Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature

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Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature

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Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature Robert Spencer Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, University of Manchester, UK

© Robert Spencer 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–23166–5

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spencer, Robert, 1977– Cosmopolitan criticism and postcolonial literature / Robert Spencer. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–23166–5 (hardback) 1. Cosmopolitanism in literature. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Imperialism in literature. I. Title. PN56.C683S64 2011 809’.04—dc22 2011008059 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my parents


Contents Acknowledgements

ix

1

Introduction: Sound upon Silence

1

Defining cosmopolitanism

4

The cosmopolitan novel?

7

2

3

4

5

6

‘A cosmopolitanism of humility’

13

Competing Cosmopolitanisms

18

Cosmopolitanism in postcolonial theory

20

‘A cosmopolitanism worthy of the name’

32

Conclusion

38

Cosmopolitan Criticism

40

Worldliness

40

Cosmopolitan hermeneutics

50

Conclusion

58

Late Yeats: ‘Beating upon the Wall of the Irish Free State’

60

Yeats and the idea of late style

64

Seeking a theme

74

‘An old man’s eagle mind’

84

Civilisations fall and rise

90

Conclusion

97

J.M. Coetzee and the ‘War on Terror’

104

Torture and dehumanisation

108

Form and allegory

112

Power and the body

126

Conclusion

136

Refuse to Choose, or, How to Read The Satanic Verses

138

Literature and fundamentalism

140

Styles of migration

146 vii

viii Contents

7

8

‘The clash of fundamentalisms’

154

Conclusion

160

‘Listening for the echo’: Representation and Resistance in Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage

163

Said contra Said

166

Narrative and truth

176

Reading and resistance

183

Conclusion

188

Conclusion

191

Notes

199

Bibliography

205

Index

223

Acknowledgements Thanks are due to friends who have read sections of the book at various stages: Iain Bailey, Tom Day, Andy Frayn, Jane Poyner, Will Smith, Jeremy Tambling and Anastasia Valassopoulos. I am grateful to those who gave me the opportunity to present my ideas at the Universities of Bern, Central Lancashire, Newcastle, Northampton, Princeton and Southampton. Far too numerous to mention by name are those friends, students, innocent bystanders and others with whom I have discussed these ideas and from whom I have learnt a great deal. I owe a special debt to my colleagues and students at Manchester. And I am much obliged to Barbara Slater for her meticulous copy-editing of the manuscript. Earlier versions of some sections were published in the following journals: Chapters 6 and 7 in volumes 46:3–4 and 45:1 of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Chapter 5 in volume 10:2 of Interventions, and some paragraphs in Re-routing the Postcolonial, edited by Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 36–47. Thank you to the publishers for permission to reprint. Finally, I am more grateful than I can possibly express to my parents, Paul and Susan Spencer, for their aid, faith and gentle forbearance over the years. To them this book is dedicated.

ix


1 Introduction: Sound upon Silence

The pages that follow were born of a conviction that the writers who really matter for the student of world literatures are those whose works attend to the extraordinarily violent and unequal conflicts inaugurated over the past several centuries by the project of imperialism. Another way of saying this would be to state that postcolonial literature is literature concerned with those conflicts, whether in a direct or oblique manner, and also with the no less fascinating and sometimes rather auspicious forms of contact and communication that have sometimes resulted from them. It is these intimations of solidarity that interest me in this book and that I have dubbed ‘cosmopolitan’. Colonialism was and (here is another of the book’s key contentions) still is predominantly a harbinger of oppression and violence. But what is attested to by the rise in recent years of popular protests against exploitation and war, by social and political movements that stretch across national frontiers, by the expanding (though of course still very imperfect) reach of international law, and by the world-historical experiments in cultural mixing undertaken every day in the world’s metropolises is an unprecedentedly acute sense of the vast possibilities brought into view by the various forms of contact between peoples and cultures. I am not apologising for imperialism of course or implying that we should be grateful to it for mixing cultures together. I am simply pointing out that imperialism, which as Marxists would argue is an essential aspect of capitalism’s restless search for new markets, cheap labour and raw materials, has created the conditions, though not yet, alas, the reality, of its own supersession. Even a cursory survey of the vast critical literature on the idea of cosmopolitanism will suffice to remind us of the diverse and often contradictory meanings attached to the term. Cosmopolitanism is variously 1

2


used to designate the Kantian ideal of hospitality and perpetual peace (Bohman and Lutz-Bachmann, 1997); a democratic community that transcends the nation state (Archibugi and Held, 1995; Falk, 1995); an expanded definition of citizenship (Smith, 2007); the universality of human rights (Falk, 2000); the institutions of the European Union (Beck, 2006; Habermas, 2006); the new ideological mask of advanced capitalism (Brennan, 2003); a pretext for military intervention (Gowan, 2003); a kind of cultural mixing dramatised by literary texts (Schoene, 2010); and a ‘convivial’ and even ‘planetary’ mentality cultivated in everyday encounters and relationships (Gilroy, 2004). For the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘cosmopolitan’ implies a sense of ‘belonging to all parts of the world’, while ‘cosmopolitanism’ means adherence to this principle. What form this adherence takes is a question with many answers. In its colloquial usage cosmopolitanism still means roughly what it meant to the Cynics of the fourth century BC and later to the Stoics, to Christian intellectuals such as Saint Paul and to Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Kant: devotion to humanity and detachment from local bonds. Generally it contains something of the political utopianism of later proposals for world government such as those set out in the early twentieth century by Bertrand Russell in Has Man a Future? and by H.G. Wells in works of prophecy like A Modern Utopia and The World Set Free. Cosmopolitanism still calls to mind images of Wellsian castles in the sky: of limitless cityscapes, glittering monorails, and blissfully altruistic masses. But it continues to strike its critics as Wells’s prophecies struck George Orwell in 1941: as a hopelessly wide-eyed vision of a forcibly united globe in which ancient hatreds are regally pacified by an aristocracy of coolly superior brains. In Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, as well as in Alexander Korda’s 1936 film version, this eccentrically attired patriciate, the ‘Air Dictatorship’, fans out across the globe from, of all places, Basra! Wells, remarked Orwell, ‘is too sane to understand the modern world’ (Orwell, 1994, 193); ‘he emigrated to World Government’, Raymond Williams later grumbled, ‘as clearly as Lawrence to Mexico’ (Williams, 1970, 128). Not entirely unfairly, cosmopolitanism remains tainted by the pejorative connotations of utopianism, escapism and condescension. Cosmopolites are viewed as free-floating and ethereal creatures: recklessly, deludedly and perhaps even selfishly indifferent to the travails and responsibilities of those who are confined through choice or necessity to the local sphere. Hence in postcolonial theory cosmopolitanism is usually understood to denote either a principled eschewal of the


3

nation state or a thoughtless neglect of its continuing importance in the lives of the rich (who rely on it to facilitate their returns) and in those of the poor (who must petition it to redress their grievances). It is the purpose of this book to locate common ground between these positions by theorising cosmopolitanism as an intellectual, moral and political process, one in which acts of literary reading can play an integral part. Cosmopolitanism does not yet exist, or at least, as Scott Malcolmson implies in referring to ‘actually existing cosmopolitanisms’ (1998, 238), it exists in distorted or at any rate incomplete forms. The book’s main thesis is that many works of postcolonial literature can be studied productively with these facts in mind. Those works dramatise imperialism’s violence and divisions in addition to – as a vital aspect of their form as well as their content – exploring and even instilling the cosmopolitan forms of relationship that would be required to create and to legitimise a global society that has left imperialism behind. The contacts, conflicts and convergences between different peoples and cultures have left their mark on the very forms of literary texts. Some works register this better than others of course; Mansfield Park with greater insistence and complexity than Frankenstein, The Tempest more effectively than, say, The Merchant of Venice (and The Merry Wives of Windsor not at all).1 Literature whose explicit subject and occasion is the tumultuous and usually forceful and unequal encounter between different peoples – postcolonial literature in other words – does this best of all. This study discusses four such works, novels by J.M. Coetzee, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie in addition to the later poetry of W.B. Yeats. It aims to stress the way in which these works respond in both their content and their form to the turbulent milieus in which they are composed and in which we encounter them. All of these works strive to galvanise their readers, to provoke them into purposeful introspection, and potentially to interpellate them as more self-conscious, more critical and more broad-minded citizens of the world. They demonstrate that literature’s value is its potential to arouse the capacity for critical self-reflection. In Franz Kafka’s beautiful phrase, it provides an axe for the frozen sea inside us (1978, 16). This study is therefore a defence of the moral and political efficacy of postcolonial writing. Works of postcolonial literature potentially engender the kind of negotiation and interaction that for the American sociologist Craig Calhoun can succeed in fostering a sense of mutual obligation and even cosmopolitan solidarity: ‘Community is not just inherited’, Calhoun argues, ‘it is made and remade’ (Calhoun, 2003, 98). Social solidarity can result not just from our inherited identities and

4


interests but also, more auspiciously, from our shared participation in the public sphere. In other words, solidarity can be a process as well as a fact. My purpose in what follows is to concur with that line of argument and to show that the gradual elaboration of cosmopolitan solidarities is to a large extent the very raison d’être of postcolonial literary criticism. A further aim, however, is to refute the sociologist’s assumption, in a revealingly dismissive aside, that literature, along with food, tourism and clothes, is what Calhoun calls an ‘easy face’ of cosmopolitanism (108). My claim is that there is nothing facile or inconsequential about the best products of postcolonial writing. Far from permitting a weak and superficial internationalisation of tastes they can actually give rise in their readers to self-reflection and to the moral and ultimately political convictions associated with cosmopolitanism.

Defining cosmopolitanism There are four questions that we need to ask about cosmopolitanism. The first and most obvious is: what is it? A provisional answer is that cosmopolitanism is both a disposition – one characterised by self-awareness, by a penetrating sensitivity to the world beyond one’s immediate milieu, and by an enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility to individuals and groups outside one’s local or national community – and, it is very important to add, a set of economic structures and political institutions that correspond to this enlarged sense of community. Daniele Archibugi calls this the ‘cosmopolitical democracy project’ (2003a), an inelegant neologism and one that it is difficult to imagine being inscribed on banners but that nonetheless captures the way in which cosmopolitanism is sometimes seen, as I see it, as a political as well as merely cultural undertaking. And cosmopolitanism is not the same thing as globalisation. If globalisation seeks to homogenise the planet from above (economically and culturally), then cosmopolitanism is a reaction or counter to this process, one that seeks to make general not exploitation or culture but democracy, rights and the rule of law: ‘globalization is a set of designs to manage the world’, according to Walter Mignolo, ‘while cosmopolitanism is a set of projects toward planetary conviviality’ (Mignolo, 2002, 157). Nineteenth-century imperialism and contemporary neo-liberalism are examples of globalisation. The protests that preceded the war in Iraq are an example of cosmopolitanism. The possibility of global community presupposes a belief that wealth and resources can be distributed more equitably and that the exclusionary and violent designs of powerful states and classes


5

can be quelled. It depends on the development of what Pheng Cheah has called ‘new cosmopolitanisms, mass-based emancipatory forms of global consciousness’ (1998, 32). The second crucial question to be asked about cosmopolitanism is: why is it necessary? It must suffice to say that cosmopolitanism is called into being by the global reach of problems that require both democratic global institutions and, in order to make these legitimate and effective, global allegiances and solidarities. These problems include ethnic nationalism; underdevelopment and exploitation (exacerbated and globalised by the relocation and subcontracting of production to lowwage economies); environmental degradation and the jeopardising of humankind’s very survival on earth by the changing climate; the abuse of human rights; the unequal distribution of resources; the proliferation of deadly weapons; and, of course, the United States’s political and military supremacy, along with the threats posed by a host of lesser militarisms. To express a wish for a democratic and cosmopolitan settlement is now less to sign up to any grandiose blueprints for world government than, more modestly, to propose political mechanisms that are capable of keeping pace with the global character of the various problems currently facing humanity. The third question is: what will cosmopolitanism look like? One needs to refer here to the work of cosmopolitan political theorists on, for instance, the Global Peoples’ Assembly envisaged by Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss (2000 and 2003) and to numerous thinkers’ proposals for democratising the United Nations and the European Union (Balibar, 2003; Calhoun, 2002; Habermas, 2006), for strengthening international law (Sands, 2005), for discharging trade deficits, preventing the accumulation of debt and engineering sustainable development (Mertes, 2004; Monbiot, 2004). Then there are what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the ‘antisystemic movements’ (2002) associated with, for example, the World Social Forum. These movements typically combine short-term goals such as legal and electoral action, middlerange campaigns against the commodification of the environment and public services (what Naomi Klein calls ‘reclaiming the commons’ (2004)), and longer term aspirations to replace a world based on hierarchy, division and inequality with one that is far more democratic and egalitarian. What unites such movements in the global South with those in the North is a common appreciation of the need for the divisive and exploitative demands of capitalism and imperialism to be rolled back by newer forms of solidarity and democratic participation. Like Robert Young (2001), I see this kind of cosmopolitanism as

6


a continuation of the abortive aspirations of anti-colonial and socialist movements for political and economic integration in the decades after the Second World War: the Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore; the global horizons and affiliations of nationalists such as Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon and Fidel Castro; the non-aligned movement initiated at Bandung in 1955 by Sukarno, Nasser, Nehru and Tito; and the trans-continental solidarity expressed (but, alas, not realised) at the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America gathered in Havana in 1966.2 My point is not that these initiatives were perfect but that they recognised something it is time we recalled: that the confrontation with an adversary so potent and far-reaching as imperialism, though it perforce takes place initially at the level of the nation state (which is where power is currently concentrated), depends for its ultimate success on the cultivation of post-national institutions and allegiances. This is a point I will try to substantiate more thoroughly in my reading of Yeats’s late poetry. By cosmopolitanism therefore I mean not so much an outlook or a form of conduct, let alone a lifestyle, but something more concrete than these: a system of trans-national relationships embodied in structures and institutions. Cosmopolitanism, in Pheng Cheah’s words, is an ‘expansive form of solidarity that is attuned to democratic principles without the restriction of territorial borders’ (Cheah, 2006, 19). Why call this cosmopolitan? I prefer the word not, as might be suspected, because it lends my title the catchiness of alliteration but because it does important work that is not performed by the more commonly used term ‘international’: that is, it forecasts a form of community beyond rather than between existing nation states. My concern here, however, is less with the institutional forms that such cosmopolitan arrangements will take (though I believe it is crucial to spell out the ways in which democracy, human rights and respect for cultural diversity can be established) than with a fourth question, which I hope postcolonial literary critics might be qualified to answer and on which I endeavour to offer some suggestions: assuming that some form of political and institutional cosmopolitanism is necessary and feasible, how are cosmopolitan sentiments to be engendered? How, in other words, are we to move from the uncosmopolitan present to the cosmopolitan future? What I wish to explore in this book are the ways in which postcolonial writing, largely through the relationships that it engineers with its readers, can engender modes of being that deserve to be called cosmopolitan. By advocating the use of this adjective to describe such work I want not to replace postcolonial literary criticism but to spell


7

out the discipline’s normative potential and thus push it into a new area of enquiry. ‘Cosmopolitan criticism’ is the name I give to a literary critical approach which is alert to the ways in which postcolonial texts make available for scrutiny both the nature of colonial violence and the latency and desirability of cosmopolitan alternatives.

The cosmopolitan novel? Several critics have discussed the potential of literary texts to embody or encourage a cosmopolitan ethos. The most compelling are Berthold Schoene’s The Cosmopolitan Novel (2010), Katherine Stanton’s Cosmopolitan Fictions (2006), Jessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (2001) and Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006). All four critics demonstrate persuasively the interest of such diverse writers as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid and J.M. Coetzee ‘in states of feeling, modes of belonging, and practices of citizenship in an increasingly pluralized cosmos’ (Stanton, 2006, 2). But when it comes to assessing the cosmopolitan effects of reading and analysing literary texts what matters is not just which texts we read but also how we choose to read them. It is the effect of these texts on their readers – specifically, their capacity to instil self-consciousness and to compel attention to the moral and political dimensions of the postcolonial situation – and not really their ability to embody or achieve a cosmopolitan outlook that makes these texts worth reading. They are less cosmopolitan in themselves in other words, than susceptible to cosmopolitan interpretations. Ultimately, I am advocating a versatile literary critical method, and not – in the manner of Schoene, Berman, Stanton and Walkowitz – identifying a select corpus of texts that deserve to be called cosmopolitan. I am interested less in cosmopolitan texts than in cosmopolitan readings. One significant advantage of Walkowitz’s book, which portrays Ishiguro, Rushdie and Sebald as contemporary modernists, is that it diverges from the preoccupation among literary critics interested in cosmopolitanism with the high modernism of the early years of the last century. When that preoccupation is combined, as it is in Jed Esty’s fascinating book on English modernism (2004), with an account of how the outward-looking ethos of modernism’s heroic phase gives way after the 1930s and the end of empire to a new inward-looking focus on national culture among English writers, then the erroneous impression is given that both modernism and literary cosmopolitanism have been

8


exhausted. It is much closer to the truth, I think, to argue that what Esty interprets as the preoccupation of post-war British intellectuals and writers with a national rather than a trans-national culture meant not the wrapping up of modernism and literary cosmopolitanism but rather something like their migration to other climes, and in the first world itself the passing of the modernist baton to immigrant writers who possess an oblique perspective on the national culture. It is worth pausing at this point to recall what Fredric Jameson had to say about the connection between modernist style and empire in his influential essay on ‘Modernism and Imperialism’ (2007). For Jameson, modernist works are to some extent responses to imperialism. This is primarily because European imperialism, particularly in its late phase after around 1900, was an experience that entailed an awareness of the existence of regions that were newly at hand, voluble and even threatening. Much of modernist literature’s self-consciousness of the limitations of consciousness and language is a product of this confrontation, as Edward Said too has argued. Europe and the West, in short, were being asked to take the Other seriously. This, I think, is the fundamental historical problem of modernism. The subaltern and the constitutively different suddenly achieved disruptive articulation exactly where in European culture silence and compliance could previously be depended on to quiet them down. (Said, 2000, 313) This experience is registered for Jameson not so much in the explicit content of works such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or, to use his example, E.M. Forster’s Howards End, as in their form and style. Far from being manifested in confident and authoritative accounts of the world beyond Europe’s frontiers, the colonised world instead makes itself felt above all in the self-doubt of modernist fictions’ narrators, in their acute and often anguished reticence and in the vague and ambiguous mysteries pondered even by those who do not travel, and which, some time around the turn of the last century, began to infect the very syntax and idiom of European fiction. The distinctively hesitant and faltering – in fact, self-undermining – style of the modernist novel attests ‘the radical otherness of colonial life, colonial suffering and exploitation’, as well as the difficulty and perhaps even the impossibility of mapping ‘the structural connections between that and this, between absent space and daily life in the metropolis’ (Jameson, 2007, 157).

Introduction: Sound upon Silence 9

The main point, as Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses have put it, is that while modernism ‘was Eurocentric – how could it not be? – it was nevertheless deeply committed to thinking beyond its cultural moment’ (Begam and Valdez Moses, 2007, 13). But what Begam and Valdez Moses do not add is that texts written outside Europe and written after the period of European high modernism possess formal qualities similar to those of the canonical modernists and, what is more, contain noticeably cosmopolitan elements as a result. All of the works discussed in this study ought to be characterised as modernistic. They constitute evidence of the endurance and continued utility of the modernist style. Written by authors whose backgrounds and beliefs permit them something of an outsider’s perspective on the discourses and ideologies prevalent in Europe and North America, they dramatise the complicated connections and engagements between different cultures, peoples and situations. Furthermore, the manifest uncertainty of their style and the flagrant contentiousness of their principal voices, not to mention their incompleteness (by which I mean their orientation towards an audience and thus their enthusiastic solicitation of that audience’s rejoinders, criticisms and interpretations), make them modernist in a quite exemplary way. These works’ modernist capacity to dramatise at the level of form the complex relations between cultures is also what makes them susceptible to cosmopolitan readings. They explore the hugely complex, convoluted and varied connections between the colonised subject and, for example, the culture and language as well as the daunting material presence of the colonisers. Because they are produced at the sharp end of imperialism and cultural conflict, they dramatise the deleterious effects of that system with particular acuteness and amplify alternatives to it with singular insistence. Postcolonial texts, in short, have a great capacity to explore cosmopolitan modes of being and are at least as susceptible to the sort of cosmopolitan analysis customarily reserved for the products of European modernism. What is also crucial is Walkowitz’s (2006) insight that it is the style of her chosen texts that makes them into cosmopolitan documents. Her point is that a peculiar posture of self-consciousness gives rise to the elaboration by writers such as Joyce and Conrad of unusual and experimental forms of relationship that transcend the hierarchies and divisions that underpin imperialism. It is an idea that bears comparison with the proposition put forward in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Edward Said’s half-forgotten book on Conrad, that modernist style is both an effect and – for the reader – also a catalyst of the experience of deracination. There is an intimate link, in other

10


words, between self-conscious style and the experience of cultural displacement or, put differently, between the manifest diffidence of modernist narrators and their conversance with multiple cultural perspectives. Conrad’s self-conscious style, which for Said has the potential to generate in its readers a no less powerful sense of uncertainty and introspection, is best described not as the product of a uniquely modernist consciousness but as the consequence of an increasingly common experience of cultural dislocation or at least of the multiplicity and relativity of cultures. It is above all else the writer’s awareness of several situations, identities and discourses that allows him to recognise and make use of an insight intrinsic to literary language: the limitedness, fallibility and relativity of the singular point of view. He or she is thus able to inject that dominant way of seeing the world with the powerful vaccines of uncertainty and self-doubt and to contrast it with alternative perspectives. This holds true of modernism, but as Rushdie suggests, it holds even truer of the writer from the postcolonial world, who is able to harness literature’s ability to discredit the dominant perspective and to articulate other voices: ‘And those of us who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism forced upon us’ (1991, 12). The important work done by the contributors to Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby’s collection of essays on Modernism and Empire (2000) demonstrates that the experience of colonialism destabilised European consciousness and registered itself in European literature as a series of omissions or moments of self-consciousness. The modernist style is ironic and sceptical of authority as well as receptive to the amplifications in the text of numerous clashing perspectives and voices. It registers a critique of the high-handed attitudes associated with colonialism. It also explores, sometimes explicitly and at other times very tentatively, cosmopolitan forms of relationship. As Elleke Boehmer makes clear, it was largely those writers who by virtue of their nationality, class, gender or sexuality (or because they hailed from outside the imperial metropolis and approached it from an oblique angle) were exiles or outsiders in some way, who were the main figures of European high modernism: Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, Mansfield, Pound, Woolf and Yeats. Their distanced and critical perspective on the imperfections and frailties of the dominant culture allowed them to express its fallibility and contentiousness and give voice to what Boehmer calls ‘the pessimism of late imperial culture’ (Boehmer, 2005, 97). Migration to the metropolis, as Terry Eagleton (1970) and Raymond Williams (1989a) both contend, was the principal catalyst of literary innovation in this period. At the level of


theme and form, high modernism is for Williams the effect of strangeness, distance and alienation, of writers’ liberation ‘from their national or provincial cultures’ and the resultant experience of language as a medium to be shaped rather than as a social custom (Williams, 1989a, 45–6). European modernism is thus, among other things, an early and tentative instance of something much more overt and consequential: the fostering of a cosmopolitan outlook in later writers who were even better placed to explore the complex relationships between cultures. It is now postcolonial writers, in other words, armed with what Boehmer calls the ‘double vision of the colonized’ (Boehmer, 2005, 110), who are best placed to undercut the authority of empire and foretell moral and political alternatives: ‘modernism is therefore revealed’, Boehmer observes, ‘as the beginning of a process of global transculturation in literature that has continued to effloresce’ (Boehmer, 2005, 124). We therefore require a method of reading more than we need a canon of texts, one that can be employed to analyse contemporary works of literature as well as those of canonical modernism. The distinction between Walkowitz’s idea of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ (2006, 2–3) and my own method of ‘cosmopolitan criticism’ is not Jesuitical. We should be looking for the ways in which literary works intimate or foretell the shape of a cosmopolitan future, not for particular texts that embody or achieve a cosmopolitan style. Perhaps there can be images of a cosmopolitan community in novels or, as I have heard it argued, cosmopolitan ‘moments’ realised therein. The passengers on board the Ibis in the Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies form one such community.3 So too, as C.L.R. James has argued in his Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1978), does the crew of the Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. But ships, as Paul Gilroy reminds us in The Black Atlantic (1993), are also purveyors of violence. The Ibis transports opium and indentured labourers, while the Pequod, as well as being the scene of a kind of convivial fraternity between mariners from different cultures, is also the vehicle of Ahab’s monomaniacal quest, his rage for mastery over things and men, and the United States’s nascent imperial ethos. Since cosmopolitanism is not a lifestyle or ethos, but a political condition that is latent but unrealised, it is in fact not possible for literary texts to incarnate cosmopolitanism successfully any more than it is possible for them to incarnate, say, socialism or feminism. Quite apart from controversies about what such terms mean, we say, for example, that a text is written by a feminist, that it explores feminist ideas, that it has feminist implications, or that it is approachable with a method of reading inspired by feminism. We would not declare the task

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of Marxist criticism to be the identification of socialist books, unless we wanted to restrict our students to celebrations of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and The Iron Heel. The same goes for cosmopolitanism. This study is not looking in literary texts for direct engagement with the problems that I have been outlining. Indeed, it would be difficult to assemble a group of writers less likely to call themselves cosmopolitan. Rather, I am looking in their work for thematic as well as formal expressions of the antagonisms and difficulties that plague the postcolonial world and of the latent possibilities that, no less insistently, are germinating within it. The project will perhaps seem even more quixotic when I announce that the word ‘cosmopolitan’ will frequently recede from view in the course of my discussions. But my claim is not that these poems and novels are blueprints for cosmopolitan action, nor that they espouse the concept or even use the word, but that their dramatisations of cultural conflict and convergence foster habits of attention and self-scrutiny that deserve to be called cosmopolitan, habits that might further the aims of those thinkers and movements who are agitating for more expansive forms of citizenship and community. Not a lifestyle or a mindset but a system of relationships embedded in institutions, structures and forms of law, cosmopolitanism cannot by definition be realised in works of art; it can only be pointed to as a possibility. Indeed – to return to another modernist trope, one articulated most compellingly by that great philosopher of modernism Theodor W. Adorno – it is important that texts lend emphasis to their own failure in this respect. Art-works of the highest rank are distinguished from the others not through their success – for in what have they succeeded? – but through the manner of their failure. For the problems within them, both the immanent, aesthetic problems and the social ones (and, in the dimension of depth, the two kinds coincide), are so posed that the attempt to solve them must fail, whereas the failure of lesser works is accidental, a matter of mere subjective incapacity. A work of art is great when it registers a failed attempt to reconcile objective antinomies. (Adorno, 1998, 100) This is the effect achieved by the writers studied here. All these works by Yeats, Coetzee, Mo and Rushdie are out and out failures. Hopefully this will seem like a less unforgiving verdict when I suggest that the criterion that distinguishes such works from the average is not reconciliation


but its opposite: the extent to which they raise formal antagonisms – which are at bottom political, social and economic ones – to expression and pose their resolution as a practical rather than merely aesthetic problem. Since, as Adorno claims, modernist art, ‘with its vulnerability, blemishes and fallibility, is […] the critique of success’ (Adorno, 1999, 160), then these works, in raising – before dashing – the possibility of cosmopolitan relationships, hold true to the prospect of a cosmopolitanism that encompasses a realm much broader than the aesthetic one. They each incite a desire for cosmopolitanism at the same time as they arouse indignation at the way in which the structures and attitudes of the present frustrate cosmopolitanism’s realisation. Adorno compared works of art to fireworks; they aspire ‘not to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away’ (1999, 28). Literary images of cosmopolitanism disappear when the book is put down, though their memory may linger. But if they can encourage the kind of moral and political introspection required to instil a desire for cosmopolitan forms of life then the effect may be more durable.

‘A cosmopolitanism of humility’ One of the things that might as well be admitted at the outset is the quixotic nature of my enterprise. There is always the danger that avowals of cosmopolitan purpose risk acting as a kind of rhetorical cover for the imposition of political and intellectual presuppositions that are in fact provincial and self-interested. Had my skin not been thick enough to withstand accusations of ‘cultural imperialism’ this book would never have been written. When asked if cosmopolitanism is just the latest camouflage for Western power I always respond by saying that it should be too self-critical for that, too committed to the procedure of self-examination, and too conscious that cosmopolitanism is a process not a finished vision. We have need of what Scott Malcolmson calls ‘a cosmopolitanism of humility’ (1998, 236; emphasis in the original). I do not think we should be afraid to espouse cosmopolitan principles of solidarity, community, democracy and human rights. For their avowal logically implies that one should agree to abide by those same principles. Cosmopolitanism therefore enjoins at least as much self-criticism as evangelism. And in any case I am espousing those principles, not seeking to impose them by violence. If it takes place then the transition from the globalisation of force and inequality to one that is much more democratic and egalitarian in nature will not be an act of fiat or coercion but of open debate and voluntary collaboration. As Paul

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Kingsnorth has put it, this ‘is a politics in which means matter as much as ends’ (2004, 74), in which we value discussion about the shape of a post-imperial social order so we can ensure both that such an order will be democratic and that it will not follow a one-sided, Eurocentric blueprint. The bottom line is that, as the chapter on Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage seeks to show, the point of criticising imperialism is to put something else in its place. ‘Colonialism is alive’, as C.L.R. James put it in his book on postcolonial Ghana, ‘and will continue to be alive until another positive doctrine takes its place’ (James, 1977, 28; emphasis in the original). Accordingly, we face two dangers: imposing our own ideas and priorities in the mistaken belief that they serve cosmopolitan purposes; and, in fear of this danger, relinquishing the goal of cosmopolitanism altogether and settling for the status quo. It is frequently objected that cosmopolitanism mistakenly assumes good intentions in those who espouse it. Jackie Stacey has put this case very eloquently. She argues that cosmopolitanism often posits a self that is transparent, accessible and fully intelligible to ourselves and others […] [But w]hat if one’s own sense of openness to difference appears to others as closure, assimilation or appropriation? […] What if the projection of world citizenship is a blended panhumanity which violently erases difference instead of recognising it? (Stacey, 2009, n.p.) No student of Freud could safely assume that our desires and motivations are transparent to us. Similarly, no reader of Robert Burns or observer of the so-called ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the last few years could be in any doubt about what usually happens to the best laid schemes of mice and men. Humanitarian intentions do not always bring about humanitarian results. Similarly, one might sincerely believe oneself to be acting in a cosmopolitan way whilst furthering objectives that are actually profoundly partial and provincial. But this insight, though sound, calls not for the repudiation of cosmopolitan ends. In this context it constitutes a recommendation that any avowal of cosmopolitanism must be accompanied by the most stringent self-criticism of the kind that I have elsewhere associated with humanism (Spencer, 2006). Beware parochialism decked out as humanitarianism. Humility and self-criticism are cosmopolitan virtues. So too is democratic discussion about what it means and takes to be cosmopolitan. Western readers are my main concern, not only because I am one but also because anything else would be too ambitious a project for a


single monograph. Though I am writing about Anglophone texts this is not because I do not think that other texts in other languages intended for other audiences are not important. Nor do I accept, as my analysis of The Redundancy of Courage will show, that Western critics and readers aren’t qualified to discuss such subjects in a knowledgeable and sympathetic way. Postcolonial critics who do not hail from the places about which they write are not therefore barred from speaking; after all, nobody expects medievalists to come from the Middle Ages. But there is a crucial divide here that cannot be ignored. Notwithstanding its sympathy for the history and aspirations of anti-colonialism and what later chapters will reveal to be its suspicions about some of the principal tenets of metropolitan postcolonial theory, I am well aware that this study would look like a decidedly self-indulgent affair to, say, the resident of a slum in Manila. Leaving aside the obvious objection, that this is true of most studies in the humanities, few of which are likely to bring people out onto the streets, my consciousness of the gap between the literatures and realities of the postcolonial world on the one hand and the ‘Western’ milieu of postcolonial scholarship on the other means that the impact of the former on the latter (rather than vice versa) is my primary subject. Those texts most likely to have a cosmopolitan effect on the Western reader are the subjects of my analyses. Besides, it is possible to make a virtue out of necessity, for an essential aspect of any viable cosmopolitan project is the cultivation of a much more inclusive sense of moral and political responsibility in citizens of the affluent countries of the West. As I have argued elsewhere, we need to see postcolonial criticism less as a means of encouraging actual movement away from the nation state than as a form of intervention that in the first instance takes aim at the nation state (Spencer, 2009). This is another way of saying that postcolonial criticism entails a decision to situate oneself in opposition to nation states that are driving forward the environmentally and humanly destructive policies of neo-liberal globalisation. For all of us this means attending before anything else to local manifestations of this system. Cosmopolitanism, paradoxically, begins at home. Asked in an interview what European and North American sympathisers could do to aid the landless farmers of Brazil (and the very outlandishness of the question is, in a way, an indication of the limits and the necessary direction of postcolonialists’ critical and political energies), João Pedro Stedile of the Sem Terra Movement responded with this straightforward suggestion: ‘bring down your neoliberal governments’ (Stedile, 2004, 46). That kind of activity is, at least, a contribution!

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I am contending that one of the most significant effects of postcolonial literature, though far from the only one, is likewise its capacity to reform the thoughts and deeds of Western readers. Of course, I do not believe that only Western readers matter, nor that only they are capable of becoming cosmopolitan. Neither do I think that only the texts analysed here are susceptible to a cosmopolitan analysis, still less that a cosmopolitan reading is the only productive way of approaching them. My method of reading postcolonial literature is one among many. In a sense, I am seeking to supplement critics’ increasing appreciation of the diverse articulations of postcolonial culture by fostering an awareness that postcolonial literature’s capacity to engender cosmopolitan sentiments is a crucial aspect of its appeal and utility, though far from the only aspect or even necessarily the most important. Not silence but speech, not incomprehension but self-knowledge, as well as the selfredefining and horizon-broadening experience of intellectual dialogue are what this reader likes to think he has taken from these authors’ works and would like to encourage in others. The reflexive narrative method employed in the novels by Coetzee, Rushdie and Mo as well as the acute self-consciousness and self-scrutiny of Yeats’s late poems have the potential to instil a similarly introspective mindset in their readers. As such, they can induce a relativisation of one’s outlook that leads to the gregarious and self-critical disposition of the cosmopolitan citizen. The German philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the enterprise of literary reading as ‘a conversation with the text’ (1979, 331). Literary reading is a voluble and even rumbustious interchange between identities and points of view that, as Kwame Anthony Appiah says in his account of what it takes to be a citizen of the cosmos, are not fixed for all time but capable of being altered and therefore made more inclusive by stimulating encounters with difference. People often recommend relativism because they think it will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation will be pointless. Relativism of that sort isn’t a way to encourage conversation; it’s just a reason to fall silent. (Appiah, 2006, 31) Coetzee’s book White Writing is in part a critical analysis of the silences and elisions that characterise pastoral writing by white South Africans: in particular, their careful deafness to the presence of black labour on


the idealised farm and their obliviousness to the evidence of a native presence that pre-dated white settlement. Fascinatingly, however, Coetzee suggests, with characteristic obliqueness, that this critical practice is insufficient. The tactic of identifying pastoral writing’s silences about colonial violence and dispossession lacks any capacity or even willingness to envision the replacement of this uncommunicativeness with the kind of dialogue or conversation that I am entreating. To note the historical fact of attempted silencing and then simply leave it at that is surely to present the conflicts between coloniser and colonised as insuperable. Unless the colonised take the opportunity to speak and be heard, to narrate their own experiences and aspirations, and to sway impressible interlocutors with their narratives, then colonialism will not have been overcome. Thankfully they do this anyway. Our task is to cup our ears and then join the conversation. Coetzee, who is not only thinking about South African pastoral and about European music, enjoins sensitivity to the sounds with which communities make themselves known to each other in addition to the silences that prevail between them. He summarises the critical practice that guides the present study when he suggests that the critic’s task is not only to emphasise the silence left behind by violence but also to help the work of art effect or envision a situation in which communication will be possible once more. Our ears today are finely attuned to modes of silence. We have been brought up on the music of Webern: substantial silence structured by tracings of sound. Our craft is all in reading the other: gaps, inverses, undersides; the veiled; the dark, the buried, the feminine; alterities […] Only part of the truth, such a reading asserts, resides in what writing says of the hitherto unsaid; for the rest, its truth lies in what it dare not say for the sake of its own safety, or in what it does not know about itself: in its silences. It is a mode of reading which, subverting the dominant, is in peril, like all triumphant subversion, of becoming the dominant in its turn. Is it a version of utopianism (or pastoralism) to look forward (or backward) to the day when truth will be (or was) what is said, not what is not said, when we will hear (or heard) music as sound upon silence, not silence between sounds? (Coetzee, 1988, 81; emphasis in original)

2 Competing Cosmopolitanisms

Postcolonial theorists are waking up to the enormous threats posed by the age of exponential globalisation, as well as to the equally sizeable opportunities of a world in which cultures and allegiances are being complicated, mixed and broadened. Popular discourses of hybridity, diaspora, exile and migration constitute not always successful but nonetheless welcome and auspicious attempts to think through a situation in which the globalisation of exploitation and injustice must be matched, as Terry Eagleton has implored, by a comparable and countervailing globalisation of experiences, allegiances and values. What Eagleton puts his finger on in his After Theory (2003) is the incapacity of post-modern, post-structuralist and post-colonial discourses, insofar as the claim to novelty implicit in their shared prefix rests on a common rejection of narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in favour of a fixation with difference and ‘little narratives’, to respond with sufficient ambition and clarity to a situation in which capitalism and all its attendant shortcomings are fully, indeed unprecedentedly, global in scope. With the launch of a new global narrative of capitalism, along with the so-called war on terror, it may well be that the style of thinking known as postmodernism is now approaching an end. It was, after all, the theory which assured us that grand narratives were a thing of the past. Perhaps we will be able to see it, in retrospect, as one of the little narratives of which it has been so fond. This, however, presents cultural theory with a fresh challenge. If it is to engage with an ambitious global history, it must have answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts. (Eagleton, 2003, 221–2) 18

Competing Cosmopolitanisms 19

There is an increasing recognition of the need for those in the first world to take responsibility for injustices that take place beyond their borders (frequently at the behest of their governments) and for those in the rest of the planet to join in making powerful governments and corporations accountable to the people whom their decisions and actions affect. Yet postcolonial scholars have in the past been too reluctant to take on the task not just of discrediting but also of imagining our way beyond the doctrines and practices of imperialism. They have dragged their heels when it comes to the various resources required to supplant (as opposed merely to criticise or bemoan) the gross inequality and violence of imperial rule. Understandably, the discipline’s energy has been devoted to the critique of imperialism as it is manifested in European culture, philosophy, historiography and so on, and to the equally stringent appraisal of doctrines and practices such as anti-colonial nationalism, which are seen as merely rehashing an exclusionary logic inherited from imperialism. But this criticism has rarely been matched by any comparable dedication to the task of formulating alternatives to the divisions and hierarchies inflicted by imperialism. This study’s emphasis on cosmopolitanism is designed to show that it is now time to decide whether we are content to persevere with the, admittedly indispensable but in my view insufficient, work of reproving the practices and doctrines of imperialism and of questioning the immediate political and cultural responses to it, or whether we are prepared instead to stretch our wings a little and add to that work of criticism and censure an ambitious attempt to formulate principles, practices and procedures of our own. Everybody knows what postcolonial theorists are against; the clue is in the name. But what are they actually for? There are several ‘schools’ of thought on cosmopolitanism in postcolonial studies: I will call them, perhaps too schematically, the sceptical, the celebratory and the socialist schools. A further school, which I shall recommend in conclusion, combines the best elements of the first three: this is the emerging school of what I am calling cosmopolitan criticism. Of course, none of these schools are self-conscious movements with agreed agendas and card-carrying memberships. Rather, they are comprised of scholars whom I have grouped together because in each case their work has common and distinctive characteristics, many of which they share with theorists in cognate fields such as sociology and political theory. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that thinkers in all these schools are adopting increasingly nuanced and multifaceted conceptions of cosmopolitanism and are thus in many cases moving towards a common position, which I shall attempt to

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theorise at the end of this chapter. The object of the exercise, then, is not to separate the sheep from the goats but to assess the current variety of positions held by postcolonial critics on cosmopolitanism and by so doing to identify some common ground.

Cosmopolitanism in postcolonial theory The first, sceptical, school dominated the postcolonial field in the years after its inception. Among this group of thinkers one would wish to include figures who are so concerned about the dominance of Western ideologies and political institutions that they tend to dismiss all efforts to gain knowledge of other cultures and societies, let alone cosmopolitan institutions and universalist ideas like human rights, as inevitably coercive. Such thinkers present local identities and communities as the natural units of affiliation and action. This early form of postcolonial work, in for example the deconstructive procedures of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, was more interested in undermining the cultural and epistemological authority of colonialism than in elucidating the relationship between colonialism and capitalism or in asking how to move beyond these things. One might also adduce Edward Said’s Orientalism, which was in many ways the book that inspired the discipline. If for Michel Foucault any discourse that claims privileged access to the unvarnished state of things is deceitfully masking its own partiality, then likewise for the Said of Orientalism, a book that relies on Foucault for its methodology, what passes for knowledge of the so-called Orient is actually a self-interested myth, a pretext for the exercise of colonial power. My worry is not that Orientalism stresses the erroneousness and partiality of much purportedly disinterested scholarship about the Middle East but that it harps on so relentlessly about the East–West divide and about Western scholars’ inability to say anything accurate and constructive about the Arab world that it makes these divisions out to be insuperable. It therefore risks undermining any basis for the sort of cosmopolitan solidarity that the later Said, as this study will repeatedly make clear, advocated much more overtly. An excessively sceptical epistemology yields, in short, to a relativist political philosophy. As Satya Mohanty points out, this tendency in postcolonial criticism complicates efforts ‘to make decolonization a meaningful project involving cross-cultural contact and dialogue’ (1997, 145). Whatever Said’s intentions, this is how Orientalism was initially received and how, as the chapter on Mo shows, the discipline of postcolonial studies subsequently developed.


I think there is now a much greater awareness among postcolonial scholars that the placing of undue emphasis on difference and identity has not done enough to challenge imperialism and imagine alternatives to it. As Said himself has acknowledged more recently, the humanities in general and literary studies in particular have had trouble locating real sites of resistance to neo-liberal globalisation because much research on colonialism and its effects has for too long focused principally (and sometimes exclusively) on issues of identity (Said, 2001, 66). Faced with a choice between an easygoing tolerance of diversity and the homogenising hubris of colonialism many postcolonial critics have opted for the former. And who could blame them? Would not anybody, who bore in mind the calamities perpetrated in the last two centuries by states that sought to put into effect blueprints for some flawless utopia, rather switch these grandiose dreams for a more modest vision of a diverse and multiform world? Should we not all be partisans of a world in which the little narratives have won out over the all-encompassing epic, in which an infinity of points of view have proliferated at the expense of one total and all-embracing truth, and in which the specific demands of the local now supersede the destructive force of the global? The answer, clearly, is yes. But this laudable penchant for diversity must not be too hasty. Two pitfalls lie in wait for this way of thinking. Firstly, it risks celebrating the arrival of a diverse and tolerant society before it has been adequately inaugurated. In other words, we must avoid extolling difference indiscriminately in a world in which the most salient differences are not admirable dissimilarities between identities and lifestyles but abhorrent disparities such as those between the rich and the poor. To acclaim the ideal of diversity too hastily is to collapse the distinction between the ideal for which we yearn and the reality that currently holds sway. As well as cutting the sinews of radical politics by removing the cause of its discontent, this fixation with identity downplays the sheer political and organisational effort required to instate a society in which diversity could truly flourish; that is the second pitfall. Will Kymlicka’s books The Rights of Minority Cultures (1995) and Politics in the Vernacular (2001) voice a widespread fear that the grand transnational designs of cosmopolitanism are incompatible with respect for cultural diversity. Another sceptic about such aspirations is the conservative philosopher John Gray, for whom contemporary movements against capitalism are of a piece with the fanatical utopianism of neoliberalism and the millenarian cults of the Middle Ages (2008). Gray argues that utopias always founder on the incompatibility of human needs and on the terminal imperfections of human nature. The best we

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can hope for is a multipolar world free from crusading universalisms. This school might also encompass many of the contributors to the Cosmopolitanism (2002) anthology of Carol Breckenridge, Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sheldon Pollock, a collection anxious above all else that cosmopolitan sentiments and institutions might erode local traditions and cultural differences. Can there, the editors ask, be a cosmopolitanism that is egalitarian and not simply a generalisation of the values and practices of ‘the West’? The cosmopolitanism that they commend is modest, ongoing, sceptical of utopian outcomes, and reluctant to throw its weight behind world-altering political projects: ‘cosmopolitanism must give way to the plurality of modes and histories – not necessarily shared in degree or in concept regionally, nationally, or internationally – that comprise cosmopolitan practice and history. We propose therefore that cosmopolitanism be considered in the plural, as cosmopolitanisms’ (Breckenridge et al., 2002, 8). The aim of their volume is to unearth diverse cosmopolitan practices, none of which, however, point to the eventual achievement of a cosmopolitan polity. The danger flirted with by the sceptical school threatens the postcolonial field as a whole; so besotted is it with the affirmation of identity that it neglects the substantive political goals of cosmopolitanism and merely adopts cosmopolitanism’s argot. Cosmopolitanism, as I have said already, ought to be seen as an objective rather than a reality, even though, obviously, auguries and anticipations of it can be seen germinating here and now. Cosmopolitanism, in other words, must be a cogent and feasible platform of economic, political and institutional proposals. Instead of avowing cosmopolitanisms in the plural, it will be necessary to contrast our cosmopolitanism (one of equality, rights and democracy) with their cosmopolitanism (of capital, exploitation and cultural standardisation). Cosmopolitanism is not a virtuous platitude but a contested and intensely political idea. Breckenridge and her co-editors spell out the view of cosmopolitanism from which this book demurs when they suggest that cosmopolitanism ‘should be considered entirely open, and not pregiven or foreclosed by the definition of any particular society or discourse’ (Breckenridge et al., 2002, 1). Talk of cosmopolitanisms is far too woolly. We are not out to celebrate diversity as an end in itself but to show that our cosmopolitanism is the best guarantor of cultural and other forms of valuable diversity and that it must be fought for in a tented field on which differing and not always compatible forms of cosmopolitanism are doing battle. What the fixation with diversity neglects, as Eagleton again has made clear, is that ‘there are certain key political struggles that someone is going


to have to win and someone will have to lose’ (Eagleton, 1993, 124). Better this unabashed partisanship than the impossibly vague notions that ‘[c]osmopolitanism is infinite ways of being’ and that ‘we already are and have always been cosmopolitan, though we may not always have known it’ (Breckenridge et al., 2002, 12). The postcolonial field’s second school of thought on cosmopolitanism, which is less circumspect than the first and has more or less eclipsed it, celebrates the advent of a condition in which borders between peoples and regions are rapidly being dismantled. Its most prominent exponents in postcolonial circles are writers like Homi Bhabha (2004) and Arjun Appadurai (1997), but the field is shared with countless less well-known scholars whose work explores the practices of hybridity, migration and diaspora. For these thinkers the experience of migration and the increasingly cosmopolitan character of culture (in particular, of communications and patterns of consumption) are outstripping the culture of the nation, which is where exclusion and oppression take place. Appadurai is ‘convinced that the nation-state, as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs’ (1997, 19). So too, apparently, are dreams of ethnic purity, moral sympathies and ‘communities of sentiment’ circumscribed by national borders, as well as the similarly passé belief that the world is divided up into powerful states and comparatively powerless ones. Globalisation for Appadurai constitutes ‘a complex overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models’ (1997, 32). Similarly, Homi Bhabha asserts that ‘it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking’ (2004, 246). Bhabha accentuates what he calls a normative ‘third space’ brought into being as a result of the contacts engineered by colonialism in which conflicts between cultures are bridged by negotiation and communication. At its most extreme the celebratory rhetoric of cosmopolitanism becomes a marketing strategy, a kind of flashy greasepaint used to hide the persistent repulsiveness of neo-liberal capitalism. G. Pascal Zachary’s odd book The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competitive Edge: Picking Globalism’s Winners and Losers (2000) is a particularly egregious case in point. The senior writer at the Wall Street Journal’s London Bureau sets out to show how individuals who cross cultural boundaries can triumph in the global marketplace. But of course cosmopolitanism is emptied of all substantive meaning when it is used to denote rapacious corporate power. Zachary’s book at least has the virtue of reminding

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us that there is more than one type of cosmopolitanism. Essentially, there is the substantive cosmopolitanism being developed by thinkers and movements agitating for cultural dialogue, for just institutions, for social and economic equality, and for the disinterested application of international law; then there is the superficial cosmopolitanism of ideologues like Zachary who wish to hide capitalism’s snarling features behind a multicultural mask. The third, socialist, school is characterised principally by its impatience with this sort of rhetoric and with the implication in works like Appadurai’s that the evils of inequality, exploitation and excessive state power that have attended capitalism since its inception are now a thing of the past. For a very trenchant critic like Timothy Brennan, cosmopolitanism is ‘less an analytical category than a normative projection’ (1997, 1), a kind of ideology that works to conceal the larger part of the world’s population that is still vulnerable to the enduring power and centrality of the nation state, and that remains at the mercy of a global order that is, alas, as systematic and as unequal as it ever was. The positions held by critics in the socialist school merit somewhat lengthier consideration because they constitute some of the most pertinent criticisms made by postcolonial scholars of the practice and ideal of cosmopolitanism. If cosmopolitanism proves robust enough to withstand their barbs, as I believe it will, then it will undoubtedly emerge with what its leftist critics have been urging: a much stronger focus on the political and critical aspects of the cosmopolitan project. What needs to be avoided like the plague, in the eyes of Brennan, Benita Parry and Aijaz Ahmad, is the precipitate rhetoric that Michael Mann has described as ‘breathless transnationalism’ (1995, 117–18), that Tom Nairn (less forgivingly) has called ‘departure lounge internationalism’ (2000, 148) and Andrew Smith (still less forgivingly) has dubbed ‘the “free-air-miles” sentiment in postcolonial theory’. This sentiment forgets ‘that, for most people in the modern world, migration is a terrifying option. Without the right circumstances of birth or bank account the majority of the world’s population remain intractably in place and very distant from the celebration of a newly mobile, hybrid order’ (Smith, 2004, 245–6). Likewise, Parry warns against ‘[t]he use of “diaspora” as a synonym for a new kind of cosmopolitanism’ because, though it is certainly relevant to émigré writers, artists, academics, intellectuals, and professionals […] it can entail forgetfulness about that other, economically enforced dispersal of the poor from Africa, Asia, Latin


America, and the Caribbean – the vast numbers of contract workers, casual laborers, or domestic servants in Europe, North America, and the Gulf States, undocumented immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and victims of ethnic cleansing – whose passage is largely coerced and who encounter punitive barriers hindering the movement of populations from South and East to North and West. (Parry, 2004a, 73) For the socialist school, the celebration of globalisation and cosmopolitanism pays insufficient attention to the fact that colonialism was and is characterised at least as much by violence, conflict and exploitation as it is by interactions and ‘third spaces’. Globalisation, in other words, is volatile and uneven. Furthermore, continuing inequality and poverty are more salient features of the current dispensation than cultural hybridity. Not all (nor even a significant minority) of the world’s citizens are exemplars of free movement between places and identities; more often they are victims of situations in which mobility is not an option or in which actual mobility is usually coerced and traumatic. There persists an offensive asymmetry between, on the one hand, the extraterritorial elites and corporations that seek to detach themselves from legal and political constraints and, on the other, the exploitable mass of labour divided up, as ever, into confined spaces. ‘If the new exterritoriality of the elite feels like intoxicating freedom’, in the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s words, ‘the territoriality of the rest feels less like home ground, and ever more like prison – all the more humiliating for the obtrusive sight of the others’ freedom to move’ (1999, 18). Those who do move are usually chased from their native places by war and ecological collapse or are condemned to flee by the desperate pursuit of sanctuary or employment. To celebrate the advent of a truly cosmopolitan culture is to defer a concerted political engagement with the causes of these misfortunes. In a very biting critique of what he calls ‘cosmo-theory’ Brennan describes a disturbing ‘continuity between the discourse of globalization in government planning and the discourse of cosmopolitanism in the humanities’ (2006, 211). Cosmopolitanism, in other words, like globalisation for James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, ‘is an ideological tool used for prescription rather than accurate description’ (2001, 12). It amounts to what Paul Smith has called a ‘millennial dream’ (1997) embraced by gullible academics whose intoxication with a rhetoric of flows, exchanges, networks, diasporas, hybrids and nomads makes them heedless of the profoundly uneven access to the privileges of travel

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and cultural eclecticism, and of the blatant endurance of poverty and inequality. In Aijaz Ahmad’s words: It is not at all clear how the celebration of a postcolonial, transnational, electronically produced cultural hybridity is to be squared with this systematic decay of countries and continents and with decreasing chances for substantial proportions of the global population to obtain conditions of bare survival, let alone electronic literacy and gadgetry. (Ahmad, 1995, 6) Peter Gowan too condemns what he calls ‘the new liberal cosmopolitanism’ (2003) beloved of ‘third way’ politicians, corporate mission statements and the mainstream media, which envisions a fractious globe united by the free market and led by altruistic states that put human rights before national sovereignty. For Gowan this naive vision has not replaced the power politics of the United States and its allies. In Leo Panitch’s words, those who focus on global trade at the expense of less seemly realities like exploitation and war ‘can’t see the bombs for the bananas’ (2000, 20). Similarly, the existing institutions of global governance are patchy at best. At worst they are disguised manifestations of US power. The Security Council of the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are all ostensibly cosmopolitan bodies that in practice, as the renegade former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz has remarked, are ‘dominated not just by the wealthiest industrial countries but by commercial and financial interests in those countries’ (2002, 18). Advocates of cosmopolitanism are, in Brennan’s phrase, ‘globalization’s unlikely champions’ (2006, 126–44). Their function, if not their intention, is to camouflage corporate and military expansion. Brennan argues that postcolonial theorists’ inattention to the endurance of imperialism and to its inseparability from capitalism makes them peculiarly susceptible to the misconception that globalisation, via the development of trade and advances in technology and communications, is bringing national chauvinism as well as the world economy’s imbalances to an end. When it is applied to formerly colonised but still subjugated peoples and nations, the very term ‘postcolonial’ acts as a euphemism. It disguises contemporary forms of imperial power or else invites us to consider poverty and under-development to be the legacies of a colonial past rather than the effects of a neo-colonial present. Our discipline’s moniker is indicative of a preference for addressing the


results of European colonialism not its contemporary manifestations. Brennan complains of a widespread neglect and even ignorance of older traditions of investigating the close connections between imperialism and capitalist globalisation: those of Marx, Lenin and Hobson; the dependency theory of Andre Gunder Frank and Walter Rodney; the world-systems theory of Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein; anticolonial nationalism; and third international communism (Brennan, 2002). Without reference to those traditions it becomes possible to overlook capital accumulation as a driving force of colonial violence and to point the finger instead at nation states. As in Appadurai’s work, the weakening of the nation state by capital flows is then seen as unambiguously positive since it allows us to transcend ethnic chauvinism and gives rise to new transnational identities. Capitalism, colonialism’s cause, is celebrated as its antidote! Hence the charge levelled at postcolonial studies in the work of critics like Aijaz Ahmad (1992, 1995), Arif Dirlik (1997) and Epifanio San Juan (1998) that postcolonialists, far from being the opponents of contemporary imperialism or its obituarists, are actually its beneficiaries and propagandists. In the eyes of the socialist school that I am discussing, one of the chief flaws of the celebratory rhetoric of cosmopolitanism is its failure to recognise the continued importance of the nation and the state (San Juan, 1998, 196–226). The assumption that the nation state is withering away takes no account of the massive proliferation of nation states in the last twenty years, of the efflorescence of ethnic nationalisms, of corporations’ dependence on states and nations, and, crucially, of the progressive possibilities of nation-based political struggles. Despite the internationalist cant of business magnates the nation state is, as the Pakistani intellectual Eqbal Ahmad observed as long ago as the early 1980s, the indispensable structure that guarantees and protects corporate profits. Their claims to internationalism and transcendence are belied by a mundane reality: big businesses have much to protect in the world, especially from the forces of national liberation, but few means of doing so except to employ the coercive capabilities of certain states. No corporation owns an army, air force, or navy. Yet one knows from three centuries of experience that these military forces are ultimately necessary to protect corporate investments and perpetuate the exploitation of people and their resources. Nothing has changed this fundamental reality which, since the advent of modern imperialism, has defined the symbiosis between monopoly capitalism and imperial states. (Ahmad, 2006, 210)

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As Leo Panitch too has argued, ‘states, and above all the world’s most powerful state, have played an active and often crucial role in making globalization happen. Increasingly, they are now encumbered with the responsibility of sustaining it’ (2000, 5). Far from it being the case that unstoppable market forces are rendering the state obsolete, the state has in fact abetted the global propagation of capitalism (Harvey, 2005, 64–86). Despite its anti-state rhetoric, capitalism requires a limited role for the state only in the area of social provision. It invents ever more tasks for the state to perform in criminalising dissent, maintaining ‘security’, hampering trades unions, surveilling citizens, removing regulations on businesses while inflicting them on the poor and unemployed, transferring vast sums of public money into private hands via a permanent arms economy, and subsidising and occasionally bailing out supposedly self-sufficient corporations. Risk and cost are the responsibility of the state; only power and profit have been privatised (Chomsky, 1998; Panitch, 2000). Nevertheless Brennan is quick to insist that nation states also offer an opportunity to subject unaccountable sources of power to the rule of law, to provide welfare and other social services, to regulate economic activity and to distribute its proceeds fairly (2003). In various articles, in his At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997), and more recently in his 2006 book Wars of Position, Brennan argues that a hasty desire to transcend the nation state and to celebrate a new trans-national order is likely to overlook the fact that for impoverished citizens excluded from the oases of affluence that characterise neo-liberal globalisation, nation states remain the sites at which they must direct their political energies and of which they must take charge if they are to redress their grievances: ‘in the current phase of worldwide neo-liberal hegemony, they also offer a manageable (albeit top-heavy) site within which the working poor can make limited claims on power, and have at least some opportunity to affect the way they are ruled’ (Brennan, 2003, 40). One’s critique of the nation state, Brennan continues, must be subtle enough to distinguish constructive uses of it (to subject rootless corporations to the rule of law and to provide citizens with welfare, education and health care) from oppressive ones (to incarcerate citizens unjustly, to silence, torture and murder them, to underwrite corporate power and enforce cultural homogeneity). We need, in other words, to resist the temptation to make our hostility to state power so total that ‘[t]he terror dome of the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner is rendered equivalent to Roosevelt’s New Deal or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela’ (Brennan, 2006, 19). We urgently need a more nuanced and discriminating theory


of nationalism, one that does not just write it off as a ‘retrograde ideology’ (Breckenridge et al., 2002, 3). Nationalism has much to offer. Abandoning sovereignty in some abstract cosmopolis might be very attractive for those whose modernity was engineered in the first place by a strong state and who now stand to gain economically from the pooling of statehoods. As Tom Nairn points out, the prospect is less beguiling for those, such as the Kurds or the Palestinians or even the Scots and the Flemish, who have been denied the prosperity that political independence helps to facilitate or the political recognition that the possession of a nation state commands (2000, 150). They do not wish to pool sovereignty for they have no sovereignty to pool. Additionally, it is only on the basis of the nation state, as Neil Lazarus (1997) maintains, that capitalism can be destabilised. This is not because control over the nation state is the ultimate goal of socialist politics. Far from it; the capture of state power is for Marxist thinkers like Brennan, Lazarus and Parry, as for Lenin (1990), Trotsky (1969) and even Fidel Castro (1972, 2001), the first step in that power’s dissolution. Alas, we cannot, as the miller’s daughter did to Rumpelstilzchen, make our adversary disappear simply by pronouncing its name; rather, we must capture, control, subdue and dissolve it. Likewise, the conquest of the nation state is not an end in itself but a stage in the liquidation of nation states. The state and the nation are among the obstacles that must be tackled and removed before the goal – a world without states and nations – can be reached. For the socialist school in postcolonial theory, cosmopolitanism is a straightforward ideology. Arif Dirlik, one of the postcolonial field’s most persistent critics, has bemoaned what he sees as its retreat from Marxism’s dialectical models of conflict towards morally dubious and politically unavailing motifs of interaction and hybridity. Contemporary postcolonial criticism privileges the ‘liminal, subaltern figures’ of ‘the excluded middle’ over the antithetical categories of colonizer and colonized, which in many ways have ceased to be antithetical as the boundary dividing them has been called into question for its essentialist and homogenizing assumptions. In stressing the experiential aspects of colonial encounters over their structural context, postcolonial criticism has moved past ‘Manichean’ divisions between the colonizer and the colonized, and even the ‘spectral excluded middle’, to stress ‘borderlands’ conditions, where the domination of one by the other yields before boundary crossings, hybridities, mutual appropriations, and, especially, the everyday resistance

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of the colonized to the colonizer. This new emphasis helps give voice to the victimized but, in the process of rescuing the colonized from voicelessness, also blurs the depth of the victimization colonialism visited upon its ‘objects’. (Dirlik, 2002, 433) Dirlik’s claim, doubtless exaggerated for polemical effect, is that for fear of being branded ‘essentialist’ and in order to avoid sketching reductive or patronising oppositions between the all-powerful coloniser and his helpless victims, many postcolonial critics have bent the stick too far in the opposite direction and forgotten the elemental truth that colonialism is by definition about conflict and power. Rash assertions of an achieved equality between cultures have even led, as Lazarus has complained, to a situation in which the ‘the staggeringly intensive and often quite systematic deployment of violence over the course of a couple of hundred years is in danger, today, in the name of a certain “postcolonial prerogative”, of being forgotten’ (Lazarus, 2001, 438). To speak unguardedly, as Bhabha does, of ‘the negotiation of colonial power-relations’ (2004, 292) is to mischaracterise the relationship between coloniser and colonised quite as grievously as Orientalism did in implying an absolute and insuperable difference or antipathy between them. ‘The necessary intimacies that obtain between ruler and ruled’, Sara Suleri argues in her book on British rule in India, ‘create a counterculture not always explicable in terms of an allegory of otherness’ (1992, 3). Suleri hastens to show that colonialism’s victims are not radically different, exotic and unknowable ‘others’. Yet by displaying the ‘intimate’ connections between cultures she succeeds in blurring the difference between the powerfulness of the one and the comparative powerlessness (or at least oppression) of the other. The history of colonialism is made to look more like one of friendly collaboration than of exploitation and slaughter. The so-called ‘colonial encounter’ is likened (or better, reduced) to a sort of get-together between interlocutors not (as it unquestionably was) an unequal conflict between combatants. Statements like Suleri’s surely invite a corrective dose of what Bertolt Brecht famously called plumpes denken or crude thinking: an unsophisticated but entirely salutary reminder that colonial domination, though it may once in a while be the cause of what Bhabha (2004) calls ambivalence, mimicry and hybridity, as well as numerous other forms of cultural cross-fertilisation, entails additionally and much more importantly the systematic exploitation and even the unnatural curtailment of hundreds of millions of human lives. All talk of ‘intimacy’ and


‘negotiation’, in other words, ought to be juxtaposed with reminders that between 1890 and the beginning of the First World War the plundering of the Congo by Leopold and his mercenaries caused somewhere between eight and ten million deaths (Hochschild, 2006). When the Herero and Namaqua of what is now Namibia revolted against their German conquerors in 1904 they provoked from General von Trotha not an ambivalent ‘colonial encounter’ but a campaign of extermination. Many were slain; the rest were driven into the desert where they starved to death. Similarly, references to the cultural transactions that took place under the British Raj, no matter how cordial and auspicious they may occasionally have been, should always be accompanied by an acknowledgement that the catastrophic droughts and famines in nineteenth-century India led (via the negligence and inhumanity of British colonial administrators) to one of the most appalling events in human history and, as Mike Davis (2002) has shown, sowed the seeds of the third world’s enduring underdevelopment. Such ‘crude thinking’ should today be applied to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. For Hardt and Negri the revolution has already taken place: ‘proletarian internationalism actually “won” […] [W]hat they fought for came about despite their defeat’ (2001, 50)! Hardt and Negri claim that imperialism is no longer directed by any single colonial power (xiv) and that capitalism is being beneficially transformed by the flights of migrants, by ‘[n]ew figures of struggle and new subjectivities, [that] are produced in the conjuncture of events, in the universal nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegenation of populations, and in the technological metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine’ (61). This sort of ecstatic rhetoric, as Bashir Abu-Manneh (2003) points out, acclaims as revolutionary movements of populations that are usually the results of coercion and exploitation, or else of unemployment and deprivation. These professedly communist philosophers present a picture of a utopian cosmopolis of equality and free movement in a world in which thirty thousand children under five die every day of preventable diseases and in which comparable numbers of people fall victim annually to the practice of human trafficking. Uncounted millions have been raped, murdered and displaced in the interminable armed conflict in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite its galloping economic growth half of India’s people live in poverty and half its children are malnourished. The colonial situation, I am suggesting, in agreement with what I am calling the socialist school of postcolonial criticism, is neither ambiguous nor serendipitous but inexcusable and radically objectionable. Without question, this

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situation is ongoing, no matter how insistently we champion the goals of cosmopolitanism.

‘A cosmopolitanism worthy of the name’ It might be objected that the complex accounts of cosmopolitanism formulated by thinkers in the postcolonial field actually have little in common with the discrete schools of thought on cosmopolitanism that I have been describing. It is true that until now I have exaggerated the unanimity within these schools and the extent of the differences between them. For though there undoubtedly are differences of emphasis, all the critics mentioned so far have adopted multifaceted positions on the question of cosmopolitanism. There is no reason, therefore, why all of these different ‘schools’ cannot unite behind a collective position. Each position has its strengths and weaknesses; to enumerate these is thus to allow the strengths of each school to correct the weaknesses of the others. For example, an obvious shortcoming of the celebratory school that I have associated with Bhabha and Appadurai is that it acclaims cosmopolitanism without sufficient regard for the obstacles that forestall cosmopolitanism’s realisation. It is, in other words, a form of cosmopolitanism that neglects, underestimates or simply fails to notice the political work, frequently at the level of the nation state, that needs to be done in order to bring cosmopolitanism about. However, the celebrants of cosmopolitanism are not so naive as their opponents make out. Even such an enthusiastic proponent of trans-national identities as Homi Bhabha, though many of his critics have not yet recognised it, was prepared to admit as long ago as 1991 that I don’t think we can eliminate the concept of the nation altogether, at a time when in many parts of the world – in South Africa, in Eastern Europe – people are actually living and dying for that form of society. You can’t completely do away with the nation as an idea or as a political structure, but you can acknowledge its historical limitations for our time. (1991, 82; emphasis in the original) No postcolonial critic is so jejune that he or she is naive enough to endorse the indefensible claim made by Thomas Friedman (2007), the New York Times columnist and globalisation cheerleader, that we live in a ‘flat world’ levelled by the global marketplace and the internet. The real strengths of the celebratory current include its capacity to sketch


an auspicious and at times utopian vision of cultural interaction which forms a very instructive and critical contrast with our decidedly uncosmopolitan present. Even its stress on the actuality of cosmopolitan relationships, which tends to mistake the value of cultural interaction for the fact of an achieved cosmopolitanism, at least has the benefit of preventing the goal of cosmopolitanism receding from view and, furthermore, of identifying the contacts, arrangements and cultural forms in which cosmopolitan sentiment is germinating here and now. Again, Bhabha has called our attention to those whose experiences of our economically and politically unequal globe are very far from cosmopolitan in any simplistic or celebratory sense: ‘The enslaved, the colonized, the untouchable dalits earn and learn their way through a world culture as a way of understanding not simply its glories but its horrors, not simply its major events but its small, forgotten voices’ (2002, 23). In other words, a responsible cosmopolitan outlook entails cognisance of those impoverished and immobile citizens presently prevented from helping to shape the world order. Indeed Bhabha now writes less of hybridity than of what he calls ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (2004, ix), which is an experience more grounded in the complex lived reality of the world’s citizens. The preface to the most recent edition of his seminal Location of Culture focuses, as ever, on peoples who move between cultural traditions and develop hybrid forms of life and art. Yet Bhabha now takes care to stress that a ‘global cosmopolitanism’ of prosperity and privilege founded on free market forces and neo-liberal forms of governance is restricted at present to an elite. In celebrating a ‘world culture’ or ‘world markets’ this mode of cosmopolitanism moves swiftly and selectively from one island of prosperity to yet another terrain of technological productivity, paying conspicuously less attention to the persistent inequality and immiseration produced by such unequal and uneven development. (2004, xiv) Moreover, globalisation, he writes, ‘must always begin at home’ (xv), addressing problems of diversity and redistribution at the local level before endeavouring to instate a hybrid global village. Cosmopolitanism should be vernacular because it needs to be measured from the perspective of those whom it currently excludes. Similarly, those critics for whom the protection of cultural diversity is paramount are both right and wrong. They are right because diversity is under threat from the concentration of media ownership and the

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promiscuous penetration of the globe by corporations, and because without significant variety in outlooks, inclinations, identities and tastes cosmopolitanism would be a monochromatic, conformist and frankly uninteresting condition. They are wrong, however, because the affirmation of difference is only half the battle. This is not least because an abstract appeal to cultural diversity is meaningless unless one is prepared to consider it a universal norm and thus countenance the possibility of establishing laws and institutions capable of ensuring the universal recognition of the rights of others. In other words, if we wish to create diversity, to adapt a remark of Raymond Williams, we need to create more than diversity.1 It is on the basis of practical solidarity, interaction and negotiation, and ultimately of democratic institutions and the comprehensive rule of law, that important differences in taste, inclination, talent and identity will thrive. Cosmopolitanism need not override or sacrifice difference. On the contrary, cosmopolitanism may be the best means of guaranteeing it. For diversity to flourish a certain amount of uniformity is necessary. Individuals, communities and nations have distinctive traditions, potentials and inclinations, and to fight for a situation in which they would have the opportunity to explore fully these divergent gifts is perhaps the foremost objective of political action. Yet for such differences to flourish others have to be abolished. The difference between those who enjoy rights and the rule of law and those who lack either of these things must be removed so that differences in outlook and culture can be allowed to survive and prosper. Cosmopolitanism, therefore, does not equal homogeneity but seeks, on the contrary, to lay down the conditions that must generally prevail in order for difference to be safeguarded and encouraged. It would entail laws, rights and institutions designed to ensure equality as well as, flourishing on and protected by this basis, the greatest possible cultural distinctiveness. The world as it is currently organised is not cut out to ensure this. Far from being able to guarantee diversity, capitalist imperialism is stamping it out. At present we have the worst of both worlds: both a globe that is shrinking and losing its diversity and, frequently in reaction to (and as a kind of compensation for) this uniform culture, an efflorescence of militant particularisms in the forms of nationalism and religious fanaticism. The obverse side of capitalist globalisation, as Slavoj Žižek has claimed, is Balkanisation: maximum uniformity combined with maximum fragmentation (1999, 215–21). Nor does cosmopolitanism reject localism in favour of an uncritical celebration of global civil society, largely because it is conscious that supra-national institutions like the World Bank are dominated by


powerful states and that humanitarian NGOs are sometimes prey to those states’ selfish agendas. Cosmopolitanism entails loyalty not to this global order but to a different one based on grassroots social movements and to the promise of equality latent in, for example, international law and the UN Charter. It therefore presupposes local forms of resistance. To inaugurate an alternative global order would in the first instance require opting out of (or as the Egyptian economist Samir Amin puts it ‘delinking’ from) the present one. For Amin, the ‘newly industrialising’ or ‘developing’ countries are not, as such terms imply, simply lagging behind the advanced economies; rather, their impoverishment is the condition of the first world’s prosperity. They must resign from this system in the short term in order to make possible the creation of a more just system in the long term. Disintegration of the system […] is not a negative phenomenon. On the contrary it is the most advanced form of construction of a genuinely multipolar world; it also provides the objective basis for a new internationalism of peoples, if the various social forces that refuse subjection to the logic of worldwide capitalist expansion can come together to define their minimum shared objectives and offer each other mutual support. (Amin, 1990, 78) The cosmopolitanism that I am espousing resembles this radical alternative to the status quo. It too presupposes an initial seizure of sovereignty followed by sovereignty’s voluntary dilution, a vision that may be vulnerable to criticism on the grounds of its likelihood or feasibility but not because it is millenarian and coercive. This emphasis on free volition opens up the prospect of a cosmopolitanism capable of combining difference with community, local and national solidarities with larger trans-national ones. In any case, negotiation between the various levels of organisation and affiliation is the normal business of politics. This complex give-and-take would not be suspended in a cosmopolitan polity so much as greatly intensified, as Raymond Williams once said of socialism (1989b, 295–313). Hence David Held’s stress on ‘multiple citizenships’ whereby individuals are ‘citizens of their immediate political communities, and of the wider regional and global networks which impact upon their lives’ (1996, 233). Cosmopolitanism need not be a behemoth that swallows us up. The problem thrown into relief by an examination of the sceptical school is this: the safeguarding of diversity is one of cosmopolitanism’s dearest objectives, but too great

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a stress on the fundamental differences between societies and cultures tends to result in an unavailing (or at least insufficient) politics that values distinctive identities at the expense of any meaningful common engagement. It can lead to what Gayatri Spivak calls a ‘wishy-washy pluralism’ (1990a, 104) that fails to tackle (and might even reproduce) the divisions put in place by imperialism. Likewise, the socialist position has advantages as well as disadvantages. Critics like Brennan and Parry point to the considerable obstacles represented by capitalism, imperialism and the nation state. They thus make it less likely that we will sell cosmopolitanism short by confusing it with neo-liberal globalisation. On the other hand, both their often intemperate insistence that capitalism and the nation state must be tackled before we are distracted by talk of the cosmopolitan condition and their brusque dismissal of cosmopolitan proposals and mission statements as forms of naive or furtive collusion with the status quo have potentially deleterious consequences. As Daniele Archibugi has noted, Brennan leaves himself open to the charge of devoting ‘far more space to critical analysis of the present situation than to concrete proposals for a way out of it’ (2003b, 265). A blinkered fixation with the uncosmopolitan present is every bit as off beam as a credulous announcement of the arrival of a cosmopolitan future. For a start, it risks losing sight of, postponing, even slighting as foolish and impractical, the possibility of a post-national, post-statist and post-capitalist future. It should be remembered, however, that the necessity of postnational and post-statist institutions and loyalties and the view that the germs of a post-capitalist mode of production are contained in the womb of the present one are both central planks of the Marxist tradition to which these thinkers adhere. In the end, however, no socialist critique of capitalism is so fixated with the here and now that it loses sight entirely of the there and then of a transformed and cosmopolitan future. The strident anticosmopolitanism of socialist critics like Parry is combined in their work with a stress on the global level at which capitalism must be confronted and at which alternative institutions and relationships must be realised. Their nationalism is a result of their hostility to nations, one might say, their focus on state power derives from their wish to rid themselves of states, and finally their aversion to cosmopolitanism is the outcome of their wish to tackle and supplant capitalism definitively and comprehensively before they announce its demise. These are paradoxical positions certainly, though a better word for them might be ‘dialectical’. Despite their distaste for the term, critics like Brennan and Parry are


not opposed to the goals of the radically political cosmopolitanism that I am sketching in this study. To the contrary, as Parry declares, ‘those who regard themselves as anti-imperialist should surely acknowledge the urge towards and the practice of a borderless resistance to capitalism’s unbounded oppression’ (2004b, 102). They are sceptical rather of the sort of premature cosmopolitanism that dooms itself to failure by not first tackling the undiminished power of capitalism and capitalism’s indispensable conduit, the nation state. Given that the uprooting of populations and the entanglement of economies has already taken place, the point of cultural and political work for Brennan is not to flee from the global, but to socialize it. No doubt global economic restructuring has forced on everyone the need to build new international forms of communication and mutual support […] To conceive of one’s political goals or cultural objectives on a uniquely national basis has never been the position of a left culturalism, and it is not mine. (1997, 307–8) The task, as he puts it, is ‘to build a cosmopolitanism worthy of the name’ (2003, 309). Moreover, political organisation at the level of the nation state is not inconsistent with the goals of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism can, as Fredric Jameson (2000) has argued, be accomplished through or via rather than in spite of nationalism. Jameson regrets that the globalisation of capital (that is, the capacity of corporations to devastate local labour markets by transferring or by threatening to transfer their operations to cheaper locations overseas) has not yet been counteracted by a comparable globalisation of the labour movement. Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith call this counter-globalisation ‘globalization from below’ (2000), Tom Mertes calls it ‘grass-roots globalism’ (2003), and Paul Gilroy observes ‘a new cosmopolitanism centred on the global south’ (2005, 289). Because the ‘new social movements’ (Mertes, 2004) are hampered by the constitution of political communities and institutions largely at the national level they must organise locally as well as globally.2 But ‘the struggle against globalization’, as Jameson claims, ‘though it may partially be fought on national terrain, cannot be successfully prosecuted to a conclusion in completely national or nationalist terms’ (2000, 66).3 As Alejandro Colás has argued, ‘cosmopolitan political action would actually involve the defence of social and political rights via the democratic nation-state’ (1994, 533). We have

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to work through the national towards the global, establishing rights and democracy at the level of the former in order to then guarantee and extend these at the level of the latter. All things considered, what we are faced with are less discrete schools than differing emphases. In fact, postcolonialists are currently refining a variety of cosmopolitanism capable of reconciling seemingly contradictory objectives. Combined as they are in the work of the figures mentioned thus far, those preoccupations point to a unified, albeit multifaceted and distinctively postcolonial cosmopolitanism. This united position is conscious of the need to think and to campaign at the local and national levels, whilst at the same time thinking and campaigning at the level of trans-national institutions and arrangements. In other words, we do not have to choose between the local and the global, for we can and must do both at the same time. Cosmopolitanism involves reconciling local attachments with global allegiances. Thus, Mitchell Cohen has talked of a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (1992) and Kwame Appiah of a ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ (1997). Cosmopolitanism, then, obliges us to work on the local or national level as well as, at the same time, on the global or cosmopolitan one that is our ultimate objective. Indeed, as well as being in two places at once cosmopolitanism also requires us, in a sense, to occupy two times. We need to think of a way in which we can face up to and work politically within our uncosmopolitan present (a time, as Parry and others rightly point out, of immense division and inequality) without losing sight of the desirability and feasibility of a cosmopolitan future.

Conclusion Cosmopolitan theory, as the authors of Global Transformations contend, needs to acknowledge the potential for, as well as the current absence of cosmopolitanism. ‘Far from being a world of “discrete civilizations”, or simply an international society of states, it has become a fundamentally interconnected global order, marked by intense patterns of exchange as well as by clear patterns of power, hierarchy and unevenness’ (Held et al., 1999, 49). What all this is intended to demonstrate, therefore, is that the two terms in my title should be given equal weight. I seek, in other words, to lay just as much emphasis on criticism as upon cosmopolitanism, to draw attention to the contumacious and oppositional mindset required to recognise the absence of a cosmopolitan world and to bring it about at the same time as accentuating the sense of global solidarity needed to imagine such a world and sustain it. It would be


a mistake, therefore, to think that these different theoretical schools have nothing in common. Notwithstanding their disagreements, what has hopefully emerged from a consideration of existing approaches in postcolonial studies is a distinctively dialectical understanding of cosmopolitanism: one that combines an attachment to diversity with a recognition of the need for community; political action at the level of the nation state with political action at a global level; and hard-headed awareness of the insufficiently cosmopolitan present with cognisance of the necessity and desirability of a cosmopolitan future. Therefore, the most promising stance on cosmopolitanism in the postcolonial field combines elements of all these approaches. This is the approach that I am calling ‘cosmopolitan criticism’. Our task is to find ways of thinking – simultaneously – the absence (or rather the latency) as well as the urgent desirability of the cosmopolitan condition. As the next chapter argues, this is what postcolonial literary criticism ought to do: convey the undiminished power, divisiveness and exploitativeness of imperialism whilst articulating the need, hope and the currently germinating potential for an effective supersession of imperialism in the shape of cosmopolitan arrangements.

3 Cosmopolitan Criticism

It ought to strike us as a curious fact that thinkers involved in the ‘cosmopolitical democracy project’ have overlooked literature as a potential source of cosmopolitan sentiment. For as Raymond Williams once argued, the task of constructing an emancipated society is surely ‘one of feeling and imagination quite as much as one of fact and organization’ (1989b, 76). It is a cultural as well as a political undertaking and therefore entails not just the regulation of economic activity but also the re-imagining and even the invention of new and more meaningful forms of human relationship. If cosmopolitan institutions are to be legitimate, sustainable and effective – indeed, if citizens are to will them into being in the first place as instruments of popular sovereignty – then cosmopolitan values, principles and ideals must perforce be encouraged. My claim in this chapter is that it is worth exploring encounters with postcolonial literature as one way of encouraging the aptitudes required to imagine, contrive and then sustain cosmopolitan institutions. A theory of cosmopolitan criticism would demonstrate how reading postcolonial literature can exemplify and engender the critical consciousness and the global solidarities that are required to uphold cosmopolitan political arrangements. My focus here, therefore, is on the capacities presupposed by effective cosmopolitan action. To be explicit, the qualities potentially instilled by an intelligent engagement with postcolonial literature are more or less indistinguishable from the democratic and cosmopolitan outlook presupposed by what Janna Thompson (2001) has called ‘planetary citizenship’.1

Worldliness This book is an assertion of the importance (though not, of course, the paramountcy) of literary reading in the cosmopolitan project. Reading 40

Cosmopolitan Criticism 41

postcolonial literature is obviously not the only way (nor is it among the most important or widely available) of creating citizens who are far-sighted enough to acknowledge obligations to people in distant countries and who are also in possession of the kinds of critical awareness required to overturn parochial ideologies and institutions. Plainly, it is not even among the most promising of such methods, given the possibility of reading postcolonial texts in ways other than those which I shall recommend and given also the significant obstacles of literacy, education, time, capital and inclination that lie between the vast majority of people and the experience of literary reading. One needs to stress too the ways in which postcolonial texts are often filtered and marketed in the West by publishers and universities. Such processes of mediation are at best selective and tendentious. We have access in the West to a tiny and unrepresentative portion of the literary output of the rest of the world. Moreover, we are often subliminally encouraged to read those texts that do reach us in ways that flatter rather than challenge our preconceptions (Huggan, 2001; Lazarus, 2005a). It would be Pollyannaish to claim too much importance and value for literature or to argue that encounters with postcolonial texts invariably result in constructive forms of moral and political engagement. Surely T.S. Eliot’s riposte to I.A. Richards is still valid: ‘Poetry “is capable of saving us”, he says; it is like saying that the wall-paper will save us when the walls have crumbled’ (quoted in McDonald, 2002, 104). In the same vein Edward Said contends that ‘in an age of the mass media and what I have called the manufacture of consent, it is Panglossian to imagine that the careful reading of a few works of art considered humanistically, professionally, or aesthetically significant is anything but a private activity with only slender public consequences’ (Said, 1994a, 385). Undoubtedly this is true, but the alternative is not simply to cultivate our gardens. My own approach does at least have this merit: it poses the question of why we consider reading and teaching literature worthwhile in the first place. To be sure, literary reading is a marginal activity but is not for that reason valueless or inconsequential. For literary texts can give rise to the sort of self-critical examination of one’s own prejudices and loyalties as well as to the kind of far-reaching awareness that are inseparable from the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship. To put it plainly, they provide, in Kenneth Burke’s congenial phrase, ‘equipment for living’ (1973, 293–304). Not least because of their peculiar power to foreground questions of authority and therefore to encourage critical reflection on power and its consequences, literary representations actually call forth this critical attentiveness and this expansive awareness.

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Indeed, how much more penetrating is this critical sense and how much more far-reaching is that awareness when the situation on which literature invites us to reflect is overtly bound up with the legacies of colonialism and with the effects of neo-colonialism, is, in short, postcolonial? I want, therefore, to demonstrate that it is among the principal purposes of postcolonial literary criticism to address the ways in which postcolonial literature engenders a critical and ultimately moral and political response to contemporary imperialism. In my view, works of postcolonial literature provide a fascinating deviation from orthodox ways of understanding and representing the postcolonial world. Each encounter with them constitutes what Said, referring to musical performance, calls an ‘extreme occasion’ (Said, 1991, 17), a chance to engage in the sort of penetrating enquiry, the imaginative exploration and the prolonged self-scrutiny so often regarded as uncalled-for (but actually sorely required) in other practices, vocations and disciplines. It is the extremity of the literary occasion – that is, its suggestion of a peculiarly heightened, acute and invigorating form of experience as well, alas, as its frequent marginality in the face of other pressures – that makes it what Said, after Theodor Adorno, calls autonomous of ‘the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life’ (Said, 1991, 20). Poems and novels, as William Carlos Williams reminds us, do not easily divulge information. Nevertheless, they are one source of the kind of self-reflection and humane awareness that in time might develop into effective moral and political action: It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. (Williams, 2000, 318) Informed awareness of other cultures and especially the capacity to reflect critically on one’s own are potential consequences of reading literary texts. This is only partly a result of the fact that postcolonial literature allows a diversity of voices from unfamiliar situations to contest one’s preconceptions. It is also, crucially, a result of literature’s distinctive and distinctively valuable ability to arouse in its readers a critical attitude or disposition. Literary texts are where voices are dramatised, reflected on and appraised. Characters’ voices are opposed and disputed


by other characters, while the authority of authors and their narrators is rendered moot by their narratives’ manifestly partial (in both senses of that word) quality and, of course, by the patently fictional nature of the world they describe. Works of literature do not posit truth claims or authoritative statements but openly fallible and therefore contestable points of view: the poet ‘nothing affirms’, as Sir Philip Sidney put it in a classic formulation, ‘and therefore never lieth’ (Sidney, 1973, 123). This is another way of saying that the voices one attends to in literature are invariably imperfect, ironised and contestable: openly susceptible to and therefore actively soliciting the critical and evaluative rejoinders of their readers. Through encounters with different and unfamiliar perspectives and via an appreciation of the limitations of orthodox points of view, readers of postcolonial literature can acquire the kind of selfreflexiveness required to relativise and evaluate their own sometimes partial or even parochial outlook. Works of postcolonial literature are thus valuable sources of critique, discussion and discovery. Part of what I am saying, however, is that self-criticism is an important upshot of literary reading: that the authority assailed by postcolonial texts includes that of the reader’s preconceptions about the people and places which those texts dramatise. Though he doesn’t quite put the matter in the more explicitly political terms that I am using here, Kwame Appiah calls this approach ‘cosmopolitan reading’ (2001). I am, then, reaffirming the relevance of literary criticism in the face of the widespread disparagement of its importance, of the increasing annexation of the university system by the priorities and jargon of the corporate world, and, even more importantly, of the frequent heedlessness, complacency and insularity of the wider culture (Miyoshi, 1998 and 2000). Another way of saying this would be to concur with the French philosopher of hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur, whose work is discussed in the final section of this chapter, that ‘[o]ne of the aims of all hermeneutics is to struggle against cultural distance’ (1981, 159). Few academics in the humanities have been more dedicated to explaining and defending this proposition than the American critic Michael Bérubé. His work is a vindication of what he is not afraid to call ‘the utility of the arts and humanities’ (2006, 71–89). In his What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Bérubé makes a very persuasive case for pedagogy dedicated to the processes of free discussion and inquiry. The humanities in general and literary studies in particular are worthwhile pursuits as well as popular targets for the political Right because they subject received truths like nationalism to critical scrutiny. ‘The true purpose of education’, Bérubé claims, ‘is to try to foster in students a kind of critical

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cosmopolitanism, such that they learn, among other things, to question any notion that one’s nation or tribe is favored by God or destiny’ (2007, 56). Other cultures must be studied and analysed so that one can learn to subject all beliefs and identities to criticism, to discuss them and expect them to justify themselves against rival points of view. As Martha Nussbaum argues in her Cultivating Humanity, one of the salient effects of a liberal and humane education – and the study of literature is a central, indeed indispensable part of such a thing – is that it instils a critical as well as self-critical disposition. In so doing it prepares its beneficiaries for responsible inhabitation of the world. The humanities are ‘aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted, but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship’ (Nussbaum, 1997, 301). Nussbaum envisions courses that make students conversant with diverse cultural practices and traditions, as well as anxious to question conventional beliefs. She is adamant that the purpose of literary study cannot be restricted to vocational preparation: that its uses include things other than patriotism and profit. This implies an expanded raison d’être for literary studies in the era of globalisation. If the aim of the humanities is to persuade students to think critically then, as Nussbaum observes, they are becoming more not less relevant in an age of intensified division and conflict. Since literary study is in part a preparation for democratic citizenship then the unprecedented interconnectedness of the globe points to the expanding role of literary study in inculcating democratic citizenship on a cosmopolitan level. What I have in mind in trying to specify a cosmopolitan outlook that can be engendered by literary texts is something akin to the disposition of ‘worldliness’. The political theorist William Smith has argued that the political project of cosmopolitanism requires a corresponding account of cosmopolitan virtue that identifies the qualities and dispositions that make individuals aware of their cosmopolitan obligations, more likely to discharge them, and more effective in doing so. His philosophically informed discussion concludes that cosmopolitan citizens ought to adopt a mode of being in the world that he calls, after Hannah Arendt, worldliness (Smith, 2007). Guided by this idea, citizens are able to promote a world that is reflective of cosmopolitan aspirations by applying the principles of justice and solidarity in their actions and judgements. In so doing, they work to create new cosmopolitan institutions and to reform existing institutions along cosmopolitan lines. In Smith’s words, they are able to act in a cosmopolitan way in a world that does not yet


serve cosmopolitan ends: ‘this element of worldliness’, he concludes, ‘should be interpreted as a strong desire to cultivate the cosmopolitan promise latent in the world as it is with a view to promoting a more cosmopolitan future’ (2007, 46). Another critic who has espoused and whose work has exemplified the disposition of worldliness is Edward Said, the postcolonial field’s most interesting and politically engaged voice and therefore one to whom this study returns again and again. Worldliness, according to Said’s definition, betokens a set of intellectual attributes. To be worldly means being articulate, persuasive, daring, independent and troublesome. It also enjoins one to campaign for the general (as opposed to the partial, self-interested or hypocritical) application of fundamental rights. The worldly critic is therefore insistent on making known the experiences and aspirations of those who might otherwise struggle to make their voices heard amidst the clamouring of the powerful and privileged.2 The idea of worldliness thus allows us to place at the forefront of our minds something that is too often lost or overlooked: namely, the pugnacious, even subversive nature of criticism and the fractious rather than politely deliberative context in which the critic is called upon to act. Indeed, this is the deceptively simple but too often overlooked proposition of Said’s essays on ‘Secular Criticism’ and ‘The World, the Text, and the Critic’ (Said, 1983), which draw our attention to criticism’s turbulent worldliness. There are two dimensions to the worldliness of texts, Said argues. Firstly, all texts are products of circumstance, a fact that obviously limits what can be done with them interpretatively but which also sets the critic free to investigate the ways in which texts express, intervene in, and provide insight into the milieus from which they emerge and in which, subsequently, they travel. Secondly, texts are not private exclamations but, by virtue of being texts in the first place, objects that are placed in the world and that beseech the attention of readers. A text’s production in a particular time and place restricts what can convincingly be said about it. Conversely, opportunities for diverse interpretations are opened up again by the text’s presentation of itself to a gallery of readers. Each of us reads and interprets the text in ways that, while limited by the text’s material fixity and by its identifiable origin in a particular situation, are nevertheless always varied and idiosyncratic. Texts hardly ever produce consensus, Said points out, and far from being a fact to be lamented this contentiousness has to be seen as the – and not just a – key aspect of their utility. Every experienced critic and reader knows that literary texts are, though frequently disobliging and

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even displeasing, seldom uninteresting or unavailing partners in dialogue. More often they are provocative and engaging. Literary texts generate discussion and controversy and they spawn new, singular, often unconventional and even radically subversive ways of experiencing the world. The literary critic’s task is to clarify the ways in which texts provoke us into interrogating our presuppositions. One upshot of criticism, therefore, is that received ideas resulting from ignorance and insularity should be made to appear much shakier and far less authoritative once they have been subjected to the text’s complex rejoinders. Criticism involves a kind of dialogue – or, if that sounds too amicable a description for what is frequently an eristic situation, a clash or quarrel – between critic, text and reader in which beliefs and convictions are placed on trial. Therefore criticism is not secondary or optional but an indispensable part of the process by which texts achieve their textuality: their being in the world. Criticism in the broad sense means contesting those theoretical systems and forms of explanation that result from academic near-sightedness or political orthodoxy and pressing instead the claims of detail, circumstance and human need. Yet even that does not say all that we need to know about criticism’s worldliness, for the critic is worldly not just in the sense of being knowledgeable, outgoing and possessed even of a certain savoir faire, but also worldly in another and more political sense: that is, possessed of far-reaching, ecumenical and even cosmopolitan principles. The critic’s charge is to cast doubt (and to show how literary texts frequently cast doubt) on received truths. He or she does so by revealing the contingency, contestability and alterability of such truths, revelations sorely required when it comes to the virulent fundamentalisms and complacent universalisms that currently hold sway over our political thinking. That being the case, the critic’s mission implies and possibly even leads to a similarly radical, though far from doctrinaire, political position. Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism (not as a modification but as an emphatic) it would be oppositional. If criticism is reducible neither to a doctrine nor to a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or method. In its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, special interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most itself and, if the paradox


can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organized dogma […] For in the main – and here I shall be explicit – criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom. (Said, 1983, 28; emphasis in the original) The critic’s sphere of operation, as Said makes clear in typically idealistic terms, the area with which he and his work are concerned, is certainly not academia nor even the nation, but the world. The kind of literary study that attends to – and is induced by texts themselves to investigate – the complex relations between different cultures and different societies has among its objectives, as one of Said’s intellectual forebears Erich Auerbach made clear, the illumination of humankind’s post-national reality: ‘our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation […] We must return, in admittedly altered circumstances, to the knowledge that prenational medieval culture already possessed: the knowledge that the spirit [Geist] is not national’ (1969, 17).3 A worldly approach enjoins us to place stress on the combative and subversive nature of criticism, as well as on criticism’s implicit orientation towards a social goal made possible by enhanced critical consciousness and by the appraisal and denunciation of entrenched sources of power. Perhaps this point about the ways in which a critical attitude and a cosmopolitan disposition are potentially cultivated through literary reading but ought then to be employed more widely will be understood better if I relate briefly the misadventures of one John Agresto, the Director of Higher Education Reconstruction for the occupying powers in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Agresto, a former president of St John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a ‘liberal arts college’ that prides itself on its great books curriculum, envisaged his responsibilities in Iraq as the making of ‘a clean start’ in that country’s beleaguered universities. Agresto admits he knew nothing of Iraq; he had purposely refrained from reading any books about it so that he might arrive in Baghdad with an ‘open mind’ (Chandrasekaran, 2007, 189). As he saw it, his job, like that of Peter McPherson (the economic adviser to Paul Bremer who saw the theft of state property as an admirable form of spontaneous privatisation), was to start from scratch. Unsurprisingly however, Agresto’s ambitious plans to restock libraries, equip classrooms with high-speed internet connections, ‘introduce’ the concept of academic freedom, and offer courses in ‘Western civilization’ and ‘the history of liberty’ all came to

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naught. His universities’ books, computers, lab equipment, desks, even their electrical wiring were looted from under the noses of the occupiers; Iraqi academics fled the burgeoning insurgency or were slain by it; promises of aid from federal funds and donor governments disappeared like smoke; and what remained of his miniscule budget was channelled to American universities that wished to set up ‘partnerships’ with Iraqi institutions. What it is not unfair to characterise as Agresto’s intentional ignorance of the place he was assigned to overhaul – in other words, the sheer intellectual and moral illiteracy of the occupation itself – is encapsulated with unusual clarity in his blasé disregard for the practice of reading and the disastrous results of his consequent ignorance. Agresto arrived not with an open mind but with a set of totally unexamined preconceptions. To give him his due, he seems to have picked up a modicum of self-knowledge during his sojourn in Iraq. Agresto now styles himself a neoconservative who has been ‘mugged by reality’: the title of a book written in an effort to make sense of his experiences (2007). But the limits of this conversion can be found in his view that the ‘reality’ by which he was molested had nothing to do with the nature of American power or with the Bush administration’s real reasons for invading Iraq. It was related rather to the incorrigible faults of the people and culture that the United States had, selflessly, sought to set free. Agresto’s mission was foiled by Iraqi ingratitude, fatalism and fissiparousness, by their ‘peculiar defects of character’ (153), and in the end by what Agresto refers to, in Conradian vein, as ‘the dark and despotic underside of the Iraqi soul’ (177). Agresto sticks closely to his lofty self-assurance and his gullible faith in American ‘good intentions’. Don’t suppose when I say that I, along with all America, was mugged by reality in Iraq that I was mugged by the strangeness of Iraqi mores or by Iraqi culture. What most hit me behind the head was America’s ignorance of what America had accomplished and what made America great. (Agresto, 2007, 107; emphasis in the original) After all, in America what is there to criticise apart from the people’s forgetfulness of their own greatness? For Agresto, the humanities furnish ‘the tools for rational deliberation’ (131). But he has evidently not allowed them to rewire his prejudices about the backwardness of Iraqis and the irreproachable excellence of their rescuers. If only he had read a book or two, as Naomi Klein drolly remarks, Agresto might have thought twice about the need to erase everything and start again (Klein, 2007, 338).


Here is an admonitory vignette for our times, perhaps to set alongside Said’s encounter with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense during the Vietnam War (Said, 1983, 2–3). For Agresto, the humanist qualities of critical consciousness and self-knowledge are an essential part of a liberal education. The administration of a foreign country, it seems, is undertaken with the aid of another set of beliefs and attitudes altogether. Likewise for the Secretary for Defense, who Said’s friend tells him keeps a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on the same desk from which he orders B-52 strikes over Vietnam. It is as though the aesthetic and the political are still two worlds that have nothing to do with each other and as though the former does not serve in part to help us think more deeply about the latter but instead functions to boost our liberal self-image and to exist harmlessly alongside the world of bombing raids and blundering ‘interventions’. Accordingly, we must keep at the very forefront of our minds the warning issued by Theodor Adorno that works of culture often simply mask the violence and injustice that take place in the world. Adorno could hardly be more explicit in his scorn for culture that seeks to insulate itself from the world of terror and suffering symbolised by Auschwitz: ‘It abhors stench because it stinks – because, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit’ (Adorno, 1996, 366). This foul dwelling should provide no sanctuary from atrocities that were perpetrated in Europe’s recent past and which are now being inflicted elsewhere. ‘In a situation where the miserable reality can be changed only through radical political praxis’, Herbert Marcuse reminds us, ‘the concern with aesthetics demands justification’ (1979, 1). Attention to culture is justifiable and not a means of distraction only when it amplifies the suffering contingent on an exploitative social order or when it instils the capacity to reflect on that order as well as the aptitudes required to undertake a moral and political transformation. Part of what a materialist theory of culture has to say, as Terry Eagleton reminds us, ‘is that culture is not of first importance’ (2000, 240), at least not yet in a world characterised instead by coercion, toil and scarcity. Paradoxically, culture’s role is to direct us to this world and to permit us to do so not in a spirit of fanaticism but in one of thoughtful, self-critical concern. Agresto’s experiences demonstrate that if we are to make contact with reality before it mugs us then ways must be found of engineering the kind of self-criticism and self-knowledge required to peer beyond established wisdom. Even with the best will in the world, humanitarian missions that lack self-awareness and the ability to interrogate received truths about one’s own cultural superiority will fail. My point is that

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the experiences and conclusions recounted in Agresto’s unselfconscious memoir are symptomatic of a widespread belief, even among professed defenders of the humanities like Agresto (author of The Humanist as Citizen (1982)), that the kind of self-knowledge and democratic sensibility that he celebrates in relation to the great literary and philosophical touchstones of the West do not usually extend to our dealings with a place like Iraq. There, on the contrary, attitudes of condescension, belittlement and haughty exasperation, not to mention an extraordinary complacency with regard to the supposed merits of one’s own society and government, still prevail. I am suggesting that the salient outcome of an ability to read well, which means attentively, openly and self-critically, is an ability to subject to criticism everything from nationalism to religious enthusiasm, as well as smug faith in the preeminence of Western culture. No less essential is an informed reflection on other cultures and situations and on peoples who are often obscured by disadvantage, enforced silence or the complacent heedlessness of the dominant point of view. ‘To read well’, as George Steiner once remarked, ‘is to take great risks. It is to make vulnerable our identity, our self-possession’ (1967, 29).

Cosmopolitan hermeneutics ‘The starting point for any genuinely profitable discussion of interpretation’, as Fredric Jameson has argued, ‘must be not the nature of interpretation, but the need for it in the first place’ (1989, 5). Put differently, in the words of Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman, ‘it is worth considering why one would be worried about literature in the era of globalization at all’ (2001, 611). My answer to these questions and hence the reason for my emphasis on the special value of literary analysis is that informed and literate citizens are the precondition of a democratic cosmopolitanism. Moreover, that emphasis is intended to correct the widespread neglect and in some cases the active disparagement (Calhoun, 2003, 108) of the cosmopolitan potential of literary texts. Plucking books from the pile at the edge of my desk as I write, or running my eyes along the adjacent shelves, is sufficient survey to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which works of postcolonial literature might accomplish the twin goals of dramatising imperialism whilst foretelling alternatives. The style, form and genre of these works of literature are as diverse as their provenance. Yet they all stress what too many theorists in the postcolonial field, whose work on matters to do with imperialism and with resistance to imperialism addresses culture in a broad sense and is hosted in the main


in university departments of literature, are sometimes inclined to forget: that the analysis of literature is the central purpose of our work because such works provide their readers with a source of self-knowledge and a cosmopolitan conscience. As Peter Hallward has noted, what is peculiar about postcolonial criticism ‘is just how little it has to say about its own “home” discipline, about literature proper […] Most postcolonial readings are brief, often insubstantial, sometimes simply anecdotal’ (2001, 334–5; emphasis in the original). Aijaz Ahmad is mistaken when he bemoans the way in which ‘interest has shifted from the “facts” of imperialist wars and political economies of exploitation to “fictions” of representation and cultural artefact’ (1992, 93), not because he is wrong about the relative inattention to war and exploitation in postcolonial scholarship but because the study of postcolonial fictions and representations might serve usefully to shed light on such phenomena. I am defending the neglected importance of the ‘literary’ in postcolonial literary criticism. This is not of course because postcolonial literature transcends and has nothing to do with the blatantly political milieus from which it emerges but, on the contrary, because such writing possesses a distinctive ability to make us attend to those milieus in ways that are penetrating and self-critical. Overcoming what Eli Sorensen has called ‘the lack of attention to the specifically literary in much postcolonial literary criticism’ (2007, 74) necessitates a recognition that the moral and political objectives of postcolonial criticism can be arrived at by passing through rather than avoiding or performing perfunctorily the essential task of analysing the details and complexities of literary texts.4 What I am trying to do is explore the way in which many postcolonial literary texts actually give rise to a cosmopolitan consciousness as opposed to being merely susceptible to analysis by readers who are already cosmopolitan. The usual method of analysing the relationship between literature and its worldly contexts – that outlined by Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) and by the French critic Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (2004) – fails in this respect. Both volumes, in addition to the essays collected in Christopher Prendergast’s Debating World Literature (2004), constitute efforts to think through Goethe’s idea of weltliteratur in order to understand the complex relationship between literature and globalisation. In this endeavour Moretti is confronted by the problem of how to furnish a tolerably accurate picture of that relationship in spite of the colossal wealth of relevant material, in the face of which even the most learned and unflagging scholar must be tempted to throw up his hands in despair. Auerbach’s

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solution when writing Mimesis, his magisterial study of ‘the representation of reality in Western literature’, was to fasten upon fertile passages of key texts, the elucidation of which will, he writes elsewhere, ‘open up a knowledge of a broader context and cast a light on entire historical landscapes’ (1965, 18). By contrast, Moretti’s solution is to stop reading books closely or even at all. In his wholly quantitative effort to chart the development of the global ‘literary field’ Moretti ‘decided to rely’, he tells us disarmingly, ‘wholly on other people’s work’ (2005, 4). Moretti’s preference ‘for the explanation of general structures over the interpretation of individual texts’ (91) or, put differently, his method of distant (as opposed to close) reading is not without its sociological uses. Graphs, Maps, Trees traces the divergence of forms, styles and conventions under the pressure of the literary market. Casanova, similarly, employs the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of symbolic capital and the cultural field to demonstrate the inequalities between different national literatures and the ways in which peripheral literatures seek to gain legitimacy and prominence. But both volumes (though Moretti’s most of all) seek to understand literature’s relationship with globalisation without attending to literature itself, which seems to me to mean abandoning one of the things that makes studying literature and especially postcolonial literature worthwhile in the first place: its ability to encourage its readers to reflect on their political and other preconceptions by portraying unfamiliar situations, by describing extraordinary points of view, and by encouraging critical self-reflection. As Paul Jay writes, ‘we need to turn our attention away from a simple preoccupation with how national literatures function in relation to historically homogeneous cultures and toward an examination of how postnational literatures are instrumental in the formation of subjectivity in deterritorialized and diasporic contexts’ (2001, 39). This is a serviceable summary of the new challenges faced by literary critics, though it is only an announcement of a need. Moreover, it is one that does not pay sufficient attention to the drawbacks and shortcomings of globalisation or to the way in which literary texts of the kind encountered in this study enjoin a critical (as opposed to celebratory) attitude to globalisation. What it takes to fulfil that need is perhaps signalled by the great British critic F.R. Leavis, for whom the distinctive value of literary study as an academic discipline is to be found in its compelling attention to concrete details, its consequent suspicion of abstract systems of explanation, as well as its postulation when examining particular works of provisional judgements aimed at instigating dialogue. The criticism of literature, in other words, trains one to criticise, scrutinise and discuss, all aptitudes that are


conducive to what I am calling worldly conduct but which are difficult to acquire by looking at and past rather than in books: ‘literature’, in Leavis’s words, ‘will yield to the sociologist, or anyone else, what it has to give only if it is approached as literature’ (1984, 193). If we wish to spell out what it is that literature can give us then we ought to heed the description by the French philosopher of hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur of how the interpretative process helps reformulate us into beings capable of undertaking self-criticism. The term hermeneutics refers to the study and practice of interpretation: the understanding of objects and of the self. Indeed, for Ricoeur these two processes take place together. His philosophy conceives of selfunderstanding not as the result of isolated cogitation but instead as the product of reflection on the interlocutors with whom and the objects with which the self interacts. Knowledge of the self, according to Ricoeur, is contrived principally via interpretation of the signs and symbols through which we encounter and shape our world. Ricoeur therefore endeavours to establish the three dimensions of a text’s meaning to which the reader consecutively applies his interpretative skill (1981, 145–64). These are the prepositional dimension (the verbal structure of the text or words on the page); the author’s intention (by which Ricoeur does not quite mean the discoverable purpose of the text’s author, but rather the implied author as a social and historical being who is revealed and manifested by his text); and finally the text’s effect on its readers. Corresponding to these three dimensions of meaning are the three stages of interpretation. These are explanation (elucidating the form of the text), understanding (clarifying its meaning), and appropriation (establishing the text’s significance for its reader). The object of interpretation is appropriated when one seeks to make sense of it in one’s own terms. Hence the meaning and significance of, say, a literary text are not so much discovered as made, not found lying about like a discarded coin but minted anew in the process of each distinctive reading. There can, therefore, be more than one legitimate reading of a literary text, which is what Ricoeur means by the ‘conflict of interpretations’ (1974). To explain, understand and appropriate a text is to conduct a dialogue with it, or at least with the surplus of meaning contained in any textual utterance: that is, with the suggestive connotations, ambiguities and associations that differ slightly from mind to mind. What Ricoeur achieves in this exposition of the process of literary interpretation is to account for the variety and inexhaustibility of legitimate readings of a particular text without surrendering too much ground to the permissive or relativist view that all readings are equally

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valid because they are entirely dependent on subjective experiences rather than external evidence. We come therefore to what is the deepest or at least, for my purposes, the most useful of Ricoeur’s insights. When one interprets an object, Ricoeur is saying, one thinks forwards as well as backwards; one thinks about the self as well as about the world beyond the self. The voices, postures and ways of being dramatised by literary texts, all of which inhabit a ferment of dialogue and conflict with each other and with the reader, serve to relativise and to make appear newly problematic and changeable readers’ existing ways of thinking and living. What Ricoeur’s philosophy has gained insight into is the combination of self-reflection and broadened perception to which every genuine feat of interpretation perforce gives rise. His complicated exposition of the process of interpretation to which readers subject literary works thus prepares Ricoeur’s ingenious contention in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981) that the world of the literary work is brought into being rather than obediently rendered. That world is not copied but realised in readers’ interpretations. One is invited by literary texts not so much to look out over existing situations as to explore new modes of being and new viewpoints that can then be contrasted with one’s customary ways of interpreting and inhabiting the world. ‘Through fiction and poetry’, as Ricoeur puts it elsewhere, ‘new possibilities of being-in-the-world are opened up within everyday reality’ (Ricoeur, 1991, 86). Ideally, literary language leads to an adjustment of our understanding. Though it is certainly mimetic, the work of art does not reproduce reality. Ricoeur is concerned instead with the capacity of literary language ‘to redirect, restructure an experience, to produce a new manner of inhabiting the world’ (1998, 83). Thus the proposed world of the text ‘is not behind the text, as a hidden intention would be, but in front of it, as that which the work unfolds, discovers, reveals. Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text’ (1981, 143; emphasis in the original). In the dual processes of reflection and self-reflection that they instigate, literary texts open up new worlds: ‘[t]o understand is […] to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds which interpretation unfolds’ (1981, 94). In The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson translates Ricoeur’s theory into an altogether more political idiom. Such is then the general theoretical framework in which I would wish to argue the methodological proposition outlined here: that a Marxist negative hermeneutic, a Marxist practice of ideological


analysis proper, must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological cultural texts. (Jameson, 1996, 296; emphasis in the original) Literary analysis, in other words, has for Jameson both a functional and an anticipatory dimension. The primary responsibility of the literary critic, whose work is distinguished by his or her sensitivity to relations of power and the facts of violence and exploitation, is, obviously, to unmask the ways in which such things are sublimated and concealed by texts as well as to show how texts themselves sometimes lay bare these things (something Jameson fails to mention). However, an ancillary but nevertheless still indispensable objective of his or her work is to reveal the ways in which literature can also point beyond exploitation and injustice. In Yeats’s phrase, ‘the arts lie dreaming of things to come’ (1961, 191). For Jameson the ‘Utopian idea […] keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one’ (1971, 111). Since the aim of the critic is both to reveal the present’s defects and in some way to foretell a future in which those defects have been put right then literary criticism involves explaining and accentuating those utopian moments in the text or, better, as they emerge in the text’s impact on its recipients, which make it possible to envision or even to prepare for that future. Utopia has been a key motif in the tradition of Marxist aesthetics. Jameson inherits it from Ernst Bloch’s (1996) voluminous studies of the way in which works of art anticipate a form of consciousness appropriate to the classless society and from Adorno’s belief that aesthetic experience, which is self-reflexive and non-violent, is ‘the model of a stage of consciousness in which the I no longer has its happiness in its interests, or, ultimately, in its reproduction’ (Adorno, 1999, 346). Jameson’s calls for ‘the renewal of Utopian thinking’ (1989, 110) are an extension of this tradition and can be heeded by a postcolonial criticism prepared not just to demystify ideology (or to show how texts themselves succeed in acts of demystification), but also to amplify the ways in which literary texts help construct new, more reflexive forms of subjectivity in addition to more comprehensive forms of human community. I am commending a hermeneutic method for the analysis of works of postcolonial literature that combines an emphasis on their critical dimension (that is, on their capacity to dramatise and incite opposition to imperial practices) with an emphasis too on their frequently neglected

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normative aspect, by which I mean their equally crucial ability to delineate – or at least to implore, contemplate or, however obliquely, foretell – moral and political alternatives to imperial rule. Axiomatic for this study therefore is Timothy Brennan’s conviction ‘that the literary intellectual in the analysis of literary texts most matters by remaining, as it were, in literature, speaking to an aesthetic need that is also a social need’ (2006, 119). I take it that Brennan means not that the critic’s focus on literature screens out literature’s broader origins and consequences but, on the contrary, that the special aptitudes that the critic employs in textual analysis are also those that the sensitive reader can employ productively elsewhere and can encourage in others: analytic attentiveness to details and contradictions; a capacity for painstaking reflection on the use and misuse of language; a self-critical examination of ideologies and preconceptions; and an acute sense of intellectual and political responsibility. What this project is designed to uphold, therefore, is the centrality of literary interpretation to the task of modifying a world characterised by force and conflict. We need a critical practice that takes seriously the insight that the ability to read well, though it is often learnt and refined in literary interpretation, has an application way beyond the hermeneutic endeavour of elucidating works of literature and that, as Said argues, we must endeavour to connect the ‘more politically vigilant forms of interpretation to an ongoing political and social praxis’ (2000, 147). Hermeneutics, according to the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, is not a method for the human sciences comparable to that of the natural sciences. Hermeneutic understanding is not secured through a technique and then objectively verified. Rather, it arises through the experience of objects, situations, interlocutors and especially artworks that have not previously been accounted for and cannot easily be explained by one’s presuppositions. To understand, therefore, is to understand differently, to either modify one’s point of view or to be made to justify one’s reasons for holding it. A no less rigorous procedure than scientific method, hermeneutics gives rise to both knowledge of one’s object of study and to an equally valuable re-examination and illumination of the preconceptions, the motivations and the very identity of the self. Human experience, in the hugely enabling conclusion of Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method (1979), ought to be modelled on such open-minded conversations. By conversing with the other we become conscious of the limitations of the self and the alterability of its precepts. To seek knowledge is for Gadamer to partake in ‘the conversation that we ourselves are’ (340), to lay one’s own prejudices and


presuppositions on the line at the same time as one explores the meaning and significance of the other. People are not adversaries, therefore, but interlocutors. Human life is not a power struggle but an unending dialogue. As linguistic beings we transcend the isolated and embattled self in the unpredictable yet fruitful course of human colloquy. There is thus, as Andrew Bowie points out, an ethical imperative to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which behoves one to recognise and attend to the broadest possible circle of interlocutors. Interpretation ‘imposes a continuing obligation upon free actors to attempt to see the world from the viewpoint of the other, and to articulate the potential created by the other, including oneself as other in self-reflexive interpretation’ (Bowie, 1997, 125; emphasis in the original). Language is for Gadamer a medium of democratic congress. He culls a social ideal from a sensitive epistemology and extracts the value of fellowship from the fact of linguistic interaction. Hence his philosophy insinuates what Richard Wolin calls a modest utopian vision according to which illegitimate relations of authority, domination, and force will be replaced by those of human mutuality. To acknowledge our lot in these terms means to credit the profane illuminations of language with a power to defetishize a reified social world and to reforge relations of solidarity and trust among men and women. (Wolin, 1992, 19) Likewise Richard Bernstein identifies ‘a latent radical thrust or telos in [Gadamer’s] thinking which points to the demand for the type of society in which every citizen has the opportunity to engage in the open dialogue, conversation, and questioning that he takes to be constitutive of what we are’ (1986, 78–9). The practice of dialogue with other experiences and points of view tests and potentially refutes parochial ideas and loyalties. ‘To be in a conversation’, as Gadamer remarks, ‘means to be beyond oneself, to think with the other and to come back to oneself as if to another’ (1989, 110). Here dialogue is synonymous with the mind-broadening power of travel, of an itinerant exploration of alternative perspectives. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, to learn that hermeneutics, in the work of its founder the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, has its origins not just (as is well known) in the decipherment of scripture but also in the interpretative encounter with other cultures and situations. While beginning to think through the peculiar challenges of interpretation (particularly the central role in it of the interpreter)

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Schleiermacher was asked in the early 1800s to translate David Collins’s Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, a grim sketch of the conditions of the aboriginal population of that colony which he planned to supplement with his own research. The project was never completed, though not for any want of enthusiasm on Schleiermacher’s part.5 My point, specifically, is that the study and practice of interpretation have always been bound up with the interpretation of other cultures and situations and that, furthermore, we too should conceive of interpretation as an attempt to contrive understanding (a vital part of which, as I have been saying with the aid of Gadamer and Ricoeur, is self-understanding) of different experiences and lives. For Gadamer, the interpretation of works of literature entails a conversation with the text and with other interpreters, a process that inculcates respect for other views as well as consciousness of the potential fallibility and revocability of one’s own. According to his biographer, it was his appreciation of the implications of this process that ‘brought the late Gadamer to an almost “political” or cosmopolitan broadening of his hermeneutics’ (Grondin, 2003, 329). In so far as they give rise to dialogue and to self-reflection, literary texts engender a potentially limitless fraternity of interlocutors. They ‘create a community, and in principle, this truly universal community extends to the whole world’ (Gadamer, 1986, 39). According to Gadamer, the sensitive and reflexive encounter with artworks and with other readers provides a model for a type of thinking that no longer tolerates parochial doctrines and allegiances.

Conclusion I am concerned with works that merit analysis because they are arresting and interesting enough to provoke self-critical dialogue. They must furnish meditation not disseminate programmes for action let alone blueprints of an achieved cosmopolis. As Ariel Dorfman has argued in his study of Latin American writing over the last decades, the most constructive works are not those which, didactic or propagandistic, seek to alter the immediate political consciousness of the reader. That sort of aesthetic relationship would preserve in the work of art the authoritarianism that is being challenged in the larger society in which the Latin American writer lives and creates. The works that Dorfman discusses conceive of the reader in a more respectful way, as if she were a citizen of the future, trusting him to decide the multiple ways in which the work must be internalized in order to be fulfilled, giving to them


the task of completing the fiction massively and plurally in the mirror or window of their community. (Dorfman, 1991, xiv) These authors, in the title of Dorfman’s book, ‘write to the future’. Never strident or dictatorial, their aim is to provoke thought via complex, multifarious and inconclusive renderings of particular situations. As ever, in Gabriel García Márquez’s words, ‘the writer’s duty – his revolutionary duty if you like – is to write well’ (Márquez, 1983, 59). ‘A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art’, wrote Leon Trotsky (1991, 207) in response to those Bolsheviks who would reduce art to political propaganda. The critic’s task is not to prescribe themes for texts or to impose visions on them but to read them carefully and attentively, to respect their complexity and particularity. In so doing he or she can learn to appreciate and then, for his or her readers, amplify the diverse ways in which those texts dramatise as well as assail doctrines of power and insularity. In the situations they portray and especially the relationships they engineer with their readers, works of postcolonial literature not only engage with and draw attention to the deplorable endurance of colonialism but envision colonialism’s supersession as well. The dialectical task of the cosmopolitan critic is therefore, in Yeats’s felicitous phrase, ‘to hold in a single thought reality and justice’ (1978, 25).

4 Late Yeats: ‘Beating upon the Wall of the Irish Free State’

My aim in this chapter is to identify the reasons for the existence of a distinctive style in the late work of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. I am far from being the first critic to reflect on the peculiar tone and technique of Yeats’s late poetry. Critics as distinguished as R.P. Blackmur (1986), T.S. Eliot (1975), Richard Ellmann (1985), Paul de Man (1984) and, I think more effectively than any of these, the Yeats scholar Thomas Parkinson (1964), have all done so before me. But I want to contest or rather add to the biographical or artistic explanations that have hitherto been advanced to account for the notable phenomenon of late Yeats. The late work’s violence and provocativeness as well as its ‘thirst for accusation’ (VP, 542) are occasioned largely by the poet’s disappointment and frustration at what Yeats sensed was Ireland’s merely partial decolonisation in the years after the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922.1 To be more specific, Yeats’s late work is distinctive and valuable, indeed it is one of the major heralds of the themes and forms of postcolonial writing, because it encourages its readers to prepare and express cosmopolitan perspectives. In 1917, at the age of only fifty-two, Yeats prepared to use his old age to put into effect a deliberate policy of offensiveness and intransigence. A poet when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his mask and his vision, without new bitterness, new disappointment […] Could he if he would, copy Landor who lived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, all lost but the favour of his muses […] Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not suffer any longer. Then he will remember Wordsworth, withering into eighty years, honoured and 60

Late Yeats: ‘Beating upon the Wall of the Irish Free State’ 61

empty-witted, and climb to some waste room, and find, forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust. (Yeats, 1959, 342) Yeats emulated Landor. His late style betokens a growing alienation from the new regime in Ireland and from what Yeats came to see as its sanctimonious and offensively bourgeois followers. Nor is it an exaggeration to state that Yeats’s poetry during this period was even more reckless, intemperate and at times raucously impertinent than his studiedly confrontational public performance as a ‘wild old wicked man’ (VP, 587): ‘I must lay aside this pleasant path I have built up for years’, he told Ethel Mannin in 1938, ‘and seek the brutality, the ill breeding, the barbarism of truth’ (quoted in Foster, 2003, 608). In late Yeats there is a brusque repudiation of the hieratic and the lofty, of pretentious attitudinising, along with a new irony and self-awareness that deflate bathetically both his own stridency and that of what W.H. Auden has called ‘youth’s intolerant certainty’ (1968, 73). What follows is indebted to the German philosopher and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno’s work on the transition from the harmonious compositions of Beethoven’s middle period to the articulation in the composer’s late works of a fragmentary and almost dissonant aesthetic.2 Adorno attributes this shift less to the composer’s deafness or old age than to his music’s acute sensitivity even in the innermost elements of its compositional style to its changing social and political context. Likewise, I do not want to relate the similarly difficult, discordant and vigorously contumacious style of Yeats’s last collections to the (for us) relatively banal fact of the poet’s age or even to what another champion of late style, Edward Said, refers to, vaguely, as the late stylist’s aversion to the ‘Zeitgeist’ (Said, 2006, 23). Rather, the distinctiveness of late Yeats testifies, firstly, to the poet’s exemplary capacity to reinvent both the forms and themes of his work in the last period of his life. Not for Yeats the fate of Virginia Woolf’s Mr Ramsay whose early success is followed by a life of cautious amplification and repetition: ‘I have felt the convictions of a lifetime melt through at an age when the mind should be rigid’, Yeats wrote in A Vision (1978, 301). But the poet’s own senescence is the least important as well as the least interesting explanation for the ‘lust and rage’ (VP, 591) that spur late Yeats into song. Secondly therefore, the peculiarity of the late style is also the result of the poet’s disillusionment with orthodox nationalism. Though Yeats’s support for Irish independence was unflinching, he derided the intolerance

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and ideological narrowness that he first discerned in the Playboy riots of 1907 and which intensified in the turbulent years of the Easter Rising, war with England, the fratricidal civil conflict and the exhilarating though in many ways for Yeats also disappointing first few years of Ireland’s independence. The apotheosis of Yeats’s late style, as Helen Vendler has claimed (2006), is the poetry written after about 1920, which, she does not add, coincides with and is in large part occasioned by his ‘Being out of heart with government’ (VP, 317). The late poems are exercised by the fear that an independent Ireland will be a replica of the England from which it had broken away. They compel reflection on the myriad of threats in the new Ireland to freedom of thought and artistic expression: fanaticism, intolerance, conformity, philistinism and censorship, religiosity and sexual repression, bourgeois mediocrity and the intolerable complacency and claustrophobia of cultural nationalism. Yeats was always acutely conscious of his political context, especially when around this time he came to see his role as a poet as being one of aggravation and provocation rather than, as before, one of service to the nationalist movement. It is perhaps truer to say therefore not that Yeats was absorbed in politics but that politics absorbed Yeats, thoroughly and lastingly. For one of the things that distinguishes Yeats’s work in all its modes and phases is its recognition that in a situation so fraught as that of a nation seeking to resist colonial power, everything, including poetry, assumes an urgently political complexion. Yeats moved, indeed he grew to maturity and formulated his aesthetic, in an atmosphere that was densely political. His late poetry was able to articulate a growing disenchantment with institutionalised nationalism because he was himself a nationalist, the intensity of his disillusionment corresponding to the intensity of his attachment. Yeats had no need for ventriloquism, for his precocious championing of the Celtic Revival, his involvement in nationalist agitation, his heated participation in the Senate in the crucial debates on divorce and censorship, in addition to his personal acquaintance with prominent political personalities (Maud Gonne, Patrick Pearse, Kevin O’Higgins, Eoin O’Duffy, even Herbert Asquith) all permitted him to speak with a voice that was overtly, if never shrilly or didactically, political in nature.3 It was precisely his fidelity to the desire for freedom that inspires nationalism, primarily the freedom from constraints set upon selfexpression, that enabled Yeats to see through and deplore the constraints imposed by the new dispensation. If the Free State constituted, in Michael Collins’s phrase, the freedom to achieve freedom then Yeats was determined to hold it to its word. In his campaign in the Senate


against the prohibition of divorce, for example, Yeats took a decidedly liberal stand for pluralism and freedom of conscience. He consistently defended Ireland’s Protestant minority against what he saw as its growing marginalisation at the hands of a nation that, like his tower at Ballylee, was ‘Half dead at the top’ (VP, 482). Fanaticism having won this victory […] will make other attempts upon the liberties of minorities. I want those minorities to resist, and their resistance may do an overwhelming service to this country, they may become the centre of its creative intellect and the pivot of its unity. For the last hundred years Irish Nationalism has had to fight against England, and that fight has helped Fanaticism, for we had to welcome everything that gave Ireland emotional energy, and had little use for intelligence so far as the mass of the people were concerned, for we had to hurl them against an alien power. The basis of Irish nationalism has now shifted, and much that once helped us is now injurious, for we can no longer do anything by fighting, we must persuade, and to persuade we must become a modern, tolerant, liberal nation. I want everything discussed, I want to get rid of the old exaggerated tact and caution. (Yeats, 1960, 159–60) In both this speech, which was published in the Irish Statesman, and in the more famous oration delivered on the floor of the Senate, in which he defended Southern Protestants as ‘one of the great stocks of Europe’ (Yeats, 1960, 99), Yeats revealed his distinctively post-nationalist and even Fanon-like consciousness that the winning of independence is nothing but a first step towards liberation. An embittered Yeats at his most ostentatiously prophetic stirred up the Senate and provoked discussion beyond its walls. His target was nothing less than the received practice of Irish nationalism, which had served its purpose and was now standing in the way of progress. In his late work Yeats is preoccupied with what comes after state and nation. What, in other words, should be the alternative or successor to nationalism once it has accomplished its immediate goal? Yeats’s work is increasingly dedicated not to the Ireland that existed, about which he harboured profound misgivings, but to ‘that ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out an imaginary Ireland, in whose service I labour’ (Yeats, 1961, 246). Though Yeats did not succeed in formulating a vision of a genuinely postcolonial or, to use Richard Kearney’s (1997) term, ‘postnationalist’ Ireland, his late work certainly does register the failings of

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institutionalised nationalism in addition to promoting reflection on political alternatives. Most of all it is the verse contained in his extraordinary late collections, New Poems from 1938 and Last Poems from 1939, that allows his readers to make out a vision of comprehensive liberation. I am referring to its great explicitness and ‘barbarous tongue’ (VP, 313), its sexual frankness, its acute sense of ‘this foul world in its decline and fall’ (VP, 619), its bracing repudiation of conventional pieties, and above all its peculiarly stimulating form. For Yeats’s late work, blind loyalty and ‘the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea’ (Yeats, 1961, 313) such as nationalism should be succeeded by the examined life. His late work entails disagreement between its readers and the reigning creeds of the new Ireland, a willed provocation and cultivation of ‘the work of intellect’ (1961, 526), in addition to the consideration and free evaluation of orthodox practices and ideas. The freedom and integrity of the intellect are always uppermost in late Yeats. Hence his belief that ‘[w]e cannot have too much discussion of ideas in Ireland’ (1994, 118). In Seamus Heaney’s words, Yeats’s ‘mature music is not a lulling but an alerting strain’ (1980, 72). In late Yeats a politics of liberation characterised above all by a distinguishing stress on the free intellect corresponds to a poetics of liberation typified by the way his recondite images encourage reflection on the various limitations and restrictions on Ireland’s new political freedom. The cosmopolitan dimension of Yeats’s late work is to be found neither in his disillusionment with nationalism nor in his estimable fascination with Eastern cultures but in the way these things are mediated by the formal details and complexities of the poems. For the attentive reader, these poems furnish images and portents of a world that has left merely national loyalties far behind.

Yeats and the idea of late style Style is not quite the same thing as form. I favour Michael Spitzer’s definition of style, in his book on Adorno and Beethoven, as ‘a fusion of thought and language’ (2006, 10): a combination of the work’s content and the way that content is expressed. Yeats’s late style is therefore a fusion of his political disenchantment with the intensely provocative forms of the late poems. By style, therefore, I intend to designate something like a blend of form and content or of expression and theme, a blend so complete that the critic cannot study these aspects in isolation. In short: idea plus form equals style. It is through style, in this case the confrontational and stimulating quality of Yeats’s late poems, that his confrontation with the shortcomings of independence finds articulation.


Whose style is this? Not just Yeats’s. For Adorno, Beethoven’s revolutionary late style prefigures and is to a degree shared by later composers in the Viennese tradition such as Mahler, Berg and of course Schoenberg, whose radicalism is indebted to Beethoven’s last-ditch interrogation of tonality (Adorno, 1991b and 2006). So too for Yeats, whose late style is not his alone, even though like Beethoven he was perhaps its first and most eloquent practitioner, but is later bequeathed to and elaborated by writers in Ireland and the rest of the postcolonial world who are struggling to surmount the obstacles thrown up by hitherto insurgent but now institutionalised nationalist projects. We must therefore resist the conclusion put forward by Richard Wollheim, for whom style cannot be attributed to schools or periods, only to individual artists (1993, 171–84). This is unsupportable, unless one believes that artists, because of the undeniable artistic individuality that is theirs, are not also social beings. Style must come from somewhere, though stating this proposition is not at all the same thing as saying that individuals do not have styles or that all style is the product of abstract historical processes. For the concept of style encompasses but also exceeds the unique manner or technique of the artist, who, whatever originality he or she may possess, is inevitably somebody who works within society and language and who therefore must share important stylistic traits with others. The most noteworthy recent account of late style is therefore mistaken in its surprising insistence that late style is the product of the intentions and experiences of the stylist not of the complex combination between these things and wider historical processes. Edward Said’s On Late Style (2006) contends that works produced towards the end of an artist’s life frequently frustrate the urge for harmonious closure and even the expectation of immediate understanding. For Said it is the extraordinary sagacity of old age and especially the defiant confrontation with imminent death that imbue the senescent mind with an uncommon aptitude for facing facts, as well as relinquishing nostalgic dreams and precipitate visions. We have late works’ dissonance and sheer difficulty as well as their demanding and uningratiating quality to thank for refusing us the sort of appeasement and consolation furnished by more beguilingly melodious compositions. Late works in Said’s view give rise to dissatisfaction and alertness, to a sort of vigilant refusal to settle down, comply or be of the same mind with the dominant view. Late style is intensely provocative, contrary and disobliging, not to mention unashamedly resistant to simplification. It is a mode of expression adopted by one who is determined to eschew orthodox perspectives and to promote that eschewal in his readers.

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Said’s rather surprising examples of thinkers’ and artists’ eleventhhour productions include the tacit fatalism of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, the anti-redemptive vision of Benjamin Britten’s late opera Death in Venice, Richard Strauss’s unsettlingly backward-looking final compositions (most obviously the Four Last Songs), the daring political affiliations of the French novelist Jean Genet, the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s lapidary novel The Leopard, and (an old obsession) the prodigious virtuosity and eccentricity of the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Said is referring to late style as something that dispels what Joseph Conrad in the closing line of his novella Youth calls ‘the romance of illusions’ (1975, 39): that is, what Said elsewhere refers to as youth’s ‘facility for romanticizing unpleasant realities’ (1997a, 112). ‘Lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present’ (Said, 2006, 14). In late style is revealed the vulnerability of youth’s frequently grandiose ambitions to the disappointment and disenchantment consequent upon the passage of time: ‘the justice that examines all offenders’, as Rosalind puts it in As You Like It (IV.i.187–8). For Said, who is glossing but also, as I will show, simplifying Adorno’s account of Beethoven’s late compositions, late style is a chapter in the career of the artist whose consciousness of mortality leaves him indignant and disillusioned (in the literal sense of that word), distrustful of expressions of hope and ideas of reconciliation, and prepared as a result to begrudge his audience any pat, homiletic conclusions. Late works ‘do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and unsynthesized fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else’ (Said, 2006, 12). Age and the consciousness of mortality are, in Said’s view, the exclusive basis of late style. I would not wish to deny the productiveness of Said’s largely biographical approach. For Yeats’s work certainly gives a sense of the sobering power of old age. The ageing poet is acutely conscious of time and transience, of ‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies’ (VP, 407). Yeats ‘wither[s] into the truth’ (VP, 261), as he puts it in ‘The Coming of Wisdom with Time’, and gains insight into the hypocrisy, cowardice and falsity of the scene he regards: ‘we old men are massed against the world’ (VP, 486). So too is Yeats remorsefully fixated with ‘Things said or done long years ago’ (VP, 501). Often the defiant tone of ‘tragic joy’ (VP, 564) is Yeats’s riposte to mortality. He is like the varied figures that populate heaven in ‘Her Courage’ ‘Who have lived in joy and laughed into the face of death’ (VP, 366). Furthermore, Yeats’s late style is antagonistic and difficult: a bromide against solace and false optimism, what he calls ‘the folly of


being comforted’ (VP, 200). But I think we need to qualify or rather add to Said’s largely biographical explanation of late style lest we neglect the vital political and historical conditions of the style of a poet like Yeats. According to the more materialist account provided by Adorno’s book on Beethoven, the late stylist is more than just a gifted paragon of truculence and dissent. His work can also, far more importantly, be a means of expressing an entire culture’s consciousness or at least inkling of its own moribundity. Adorno is exceedingly impatient with standard biographical or psychological interpretations of Beethoven’s late works in which their enigmatic quality is put down to the composer’s age and debility (Adorno, 1998, 125). The mordant outlook of late-period creators can instead be a consequence of a whole society’s elongated death throes, of a perceptive (and not necessarily elderly) individual’s more or less conscious recognition that a specific social order’s halcyon period of youthfulness and promise has given way to a late phase of decrepitude. In the middle or classical period of Beethoven’s work the final movement or reprise of the sonata always resolves different themes in the ambit of the dominant theme. This is music that resounds with a revolutionary desire for social harmony; it ‘reverberates with the roar and ideals of the heroic years of its class’ (Adorno, 2006, 100). But this classical idiom rings false in a society with no experience or imminent expectation of harmony. The transition from Beethoven’s classical to his late style reveals in aesthetic form the flawed and incomplete character of the social whole: ‘late style’, according to Adorno, ‘is essentially critical’ (1998, 97). In, for example, his late mass, the Missa Solemnis, which eschews Beethoven’s characteristic principle of thematic development (138–53), or in the way that particular phrases in the last quartets and piano sonatas, because of the music’s jarring caesurae and its outworn conventions, no longer seem yoked to the dynamic flow of the whole, the first encroachments of dissonant twentieth-century music can be perceived. Beethoven’s late works are bare and fragmentary. Because the recapitulation of the dominant theme grates against the common experience of antagonism it is employed, as Charles Rosen also notes, in an incongruous or sardonic and even ironic fashion (1971, 460), indefinitely postponing the thematic resolutions effected during his mature period. Beethoven’s late works are for Adorno the ne plus ultra of bourgeois art, the limit point beyond which the highest forms of cultural expression are essentially negative. To the musical experience of the late Beethoven the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, the roundedness of the successful symphony,

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the totality arising from the motion of all particulars, in short, that which gives the works of his middle period their authenticity, must have become suspect. He saw through the classic as classicism […] At this point he raised himself above the bourgeois spirit, of which his own oeuvre is the highest musical manifestation. Something in his genius, probably the deepest thing, refused to reconcile in the image what is unreconciled in reality […] It is, in the proper sense of the word, a realistic trait in him which is dissatisfied with tenuously motivated conflicts, manipulated antitheses of the kind which in all classicism generate a totality which is supposed to transcend the particular but in reality is imposed on it as if by a dictate of power. (Adorno, 1998, 151–2) Late style, therefore, is both an unavoidable misfortune in the life of the artist, who in consciousness of mortality ceases to impose his unifying will on his aesthetic material and thus reveals its rifts and fissures, and a seismic event in the history of modern culture. No longer content to camouflage the existence of alienation and social conflict, the composer devotes his works, in Adorno’s terms, to the articulation of truth: to the candid assertion of society’s deficient, unfinished character. To be late, in Adorno’s view, is therefore to be disillusioned: to view the bourgeois world without consoling fancies and daydreams. Late style is, then, not just an approach or a technique that affects artists when they are long in the tooth. What Adorno is getting at, in contrast to Said, is an appreciation, grasped and conveyed through artistic form, that a social order characterised by division and conflict is therefore unsustainable and, consequently, on the verge of dying out. Late style dramatises what Adorno calls the ‘limit of the bourgeois mind’ (1998, 141). We would therefore be well-advised when seeking to account for the dissonance of Yeats’s late work to look beyond the standard biographical explanations. Blackmur (1986), Eliot (1975), Ellmann (1985) and Arra M. Garab (1969) all contend that Yeats’s late works fought out an exhilarating though perforce unsuccessful battle with the inescapable limits of reality and time. In his final works, like Prospero’s, every third thought is the grave. I am suggesting that instead we explain Yeats’s late work in relation to its context. This involves augmenting Said’s influential characterisation of Yeats’s work, in his extended study of the poet’s oeuvre in Culture and Imperialism, as postcolonial (Said, 1994a, 265–88). Because Yeats was embroiled in a nationalist struggle against colonial power, his early work, for Said, bears comparison with that of anti-colonial poets such as Aimé Césaire, Mahmud Darwish and Pablo


Neruda. Yeats is seen as ‘the indisputably great national poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the dominion of an offshore power’ (Said, 1994a, 265–6). What this interpretation fails to emphasise is what Said himself has characterised as ‘the anger and gaiety of [Yeats’s] anarchically disturbing last poetry’ (1994a, 278). For it is precisely here that Yeats’s work responds to the failings and limitations of national consciousness. We should therefore place Yeats not just in the context of anti-colonial nationalism but in the more topical context of the period that comes after the formal winding up of Europe’s colonial empires and therefore after the partial or preliminary success of the kind of anti-colonial nationalist project of which Yeats and his works were a part. As Jahan Ramazani (2001) along with Marjorie Howes (2006) and some of the contributors to Deborah Fleming’s volume of essays on W.B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (2001) have contended, Yeats’s work rewards the attention of postcolonialists for several reasons, including its involvement in cultural resistance to colonial power and its fascination with the experiences and values of other cultures (Ramazani, 2001, 21–48). A further reason, I am claiming, is that his late work alerts us to a historical stage that was soon to become universal: a failed transition from the age of colonialism to a genuinely post-colonial dispensation. For Said, nationalist resistance to colonialism has two different, if not quite distinct, phases (1994a, 277). The first entails an awareness of the exceptionable fact of colonial domination and a resultant determination to resist colonialism both politically and at the level of culture. This is the moment at which the nation is taken possession of through political and even military organisation and is given shape at the level of the imagination through symbols and narratives that replace demeaning stereotypes with images of the awakening nation’s unity, value and purposefulness. Yeats’s early poetry and drama along with his championing of the Celtic Revival belong to such a moment. The second stage of resistance, according to Said, who is glossing Frantz Fanon’s ideas, takes place alongside this first and emerges from it before, hopefully, superseding it. This stage becomes most constructive and necessary at the point at which the former colony’s political independence has been achieved. For of what use are braggadocio and cultural unity once the coloniser has been expelled? Indeed, there is a danger that nationalism will then degenerate into narrow chauvinism. This is a point made by Said when he decries the deficiencies of those regimes that took power in Africa and Asia after decolonisation: regimes that failed to move from the first stage of resistance to the second, from (to use Fanon’s terms)

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national consciousness to social and political consciousness and even international consciousness (Fanon, 1990, 199). Resistance’s second stage involves repudiating the rhetoric of unity and sacrifice that, of necessity, characterised nationalism during its insurgent phase and replacing it with a willingness to address, for example, social injustices and the oppression of women, to prioritise education, and to encourage democratic participation. This is the milieu of Yeats’s later poetry, the point after the achievement of Ireland’s independence at which in Ireland nationalism in the sense of a unified struggle against colonialism becomes largely unnecessary. At this point Yeats aimed to substitute ‘positive desires for the negative passions of a national movement’ (1966, 572). The heroic phase of nationalism aspirant has given way to the compromises and prevarications of nationalism triumphant. Now other forms of injustice, hitherto repressed pending the expulsion of the foreign power, must be tackled. ‘The boy who used to want to die for Ireland’, Yeats declared in 1914, confident that Home Rule would be enforced, ‘now goes into a rage because the dispensary doctor in County Clare has been elected by a fraud. Ireland is no longer a sweetheart but a house to be set in order’ (quoted in Foster, 1997, 513). Crucially, the struggle against colonialism’s legacy also entails the cultivation of much broader post-nationalist allegiances. The original goal of anti-colonial resistance was never separation or the assertion of exclusive identities. Of course, the affirmation of their identity is an essential means for a people to regain self-confidence and legitimacy after centuries of defamation, just as national sovereignty ought to be used to curtail dependency and under-development. But as Fanon and others recognised, sovereignty and identity are no more than staging posts en route to genuine emancipation, which would necessitate new, non-nationalist allegiances that solicit loyalty not to some hunk of territory gerrymandered by the former colonial power but to a fully global community. Decolonisation, in Fanon’s words, ‘sets out to change the world’ (1990, 27). Yeats, Said rightly suggests, ‘partially belonged to this second moment’ (1994a, 278), as shown by that anarchic late poetry and its voluble dissatisfaction with nationalism, a crucial point that Said does not expand on or substantiate. My objective is to show in detail (as opposed to pointing out in passing) how Yeats’s work can be read not just in relation to anti-colonial nationalism but also in relation to the second or post-nationalist phase of liberation that explores expansive alternatives to national power and consciousness. However, there is a very different and widely held view of Yeats’s late work that must first be considered. For late Yeats is associated more


often with fascism than with militant anti-colonialism. My sense is that close attention to the late poems makes one extremely sceptical of the simplistic narrative of Yeats’s political development set out in, say, Paul Scott Stanfield’s Yeats and Politics in the 1930s (1988). Stanfield sees Yeats eschewing nationalism and turning himself into a snobbish Anglo-Irish reactionary and even a fascist. Elizabeth Cullingford, however, in her Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (1981), views Yeats’s brief flirtation in the 1930s with the quasi-fascist Blueshirt organisation of Eoin O’Duffy as an injudicious response to his otherwise laudable contempt for the conservative stuffed shirts that headed official nationalism. More significantly, we should be more careful to distinguish the politics of the poet from the politics of his poetry.4 The aristocratic mask donned by Yeats in the late poems should be seen less as a defiantly illiberal assertion of outmoded ideals of hierarchy than, on the contrary, as the assumption of a persona that allowed him to attack prevailing dogmas all the more fiercely by presenting himself as a free spirit beholden to no particular interest or party. Far from a defence of social order, the aristocratic stance might equally license an eschewal of it: ‘What if the Church and the State | Are the mob that howls at the door!’ (VP, 554), where the unexpected exclamation mark has the force of a self-critical revelation. The celebrations of Lady Gregory’s aristocratic demesne in poems like ‘Coole Park, 1929’ (VP, 488–9) and ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ (VP, 490), though ostensibly a thoroughly reactionary and nostalgic, even high Tory, vision of the poet as an aristocrat’s obedient retainer, are on another level elegies for the loss of artistic freedom in Ireland in the face of growing censorship.5 ‘Another emblem there!’, exclaims the poet as a swan swims into view, though as Thomas Parkinson has noted, the emblematic significance of the swan is less obvious here than in previous poems (1964, 126). Now it seems to connote not just the Platonic soul but, drifting on its ‘darkening flood’, also the poet and his milieu’s vulnerability to some vague threat. What is central is less the ancient house, which is on the wane, than the ancient house as an emblem of the unfettered intellect and of artistic freedom. ‘Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation’ is indefensibly conservative if read literally as a protest against the reduction of tenants’ rents at Coole on the grounds that this measure imperils the existence of Yeats’s writing sanctuary. But it becomes far more persuasive if the poem is read as a poem rather than as a political statement: in other words, if we interpret creatively the image of the sturdy house ‘Where passion and precision have been one’ in giving birth to ‘sweet laughing eagle thoughts’ (VP, 264). I am suggesting that the indeterminacy of such images leaves us free to interpret

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the poems as personal experiences transmuted into general morals and therefore, perhaps, as a defence of what Theodor Adorno calls the ‘autonomy’ of the aesthetic or what Yeats calls ‘a written speech | Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease’ (VP, 264).6 Likewise, the vision of the cautious shopkeeper in ‘September 1913’ fumbling in the ‘greasy till’ whilst adding ‘the halfpence to the pence’ and ‘prayer to shivering prayer’ (VP, 289), though unquestionably disdainful, stems perhaps from Yeats’s fear that in independent Ireland minds might be circumscribed by the middle-class vices of vulgarity, avarice and piety.7 Yeats was no anti-capitalist of course. Despite his admiration for revolutionaries like James Connolly it would be unconvincing, not to say absurd, to claim Yeats on behalf of Connolly’s project of hoisting the green flag over Dublin as a prelude to the building of a Socialist Republic (Connolly, 1973, 124). In the late poems, however, we find an aversion to the unequal social order of independent Ireland: ‘money’s rant is on. | He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount’ (VP, 580). The ostensibly patrician disparagement of the bourgeois ethic, of ‘the merchant and the clerk’ breathing on the world ‘with timid breath’ (VP, 266), might equally be seen as a progressive rejection of capitalist social relations. I am even tempted to say of Yeats what Fredric Jameson has argued of Wyndham Lewis: that it is when he is at his most apparently reactionary that his affront to orthodox sensibilities makes his work most interesting and emancipating (Jameson, 1979). Indeed, Yeats seems surprisingly and even commendably willing to sacrifice personal reputation for poetic effect: ‘O what am I that I should not seem | For the song’s sake a fool?’ (VP, 553). Even the notorious misogyny of the later poems, in which it is usually women who are enchanted by hysterical or extremist passions, can be explained, if not entirely excused, in this way: by approaching them as literary works not as statements of the poet’s views. Everywhere in late Yeats, women’s voices grow ‘shrill’ (VP, 392) and their minds become ‘bitter’ and ‘abstract’ (VP, 397). Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz, for instance, are distracted from beauty and fineness by ‘Some vague Utopia’ (VP, 475). Yet these dubious figures for hysterical abstraction and militancy are also bound up with Yeats’s laudable suspicion of ‘the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea’ (1961, 313): that is, of people whose vibrancy, beauty and individuality are subordinated entirely to nationalist agitation and who therefore lose sight of the nobler intellectual, artistic and humane values that national independence paves the way for but does not itself represent and cannot bring about. ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’


(VP, 475–6) should be read alongside ‘Why Should not Old Men be Mad?’ (VP, 625–6). Here the extreme disillusionment of old age is put down to the transformation of youthful creativity and elegance into mediocrity, ‘intellectual hatred’ (VP, 405) and single-minded extremism. The poet’s disaffection is brought about less by his own old age than by his having lived long enough to witness the frustration of youth’s ambitions. That he laments his former companions’ shrillness is an example of the poet’s misogyny perhaps but it is also, more interestingly and less moralistically, a metaphor for a kind of chronic and inordinate political zeal. It is the poetry that concerns us here. An essential part of my argument in this study is that it is literary texts, not least by virtue of their contentiousness and indeterminacy, that provoke their readers into adopting alert, inquisitive and self-critical postures. As Auden suggested in his elegy for Yeats, we must attend mostly to the complex truths that unfold through language and not to the simplifications now and then put about by the mortal, sometimes misguided and frequently, ‘like us’, ‘silly’ people who wield it. Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well. (Auden, 1940, 109) We need to understand the enduring complexities and provocations of Yeats’s poems as an implicit repudiation of fascism as well as nationalism.8 By 1937 Yeats associated fascism with the contrived and violently imposed unity that he was rebelling against in his verse: ‘What discords will drive Europe to that artificial unity – only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle – which is the decadence of every civilisation?’ (Yeats, 1978, 301–2). Yeats expressed his horror that ‘men will die and murder for an abstract synthesis’ (161). His late work’s complexity and its polysemic character, its refusal to effect what Adorno calls ‘reconciliation under duress’ (1991a, 216–40) by forcibly uniting a complex reality in the poetic image, went hand in hand with its political aversion to all ideologies that demand conformity and obedience. Perhaps here we find the reason why lateness is so frequently associated with failure and the inability to finish. Adorno’s book on Beethoven, like Said’s on late style, was published posthumously. It is a collection of scattered, though characteristically dazzling, fragments culled by his indefatigable executor

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from sketches, research questions and recondite aide-mémoires. Adorno’s failure to write his long-gestated study is itself an object lesson in the vanity of human wishes and in the resistance of the composer’s oeuvre to coherent theoretical exposition. It also denotes the expressive power of failure, of a Yeatsian eschewal of contrived unity and coherence (of which the bundled sticks of the Italian fasces are a symbol) in favour of uncertainty and fragmentariness. There are political implications here, as well as philosophical and epistemological ones. The form of Yeats’s late poems, particularly the ways in which the subjective intentions of the poet have given way to a new kind of uncertainty, a new absence of resolution and therefore to a new interpretative freedom on the part of their readers, is the most eloquent rejoinder to accusations of fascism. The value that I am ascribing to late Yeats is to be found in the poems’ calculated provocation of intellectual exertion and therefore of disagreement and dissent: estimable characteristics of course not fascist ones, no matter what we make of Yeats’s frequently ill-judged political sympathies.

Seeking a theme Yeats’s early plays and poems are indebted to the traditions of French symbolism; Arthur Symons’s influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature of 1899 was dedicated to Yeats (Symons, 1899, v–vi). They are also part of the edifying legends and myths of the Celtic Twilight (Yeats, 1981), the national symbols unearthed in folk culture and fairy lore, in addition to Yeats’s enduring fascination with the visions of Blake. Frank Murphy aptly characterises Yeats’s early poetry as a ‘quest for reconciliation’ (1975). This is also the eccentric milieu of theosophical societies, neo-Platonism and the occult, of alchemical research and séances where the spiritual and material worlds intersect. Early poems like 1892’s ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ (VP, 137–9) are products of the youthful poet’s desire to articulate Ireland’s national spirit through graspable symbols. The poem begins by rejecting the view that the symbolic nature of the poet’s work distances it from political involvement: ‘Know, that I would accounted be | True brother of a company | That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong’. He places himself in the company of earlier patriotic poets, Thomas Davis, James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. Far from escaping politics, Yeats endeavours to defend poetic composition itself as a profoundly political act. He represents the nation figuratively, encapsulating it in a resonant image: ‘Nor be I any less of them, | Because the red-rose bordered hem | Of her, whose history began | Before God made the angelic clan, | Trails all about the


written page’. The ‘measure’ of the dancer’s ‘flying feet’ are echoed in the poem’s similarly sprightly, scarcely varying iambic tetrameter. Here no disparity is perceived between the measured, temporal world and the unmeasured realm of eternal beauty and national unity that the poet seeks to incarnate in compelling symbols. On a superficial level the change in Yeats’s style is heralded by his poetry’s altered rhythms, which change from repetitious and incantatory to quite intricate and varied metrical patterns; the introduction of more topical allusions to people and events; and the placing of declamatory emphasis not on the realms of the divine but on the desires and limitations of the body: here ‘All dreams of the soul | End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body’ (VP, 374). The contemplative mood is replaced with one of stridency, vehemence and perturbation. Grand and archaic diction is rejected and a decision is taken ‘to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech’ (Yeats, 1961, 521). Responsibilities (1914) marks the advent of work that is ‘not at all a dream, like my earlier poems, but a criticism of life’ (quoted in Foster, 2003, 1). The stylistic equivalent of this transition and the deeper as well as more interesting reason for the late poetry’s distinctiveness and originality is, as Paul de Man suggests, the changed function of the image or symbol. We should take note of de Man’s persuasive contention in The Rhetoric of Romanticism that ‘the change in manner’ that led to ‘the masterly poetry written after 1916’ is best understood ‘in terms of the different kind of imagery that precedes it’ (1984, 181). The imagery of late Yeats is always so indeterminate, uncertain and even obscure that it demands from us a sort of hermeneutic exertion. Here the onus of interpretation is bequeathed by the poet to his readers. Hence the prevalence of insoluble predicaments and inconclusive dialogues in late Yeats as well as the unanswered questions that are asked, most famously, in the last lines of ‘Leda and the Swan’ (VP, 401) and ‘The Second Coming’ (VP, 402). Images now raise but do not answer questions: Images and memories From ruin or from ancient trees, For I would ask a question of them all. (VP, 410) De Man draws a distinction between the relatively simplistic mythological allusions in Yeats’s early drama and verse and the much more complex, multifaceted, even esoteric emblems employed in the later

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poetry. In these compound emblems the connection between symbol and meaning is always precarious, provisional and contestable. ‘No interpretation will do Yeats justice that fails to account for the controlled violence of the late work’ (de Man, 1984, 189). The violence to which de Man refers is done to the preconceptions of the late poems’ readers. It is in late Yeats’s practised capacity to provoke his readers into reflection on the poems’ images and their connotations that he reminds us that this violence is, to use de Man’s term, ‘controlled’: that the late works’ capacity to needle, inflame and even aggravate us is in fact intentional as well as purposeful. It is worth recalling at this point Benedict Anderson’s contention in his Imagined Communities that, since the nation is too large and diffuse an entity to be experienced directly, it becomes a compelling reality to its subjects through its incarnation in symbols like cenotaphs, maps and flags, as well as in textual representations such as, for example, newspapers and novels: emblems ‘that penetrated deep into the popular imagination’ (Anderson, 1991, 175). ‘Nations’, as Timothy Brennan has argued, ‘are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on the apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role’ (1990, 49). For the young Yeats too the nationalist artist provides symbols of Ireland’s unity. In 1901 he expressed his ambition to ‘re-create the ancient arts […] as they were understood when they moved a whole people’ (1961, 206); ‘a country which had no national institutions must show its young men images for the affections’ (312–13). That the later poetry complicates the poetic image – which is to say confounds it, throws it off balance and renders it much more intricate and demanding – expresses a philosophical alienation from certainty and is evidence at the poetic level of what I have been calling Yeats’s prescient disillusionment with nationalism. Yeats’s late style differs from the early on account of its new consciousness (as well as appreciation) of a truth that is at best implicit in the early work and which often seems there to vex or baffle the poet and which he therefore frequently resists. It is a truth that has been recognised most clearly and discussed most convincingly by Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur’s The Rule of Metaphor contends that the value we ascribe to the figurative use of language should be put down to the capacity of metaphors and symbols to refresh our habitual perceptions. They goad readers into thought through their indeterminacy and therefore their manifest susceptibility to interpretation. Intrinsic to the effect of metaphor is the obligation of interpretation they place on one. Why is all the world a stage? What is Yeats’s restored tower at Ballylee a symbol of? All


language, of course, is metaphorical, but we call that language literary which foregrounds this quality, which openly retains the gap between the metaphor and that with which it is being likened, and which thus invites reflection and interpretation. For Ricoeur, metaphors are capable of suspending our ordinary ways of describing their referents in order to provide imaginative and refreshing ways of experiencing them: ‘metaphor is that strategy of discourse by which language divests itself of its function of direct description in order to reach the mythic level where its function of discovery is set free’ (1978, 247). This sounds grandiloquent but Ricoeur’s point is simple enough: fresh metaphors can regenerate meaning by encouraging new and inventive ways of perceiving their referents. They rejuvenate and breathe new life into perception, something captured in the original title of Ricoeur’s book, La métaphore vive. An effective metaphor for Ricoeur, like ‘true expression’ for Pope, ‘Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon’ (Pope, 1966, 73). Metaphors provide alternative forms of perception, unusual angles from which to view seemingly familiar phenomena. ‘Literary language’, for Ricoeur, ‘has the capacity to put our quotidian existence into question; it is dangerous in the best sense of the word’ (quoted in Kearney, 1984, 24; emphasis in the original). Thus the creative use of metaphor goads us into reflecting in new ways upon our world; it ‘forces conceptual thought to think more’ (Ricoeur, 1978, 303; emphasis in the original). The metaphor or symbol is opaque and inconclusive. Its meaning and significance cannot be found in itself but must be brought to light. ‘The symbol invites us to think, calls for an interpretation, precisely because it says more than it says and because it never ceases to speak to us’ (Ricoeur, 1974, 28). Yeats’s late poetry furnishes enigmatic material for reflection. Above all through its recondite, indeterminate imagery it provokes us to think more about the shortcomings of the postcolonial state and in so doing to begin to explore intellectual and political alternatives. In ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, the penultimate poem in his last collection, Yeats’s metaphors take on a life of their own (VP, 629–30). I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last, being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

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The absconding animals of the poem’s title are the images and symbols of Yeats’s early poems and plays such as ‘that sea-rider Oisin’ and ‘the Fool and Blind Man’ from On Baile’s Strand. Crucially, they have abandoned the poet and not the other way round, for this is less a confession of Yeats’s disillusionment with symbolic art than an admission of its impossibility in the sense that he had once conceived it. This is not a straightforward poem about the waning of the poet’s creative powers in other words, though the first stanza, as in ‘An Acre of Grass’, does its best to make us think this is so. Yeats describes himself as ‘a broken man’. He has ‘sought’ for a new theme or inspiration but sought for it ‘in vain’, a failure made more poignant by the obsessive and rather frantic use of the past-tense ‘sought’ three times in the first two lines. In my view, the poem is a successful pursuit of a resonant new theme for Yeats’s verse and a new method for employing symbols that are eloquent and engaging precisely because they lack directness and specificity. In the first two lines, despite his habit of repeating himself, the elderly poet does not seem to possess another of the characteristics of old age: shortness of breath. ‘I sóught a théme and sóught for ít in váin, | I sóught it dáily fór six wéeks or só’ is in steady iambic pentameter. That last, rather blasé colloquialism ‘or so’ prepares the ear for the abrupt variation of the next line with its decidedly less formal, indeed positively dishevelled and irregular, metre. ‘Maybe at last, being but a broken man’ would represent a more fluent shift of gears within the limits of blank verse were it not for the jarring ‘but’ in the middle of the line, which takes it from ten to eleven syllables. Michael Wood refers to these moments in Yeats’s verse as ‘snags’ (2010, 128), points at which the metrical flow is disturbed and we become uncertain how to scan the line and even whether we should scan it at all. Without this snag, the line would have a steady enough rhythm, consisting of three dactyls (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) and a final, satisfying stress on ‘man’ in the manner of the fifth line of this poem as well as, say, the title and first line of Keats’s sonnet ‘Hów many bárds gild the lápses of tíme!’. But that incongruous conjunction serves instead to convey the poet’s brokenness and loss of inspiration (in both senses of the word): the disappointing disorderliness of his work as well as the elderly poet’s shortness of breath (as well as ours when reading the line aloud). ‘But’ both scrambles the metre and shifts some of the emphasis of ‘man’ onto itself. It thereby lays stress not on the coherent or controlling personality of ‘man’ but on man’s incoherence and lack of control; the poet is not ‘a broken man’, he is ‘but’ or only a ‘broken man’. Those alliterative, plosive bs in ‘being but a broken man’


contribute to the reader’s need to enunciate this line haltingly and with difficulty rather than fluently and with equanimity. Almost spat out, they hint for the first time in this poem at the anger expressed elsewhere in the late poems and which is here held back until the final stanza. But it is the metrical variation above all that throws into relief the stanza’s main themes of limitation and deficiency. Something similar happens in the next line, which again botches and oversteps the metre and does so once more in order to lay emphasis on an out of place element, this time the dramatically stressed monosyllables ‘with my heart’, another malfunctioning organ it seems, given the irregular beat of these lines. Yet neither the Muse’s departure nor the poet’s physical debility, nor even his loss of inspiration, make this poem an expression of defeat, for the tone of resignation with which Yeats contemplates his abandonment by his early works’ visionary motifs involves him in a telling performative contradiction; by saying these things, he disproves them, announcing his loss of virtuosity with undiminished virtuosity. Just as the colloquial announcement of poetry’s redundancy in ‘The Tower’ (‘It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack’ (VP, 409)) is nevertheless in tightly controlled iambic pentameter, so this later announcement of artistic crisis takes the form of a no less rigorous and characteristically stately ottava rima with apposite variations of emphasis. Form refutes content therefore, the poem’s technical control and vigorous manner belying the professed loss of purpose and power. Yeats resembles the protagonists of Shakespeare’s tragedies and the Chinese figures on the carving in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, greeting impending catastrophe with a kind of defiant vivacity: ‘Gaiety transfiguring all that dread’ (VP, 565). He greets the prospect of war in that poem as he greets old age and artistic crisis in this one: with an exemplary intensification of his poetic energies that controverts the threat of imminent death. Furthermore, the poem refutes the first few stanzas’ ostensible scepticism about the possibility of transmuting reality into art by doing exactly that. This time, however, reality’s miscellaneous oddities are not transmuted into the Gaelic images of the early poems and plays. Those images are ‘stilted’ in both senses of the word: that is, out of the reach of the bustle and commotion of ordinary life as well as affected, wooden and unnatural. In ‘High Talk’, also from Last Poems, stilts stand for elevated style and lofty thoughts and metaphors (VP, 622–3). Here, in ‘Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, | Lion and woman and the Lord knows what’, that last phrase is a sort of offhand admission of the poet’s own exasperation with the elaborate system of symbolic correspondences he constructed for the early poems. The underwhelming

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half-rhyme of the vague, indifferent ‘what’ with the incongruously hyperbolic ‘chariot’, especially after the uncomplicated rhymes of the rest of the stanza, adds to the bathetic effect. This sense of anti-climax is compounded by the contrast with the lucid internal rhyme of ‘lion’ and ‘woman’. In addition, the phrase ‘the Lord knows what’ is not just an exasperated colloquialism but also a literal statement that God alone and certainly not the modestly proficient, randomly associative minds of men could make sense of Yeats’s esoteric system of symbols. Yet if ‘stilted’ is one adjective Yeats chooses to apply to his images then ‘burnished’ is another, implying a creative and artistic process of which the poet is justly proud. The ‘burnished chariot’ was a stylish product of the poet’s craft, as is the phrase itself, which echoes melodiously the assonance and stress of ‘circus animals’ in the previous line. Yeats is again removing his coat ‘Covered with embroideries | Out of old mythologies’ (VP, 320), so long as one recognises that this act of disrobing also contains a measure of delight in the beauty, intricacy and craftsmanship that went into the needlework. Already, therefore, the mood of despair, confusion and renunciation is offset by a sense of the poet’s pride in his achievements and therefore by a hint that neither his poetic skill nor his belief in its efficacy have been entirely put aside. It is important to remember that Last Poems gets underway with Yeats’s attempt in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, partly through dictating his own epitaph, to prescribe his work’s fate after his death. He ‘commands’ the words of his epitaph to be cut and stipulates themes for the next generation of Irish poets (VP, 639–40). However, the rest of the volume, of which ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ is the penultimate poem, serves to undermine this last-ditch attempt to control the reception of his work and the responses of Yeats’s readers and successors. Even the circus animals, those wild creatures that he once aspired to tame and put ‘on show’ in order to gratify his audiences, have proven to be as ‘ungovernable’ as the sea fought by Cuchulain. Therefore the poet must accept the necessity of making poetry out of more feral, brutish and undomesticated, as well as unappealing, material and of allowing his readers to judge the results. One of the salient traits of Yeats’s late collections, also evident in the historical cycles of A Vision, is their acute and even ebullient awareness of the impermanence of civilisations’ ‘glory’ and ‘monuments’ and therefore also of the imminent passing of Yeats’s own: ‘Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!’ (VP, 563). All things, including the poet’s own ‘glory’ and ‘monuments’, his poems, are made to seem mortal, a truth realised and proclaimed in a tone of levity not disappointment. So too the poet’s own life, which, like Swift,


he recapitulates from the standpoint of his own death in pensive poems like ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ (VP, 601–4), ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (VP, 636–40), and ‘The Black Tower’ (VP, 635–6). As Adorno says of Beethoven’s last works, these poems ‘abdicate before reality’ (Adorno, 1998, 123); they seek out what Yeats calls ‘the desolation of reality’ (VP, 563). By now the poet is ‘worn out with dreams’ (VP, 329). His themes and images, the poet realises, are to be found elsewhere than in the realm of abstractions and eternal ideals. Consequently, he must forfeit his fixation with perfection and completeness. However, the ‘counter-truth’ voiced in the third and fourth stanzas subverts the dismissal of myths and symbols in the first two. Yeats admits that at one time he was obsessed by art itself, not the emotions and situations in which it originates: ‘Players and painted stage took all my love | And not those things that they were emblems of’. The distinctive emphasis in ‘Players’, not an iamb but a lone trochee, serves to spotlight that word and so establish the pre-eminence of art rather than the stuff from which art is made. The Countess Cathleen was written, the poem tells us, in order to divert ‘my dear’ Maud Gonne from the ‘fanaticism and hate’ that were ‘destroying’ her soul. Cathleen had sold her soul to the devil to buy bread for the starving poor, and Yeats thought that Maud too had bartered her beauty for political commitment. But the ‘dream’ of the play took ‘all my thought and love’, that ‘all’ perhaps implying that his devotion to art and his obliviousness to the realities and motivations that brought art into being was itself a kind of fanaticism no less intolerable than Maud’s. The ‘counter-truth’ is countered. Neither an obsessive fixation with perfected symbols nor their impatient disavowal represents a satisfactory method of composition. The final stanza concludes that reality is too wilfully unmanageable to be transformed into coherent symbols or into what ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ calls ‘Monuments of unageing intellect’ (VP, 407). By making this admission the poet locates a new theme. Yeats is able to plot a course between the poem’s truth and its counter-truth, between a disavowal of art in favour of reality and a nostalgic recollection of a time when it was art that engrossed him entirely. Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,

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I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. That ‘must’ in the penultimate line is poised, as Harold Bloom has pointed out (1970, 456–9), somewhere between a resigned admission that the poet has no choice but to lie there and an affirmative and volitional desire to do so, between defeated resignation and a kind of triumph. While ostensibly a disappointed admission that Yeats’s ‘masterful images’ originate in and cannot ultimately transcend the confused, unpropitious flotsam of the real world, the poem is also a culminating realisation and acceptance, even celebration, that poetry can and ‘must’ be made from this material. Nobody but Yeats has encapsulated so memorably in suggestive images Walter Benjamin’s declaration that the achievements of culture grow from (and at their best seek to express) art’s origination in violence, grime and desire (Benjamin, 1992, 248). The ribaldry of the Crazy Jane poems in The Winding Stair already reminded us of the earthly origins of higher things: of the fact that ‘Love has pitched his mansion in | The place of excrement’ (VP, 513). ‘Byzantium’, another of Yeats’s late reflections on death and on the inevitable vagueness and evanescence of the images with which we try to imagine it, sees life’s deeds and wishes originating in ‘The fury and the mire of human veins’ (VP, 497). These late poems of abandonment are at once impressive feats of poetic skill and surprisingly carefree disavowals of poetry’s capacity to transcend its coarse starting point in the ‘fecund ditch’ (VP, 479) of human passion. By turning his mind to ‘the sweepings of a street’, Yeats is recapitulating a theme that had occupied him for years. Now, however, poetry’s origination in the multiply suggestive jumble and refuse of ordinary life is, if not celebrated, then at least accepted with a kind of stoical dignity. There is no tone of resentment in the concluding stanza of ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, because the poem recognises the poetic possibilities in sourcing one’s images in this way. The line from the second stanza, ‘What can I but enumerate old themes’, has no question mark, as though this is a merely rhetorical and private expression of dissatisfaction. By the final stanza, however, this mood of introspection has dissipated and the reader can add her own question mark and even hazard an answer: ‘why, enumerate new ones!’ But this is not an answer in the sense of a crowning resolution; these new themes and images are too indeterminate for that. This is the end of the poet’s oeuvre but the beginning of his readers’ deliberations. The Muse in ‘The Tower’ has obeyed the poet’s command to pack her bags and has


taken up residence here. She is ‘that raving slut | Who keeps the till’, although this time she is not fumbling there like the dreary shopkeepers in ‘September 1913’ but is, to the contrary, frenzied and unmanageable. Unusually, it is she, not the poet, who is angry and she, not the poet, is the manager here, though hers is a special kind of authority. Though she is described with the derogatory word ‘slut’, it is by no means certain, especially in the light of Yeats’s almost Joycean insight into female sexuality in the Crazy Jane poems, that we should understand that word in a pejorative sense. She is only as slovenly and promiscuous as the images of the final stanza, which are in a similarly slatternly state and which, being opaque and puzzling, are not betrothed monogamously to the poet’s intentions but wantonly solicitous of each reader’s efforts at interpretation and elucidation. It is undeniable that there is a profound scepticism about imagery in these late poems. The impressionistic ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’ (VP, 577–8) in New Poems relates experiences, such as the poet’s father ‘upon the Abbey stage’ brazening out the mob and the stately, defiant Augusta Gregory ‘seated at her great ormolu table’. These are images of course, but it is left to the poem’s readers to decide what they are images of. Likewise, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ is not abandoning the essential poetic task of fashioning resonant images from material discovered in the grossly physical world. The poem utilises that material, but refrains from ‘burnishing’ the resulting images in the way that Yeats’s youthful self burnished Cuchulain’s ‘chariot’ in the first stanza. These are not immaculate wares placed in an extravagant, upmarket shop window, polished and perfected, the labour of their composition concealed. ‘Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, | Old iron, old bones, old rags’, they are placed before the reader with the artifice of their composition still showing. The poet does not direct their interpretation; he cannot even describe or distinguish them adequately, applying to each one the same inexpressive adjective. The production of beauty and the manufacture of symbols requires labour, as Yeats admits in ‘Adam’s Curse’ (VP, 204–6) and demonstrates in ‘Easter 1916’ (VP, 391–4). The circus animals were ‘on show’ ‘Winter and summer’, perhaps because circuses are seasonal concerns but also because the toil that went into coaching and preparing his images was for the poet both long and arduous. Here, in a poem about the writing of poems, that labour is laid bare. But Yeats actively disproves the first line’s admission that he has run out of themes. He combines the most profound scepticism about poetry’s ability to transmute life into lasting art with the most exhilarating and efficacious reaffirmation of poetry itself and

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in particular of poetry’s highest merit: its capacity to generate images that stimulate the mind. This is not a rejection of poetry in other words but an expansion of its remit. ‘The “ladders” that lead upwards towards art’s dubious triumphs are not kicked aside’, as Michael O’Neill has pointed out, ‘merely viewed from the bottom rung’ (2003, 257). Yeats’s ladder has ‘gone’ but he leaves it possible for others to climb the ones that remain. The concluding stanza is at once an act of renunciation or exhaustion as well as, in the insistent monosyllables and the forceful rhyme of its last line, a last-ditch outburst of poetic energy and skill that attests to the undiminished viability and importance of the poet’s life’s work. Yeats has responded to the finale of his poetic oeuvre not with some artificial and contrived sense of completion but by finding a new theme and purpose: the initiation of evocative images.

‘An old man’s eagle mind’ One of the most significant and topical questions asked by late Yeats is about the limitations of space. Yeats argued in his Senate speech on divorce that Ireland’s partition could not possibly be addressed if the country ‘is going to be governed by Catholic ideas and Catholic ideas alone’ (1960, 92). The eventual transcendence of arbitrary borders and partitions, the Free State’s dearest objective, would be the result of persuasion not force: of the moral and intellectual allure of tolerance’s good example. ‘An Acre of Grass’ (VP, 575–6) from New Poems addresses Yeats’s concerns about the Free State’s chauvinism and claustrophobia more subtly and effectively than any other of his works. The scene is Riversdale, the house outside Dublin to which Yeats and his wife moved in 1932. The poem gets underway with a candid admission as well as exposure of the elderly poet’s apparently fading powers. Picture and book remain, An acre of green grass For air and exercise, Now strength of body goes; Midnight, an old house Where nothing stirs but a mouse. In the very first line the stress falls on the strong plosives in the first two feet of the trimeter (a trochee and then an iamb) before the much fainter consonants of the iambic third foot and the comparatively elongated second vowel sound in ‘remain’ denote a palpable flagging of


force and energy: ‘Pícture and bóok remáin’. The nostalgic note adds to the effect. That slackening is also evoked by the unimaginative couplet that ends the stanza, rhyming ‘house’ with ‘mouse’ as though Yeats were merely going through the motions of writing poetry. This is what Ted Hughes might have called a ‘deadlock rhyme’, one that lacks the nuance and dissonance to prompt any further reflection or variation. This is also a so-called masculine rhyme; all the stress is placed on the final beat, especially since ‘mouse’ is preceded by two unstressed syllables. It is as though the poet is drawing our attention to this undemanding rhyme and therefore to the exhaustion of his poetic skill. A similar effect is achieved in ‘Now strength of body goes’, where the stress falls on ‘strength’ before the clipped vowel sounds give way to the extended drift of ‘goes’, which is stretched out further by the sibilance that ends this line, as it does six of the seven lines in the stanza. The opening to the poem therefore possesses something of what Terry Eagleton has called ‘the contrived swagger and slap-dash of the last poems’ (1998a, 284). ‘Swagger’ seems the wrong word for the ebbing strength of the poet until one realises that this evocation of the poet’s enervation is a skilful poetic effect like any other and that Yeats is so audaciously, perhaps swaggeringly, convinced of his own virtuosity that he is prepared to accentuate it by appearing to write badly. The next stanza, the second of three, continues in the same vein. My temptation is quiet. Here at life’s end Neither loose imagination, Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known. The ‘looseness’ of the senescent imagination, its sloppiness and laxity, is even more evident in the second stanza than in the first. The jumbled metre with its apparently capriciously varying line lengths and uncertain stresses suggests a loss of poetic control. But the mind’s mill fares no better. It tries to transmute the flotsam of ordinary life, seen here as in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ as recycled ‘rag and bone’ (VP, 630), into poetic images. The mechanical metaphor suggests a method of composition so disciplined and regulated that it is akin to industrial production, an effect reinforced by the machine-like anapaestic reverberations of each foot and the alliterative repetition: ‘Nor the míll of the mínd’. But the mill too is powerless, as is suggested perhaps by the faint archaism of

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the word: powerless, that is, to enable poetry to express reality in vivid and truthful images. The stanza begins, however, with a covert ambiguity that many of the poem’s readers have failed to detect and which starts to suggest, perhaps, a new way of bringing poetry closer to truth. As Jon Stallworthy (1963, 216–17) has pointed out, ‘My temptation is quiet’ can be read in two opposed ways: as it has customarily been read, as an announcement that the poet’s daring, sinful self has been silenced; or, alternatively, as I am inclined to read it, as a declaration that quietness itself represents a temptation for the ageing poet. ‘Quiet’ is a noun as well as an adjective. Read this way, the poet, far from being quiet, still resides amidst disquiet, bustle and unappeased longings.9 The latter reading is supported by the sound of the line, with its strident alliteration in ‘temptation’ as well as the sibilance of ‘temptation is’. Similarly, the trochaic ‘quiet’ loads all the emphasis onto the long first syllable, which, ironically, disturbs the brief lull caused by the two unstressed syllables that precede it. If this is acquiescence in quietness and tranquillity, then it is a decidedly noisy one. For already the poem is preparing at the level of sound for the fury of the final two stanzas, a fury that will enable the inauguration of a more effective compositional method. The abrupt tonal shift at the outset of the third stanza makes explicit the technical control that has been operating more or less surreptitiously in the first two. Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till truth obeyed his call. ‘Grant’ introduces immediately a new tone of command that complements the much greater metrical regularity. ‘Grant’ is also an imperative verb, an instruction, like most other verbs in these last two stanzas such as ‘remake’, ‘beat’, ‘pierce’ and ‘shake’. That a frenzied late style must be claimed reinforces the point that it does not come naturally at the end of an artist’s life but must be sought after. The sense of urgency is compounded by the expeditious enjambment which strides over (the literal meaning of enjambe) the confines of punctuation and beyond the sense of enclosure imparted by the hesitant syntax and garden imagery of the first stanza. The tone is not too peremptory or hectic, however, because the poet’s own personality is specified as one of the objects


to be bent to his will. ‘Myself must I remake’ alters the natural word order in order to place ‘Myself’ at the beginning rather than the end of the line. This is done not for the sake of the metre, one assumes, since ‘I must remake myself’ would still be in iambic trimeter but in order perhaps to emphasise, by foregrounding ‘Myself’, that it is the poet’s character and identity that will be subjected to radical alteration. If the last two stanzas assume an aura of command, therefore, then this is less Ozymandias’s ‘sneer of cold command’ in Shelley’s sonnet than that of a fretful will fortifying itself before the commission of an arduous task. Self-remaking is an ongoing and incomplete process in other words: the ‘I’ is not something immutable but a project to be worked on. The objective of that remaking is to perform the roles of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes Timon and Lear. Yeats imagines himself penning an unrepentant epitaph like Timon and assuming Lear’s righteous fury.10 Craving an ‘old man’s frenzy’, Yeats rages in the final two stanzas like Lear on the heath. He is an ‘Unaccommodated man’ (III.iv.103), exiled now from safety and from home as well as reduced to the lowest common denominator of all men, their insubstantial corporeality: ‘a paltry thing’ or ‘A tattered coat upon a stick’, as Yeats puts it in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (VP, 407). Yeats remains focused on restyling and rejuvenating his own personality. He is resolved to become like ‘Timon and Lear | Or that William Blake, | Who beat upon the wall | Till truth obeyed his call’. Yeats, like Timon and Lear, finds himself in political exile. He is a prophet in the wilderness, performing the roles of these two great tragic protagonists in a dramatic display before his audience. The fury of late style as well as its capacity to affront and challenge result not just from the poet’s private distress but from his assumption of a character whose part is to embody for a public, in an exemplary and instructive way, a condition of exile and dissatisfaction. This exaltation of creative vision induces readers to look more closely at the four images contained in these two stanzas. The first, Blake beating upon the wall, in which the thudding iambic trimeter sounds out the poet’s insistent pounding, is of the imagination protesting against physical and mental constraint. It conjures a violent protest against the sense of enclosure evoked in the first stanza. The next three images are contained in the final stanza, where the poet claims A mind Michel Angelo knew That can pierce the clouds, Or inspired by frenzy Shake the dead in their shrouds;

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Forgotten else by mankind, An old man’s eagle mind. In the second image the precision and control implied by ‘pierce’ contrast with the recollected ‘looseness’ and enervation of the first two stanzas. By this stage, moreover, the assertive rhymes have lent the brief lines a kind of focus and exactitude whereas the bathetic and sibilant endings of the first stanza made them seem merely fatigued. More significantly, the intensely evocative nature of the images, even though their significance and meaning are not spelt out, indeed because this is the case, conjure reality more effectively than either the loose or mechanical symbolising that Yeats rejected in stanza two. By adding the Renaissance artist to his roll call of models, Yeats is also preparing for the poem’s third major image, the artist’s readiness to ‘Shake the dead in their shrouds’. This is probably a reference to another late work, Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, which depicts the resurrection of the dead and which Yeats may have seen when he visited Rome in 1934. Since the fresco was famously denounced for its portrayal of naked figures, there may also be an allusion here to Yeats’s campaign against censorship in the Free State. Like the ‘upright’ dead shaking in their tomb in ‘The Black Tower’ (VP, 635–6), the image is more dramatic than meaningful, though it is suggestive rather than merely vague. The dead in these poems are ‘upright’ in two senses: because they are uncorrupted and because they are not really dead. One might, for example, recall Walter Benjamin’s reflections in wartime Paris less than four years later on the angel in the painting by Paul Klee whose gaze, according to Benjamin, is fixed steadily on the unavenged and therefore unquiet victims of injustice (1992, 249). Perhaps the departed companions of the poet’s long life are being invoked and commemorated, as they are in ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’ (VP, 577–8), or, more likely, the heroic dead of the Easter Rising, as MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse were in ‘Easter 1916’ (VP, 391–4), ‘Sixteen Dead Men’ (VP, 395) and ‘The Rose Tree’ (VP, 396). Benjamin refers to revolution as ‘the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden’ (1992, 251). By abandoning our outrage at the injustices inflicted on our forebears and by forgetting their sacrifices and abortive revolts we forfeit any appreciation of the necessity and possibility of political change. Thus we fall prey to passivity and to the chicanery and compromises of our leaders. By awakening the dead, Yeats endeavours to combat the forgetting described in the penultimate line. He fills our thoughts not


with peace or satisfaction but with the melancholy realisation that the ideals of the fallen have not yet been fulfilled. The final image is the most important and the one for which the others have been preparing us: ‘An old man’s eagle mind’. This is an emphatic final statement; four of the six syllables in this last line are stressed. The struggle against restraint and enclosure, the quest for poetic images that are evocative without being merely vague, and the rousing of the dead out of dissatisfaction with the status quo, all preface this last compelling image of solitary, belated flight. What is Yeats in his ‘old man’s frenzy’ railing against? There is no explicit suggestion that the dead being shaken are the martyrs of the Rising, but there is a very subtle indication in the first stanza that Ireland itself, as so often in the late works, is the veiled target of the poet’s disenchantment. The guttural alliteration and dual, spondaic stress of ‘green grass’ are the only hints in the first stanza at the impatience and agitation that explode in the second half of the poem. What requires further reflection, however, is the metaphorical significance of ‘An acre of green grass’. Critics have not given anywhere near enough attention to the poem’s title, though I believe it provides the most instructive context for the anger and disenchantment dramatised by the poem. The sense of confinement in a small garden hints only vaguely at the poet’s similar distress at his imprisonment within the larger national space, although that specifically political disaffection is suggested quite insistently by the first stanza’s addition of the adjective ‘green’. Ireland too is ‘no country for old men’ (VP, 407). The eagle, which was Ezra Pound’s slightly ingratiating nickname for Yeats, is in part an image of the ascending imagination piercing the clouds of confusion with suggestive images. Whereas in 1917 he had still sought to restrain ‘the balloon of the mind’ that ‘bellies and drags in the wind’ by bringing it ‘Into its narrow shed’ (VP, 358) of discipline and purpose, here Yeats positively relishes such imaginative and insubordinate flights. But if we insist on seeing the acre of Yeats’s new house as a metaphor for the Free State then the eagle becomes not just a possessor of acute perception but also a harbinger of movement. The bird recalls the ‘hawk of the mind’ cleaving ‘the tumbling cloud’ in The Wild Swans at Coole (VP, 349), ‘The ravens of unresting thought’ that pestered the poet in the much earlier ‘The Two Trees’ (VP, 136) and the ‘eagle thoughts’ nurtured at Coole (VP, 264). There the bird symbolises something like the mind’s unruly deviation from the rest of one’s faculties, a departure both celebrated for its defiance and freedom and deplored for impairing the unity of personality. For Yeats’s alter ego Tom O’Roughley, whose thoughts are rooted in the body, ‘“wisdom is a butterfly | And not a gloomy bird of prey”’

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(VP, 338). Here, however, the eagle connotes, in addition to far-sightedness, predatoriness and a certain grandeur, the sort of freedom from locality and restraint that Yeats had celebrated in his elegy to the ‘Irish airman’ Robert Gregory (VP, 328). Neither public men nor cheering crowds drove young Gregory to the Royal Flying Corps according to Yeats, but rather the opposite of these things: a ‘lonely impulse of delight’ in selfsovereignty and a praiseworthy indifference to national attachments.11 Something of this note of jubilant unrestraint is suggested by the image of the eagle, which is capable of a movement more stylish and expansive as well as more self-delighting than the cursory excursions undertaken in his garden by an ailing versifier ‘For air and exercise’. Yeats summons anger and tumult in this late poem, passions that enable him to intensify his poetic energies and therefore to produce images and effects that are neither simplistic nor too neatly systematic. The reasons for this are at once personal – to do with the poet’s illnesses and his commendable determination in the last years of his life to shake himself from lethargy (as he shakes the dead in the final stanza) – and public, a product of his desire to do the same to his readers and to incite disenchantment with restraint of all kinds. After all, it is an unabashedly political rage that animates New Poems’ reflections on Parnell, Oliver Cromwell and Roger Casement. Indeed, the memorable images of the final two stanzas of ‘An Acre of Grass’, which are resonant and lucid without being didactic and which are at once specific and multiply suggestive, are precisely the result of Yeats’s struggle, dramatised in the second stanza, to augment the potency and effectiveness of his verse. He does so by devoting it to the presentation of expressive and intriguing metaphors. I am trying to present enough evidence to show that we are justified in construing the gusto and anger summoned by late Yeats, as well as being related to his own old age and to a perceived impasse in his way of composing poetry with symbols, as also partly political in nature. In my view it betokens and enables a confrontation with censorship and intellectual conformity, a remembrance à la Benjamin of the possibility of resistance and of the ideals of independence, as well as, faint perhaps but audible nonetheless and much more vociferous in later postcolonial writing, an intolerance of the distressingly narrow horizons of official nationalism.

Civilisations fall and rise ‘Lapis Lazuli’ from New Poems utilises the same compositional method in order to subvert cultural stereotypes about the East and its art. There


are three poems on the theme of sculpture in Yeats’s last two collections: ‘Lapis Lazuli’ (VP, 565–7) is one; the others are ‘The Statues’ (VP, 610–11) and ‘A Bronze Head’ (VP, 618–19). ‘The Statues’ is an idiosyncratic reflection on the European sculptor’s imposition of ideal or exemplary form. Here, however, that process is represented in a way that is objectionably Orientalist in Edward Said’s sense of conforming to an ensemble of durable doctrines and stereotypes about the alleged ontological difference and inferiority of the East (Said, 1985). Europe is contrasted with what the poet sees as the vastness and diffuseness of the East. The poem contends that Pythagoras’s mathematical measurements and ratios of human proportion gave rise to a lasting ideal of physical perfection. Even greater than Pythagoras were those sculptors who embodied that ideal with mallet and chisel. These acts of creation not only gave birth to the European model of human beauty; they also ‘Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass’. The sculptor’s ideal determined the composition of the species by influencing sexual selection. In addition to the sinister eugenic implications of the argument that reproduction should conform to carefully delineated types, another, equally dubious political point made by the poem is that the artistic imposition of form has been an active part of Europe’s imposition of its will upon the plastic, unformed material of the East. European sculptors put down All Asiatic immensities, And not the banks of oars that swam upon The many-headed foam at Salamis. (VP, 610) The poem seems to deny that the Greek navy’s defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis in 480BC was as significant in quelling Asia’s unruly immensities as Phidias’s controlled, archetypal forms. But just as the ‘many-headed foam’ betokens both Asia’s chaotic immensities and the drowning sailors, so the phrase ‘put down’ suggests actual violence as well as a mere violence of will or technique. Nonetheless the third stanza complicates slightly the brash certainties of the first two. Although the Europeans are said to impose truth while Easterners are merely trapped within a series of mirrors, there is at least a suggestion that it is the starved and abstract Hamlet whose ‘eyeballs’ are ‘Empty’ and unseeing and it is therefore he and not the Buddha who is trapped within mirrors. Moreover, the ‘Grimalkin’ or cat who ‘crawls to Buddha’s emptiness’

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is an image of either cunning or submission, but certainly not of control. Europe is as wasted and anxious as its great tragic hero. But this brief mood of uncertainty is conjured only so that it can be cancelled by the imperious tone that introduces the final stanza: ‘Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side’. What stalked through the Post Office at the Easter Rising? ‘What intellect, | What calculation, number, measurement, replied?’ Unusually for the late poetry, Yeats answers his own question. The poem declares that ‘We Irish’ have inherited Europe’s mission to impose form on ‘this filthy modern tide’ and its ‘formless spawning fury’. That last trochaic phrase, in which the stresses fall on the prolonged vowel sounds, is as vituperative as any in Yeats’s voluminous oeuvre. The rebels summon Cuchulain to their side as a source of inspiration and therefore of unity and strength, just as Phidias’s sculptures inspire Yeats as an image of European form imposed on Asiatic chaos. Here is very little ambiguity, nor hardly a suggestion of self-doubt. In one of his final works, the poet elaborates a way of forestalling the impending collapse of European civilisation: a youthful nation’s revival of Europe’s will to power. This is a restoration reflected and, he hopes, inspired by Yeats’s own creation of exemplary form: forceful images of wilful Phidias, the banks of oars at Salamis, and the stalking rebels. The achievement of ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is all the greater therefore for not sharing the trepidation articulated in ‘The Statues’ at the prospect of European civilisation’s demise. In the latter poem, the people ‘stare’ passively at Europe’s aesthetic supremacy, which is brought to mind by both Phidias’s form-giving sculpture and by the poem’s own purposeful elaboration of determinate symbols. The poet is intrusively present throughout, conducting the poem’s interpretation by keeping ambiguity to a minimum and setting Europe’s vigour and clarity of purpose against the seemingly flaccid East. Likewise in Yeats’s correspondence, his description of the carving given as a present on the occasion of Yeats’s seventieth birthday the previous year by Harry Clifton, the dedicatee of ‘Lapis Lazuli’, lapses into a clichéd opposition between an active West and a passive East. Ascetic pupil, hard stone, eternal theme of the sensual east. The heroic cry in the midst of despair […] But no, I am wrong, the east has its solution always, and therefore knows nothing of tragedy. It is we, not the east, that must raise the heroic cry. (Yeats, 1954, 837) Volition and action are the preserve of the West. One might, of course, set these stereotypical views against Yeats’s admirable sympathy for


non-European cultures and traditions, his fascination with Rabindranath Tagore, his friendship with Shri Purohit Swami with whom he translated the ten principal Upanishads, and his discovery of the Japanese Noh plays along with their influence on his own dramatic style. Nonetheless, I think it is undeniable that for Yeats Asia meant primarily sensuality, tradition and naturalness, as well as immensity, vagueness and submission. Although he may periodically have approved of these things, that approval does not mitigate his belief in the pre-eminence of Europe or his fear that Europe’s replacement by Asia would constitute a sort of historical regression. It might even, as Ramazani notes, be ‘an indication of Yeats’s orientalism’ (2001, 34). Nowhere in Yeats’s oeuvre is the simple dictum that has guided my argument in this chapter, that it is not Yeats but his poetry that disrupts conventional expectations and therefore demands critical attention, been illustrated more effectively than in ‘Lapis Lazuli’. Ramazani is commendably sensitive to the ambiguities and ambivalences in Yeats’s relationship with the East. But it is primarily the poet’s views and his work’s content that preoccupy him and not the element of Yeats’s work to which I am endeavouring to attend: the late works’ style and thus the centrality of their form. In ‘Lapis Lazuli’, Europe’s demise is neither resisted nor bemoaned. What we might call the poem’s polysemic quality, its susceptibility to many interpretations, is largely unrestricted by the poet’s vision. To approach the West’s decline with the ‘tragic joy’ of stoicism and insouciance is also to stand firm against the temptation to defy or seek to forestall Europe’s collapse didactically through verse. This is the more typical mode of Yeats’s late style: a purposeful relinquishment of control. What the poem enacts is a deployment of artistic skill not to prescribe readers’ responses as in ‘The Statues’ but, to the contrary, to liberate those responses and transform them into imaginative interpretations. Here it is not just Irish nationalism that is senescent and requires reflection but Europe itself. The poem was written in July 1936, the month that saw the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the German reoccupation of the Rhineland must also have been fresh in Yeats’s mind. The poem sees the coming war, as in fact it was, as the death knell of the continent’s pre-eminence. Yet the impending war is not welcomed, as it is in the belligerent mood of ‘Under Ben Bulben’ where Yeats’s citation of John Mitchel’s prayer ‘“Send war in our time, O Lord!”’ (VP, 638) suggests a wholly uncharacteristic faith in a providential deity. Rather, war is accepted with a kind of carefree and even impudent recklessness that subverts all faith in providence and command. This surrender of volition and

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action at the level of the poem’s content is fortified and developed by a commensurate forfeiting of authority at the level of form and image. Significantly, like ‘A Bronze Head’ in Last Poems, this is an ekphrastic poem, one occasioned by the poet’s reflection on a particular work of art. The poet’s as well as the poem’s decision to face calamity with tragic gaiety rather than the worldly disquiet of the ‘hysterical women’ depicted in the first stanza, takes place within the context of another meditation on the relationship between Eastern and Western art. Now, however, this meditation is more disinterested. Via considerations of their artistic artefacts, the poem manages to present both East and West in a way that undercuts conventional stereotypes about their properties and relative merits. ‘Lapis Lazuli’, as Richard Ellmann has noted, portrays Europe and Asia ‘without representing them at odds with one another’ (1964, 185). The ‘hysterical women’ in the first stanza are ‘sick of the palette and fiddle-bow’. They are activists intolerant of artistic self-indulgence in the face of looming aerial bombardment. For them, poets are like Nero, fiddling while Rome burns. Thereafter, the poem is an effort to refute this narrow-minded dismissal of art by showing that a large part of art’s efficacy is to be found in its capacity to respond with gaiety to catastrophe, and to react to Europe’s decline by provoking the kind of patient reflection of which hysterics are not capable. The second stanza contends that Hamlet, Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia achieve their great tragic status at the moment of their own death. Though they ‘ramble’ and ‘rage’, they are fixed and immobile as archetypes of European art. Tragedy may be vivid but ultimately ‘It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce’ (VP, 566). It is static and unchanging, properties more commonly associated (stereotypically and unsympathetically) with the East and its artworks. The image of ‘Black out’ in the stanza’s eleventh line therefore has three dimensions of meaning, which it runs together: the deaths of Shakespeare’s heroes, the extinguishing of the lights in the theatre at the end of a play, and the death of Europe itself which the first stanza foretells in the urban destruction wrought by bombing raids. Having called into question the prestige and longevity of this most prestigious of European art forms (drama), the next stanza is then preoccupied with accentuating an archetypal theme of the late poems: the transience of apparently immutable civilisations: ‘Áll thı¯ngs fáll a¯nd a¯re búilt a¯gáin | And those that build them again are gay’. Typically, the first of these lines is in tetrameter and its metrical arrangement is true to the line’s sentiment. Two trochaic feet, in which the stressed first syllable falls like a civilisation into an unstressed second beat,


are followed by two iambic feet in which an effect of construction or progress is achieved by the building of emphasis within each foot. The transition from trochees to iambs necessitates two unstressed syllables, ‘and are’, which also constitute a conjunctional phrase. The line therefore summons its energies for an effort at optimistic creation in its second half, a mood that continues into the next line with its sprightly iambs and is then sustained in the final two stanzas. This transition from the contemplation of death to an unexpected mood of gaiety prefaces the description of the carving in lapis lazuli of three Chinamen. Two Chinamen, behind them a third, Are carved in lapis lazuli, Over them flies a long-legged bird, A symbol of longevity; The third, doubtless a serving man, Carries a musical instrument. Every discoloration of the stone, Every accidental crack or dent, Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Of lofty slope where it still snows Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch Sweetens the little half-way house Those Chinamen climb towards, and I Delight to imagine them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play. Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay. (VP, 566–7) Importantly, it is the carving’s flaws (the ‘discoloration of the stone’ in addition to accidental cracks and dents that look like water-courses and avalanches) that are said to endow this static sculpture with an impression of movement. This is not a lifeless, unresponsive or insipid work of art it seems, but for the poet, precisely by virtue of its imperfections, an animated and intriguing one. ‘I | Delight to imagine them seated there’ says the poet, as though the carving has become a form of theatre no

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less enjoyable and edifying than Shakespeare’s drama and as though his own imagination and therefore his participation as a spectator have become an integral part of the carving’s aesthetic effect. If European art can be lifeless and unchanging then Eastern art can be unexpectedly lively and intriguing. Both, however, invigorate the spectator: Shakespearean tragedy because it imparts or secularises profound truths (‘Heaven blazing into the head’); the carving because its suggestiveness, which is enhanced by its endearing flaws, allows the poet to venture his ingenious, albeit slightly idiosyncratic interpretation of this tableau. The belief of the poet, who is behaving like a reader, that the Chinese figures are emblems of gaiety in the face of ‘the tragic scene’ is as patently capricious as his conviction in the penultimate stanza that the ‘long-legged bird’ in the carving is ‘A symbol of longevity’. Every blemish and defect in the poem only ‘seems’ to represent motion since the impression of movement is actually projected by the poet. Yet the idiosyncrasy of the poet’s interpretation of his carving is also an example to the reader. For the poem too is an intriguingly blemished work of art susceptible to imaginative interpretation. The last stanza is a sonnet in itself, though an imperfect or unconventional one. It possesses a convoluted or at least elaborate scheme of faintly echoing para-rhymes and vowel rhymes and it conforms to no traditional or recognisable sonnet structure. (One is tempted to say that as an old disciple of John O’Leary, Yeats would not dream of subjecting himself to English or Elizabethan discipline.) That it has alighted on the pleasing insight that an imperfect poem is also an evocative one as well as one that can be taken possession of imaginatively by its readers is perhaps the reason for the affirmative mood of this last stanza. The figures’ eyes are ‘mid many wrinkles’ because they are old and because the work of art in which they appear is similarly old and blemished: they, the poem and the poet all look upon the scene with a kind of permissive stoicism, performing the act of calculated abandonment peculiar to Yeats’s late works. The tone of the final stanza is not agitated but surprisingly tranquil and assured, and its elegance and cheerfulness contrast with the peevishness as well as the slight coarseness of the first stanza with its colloquial rhythms and diction. Yeats’s reluctance to make of this poem a didactic instrument for promulgating a particular view, as he does in ‘The Statues’, turns it into an irresolute or inconclusive document, though it is one whose apparent flaws and incompleteness, like the carving’s dents and discolorations, enhance its effectiveness. The disruption of orthodox conceptions of Western and Eastern art leaves us free to meditate further, as Yeats meditates on possible responses to civilisations’ transience, on


Europe’s mortality and its supersession by a world that is not, as conventional Orientalist conceptions would have it, immense, malign or soporific but vigorous and complex in ways that the poet himself hardly comprehends. No censure is intended in calling ‘Lapis Lazuli’ flawed, for it is its manifest incompleteness, by which I mean its neutral meditation on Eastern and Western archetypes of art, that enables this late poem to respond with gaiety and an empowering suggestiveness to the prospect of ‘blacking out’.

Conclusion De Man is undoubtedly correct to present the late poems as rejections of an aesthetic of unity and certainty. But he is totally mistaken to conclude by acclaiming their ‘total nihilism’ (1984, 238). De Man sees in Yeats’s late works a deconstruction of the classical symbol with the aid of emblems that furnish no knowledge, promise no reconciliation, and convey no message other than confusion, disappointment and death. David Lloyd is another critic who has usefully analysed the way in which Yeats’s emblems intervene ‘to prevent a reading of the poem in relation to that tradition of symbolism wherein an organic continuity inheres between the particular symbol and the universal totality’ (1993, 64). Like de Man, Lloyd sees the later verse as a refusal of symbolism and an eschewal of the ideal of reconciliation, a process that he interprets in political rather than merely philosophical terms. However, Lloyd too sees Yeats’s late work as a counsel of despair. He sees in it only ‘the faintest gleam of an alternative’ (Lloyd, 1993, 79) to what he calls the political and cultural ‘bankruptcy’ of the Irish Free State. This ascription of nihilism or despair to Yeats’s late poems is, I think, the consequence of a misunderstanding of what I have been characterising as their enthusiastic susceptibility to interpretation. De Man sees the late poems as allegories. But his understanding of allegory is almost nominalistic in its insistence not just on allegory’s fragmentariness and incompleteness but also on what he sees as allegory’s intrinsic blindness: its inability to refer to anything but itself. However, a close perusal of Yeats’s late work actually leaves us more convinced than before that the literary text is not just ‘the allegorical narrative of its own deconstruction’ (de Man, 1979, 72). Quite the contrary in fact; my claim is that their multiplicity as well as the very absence of explicit messages are precisely what enable Yeats’s emblems to provoke the sort of intellectual effort that Ricoeur argues is called forth by figurative language and that was required to question the

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conservative nationalism instated in Ireland after 1922. Yeats recruits his readers as free-thinking, self-determining citizens of a post-nationalist Ireland, and if ‘recruits’ sounds too martial in this context then it is crucial to add that this process is necessarily volitional. Yeats, like Ricoeur, craves ‘a recharging of thought with the aid of symbols’ (Ricoeur, 1969, 353). His emblems call into question fanaticism, chauvinism, religious hypocrisy and insularity without stating this directly and without stipulating the course of action necessary to deal with these difficulties. Yeats’s late work refrains from the discourtesy of didactic purpose, instead assuming, necessitating and calling forth intellectual effort in the poems’ recipients. Poetry’s salient effects are more circuitous, more difficult and more painstaking than any moralising and polemical statement, but they are also, for those reasons, more likely to be successful in inculcating the relatively unrestrained thinking for which Yeats was agitating. As in Yeats’s approximate rendering of Swift’s epitaph, the poet aims to exert influence after his death by provoking thought and thereby serving liberty (VP, 493). In Seamus Heaney’s splendid phrase, poetry ‘provokes consciousness into new postures’ (1995, 158). It is one of the qualities of Yeats’s late verse (and also, I am claiming, its principal value) that the connotations and implications of its remarkable emblems were not spelt out in a didactic manner but left to later generations of writers and readers to make sense of: ‘to him who ponders well, | My rhymes more than their rhyming tell’ (VP, 138). Hence what I have been referring to as the presence in Yeats’s late verse of a politics and a poetics of liberation: a rousing directive to ‘ponder well’ the restrictions and limitations of national consciousness. It is not an exaggeration to state that Irish poetry since Yeats is to a large extent a prolonged rejection of the simplifications inherent in the symbolist aesthetic of his early work, a rejection that Yeats himself paradoxically initiated: ‘Yeats as precursor’, in Steven Matthews’s phrase (2000). In other words, Irish writing picks up, carries on and extends the critical or counter-Revivalist impulse of Yeats’s later poems.12 In Louis MacNeice’s ‘Dublin’ (1966, 163), for example, Ireland is presented as a petrified, past-besotted country of lifeless statues in which, in Samuel Beckett’s quip, the pigeons are given great encouragement (Beckett, 1983, 76). I do not say I agree with MacNeice’s characterisation of his ‘strong precursor’ Yeats in such poems or in his 1941 book The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (MacNeice, 1967) where he sets out his desire not to follow Yeats’s example. I would state, however, that regardless of the legitimacy or otherwise of MacNeice’s characterisation of Yeats’s work, the wish to repudiate simplistic symbolism is a salutary one, has been widespread


in Irish poetry in the last six or seven decades, and is connected very closely indeed with a wholly constructive critique in poetry and elsewhere of the simplifications and contrived unities and hierarchies of political nationalism. I would add that late Yeats is the place where this enterprise first got under way or, in MacNeice’s words, where Irish poetry began ‘spilling across the border | Of nice convention’ (1966, 247). Declan Kiberd refers to the ‘internationalization of themes and tones’ (1996, 613) in Irish writing in recent decades and concludes that this movement constitutes ‘something very like a second literary renaissance’ (612). Irish literature since Yeats has seen a protracted repudiation of the nationalist myths and partialities associated with what Yeats dubbed ‘the Celtic Twilight’ (and Finnegans Wake scurrilously rechristened the ‘cultic twalette’ (Joyce, 1939, 344)). Even those poets who have fought with or fought off Yeats’s legacies are therefore in his debt. What we are dealing with in Yeats’s work is not some abrupt transition from an early period characterised by political commitment and artistic symbolism to a late period of political disillusionment and arcane allegory. In their own way, the early works too are complex symbols that have their own kind of indeterminacy. I have been arguing, however, that this indeterminacy becomes greater and more pronounced in the later poems. Furthermore, this aesthetic development was accompanied in Yeats’s work by a corresponding development of his political ideas and therefore by a far greater stress than hitherto on the importance of dissent, on the breaking apart of the old orthodoxies and limitations of nationalist politics as well as on the incitement of deliberation and self-knowledge. ‘I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet’ (Yeats, 1961, 526). State and nation were passing commitments, intellectual constructs that could be comprehensively rethought. The problem pondered by both Fanon and Yeats was how to move from a political situation in which conformity and discipline are the paramount virtues to one in which these pragmatic qualities must be replaced by a willingness to explore new, more unorthodox and experimental forms of thought and action. How are formerly colonised nations to move from a decisive condition in which intelligence must be subordinated to emotional energy to one where liberty, consciousness and tolerance should be given priority? Yeats’s answer was the wilfully provocative imagery of the late poems. I have been arguing that the purpose served by these complicated symbols is to arouse ‘audacity

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of thought’ (quoted in Foster, 2003, 295) in a country that for Yeats should be comprised of vigorously reflective citizens. His late work is profoundly topical because it explores a state of unfinished decolonisation, that fraught period, in which we still reside, between the winding up of colonialism and the inauguration of full decolonisation. I do not wish to deny the existence of Yeats’s very staunch nationalist convictions, at least not in the way that Roy Foster (1997 and 2003) does in his biography of the poet where they tend to be dismissed as a transient fixation or else a mediated expression of his amorous passions. In fact the first obstacle one encounters when undertaking to defend the potentially cosmopolitan dimensions of Yeats’s late work is his consistent repudiation of such terms. ‘I have an ambition to be taken as an Irish novelist’, the young Yeats wrote to Katharine Tynan in 1891, ‘not as an English or cosmopolitan one choosing Ireland as a background’ (Yeats, 1986, 274–5). One also has to contend with his belief that ‘[a]ll literature and all art is national’ (Yeats, 1975, 141). ‘For Yeats the world ultimately meant Ireland’, is the judgement of one of his biographers (Jeffares, 2001, 209). But, as I have been repeating, my focus is on the poems not the poet. Yeats’s cosmopolitanism, if we can speak of such a thing, can be found not in political proposals or personal convictions, nor even in his work’s admirable receptiveness to other cultural traditions. It resides in a suggestive as well as prophetic exasperation with national feeling at the level of the poetic image. Therefore, my challenge to prevailing critical conceptions of lateness is that it was not Yeats’s own old age so much as the complex relationship between this and the comparable lateness of his historical and political situation that gave rise to the very salutary forms of provocation contained in the late poems. To some extent I agree with Gordon McMullan’s argument in his illuminating study of the idea of late writing in relation to Shakespeare that ‘the idea of late style is in fact synechdochic of the biographical urge in general, and any critique of late style must therefore also involve a critique of the central place biography still occupies in the critical process’ (McMullan, 2007, 3). The notion that great artists possess a distinctive style in old age (whether it is one of dissonance and rebarbativeness or, as Shakespeare’s is usually assumed to be in The Tempest, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, one of serene valediction) is for McMullan connected inextricably to the mistaken belief that an artist’s style is the organic product of his own life and will.13 But I would not wish to abandon the idea of lateness altogether, as McMullan is inclined to, not only because I do not share his dislike of biographical explanations (which surely have a role to play in


explaining the genesis of a writer’s style, albeit not the sole or even the main one) but because to do so would be to deprive ourselves of a term that can shed considerable light on the political and historical contexts in which works like Yeats’s last poems were produced. Late style can be found where expressive power, the origins of which we perforce struggle to explain, confronts political disenchantment, which, we can say with greater confidence, is consequent upon the increasingly apparent moribundity of the social and political system in which the artist resides and on which his work, however obliquely, reflects. In Yeats’s case that system is anti-colonial nationalism. Serendipitously, his own old age quickened and intensified his sensitivity to nationalism’s comparable senescence. Yeats’s late work articulates and compels critical engagement with a period in which religiosity, censoriousness, bourgeois small-mindedness and national feeling no longer seemed essential components of anti-colonial political organisation but instead appeared as obstacles blocking the extension and entrenchment of the campaign for freedom begun but not concluded by Ireland’s independence. In Adorno’s analyses of Beethoven’s fragmentary late piano sonatas, of the lingeringly elegiac last movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1991b, 164–7), and of the dissonance as well as the remorseless technical organisation of serial composition (2006, 27–102), it is the increasingly apparent impossibility of achieving equality and social harmony under capitalism that is the principal catalyst of late style, or, as he euphemistically puts it, ‘the end of the symphonic sonata, or, to call the intentional object by its proper name, the end of the order that bore the sonata’ (Adorno, 2002, 609). Alas, I do not have the space to explore whether or not the lateness of anti-colonial nationalism dramatised by Yeats’s final poems is connected to the lateness of the bourgeois order that Adorno shows is registered in the evolution of the Austrian and German classical traditions. My hunch is that it does, not least because poems such as ‘September 1913’ register dissatisfaction with the bourgeois social order of independent Ireland. What may not be true for Ireland, which as the saying goes is now a first world country with a third world history, but which certainly is true for most ex-colonies is that the impoverishing effects of colonisation are so profound that development cannot be accomplished within the constraints of the capitalist system. For that a veritably Herculean process of transformation and redistribution is required on a global rather than a merely national or regional scale. As Fanon averred and as Neil Lazarus has reminded us, ‘the process of decolonisation brings the future of capitalism radically into question’ (Lazarus, 1999, 79; emphasis in the original). Seen in this

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way, Yeats’s work as well as that of Adorno and of the composers he analyses may all be responding to the same phenomenon: ‘late capitalism’ in Ernest Mandel’s (1975) phrase or, since Mandel’s periodisation is more specific than the one I am offering here, ‘the late bourgeois world’, to use the title of a novella by Nadine Gordimer (1966). Whether this is true or not (and for now it must remain matter for further investigation), it is worth stressing in conclusion that Yeats’s late work’s powerful sense of exhaustion, impotence, discontent and disengagement is allied, paradoxically, to a sense of novelty and inventiveness. Yeats’s work, like Adorno’s and Mahler’s, declares the obsolescence of one thing in order to prepare the way for something else. That one is obliged to put the matter in such vague terms is part of – to speak only of Yeats – what I have been describing as his work’s willingness to ask questions rather than provide answers. It speaks to us so powerfully today because the ‘thing’ whose moribundity it registers is still with us and because the ‘something else’ it enables us to imagine and think through has not yet been brought about. Seen in this way Yeats’s evocation of ‘raving autumn shear[ing] | Blossom from the summer’s wreath’ (VP, 475) recalls the west wind driving Shelley’s ‘dead thoughts over the universe | Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth’ (1970, 579). Like Shelley’s, Yeats’s fierce and impetuous spirit is personal and political; it is also a kind of valediction aimed, paradoxically, at inspiring hope and rebirth: ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Many of Yeats’s most memorable poems are memorable precisely because they articulate a general condition, which I am claiming still obtains, that is, as Michael Wood says of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ and ‘The Second Coming’, poised between a past that is coming to an end and an uncertain future that has not yet transpired (Wood, 2010, 14). It is a critical commonplace to remark on Yeats’s ambivalence about nationalism. As Marjorie Howes has shown, his attitude to nationalist organisation was positively Sartrean in its conviction that political involvements are short-lived, provisional and at times even unendurable impingements on the integrity of the self and its private inclinations (Howes, 1998). However, what ought to be said about Yeats’s nationalism is not that it is ambivalent but that it is pragmatic. In other words, as the speeches on divorce demonstrate, Yeats recognised the necessity of nationalist organisation in a context such as Ireland’s but was always acutely aware that nationalism is not an end in itself but, in words pronounced several decades later by the Guinean nationalist Amilcar Cabral, ‘something we have to achieve in order to do something else’ (1980, 31). In its rigid postures, its fanaticism and its weakness for


religious, social and cultural hierarchies, orthodox nationalism was for Yeats a servile imitation of its English equivalent: ‘English provincialism shouts through the lips of Irish patriots’ (Yeats, 1962, 232). Yeats’s creed was not a chauvinistic or uncritical worship of one’s patria but something more like a civic (as opposed to metaphysical) nationalism.14 His was ‘the Romantic conception of Irish nationality’ (Yeats, 1961, 246) that he associated in ‘September 1913’ and elsewhere with the broadminded idealism of his Fenian mentor John O’Leary.15 His dislike of ‘mobs’, his emphasis on thought and criticism as opposed to docile fealty, and his aversion to the cultural chauvinism and ‘fanaticism’ (his favoured epithet) forever associated in his mind with the Playboy rioters and the Sinn Fein of Arthur Griffith, are all of a piece with Yeats’s laudable conviction that the successor to national consciousness is less, in Fanon’s terms, ‘social consciousness’ or ‘international consciousness’ so much as (devoid of moderating adjectives) ‘consciousness’: the individual’s unfettered reflection on and ultimately freedom from the various nets that seek to constrain the intellect and from which, like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the intellect seeks to fly. Poetry, in Heaney’s view, troubles and explores what he calls the ‘frontier of writing’: ‘the line that divides the actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative representation of those conditions’ (1995, xvi). My claim is that, by provoking an imaginative re-examination of those conditions, Yeats’s late poetry calls other kinds of frontier into question as well. Its provocative method is involved, as Roy Foster has put it, in ‘transgressing boundaries and limitations, whether imposed by his own old age or the new Ireland’ (2003, 440). Looked at in this way, the unappeased fury and belligerence of the last poems is not an end in itself but a preparation for a cosmopolitan condition that their author could not envision but which his work nonetheless obliquely portends.

5 J.M. Coetzee and the ‘War on Terror’

When the security police in J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians charcoal the word ‘enemy’ on the backs of the captured barbarians and then lash them until the words are obscured by blood, the link between representation and torture – between the dehumanising definition of others and the infliction of pain – is made, as it were, graphically clear.1 What I wish to explore here is the way in which such representations still serve, and since 2001 have served increasingly, to reinforce a system of beliefs that by defining a group of people as less than human seeks to legitimise their murder, exploitation and torture. That the townspeople in Coetzee’s scene titter and gawp at the gruesome spectacle in the square is testament to its success in denying the humanity of the ‘barbarians’ and in placing their pain beyond the reach of their tormentors’ moral imaginations. The act of torture in this case is a public one; it marks off a boundary between what is human and what is not in order to justify the infliction of pain and terror on defenceless bodies. Yet when Coetzee’s protagonist catches sight of the hammer with which Colonel Joll is about to cripple the ankles of the captives and interrupts what Samuel Durrant has called this ‘pedagogical spectacle’ (1999, 456) he seeks heroically though inarticulately and with terrible personal consequences to protest against the logic of dehumanisation: ‘Look at these men’, he implores, ‘Men!’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 117). In so doing the Magistrate provides a reminder of the implicit normative vision of Coetzee’s oeuvre and of the necessary corrective to torture: an egalitarian and unabashedly humanist moral code based on our shared vulnerability to physical pain.2 What the reader experiences as a result of reading Waiting for the Barbarians is a reflection on an exemplary consciousness trying to make sense of its entanglement in a situation of imperial domination. 104

J.M. Coetzee and the ‘War on Terror’ 105

What Edward Said has said of Joseph Conrad could with equal justice be said of Coetzee: he ‘know[s] what it [means] to write the history of conscience, to record the growth of the faculty that grants one a moral awareness of conduct’ (Said, 1966, 10). Narrated throughout in the first person and the present tense, Waiting for the Barbarians is a loquaciously confessional text. The consciousness dramatised by this narrative method comes up against the limits of its knowledge and of its moral imagination so that it can first examine and then try to peer beyond its limited experience and sympathies. Hence it is not its self-consciousness alone that makes Coetzee’s novel into a radical and protestatory document but also what it is self-conscious of: namely, a pseudo-humanism that sets civilisation against barbarism in order to justify imperial power. Furthermore, the result of that characteristically modernistic self-doubt is not resignation or despair, let alone irreverence, but the cautious articulation of a new mode of thinking about and of living alongside those previously castigated by imperialist discourses as inferior. Waiting for the Barbarians does not just protest but protests in the name of an alternative set of values or, if this sounds too grand a description of Coetzee’s guarded writings, of a normative if tentatively articulated moral code. Coetzee’s protagonist tries in vain (though his struggle is no less instructive and impressive for its failure) to think his way into other lives. This figure’s painstakingly demonstrated incapacity to effect moral change without re-examining fundamentally his preconceptions about others and without seeking some root-and-branch transformation of the social, economic and political circumstances in which he encounters those others, means that the task which he leaves unfinished (and which a fictional construction like the novel is in any case incapable of resolving) is a task bequeathed rather than a task abandoned. I am speaking of the way in which this novel both portrays and engenders a sort of heightened consciousness of the unreliability and self-centredness of what human beings say and think about each other that leads, potentially, to a robust insistence on the possibility of self-knowledge and to a conviction that self-knowledge can give rise to effective sympathy and practical (that is, political) solidarity with the sufferings of others. Of course, the Bush administration is not the only government to sanction the use of torture. It was not even, despite the too hasty assumptions of some of its critics, the first American government to do so.3 But what is especially pernicious about the publicised and unpublicised abuses perpetrated at American-run dungeons across the globe is that their existence has been made possible and even excused by an

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unprecedentedly bellicose but profoundly hypocritical humanitarian rhetoric. These crimes have taken place not under a totalitarian dictatorship but at the behest of a democratic country that professes allegiance to the highest humanitarian principles. The limits of those principles, as they are conventionally applied, must therefore be acknowledged. Aerial bombing, illegal munitions, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, the indiscriminate killing of thousands: that all this has been done in the name of exporting ‘Western values’ of democracy and human rights ought to show us that those values are not Western at all or at least that they are not safe in Western hands. In short, the co-existence of torture with the employment of a humanitarian rhetoric to promote the ‘interventions’ made recently by the United States and its auxiliaries ought to make us recognise what Edward Said showed in his Humanism and Democratic Criticism: that it is necessary ‘to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism’ (Said, 2004a, 10). The idea and practice of humanism must therefore be distinguished much more clearly from the partial variety championed by political elites in the West. The humanism espoused and potentially inculcated by Coetzee’s novel should be understood to involve both a biting distrust of such exclusionary and self-seeking doctrines and, consequently, an inclusive commitment to humanity as a whole (and not to this or that nation, religion or ‘civilisation’): ‘a true humanism’ in Aimé Césaire’s terms, ‘a humanism made to the measure of the world’ (1972, 56). Its ineffectiveness as a way of gathering reliable information is the least of torture’s drawbacks. Torture, as Tzvetan Todorov has said, ‘is an inadmissible attack on the very idea of humanity’ (2009, 60). It subverts the very foundation of the idea of justice and law, since it betokens the rejection by an entire society, in so far as the members of that society avert their eyes and do nothing to put an end to torture, of the humanity of the other. Torture damages the body, wrecks the spirit and violates human dignity. I have no compunction about using such phrases, not least because I am convinced that the humanist belief in the value and equality of all human life is a vital component of any comprehensive alternative to the divisions and hierarchies put in place by imperialism. The ethnocentric and hypocritical pretence of humanism usually espoused by the West does not preclude the development of more selfcritical and inclusive variants. Waiting for the Barbarians dramatises and enjoins human empathy, conjoined with the most rigorous self-scrutiny. I hope to show that the novel also encourages its readers to establish more robust political and legal means of enshrining that ethos. For the effective impunity of the war on terror’s protagonists vindicates an old


maxim: currently, laws are like cobwebs: they entangle the weak but are too flimsy to detain the strong.4 Waiting for the Barbarians underlines the essential precondition of a cosmopolitan polity: the establishment of a global community underpinned by expansive allegiances and extensive institutions. This chapter is therefore intended to demonstrate a form of postcolonial criticism appropriate for an era in which, as Arundhati Roy has argued, the war in Iraq ‘has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades’: that is, has made manifest the persistence, contrary to what the prefix ‘post-’ would have us believe, of imperial ambitions and practices (Roy, 2004, 99). Its premise is that one of postcolonial criticism’s chief aims should be to address the ways in which many literary texts succeed in fostering a critical and ultimately moral and political response to exclusionary ideologies and to the violence that those ideologies engender. Postcolonial criticism should therefore be practised not only with the textual, cultural and epistemological manifestations of imperialism in mind but also with an acute mindfulness of what Neil Lazarus has called ‘the unremitting actuality and indeed the intensification of imperialist social relations in the times and spaces of the postcolonial world’ (2006, 16).5 My reading of Waiting for the Barbarians has been prompted by a conviction that postcolonial studies, since its inception, has been characterised by a disproportionate focus on the cultural and textual dimensions of imperial rule and on matters of representation, at the expense, crucially, of enough attention being granted either to imperialism’s unrelenting physical power or to the connections between that power and the varied articulations of postcolonial culture. Additionally therefore, I want to demonstrate one of the ways in which ongoing forms of imperial rule can be appraised, interrogated and found wanting by literary texts like Coetzee’s. The topicality of this novel is due firstly to its capacity to demonstrate that torture is made possible not just by the criminality of its perpetrators and the connivance of lawyers and policymakers but also, ultimately, by a pervasive ideology of dehumanisation. Secondly, by virtue of its first person narrative form, the novel recounts in the voice of the coloniser a gradual process of confusion, introspection and remorse that enables the reader to experience closely rather than merely witnessing from a distance an exemplary process of self-questioning. Though the novel’s protagonist, who is the Magistrate of an isolated settlement in an unidentified ‘Empire’, is unable fully to reach either a successful rejection of imperial structures or an effective empathy for their victims, the specific practice of reading

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that the novel dramatises and requires makes those achievements appear both available and compelling to its readers. Waiting for the Barbarians is thus further distinguished by its revival in its readers of a moral and ultimately political sensibility that is usually inhibited by the ideology of dehumanisation but which is presupposed by cosmopolitanism. It certainly does not, to use the political theorist Ulrich Beck’s words, ‘enlighten human beings concerning the real, internal cosmopolitanization of their lifeworlds and institutions’ (Beck, 2006, 2), for it shows us, to the contrary, that our lifeworlds and institutions are violent and exclusionary. Cosmopolitan lifeworlds and institutions do not yet exist (except in embryo) and must therefore be seen as possible outcomes of the concerted political action which the novel beseeches and enables. As Richard Falk has argued, to act as a cosmopolitan citizen requires not that one behave as though one lived already in a cosmopolitan future but rather that one should act in ways likely to bring such a future about. Cosmopolitanism requires a response ‘to the overriding challenge to create a political community that doesn’t yet exist’ (Falk, 1996, 139).

Torture and dehumanisation Torture, Coetzee has written, ‘provide[s] a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims’ (Coetzee, 1992, 363). The unusually stark and exceptionable brutality of torture makes it the very apotheosis and exemplar of a wider system of violence. Hence by referring to the heightened violence of torture I am pointing also to the even more grievous extinction of human lives through avoidable evils such as poverty, disease, environmental destruction and war. As Noam Chomsky has argued, ‘torture, however horrifying, scarcely weighs in the balance in comparison with the war crimes at Falluja and elsewhere in Iraq, or the general effects of the US and UK invasion’ (Chomsky, 2007, 52). Especially pertinent in this context, therefore, is the so-called ‘war on terror’. Although he refrains from using the bellicose rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’, President Obama has not closed the prison at Guantánamo and has ruled out prosecutions for government officials who are suspected of committing war crimes. The new president may have mitigated some of the worst abuses of the Bush era, but he has not renounced the doctrine of pre-emptive war, has not signed up to the International Criminal Court and has certainly not thrown open the doors of America’s secret prisons or withdrawn from the many hundreds of American military bases that dot the globe. The unilateral, imbalanced, domineering – in short, imperialistic – role of the United States,


of which the ‘war on terror’ was a peculiarly intense manifestation, has been subjected to a small change in degree not in kind. The analysis of torture, which for all we know still takes place, is a concentrated and stark analysis of the logic of imperialism itself, the continuation of which is beyond question. Torture has come to symbolise the calamitous ‘war on terror’: from the ‘rendition’ of prisoners to unscrupulous regimes with fewer political and legal obstacles to the practice of torture (Paylen and Thompson, 2006), to the increasingly apparent (though officially unacknowledged) complicity of the British government in the torture of its own and other nations’ citizens,6 to the United States’s hidden global network of detention centres (Grey, 2006), and of course to the atrocities perpetrated at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Many of these wrongdoings remain shrouded in secrecy. All have been imperfectly understood. None have resulted in satisfactory prosecutions or in justice for their victims. To speak only of events at Abu Ghraib, numerous official inquiries have camouflaged deeds with jargon, hidden their extensiveness, rapped the knuckles of low-ranking perpetrators and exonerated their overseers. Citizens of democracies – not unlike the townspeople challenged by Coetzee’s Magistrate to recognise the humanity of their alleged enemies – have greeted largely with indifference and inaction revelations that soldiers and unaccountable contractors acting in their name and with the explicit or effective endorsement of their elected representatives, subjected prisoners to excruciating positions, isolation, sensory deprivation, ravening dogs, hooding, terrifying threats, beatings, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, repeated near-drowning and extremes of heat and cold.7 Acts that are outlawed by a universal and indefeasible legal prohibition,8 that are utterly unwarranted under any defensible moral code, and that are operationally useless and guaranteed only to sow the dragon’s teeth of future conflict, have nonetheless been allowed to pass with only a momentary spasm of contrition and without, therefore, anything remotely resembling the sort of sustained self-scrutiny called for by the former Chilean dissident Ariel Dorfman (2006). How and why has this been allowed to happen? The first part of the answer can be found in the legal memoranda, official reports into abuses, depositions of prisoners and witnesses, and other documents collected by Mark Danner (2005), Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel (2005), and in three articles published in the New Yorker in 2004 by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.9 Books and articles reveal the extent of official complicity in the torture that took place in Iraqi prisons under the American occupation. They compile a full account of

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what the army’s fragmentary inquiries seem designed to conceal: that in the face of the growing insurgency a decision was taken by civilian and military leaders in Washington to focus the Iraqi prison system on interrogation and the collection of intelligence and to import the abusive methods developed at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan. Hersh (2005) demonstrates exhaustively that the offences committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were systematic. Their origins can be found in decisions taken at the highest levels of the Bush administration, which were then furnished with a flimsy legal cover. Bush’s stipulation that ‘war on terror’ detainees be treated in a manner ‘consistent with the principles’ of the Geneva Conventions ‘to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity’ (Danner, 2005, 106), for example, left a legal loophole large enough for an entire state-sanctioned policy of torture to pass through. The documents also reveal a wider distrust of legal and judicial processes in the US and elsewhere as unwarranted checks on executive power. Memoranda even ape the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt by dismissing as unconstitutional all legal or Congressional restraints on the President’s entitlement to sanction torture.10 All these measures and decisions add up to a calculated policy to withhold from fellow human beings the rights and protections to which they are entitled by law. But this assiduous fact-gathering, penetrating and instructive though it is, tells us how torture has been allowed to take place but not why. Waiting for the Barbarians provides a different but no less essential kind of insight. It helps us understand why democracies tolerate torture even when confronted with evidence of its adoption as official policy and with confirmation of its revolting and self-defeating effect. The belief that the crimes carried out at Abu Ghraib were the acts of sadistic ‘bad apples’ fails to take into account not only the complicity of a chain of command that stretched all the way from senior officers to the Pentagon and the White House (Gourevitch and Morris, 2008; Sands, 2008), but also, perhaps even more ominously, the general acceptance of the view that the West’s ‘others’ do not merit the moral and legal status of human beings. Nothing identifies the ‘war on terror’ as imperialistic more clearly than its employment of the rhetoric and practice of dehumanisation. ‘Since January 2002’, writes David Rose in his study of the prison at Guantánamo, ‘the rhetoric of Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush has reinforced the message of those first shocking photographs: that the detainees were in some way subhuman, lacking the qualifications for full membership of the species: üntermenschen’ (Rose, 2004, 134). Seventy years ago George Orwell, recuperating from illness in Marrakech,


reflected that all empires are founded on a refusal to view the natives as human beings (1994, 30). Imperialism, in Frantz Fanon’s words, ‘dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms’ (1990, 32-3). For Jean-Paul Sartre, the practice of torture cannot be separated from the dehumanising ideology of imperialism. That people kill each other is the rule: we have always fought for collective or individual interests. But in torture, this strange combat, the stakes seem extreme; it is for the title of man that the torturer pits himself against the tortured, and the whole thing happens as if they could not both belong to the human species. The aim of torture is not simply to force someone to talk, to betray: the victim must designate himself, by his cries and his submission, as a human animal. In everyone’s eyes and in his own eyes. His betrayal must break and dispose of the victim forever. The intention is not just to force those who yield to torture to talk; they have had a status imposed upon them forever: that of a subhuman. (Sartre, 2006, 85; emphasis in the original) We need to recognise that the events symbolised by the Abu Ghraib snapshots occasioned hardly a modicum of self-scrutiny, let alone admissions of guilt or real justice, because for many they had befallen not beings whose sufferings it was possible to imagine and disapprove but legitimate targets of violent correction, a contemptible sub-species outside the rule of law and humanitarian obligation. Two things stand out when one considers the close relationship between imperialism and torture. Firstly, both are forms of power that depend for their existence on a firm dichotomy between a superior group that exercises control and an inferior one that is subjected to it, between one that is human and one that is not. Secondly, imperialism, which professes to be a disinterested, humane and enlightened form of rule, by representing its subjects as less than or nor yet fully human, actually makes torture inevitable. Ostensibly a means of promulgating the most advanced, civilised values and institutions, it actually licences the most despicable form of violence imaginable. ‘The avowedly benevolent ideology of the civilizing mission’, according to Rita Maran’s study of the use of torture in the Algerian War of Independence, ‘was the mechanism by which the doctrine of the “rights of man” was contorted in order to encourage and justify the practice of torture’ (Maran, 1989, 2). In Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers,

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the character of Colonel Mathieu, challenged by a journalist who questions the widespread practice of torture, reasons that once one has accepted that France is entitled to remain in Algeria and therefore that the FLN must be crushed then ‘you must accept all the consequences’: that is, one must acquiesce in the violence and torture required to uphold a superior form of civilisation. Thus the most unspeakable cruelties can be committed in the name of a system of values that ought to find them insufferable. The torture of Algerians was neither exceptional nor contingent, as Frantz Fanon argued, but the result of the racist, dehumanising system of French colonialism itself: ‘Torture is inherent in the whole colonialist configuration’ (Fanon, 1970, 74). Informing my reading of Coetzee’s novel, therefore, is an unapologetically political conviction that the practice of torture in the conduct of the ‘war on terror’ is the result less of random wickedness or casual sadism than of a widespread and long-lasting ideology of dehumanisation which underpins the imperial assumption that large parts of the globe are places where (as Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow at Washington think-tank the Brookings Institution, said of the naval base at Guantánamo) ‘we can sort of do what we want to’ (quoted in Sands, 2005, 158). We need to remind ourselves of this insight when we contrast the sufferings depicted in the notorious images from Abu Ghraib with the cheerful callousness of the American guards. Dehumanisation staves off the moral horror that should stay the hand of the torturer or stop the mouth of his apologist – were they able to imagine the agonies suffered by their victims. Obscured by the doublespeak of the protagonists of the ‘war on terror’ and excused by the casuistry of their lawyers, the atrocities perpetrated at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and other known and unknown stockades and ‘black sites’ upon suspects, ‘unlawful combatants’, uncooperative locals and unfortunate lookerson hauled in by their panicky assailants are indicative of the imperial mindset. That mindset’s hypocrisy was captured over a hundred years ago by Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz when, in a fit of distraction, he scrawled ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ at the bottom of his ‘humanitarian’ report (Conrad, 1995, 83–4).

Form and allegory Contemporary history makes itself felt in Coetzee’s novels less through any overt representation of its complexities and challenges (for most of his fictions are highly allegorical) than through their parodic occupation of the systems of representation associated with imperial power. ‘History,


in his work’, as David Attwell has remarked, ‘seems less a process that can be represented than a force acting on representation’ (1993, 66). What makes it most effectively political is precisely its capacity to foreground consciousness and language and thus to compel critical scrutiny of the forms of representation that permit the imposition of imperial power. The objective of Coetzee’s fiction, as Stephen Watson has noted, is ‘to register the impact of colonialism not, as is customary in the realist novel, through a series of incidents or events but at the more basic level of language itself’ (1986, 373). In earlier, sustainedly ironic works like Dusklands the purported omniscience of the imperial imagination is rebutted by the painstakingly demonstrated ignorance, prejudice and lack of self-consciousness of the narrators: a specialist in psychological warfare working for the US Defense Department during the Vietnam War and one Jacobus Coetzee, a vengeful Boer frontiersman relating his punitive expeditions in the Cape. Such works require readers alert enough to see through the intellectual and moral fallibility of their narrators and of the mindset that they make available for scrutiny. Magda, the farmer’s daughter who narrates In the Heart of the Country, bemoans her unavailing dialogues with her native servants and, just as crucially, her unfulfilled desire to establish a basis for democratic communication: I cannot carry on with these idiot dialogues. The language that should pass between myself and these people was subverted by my father and cannot be recovered. What passes between us now is a parody. I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and perspective. It was my father-tongue. I do not say it is the language my heart wants to speak, I feel too much the pathos of its distances, but it is all we have. I can believe there is a language lovers speak but cannot imagine how it goes. I have no words left to exchange whose value I trust. (Coetzee, 1982, 97) Coetzee’s fiction, then, is distinguished by its powerful recognition that discourse is deeply implicated in the imposition of imperial power. What it reveals to be at issue is the way that empires imagine and represent their victims and the way that language is transformed or misused to excuse practices that would otherwise be abhorrent, in the process forestalling the development of a language founded on equality and trust rather than enmity and alienation. For Coetzee therefore, it is important for fiction to examine the very idea and practice of representation. His aim is to get inside his narrators’ ideas, to expose their moral blindness (or at least their self-serving definitions of what it means to

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be moral), and to dramatise their incomplete and ongoing experiences of self-criticism. Notoriously taciturn on public occasions, Coetzee lets his novels do the talking.11 They work away at their readers’ presuppositions and quietly press the claims of more altruistic forms of life. This is the method employed by Waiting for the Barbarians, which narrates in the protagonist’s own voice the process by which complacency is assailed by confusion and painful introspection. When they elicit confessions from the captured barbarians, Colonel Joll and the officials of the Civil Guard face no obstruction from the Magistrate. He has a kind of patrician contempt for the earnest bureaucrat from the capital and a disdain for his methods. But as he remarks, ‘I drink with him, I eat with him, I show him the sights, I afford him every assistance as his letter of commission requests, and more. The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 6). Though he is aware that ‘savages’, whose people he holds in contempt for their ‘animal shamelessness’ (20), are being slashed and branded in the granary the Magistrate goes about his official business, ‘occupying my evenings in the classics, closing my ears to the activities of this upstart policeman’ (22). The Magistrate’s use of ‘the classics’ to stifle the cries of Joll’s victims is no doubt another instance of what George Steiner has referred to as the conflict ‘between humane literacy and the politics of torture and mass-murder’ (Steiner, 1984, 10). Steiner’s work is in large part an effort to understand the eruption of the most appalling crimes in human history in Germany, the birthplace and haven of modern European high culture. His conclusion is that the evacuation of humane values from wider social life and their confinement to a segregated aesthetic realm led to a situation in which ‘the spheres of Auschwitz-Birkenau and of the Beethoven recital, of the torture-cellar and the great library, were contiguous in space and time. Men could come home from their day’s butchery and falsehood to weep over Rilke or play Schubert’ (1984, 11).12 Coetzee’s novel has the audacity to evoke this powerful image because, in the manner of a stridently anti-colonial voice like that of Sven Lindqvist (1997), it likens imperialism to the Third Reich and because it seeks to draw readers’ attention to the reliance of all imperial systems on a pitiless contempt for the ‘barbarians’ from whom ‘civilisation’ distinguishes itself. Thus when the colonel temporarily departs, the Magistrate declares himself ‘happy to be alone again in a world I know and understand’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 14), a world without visible sufferings and uncertainties to trouble his moral complacency.


The catalyst for what the Magistrate later calls ‘a change in my moral being’ (47) is his encounter with a barbarian girl who is found wandering about the town after she has been tortured and her father murdered by Joll’s men. Until his disquieting infatuation with the girl the Magistrate is almost devoid of the self-knowledge and the capacity for empathy necessary to understand experiences different from his own. The ruins excavated from the adjacent dunes are a mystery to him and so too, more significantly, is the indecipherable script inscribed on the cache of wooden slips or ‘calligraphic riddles’ (79) that he discovers there. The Magistrate is at first a similarly clueless and unimaginative reader of the gestures and thoughts of the girl: ‘The body of the other one, closed, ponderous, sleeping in my bed in a faraway room, seems beyond comprehension’ (45). Endlessly washing her feet in a futile effort to expiate a sense of guilt that is only very dimly understood, and badgering her for details of her mistreatment, the Magistrate attempts, like Joll and his men, to crack his subject, uncover her secrets and translate the girl into his own terms and definitions. The motives and judgements that he ascribes to this recalcitrant figure are, he gradually realises, nothing but projections, less insights or discoveries than, like the confessions extracted by Joll’s torturers, self-serving constructions of the truth. ‘Is this how her torturers felt’, he wonders in a flash of self-knowledge, ‘hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was?’ (46) When the Magistrate returns from a perilous expedition across the frontier to convey the girl back to her people, he is detained for making contact with the ‘enemy’. It is at this stage of his moral development that the Magistrate starts to reject rather than simply have doubts about the Empire’s ideological categories. It is not the indigenous people who are barbaric, he realises, but the Empire itself: ‘We are at peace here’, he tells his interrogator Warrant Officer Mandel, ‘we have no enemies […] Unless I make a mistake […] Unless we are the enemy’ (85). Aware that the customary distinctions are erroneous, he describes the men who have usurped his desk and ransacked his office as ‘barbarians’ (189). The Magistrate is exhilarated by the thought of being in open opposition to the military authorities but is now sufficiently self-aware to remind himself that there is ‘nothing heroic’ (86) in his opposition and to ask himself and his readers if his resistance betokens simple vanity rather than allegiance to an alternative set of values: ‘And is there any principle behind my opposition? Have I not simply been provoked into a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians usurping my desk and pawing my papers?’ (85). What remains to be accomplished, therefore,

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is a positive vision to complement the Magistrate’s largely negative and questionably motivated critique of the Empire. But the Magistrate is tortured before this vision can be articulated, essentially for the same reason that the barbarians are tortured earlier in the novel: not so that any actual conspiracy against the Empire can be uncovered but so that the dichotomy that structures the imperial worldview and underpins its authority can be reproduced. The ‘barbarians’ are made to confess to subversive plots so that the myth of a united and belligerent barbarian threat can justify the activities of the secret police. Thus the Empire confirms its raison d’être as a civilised outpost in a backward wilderness. Similarly, the Magistrate is tortured in order to uphold the Empire’s reigning ideology. Reduced to the basest feral needs, his increasingly cogent critiques of imperial rule are silenced. The high-sounding phrases the Magistrate plans to fling in the faces of his tormentors are reduced to the simple, levelling eloquence of pain. What I am made to undergo is subjection to the most rudimentary needs of my body: to drink, to relieve itself, to find the posture in which it is least sore […] [M]y torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it means to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself […] They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal. (126) The Magistrate’s experience of torture thus resembles that of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Neither information nor incrimination is the objective of his torment, but rather the utter abasement of the victim: the reduction of a thinking, vigorous and insubordinate human being to ‘no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 93), a gibbering and helpless body focused now not on resistance but on the endurance and alleviation of suffering. As Elaine Scarry has argued, the moral, linguistic and political horizons of the body are violently contracted by torture (1985, 27–59). ‘In my suffering’, reports the Magistrate, ‘there is nothing ennobling’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 126). The novel permits no morally dubious suggestion that undergoing torture is a cathartic route to atonement. Instead,


the Magistrate is confused and defeated. Neither his incipient critique of the Empire nor his outrage at his treatment and at the merciless torture of barbarian captives develops into a fully articulated rejection of the Empire’s legitimacy. His awareness of his rudimentary kinship with the tortured inmates inspires the Magistrate to examine his own complicity in their torment and to discover a capacity to imagine and sympathise with the sufferings of others. But admixed with this dawning sense of empathy are doubt, a nagging inability to contemplate a life outside or without the settlement’s gates, and the disorientating and isolating effects of his ordeal. Yet the Magistrate’s failure to articulate an alternative to the Empire need not entail any comparable failure on the part of the reader. Few critics have failed to observe that the practice of reading is a central theme of the novel, which meditates explicitly on the responsibilities as well as on the difficulties of reading. In so doing, Waiting for the Barbarians hints at the manner in which it should be read. The form of reading that it commends possesses the same capacity for self-criticism and therefore the same moral and political intelligence required to contest the dehumanising ideology that makes torture possible. Nowhere is Coetzee’s own preoccupation with the ethical consequences of reading more evident than in his 1986 essay ‘Into the Dark Chamber: The Novelist and South Africa’ (collected in Coetzee, 1992). He is concerned there with the literary representation of torture. The writer who is compelled by the urgency of this theme to render it into fiction is, Coetzee argues, caught in a dilemma. Obviously he cannot ignore torture because to do so is to help close the eyes and consciences of his readers to a parallel world of debasement, force and pain. In the same way, Coetzee points out, South African legislators under apartheid removed offensive spectacles of suffering from the eyes of their white electorate. Yet the writer ought to find the explicit representation of acts of torture equally problematic: ‘there is something tawdry about following the state in this way, making its vile mysteries the occasion of fantasy’ (Coetzee, 1992, 364; emphasis in the original). There is a danger that the writer who bodies forth torture from the imagination will inadvertently normalise and even glamorise the act and its perpetrators, something that also disturbs Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello about the fictional writer Paul West’s novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (Coetzee, 2003, 156–82). Straining to put into language the torturer’s character and the vileness of his deeds might result, unwittingly, in a darkly seductive lyricism or a sort of pornographic fascination with the mysteries of the torture chamber. Precisely by representing suffering,

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as Theodor Adorno argues even of Arnold Schoenberg’s harrowing Survivor from Warsaw, the artist potentially makes it into matter for entertainment and titillation. [B]y turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. (Adorno, 1977, 189) Waiting for the Barbarians suggests that the solution for the novelist trying to avoid impaling himself on such dilemmas is to avoid regarding torture from the detached viewpoint of a bystander who either shirks the responsibility to address torture or else views it as an occasion for melodrama. Neither approach gets near the self-knowledge and self-criticism – indeed the self-implication – required truly to understand what torture is and how to prevent it from taking place. In other words, torture must be analysed and understood but in order for this to happen effectively then self-criticism must be made to take place. The best way of explaining what I mean by this is to state that the novel’s understanding of the problem of torture is so profound that it is able to explore the ‘bare and extreme’ metaphor of torture without presenting it from a morally compromising aesthetic distance. To prevent the reader distancing herself from the deeds of the torturer, the novel’s narrative mode obliges her to ponder those deeds through the eyes of one who comes to realise his own complicity in torture. The aim of the novel, then, is to engender reflection on the ideology that makes torture possible and to provoke ‘a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering’, as Susan Sontag (2003, 92) puts it in Regarding the Pain of Others, her discussion of the ethics of representing atrocity. By speaking with the Magistrate’s voice, as Rosemary Jolly has noted (1996, 123), the novel adopts something of the mindset of the torturer, who is shown to possess both the erotic fascination with scenes of torture and the questionable preoccupation with that scene’s ‘evil grandeur’ (Coetzee, 1992, 365) that Coetzee’s essay censures. Evolving from its narrator’s initially rather haughty tone to one of distress and bafflement, from a milieu of comfort and ‘placid concupiscence’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 9) to a state of panic and confusion, from careful self-delusion to lacerating


self-consciousness, and from an orderly recitation of events to a more fragmentary, muddled and even circuitous narrative, Waiting for the Barbarians enacts rather than merely describes the slow dismantling of its protagonist’s view of the world, which is also ours. It is by assuming this voice that Coetzee’s novel approaches torture not as a problem to be explored within the text but as a predicament to be overcome by the text in collaboration with its readers. Hence the novel recognises the importance of an insight that I have been propounding: that the problem of torture encompasses both its perpetrators and the complicity of witnesses, apologists and bystanders. Importantly, however, the reader, as well as being in sympathy with and reliant on the Magistrate’s account, is also distanced ironically from it. He or she is thus able to interpret events that baffle the Magistrate and to infer insights that are unavailable to him. Whereas the protagonist is merely self-conscious about his guilt and complicity, the reader is able to take this self-consciousness a step further by gaining insight into the Magistrate’s situation and by exploring alternatives. For example, the ‘mournful dry bellows’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 131) that emerge from the Magistrate’s throat as he hangs in excruciating pain from a tree in the yard are, as one of his tormentors observes mockingly, cries for help from his ‘barbarian friends’ articulated in ‘barbarian language’ (132). To the attentive reader it is evident that the barb is true in a rather different sense from that intended. What is apparent to the novel’s readers, though not to the victim, is the likeness that the incident has revealed between the suffering Magistrate and the ‘barbarians’ tortured by the secret police. They share the same language as a result of their shared susceptibility to pain. When the Magistrate’s tormentors reveal the ‘meaning of humanity’ (126) (its capacity for cruelty as well as its shared vulnerability to pain), they do so primarily to the reader. The implications of reading in the widest possible sense, by which I mean the understanding of one’s world rather than just the perusal of literary texts, are in the end the subject of the book. The Empire and its citizens are inclined to interpret the ‘barbarians’ as outsiders and inferiors. This perception is presented as extremely durable and extensive: ‘It is this contempt for the barbarians, contempt which is shown by the merest ostler or peasant farmer, that I as magistrate have had to contend with for twenty years’ (55). By the end of the novel both the protagonist-narrator – who complacently distinguishes himself from the prejudices of the rabble – and, more importantly and it is to be hoped with more success, the novel’s readers, must learn to interpret the world in a more self-critical fashion. Of course, the torturers’ pursuit

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of ‘truth’ is in fact no kind of reading or interpretation at all, or at best a very deficient and ineffective one. It is instead an imposition of ideological meanings on resistant texts, bodies and voices. The captured prisoners are not encouraged to divulge the truth about their presence near the settlement (which it seems is to seek medical help for a sore on the young man’s leg) but are instead coerced into verifying their tormentors’ expectations of barbarian sabotage. The urge to confirm one’s presuppositions about truth is a form of domination; thus the Magistrate is initially exasperated with his interminable meditations on the girl’s cryptic body when ‘I ought to be filling her with the truth’ (44). The verb makes known the connections between the imposition of meaning and the infliction of violence, in this case sexual violence. The Magistrate implores the captives to tell Joll the truth about their ‘subversion’ instead of enquiring if they are subversives (3) or asking himself what ideological function the word ‘subversive’ serves in this context. However, the ‘change in his moral being’ takes the form increasingly of an altered method of interpreting his world. Instead of viewing the world as if it were comprised of familiar signs revealing (or being made to reveal) a dominant truth, he gradually comes to appreciate that incidents and encounters are complicated and strange enough to warrant close scrutiny and therefore capable of contesting and even disproving that dominant ‘truth’. The Magistrate gradually becomes a more attentive and self-critical reader. When hunting a waterbuck after Joll’s initial departure, for example, he fails to experience his usual relish for the kill. Reading the Magistrate reading, we can discern in the hunter, whose powerful gaze has been returned by the visage of his prospective prey, an appreciation of the animal’s power and intelligence and even a dim intimation of sympathy. For the Magistrate, who has ‘time even to turn my gaze inward’, this intimation is only ‘an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness’ (42). For the reader, however, this scene is an early example of the Magistrate’s deeply admirable (but ultimately failed) attempt to read and bring to articulate expression the world and his place within it and to envision alternatives to the prevailing hierarchies, a failure that should be seen by the novel’s readers not as terminal or inevitable but as an opportunity to take further the Magistrate’s abortive groping after self-knowledge. For what is deeply impressive about the scene is not simply the protagonist’s vain effort to bring to consciousness an obscure sentiment of sympathy with a beast that he refrains from shooting but also the explicit, well-nigh metafictional, presentation of the scene as an opportunity for reading in its own right. An example of largely unsuccessful reading is immobilised


as a kind of figurative tableau and then proffered to the reader as material for interpretation of the scene’s larger allegorical significance. In this ‘frozen moment […] the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things’ (42–3). In other words, the Magistrate’s failure to read the scene provides the reader with an opportunity to do so, an opportunity motivated by that failure and highlighted by the author’s impatient plea to the reader to try and interpret the ‘other things’ for which the scene stands: the Magistrate’s growing self-consciousness, his newfound aversion to violence, and a dawning sense of empathy. The allegorical status of Coetzee’s novels has been a persistent topic of debate among his critics. For David Attwell, Waiting for the Barbarians ought to be read as an allegory of the beleaguered apartheid state in the late 1970s (1993, 70–87). The Empire’s campaign against the barbarians is thus seen as an indirect portrayal of the South African regime’s ‘total strategy’ of violence, surveillance and torture aimed at combating internal dissidence and perceived external threats. Derek Attridge has taken issue with this sort of approach in a piece entitled ‘Against Allegory’. He does so on the grounds that the critic’s impulse to identify a particular set of historical circumstances of which the text is an allegorical expression serves to restrict the range of possible readings, to fix the text’s meaning and significance instead of allowing for meaning and significance to be refreshed by different occasions of interpretation. I do not wish to enter this debate, not least because these positions do not strike me as being in contradiction with each other. Attwell, it seems to me, is not saying that his is the only legitimate reading of the novel. The Empire is not literally or only Botha’s South Africa; in Waiting for the Barbarians the cold winter winds blow from the North not, as in South Africa, from the South, as though the novelist were subtly discouraging us from drawing simple parallels. Meanwhile Attridge, in his own words and despite his title, is ‘not against allegory’ (2004, 67) but against the temptation on the part of readers and critics to leave the text, or rather the exciting and at times disconcerting experience of reading the text, behind in a rush to identify its ‘true’ meaning (64). Attwell’s (1993) claim is that a sensitive reading of the novel provides knowledge of particular situations, one of which is the South African, although the indefinite character of the appellation ‘Empire’ obviously invites comparisons with others. Attridge’s compatible contention is that ‘the event of reading’ whereby ‘our habits and assumptions are tested and shifted’ (2004, 60) illuminates the specific circumstances of each successive reader. For both critics, despite their different emphases, it is the novel’s

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capacity to engender a self-critical attitude in its readers that makes for salutary interventions in particular situations, many of which could not have been foreseen by the author. This kind of reading, which views the text as a versatile and allegorical meditation on the circumstances of each reader, is close to the theory of allegorical interpretation set out by Walter Benjamin in his accounts of the German Trauerspiel (1999) and the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin, 1997). Benjamin argues that whereas symbols are replete with an apprehensible because fully embodied significance or meaning, allegories are radically disharmonious, unfinished and ambiguous. Symbols were viewed by Romantic poets such as Goethe, Coleridge and Blake as vital and spiritual forms of expression and allegories as comparatively lifeless, undemanding and even artificial purveyors of simple messages. Boldly, Benjamin reverses this distinction and emphasises the intellectual appeal of allegory as well as its suitability for portraying the complexity of modern experience. ‘Allegories’, he writes, ‘are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’ (1998, 178). Allegories are fragments and refer outside of themselves to a ‘something else’ which is uncertain, difficult to make out, and in need of the hermeneutic exertions of its readers. The kind of allegory that detains Benjamin’s attention has little in common with, say, morality plays, Langland’s Piers Plowman or the dream visions of Dante, all of which are permeated with allegory because Christian literature between the European Middle Ages and the early modern period presumes a universe of integrated meaning. The Baroque and modern eras, by contrast, have for Benjamin been bleached of immanent truth. They do not produce straightforward allegories with immediately intelligible meanings that can, as it were, be read off the work’s didactic exterior. Baroque and modern allegorical works are cryptic and incomplete, distrustful of beautiful appearances, of the pretence of coherence and reconciliation, of a fallen language’s imperfect modes of reference, even of the very possibility and legitimacy of the aesthetic itself. Jeremy Tambling contends that Waiting for the Barbarians is conscious of Benjamin’s writing on allegory (2009, 158), something also implied by Coetzee’s (2007, 40–64) perceptive article on Benjamin’s Arcades Project. It is, significantly for my purposes, the figures of the fragment and especially the ruin that typify allegory for Benjamin, just as much as they do for the Magistrate and his readers when confronted by the ruined settlement and the cache of cryptic wooden icons he finds there. We should not be too hasty, therefore, to reject an allegorical approach to the novel. For Benjamin the allegorical text is not, any more than it


is for Attwell, a signpost that directs readers’ attention to one particular set of events and therefore to one possible interpretation. Rather, allegories are texts that – as I have been arguing of Waiting for the Barbarians – are complex and unfinished; they point, therefore, to many different situations and responses. Abdul JanMohamed is thus quite mistaken when he argues that the imprecision of the novel’s setting means that it ‘refuses to acknowledge its historical sources or to make any allusions to the specific barbarism of the apartheid regime’ (1985, 16). To the contrary, the uncertainty of the setting combined with its suggestive resemblance to various contexts radically enhances the novel’s capacity to ask political questions about all manifestations of barbarism. The Magistrate gains insight into his situation when he is asked by Joll to arrange and translate the ruined settlements’ wooden slips. He interprets them in an allegorical manner. Joll wants this interrogation to confirm his view that the slips are coded messages from ‘barbarian’ conspirators. A lackey is poised to transcribe that meaning but does not put pen to paper because no such meaning is forthcoming, or at least not in the sense anticipated and desired. Indeed, the thirst for order and familiarity evident in Joll’s clinical rearrangement of the Magistrate’s office is intentionally frustrated by the Magistrate’s newly imaginative or allegorical approach to reading. He invents numerous and contradictory (not to mention implausibly long-winded) versions of the little slips’ meanings. These improvised translations mock Joll’s assumption that the slips contain a single message or subversive code. The slips are said to ‘form an allegory’; ‘each slip can be read in many ways’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 122). The Magistrate is obviously unaware (or at least unsure) of their original meanings, but it is precisely this indeterminacy and fragmentariness that makes the slips susceptible to allegorical interpretation. The Magistrate attributes their ambiguity, parodically, to ‘barbarian cunning’ (122). His most provocative account reads the slips ‘as a history of the last years of the Empire – the old Empire, I mean’ (122). The hasty correction sounds sarcastic and serves only to draw attention to the possibility of confusing the ruined settlement from which the slips were taken with the current Empire and its comparable vulnerability and transience. In other words, the Magistrate’s interpretation of the slips is neither simply mischievous nor wholly arbitrary, for what is revealed by this ruined town’s recondite but suggestive fragments is something like the knowledge granted Shelley’s ‘traveller from an antique land’ when he happens upon the ruins of a bygone and equally vainglorious civilisation: the transitoriness of systems of power and therefore, by implication, the Empire’s own obsolescence. Likewise, the Magistrate’s

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imaginative readings of the slips as ‘barbarian’ reports of abductions and torture at the hands of the Empire and as assertions of a desire for ‘vengeance’ and ‘war’ are occasions for his most articulate insights into the Empire’s violence and its consequences. Latterly, his recognition that the slips are allegories of the impermanence and ultimate demise of systems of power pushes him into declaring his opposition to Joll’s regime and its abuses. Allegories, for the Magistrate as much as for Benjamin, are ubiquitous. ‘Tout pour moi devient allégorie’, wrote Baudelaire; ‘all is allegory’, according to Lady Chandos in the cryptic postscript to Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003, 229). Everywhere there are signs that can be interpreted as allegorical reminders of the Empire’s crimes, the Magistrate tells Joll: Allegorical sets like this one can be found buried all over the desert. I found this one not three miles from here in the ruins of a public building. Graveyards are another good place to look in, though it is not always easy to tell where barbarian burial sites lie. It is recommended that you simply dig at random: perhaps at the very spot where you stand you will come upon scraps, shards, reminders of the dead. Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere. The night is best: sometimes when you have difficulty falling asleep it is because your ears have been reached by the cries of the dead which, like their writings, are open to many interpretations. (Coetzee, 2004b, 123) As the Magistrate employs the wooden letters not to divulge some now unintelligible original sense but to shed light on his situation and declare his opposition to it, so must we use this novel, which is no less runic and no less resistant to the establishment of some indisputable final meaning. The Magistrate uses the practice of imaginative interpretation to gain insight into the Empire and into his complicity with it; likewise, the novel’s readers should employ the labour of interpretation to clarify the similarity between the protagonist’s predicament and their own. The ruined dwelling and the allegorical slips alert the Magistrate to the Empire’s crimes and its transience and thus briefly stiffen his resolve to resist it. Waiting for the Barbarians too is an ‘amorphous fragment […] seen in the form of allegorical script’ (Benjamin, 1999, 176): allegorical because the novel frustrates the effort to consign it to one particular setting and because it deflects the interpretative endeavours


of its readers onto their own situations; ruined (or rather fragmentary and incomplete) because at the denouement the Magistrate and the townspeople have not yet undertaken that process of self-scrutiny and therefore remain waiting for the future which they have been unable to anticipate or call into being. Dreams in the novel are, as they were of course for Freud, occasions for interpretation. Specifically, dreams can be interpreted as oblique portents of a community free from enmities and hierarchies. Upon his release the Magistrate discovers ‘that I am not without friends’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 139). The solicitousness of the townspeople, along with the innocence and playfulness of their children, are placed in implicit contrast with the cruelty of the Magistrate’s tormentors. But if the prospect of a community based on kindness is only hinted at in the narrative it is raised more persuasively in a dream that recurs to the Magistrate throughout the novel. A figure in a hood is sitting with children in the middle of the square. Together they are using snow to make a replica of the fort. Recurring on seven occasions throughout the novel, the dream, which gradually accrues detail, constitutes a cryptic narrative made available for interpretation both to the Magistrate, whom it repeatedly confounds, and, again it is to be hoped with rather more success, to the reader, for whom it affords a tentative vision. What is gradually made clear is that for the resourceful interpreter the dream’s perplexing images constitute enigmatic auguries of the egalitarian and post-imperial community that the novel itself refrains from forecasting. These tentative explorations enact Coetzee’s commitment to ‘representations – which are shadows themselves – of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light’ (1992, 341). On each occasion the outlines of the surroundings have been blurred, as though the conventional demarcations between things can be erased at least temporarily in the world of the dream. Thus the flagpole in the first dream is bare, as though national allegiance has been suspended or superseded (Coetzee, 2004b, 10). As the dream progresses the Magistrate is walking towards a group of children playing in the town square. One of the figures is hooded and at first he cannot make out the face. There is a thick blanket of snow cleansing the ground and erasing shapes and distinctions. It is gradually revealed that the children are constructing a model of the town, a new but unfinished and unpeopled and therefore only imagined community. The figure in the hood, it turns out, is the girl. Only as he continues on his journey of self-discovery does the dream allow the Magistrate firstly to look upon her kindly face and secondly, as he nurses the blows suffered from a beating in the square, to receive from her a loaf of bread

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(119–20), a symbol of generosity and fellow-feeling that sustains and guides him. The novel’s final scene resembles the world of the dream, hinting perhaps that this increasingly auspicious realm of fantasy and projection is beginning to merge with the waking life of the town in the aftermath of the soldiers’ ignominious retreat. It is snowing and the children in the square are building a snowman. The Magistrate approaches but unlike in the dream the children are too busy to be alarmed by his presence. What is interesting is that the Magistrate has no part to play in this unfolding drama. He would like to tell the children to give the snowman arms but does not want to interfere. Elated by this scene of oblique hope, in which the settlement’s children – even in the midst of approaching winter and impending shortages – are at last demonstrating their willingness to assemble figures with which to people their new settlement, the Magistrate confesses his confusion and admits his unimportance. His experiences have not so much brought into being or even foreshadowed a moral community as cleared the way to its development. His authority and the worldview he represents have become marginal. A new community is being put together in the minds and play of the young, beyond the discredited worldview of their elders, which is perhaps why the novel is dedicated to Coetzee’s own children. The reader who reads such scenes astutely and discerns in them anticipations of a transformed future is perhaps a part of that process.

Power and the body Its unrelenting preoccupation with the mortal bodies of others and with their capacity for suffering, along with its sustained presentation of a fictional consciousness striving to recognise and to respect this mortality and suffering, are what make Waiting for the Barbarians so pertinent for a contemporary readership. Not words, nor discourse, but the body is the standard of Coetzee’s fiction: not, however, the carnivalesque body described by Bakhtin or the postmodern body celebrated by Foucault’s late chronicles of sexuality but more like the body as it is rendered by Lear, with all the unchallengeable authority of its suffering and abject form: ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’ (III.iv.104). Despite their frequently noted affinities with the outlook of postmodernism, Coetzee’s works’ insistence on employing doubt, self-consciousness and a sense of the insufficiency of language in order to amplify an underlying and incontrovertible physical and moral truth means that they resemble much more closely the fictions of modernism.13 Indeed, given his unequivocal warning that ‘radical metafiction’ is in danger of ‘swallowing its own tail’


(Coetzee, 1992, 204, 86), Coetzee’s works’ essential modernism should not have been missed. Far from being postmodernistic, Coetzee’s works seem rather to confirm Neil Lazarus’s point about the persistence in the postcolonial world of modernism and all its rebarbative, protestatory energy (Lazarus, 2005a). Waiting for the Barbarians belongs to an oeuvre that retains a very strong affiliation with the seminal works of European high modernism, replete as it is with intertextual references to Kafka and Beckett. Its characteristic features include the emphasis laid on the difficulty of meaningful communication, on the nightmarishness of history, on the fraudulent transparency of language and meaning, and on the need to subject to criticism forms of authority and power based on the myth of that transparency. But Coetzee’s novels emphatically do not cast doubt on received truths so comprehensively that they negate their own capacity to protest in the name of some normative idea. Rather, Coetzee injects disbelief into every established doctrine until nothing is left that speaks with authority but the bellowing, clamouring body in pain. He starts a new morality from scratch, based not on pious abstractions but on suffering’s incontrovertible eloquence. If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not ‘that which is not,’ and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt […] [I]t is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body. It is not possible, not for logical reasons, not for ethical reasons (I would not assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure) but for political reasons, for reasons of power. And let me again be unambiguous: it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body; the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (Coetzee, 1992, 248; emphasis in the original) In Waiting for the Barbarians, as Jennifer Wenzel has argued, the theme of ‘torture represents the limits of the postmodern mind’ (1996, 64), the point at which the certainty-extinguishing scepticism of postmodernism, instead of spooling off into cynicism and disbelief, reaches a truth so incontrovertible and so compelling that it demands attention and curative action. Torture discloses the true nature of imperial power, unpicks imperialism’s dehumanising ideology, and tentatively outlines an alternative to this ideologically constructed inequality by raising the prospect of an egalitarian moral code.

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Terry Eagleton claims that the body and its travails can serve as the foundation of a political universalism based not, as is so often the case with universalism, on parochial or ethnocentric abstractions but instead on our shared mortality and capacity for suffering. Eagleton, like Coetzee, wishes to ground a universally applicable moral code in humankind’s physical vulnerability, to transform bodiliness into consciousness or the fact of human dependency into the value of political solidarity. What Eagleton calls ‘a materialist morality’ (2003, 181) founds moral values on the fellow feeling that results from the recognition that we each possess the same sort of dependent and vulnerable body. Judith Butler characterises this foundation as the mutual precariousness and dependency of our physical existence: ‘the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own’ (2006, 28). Similarly, the body serves Waiting for the Barbarians not just as the target of the interrogator’s curiosity and power but also and conversely, as Brian May has claimed, as ‘the origin of morally purposive intention and action’. The body in this novel ‘means not only pain, but possibility’ (May, 2001, 394, 415). This is why I am wholly unconvinced by Patrick Lenta’s reading of the novel ‘after September 11’, for I do not agree that Waiting for the Barbarians presents power relations as ‘ineradicable’ or that it does away with moral and political certainties and therefore ‘also renders impossible the envisioning of a programme of emancipation or scheme of justice’ (Lenta, 2006, 79). For Waiting for the Barbarians is distinguished by its fidelity to a moral code rooted in an inviolable truth. That truth, however, does not resemble the ‘truth’ produced by Joll’s interrogations or the ‘truth’ the Magistrate demands from the girl. In both these cases, what the victim is encouraged to confess is the confirmation of ‘truth’ as the interrogator’s ideology has constructed it. The officials of the Third Bureau are ‘guardians of the State, specialists in the obscurer motions of sedition, devotees of truth’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 9). But to torture is to impute truth, to elicit confessions of guilt and so to reinforce an ideology that pits civilisation against its reputed enemies. By contrast, the truth propounded by Coetzee’s fiction betokens the indubitable authority of a suffering that exists beyond and outside mere words, and that will therefore not be drowned out by discourse or obscured by language’s ambiguity: ‘Pain is truth’, the Magistrate learns from Joll (first abstractly, then directly); ‘all else is subject to doubt’ (5). In addition to discrediting the imperial mindset by injecting self-doubt into the seemingly authoritative


and initially unperturbed consciousness of the Magistrate-narrator, the novel also explores, very cautiously, the possibilities of community. Hence its author’s sense of ‘responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged’ (Coetzee, 1992, 246). It is important to be aware that Waiting for the Barbarians does not furnish any solutions to the situation it dramatises. Rather, it is inconclusive and open-ended, preparing the way for the emergence of the practical alternatives to violence and inhumanity that a mere novel cannot, of course, beget. Waiting for the Barbarians tries in vain to put the body into words, to use language to convert a laboriously gained awareness of our shared vulnerability to pain into a compelling discourse of equality. The Magistrate does not fail to recognise that his desire to possess the body of the girl makes him akin to her torturers or that occupying himself with his ledgers while prisoners are being made to gibber with pain in the granary makes him complicit in torture. But he fails to further develop such insights. The Magistrate describes the Third Bureau as ‘barbarians’, which on one level is of course a telling inversion of the ideological system that sustains the Empire but on another betrays the paucity of the Magistrate’s critical vocabulary. He can use language pejoratively, to denounce abuses and indict their perpetrators, but he cannot deploy language as the basis of reconciliation or equality. The confusion of the novel’s final pages is at least partly an effect of their narration in the voice of a figure whose beliefs have been discredited and abandoned but who is so thoroughly constituted by the idiom and prejudices of the imperial worldview that he struggles to formulate alternatives. After leaving the girl with her people, he realises too late that he could not understand a word of her native speech and that he should therefore have devoted the nights that he wasted trying to expiate his guilt by washing her feet learning her language instead (Coetzee, 2004b, 78). As Barbara Eckstein remarks in her account of the novel, ‘language can make as well as unmake. It is not inherently a weapon’ (Eckstein, 1989, 193). Or, to put it another way, it is not only an instinctive sense of solidarity with the bodies of others that establishes hope for an egalitarian community but the as yet unrealised possibility that this pre-verbal fellow-feeling can be put into compelling and authoritative words, something that the Magistrate, as he sits at his desk to compose what he knows to be a deceitful history of the outpost, cannot do. The novel concludes with the Magistrate assuming his old duties after the soldiers are routed in the desert and flee the fort. He tries to pen a history of the settlement but produces only self-deceiving pastoral

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clichés about the ‘charm of life’ in this ‘paradise on earth’. ‘It would’, he remarks, ‘be disappointing to know that the poplar slips I have spent so much time on contain a message as devious, as equivocal, as reprehensible as this’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 169). The Magistrate does not provide us with an idiom with which to protest against wrongdoing and conflict or, as he says of the cook’s grandson’s visits to his cell, a means of ‘filling the space between us with human words’ (94). He fails to furnish examples of a language of contact and communication that might convey something of the dimly understood sense of human equality revealed by physical suffering. We are left with an equivocal prophecy that when the Empire is finally defunct the Magistrate ‘will abandon the locutions of a civil servant with literary ambitions and begin to tell the truth’ (169). But ‘like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere’ (170). The ‘it’ which he leaves is not just the scene in the square but also the novel, of which this is the last line. However the anti-climactic atmosphere of the novel’s denouement and the final bewilderment of its protagonist are not necessarily akin to the experiences of its readers. The Magistrate’s incorrigibleness and bafflement are to be read not as an assertion of defeat but as both an indication of the inconclusiveness of his intellectual and moral transformation and as an assertion of the limits of fiction itself. The imperial system and not just the behaviour of its members is at fault for the violence that it perpetuates; the obviousness of this insight to the reader means that the task the Magistrate leaves unfinished is bequeathed rather than abandoned. In other words, the process of enquiry, criticism and resistance that the Magistrate gets under way but is unable to complete potentially takes on a momentum that carries it beyond the text into the lives of its readers. How are we to continue the process of reparation and transformation commenced by the Magistrate? The novel, I think, provides a hint of what a reformed community might entail. Towards the close of the novel the Magistrate recollects hearing the case of a young peasant, enlisted into the army for stealing chickens, who deserted from the garrison to see his mother and sisters. He recalls lecturing the conscript about citizens’ equal subjection to the law: obedience to the law, he tells him, trumps even the promptings of one’s conscience. The law, the Magistrate admits, takes no account of the fact that, as he imagines, ‘all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice’ (152), carrying with them a code based not on categorical imperatives without room for clemency but on an intuitive sense of what is just. The best that can be done in an imperfect world, he remembers


telling the boy, is to uphold the law without allowing that memory to fade. Yet at the close of the novel the argument strikes him as specious. Justice, he reflects, resides in the promptings of one’s conscience not in the law, which is a tool of the ruling powers and an apparatus for inflicting punishment. Troubling the Magistrate throughout the novel is what he sees as a contradiction between our intuitive capacity to tell right from wrong and our subordination to the oppressive edicts of the law. ‘Law operates in the Empire as an instrument of domination’, as Patrick Lenta points out (Lenta, 2006, 78). But Lenta fails to see that this is not the only view of the law contained in the novel. When it has been suspended by the police’s emergency powers the law’s even-handedness appears less as a hard-hearted indifference to individuals’ innate awareness of what is just than as a precious counterweight to arbitrary power. When he is imprisoned the Magistrate tells Joll he will defend himself in a court of law (Coetzee, 2004b, 91), though at this stage the appeal strikes the reader as another example of the Magistrate’s unwarranted trust in the Empire and his naive faith in the protocols of ‘civilized behaviour’ (25). However, when he is eventually released and asks Mandel how the torturer manages to reconcile his profession with his conscience, the Magistrate appeals to the law again: ‘“When are you going to put me on trial?” I shout at his retreating back’ (138). This time the question strikes us less as a naive request for a fair hearing by an autocratic state than as a rhetorical accusation, a daring affirmation of the principle of equality at the heart of the law and therefore a protest against the law’s misuse as an instrument of power. At the close of the novel the Magistrate is thinking through a notion of justice that reconciles respect for legality with his spontaneous abhorrence of injustice, the universal rule of law with what Adorno calls the ‘pointlike, flaring, swiftly extinguished consciousness inhabited by the impulse to do right’ (1996, 297). This is a notion of justice that no character in the text can respond to or even understand. The action of the novel suggests that neither the individual’s inclination to be just nor the rule of law are sufficient. The former without the latter is ineffective, whereas the latter without the former is callous and tyrannical. How to unite the two in a coherent alternative system is the task the novel sets its readers. The notorious images from Abu Ghraib are indeed shocking and repulsive. But the abominations they depict were not unsupervised aberrations. Nor were they simply crimes permitted, even encouraged, by an especially reactionary government. What the photographs only partly reveal are the values that underwrote the unconscionable behaviour of

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the world’s foremost power as it embarked on a dangerously indiscriminate ‘war on terror’. What is only glimpsed in the images of smirking sentries fooling around besides piles of naked prisoners is an ideological system that has for decades denied the moral and legal status of humanity to a significant portion – in fact, a majority – of the world’s citizens. Perhaps this is why for Susan Sontag (2007) the carefully composed souvenirs of soldiers gloating over their mortified Iraqi captives recalled the postcards that were widely distributed in the American South after Reconstruction showing white citizens posing beneath the swinging bodies of the victims of lynch-mobs. Both show activities that the participants evidently considered acceptable if not praiseworthy. What the Abu Ghraib pictures were intended to capture, it would appear, were japes, which there was no need to conceal from superiors and of which the protagonists had no need to feel ashamed: snapshots to amuse friends and relatives. That the perpetrators thought their actions would not bring down shame or punishment upon them (and thankfully they were wrong, at least about the former) shows how ingrained was what the International Committee of the Red Cross called ‘a widespread attitude of contempt’ among US guards for Iraqi detainees (Danner, 2005, 259). Yet ‘widespread’ is here something of an understatement for I am arguing that this dehumanisation is utterly pervasive and is inseparable from the imperial enterprise itself. ‘Considered in this light’, in Sontag’s words, ‘the photographs are us’ (Sontag, 2007, 131; emphasis in the original): are indicative, in other words, of rarely contested presuppositions about the rights and entitlements of others. The remedy for this state of affairs is, in the first instance, what Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello dubs the ‘sympathetic imagination’ (2003, 80). The particular horror of the [Nazi death] camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else […] In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. (Coetzee, 2003, 79; emphasis in the original) We should value Coetzee’s work for its ability to indicate the depths of human cruelty, its ability to discredit the limiting doctrines that


permit such depredations by occupying those discourses and hollowing them out and its ability to instil the imaginative sympathy required to prevent such acts from taking place. What is usually overlooked by Coetzee’s academic champions, however, is that thinking one’s way as far as is possible into the experiences of another, conceiving of his or her vulnerability to pain, appreciating a very fundamental kind of solidarity with him or her, and then letting this sense of solidarity guide one’s actions, are less ethical acts than moral and, ultimately, political ones. It would be more accurate, in the light of Coetzee’s own uncharacteristically frank pronouncements on the ‘undeniable’ (Coetzee, 1992, 248) authority of the body in pain, to think of Waiting for the Barbarians as a work that is concerned with engendering the kind of authoritative code usually associated with morality. In fact, its authority and its ‘undeniableness’ suggest that this code should be entrusted to a legal system rather than to the whims of virtuous individuals and that, therefore, the novel’s potential effect is ultimately a political one. Reluctance to explore its moral and political dimensions constitutes what is, I think, a significant shortcoming in much academic criticism of Coetzee’s work. For instance, Derek Attridge’s otherwise noteworthy book on Coetzee is, to my mind, far too enamoured with a fashionable but largely under-theorised ethical rhetoric that, though it loudly proclaims the need for some sort of personal commitment to others, tends to think of that commitment in somewhat woolly, voluntaristic, and even mystical and frequently theological – at any rate anti-political – terms (Attridge, 2004). What makes a sense of guilt, compassion and indignation enforceable, what makes it really compelling and what gives us the will and capacity to uphold it and to follow its provisions, is a matter that, understandably enough, is not explored in detail by Coetzee’s work. There is surely less excuse for this omission in the works of his critics. My point is that in trying to put into words what Rita Barnard has usefully called the ‘muted utopian dimension’ (1993) of Coetzee’s work we should do our best to avoid a Christological rhetoric of sacrifice, forgiveness, grace and blind faith. Though this may serve to characterise the actions of his characters it fails to capture the moral and political effect of Coetzee’s work on many of his readers. In other words, we cannot generalise, as Attridge seeks to do, from, for example, the predicament of Age of Iron’s Mrs Curren in 1980s Cape Town who, burdened with a sense of shame, with terminal illness and in the absence of any meaningful human or political links with the insurgent townships, places a wager on what Attridge describes as ‘trust, like a pure decision, [which] is born of uncertainty and uncertainty alone’ (2004, 98). Mrs Curren

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welcomes into her home the taciturn vagrant Vercueil and even contemplates torching herself in Pretoria in a sacrificial protest against apartheid. The actions of many of Coetzee’s characters conform to this very stringent ethic of contrition and self-abnegation. Mrs Curren, the eponymous protagonist of The Life and Times of Michael K and the Magistrate all act as they do because they suspect that the social world has been almost wholly divested of opportunities for moral and political progress and that no positive conception of right behaviour and no community in which, as Coetzee puts it, people ‘share the same sense of what is just and what is not just’ (Coetzee 1992, 340), currently exist. Happily, we do not live in such unpropitious conditions. Our moral decisions, unlike Mrs Curren’s, are not born of ‘uncertainty alone’. Today there is no justification whatever for generalising from the situation of a remorseful former classics professor under apartheid who finds herself unable to act out of loyalty to an established moral code or to prevailing laws, and least of all from a religious mythology of atonement and sacrifice. To portray the responsibilities of the individual in such terms today strikes me as melodramatic. It glamorises and presents as a norm the deeds of those who are forced to think, feel and act in isolation, unguided by allegiance to a political movement or by the precepts of a moral or legal code. It also ignores the readily available standards and criteria according to which we can make moral and political judgements. These standards have been enshrined in the numerous conventions, treaties and protocols that cover everything from the prohibition of torture to individuals’ entitlement to cultural, social, political and economic equality. The setting up of organisations by the survivors of torture aimed at reconstructing their strength and selfhood, the development of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity, and the expansion of humanist allegiances and solidarities, all form in embryo or outline a community in which people share an idea of what is just. The United Nations Convention Against Torture is more honoured in the breach than the observance but it is nonetheless a kind of promissory note that we can redeem through purposive action. Our deeds ought to be motivated, therefore, not by faith in the hereafter or by trust in an ‘unknowable’ future (Attridge, 2004, 105) but by a commitment here and now to an existing body of principles and laws. What interpretations like Attridge’s overlook, then, is that the role of martyr or voluntary scapegoat is contemplated by the Magistrate and by many of Coetzee’s other similarly guilt-afflicted protagonists because of the perceived absence of an existing movement or code to which they can commit themselves, an absence from which, perhaps, members of


the white ruling class suffered in apartheid Cape Town or from which others might suffer in an imperial outpost in which the security police have been granted ‘emergency powers’, but from which we, thankfully, do not. Indeed, one of the striking things about both Age of Iron and Waiting for the Barbarians is that the characteristic fallibility of Coetzee’s narrators is manifested in a kind of obtuseness that positively invites a corrective from their readers. What none of these protagonists can appreciate, though the Magistrate is at least aware that something obvious is staring him in the face (Coetzee, 2004b, 170), is that the moral community of which they dream is a real possibility not just a utopian aspiration: Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it all end? Easier to shout No! Easier to be beaten and made a martyr. Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians: for where can that argument lead but to laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people whose land we have raped? (118) The Magistrate contemplates martyrdom because he is unable to imagine relinquishing his arms and throwing open the gates of the town. It is to be hoped we do not share his misgivings about the wisdom of throwing open our fortified oases of privilege and of affirming ‘justice for the barbarians’. What we readers should know but the Magistrate does not is that opposition to the power of the state and defence of the rule of law will not open the gates to rapine and bloodshed. The Magistrate would like justice to be done but he is frightened that the heavens will fall. Indeed, it is odd that a critic like Attridge, usually so sensitive to what he calls Coetzee’s novels’ denial of any authoritative voice (2004, 7), should take them at their word when their protagonists dramatically underestimate the prospects of an egalitarian civic life. He seems unaware that the Magistrate embraces a kind of lone moral courage not only because, of course, he has no just legal or moral order to appeal to, but also because, less creditably, he remains unwilling, in spite of everything that has been demonstrated by the events of the novel, to countenance a moral community that includes the ‘barbarians’. He still has ‘twinges of doubt’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 118) about the idea of justice; imaginary ‘barbarian’ incursions still fill him with terror; he cannot spend a night in the desert without frantically seeking the sanctuary of the Empire’s walls; and he remains convinced, one hopes wrongly, that after the events of the novel ‘we will have learned

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nothing’ and that ‘[i]n all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable’ (157). Coetzee’s Magistrate has taught but has not himself learnt the transparent lesson of Waiting for the Barbarians: the radically objectionable nature of the imperial system itself and the need therefore to envision and accomplish its wholesale replacement in the name of alternative values. His experiences are not the model but the catalyst of an effective response to torture.

Conclusion Waiting for the Barbarians urges the most acute sensitivity to the corruption of language at the heart of the imperial imagination.14 Words have been deployed in the ‘war on terror’ not to bring reality closer but to push it further away. When, according to the infamous ‘torture memo’, only mutilation and murder constitute torture, pinioning a detainee to a board, swaddling his head in rags, and repeatedly immersing him in water until he starts to drown becomes a legitimate form of crossexamination or, at worst, ‘abuse’.15 The documents that Mark Danner has collated reveal an anaesthetic jargon made up of acronyms, euphemisms and prolix military terminology. In reports, for example, the term ‘pride and ego down’ euphemises the practice of racially insulting prisoners while the innocuous phrase ‘frequently adversarial’ actually refers to interrogations in which prisoners are beaten until they lose consciousness. This verbiage works to conceal the reality of another person’s pain so successfully that the torturer’s awareness of what torture actually entails (that is, his acquaintance with, in Danner’s unapologetically frank term, its truth) is so cursory and the promptings of his conscience are stifled so effectively that it becomes permissible to suspend the moral imagination required to think one’s way into the experiences of a man gagging on sodden cloths or forced to stand naked in front of barking dogs. It is the great virtue of Waiting for the Barbarians that it compels reflection on one’s own responsibility in relation to practices that are usually secreted behind a veil of heedlessness and obfuscation. Waiting for the Barbarians demonstrates what Coetzee has called the irresistible power of the world one’s body lives in, a world ‘that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination’ (Coetzee, 1992, 99) and is characterised by callousness, brutality and pain. For Coetzee the proper corrective to this situation is the moral capacity, potentially instilled by literature, to experience the world from the perspective of the other and in particular to imagine the other’s capacity to feel pain. It is important to stress that this empathy does not end where the


novel ends. Nor does it exhaust itself in the sentiment of fellow-feeling. Waiting for the Barbarians demands an allegorical and therefore topical and acutely introspective method of reading. The potential effects of reading it allegorically – that is, of employing it, as the Magistrate employs the cache of wooden slips, as an opportunity to meditate on one’s own involvement in systems of power – are self-analysis, a sense of guilt and practical gestures of reparation. Yet the novel must induce far more than a nebulous ‘faith in the impossible’ (Attridge, 2004, 129). Whereas the Magistrate finds it easier to shout ‘No’ we must have the courage to pronounce the word ‘Justice’ and to follow where it leads. The novel entreats us to place ourselves in opposition to an ideology that has not ceased to deny its perceived opponents their humanity and is once again scrawling the word ‘enemy’ on their backs. That ideology has consigned these ‘enemies’ to a remote and twilit sphere like Wells’s island of Dr Moreau, a place of pain outside the ambit of conscionable awareness. And torture, as I have been saying, is only a small part of a system that disregards the humanity of Mark Curtis’s ‘unpeople’ (2004), whose lives can be snuffed out with equanimity and impunity. Atonement for this situation requires the ‘spirit of outrage’ (Coetzee, 2004b, 110) and the readerly skill of Coetzee’s Magistrate as well as the normative vision that the novel tentatively invokes. At the very least, it entails respect for the rule of law, for the numerous indefeasible covenants by which torture is outlawed, and for the idea and practice of humanism. In a memorable phrase the barrister and activist Helena Kennedy states that ‘[h]uman rights is where the law becomes poetry’ (Kennedy, 2004, 318). But the reverse is also true: human rights is where poetry becomes the law, where the imaginative sympathy engendered by writers like Coetzee is embodied in our actions and institutions.

6 Refuse to Choose, or, How to Read The Satanic Verses

‘We are embattled’, Homi Bhabha wrote amidst the rumpus that greeted the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988, ‘in the war between the cultural imperatives of Western liberalism, and the fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, both of which seem to claim an abstract and universal authority’ (Appignanesi and Maitland, 1990, 112; italics in the original). What Bhabha values in Rushdie’s book is principally its capacity to question and trouble, if not quite dismantle, that simplistic opposition between fundamentalist Islam and an equally dogmatic faith in the virtues of ‘the West’. After all, what Bhabha understands by ‘hybridity’ is a state of cultural and experiential intermixture that makes it illegitimate and harmful to speak of either the West or putative adversaries such as Islam as though they are airtight compartments insulated from contamination or critique by other points of view. Rushdie’s novel constitutes a kind of heresy against religious and other forms of ideological certainty. The Satanic Verses provokes criticism not just (as is well known) of fundamentalist Islam but also (an aspect of the book that is often overlooked, lately even by Rushdie himself) of the West’s cultural complacency and its unselfconscious faith in its own social, political and economic arrangements. My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate the timeliness and effectiveness of its double-edged critique. We are justified in revisiting this novel yet again in order to emphasise its comprehensively (as opposed to tendentiously) critical thrust, something that is even more relevant amidst the heightened cultural mêlée of the so-called ‘war on terror’ than it was in the 1980s. I want also to show how the enduring significance and indeed salutariness of the novel in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 2001 has not been matched by the relative tendentiousness of Rushdie’s recent media-based analyses of Islam, terrorism and Western power. 138

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What this shows is the potential effectiveness of novels as interventions in the political realm. I want to note not just, as Sabina and Simona Sawhney have done, the similarity between Rushdie’s recent articles and ‘many mainstream media responses to the events of September 11’ (Sawhney and Sawhney, 2001, 433) but also to argue those articles’ dissimilarity to the less partisan, as well as more critical and, crucially, self-critical, ways in which literary texts can dramatise these issues. There is no achieved cosmopolitan condition in The Satanic Verses. Rather, what it shows is the way in which the experience of migration can give rise to the kind of cosmopolitan or worldly sensibility I outlined in Chapter 2: that is, to an appreciation of diverse points of view and therefore of the fallibility and limitedness of cultural, religious and national ideologies. Cosmopolitanism here denotes a state of critical awareness doing battle with the unrelenting actuality and power of xenophobia, cultural arrogance and excessive religious fervour. My argument about The Satanic Verses is that the novel is less, as Rebecca Walkowitz’s reading of it in her Cosmopolitan Style would have us believe, about the ‘mixing up’ of identities and cultures than it is about the enduring obstacles to such a desirable situation (Walkowitz, 2006, 131–52). Its theme is the latency – not the actuality – of cosmopolitan relationships in a situation characterised by the interaction of different cultures but also, alas and more frequently, by a state of tension and discord between them. The Satanic Verses is in large part preoccupied with Britain under ‘Mrs Torture’, with race riots, state violence and political resistance. London is represented there with none of the optimism of recent portraits such as White Teeth or Brick Lane. Estranged as ‘Ellowen Deeowen’, ‘Babylondon’ or, à la Orwell, ‘Airstrip One’ (Rushdie, 1998, 459), London is ‘a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future’ (320). The Satanic Verses is preoccupied not with Islam but with the varied experience of migration to this complex metropolis. It aims to arouse the farsightedness, self-knowledge and critical disposition that for Rushdie and for thinkers like Paul Gilroy (2004) can be instilled, serendipitously, by the experience of migration (Rushdie, 1983, 85–6). Rushdie’s novel will be read here as a work that is radically political because it lays bare both dogmas of religious and cultural certainty and the fraudulent image of Britain as a normative because intermingled and hospitable community. The function it seeks to perform is that of devil’s advocate: a molester of certainties rather than a celebrant of realities or a champion of norms.

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It is a function that, as we shall see, Rushdie’s literary writing performs far more effectively than his recent writing on current affairs.

Literature and fundamentalism Yet to call the novel and its effect political is not the same thing as to say that it is didactic. On the contrary, The Satanic Verses constitutes and, more importantly, encourages an intellectual revolt against certainty and conformity. In a rousing defence of The Satanic Verses in the wake of Imam Khomeini’s fatwa, Edward Said captured what I am characterising as the essentially critical nature of the author’s undertaking: Why do readers find it hard to accept its energy? Because it overturns not just religious orthodoxies, but national and cultural ones as well. The Satanic Verses is a great novel and a great challenge to settled habits, to lazy authority, to unthinking, unconscious assent […] Rushdie is everyone who dares to speak out against power, to say that we are entitled to think and express forbidden thoughts, to argue for democracy and freedom of opinion. The time has come for those of us who come from his part of the world to say that we are against this fatwa and all fatwas that silence, beat, imprison, or intimidate people and ban, burn, or anathematize books. Rushdie, his book, and his life stand at the frontier where tyranny dares to pronounce and exact its appalling decrees. His case is not really about offense to Islam, but a spur to go on struggling for democracy that has been denied us, and the courage not to stop. Rushdie is the intifada of the imagination. (Said, 1994c, 260–1) Astutely, Said characterises Rushdie’s novel as an affront to national and cultural orthodoxies as well as religious ones. He makes a connection between the book’s capacity to arouse critical energies and the political struggle for freedom in autocratic and hidebound societies. Crucially, he associates the novel not just with a critique of fundamentalist Islam but with a specifically Arab and perhaps also Islamic or at least non-Western practice of struggle. This last is achieved by his figurative reference to the first Palestinian intifada or uprising against Israeli occupation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This is very significant. As is widely known, The Satanic Verses is on one level a modernistic and hence self-conscious and irreverent novel that makes known the unreliability of texts in order to mock the putative inviolability of the Qur’an. It therefore strikes at the foundations


of states such as Pakistan and movements such as militant Islamism that claim their authority from that of the holy book. Readers of Shame or Midnight’s Children will already have been aware that Rushdie’s salient targets have included the cupidity and murderousness of South Asia’s post-colonial elites in addition to the ideologies and myths with which they seek to hold their people in thrall. In a characteristically blunt aside, the narrator of 1983’s Shame tells how ‘[s]o-called Islamic “fundamentalism” does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people’ but ‘is imposed on them from above’ by autocratic regimes like that of the egregiously religiose Zia-ul-Haq (Rushdie, 1983, 251). In Shame it is the novel’s ironical and digressive quality, its manifest incompleteness and the untrustworthiness of its narrator, that discourage the reader’s faith in the authority of texts and therefore promote scepticism about the supposed inviolability of the Qur’an. Thus Bilquìs’s rebellion against Bariamma’s family sagas told ‘in the formulaic words which it would be a gross sacrilege to alter’ (78) mirrors the reader’s increasing suspicion of that other ‘hallowed, sacred text’ (76) that permits no deviation and also about the state (Pakistan) that enlists the Qur’an’s authority. What is original about The Satanic Verses is not, therefore, its critical exploration of the ways in which the Qur’an is exploited by the powerful. Rather, the critique to which Shame subjects these elites is also deployed here against the British state. Disproportionate focus on the novel’s critique of Islam obscures what Said’s reference to the intifada makes clear: that The Satanic Verses is partly written from a position outside – or at least in opposition to – the norms and precepts of ‘the West’. In other words, its protests against British and also American complacency and xenophobia are every bit as bracing as its protest against Islamic fundamentalism. This is what makes it, like Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a text that is especially susceptible to a cosmopolitan reading in the context of the ‘war on terror’ and the putative ‘clash of civilizations’. The Satanic Verses dramatises an instructive encounter between different cultures and therefore between different perspectives and experiences; it accentuates the conflicts and struggles to which such interactions give rise; and, partly through its dialogic form, it relativises and contests these clashing dogmas. By portraying the complexity and intermixture of life in Thatcher’s London, it permits the reader to appreciate the sheer falsity of fundamentalist political and religious doctrines that seek to suppress that complexity and intermixture in favour of exclusion, partition and forms of authority based on pure origins. The consequence of that rejection is, potentially, a cosmopolitan consciousness capable of

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criticising all exclusionary ideologies; of denouncing the political, social and economic structures that they uphold; and of exploring new forms of human relationship based on equality and dialogue rather than violence and segregation. Largely as a result of its distinctively self-critical form (what Gayatri Spivak has called its ‘self-ironic modernism’ (1990b, 48)), The Satanic Verses is a means of unmasking the contestability of texts and of the voices that they dramatise. Pertinent here in allowing us to pinpoint the distinctive value of the novel’s literary debunking of various kinds of fundamentalism is Said’s work in his Beginnings on the ways in which authority is both accentuated and, as he puts it, ‘molested’ by narrative prose fiction. By [molestation] I mean that no novelist has ever been unaware that his authority, regardless of how complete, or the authority of a narrator, is a sham. Molestation, then, is a consciousness of one’s duplicity, one’s confinement to a fictive, scriptive realm, whether one is a character or a novelist. And molestation occurs when novelists and critics traditionally remind themselves of how the novel is always subject to a comparison with reality and thereby found to be illusion. Or again, molestation is central to a character’s experience of disillusionment during the course of a novel. To speak of authority in narrative prose fiction is also inevitably to speak of the molestations that accompany it. (Said, 1997a, 84) Authority, in the case of characters and narrators, is assailed by the disruptive events of the narrative and by the rival voices of other characters. In the case of the novelist it is ambushed by the openly fictive nature of the world he conjures. Another way of making this point is to agree with Adorno’s proposition in his Aesthetic Theory that, whatever they intend or achieve, texts, precisely because they are texts and not some putatively immediate kind of experience, construct milieus in ways that are not authoritative, convincing or trustworthy. They are, instead, imaginative, often inventive, florid, strange and extraordinary, hopefully edifying and absorbing, but also, because of their openly fictitious nature, invariably fallible and contentious as well. This is what Adorno calls the ironic or ‘semblance’ [Schein] character of artworks (1999, 100–18): their flagrantly constructed and chimerical quality. Compared with reality, as Said puts it, literary texts are found to be illusory.


Rushdie’s work is acutely conscious of the sheer gravity of a world that dwarfs and outstrips what can be said about it by the relatively trifling, imprecise medium of mere writing: of what Abu Simbel in The Satanic Verses calls the ‘great lie’ that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ (Rushdie, 1998, 102). What might seem an obvious proposition – that literary texts are more prepared than other sorts of text to confess their fictional nature, that in Paul de Man’s words they are ‘the only form of language free from the fallacy of unmediated expression’ (1971, 17) – actually allows Adorno and Said in their different ways to impart an understanding of what makes literature worth reading in the first place. Since literary texts flaunt the arguable, provisional and fallible relationship between word and world they make it more likely that readers will assess critically those texts that try to pass themselves off as infallible and imposing. The authority of scripture is their natural target. But so too does their tendency to debunk all ideas or discourses that claim infallibility and inviolability amount to a critique of any and all forms of fundamentalism. Whereas scripture tends to present itself to its readers as authoritative and indisputable (though of course it need not be read like that) literary texts are more brazenly fictive and contestable, susceptible to creative interpretation and even prone to encourage readers to interpret the text and its milieus in imaginative and critical ways. There is something pleasingly to the point about literary critiques of fundamentalism because, as Terry Eagleton has argued, Fundamentalism is a textual affair. It is an attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning. It means adhering strictly to the script. It is a fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate, as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity. Both Islamic and Christian versions of fundamentalism denounce idolatry, yet both make an idol of a sacred text […] Fundamentalists do not see that the phrase ‘sacred text’ is self-contradictory – that no text can be sacred because every piece of writing is profaned by a plurality of meanings. (Eagleton, 2003, 203) Fundamentalism demands undeviating allegiance to doctrines, traditions and beliefs. It interprets scripture literally not allegorically. The novelist, by contrast, views ‘sacred’ texts as texts: that is, as documents requiring and even, by virtue of being texts in the first place, beseeching

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creative interpretation. This process can only be made possible by a recognition of texts’ flaws, their lack of peremptory authority, and their susceptibility to fresh and divergent readings. If for Rushdie ‘men use God to justify the unjustifiable’ (Rushdie, 1998, 95) then this is because, as Said contends in Beginnings, otherwise debatable ideas and practices must, to appear legitimate, be validated by their descent from some prestigious, unarguable revelation. To demonstrate the secular rather than divine source of texts, as The Satanic Verses seeks to do, is then to detach them from the prestige of divine revelation and to make possible their critique or at least their creative interpretation. In Said’s terms it is to substitute the notion of the text as a beginning for the idea of the text as an origin, ‘the latter divine, mythical and privileged, the former secular, humanly produced, and ceaselessly re-examined’ (Said, 1997a, xix). The incident of the so-called ‘satanic verses’ (Rushdie, 1998, 123) serves Rushdie as a way of inviting reflection on the Qur’an’s sublunary rather than divine status. As is well known, for the first eight years of the Islamic faith its founder, the Prophet Mohammed, is reputed to have tolerated continued worship of the pagan goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat. Subsequently a series of military victories made this compromise with polytheism unnecessary. Verses previously received by Mohammed exalting the goddesses were deleted from the Qur’an and replaced. The reason given for this expedient switch was the reputed discovery that the rogue verses had been recited to Mohammed not by the Archangel but by Satan. The incident serves Rushdie as a demonstration of the way in which religious authority originates not in the incontestable edicts of the Almighty but in the considerably less authoritative wiles of his intermediaries and, crucially, in the shifty and ambiguous medium of writing. The Satanic Verses furthers the practice of criticism by demonstrating the reliance of religious forms of authority on texts, which if nothing else are secular, historical documents, contaminated by the interests and biases of their authors and susceptible to the interpretations and rejoinders of their readers. One more concept that will be of use in elucidating what I am characterising as The Satanic Verses’ salutary capacity to produce discussion and criticism is ‘worldliness’. Said begins his seminal essay on ‘The World, the Text, and the Critic’ by noting the impossibility of Glenn Gould’s attempt to evade the hazards and slip-ups of public performance. What the pianist failed to foresee is that by restricting himself to studio recordings he might succeed in polishing his performances to an almost unparalleled level of virtuosity (as well as quirkiness) but ultimately fail in protecting his work from acoustic distortion and from


the unpredictable reactions of his listeners. Neither Gould’s meticulous control of the recording environment nor the technical wizardry lavished on his recordings could prevent his irritating habit of humming along to the music from being audible. Whatever form Gould chose for his recitals possesses a tangible and gregarious material presence. Said’s point is that artistic performance, whether musical or literary, has an intrinsic and for its progenitor frequently worrying and disagreeable vulnerability both to the fallibility of its medium and to the unpredictable responses of its audience. ‘The point’, Said argues, ‘is that texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society – in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly’ (Said, 1983, 35). What he is at pains to stress is that the sometimes indelicate treatment that texts receive from their patrons is not accidental or avoidable but in fact essential to the very textuality of the text. What makes a text a text, in other words, and not a private, unheard exclamation, is its placing of itself at the mercy of the volatile gallery. Literary reading is an intense but hopefully constructive and consequential encounter between a text that is invariably moot and debatable and a reader whose presuppositions and very identity are similarly contestable. By virtue of being texts, therefore, literary works, like Gould’s promiscuous discs, are objects in the world that beseech our attention and that do so in ways that are never predictable, manageable or uncontroversial. Said mentions three authors who conceive their texts not as sphinxes oblivious to the prying nuisance of worldly attention but as interlocutors soliciting a discursive encounter between speakers. Far from being the anxious progenitor of legend who was reluctant to subject his textual offspring to the rough handling of its readership, Gerard Manley Hopkins was instead, according to Said, a liberal and deliberately thought-provoking artist and his poetry a vivacious, orphaned descendant of his urge to communicate with rather than merely to his world. His poems are freighted with meaning, oriented towards expression and therefore commanding of the attention and involvement of readers. For Hopkins, texts, like all objects in the world, entreat our participation in the creation of meaning by means (rather than in spite) of their suggestiveness and opacity (Said, 1983, 40–1). Said also recalls the discursive aspect of Oscar Wilde’s provocatively epigrammatic style and Wilde’s acute consciousness, by no means incidental to his personal ruin, of how texts pass through the hands of wilful and at times malicious readers (41–3). The novels of Joseph Conrad, Said’s third example of a voluntarily deliberative body of work, are intentionally put forward as instigators

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of dialogue. Conrad’s narratives invariably foreground the occasion of their telling. They are episodes dredged from the fallible memories of temperamental, uncertain, even at times dishonest speakers. In Heart of Darkness, for example, we listen in to a second-hand account of ‘one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences’ (Conrad, 1995, 21) in Africa, related upon the crepuscular deck of a Thames-moored cruising yawl. Conrad’s novels frequently depict a character crossing swords with his destiny in a remote place of trial and give rise also to a comparably uncertain and demanding encounter between the effusive but unreliable text and its equally garrulous readers (Said, 1983, 43–4). I am claiming that Rushdie, for obvious reasons, should be added to Said’s list. Its public burning in Bradford, the worldwide protests against its publication, along with the revilement and hounding of its author, all confirm with unusual clarity the inescapably worldly fate of The Satanic Verses. The works of all these authors – and Rushdie’s above all – attest the compelling, certainly consequential and often grave fact that written texts escape and defy the authority of their begetters. They make possible and urge the creative, unpredictable, at times salutary and at others downright malignant involvement of readers that we know as criticism. A death sentence, as some wag has observed, is nothing if not a bad review.

Styles of migration Broadly speaking, The Satanic Verses deals with political questions about authority, freedom and democracy. Indeed, the narrative method of Rushdie’s fiction is a way of dealing with and drawing attention to the problem of political power. Its aim, in Said’s terms, is to molest and discredit the authority of ruling myths and to impart what Rushdie calls, in his rarely cited book on the Nicaraguan revolution, ‘some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel’ (Rushdie, 2000, 4). Hence Rushdie’s characterisation of The Satanic Verses as a ‘migrant’s-eye view of the world’ (Rushdie, 1991, 394), for it is the migrant’s experience of multiple points of view that potentially makes him or her profoundly sceptical of the dogmatic certainties of the powerful. This theme of migration is inseparable from what Timothy Brennan (1989) has characterised as Rushdie’s modernism, since it is the migrant’s capacity to compare different cultures, ideologies, forms of life and so on that endows him or her with the modernist’s appreciation of the fallibility and susceptibility to criticism of ruling myths and of the texts from which they derive their authority.


Much critical attention has been devoted to The Satanic Verses’ portrayal of the founding of Islam in what it calls the city of Jahilia (Arabic for ignorance and the term used in Islam to refer to the Arabian peninsula before the revelation of the Qur’an). Yet the relationship between The Satanic Verses’ modernistic self-subversion and its critique of the authority of the Qur’an should not be allowed to obscure the fact that most of the novel’s digressive and intricately interrelated subplots are centred upon its two contemporary protagonists, not least because these plots are dreamed by one of them: the Bombay movie star Gibreel Farishta. Gibreel’s delusion that he is Gabriel, the Angel of the Recitation, is an element in the novel’s broader critique of virtue, authority and celebrity. His dream of the fanatical Indian prophetess Ayesha and her doomed pilgrimage to Mecca recalls the earlier tale of the brothel in Jahilia where the prostitutes are all named after the Prophet’s wives, including his favourite, the prophetess’s namesake. The serious (rather than merely offensive or gratuitous) critique at the heart of the latter episode is brought out by the sustained indictment of religious indoctrination in the description of Ayesha’s pilgrimage. This delusional caravan of the sick and dying comments reflectively on the religion of ‘submission’. Both Islam and Ayesha’s cult are seen as rulebound, fixated with discipline, cold-hearted and credulous. Ayesha’s self-serving revelations (the archangel sings to her ‘“to the tunes of popular hit songs”’ (Rushdie, 1998, 497)) are a parody of Mohammed’s. The point therefore, to which we shall return in greater detail, is that these digressions in the narrative are omens, lessons and deterrents: dramatisations of the decisions and dilemmas faced by the migrant. In the account of Islam’s inception it is the temptations of rule-bound religious doctrines that are explored and discredited. The tale of Jahilia or Mecca dramatises the rivalries, challenges and compromises that accompanied the founding of Islam. It humanises the Prophet, represents his struggle to convert followers from their existing loyalties and beliefs, and describes the process of the Qur’an’s recital and composition. New readers might be surprised to discover that the accounts of, for instance, the new religion’s followers’ ability to take strength from persecution are, contrary to the novel’s reputation, actually remarkably sympathetic (125). But pitted against the received account of Islam’s lightning triumphs, against the dogma of the Qur’an’s incontestability, and against the prevalent (though probably heretical) veneration of the Prophet, are depictions of Islam’s compromises with polytheism, of the illiterate Mohammed’s scribes altering the Angel’s words, and of the Prophet’s all too human (as opposed to divine) personality. The

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revelation of the Qur’an to Mohammed and the consequent inception of Islam are shown to be warped and skewed by worldly expediency, by the human failings of Mohammed himself, and above all by the untrustworthy, ambiguous and finally profane medium of writing. Since the Prophet was illiterate he was attended by a number of scribes whose task it was to record the revealed verses. It was then Caliph Othman bin Affan, Mohammed’s third successor, whose committee gathered the extant written versions and interviewed the Prophet’s followers in order to produce the authorised Qur’an. Not least among the hazards attendant on these processes are the vulnerability of the Creator’s intentions to the Chinese whispers of multiple and frequently unreliable amanuenses and especially the exposure of those intentions to the cryptic and equivocal medium of language. These are of course the inescapable perils of writing itself, personified by a ‘bum from Persia by the outlandish name of Salman’ (101), the Prophet’s ‘official scribe’ (365). Salman knowingly alters his master’s verses and in so doing reveals the gulf between writing and authorial purpose, as well as the unreliability of texts and the inadvisability of taking them at their word: ‘Here’s the point: Mahound [Mohammed] did not notice the alterations. So there I was, actually writing the Book, or re-writing, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But, good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation by God’s own Messenger, then what did that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry?’ (367) These are the essential questions posed by the novel. By casting into doubt the orthodox belief that the Qur’an is the flawless, unmediated and therefore unassailable word of God, The Satanic Verses exposes the holy book to the kind of interpretation, interrogation and evaluation that, incidentally, are for many Islamic scholars crucial elements in the decipherment of its message. Here at the origin of Islam, then, is a conflict between revealed and imaginary literature: between the fundamentalist idea of the sacred, inviolable ‘Rule Book’ (385) and the more obviously literary conception of the text as a text: a profane document susceptible to and imploring, encouraging, even necessitating interpretation and criticism. Texts in general ought to be viewed as arguable and incomplete, including, as the forename of Mohammed’s scribe suggests, the novel we are reading.


Interpretation, interrogation and evaluation (in short, criticism) are a potential consequence of migration. Satan, in the epigraph from Defoe, is not just a dissenter but a vagabond ‘without any fixed place, or space’. At the start of the novel Gibreel and the actor and Anglophile Saladin Chamcha descend to England from the exploded jumbo jet Bostan (Farsi for paradise). Their fall enacts that of another dissenter, Shaitan or the devil. It is the ‘satanic’ practice of criticism that is being incited by Rushdie, who is as fallible an amanuensis as his namesake and as truculent, as subversive and, interestingly, as vulnerable to persecution as Baal, the novel’s insubordinate poet who recognises no jurisdiction except that of his Muse (391). What the ‘devil talk’ (93) of dissent and disagreement betokens, therefore, is less a sort of scurrilous attack on Islam than a by no means unsympathetic subjection of it in the mind of the migrant to the rigours of criticism or devil’s advocacy. The novel’s dominant theme, as Gillian Gane (2002) argues, is migration or rather, as Shailja Sharma (2001) has shown, different models or styles of migration. More specifically, the novel’s preoccupation is with the possibility that the experience of migration might (though there is no guarantee that it will) give rise to the ‘devil talk’ of dissent: to the kind of sceptical disposition that subjects religion, as well as other sources of entrenched power, to criticism. Without question, much of the novel is deliberately provocative. Referring to Mohammed as Mahound, for instance, recalls a disreputable tradition of slurs going back to the medieval chansons de geste. Yet even here the epithet serves a critical purpose, since it is part of the novel’s utility that it transforms ‘insults into strengths’ (Rushdie, 1998, 93). That which is conventionally rejected as errant and sinful – in a word, satanic – is explored in order to see how it contrasts with and perhaps calls into question the supposedly virtuous and authoritative discourses of the powerful. What we are given is what Rushdie has called ‘the devil’s version of the world […] the version written from the experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness’ (Rushdie, 1991, 403; emphasis in the original). Hence the growth of Chamcha’s ‘goaty, unarguable horns’ (141) emphasises the racist denigration of immigrants as ‘devils’. It also illustrates the ways in which that identity can be embraced and refashioned so that it signifies not inferiority or ‘otherness’ but rather the virtues of intellectual and practical resistance. Devilishness is here a synonym for dissent, for the interrogation and alteration of dominant ideas. Even the metaphor at the heart of the racist ‘rivers of blood’ speech of ‘“the ferrety Enoch Powell”’ (186) is ‘reclaimed’ by the poet

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Jumpy Joshi and refashioned into an image of the ethos of adaptability and change represented by Britain’s minorities. The novel begins, therefore, with its two protagonists tumbling and entering a condition of migration or weightlessness which for Rushdie is universal and even existential. From this migrant condition ‘can be derived a metaphor for all humanity’ (Rushdie, 1991, 394). It is worth recalling that the inhabitants of Jahilia are themselves migrants who seek to make permanence out of mutability, a dogma of stasis from existential homelessness. Three or four generations distant from their nomadic forebears, they have, in the shape of their walled, four-gated ‘miracle’ of a city, ‘learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, – the very stuff of inconstancy, – the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, – and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence’ (94). What emerges at the outset is the image of a merely apparent and very vulnerable permanence, endangered, as Jahilia is endangered by the destructive power of water, by the prospect of change and movement. One would be tempted to liken the at times salutary experience of migration in Rushdie’s work to the exilic outlook propounded by Edward Said (1994b, 35–47), were the word exile not used in The Satanic Verses as a way of summarising the experiences of those unwilling expatriates who refuse to allow the fact of displacement to grant them insight into the provisionality and contestability of their loyalties and beliefs. Illustrating this state of unasked for and resented banishment is a brief but particularly compelling portrait of ‘the Imam’, a figure resembling but not identical with a very prescient subject of Rushdie’s ire, the Ayatollah Khomeini in France after his expulsion from Najaf in the late 1970s. Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. (Rushdie, 1998, 205) Significantly, fundamentalist Islam is equated in the figure of the Imam with a refusal to learn migration’s salutary lessons. The Imam is like Napoleon on Elba, craving an imminent restoration, not like the deposed emperor on St Helena, doomed to abide and therefore forced to confront


his new habitation. Moping in his rented flat behind closed curtains, emerging infrequently for strolls with his entourage, the Imam broods upon the wickedness of this land that has given him sanctuary and fixes his mind on the prospect of homecoming (205–6). He calls to mind Benedict Anderson’s contention that instead of fostering an awareness of the relativity of cultures and a willingness to question them, migration is just as likely to bring about an intensification of religious certainties and nationalist allegiances. It can be ‘a project for coming home from exile, for the resolution of hybridity’ (Anderson, 1994, 319). Yet the fetish of assimilation is shown by The Satanic Verses to be as defective a form of migration as the Imam’s refusal to adjust. Whereas the latter is uncritical of his native soil and contemptuous of his new habitation, the Indian migrant Saladin is, conversely, disdainful of his homeland and besotted with a clichéd and Romantic vision of England. In contrast with Gibreel (who sings an irreverent ditty about the fusion of cultures as he plummets from the Bostan (5)) and with his lover Zeeny Vikal (who has written a ‘book on the confining myth of authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism’ (52)), Saladin is determined ‘to become the thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a good and proper Englishman’ (43). Even before his relocation to London, he prays for the England cricket team ‘to defeat the local upstarts’ (37) of India. The Imam’s holy land is Iran and his restoration there the exclusive object of his thoughts; Saladin too, like his namesake, has a holy land, which in his case, as his wife observes, is England (175). Dedicating himself ‘with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness’ (256), he is even, she recalls, a passionate advocate of what his author once called that ‘crazy war’ over the Falkland Islands, for Rushdie at the time the indication par excellence of jingoism and fatuity (Rushdie, 1991, 159). Saladin dreams of sleeping with the queen and marries Pamela Lovelace because her voice ‘stinks […] of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty, rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit’ (180). It is the reader, not Saladin himself (who remains convinced of Britain’s ‘hospitality […] in spite of immigration laws, and his own recent experience’ (398) of police brutality), who is soon awoken from Saladin’s ‘dream England’ by the realities of British racism and, related to this, the cynical commercialism of the Thatcher years. Thatcher’s England is ‘a peculiar-tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones’ (44) that the young Saladin forces down as proof to himself of his capacity to ingest the country in all its unpalatableness but on which, however,

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the reader tends to choke. Voiceovers, particularly his part in The Aliens Show, a sitcom about extraterrestrials, are the actor Saladin’s most regular assignments; they exhibit his talent for imitating his hosts in addition to, as Zeeny points out, his employers’ racist reluctance to discompose their patrons with the sight of a non-white face (60). What is apparent to Rushdie’s readers though not, it seems, to his protagonist is the fact that Thatcher’s England, with its insularity, its violent antipathy to newcomers and its rising class of shysters and con men, clashes with its own complacent self-image; it does not represent ‘the England he had idolized and come to conquer’ (270). The target of this profoundly political novel is not just the sacred text whose authority it endeavours to subvert but also the repressive and racist institutions of the British state. The Satanic Verses shows that neither Saladin’s ‘dream-England’ nor the Imam’s dream-Islam merit the approval of Britain’s minorities. Religious fundamentalism is an important element of the novel only in so far as it can be shown to constitute one (misguided and unattractive) mode of living for immigrant communities and, more generally, for all of us who are confronted and challenged by a new consciousness of the multiplicity and relativity of cultures. The novel is, after all, set in Thatcher’s London, ‘that tortured metropolis whose fabric was now utterly transformed, the houses in the rich quarters being built of solidified fear, the government buildings partly of vainglory and partly of scorn, and the residences of the poor of confusion and material dreams’ (320). What must not be disguised by the allegations of blasphemy, therefore, are the novel’s depictions of Saladin being assaulted in the back of a police van (158–9); ‘of black youths hauled swiftly into unmarked cars’ (451); of ‘Brickhall’ Magistrates Court where ‘the police will be trying to fit up a fifty-yearold Nigerian woman, accusing her of assault, having previously beaten her senseless’ (183); of the Thatcher government’s short and nasty misadventure in the Falklands (allegorised in the experiences in Argentina of Rosa Diamond who, like Britain, ‘did not know how to look her history in the eye’ (153)); and of Hal Valance, the media mogul who cancels Saladin’s show in deference to the racist tastes of the British public and who personifies the cynical hypocrisy of the Thatcher-era magnate who loves his country so much he is ‘“going to sell the arse off it”’ (268): indeed, all the instances of rapacity, abuse, corruption and twofacedness that the novel shows happening ‘in places which the camera cannot see’ (457). Gibreel sees London as a colonial city still, its recent imperial past kept alive by new inequalities between the yuppie elect and the hoi polloi in their cardboard boxes and council high rises: ‘a wreck,


a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances’ (439). To think like a migrant is to subject such practices and dogmas to a criticism that is every bit as searching as that usually applied to Islamism. Alas, the novel’s portrayal of the varieties of immigrant experience is not invariably successful. Timothy Brennan has objected to its poking fun at resistance movements in Britain’s black communities (Brennan, 2006, 88–9). It is not, of course, that for Brennan those movements are invulnerable to parody but rather that the parody here is aimed less at, say, their objectives or pretensions (which are fair game) than at the intrinsic ludicrousness of their manners and speech (which are not). In the caricature of dub poetry or the spat in pidgin between two black workers on the Underground the raillery seems unmotivated, gratuitous, even spiteful. It is worth acknowledging that the points at which the novel occasionally fails to carry the reader with it on its scurrilous tour d’horizon of Thatcher’s London are also the junctures at which it fails to live up to its own philosophy of criticism.1 The exploitation of comic stereotypes about Britain’s black communities is one such juncture, an exception to and a momentary departure from the novel’s generally very critical portrayal of mainstream preconceptions. It is left to Antoinette Roberts to reassert that critique by quoting the words of her son, the activist Uhuru Simba, at his trial: ‘[W]e are here to change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top.’ (Rushdie, 1998, 414) Minorities will be made over by the experience of migration. Yet Uhuru also acknowledges what both Saladin and sometimes Rushdie fail to see: that minorities will in turn resist, interrogate and ultimately transform the society in which they have taken up residence. Almost in spite of itself at such points, the novel’s ethos is critical and, crucially, political in ways that are muffled by Rushdie’s unfortunate caricatures. Or rather, such incidents reveal Rushdie’s ambivalence about Airstrip One, an ambivalence that would soon begin to look more like partiality.

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‘The clash of fundamentalisms’ Critics sometimes forget that Rushdie has always been equal parts novelist and pundit. In his literary, critical and political writings he has consistently encouraged dissent and disagreement. Since the long reclusion of the fatwa, however, and particularly since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, a propensity to pull his punches has been more evident. This erstwhile socialist, defender of Palestinian rights and member of Britain’s Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, had initially rejected unequivocally the popular view that the fatwa threw into relief a ‘clash of civilisations’. Let me say this first: I have never seen this controversy as a struggle between Western freedoms and Eastern unfreedom. The freedoms of the West are rightly vaunted, but many minorities – racial, sexual, political – just as rightly feel excluded from full possession of these liberties; while, in my lifelong experience of the East, from Turkey and Iran to India and Pakistan, I have found people to be every bit as passionate for freedom as any Czech, Romanian, German, Hungarian or Pole. (Rushdie, 1991, 396) Yet as Sabina and Simona Sawhney have pointed out (2001), Rushdie has seemed willing of late to endorse precisely that opposition. He has, justifiably of course, deplored fundamentalist denunciations of his work as ‘a war against independence of mind, a war for power’ (Rushdie, 2003, 232). But it is with rather less justification and with, it must be said, rather less independence of mind that recent op-ed pieces have dismissed criticism of the ‘war on terror’ as part of an irrational ‘antiAmericanism, which is presently taking the world by storm’ (398). While Rushdie is still prepared occasionally to remind his readers that ‘“fundamentalism” is a term born in the USA’ (287) and that it is the right of human beings and their works of art ‘to […] prevail over the whimsical autocracy of whatever Olympus may presently be in vogue’ (281), there are to be found in his recent writings dispiritingly uncritical references to ‘decent men like Mr Blair’ (311) and the ‘statesmanlike’ General Powell (400). Instead of a stirring defence of criticism, the ‘spineless’ opponents of the bombing of Afghanistan are told that it ‘had to be done’ (399) and that their unfavourable appraisals of American foreign policy are examples of ‘sanctimonious moral relativism’ (392). In other words, Rushdie’s laudable plea for ‘independence of mind’ has morphed of late into a plea for the nation that he now sees, to say the least


contentiously, as freedom’s embodiment and promulgator. The spread of what he calls, euphemistically, American ‘culture’ ought not to be resisted, he reasons, if ‘in the world as it actually exists, rather than in some unattainable Utopia, the authority of the United States were the best current guarantor of that “freedom”’ (297). This newfound deference to authority is symbolised by the decision to pose for the cover of a French magazine with the Stars and Stripes, as the anonymous Pakistani voices of Shame complain of their author’s ‘foreign language’ and as Zeeny Vikal says in The Satanic Verses of Chamcha’s ‘Angrez accent’, ‘wrapped around you like a flag’ (Rushdie, 1983, 28; 1998, 53). Now what is at issue here is less the defensibility or otherwise of Rushdie’s increasingly partisan political writings than the extent to which that partisanship is at variance with the more or less unqualified and unconstrained advocacy of criticism in his literary work and particularly, as we have seen, in The Satanic Verses. There the image of the US as the apostle of freedom is countered by other voices such as that of the young Indian Marxist and film-maker George Miranda, for whom the US is ‘[p]ower in its purest form, disembodied, invisible’ (Rushdie, 1998, 56). For Saladin’s father it is the looter of India’s cultural heritage (70). For Zeeny, who works as a doctor with Bombay’s homeless and ‘who had gone to Bhopal the moment the news broke of the invisible American cloud that ate people’s eyes and lungs’ (52), it is the perpetrator of the Union Carbide gas leak. The cartoonish and unsubtle, not to mention somewhat snobbish but undeniably critical personification of America for The Satanic Verses is Eugene Dumsday, the ‘“humble foot soldier, sir, in the army of Guard Almighty”’ (75) who bothers Saladin aboard the Bostan. Significantly, the appearance of this pushy and unselfconscious figure precedes that of the terrorist gang who will detonate the plane. Fundamentalism and Western power, in other words, are linked and to establish that connection is, as the episode of the Bostan’s hijacking demonstrates, to subject both to criticism. Dumsday (the surname of course is an indication of his religiosity as well as a punning sneer at his stupidity) is returning from a visit to ‘“your great nation to do battle with the most pernicious devilment ever got folks’ brains by the balls”’ (75): Darwinism. Saladin’s mockery elicits from Dumsday only a look of uncomprehending reproof: ‘It was a hard fate to be an American abroad, and not to suspect why you were so disliked’ (77). This kind of insight might effectively be described as migratory since it is the view from abroad that makes critical perception possible. Rushdie’s recent positions are exceptionable because they neglect this method and present their readers instead with a Hobson’s choice between the West and violent extremism. Such choices obscure the

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significant causal connections between the partial and invidious hegemony of ‘the West’ and the violent and, it goes without saying, futile and murderous ‘blowback’ of the fundamentalists. Instead we must heed the lesson that Rushdie himself drew from the mercifully brief prominence of the late Austrian neo-Nazi Jörg Haider: that the successes of the extremists are invariably linked to the failures of the system they seek to supplant (Rushdie, 2003, 330). The critique of Islamic fundamentalism must additionally acknowledge, as again Rushdie himself once maintained, that ‘there are other kinds of fundamentalism also’ (Appignanesi and Maitland, 1990, 31), including Christian, as well as political and economic fundamentalism. The face-off between violent Islamism and an equally dogmatic faith in the irreproachableness of the West and its social and economic system amounts to what Tariq Ali has dubbed a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ (2002a). Without mutual criticism of these fixed positions and their failures, politics is reduced to what Benjamin Barber has characterised as an unappealing choice ‘between the market’s universal church and a retribalizing politics of particularist identities’ (Barber, 1996, 7) or, in a more populist idiom, between McWorld and Jihad. Susan Buck-Morss argues in her Thinking Past Terror against sharp divides between Westerners and Islamists, liberals and fundamentalists, the forces of good and the doers of evil. Such dichotomies ignore the need to reflect on, criticise and put right not only Islamic fundamentalism but also a no less destructive and dogmatic faith in the rectitude of the ‘West’, in its social and economic structures, and in its entitlement to sermonise other peoples and rearrange their countries. We should call down a plague on both their houses. The mark of fundamentalism is not religious belief but dogmatic belief that refuses to interrogate founding texts and excludes the possibility of critical dialogue, dividing humanity absolutely into pre-given categories of the chosen and the expendable, into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ And whether this is preached by a head of state, or in a place of worship, or at the IMF, no cultural practice – religious or secular, economic or political, rational or romantic – is immune to fundamentalism’s simplifying appeal. (Buck-Morss, 2003, 93) ‘All these enthusiasms’, as Said has argued, ‘belong essentially to the same world, feed off one another, emulate and war against one another schizophrenically, and – most seriously – are as ahistorical and as


intolerant as one another’ (Said, 2004a, 51). To choose one is to accept them all. Simplistic dichotomies overlook the extent to which terrorism, violence, the oppression of women, economic exploitation and so on are all interrelated global problems for which we share a common responsibility rather than predicaments specific to particular cultures or religions.2 Hence Slavoj Žižek’s insistence that when it comes to the two main narratives that emerged after 11 September 2001 (the myth of wronged innocence and the loathsome view that America ‘had it coming’) ‘both were worse’ (2002a, 244). One must reject the clash of fundamentalisms by looking at it dialectically: as a symptom of the totality of neo-liberal capitalism. The two sides are not really opposed but belong to the same deplorable situation. The rise of religious fundamentalism, as Gilbert Achcar (2008) has shown with regard to radical Islam, is partly a response, albeit a misguided and profoundly destructive one, to the inequality and nihilism of late capitalism. Radical Islamism gained ground as secularism, nationalism and socialism were defeated in Muslim countries. This is an eruption of irrationality, in other words, that can be rationally explained. In one form of fundamentalism, Islamism, people take shelter from another, neo-liberal capitalism. The real adversary is not religious fundamentalism therefore, which is certainly an adversary, but is rather, simply, fundamentalism, shorn of all qualifying or restricting adjectives and understood to mean not literalist theism but uncritical faith generally. A rejection of the putative ‘clash of civilizations’ between Islam and the West certainly necessitates a rejection of the despotism and mediocrity prevalent in large parts of the Islamic world, as well as a repudiation of the sclerosis represented by fundamentalist strains such as Wahhabism (Ahmad, 1999). But it also requires looking at the West with critical distance and might therefore entail a willingness to think through the more humane elements of Islamic teachings and traditions. Not least among these are Islamic culture’s stress on economic justice and its aversion to national divisions, along with its rich tradition of theological speculation and of artistic and scientific innovation. There is a widespread ignorance of the diversity of Islamic tradition, in particular of what Said calls its ‘rich and vastly ingenious interpretative energy’ (Said, 1997b, 66) which is embodied most strikingly in its illustrious heritage of poets, dissenters and scholars. One might establish the longevity of this tradition by echoing Rushdie’s former conviction that ‘these people’s [that is, the fundamentalists’] Islam is not the only Islam’ (Appignanesi and Maitland, 1990, 24) and by adducing the literally hundreds of distinguished writers and intellectuals from

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the Muslim world who leapt to Rushdie’s defence in the wake of Khomeini’s edict: anti-colonialists like Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod for whom the vilification of the novelist was ‘antithetical to Islamic traditions of learning and tolerance’ (Ahmad et al., 1989); distinguished writers like the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka for whom the fatwa was an ‘un-Islamic affront to the brotherhood of man’ (Soyinka, 1989, 21); as well as novelists like the Sudanese Tayeb Salih for whom ‘the noble and tolerant nature of Islam’ ‘has always thrived on controversy’ (Salih, 1994, 264, 262), the Algerian Assia Djebar for whom Rushdie’s forced confinement made him ‘the first man to be able to write from the standpoint of a Muslim woman’ (Djebar, 1994, 125), and the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz who placed himself in grave personal danger by telling Der Spiegel in 1988 that ‘Khomeini has already done more harm to Islam than many others in the history of our religion’ (Mahfouz, 1989, 190). The kind of critical practice that I am enjoining and that, I think, any shrewd reading of The Satanic Verses entails is close to that set out by Rushdie’s confrere Christopher Hitchens in a 1989 commentary on the fatwa and its repercussions. Hitchens’s argument, like Talal Asad’s, is that the fatwa is reprehensible not because it offends against ‘Western’ values but because it contravenes values, such as freedom of speech and thought, that are (or ought to be) universal (Asad, 1993, 239–306). Our respect for cultural differences should not blind us to the need to reprehend those who advocate murder and the suppression of free thought in the name of Islam. Equally, however, our belief in universal values should compel us to criticise all societies that fail to conform to them, including those in the West. The unwavering defence of Salman Rushdie and his rights is therefore mandated, not just for those who believe in fair play for individual and minority rights, or for those who profess pluralism and tolerance, or for those who prefer scientific detachment to magic and superstition, but for those who suspect that all these things are interdependent. It is absurd for any one ‘civilization’ to claim this insight; the ‘West’ would not be the West if it had not persecuted Dreyfus and Galileo. That is why this confrontation has been fought out on every continent. (Hitchens, 1994, 302) A confrontation with forms of political, cultural and religious power must indeed be waged on every continent. Criticism must be applied


equally to the ‘West’ and the ‘East’. History for The Satanic Verses is, then, the history of intermixtures, or rather a history that demonstrates the assailability of all norms and fixed ideas, whether cultural, religious or political, by other points of view. Only when it included the provinciality and unresponsiveness of the British state in its sights, Asad argues in similar vein, was criticism of the zealots who urged the banning of the novel and the killing of its author truly effective. Otherwise such criticisms had a tendency to become a pretext for mediocre polemicists like Fay Weldon to ridicule Islam (Weldon, 1989), for complacent politicians like the Tory Home Office minister John Patten to lecture British Muslims about the need to assimilate, or for racists like Jean-Marie Le Pen to whip up xenophobia. Timothy Brennan urges us to note that this Rushdie, who refuses to fight under anyone’s banner, has been stifled by an embattled Rushdie now far more willing to concentrate his critical fire on Islam and its adherents. Rushdie directs it away from former targets such as the British state, by which he was protected, and the American one, to which he has, in the last decade, decamped. ‘The Rushdie of the early and mid-1980s is really the one lost in the uproar and in need of recovery’, as Brennan (2006, 82) laments. The knighting of Rushdie in 2007 (which left him, reportedly, ‘thrilled’ and humbled’3) proved something more than the embarrassing anachronism of the method by which the British state still chooses to reward its ‘subjects’. It also showed that Rushdie, formerly so provocative, so obstreperous, so dedicated to what R.P. Blackmur famously called the modern novel’s ‘technique of trouble’ (1967, 21–37) – in short, so gloriously lacking in ‘humility’ and so contemptuous of the kinds of ‘thrills’ dispensed by countries like Britain – had made his peace with a state that he and his work had once condemned in the strongest possible terms for its racism, its colonial hauteur and its contempt for minorities and the poor. Admittedly it also shows that a hard core of zealots can always be relied upon to reinforce the popular dichotomy of Western liberalism and Eastern fanaticism, for not only were loud-mouthed Pakistani politicians up in arms at the news of Sir Salman’s elevation but no less a figure than Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s garrulous proxy, was moved to issue empty threats that al-Qaeda was planning a response to the novelist’s impending visit to the palace. My aim has not exactly been to bemoan the evolution of Rushdie’s political views or to join Tariq Ali in identifying him as a member of the ‘belligerati’ (2002b). Rather, I am claiming that in the wake of the publication of what Sabina and Simona Sawhney have called ‘a set of

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political writings incongruent with the general trajectory of his work’ (2001, 437), critics of Rushdie ought to attend more to his literary than to his political output. To be sure, the lines that separate the two are often blurred. The cartoonish characters, the baggy and contrived plots, and Rushdie’s perennially intrusive and omnipresent, if not of course omniscient, narrative voice, add up to a style that is unusually discursive and reliant for the maintenance of interest on its author’s editorialising. It is remarkable, for instance, how often ideas and even whole phrases from his critical writings find their way into Rushdie’s fiction. But notwithstanding this close and almost incestuous relationship between his novels and his commentaries, it is fair to say that it is the non-didactic quality of the former that makes them superior forms of critical intervention. There, each and every political position is subverted by the patent fallibility of the narrator’s voice, by the rejoinders of events, characters and voices, and by the encouragement of the kind of critical sensibility that Rushdie now upbraids when it is applied to the United States and its auxiliaries: in short, by what Said characterises as the manifest and unavoidable self-molestation of narrative fiction. Rushdie’s novels are more effectively or (what amounts to the same thing) exhaustively critical media than his political commentaries. If we heed the aesthetic theories of Said and Adorno and, indeed, Rushdie’s own defences of the novel form in Imaginary Homelands, then we are obliged to conclude that literary texts place themselves before their public not as authoritative treatises that wish to make a case, state aims or back parties and movements, but rather, as I have been arguing, as subjects of a dialogue that they initiate by virtue of being in and of the world. They request, or rather positively beseech and require the intercessions and rejoinders that we call criticism.

Conclusion My contention, then, is that in the face of ideologically constructed oppositions between the warriors of Good and the partisans of Evil we need to remind ourselves of Milan Kundera’s indispensable dictum that things are, of course, more complicated than that.4 The Satanic Verses does not bear witness to the superiority of any particular ‘civilisation’: not, of course, that of Islam or of India, nor that of Britain’s exclusionary and belligerent society, and certainly not that of the ‘greater deity’ that threatens to consume Malik Solanka in Fury: ‘America, in the highest hour of its hybrid, omnivorous power’ (Rushdie, 2002, 44). If London, for The Satanic Verses, is insufferable then so too are ‘the


hot certainties of that transatlantic New Rome, with its Nazified architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make its human occupants feel like worms’ (Rushdie, 1998, 399). ‘“It isn’t right,”’ declares the proud and arrogant poet Baal, ‘“for the artist to become the servant of the state”’ (Rushdie, 1998, 98). Rushdie, like Blake’s Milton, writes in fetters when he writes of angels and God; he writes at and for liberty when, in his fiction, his subjects are devils and Hell.5 The devil’s role is to voice protests, offer objections, state alternative points of view, and combat dogmas and abstractions. The upshot is that The Satanic Verses’ denouement, in which Saladin turns away from his childhood view of the Arabian Sea and departs for a new life with Zeeny, punctures those ‘hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home’ (Rushdie, 1998, 4; emphasis in the original) with the simple reproofs of solicitude, affection and self-knowledge. An appreciation of the inadmissibility of fundamentalism and of the need to find some other way of ordering human affairs constitutes the basis of a cosmopolitan sensibility, though not yet, of course, the achievement of a cosmopolitan condition. The sort of comprehensive critique found in The Satanic Verses is now more necessary than ever since it potentially engenders a more expansive, self-critical and even incipiently cosmopolitan outlook in readers usually subjected in the media and elsewhere to the partisan simplifications of the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘clash of civilizations’. For T.S. Eliot, ‘first-rate blasphemy is one of the rarest things in literature, for it requires both literary genius and profound faith’ (Eliot, 1934, 52). And while Rushdie may possess the former, he indubitably lacks the latter; what we have here is not blasphemy but criticism or, more specifically, the critical outlook potentially instilled by migration. To stand outside or between ‘religious fundamentalism’ and ‘Western liberalism’ is to reject them both and to reflect that the choice being offered is no choice at all, for they are two aspects of the same system and problem: ‘precisely in such moments of apparent clarity of choice mystification is total’, as Žižek has observed of the demand to fall in behind the ‘war on terror’ or else line up alongside the fanatics who flew planes into the twin towers (Žižek, 2002b, 54; emphasis in the original). The real choice is that between neo-liberal capitalism, which spawns the monsters it struggles to combat, and the admittedly arduous task of building a comprehensive alternative: The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build transnational political movements

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and institutions strong enough to constrain seriously the unlimited rule of Capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order […] are part of it? (Žižek, 2006, 266) Thus for Buck-Morss, a global public or counter-culture – what she calls, intriguingly, a cosmopolitan Left (2003, 102) – can think past conventional barriers and divisions. Solidarity beyond and across these identifications can result in criticism of all fixed positions and all violent and exclusionary ideologies in the name of shared values such as economic justice, democratic participation and individual freedom. Rushdie, alas, has made his choice. But the advisability of refusing limiting choices between fixed or reified positions is not just the lesson learnt by the protagonist of his post-fatwa short story ‘The Courter’ but also, ultimately, the dominant theme of his literary oeuvre. It is also the disposition of the cosmopolite: I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose. (Rushdie, 1995, 211)

7 ‘Listening for the echo’: Representation and Resistance in Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage

To ponder the partial impression given of Edward Said’s legacy by many postcolonial critics who promote Orientalism (1985) and neglect to call attention to his many other works is to be reminded of Dr Johnson’s description of those readers who recommend Shakespeare with select quotations: they are like the Greek who peddled his house by carrying round one of its bricks as a specimen.1 My aims here are to show that in its radical epistemological and political scepticism Orientalism is but a small and rather unrepresentative slab in the larger edifice of Said’s achievement; that this edifice was built on very different and much firmer political and theoretical foundations; and therefore that critics and students in the postcolonial field would be well-advised to explore some of the relatively unfrequented chambers of Said’s work, not least if they wish to develop a cosmopolitan mode of literary analysis that gives due emphasis to those texts’ capacity to offer alternatives to (as opposed to bemoaning or endlessly deconstructing) dominant definitions of the postcolonial world. As is well known, Orientalism traces a durable system of representations of the Middle East stretching from Herodotus to Henry Kissinger. Orientalism (the idea not the book) evokes images of a dependent and powerless place, a canvas for the realisation of the West’s economic objectives, strategic plans and cultural fantasies. The Middle East is subjected by it to an extraordinary campaign of distortion. Where there should be sympathy and careful analysis there is only a fraudulent wisdom based on misinformed surmises. Said’s analysis of Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said, 1985, 3) is salutary and convincing, as well as topical. But what makes Orientalism to my mind an unrepresentative sample of Said’s oeuvre is the way in which it has been read and the way in which 163

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a large part of it positively asks to be read as a Foucauldian text. What I mean by this is that Orientalism’s methodology and, more particularly, its very sweeping denunciations of Western scholarship about the ‘Orient’ are conspicuously and, I think, excessively reliant on Michel Foucault’s claim that the pursuit of knowledge is unavoidably entangled with the exercise of power (Foucault, 1977; 1991, 27–8). Orientalism, which for this reason as Neil Lazarus has argued is ‘a relatively atypical Saidian text’ (Lazarus, 1999, 11), casts doubt on the possibility of intellectuals, artists and ordinary citizens in the West doing anything to correct the contamination of their minds by Eurocentric prejudices. Orientalism gave rise to – or at least, until its too often disregarded final section, did too little to discourage – many of the initial tenets of postcolonial studies. Prevailing, though contested and now, thankfully, somewhat embattled tendencies in a discipline that has long proceeded, as it were, under the influence of Orientalism include an assertion of identity at the expense of community and equality; an uncritical adoption of the argot and agenda of post-structuralism and anti-humanism; and a widespread misreading of (and even unfamiliarity with) similarly self-reflexive but less drastically sceptical strains in European philosophy such as the dialectical and the hermeneutic traditions. Despite their considerable achievements, postcolonial critics have done too little to persuade against an extreme notion (derived from Nietzsche, developed by Foucault, then embraced by Orientalism): the notion that there is no knowledge, only partial, self-serving viewpoints, and that reality itself is little more than an effect of the various texts and discourses that we use to represent it. In many cases this notion has led to a disastrous belief that it is not possible for citizens and especially intellectuals in the West to gain knowledge of other peoples and societies. Typically, this impossibility is put down to the fact that cultures are discrete and impermeable: airtight compartments whose occupants cannot really know those who belong to other cultures and belief systems. But once arguments about the unfeasibility of representation have been deemed credible then we are left with a sort of separatist ideology which resembles the fetish of local difference that one finds in postmodern thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard more than it does the goal of universal human emancipation that has inspired – and, just as importantly, continues to inspire – anti-colonial theory and activism. Cultural separateness is neither an adequate characterisation of the contemporary world system (which is not so much separate as unequal and is not disconnected but linked by relations of power) nor an appealing alternative to the ongoing history of imperialism (since alternatives ought to entail some element of dialogue, understanding and solidarity).

Representation and Resistance in Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage

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Such positions bear very little resemblance to – and indeed are unequivocally gainsaid by – Said’s demonstrable commitment to speaking on behalf of marginal groups that require or request representation. In works like The Politics of Dispossession (1995) and The End of the Peace Process (2002), Said insisted on trying to represent faithfully to his readers the existential situation and political aspirations of his Palestinian compatriots. Furthermore, he rejected outright the belief that cultures are discrete and homogeneous phenomena: ‘On the crucial issue of “difference,” which is central to many recent theoretical and interpretive discussions, one can, however, declare oneself for difference (as opposed to sameness or homogenization) without at the same time being for the rigidly enforced and policed separation of populations into different groups’ (Said, 1995, 80–1; emphasis in the original). Said associated ‘identity politics’ not with the postmodern celebration of difference but with Zionism’s forcible ghettoisation of the Palestinians. The relevance of Said’s thought lies principally in the fact that he usually does not respond to Western scholars’ efforts to deny colonised peoples a voice by enjoining those scholars to hold their tongues. On the contrary, he wants to reform not disallow their practice, to provoke self-criticism in Western readers as well as encourage them to explore what he calls ‘new and different ways of conceiving human relationships’ (Said, 1983, 17). These ways resemble the attributes of cosmopolitan consciousness: a critical as well as self-critical sensibility allied to expansive moral and political sympathies. It is therefore important not to dismiss Said’s work, as Aijaz Ahmad has done, for implying that ‘Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-Europe’ (Ahmad, 1992, 178; emphasis in the original). We need, rather, to read Said against Said: to accentuate the resources contained in his work that allow us to develop more self-conscious but still politically engaged ways of thinking against the atypical and comparatively infrequent moments at which Said appears to write such scholarship off. I want to demonstrate, in the spirit of Said’s oeuvre, that certain works of post-colonial fiction can produce the kind of cosmopolitan Western interlocutor to whom I am appealing: one who is as knowledgeable and sympathetic about other situations and cultures as he is critical of his own. Accordingly, I shall end by analysing the peculiar narrative voice of The Redundancy of Courage (1991), the Anglo-Chinese writer Timothy Mo’s little-known allegorical novel about the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (or, as he calls it, Danu) in the 1970s and the subsequent war of resistance.2 The narrator’s irony and self-awareness are matched

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only by his equally prominent determination to address and to redress the gap between the uncertain Western percipient and the far-flung and largely unheeded historical event. In full consciousness of the pitfalls of such a quixotic enterprise, of the inescapable bad faith involved in speaking through the dead or silenced mouths of distant victims, and of the estranging medium of writing itself, Mo nevertheless seeks to work the obscure events of East Timor’s colonisation and resistance into fiction. His novel succeeds not in articulating the testimony of the East Timorese – indeed, its narrator’s acute consciousness of his own marginality is largely a result of the author’s alertness to the gulf that separates the puny powers of writing from the stifled voices of colonialism’s victims – but rather, more subtly, in puncturing Western complacency and incuriosity in addition to exposing the media’s bias and self-interest. Most importantly, it urges its implied readers to help remedy the prevailing cynicism by reaching across borders in order to engage with the violence perpetrated, legitimised and eclipsed by dominant narratives penned in the service of colonial power. I wish to demonstrate (as opposed to merely announce the need for) an alternative form of postcolonial literary criticism that fosters self-criticism without sacrificing the possibility of knowledge, communication and even corrective political action.

Said contra Said The quietistic brand of postcolonial criticism to which I am objecting is exemplified by John Beverley’s Subalternity and Representation (1999), which is unquestionably one of the most interesting and provocative texts to emerge from the Latin American Subaltern Studies collective (a project inspired by the more widely known work of Ranajit Guha and others in South Asian Subaltern Studies).3 The task for subaltern studies in the Latin American context, Beverley argues, is certainly not to represent the social and historical situation of the subaltern (classes and other social groups excluded from hegemonic power). On the contrary, it is to acknowledge the extreme difficulty and in the end the impossibility of representing the subaltern from the disciplinary position of the first world historian or, in Beverley’s case, literary critic. Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard and Orientalism are Beverley’s lodestars. He acknowledges that ‘the critique of representation developed by poststructuralism’ (1999, 7) might lead either to new forms of scholarship and pedagogy or to the conclusion that academic disciplines and methodologies are, at least currently, uncomprehending and deleterious


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without exception. Beverley’s sympathies are overwhelmingly with the latter position. This confessional and apologetic book comes out, as he says, of his own disillusionment with the failure of national liberation struggles in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua in the 1980s (3). What these letdowns proved for Beverley was the failure of national elites (especially Marxist ones) to speak and act for subaltern groups, as well as the inability of well-meaning academics like Beverley and his colleagues to show effective solidarity with them. Beverley is therefore insistent that historical scholarship, even sympathetic efforts like Florencia Mallon’s account of the subaltern contribution to the national-democratic revolutions of Peru and Mexico in her Peasant and Nation (1995), actually misapprehends subaltern groups and helps to generate their subordination. In works like Mallon’s, the academy, by trying to speak for the subaltern, reinforces preconceptions about the subaltern’s marginality, muteness and powerlessness. Those of us who are involved in the project of subaltern studies are often asked how we, who are, in the main, middle- or upper-middleclass academics at major research universities in the United States, can claim to represent the subaltern. But we do not claim to represent (‘cognitively map,’ ‘let speak,’ ‘speak for,’ excavate) the subaltern. Subaltern studies registers how the knowledge we construct and impart as academics is structured by the absence, difficulty, or impossibility of representation of the subaltern. This is to recognize, however, the fundamental inadequacy of that knowledge and of the institutions that contain it, and therefore the need for a radical change in the direction of a more democratic and non-hierarchical social order. (Beverley, 1999, 40) Here it is not the content of the representation but the location of the scholar who does the representing that is the criterion by which its efficacy should be judged. Beverley implies that European and North American theorists who try to represent other peoples and realities are to be indicted less because of what they say than because of where they say it. What we are left with is the more or less explicit contention that only those outside this disgraced sphere can represent effectively the lives and aspirations of subaltern groups. What ought to trouble us about Beverley’s work is not its affirmation of cultural difference (which is salutary) nor its faith in subaltern self-representation (which is well-founded) but rather its unmitigated writing off of academic

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representations. His protracted mea culpa shows a total lack of interest in facilitating or pointing us towards (as opposed to passively awaiting) the ‘more democratic and non-hierarchical social order’ to which he looks forward. The idea that by providing alternative representations of subaltern groups academics in the West might give rise to a degree of knowledge and sympathy and by so doing bring that democratic order a little closer is dismissed as impossible and even undesirable. The best course of action for the committed intellectual in these unpropitious circumstances is either to bide her time or, better, fall on her sword. Academic work is reduced to a sort of penance or self-mortification; auto-critique becomes the sole end of radical scholarship. Beverley’s is, as Richard Wolin says in a related context, ‘a critique of reason that, in its radicality and inattention to nuance, threatens to become a defeatism of thought’ (Wolin, 1992, 4). Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential Provincializing Europe claims, promisingly, that the task of undoing ideological assumptions that fix Europe as a normative centre ‘is not a project of rejecting or discarding European thought’. European thought ‘is at once indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations’ (2000, 16). Yet even Chakrabarty, who is always careful to qualify his arguments in this way, is not really interested in the resources of ‘European thought’, except insofar as it can be shown to divulge its own ignorance. My point is that Chakrabarty has an exceptionally low opinion of European thought’s resources: of its capacity to undertake self-examination, to reform its own preconceptions, to produce knowledge and even incite solidarity. His energies are devoted almost entirely to critiques of European humanism, of historicist philosophies that see Europe as history’s model and sole actor, and of the Eurocentric view of politics ‘as a story of human sovereignty acted out in the context of a ceaseless unfolding of unitary historical time’ (15). Chakrabarty’s work is instructive because despite its welcome admission that academics born or resident in Europe are not irredeemably Eurocentric and are in principle capable of undertaking self-criticism and of promoting knowledge and solidarity, he still devotes almost all his energies to denouncing European thought and hardly any to identifying exceptions to its nearsightedness. In other words, a sustained critique of Eurocentric assumptions about the post-colonial world is rarely accompanied in his work by a discriminating critique of European knowledge production. Nor is it often matched by a comparably energetic commitment to showing how (as opposed to conceding grudgingly that) the postcolonial world can be represented differently. Even where the


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possibility of alternative scholarship is countenanced it is rarely considered at length, let alone endorsed or undertaken. Rather, such tasks are deferred, marginalised, mentioned in passing – as though the pleasure of being right about Eurocentrism was more important than the tasks of dismantling and replacing it. In a wide-ranging critique of the intellectual climate of post-structuralism, Christopher Norris has noted ‘the odd conjunction of a post-modern-pluralist rhetoric – one that professedly holds out a welcome to the widest variety of language-games, discourses, cultural forms of life, etc. – with an outlook which in fact, if consistently maintained, would deny us any access to belief-systems other than our own’ (1994, 14). If all contact between cultures is injurious then inaction would appear to be the best policy and if all knowledge is a disguised expression of power then we can rest easy with our ignorance. For the theory that cultures are entirely discrete entities does not enjoin one to act differently towards other cultures or even, oddly enough, encourage one to challenge the dominant culture in which one is ensconced, the permanence and inescapability of which it paradoxically affirms. Nobody has been more closely identified with the importation of post-structuralist methods into postcolonial theory than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ‘French theorists’, she writes, ‘such as Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, and the like, have at one time or another been interested in reaching out to all that is not the West, because they have, in one way or another, questioned the millennially cherished excellencies of Western metaphysics’ (Spivak, 1987, 136). In widely read essays on the blind spots and complicities of canonical English literature (1985), on French feminism’s dubious claims to speak for all women regardless of differences of culture and race (1981), on the very different situations of metropolitan migrants like herself and the inhabitants of colonies and post- or neo-colonies (1993), and on the shortcomings of Indian historiography (1988), Spivak has made use of deconstruction to reveal the concealed limitations of elite discourses about oppressed groups in the third world. But it has not escaped the attention of many of her readers that her reliance on a philosophy that rejects the notion of transparency has taken its toll on Spivak’s notoriously prolix style. Sometimes her overstuffed prose seems to be opposed to intelligibility on principle. It is abstruse, mannered in the extreme, not to mention loftily uninterested in deciphering its jargon for the benefit of those of us who do not breathe quite so easily in the thin air of high theory. Nonetheless, what ought to be as widely acknowledged as her wellknown debts to deconstruction are Spivak’s equally significant departures from deconstructive orthodoxy. I am thinking in particular of her

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exemplary willingness to add to her deconstruction of Eurocentrism and cultural racism an equally compelling account of the important intellectual and, crucially, political tasks that deconstruction does not undertake. Spivak recognises that the deconstruction of orthodox representations of oppressed groups is not itself a political achievement. Left to its own devices, she argues, deconstruction reveals the abyss between language and its referents and between the disenfranchised and the definitions that we offer of them without offering any normative proposal for moving beyond those antipathies. Hence Spivak’s often unheralded commitment to what she calls ‘transnational literacy’ (1999, 357), by which she means the potential of intelligent reading to foster self-knowledge as well as an awareness of (and solidarity with) distant interlocutors. Spivak’s work endeavours to, as she puts it, ‘bring about the rituals and habits of democratic behavior’ (Spivak, 2006, 117), firstly through her involvement in the reformed comparative literature programme at Columbia University in New York (Spivak, 2005) and secondly through her broader interest in literacy and pedagogy, in particular her contribution to teacher training initiatives in rural India.4 Spivak works on the basis that deconstruction is a propaedeutic: Deconstruction cannot found a political program of any kind […] It is a corrective and a critical movement […] Politically, all this does is not allow for fundamentalisms and totalitarianisms of various kinds, however seemingly benevolent. But it cannot be foundational. If one wanted to found a political project on deconstruction, it would be something like wishy-washy pluralism on the one hand, or a kind of irresponsible hedonism on the other. (Spivak, 1990a, 104; emphasis in the original) The most useful thing in Spivak is her emphasis on the ethical and political work that deconstruction prepares and even makes possible but does not itself perform or even, when understood as an authoritative method in its own right, permit. Her work constitutes a discerning use or development of post-structuralist theory rather than an uncritical application of it. ‘This’, she writes, ‘is the greatest gift of deconstruction: to question the authority of the investigating subject without paralysing him’ (Spivak, 1987, 201).5 This is how we should view Said’s work: as a deconstruction of Orientalist scholarship that far from incapacitating the European intellectual and disqualifying him or her from discussions


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of the non-European world actually goes on to countenance, explore and even demonstrate alternatives to Orientalist thinking. Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004a) argues the critical importance of literary reading for this project. For Said, works of literature present a uniquely complex and rewarding opportunity for interpretation and for the cultivation and even the inculcation of humanist convictions: that is, an appreciation of the dignity, value and equality of all human life. The detailed scrutiny of language allows the reader in the first instance to examine the text as a discrete object. Starting with the particular challenges of the aesthetic work, the reader moves through ‘widening circles of awareness’ (Said, 2004a, 75) until he is able to elucidate the frameworks in which that text exists, the ideologies and structures of feeling in which it participates, as well as the systems of power in which it was produced and in which it is read. Sensitively read, texts from other cultures engender both knowledge and, crucially, self-knowledge; they are correctives to our customary indifference to the sufferings and aspirations of distant populations. Works of literature and their humanistic investigation are thus, ideally, gateways to the critical examination of one’s position in relation to the dehumanising forces of the market and of the increasingly untrammelled power of states and corporations. Responsible readers should not linger overlong amidst the words and meanings of the text in the style of New Criticism; nor should they content themselves with disarming texts of their authority in a manner resembling the no less abortive new New Criticism of Derrida and his acolytes. Deconstruction for Said, who is quite unequivocal on this point, gives rise to cynicism or else ends in uncertainty and inaction if its practitioners are not prepared to broaden their focus: to move from addressing the authority dramatised by texts to reflections on and ultimately involvement in wider struggles over social power. It is the avoidance of this process of taking final comradely responsibility for one’s reading that explains, I think, a crippling limitation in those varieties of deconstructive Derridean readings that end (as they began) in indecidability and uncertainty. To reveal the wavering and vacillation in all writing is useful up to a point, just as it may here and there be useful to show, with Foucault, that knowledge in the end serves power. But both alternatives defer for too long a declaration that the actuality of reading is, fundamentally, an act of perhaps modest human emancipation and enlightenment that changes and

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enhances one’s knowledge for purposes other than reductiveness, cynicism, or fruitless standing aside. (Said, 2004a, 66) For Said, the authority that is manifested in texts and that exposes itself there to deconstruction is actively mystified by vague abstractions such as ‘Western culture’, ‘logocentrism’ or ‘the metaphysics of presence’. In the end textual authority focuses attention on real power, power that has its origins in uneven contests between classes, ideologies and societies. To deconstruct it and to show how literary texts frequently invite deconstruction (as we have seen Waiting for the Barbarians and The Satanic Verses doing) is therefore to intervene in a historical process in which different forces are engaged in a battle over power and, furthermore, over the very shape of social life. The point is that the critic, if he or she is to merit that title, has an obligation not just to deconstruct power but also to explain its existence, trace its origins, criticise its effects and beseech its dissolution (Said, 1983, 214). The activities of those deconstructive critics who discredit the metaphysical foundations of power without bothering either to address power’s material presence and effects or countenance its downfall resemble the trick of the entertainer who removes the table-cloth with such force that the dinner set is left standing: both are impressive ways of leaving everything exactly as it was before. Philosophy for Derrida, like poetry for Auden, makes nothing happen. As Wittgenstein says, it ‘leaves everything as it is’ (1953, 49e (124)). Said’s explicit criticisms of post-structuralism have usually been overlooked or ignored. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, published in 1983 but containing articles written over the course of the previous decade, Said offered several lengthy appraisals of what he saw as the unconscious parochialism of Foucault’s thought. Though he had done extremely valuable work in exploring the connections between the exercise of power and the discourses of reason and knowledge, Foucault had neither illuminated the sources of that power in sufficient detail nor given due emphasis in his work to power’s limitations and weak points. Contests between classes, societies and ideologies are largely absent from his work. Moreover, Foucault’s idea of a ‘microphysics of power’ had actually obscured power’s origins in ruling classes and dominant interests. In his qualms about subjectivity and the language of humanism, and notably in his depiction of power as undifferentiated and ineluctable, Foucault had shown little interest in the possibility and desirability – or for that matter the manifest actuality – of resistance to


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the effects of discursive power and to the social and economic order on which discursive power depends. Why power is exercised and by whom are questions rarely if ever broached by Foucault’s work. Colonialism is the salient blind spot of an oeuvre that is not even wide-ranging enough to be called Eurocentric. Its most salient and grievous flaws are thus its tendency to depict power as all-penetrating, uncontested and inexorable and, resulting from this, its inability to provide an account of historical change: ‘power’, in short, ‘can be made analogous neither to a spider’s web without the spider nor to a smoothly functioning flow diagram’ (Said, 1983, 221). Orientalism presents colonial power in a Foucauldian manner. Elsewhere, however, Said’s project is a sustained campaign for empirical knowledge and worldly engagement where currently there exists merely ignorance, seclusion and self-interest. Said is typically exercised not only by the frequent collusion of knowledge in power but also by the more interesting and constructive problem of how to produce knowledge by grounding it in ethical precepts. Indeed, his point at the close of Orientalism is not that power is ubiquitous and knowledge impossible. On the contrary, knowledge of the peoples and societies of the Middle East, though it cannot be attained without the most perspicacious attention to their details and complexities and the most intense distrust of received ideas, is feasible, not to mention necessary and urgent. Representations are invariably but not equally distorted by the social, political, cultural and institutional contexts in which they emerge and by the terminally inexplicit medium of language: ‘I would not have undertaken a book of this sort if I did not also believe that there is scholarship that is not as corrupt, or at least as blind to human reality, as the kind I have been mainly depicting’ (Said, 1985, 326). Once these facts have been established then the more interesting and constructive task for the European or North American scholar, one that is not carried out by Orientalism but is eventually entreated by it and then undertaken by subsequent books such as Covering Islam (1997b) and The Question of Palestine (1992) (which complete Said’s trilogy on representation and colonial power), is that of actually providing less flawed representations or at least of explaining how such representations might be achieved and identifying the situations in which they are required. Since his emphatic commitment to making known the history and reality of the Middle East is insufficiently appreciated, it is fair to say that Orientalism has been read tendentiously or at least partially by many in the postcolonial field. Notwithstanding Timothy Brennan’s forceful argument that it has been almost entirely misread (1992; 2006, 93–125),

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Orientalism is in my view an unquestionably contradictory text. This is quite different from saying, as Said himself has done, that Orientalism’s method is creatively eclectic.6 For there is an inconsistency between, on the one hand, a materialist method which understands Orientalism as an ideology that can be criticised and replaced with less misleading forms of knowledge and, on the other hand, a post-structuralist method that sees Orientalism as a discourse somehow intrinsic to the subject position of the West and hence effectively irreplaceable by more illuminating and sympathetic modes of perception. This is not just an inconsistency between Orientalism and Said’s later texts but an inconsistency within the contradictory impulses of Orientalism itself: between discourse and hegemony, Foucault and Gramsci. Is Said suggesting that it is impossible to get outside Orientalism and that ‘every European was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’ (Said, 1985, 204)? Or is he venturing the incompatible claim that we can get outside Orientalism because ‘I certainly do not believe the limited proposition that only a black can write about blacks, a Muslim about Muslims, and so forth’ (322)?7 One would be more willing to applaud Said’s admirably catholic taste in theory were it not for the fact that these two approaches are patently jarring, a fact perhaps registered by the short shrift that Said subsequently gave to Foucault’s theories.8 In other words, by depicting Orientalism as a hegemony à la Gramsci and Raymond Williams (a comprehensive but hardly all-powerful series of ideas that seeks to justify certain material and specifically class interests in the Orient) he surely precludes the possibility of referring to it à la Foucault as a discourse (a dense and more or less ineluctable system of ideas intrinsic to the outlook or ‘episteme’ of the West). The utilisation of Foucault, because it was a dispensable part of what Said set out to do in Orientalism, was unnecessary and misleading. It served to associate the book with the ascendancy of post-structuralist approaches at the beginning of the 1980s, to flatter the many readers at that time who favoured post-structuralism, and to obscure the book’s largely materialist presentation of Orientalism as an ideology susceptible to critique and transformation. Said’s writings about the Palestinians show more clearly where his theoretical sympathies lie. Given the extraordinarily comprehensive and, it must be admitted, fairly successful drive to misrepresent the experiences and aspirations of the Palestinians, it can be very hard to get far enough outside the structure of received ideas about their plight and history to give a rigorous account of who they are, of what has been done to them, and of their accomplishments and objectives.


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Nevertheless, we need to acknowledge that there are valuable representations (not least among them Said’s own efforts) that frequently succeed in engendering knowledge and empathy. Take this noteworthy formulation from The Question of Palestine: I must again repeat what I have said in this book and in Orientalism: That the discussion of the Arab world in general, and of the Palestinians in particular, is so confused and unfairly slanted in the West that a great effort has to be made to see things as, for better or worse, they actually are for Palestinians and for Arabs. The danger is that in trying fairly to represent the complex circumstances of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, I may not be doing enough to dispel the massive accumulation of lies, distortion, and wilful ignorance surrounding the reality of our struggle. Perhaps there is no simple formula for letting the truth emerge in such cases, and certainly I would add that in my own case I have the strongest belief that the historical and moral sufficiency of the Palestinian cause will finally outlast and outstrip any attempts to misrepresent it. In the end, of course, it is the struggle of a people, and not only of writers about that people, which determines its history. Nevertheless writing does count for something, and so certain points have to be made. (Said, 1992, 214–15; emphasis in the original) I quote this passage at length because its emphases are, I believe, exemplary. It stresses the difficulty of representing the Palestinians fairly and truthfully, notes the sheer gravity of their survival and actuality, and calls attention to the reliance of successful representation on the scholar’s nagging suspicion that if he does not maintain his sensitivity to detail and his distrust of conventional wisdom then his efforts may be unsuccessful, unnecessary or even counter-productive. All the same, Said places the fraught and occasionally unrewarding character of the intellectual vocation in the context of a dynamic and inconclusive history of anti-colonial struggle that, while certainly not decided or even crucially affected by representations produced by sensitive witnesses in Europe and North America, can nevertheless be assisted by such work. Such goals demand intellectual work that is exceedingly self-conscious but not crippled by self-doubt; intolerant of restrictive methods, allegiances and fixed ideas; open to the revocability of its own presuppositions and distrustful of generalisations; but prepared nonetheless to peer beyond the bounds of established wisdom, to make statements, offer judgements, to speak out in the name of far-reaching principles,

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and (my own mission here) to show how literary texts frequently interrogate and offer alternatives to the sometimes parochial preconceptions of their readers. Said’s work remains important because it points not in the direction of epistemological scepticism or political relativism but towards a very different and far more constructive theoretical position, one that does countenance the production of knowledge, that rejects the ideology of cultural separateness, and, crucially, that values the potential of literary reading to explore cosmopolitan forms of human relationship.

Narrative and truth The first things to be aware of when reading The Redundancy of Courage are the sheer obscurity of the events that it dramatises and that obscurity’s colossal human cost. Both are encapsulated by the Australian journalist John Pilger’s 1992 book Distant Voices. Seeking a map of Timor at Stanford’s, the map shop in London’s Covent Garden, Pilger is rebuffed by an embarrassed sales assistant. It is the first time the shop has received such a request and all they have to offer is an incomplete aeronautical chart. Such is the depth of the silence that has enveloped Timor, or specifically East Timor, the part of the island under an illegal Indonesian occupation since 1975. Other places on the planet may seem more remote; none has been as defiled and abused by murderous forces or as abandoned by the ‘international community’, whose principals are complicit in one of the great, unrecognised crimes of the twentieth century. (Pilger, 1992, 233) Pilger’s book focuses on little known events in places such as Cambodia, Nicaragua, Australia and the Palestinian territories in addition to East Timor. He presents the testimonies of these events’ protagonists as ‘distant voices’, firstly because their tales of violence and dispossession offer uncomfortable ripostes to mainstream political and media narratives about Western powers’ beneficence, and secondly because, no matter how faint, they are capable of reaching the ears of conscionable Western readers and of giving rise to a degree of sympathy and even practical solidarity. Amplified by sympathetic witnesses, ‘distant voices’ can for Pilger be heard and taken notice of. This is also the conclusion we should draw from Mo’s allegorical novel. The Redundancy of Courage is


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not really – or rather not just – about East Timor. The territory invaded in its opening pages is not East Timor at all but Danu and the invaders are not Indonesians but ‘malais’. It is as if Mo wishes to avoid being looked upon as an insider or an authority on East Timor’s colonisation and is therefore anxious to stress the fictional rather than journalistic nature of his undertaking. Or perhaps it is the general rather than merely local significance of the novel’s themes that prompts its author to give The Redundancy of Courage a broader allegorical scope, to make it about colonisation and resistance, oblivion and knowledge more broadly instead of concentrating on these things in relation to a specific place. This tale of neo-colonial violence might be read productively as a reflection on the fate of any number of diminutive and subjugated, albeit bravely insubordinate little states such as El Salvador and Haiti. The novel’s narrator, Adolph Ng, is very far from being an authority on Danu or in any uncomplicated way an insider in its people’s resistance to colonisation. Despite his friendship with the territory’s political leaders and although he is induced to flee to the mountains and take part in the ill-fated armed struggle against the invasion, this self-styled ‘misfit’ and ‘citizen of the great world’ (Mo, 1991, 24) is distanced from the struggle’s earnest protagonists in a number of ways: by his patrician airs, ethnicity, sexuality, foreign education, and status as well-to-do local entrepreneur.9 At the start of the novel we find Ng, a gay Chinese hotelier recently returned from a Canadian university, whiling away the days in his coastal retreat with an obliging entourage. But Ng also displays an admirable partisanship for the Danuese cause. He revises his initial contempt on returning from Canada for what he calls the ‘barbarism’ of this ‘small, broken-down settlement at the back of beyond’ (28), for its ‘independence-minded hotheads’ (30) and for the ‘petty, circumscribed horizons’ of his peers’ cultural soirées (34). He is moved, despite himself, by the Independence Day celebrations (96–7) and by the crowds in the Praça singing Danu’s new anthem (86). Neither insider nor outsider therefore, Ng is a manifestly problematic spokesman for the Danuese version of events. He rejects affiliations and is himself rejected: by the departing Portuguese, by the revolutionary leaders who govern Danu during the brief interregnum between European and malai rule, and by the Chinese expatriate community (for whom he reserves a peculiarly caustic though self-incriminating disdain (7)). The novel is narrated entirely in the first person from the partial standpoint of this mordant bystander, who in his own words is ‘a quirky guy with an odd history’ (113). Ng’s characteristic voice is by turns earnest, cynical, fastidious, querulous, wry, jocose and aloof. He is also intensely self-conscious,

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by which I mean that he is occasionally awkward and insecure but also capable of self-knowledge and of impressive insights into his own detachment (what he calls his ‘sense of unreality, of alienation from the actual’ (9)). Ng is candid and familiar with the reader, whom he addresses directly; his reports on events are repeatedly interrupted by arch asides, confessions, explanations, demurrals, and admissions of fear and guilt. He is sometimes blinkered and fixated with detail, to the extent that the reader’s own perception of events remains, in both senses of the word, partial: that is, patently fragmentary and subjective. The action is restricted in space (since the larger part of the novel is devoted to Ng’s experiences in the guerrilla fighters’ mountain hideaways) and in time (since Ng is obliged to live, as he says, ‘in the moment’ (14)). Indeed, the complexity of perception is in large part the theme of the book. Or rather, perception’s slanted, distorted and consequently deficient nature constitutes both the novel’s narrative method and an idea that it endeavours to bring home to its readers. The relativity of truth, the way in which events are always mediated by the distorting prism of language, is the larger reason for East Timor’s obscurity. Indonesian propaganda, the fourth estate’s subservience to mainstream narratives of Western altruism, and the inability of the Timorese to shout loud enough to attract listeners, are all bricks placed in a wall of denial and obfuscation behind which real violence and real suffering are concealed. It is above all the mode of narration that alerts us to the fact that truth never speaks for itself but is invariably spoken for in the moot reports of witnesses. Yet as we shall see, this is not the book’s sole objective. For its ultimate effect is to engender in its readers some degree of conscionable awareness despite and even as a result of our appreciation of the extensive obstacles to this process. It is thus hardly satisfactory to say that Ng’s narration is unreliable, since he admits as much himself. In any case, his sardonic comments on everything from this Lilliputian territory’s grandiose ruling party (the FAKOUM) to the paltry legacy of its erstwhile colonisers (4), as well as his faithfulness to the dream of independence and his loathing for the invaders, not to mention his almost punctiliously detailed descriptions of events and his vividly opinionated accounts of Danu’s history, actually strike the reader as rather insightful. Ng is very knowledgeable about the causes of the Portuguese revolution (55) and about the diplomatic and trading links with their populous northern neighbour (93) that deter the Australian government from condemning the malai murders of an Australian TV crew. He is au fait with recent malai history,


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making reference to the massacres of communists in the 1960s (20), the Soviet connections of the current president’s predecessor (19), and the malais’ colonisation at the hands of ‘a crew of flaxen-headed burghers and herring fishermen from the North’ (30). Though he is prone to repeat colonialist stereotypes about the indolence and backwardness of the peasants (39–41) and to bemoan the ‘perdition’ to which ambitious schemes are doomed in the tropics, Ng’s narrative voice is not so much unreliable or unsympathetic as patently and self-confessedly incomplete: impressionistic rather than untrustworthy. It is subjective and prejudiced of course, but openly rather than deceitfully so. Ng is droll and ironical where others are merely insincere. The first chapter compels attention to the problematic nature of perception through Ng’s description of the first day of the malai invasion. The technique employed has a great deal in common with what Ian Watt has called, seeking to characterise Joseph Conrad’s narrative method in Heart of Darkness, ‘delayed decoding’ (Watt, 1979, 175). The actual subject of the chapter is rendered only partially and belatedly by a narrator who does not so much explicate it (since he is not in a position to do so) as describe it impressionistically and from a position, as Ng puts it, ‘outside the events I was observing’ (Mo, 1991, 4). Immediate perceptions are related and then later ‘decoded’ or explained by the unfolding events of the narrative. In other words, the reader is met not with an exhaustive portrayal of events but with a record of the confused visual sensations of an observer looking on from his secluded hotel: the white and silent parachutes ‘drifting as if they were thistledown or broken cotton-pods’, ‘the storm of the dust in the town’ being shelled by vessels off the coast, ‘the dirt fountains’ placed at the side of the road by airborne ‘silver insects’, and the bridge shaking ‘as if a giant hand had seized it’ (3). These descriptions are less metaphors designed to enhance or refresh our comprehension of events as fleeting sensations that demonstrate the mediation of those events by a befuddled and introverted consciousness: ‘I do not strive to be poetic. That was exactly how they appeared’ (4). Ng and therefore his reader elicit meaning from his observations only gradually. Mo’s narrative technique, which insists on accentuating the fallibility of the first person voice, serves to make us conscious right away of what Watt describes as ‘the bounded and ambiguous nature of individual understanding’ (Watt, 1979, 174): of the only partially and painstakingly bridgeable gap between impression and awareness, or between the actual happening and our sluggish and imperfect comprehension of it. In the very first pages of the novel the reader is mindful that his or her view of events is reliant on

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a single observer whose version, though graphic and obviously aided by the wisdom of hindsight, is nonetheless compromised by detachment and partiality and also by the inescapable precariousness of perception itself. Therefore it is not just Ng’s irreverent, subversive, at times even scatological commentary that mocks the ploys and pretexts promoted by Danu’s conquerors but also the manifest literariness of the novel itself; that is, the painstakingly accentuated discrepancy between the narrative and that which the narrative purports to describe. By accentuating the gulf between words and world, Mo implants distrust about the accuracy and disinterestedness of official propaganda. Yet this does not tell us all we need to know about the narrative method of The Redundancy of Courage. Mo does not stop at molesting prevailing ‘truths’ about the situation in places like Danu but goes on, crucially, to stress the need to supplant those ‘truths’ with alternative accounts. After all, without defective points of view like Ng’s the events allegorised by the narrative would be threatened with oblivion. Ng is obliged to compensate for the absence of more enlightening witnesses, not least because, as we learn, the Australian journalist Bill Mabbeley, one of the very few foreign reporters to remain in the territory after an Australian television crew is massacred during a malai incursion, is executed on the waterfront in the first hours of the invasion.10 Since Danu is militarily too weak to repel its much larger neighbour, which as Ng tells us is a close ally of the United States, the battle for public opinion in the West assumes a disproportionate importance: ‘Mabbeley was as valuable to FAKOUM now as three tanks or a jet-fighter; maybe more valuable’ (13), Ng remarks in the hours before Mabbeley’s death. Ng is fully aware of the importance of disseminating accurate information. Letting his ironical guard slip for a moment and using an uncharacteristically respectful mode of address, he implores Mabbeley to make the outside world aware of the nation’s plight: ‘“You tell them the truth, Mr Mabbeley. Tell the world what’s happening.” I was embarrassed for myself as soon as I heard the words issuing from my mouth’ (11). Mabbeley is a dependable if far from impartial spokesperson for Danu’s cause: the ‘[r]idiculous, brave old bastard’ (96) wears a cast-off pair of Arsenio’s boots (86) and is seen at the Independence Day celebrations giving a clenched fist salute (96). Hence Ng’s narrative becomes after Mabbeley’s murder an attempt to compensate for the journalist’s death by producing for its readers an alternative (though far from objective) account of Danu’s colonisation and resistance. At the same time, less obviously, Ng’s narrative focuses our attention on the respective merits of literature and journalism. Or rather, The Redundancy of Courage is a surreptitious meditation on the


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capacity of fiction, which is by definition untruthful, to stand in for a putatively authoritative medium such as investigative journalism in order to attest to real atrocities and struggles. For all its flaws, Ng’s self-conscious narrative generates new and valuable kinds of understanding. For a start, his ambivalence and his detachment allow Ng insights unavailable to the undoubtedly heroic but nonetheless too fervent and unselfconscious figure of the guerrilla leader Osvaldo. ‘Osvaldo’, Ng remarks, ‘was efficient about anything he’d set his mind to, he was capable of clemency but – how can I put it? – like in one hundred per cent doses. He wasn’t a 50-50 liberal. For him the world was black and white, as I’ve had occasion to remark; it was part of his nobility and his baseness, too’ (231). It is wisdom born of marginality that enables Ng to discern the potential for fanaticism as well as the presence of great valour in Osvaldo’s dedication to the cause. Furthermore, Ng becomes a playfully satirical presence through a sort of low comedy of the body that mocks and to a degree subverts and calls into question the earnestness and self-discipline of his nationalist associates. His physical reactions to fear, his sexual peccadilloes, his acute awareness of his own body, even his habit of exposing himself to the amused washerwomen, are all related to the reader without shame or embarrassment. His very name is a marker of Ng’s bathetic and scatological humour: ‘My name is Adolph Ng. Please laugh. To pronounce it, imagine you have been constipated a long time. Now strain. There you have my surname’ (24). Likewise, Ng’s status as a ‘man of the world’ is the cause of both a regrettable distance from the independence struggle and from its fervent protagonists and a decidedly admirable sensitivity to the shortcomings of nationalism and nativism. His tolerant cosmopolitanism is more faithful to the movement’s principles than, say, the zeal and the aversion to ambiguity (138) that lead Osvaldo to preside over the massacre of his party’s Danuese opponents in the panicky aftermath of the invasion (229). Notwithstanding Osvaldo and Arsenio’s calculatedly ingratiating speeches to the rural ‘betel-chewing constituency’ (64) as well as his own sympathy for the FAKOUM, Ng is conscious that the nationalist programme is potentially exclusionary: ‘the bastards’ of the FAKOUM had ‘an unofficial Chinese exclusion policy’ (76) and ‘[i]t won’t surprise you that, to use his own expression, that mean son of a bitch [Arsenio] paid a great deal of lip-service to the idea of the emancipation of women’ (71). His own ostracism makes Ng sensitive to the ostracism of others. In other words, it is precisely his status as a ‘misfit’ that gives Ng a privileged insight into the national community and,

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in particular, into nationalism’s insufficiency, its aggressiveness, its hostility to outsiders, and its tendency to use the rhetoric of unity to cover over rather than address class and gender inequalities. There is a further reason why we must resist the temptation to dismiss Ng’s standpoint. The novel accentuates both the extreme difficulty of perceiving and narrating events authoritatively and the pitfalls that lie in wait for those prepared to rest easy with this conclusion. Nowhere is the reader allowed to feel comfortable with the obvious gulf between words and facts. The Redundancy of Courage places at the very forefront of its readers’ minds the full political and even existential consequences of denying the possibility that truth might be accessed by language. Hence for every occasion on which the official account is revealed by the novel to be propaganda the reader is made aware of the efforts of the Danuese to broadcast their plight. In short, for every anticommunist smear there is a desperate radio operator screaming in vain for help in heavily accented English (10). This is the second reason why the characterisation of Ng’s voice as unreliable would not constitute a satisfactory reading of the novel: The Redundancy of Courage associates the eschewal of truth less with sophisticated philosophical critiques of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ than with cynical misrepresentations of the facts aimed at concealing the reality of suffering and injustice. As Mo demonstrates and as Terry Eagleton has argued, power sustains itself not just by imposing its own version of events but also by preventing the emergence of alternative accounts. ‘The beginning of the good life’, Eagleton therefore contends, ‘is to try as far as possible to see the situation as it really is. It is unwise to assume that ambiguity, indeterminacy, undecidability are always subversive strikes against an arrogantly monological certitude; on the contrary, they are the stock-in-trade of many a juridical enquiry and official investigation’ (Eagleton, 1990, 379–80). To dismiss the notion of truth out of hand is to blind oneself to this strategy and to deprive oneself of the capacity to counter it with alternatives that, no matter how hedged as Mo’s is with admissions of partiality and incompleteness, seek to contest the dominant version. Hence the insistence with which the novel emphasises both the malais’ distortion of the real intentions and effects of their occupation and the equally forceful effort on the part of the Danuese to transmit an alternative narrative of their struggle. Before the invasion Arsenio and the other FAKOUM leaders are anxious to counteract the malais’ campaign of distortion with ‘an international PR drive’ of their own. They cultivate the handful of foreign journalists in Danu in an effort to explain their revolution and make known their neighbour’s malign


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intentions. As Ng remarks after a malai raiding party burns down a village in advance of the invasion, ‘we had to get into the frame of that bigger world’ (88). ‘It’s worth repeating’, he soon concludes: ‘if it doesn’t get on to TV in the West, it hasn’t happened’ (91; emphasis in original). ‘Well, I’ll give them their due’, he says elsewhere: ‘they appreciated their McLuhan, the FAKOUM boys and girls’ (72), which means, presumably, that they were awakened to the power and pervasiveness of the media. Their most powerful weapon in this regard is Joaquim Lobato, a character obviously modelled on José Ramos-Horta, East Timor’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and now the beleaguered president of that wounded country. The indefatigable Lobato, a former journalist, does the rounds of unsympathetic ambassadors in Canberra and then, stranded abroad by the invasion, assumes a ‘later career as FAKOUM torch-bearer and thorn in the malai side where it mattered – abroad’ (91). Danu’s representative for over a decade at the United Nations, where he meets the exiled Ng towards the end of the novel, the impecunious Lobato devotes himself, unsuccessfully but untiringly and not without swaying the sympathies of many onlookers, to lobbying the General Assembly to adopt a resolution censuring the malai invasion. Lobato tells Ng of the cynical realpolitik behind the West’s support for the malais and of the green light given to the invasion by the Americans. The magnitude of that collusion makes Western cities like New York – that for Ng seem so remote from the sharp end – and specifically the battle there to effect a change of policy by raising awareness, attracting sympathy and provoking corrective action, a key arena of the struggle: ‘“Remote?” he cried […] “This isn’t remote,” his voice shook. “This is where it’s determined; this is where it began; this is where it will end”’ (404).

Reading and resistance In the final third of the novel Ng is captured and put to work as a dogsbody and companion for Mrs Goreng, the wife of a sadistic malai colonel. Before long Mrs Goreng is placed in charge of escorting a delegation of foreign journalists around the Potemkin villages of the subjugated territory. They are cosseted, fawned over, fed crude euphemisms for ‘military dictatorship’ to use in their copy, flattered in their lordly preconceptions about Washington’s indelicate but essentially altruistic world role, induced to misrepresent the Bishop of Danu’s broadsides against the occupier, and spun transparent falsehoods about Danu’s ‘reunion’ with its conqueror and the mass base of the island’s integrationist party.11 In the end the journalists’ self-importance and

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incuriosity are not evident to their newspapers’ readers. But the journalists inadvertently reveal to Mo’s readers what is already known by Mrs Goreng’s contemptuous helpmeet: the unreliability of orthodox channels of information and therefore the gulf between reality and official truth. Asked by the German journalist Speich if he would like a message conveyed to the world beyond Danu, Ng responds with the simple injunction to ‘“write the truth” […] Speich said, “Truth is relative, Mr Ng. Like beauty it is in the eye of the beholder”’ (359). Yet if it is true that the novel demonstrates the moral deplorableness of this stance then the ostensible disillusionment of Ng’s eventual flight and exile in Brazil as well as the pessimism of the book’s title remain to be explained. We were correct to think that we had no control over our destinies: to consider that resistance was futile and bravery superfluous. From the start, our fate was determined not by ourselves, not locally or by the invader even, but abroad, in Canberra and Washington. That was why the malais had tried to destabilise the FAKOUM regime, to disseminate a campaign of lies […] The distortions of the press campaign provided so many pretexts which, however intrinsically flimsy, could be used to veil the issue, obfuscate. The disinformation – a word which had been much relished by Martinho who only heard it for the first time then – was as vital to the success of the invasion as the strafing and the barrage. (110) In its exposure of the ineffectiveness of physical resistance in this particular struggle against colonialism (the redundancy of courage), the novel mostly limits itself to exposing as well as reprehending the limitedness and partiality of official narratives about colonial power. It adheres to what R.P. Blackmur has called ‘the true business of literature, as of all intellect, critical or creative, which is to remind the powers that be, simple or corrupt as they are, of the turbulence they have to control’ (1955, 41). The novel’s primary task is to make apparent the gulf separating the turbulence of real lives and experiences from the official narratives that seek to obscure them, in Ng’s words to demonstrate that ‘an identity and a history cannot be obliterated with a switch of a name or a stroke of a pen’ (Mo, 1991, 406). Ng finds that in exile he is unable to ‘fashion a new notion of myself and impose it on others as truth’ (402): ‘I was trying to accomplish within my own small person what the malais hadn’t been able to do to a nation’ (406). What has come


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into being through suffering and struggle cannot easily be obscured or reinvented. The novel’s second aim is then to articulate its protagonist’s awareness that this insight is essential but insufficient. It shows, via the media’s gullibility and incuriosity for example, that the discrepancy between official and actual truth must be addressed in addition to being acknowledged. In other words, unless one is prepared to respond to the partiality of the dominant narrative by elaborating alternatives, then one might as well succumb to the cynicism and paralysis of a Speich. The task to which this second aspect of the novel directs us is the creation of alternatives to the official accounts and to the political, economic and military order that the official accounts uphold. Obviously this is not the responsibility of Ng, who is disillusioned, or of the novel, which narrates the failure of resistance and is after all just a novel. The ostensible disillusionment of The Redundancy of Courage is therefore a ruse: less an assertion that resistance is futile than a hard-headed declaration that resistance is hopeless in such a situation if works like Mo’s are not able to encourage alternative narratives that inspire solidarity and sympathetic action. Far from being a cry of despair then, the novel’s title is an illustration of the weakness of physical resistance faced with the political, military and ideological hegemony of powerful states as well as, just as importantly, an admission of the limits of fiction, which does not have it in its power to correct this state of affairs. In part, therefore, The Redundancy of Courage is a spur to the corrective actions of the novel’s readers in the distant but decisive Western metropolises whose centrality is stressed by Lobato, a plea for them to help in discharging the tasks which the novel inevitably leaves unfinished. Ng’s final peroration, then, refers equally to agents within East Timor and to distant readers awakened by Mo’s mediated representations of that territory: ‘The malais might have put the torch to the field, they might think they’ve exterminated all the creatures in it, but there’ll always be one woodchuck left. There always is’ (408). It is significant that Ng refers to ‘woodchucks’, the name he gives to his young charges during his time as a sapper. The indomitable opponents of official power to whom Ng appeals are not only those at the receiving end who have decided to contest it but also, crucially, Ng’s other protégés, the far-off readers who have been instructed and galvanised by his words. The main point I want to make about The Redundancy of Courage is that, unlike a great deal of scholarship in postcolonial studies, it is not satisfied with demonstrating the erroneousness and partiality of orthodox representations of distant societies like East Timor. Of course, it is prepared to discredit the propaganda disseminated by powerful states,

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to protest the fourth estate’s obedience to political power, and to censure the conformity and incuriosity of ordinary citizens. Indeed, it is the blatantly literary (as opposed to testimonial or reportorial) nature of Mo’s text or, what amounts to the same thing, its reliance on the openly partial and therefore questionable point of view of its protagonist, that draws the reader’s attention to the inevitable shortcomings of any effort to speak of a situation so distant, murky and contested, and so deliberately heaped over with misinformation. The novel encourages a critical assessment of various perspectives, including that of its protagonist and narrator plus those of the characters in the military and the media who seek to fill the gap between discourse and reality with misinformation. It is in spite and perhaps even because of that capacity to arouse its readers’ scepticism that the novel also incites dissatisfaction with the common, though – in the light of its utilisation by Speich as a rationale for cynicism and by the invaders as an instrument of deception – patently insufficient and morally censurable conclusion that what we say about the world can bear no relation to what actually takes place there. In short, The Redundancy of Courage promotes an appreciation of the possibilities of critical reading. This constitutes both the novel’s legacy and the precondition of any effective Western engagement with the situation that it dramatises. Indeed, the novel provides an indication of the way in which it wishes to be read. Before her husband’s posting to Danu, Mrs Goreng had worked for a women’s magazine penning ‘puff’ pieces about new restaurants and hotels and, on one occasion, a fawning interview with the malai president’s wife. But so strong is the captive Ng’s craving for information about the outside world after his long confinement to the guerrilla army’s remote fastnesses and so determined is his new employer to keep this former subversive from gaining access to useful news that he is forced to pick up information from the partisan monthlies that Mrs Goreng leaves lying about the house. He does so by reading critically: that is, attentively and sceptically, so as to detect the omissions and biases of the texts as well as to perceive the traces left by historical events on even the most trivial and slanted copy. In the middle of the trivia, the stuff that could easily have been 1930 or 1960, there was information for the gleaning. It wasn’t by any means a straightforward process. The articles of direct newsworthy interest in her magazine were as few and far between as the flecks of gold in a prospector’s pan. What you had to do was listen for the echo – not the report itself […] Thus I learned that Chaplin was dead and so was Elvis (I’d thought the former long since gone but this


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intelligence of Presley startled me), that Iranians had held Americans hostage, administered show trials and televised humiliation; that a geriatric cowboy had become President of the mightiest nation on earth – all in all, show biz news. (318) It is not just, as he quips, ‘show biz news’ that Ng gathers from perusing Mrs Goreng’s magazines but (as is suggested by the incongruity of thinking of news of Elvis’s death as ‘intelligence’) useful knowledge. Ng reads these texts critically: that is, in full awareness of their bias and incompleteness, and of their capacity to register if not of course adequately to represent a wider milieu. And so he learns from these discarded glossies something akin to what the reader ascertains from the text Ng writes: an inkling (though far from an exhaustive or disinterested chronicle) of important events, in addition to a grasp of the close relationship between showbiz and power or, put differently, of the reliance of political power on power over the promulgation of information, images and narratives. The ‘mightiest nation on earth’ and authoritarian regimes in Iran and Indonesia depend on sowing confusion between truth and fiction. What distinguishes the novel from the magazine, however, is that the intense self-consciousness of the former encourages the critical reading to which the latter is merely susceptible. The novel advertises rather than conceals the gap between text and truth and it therefore positively entreats its readers to cup their ears to the echo of distant events. By telling the story through the fragmentary and idiosyncratic, but admirably curious, self-aware, fair-minded and at times also principled voice of Adolph Ng, Mo gives us an idea of the difficulties as well as the rewards and even the moral and political necessity of seeking knowledge about distant and hitherto obscure situations. The reader is encouraged to look inwards before looking outwards: to seek to understand others only on the basis of the most stringent reflection on one’s own biases and one’s vulnerability to the media’s distortions. Thus at the end of the novel Ng’s Canadian college friend Annie’s religiose missive condemns from her own mouth the ignorance of the average Western reader and reveals the enormous chasm between her simplistic preconceptions and the realities and complexities illuminated by the novel we have just read (399–400): ‘You must be glad the terrorists have gone away’, she tells the ‘terrorist’ veteran Ng, who offers no comment. Just as he was commendably willing to allow his other protégés to show initiative under minimal supervision he refrains from adding his customary gloss because presumably by now he is confident that

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we readers can see through such misinformation and condemn such reprehensible ingenuousness. Annie’s letter stands indicted by the reader’s awareness of (though not of course his or her direct acquaintance with) the violence perpetrated by military powers that spin yarns about combating terrorism. One can read in works like Mo’s protests against the misrepresentations and falsifications perpetrated by dominant narratives as well as, if not the report itself, then at least an echo of the reality those narratives silence.

Conclusion None of what I have been saying about the constructive potential of reading and scholarship in the West is intended to dispute the postcolonial field’s founding contention that a very great deal of what Europeans and North Americans think, write and do in relation to other parts of the globe is erroneous and harmful. What I have been saying is that the consequences of responding to these misrepresentations by not representing the oppressed or by compounding the suspicion that they cannot be represented from the outside are wastefully oblivious of the beneficial effects of committed postcolonial criticism. If Said’s insights into the injuriousness of most Western representations of the non-Western world are not to license cynicism and various kinds of intellectual withdrawal then they need to preface an acknowledgement that other forms of representation are possible, ones less dogmatic and inflexible than the dominant versions as well as more painstaking, more perspicacious, and more conscious of the human details contained in the picture one is endeavouring to paint. As Keya Ganguly has shown, the correct response to a situation in which careful representations are crowded out by formulaic ones is not ‘a pendulum swing to the opposite extreme of epistemological uncertainty and theoretical relativism’ (2002, 243). The rigour and insistence of Said’s critique of Orientalist forms of knowledge is matched only by the alacrity and pertinacity with which, in the rest of his work, he proceeded to think through the even more pressing problem of ‘how the production of knowledge best serves communal, as opposed to sectarian, ends; how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions, and the strategies of power’ (Said, 2000, 200). No sufficient let alone flawless expression of the lives and aspirations of marginal groups is possible from a position so compromised by distance and by the history and actuality of imperial power. Interpretation is too sketchy, too


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provisional, too warped by the cultural and other investments of the interpreter – in short, too fallible – for the voices of marginalised and oppressed groups to be rendered adequately by percipients in the West. Nevertheless paralysis and incomprehension are not the only alternatives to the prevailing myopia. There is also, as Said avers and as his work exhibits, the thorny but not unfeasible or trifling task of transcending incomprehension in order to accomplish something like knowledge, empathy and solidarity. There are then the alternatives either of silence, exile, cunning, withdrawal into self and solitude, or more to my liking, though deeply flawed and perhaps too marginalized, that of the intellectual whose vocation it is to speak the truth to power, to reject the official discourse of orthodoxy and authority, and to exist through irony and skepticism, mixed in with the languages of the media, government, and dissent, trying to articulate the silent testimony of lived suffering and stifled experience. There is no sound, no articulation that is adequate to what injustice and power inflict on the poor, the disadvantaged, and the disinherited. But there are approximations to it, not representations of it, which have the effect of punctuating discourse with disenchantment and demystifications. To have that opportunity is at least something. (Said, 2000, 526; emphasis in the original) By encouraging us to ‘listen for the echo’ not the report itself, postcolonial literature can amplify the otherwise silent testimony of the oppressed, can discompose our ignorance and complacency, and can make us aware of unheeded experiences, unanticipated realities and disregarded or suppressed aspirations. It does so in forms that are invariably accompanied by an ironical sense of the breach between a complex reality and the relative powerlessness of mere writing. It gives us representations hedged by doubt, conscious of their own contestability and of literature’s marginality and relative impotence when compared with the awesome facts of violence and resistance. Yet novels are composed because literary writing and the equally uncertain forms of illumination and edification of which it is capable are preferable to the political failure that is guaranteed by silence and the refusal to even countenance, let alone attempt, communication between cultures. Critics who fail to emphasise the possibility, actuality and desirability of such crosscultural contact are prone unintentionally to impugn and perhaps to deter the acts of conscience and solidarity of which even citizens of

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imperial states like Britain and the United States are capable. Though the potential effects of such acts pale in comparison to the tangible and potential results of the self-representations of the oppressed themselves, those effects are not negligible. José Ramos Horta’s 1987 book on East Timor is obviously one of Mo’s sources. It is a work animated by its author’s rage at the subjugation of his compatriots, at the connivance of Indonesia’s powerful accomplices, and at the cynicism of the Western press. It is also distinguished by its faith in the frequent sympathy and solidarity shown by what Ng calls ‘the educated and interested (few enough in all conscience) of the metropolises of the West’ (Mo, 1991, 339). Postcolonial criticism is, ideally, a version and perhaps even a catalyst of what Ramos-Horta calls ‘the dimension of people’s solidarity that breaks political frontiers, race and creed’ (1987, 204). The shortcomings of Orientalism (as well as the shortcomings of Orientalism) do not diminish but considerably increase the opportunities for progressive intellectual practice. Elaborating alternatives to ‘the official discourse of orthodoxy and authority’ analysed by Said is an endeavour which I think should allow postcolonialists to perform all kinds of useful critical work, including (my own project in this study) analyses of the ways in which postcolonial literary texts do not just dramatise the colonial condition but try also to imagine their way beyond it. ‘The political edge of fiction’, as Jacqueline Rose has written in a valedictory essay on Said, ‘is its ability to undo one thing, so that we can imagine something other, something better, in its place’ (2008, 28). In the end of course, the postcolonialist is like Walter Benjamin’s ‘destructive critic’; he devotes most of his energies to critique. But critique is neither the sole focus of his work nor its objective. He never allows his awareness of the pervasiveness of established ideologies or his inhabitation of a society suffused by them to trail off into cynicism and despair. This careful self-situating entails vigilance not lassitude, dissidence and solidarity where before one might have been beguiled or intimidated by orthodoxy’s prevalence. ‘What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it’ (Benjamin, 1992, 159).

8 Conclusion

The focus of postcolonial criticism has been affected quite profoundly by the Bush administration’s belligerent response to the attacks of September 2001; by its contempt for the existing multilateral system of global governance; by what the legal scholar Philippe Sands has called its ‘war on law’ (2005, xii); by its brazen scheme for a ‘New American Century’; and by its resort, under pressure from competing economies and from political resistance in the global South, to a nationalist strategy of protectionism, ‘full spectrum dominance’ and what David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2003, 137–82). The power of the United States is world-encircling but nonetheless, as Michael Mann (2005) and Immanuel Wallerstein (2003) have noted and as the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved, limited. The desire to create a functionally integrated global economy under the leadership of the United States may have stalled or even gone into reverse, as Walden Bello has argued (2006). The Italian political economist Giovanni Arrighi has shown that ‘the new imperialism of the Project for a New American Century probably marks the inglorious end of the sixty-year long struggle of the United States to become the organizing center of a world state’ (2007, 261). Iraq’s assailants have done us the service of demonstrating that the world as it is currently organised is not a chrysalis from which a cosmopolis of democracy and prosperity will simply issue forth. They have unmasked the folly of ignoring capitalism’s overpowering centrality, of understanding imperialism chiefly in cultural and epistemological terms, and of overlooking the abortive, halffinished nature of the decolonisation process, which over the past few decades has been deformed, suppressed and, where the world’s foremost powers have deemed this expedient, ‘rolled back’ (Bello et al., 1999). Though we are citizens of diverse locations and outlooks, we are already 191

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interconnected, more often than not in antagonistic and exploitative ways. The task remains to recognise these connections and to set about turning them into conscious and equitable ones and therefore into cosmopolitan allegiances, convictions and forms of life. For as the editors of a recent volume of essays on the state of postcolonial studies have averred, this constitutes the most significant challenge facing democratic thought: what visions of a postcolonial world can we as humanists offer that will interrogate, perhaps even interrupt, the forms of globalization now dictated by politicians, military strategists, captains of finance and industry, fundamentalist preachers and theologians, terrorists of the body and the spirit, in short, by the masters of our contemporary universe? (Loomba et al., 2005, 13) It is because I don’t think enough effort has been devoted by postcolonial scholars to this vital question that I have acclaimed the ideal of cosmopolitanism. In other words, we should use our cognisance of the baleful durability of imperialism as an incentive to formulate cosmopolitan alternatives. Alas, however, there is often a frustrating imprecision to the way the term is used in discussions about culture. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ tends to signify a kind of ethos or lifestyle. But cosmopolitanism, as I see it, means trans-national solidarities aimed at transcending the divided and unequal present by creating and maintaining cosmopolitan institutions. Cosmopolites, as Robert Fine has argued, are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they insist on seeing cosmopolitanism as a social order that demands laws and institutions then they risk making it look like a distant and even unfeasible utopia. But if they overcompensate and depict cosmopolitanism as a reality here and now then they risk making it indistinguishable from the present. Sometimes they seem to construct an image of the world as it ought to be that has little connection with the world as it is; at other times they seem to leave the world of power politics roughly as they find it – merely painting over its cracks with a bright cosmopolitan gloss. (Fine, 2003, 466; emphasis in the original) Perhaps therefore, we should describe the task of constructing cosmopolitanism, after Raymond Williams, as a ‘long revolution’ (1961)

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in attitudes, values and institutions, provided that, as Williams once pointed out to critics who accused him of losing his radical edge, we place as much emphasis on ‘revolution’ as on ‘long’ (Williams, 1980, 244). This is why all of the chapters in this study present cosmopolitanism as a disposition embraced by many individuals, movements and communities as well as one that looks forward to more expansive cosmopolitan forms of life, to new institutions, legal frameworks, economic arrangements, and so on. Cosmopolitanism is defanged as an idea when it is deprived of this political element. It becomes a marketing gimmick, impossible to tell apart from capitalism. Hence I have rejected Berthold Schoene’s view in The Cosmopolitan Novel (2010, 10) that ‘the new cosmopolitanism is rooted in the realities of the present rather than mobilising for the future fulfilment of any one or other set of utopian ideals’. Cosmopolitanism’s strength, in my view, is its unabashed utopianism. This position at least has the virtue of positing a definition precise enough to disagree with. Perhaps it will encourage others to spell out what they mean by the term. For me, to be explicit, cosmopolitanism is a political goal: one that, as Daniele Archibugi makes clear, calls not just for global responsibility but actually attempts to apply consistently the principles of democracy and human rights within states, between states and at the world level (Archibugi, 2003a, 7–8). I am referring to expansive communities of sentiment much greater in scope than the lesser allegiances of nation, religion or race, communities with a sense of solidarity robust enough to call into being and then sustain comprehensive institutions such as a working international legal system, a democratic United Nations, an International Clearing Union to help poor countries clear their debt, a Fair Trade Organisation to engineer development, even – who knows? – a global assembly.1 Perhaps there should be no attempt to pre-empt the democratic process by decreeing in advance what a cosmopolitan condition would look like. ‘We have to ensure the means of life, and the means of community’, to quote Williams again. ‘But what will then, by these means, be lived, we cannot know or say’ (1962, 321). Assuredly, however, I would add that I have the strongest conviction that a developing consciousness of global solidarity along with a growing antipathy to the violent divisiveness of the ‘colonial present’ will eventually contrive appropriate institutions. Cosmopolitanism is certainly foretold in literary texts and its harbingers are often edified and inspired by reading them, but it is not instated there. Put simply, I have been thinking about the relationship between representation and anticipation: about the way in which

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acutely self-reflexive and polysemic postcolonial texts can persuade their readers to think critically about dominant representations of the postcolonial world and thereby acquire attitudes, dispositions, and sympathies appropriate to the creation and maintenance of a cosmopolitan order. Therefore I have tried to lay as much emphasis on the faculty of ‘criticism’ as on the doctrine of ‘cosmopolitanism’. It is not enough to believe or declare oneself to be cosmopolitan. Every avowal of cosmopolitanism should in my view be accompanied by the most stringent self-criticism of the kind I have been trying to show is encouraged by the texts I have analysed. Too often political leaders and others assume political responsibility for citizens in other parts of the world without undertaking anything remotely resembling critical introspection. We need to be extremely careful not to mistake the priorities of a tiny class fraction in the major Western powers for the interests of humanity as a whole. There can have been few more cosmopolitan statements made by Western politicians than Tony Blair’s party conference speeches and George Bush’s second inaugural address, which are replete with high-sounding aspirations to spread liberty and happiness across the globe. The only problem, of course, is that these purportedly cosmopolitan ideals were in fact deeply parochial. Or better, Blair and Bush understood and then imposed them in parochial ways. The closure of state-run factories in Iraq, the firing of hundreds of thousands of state employees, the rewriting of Iraqi law to favour big business, the repatriation of profits by Western firms, the inhibition of trades unions and the exclusion of Iraqis from reconstruction and supply contracts were all intended to bring about a free market utopia in that country (Hughes, 2008; Klein, 2007, 325–82). Instead this litany of mismanagement, all of which is contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention’s expectations of an occupying power, has triggered unemployment and scarcity. Combined with the casual violence of the occupying forces, it has served only to fuel the resistance. What is at fault here is not the desire to aid liberation in far-flung countries but the attempt to do so without sufficient awareness of the place one is trying to make over, without humility or self-knowledge, and therefore without any insight into the expediency and self-interest often lurking behind credulous or hypocritical avowals of humanitarian purpose. It is not enough to believe or profess oneself cosmopolitan. For a critical attitude towards the doctrines that govern one’s own and one’s nation’s presence in the world is equally essential if we are to avoid mistaking self-interest for altruism. Of course, if we lack faith that imperialism can be replaced

Conclusion 195

by a different system then we are engaging in nothing more than the protracted fault-finding I censured at the start of the chapter on Mo. But glibness and naivety, not to mention complicity in the survival of our decidedly uncosmopolitan present, are the fate that awaits those who delude themselves into thinking that cosmopolitanism is a benefaction dispensed by established powers – powers that actually benefit from the perpetuation of division, inequality and exploitation behind a rhetoric of humanitarian selflessness. My first chapter was an attempt to show scholars and students working in the field of postcolonial studies that they would do well to adapt Kant’s maxim about concepts and intuitions: criticism without cosmopolitanism is empty; cosmopolitanism without criticism is blind. Hence my claim for the importance of literary analysis, which is ideally both an example of the critical outlook and a spur to its cultivation. Criticism, as Edward Said argues, is the capacity to place received and apparently indubitable truths back in the realm of history from which they emerged and in which they can be examined, evaluated and if necessary refined or transformed. Literary criticism is in part the practised capacity to show one’s readers how texts perform this function (Said, 1983, 1–30). It is no accident, in short, that a popular synonym for literary criticism is simply ‘criticism’: the purpose of the former is to nurture the latter. Waiting for the Barbarians is one example of a literary text that employs its ‘literariness’ – that is, the contestability of its voices, the indeterminate and uncertain way in which it represents its colonial milieu, as well as its manifest susceptibility to interpretation – to provoke a new kind of heightened awareness in its readers. This enthusiastic promotion of readerly involvement entails a newly critical engagement with the voices dramatised by the text, an engagement that is all at once sensitive, penetrating and introspective. In the case of Coetzee’s novel, this state of critical awareness does battle with the various situations, including, I have argued, our own, in which an ideological barrier is erected between those who see themselves (wrongly) as civilised and those who are routinely dismissed (unconscionably) as barbarians. Similarly, Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage compels reflection on dominant representations of the postcolonial world prevalent in the fourth estate and in government propaganda. Those representations lie about or simply silence the experiences and aspirations of tortured places like East Timor. But in spite of the severe difficulty of getting outside mainstream narratives, the novel employs its peculiarly self-conscious narrative voice to enjoin from its readers a similarly selfconscious but also conscionable and even practical engagement with

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distant sufferings. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses does what the novel as a form exists to do; since it is itself an openly imaginative and therefore inherently fallible and untrustworthy form of expression, the novel serves to arouse in its readers the faculty of scepticism about purportedly inviolable texts and truths and therefore about dogmatic religion as well as complacent faith in the political and institutional arrangements of societies like Thatcher’s Britain, all of which are satirised quite mercilessly in Rushdie’s novel. Rushdie makes a case for seeing the novel as a way of relativising and contesting fixed ideas: a form of dissent ‘from imposed orthodoxies of all types, from the view that the world is quite clearly This and not That’ (1991, 396). It dissents from the end of dissent. This is what makes The Satanic Verses so profoundly critical of all dogmatic and exclusionary ideas and therefore what enables it to encourage a cosmopolitan sensibility in its readers. Something similar can be said of W.B. Yeats’s late poems. Their recondite quality, by which I mean the indeterminacy of their images and their assiduous avoidance of explicit political statements, is the means by which they provoke intellectual exertion. This is what makes late Yeats so aesthetically appealing as well as politically effective. Yeats’s late works were among the first to promote critical reflection on the received practice of anti-colonial nationalism and therefore to explore cosmopolitan modes of belonging as aspects of a wider process of political liberation. In all these cases, the texts’ indeterminacy is matched by their obvious incompleteness, what I have referred to on several occasions as their allegorical nature by their unfinishedness. They require and even positively entreat the involvement of their readers. Moreover, the situations they dramatise, which I have been endeavouring to show are situations in which the divisions brought about by imperialism have definitely not been brought to an end, are themselves radically incomplete. This is what makes them postcolonial: their composition and circulation in situations of rumbustious political, economic and cultural interaction, situations that give rise to forms of violence and exploitation (torture, occupation, racism, the silencing of dissent and so on) but that also entail, albeit at lower volume, the exploration of radical new forms of moral and political community (expanded forms of awareness and empathy, the eschewal of exclusionary cultural and political dogmas, a desire to transcend national consciousness). All of these works strive to recruit their readers to the political tasks they depict but cannot accomplish: the practical supersession of imperial forms of rule. The resistance acclaimed by Mo’s Adolph Ng at the conclusion of The Redundancy of Courage, the unappeased disenchantment of Yeats’s late

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poems, the ongoing moral and political transformation of Coetzee’s Magistrate, and The Satanic Verses’ refusal to rest easy with restrictive choices, make all the works analysed in this study exemplifications of the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s invaluable dictum that the best books do not end on the last page (1983, 56). It came as something of a surprise to me when researching this study that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy came to play such a prominent role in my thinking. But no other thinker seems to have put into such compelling words the precise connection between literary analysis and cosmopolitan awareness. The affirmative and even normative aspect of Ricoeur’s philosophy is found in his conviction that we are fallible, fragile beings, connected by bonds of common humanity to the vast, involuntary world that exceeds our autonomous powers: ‘my humanity is my essential community with all that is human outside myself; that community makes every man my like’ (1965, 93). Moreover, we can be awakened to this community via the kinds of reflection engendered by aesthetic experience. Conscientiousness is therefore the guiding principle of our inhabitation of the world for Ricoeur: what we say is the product of dialogue, what we think the product of discussion, and what we do the product of interaction. The good life will be lived, according to Oneself as Another, when we have discovered social arrangements that conform to the principles of deliberation and solicitude. Hermeneutics aims, ultimately, ‘at the good life with and for others in just institutions’ (1994, 180; emphasis in the original). Though Ricoeur’s thought begins with a strictly philosophical investigation of the mediated character of understanding, its own momentum carries it towards a consideration of the ethical possibilities of human interaction and, ultimately, towards an affirmation of the cosmopolitan outlooks and institutions required to enshrine this latent mutuality.2 For Ricoeur hermeneutic understanding necessitates the critical selfconsciousness and the itinerant receptiveness to new experiences that are the twin bases of the enlarged self, which, I have been arguing, is the precondition of a cosmopolitan consciousness. I agree with Ricoeur that literary interpretation is one means (and by no means the least consequential) of criticising parochialism, self-assertion, and misplaced ideological certainty: of struggling, in Ricoeur’s phrase, ‘against cultural distance’ (1981, 159). By presenting orthodox perspectives with irony and with a sense of their susceptibility to the rejoinders of other voices, the process of literary interpretation encourages a much wider interrogation of established institutions and structures of power. Interpretative encounters with literary texts are catalysts not just for reflection and

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self-reflection but also, crucially, for what Ricoeur calls ‘distanciation’: the intellectual freedom to examine, evaluate and ultimately overthrow and replace the parochial preconceptions and allegiances that go to make up ‘the experience of belonging’ (1978, 313). All postcolonial literary texts are composed and involved in situations of cultural, political and economic conflict as well as various forms of exchange, negotiation and interaction. Not all of them respond to those situations in the same way as the texts analysed in this study. But those that do respond with an acute sensitivity to colonialism’s unwarranted endurance, and to their own potential for awakening their readers and making us in every sense more worldly, vindicate Edward Said’s dictum that the activity of criticism demands attention and sways minds only when it is oriented towards a normative political goal: ‘And what is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?’ (1983, 257).

Notes 1 Introduction: Sound upon Silence 1. Incidentally, Mansfield Park, contrary to what Edward Said has said about it (Said, 1994a, 100–16), can be read as a work that does not so much collude in the silence about slavery that greets its protagonist’s enquiry about the subject as draw attention to that silence and rebuke the insularity and selfishness of those who tolerate it. In every class with which I have discussed this novel the majority of students have thought Said’s to be an inadequate reading. What is missing from his response to Mansfield Park, as Susan Fraiman (1995) and others (Sunderrajan and Park, 2004) have argued, is any sensitivity to the ability of Austen’s novel not just to register the importance of Britain’s Caribbean holdings at a time of intensifying Anglo-French competition but also to encourage an oblique but to the attentive critic quite apparent protest against Sir Thomas’s holdings, against the claustrophobia of Mansfield Park, and against English society’s treatment of women and slaves. 2. Laura Chrisman too has reminded us of the global dimensions and aspirations of anti-colonial nationalism (2004). 3. Annie Cottier drew this example to my attention. Such cosmopolitan ‘moments’ form the subject of her doctoral thesis.

2

Competing Cosmopolitanisms

1. Williams’s original remark, in the context of a discussion of nuclear disarmament, is: ‘[t]o build peace, now more than ever, it is necessary to build more than peace’ (1989b, 209). That is, if peace between nations is to be achieved then the root political and economic causes of their antipathy must be addressed. 2. On the new social movements see the contributors to Tom Mertes (2004). 3. See also Fredric Jameson (1998).

3

Cosmopolitan Criticism

1. On the possibilities of cosmopolitan citizenship see also Gerard Delanty (2000), Nigel Dower (2000), Richard Falk (1996) and William Smith (2007). 2. This commitment, as Neil Lazarus explains in a discussion of Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1994b), is derived ‘from the kind of engaged (and, indeed, enraged!) citizenship that Said has elsewhere termed “worldly”: an active searching out and public presentation of connections, contrasts and alternatives that shades necessarily and ineluctably into the framing and articulation of political demands’ (2005b, 117; emphasis in the original). 3. I have discussed the importance of German comparative philology in Said’s intellectual formation in ‘Edward Said and the War in Iraq’ (Spencer, 2006). 199

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Notes

4. The growing recognition of the need for postcolonial critics to focus on the particular forms of knowledge and edification enabled by literature has been catalysed by critical attention to Edward Said’s work on aesthetics, particularly his insistence ‘that there is a fundamental irreconcilability between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic’ (Said, 2004a, 63). See Katherine Fry (2008) and Nicholas Harrison (2009). See also Elleke Boehmer’s discussion of the ‘postcolonial aesthetic’ (2010). 5. See Stephen Prickett (1998).

4 Late Yeats: ‘Beating upon the Wall of the Irish Free State’ 1. All references to Yeats’s poems are taken from the Variorum edition. Page references are given after VP in parentheses in the text. 2. See also Paddison (1995, 233–42), Nicholsen (1999), Solomon (2003), Rosengard Subotnik (1994) and Sample (1994). 3. Studies that shed light on the development of Yeats’s political thinking include Foster’s biography, which charts the evolution of Yeats’s politics through his poetry; Marjorie Howes on what she calls Yeats’s ‘ambivalent’ nationalism (1998) and Michael Wood on Yeats’s poetic exploration of violence (2010). 4. This is not, of course, to excuse Yeats’s brief dalliance with the far right, though it is perhaps to take issue with well-known ad hominem denunciations of his work by George Orwell (1970), Conor Cruise O’Brien (1965) and Seamus Deane (1987). 5. On Yeats’s campaign against the Censorship of Publications Bill in 1928 and his ‘passionate support for freedom of artistic expression’ see Martin (2006, 81–90). 6. Whatever his aristocratic posturing, it seems that for Yeats Coole also represented the freedom to write unfettered by economic or political pressure. ‘This house has enriched my soul out of measure, because here life moves without restraint through spacious forms. Here there has been no compelled labour, no poverty-thwarted impulse’ (Yeats, 1972, 226). 7. That fear, and the imagery of the poem’s opening stanza are traceable to an article in the Manchester Guardian in 1913 where Yeats warned that if the people of Dublin did not meet the condition of Hugh Lane’s bequest of his collection of impressionist paintings then the ‘intellectual movement’ will be defeated and ‘Ireland will for many years become a little huckstering nation, groping for halfpence in a greasy till’ (quoted in Foster, 1997, 494). The tone is snooty but the objection is defensible enough; Yeats is for the intellectual possibilities of aesthetic experience and against a kind of philistine pennypinching. 8. In other words, it is necessary to continue the debate commenced by Auden in the spring of 1939 in an entertaining little piece in which he imagined the late poet’s sometimes reactionary views being placed on trial. Regardless of the poet’s private views, the counsel for the defence presents Yeats’s work as evidence of a persistent rejection of stultifying certainties (Auden, 1977, 393). 9. If ‘quiet’ is a noun and recalls ‘quietus’ then the line might equally describe the temptation of death, which would support the first reading. The ‘acre of grass’ is then ‘God’s acre’: the graveyard.

Notes 201 10. Yeats’s epitaph, dictated at the end of ‘Under Ben Bulben’, in which he commands the horseman to ‘pass by’ (VP, 640), does in fact resemble the instruction on Timon’s grave’s to onlookers to ‘pass and stay / not here thy gait’ (V.iv.73). 11. Another of Yeats’s poems about Robert Gregory, ‘Reprisals’, which was suppressed at his mother Augusta Gregory’s request, is far more explicit about this repudiation of national chauvinism. Gregory, who was killed fighting for Britain, is urged to ‘rise from your Italian tomb’ because Britain’s ‘Halfdrunk or whole-mad soldiery’ are murdering his tenants at Coole in the Anglo-Irish War. 12. On the anti-Revivalist impulses of much Irish poetry after Yeats see Elmer Andrews (1992), Matthew Campbell (2003), Neil Corcoran (1997) and John Goodby (2000). 13. Both Russ McDonald (2010) and Simon Palfrey (1997) have refuted convincingly the view that Shakespeare’s late romances are concerned with repose and reconciliation. 14. Yeats’s belief that the six counties of Northern Ireland could be ‘won in the end’ not through force but through the example of good, non-sectarian governance (quoted in Foster, 2003, 277) anticipates Terry Eagleton’s (1999) non-nationalist case for a united Ireland. That is, Yeats too envisaged in Ireland a form of community based on something other than religious, cultural or ethnic divisions. 15. Undoubtedly Yeats’s most caustic account of ‘the dissolution of a school of patriotism that held sway over my youth’ and its replacement by what he saw as an ignoble and prosaic form of chauvinism is his essay on ‘J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’ (1961, 311–42).

5 J.M. Coetzee and the ‘War on Terror’ 1. As is well known, the scene recalls the apparatus that methodically inscribes the name of the offence on the body of its perpetrator in Franz Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1999). 2. The faculty of empathy is not restricted in Coetzee’s work to relations between humans. I do not have the space to do justice to this topic, which has been very instructively analysed by some of the contributors to Jane Poyner’s volume (2006) and by Louis Tremaine (2003). 3. Claims that events since 2001 have blotted the USA’s otherwise pristine copybook are unsustainable (Harbury, 2006; McCoy, 2006; Otterman, 2007), a point made by Stephen Grey (2006) who compares the secret rendition programme to the CIA’s ‘outsourcing’ of torture to dictatorial regimes during the Cold War. 4. I have taken this maxim from Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001, xi). 5. Numerous critics have therefore beseeched a greater engagement in postcolonial studies with the durability of imperialism and with the diverse ways in which literary texts register and resist that durability (Brennan, 2006; Dirlik, 1997; Eagleton, 1998b; Lazarus, 2005a, 2006; Parry, 2004b). 6. I am referring to the issue of the British government’s attempts, on the basis of flimsy ‘memoranda of understanding’, to deport terrorist suspects

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

Notes to countries such as Libya and Jordan where they are at risk of torture; its complicity, according to an authoritative Council of Europe report, in the United States’s ‘rendition’ of detainees; and its willingness to act on intelligence obtained by torture in, for example, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. See Iain Cobain (2009). I will not address the question of the guilt or otherwise of individuals subjected to torture during the ‘war on terror’. For all I know, many of them might be guilty. But in the eyes of the law this is not important, for there are no justifications for torture nor exceptions to its prohibition. In any case, guilt is a status determined by due process and courts of law not by military tribunals or through forced confessions. The United Nations Convention Against Torture is quite explicit on this point: ‘No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture’, http://untreaty.un.org/ english/treatyevent2001/pdf/07e.pdf. Amnesty International provides the most accessible account of the legal basis of that prohibition and of the reasons why it must not be compromised. Torture is prohibited indisputably and in all circumstances; is a notoriously ineffective technique of interrogation; corrodes the rule of law; and legitimises the use of violence by the state and therefore tends to spread throughout the criminal justice system. See ‘No Hiding Place for Torture’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/ library/asset/ACT40/008/2008/en/7d1f366a-2d94-11dd-a96c-df479ae1e786/ act400082008eng.pdf. Alan Dershowitz’s reprehensible proposal that ‘torture warrants’ should be issued in ‘exceptional’ circumstances (Levinson, 2004, 257–80) has been meticulously dismantled by Elaine Scarry (Levinson, 2004, 281–90), who shows it to be based on faulty and contradictory reasoning. Such a scheme would be likely to normalise torture and extend its use. I agree with Scarry that the ‘liberal’ argument for torture is utterly specious and with Slavoj Žižek that ‘it gives legitimacy to torture, and thus opens up the space for more illicit torture’ (Žižek, 2002b, 103). Those articles subsequently formed part of Hersh’s book Chain of Command (2005). This belief that the President in his capacity as commander-in-chief is entitled to suspend the rule of law in wartime is essentially a restatement of Schmitt’s theory of the ‘state of emergency’ that frees the executive from legal restraint. See Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (2005, 3–4). On Coetzee’s distinctive strategies of intellectual intervention see Jane Poyner’s J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (2006). See also Clarence Karier (1990). I am thinking here in particular of Teresa Dovey’s book on Coetzee (1988), which interprets the novels as ‘Lacanian allegories’ or illustrations of the self’s irremediable entrapment within language; of Susan VanZanten Gallagher’s presentation of the Magistrate as a postmodernist disillusioned with language, dialogue, communication and politics (1991, 122); and of Lance Olsen’s (1985) postmodern reading of Waiting for the Barbarians as a novel about absence and meaninglessness. This common interpretation has been refuted convincingly by Barbara Eckstein (1989). Lazarus has made a similar point about all dissident white writers in apartheid South Africa: ‘This literature

Notes 203 must now be defined not only by its marginality and acute self-consciousness. And one is tempted to ask whether a literature displaying these characteristics, and written after – and frequently even in the idiom of – Kafka and Beckett and, for that matter, Kundera, could be anything other than modernist; especially when it is borne in mind that as a discourse it is so ethically saturated, so humanistic in its critique of the established order, so concerned to represent reality, and so rationalistic that it would be quite inappropriate to describe it as postmodernist’ (Lazarus, 1987, 148; emphases in the original). 14. For an extended analysis of the ways in which language has been manipulated in order to justify the so-called ‘war on terror’ see Richard Jackson (2005). Intriguingly, several of the epigraphs in Jackson’s book are taken from Waiting for the Barbarians. See also Simpson (2005). 15. The ‘torture memo’ was submitted by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002. Capriciously and without any legal precedent, the memo restricted the definition of torture to pain ‘equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death’ (Danner, 2005, 115).

6 Refuse to Choose, or, How to Read The Satanic Verses 1. See also John McLeod’s instructive analysis of The Satanic Verses’ London setting (2004, 147–57). 2. Fernando Coronil (1996) and Neil Lazarus (2002) both criticise the widespread practice of framing political and economic conflicts in cultural and geographical terms. 3. ‘Rushdie Knighted in Honours List’, BBC News, 15 June 2007, http://news. bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6756149.stm. 4. ‘To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are of course more complicated than that’ (Kundera, 1996, 85–6). 5. ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils [sic] party without knowing it’ (Blake, 1977, 182).

7 ‘Listening for the echo’: Representation and Resistance in Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage 1. There are many anthologies of and introductions to postcolonial theory. Although they invariably include extracts from Orientalism, they rarely include a flavour of Said’s writings on the Palestinians, his work on humanism, his attacks on post-structuralist orthodoxy, his most cogent philosophical statements in Beginnings (1997a) and Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), or his extensive literary and musical criticism (Childs and Williams, 1997; Gandhi, 1998; Loomba, 2005; McLeod, 2000; MooreGilbert, 1997). Included in Valerie Kennedy’s (2000) and Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia’s (2001) books on Said are useful discussions of Said’s writings on the Palestinians but not a substantial treatment of these other preoccupations. Abdirahman A. Hussein’s book on Said, which includes a section on

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

Notes the ‘critical misreception’ of Orientalism, is altogether more comprehensive (2002). The only scholarly consideration of the novel that I could lay my hands on was a brief review by Paul Sharrad (1992), which misunderstands the nature and pertinence of its narrative method. See Guha (1997) and Chaturvedi (2000). On Spivak’s interest in pedagogy see her ‘Teaching for the Times’ (1995). For Spivak, as for other Marxist scholars such as Samir Amin (1988, vii–xiii) and Neil Lazarus (2004, 12–13), Eurocentrism and Orientalism are not intrinsic features of the European mind but ideologies: dense, pervasive, even insidious, but ultimately susceptible to critique and revision. ‘One cannot of course “choose” to step out of ideology’, Spivak writes. ‘The most responsible “choice” seems to be to know it as best one can, recognize it as best one can, and through one’s necessarily inadequate interpretation, to work to change it’ (1987, 120). For example: ‘Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent, and I designed it that way: I didn’t want Foucault’s method, or anybody’s method, to override what I was trying to put forward. The notion of a kind of non-coercive knowledge, which I come to at the end of the book, was deliberately antiFoucault’ (Said, 2004b, 80). This second position was outlined with greater gusto and less ambivalence in ‘The Politics of Knowledge’ (in Said 2000, 372–85). ‘The discovery I made about Foucault […] was that, despite the fact that he seemed to be a theorist of power, obviously, and kept referring to resistance, he was really the scribe of power. He was really writing about the victory of power. I found very little in his work, especially after the second half of Discipline and Punish, to help in resisting the kinds of administrative and disciplinary pressures that he described so well in the first part. So I completely lost interest in his work’ (Said, 2004b, 214; emphasis in the original). All references to Mo’s novel are taken from the original Vintage edition rather than the subsequent Paddleless Press edition. The character of Mabbeley is based on the freelance journalist Roger East who arrived in East Timor in order to investigate the deaths of the Nine Network TV crew and was then shot on the first day of the invasion, as the novel depicts. The real Bishop of Dili, Carlos Ximenes Belo, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Ramos-Horta in 1996.

8 Conclusion 1. These proposals are discussed in George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order (2004). 2. See Karl Simms (2009) on the possibility of a rapprochement between Ricoeur’s philosophy of hermeneutics and the themes and aims of postcolonial studies.

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Index Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, 158 Abu-Manneh, Bashir, 31 Achcar, Gilbert, 157 Adorno, Theodor W., 42, 55, 72, 73, 131, 160 on aesthetics of failure, 12–13 on images of suffering, 118 on late style, 61, 65, 66, 67–8, 73–4, 81, 101–2 on questionable legitimacy of the aesthetic, 49 on semblance character of artworks, 142–3 Agamben, Georgio, 202n Agresto, John, 47–50 Ahmad, Aijaz, 27 critical of Edward Said, 165 critical of postcolonial transnationalism, 26 on culturalist bias of postcolonial studies, 51 Ahmad, Eqbal, 158 on capitalism’s dependence on states, 27 Ali, Tariq, 156, 159 allegory, 176–7 De Man on allegory in Yeats, 97 in The Redundancy of Courage, 176–7 in Waiting for the Barbarians, 121–6 Amin, Samir, 204n on ‘delinking’, 35 Anderson, Benedict on ‘long distance nationalism’, 151 on nationalist symbols, 76 Appadurai, Arjun as exemplar of ‘celebratory’ school of cosmopolitanism, 23, 32 Appiah, Kwame Anthony on ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’, 38 on ‘cosmopolitan reading’, 43 on relativism, 16

Archibugi, Daniele, 4, 193 objects to socialist critique of cosmopolitanism, 36 and David Held, 2 Arendt, Hannah, 44 Arrighi, Giovanni, 191 Asad, Talal, 158–9 Attridge, Derek against allegory, 121–2 ethical approach to Coetzee’s works, 133–5, 137 Attwell, David, 112–13 allegorical interpretation of Waiting for the Barbarians, 121–3 Auden, W.H., 61, 73, 200n Auerbach, Erich, 47 on philological method, 51–2 Balibar, Étienne, 5 Barber, Benjamin, 156 Barnard, Rita, 133 Barthes, Roland, 166 Bauman, Zygmunt, 25 Beck, Ulrich, 2, 108 Beckett, Samuel, 98, 127, 203n Beethoven, Ludwig van, 61, 65, 66, 67–8, 81, 101 Begam, Richard and Michael Valdez Moses, 9 Belo, Bishop Carlos Xemenes, 204n Bello, Walden, 191 Benjamin, Walter, 82, 88, 190 on allegory, 122–3, 124 Berman, Jessica, 7 Bernstein, Richard, 57 Berube, Michael, 43–4 Beverley, John, Subalternity and Representation, 166–8 Bhabha, Homi, 22, 138 as exemplar of ‘celebratory’ school of cosmopolitanism, 23, 30, 32, 33, see also hybridity

223

224

Index

Blackmur, R.P., 60, 68, 159, 184 Blair, Tony, 194 Blake, William, 87, 161, 203n Bloch, Ernst, 55 Bloom, Harold, 82 Boehmer, Elleke, 10, 11, 200n Booth, Howard and Nigel Rigby, 10 Bourdieu, Pierre, 52 Brecher, Jeremy, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, 37 Brennan, Timothy on the ‘literary intellectual’, 56 on literature and nationalism, 76 on Orientalism, 173 on The Satanic Verses, 146, 153, 159 socialist critique of globalisation, 2, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 36–7 Buck-Morss, Susan on fundamentalism, 156 on the ‘cosmopolitan Left’, 162 Burke, Kenneth, 41 Bush, George W., 105, 108, 110, 191, 194 Butler, Judith, 128 Cabral, Amilcar, 102 Calhoun, Craig, 3–4, 5, 50 Casanova, Pascale, 51–2 Castro, Fidel, 29 Césaire, Aimé, 106 Chakrabarty, Dipesh Provincializing Europe, 168–9 Cheah, Pheng, 5, 6 Chomsky, Noam, 28, 108 Chrisman, Laura, 199n Coetzee, J.M., 3, 16 Age of Iron, 133–4, 135 body in, 126–9 Doubling the Point, 117, 126–7, 129, 133, 134, 136 Dusklands, 113 Elizabeth Costello, 117, 124, 132 In the Heart of the Country, 113 law in, 130–1, 134–5, 137 The Life and Times of Michael K, 134 narrative method of, 105, 107–8, 112–26

Waiting for the Barbarians, 104–8, 110, 114–31, 133, 135–7, 141, 172, 195, 203n White Writing, 16–17 Cohen, Mitchell, 38 Colás, Alejandro, 37 Collins, Michael, 62 Congo, 31 Connolly, James, 72 Conrad, Joseph, 66, 112, 145–6, 179 see also Said, Edward Coronil, Fernando, 203n cosmopolitan criticism method of analysing literature, 3–4, 6–17, 40–59 theory of, 32–9, 194–5 cosmopolitan novel, the, 7–13, 193 cosmopolitanism, 1, 3–4, 139, 141–2 colloquial connotations of, 2 cosmopolitan hermeneutics, 50–9 and cultural diversity, 21–3, 33–6 definitions of, 1–7 disposition of, 4, 13–17 distinguished from globalisation, 4 distinguished from internationalism, 6 necessity for, 5 pejorative connotations of, 2 as political proposal, 5–6, 13–14, 22, 191–5 in postcolonial studies, 18–39, 192 socialist critique of, 24–32, 36–8, 101 since the ‘war on terror’, 191–5 Cullingford, Elizabeth, 71 Curtis, Mark, 137 Danner, Mark, 109, 136 Davis, Mike, 31 deconstruction, 171–2 De Man, Paul, 60, 97, 143 on the changing function of the symbol in late Yeats, 75–6 Derrida, Jacques, 169, 171–2 Dershowitz, Alan, 202n Dirlik, Arif, 27 critique of postcolonial theory’s antiMarxist methodology, 29–30 Djebar, Assia, 158

Index 225 Dorfman, Ariel, 58–9, 109 Dovey, Teresa, 202n Durrant, Samuel, 104 Eagleton, Terry, 10, 22–3, 49, 182, 201n After Theory, 18 on fundamentalism, 143 on universalism and ‘materialist morality’, 128 on Yeats, 85 East Timor, 165–6, 176–8, 183, 185, 195, 204n Eckstein, Barbara, 129, 202n Eliot, T.S., 41, 60, 68, 161 Ellmann, Richard, 60, 68, 94 Esty, Jed, on waning of British modernism, 7–8 failure, aesthetics of, 12–13 Falk, Richard, 2, 108 and Andrew Strauss, 5 Fanon, Frantz on anti-colonial nationalism, 69, 70, 99, 101, 103 on colonialism and torture, 111, 112 Fine, Robert, 192 Fleming, Deborah, 69 Foster, R.F., 100, 103 Foucault, Michel, 126, 166, 174 influence on Orientalism, 20, 164, 174, 204n Said’s critique of, 172–3 Fraiman, Susan, 199 Friedman, Thomas, 32 fundamentalism, 138, 141, 143–4 in The Satanic Verses, 154–62 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 16 philosophy of hermeneutics, 56–8 Gane, Gillian, 149 Ganguly, Keya, 188 Garab, Ara M., 68 Ghosh, Amitav, 11 Gilroy, Paul, 2, 11, 37, 139 globalisation, 23, 25, 33, 37, 38 distinguished from cosmopolitanism, 4 Gordimer, Nadine, 102

Gould, Glenn, 144–5 Gowan, Peter, 2, 26 Gramsci, Antonio, 174 Gray, John, 21–2 Greenberg, Karen and Joshua Dratel, 109 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 71–2, 83, 201n Gregory, Robert, 201n Grondin, Jean, 58 Habermas, Jürgen, 2, 5 Hallward, Peter, 51 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 31 Harvey, David, 28, 191 Heaney, Seamus, 64, 98, 103 Held, David, 35, 38 hermeneutics, 43, 50–9, 197–8 Hersh, Seymour, 109–10, 202n Hitchens, Christopher, 158–9, 201n Hochschild, Adam, 31 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 145 Howes, Marjorie, 69, 102, 200n Huggan, Graham, 41 Hughes, Ted, 85 humanism, 49–50, 104–7, 126–30, 137, 171, 172 ‘humanitarian interventions’, 14, 47–50, 105–6, 194 Hussein, Abdirahman A., 203–4n hybridity, 18, 23–5, 30 imperialism, 1, 3, 5, 191 Iraq, war in, 4, 14, 47–50, 107, 108–10, 191, 194 Ireland, decolonisation of, 60, 61–4, 68–70, 84, 97–103 see also nationalism Islam, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143–4, 147–51, 156–9 Jackson, Richard, 203n James, C.L.R., 11, 14 Jameson, Fredric, 72, 199n on literary interpretation, 50, 54–5 on modernism and imperialism, 8 on nationalism, 37 JanMohamed, Abdul, 123 Jay, Paul, 52

226

Index

Jeffares, A. Norman, 100 Jolly, Rosemary, 118 Joyce, James, 99, 103 Kafka, Franz, 3, 127, 201n, 203n Kant, Immanuel, 2, 195 Kearney, Richard, 63 Keats, John, 78 Kennedy, Helena, 137 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 150–1, 158 Kiberd, Declan, 99 Klein, Naomi, 5, 48 Kundera, Milan, 160, 203n Kymlicka, Will, 21 Lacan, Jacques, 166 late style, 60–74, 97–103 see also Yeats, W.B.; Adorno, Theodor W. law, 191, 202n in Waiting for the Barbarians, 130–1, 134–5, 137 Lazarus, Neil, 29, 30, 41, 101, 107, 127, 164, 199n, 202–3n, 203n, 204n Leavis, F.R., 52–3 Lenin, V.I., 29 Lenta, Patrick, 128, 131 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 159 Lindqvist, Sven, 114 Lloyd, David, 97 Lyotard, Jean-François, 164, 166 MacNeice, Louis, 98–9 Mahfouz, Naguib, 158 Malcolmson, Scott, 3, 13 Mallon, Florencia, 167 Mandel, Ernest, 102 Mann, Michael, 24, 191 Mansfield Park, 3, 199n Maran, Rita, 111 Marcuse, Herbert, 49 Márquez, Gabriel García, 59, 197 Marxism, 27, 36, 55–6, 167 Matthews, Steven, 98 May, Brian, 128 McDonald, Russ, 201n McLeod, John, 203n McMullan, Gordon, 100–1

McPherson, Peter, 47 Melville, Herman see Moby Dick Mertes, Tom, 5, 37, 199n Mignolo, Walter, 4 Miyoshi, Masao, 43 Moby Dick, 11 Mo, Timothy, 3, 14 The Redundancy of Courage, 165–6, 176–88, 190, 195–6 modernism and cosmopolitanism, 7–11 in The Satanic Verses, 142, 146, 147 Mohanty, Satya P., 20 Monbiot, George, 5, 204n Moretti, Franco, 51–2 Murphy, Frank, 74 Nairn, Tom, 24, 29 nationalism anti-colonial, 5–6, 29, 61–4, 196, 199n enduring significance of, 36–8 in The Redundancy of Courage, 181–2 in Yeats, 68–70, 99–100, nation state, enduring significance of, 27–9 see also nationalism Norris, Christopher, 169 Nussbaum, Martha, 44 O’Brien, Susie and Imre Szeman, 50 O’Hanlon, Michael, 112 O’Leary, John, 103 O’Neill, Michael, 84 Obama, Barack, 108 Olsen, Lance, 202n Orwell, George, 2, 110–11, 116 Palfrey, Simon, 201n Panitch, Leo, 26, 28 Parkinson, Thomas, 60, 71 Parry, Benita, 24–5, 36–7 Patten, John, 159 Petras, James and Henry Veltmeyer, 25 Pilger, John, 176 Pontecorvo, Gillo, The Battle of Algiers, 111–12 Pope, Alexander, 77

Index 227 postcolonial literature, 1, 3, 9, 16, 196 see also cosmopolitan criticism and hermeneutics postcolonial studies, 15, 26–7, 50–1, 107 need for a normative dimension to, 18–20 principal tenets of, 164–5, 166–76, 188–90, 201n see also cosmopolitanism Poyner, Jane, 201n, 202n Pound, Ezra, 89 Prendergast, Christopher, 51 Ramazani, Jahan, 69, 93 Ramos-Horta, José, 183, 190, 204n reading, practices of, 3, 40–4, 50–9, 171, 186–7 Richards, I.A., 41 Ricoeur, Paul, 43, 204n cosmopolitanism in, 197–8 on hermeneutics, 53–5, 58 on metaphor, 76–7, 97–8 Rose, David, 110 Rose, Jacqueline, 190 Rosen, Charles, 67 Roy, Arundhati, 107 Rushdie, Salman, 3, 10 fatwa, 146, 154, 159 Fury, 160 migration in, 149–53 The Satanic Verses, 137–53, 155, 158, 160–1, 172, 196, 197 Shame, 141 writing on current affairs, 138–40, 154–6 Said, Edward, 21, 41, 42, 49, 56, 106, 140, 150, 156–7, 158, 160, 165, 170–1, 188–9, 198, 199n, 200n, 203–4n Beginnings: Intention and Method, 142, 143, 144 Culture and Imperialism, 68–70 Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 171–2 Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, 9–10, 105 On Late Style, 61, 65–7, 68, 73–4

Orientalism, 20, 30, 163–4, 166, 173–6, 190, 204n The Question of Palestine, 173, 174–6 The World, the Text, and the Critic, 45–7, 144–6, 172–3, 195 Salih, Tayeb, 158 Sands, Philippe, 5, 191 San Juan, E., 27 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 111 The Satanic Verses, see Rushdie, Salman Sawhney, Sabina and Simona Sawhney, 139, 159–60 Scarry, Elaine, 116, 202n Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 57–8 Schmitt, Carl, 110 Schoene, Berthold, 7, 193 Sharma, Shailja, 149 Sharrad, Paul, 204n Shelley, Percy, 87, 102, 123 Sidney, Sir Philip, 43 Simms, Karl, 204n Smith, Andrew, 24 Smith, Paul, 25 Smith, William, 2, 44–5 Sontag, Susan, 118, 132 Sorensen, Eli, 51 Soyinka, Wole, 158 Spitzer, Michael, 64 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 20, 36, 142, 204n relationship with deconstruction, 169–70 Stacey, Jackie, 14 Stallworthy, Jon, 86 Stanfield, Paul Scott, 71 Stanton, Katherine, 7 Stedile, João Pedro, 15 Steiner, George, 50, 114 Stiglitz, Joseph, 26 style, 9, 64–5 see also late style subaltern studies, 166–8 Suleri, Sara, 30 Symons, Arthur, 74 Tambling, Jeremy, 122 Thompson, Janna, 40 Todorov, Tzvetan, 106

228

Index

torture, 104, 127, 134 and dehumanisation, 104, 107, 108–12 ‘liberal’ defence of, 202n representation of, 114–19 in war on terror, 105–7, 108–10, 136–7, 201–2n, 203n Tremaine, Louis, 201n Trotsky, Leon, 29, 59 utopia, motif of Marxist aesthetics, 54–6 VanZanten Gallagher, Susan, 202n Vendler, Helen, 62 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 7, 9, 11, 139 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 5, 191 ‘war on terror’ and postcolonial studies, 191 and The Satanic Verses, 138–9, 141, 154–7 see also torture Watson, Stephen, 113 Watt, Ian, 179 Weldon, Fay, 159 Wenzel, Jennifer, 127 Wilde, Oscar, 145 Williams, Raymond, 2, 10–11, 34, 35, 40, 174, 192–3, 199n Williams, William Carlos, 42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 172 Wolin, Richard, 168 Wollheim, Richard, 65 Wood, Michael, 78, 102, 200n Wordsworth, William, 60–1

worldliness, 40–50, 144–6 Said, Edward, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 45–7, 144–6, 195 World Social Forum, 5 Wyndham Lewis, Percy, 72 Yeats, W.B., 3, 6, 10, 55, 59, 60–103, 196–7, 200–1n ‘An Acre of Grass’, 78, 84–90 on censorship, 200n ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, 77–84, 85 ‘Coole Park, 1929’, 71–2 ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’, 71–2 and cosmopolitanism, 100 and fascism, 70–4, 200n ‘Lapis Lazuli’, 79, 90–7 late style of, 60–77, 90 , 97–103 ‘In Memory of Eva Gore–Booth and Con Markiewicz’, 72–3 and misogyny, 72–3 and nationalism, 61–4, 68–70, 76, 99–100 ‘September 1913’, 72, 83, 101, 103 ‘The Statues’, 91–2, 93, 96 and symbolism, 74–7, 99–100 ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, 74–5 ‘Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation’, 71–2 ‘Why Should Not Old Men be Mad?’, 73 Young, Robert, 5 Zachary, G. Pascal, 23–4 Žižek, Slavoj, 34, 157, 161–2, 202n

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