Signifying With a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers

Signifying with a Vengeance

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Signifying with a Vengeance Theories, literatures, Storytellers

Mustapha Marrouchi

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y., 12246 Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marrouchi, Mustapha, 1956– Signifying with a vengeance : theories, literatures, storytellers / Mustapha Marrouchi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5267-0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5268-9 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism— Theory, etc. 2. Literature and anthropology—United States—History—20th century. 3. Culture—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. 4. Gates, Henry Louis. Signifying monkey. 5. Postcolonialism—United States. 6. African Americans in literature. I. Title. PS153.N5 M2627 2002 810.9'896073—dc21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2001049330

For my parents and In memory of Malcolm H. Bryson

Signifying was also a way of expressing your own feelings. . . . Signifying at its best can be heard when the brothers [and sisters] are exchanging tales. H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die!, 25.

The work of Fanon himself, C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, Syed Alatas, Abdallah Laroui, Pannikar, Shariati, Mazrui, novelists like Ngugi, Rushdie, and Morrison—all these as well as the enormously powerful adversarial work of feminists, Afro-Americans, and minority cultures in the West and in the Third World, amply record the continuing attraction to libertarian struggle. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 334.

The existential challenge to the new cultural politics of difference can be stated simply: how does one acquire the resources to survive and the cultural capital to thrive as a critic? Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” in Out There, 32.

Si la “non-maîtrise d’un langage approprié” . . . qualifie en premier lieu, plus littéralement, plus sensiblement, des situations d’aliénation “coloniale” ou d’asservissement historique, cette définition porte aussi, pourvu qu’on y imprime les inflexions requises, bien au-delà de ces conditions déterminées. Elle vaut aussi pour ce qu’on appallerait la langue du maître, de l’hospes ou du colon. Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, 44.

Contents

PREFACE INTRODUCTION

ix 1

PART ONE Theories of the Tradition Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

MICHEL FOUCAULT: MISSIONARY OF TRANSGRESSION DERRIDALGERIANCE; OR, THE PROSTHESIS OF DECONSTRUCTION COUNTERNARRATIVES, RECOVERIES, REFUSALS

51 85 133

PART TWO Reading the Tradition of the Postcolonial Chapter 4 V.S. NAIPAUL: A CRITIQUE OF THE POSTCOLONIAL SIGN Chapter 5 FEAR OF THE OTHER, LOATHING THE SIMILAR Chapter 6 ON FRICTION IN FICTION: MY AUNT IS A MAN

185 219 263

NOTES SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

303 321 335

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Preface The opportunity to present parts of this book at learned meetings in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and Tunisia yielded helpful suggestions for expansion, elaboration, and revision. Dr. David Hoeniger, a true friend and kindred spirit, helped me shape the manuscript and complete it. To receive from him what Michel Foucault once called the “kind of criticism that bring[s] an idea to life . . . a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination” while a book is still in the making is to claim victory, no matter how modest it may be (1988: 326). My gratitude also goes to those who have indirectly or directly aided my thinking in writing this book. I am particularly indebted to Homi Bahbha, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Salman Rushdie, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bart Moore-Gilbert, James Wood,
iz
ek, James J. Sosnoski, Mark Poster, Lewis Nkosi, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Z Firdaus Kanga, Michael Gorra, and many others, and of course Edward Said, without whom there would have been no book, just a muddle of ideas. I would also like to thank Dr. Prof. Hans-Joachim Possin and Liselotte Glage for generously hosting me after inviting me to deliver portions of this book at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and Universität Hannover, respectively. The lively debates that followed sharpened the focus of the argument and forced me to think anew. To my former Chair, Fred Case, who gave me my first job, the benefit of his insight, practiced eyes, and, most of all, sincere friendship, I must say thank you. This work was both impelled and impeded by the constant encouragement, indulgence, hospitality, and criticism of such friends and colleagues like Cecile Sandten, Wolfgang Karrer, Bernard Moet, and Ted Blodgett, whose comments on the manuscript still produce vibrant notes. I owe particular gratitude to Sherbanu Mamujee, who helped me a great deal in the preparation of the manuscript; her patience and competence were of invaluable importance. Finally, my last but not least thanks I must ix

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proffer to my students, whose energies have kept me buoyant through many a long hour of writing. It is indeed difficult to express adequately the support this book has received from them. Shorter versions of chapters 2, 3, and 5 appeared as “Decolonizing the Terrain of Western Theoretical Productions,” College Literature (Summer 1997): 1–35; “Counternarratives, Recoveries, Refusals,” Boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 205–257; “Fear of the Other, Loathing the Similar,” College Literature (Fall 1999): 17–59. To the original publishers of parts of these pieces, my thanks for giving their permission to reprint. I must also record my deep gratitude and admiration for James Peltz, superb editor, exacting and always sympathetic. Katy Leonard was unfailingly helpful in getting things right as the book moved through the publishing process. Rosemary Wellner, Wayne Tompkins, and Kelli Williams helped to see what I was trying to do, then made the most acute suggestions for sculpting a bulky, disorderly manuscript into a semblance form. I owe them an acknowledgment of the deepest gratitude. Fran Devlin brought to the whole manuscript her characteristic unique intensity, rich learning, and penetrating intelligence. To Carolyn Bryson, who not only proofread this book in its entirety but untangled my plaits from my dreadlocks, heartfelt thanks for her constant love and support. I must confess that without her skill my strands of hair would still be interlaced. I have been fortunate enough to have the benefit of her keen analytic mind. Infinitely patient and forever present, Carolyn has done it with a smile, too.

Introduction

Without this power to proceed . . . we are caught between two problems: on the one hand, theories, however subtly argued, that support the idea that upward class mobility—mimicry and masquerade—is unmediated resistance; on the other, a failure to “recognize . . . the passing of an era when the West . . . [is] willing to tolerate the rhetoric of the third world.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, xii.

Goethe may have spoken first, in the afternoon of the millennium, of “world literature,” but its existence is quite recent; it was born with modernism, and now flourishes in an age of postmodernism. When writers became exiles or émigrés, when they began to write in their second or even third languages, and above all when the experience of this displacement became the subject of their work, then world literature was born, for better or worse.1 The postcolonial writer is probably the purest example of this negative liberty—literally homeless, he or she writes repeatedly about the actual and figurative centrifuges of modern life; infamous as a writer to millions who have never read him or her, he or she is celebrated by thousands who cannot read him or her, for the hybridity of his or her narrative (Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet is a case in point, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is another), which “is not only double-voiced and double-accented,” Mikhail Bakhtin informs us, But is also double-languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two individual consciousnesses, 1

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two voices, two accents, as there are [doublings of] sociolinguistic consciousnesses, two epochs . . . that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance. . . . It is the collision between differing points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms. . . . Such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new “internal forms” for perceiving the world in words (1971: 175). This hybrid, also known as a “cultural amphibian,” like the test-tube baby, is a miracle of the twentieth century, or, in a darker light, a curious effluent, an unwitting by-product of the great technological, industrial and economic projects of a tumultuous age; an age in which both families and nations are being flung apart by the centrifugal forces of history; an age in which everything seems to be “shifting, changing, getting partitioned, separated by frontiers, splitting, re-splitting, coming apart” (Rushdie, 1999: 322). According to François Lyotard the defining idea of postmodernism is the discarding of un grand récit (the story of the development of Western culture, from the Greeks, the Romans, the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment to modernism, no longer to be accepted or believed), he insists that our languages, ideas, even our lives are all programmed along the lines of an essentially nondefinitive petit récit, this itself he contends has become a definition of our times. But postmodernism is indeed, in its way, un grand récit. Enthusiasts for some of the grand récit that postmodernism undermines, most notably Marxists, might ask whether postmodernism is anything more than the frivolity of a particular phase of late capitalism. There has never been a time, in Western history at least, when life was so ridiculously easy. Toilers no longer struggle in dark satanic mills; women no longer scrub floors or mangle the laundry, or clean carpets with dustpan and brush (Eagleton, 1999). Even mashed potatoes are bought ready-made in supermarkets. In such a world it is hard to think of a Marx or an Engels being able to formulate a system of economic value based on labor. Postmodernism relieves its philosophers of the difficulty of dreaming up either problems or solutions. With its light ironies, its refusal to make judgments or draw conclusions, postmodernism (by the paradoxical virtue of its not being a system at all) seems the perfect intellectual paradigm of our age in that it resembles “a latecomer to the party, arriving only in time to see the bottles and cigarette ends being swept up. Belatedness may also imply a certain dependence, for the post-culture cannot even define itself in any freestanding way, but is condemned to the

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parasitic prolongation of some vanished cultural achievements” (Connor, 1989: 29). It fits Bill Gates, Tiger Woods, and Jennifer Lopez as neatly as Aquinas fits Dante, or medieval cathedrals.2 Philosophical realists might say that there is a verifiable world outside both the individual’s perception, and outside particular language systems as well. For the globocracist such claims seem infantile when applied to the old questions of “consciousness” or “culture.” Consider the hard-line free marketeer Lawrence Summers and this will be clear enough. Summers, who once argued that the North should export its pollution to the South, wants to extend the same internationalization to the Third World. He believes that capital should be allowed to move freely around the world. He calls this “integration.”3 The IMF, WTO, and the World Bank are already pursuing this agenda. With Summers in the chair of one of the economic top jobs, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, we can be sure of increased efforts to make the developing world seem more and more like home sweet home: a miniature of America. The narrator Rai in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet puts it succinctly when he announces: “It is evident from the daily newspaper that the world beyond the frontiers of the United States (except for Indochina) has practically ceased to exist. The rest of the planet is perceived as essentially fictional” (1999: 239). This is the postmodern version of “le devoir civilisateur” of the nineteenth-century colonial powers. The Western interest and the world interest are the same, but behind this world mission a simple question arises: Is it always true that what is good for the West is good for the Third world?4 The terms have changed from “civilization” to “good governance,” but the message is the same: Western dreams might well become nightmares for the Third World. The need to restore a comprehensible human dimension to historical experience is perhaps the chief reason for the phenomenal popularity of old-fashioned, highly individualized accounts of moments of extreme crisis. One particularly striking example is Lynne Mastnak’s narrative of the Kosovo War Operation, “Why Are You Leaving?”5 While the dominant television image of the war in the Balkans was the screen on which targets were located, aligning thereby the situation of the combatant with that of the television viewer, and with the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into neighboring countries, it was finally the profoundly traditional récit of the individual soldier, eclipsing the technological novelty of the war, that appealed most vividly to a reading public strangely consoled by episodes of solitary heroic action of a kind that would have been recognizable in any war at any time in history. The war proper does not concern the postmodernist one iota. Having been persuaded that we can all construct our own petit récit, we do not feel confident that there is a

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grand récit that could either wreck, or rescue, the world. We have persuaded ourselves that the world is much nicer, and this is partly postmodernism’s doing: the view, of course, not the niceness. Examining the postmodern, whose influence helps articulate one petit récit among many others, namely the subaltern tradition’s theory of its literature, Signifying with a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers sets out “to restore a third dimension to hard-set profiles; a way of writing that makes not only black and white but also brown and yellow and red come alive in a multiple text; a way of talking, of moving back and forth along the tongue, to bring language to a place of community and conversation that is never simply white and never singly black” (Bhabha, 1998: 24). In the process, it reroutes literature and theory through the works of a handful of writers and shows how paradoxically “looking awry” at an object (with specific philosophical or ideological interest) allows it to come into focus and gain shape. It also uses this critical framework to read the tradition as represented by the stepchildren of the postcolonial state (Said, Ben Jelloun, Derrida, Naipaul) and the granddaughter of slaves (Toni Morrison). What do these writers have in common? As their divergent “colonial” and “modern” histories—of Anglo-American slavery and European imperialism—circumnavigate the globe in opposite directions, they meet on the margins of nonstandard “vernaculars” or hybridized orders of speech. “These are twisted versions of the language of the master, alienating in the vernacular sense the syntactical ‘eloquence’ and international ‘elegance’ through which ‘standard’ English [or French] naturalizes itself as a national cultural norm. Their world cannot be reduced to the description of speech as an ‘object’ of linguistic study or as a functionalist form of verbal communication without doing violence to the living tongue” (Ibid., 25). In this moment, at the limits of history as we have known it (the much vaunted moment of the postnational, the transnational, the “glocal”), we are witnessing the dawning of another way of telling. A looking awry at such tellings throws the subtle evasions of traditional literary discourse into sharp relief.6

I The challenge of my project is to locate and identify how the postcolonial has theorized about itself. My reading of Henry Louis Gates’s seminal and compelling work The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, itself a sly parody of its genre, generated in part the concept of Signifying with a Vengeance. Constructing a myth of origins around the trickster figures of Esu-Elegbara and the signifyin’ monkey, Gates points out that the black vernacular celebrates figurative language and ambigu-

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ity rather than literal interpretations and determinate meanings. To buttress this claim he draws on a body of mythic literature—folk tales and lyrics—as well as the studies of linguists and anthropologists.7 The vernacular term for figurative language use is signifyin’—a highly complicated verbal art of parody, making a monkey of your vis-à-vis, perhaps aggressively, but always in a way to keep short of violence (of the letter). The eponymous master of this art is the signifyin’ monkey, a sly, mischievous little fellow whose cunning, guile, and gifts of mimicry are the bane of his comic stooge, the physically powerful but vainglorious and dimwitted lion—officially the “king.”8 Most significant for Gates is that signifyin’ revises and critiques both the standard English usage of signification and the structuralist conception of the sign, as represented in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who was the first to point out that signs get their meanings not by being like the things they stand for but by being different from other signs: a sign for black means black because it is not like the sign for white. The vernacular term signifyin’ corresponds with Jacques Derrida’s coinage of différAnce to announce his revision of structuralism’s “difference.”9 As every student of texts now knows, what makes a sign a sign is its difference from other signs; but this means that the difference which lends a sign its identity also makes it impossible for a sign to be complete in itself. Difference, as Jacques Derrida playfully put it, both “broaches and breaches” meaning (1992: 34). A close reading of another, no less influential essay, “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance” by Salman Rushdie, affords the opportunity to expand on a theory of criticism that forms another part of my narrative. For Rushdie, a vivid illustration of the Empire striking back is to be found in the way Britain’s former colonies have begun to seize the very essence of English literature, while renewing the idiom with vivid colors and new tempos. Rushdie uses the example of G. V. Desani, whose “triumph was to take babu-English, chamcha-English, and turn it against itself: the instrument of subservience became a weapon of liberation. It was the first great stroke of the decolonizing pen” (1982: 9). He maintains that the English language has been taken over by writers who write in English, but not in the English they had learned in England, or earlier in the hallowed portals of the colonial classroom. Their English is a postcolonial invention, a language on the margin, a hybrid creature with many heads and arms, guardian-goddess of an imaginary land that lives and grows in the memory. Its assault of words, hopes, dreams, and anguish all come together in portrayals of home (wherever that may be) as Mother Periphery: sometimes as nostalgia for color, at others as an indictment of the monstrous warts with which the periphery has been afflicted since independence. These writers have made English (in the case

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of Ben Jelloun, French) prose look pallid. Their works have moved the limits of the language, drawing them outward, scattering them with an unprecedented rigor.10 Whereas Rushdie utilizes the trope of “writing back” to denote the possibilities of representation for the postcolonial polyphonic voice and Gates invokes the Yoruba trickster Esu-Elegbara to explore the layers of irony of four hundred years of African-American monkeying around with the white Western tradition, I intend Signifying with a Vengeance as a kind of splitting of the language of authority, and returning that language in a just slightly altered state. In doing so, it investigates these new tutelary spirits acting out the English language in literary texts, and shows these texts as constituting a radical critique of assumptions underlying historic Eurocentric notions of literature and language. It is an inquiry into the cultural topography of the Margin and the Rest. To put it another way, Signifying with a Vengeance is another way of writing and/or talking back, renarrating the experience of domination; in fine, narrating oneself as well as reading against the grain. In this sense, it “is clearly thought of as a kind of art—a clever way of conveying messages” from the rim of the world to the rock of the dome (Mitchell-Kernan, 1973: 318). I call this troping “sly civility”: an interpretation or mis-taking of meaning, to borrow a phrase from Homi Bhabha, because, as Mitchell-Kernan points out, “Signifying . . . alludes to and implies things which are never made explicit,” makes visible the hidden assumptions that set the context for domination (ibid., 319). Gates’s critical practice of signifyin’ around and Rushdie’s salient trope of writing back generate the central idea of this book. I will present a portrait of the postcolonial writer as a missionary in reverse, set amid the clamor of Western liberalism and the intolerance of Eastern fundamentalism. Lest this criticism of theory, however, be thought of as only postcolonial, let me admit that the implicit premise of this study is that all texts signify on other texts, in motivated and unmotivated ways—hence, for example, Edward Said’s debt to Michel Foucault and Gates’s to Ishmael Reed.11 Writers of theory, like their counterparts in fiction, simply produce ways of signifying on other writers. This engagement with signifying teaches us how to conceive of a present that carries forward a commitment to imagining the future not in a homogeneous but heterogenous fashion, while at the same time remaining keenly aware of the power and role of the writer in that process. The contradictions and affinities between the world of Foucault and that of, say, Said need therefore to be maintained since there is a great deal to be learned from them as dissenting voices whose use of knowledge broke new grounds as well as deepened (and continues to do so) the unsettling thrust of their own iconoclastic discoveries in history, culture, theory, literature, and politics. Their reputation,

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persistence, and status as oppositional intellectuals have come not simply from their quality but from the efforts to signify with a vengeance. One aspect of monkeying around for the postcolonial critic therefore involves not only demystifying the old giant that is English (or French) literature and even English (or French) as language but finding one’s own literary voice. In this sense, Signifying with a Vengeance upholds critique as a model arsenal of intellectual endeavor. Another, no less important mode of writing back involves affirming the tradition of struggle and resistance in postcolonial societies. As Edward Said has stated: Here too there is intellectual responsibility for saying that resistance cannot only take the form of rejection. We must as an alternative revive the secular ideal of liberation and enlightenment and give them concrete applicability to our struggle as a people. Above all we need to think in terms of effectiveness, of actually gaining some ground, and not in terms of pure theory or abstraction. Such a shift from the discourse of politics to an authentic intellectual idiom is long overdue (1996: 111). Said’s example provides the postcolonial standard of excellence. For this, he deserves a special gratitude. He, in many ways, serves as my ideal critic, as the voice that I trust and respect and to which my work is addressed. His contrapuntal method of reading has inspired my own approach to literature.12 If one were to formalize the general configuration of Signifying with a Vengeance, one would obtain an operation of repetition between the thing and the idea through the mediation of the sign, what Foucault aptly calls an operation of “duplicated representation.”13 Let me explain. The process of semantic appropriation has been eloquently described by Mikhail Bakhtin as a double-voiced word, that, a word or énoncé (utterance), in this context, decolonized for the postcolonial’s purpose “by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which already has—and retains—its own orientation” (1971:182). The following elaboration by Gary Saul Morson on Bakhtin’s concept helps us clarify what Bakhtin implies: The audience of a double-voiced word is therefore meant to hear both a version of the original utterance as the embodiment of its speaker’s point of view (or “semantic position”) and the second speaker’s evaluation of that utterance from a different point of view. I find it helpful to picture a double-voiced word as a special sort of palimp-

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sest in which the upper-most inscription is a commentary on the one beneath it, which the reader (or audience) can know only by reading through the commentary that obscures in the very process of evaluating.14 The sign, in other words, has been demonstrated to be mutable. Following the logic of Signifying, which, in Lacan’ s sense, is the Other of discourse; but it also constitutes the postcolonial Other’s discourse as its rhetoric, I propose the presence of meaning of signifying with a vengeance as a chain of utterances and meanings that depend on the presence/absence of Other in order to claim its being of and in the world. To put it differently, the driving idea behind Signifying with a Vengeance is distinctly articulated in Foucault’s rejection of the totalizing explanations of human development in favor of a more detailed analysis of how power functions within particular discourses; in Derrida’s mode of reading, which rejects the idea of “presence” in which authority resides, thereby lifting all restrictions on the “play” of differences; in Said’s inquiry into the cultural topography of imperialism, which provides new insights into central and enduring features of world society, and helps us to understand who we (postcolonials) are and what we must do if we aspire to be agents of change, not servants of local or global power; in Morrison’s act of “rememorying,” which belongs to the community, and is passed on orally, in defiance of the “deliberate survivalist’s intention to forget an unspeakable past”; in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s split narrative, as in “my aunt is a man,” that grows from the confrontation of one world with another: the way the West and the rest collide but do not cohere; in his multiple narrative strategy, which functions in his work as a form of resistance to the unitary nature of imperialist ideology and political control and has always insisted on the impossibility of any tradition fully surviving the disruptions of Western domination; and finally, in Naipaul’s gift to honestly critique the Third World and its appalling failures to come to terms with the Self—this he does with a detached irony of tone. His narrative rarely strays from themes of postcolonial bemusement and disorder. This preoccupation, over the years, has won him few friends: Naipaul’s lofty and fastidious manner reminds some Third World intellectuals of their erstwhile colonial masters. The result is clearly not that simple as Signifying with a Vengeance goes on to argue. High and subversive creativity, layers of irony and parody, the pathos of expression finds a way for itself through (and via) the stereotypes that would repress it, of many years of monkeying around with the Western tradition as Gates would have it. By rewriting theorizing as Signifying with a Vengeance, I want to demonstrate an intriguing counterargument to the claim that theory is

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somehow foreign to the postcolonial tradition: to theorize is to do nothing that postcolonial writers have not done for a long time. This is where my book comes into its own insofar as there is a double significance to its emphasis on theory. As Ishmael Reed implies in Flight to Canada, according to European “science” of the nineteenth century, the colonized people were supposed to be incapable of abstract thought; they had smaller skulls, the fact Conrad satirizes in Heart of Darkness. Reed’s novel says further that what cannot now be won on the literary battlefield is being fought for on the field of poetry, but I would aver that the battle is now being waged on the field of literary criticism: that is, around the power to interpret the meaning and significance of literature.15 And even if I do not assent fully to my own argument, I hope my demonstrated ability to suggest relations among competing narratives may help lay to rest the tiresome charges that attention to figurative language and literary form is inherently at odds with postcolonial literary theory and practice. (The chapters on Said and Morrison are perfect examples of what I mean.) Part One sets the stage for theoretical readings of French “high” theory, samples of which constitute a third of the book. To refer to Derrida, for example, as the father of deconstruction is to remind ourselves of the fact that there are two Derridas: one is Algerian, the other French. French Derrida is a saber-rattling polemicist given to scandalously provocative pronouncements: truth is rhetoric, origin is an illusion. Algerian Derrida is the respectable academic who will undercut the force of these utterances by insisting that they are descriptive rather than normative. I want to demonstrate how Derrida is the cross-grained outsider who at times fails to speak up for Algeria and, himself Jewish, comes from one such cultural margin. It is fortunate in a sense for Derrida’s schizoid persona that there is a place where presence and absence go together. The performance in Part Two is more mixed, in large part because the readings of postcolonial narratives, Ben Jelloun’s The Sacred Night, Morrison’s Paradise, and Naipaul’s A Way in the World are polyphonic for a work that locates itself in a textual milieu that includes not only Foucault’s irreverent prose but the deconstructive narrative of the signifying sign, earthy jazz lyrics, and the verbal play of postmodernism. The book’s first move is to trace the revisions of a trope called “le livre parlant,” in a series of postcolonial novels.16 The trope derives from the claims made by early postcolonial writers that before they learned to read they believed that books actually talked to men and women. I argue that the recurrence of this trope is more a marker of intertextual revision than a reference to the personal experience of each writer. In fact, this version of intertextuality, which Gates aptly describes as books talking to other books, is itself a revision of this trope. But the point of all this tracing is

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rather to illustrate that these writers read and revised each other than to exemplify the potential signifying with a vengeance as a critical practice. It is a practice of specifying. (The chapter on Ben Jelloun in particular lends itself to this kind of reading.) In this respect, Signifying with a Vengeance may be thought of as a liberating text from the tyranny of the narrative present. Rather than probe this tyranny as a potential contradiction within Naipaul’s work, for example, my book views his rhetorical strategy as a self-consistent response to such textual ancestors as Joseph Conrad. To appreciate fully the drama enacted in Signifying with a Vengeance one must keep in mind the characterizations of the text’s two central antagonists. On the one hand is a figure emerging from the postcolonial movement preaching a narrative of a postcolonial cultural essence that is necessarily incompatible with Western literary standards; and on the other is an avatar of Euro-American poststructuralist theory with its attendant attack on referentiality and its valorization of intertextuality and indeterminacy. These two figures have crossed words if not swords in much of my work, for Signifying with a Vengeance is a mélange of new and topical material as well as the second part of a projected supplement on postcolonial literature and theory. My task in this endeavor has been to stage my drama so that the hero does not end up either uttering a mealy-mouthed cultural nativism—convinced of the reality of postcolonial difference but too steeped in deconstructive thought to say so plainly—or expounding an eviscerated deconstructive critique that debunks everything except the sanctity of the postcolonial space. Signifying with a Vengeance also deploys a strategy that addresses questions related to reading a work of art in terms of resistance. Many readers feel that, since great literary works are saturated with worldly concerns about moral choices, the development of attitudes and feelings, discrimination and perception, and character and motive, it is not only difficult but also a distortion to sever the study of these works from the worldliness of our time. It is therefore obvious that works like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Said’s Orientalism (to name only a few) must rest on a radical analysis of the whole project of modernity understood in terms of the life-world that is cultural and material at once. They are part of this signifying with a vengeance, which can be described as both a sly parody of its genre—imitation with a mocking difference—and the thing itself. Bakhtin put it lucidly: In parody, as in stylization, the author employs the speech of another, but, in contradistinction to stylization, he introduces into that other speech an intention which is di-

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rectly opposed to the original one. The second voice, having lodged in the other speech, clashes antagonistically with the original, host voice and forces it to serve directly opposite aims. Speech becomes a battlefield for opposing intentions. . . . Parody allows considerable variety: one can parody another’s style as style, or parody another’s socially typical or individually characteristic manner of observing, thinking, and speaking. Furthermore, the depth of parody may vary: one can limit parody to the forms that make up the verbal surface, but one can also parody even the deepest principles of the other speech act (1971: 185–186). For parody is not only the book’s central technique or method, but even finally, something like but not its ethos. It shows that Western culture since the Enlightenment has dismissed the cultural accomplishment of the Periphery as mere imitation. Frederick Douglas has been telling us that the Western stereotype of the one-dimensional Other (Arab, Black, Hispanic, Irish, Aboriginal, women, gay, lesbian) is delusory, and subject to shrewd manipulation by its victims. If Westerners have (mostly) failed to “get it,” that is because they did not want to make the effort. After all, your oppressor’s unshakable conviction that you are a stick figure can be of advantage to you. The revolution in theory occurring over the last three decades has made this intellectual affront possible and even an acceptable way of putting things together. The now-démodé mystique of the “artist” as master of his (yes, his) culture—autonomously untrammeled by it and simultaneously its purest, most sublime representative—depended on assumptions about the Self, art, and culture that recent developments in semiotics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology have challenged (Said, 1999). Every text (we now say) is an intertext, dependent on previous ones (hence the rationale for making intertextuality, or parody, central); likewise selves are intersubjective, and no culture is ever pure: growth and development, whether of literatures, cultures, or selves, is always an affair of appropriation and an adaptation of preceding models—an affair, in other words, of “monkey see, monkey do” as Gates puts it. Signifying with a Vengeance’s theoretical finesse involves a degree of making a “monkey of theory.” But theory, thus monkeyed with, also comes out looking different—for one of the things this book is signifying is that signification, too (certain reaches of theory to the contrary), signifies. There is no hors du texte. One knows what that means, and takes it as a convention of certain kinds of

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inquiry, rather than a revelation of truth. As for the theory-mongering guru who takes theory all too literally (for theory has its gurus, too), I once heard Gates joke about him in a lecture: he is the kind who cannot write home to Mother without putting the M in brackets. Pay no mind to his roaring about absence, presence, and différAnce; he is just (so to speak) signifying with a vengeance—in the sense of talking back and/or renarrating the experience of domination and believing himself. And yet, finally, the following question begs to be asked: How much theory and/or literature as conducted in the classroom could be directly involved in culture at large and what would then be gained or lost if that theory and literature came under the influence of daily issues like citizens’ rights, new legislation, the restructuring of power, the problems of minorities? Would it be more appropriate, for example, to read and teach The Tempest as a play mainly about modern colonialism (using Fanon, Memmi, Said, and Greenblatt principally) or as a late play of reconciliation and departure within Shakespeare’s oeuvre? (Said, 1999). As Said has argued, it is thanks to feminist, African-American, new historicist, gay and lesbian, postcolonial, postmodern, and deconstructionist work that we now can see the vast ocean of human effort in which the official culture exists like an archipelago, and we can appreciate how the reading and interpretation of classics must not stop at veneration and respectful appreciation but needs to go on from here to uncover the enormously interesting networks of relations between canonical and emergent writing. There is simply no end to that sort of work (1998: 25–31). The more a work (of art) is linked to other works and histories, the more precarious are our excavations of it. As C.L.R. James used to say, “Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to Germans, since his music is now part of the human heritage.” Underpinning the whole enterprise of learning has to be some sense of history, “not only as chronology but also as Vico saw it, an activity of human labor, languagebased literature and theory being central to it,” Said maintains. Hence, in my view, Signifying with a Vengeance calls for a patient, scrupulous reading of texts; a profound respect for clarity of utterance; a careful attempt, in R. P. Blackmur’s memorable phrase, to bring literature to performance. In itself this investigation of literature and theory “will certainly neither determine the outcome of an election nor end exploitation and cruelty. But it might encourage and deepen the tension and irreconcilability between the search for knowledge and political oppression and injustice. To cross from one realm into the other we need to understand each on its own—the better to understand how their incompatibility is so often overridden and transcended by grand-sounding rhetoric and inhuman schemes” (Said, 1999: 23).

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I argue that scholarship of the sort I discuss has broken up the geography of the world as homogenous, as a reductively understood domain. Gone are the binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise. Instead we begin to sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by the new authority, but that new alignments made across borders, types, individuals, nations, and essences are emerging, and it is these new alignments that will provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of domination. This focus, or what Bakhtin aptly terms the “social,” on a literary tradition creates a style of critique that moves abruptly from claims based on authorial intention (Said, 1986; Bhabha, 1993). For example, my book employs a logic of cultural necessity to argue that theories of narrative held by Naipaul, Ben Jelloun, and Toni Morrison comprise a matrix of issues to which subsequent emergent fictions, by definition, must respond. At other times, however, the book’s language seems to grant individual writers the discretion to define their relationship to other writers: while most, if not all, of them seek to place their works in the larger tradition of their genre, many also revise tropes from substantive antecedent texts in the postcolonial tradition. The oscillation between structural and/or cultural determinations on the one hand and assertions of authorial autonomy on the other suggests that Derrida and Foucault may be overshadowed by the figure of Harold Bloom, who appears only briefly in the pages of Signifying with a Vengeance to provide some rhetorical terms. These brief appearances notwithstanding, my book can be read as a rewriting of Bloom’s Oedipal drama for the postcolonial tradition in which psychology gives way, once again, to rhetoric, and “signifying with a vengeance” replaces “anxiety.” Thus, while for Bloom “strong poets make [poetic] history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (1973: 5), for me, signifying revision serves, if successful, to create a space for the revising text. Bloom’s allegory of textual revision functions therefore as a means of bending Derrida and Foucault and Said to my own ends.

II Paul Hazoume, C.L.R. James, Sol Plaatje, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon were the true architects of the tradition called postcolonial theory and/or practice. Almost all dealt with domination and control made from the standpoint of either a completed political independence or an incomplete liberationist project. But rebellions against colonialism had of course occurred before. Liberating voices in Ireland made similar assaults on the classic frontiers of the language, as evidenced in the works of James Joyce,

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W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. There were often difficult nettles to grasp, nowhere more so than in eloquence: the charged atmosphere of control and authority. For the native who begins to hear that persisting note, it sounds the “note of crisis, of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home.”17 This is how Stephen Dedalus memorably states in the library episode of Ulysses; the decolonizing native writer—such as Joyce, the Irish writer colonized by the English—reexperiences the quest-voyage motif from which he had been banished by means of the same trope carried over from the imperial into the new culture and adopted, reused, revisioned. It is worth recalling that the United States, like Ireland and India, was a colony of the British Empire, and that an American language and an American literature are, historically, relatively recent: they came into being after Independence. In America, English was something that had to be appropriated from the British and made new again. Long before anyone coined the term “cultural imperialism,” writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson complained about British influences in American habits. He boldly proclaimed that every nation needs its own language and literature. Although Emerson announced in The American Scholar that we had “listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” he nonetheless thought that a distinctively American kind of English was an appropriate medium to express what he called—in Nature—”an original relation to the universe” (1883–1893: Vol. I–IX: 113). We are witnessing a similar return now, among Indian writers, for example, nearly six decades after India’s independence: in a land of eighteen languages and a seemingly infinite range of cultures, a new kind of English is finding a voice, a distinctly Indian English, one that is at once local and international, a voice of its culture and of the globe (Rushdie and West, 1997). Another challenge to cultural servitude that demonstrates a radical attempt to further the cause of liberation is to be found in the effort that explores African-American language and literature. As early as the 1900s, between the end of World War I and the Great Depression to be precise, there occurred in Harlem such a flowering of music, dance, theater, and painting as to change white American perceptions of African-American artistic expression. Eric Walrond expresses the importance of the new wave with eloquence: And on swept the dance. Swift as the pelting rain, the dusky revue, the clang of song and dance, of beauty and color, whirl and madly by—yellow girls, tightless, supple, deep-colored, aflame, their eyes affluent of emotion, laugh—dance—sing—comedians crack jokes; figures glide on the floor of marble, floor of gold. 18

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This is not so much un-American prose as the prose of a new era. In a little over a decade, more books by black folks appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing. In December 1923, Opportunity, the porte-parole of the National Urban League, declared in its editorial: “There are new voices speaking from the depths and fullness of the Negro’s life, and they are harbingers of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.” Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later remembered the Harlem Renaissance as “that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American history.”19 The following decades would see credits, booms, busts and gains—to use a recurring trope of the market economy (Nkosi, 2000; Archer-Shaw, 2001). The new racial consciousness of the 1920s coincided with the arrival of the Jazz Age. Josephine Baker was the toast of Paris. After seeing her in Chocolate Dandies, the Greenwich Village poet, e.e. cummings reported ecstatically that “she resembled some tall, vital, incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes, warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner.”20 The Lindy, the Charleston, and the Black Bottom were in vogue in the dance halls and nightclubs of London, Paris, and Berlin while W.E.B. Du Bois fed the news back to Harlem through the NAACP paper, the Crisis, as black troops arrived on the cold banks of the Moselle, one of them playing a trumpet: “Wild and sweet leapt the strains on the air. French children gazed in wonder—women left their washing.”21 Scott Fitzgerald’s “flappers” flocked to Harlem in droves to dance to Duke Ellington’s music at the Savoy and the Cotton Club. Carl Van Vechten, whose novel Nigger Heaven helped to launch the “Harlem vogue,” wrote in In the Garret: “How the darkies danced, sang and cavorted! Real nigger stuff. . . . They are delightful niggers, those inexhaustible Ethiopians” (2000: 167). To the art historian, Richard Powell, the meaning of this giant leap was obvious. “In a society that had recently suffered a war of tremendous proportions and was increasingly changing into an urban impersonal and industry-driven machine,” he perceptively writes, “black culture was viewed, interchangeably, as life-affirming, a libidinal fix, an antidote for ennui, a sanctuary for the spiritually bereft, a call back to nature, and a subway ticket to modernity.”22 Powell’s intimacy with the facts is absorbing; he is good at describing the fiercely guarded fears and insecurities of the new black consciousness. As Nkosi has acutely argued, the origins of the New Negro movement lay further back in the widespread social and cultural upheaval in America at the beginning of the century (1996). That was a time of great transition, according to Wayne Cooper, when, “old, fundamental

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INTRODUCTION

assumptions that had dominated American intellectual life since the Civil War—the belief in universal morality, the inevitability of progress, and the sanctity of inherited Anglo-Saxon cultural norms—were all beginning to be questioned and undermined” (1987: 114). The arrival of the New Negro was signaled by horrendous racial bloodshed across most of the Deep South, and massive migrations of black people to the industrial cities of the North itself, followed almost invariably by new forms of racial conflict. The Harlem Renaissance may have been well under way before anyone paid any attention, but when in 1925 Alain Locke put together an anthology of the new writing with the alluring title The New Negro, it seemed to burst into life. “In Harlem,” he wrote in the introduction, “Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises to be—a race capital. . . . Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia” (1997: 27) What Locke understood well, and what every historian of the various modernists has carefully documented, is the importance of Harlem to any form of modernist sensibility. But it was left to Charles Johnson to synthesize the scattered, inchoate moods, sentiments, and feelings of the period. It is he who is remembered as the engine of the New Negro movement. Du Bois, meanwhile, attempted to guide the new literary productions, encouraging their authors to aim for self-improvement and the cultivation of an authentic African-American identity. Today, he is celebrated primarily for his mold-breaking study of black American life and culture, The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903, the book has exerted an enormous influence on generations of emerging black writers, including black South Africans. “I do not doubt,” Du Bois intoned, “that the ultimate art coming from the black folk is going to be just as beautiful . . . as the art that comes from white folk, or yellow, or red; but the point today is that until the art of the black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human.”23 This resulted in the distinctive and invigorating black prose of McKay, Locke, Johnson, and others who stood up with their chests out, shoulders squared, having drawn themselves up to their full height: clear-eyed, square-jawed, firm, intelligent, and emotionally direct (Rogin, 2001; Nkosi, 2000).24 The problem was that the political weight that artists and writers were asked to bear by the Harlem Renaissance was simply too much. A chastened Langston Hughes recalled returning to Harlem in 1924 after his wanderings in Africa and Europe to find the Renaissance in full swing: “Had I not had to earn a living, I might have thought it even more wonderful than it was. But I could not eat the poems I wrote. Unlike the whites who came to spend their money in Harlem, only a few Harlemites seemed

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to live in even a modest degree of luxury.”25 But the writers were undeterred by privation. Novels began to appear in print; white journals published stories and poems by contributors who would not previously have had access to them: Hughes himself, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Angelina Grimke, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher. Most were migrant self-exiled from distant homelands who had come to New York in hope of making a better world for themselves. “The array of personalities in the literary area is startling,” one of them observed. “Few were born in New York, although we speak of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay, one of the movement’s ornaments, was born in Jamaica, Eric Walrond, short story writer, in British Guiana” (Locke, 1997: 23).26 By the middle of the 1930s, when the energies of the New Negro movement had all but dissipated in the wake of the Great Depression, its influence had spread to the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. The leaders of the cultural movement known as “Négritude,” which challenged the assimilationist policies of French colonial rule and culture, derived some of their insights from Harlem (Wood, 2001). Sitting in Paris and plotting their next move, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor read voraciously the poetry of the Renaissance. In the May 1967 issue of the Negro Digest Senghor remembered that time: We owe a great deal to the United States. Indeed, with regard to our Négritude, we have depended largely on the teachings of our professors of ethnology and anthropology on the subject of black African civilizations. But, was it not “the New Negro” movement, the movement of the “Negro Renaissance,” with Alain Locke and others, was it not they who stimulated us to do as they did? In this way, I want to give to America that which is due to her, that is to say to have been, in a way, the initiator of Négritude.27 In pointing to the movement’s migration, Senghor intends to teach us that, like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel—from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another. Cultural and intellectual life are usually nourished and often sustained by this circulation of ideas, and whether it takes the form of acknowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation, the movement of ideas and theories from one place to another is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity (Said, 2000). The idea of the Harlem Renaissance was not itself entirely original. White writers had already announced their own renaissance—an attempt

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to fashion works in the American grain as part of a coming of age that would entail the discovery, in Van Wyck Brooks’s memorable phrase, of America’s “usable past.” However, the leaders of the white renaissance had left black Americans out of their account. “In Brooks’s call for cultural renaissance, and his lament that America did not possess the organic culture and folk spirit that could be seen in Ireland,” Mark Helbling observes, “he did not give thought to the folk life of black Americans. This was a striking omission, one that Alain Locke was quick to correct.”28 By and large the writers of the Harlem Renaissance did not experiment in the manner of Pound, Eliot, and Stevens; in their use of the vernacular, their play with syntax and mixing of forms, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Eric Walrond were rare exceptions. Nevertheless, they succeeded in refashioning classical forms in such a way as to accommodate a new black sensibility: “We shall not always plant while others reap / The golden increment of bursting fruit,” Countee Cullen wrote in “From the Dark Tower.” “Not always countenance, abject and mute, / That lesser men should hold our brothers cheap.”29 Countee Cullen’s lines are a gentle reminder of how the Harlem Renaissance has been overlooked in many accounts of American modernism, even if the new Norton Anthology of American Literature gives it space (Rogin, 2001; Nkosi, 2000; Wood, 2001). While the New Negro movement flourished in Harlem, aesthetic modernism is still characteristically regarded as (white) metropolitan and Euro-American. It neglects not only the contributions to modernist art and literature from the British and the former French colonies (in particular, in the latter case, from the Négritude writers and artists) but also fails to note how in modernism, cross-fertilized influences, transplanted cultural forms (not in every case transferred by Europeans) have displaced Western precepts and conventional beliefs. Edward Said expresses the idea best in the following excerpt, which I must quote at length: Most histories of European cultures aesthetic modernism leave out the massive infusions of non-European cultures into the metropolitan heartland during the early years of this century, despite the patently important influence they had on modernist artists like Picasso, Stravinsky, and Matisse, and on the very fabric of a society that largely believed itself to be homogeneously white and Western. “In the interwar period,” Said goes on to say, Students from India, Senegal, Vietnam, and the Caribbean flocked to London and Paris; journals, reviews, and

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political associations formed—one thinks of the panAfrican congress in England, magazines like Cri des Nègres, parties like the Union des Travailleurs Nègres established by expatriates, dissidents, exiles, and refugees, who paradoxically work better in the heart of the empire than in its far-flung domains, or of the invigoration provided African movements by the Harlem Renaissance. A common anti-imperialist experience was felt, with new associations between Europeans, Americans, and nonEuropeans, and they transformed disciplines and gave voice to new ideas that unalterably changed that structure of attitude and reference which had endured for generations within European culture. The cross-fertilization between African nationalism as represented by George Padmore, Nkrumah, C.L.R. James on the one hand, and, on the other the emergence of a new literary style in the works of Césaire, Senghor, poets of the Harlem Renaissance like Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, is a central part of the global history of modernism (1993: 242). The basic form and substance of the debate were noted by Salman Rushdie, when he observed that writers of the colonial contact zone, inhabitants of fractured, hybrid, upturned worlds, polyglot by necessity, were in a sense not only modernists but also postmodernists avant la lettre. They “have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had PostModernism forced on . . . [them]” (1996: 104). The point Rushdie makes is significant insofar as displacement invariably involves feelings of guilt and loss. But displacement can also give rise to an alternative vision, as it were, that sees both sides of the imperial divide. One has to examine migrancy therefore with the same pair of lens, seeing it as something with a positive aspect. The Renaissance movement that flourished in Harlem would be incomplete without the new black consciousness, a second generation of writers, artists, and intellectuals (Amiri Baraka, Abram Hill, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, William Gardner Smith, Albert Murray, Richard Wright, James Baldwin come to mind) who not only stood up against oppression but also wrote stories with new rhythms, lyrical stories, sketches, poems, new histories, and a range of experiences rendered in English depicting the lives and culture of black people. It is no pretense to say that they were successful only to the most patient reader. Some divided

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INTRODUCTION

their work into “high” and “low” art, others, like Baldwin, broke down the walls between the two. It is now received wisdom that this generation of writers is often claimed as the “fathers” and “mothers” of black writing today. We see their reflections in black in Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, Jr., and Shirley Anne Williams, among others. They have validated the significance and essentiality of African-American literature and theory as a fundamental aspect of the American canon. The new black elite’s work evinces a comparably intense moral earnestness and is guaranteed by a tone much less melodramatic. In the process, it is proving painful to read. Black anger has come out of hiding, out of the ruins of the Harlem Renaissance and its splendid illusions of justice willingly offered up to art. The famed outpouring of a third renaissance in the form of novels, poems, and plays in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrates the African-American’s humanity and cultural citizenship.30

III Signifying with a Vengeance emerges from a conception of the center that supplements concurrent theories of hybridity that have opened up the center. The hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-sie
cle luxuriance and overabundance has shown us that capital and its operations have been globalized and that the center/periphery paradigm, on which certain theories of hybridity continue to rely in theorizing the in-between, has accordingly ceased to have the conceptual force that it once did. Insofar as the center is just as heterogeneous and inconstant, in terms of its class, gender, and ethnicity, as the fringe, the sources of affiliation have become inherently almost enormously circuitous, so that various groups can at one time be part of the center, at other times of the fringe, and, at moments, of both simultaneously. Written from within and outside the center and/or the fringe, the explorations gathered here continue to challenge the former in the most agnostic manner without, however, direct confrontational modes of decentering it that can, as Derrida warns us, simultaneously recenter it (1996: 23–56). This book attempts to examine the role of the subaltern31 in shaping the curriculum, the dialectic of the geopolitics between Western theories and “new” literatures, Western literary awards and their recipients from the margin, and, to be sure, the plight of the “glocal” writer as a witness under siege. As a result, other issues—representation and its critique, political resistance, cultural pluralism and location, agency, indeterminacy—that the reader may feel are entitled to much fuller treatment, often are reduced to a single paragraph. It is a work based on what J. Hillis

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Miller has aptly called “uncanny criticism,” that is, criticism not primarily based on tradition, common-sense conventions but on subversion, negotiation, and, we should add, in fairness, circulation; for the situation or occasion of one’s discourse always manages to shape its meanings, however careful, objective, and truthful one tries to be. “The work of art,” Stephen Greenblatt writes, “is not itself a pure flame that lies at the source of our speculation. Rather the work of art is itself the product of a set of manipulations, some of them our own” (1990: 7). Gone are the days when interpretations were as plentiful as blackberries: anyone with a text could count up its images, pick out its themes, and offer a new reading. Today, such an apparently simple procedure of looking straight at words on a page is, we have come to recognize, impossibly complex, its seeming innocence being its most deceptive characteristic. So, by now, those who seriously consider the power relations in which a given text is encoded in the discourse are aware that literary texts have of late been coupled with new and defiant readings. After all, a text is not something-in-itself with an existence independent of audiences, constituencies, and communities, but something that comes into being only by and through interpretation. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes, quoting Nietzsche on interpretation as will-to-power, writes: Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity. This fiction is no longer the illusion of a unity; on the contrary, it is the theater of society in which we stage our plural: our pleasure is individual—but not personal (1977: 24). Only then does the interpreter’s (be it colonial Other, gay, lesbian, women, African-American, or “Behafist,” in Rushdie’s celebrated formula) identity become also internal to and indissociable from interpretation. Otherwise, the most conscientious student of texts will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning. Academics, like other people, start with a personality that is afflicted by ignorance and prejudice, and try to escape from that personality, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, through absorption in impersonal scholarship. One emerges on the other side of this realizing once again that all knowledge is personal knowledge, but with some hope that the person may have been, to whatever degree, transformed in the meantime. Literature itself is threatened by the technological revolution that has rapidly transformed a print to an electronic culture, replacing the authority of the written

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word with the authority of television (Kernan, 1990: 3–10). Moreover, the turn taken by theory, in deconstructing traditional literature and declaring it void of intrinsic meaning, has speeded the disintegration. To which I am tempted to add the later modification of this new situation that the evolution of emergent writing also exploited: the shift from writers to celebrities (classically anatomized by Regis Debray), substituting highcultural talk shows for laboriously meditated philosophical tomes, interviews for novels, cultural fashions for old-fashioned literary movements, famous names for unknown masterpieces. If evaluation is a minor and subordinate function of the critical process, at best an incidental by-product, it should never be allowed to take priority over scholarship. Literature, on the other hand, as Northrop Frye once remarked, continues in society the tradition of myth-making, a myth-making that Barthes has presciently described as bricolage, an assembling and pasting together of bits and pieces out of whatever comes to hand.32 Contained in the idea of bricolage, moreover, is the notion of palimpsest. And as LeviStrauss explains, from a “repertoire,” a “treasury” of heterogeneous objects (such as metonymic verbal strings) is built a new arrangement of elements wherein old ends become new means; here is the construction of a system of paradigmatic association from fragments of prior syntagmatic chains (1966: 331). Only to the bricoleur need the possible relation to one another and relevance of erstwhile diverse elements be apparent. Hence, finally, there is a certain poetry in bricolage because in the creative use and arrangement of elements such a metaphoric verbal juxtaposition can be seen to express a part of the bricoleur’s own personality. In a way, this essay is a work of bricolage, in a book which is also that. For a variety of reasons—its convenient length, our postmodern emphasis on the flux of fact into fiction, and the desire of the younger generation to topple the staid opinion of the past—the essay is experiencing a renaissance comparable to the rise of the periodical essay during the eighteenth century. It is mobilized not only to confront large new areas of experience in the late twentieth century but to show how reality about our confused, mixed world has become virtual. Part of its (the essay’s) renewed popularity lies in the convenient forum it offers for a diversity of voices heretofore excluded. Writers like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and even African-American writers like bell hooks, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, and others whose works would once have been ignored on the basis of their authors’ gender, religion, or ethnicity are now disseminated regularly. They reside now in a position almost unimaginable three decades ago, when they were young intellectuals working shrewdly beside rather than within the Western Arts movement. Pico Iyer expresses their importance best:

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Authors from Britain’s former colonies have begun to capture the very heart of English literature, transforming the canon with bright colors and strange cadences and foreign eyes. They are revolutionizing the language from within. Hot spices are entering English, and tropical birds and sorcerers—magical creations from the makers of a new World Fiction. All are writers not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, born more or less after the war, and choosing to write in English. All are situated at a crossroads from which they can reflect, and reflect on, our increasingly small, increasingly mongrel, increasingly mobile global village (2001: 46). The vehicle of this new “frontierless” kind of writing is the narrative: brash, cosmopolitan, and undaunted. Enriched by marginal voices, it is proving a popular medium for shaping the attitudes and values of the (international) reading public. The marginal writer expressing his or her innate genius, the cultural critic reflecting his or her innate or acquired wisdom to the new view of things must be read in the light of the career determinism that has been one of Pierre Bourdieu’s major achievements.33 Here the historical situation (of publishing houses, journals, literary movements) constitutes one axis, the competition for “cultural capital” the other. Whatever misgivings the metaphorical nature of this concept may inspire, it sheds a good deal of raw light on subaltern writers, on their commitments and activities. The postcolonial group, for example, is made up of both rich and poor (Said and Spivak, for openers), but is above all characterized by people lacking in what has traditionally constituted cultural capital in the West. They are not all Ivy League graduates, for instance; some are provincials, most even foreigners, mounting to the center (London, Paris, or New York) for their assault on the capital as ill equipped as Balzac himself, since they have only their genius to declare. But it is not a question of acquiring cultural capital by their talent (as other, more naive contenders attempt to do): rather a matter of changing what counts as cultural capital in the first place, so that this new off-the-edge kind of talent they possess will suddenly count, and in the process devalorize the old Western kind. They arrived at the right time, coinciding with an explosion of the new thing called theory, which deflated traditional philosophy and literature, in such a way that a Said, for example, would henceforth appear as a new combination of writer and theoretician. At the same time there was a huge expansion of the university system so that a new public of students was available for the new writing and the new kind of theoretical journal. As a

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result, the traditional separation between scholarship and “creative” literature was broken down. It makes perfect sense; free from anything extraneous—certain specifics of time and place—so as to be universal, the “new” author is writing not for a local audience but for a global one. In the process, he or she finds himself or herself touring the world doing promotion gigs of one sort or another. The irony of this event called “touring” lies in the writer being encouraged almost not to write, and to spend all his or her time just talking to different audiences about what he or she has written. This writer may have started a new genre, similar to the one we find in The Information by Martin Amis, which is mostly about room service, radio stations, and transit lounges (Wilson, 1995: 96). Pushed by his or her publisher(s) and afflicted by the pressures of being successful and having to go to Singapore, Norway, and Brazil, the new writer must disseminate as well as publicize his or her work. In so doing, the writers become affected by the new environment they find themselves in: airplanes, airports, hotels, university campuses. A new kind of narrative is emerging. Let me here cite the words of Kazuo Ishiguro, which succinctly sum up the present atmosphere: I think if there is some sort of difference between the younger generation and the writers who wrote in the sixties and seventies it is that the younger group are consciously or unconsciously trying to make their writing wider. There is a feeling of writing from a society and a place that are not central, and they have to look to Europe, or the Third World, or to America, whether in subject or technique, if they’re going to write big, important things (1996: 30). Whether or not the celebration of diversity in our culture and the renewed respect for narrative aimed at a global audience are connected, I am not sure. What is, however, certain is that we are witnessing, perhaps for the first time, a presence of newly emergent voices whose obligation is to articulate the experiences and variety of their stories in a world in which literature is no longer a monument to be revered. When T. S. Eliot advocated that “the past should be altered by the present as the present is directed by the past,” he did not mean by this statement that the past should be censored to suit the preferences of the present (1932: 14–15). He did not mean that works of art should be revered only because those who wrote them were demeaned. What he later makes clear is more subtle and significant: our knowledge acts as a telescope, bringing the past into focus so that we can see the writers of the past more objectively than they could see themselves.

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Contemporary essayists from Barthes to Bhabha, on the other hand, counteract Lamb’s and, some would say, Eliot’s prejudice, either directly or indirectly, by the sheer force and astonishing prescience of their “great labor,” in Eliot’s formula. For it is a process of creative appropriation of both the past and the present. In other words, they claim their “droit de cité” through their awareness of their place in time as well as tradition. Thus, they help correct the errors of the past as well as carry on the tradition of the essay to the future. Said put it succinctly: “I am to be taken seriously as saying that if secular criticism deals with local and worldly situations, and that it is constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systems, then it must follow that the essay—a comparatively short, investigative, radically skeptical form—is the principal way in which to write criticism” (1985: 26). And in the face of a brilliant nonfictional tour de force such as The World, the Text, and the Critic, in which a reexamination of literature achieves all the tension and intellectual innovation of the best criticism, one can only applaud the arrival on the scene of a new kind of imaginative essay writing—or, better, the return of the encyclopedic playfulness of Montaigne or Diderot. If I cannot match that, I have at least been more direct with the essay as anti-genre.

IV As in one of Escher’s visual paradoxes, where infinity opens up vertiginously within a single geometric figure, object and anti-object define each other, and “foreground” and “background” are made to shift according to one’s perspective, the highly combustible issue of the postcolonial, its reason and its consequences in terms of the academic-literary canon, depend almost entirely on one’s position. The much publicized “culture wars and culture whores,” in Homi Bhabha’s totemic phrase, and the seriocomic “battle of the books” of the Western literary academic community—the bitter controversies over who will determine the sacred “canon”—are less about putative standards of literature than about what constitutes a “worthy” life. Is its imprimatur of literature to be bestowed exclusively on the products of a ruling class, Anglo-Saxon in origin, in any case Europeandescended, with a further emphasis on male experience? Are the imaginative products of other kinds of experience, and therefore other lives, by definition to be less significant, because those lives themselves are less significant? “Color is not a human or personal reality,” James Baldwin once wrote, “it is a political reality” (1955: 34). Substitute “ethnic identity,” “gender,” or “class” for the word “color,” and you see how far-reaching and how potentially anarchic the controversy is. And how far from being resolved or fully articulated.

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There is another dark side to the culture wars, the relentless rise of the right and its surfing on a cultural counterrevolution; what Jonathan Freedland has aptly called “the gathering force of the ‘whitelash’” (1995:1–2). Let us quickly concede what must be conceded. It is true that any written tradition survives and multiplies in a range of forms between two extremes—between the vast, continually expanding possibility consisting of anything that has been written, published, and preserved in some library, and the narrow list of selections on somebody’s syllabus. How does a work move from one to the other? Is the text different from the work? Barthes puts the case forcefully: The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacan’s distinction between “reality” and “the real”: the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text (1977: 156–157). Although any work can theoretically appear on any syllabus, most teachers rely on what is currently available from publishers, that is, on a canon determined by the thousands of choices specific teachers make year after year. And teachers are most influenced by each other. Battles about what to include have a long history and are themselves traditional: Swift (in The Battle of the Books) and Chesterfield (in “On Prejudice”) set the ancients (Homer and Virgil) against the moderns (Milton and Tasso). T. H. Huxley debated with Matthew Arnold over the inclusion of science in the Curriculum. F. R. Leavis excluded Lawrence and Joyce from The Great Tradition. T. S. Eliot resurrected the metaphysical poets while Harold Bloom arbitrarily shut out Alice Walker from The Western Canon, who in his text gets slammed more than once as an example of the kind of writer overvalued by the “academic lemmings,” as Bloom calls them (1994: 212). Stanley Fish gaily took on the well-placed few who maintained that squads of Puritan Red Guards in multicultural feminist clothing were polluting the previously pristine academic pond. After sharpening his television pitch, Fish

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went on the road for four debates with the imported demagogue Dinesh D’Souza, who was once associated with the anti-black, anti-Semitic Dartmouth Review, and who is now backed by powerful interests, including William Simon, a former cabinet member, the Olin Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of the anti-PC tract Illiberal Education. And yet D’Souza begins The End of Racism by carefully registering his own racial and ethnic identity—he is a naturalized American born in India. Being a “person of color,” he contends, gives him “ethnic immunity” to comment on all aspects of race (1995: 10). Here too the use of color and ethnicity seems to confuse the categories of analysis, yet his application of the terms makes quite clear who is the subordinator and who is the subordinate. Some of these pronouncements lasted more than a decade. Others did not. Nonetheless, publishers responded to the perceived need. Thus each member of each group—writers, publishers, readers, scholars— is responsible for what we pass on to the next generation to read. Relationships between art and evil ideas (and practices too) should of course be elucidated, but ought we to ban Edmund Spenser for his views of the Irish, or Carlyle for his theses on the “nigger question,” or Renan for his ideas about the “Semitic mind”? Some years ago Chinua Achebe attacked Conrad’s “racism” in Heart of Darkness, and found direct links between that work and the dehumanization and exploitation of Africa. He was not trying to prevent Africans from reading Conrad, but rather to show them that it was not necessary to see Conrad as a “classic” or great writer. That is a view one can argue with, however much one may agree or disagree with Achebe’s critique of Conrad’s “reactionary” and “racist” politics.34 Although loyalty can be a form of self-assertion, I find myself at odds with Achebe’s thesis concerning Conrad’s so-called “racism.” Why should we (people who were once colonized) still be interested in Conrad, we might ask? We may study him for what he has to teach us about nineteenth-century British and/or European imperialism and rapacity. We should read him for a fuller understanding of Edwardian culture, or to investigate the intellectual roots of the will to authority and transgression in writing. When writing on these matters, as other writers who have come after him have often reprovingly noted, Conrad’s real subject is another way of narrating the experience of empire. That is, in my view, the best reason for reading him today. He had an extraordinary mind, without rival in the diversity and richness of its learning, and the breadth of its generosity. This is no reason why we should value Achebe’s thought any the less. For Achebe and for us, how traditional literature is ceasing to be legitimate or useful in these changed social surroundings depends to a large extent on how tradition shapes us while we shape it. Change is inevitable, but not at any price: some have to be pushed off, demeaned, and denigrated to

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make room for others. What the dispirited voices of the “Great Western Canon” debate want to make us believe is that the oppressed of the world, in wishing to be heard and recognized, seek to sully its splendor. But that is not the spirit of resistance as witnesses Aimé Césaire’s line: “There is room for all at the rendez-vous of victory” (1990: 220). The question is not whether we should read more gay and lesbian, postcolonial or AfricanAmerican literature. The issue is excellence—we need everything, as much as possible, for understanding the human adventure at its fullest, without resorting to enormous abstractions and generalizations, without replacing Eurocentrism with other varieties of monocentrism or, say, Islamocentrism, or Afrocentrism or gyno-centrism. History used as a weapon abuses history. The high purpose of history is not the presentation of self or the vindication of identity but the recognition of complexity and the search for knowledge. “We need odes not to blood and mythology or uprooted, mourned or dead plants,” Said notes, “but to living creatures and actual situations” (1994: 291). In the West, the urgency with which black, women and minority studies have been promoted since the 1960s has turned the humanities syllabus—indeed literary studies at large—into an arena in which culture-war skirmishes are energetically pursued. If the majority of U.S. citizens will be persons of color by the year 2020, then the establishment of minority studies as a universal “option” in the Academy becomes a matter of no small importance.35 The syllabus’s adequacy as an implement for the propagation and reinforcement of a democratically representative “culture” undeniably warrants more subtle probing than it receives, but, in Gates’s eyes, any half-hearted schemes will be likely to fail since in the United States blackness is emphatically not optional: “The idea that African-American culture is exclusively a thing apart, separate from the whole, having no influence on the shape and shaping of American culture, is a racialist fiction,” Gates writes. “For us,” he adds, “and for the students that we train, the complex meaning of blackness is a vision of America, a refracted image in the American looking-glass” (1997: 9). Considerations of this sort persuade Gates to stress the potential of slave narratives as a stylistic and structural template for an American literature. Focusing on such a question puts Gates in a difficult intellectual position, for it posits, and then balefully argues against, the assertion that legitimate and authentic culture in America is perceived only as white culture. Therefore, the black artist, writer, scholar, or even politician cannot define himself or herself freely but must work within a complex role that has already been established—that of the outsider, the outlaw, someone heroically disadvantaged and separate. This issue of an enforced and disempowering identity haunts African-American writers, of course, but

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for the best of them it remains secondary. Growing up in more hateful times, writers such as Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and James Baldwin forced themselves beyond the constraints of white culture; they understood in a deeper sense their true relation to it (thus can Murray openly admire Thomas Mann and Ellison praise William Faulkner); they came to value their own worth and to recognize the highly individual and essentially nonracial difficulty of knowing their own souls.36 The search for a critical mode appropriate to such a narrative and to the writing it generates must eventually involve a definition of critical principles peculiar to black literary traditions. As familiarity with those traditions increases, black, text-specific theories will have to be constructed in order that we may learn to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix, not just within a white one. This is the discourse forged in captivity by a culture systematically robbed of its own language and forced to adapt itself to the contours of another. The specific features of the experience of captivity are subtly hinted at in the way in which African-American word “Signifyin(g)” confronts, challenges, and even covertly offers to master the very instrument of its own servitude—embedded in the crucially homonymous English word “signifying”—while apparently remaining ignominiously shackled to it.37 Learning to signify serves as the initiation rite of a culture that experiences its “own” language as a foreign tongue imposed by an oppressor. In the struggle for ownership, parallel but distinct orders of meaning come to inhabit the same sequence of words, and when these square up to each other, the stakes will inevitably be high. To control signification is, after all, to have power/pleasure, and at the heart of this rhetorical practice lies a principle of free-wheeling revision, in which a subordinate culture repeats the products of a dominant culture, down to the individual words of the language it is forced to share, and in doing so, subtly, even paradoxically, remolds them. “The Odyssey of the African-American throughout the twentieth century,” August Wilson proclaims, “has been one of loss and reclamation. It’s about reclaiming those things which were lost during slavery” (quoted in Oates, 1995: 15). The process of recovery inevitably proposes the release of the illogical, scandalous, restive Other that which is usually suppressed in order that straightforward, acceptable meaning may be brought into being. Otherness, seen thus, might stand as the repressed Other of whiteness. The ungrudging scope, as well as the wit and parodic flair, characterizing the oppositional work I discuss in the book, permit no hint that the multiculturalism of the Western societies might better be reduced to a unified unity. Yet on no account are cultural critics decided about the present situation, where what is effectively an AngloAmerican “regional” culture can glibly pass itself off as universal. Their

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position remains liberal and pluralist to the extent of believing that to relinquish the ideal of America as a plural nation would be to abandon the very experiment that America represents. This is signifying with a vengeance.

V A tongue (English or French) not native to a writer becomes the immediate vehicle of his or her innermost genius. Uncannily, all these writers locate in English (or French) the language into which they are metamorphosing themselves the precise equivalent to the joke, the argot, the stroke of local color in the original. Yet “original” may well be the wrong, flattering term. At levels masked from us, they may have initiated the postcolonial act at depth, in a sort of volcanic magma, in which English or French (together, one suspects, with shards of Gaelic, Westminster-Oxford-Waterloo English, Ebonic-bubonic, Hinglish, Angrezi; Charabia, Petit Nègre) is fused into “something rich and strange,” in Ariel’s phrase. It is as if they harnessed the undifferentiated preconscious of word and grammar before Babel. The powerless become lords of sounds, the dispossessed rule all creation with their tongues. Language is not a small victory. It was out of this last, irreducible possession that the formerly colonized peoples of the earth made a counterworld of words, the Irish vanquished England and Antillean poetry bloomed lushly over the oppressor’s burial grounds. I have selected a fair sample of countercanonical texts for close reading. Three chapters of readings follow, to explain several modes of signifying with a vengeance at work in postcolonial literary texts. By discussing explicitly what is implicit in Ben Jelloun, Naipaul, or Morrison, I hope to enhance the reader’s experience of what Nadine Gordimer calls the literature of the “Other World” while identifying levels of meaning and expression that might otherwise remain buried (1995: 83). I make no claim for inclusiveness in the selection of these texts; they were settled on primarily for the range of concerns they demonstrate about my book’s theoretical assumptions. Other texts could just as appositely have been evinced. Rather than a selective deconstruction of postcolonial literature, then, Signifying with a Vengeance is an attempt to arrive at a general theory of such literature. Precisely because I could have selected numerous other texts as examplar, my plan is to draw on the premises of this book in writing a detailed account of the active role the younger generation of writers has played in the field of postcolonial literature and theory. If we look for the geographical focus of new canonical writing, we are less likely to find it in the heart of the metropolis than on its social margins, in the depressed suburbs where writers of African, Indian, African-American, Caribbean

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descent like Ben Okri, Hanif Kureishi, Gloria Naylor, Rita Dove, Jamaica Kincaid; Mehdi Charef and Ferida Belghoul, the so-called Beurs, the Créolistes (Lucien Taylor, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, and Jean Barnabé) have developed. Their work conveys a vivid sense of what it feels like to grow up on the edge, gazing longingly into the center. In theory, after Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Henry Louis Gates, and Homi Bhabha are the theory’s new heirs apparent.38 Signifying with a Vengeance is a prologue. Both Part One and Two of the book explain different modes of breaking the spell of the imagination. Said, Morrison, Naipaul, Derrida, and Ben Jelloun each in his or her own way turn to their e [yb (heritage) in various formal ways to inform their creation. Just as they enable us to move directly beyond what Raymond Williams called the ideological capture of the text and into the life of communities, so too do their works over time give us immense pleasure. To tell and/or to rename is therefore to revise, and to revise is to signify with a vengeance. To do so, it seems to me, is to ground one’s literary practice outside the Western tradition. They do it with a compelling sense of difference. This I attempt to do in Signifying with a Vengeance. “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is,” Gramsci perceptively notes, “and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory” (1975: 1363). Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my own awareness as a “Berber” child who grew up in a former French colony. All my education, in the colony and in La Métropole, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways Signifying with a Vengeance has been an attempt to inventory the traces in me, the once French colonial subject, as well as write back to the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in my life. Whether what I have achieved is the inventory prescribed by Gramsci is not for me to say, although I have felt it important to be conscious of trying to produce one. Such an inventory is dense, associative, contrapuntally layered, flecked with allusions insofar as a contrapuntal perspective is required in order to read Foucault, Morrison, Said, Derrida, Ben Jelloun, and Naipaul. That is, we must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them coexisting and interacting with others (Said, 1999). Let me be more explicit: every kind of writing follows some sort of fil conducteur; it establishes explicit and implicit rules of pertinence for itself—certain things are

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admissible, others are not. This book attempts to read Said, Foucault, Morrison, and others not in a linear but in a jazzy, variational way. My own critical terms (transitive, contrapuntal—as distinguished from—linear, structural) are built on associations of ideas that, as will become fairly evident, gather in a rather wide range of interests. Each of the six chapters, or episodes, has an internal coherence that depends on some aspect of beginning and beginning-again to write; each covers a historical pattern (e.g., the development of the narrative in Ben Jelloun) that does not stray very far from the core subject of signifying, although paradoxically I find it possible in one chapter in particular to discuss both autobiography and philosophy. Altogether, these six plateaux constitute a “structure of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s totemic phrase, though not in a narrow way (i.e., single-voiced). Perhaps my decision to quote Said in the epigraph and to make his work the subject of Chapter 3 makes my point about polyphonic reading best—namely, that signifying implies return and repetition rather than simple linear accomplishment, that signifying not only creates but is its own method because it has intention. In short, signifying is improvising with difference, but—and here is the great fascination for me in the subject and method—difference that is the result of combining the already familiar with the fertile novelty of human work in language. Each of the chapters builds on this interplay between the new and the customary without which (ex nihilo nihil fit) a signifying with a vengeance cannot take place. In Chapter 1, I offer a reading of an exemplary position—namely, that of Michel Foucault, whose intellectual journey carried him across many different disciplines while it kept shifting throughout: from the perspective of philosophy, the history of science and intellectual history to sociology, political science, and theory. His importance as thinker and social critic who transcended academic boundaries to challenge the entrenched, institutionalized models of theoretical rationality and practical normalcy may have been at the origin of the culture wars that are dividing Academia even today. Given his diversity of interpretative strategies, it is nonetheless fair to say that the major theoretical tendency of Foucault’s work is to regard the literary text as part of a larger framework of texts, institutions, and practices. The two most important examples of criticism associated with his ideas, those of Edward Said and Stephen Greenblatt, are stunning instances of his legacy.39 It is more than likely that Foucault’s impact on culture will take shape as a renewed form of Marxist interpretation, perhaps along lines recently developed by new historicism.40 Foucault shares with the latter group an aversion to theory, in his case involving the paradox that he was read, in the United States at least, primarily as a theorist. His hostility to theory led

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to several difficulties for those who attempted to practice his strategies of reading. First, Foucault’s texts betray a continual shifting of the position of the author. Only when he deals with the question raised by Kant in Was ist Aufklärung? “What Is Enlightenment?” that describes the modern form of caring for our selves does Foucault come to affirm the need for the writer to take responsibility for the act of writing by situating him or her through writing in critical antagonism to the present. Second, Foucault’s later works notably, the three volumes on sexuality (Le Corps et la chair, the fourth and last volume is not currently available for consultation or known to be destined for imminent publication), Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, and Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres (another uncompleted project announced as forthcoming in the new series Des Travaux) take us in the direction of a critique of the way discourse constitutes the self in “truth,” but they fail to provide the criterion by which to distinguish the discursive effects of Foucault’s own texts from those that confirm structures of domination (Poster, 1994). There is also the problem why Foucault kept shifting grounds in the choice of his topics: from madness to sex, from the prison to the asylum, from author to non-author. Is his field of knowledge divorced from his “responsibility to take a critical stance” toward the present, to strive for reflexivity by situating my idea firmly in the context of the present conjuncture? Some parts of the sensibility, preoccupations and polemics, in his writings may have dated, while for others (for me, this includes areas under the constellation of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bataille), it is perhaps rather that they now belong to a different layer of modernity from that which we inhabit (Davidson, 1997). The intellectual core of his work, his critical and historical epistemologies of knowledge of the human and its limits, has not dated at all. From beginning to end, Foucault’s work teaches how human practices relating self to self are contingent, and change, in the process altering, but not abolishing our ways of being ethical and moral beings. In this, like Auden’s Freud, he has become a whole climate of opinion even if his Eurocentrism was almost total, as if history itself took place among a group of French and German thinkers alone (Said, 1984). Foucault, along with Barthes, is also famous for having added to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God a subsidiary demise, that of the literary author. But if there are no authors, then there are no fictional personages, presumably because literature does not refer to a world outside language. Finally, undoubtedly it is important to see Foucault as the obvious methodological link between Said’s Orientalism as a text and the postcolonial as a field of study. We have to concede both in theory and practice that the theoretical basis for the discipline as it is pursued in the world today— the one that Said is said to have founded—is in major part (although of

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course not exclusively) Foucauldian. If Homi Bhabha drew on Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida to write The Location of Culture and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak made use of Derrida, Hegel, and a textualized (or Derridean) Marx to produce A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, the most important influence to date, theoretically speaking at least, on the postcolonial, remains Michel Foucault, whom Said disregarded after 1979 as a model of resistance to power arguing that the French cultural critic became too “systematic” for his taste. He opted for two other intellectual mentors instead: Frantz Fanon and Raymond Williams. The course of Said’s rich experience is one of gradual indifference not only to Foucault but also to theory. I shall expand on Said’s trajectory in chapter 3. Chapter 2 marks another position that is no less exemplary and even more complex in its relation to law, ethics, politics, history, the university, and teaching as an institution: that of Jacques Derrida whose work announced the demise of the Western philosophical tradition from the security of a professorship that the prestige of that selfsame tradition helped to found and maintain. The purely rhetorical element in the oppositional stance of Deconstruction is nothing but the result of the practice of a particular intellectual project, the emphasis on the formal character of literary work, reconstructed in endless interpretations at the expense of an historical knowledge of how works have been written and of what institutions have helped them to survive. Such a knowledge confronts the critic and the student with the exigencies of power that excessive stress on interpretation evades. It is then in a new kind of historical inquiry that I discern the potential for a politically correct and responsible Derrida who keeps deferring the question of his debt to his native Algeria. Unlike other ex-colonials, Derrida writes not to recover but to bury the past, history, memory. His avoidance of a sustained historical investigation into the Algerian question shows the potential for a politically irresponsible critique. This investigation into Derrida’s debt to Algeria is conducted despite the conception of origin, which has, of course, radically changed (and was, no doubt, already being challenged in practice): the “individual’s” autonomy, with its concomitant social and linguistic authority, has been seriously eroded. The text now creates the fictions of a “self” rather than the reverse. Derrida’s philosophical critique of presence, of origins and the “full subject,” meticulously deconstruct many of the premises of conventional original forms, as do Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic writings on the predominant role of intersubjectivity in the constitution of the subject. With the Cartesian subject standing “on trial/in process,” as Julia Kristeva put it, and Barthes’s well-known proclamation of the “death of the author” as supreme controller of the text, the possibilities of the formation of an origin (or its very desirability) have to be rethought.41 For the colonized

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Other, these radical alterations in language have turned origin into a model for writing in general, a self-reflexive mode with its subject dispossessed, if not eliminated. The critic’s responsibility is to challenge the hegemonic power of cultural formations. This cannot be accomplished by laying an embargo on the source while showing the signature, nor by what Said calls “Derrida’s elimination of . . . intention” (1985: 191). In other words, deconstructive, interpretative strategies characteristically intervene in different ways practiced with “nihilistic radicality” in pursuit of the meanings of writing that shimmers just a hair beyond utter blankness. Writing leads to a deeper understanding of the starting point and of the paradoxes surrounding the notion of “presence.” It is a trace that cannot be present without having divided itself, since it always refers back to another being, to another place. The central questions of these poetics become indissociable from the new philosophical problematics of Derrida’s recent writings: What is an event? What is hospitality? Under which conditions is it possible? How can we trace back the fountainhead of his knowledge? What is a signature? What is a name in a text? These problems still imply the strategy of “double b(l)inds” that Derrida invented to circumvent the issue. For how can Derrida not write on “Derrida, l’Algérie ou l’enfance troglodyte?” asks Hédi Abdel-Jouad, who adds: Derrida’s work has been examined from every imaginable aspect, point of view and place, except, oddly enough, the most obvious one: Algeria, where he was born. Yet, this baroque oeuvre, which exceeds its own architectonics and thereby overthrows its monolingual structure, bursting into polysemy and difference, forges for itself, by way of its style, the concerns and questions it raises, a creative and writing space that today we call, for lack of a better term, French language Maghrebian literature (1989: 169). In other words, how can one measure “the extent of Algeria’s presence, however absent, the traces of Algeria, however faded? Buried deep inside his being lives a secret Algeria,” Hédi Abdel-Jouad perceptively concludes. We know everything about Derrida’s works but nothing about the young man, his Algerian years, his beginnings, his past, childhood, intention, and method, protohistory. To what extent, then, did Algeria—“earth, sky, man, woman, flora and fauna”—play a role in the Derridean thinking and writing? (ibid.). Derrida has of late reconsidered the notions of writing and language, which he had until recently treated as animated by a given text or subject—the history of philosophy, for instance, or the idea of narrative as a

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theme in prose philosophy. What concerns him now is how a subject is constituted, how a language can be formed—writing as a construction of the Self. This is the world of “French Algeria” of which he is a part. The first attempt he makes at this kind of writing is Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine, in which he speaks of his embattled, fragmentary hyphenated identity as “Franco-Maghrebian.” The essay shows Derrida as someone who is no longer able to live an uncommitted or suspended life vis-à-vis the country of his birth: he does not hesitate to declare his filiation and/or affiliation with the subaltern: the Arab, the Berber. There is a definite, almost palpable discomfort to such a position of reclaiming an ¹«[‡ Ç (authenticity) that is Maghrebian in the first place, especially given the irreconcilability of the two constituencies (Algerian/French), and the two lives (Algérois/Parisian) they have required (1996: 34). That Derrida pays homage to the country of his birth is de rigueur, but why so very late? “I dream of writing an anamnesis of what enabled me to identify myself or say I am Algerian” (ibid., 66). The essay intertwines theoretical reflection on “home” wherever that may be, with historical and cultural particularity of the French language. Derrida testifies to aspects of his acculturation as an Algerian Jew with respect to language acquisition, schooling, citizenship, and the dynamics of cultural-political exclusion and inclusion. Since the essay’s central theme turns around the question of linguistic and cultural identity, its argument deals with the tacit or explicit self-censorship that had erased Algeria from serious critical consideration and with the complex interplay of historical factors that invest the subject of identity with the desire to recover a “lost paradise” and language of origin. Chapter 3 discusses the legacy of Edward Said’s pioneering oeuvre. “A lone individual, who might have done very well for himself either by keeping silent or by playing along, and who had moreover recently been diagnosed as being gravely ill, chose instead to place the emphasis on unwelcome truth, on ‘what people do not want to hear’” (1996: vii). This is how Christopher Hitchens renders justice to Said, who, in a life that has reflected many of the distinctive features of the twentieth century, has made an outstanding contribution to debates on literature, theory, politics, history, and music. The entire corpus of Said’s quite voluminous output continues to be influential throughout the first part of the twenty-first century wherein the new figure of the intellectual, created a century ago, plays a large role. The onrush of modernization in the form of the global economy has helped produce a new scapegoat, the Arab, who replaces the old (but not forgotten) figure of the Jew. Said has become, “almost in a Borgesian way,” a university text for the Western classroom just as he has for the Third World, although not without censorship in the Arab

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world in particular; whether in the original, in translations, or in adaptations, his work has had a large effect on the development of any study and/or understanding of the relations between the metropolitan West and the decolonizing periphery. In large measure, thanks to him, we have become aware that all reading, all memories of reading, and all criticism are processes of fragmentation, a prey to (but also the beneficiaries of) the random, the contingent, the mediated. Many of us—subalterns living in a postoriental, postmillennium, postnational, postcolonial world—are greatly indebted to Said and his accomplishment as a cultural critic who has managed, uncannily, to invent his own mode of literary representation, the significance of which is very pertinent for the colonized Other. People like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Gauri Viswanathan, Bart Moore-Gilbert, and others owe a great deal to Said’s vision, friendship, and example. I myself acknowledge a long and outstanding debt to Said both personal and professional. When Viswanathan wrote: “To Edward Said, who inspired me . . . in the first place, I offer my warmest appreciation. The most encouraging of teachers, he deepened the excitement of intellectual inquiry,” she speaks not only for herself but for all of us (1989: x). Said, critic, political activist, accomplished musician, has long been the purveyor of this energetic, wry u\¸cj É (perseverence). Consider Culture and Imperialism, which, Henry Louis Gates announces, “is a brilliant demonstration of a cultural criticism that matters. Lucid, learned and, in the deepest sense, humane, [it] . . . is a major event in the discourse of the West—and the rest.”42 He places it in the category that includes some of the most influential texts of the last quarter of this last century. A Palestinian Christian, Said was brought up in Jerusalem and Cairo, but has built a formidable fortress in America, where he has assumed the position of the exiled literary man in extremis—an Arab critic of the West and the Arab world, a reader who is at home in Western literature but makes an active case for other literatures. He loathes insularity and parochialism, and has disdained “flat-minded” approaches to reading. Over the years, he has gained many disciples and followers, some of whom he has recently chastised for carrying his moral and political critiques of Western literature to the point of caricature. Surrounding an impressive performance of books, essays, articles, and reviews on different subjects embracing a whole range of issues of culture, literature, politics, not to mention public appearances—lectures, talks on radio shows, television debates with the likes of Terry Eagleton, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Salman Rushdie, Daniel Barenboim, the late Eqbal Ahmad, Tariq Ali, among several others—so numerous are these undertakings that some of them make the very substance of some of his best essays, which give voice to, as well as document, one of the worst political

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injustices of the late twentieth century: Israel’s (and America’s) denial of Palestine’s right to statehood. Here, Said plays the witness, analyst, and voice of human conscience.43 A recurrent concern of his books involves the political responsibilities of humanist intellectuals in general and literary critics in particular. Intellectuals, Said argues, should be “oppositional.” As critics, they have an obligation to intervene in the formation of cultures, which are “ensembles of pretexts, texts, and paratexts.” (Sosnoski, 1994). The intellectual’s responsibility is to challenge the hegemonic power of cultural formations. One cannot help noticing how Said feels a sense of responsibility to the public, an affiliation with a cause; a unified position that he maintains in the midst of conflicting posts—whether it be poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism or post-anything, they all represent a sort of spectacle.44 How has Said developed from this singular perspective an influential type of cultural criticism? His importance to contemporary critics is that, in refusing to accept the cloak of neutrality that most critics wear, he has shown how theory can be applied to the most volatile and current of struggles for cultural hegemony. Following Sosnoski, I want to investigate three configurations that appear as “beginning intentions” in his criticism: “(1) a desire to make critical work out of the fabric of life, (2) a refusal to separate the imperialism of mind from that of nations, and (3) a will to forge literary criticism into an act of political intervention in the production of cultures.” (1994: 643). His application to his own career of a “postnarrative” or nonlinear concept keeps it shifting from fictionalized autobiography to the study of narrativization of experience to critiquing performances of classical music and opera recitals. Intervention in the formation of culture is a goal of Said’s work. The question of taking responsibility to write broached in his study of Conrad, as authorship, and in Beginnings: Intention and Method as authority of a “beginning intention,” becomes in his later work (Representations of the Intellectual is a case in point) a matter of political agency. His study of narrativization then takes a political turn; it leads directly to his rewriting of contemporary history to protest against such fictional concepts as “Arabs” and “Islam.” He theorizes that affiliations to cultural institutions replace the filiations of birthright. Writing the history of cultures and personal histories are inseparable (Sosnoski, 1994).45 Chapter 4 deals with a novelist estranged from people, places, things. With his legendary pique and eccentricity, V. S. Naipaul continues to write from within the West. But if he intimidates, his writing is nevertheless admired for its unique and penetrating perspective—that of a man who discovered the world as a migrant. He quotes Conrad as saying: “The empires of our time were short-lived, but they have altered the world for

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ever; their passing away is their least significant feature” (1969: 133). His novels chart that alteration and are themselves a product of it. Over the years Naipaul has been feeding on the remains left behind by the ebb tide of the British Empire with a keen sense of never having enough. For one of the most important things those empires left behind were their languages, and the new literatures in English have been especially vital. He has been demonstrating that a great writer is more often than not an insatiable scavenger, too—gobbling his opportunities wherever he can. A descendant of Hindus who came to Trinidad as indentured laborers, Naipaul has become over the last four decades one of the most prominent figures in what was at first called “Commonwealth Literature” and is now known as postcolonial literature. The field is too large to survey here, though its importance is suggested by the literary prizes awarded to some of these writers (Gora, 1994). Naipaul’s narrative testifies to what he describes as the great restlessness of our age, restlessness whose mass migrations and cultural upheavals were created by imperialism, but which seems only to have increased as the empires themselves have receded. Naipaul deals with people whose lives have been “handcuffed to history,” and thereby “transformed into grotesquery” (Rushdie, 1991: 431). He is a master of an astringent comedy that grows from the confrontation of one culture with another: the Third World and the West collide but do not cohere. Most of his characters stand as examples of what he calls “mimic men.” For in their wounded civilizations all terms of value and reference seem to come from outside, from the West. They mimic its manners but they are not so much men who mimic as they are mimics of men, “pretend[ing] to be real.” The narrator Salim in A Bend in the River becomes so fascinated with the science he learns from popular magazines that he looks to the West as the exclusive source of knowledge and civilization, filled with a sense of how far he has to go to catch up? So, too, the societies from which men like Salim come; they remain dependent on metropolitan values—or rather on the value the “Métropole, the Capital-City–Mother-Fatherland,” as Derrida would have it, the city of the mother tongue, places on them, on their bauxite, sugar, oil, and trade. For Naipaul, they are dependent, at best “half-made,” an imitation of what a man should be. The world has no place for “men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing” (Naipaul, 1979: 56). But in a mortified society how can anyone make himself or herself into something other than a mimic of a man? How does one move from dependency to development when the tools of the “half-made” men and women are so often the chains of the men and women they seek to ape? Does the colonial writer see the library shelves of the metropolis as a sign of his or her own inconsequentiality

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INTRODUCTION

even though he or she has no way of escaping the sense of his or her own belatedness except by trying to fill a shelf of his or her works, embracing the very thing that oppresses him or her?46 What has Providence done to Naipaul that he should find the world so consistently depressing? Can one think of a place that would cheer him up, that would resist his persuasive invitation to lament? The Third World—in the first half of the 1970s, was it not in a sorry enough state to justify everything in his usual tone, to exclude even the odd glimmer of optimism that can be found in his account of a second visit to his first area of darkness, India? The Third World was in such a state, but one still comes to the conclusion that this cannot justify all of Naipaul’s intensities and obsessions. His effort of thought and sympathy, an effort that “does not stop with the aspect of the land. It extends to all men and women in these dark and remote places who, for whatever reason, are denied a clear vision of the world.” They offer a “vision of the world’s half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade themselves, where there was no goal, and where always something inherent in the necessities of successful action . . . carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.’ Dismal but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation” (1980: 206). For Naipaul, since what sets the problem of backwardness is that life in the Third World is a jungle, its solution needs to be more than a rigmarole of savages. Naipaul finds his affinity with Conrad in his account of Third World confusion. At his best, where his imagination is fully caught, he does convey his own dismal truth, and even offer his mite of consolation. He does not make geographical allowances for fraudulence. A way of thinking that is bogus in one place is just as bogus in another, and to deny this out of some false respect for ex-colonial beginners is not charity, but treasonable condescension. That will be paid for, though not, of course, by those who have their return air-ticket. The “social-intellectual diversions of the north,” he observes, “are still an essential aid and comfort for the deluded of the south”; for those (Ibid.) who do not look for modesty or skepticism or warnings that our fashionable dogmatists should be taken with a pinch of salt: what is sought is what in conscience should not be offered— authority. It is a much more complicated problem than working out the terms for “lifting” bauxite. Chapter 5 looks at the politics of the world’s greatest literary award—namely, the Nobel Prize, that has held together the idea of world literature. It also examines the Nobel syndrome.47 The literary prize has become the symbol of the globalized literary marketplace, accompanied by lavish award ceremonies, audiovisual presentations, and black-tie dinners in swanky hotel ballrooms. In the middle of this ballyhoo, the Nobel Prize for Literature has managed to retain its dignity, and never

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more so than when it awards its laurels to an off-the-edge writer. The news that in 2000 the coveted prize had gone to a Chinese writer in exile, the experimental playwright and novelist Gao Xingjiang, provoked a chorus of “Who?” and academic gripes against Gao’s elevation. None of this obscures the headline news that this is the first time China has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and that, of course, tells us plenty about the politics of our time. For the moment the publicity surrounding the Nobel has brought to our notice a number of writers whose work we previously knew nothing about. That is where the literary prize—arbitrary and capricious as it doubtless is—serves such a valid purpose, sponsoring publicity and discussion and, finally, enlisting new constituencies and audiences. The upshot of the whole operation is that the West is at long last beginning to value some of the central cultural ideas and accomplishments of others, about whose traditions people in the West are only starting to learn, appreciate, and respect. It is a crude, slightly brutal process, as unsettling in its way as the heavy journalistic knocking that brought unsuspecting Gao Xingjiang to the door of his Paris apartment—in his slippers. Amid dignity and the hype, what should be the attitude of the “third space”: the subordinate, the subaltern, and the subterranean who can no longer be described simply in terms of class/race/gender/nation toward a cultural institution like the Nobel and what it represents? Is the history of the Nobel Prize a history of circulation and negotiation? Can the Nobel laureate find the means the morning after to resist, and refuse the prize the way Beckett and Sartre did, respectively and repel the glare of publicity? These questions do not stand alone. They are strung on a chain that may be described this way: the cultural presuppositions, historical excavations, and literary representations of the dominant—insofar as they are shared by the emergent postcolonial—also trace the emergence of a worldwide debate about the Academy’s decisions, motives, intellect, and ethics in awarding the prize. The cultural politics of the Nobel seem to contain a coda. In the telling, the prize seldom appears to be above the fray. At the risk of tempting fate, all one can say with any certainty is that we all participate, albeit from different cultural positions, in a global system of culture. The chapter also reflects on the way writing race has represented the world in which another off-the-edge Nobel laureate lives and from where she continues to tell her stories. For the formal properties of the AfricanAmerican idiom as celebrated by Toni Morrison, the first female black writer to be honored since 1901, are clear: properly wary of the establishment of black writing on the white Western model, she is also aware of the extent to which only the master’s tools will ever demolish the master’s

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house. One can observe this assault in Paradise, which achieves a startling representation of the historical meaning of the racist exploitation under slavery in the United States as it remembers the lives of the survivors of slavery through the uncanny afterlife of the ghosts of racial violence from the past. From the eruption of the dead in the living, there arises the haunting agency of the victims that torment the narrative of slavery recounted by history.48 Drawing on orality, slavery, cultural history as well as jazz, blues, and gospel, Morrison rests the case for a distinctive African-American mode of writing squarely on its use of English, and particularly on its involvement with a range of verbal rituals. The finished product is a narrative that announces the concept of oral roots and points to a range of elaborate rhetorical displays that make much of conspicuous, self-advertising tropes, illogical leaps, systematic lying, focus on a word’s sound rather than its meaning, “needling,” talking “around” a subject, parody and pastiche; in fine, signifying with a vengeance. Her narrative techniques also operate as a putative game, with increasingly forceful interchanges of language directed at each player’s closest relatives, usually the mother who “holds the tale,” as Anita Desai once put it. The first participant to become overtly upset loses the advantage. In practice, the new narrative techniques act as a kind of effective commando course, testing and training emotional strength in the face of a white, hostile world, ever poised to insult one’s parentage. Any theory of signifying with a vengeance that takes on board Morrison’s provocative evaluation of it as the distinctive feature of AfricanAmerican language must begin by accepting that it involves a deliberate disruption of the apparent sequential coherence usually implied by the process of signification. Its mode is figurative. This frontal oral challenge to literate African-American notions of the linear, incremental generation of meaning is, as Morrison argues, the distinctive black trope of tropes, the “trope-a-dope,” in Gates’s phrase, the central rhetorical principle of a vernacular discourse with its own material history, as in the case of the “personal statement” the young Gates included with his application to Yale University: “My grandfather was colored, my father Negro, and I am black. . . . As always, whitey now sits in judgement of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself.” In 1929, in 1949, or even 1959, what would have been the result of such brashness? Fortunately for Gates, it was 1969, and a new America, and “they let [him] . . . in” (quoted in Oates, 1995: 15). The chapter ends with the attempt to recover the subaltern subject-position by submitting to the final set of questions—Who speaks in the narrative? Is it Morrison, her

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characters, or both? To answer that question we would want to reply to yet another one. Is the African-American writer and her narrative a site for and the space in which voices of subaltern consciousness are constantly made anew? Are race and language as illuminating a category as gender and class? If so, what are the points of contention and intersection? Having said that, crucial to the culture of the postmodern age, it must be said, is the ethic of individualism, an understanding of the world that the Western European tradition takes for granted as part of the natural order of things but that in fact represents the fairly recent historical development of a consciousness or sense of self that remains strange and even incomprehensible to people outside the tradition. For those on the margins of Western culture, or those of minority groups or culturally deprived social classes within them, does the novel, as celebrated by Morrison, provide access to a liberating understanding of the cultural forms that oppress them? The discussion of writing in the “pluri-langue” in Chapter 6 is occasioned here formally by a strain of fiction, initiated by the likes of Abdelkebir Khatibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun. If English has become a world language whose literatures occupy a dominant position in an emerging global culture that parallels the global economy, the French language and literature still hold an incredible sway over its subjects. Think of the superinflated “Championat du monde d’orthographe,” broadcast from the rock of the dome to the rim of the world, and the point will be clear enough.49 French publishing houses are another example of this cultural domination. If one is not published in Paris, one’s scholarship barely exists. In addition, if all written languages undergo slow processes of mortification—English now remains most vital where it is still used in predominantly oral cultures—the Maghrebian writer, if he or she is to write at all, must do so in a written language. He or she has no real choice but must write in whichever of the two languages (Arabic or French) he or she most easily masters. This means that he or she must share the position of “in-between” Khatibi speaks about so perceptively in Maghreb pluriel. In the process, how are we therefore to interpret “French” as it is used by the Maghrebian Francophone writer, and is it really possible for him or her to utilize it without surrendering to its ideology? Rachid Boujedra, whose view of colonialism and its imposition of French education in Algeria led him to a renunciation of the French language in his own writing, labors in Arabic. By a twist of the pen, one could easily argue that to deny French and its influence is to ignore a long colonial and imperial history that has shaped and changed experience and identity in profound ways. It would be like shredding or incinerating the offending past, and, like most shreddings of history, represent a cover-up that would guarantee historical amnesia and a return of the repressed. To

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write in French is to purge and exorcise a scarred portion of history. This does not, however, mean that we should continue to promote French over other languages (e.g., Arabic or Berber). For to do that would be to deny our specificity and long history of local resistance. Locked in the compromises of the present, the Maghrebian francophone writer must decide on a mode of temporary, strategic oppositions that necessarily involve an engagement with “French” and/or Arabic literature. The appropriation of the French language, given the present impossibility of overreaching French studies from (specifically) Maghrebian education, may “involve re-interpretation”—a simultaneous examination of their meaning in both culture and history. My reading of Ben Jelloun emphasizes the alignment between language, nation, and literature on the one hand, unity, identity, plurality, and marginality on the other. My analysis of his works directly addresses the evasions and willed blindness on which much contemporary and previous criticism has rested. The historical contexts of the works provide an interesting perspective on how Orality/Writing impinge on each other and inform much of the francophone Maghrebian narrative’s tensions and motives today. Maghrebian Francophone writers are not of the same type. Some of them are Algerian, others are Moroccan. Some are black, others are white. They include both women and men. They are made of exiles, émigrés, firstgeneration migrants, affluent expatriates whose residence in La Métropole is frequently temporary, naturalized French, and people born there who have never laid eyes on the Maghreb. Clearly, nothing that one says can apply across all these categories. But one of the interesting things about this diverse community is that as far as Francophone fiction is concerned, its existence changes the order of things because that fiction is coming as much from Paris or Marseilles as from Tangier or Algiers. One of the changes has to do with attitudes toward the use of the French language. Consider what Khatibi has to say on the subject. I think that Francophone literature in The Maghreb is inscribed in a chiasmus. On the one hand, it belongs to the tradition of the French language regardless of the writer’s intent. . . . On the other, this literature is molded by the mother tongue, orality, and proverbial speech. And the results are everywhere: what sometimes seems like a disturbance or subversion of the French language is indicative of a process of translation (conscious or unconscious) from one language to the other. It is this divergence which determines the originality of a text. Where does the violence of the text stand out, if not in this para-

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dox, this irreconcilable cross-roads? Even so, one must not make it in the text itself. Yes, use the French language to express the rift and the pleasure felt by the stranger who must continually work on the margin, for himself, alone (1983: 47–48). The almost reiterated stress on writing in the “pluri-langue” is part of a strategy that is intended to make us sense the intimate interrelationship among creative generative powers. And Khatibi has this to add: Francophone Maghrebian writers cannot simply use French in the way French people do; it needs remaking for their own purpose. Ben Jelloun goes farther afield in stating that writing in French is not a choice but the result of colonial violence (of the letter). What emerges is an impression of great singleness of purpose. Writing in French “surrenders us to the other, but we will defend ourselves with arabesque, subversion, labyrinthine constructions, the incessant decentering of the sentence and of language so that the other will lose the way just as in the narrow streets of the Casbah” (Meddeb, 1987: 23). If there is one ineluctable simile in Abdelwahab Meddeb, it may simply be the one that has the function of superimposing an unfamiliar model text that needs to be decoded if the process of intertextuality is to attain its true significance in francophone Maghrebian writing. So long as a classical colonial empire like France existed, the dialectics of subjection and later of liberation were the principal aspects of the nation’s life. Yet the problem of the relationship between cultures has continued, either as a legacy of the colonial past or as a modern political issue within the Maghreb. What is the cultural relationship today between, say, Morocco and Algeria on the one hand, and France on the other? Does the use of the French language make possible a kind of guerilla assault on French itself? Those who use French do so in spite of, or maybe because of their ambivalence toward it. Perhaps they find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within themselves and the influences at work on the society in which they live. Or, to conquer French even in the most folkloric fashion may be to seek an alternative to Arabic and thereby complete the process of liberation. At any rate, the Francophone Maghrebian writer does not have the option of simply rejecting French. His or her children will grow up speaking it, probably as a first language; and in the process of forging an identity, split though it be, French is of central importance. It must, despite everything else, be embraced at all cost. However, the most sinister aspect of writing in the “pluri-langue” is that writers like Khatibi, Ben Jelloun, Meddeb, and others have come to

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see the new form of twentieth-century displacement as something that excludes all but the ethnic members of the main exile group in France. Maghrebians in Paris or Nice remain Maghrebian, interested in Maghrebian affairs, setting up their own Marrakesh or Tunis or Algiers. Much the same can be said of émigrés and exiles elsewhere. Having come to the First World in an age of rapid travel and communication no longer means that you have to give up the old country, since it turns out you can bring it with you. For “les Arabes de France,” as they are often called, ® \°n (hammam), ]\jn (hija¯ b), ª Øn(halal), Áé¨é§ (couscous), ¾½ƒ¯ (mechoui), {\¤ #z¯ (merguez), y[|^ (bazaar) as well as the belly dance are part and parcel of the stuff their identity is made of—the need to achieve an independent sense of being in their adopted home. In the process, they proclaim themselves multiple. The fantasy of this most revolutionary sensibility is that colonial subjection does not invariably produce subjugation; that there is an identity beyond the boundary of cultural colonialism. It is to the possibility of existence beyond a boundary that this chapter addresses itself.

VI The brutalities of tyranny and the hazards of artistic daring are at the heart of all writing in the Third World and in the Arab world in particular; a world where tribalism has replaced the old concept of the imposed from above nation-state and where the death threats against intellectuals who speak against corruption, injustice, and poverty, are renewed every day. In our postmodern age—an age that still lacks a clear definition or any sense of single or simple self-consciousness—which is worse than useless for it is neither capable of understanding and analyzing the power structure of the world nor is it intelligent enough to grasp the particular aesthetic merit of an individual work of art, expectations about the possibility of massive change for the better have been lowered; tribal warfare has replaced revolution. For despite Lyotard and his acolytes, we are still in the era of large narratives, of horrendous cultural clashes, and of appallingly destructive war—as witness the shame in Bosnia, the brutality of war in Serbia, the impotence of the so-called United Nations in Rwanda, the carnage in the Great Lakes region, the savage repression in Palestine—and to say that we are postmodern, or beyond modernism, is to be blind and trivial. For if innocent human life is sacred, then it must not cynically be sacrificed if the victims happen not to be white and Western. One must always begin one’s resistance at home, against power that as a citizen one can influence; but, alas, a nationalism masking itself as patriotism and moral concern has taken over the critical consciousness, which then puts loyalty to one’s “nation” before everything else. At this point there is only the treason of the

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intellectuals and complete moral bankruptcy (Said, 1998; 1999; Fisk 1999; 2000). When Mahmoud Messaadi, Tunisia’s great literary figure, agreed to become the Minister of Education under Habib Bourguiba, he stopped being a true intellectual at the very moment that he changed camps. The role of the Third World intellectual today is to do the opposite of what Messaadi did; he must be able to speak the truth to power, to address the central authority in every society without hypocrisy, and to choose the method, the style, and the critique best suited for those purposes. This is so because the intellectual produces a kind of performance that continues for years; a performance similar to the one Pramoedya Ananta Toer gives us in the Buru Quartet, which he composed in a prison camp—first reciting it to his fellow-prisoners, then writing it down. In such circumstances, what does the intellectual who has witnessed years of crushing tyranny write about? Will a vision, a new role for him or her rise from the ranks of the oppressed to project renewed hope and determination? What is the effort of writing if it does not require care and attention to understand psyche, society, and world? How can we care for the self as well as for creative energy? These haunting questions remain unanswered—at least for now—yet the challenge they pose must be met. The new spirit of resistance must confront these enormous and urgent situations. It will require all the imagination, intelligence, courage, sacrifice, and patience we can muster. In the process, we look at the past for strength, not solace; we look at the present and see artists and writers, people perishing; we look to the future and vow to change it (for the better). The task of the “New World bricoleur,” in Cornel West’s phrase, is to “struggle and stay . . . with intellectual rigor, existential dignity, moral vision, political courage and soulful style” (1990: 36). It is this new tradition that has stimulated the kinds of interests and interpretations ventured here, but these circumstances have certainly made it possible for me to feel as if I belonged to more than one history and more than one constituency or one group of people. As to whether such a state can be regarded as a truly salutary alternative to the normal sense of belonging to only one culture and feeling a sense of loyalty to only one tribe, the reader must now decide.

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Part One

Theories of the Tradition

Ainsi je célèbre cet éveil Ces signes sur tes mains Au coeur de leur tatouage. . . . Quadruple signe Sur le tapis qui te porte : Quel hiéroglyphe De ta forme imaginale Lie et délie Ma pudeur latente ? Abdelkebir Khatibi, Dédicace à l’année qui vient, 28.

Man, if I gave you your five dollars, you wouldn’t have nothing to signify about. Mitchell-Kernan, “Signifying,” 319.

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Chapter One

MICHEL FOUCAULT: MISSIONARY OF TRANSGRESSION At the heart of Foucault’s work is . . . the variously embodied idea that always conveys the sentiment of otherness. For Foucault, otherness is both a force and a feeling in itself, something whose seemingly endless metamorphoses his work reflects and shapes. Edward Said, “Michel Foucault, 1926–1984,” 5.

With the publication of Dits et écrits in 1996, Michel Foucault moved once again to center stage. This time, however, the intense debate centers around the philosopher-critic’s life and how disturbing, exemplary, and brilliantly provocative it was. In attempting an overall response to Dits et écrits (essays, articles, lectures, letters, statements, journalism, prefaces, book reviews, discussions, and interviews), one can hardly avoid thinking of the question asked in Foucault’s essay “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Do the contents of these volumes form one oeuvre, many, or none? Is there one personal curve or equation running through a conversation with a film director, a debate on the history of biology, a defense of suicide or sadomasochism, a discussion on homosexual friendship in antiquity and today, a tribute to a dead friend, a protest at an extradition or an execution? Meanwhile, it is proper to measure the extent to which Dits et écrits, which exceeds the total volume of Foucault’s previous books, revises and enlarges our vision of his life and work. 51

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Foucault wrote, on the death of André Malraux, that “we are perhaps too much given over to commentary to understand what lives are” (1994: Vol. III: 108). True insofar as his was multiple, to say the least. The four volumes of Dits et écrits transform the conditions for all future research on Foucault. Taken together, the posthumous works and studies, unlike the previous ones, invite us to ponder the Foucault phenomena as well as his work as he himself understood it. “At every moment,” he remarked in 1983, “step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.” And this requires us to engage in a deconstruction of dream and reality, concept and existence, just as Foucault suggested: “The key to the personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be conducted from them, but rather in his philosophy—as—life, in his philosophical life, his ethos” (ibid., 417). Put in different terms, we must strip wisdom and truth away from the very intellectual horror that at times surrounded both the philosopher and his writings. “I had had enough of being surrounded by half-madmen,” Foucault told Gilles Deleuze after he left the then anarchic new University of Vincennes. “He wore masks, and he was always changing them,” said his mentor Georges Dumézil. But it was (was it not) more than a matter of masks. “No doubt,” Eribon writes, “there are several Foucaults—a thousand Foucaults” (1989: 56). Foucault was a peculiar kind of intellectual figure; as Eribon also makes clear, his personal history included several failures: a suicide attempt, a nervous breakdown, a short period of institutionalization, a police file, accusations of theft and murder at the time when he was an Hypocagne student in Poitiers. His gayness, which remained a source of enigma, haunted him all his life. In 1959, it even got him expelled from a teaching post in Poland after meeting a boy who turned out to be a Communist spy. In later years, happily in his relationship with his lover Daniel Defert, Foucault remarked to the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan: “There will be no civilization as long as marriage between men is not accepted” (1994: Vol. IV: 320). And although Foucault lived up to the image of the “specific” intellectual par excellence, his commitments as well as interventions were always individual and sometimes surprising. One such intervention took place in 1980, the year he gave a most bizarre interview that later appeared in Le Monde (April 6–7) under the title Le Philosophe masqué. In the introduction to the interview, the interviewer set anonymity against author/authority: “Here is a French writer of some renown . . . who has agreed to grant us an interview . . . on one express condition: that he remain anonymous.” In answer to the first question put to him, the interviewee makes this suggestion: “I say we have a ‘year of the anonymous,’ during which we would publish books without the author’s

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name. Critics would have to deal with entirely anonymous work” (ibid., 104). Reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges who could permit himself the luxury of inventing an author and a book, and who in his critique of the book went so far as to give details on its subject matter, plot, subplot and characters, while borrowing from Kipling and referring to the twelfth-century Persian Sufi Farid-ud-Din Attar, so here too only a well-known figure could choose to conceal his name. The interviewer in Foucault’s case, like the narrator in Borges’s El acercamiento a Almotásim, challenges the reader to reveal the identity of this author: “at the end of this conversation, the most discerning readers will no doubt have solved the mystery.”1 It emerged that at least one mystery was solved: that Foucault was different from other intellectuals. General readers (if they still exist) may marvel at the maneuver aroused by essentially academic encounters. Where else but in France would a difficult professional philosopher be the subject of an unidentified interview? One explanation the authorless intervention may offer is that the idea of the author as a free and creative subject must be rejected in favor of the analysis of the author as a function of discourse. This “authorfunction” can reveal the manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of its place in a given society and so establish the specific “mode of existence” of that discourse. “Le Philosophe masqué” primarily argues that the indifference to the identity of the author is the “fundamental ethical principle” of contemporary literature. This indifference has freed writing and speaking from the necessity of expression and allowed it to unfold in reference only to itself (Vol. IV: 104). Here again Foucault wants to liberate the Text from the appropriation of authorship. The author is commonly reduced to a mere secondary “effect” within the Text. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” he asks and answers with equal aplomb. “The author-function is the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call ‘author’” (1994: Vol. III: 742). Roland Barthes takes emancipation a step further; progressive authors must deconstruct themselves: “The problem facing modern writing [lies in] how to breach the wall of writing, the wall of origin, the wall of ownership” (1977: 143). How indeed? Although Barthes attributes S/Z to the collective of his seminar, the above words from it are owned by him and will be owned by his heirs for the next half-century. How then achieve the ownerless, de-authored text? Barthes gives an oblique reply on the back page of S/Z’s French edition, where it is noted that medieval writing was quadripartite. There was the scriptor who copied, the compilator who interpolated common places, the commentator who wove interpretation, and the auctor who ventured some new ideas. Such monasticism is reminiscent of the electronic global village the world has become and where authors tend to disintegrate into the pure collectivism of writing function.

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To return to “Le Philosophe masqué” is to be reminded of Foucault’s use of the interview as anti-genre. Its dialogic form enabled him to engage intimately in a critical reflection on the crucial shifts in philosophy, politics, and culture. No other intellectual, except perhaps for Edward Said, has been so committed to the interview as a cultural form. Foucault used it masterfully to gloss and supplement his theoretical work in an accessible and personal way and thereby assure it a central place within his corpus. The “Dits” which in Dits et écrits may be understood as “sayings” or “things said” accords with the fact that, from the publication of Les Mots et les choses in 1966, when Foucault became a celebrity in France, nearly half of the collected pieces in the four volumes are interviews. There are, altogether, 156 interview and discussion pieces; in a few of these, it is Foucault who is the interviewer. Over the period since the Dutch student Franz Burman recorded his conversations on René Descartes, Foucault must be one of the most prolific interviewees in Western culture. This is despite the fact not all his interviewers’ questions are especially acute, searching, or concise. Yet it is plain that he relished interviews, with their potential for the unexpected and their aspects of risk and play, their opportunities to be surprised into a new thought, to crystalize a current problem, to negotiate explanations and answer challenges. Anyone who aims to distill Foucault’s most essential thinking will need to draw on a number of these sayings and writings. Deleuze gives some indication of what is at stake: Right until the end of his life, Foucault attached a great significance to interviews, in France and even more so outside of France, not out of pleasure, but because he was marking out a currency that cannot be captured in great books and that needed some other form of expression. Interviews are diagnoses. Think of trying to read Nietzsche’s works independent of their present-day Nachlass. Foucault’s entire oeuvre, as conceived by Defert and Ewald, is the sum of the books that have left their mark on all of us and the interviews that take us forward, toward a destiny: the macro and the micro (1988: 52).

I “Who, or what, is Michel Foucault?,” James D. Faubion asks and answers: The possibilities already seem endless: structuralist, idealist, neoconservative, poststructuralist, antihumanist, irra-

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tionalist, radical relativist, theorist of power, missionary of transgression, aestheticist, dying man, saint, or, if nothing else, “postmodern.” But, in fact, the most accurate label may simply be “Foucauldian” (1998: x). Foucault’s philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enterprise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. His analyses of this power as it manifests itself in schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are the subject of my inquiry in this chapter, which will try to present the Faucauldian within those horizons immanent in Foucault’s own writings: in his own puzzlings and assertions, his own speculation, his own references and allusions to other writers and other texts, to objects and events. Moreover, the chapter will reconstitute, however briefly, the voices of some of Foucault’s most privileged critics. They provide a missing context for his work and help us understand his appropriations of and struggles with his own philosophical culture. They also assist us in coming to grips with his intellectual specificity, which included nearly everything except France’s mission civilisatrice in the colonies. As the new century (and the millennium) dawn, who should we say is the great philosopher after Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger or even Sartre? Does Foucault actually compare to the earlier four? What shape did his challenge to Marxism take and was he right to ask that we see literature as a discursive practice fully implicated within a culture’s distribution of power? Can we account for his work as a series of histories (rather than history) that question and describe the formation of subjectivity and modernity? Does it undergo any profound internal shifts of direction? Why did Foucault move away from his phenomenological base while embarking on careful historical studies of the social apparatus that organize everyday existence in modern society? How successful was he in declaring himself a Communist and Nietzschean, structuralist and historian at the same time? This set of questions provokes yet further interrogations concerning Foucault and his method: How are we to trace his intellectual itinerary that may be said to reflect the stages of his thinking?2 How does his method differ from other methods used by other theorists like Habermas, Derrida, and Said?3 Without claiming to answer all the points raised by these questions, this chapter attempts to map Foucault’s trajectory from the early Heideggerian phase to the archaeological and on to the genealogical as well as the ethical stages, aware that each juncture is pulled toward one pole or the other. His uncanny ability to invent whole new fields of investigation gave birth to one area of studies in particular that was to prove crucial to the colonized Other—namely, his influence on Edward Said and

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his method of breaking new grounds in the study of literature, heterodoxy, and representation (1979: 23). Foucault’s critics may point out that he has the necessary qualifications of a Maharishi, in that his writings tend to be cross-disciplinary, obscure, and fairly opaque. Yet his work took on a new clarity toward the end. However dense the theory may have been in L’Archéologie du savoir and Les Mots et les choses, the statements were not hard to understand. The historical writing of the volumes on sexuality is less obscure as well as readily accessible. “Michel Foucault is,” James Miller writes, “one of the representative men—and outstanding thinkers—of the twentieth century. His life and the texts he wrote are intricately intertwined in ways that prove mutually illuminating” (1993: 13). This finding is quite propitious as Foucault offers the two things that people want from a philosopher: a view concerning the values people attribute to knowledge-claims, and hints about how to change the world. More to the point, he presents a skeptical judgment about the nature of science with concrete suggestions about how power might be taken from those who presently have it. His view of knowledge stems from Nietzsche. His view of power derives from Marx and Heidegger. All my philosophical future was determined by Heidegger’s works. But it was Nietzsche who really had the greatest impact on me. I know Nietzsche much better than I do Heidegger; they were nonetheless two fundamental influences for me. If I hadn’t read Heidegger, I probably would not have read Nietzsche (1994: Vol. IV: 599). And Foucault uses each of these men to criticize the other. The common complaint about Nietzsche, however, is that he offers no special hope, no sense of human community. The dissatisfaction with Marx is that he is in bondage to simple-minded, nineteenth-century ideas about philosophy as “science,” that Marxist theory is a hindrance to Marxist practice. People who admire Nietzsche on the subject of knowledge are encumbered by Nietzsche on power. People who favor Marx’s analysis of power relations in modern society are perplexed by his (not to mention Engels’s and Lenin’s) pretensions to methodological and epistemological theory.4 Foucault offers one chance to be as skeptical about science and philosophy (and “theory” generally) as Nietzsche, while being as socially concerned and politically minded as Marx. Foucault’s debt to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Marx is clear. But the problematic that primarily interests Foucault in his archaeology of modern

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philosophy is whether he is able to blend the three philosophers. Were he to succeed, he would have worked a mix that no other important philosopher of our century has accomplished except, perhaps, Sartre who tried to combine the kind of writing about other philosophers that displays their self-deceptions with the kind of writing that mobilizes men and women to create a better world. But his attempt failed. The more Sartre used themes from his early “existentialist” writings to recast Marxist analyses in a new jargon, the better straightforward, old-fashioned Marxism looked. The more he tried to associate particular political initiatives with an overall philosophical view, the more he seemed simply a revolutionary, able to put forward a fast philosophical apology for anything that might harm the French bourgeoisie.5 In one sense, Foucault’s endeavor to get philosophy and politics together is more profound, concrete, and generally better thought out than Sartre’s. Like Heidegger’s, Foucault’s work may be divided into a pre-Nietzschean period, or, more exactly, an early period in which Nietzsche is not an important figure, and a later one in which finding the right response to Nietzsche becomes all-important. Foucault’s early writings—including Les Mots et les choses—were histories of institutions, disciplines, and vocabularies. They pointed at a philosophical moral: that what counts as “science” and as “rationality” is a matter of rather suddenly formed “grids,” ways of ordering things. In these books, he showed us how what counted as “medicine,” “disease,” “madness,” “logic,” “history,” and the like changed in startling ways at various periods. In doing so, he was trying to disclose the radical contingency of the concepts used at a given time, the looseness of fit between what went on and what people said and did about it. And, here, Foucault has in mind the thought of not only Marx but also of Heidegger and Sartre. It is in this context that it is tempting merely to repeat how he made concrete and dramatic considerations that had been presented more schematically by Wittgensteinian philosophers of science such as Hanson and Kuhn.6 The positivist idolaters of “scientific method” whom these latter men criticized were the last thinkers who, from the Enlightenment onward, had hoped to secularize culture by substituting for religious ideals “the quest for scientific truth.” Wittgenstein’s insistence that one cannot get outside language-games so as to compare our language with reality was used by Hanson, Kuhn, and others to construct a picture of science as a matter of working with (and using up) tools, rather than of seeing reality more clearly. Such Wittgensteinian criticism of Enlightenment notions of “truth” and “science” will seem more paradoxical than logical positivism, however, as long as we retain the nineteenthcentury picture of continuous, asymptotic, scientific progress—of knowledge as evolving and spreading in a continuously rational way.7

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Foucault’s histories on the other hand help us to see the discontinuities, the sudden twists and turns; his notion of épistémè, “the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterized as scientific” (1980: 197). His illustrations of how such apparatus can suddenly be cast aside help flesh out Kuhn’s notion of “paradigm.” After all, as Kuhn himself has insisted, “Language is also a medium of domination and social power, it serves to situate relations of organized forces” (ibid., 360). And as Foucault asserts in reply to Habermas, “In a given society there is no general type of equilibrium between finalized activities, systems of communication, and power-relations. Rather there are diverse forms, diverse places, diverse circumstances or occasions in which these interrelationships establish themselves according to a specific model” (ibid., 218). One difference between Kuhn and Foucault, however, is that Kuhn deals mostly with relatively “hard” sciences (physics, chemistry), and Foucault with relatively “soft” ones (sociology, psychiatry). From the abstract epistemological standpoint, there is no difference between them: the theories and vocabularies of either are (in a Wittgensteinian view) to be seen as tools rather than representations. But from the point of view of power, the difference is important. Our will to power is mostly a will to dominate other people. The way in which a scientific vocabulary defines what counts as a rationale does not stretch far beyond assertions in the case of physics, but in the case of psychiatry it stretches to actions, institutions, permissible modes of life. So if one formulates a rejection of traditional, representationalist epistemology in Nietzsche’s terms rather than Wittgenstein’s, one will concentrate on the “sciences of man.” Tools for doing things with people are better illustrations of Nietzsche’s point than tools for doing things that include balances and microscopes. For Foucault, behind the impulse to discipline lies the “haunting memory of ‘contagions’ of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder” (ibid., 198). Put bluntly, disciplinary power brings “nomads” and “mobs” as well as the “insane” and the “sick” into order. We are once more persuaded to merely repeat Foucault’s insistence that he was moved by the events of 1968 in France to begin thinking of himself as having been talking about power all the time. Demurring at the compliment that he was the first person to pose the question of power regarding discourse, he writes in Power/Knowledge: I don’t think I was the first to pose the question. On the contrary, I’m struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was

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that I was talking about, in Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic, but power? Yet I’m perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word (ibid., 229). When the events of 1968 turned him, as he says in the same book, toward “daily struggles at the grass roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power,” Foucault began to be less concerned with the specifically epistemological attempt (common to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and early Heidegger) to expunge the traditional picture of knowledge as a relation between subject and object, words and things (ibid., 116). He came to see his earlier self as having been perplexed by “phenomenological” talk about “meaning,” whereas “the history that bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of language; relations of power, not relations of meaning” (ibid., 26). He now tries to say why the previous attempt—Marx’s—to make this break, to get at the “materiality and contingency” at the roots of the ways institutions have constituted what shall count as “rationality,” did not work. Whereas earlier he had made implicit use of Nietzschean arguments to criticize Cartesianism and Hegelianism, he now uses Nietzsche explicitly to criticize Marx. It was Nietzsche who specified the power relation as the general focus, shall we say, of philosophical discourse— whereas for Marx it was the production relation. Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory to do so (ibid., 209–210). This last phrase, grasped more concretely, may be said to express Foucault’s own present ambition, and it explains why he now has to make Marxist theory an explicit topic of reflection. Moreover, what this sentence expresses is the sense that Foucault undermines both Marxist theory and Marxists’ interpretation of it. This is explained in a comment made by Colin Gordon, who says: “The trouble with Foucault’s work was that its originality was in inverse proportion of its utility for Marxism” (ibid., 232). The problem Gordon alludes to is put in a much clearer perspective by Alan Sheridan, who observes, “The prospect of Marxist critics trying to get a grip on Les Mots et les choses was rather like that of a policeman attempting to arrest a particularly outrageous drag-queen.” (1980: 209–210). Stated simply, for Foucault, a new “interpretation,” say, of Galileo (from a scientific point of view) would only be of importance to the history of science, whereas a new interpretation of Marxism might change current Marxism,

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not in any simple way a sign of science’s unique powers to understand or to produce truth. Marxists (Eagleton, Jameson, Bourdieu) found Les Mots et les choses extravagant and whimsical. It not only fell short of linking mutations in conceptual superstructures with changes in the power relations in society, but it treated Marx himself as plainly one more, not so important, expression of a curiously nineteenth-century way of seeing things. Eight years later, however, Foucault declared that he would be more or less willing to agree that the term “Marxist historian” is a pleonasm, but that he now wanted Marxist history without Marxist philosophy—indeed, without a philosophical theory about the nature either of knowledge or of society. He sees Marx as still plagued by the “will to truth,” and thus as driven to build a theory. He thinks that Marxist and liberal “behavioral scientists” share the hope of finding “the secure path of a science,” and that “it is surely necessary to question ourselves about our aspirations to the kind of power that is presumed to accompany such a science” (1994: Vol. II: 137). Whereas his early work had been accused of being pre-Marxist, Foucault now accuses the Marxists of being pre-Nietzschean. They are answering what he calls “the traditional question of political philosophy in the following terms: how is the discourse which par excellence is concerned with truth, able to fix limits to the rights of power?” Rather, Foucault says, we would ask a question that is much more down to earth and concrete: What rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth? There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth (1980: 93). If we take this latter claim seriously, we shall not expect to have a “theory” about the “nature” of either knowledge or power, because anything recognizable as theory would be already part of the apparatus of social control that forms our society. For Foucault, at least, Marx is both old-fashioned and digressive. It is in these terms that he considers modern knowledge ultimately to take the form of an action that will allow man’s essence to be satisfied within the finitude that conditions him. Current lacks and divisions will give way to the completion of what we could call the human project. And, here, Foucault has in mind the thought of Marx. Nevertheless, the question: What does Foucault hope to give us, if not a theory, remains unanswered. A history, perhaps. Roughly, yes. But not a teleological

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history of the Hegel–Marx type that illustrates universal tendencies and places our own period halfway along a sequence. Rather, Foucault wants a “genealogy,” a “history of the present” that explains to us why we are taking for granted what we think obvious (e.g., that lunatics should not be thrown in with criminals, that prisons are not necessary for public safety, etc.). Such genealogies would be “Marxist history” in the sense that they would debunk contemporary liberal institutions. But they would be nonMarxist insofar as they would not assume power that essentially oppresses. That assumption is a corollary of the pre-Nietzschean premise that man has a true self that ought not to be repressed, something that exists prior to being shaped by power. To dispense with this assumption is to free oneself from the temptation to bring all genealogies together in a “unitary discourse,” a science; to all these demands of “Is it or is it not a science?” The genealogies or the genealogists would reply: “If you really want to know, the fault lies in your very determination to make a science out of Marxism or psychoanalysis or this or that study.”8 If we have any objection against Marxism, it lies in the fact that it could effectively be a science. Instead of a unitary science, we want lots of little “fragmentary” genealogies—genealogies that will be usable by those caught “in the fine meshes of the web of power.” To state it more simply, both Power/Knowledge and Language, Counter-Memory, Practice can be read as canceling and replacing Foucault’s earlier attempt to show the method and goal of his historical writing in L’Archéologie du savoir, his most obscure book. Especially in the interviews, Power/Knowledge is remarkably clear, coherent, and honest. Yet there remain difficulties that entail some more backtracking, as made clear by Foucault himself in an interview: Myself, I am not sure, when I began to interest myself in this problem of power, of having spoken very clearly about it or used the words needed. Now I have a much clearer idea of all that. It seems to me that we must distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties—strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of others—and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call power. And, between the two, between the games of power and the states of domination, you have governmental technologies—giving this term a very wide meaning for it is also the way you govern an institution. The analysis of these techniques is necessary, because it is often through this kind of technique that states of domination are established and maintain themselves. In my

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analysis of power, there are three levels: the strategic relationships, the techniques of government, and the levels of domination (1988: 19). Here lies the strength of Foucault’s description of power. His task now is to debunk the ever-recurring Rousseauistic notion that says once we get the nasty old social pressures off our backs we will be good, wise, and brave. He agrees with Hegel that there is nothing much to us without those pressures. There is no truth to be known about us except the truth that is “constituted” by the vocabulary that some society lets us use. Nor is there ever going to be a society that does without power, or without a linkage between the theories that count as rational and the institutions that keep the population under control. We are never going to come out on the other side of language, nor is language ever going to be anything except something shaped by power. “Science” does not free us from power, for science is just carrying out procedures that the language tells us to carry out. There is, finally, no hope at all for a grand breakthrough from Opinion into Knowledge, from Prejudice into Rationality, except perhaps at the archaeological level where these doublings and discrepancies seem clear enough. If, on the contrary, they have not been more widely recognized, that is because modern thought has fallen into a new dogma, what Foucault has called the “anthropological sleep.” This may sound wonderful on a purely philosophical plane but rather depressing spiritually. For reasons having to do with both spirituality and depression, Sheridan consoles us by giving us a perspicacious account of the trajectory of Foucault’s thinking so far. He organizes his account around Foucault’s switch from “archaeology” to “genealogy” while attributing Foucault’s motives and allusions to the political events that took place in the author’s career during the 1960s (1980: 89–113). I want to suggest that Foucault’s early life was also dominated by alternative philosophical methods. I belong to a generation who, as students, were locked into a mind set influenced by Marxism, phenomenology, existentialism . . . all extremely interesting and stimulating, but which after a while lead to a feeling of suffocation and the desire to look elsewhere (1994: Vol. IV: 600). The desire to go elsewhere, indeed, for the later Foucault defines the way in which he understood philosophy. “But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the en-

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deavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?” (1980: 8–9). In the end, Foucault’s dialectical maneuver may be a brilliant one in that it enabled him to bury Marx, Nietzsche, as well as Sartre, but whether the attempt will come off depends on whether the new focus on power in his later works, in which the shift from subconscious, social power to self-conscious, sexual subjects is to be explained, not as an abrupt discontinuity in his thought, but, as he says, as an extension of his general method of genealogy. Genealogy studies how we constitute ourselves as human subjects. At times, Foucault does not seem to be interested in studying the history of the moral code that comprises the clear instructions, since he believes these are almost always steadfast right through the varied and various historical intervals. Reminiscent of Hegel, who felt the need to explore, not the moral axioms, as Kant did, but the “ethical substance,” the common beliefs of what it was to be a part of a social group and consequently to yearn to being a decent individual, Foucault believes that to see what has shifted we must consider another stage than that of the intelligible system. We must discover how the formation of the self altered, for instance, between the Greco-Roman idea of caring for the self and the Christian objective of selfrenunciation; by the same token, how sexual subjectivity changed, for example, between Greek aphrodisia and Christian desire of the flesh. “Honesty” and openness about sex, Foucault seems to be hinting, provide the basis for a new set of values, actions, pleasures, and anxieties. Even on this point, however, no matter how we clarify the deviation between Foucault’s heterogeneous annals at disparate stages in his life, there are some clear standards of progression. An obdurate interest throughout his work, for example, is with the vicissitudes of “human nature.” Resembling Nietzsche, Foucault is not of the opinion that there are any historical givens about human conduct and cultural experience that stay unalterable. Foucault’s prison and sexuality studies show that even the human body (as it is tried), which is the lowest common denominator throughout all historical change, is transformed over time by technologies of social power. Even so and happily for us, the Foucault on the history of sexuality is much clearer. At times he seems to be making the general point that physical acts such as bodily couplings are often catalogued under a special way of explanation. Such a way of interpretation will condition those physical acts. In the end, such self-understandings are codified into forms of knowledge, into systems and usages (psychology for the normal and psychotherapy for the deviants), and into codes and practices. Are we then to understand that the rules transmute gradually, and that the grounding comprehension of these rules can alter at a different tempo?

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The answer to that question lies in finding out whether the knowledge the agents might think they have of why they conduct themselves the way they do is fragmentary and applicable for other periods. Over time, these modes of self-understanding, and thus the kind of experience people have, will change; for better or for worse, we do not know. But far from accepting the role of the intellectual as a social technician, Foucault deals with the burden of proof for this historicist view of human action as if it had landed on historiography rather than on philosophy. I am not sure whether anyone thinks volume three, L’Usage des plaisirs, gives enough evidence, since it does not venture into modern times. For the propositions about our times, a good example is to be found in the cover of the paperback edition of the Dreyfus/Rabinow book, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, which amply demonstrates Foucault’s own illustrations on a classroom blackboard of different formulae of sexual behavior. The appended interview with Foucault then compares the Greek, Chinese, Early Christian, and modern units and patterns. And because the logic of sexual behavior was deemed elusive, a great deal of a population’s existence could be examined and altered to uncover sexuality’s workings. Foucault insists that what distinguishes him from Nietzsche, for example, is that he does not engage in denunciations of the Christian practices, in all likelihood because Christianity appears to him as historically old-fashioned. Much of our contemporary understanding of sexuality, as embodied, for example, in psychiatric treatment or liberationist rhetoric, stems from the practice of confession. The confession has spread its effect far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships and love relationships, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illness and troubles. . . . One admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell anyone else, the things people write books about. . . . Western man has become a confessing animal (1978: 59). (Hence allegedly distrustful), Foucault also accepts that the Christian formula for sexual behavior is not in accordance with the modern formula. The former would eliminate desire whereas the latter wants to “liberate it.” So, in sexuality, as in penalty, a moral discourse is consolidated and displaced by practices and modes of thought that construct norms and impose them as respectable, natural, or normal. The main argument behind these disparities is to try our own sexual behavior, but not by making up

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any one historical perception of sexual conduct as the best choice. Foucault is not of the opinion that we should like to return to the Greek formula, no matter how attractive it may be. These historical modalities of sexual practice and self-understanding are only dissimilar from ours, not better or worse. They are not even options, since we could not resort to them given the extreme difference in the grounding of beliefs and experiences. But their difference is what makes us aware of the flaws in our own selfunderstanding and practices, they do not do so thanks to an ideal for which we could yearn. Foucault relentlessly reminds us that the Greeks were disturbed about sexual conduct, and that “it was not a golden age of totally liberated bodies and pleasures” (ibid., 38). Bio-power relations operate directly between individuals—of whatever age, class, or gender. The upshot is that however likely it may seem, Foucault’s curiosity has both changed and differed from his earlier interests with the way discourse comprised pragmatic and experiential reality, or even with the way power relations conditioned discourse. The central point on the self as lived through the history of sexual ethics seems to unearth the obsession with self-consciousness and subjectivity that structuralists allegedly laid to rest in the casting off of phenomenology. The later Foucault attempted a new discourse in which not only inclusion/exclusion, truth/falsehood, presence/absence, strong/weak, the insane/the sane, the sick/the healthy, the criminals/the “good boys,” but also voluntary/involuntary, past/present, conscious/unconscious, would be effaced. This led him to reflect on all the rules, systems, and procedures that constitute and are constituted by our will to knowledge. These, Foucault argues, comprise a discrete realm of discursive practices—the order of discourse—a conceptual terrain in which knowledge is formed and produced. What is analyzed is not simply what was thought or said, but all the discursive rules and categories that were assumed as a constituent part of discourse and therefore of knowledge. These are indeed so fundamental that they remain unvoiced. We live in a world where things are said. These things, in the very reality of the spoken word, are not, as we often tend to think, fleeting. They live on, and our world is in fact intertwined with discourse. From that point of view, we cannot dissociate the historical world we live in from all the discursive elements that have inhabited and continue to inhabit this world (1994: Vol. IV: 599). The effect of the discursive elements is to make it virtually impossible to think outside them. As a matter of fact, to think outside them is, by

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definition, to be mad, to be beyond comprehension and therefore reason. It is in this light that one can see how discursive rules are linked to the exercise of power; how the forms of discourse are both constituted by and ensure the reproduction of the social system, through forms of domination, selection, and exclusion.

II Foucault’s work on the three-age tale (Ship of Fools/Great Confinement/Age of Psychiatry), otherwise termed Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, suggests that Foucault was trying to return, “in history, to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself.”9 In the written submission required of candidates for admission to the Collège de France, Foucault explained: In Histoire de la folie, I wanted to determine what could be known about mental illness at a given period. Such knowledge, of course is manifested in the medical theories. . . . They can also be seen in phenomena of opinion . . . represented in theater or literature. . . . But there was a dimension that seemed unexplored to me: it was necessary to study how madmen were recognized, set aside, excluded from society, interned and treated . . . in short, what was the network of institutions and practices in which the madman was simultaneously caught and defined. Rather than perusing the library of scientific books, as one so happily does, I had to visit a group of archives including decrees, regulations, hospital or prison registers, judicial precedents. Working at the Arsenal or the National Archives, I began the analysis of a knowledge whose visible body is neither theoretical or scientific discourse nor literature, but a regular, daily, practice. He concludes: The example of madness, however, did not seem sufficiently pertinent. . . . It seemed to me that clinical medicine, at the moment of its birth, put the problem in more rigorous terms. . . . The practice of medicine makes up an unstable mixture of rigorous scientific and uncertain tradition, but it is not limited to this; it is constructed like

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a system of knowledge with its own equilibrium and coherency. It could be generally conceded, therefore, that there are realms of knowledge that cannot exactly be called sciences and yet are more than mere mental habits. . . . This knowledge takes shape not only in theoretical texts or experimental instruments, but in a whole system of practices and institutions (1965: xi). It is therefore a history of the age in which mental illness was compulsorily dissociated, institutionally and philosophically, from reason, specifically through the founding of mental asylums. In defending this thesis, Foucault appeared to be challenging those like Descartes who, without reason (ie., without sufficient reason for thinking they are not mad), cast aside madness as “extravagance” that is absolutely unintelligible and probably unlikely. Reason can corroborate itself only by refusing to weigh whether insanity has its proper standard of validity (1994: Vol. II: 106). Foucault implies that through writing a history of the techniques by which the insane have been removed and excluded from society, he may recapture the original experience of madness before the separation of madness and reason. Thus Foucault’s history of madness is again a history of the way madness is defined and produced within society and of madness itself as an “experience” that precedes its significations. The case is articulated in The Order of Things where Foucault saw, registered in the story of Don Quixote, a giant change: an “end of the old interplay between resemblance and signs.” Foucault’s construction, or error, is suitably cryptic. Don Quixote is articulated as graffiti, as a portentous squiggle. This reader of romances is not a man given to extravagance, but rather a diligent pilgrim breaking his journey before all the marks of similitude. He is the hero of Same. He never manages to escape from the familiar plain stretching out on all sides of the Analogue, any more than he does from his own small province. He travels endlessly over that plain, without ever crossing the clearly defined frontiers of difference, or reaching the heart of identity. Moreover, he is himself like a sign, a long, thin graphism, a letter that has just escaped from the open pages of the book. His whole being is nothing but language, text, printed pages, stories that have already been written down. . . . If he is to resemble the texts of which he is the witness, the representation, the real

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analogue, Don Quixote must also furnish proof and provide the indubitable sign that they are telling the truth, that they really are the language of the world. It is incumbent upon him to fulfil the promise of the books (1966: 156). Don Quixote pursues resemblance, significance; and the difference he encounters is produced by enchantment. Since the Renaissance, Foucault suggests, poets and madmen have been drawn, in their different ways, to the possibility or project of a universal analogy. It should be noted that the study of madness in general and the attack on Descartes in particular was sharply criticized by Foucault’s archrival, Derrida who stood up for Descartes, arguing that philosophy as logical and lucid thinking cannot consider earnestly the plausibility that it might be totally mad, disordered, or absolute. Such thinking, Derrida maintains, “would not be thinking at all,” and he evidenced the insane themselves are fully aware of the difference. And “Even if Foucault were right,” Derrida writes, “he would not be able to recapture the true experience of madness through his writing. If to write and to represent is already to order and to organize, and if madness is the opposite of logic and order, accurately representing madness would also escape Foucault. The project is thus impossible, and the conception of it unintelligible.”10 Foucault replied to Derrida denouncing him for being an old-fashioned philologist who relies heavily on close reading of texts, but cannot grasp the passage on madness even when he gives it some serious thought. He stuck to his view more ardently then than later in his life, maintaining that what individuals can think, and what they think they can know, is seasoned by a structure of fixed order that allows certain things to be meaningful and rejects other possibilities. So, he says, there is a practice that obscures Derrida’s reading, a “system of which Derrida is today the most decisive representative in its final éclat” (1972: 583–04). Foucault believed that Derrida is a pure textualist who does not take into account the social measures of discursive practices; their visions which instantiate words; or their indefinitely deferred sensations and desire for knowledge which require the consumption of text after text after text (1994: Vol. II: 281–296). It appears that Foucault did not change his mind about Derrida, for he makes a similar critique of him in the 1983 Dreyfus/Rabinow interviews. Here, he confronts Derrida’s reading of Plato’s metaphor for writing as Pharmakon in the Phaedrus. What the exchange brings forward is that Foucault, who does not think he is an enemy of the truth, believes that Derrida’s habit of grouping together matters about textual truth blinds him to the reality that Plato’s critique of writing is about truth and not about what separates speech from writing. Little could be less Heideggerian or less

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Marxian than this, but in “Distance, aspect, origine,” Foucault comes to accept that historical work is a criticism that, like transgressive fiction, breaks, and breaks into, the fiction of history. The refusal to accept Derrida’s reading of Plato is stated in the following terms: If you read the Phaedrus, you will see that this passage is secondary with respect to another one which is fundamental and which is in line with the theme which runs throughout the end of the text. It does not matter whether a text is written or oral—the problem is whether or not the discourse in question gives access to the truth. Thus the written/oral question is altogether secondary with respect to the question of truth (ibid., 245). The way Foucault examines the Pharmakon is puzzling to say the least in that the resolve about how to grasp what connects speech, writing, and truth cannot be separated from the involvement with the techniques for the art of living. The philosophical quarrel with Derrida helps to show Foucault’s understanding of the contrast between how the Greeks understood philosophy and how we understand it today. Foucault thinks that at the commencement of philosophy there was not an abrupt break between epistemology or theoretical philosophy, on the one hand, and moral and social, or practical philosophy, on the other. Validity and benevolence become apparent and dissimilar concerns only later, when the early modern period discerned them differently. Instead of limiting analysis to a wholly syntactic and textual level, as he believes Derrida does, Foucault searches for the social practices that the text both mirrors and uses. By connecting the question of writing with “the technical and material framework in which it arose,” he is not claiming to provide us with yet another precise historical diagnosis, for he also feels the need to make us realize the degree to which similar or different modes today are political—that is, by being au courant of modes that are so frequent that we consign them to oblivion, and then by noticing that they sustain opinions and self-understanding that we should question, we may want to reflect on whether there is not too big a conflict between our own standards and our practices. In Foucault’s view, therefore, Derrida’s deliberate ruling to rebuke questions about the degree to which the text comes into being and mirrors the hidden practices itself reflects a social practice. Derrida’s method thus may seem to be methodologically flawed in that it cannot take into consideration the matter of weighing textual interpretation as a social and political practice, which it also is. Insofar as the practice is used to conceal analysis from the social and political context, it is

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politically defective. Derrida’s approach would prevent questions about truth in normative, social, and political matters. “Foucault’s taking on Derrida,” Edward Said observes, whom he viewed as his major domestic competitor for intellectual ascendancy, tells of the edge and decisive scorn that were not typical of him, as if in striking he had to strike definitively at the man who was otherwise affiliated with him by virtue of a common anti-mythological, anti-conservative project. To the best of my knowledge Derrida did not respond to Foucault, a mark of compunction and restraint which led, I believe, to a gradual healing of the rift between them (1988: 7). True. Later, however, Foucault revised his approach and may be said to have learned a great deal from Derrida’s reading of his work on madness. A lengthy outline appeared in L’Usage des plaisirs that clearly presents Foucault redefining his theory of experience so that he may steer clear of the confusions he encountered in the study of madness. He accepts that his earlier view of experience was “floating,” that it was left undefined in Histoire de la folie. He now attempts to define it as comprising three different components that can be investigated by the historian: first, a field of knowledge (savoirs) in concepts, theories, and diverse disciplines; second, a normative collection of rules (e.g., those operant in distinguishing the permitted and the forbidden, the natural and the monstrous, the normal and the pathological, or the decent and the indecent); and third, a mode of relation to oneself (by which, for instance, one recognizes oneself as a sexual subject among others). He summarizes the case thus: To speak of “sexuality” as a historically singular experience . . . presupposed the availability of tools capable of analyzing the peculiar characteristics and interrelations of the three axes that constitute it: (1) the formation of sciences (savoirs) that refer to it, (2) the systems of power that regulate its practice, (3) the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves as subjects of this sexuality. Now, as to the first two points, the work I had undertaken previously—having to do first with medicine and psychiatry, and then with punitive power and disciplinary practices—provided me with the tools I needed. The analysis of discursive practices made it possible to trace the formation of disciplines (savoirs)

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while escaping the dilemma of science versus ideology. And the analysis of power relations and their technologies made it possible to view them as open strategies, while escaping the alternative of a power conceived of as domination or exposed as a simulacrum (1980: 4–5). These three axes can be encountered in any of his works, but the study of the asylum focuses on the first, that of the prison on the second, while the history of sexual ethics deals mainly with the last, because in Western society sexuality is a major way in which one has to define oneself. Here Foucault is no longer making a plea to accede to the realm of personal experience that is in theory unattainable to enunciation and investigation, as he did in the preface to Histoire de la folie. He focuses rather on the social and textual disclosures where sexuality was indeed examined and evidenced, and to which historians have access. Once more, Foucault reminds us of Heidegger. He, like Heidegger, does not believe self-understanding is shown through inwardness, through the door to a personal, subjective field. Rather, self-understanding is divulged through actions, and especially through prototypes of action. Although such actions may seem to the practitioners to be clear, distinct, a critical history may disclose that “the practices are not as rational or as inevitable as they were taken to be,” David Hoy explains in “After Foucault”: The result neither of explicit, autonomous, self-conscious decision-procedures, nor of biological programming, selfunderstanding is itself a function of a matrix formed by the interaction of social and discursive practices. To the extent that these practices are shown to be historically variable, self-understanding will be correlatively variable (1984: 9). And, in line with Hoy’s argument, because the logic of sexual behavior was deemed elusive, and its practices radically private, a great deal of a population’s conditions of existence could be examined and changed to uncover, protect, and manage sexuality’s workings. Clearly, Foucault’s analysis appears to conform to the vision in his earlier work on the origin of the modern world that traced the emergence of what he came to call “desiring man” (“l’homme de désir”) to a point between the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, with antecedents in the specialized confessional disciplines of Christian monastic life. There he discerns in the age of reason a new, sinister shift of interest to the sexuality of children and “the relationship between sexual behavior,

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normalcy and health.” Foucault thus suggests that something as basic as sex is not a biological given. “To think and act as if having certain organs determined gender,” as Hoy puts it, or as if sexuality were totally conditioned by an orientation toward particular ways of using these organs, is only a recent way of conceiving (or at least of conceptualizing) human beings. For Hoy, Foucault’s histories are intended to show us that what we mean by the term “sex” is not obvious, and that we take too much for granted in assuming that our experience must be the way it has been always and everywhere for others. Foucault plays with the thought that there has been “sex” only since the nineteenth century, and that we would be better-off in the future not wanting to have “sex.” His view is that “sex” is a socially and historically conditioned concept, one formed by abstracting our thoughts from the diverse and multiple phenomenal manifestations of “bodies and pleasures.” L’Usage des plaisirs shows how the form of his investigation changes, taking him further into the Western past than he had expected in pursuit of [t]he practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves and themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being, be it natural or fallen. In short, with this genealogy the idea was to investigate how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire, a hermeneutics of which their sexual behavior was doubtless the occasion, but certainly not the exclusive domain. Thus, in order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of a “sexuality,” it was essential first to determine how, for centuries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire (1980: 5–6). What Foucault underlines here is the thought that sexuality is a specific historical concept by contrasting Greek mores. He insists that the Greeks found sexual conduct as problematic as we do, but in different ways. For them it was not how or with whom one wanted to have sex that was crucial, as it supposedly is now, but whether you were master or slave of your passions. So the Greeks could not have been opposed to what we call perversion, only to the aesthetic ugliness of physical excess. Foucault illustrates this point with perception and skill. He quotes a curious passage from St Françis de Sales’s Introduction à la vie dévote:

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I will tell you a point of the elephant’s honesty. An elephant never changes his mate. He loves her tenderly. With her he couples not, but from three years to three years. And that only for five days, and so secretly that he is never seen in the act. But the sixth day, he shows himself abroad again, and the first thing he does is to go directly to some river and wash his body, not willing to return to his troupe of companions till he be purified. Be not these goodly and honest qualities in a beast by which he teaches married folk not to be given too much to sensual and carnal pleasures? (1981: 5). Nothing could sound more “Christian” on sex, one would normally think. But the question that is more to the point in the three volumes (I, II, and III) of Histoire de la sexualité, is in fact a double one: Why should sexual behavior form an object of moral preoccupation different from, or greater than, other activities vital to the maintenance of life, such as the supply of food or the accomplishment of civic duties? And that said, where do the characteristic features of our present “problematized” understanding of the subject come from? Foucault rejects the naive view of paganism as being, so to speak, soft on sex, where Christianity was hard, and the allied notion that the association of sex with sin entered Western consciousness with the doctrine of the Fall. The difference between the pagan and the Christian view, he notes, lies in features of the organization of prohibitions, not in their servility. And danger lay in sexual excess or passivity rather than in the act of sex itself or in the gender of the object of desire. The ideal was virility, not what we call “heterosexuality.” Thus pederasty, though acceptable and even admirable, involved detailed moral observances and rules of behavior, for lover and loved one, including austerity and sometimes renunciation—rules that were far more detailed and demanding than those governing marriage and Greek society. It is this subject position of the care for the self that Foucault presents in some detail in Subjectivité et vérité: “A project such as this one is at the junction of two themes previously discussed: a history of subjectivity and an analysis of the forms of governmentality” (1994: Vol. IV: 213). This is another way to rewrite the history of subjectivity and resume the question of governmentality: “The governing of the self by oneself as it relates to one’s dealings with others” (ibid., 214). For Foucault, the care for the self includes not only “the techniques of the self” but “the writing of the self” as well. It is no accident that chapter II of Le Souci de soi is called “La Culture de soi,” characterized by the fact that the art of living is dominated by one principle—namely, that of caring for the self. Foucault outlines his project

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in five points. The trope of the care for the self has been first and foremost an injunction in philosophy since Plato. Socrates defined himself as the man of the care for the self: “He is the one who ensures that his fellow citizens take care of their selves.” Sénèque, Marc-Aurèle, and Epicure also remind us that nothing is more urgent than to “care for oneself.” To give only one example among many available: “Connais-toi toi-même.” Second, Foucault notes that the care for the self does not only mean a vague preoccupation, but an ensemble of preoccupations, exercises, practices, and diverse activities. “There is the care of the body, diet, physical activity without excess, satisfying one’s needs as moderately as possible. There is meditation, reading, taking notes on books, recalling truths we know but which we need to appropriate better still”11 Far from being a solitary and selfish occupation, the care for the self stands for a social practice, too. “This truth dedicated to oneself is not an exercise in solitude but a real social practice” through, for example, the support required of the other, be it a friend or parent (1986: 51). In fine, it is meant to enhance and intensify our social relations with the different members of the community. Thirdly, the care for the self is “closely linked to medical thought and practice” (1994: Vol. IV: 58). It gives us the chance to think of philosophy as medicine and vice versa; it brings medicine closer to philosophy. Through the care for the self, philosophy and medicine become metaphors for each other with one objective: to cure the sick: “The care for the self implies that we see ourselves not just as imperfect, ignorant individuals who need to be corrected, trained and taught, but as individuals who suffer from certain ills and who must be cared for either by ourselves or by someone qualified to take care of us” (ibid., 64). Fourthly, to the care for the self is ordained an entire series of techniques aiming at knowing oneself: tests of abstinence (hence the degree of virtue), trials of conscience, and exams of thought according to the logic of inspection. Finally, Foucault explains that all these techniques have only one end result: “la conversion de soi.” “It is not that we should cease another form of occupation to devote our time entirely and exclusively to the self; but in the activities we must do, we should bear in mind that our main personal objective is to seek within ourselves, within the relationship of the self to the self” (ibid., 67). Speaking of Sénèque, Foucault notes: “La conversio ad se is a path that, like a haven sheltered from storms or a fortress protected by its battlements, that by passes all dependencies and all enslavements, allows of one to find oneself” (ibid., 68). Put otherwise, we must get rid of everything that is not ours in order to be true to ourselves, and reach therefore the state of happiness where we are at long last pleased with ourselves, in the absence of trouble. For Foucault, the care for the self also embodies the art of governing oneself. It is a code that involves a relationship with others, insofar as it

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makes it possible to have a room of one’s own while interacting with the different members of the community. He sums up the argument in the following terms: The care for the self is in itself minor; but it implies complex relationships with others, in that the ethos of freedom is also a way to care for others; that is why it is important for a free man to behave correctly, to know how to govern his wife, his children, his house. It is also about the art of governing. Ethos implies also a relationship with others, in that the care for the self enables one to hold an appropriate position, whether in the town, the community or in relationships between individuals—as a magistrate or as a friend. The care for the self also implies a relationship with the other, in that, to care well for the self, one must listen to the lessons of a master. We need a guide, an adviser, a friend, someone who tells us the truth. Thus, the issue of relationship with others is present throughout the development of the care for the self (ibid., 214). It would be difficult not to conclude from all this that the practice of purism as practiced by Athenaeus’s dinner-scholars was producing an intense and rather peculiar subjectivity, a nice conjunction of self-consciousness and a discursive practice that should not have escaped Foucault. Yet one searches in vain through Le Souci de soi for references to Atticism or the practices of nostalgia. One of the problems perhaps was that Foucault drew his line at the wrong period, at the end of the classical period instead of the beginning of the imperial one. Later, the Greeks were unable to notice the end of the classical period or the past they had dreamt about, which now runs seamlessly on, past Alexander and into the early Hellenistic period dominated by his Greek(ish) successors. The real trauma began when the Romans arrived at the scene, at the end of the third century B.C., to start over a century and half of cynical exploitation, violence, and terror. Between Plato and Plutarch there was one of those real discontinuities that Foucault was always looking for but found so hard to locate. It was not to be discovered in some kind of “paradigm-shift,” but in war, not in the kind of power that is invisible and all-pervasive, but in the kind whose arrival one could not fail to notice, the kind that had not been there before, and that one wished would go away. It might even be argued that the “new” subjectivity one sees in Plutarch and Aristide, for example, is not political so much as it is geopolitical, the result of an imposed domination and a profound alienation from a present occupied by barbarians.

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Foucault fails, however, to tell us that the care for the self as it is represented in the literature of love could not have functioned without class. Always a select affair, it has never been, historically speaking, for the masses although in our day and age it is hardly possible to say so.12 Consider two examples: Gustav von Aschenbach’s amorous relationship with young Tadzio in Death in Venice and Swann’s love for Odette in À la recherche du temps perdu. In both cases, Proust and Mann’s art appears to be a form of sublimation, a deflection of desire. Or is it? Sublimation suggests that sexuality is suppressed or transformed. Mann (I will come back to Proust) channeled his unrequited longings for young men into stories about unrequited longings for young men. In Death in Venice he transcribed his “own emotional adventure”: Gustav von Aschenbach, an eminent author whose curriculum vitae is stocked with Mann’s abandoned projects, looks at a beautiful Polish boy on the beach, exactly as his creator did on a 1911 vacation. “Nothing was invented,” Mann later said—except, of course, that Aschenbach has no family in town and winds up dead. Mann intended to pay ironic tribute to the sort of half-concealed, hyperaestheticized boylove celebrated by cultish poets like August von Platen and Stefan George. Listen to Mann’s impossibly arch narrator recommending literary discretion as Aschenbach composes a “choice piece of prose” within sight of the boy: It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources of an artist’s inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail (quoted in Heilbut, 1997: 111). This elegant formula mocks itself to death. Death in Venice exposes the secret sources not only of Aschenbach’s work but of Mann’s own. Humorless variations on that cosmically laughing sentence have appeared in a great many critical glosses on Death in Venice. We are told that Mann’s homosexual impulses, if they did indeed exist, disappeared into the fabric of his writing. Such are the dangers of the ironist’s trade: things can be taken at face value. Mann also left himself open to the more plausible suggestion that Death in Venice was a condemnation of dirty love, with disease and death as the pervert’s reward. At first reading, the terrible swiftness of Aschenbach’s demise does feel like the swish of a moralistic guillotine. The fact is that creeping death operates as a general formal principle in Mann’s writing. Here, as David Luke points out, the fall begins not when Aschenbach first thinks about the boy but when he says

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nothing to him, fails to warn him of a cholera epidemic. Which is not to say that the story wishes Aschenbach had put his paws on young Tadzio. It has him die at the moment he rises to follow. Defying most modern canons of healthy sexuality, Mann advocated absolute physical repression and endless public fantasy. Unlike Aschenbach, Swann, in À la recherche du temps perdu, does not appear to be, like some Spanish hero, the guardian of his own reputation, which an unfaithful mistress has placed in hands other than his own. Proust is not the dissector of jealousy as the despotic legislator of social behavior, but as a purely individual and aesthetic phenomenon involving its own special sorts of insight and suffering. As Octavio Paz comments: Neither the tyranny of sexual attraction nor that of the spirit binds Swann to Odette. Years later, recalling his passion, he confesses to himself: “And to think that I have wasted the best years of my life for a woman who wasn’t my type.” His attraction to Odette is an inexplicable sentiment, except in negative terms: Odette fascinates him because she is inaccessible—not her body, her mind. Like the ideal beloved of the Provençal poets she is unattainable. Despite the ease with which she surrenders herself, she forever eludes him by the mere fact that she exists. She is unfaithful to him and lies continually, but even if she were true to him and sincere, she would still elude him. Odette will always be the other. Does she really exist or is she her lover’s fiction. . . . Yet she is a presence, a face, a body, an odor, and a past that will never be his (1993: 85). But is not the reality of the thing rather more straightforward? Everyone comes to know in time, after all, and comes to know all the more if they are in love, that the loved one is metaphysically “unattainable” in just the way that Odette is being presented here, out of Proust by way of Paz, who comments: “Odette appeals to Swann precisely because she is not his type. And to fall in love with someone wholly below one’s station can be as obsessive as the worship of someone far above” (ibid., 96). The fuel that nourishes what Paz calls the double flame—love and eroticism—is fed by the original fire: sexuality. And this applies to both heterosexuals and homosexuals. “The desire for tender boys,” Gabriel Matzneff writes, “is not homosexuality. . . . A man can quite naturally desire women, marry, be a lover to countless young girls and at the same time, not be insensitive to the charm, grace and beauty of some young, adolescent boys. Tibulle loves

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the beautiful Delie, but he loves young Manatus too.” As Matzneff goes on to show, what feeds the dual flame of love for Horace’s poet (lover), after being rejected by the woman (Inachia) he loves, is his love for Lyciscus who boasts he is more tender than any little woman, from which nothing friends say has power to free me, not their honest advice nor their strictest admonitions, nothing but another flame, for a dazzling girl, or for a graceful young boy, who leaves his long hair unbound (1974: 111–12). Foucault, too, comes to see Attic love for tender boys as something that expresses itself in its own unique and secret way. And if Proust points out that the talismanic word cattleya (in public terms a showy form for orchid) has one meaning for Odette and another for Swann: for her it means erotic pleasure with one particular person; to him, it signifies the whole complex and distressing phenomenon of being in love with Odette; Foucault, who speaks of the aristocracy of the heart, closes L’Usage des plaisirs with this observation. This philosophical reflection concerning boys suggests a historical paradox. To this male love, and more precisely to this love of young boys and adolescents—a love that was later to be so severely condemned for such a long time—the Greeks granted a legitimacy, which we are fond of seeing as proof of the freedom they granted themselves in this domain. And yet it was in connection with this love, much more than with health (which also preoccupied them) and much more than with women and marriage (the orderliness of which they nevertheless sought to maintain), that they spoke of the need to practice the strictest austerities. To be sure, except in a few instances, they did not condemn it or prohibit it. And yet it is in the reflection on love of boys that one sees the principle of “indefinite abstention” formulated, the ideal of a renunciation, which Socrates exemplifies by his faultless resistance of temptation; and the theme that this renunciation has a high spiritual value (1980: 245). To those who like to call themselves moderns, it is a paradox to see in such deviant love “the need for a long and difficult struggle with oneself, the

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gradual purification of a love that only applies to the being itself in its truth, and man’s questioning of himself as an object of desire” (ibid., 269). No, there is no doubting the matter of Foucault’s aesthetic dimension when writing on sexuality. In the course of the Christian era the point d’appui of moral reflection moved to women as in the case of Odette, giving rise to themes of virginity, proper marital conduct, and finally symmetry between man and wife (the last a feature conspicuously absent in Greece). In both cases, the relation of texts to actual practice in the ancient (and modern) world remains problematic. Foucault’s interest in the erotic life of Romans and Greeks lies strictly in the origin of particular kinds of moral scruple, not in the incidence of their observance. Or, put differently, what Foucault hopes to show us is that the structures of power have made life pretty well impossible for those whose sexual organs are intermediate. Suppose they have; but that would be like saying that they have made life almost impossible for those who are deaf and blind. One is not going to feel the force of either remark unless one can think up some structure that would not have this effect. Foucault does not speculate about possible future utopias, either in connection with sexuality or anything else. His suggestions about reform remain hints. But one wishes he would speculate. His obviously sincere attempt to make philosophical thinking be of some use, do some good, help people, will not get us anywhere until he condescends to do a little dreaming about the future, rather than stopping dead after genealogizing the present. A case in point is the phallus in Ancient Greece. Blended with Beauvoir’s Other, Freud, and Foucault, the phallus has come to be seen as the key to a whole society, lying at the center of a nexus of sex and power. “Sex was phallic action,” David Halperin claims, “it revolved around who had the phallus, was defined by what was done with the phallus, and was polarized by the distribution of phallic pleasure” (1978: 34). For the Greeks, sex was a chronic, traumatic, political event. Far from bringing people together it kept them apart, dividing those penetrated, while at the same time erasing distinctions on either side of the phallic equation. Penetration, moreover, meant power. Those who had the phallus and used it were the dominant citizen males. Those who had been born without one or had lost theirs somewhere along the way were the disenfranchised Other: women, slaves, foreigners, and men who enjoyed getting shafted. Sex made everyone either active or passive, a plus or a minus; it was a zerosum game. Phallicism was not merely characteristic of sex in the ancient world (as it has been thought characteristic of sex today) but actually constituted a sexuality. In fact, there was no such thing as sexuality in antiquity, only “a more generalized ethos of penetration and domination.” Phallicism thus presented historians with a real-life example to support

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Foucault’s theory of radical discontinuity in the history of desire. The “problem” of Greek homosexuality was a problem no more. So long as they were on the positive end of the penetrating penis, the Greeks did not care about the gender of the person on the other. Even Foucault, who would not normally allow a monkey within a hundred miles of his philosophy, is quite happy to refer to Kenneth Dover’s bestiary as evidence for ancient attitudes to penetration. His followers have tended to follow suit, producing a curious blend of primatology and psychoanalysis, treating the penis as a transcendental signifier and reading the meanings of making love without reference to cultural conventions. A theory that claims to challenge universalizing notions of sexuality depends on universalizing interpretations of sex (Doldhill, 1995).

III One sometimes suspects that whereas Foucault stage one is an “archaeologist of the human sciences” who presents a subversive history of modern ideas about man, Foucault stage two is a “microphysicist of power” who, after May 1968, examined modern techniques of social control. What remains is Foucault stage three and Foucault stage four. While the former undertook a comparative study of the pagan morality of the Greeks and Christian morality, with the aim of clarifying our own moral assumptions, the stage we seem to be reaching now is that of the latter, the philosopher whose insights inspired the writings of Foucault stage one, Foucault stage two, and Foucault stage three. But is the “archaeology” of Foucault (stage one) already an epistemology? Should one, in other words, seek out Foucault’s philosophy of knowledge in his “archaeological” analysis—or rather in the conception of knowledge his analysis presupposes? Ian Hacking holds that Foucault’s historical construction is in itself his philosophy (1986: 14). Gilles Deleuze disagrees with the mere assumption that Foucault would be a historian of “mentalités,” and insists instead that Foucault is a philosopher. For this reason he attempts to uncover a version of the transcendental logic which Foucault himself never explicitly presented. Foucault’s success as a great philosopher is due to his using history to the benefit of something else: as Nietzsche said, act against time, and thus on time, in favor of, I hope, a time to come. For what seems to us current or new according to Foucault, is what Nietzsche called untimely, out dated, a destiny that diverges from history, an analysis with other means. Not predicting, but being attentive to the unknown (1988: 51).

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One can say the same of Foucault’s “microphysics of power.” Foucault illustrated the sort of political history one would write if one exchanged the premises of political reasoning that are generally accepted by leftist intellectuals (be they “liberals” or “Marxists”) for other premises. Yet he never made the new premises explicit. Occasionally he gave the impression of practicing the petitio principii, of claiming to have obtained results from his archival work that were already there at the outset. Not surprisingly, it is precisely these premises that have been of greatest interest to critical readers. Most of the critics who discuss Foucault’s political thought question how he could define any regime, whatever its nature, as a pure relation of forces, and nevertheless still take a stand against some regimes (but never, admittedly, for other, opposed regimes). If every political regime is a power relation, why should some regimes be considered illegitimate or unacceptable? Said suggests that Foucault would have been more convincing if he had made a distinction between submitting to a power and following a social convention. For him, there is a quite remarkable account of the connection between ideas about discipline (taken from the army, schools, and monastic orders) and the rise of modern penal institutions in early nineteenth-century Europe. As an idea, penalty is viewed as a correction of the physical brutality formerly administered to criminals. Prison society emerges then as mock-family, uniformly celibate and disciplined, of course. Curiously, however, Foucault never remarks on the resemblance, just as he seems undecided as to whether the prison is a new institution or a redeployment of the old or analogous elements.13 In the end, Said rejects Foucault because he “seems actually to represent an irresistible colonizing movement that paradoxically fortifies the prestige of both the lonely individual scholar and the system that contains it” (1993: 278). Dissatisfied with the limitations of Foucault, Said liberated himself, as he saw it, from Foucauldian forms and ways of seeing. In Deleuze’s view, Foucault’s real difficulty lay in the fact that the “strategic” analysis of power relations did not allow him to answer a different question: How can one resist power? If you are powerless, you are not capable of resisting; you can only endure. If, however, you are able to resist power, it is because you participate in power: you use power, hence you do not resist it.14 According to Deleuze, this dilemma explains why Foucault finally turned to the history of the various forms assumed by the “self” over the course of Western history. In most of his books, he uses brand new historical material to provide a well defined record of the seventeenthcentury general hospital, the eighteenth-century clinic,

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the nineteenth-century prison, subjectivity in ancient Greece and in Christianity. But that is half his work. For out of rigor, a desire not to mix everything, his confidence in his reader, he does not formulate the other half. He does so, and explicitly, only in current interviews on his major works: what of madness, prison, sexuality today? What new methods of subjectivity are emerging today that are certainly neither Greek nor Christian? This latter question, most of all, haunts Foucault until the end (we who are no longer Greek nor even Christian) (1988: 52). This finding as such will not be disputed, but my point goes further. When Foucault takes up the old theme of the antithesis between the ancient morality of personal happiness and the Christian morality of obedience to divine law, he does so in order to address the issue of the morality that characterizes our time—the morality of autonomy. Autonomy means that our conduct can no longer be governed by motives of the common good of the group or of a sacred law. Yet how are we to conceive of the autonomy of the individual, of his or her capacity to hold out in the face of external pressure? Should we allow the Kantian route of submission to the law of pure reason? Or should we resort to the “pagan” precept of caring for the self? It is precisely at this point that Foucault stage four becomes all the more crucial for his earlier stages one, two, and three. For Habermas, Foucault’s “archaeological theory” does not allow him to make judgments or take political positions, for it does not wish to acknowledge universal norms.15 In response to that criticism, Dreyfus and Rabinow suggest that Foucault goes much further than other thinkers, both German (“beyond Hermeneutics”) and French (“beyond Structuralism”), in elucidating what they call “modernity.” By “modernity” they mean grosso modo, the post-Kantian situation. One is modern by giving up the search for a transcendental foundation that would justify the beliefs and standards that prevail in one’s culture. On this view, we are modern if we recognize our “autonomy,” at least in the negative sense of the term— that is, the sense that each of us in making his or her judgments is left to his or her own resources. The modern predicament seems to be that we must choose between two equally disappointing positions. The first is to settle for Critical Theory, which means that we should undertake a quest for an immanent foundation (which must be purely formal) if we want to retain the possibility of judging. The second is advocated by those whom Dreyfus and Rabinow call “post-philosophers” or “anti-thinkers,” those who tell us that we must admit that our judgments cannot be founded, that they are inescapably arbitrary.

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Dreyfus and Rabinow praise Foucault for having opened up a third possibility. In their view, Foucault’s way out of the impasse is to give priority to “genealogy” over “archaeology.” Or, to put it in different terms, he made the relativist component of his method subordinate to a pragmatic thesis that upholds the priority of practice over theory. Foucault’s method allowed him not only to relativize our culture but also to take our concerns seriously. Hence their view in the following excerpt: The archaeological step back that Foucault takes in order to see the strangeness of our society’s practices does not mean that he considers these practices meaningless. Since we share cultural practices with others, and since these practices have made us what we are, we have, perforce, some common footing from which to proceed, to understand, to act. But that foothold is no longer one which is universal, guaranteed, verified or grounded (1983: 104). Thanks to archaeology, we understand that the conceptual schema of our culture is not based on a principle situated somewhere beyond this culture. Thanks to genealogy, however, we can do quite well without a universal, existing foundation. Because we belong to our culture by taking part in its practices, we cannot help but take seriously—and from within— the problems that this culture takes seriously. If, for Deleuze, the refusal to let oneself be confined within an identity accorded by culture or tradition is the precondition of authentic thought, then for our own thinking to be liberated, we must accept, in Foucault’s phrase, the “death of man.” Foucault’s message is that our endless questioning of power, the text, the flesh, the self, “sex,” “sexuality,” rules for same-sex relationships, desire, pleasure, the practice, are what keeps history going. The play of similarity and difference between the present and the past, the dialogue with the ancestors, engenders the future. That, at bottom, is Foucault’s attempt at our modes of thought and social institutions as a social critic and selfcritic/self-creator. His various histories constitute an effort to create in writing a life that shows the care for the self. To quote Deleuze once more. Foucault agrees with Burroughs, who talks about our controlled rather than disciplined future. The question is not to know if it is worse. For we also resort to productions of subjectivity that are capable of resisting the new form of domination and which are very different from those that formerly dominated the subjects. New light, new statements, a new force, new forms of subjectivity?

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In any system, we must untangle the lines of the recent past and those of the near future: the archival part from the current, the historical part from the one that is yet to come, the analytical from the diagnostic (1988: 51). There is no question that the speaking subject here resists closure. However, of importance to us is the care for the self, a new century (and millennium) embattled self, through which Foucault sought consistently to test cultural assumptions in given historical periods including our own. His untimely death prevented him (and perhaps us) from attaining to the principle of responsibility in a culture of fear.16 Not only Dits et écrits but also his other works will continue to denounce—and expose—for years to come the microphysics of power.

Chapter Two

DERRIDALGERIANCE; OR, THE PROSTHESIS OF DECONSTRUCTION To my great surprise it returned to me, but abroad in France, the Algeria I desired in vain when I was ten. . . . It returned to me but in grief, threatened, trembling. I did not expect it at all. And she addressed me, for the first time since I was born, as if we had never left one another, in a movement of recognition that not a single time did I foresee or hope for. Hélène Cixous, “My Algeriance,” 262.

Jacques (or Jackie) Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in El-Biar (Algeria), as were his father and grandfather and several generations before them, the third baby-boy of Aimé Derrida and Georgette (Safar) Derrida, a lower middle-class, Sephardic Jewish family whose ancestors had fled the Spanish Inquisition.1 The Derridas set up house in la rue Saint-Augustin in 1923, the year they got married. A town hall document dated October 21, 1871, confirms that Georgette Safar’s grandfather, “born in Algiers during the year eighteen hundred and thirty-two fulfills the conditions for citizenship prescribed” by the 1871 decree, and “has declared that he takes the name of Safar as family name and as first name that of Mimoun.” Seven witnesses had vouched for the parents of “the above named,” who had “just signed in Hebrew.” They “had been established in Algeria before eighteen hundred and thirty.” Until the Crémieux decree of 1875, the “indigenous Jews” 85

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of Algeria were not French citizens. They would lose their citizenship and become indigenous again under the Vichy government.2 In 1934, the family left the rue Saint-Augustin for another house, better known as the “garden,” the “orchard,” or the “Pardès,” 13, rue d’Aurellede-Paladines in El-Biar where Derrida, now five years old, attended kindergarten and later primary school. “Then, in 1940, the singular experience of the Algerian Jews occurred. Incomparable to that of European Jews, the persecutions were nonetheless unleashed in the absence of any German occupier.”3 Derrida, still at school, whereas his brother René and sister Janine had already been expelled, was replaced by another pupil to stand before the flag because Derrida was Jewish. One episode in particular from those dark days provides ample indications of the troubles that were to come. In 1942, Derrida joined Lycée Ben Aknoun only to be sent off home on the first day of school. “It’s an experience which leaves nothing intact,” he intones with an overt sense of exclusion, Something you can never again cease to feel. The Jewish children were expelled from school. In the principal’s office: “Go back home, your parents will explain.” Then the Allies land, and it’s the period of what was called the twoheaded government (de Gaulle–Giraud): racial laws were maintained for a period of almost six months, under a “free” French government, friends who no longer knew you, the insults, the Jewish lycée with teachers expelled without a murmur of protest from the colleagues. I was enrolled there, but I skipped classes for a year (1988: 74). One cannot help sensing the still angry memory preventing Derrida from recounting the incident in detail. Suffice it to say that anti-Semitism was unleashed and officially authorized and so was verbal and physical violence. The list of colonial, anti-Semitic administrators and judges also includes its fair share of rebels, renegades, and rakes; its nighttime terrors, dementias, mental breakdowns, and suicides. The poignancy of systematic oppression and attack on account of religious beliefs stands out like a sore thumb. “At nineteen I naively believed anti-Semitism had disappeared, at least where I was living then. But, during adolescence, and that was the real tragedy, it was there for everyone else” (ibid.). In the spring of 1943, Derrida enrolled at Lycée Emile-Maupas where Jewish teachers, thrown out from the public system, had set up teaching. So divided and uncontrolled had Algiers—the colony’s nerve center—become, its services crippled, its immense infrastructure crumbling, its people branded. There was now something unyielding about the place that encouraged intolerance, racism, xenophobia; all sorts of absolute religious and cultural claims emanated

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from the city, most of them involving the denial or downgrading of the others. Derrida recalls with ever-renewed poignancy the sudden sense of fear he experienced as a child: “Yes, and I knew from experience that the knives could be drawn at any moment, on leaving school, in the stadium, in the middle of those racist screams which spared no one, Arabs, Jews, Spanish, Maltese, Italians, Corsicans” (ibid.). This observation holds force not just because of the gloomy sentiment of being torn apart from family, friends, and homeland, but also because of the discontinuity of memories and experiences of being at “home,” so to speak. This experience, the sense of being persecuted, is the result of a political process that aimed to brand a tiny minority (the Jews) within a powerful colonial Christian minority within an enormously poor Muslim Arab majority. In the fall of the same year, Derrida returned to Lycée Ben Aknoun. Disobedient and unruly, he delighted in playing soccer. As a matter of fact, he wanted to become a professional soccer player. These extracurricular activities cost him his baccalaureate exam (held in June 1947). An early dissenter, Derrida kept a diary and even had a few poems published in local reviews. From 1947 to 1948, Derrida attended a philosophy class at Lycée Gautier in Algiers and even contemplated becoming a teacher. After passing the baccalaureate, in June 1948, he learned about a career orientation program that was disseminated on the radio extolling hypokhâgne for its interdisciplinarity.4 The instructor who broadcast the program reported that Camus had been one of his students. Derrida rushed to see him the following day and signed up in the advanced literature class at Lycée Bugeaud in Algiers. In 1950, he sailed to metropolitan France, his first trip ever outside of Algeria, ironically enough, on board the Ville d’Alger. To the question “How old were you when you left Algeria?” put to him by Catherine David, he replies: Please, now . . . I came to France when I was nineteen. Before then, I had never been much past El-Biar. The war came to Algeria in 1940, and with it, already then, the first concealed rumblings of the Algerian War. As a child, I had the instinctive feeling that the end of the world was at hand, a feeling which at the same time was most natural, and, in any case, the only one I ever knew. Even for a child incapable of analyzing things, it was clear that all this would end in fire and blood. No one could escape that violence and fear (1983: 74). Derrida returned to Algeria in 1957 to do his national service in the middle of the Algerian war. Seconded to a school in Koléa, he taught French and English for more than two years as a second-class soldier dressed in

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civilian clothing. He also translated press articles and saw Pierre Bourdieu in Algiers on a regular basis. Derrida always condemned France’s colonial policy in Algeria and hoped, until the last moment, for a compromise that would induce indigenous Algerians and the pieds-noirs to live together peacefully. He even tried to prevent his parents from leaving Algiers in 1962. But in his mind, he soon realized he was perhaps an idealist whose belief was not in accordance with actual facts. The pied-noir was also the French colonist in Algeria: an emigrant, a conscript, or a voluntary exile, without family or heritage, landing in the country without anything—and remaking the world. This “Adam” felt he had to leave now and that went for the Derridas, too. This the piedsnoirs called “Nostalgia for another Algeria.”5 Derrida would go back three times: in 1971 to lecture at the University of Algiers, in 1984, accompanied by his sister Janine, to visit 13, rue d’Aurelle-de-Paladines and in 1999 to shoot a film (Tourner les mots) with Safia Fathy. This brief “background” denotes the inscriptions of a bodily signature against (or beyond) which an intellectual mark would play and yet not successfully ever be erased. This personal Algerian “background” (and it is this idea of “background” and the “figure” of the intellectual that is Derrida cast upon it) really deserves fuller statement and description if the philosopher-critic is to thicken into person, a fascinating and infinitely recessive process. Conscious of his “background,” Derrida continues to cover it up. But he knows his anamnesis will be only restored in order to be reintegrated into the Algerian saga, to bear witness to an era that goes back in time, forever; it goes back to the very beginning; in his genes he carries the memories of thousands of beings both Algerian and non-Algerian. Only someone that eager to belong, so ritually and historically excluded from belonging, would be willing to take on board such a burden of caring for himself and the country of his birth. The idea of a recently wiped-out past becomes more and more difficult in another way. As long as Derrida tries not to enter that idea, it ramifies. And it ramifies more and more as his understanding grows: a minority whose ancestors lived for centuries in Algeria with their own overwhelming concerns that have long passed from his remembrance. How soon does the past fade from recollection of this supposed previous existence? We are not sure. Only Derrida can tell us. Witness the following exchange with Catherine David, which shows his gift for weaving together scraps of autobiographical reflections, and which I must quote at some length. N.O.

To evade such reckoning, is this the same thing as evading destiny, the destiny of philosophy, for example?

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Do you seriously want me to speak about my “destiny” in these circumstances? No. But with destiny, which is a singular way of not being free, what interests me, precisely, is this intersection of chance and necessity, the “life line,” the very language of one’s own life, even if it is never pure. . . . A property you cannot appropriate; it somehow marks you without belonging to you. It appears only to others, never to you. . . . What I write resembles in my account, a dotted outline of a book to be written, in what I call—at least for me—the “old new language,” the most archaic and the newest, unheard of, thereby at present unreadable. You know that the oldest synagogue in Prague is called the Old-New? Such a book would be quite another thing; nonetheless, it would bear some resemblance to this train of thought. In any case, it is an interminable remembering, still seeking its own form: it would be not only my story, but also that of the culture, of language, of families, and above all, of Algeria. . . . You are going to write it? What do you think?

N.O.

Just now you spoke about Algeria, where it all began for you. . . .

J.D.

Ah, you want me to tell you things like “I-was-born-in-El-Biar-inthe-suburbs-of-Algiers-in-a-petit-bourgeois-Jewish-familywhich-was-assimilated-but. . . .” Is this really necessary? I just couldn’t do it, you’ll have to help me (1983: 73–74).

The results are poetic in the best sense; confessional at times, without being self-indulgent.

I My task in this chapter is not to speak of Algeria’s difficult transition from a recently subordinate condition to a nightmarish postcolonial one but to tell “by some other way of telling,” in John Burger’s celebrated phrase, the story about Derrida’s debt to Algeria; a debt he continues to deny in the most fashionable of manners. Insofar as readers of Derrida frequently neglect to recollect the obvious, or the extreme particularity of his historical position vis-à-vis the country of his birth, I must begin by suggesting that Derrida’s career, or at least the early part of it, represents a localized and singular moment in the history of that country. And even though his

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writing lends expression to a dying generation, whose linguistic and cultural crises will not again be duplicated in the engaged violence of a given “Third World” history, Derrida’s canonicity nevertheless remains authoritative. In an arena of such frenetic change, Derrida refuses to modify a perspective that knows its time is done even before it has had the chance to be fully articulated. This perspective or apparent relation has no choice but to register its own bewilderment at the relation between empire and colony, center and periphery, domination and resistance, Self and Other, text and context, Derrida and Algeria. In proposing to make visible the historical bases of intellectual signatures, I find myself inevitably led to think about what is intrinsic and what extrinsic to author, authority, oeuvre. Recent cultural or literary criticism has greatly debated the way in which so-called canons, or lists of great works, are constituted. Is the Western canon of essential books from Homer to Huxley, for example, something that reflects the interests of a class, a coterie, a world or is it intrinsically what is best, inherently authentic, irreducibly great in Western literature? This question gives rise to others that concern hybridity. Knowing that all poststructuralist rejections of origin myths are, in fact, alibis for a-historical and a-political posturing and given that Derrida himself resists the idea of originary morphologies, why should he be subject to such a demand? Ultimately, the problem rests on a question that Derrida has himself made possible to ask: Since cultures are syncretized, one cannot search for the “roots” of messy histories. To do so is to indulge in humanist fantasizing. This is not a tenet I wish the reader to refuse and reject. For the last section of the chapter will attempt to address the existential as well as the felt political need to bring one Self (French Derrida) into harmony with the Other (Algerian Derrida), for as the debate about what had once been called “L’Algérie française” metamorphosed into a debate about belonging. I excerpt from Le monolinguisme de l’autre: “I must go on dreaming about it in my nostalgérie” (1996: 86). What I am trying to claim is a somewhat more complex appeal for geopolitically aware protocols of vigilance. In this connection, I would like to reflect on Derrida, whose domestication and canonization he himself seems to be happily or sadly encouraging, as a visible spoken consciousness that continues to defer the book that is to be written on Algeria. Despite this silence, or in fact, because of it, one will perhaps permit me to interpret this lecture as the most “autobiographical” speech I have ever risked. But if one day I had to tell my story, nothing in this narrative would start to speak of the thing itself if I did not come up against this fact: for lack of capacity, competence, or self-

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authorization, I have never yet been able to speak of what my birth, as one says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab (1989: 31). By stating in this way the question of what connects Derrida to Algeria and what calls the relationship from its absolute singularity, I am well aware of the too many perils in writing about both present-day Algeria (where a war to the death is being waged against civilians and intellectuals who speak out against injustices: Tahar Djaout and Abdelkebir Alloula among others, come to mind, and in and for whose memory I write today) and Derrida, a prolific writer who has published to date more than 62 books and hundreds of essays, interviews, and whose work has been garrisoned by armies of critics and schools of interpretations with more than 157 books, 51 special issues of journals, and 400 essays devoted to him at the last count.6 As there is a fortress Freud so is there a fortress Derrida; Derrida his own castle. For admission, a certain high seriousness must be deemed essential. One is nervous about presuming even to write Derrida’s name, if only because he was, and still is, so reluctant to write his name himself. Like the Hebrew name of God, it is a name that should not be spoken. In thus de-nominating himself, Derrida was to make his name memorable. Diminishing it, he augmented it, and not merely for posterity. Even the letter D—as in Derrida—has become significant in his own time: différAnce, deconstruction, dissemination, deterrence, détente, displacement, decapitalize, double bind, decapitation, destination (1990: 10); dérive, déracinement, délocalisation, desincarnation, destinerrance, demeure (1999: 26). One may be tempted to ask the question: “Who is Derrida, anyway?” A simple answer like Derrida is a homo academicus at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and co-founder of Le Collège International de Philosophie, doctor honoris causa of several universities including Cambridge, author of more than sixty books, most of which have been translated into several languages, would not be adequate for most purposes simply because it points to the bearer of that name. One would need to reply that Derrida is an Algerian by birth, that he was born of Jewish parents who lived for centuries in Algeria (the family names like “aimé” or “rené,” often impossible to decipher even by those who bear them, are encrypted along with several others in La Carte postale) before they left for France in the early 1960s, that he is the author of De la grammatologie, and that he is a leading proponent of (so-called) “Deconstruction” (1978: 322). Simply to point him out, Derrida ipse, would be to mistake the inquirer’s meaning if he wanted to know who “Derrida” is. Using the name “properly” in most contexts of discussion would involve knowing something about Derrida’s texts and that they signify with a vengeance in terms of

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current philosophical debate. Thus “sense determines reference,” as Friedrich Frege once put it, even in the case of proper names, at least where those names are not used in a purely denotative fashion but indicate, on the speaker’s part, a grasp of certain pertinent facts. Poets have been rather less touchy than philosopher-critics in this respect. Shakespeare’s Sonnets—like much Renaissance poetry—make elaborate play on his and other proper names: Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, And Will to boot, and Will in overplus. [...] So thou, being in Will, add to thy Will, One will of mine to make thy large Will more. One of his less impressive sonnets—No. 145—apparently plays on the name “Hathaway” in the following line (“I hate from hate away she threw”), and may be an early love poem written for Anne Shakespeare. John Donne, the poet and divine, was well known in his lifetime for his mischievous wordplay, and was especially susceptible—like Shakespeare quibbling on “Will”—to puns on his own name. The most famous of these is “John Donne/Anne Donne/Un-done,” summing up his clandestine marriage to Anne More in 1602, an audacity that cost his position and landed him briefly in prison. And there is the series of punning refrains in his penitential A Hymn to God the Father written during his serious illness in the winter of 1623. The refrain contains a recurrent echo of his name: “When Thou has done, Thou hast not done / And, having done that, Thou haste done.” Ben Jonson not only engraved Shakespeare’s name, after the latter’s death, in a poem beginning with: “To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,” but went so far as to change the spelling of his own name from “Johnson” to “Jonson,” thus affirming an identity that was selfcreated rather than inherited7 (Norris, 1987). The proper name “Jacques Derrida” also offers itself to an exploration, a decipherment: it becomes at once a “milieu” (in the biological sense of the term) into which one must plunge, steeping in all the reveries it bears, and a precious object, compressed, embalmed, which “must be opened like a flower,” Roland Barthes observes (1990: 59). Put otherwise, if the name (Jacques Derrida) is a sign, it is a voluminous sign, a sign always full of a dense texture of meaning, which no amount of wear can reduce or flatten. The name Jacques Derrida covers everything that memory, usage, culture can put into it; it offers itself to a veritable semic analysis, which Derrida himself does not fail to postulate or sketch out “J.D.”: what Proust’s narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu calls Name’s different “figures”: “I find

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in the duration of this same name within myself, seven or eight different figures one after the other” (1954: Vol. III: 145). One of the numerous figures that are in the name Derrida is Algeria with its hopes and impediments. There are reasons for, and there is an interest in, raising the following set of questions about the relationship with and exclusion of Algeria from Derrida’s enterprise. In his case the reasons for separating his earlier life from his later work are an assessment of responsibility and a decision about consequences of the sort that are contained in such matters as: If Derrida had not been born in Algeria, could he then have written excellent work? Or: Is his work outside of Algeria the result, the direct result (either because he tried to hide or marginalize it), of his earlier ideas—those ideas he first received in Algeria when he was a young man growing up there? What are the consequences for deconstructive theory or Derridean logocentrism generally if one can prove that their author was—and still is— oblivious of an entire history and culture? Is there a way of reading and enjoying works like L’Écriture et la différence, Psyché, Limited Inc., given that Derrida’s whole being centers around an origin that is Algerian in the first place? Does Derrida’s work reflect his postcolonial ¶å «\å¯ å Ç (source), or the tension arising from his “mestizo” experience? Let me add something here that may appear to be so irrelevant and so idiosyncratic as to be trivial, but which at least I think needs saying. None of the books, essays, and interviews I have read glosses one especially sinister fact: Derrida’s deliberate quasi—mutism vis-à-vis the Algerian question. You do not have to be an Algerian to know that Derrida was born, educated, and nurtured in Algeria first and France second. For me, to read a colossal production of narratives on one of the most influential philosopher-critics of our time has been to wait in vain for someone who would note how a-historical and/or apolitical the whole Derridean project is. But having begun to unravel the knot, we should proceed further and speak of Algeria’s contribution to France and the world; a contribution often neglected and swept aside. Algeria was the greatest and the most profitable of all French colonial possessions. It stood like India to a rival colonial empire. From the time the first French expedition (37,000 men) arrived there in 1830, until the last French settlers departed in 1962, Algeria acquired an increasingly massive and influential role in French life, commerce and trade, industry, politics, ideology, war, and, by the middle of the twentieth century, culture and the life of the imagination. In French literature, art, and thought, the list of great names who dealt with and wrote about Algeria is astonishingly impressive. It includes Robert Randou, Jules Roy, Jules Lecoq, René-Jean Clot, François Bonjean, Marie Cardinal, Jean Pierre Millecam, Marcel Moussy, Musette Auguste Robinet, Jean Pélégri, Sadia Lévy, Sarah Bernhardt, Paul Morand, Jean Amrouch, Elissa Rhaïs,

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André Rosfelder, Emmanuel Roblès, Eugène Delacroix, Dominique Ingrès, Charles Julien, Aimé Dupuy, André Gide, and Albert Camus, whose role in the definition and formulation of what Algeria was to the French empire in its mature phase, just before the whole edifice began to show cracks and came tumbling down, is extraordinarily important.8 The other generation of thinkers that Algeria nursed forms the core of French Marxism, feminism, sociology, film industry, literature, politics, haute couture, and philosophy. Think of Louis Althusser, Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas, Hélène Cixous, Bernard-Henry Lévy, Jacques Berque, Jean Lacouture, Jacques Attali, Yves Saint Laurent, and of course Derrida, whose deconstruction has dominated not only literature, philosophy, theory, religious studies, but also architecture, cinema, painting, technology, history, law, and even management, economics, and accounting. And whereas Camus deliberately chose his mother over the mother-country: “I have always condemned the use of terror, I must also condemn a terror that is practiced blindly on the streets of Algiers and which may any day strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice,”9 Derrida remains mute on the subject of a dirty savage war, a territory that was subjugated for over a century and a quarter and a country with which his name will always be associated, just as Kipling is with India or Naipaul with Trinidad.10 There is something that is inescapably Algerian about Derrida as there is something inescapably Palestinian about Edward Said, and it is not only his self-deprecation. What is Algerian about Derrida is that by origin, he is un-French, un-European, un-Western just as Said is un-English, un-American. Consider Richard Stern’s description of him in “Derridiarry”: “With glasses, he looks like an upper-level, not absolutely top-grade French bureaucrat, an administrator in a colonial territory (such as the Algeria) in which he spent his early life.” When asked whether he learned Arabic, he dismissively replied: “[I’m] almost pathologically monolinguistic” (quoted in Stern, 1991: 20). And yet despite Derrida’s monolithic reply, the final question is: How can one whose ancestors had resided in Algeria for centuries live in a country for almost a quarter of a century and not acquire or even pick up the language of that country? The answer is simple: Derrida did not learn Arabic, only because Arabic—or what the French like to call Charabia—is resented outside the Arab world. Ironically inside the Arab world all Arabs regard the immense literary and cultural worth of their language as one of their principal contributions to the world. Arabic is of course the language of ² [z䣫[ (the Koran) as well as the conscious vehicle of Islamic piety and is therefore central to Islam, in which it has a hieratic, historical, and everyday use that is almost without parallel in other world cultures. Because of that role, and because it has always been associated

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with resistance to the imperialist incursions that have characterized Arab history since the late sixteenth century, Arabic has also acquired a uniquely contested position in modern culture, defended and extolled by its native speakers and writers, and belittled, attacked, or ignored by foreigners for whom it has represented a last defended bastion of Arabism and Islam. It is true that Arabic is a difficult language for at least three reasons, all of them applicable in Derrida’s case. It is made up of a spoken version that varies dramatically from country to country; a Moroccan cannot readily be understood by a Lebanese, for example, though Palestinians, Syrians, and Egyptians—each with a distinctive accent—can communicate with each other. Which dialect does one learn? The written version, on the other hand, is common to all Arabic readers and writers, but it is an almost completely different language from the spoken dialects; its relationship to demotic Arabic is rather like Latin’s to French, Italian, and Spanish. The rich vocabulary, grammatical complexity, and rhetorical structures of written or classical Arabic are difficult, but necessary to master. Linguistic knowledge and fluent literacy are an almost obsessive concern for most educated Arabs. Third, there is a cultural barrier against Arabic in the West. Arabic is associated with violence and terrorism and, of course, anti-Israel rhetoric, Arabic literature is scanted, and the Arab contribution to civilization is usually ignored or downgraded. For a young person like Derrida growing up in Algiers in the 1930s and 1940s, one would think the challenge to press on and actually get hold of the language have been formidable, but it was not to be. Arabic, by the end of World War II, had been proscribed as a language, because Algeria was considered a fully-fledged Département Français. The only place, and this has an extremely important bearing on the situation of contemporary Algeria, in which the language could be taught was in the mosque. Islam then and now is the last refuge of nationalism. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) took power in 1962 and restored Arabic. There was a rather misconceived program of Arabization. The generation of Ben Bella and Boumediene did not know Arabic at all, their working language was French. They could speak patois and they could read ² [z䣫[ (the Koran), but they were not able to use Arabic the way the rest of the Arabs can in the Maghreb or in the Mashreq. So they had to learn from scratch. In the meantime, the FLN became the party not only of the nation but also of the state. With its monopoly of power over thirty years, it became a force against which the so-called faithful rebelled. Hence the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS). It is a repetition of the same sordid history. Derrida may be monolinguistic, but his tradition of dialectics that is so fundamental to ethical discourse whether written or oral is grounded in Judeo-Islamic hermeneutical sensibilities and stems from his belonging to a culture that stresses dialogue and disputation in ostensibly monologic

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texts. They constitute a family of resemblances with overlapping origins and many commonalities, but it is only through the play of their differences, and their acknowledgment of cultural inferences, that the fullness of the dialogic emerges from its parochial veilings and monologic chauvinisms. Consider only the metaphoric differentials of the Jewish oral and written äråú (Torah) (from ohr, “light”), and connect it to ² [z£«[ controlled by two paradigmatic imperatives, Ç z£É (read or recite) and ª£ (tell), and the idea will be clear enough. And whereas the Christian tradition seems to privilege the archetypal relation: the world as realization of the logos, language as representation, New Testament as reification of the Old, writing as secondary to an originary word, scripture as codification, Jewish as well as Islamic scriptures privilege the “trace,” “divine sparks,” or play of meaning (Jacob, “he who wrestles with God”), claiming that both written and oral forms require disputational, hermeneutic explorations to pursue the plenitude that through language creates the human, moral world (Handleman, 1982: 165–167). For Derrida, the great conspiracy of 3,000 years of Western philosophy is the debasement of writing as a fall into exteriority of pure, interior mental experiences. The voice, or spoken word, on the other hand, is indissolubly wedded to the mind, while the written word can only point to the fullness of meaning of which it is the faintest, interior representative. Philosophy has despised writing for the same reason, Bataille says, we despise the toe, for the same reason Plato’s divided line privileges intelligible over sensible beauty, for the same reason the Christian exalts the soul over the body and God over nature (1985: 167–189). There is simply a horror— and consequently there is a massive repression—of the material basis on which spirituality and all dignified superstructures depend. This repression of the material is the ontological version of all other kinds of oppression in the world, of labor by management, of faculty by administration, of female by male, of the dark races by the white. Susan Handelman speaks of the Derridian project in part as an outsider’s protest against what everyone else takes for granted, in part as a rebellion of the rabbinical tradition of midrash (textual commentary) against Greek logocentrism. ùrln (Midrash) multiplies and proliferates meaning while the Greek impulse is toward unity and simplification.11 And if LéviStrauss in A Writing Lesson made writing the source of hierarchyzation and tyranny, Derrida wants to show that writing is more often liberation from centralization (1976: 131). Moreover, according to the lrnìú (Talmud), the äêåú (Torah) existed before space and time, even before the creation of the world by God. The äråú (Torah) consisted of letters of black fire burning against a background of white fire, and when the holy one created heaven and earth, he looked into the äråú (Torah) to see how it was done. The tex-

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tual is prior to the natural.12 The world is the product of the äêåú (Torah). There is nothing, in this sense, too, outside the text and that includes the trace, which is fully expounded in äìhn úhrá (berit milah) or sunnet (a classic rite of passage marking the time when boys symbolically leave their mothers to become men).13 In both cases, circumcision is one of the central covenants of the Jewish as well as Islamic faiths—the sign of Abraham’s pact. In Genesis 17, circumcision is enjoined and defined as the sign of the covenant. God tells the prophet Abraham: This is my covenant between me and you and your descendants that you shall keep: every male among you is to be circumcised. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and this shall be the sign of the covenant between me and you. At the age of eight days every male among you shall be circumcised, generation after generation. . . . An uncircumcised male, everyone who has not had the flesh of his foreskin circumcised, he shall be cut off from his skin. He has broken my covenant (quoted in Robbins, 1995: 31). Jill Robbins explains how circumcision, which was observed by many cultures in the Near East as a puberty ritual as well as an investiture into marriage attains a religious importance that was kept alive not only by Jews but also by Muslims alike. Derrida, who was circumcised in Algeria, speaks of it in the following terms: Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about, consider the discourse on the limit, margins, marks, marches, etc., the closure, the ring (alliance and gift), the sacrifice, the writing of the body, the pharmakos excluded or cut off, the cutting/sewing of Glas, the blow and the sewing back up . . . yes but I have been, I am and always will be, me and not another, circumcised. . . . [I]n my family and among the Algerian Jews, one scarcely ever said “circumcision”’ but “baptism,” not Bar Mitzvah but “communion,” with the consequences of softening, dulling, through fearful acculturation, that I’ve always suffered from more or less consciously, of unavowable events, felt as such, not ‘Catholic,’ violent, barbarous, hard, “Arab,” circumcised circumcision, secretly assumed accusation of ritual murder.14

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In Derrida’s language, there is no presence “behind,” only a creative absence: Issac Luria’s tsimtsum; the universe contained in the dot of ] in ã[ ®äääé^ (in the name of God). It is the “trace” on the other hand that makes Derrida different in that he understands it as a “decapitation” or, even better, as a “chiasmal double invagination of the edges.” Actually, Derrida connects writing to circumcision and explains his lifelong preoccupation with writing as the sense of guilt that he can never separate from writing: Does one ask for pardon in writing, or does one ask for pardon for the crime of writing? It anticipates Derrida’s desire for self-surgery, to mark himself: “I am also the mohel my sacrificer. I write with a sharpened blade. If the book doesn’t bleed, it will be a failure.”15 But what of the other trace, the one that plays up context, intent, face-to-face event and distrusts both archetype ª¿¼Èb (recitation) and zÀåéŸb (hermeneutic play), although adept at both (the search is for plain meaning in a world of appearances)? Is the tradition of disputation+n^ d 16 able to provide an inquiry into the trace, understood this time not as circumcision but as the footsteps of Derrida? Can we trace Derrida’s postcolonial itinerary, marks, signs that tell of his footprints to the source (Algeria)? Do his politics of denial reflect a rejection of both postcolonial and postcoloniality? More important, does this denial limit Derrida’s deconstruction (of self and texts) to an uncritical, a-political hermeneutics “from the center”? Trace seems to name something of which presence and absence, or more generally Self/Other—which in concrete terms would be postcolonial Derrida/Algeria—are the erasure within the discourse of philosophy. Whereas philosophy traditionally considers the Other to be secondary to the Self, the Other of the self, thus annulling the Other in its own right, Derrida’s inquiry into their difference leads to the recognition of a certain irreducibility of the Other with respect to the Self. Indeed, despite the Self’s traditional subjection of the Other to itself, its own identity is a function of its demarcation from the Other, which thus becomes endowed with an essential autonomy. The trace is the constituting possibility of this differential interplay between Self and Other. To recognize that the Self may not be so unitary and that the Other might actually consist of many others is to recover the Other’s voice hitherto silenced by the strategy of negation of which Derrida is today an astute practitioner. The trope of reference to Self/Other or Derrida/Algeria is the one that matters in L’Autre cap where Derrida discusses the unification of Europe, Eurocentrism, racism, his marginality within a chauvinistic, closed-in French culture, and the “Other” (i.e., Algeria). Here Derrida is quick to acknowledge that he comes “from the other shore if not from the other heading—(from a shore that is principally neither French, nor European, nor Latin, nor Christian)” (1992: 72–73). The trace that makes possible such ref-

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erence to Self by way of an Other is “more ‘primordial’ than what is phenomelogically primordial,” or pristine to expression—that is, meaning, self-presence, evidence, and so on. The originary trace is therefore the nonpresence. It repeats itself infinitely as the same by referring to an Other and to (an Other of) itself within itself. It must be understood as a constant “bending back,” as a minimal (self-)difference within (self-)identity, which secures selfhood and self-presence through the detour of oneself (as Other) to oneself.17 As the very condition of being a Self, the trace is the inscription within the stigma of the self of “the other point toward which it continually drifts.” Yet, clearly enough in this sense the trace is also forever present, since the relation to the Other is older than Selfhood. The trace has this capacity of being at once the Self and the Other. As a matter of fact, the Self is what it is thanks to the Other. It is the rim of the world (Algeria) that made the rock of the dome (Derrida) what it is today. This reality Derrida recognizes by confessing that it, the Self, was once part of the Other (Gasché, 1986: 241). Now, however, he speaks not of Algeria but of the identity and future of a “new Europe” (post-EEC, post-wall, post-Perestroika); a Europe that recognizes that its identity is constituted by the Other who lives and breathes within its boundaries. To begin, I will confide in you a feeling. Already on the subject of headings [caps]—and of the shores on which I intend to remain. It is the somewhat weary feeling of an old European. More precisely, of someone who, not quite European by birth, since I come from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, considers himself, and more and more so with age, to be a sort of over-acculturated, over-colonized European hybrid. (The Latin words culture and colonization have a common root, there where it is precisely a question of what happens to roots.) In short, it is, perhaps, the feeling of someone who, as early as grade school in French Algeria, must have tried to capitalize, and capitalize upon, the old age of Europe, while at the same time keeping a little of the indifferent and impassive youth of the other shore. Keeping, in truth, all the marks of an ingenuity still incapable of this other old age from which French culture had, from very early on, separated him (1992: 67). Derrida links the question of his identity to the question of Europe as an example of domination. What, he asks, is Europe? How has Europe traditionally been defined and how is the current world situation changing that

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definition? To answer this set of questions, any African—and Derrida (just like Augustine who came from what is modern Souk Ahras in Algeria and to whom Derrida refers as his “compatriot”) is African by birth—who contemplates the Europe of which Derrida speaks so eloquently must naturally inquire how it has affected Africa. If he is conscious of Africa’s travails in the past 500 years, he must query whether the aftermath of 1992 has proved as damaging for Africa as did those of 1492, 1884, and 1962.18 In 1492, Christopher Columbus, who was both prophet and profiteer, landed in the Americas. That event was to further the slave trade, started by the Arabs, that devastated Africa for more than three centuries. In 1884, in Berlin, European powers partitioned Africa among themselves. Thereafter, their troops invaded a continent already shattered by slavery. (In the case of Algeria, the French occupied it earlier, much earlier.) African lands were forcibly expropriated, sometimes through genocide (as the Herero in Namibia); and African labor was made to serve the conqueror’s purposes (often at the kind of barbarous cost exemplified by millions of people who died in the space of twenty years while gathering rubber in the Belgian Congo). The facts of the case are exposed in the Congo that Joseph Conrad saw in 1890, which was in the midst of a human catastrophe—the bloodiest chapter of Europe’s turn-of-the-century scramble for Africa. The Europeans who came to exploit the territory and subdue its peoples tended to be hard-bitten men who were willing to risk death in order to get rich quick and enjoy some combat against a poorly armed foe as well. White contempt for Africans was so great that one British adventurer in the Congo in 1887 packed an African’s head in a box of salt and sent it to his Piccadilly taxidermist to be stuffed and mounted. Jan Vansina, one of the leading ethnographers of central Africa, estimates that between 1880 and 1920 the territory that was then the Congo and is now the Republic of Congo suffered a net loss of some ten million people, fully one-half of its population. For five centuries (from 1517, when the transatlantic slave trade began, to 1920, when the pacification of Africa was completed, to 1962, when the Resistance movements won independence, to the signing of the Schengen Accord in 1992 making Europe a super state), Europe’s impact on Africa has been consistently and massively destructive.19 In 1945, Germany was defeated by the Allied Powers so expensively that the victors had to reorganize their empires. In the process, the jigsaw pieces of territory through which Europe governed Africa were given flag independence and ushered into the wilderness of neocolonial maldevelopment where, without economic or cultural autonomy, they still wander today.20 Since the name of Columbus invokes the very dynamic of the signature, it may be worth spending a little more time on the historical origins of the encomienda. Some critical recognition or discussion of the agency, its limits,

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and its “significations” in the case of Columbus and the “event” accelerating the slavery trade needs to be made in a study of this kind (one that calls into question the process, problem, and fictiveness of the signature effect). That is why it is historically significant that the date of Columbus’s “discovery” of America is also the date of the conquest of Grenada and the expulsion of the Jews (the Derridas included) from Spain: all three are symbols of this signature. The year 1492 marks the beginning of Eurocentric world history, of the conviction that a few Western countries were destined to conquer and rule the globe, of Euromegalomania. “The most famous moment in the history of exploration,” Felipe Fernández-Armesto notes, However, is also one of the most baffling. In the early darkness of 12 October 1492, a lookout, straining from the rigging of the Pinta, set up the cry of “Land!” Yet his identity remains uncertain, clouded by widely differing versions of his name; and the priority of his sight of the New World was disputed by a fellow traveler called Columbus, who claimed the reward for himself. Columbus’s insistence that he saw America first has been variously interpreted: by some as naked, mean greed; by others as honorable self-deception, born of the arrogance of lust for fame. . . . At the moment of his discovery, the impact of America was absorbed in layers of his own reading and made to fit his capacious image of himself. Like the artist who showed Cortés riding into Mexico on an elephant, he accommodated his vision of the New World to the framework of an old one.21 Fernández-Armesto suggests that America is like Hamlet: someone is always seeing it for the first time, but rarely with fresh perceptions. Still, the “discovery” of the New World is a mixed affair. By any standards, 1492 was a remarkable year. Depending on your point of view, it was a triumph or a calamity. It was a good year for Spain’s Catholic monarchs, who crushed the Infidel at Grenada before packing Columbus off to find a back route to India. Isabel la Catolica wielded the Holy Office like an army of crack troops to unify a kingdom whose cohesion had been diluted by two feeble kings, by civil war, and, according to the propaganda of the day, by the absorption of Jews and Muslims. At the time of her accession the region’s economy was heavily dependent on some 250,000 resident conversos and 200,000 Jews. Ghettoized to limit their influence over conversos and taxed to pay off the royal war debt, the Spanish Jews were finally expelled by a queen who, according to her own chronicler, “paid no heed to

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the diminution of her rents, esteeming very highly the cleansing of her lands” (quoted in Aridjis, 1992: 214). The final irony is that the way out of this moral chaos, the route westward, is burdened with the imagery of the past, a fatalistic circularity. Columbus is first glimpsed via one of the semiapparitions that Juan Cabezon of Castile observes, a choleric despairing figure reciting the Jews’ creation of the world down to Noah’s flood— ”rapidly figuring the world’s accounts, just as later I was to hear Don Cristobal Colon do.” Later, in a bar in Toledo, a familiar of the Inquisition asks Columbus whence he comes. “From myself” is the reply. The familiar warns Columbus that “the generations of men succeed each other like waves of the sea, and his dreams as well” (ibid.). There is a hint that Columbus may have barred Jews from what he thought were going to be his new dominions. Irony of ironies, the last ship of Jewish exiles set sail southward, followed within days by that of Columbus westward. Orphanage, displacement, persecution, and, crucially, the promise of a new start in a new land. The consequences of the Columbus’s voyages and those of his successors cannot be reversed. The sufferings imposed on indigenous Americans and imported Africans, whether by deliberate human action or as the unintended consequences of conquest and exploitation, are undeniable and cannot be canceled in retrospect. That the impact of conquest and exploitation on these populations was catastrophic, and not only during the first 150 years of European conquest, must not be denied or overlooked either. Nevertheless, “we cannot cancel history, but only remember or forget or invent it,” in Ibn Khaldûn’s totemic phrase (1967: 219). Everyone who lives in the Americas today, whether descended from the Aboriginal population that was almost decimated or from voluntary or involuntary settlers, has been shaped by the 500 years that have passed since Columbus sailed. But so has everyone in the Old World, though in ways of which we are rarely conscious. That deconstruction was born in the New World and transferred to the Old one is no accident. The New World, “that historical space which today, in all its dimensions and through all its power plays,” Derrida announces, “reveals itself as being undeniably the most sensitive, receptive, or responsive space of all to the themes and effects of deconstruction.”22 I hope it is not too much to say that European deconstruction now explicitly accepts the principle of noninterference. The transformation in the New World is captured in a poem by Derek Walcott, a creole himself, who asks the following questions: But who in the New World does not have the horror of the past, whether his ancestor

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was a torturer or victim? Who in the depth of conscience is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge? The pulse of the New World history is the racing pulse beat of fear, the tiring cycles of stupidity and greed (1974: 79). Breaking those tiring cycles of stupidity and greed becomes a responsibility, then, in dealing with Columbus and the claims being made for him in his name and signature. His discovery unfortunately maintains among many the myth of Europe’s discovery of “other” lands that were earmarked for conquest, settlement, and protracted domination. The “Other,” with defensive irony, uses the phrase without believing in it. For who was it who said that “there may have been other people before Columbus, but when Columbus discovered the New World, it stayed discovered”? “New” to whom? one might ask. To Columbus and his men, but not to the people who were there before them. The concept itself is a-historical and a function of ethnocentric conceit that denied the integrity of human settlement and of the civilizations of “native” peoples. No other person worth his or her mettle can subscribe to such a view of history or human development. Yet life need not be lived between the “either” and the “or” of Europe’s binary vision. What the genuine products, like Walcott, Derrida and others of a process of creolization, through cultural cross-fertilization are trying to communicate to us is the fact that they are capable of coping with a world that is still not organized, designed, or made to function in their interest. They have, over three or four centuries, fashioned all sorts of modalities to survive—and to go beyond survival. As Eugene Genovese argues with wit and dash in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, the slaves’ oppression involved patterns of behavior “within which they drew their own lines, asserted rights, and preserved their self-respect. . . . The slaves thereby provide an excellent illustration” of Gramsci’s popular consciousness or common sense. “In Gramsci’s terms,” Genovese observes, The slaves had to wage a prolonged, embittered struggle with themselves as well as with their oppressors to “feel their strength” and to become “conscious of their responsibility and their value.” It was not that the slaves did not act like men. Rather, it was that they could not grasp their collective strength as a people and act like political men.

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The black struggle on that front, which has not yet been won, has paralleled that of every other oppressed people (1972: 149). The core of Genovese’s reading of Gramsci lies in the immediacy with which he brings out the creativity, humanity, and sheer daring of the slaves. Rejecting slavery by projecting their worth as human beings, the slaves developed their own ethos of freedom as well as a complex network of resistance against containment. Central to the African-American culture today is the unfailing resourcefulness of the black community that was once deprived of its most basic rights. In this context, James Baldwin dealt with the question best. Referring to Haitians able to trace their ancestry back to African kings, he said that any American Negro wishing to go back so far will find his “journey through time abruptly arrested by the signature on the bill of sale which served as the entrance paper for his ancestor” (1998: 144). A reminder to us all that another signature, at another time, in another place was enacted. In other words, what was once Africa, Asia, and Native America’s encounters on foreign soil gave room to a viable plural society in which people live not just side by side but together. For that heritage has long been given to racial tolerance (however flawed), to freedom (for which slaves fought so relentlessly), and to a creative ecumenism in maintaining the integrity of differing belief systems. All this developed and exists today despite Columbus and his epigones. What we must come to terms with is that the idea of a New World starting in 1492 is (a) a-historical for Native Americans (themselves changed through sustained contact with alien cultures); (b) particularly disturbing for people of African ancestry whose centrality to the shaping of the so-called New World ethos is still denied in some circles; and (c) far too Eurocentric for the comfort of persons who may be part-African, part-Asian, part-Native American, and part-European—itself a most original way to have survived Columbus. That alone does not, however, empower post-Maastricht Europe to still think of Africa as its postscriptum or supplement, a mere extension of its boundaries insofar as flag independence did not eliminate the institutional arrangements or beliefs through which the former impoverished the latter; they are simply reorganized. In their new versions, Europeans have kept African developments within the boundaries set by Europe. Since 1960, African governments have continued to be made and unmade by Europe, not only through coups masterminded from up there but also through European mercenaries and resident political and military “advisers” who have propped up regimes that Africans, if left to themselves, would remove; and they have removed regimes that Africans, if left to

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themselves, would have retained. The Great Lakes’ tragedy is a reminder to us all of the curse of the nation-state imposed from above, foreign intervention, dehumanization, and exploitation. The tragicomic career of the late self-crowned Emperor Bokassa or the late self-appointed Marshal Mobutu is merely the most absurd illustration of this syndrome. African economies have been forced into debt trap peonage by the plans of “development” experts and fraudulent loan schemes of bankers and suppliers. And they have been unable to escape from it because of economic treaties such as the Lomé Conventions, the debt payment and rescheduling terms imposed by the Club of Paris, the IMF, and the World Bank. African cultural and political life has been manipulated by Europeans through religion, multinationals, academies, and even the Nobel Foundation. Every Nobel Prize for Literature so far awarded to an African (Soyinka, Mahfouz, Gordimer) has been an act of intervention designed to push African political and cultural developments into channels favorable to European hegemony.23 Ngu˜gi˜ put it trenchantly: “In the 18th and 19th centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the 20th century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their economy and cultures. Africa needs back its economy, its politics, its culture, its languages and all its patriotic writers” (1986: 34). Ngu˜gi˜ hammers nails in the coffin of injustice all over Africa. He also anatomizes what he calls the “spoils of native power” with a revealing glance at the case of how the native bourgeoisie hijacked the revolution while exposing the common control method of tribal dissent. So much for what might be called (though appropriately) the underpinning of Eurocentric biases. But why these reflections of today’s Europe and this obsessive fastening on the other heading? It is precisely at this point that Derrida becomes interesting in that he, like a navigator, say Columbus, sets out from a Europe that has always defined itself as the capital of culture, the headlight of thought, in whose name and for whose benefit exploration of other lands, other peoples, and other ways of thinking has been carried out. If such Eurocentric biases are not to be repeated, Derrida warns, the question of Europe must be asked in a new way; it must be asked by recalling another heading.

II Derrida’s writing undermines our usual ideas about texts, meanings, concepts, and identities—not just in philosophy and literature, but in other fields as well. Reactions to this hybridity have ranged from reasoned criticism to sheer abuse—deconstruction has been controversial. Should it be reviled as a politically pernicious nihilism, celebrated as a philosophy of

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radical choice and difference or a way of doing philosophy, a way of reading theoretical texts; a sustained assault on the Western philosophical tradition? There is much more to Derrida’s work than the public controversies suggest. But controversy can reveal something about what is at stake in contemporary philosophy. A small quarrel at Cambridge has done precisely that. According to a tradition dating from 1479, English universities award honorary degrees to distinguished people. It has never been quite clear why but it has been assumed that both parties benefit. On March 21, 1992, senior members of the University of Cambridge gathered to decide its annual awards. It should have been a formality—no candidate has been opposed for twenty-nine years. But the name Jacques Derrida was on the list. Four of the dons ritually declared non placet (“not contented”) (i.e. and they forced the university to arrange a ballot. There were two problems. First, this was a boundary dispute. Most of Derrida’s proposers were members of the English faculty, but by training and profession Derrida is a philosopher. More trenchantly, Cambridge traditionalists in both disciplines saw Derrida’s thinking as deeply improper, offensive, and subversive. Campaigns were organized, and the press was alerted. To the outraged dons, Derrida represented an insidious, fashionable strand of “French theory” that subverts Anglo-Saxon attitudes to learning. Derrida is accused of obfuscation, trickery, and charlatanism. He is not a philosopher, he is a flim-flam artist. And strangely, his trivial joking gimmickry is seen as a powerful threat to philosophy—a corrosion of the very foundations of intellectual life. The May 16 ballot vindicated Derrida and his supporters by 336 votes to 204. Derrida collected his award, but the dispute has continued (Smith, 1992: 5). What was at stake? Underneath the posturing, there were two important questions (1) The question of deconstruction: Where and what are its boundaries? How are they produced and policed? What belongs “inside” deconstruction, and what has to be expelled in the bid for “clarity and rigor”? (2) The question of philosophical language: What counts as a properly philosophical text? What form should it take? What kind of language should it use? If the dons had wanted rigorous address to these questions, they might have found one in the writings of a certain Jacques Derrida, who once defined his project with the aid of a metaphor from the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. It was a question, he suggested, of “vomiting up” philosophy and restoring her to the “sea of texts” from which she had proudly withdrawn. Those who would like to take the allegory farther afield may argue that Jonah was not in fact precipitated into the sea but onto dry land, and lost no time in prophesying doom to the great city of Nineveh (1972: 353–357). Derrida’s “slip” regarding the Jonah allegory is significant in that he seeks to interpret his philosophical project in a

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“nonworldly” manner. It seems to me, however, that there is an important symbolic difference between the sea, which for humanity is the nonworld, and dry land, which is always the world of humanity. Jonah was thrown back to the earthly world of life and suffering, for to be in the sea is to be nowhere; it is the denial of existence that is always nulle part. Derrida’s much quoted phrase “there is no ‘outside’ to the text” may be interpreted that we, as readers, have no legitimate business with the extratextual or the “real,” or whatever lies outside language. And yet texts exist in the absence of the “real” on the one hand, and, if reality is structured through and through by the meanings we conventionally assign to it, then the act of suspending or “deconstructing” those conventions has a pertinence and force beyond the usual bounds of textual or literary interpretations on the other. Derrida thus never made a pronouncement about the social reality beyond the text. I mean Algeria as a postcolonial text to be constructed, assembled, and represented. One may read “there is no ‘outside’ to the text” as advocating the isolated, a-political reading of reality, and that it stands as an adversary to “con-text.” Perhaps the least sympathetic interpretation of the deconstructive questioning of “con-text,” “representation,” or “reference” is that it makes it impossible to escape from the isolated literary text. But surely there is a difference between a single text and that general Context that is synonymous with Culture. No doubt the text in Derrida’s remark, as he himself has claimed, also means the larger cultural text to which Said, Norris, Scholes, Graff, and others direct our attention. Jonathan Arac goes so far as to use the key term “trace” to elucidate the “re” of representation as part of the most fundamental structure of repetition. My argument is: What other reasonable meaning can possibly be attached to the cryptic dictum that “there is no ‘outside’ to the text” than that there is no escape from culture, history, and destiny in social and political terms? Yet Derrida has remained vague and his argument concerning the question of Algeria underdeveloped. The point at issue then becomes: What are the personal/psychological and/or sociopolitical forces that have prevented him from addressing the subject? How can we move beyond that crisis to recover and/or restore a portion of his as well as Algeria’s history? That the impact of his early life in Algeria was scarred, and not only during the war must not be denied or overlooked either. This last series of questions brings me face-to-face with what I earlier referred to as the politics of denial. Victimhood, alas, does not guarantee or necessarily enable an enhanced sense of humanity. To testify to a history of oppression is necessary, but it is not sufficient unless that history is redirected into intellectual process and universalized to include all sufferers. Yet too often testimony to oppression becomes only a justification for

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further cruelty and inhumanity, or for high-sounding cant and merely “correct” attitudes. Derrida’s stand vis-à-vis the motherland typifies to such cultural politics of indifference and even negation. There is an altogether irony in finding out that a philosopher-critic who dared to deconstruct Western metaphysics as represented by Plato, Spinoza, Mallarmé, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger, pleading for not only the “trace” of an absence or différAnce but also for an open Europe, cannot come to terms with his own past. One could go on giving reasons for Derrida’s lack of interest in the Algeria case and the time spent deferring it, but buried beneath the whole deeply compelling matter is the question of whether moral and political affiliation or guilt in the world of everyday life can have a serious bearing on the quality and interpretation of works of the mind, works that are principally aesthetic and intellectual and in which matters of fact—Algeria lost one million people to free itself from French occupation—are excluded from consideration (Horne, 1984). Behind the question, of course, is the problem of both authorship and authorization. When T. S. Eliot made the distinction between the poet as poet and the person who has a personality, suffers, and has a psychology, he did little to settle the distinction once and for all: he simply articulated it with eye-catching skill as a problem. For are we to conclude that brilliant writers, as brilliant as Derrida, are also authors who forget their past and, perhaps even more important, the past of the homeland, a homeland that demands construction of its history out of the ruins of empire? Does the author of a work that is as important as Derrida’s today, by virtue of belonging to a common world of discourse, count as author when the very idea of his beginnings in the world is being deliberately buried? Conversely, most of us will allow that if an artist has a life of distinction and “human interest” on aesthetic and (presumably) moral grounds, knowledge of that life can stimulate a greater appreciation of their works. This has certainly been the case with Joyce, Yeats, C.L.R. James, Said, and others. I have so far attempted to list the permutations and possible articulations of what might be regarded as admonishment to connect things with each other, and I will not even try to be exhaustive. What I want to assert, however, is the intuitive conviction I have, and I think most of us have, that what we are dealing with here is the separation of the sense of a beginning from the sense of continuing, that there is a connection between childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age on the one hand, and life and art on the other. For me to read Derrida has been to discover how he disconnects the former from the latter, and he seems to be doing it casually, almost offhandedly, as if the real subject of inquiry were the health of a super Europe, not the anguish of a wounded country’s past.

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And while it is not necessary to regard every reading as a misreading, it is, however, important to regard every stand as moral or immoral. Elie Wiesel’s refusal to translate the lessons of his own past into consistent criticisms of Israel for doing what it has done to Palestinians is a case in point. Like Wiesel’s, Derrida’s position toward Algeria may be interpreted as unworldly, not of this world where there are no corners left to hide from the jaws of history. A still more crucial lesson is what marks detachment and marginality. Marginality (the French like to call Derrida “an American star” and “nihilistic spoilsport”) has often been a condition that motivates criticism and determines the critic’s characteristic tone and appearance. This is true of the Derridean case. It is not, however, a condition that makes for disinterest, dispassion, open-mindedness, or objectivity. Nor is it an external condition. Marginal men and women are like George Simmel’s stranger, in but not wholly of their society. The difficulties they experience are not the difficulties of detachment but of ambiguous connection. Derrida’s close relation with France, for example, has not been without difficulties, Derrida had to teach for twenty years as an assistant professor before he was promoted to full professorship.24 Free them, that is, the marginalized, from those difficulties and they may well lose the reasons they have for joining the critical enterprise. Moreover, criticism will differ from what it is when it is practiced on the margins by displaced intellectuals or members of subject classes or oppressed minorities, or even outcasts and pariahs. Now we have to imagine not a marginal philosopher-critic but a philosopher-critic detached from his own marginality like Derrida. He or she (the critic) might still be critical of any society in which groups of men and women have been pushed to the margins, French Arabs and Jews living in France today come to mind (or he might not, seeing that the margins are so often a setting for creative activity). But Derrida’s own marginality, if he remembers it, would only be a contributing factor, aiding his capacity for objective judgment. So would his centrality, his close involvement, if he were indeed involved with the affairs of the homeland (Algeria) the same way Said is with the affairs of Palestine, for example. Detachment stands to the marginal and the central in exactly the same way: free of the tensions that bind the two together. Today, Derrida is not really a marginal figure; he has made a terrific entry into a provincial, narrow-minded and closed-in French establishment that thrives on Gallocentrism, an appropriated outsider who has managed against all odds to derive a kind of authority from the distance he has established for himself. We might compare him to an imperial judge in a colony, say, Algeria at the turn of the century. He stands outside, in some privileged place, where he has access to “advanced” or universal principles; and he applies these principles with an impartial intellectual

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rigor. He has no other interest in the colony except to recover its history and bring it to the forefront. We might grant benevolence, I suppose; he wishes the natives well. Indeed, to make the analogy tighter, he is a native himself who has become a Parisian philosopher-critic and happens to be Algerian. He went to school in the periphery and at the imperial center, and broke radically with his own parochialism. What I am suggesting finds legitimacy in Sartre’s model of the critic. Sartre professed to believe that the intellectual is a permanent critic. Set loose from his own class by search for universality, he joins the movement of the oppressed. But even here the critic is unassimilable: “he can never renounce his critical faculties if he is to preserve the fundamental meaning of the ends pursued by the movement,” Sartre intones (1988: 79). He or she is the “guardian of fundamental ends,” which is to say, of universal values. The intellectual achieves this guardianship by the Sartrean version of stepping back, that is, “by constantly criticizing and radicalizing [himself or herself],” even if the path to universality may in the long run prove hazardous. Having “refused” what Sartre calls his “petty bourgeois conditioning,” the intellectual is likely to find himself or herself with no concrete and substantive values at all.25 Of course, Derrida is a consistent and brave philosopher-critic of texts, be they literary or philosophical, of French society, apartheid, xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism. I quote from Jacques Derrida: “The combat against xenophobia and racism also goes via this right to vote,” he said in 1989 while campaigning alongside Harlem Désir and the collective “89 for equality,” demanding voting rights for immigrants in local elections. “So long as it is not gained,” he remarked, “injustice will reign, democracy will be limited to that extent, and the riposte to racism will remain abstract and impotent” (1991: 324). He is at the same time a philosopher-critic who continues to defer acknowledgment of his Algerian heritage and remains silent on the Algerian war and then the conduct of the war, both of these viewed as necessary consequences of French colonialism. “A little black and very Arab Jew” and a colonial subject, too; Derrida met with ostracism: he was expelled from Lycée Ben Aknoun in 1942 on the sole ground that he was a Jew. He “understood nothing about it, [and] no one gave him the slightest reason” as to why he was sent home. The episode is narrated with bitter irony in La Carte postale: France now, the French University. You accuse me of being pitiless, and above all unjust with it (scores to be settled perhaps): did they not expel me from school when I was 11, no German having set foot in Algeria? The only school official whose name I remember today:

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he has me come into his office: “you are going to go home, my little friend, your parents will get a note.” At the moment I understood nothing, but since? Would they not start all over, if they could, prohibiting me from school? Is it not for this reason that I have for ever ensconced myself in it in order to provoke them to it and to give them the most urgent wish, always at the limit, to expel me again? (1980: 87–88). Does Derrida have to deny something (Algeria’s scar) in order to claim his own? Why doesn’t he extend an application of construction to such matters as the resistance movement, the revolution, or the aftermath of the revolution; a time when Algeria was left to mold a political consciousness of its own? Derrida would be at odds with Sartre who viewed criticism as war. The war, the Algerian war, on the other hand was real enough, but the critique of the war is a distinct and separate exercise. Join the two, and the critique becomes matter-of-fact. Yet Derrida prevents himself and us from an inquiry into the predicament of the homeland. The proper ground of the philosopher-critic then becomes the ground that the detached philosopher-critic, Derrida, has abandoned. But does such a ground allow for critical distance and even withdrawal? It obviously does, else we would have far fewer critics than we do. Criticism does not require us to step back from society as a whole but only to step away from certain power relationships within society. It is not connection but authority and domination from which we must distance ourselves. Marginality is one way of establishing (or experiencing) this distance; a kind of internal withdrawal provides other ways. I am inclined to think that something like this retirement (from presence) is a requirement of intellectual life generally, as in the advice given by a Talmudic sage to would-be sages: “Love work, do not domineer over others, and never seek the intimacy of public officials.” To the expenditure of time on windy discussions of Derrida, deconstruction, and of philosophy as somehow above politics, Cornel West is an admirable corrective. Consider two passages: The first, from West’s “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” tells of Derrida’s drawback when it comes to taking concrete political action: The major shortcoming of Derrida’s deconstructive project is that it puts a premium on a sophisticated ironic consciousness that tends to preclude and foreclose analyses that guide action with purpose. And given Derrida’s own status as an Algerian-born, Jewish leftist marginalised by

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a hostile French academic establishment (quite different from his reception by the youth in the American academic establishment), the sense of political impotence and hesitation regarding the efficacy of moral action is understandable—but not justifiable (1995: 30). The second, from Herman Rapaport, who attacks West for being insensitive to Derrida’s history of victimhood: One subtext of West’s essay may be that Derrida lives up to the Jewish stereotype of passive victim, a weakling who thinks too much and whose ideas are therefore far too involuted and self-reflexive for a new cultural politics of difference. . . . While we may be wise to contextualize this in terms of an African-American history sensitive to what has resulted from pacification and accommodation, it remains true that in taking his stand against deconstruction, West surreptitiously contributes to an antipathetic view of Jewish intellectualism. . . . Exactly how West can conclude that Derrida . . . has been politically impotent because he is an “Algerian-born Jewish leftist” is hard to imagine. This statement only reinforces my point that some sort of anti-Semitic stereotype may be informing West’s remarks (1995: 107). West’s argument is at its most attractive and serious when it probes the haunting query of Derrida “the Algerian-born Jew.” It makes a very good case not only for recovering Derrida’s bracketed Algerian origins, but also for restoring the postcolonial dimension to deconstruction. The effect is something of a tour de force of associative intelligence. This forgotten and unthought question, the hidden ground of the source “qui attend d’être encore pensée,” Blanchot informs us, is the one that makes sense to me, particularly at a time when, all over the globe, identities, civilizations, religions, origins, and cultures seem more bloodily at odds than ever before. Deconstruction, Marxism, or postmodernism can do nothing to try to understand this reality. On the other hand, identity seems far too caught up in a realism that has become too private, too soft, and too hard to adapt to the competing solidity of real cultural politics. But if Derrida “insist[s] that Deconstruction is not neutral”; that “it intervenes in the world,” as Rapaport makes us believe, then we have reason to demand of him to tell us about his ideological ties, personal identity and Algerian background in order to think and read him differently and in novel ways, too. Otherwise, by

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virtue of denying his Algerian source, Derrida rejects marginality and the marginalized, thus forcing deconstruction to remain an impotent hermeneutics stemming from the center. I should like to take this kind of pattern of the politics of blame and trace it in Rapaport’s essay not simply as writing but as part of a process of laying claim to truth and justice. Some of the thrust of Rapaport’s discussion of Derrida’s project of deconstruction is directed against West, who made the infamous assertion that deconstruction remains ideologically disabled, especially in France. Rapaport takes West down by reminding him that claims like his were already political (i.e., anti-Semitic), too enmeshed necessarily in matters over which will, intent, and reason do not easily rule. Rapaport reads Derrida’s works as revealing despite themselves; his stand against racism, apartheid, ethnocentrism, but he says nothing about Zionism, or Derrida’s stand vis-à-vis it in that it lays claim to a suppressed place and endows it forcibly with meaning, statehood, and redemptive status. Far from simply coming down comfortably on the side of dispossession, however, Rapaport says nothing about the victims’ victims: the Palestinians. Instead, he reminds us of Derrida’s historical trauma, as if it were the only one, and how it has been transmitted and repeated across time, and in unpredictable ways, mimes, echoes, counterpoints itself against the confident assertions of West’s argument. West’s reading of Derrida is made to seem disproportionately fearsome, lending support to an anti-Semitic feeling. A disturbing pattern in West’s essay, Rapaport announces, is the way he has of undoing the rhetoric of deconstruction as championed by “Derrida—one of the founders of a new French university, and extremely active in the politics of educational reform in France” (ibid.). But the critic’s job is to unpack the points of uncertainty, to follow internally, the way West does, a writer who keeps fading in and out of the political world out there. This is not the only paradox of Rapaport’s argument nor is it the only difficulty that one feels with Derrida’s reticence to tell his story about his native Algeria. As Jill Robbins reminds us: “Of himself, of his Jewish and Algerian background, Derrida says nothing” (1995: 29). And while Robbins’s argument is lovingly detailed, sure of its bearings and learned, Rapaport’s belongs, whether he likes it or not, to Robert Hughes’s culture of complaint. He blames West for holding “a militaristic view: that criticism should be treated as a weapon to be used in a culture war with military, economic and social powers” while he comes to the defense of Derrida who he thinks is “a passive Jew.” That Derrida is a passive Jew inside France may be true, but his image abroad, especially in the United States, has been carefully manicured to make him seem like “the conscience of Judaism” whereas the fact is that

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during his visit to Israel in June 1988, he spoke on “interpretations at war” and an Israeli government decision to close the universities in the Occupied Territories but did not unconditionally oppose the politics of annexation and brutalization adopted by Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He has never spoken out for total evacuation of the Occupied Territories, of returning East Jerusalem, or paying reparations to the Palestinians for the suffering they have endured since 1948. He lectured on the right of the Israeli state to exist instead. The same thought should lead to an interpretation of this overpowering institution called the State, understood here as the State of Israel (the existence of which, it goes without saying, must, from now on, be recognized by everyone and made safe once and for all) its prehistory, the conditions of its recent foundation, and the constitutional, legal, political makings of its present functioning, the forms and limitations of its self-interpretation (1989: 211). In doing so, he presented the privileged colonial side only. For Derrida, the opposite existential mode, the occupation of an ancient territory by an ancient people’s contested right that creates colonial power over another no less ancient people with the same legitimate right is the one that holds. Clearly, Derrida’s work arcs across the two poles characteristic of our time: the age of commitment and the age of alienation by which our century will be known. So he too is not a passive figure but a man operating very close to the sanctioned center of Jewish society. Besides, there is the very real question of whether Derrida will ever speak out on behalf of the oppressed, be they Algerians under the French or Palestinians under Israel. West’s plain discomfort with the way in which Derrida and his method of deconstruction are said to be “transgressive,” “reductive,” and “politically impotent” chimes with a remark made by R. P. Blackmur who once said that knowledge is a fall from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation. Much of Derrida’s pseudo-autobiographical writings find Derrida wrestling with the consequences of that insight, trying to restore or answer the question: Who am I? One thing we can be sure of is that he is not French, even though he thinks that in colonizing Algeria, France presented him with a gift—namely, the French language. French, he writes, is “the language made a present to me by its colonization of Algeria in 1830” (1992: 69). What intrigues me is how a person whose name is ranked with the great names of this century: Václav Havel, Octavio Paz, Georges Soros, Tom Peters, with a mind of great capacity to love can murder his memory and become oblivious to the humanity of his countrymen and women.

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Thus far my inquiry has dealt with Derrida and Algeria. But there is another, more plausible way of pondering over the argument, what Raymond Williams has aptly called “writing in society.” Derrida is a philosopher-critic who once admired Sartre, who says: We must take up a position in our literature, because literature is in essence taking a position. . . . We will be able to safeguard literature only if we undertake the job of demystifying our public. For the same reason the writer’s duty is to take sides against all injustices, wherever they may come from (1988: 197). This is the stand of the intellectual engagé as conceived by Sartre, who took a position not only on the Algerian question but also on anti-Semitism and the right of the Jewish State to exist. That is why when we remember an intellectual like . . . him we recall the personal mannerisms, the sense of an important personal stake, the sheer effort, risk, will to say things about colonialism, or about commitment, or about social conflict that infuriated his opponents and galvanized his friends and perhaps even embarrassed him retrospectively. When we read about Sartre’s involvement with Simone de Beauvoir, his dispute with Camus, his remarkable association with Jean Genet, we situate him (the word is Sartre’s) in his circumstances; in these circumstances, and to some extent because of them, Sartre was Sartre, the same person who also opposed France in Algeria and Vietnam (Said, 1994: 13–14). Derrida, on the other hand, not only rejected Sartre, “a model that I have since judged to be ill-fated and catastrophic,” but also Algeria.26 The twentyfour-odd years he spent in Algeria that formed his early selfhood are out of context, excluded, en marge of both reality and history. The point I am trying to make can be summed up in Said’s idea of worldliness. According to Said, by linking the world, the text, and the critic to each other we bring them out of the neglect and secondariness to which, for all kinds of political and ideological reasons, they had previously been condemned. What Said talks about therefore is the opposite of exclusionism, and also the reverse of silence. It is only through telling that reality can be brought in, so to speak, and kept in. Otherwise it will be regarded only as nonexistent. Worldliness is therefore the restoration to so many of

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the earth’s people of their history and place in the global setting, a restoration that can only be accomplished by preventing the world from going to sleep and bringing life to those peoples that have been languishing to be part of the large, in Said’s memorable phrase, “many-windowed house” of human culture (1983: 31–53). Derrida’s belonging to a motherland and a culture that he has so far neglected from his project thus ought not to be simply ignored. Sanctioned by history and those who, like Derrida, refer to it as “French Algeria,” Algeria today stands for the distant past. And this despite efforts directed at “rooting out the evil,” as Christian Schembré put it. Like Derrida, he, too, was born and raised in Algeria, but unlike him, he chose to break up the silence.27 With the exception of a handful of university teachers, the majority of researchers and politicians considered that Algeria presented itself as an undifferentiated faction, peoples and governments together, almost an anachronism. Decolonized, this country no longer had a history. But one refused to really worry about it, using the traditional, passive, and turbid state of society as an excuse. “An Eastern country in the sun,” Algeria was (and still is) perceived, as it were, as a “frigid” and repetitive society, therefore justifying the marginalization of its political, historical, as well as cultural realities.28

III This restorative interpretation is not meant vindictively. Nor do I intend after the fact to blame Derrida for hiding things about Algeria in his works, for example, in the various pseudo-autobiographical pieces collected here and there he is at pains to explain. Instead my primary interest has been to look at how he excoriates and dispossesses Algeria from a chapter of its history; a chapter that should have been written by one of its natives, and a brilliant one to boot. But Derrida, whose “thinking,” Abdelkebir Khatibi remarks, “is a jump toward a philosophy of the unfathomable difference,” continues to prevent it from happening (1983: 124). In doing so, he joins many other Algerian-born French intellectuals who, in their works, make no mention of subordination, colonial or postcolonial Algeria, or the national mémoires, records, archives that the French seized in 1962, robbing Algeria of a crucial period of its history, even though he writes about freedom, torture, and “forgotten people” elsewhere.29 It is the debarrment of Algeria from Derrida’s reflections that is noteworthy. Moreover, if Camus wrote of Algeria as a nameless being used as background for the portentous European metaphysics explored by his heroes, Derrida continues to lay an embargo on the truth. So dense, intertwined, and extended a mass is the real web of circumstances given rise to by any reflection on Derrida’s

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and/or deconstruction’s postcolonial Other since we cannot seriously think about one without considering the other, so surprising their twists and turns, so unexpected their ramifications, so dense a commingling of the deplorable and the tragic, so much do they depend on which person with what history writes about them, that it is all we can do to inventory them accurately. In the process of doing so, they remind us, all of us, of that famous phrase James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus constantly refers to in Ulysses: “[History] . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (1934: 322). For me, if there is any redemptive meaning in the inquiry about what Derrida once called his nostalgérie, it lies in the idea of gathering the bits and pieces, recovering the past, and claiming a mutilated memory that tells of the common bond that ties him to a µ‘¼ (homeland). In the course of going forward, of finding and setting our energy free, we may be forced to “swallow the [whole] . . . lot,” to cite Rushdie, for without that, I believe, we become prey to yet another ban upon a difficult, scarred, painful, very troubling, and yet somehow touching portion of history that has alas been sanctioned by both Algerians and non-Algerians alike! And while there is life, there must be analysis, struggle, persuasion, argument, polemic, rethinking, and all the other words that add up to one very short word: hope. It is because of that tiny little word that I want to close this last section with a fragment from L’Autre cap, which I trust will be read as a tribute to the obdurate reality and the enduring vitality of Derrida’s double bind; a double bind he expresses in the following terms: I am European, I am no doubt a European intellectual, and like to recall this, I like to recall this to myself, and why would I deny it? In the name of what? But I am not, nor do I feel, European in every part, that is, European through and through. By which I mean, by which I wish to say, or must say: I do not want to be and must not be European through and through, European in every part. Being a part, belonging, as “fully a part,” should be incompatible with belonging “in every part.” My cultural identity, that in the name of which I speak, is not only European, it is not identical to itself, and I am not “cultural” through and through, “cultural” in every part. If, to conclude, I declared that I feel European among other things, would this be, in this very declaration, to be more or less European? Both, no doubt. Let the consequences be drawn from this. It is up to the others, in any case, and up to me among them, to decide (1992: 82–83).

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The gist of this passage lies in the obscure result of its private reflection on the question of identity. Those to whom it communicates anything at all may be no more than the aesthetic matrix that is the fount of Derrida’s own creative inspiration; it influences his critical response to address other cultures but not his own. To understand this, one needs only to think of the male/female binary in terms of France/Algeria, white/black, rich/poor, smart/stupid, high/low, or clean/dirty. Perhaps it is the last of these oppositions that unleashes the most apoplectic rage. As Bataille reminds us, the fear of the right side of the binary is the fear of death itself. Yet I want to underline my conviction that only a revitalized conception of the intellectual vocation itself can remedy the situation in the case of the first binary France/Algeria. A little more than seventy years ago Julien Benda accused intellectuals of failing in their mission when they compromised with the truth and succumbed instead to what he called the organization of collective passions (1969: 45). We live in a more difficult world today, a world in which intellectuals have become vastly specialized in various fields of knowledge and expertise; they do not cross over from one field into another, nor in general do they challenge the prevailing consensus, which in the West is like a lucrative Khunian paradigm that guarantees consultancies, jobs, tenure, grants, promotion, and the like. To speak of Derrida and of Algeria and the challenge they offer to the intellectual conscience: I do not want to be interpreted as saying that Algerians have recovered their fate. On the contrary, they have not. We are discussing matters of responsibility based on intellectually discriminating and accurate representation of the collective historical reality. It is therefore imperative for us to insist that Algeria has a history of suffering of which Derrida is part. None of this can, however, lessen the truth of what all this has meant for the subordinate, a truth that needs, indeed cries out, for expression. The intellectual task for Derrida is to connect and face up to history with something more creative and audacious than reiterated appeals to an abyssal oblivion. Otherwise, he falls a prisoner to his own past, like Thomas Hardy’s Tess, a past full of shame and mortifications. He, like us, must train himself to face it. Indeed, it must become his as well as our subject of inquiry. “In time every event becomes an exertion of memory,” Derek Walcott once wrote, “and is thus subject to invention. The farther the facts, the more history petrifies into myth” (1974: 74). Derrida may in fact find solace from his nostalgérie in a haunting autobiographical statement of Hélène Cixous, another Algerian-born, which reveals how writing became intertwined with herself and the Other, how it was part of her body, her family, her culture, her ethnic identity, her gender, her country, and even her town.

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My writing was born in Algeria out of a lost country of the dead father and the foreign mother. Each of these traits which may seem to be chance or mischance became the causes and opportunities of my writing. I have had the luck to have foreignness, exile, war, the phantom memory of peace, mourning and pain as the place and time of my birth. At the age of three I knew, among the flowers and their scents, that one could kill for a name, for a difference. And I knew that uprooting existed. But also good uprooting. I should give you a date as well, 1940 for instance. I saw the human roots know no borders and that under the earth, at the very bottom of the ladder of the world, the heart was beating. My first others were the Arabs, the scarabaeid, the French, the Germans. My first familiars were the hens, the rabbits, the Arabs, the Germans, etc. And the tongue that was singing in my ears? It was languages: Spanish, Arabic, German, French. Everything on this earth comes from far off, even what is very near. I listened to all languages. I sang in German. I also cackled with the hens. I lost myself often within the city of my birth. It was a veiled woman: it was a signifier. It was ORAN. I had everything: OR-AN—HORS EN—ORAN-JE (Golden-year) (Outside-in) (Oran-I: Orange) The first of my treasures was the name of my native city which was Oran. It was my first lesson. I heard the name Oran and through Oran I entered the secret of language. My “sortie” occurred through entrance. I discovered that my city meant fruit through the simple addition of me. Oran-je—Orange. I discovered that the word held all the mystery of fruit. I will let you unravel to infinity the composition, decomposition of this name. Then I lost Oran. Then I recovered it, white, gold and dust for eternity in my memory and I never went back. In order to keep it. It became my writing. Like my father. It became a magic door opening onto the other world (1991: 73). The intensity of Cixous’s devotion to Algeria is clear here, as elsewhere. Her preoccupation with the idea of “home” brings life to her argument. Cixous, who with Derrida, has an Algerian-Jewish background and a subversive interest in binary habits of the mind, may embody a paradox.

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For her, the presence of a pair (a couple) signals not only the patriarchy— male thought advances through oppositions—but hierarchy as well. To such insane violence, she says, there was only one answer: “I have always wanted war.” She means revolutionary movements, to be sure, but also texts of struggle, where at times one has to live, because there is simply nowhere else that does not replicate the status quo. Writing can dream and invent new worlds. It alone is the utopian space, where the Other begins to speak about heretofore unheard things, where authorities are put to the sword, and where witches come in from their exile on the heaths to say how culture can be transformed, how desire can proliferate, circulating openly beyond that paralyzing idée fixe of the family. What will be speaking in this utopian, alogical, nonconsequent text will be the previously silent organs and body of Other (woman in Cixous’s case), no longer completely outside the mainstream-dominated network of discourse. When we hear the “voice of the mother,” all sovereignty, sadism, geometric rigidity, standing at attention, and states of erection will collapse in revolutionary effervescence and laughter (Cixous, 1997: 268). Politically speaking, Cixous may be said to represent a radical contemporaneity—postcolonial, feminist: but aesthetically she belongs in the early twentieth century, trying to change reality through linguistic disruption and playfulness. And here one wants to take issue with a philosopher-critic like Derrida who would presumably approve of Cixous, who is as nonrealist as they come, and yet how tendentious her writing seems to be next to the emotional intensity of Derrida who is still searching for his mother’s garden not in the sterile efflorescence of postmodernist language games, but in the dirt and flowers of reality, and it is here that he does not lead at all even if at times he is intent on trying to face up to reality as witness his most recent works: Of Hospitality, Sauf le nom, Tourner les mots, La Contre-allée. In the upshot, does one have the right to stop here and be content with this performance of reading Derrida against the grain? Is an-other reading possible? One can find and/or justify a response to this set of questions only by continuing to read and/or construct Derrida; by continuing to take into account his most recent works, his new corpus, his new archive; what this new archive says on the subject of the other archive that is Algeria. They mark an important new stage in his career as a critic, philosopher, and theoretician. Indeed, Le monolinguisme de l’autre is shown to anticipate to a remarkable degree the preoccupations of a postcolonial audience. Derrida opens up a dimension of “embodied” time that sustains and nourishes the human psyche in its present predicament. In the process, he is able to show the joyful experience of childhood in Algiers accompanied by a sense of nothingness, the mortality of the foreign nature of the beloved country, a combination that engenders delightful forms of

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joy and suffering. On the other hand, the faculty of memory that reveals this exquisite duality to us is lodged in an “unknown domain, in the entire existence of our bodies,” with the effect that “a series of different and parallel” states of the self are superimposed, and consequently the self of today can rediscover the previous self intact, provided that the underlying sensations have the character of “intermittencies”: being both violent enough and null at the same time, tender and listless, combining joy with grief and perhaps remorse. One feels therefore impelled to ask about the whole criteriology that gives assurance to a historical knowledge concerning the question of what Edward Said has called “between worlds.” One would have to ask about the background that gives assurance to a historical knowledge concerning an intellectual figure (Jacques Derrida), an epoch (French colonial Algeria), a paradigm, and a lieu de mémoire (Algiers). They come out of the logic of opposition, in this case, the logic of inclusion/exclusion of the alternative between the inside and the outside. This inclusion/exclusion or hors-série is the result of a decision, the result of an act of force, even violence (of the letter). Let us therefore consider once more the couple Derrida/Algeria. To begin, let us indicate a few telling signs. When one says, “one must do justice,” “one has to be fair,” it is often with the intention of correcting an impulse. For it is here, in the pages of Le monolinguisme de l’autre, a brash, witty, and caring essay that we find Derrida “doing justice” to Algeria by facing the question of “origin” head on. It is quite clear from this new direction, this other heading, this new intention and method, that Derrida wants to put another anxiety to rest—namely, to engage his other world. It is both timely and fortuitous that he should undertake the elaboration of “la prothèse de l’origine,” as he calls it, to trace his rootprints to Algeria. Derrida may well have come to terms with and learned a great deal from his “destination, destinality, decision” to break up the silence on “Algeria land of friendship and enmity, ferocious, the one and the other” (ibid., 268). If there is a common thread to the essay, it is that the worlds he inhabits are far from foreign, and that “the dark smudges of resignation around the coal eyes / of children who all look like Kafka” and the “winged moon [which] is pinned to its curtain like a night moth,” inhabit the same universe (Walcott, 1997: 73). Derrida, like Derek Walcott, is less interested in the paradox of the differences he describes than in their strange seamlessness, which he sets out to clarify for us. One must therefore do justice to him by reversing the direction of a tendency. This decision is the result of an act of force that stopped reducing Algeria to silence and forced Derrida to trace a strict line of reclaiming a e [zb (heritage) that is his in the first place. Much of Le monolinguisme de l’autre shows him wrestling with the question: “What can that really mean, I ask you, you

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who value meaning. What is the nature of this hyphen? What does it mean? What is Franco-Maghrebian? Who is “‘Franco-Maghrebian’?” (1996: 26). A set of question he raises and answers. Derrida—whose previous books attacked “phallogocentrism,” that is, the centrality of the phallus and the centrality of meaning, arguing that they were at some level identical even though it was difficult to understand why, still less what a world in which that centrality had been displaced would look like—is by no means always accessible. It is not that he is hard to understand, nor that his genius is not everywhere self-evident. It is just that he writes with such colossal dignity and sonority, that his discourse can sometimes wrap an anchor and chain around even the most dedicated readers. One is dropped to the ocean floor of his imagination, there to be hauled along on his pondering (and occasionally ponderous) voyage of discovery. Part of the problem is his unyielding choice of words and his admirable, even remarkable sense of meditation, usually inventive and rarely out of context as the following excerpt on the question of identity amply shows: “ Being Franco-Maghrebian, being one ‘like me,’ is not, not above all, above all not, an excess or wealth of identities, attributes or names. Rather, it betrays, first of all, a turmoil of identity” (ibid.). This dexterity is made to look effortless; but Derrida frequently runs the risk of writing something hybrid and dense. Case in point: “Rather than an explanation of myself, it would be the explanation of what would have stood in the way of my self-explanation. Of what would have exposed me to that obstacle and thrown me up against it. A serious traffic accident that I can’t stop thinking about” (Ibid., 131). None of which denies the essay its richness, its coherence, the way Derrida moves steadily to claim a splintered ¶åä«\ä¯ Ç (background) between the external world of chaos and his own private inner world. Form and content are subtly at variance. The mercurial sparkle of Le monolinguisme de l’autre is at odds with Derrida’s other writings’ bleak, almost mechanically recurrent content. It opens with a reflection on language, home, belonging. “Yes, I have only one language,” Derrida informs us, “but it is not my own” (Ibid., 15). The principal aim of the identity claim is a scholarly disquisition, in which rich images of native Algeria rub up against snapshots of Gallocentric France where he lives and continues to operate in relative safety.30 The net result in terms of his writing this essay has been to attempt a greater transparency, to free himself from philosophy and not to hide behind euphemism and circumlocution where difficult issues like source, origin, and beginnings have been concerned. We are not sure whether self-invention or a constant restlessness forced Derrida to face up to the task. We are, however, certain that identity for him is about as boring a subject as one can imagine. Nothing seems less interesting than the narcissistic self-study that today passes in many places

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for identity politics, or ethnic studies, or affirmations of roots, cultural pride, drum-beating nationalism, and so forth. Derrida stands for the maxim that says we have to defend people and identities threatened with extinction or subordinated because they are considered inferior. Having himself lost a country with no immediate hope of regaining it, he does not find much comfort in cultivating a new garden, or looking for some other association to join. In doing so, he echoes Adorno who maintained that reconciliation under duress is both cowardly and inauthentic: better a lost cause than a triumphant one, more satisfying a sense of the provisional and contingent—a rented house, for example—than the proprietary solidity of permanent ownership (Said, 1999). Le monolinguisme de l’autre offers a good introduction to the virtues and vices of Derrida’s method and thought on “la prothèse de l’origine.” The very project bears witness to immense originality and scholarship in which the author finds himself reliving the narrative quandaries of his early years, his sense of doubt and of being out of place, of always feeling himself standing in the wrong corner, in a place that seemed to be slipping away from him just as he tries to define or describe it. The worst part of his situation, which time has exacerbated, has been the warring relationship between belonging and its opposite, unbelonging. In the process, he attempts to tease out the implications through a prolonged meditation on his “Algeriance” and what it means today. “So I accept the proposed agreement, and once again, since you want to tell your story, bear witness in my name, talk about what is yours and what is not, I must take your word for it” (1996: 24). There is, in that final sentence, an echo of Derrida’s astonishing interpretative powers used to their fullest: he persuasively demonstrates how identity that seems to escape definition is crucial to any understanding of the private: the living fragments of one’s life. It is thus exactly the basis for a better order that can neither be described nor prescribed but only experienced in a transformed way. It was Carlyle who said of the German idealists’ use of language that none had dived so deep nor emerged so muddy; but Carlyle had not had the benefit of seeing Derrida breathless and bespattered. And if it be argued that opacity of language is a necessary consequence of extreme originality of thought, there is reason to believe that Derrida is at his best when he engages in the historical exercise of sorting through the private debris of his early life on the edge of history. We learn to explain what we read because we have been moved by what we have read, and we want to understand why, and how, and whether it will happen again. A writer of stature and significance must be “resisted,“ which implies that we readers are an oppressed people tyrannized by our betters. It is from this experience of reading (Le monolinguisme

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de l’autre) that one forms certain thoughts about Jacques Derrida, the Algerian. The essay shows him rescuing and commemorating his pre-political life, given that the place he grew up in has ceased to exist. His memories of those days and places remain extremely vivid, full of little details that he seems to have preserved as if between the covers of a book, full also of expressed feelings generated out of situations and events that occurred decades ago but seem to have been waiting to be articulated now (Said, 1999, 2000). In doing so, he reminds us of Conrad who writes in Nostromo that a desire lurks in every heart to write down once and for all a true account of what happened (1998: 311). This certainly is what seems to have moved Derrida to deal with the Algeria of his youth. In his text the writer sets up house. . . . For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. . . . Yet the demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical tension with the necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing (Adorno, 1974: 192). In writing a restorative piece of narrative, Derrida achieves at most a provisional satisfaction, which is quickly ambushed by doubt, and a need to rewrite and redo that rends the text uninhabitable. Better that, however, than the sleep of self-satisfaction and the finality of silence. In the upshot, Le monolinguisme de l’autre affirms Derrida’s writerly spirit in the glow of affirmative literature, which enables him to leap in a paragraph on “his faithful and admiring affection” for Abdelkebir Khatibi to Les Origines du totalirisme, Luc Legoux to L’Au-delà du verset. His constant effort to take the stuff of the neurotic, damaged, modern displaced personality, and the stuff of everyday irritation, anger, fear, impotence, loathing, and contempt—the Self in all its horrors—and try to move it toward some divine plateau where the burdens of interpretation fall away and the truth, painful though it may be, makes itself known, is an effort of will. The following excerpt shows its importance best: I am not able, rightly and spontaneously, to put this last hypothesis (the exposure of the Jewish community earlier on to colonial expropriation) to the test: because I see in

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negative, if I may say so, the legacy of this amnesia which I have never had the courage, strength or means to resist, and because that would require the work of an original historian for which I am not qualified. And maybe this is the reason why. This inability, this handicapped memory, is the essence of my complaint (1996: 89). It is when we are able to discern the blindspot of another self, its point of failure, that we are most at one with it, since it is just such an internal limit that constitutes our own forms of life, too. Schopenhauer saw us all as permanently pregnant with monsters, bearing at the very core of our being something implacably alien to it. He called this the Will, which was the stuff out of which we are made and yet was utterly indifferent to us, lending us an illusion of purpose but itself aimless and senseless. Freud, who was much taken with Schopenhauer, offered us a nonmetaphysical version of this monstrosity in the notion of desire, a profoundly inhuman process that is deaf to meaning, which has its own sweet way with us and secretly cares for nothing but itself. Desire is nothing personal: it is an affliction that was lying in wait for us from the outset, a perversion in which we get involuntarily swept up, a refractory medium into which we are plunged at birth (Eagleton, 1999). For Freud, what makes us human subjects is this foreign body lodged inside us, which invades our flesh like a lethal virus and yet, like the Almighty for Thomas Aquinas, is closer to us than we are to ourselves. This “Thing,” as Lacan calls it, with horror movies archly in mind, is otherwise known as the Real, in the Lacanian Holy Trinity of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic (Z
iz
ek, 1997: 36–100). The Real is desire. This enjoyment, more specifically jouissance, which sounds rather less suburban in French, is a sublimely terrifying affair. It is the pleasure (of the text) in which we reap delight from the way we read. If enjoyment is the only substance that psychoanalysis recognizes, Le monolinguisme de l’autre becomes one’s unwavering obsession. But because it (enjoyment) can never be signified, seen head-on, it is also a sort of nothing, detectable only through its effects, constructed backward after the event (of reading). We know it only from the way it acts as a drag on our discourse, as astronomers may identify a heavenly body only because of its warping effect on the space around it. For the Real to take on tangible embodiment, to crop up in the shape of voices or visions, is for us to become psychotic. The Real is the sign that means nothing but itself.31 Every signifying system contains a kind of super-signifier whose function is just to point to the fact that system cannot be totalized. It is

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that system’s point of internal fracture, marking the space where it does not quite gel. But this absence is what organizes the whole system, and so is also a kind of presence within it. One can call this constitutive lack the human subject itself, which is necessary for any set of signs to work, yet can never be fully encapsulated by them. But this is also the function of the Real, whose very absence from consciousness is the cause of our carrying on trying to signify it there and always failing. If we failed to keep failing and trying again, if the repression was lifted and the Real burst to the surface, history would instantly cease. In this sense, the sheer impossibility of desire to speak and/or to write about Algeria, the fact that we can only ever plug our lack with one poor fantasy object after another, is also what keeps us up and running. That fissure or hindrance in our being that is the Real is also what props up our identity. One excerpt in particular in Le monolinguisme de l’autre situates Derrida as Maghrebian as they come amid conflicting belongings and makes rather authentic claims to the source. So here I am, ecce homo, a parody, like the exemplary Franco-Maghrebian, but disarmed, with more naive, less careful, less polished accents. Ecce homo, because this is about “passion,” don’t laugh, the Franco-Maghrebian martyr who from the moment of his birth, ever since his birth but also by his birth on the other coast, his own, in fact never chose anything, never understood anything, and who is still suffering, and testifying (1996, 39–40). The striking feature of Derrida’s use of origin is its lack of coyness. Le monolinguisme de l’autre bristles with difficulties but never serves up a turgid sentence. The demotic companionability of its style is an implicit rebuke to the high-minded terrorism of so much French theory today. Lacan may insist that the analyst is an empty signifier, that he holds no secret key to the patient’s unhappiness, but his posturing rhetoric belies any such disavowal. In spite of the author’s suffering, “Have a little fun” seems to be the essay’s implicit injunction to the reader, as it shifts within a single chapter from Simone Weil to time travel, home to the “rendez-vous of victory,” in Aimé Césaire’s totemic phrase, trouvailles to retrouvailles, while managing somehow to sustain a coherent argument about the worlds its
iz
ek, 1997). author has inhabited. (Z When Derrida deals with the place of his birth, his language is splendidly crisp and lucid, even if some passages can be fearsomely difficult. Consider, for example, the following excerpt on language: “For the person

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speaking or writing the language, this experience of monolingual solipsism is never owned, never his property, never mastered, never entirely hospitable or hostile ‘ipseite,’ of whatever type it may be” (1996, 44). The difficulties belong to the idea (of claiming the self), not to the expression, a distinction between signified and signifier. His style is deep and light simultaneously, shot through with intense political seriousness but never at all portentous. His prose resonates with the feel of a markedly idiosyncratic personality, but is curiously without self-display. To illustrate the dialectic of presence and absence, he recounts the story of the loss of his citizenship in 1943. Citizenship, by nature, does not grow like that. It is not a natural thing. But its artifice and its precariousness are more apparent, as in the flash of a privileged revelation, when citizenship is part of the memory of a recent acquisition, for example when French citizenship was granted to Algerian Jews by the Cremieux decree of 1870; or part of the traumatic memory of a “degrading,” of a loss of citizenship, for example when those same Algerian Jews lost their French citizenship less than a century later (Ibid., 34–35). Another example of this alienation can be found in Derrida’s disbarring from attending the first congress of cities of asylum, held March 21 and 22, 1996, at the European Council in Strasbourg following the initiative of the International Writers’ Parliament. Derrida, who was prevented from participating, writes: “I was insistent on sending this message to my friends: Cosmopolitans from all countries, one more try!” (1997: 9). This dialectic, one might claim, is a classically poststructuralist sort of doctrine. Poststructuralists have almost patented the paradox that what makes something impossible is also what makes it possible. Or take the
iz
ek in The Plague of Fantasies, that blindness idea, much touted by Slavoj Z is the condition of insight, truth the upshot of misrecognition (1997: 44–45). For Nietzsche, it is only a blessed state of amnesia that enables us to act, since otherwise we would simply be paralyzed by the burden of history. For Freud, we are shaped into human subjects only by a shattering repression of much that went into our making. It is this crippling forgetfulness that allows us to thrive. The roots of our conscious life must be absent from it if we are to function as subjects at all, rather as the law, if it is to maintain its authority, must erase the fact that it was originally imposed by an arbitrary act of violence (Eagleton, 1999).

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If the (secret) police do not take kindly to talk of political resistance, one can always recode it as deconstructing totalities, subverting the MasterSignifier, opening up to the Other. Racism, nationalism, anti-Semitism are where the abstruse categories of psychoanalysis are brought home to everyday political life. And Derrida, writing with Le Pen and the National Front at his doorstep, has a sense of the realpolitik of the psyche in the gentrified, consumerist, post-ideological Western world where “the police becomes omnipresent and spectral in so-called civilized states when they start to make the law instead of simply applying it and ensuring that it is observed. And this fact becomes clearer than ever in the age of new teletechnologies.” He quotes Walter Benjamin as saying: “Police violence is at that point ‘without face or form,’ and remains therefore without responsibility; it is not distrainable as such anywhere; in civilized states, the spread of the specter of its phantom-like apparition has no limits” (1997: 36). If he is more unabashedly theoretical than the typical Anglo-Saxon intellectual, Derrida is also a lot more practical. He is even getting a little restive with the small network of “villes-refuges,” chiding its neglect of hospitality to the closing of Europe’s borders as a super state. Even racism is now reflexive. Consider the Algerians. They are portrayed in the liberal Western media as a vortex of ethnic passion—a multiculturalist dream turned into a nightmare. If you ask, “Where does Algeria begin?” you will always be told that it begins down there, toward the other shore of the Mediterranean. For many Italians and Austrians, it begins where the Sahara ends. For many Germans, Algeria is tainted with Islamicist corruption and inefficiency. Many arrogant Frenchmen associate Algeria with Arab brutality—it lacks French finesse. Finally, to some British, Algeria is a new version of the Turkish Empire—a voracious despotism threatening Western freedom and sovereignty. We are dealing with an imaginary cartography, which projects onto the real landscape its own shadowy ideological antagonisms, in the same way that conversion-symptoms of the hysterical subject in Freud project onto the physical body the map of another, imaginary anatomy. Much of this projection is racist. The villes-refuges that Derrida wants open and hospitable toward the Other remain closed to those who come from elsewhere. There is the old-fashioned, unabashed rejection of the Arab Other (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, Muslim, corrupt, Oriental) in favor of true values (Western, civilized, democratic, Christian)
iz
ek, 1992), (Stora, 1987); (Said, 1979). (Z Le monolinguisme de l’autre expresses a fascinatingly traceable progression from a position of profound disillusionment with one’s place of birth to one of increasing spiritual wisdom. Its pleasure lies in its extraordinary language, which makes each and every page “bleed” as it should. Indeed the flavor of one’s mind is thoroughly Hegelian, continually on the prowl

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for anti-theses inverting themselves into identities, in a set of dialectical guerilla raids on common sense. Some random examples: It is not that order and disorder are opposites, but the imposition of a (purely contingent) order on chaos is itself the highest mode of disorder. The Other—the Symbolic Order, or language as a whole—can have no Other to itself, which is to say that there can be no ultimate guarantee of the field of meaning. For Derrida, multiculturalism is just a kind of racism in reverse, respecting another’s culture from the distancing, unchallenged vantage point of one’s own. The law must be irrational, since if there were reasons for obeying it, it would lose its absolute authority. (Z
iz
ek, 1997). The unconscious is not the opposite of consciousness, but the founding act of repression by which consciousness is established in the first place. Le monolinguisme de l’autre shows that one is able to think Algeria and Derrida entirely compatible, partly because one reads the former through the latter in a heretical deconstruction of some supposed holism. This effort, this narrative movement toward being occurs in Le monolinguisme de l’autre and is even more explicit in Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!, which sets itself against the official definition of the nation, rescuing perhaps the true nation from those who hold it captive. Writing as mapping: the cartography of the imagination. (Or, as modern theory might spell it, Imagi/Nation.) In the best writing, however, a map of a nation also turns out to be a map of the world. Derrida puts it this way: We also can discern the medieval tradition which gives the city a certain sovereignty: the city could decide on its own laws of hospitality, on specific bills, plural or restrictive, and therefore, by which it meant to condition La grande Loi de l’hospitalité, an unconditional law, singular and universal at the same time, which would order that doors be opened to every man and woman, to every other, everyone who arrives, no questions asked, no identification even, no matter from where and no matter whom (1996: 46). In this international moment, can any system remain closed? Derrida cites Hannah Arendt, who, for fear of seeing the world fenced in, challenged it to open its doors to those newly mapped-out solitudes. Writers like her who severed frontiers have become border guards. In a time of even more narrowly defined nationalisms, of walled-in tribalisms, writers like Derrida will be found uttering the word of resistance in the face of the oppressor as the following excerpt, which captures something of his characteristic intellectual daring, shows:

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Need I remind you of the violent acts erupting all over the world? Or that these crimes are endorsed sometimes by State organizations sometimes not? The increase in threats, acts of censorship and terrorism, persecutions and enslavement of all kinds are impossible to list. The victims are countless and almost always anonymous, but they are more and more often what we call intellectuals, scholars, journalists, writers, men and women who can bring to a public space a message that the new powers of telecommunications make more and more formidable to the police in all countries, to the faces of censure and repression, State or non-State, religious, political, economic or social (ibid., 16). Yet this is only one side of a story Derrida is determined to confront in its entirety. What are the roles of tradition, ritual, authenticity, and narratives of return in all this? The core of the quest has to do with writing itself. If writing turns repeatedly toward nation, it just as repeatedly turns away. The deliberately uprooted intellectual views the world as only a free intelligence can, going where the action is and offering reports. The intellectual uprooted against his or her will (a category that includes, these days, a high proportion of the finest Maghrebian writers) rejects, too, the narrow enclosures that have rejected him or her. There is great loss, and much yearning, in such rootlessness. But there is also gain. The frontierless nation is not a fantasy any more: “Cosmopolitans from all countries, one more try!” Much great writing has no need of the public dimension. Its agony comes from within. The public sphere is as nothing to Jacques Derrida. His alienation—his freedom—his subject is elsewhere. What prompted this initial change in Derrida’s sense of self, and of the language he uses, is the realization that in accommodating the exigencies of life in his adopted home, he has had willy-nilly to accept the principle of annulment of which Adorno speaks so perceptively in Minima Moralia: The past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled. Earlier it was the warrant of arrest, today it is intellectual experience, that is declared non-transferable and unnaturalisable. Anything that is not reified cannot be counted and measured, ceases to exist. Not satisfied with this, however, reification spreads to its own opposite, the life that cannot be directly actualized; anything that lives on merely as thought and recollection. For this a special rubric has been invented. It is called “background” and appears on the

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questionnaire as an appendix, after sex, age and profession. To complete its violation, life is dragged along on the triumphal automobile of the united satisfactions, and even the past is no longer safe from the present, whose remembrance of it consigns it a second time to oblivion 1974: 211). This is a triumph of imaginative sympathy certainly, but also of the unobtrusive patterning of tropes. Adorno’s meditation is cast as a kind of polyphony of witness statements about rootlessness. In writing Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Derrida imposes a heavy burden of anxiety on his critics by being himself a critic (of his origins) of exceptional subtlety and penetration. His message in the essay, reiterated across the vast canvas of his imagination, is that criticism frequently makes the vulgar error of confusing the interest attached to the work with the incidental information to be derived from studying the author’s biography. Even if the reader is at first fascinated by the thought of meeting Derrida face-to-face, he or she soon learns that he (Derrida) remains as elusive as ever. It almost seems as though he succeeds only too well in deflecting his critics from wishing to assert any hard-and-fast connection between experience and the text. In this respect, of course, his prescriptions have been powerfully seconded more recently by the critical strategy of Roland Barthes, especially in his widely read essays “From Work to Text” and “The Death of the Author.” Barthes rarely wrote about Derrida. Derrida wrote a touching essay about Barthes (1987: 273–305). If, for Barthes, the death of the author implies the birth of a new type of reader, then this reader (in Hill’s terms) could hardly do better than test the new skills on the Derridean text. Set against the background of the Western tradition, Derrida speaks with authority not simply as the author of a text—notably, Le monolinguisme de l’autre which demonstrates the most virtuoso use of the possibilities of language, but also as the Other who reconciles a penetrating knowledge of the social and/or political world(s) in which he grew up and with an intimate devotion to the enrichment of the inner life through the medium of time. The question becomes: Does this mean the return of the biographical subject? In a sense, it undoubtedly does. For in using memory to construct Le monolinguisme de l’autre in this way, Derrida is adopting an ethical position. He is contrasting the disarray of the world and of the self with the unending search for that lost temple, that invisible temple, which is ”the felt time of our subjective memories” (Proust, 1954: 43). There have been many people, along with Derrida, who have applied themselves to enlarging a fragment of felt time—writers of the nouveau roman have enhanced such fragments as if they were installing them in a

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stained-glass window. They may appear to be more modern, more elliptical, provocative, and “transgressive.” But Derrida remains the only one to keep the balance between the violence implicit in the marginal status of the narrator (and the author) of Le monolinguisme de l’autre, and the grateful capacity for creating a world, a place of communion in worldly time. It is this fragile balance that we seem to have lost. Perhaps that is another reason why Derrida, our contemporary, is also difficult to reach in his intimate life. His story should be read, not as a meditation on his beginning(s) as opposed to origin(s), but as an experience of how writing transforms, and is transformed by, human experience. In the process, he differentiates beginning from origin: the latter divine, mythical, and privileged, the former secular, humanly produced, and ceaselessly reexamined. His perpetual self-invention or constant restlessness can be fathomed by turning once more to an excerpt from Minima Moralia, in which Adorno speaks about the pleasures as well as limitations of displacement: The predicament of private life today is shown by its arena. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests. The house is past. . . . The best mode of conduct, in the face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one’s own needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as something still socially substantial and individually appropriate. “It is even part of my good fortune not to be a house-owner,” Nietzsche already wrote in the Gay Science. Today we should have to add; it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home (1974: 221).

Chapter Three

COUNTERNARRATIVES, RECOVERIES, REFUSALS It was left to the African, Caribbean, and Asian writer to imagine the alternative and start writing back. Edward Said is foremost among those who pushed this quest forward beyond nationalism and post-colonial statehood, crossing boundaries to interpret the world and the text “based on counterpoint” as he would say, “many voices producing a history.” Iqbal Ahmad, The Pen and the Sword, xviii.

My paternal grandfather had for a time worked as a tour guide, and when he was a boy my father sold crowns of thorns to tourists near the Sepulcher. . . . Still, a few yards away from the Sepulcher, underneath a declivity in the city wall, we stumbled on Zalatimo’s, the renowned pastry shop whose speciality mtabaqa, a flat pancake folding in hazelnuts and sugar, was a great family favorite. A wizened old baker was in there stoking the oven, but he looked as though he was only barely surviving (1992: 49). So Edward Said writes movingly of “Said Snr. the Jerusalem relic-vendor turned into an ace modernizer: he was the man who, via his Egyptian business, introduced filing and the typewriter into Arabic culture. He saw identity principally as a question of backbone, and was chronically upset by his son’s inability to stand up straight, in the ramrod style approved by 133

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the Boy Scouts. When young Edward’s vertebral slackness got too pronounced for him he was packed off to America, aged fifteen. He had never seen snow, and was compelled to invent a new personality at a puritanical New England boarding school. A few years later he escaped to Princeton, and then in 1963 to New York’s Columbia University as “an instructor of English literature, “where he has remained” until now and from where, in relative safety, he continues to operate.1 (Nairn, 1997:169). “This brief background provides an unusual identity-humus,” Nairn goes on to add. Self-conscious of his bourgeois upbringing, Said attended St. George School in Jerusalem and the best Cairine prep schools—the American School, where his schoolmates were the likes of diplomats, ironically enough from the United States. Later, at Victoria College, he studied with Zeid el-Rifai, later prime minister of Jordan, the future King Hussein of Jordan, Adnan Khasoggi, and the actor Omar Sharif, then known as Michel Chalhoub. He received piano lessons from Ignace Tiegerman, and had tea at the Mena House Hotel at the Ghezira Club in the middle of the Nile (what he later described as “colonial habits: tea in the garden”).2 Nevertheless, Said spent his life “standing up” for a people and a cause—a cause that requires a certain distance, a space, an implicit separation of the self from background and community. (ibid., 169). “What I like about New York City is its anonymity,” he observes (1993: xxvii). And while it is true that Said grew up riding horses, speaking several languages, recreating himself in the old colonial fashion—the episode is eloquently narrated in “Cairo Recalled”— he, however, went out to do “fieldwork.” He may in fact be called a wild anthropologist in that he, like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has done fieldwork; not in the disciplinary sense, but pushed by class alliance and power line, he has acquired his authority from such devices as quoting from fieldwork data and telling stories that testify to his presence at the scenes of action (Spivak, 1989, 290). His “direct experience” with the West made him successful, almost indistinguishable from wild anthropologists. “I must confess to a certain pleasure in listening in,” Said writes, uninvited, to their [Orientalists] various pronouncements and inter-Orientalist discussions, and an equal pleasure in making known my findings to both Europeans and nonEuropeans. I have no doubt that this was made possible because I traversed the imperial East–West divide, entered into the life of the West, and yet retained some organic connection with the place I originally came from. This was very much a procedure of crossing, rather than maintaining barriers; I believe Orientalism shows it.3

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In meeting with the West on Western turf, in defining, interpreting, as well as circumscribing his experience, Said set a line of demarcation between himself and other postcolonial intellectuals who are still interested in either proving that they are ethnic subjects and therefore the true marginals or that they are as good as colonials. As a matter of fact, Said may be said to resemble the character Jasmine in Baharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine who, living through many reincarnations, says: “There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake our self” (1989: 27). And while Jasmine must murder who she is so she can rebirth herself in the images of dreams, Said claims that he is Palestinian-American. This hyphenated identity he made known in an interview he gave in 1976 when he spoke of the “two quite separate lives” he leads. “On the one hand,” he noted, I’m a literary scholar, critic, and teacher. I lead a pretty uncontroversial life at a big university. . . . Yet I lead another life, which most other literary people know nothing about. . . . My whole background in the Middle East, my frequent and sometimes protracted visits there, my political involvement: all this exists in a totally different box from the one out of which I pop as a literary critic, professor, etc. (1976: 35). It was that other, less known, aspect of his life that provided the impetus for his world celebrity. The fact, however, remains that Said, despite his breaking up the boundaries both physically and ideologically, is still profoundly an outsider and his work truly the product of exile from his homeland (Palestine). Said’s Palestine is not that of the national poet Mahmoud Darwish and perhaps even less that of Samih al-Qasim. What he retains from it is less its legendary past or its uncertain political future than its tormented present, that of the beginning of its annexation and appropriation by the Zionist movement after 1948. The photo-essay After the Last Sky portrays the transient nature of Palestinian existence and testifies to the Palestinian predicament.4 As Elizabeth Hayford wrote in 1986: “While the photographs rivet the reader’s attention, Said puts their pain and dislocation into words” (36). My purpose here is not to sing along with Darwish the pain of that hollow condition called ÅŸ´° ä«[ (exile and estrangement), which amounts to an epic effort in his poetry to transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of a thwarted coming home, but to investigate Said’s role as an intellectual whose authority operates both inside Academia and in American society at large. He is in fact the only cultural critic— with the possible exception of Germaine Greer, Hélène Cixous, Fatima

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Mernissi—not only to address large audiences from positions of institutional independence and serious cultural engagement but also to inhabit a space of multiple allegiances.5 Although considerable attention has been directed to the superficial aspects of the “Said phenomenon,” little has been said about its true nature. In this spirit, I want to map out a counternarrative based on three different sets of questions. First, there is the difficult task of the currently changing—and challenging—space Said is constantly called to occupy: How are we to view his intervention in the world, an intervention he regards as an intellectual mission dedicated to the proposition that the world is not a stage on which to dash about and moralize by yourself, but a place to be lived in and shared with others? Second, what of Said’s perception of “texts” as “events” and his endorsement of oppositions as linear, narrative time and space. “The inherent mode,” for Said’s “contrapuntal method” is, as he insists, “not temporal but spatial” (1993: 18). What of the “adversary” role of the intellectual within his discipline and its institutional supports that are indicative of a critical consciousness that is caught in a cultural double bind, while refusing to confine itself in any way possible? Third, how has his work on theory informed his politics or vice versa? What are we to do with the constant pummeling Said has received both at the center and in the periphery? Finally, how far is Said indebted to Michel Foucault, a social critic and philosopher he both admired and disposed of? In proposing to discuss some of the joint interrogations posed here, I do not wish to deny these categories their specific historicities and particular meanings within different theoretical and political contexts. What I am attempting to formulate are the complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of the critic as both v¸bj¯ and z8韯 (perseverer and deconstructionist) and have made him the subject of a range of social, political, and literary investigations.

I In the Center, Said is acknowledged but not without criticism. Of all Said’s works, none has elicited more comment than Orientalism, “much of it positive and instructive,” Said remarks, “yet a fair amount of it hostile and in some cases (understandably) abusive” (1996: 4). Dennis Porter, for example, rejected it as being an ahistorical and inconsistent narrative. For Porter, the differences that tie together “national” narratives of empire and the conflicting arrangements of representation to which they give rise are more complicated than Said purports to know. In a scathingly critical review, Bernard Lewis, whose work is subjected to a minute critique in

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the book, blamed Said for “poisoning” and “polluting” Orientalism’s true history and meaning. Attributing the origin of this pollution to the Muslim world, Lewis declared Orientalism to be an ideological and illegitimate intrusion of politics into the world of scholarship. James Clifford went so far as to argue that Said’s work emerges as a subversion of his own authority, an authority he is constantly nurturing from within the Occident where he performs all the maneuvers necessary for his survival. Robert Young asserts that, for Said, conflict can only “arise [within the dominant discourse] from the intervention of the outsider critic, a romantic alienated being battling like Byron’s Manfred against the totality of the universe.” For Jacques Berque, Edward Said “has done quite a disservice to his countrymen in allowing them to believe in a Western intelligence coalition against them.”6 Berque, who excoriates Orientalism for nostalgia, sensuality, and exoticism while assuring himself profitable consultancies, frequent television appearances, interviews, and book contracts, comes under sharp criticism from Abdelkebir Khatibi for his Orientalism. The passage is telling. “This phony heir to Orientalism in the Maghreb is experimenting, with his era and field of study (“his Arabs”), in a mechanical and ravenous way” (1983: 130). For Khatibi, Berque, an emir from the West, has appropriated The Maghreb from his strategic location (Le Collège de France) thanks to pseudo-scholarship (a mixture of anthropology, sociology, theory, and misreadings of certain Islamic texts, and creamy translations of authoritative texts including ² [z䤫[ (the Koran). As Alexander Pope once remarked, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and a lot of it is positively disastrous. The son of a ®§\n (colonial officer), Berque was born in 1910 in Frenda (Algeria). After graduating from the Sorbonne in the 1930s, he became a civilian controller. During his tenure in the Atlas, he observed, filed, and studied the Seksura tribes’ social structures in Imintaout. By intruding on a people confined to their mountains, speaking for them, and telling his readers in what way they are “typically Oriental”—exotic, monogamous, Sufist, agrarian, shy, shrewd, simpleminded—Berque places his research in the long history, broached by Derrida’s De la grammatologie, of the West’s attempts to appropriate Oriental culture for its own various ends. The result of his inquiry culminated into Structures sociales du Haut-Atlas, his entryticket to the Collège. Khatibi’s argument is that Berque’s rapport de force with the natives was not an isolated instance. It stood for the pattern of domination of The Maghreb by France, and the discourse that it enabled. Berque is the legitimate heir to the colonial ideology that Said tried to break open. His theory of anthropology is one such example of the “modern” technology of power; and, Said would argue, so is the whole system of colonial knowledge-gathering, whether ethnography, compilations of lexicons and

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grammars, or physical surveys. It is designed to strengthen colonial rule by redefining the meaning of traditional culture for Algerians themselves. But the Berque case alone does not impart to Maxime Rodinson his curious sense of critique. For he thinks that Said is not a “pure Arab” the way Darwish is, for example, and that he writes out of egocentricity and a guilty conscience since he stood up for the cause (the Arab predicament) only late in life. “He feels an acute sense of guilt,” Rodinson notes, and suggests that the only way out of the impasse for Said is to be heavily involved in the affairs of the homeland. For Rodinson, there can be only one explanation as to why Said writes with intensity: in order to make up for his absence from the arena. Furthermore, according to Rodinson, Said’s knowledge of the East is totally flawed. He dedicates an entire superficial volume to what he calls “Orientalism” without ever having studied subjects known as Orientalist, which he criticizes vehemently, without even having had any close contact with them. For the sake of brevity, I will only mention here what can be called his ethnocentricity. He is an Eastern Arab. Without prejudice as to his lack of knowledge of Arab history, literature, civilization, which he experiences only through popularizing works characterized by nationalistic-type apologetics, his interest in the Arab world is no more than secondary.7 As if you could not be born in Pakistan or Palestine and still become an authority and lay claim to serious and authentic scholarship on Zionism, for example, when it is fairly easy for a Jew to play the role of the expert on matters pertaining to Islam, terrorism, Arab culture. It seems to me that Rodinson’s critique of Said represents a narrow and chauvinistic view of Jewish culture that does not take stock of the interesting role played by the likes of Said, non-Jewish intellectuals who have written on Judaism, Zionism, terrorism, and other matters pertaining to the Orient (1979: 327). The effect is clear: Said becomes alien to his own culture. That he should pay Berque and Rodinson handsome tribute for their “methodological self-consciousness” is beyond comprehension. “What one finds in their work is always, first of all, a direct sensitivity to the material before them, and then a continual self-examination of their methodology and practice, a constant attempt to keep their work responsive to the material and not to a doctrinal preconception” (326–327). Here, Said is blinded by his own insight. The crux of the claim against Said and his disciples is advanced, I think injudiciously, in the following quote:

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As they move out from traditional literature into political economy, sociology, history, and anthropology, do the postcolonial theorists master these fields or just poke about? Are they serious students of colonial history and culture or do they just pepper their writings with references to Gramsci and hegemony? (Jacoby, 1995: 32). Therefore, Russell Jacoby, concludes, Said fails to understand imperial history and historiography. He thinks Said generalizes historical representation or scheme that can be articulated with the experience or reality to which it is opposed and which remains for him unsolved. For Said takes the totalization of the historicism to which he is opposed too much at its own word: the problem is as much how it can be closed as how it can be opened. The fact is that Jacoby’s claims about Orientalism are ludicrous. How can he on the one hand insist on the nebulosity of Said’s ideas and on the other confidently assert they are distillable into specific concepts of antiWesternism? He scarcely allows for the possibility that people can read Said and disagree with him on certain fundamental issues the way Bart Moore-Gilbert does, for example, in his brilliant essay “Edward Said: Orientalism and Beyond.” Jacoby makes no provision for counterinterpretations of Said’s thesis, nor does he consider it a possibility that his work might (as Adorno once suggested) contradict itself or that there are other ways of reading Said besides Jacoby’s own literalist canons. There are also troubling continuities and analogies in MacKenzie’s Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, most of them too obvious to point out. The epistemology of his arguments about Said is seriously flawed, since it all too easily collapses art, history, and politics into each other, and seems by extension to validate excision and avoidance as tools of analytic research (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). Reviewing Culture and Imperialism, an essay that shows one of the great advances in modern cultural theory (namely, that cultures and civilizations are hybrid and heterogeneous as well as interdependent and interrelated), Ernest Gellner, another spokesman for the guild of Orientalists, accused Said of “inventing a bogy called Orientalism” and attributing to it a far too pervasive cultural influence. His attack is twofold. First, Gellner blames Said for not locating his chosen cultural polemic accurately enough within a grander, epochal framework—the “transition from agrarian to industrial society,” which has long been Gellner’s own preferred trope. Second, he argues that because it lacks this degree of theoretical articulation, the anti-Orientalist crusade has too often sunk into a banal vindication of its victims (1993: 3–4). If most Western scholarship and writing about the East is Orientalist conspiracy, then hope lies exclusively on the other side: in the camp of those put down, crassly categorized, or adored for the

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wrong reasons. But the trouble with this anti-imperialist “camp” is the hopelessness of so much of it: its vile dictators, censorship, clerical mania, and traditionalism incompatible with any sort of modernization (Westernled or not). (Nairn, 1997).8 As Nairn has persuasively argued, Gellner is quite right on the first point: Said is no theorist, and rarely situates his cultural forays within a wider historical perspective. “It is quite true that progress was bound to take off in one region of the world rather than another. Unevenness could only have been avoided with guidance from outer space by something like the miracle-stones in Arthur Clarke’s 2001. Progress might have erupted out of China, in which case some Atlantic equivalent of Edward Said might by now be denouncing Occidentalism and the near-universal contempt displayed by the academic lackeys of Peking for the bulbous-nosed and straight-eyed.” About his second point, Nairn and the rest of us are less sure. “Out of unevenness came nationalism, including the sort Edward Said defends, and I would have thought that in the long run the victims would be likely to tell a better and more accurate story about what happened to them, and about their own social and cultural histories.” (ibid., 171). That Said should pay handsome tribute to Third World cultural critics like C.L.R. James, George Antonius, Ranajit Guha, and S. H. Alatas is understandable, but he “clearly prefers the first pair to the second,” Moore-Gilbert writes. “This is because James and Antonius are more directly connected to broader political struggles, whereas the second pair are seen as primarily preoccupied with methodological problems in academic fields of study” (1997: 65). Marshaling the facts of the Said Western critique, one cannot help noticing that at the center of these remarkably confident statements is a somewhat recalcitrant reality that Gellner et al. deftly incorporate yet also dismiss: that Western scholarship is beyond any reproach. This is not to say that they have explored Said with a miraculous, zany lightness of touch. On the contrary they have called him names, denounced his ideas, condemned what he wrote. He is a “professor of terror,” “an anti-Semite,” “an accomplice to murder,” “a liar,” “a deranged demagogue,” and so on. The tirade is not only mean-spirited and perverse, but disquieting. Their condemnation of him brings to mind Flaubert’s defense of Louis Bouilhet, who was awarded the Belles-Lettres et Arts de Rouen medal of honor in 1862: The life of the man of letters is . . . a painful business for those who have a higher regard for Art than for vaunting their own names or swelling their fortunes. Innumerable obstacles impede this career in which one is assailed by calumny and slandered by stupidity as one is obliged to

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trample one’s way over those Lilliputian vanities that writhe in the dust! Even after all the anguish of giving birth and the disappointments of the ideal, once the task is completed, nothing is achieved. Then one is subject to indifference, to rejection, to disdain, to insult, to the promiscuity of banal applause or to the sarcasm of the malicious; obliged to avoid the plots of the jealous and to stay forever silent in the face of triumphant mediocrity. And yet there are men who, by force of talent and energy, soon grasp the prize for which so many are striving (1996: 391). Flaubert meant the speech as an impeccable piece of ironic mischief, worth writing for its mimicry of the official high style, which he so detested, and for his oblique expression of his deepest feelings about the situation of the artist. There is a prize for those who, like Lewis but unlike Flaubert, not only pass formal sentences on Said but also fail to show how the insurgent existence of Orientalism is due, more than anything else, to its relentless transgression of boundaries drawn by disciplines of knowledge and imperial governance. In unsettling traditional oppositions between the Orient and the Occident, reading literary texts as historical and theoretical events and crosshatching scholarly and political writings, Orientalism forced open the authoritative modes of knowing the Other. The indeterminacy in the authority of Western knowledge brought about by the essay has provoked us to rethink the modern West from the perspective of the Other, to go beyond Orientalism itself in examining the implications of its demonstration that the East/West opposition is an externalization of an internal division in the modern West. Even if Said’s work performs this task inadequately, the proliferation of writing back with a vengeance would be unimaginable without it (1995: 5). “There has been a revolution,” Said claimed in 1995, sixteen years after the publication of Orientalism, “in the consciousness of women, minorities and marginals so powerful as to affect mainstream thinking world-wide. Although I had some sense of it when I was working on Orientalism in the 1970s, it is now so dramatically apparent as to demand the attention of everyone seriously concerned with the scholarly and theoretical study of culture” (ibid., 3). In addition, Said may be the only cultural critic living today who acquired the resources to survive and the “cultural capital,” in Pierre Bourdieu’s formula, to thrive as a writer in revolt. Selective appropriation, incorporation, and rearticulation of Western ideologies, cultures, and institutions alongside an Arab e [zb (heritage) have been some of the strategies he both deployed and employed. He has done it thanks to the high-quality skills required to engage in critical practices but, more

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important, to the self-confidence, discipline, u\¸cjÉ , and zÀéŸb (perseverance and deconstruction) necessary for success without an undue reliance on the mainstream for approval and acceptance. My way of doing this has been to show that the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity—for identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain, while obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences, is finally a construction—involves establishing opposites and “others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from “us” (Said, 1979: 325). These words would find an echo and Said would attempt to guide the new literary current called “postcolonial,” encouraging its authors to aim for self-improvement and the cultivation of an authentic identity. At the Periphery, even though Said’s work assumes a wide relevance and has already generated a considerable amount of debate in several circles, it still raises questions to which critics like Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Anwar Abdel Malek, Mohammed Arkoun, Homi Bhabha, Zakia Pathak, Aijaz Ahmad, and others have addressed themselves. They argue that if Said duplicates the Foucauldian notions of “field” and “archive” and utilizes the poststructuralist method of reinterpreting texts within their historical contexts, he must also surrender to its ideology. Although marred by virulence, this debate has had at least one salutary effect: Middle Eastern and Islamic affairs specialists—a breed not much interested in the hermeneutic questions underlying their endeavor–have been jolted into soul searching. Most notably they find themselves asking the basic questions posed by Orientalism: “How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one?” “Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly?” (ibid., 45). Said has underlined the terms “represent” and “another” for the obvious reason that his is a critique of Western (especially British, French, and American) writings about Islam. It is indeed among such Western observers of Islam that the debate about Orientalism has been taking place. But what do Third World observers of Islam think of Orientalism? Their contribution, coming as it does from the inside, may add some valuable insights into what has become a repetitive cycle of

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(exclusively Western) polemics. It is a measure of the importance attached to Said’s thesis that Al-Bitar and Al-Azm–the most prominent of the group—have given it the most exhaustive treatment. Both readily agree with Said that º 7½£ ¶ä½ %zœ°«[ (knowledge is intertwined with power). Both grant that Orientalism as an intellectual enterprise has close ties with colonial domination in the Middle East. And yet, unexpectedly perhaps, they are ill at ease with the argument. No paragraph in Orientalism infuriates them more than the one where Said maintains that “Orientalism flourishes today. . . . Indeed there is some reason for alarm in the fact that its influence has spread to the “Orient” itself: the pages of books and journals in Arabic . . . are filled with second-order analyses by Arabs of the “Arab mind,” “Islam” and other myths” (ibid., 322). This Arab scholars see as an attack on themselves. For it becomes imminently clear as they read further that, for Said, any cultural critique from within Arab society is merely a brand of “Arab Orientalism,” a pejorative term in Arab conservative parlance. “If he says that these are second-order analyses . . . shouldn’t he explain to us in what way they are so bad?” Al-Bitar asks ironically. “Is it because they try to liberate (the Arab) from the dregs and vestiges of the past?”8 In effect, what Said objects to is a considerable body of writings produced in Arabic, especially over the last three decades, that tries to come to terms with the Arab past and, more specifically, with the impact— not total, nor even direct, but still important—that this past has on the Arab present. (I will come back to this point in Section Two). Homi Bhabha distinguishes between Said’s latent or µ‘\^ Orientalism—”an unconscious positivity”—and a manifest or z· \Œ [ Orientalism— ”stated knowledges about the Orient,” while implying that the book’s shortcomings are mainly due to Said’s inadequate engagement with alterity and ambivalence in the articulation of these two economies which threaten to split the very object of Orientalist discourse as a knowledge and the subject positioned therein. He contains this threat by introducing a binarism within the argument which, in initially setting up an opposition between these two discursive scenes, finally allows them to be correlated as a congruent system of representation that is unified through a political-ideological intention which, in his words, enables Europe to advance securely and unmetaphorically upon the Orient (1986: 157). For the colonizer, representing the colonized Other—the word has acquired a sheen of modishness that has become extremely objectionable—

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is by no means clear. According to Bhabha, Said falls victim to a single originating intention. He summarizes his argument thus: “There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer which is a historical and theoretical simplification” (ibid., 158). The act of razoring out Said may be quixotic, but it is not accurate. In his founding text, Orientalism, Said has characterized the intransigence of Orientalist tropes and typologies–their ability to sink into consciousness as credible stand-ins for reality itself—as “radical realism.” Said explains that the book is a study of the ways in which the power, scholarship, and imagination of a 200-year-old tradition in Europe and America viewed the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam. He intended it to be explicitly antiessentialist in its arguments and radically skeptical about all categorical designations like Orient and Occident. What interests me as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail, as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the indisputable truth that Occidentals are superior to Orientals, but the profoundly worked over and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the very wide space opened up by that truth (Said, 1979: 15). Equally important to Said’s work are his deep sense of personal and collective loss and his quest for positive and universal alternatives to sectarian ideologies, structures, and claims. In his oeuvre these tropes are strung together on threads that connect knowledge and power and establish the link between them. He makes these connections always in ways that open a more interesting and humane choice—a counternarrative, a spirit in opposition, a culture of resistance, the promise of a secular liberation (1997: 34–74). Said’s analysis of Orientalist discourse implicates not only the internal politics of the colonized but also the ways in which European linguistic conventions and epistemologies underpinned the conception, management, and control of colonial relationships. In “East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism,” he points out that the guild of Orientalists has a specific history of complicity with imperial power. He observes that, in Orientalism, what he calls for is a new way of conceiving the separations and conflicts that stimulated generations of hostility, war, and imperial control between East and West.9 Bhabha is at pains to show Said’s counterpoint, a kind of testimonial to subaltern studies; his preoccupation with memory; with the narrative of the oppressed but he is also fastidious in describing Said’s commitment never to let a dominant myth

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or viewpoint become history without its alternative. Hence his failure to master the whole question of political agency, narrativization of experience, and the struggle for cultural hybridity that are at the center of Said’s undertaking instead of regarding it as so much exotica—amusing, perhaps, but eminently dispensable. “All I have to do,” a black folk saying has it, “is stay black and die.” Bhabha’s verbosity scarcely conceals the underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong. A case in point is his reading of the “colonial plot” in The Location of Culture where his ensuing conclusion is trapped by the cultural binarism that he wishes to critique. Insisting that the modern cultures of Western nations must be entirely relocated from a postcolonial perspective, one usurped by the project of a new cultural politics of difference, Bhabha proposes an emergent body of critical knowledge issuing predominantly from the ranks of the subaltern and the displaced. The essay aims to map out within a psychoanalytic/deconstructive framework the very “conceptual imperative” and “political consistency” necessary for such a project. In an immensely troubling fashion, Bahbha examines the way in which this ambivalence at the heart of colonial and neocolonial discourses both structures and problematizes legitimating claims to authority and singular or determinate meaning. Although refined and adjusted throughout the essay, this argument is shaky to say the least. Bhabha suggests an understanding of the colonial stereotype as a “complex and contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive” based on an oppositional model analogous to psychoanalytic theories of the split structure of the mind. (Genocchio, 1995: 15). As such, he redefines this concept as a “suture” or “seam” by way of conveying the contradictory nature of an authority that, in order to guarantee its representational function, is dependent on the continual fixing of discriminatory identifications along with a fetishized process of “fantasy/denial” (1994: 70, 81). Here, Bhabha is not only simplifying social and political matters but sacrificing history at the expense of poststructuralist forays as well. This hermeneutic sabotage of postcoloniality as a project of renarrating ourselves as subaltern subjects obfuscates the realities of the debate as long as Bhabha engages in and relies on post-Fordist capitalism that is anathema to postcolonial bricolage. Fanon warns us against this kind of tactic in Les damnés de la terre: “I am my own foundations. . . . It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world” (1961: 231). Bhabha may well learn from Fanon whom he misreads and/or misinterprets in Black Skin, White Masks, and whose prayer is: “O my body, make of me always a man

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who questions!” Bhabha’s entire approach to postcolonialism remains locked in “an idealist reduction of the social to the semiotic,” to use a phrase from Callinicos. E. San Juan Jr. sums up the Bhabha syndrome with wit and dash: Following the poststructuralist tenets of Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, the discursive practices of the colonizer are assumed to limit opposition peremptorily so that all resistance is fated to be complicit in domination, and all we can hope for is what postcolonial guru Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space of enunciation,” the “inbetween” of Derrida’s écriture, of translation and interstitial negotiation, the “discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference.”10 I might add here that for many of us, Bhabha stands for a cult figure of a ludic postcolonialism that has really nothing to say on the role of the West as an instrument of exploitation. Globalization administered by an aggressive North on behalf of home-based corporations proceeds unquestioned as usual and in even more insidious ways than ever before. All this is done by displacing the burden onto the backs of subalterns. Bhabha, who somehow obtained ascendancy over the discipline of postcoloniality, has been a critic of considerable authority in the debate over hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence, concepts borrowed from French “high” theory. The ramifications to this style are advanced by Arif Dirlik, Bhabha’s most disobliging critic, who writes: [Bhabha’s] work . . . is responsible for more than the vocabulary of postcolonialism, as he has proven himself to be something of a master of political mystification and theoretical obfuscation, of a reduction of social and political problems to psychological ones, and of the substitution of post-structuralist linguistic manipulation for historical and social explanation—all of which show up in much postcolonial writing, but rarely with the same theatricality (and incomprehensibleness) that he brings to it.11 The problem of dependency on Western theoretical productions is not simply a matter of cultural sellout on Bhabha’s part. These problems exist everywhere in postcolonial writing and they can easily be addressed. Nor do I mean to take anything away from his achievements as an acclaimed postcolonial critic. His footnotes bear rich testimony to the insights he has

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derived from his non-subaltern critics’s knowledge and creativity. The dominance of Europe as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is produced in the Third World. (What Michel Foucault perceptively called the Reign of Terror.) He announced that there is nothing really worth explaining in its coming, since everything in Western culture, seen properly, is a reign of terror. This condition ordinarily expresses itself in a paradoxical manner. Third World critics acknowledge their debt to Western authorities; critics of the West do not feel any need to reciprocate. They produce their work in relative ignorance of Third World scholarship, and this neglect does not seem to affect the quality of their work—a luxury “we” cannot afford without running the risk of appearing “old-fashioned” or “outdated.” What Bhabha does is that he adds to this symptom of subalternity.12 Nowhere is Bhabha, or his humanistic closure more severely criticized than in Abdul JanMohamed’s pungent attack as witness the following jaw-dropping comment: “In this kind of imperial context, what does it mean to imply as Bhabha does that the native, whose entire economy and culture are destroyed, is somehow in ‘possession’ of ‘colonial power?’” He asks and answers with equal aplomb: Bhabha’s unexamined conflation allows him to circumvent entirely the dense history of the material conflict between Europeans and natives and to focus on colonial discourse as if it existed in a vacuum. . . . By dismissing “intentionalist” readings of such discourse as “idealist” quests, Bhabha is able to privilege its “ambivalence” and, thereby, to imply that its “authority” is genuinely and innocently confused, unable to choose between two equally valid meanings and representations. Bhabha’s view “severely brackets the political context of culture and history,” JanMohamed says carefully. “This typical facet of humanistic closure requires the critic systematically to avoid an analysis of the domination, exploitation, and disenfranchisement that are inevitably involved in the construction of any cultural artifact or relationship” (1985: 79). For JanMohamed, Bhabha’s critical stance provides a rather odd example of this closure in his assumption of the “ambivalence” of colonial discourse, which conflates colonizer and colonized into a single subject. These are penetrating remarks, not merely for what they imply about a domesticated Bhabha but for the ways in which they appear to consolidate the view that today he is exemplary of the Third World intellectual who continues to depend largely on First World criticism.

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Bhabha may in fact find solace from his misreading of Said in “Edward Said: Orientalism and Beyond” by Bart Moore-Gilbert. The core of Gilbert’s reading lies in the immediacy with which he brings out the irreducible tension between latent and manifest Orientalism. “In Said’s scheme,” he asserts, “‘latent’ signifies the ‘deep structure’ of Orientalism, the political positionings and will to power which supposedly remain constant in the discourse, whereas ‘manifest’ signifies the ‘surface detail’—the individual discipline, cultural work, scholar or even national tradition.” Gilbert can be read not only for the most recondite and deep knowledge but also for the minute scrupulosity of its exactness, its wit, and its dash. He continues to evoke this process of latent as opposed to manifest Orientalism in another passage that stakes out for Orientalism its quite unusual angle of attack: The conflicts involved in Said’s attempt to theorize the relationship between “latent” and “manifest” Orientalism are signaled at the most basic level in his divided view of how Orientalist texts are to be read. Insofar as he focuses on “manifest” Orientalism, he elaborates a reading strategy characterized by close readings of the individual text, to highlight the ways in which particular writers diverge from the patterns established by “latent” Orientalism.13 “Edward Said: Orientalism and Beyond” works wonderfully as explication de texte in an entirely classical sense. But just as important—and this gives the often cheeky venturesomeness of Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics its breadth and passion—Moore-Gilbert cares about human enlightenment and emancipation. Underlying his essay is the steadily unfolding grand narrative of the struggle to achieve justice, freedom, and knowledge. That he discerns it so unfailingly in the broad features as well as the hints, ellipses, and figures of the books he reads testifies to what an extraordinary student he is of the unending contest between life and literature. Aijaz Ahmad’s shrill attack in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures— an essay charged with considerable polemical heat but little insight—deserves all the patience one can muster. Uncomfortable with Said’s stance with respect to Marxism, the essay repeats many of the earlier criticisms of Said. But unlike other critics who note and explore the contradictions in Orientalism, particularly with respect to humanism and Foucault, to outline perspectives that remain in sympathy with the book, Ahmad reiterates these criticisms to orchestrate a savage attack that accuses Said of mobilizing all sorts of eclectic procedures to establish “that Europeans were ontologically incapable of producing any true knowledge about non-

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Europe” (1992: 178). As for the effect of the essay, Ahmad attributes it to the aspirations of the middle-class immigrants and “ethnic” intellectuals in the West who allegedly find Said’s perspective useful in their upward mobility. His theory’s critique of Said is caricatural, to say the least. For Ahmad, Said’s thesis is riddled with “inflat[ed] differences of individual formation and attitude into meaningless global typologies.” He tells us that Said’s reading of Kim, his essays on “Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture,” “Figures, Configurations, Transformations,” and to a large extent Orientalism itself are defective. They show, he writes, the “most arrant idealism . . . and facilitate a very peculiar kind of ahistorical leveling” (ibid., 205). That is a curious reading, coming from a diehard Marxist. One would have expected Ahmad to see the politics of identity that is at the heart of the imperial cultural enterprise Said analyzed in both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. That the politics of identity had needed to assume, indeed truly to believe, that what was true about Orientals of Africa was not, however, true about or for Europeans. For Said, when a French or English or American scholar tried to identify the main characteristics of, for instance, the Chinese mind, his work was only partly intended to do that; it was also intended to show how different the Chinese mind was from the Western mind.14 In other words, Said is articulating centuries-long heartfelt human responses to being oppressed and exploited, disfigured and misrepresented by powerful European and now American imperial countries. For Said, the difference between the occupying French in La Nouvelle-Calédonie and the Israeli Army in Palestine is minor since the occupying forces’s common denominator is domination of lesser races and cultures: the Canaques, the Palestinians. This fact seems to escape Ahmad who reduces Said’s argument to the assumption completely, that Western discourse, including diplomatic and academic as well as fictional texts, has projected an image for the Orient that has, for all intents and purposes, become its reality. Armed with this assumption or conviction, Ahmad proceeds to dismantle Said’s argument as an instance of yet another colonialism that does not know itself and is therefore even more powerful and insidious in its effect. This is preposterous, since for Said, [t]o speak of someone as Oriental, as Orientalists did, was not just to designate that person as someone whose language, geography and history were the stuff of learned treatises; it was often meant as a derogatory expression signifying a lesser breed of human being. This is not to deny that for artists like Nerval and Segalen the word “Orient” was wonderfully, ingeniously connected to

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exoticism, glamour, mystery and promise. But it was also a sweeping historical generalization (1995: 4). To pretend as Ahmad does that Orientalism is too complex, various, and ambivalent to exist in a form for any postcolonial to criticize is to show his tactic of misreading a significant amount of historical experience. For in writing an essay like Orientalism, Said not only rereads the canonical cultural works, not to degrade them, but to reinvestigate some of their assumptions, going beyond the stifling hold on them of some version of the master–slave binary dialectic but also gives voice, and this is perhaps more important, to the wretched of the earth (Orientals and others) to talk back to a West they no longer see as one homogeneous bloc. Consequently, there is some poetic justice in the perceptive criticism that Moore-Gilbert levels against Ahmad. He maintains that despite his polemic against Said, Ahmad is unable to escape the influence of Said’s thinking. “The force of In Theory‘s critique,” he observes, “derives in large measure from attention to Said’s privileged position within an institutional framework.”15 In other words, Ahmad is much less interested in being politically correct than in being what you would call logically correct, and there is an undeniable logic to his chic Marxism. Let me now return to what Zakia Pathak and her co-authors have called “The Prisonhouse of Orientalism.” The hindsight of authors like them not only stimulates in them a sense of what Freud called la dénégation at what they could or ought to have done but did not; it also gives them a wider perspective in which to comprehend what they did. I quote from their essay: “The history that Orientalism helps recover from the white text is thus monologic; it does not help us to recuperate the other narratives of Imperialism” (1991: 198). To counterargue this misleading claim and for evidence of the ways in which postcolonial discourse itself provided the means to generate a counterdiscourse, one needs to point to Wilson Harris’s “Interior of the Novel: Amerindian/European/African Relations.” This predates by two decades Said’s recently developed approach to texts such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There is a considerable merit to Harris’s thesis of restoring the precolonial legacy, from which in recent years the very suggestion of this effort has slipped almost unnoticed. For Harris, the heroic ideal in reclaiming a heritage of customs, traditions, language, and culture is principally neither an act of conformism, of expressing and consolidating what is already known, nor an act of amiable respect for the powers that be. Nor certainly does it have anything to do with self-esteem or feeling good (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). For what is crucial to humanistic thought, even in the very act of sympathetically trying to understand the precolonial past, is that it is a

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gesture of resistance and critique. Harris’s stubborn belief that the struggle is not yet, is never, over is put forward in the following passage, in which he engages head-on with the idea of reclaiming a legacy. I believe a philosophy of history may well lie buried in the arts of the imagination and whether my emphasis falls on limbo or vodum, on Carib bush-baby omens, on Arawak zemi, on Latin, English inheritances—in fact within and beyond these emphases—my concern is with epic stratagems to Caribbean man in the dilemmas of history which surround him (1981: 36).16 To this observation one ought to add how each of the laboriously crafted texts that Harris has produced symbolizes, I believe, a heroic effort that is rationally willing to venture beyond what Freud aptly called the basement of human life, not the upper stories of the edifice of human existence, to unsettle and rediscover what lies hidden or forgotten beneath them. For Harris, humanism is disclosure; it is agency; it is immersing oneself in the element of history and culture; it is recovering what Vico termed the topics of mind from the turbulent actualities of human life, the “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” and then submitting them painstakingly to the rational processes of judgment and criticism. To this end, the palpable physical coefficient to Harris’s work symbolizes the very idea of labor, the sheer unremitting scriptual effort and its physical realization in the world. (Said, 2000). Like Harris, Said seeks to consider the corollary to this excavation that Harris finds so valuable for his purpose of locating the stable in “a new dimension . . . within which the losses and the gains on both sides are beginning to cross-fertilize the imagination of our times” (in Goodwin, 1991: 145). Pathak fails to note how crucial for Said’s conception of counterpoint is the desire, as in Harris, to circumvent the “politics of blame” identified with cultural nationalism. What Said terms in a telling image, worth quoting again, “contrapuntal analysis should be modeled not (as earlier notions of comparative literature were) on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble” (1993: 386). His interest therefore lies in a reconstructed “humanism” as a way out of binary oppositions, “a certain ‘void’ or misgiving attending every assimilation of contraries,” in Harris’s celebrated phrase (1993: 62) Like Derrida’s figure of the hymen or the entre, Said’s “void” is also a place that allows cultures to come together. Additionally, for evidence of the ways in which postcolonial discourse itself provided the means to generate a counterdiscourse, Pathak may learn from Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, Pratt, Imperial Eyes, as well as the work of Spivak and Mernissi.

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What Said seems to share, however, with the bulk of First World and Third World critics both hostile and sympathetic is that on the one hand in writing Orientalism, he rethought what for centuries had been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from West and on the other stressed the conviction that in the Third World, modernism has been nothing but a shallow pretense with its local games and pastiches. For the Third World today is still limited at best to instrumental borrowing, or at worst to gadget borrowing, what V. S. Naipaul has ably called “playing the ape,” the natives being capable only of mimicking the white man, who forever keeps them in check. Yet the mimicry that Naipaul speaks about begs the question of the values of modernity that are inexorably linked to the instruments of technology. It does not relate to the problem of what is to be done when some of these values clash with one’s e [zb (heritage), but tries to “reconcile” them by vague formulae. Much like the great public intellectuals of the 1960s, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and C.L.R. James, Said not only refutes Naipaul’s thesis of neocolonialism but also argues that the so-called revolutionary regimes are nothing but a sham, failing to bring about structural change, and that the direction the Third World in general and the Arab world in particular should take is that of a ¹Œ·ä´« (cultural revolution), and with it a complete break with the past.

II I will now return to the trope of the “past” that so ubiquitously characterizes the speaking subject of “subaltern” history. Along with Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, Said recognizes the problématique of an originating moment in the history of an individual, race, or civilization, where an idea or a set of ideas may be said to have emerged. But in the end it leads to nostalgia and all its attendant falsifications. Foucault’s unfolding of the trope of origins, for example, needs quoting in order that we may appreciate its particular quality, which Said has described as a “poetics of thought.” Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin (Ursprung), at least on those occasions when he is truly a genealogist? First, because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession. This search is directed to “that which was already there,” the image of a primordial truth fully adequate to its nature; it necessitates the

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removal of every mask to ultimately disclose an original identity. . . . History . . . teaches us how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin. . . . The origin always precedes the Fall . . . it is associated with the gods, and its story is always sung as a theogony. But historical beginnings are lowly: not in the sense of modest or discrete like the steps of a dove, but derisive and ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation (1977: 142–143). Foucault’s point is that the search for origins is essentialist and militates against a proper sense of historicity. For the colonized people, such a search for their origins is doubly foreclosed, “derisive and ironic,” because the process of colonization meant precisely the wiping out of their history, traditions, language, culture. As an instance of this foreclosure, Said glances at the Middle East as the locus for biblical origins: “All pilgrimages to the Orient passed through, or had to pass through, the biblical lands; most of them in fact were attempts either to relive or to liberate from the large, incredibly fecund Orient some portion of Judeo-Christian-[Muslim]/Greco-Roman-[Arab] actuality” (1979: 168). The consequence of these investments, as Said has repeatedly emphasized, has been the denial of human rights, the legal right of residence, the status of nationhood and the historical identity accruing to the Palestinian people. The Palestinian problem is a dramatic case of the ways in which beginnings are constantly being made afresh (1985: 38–58). Before Said, Fanon, his maître à penser, had recognized that in the triangular dialogue between the settler, the native, and the native intellectual there is “a prominent confrontation on the phantasmic plane.” Versions of origins are offered and resisted in a continuing dialectic. Fanon likens the self-justifying ideological operation of colonialism to the mother “who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts.” He continues: “The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its own unhappiness which is its essence” (1964: 43, 170). In this Oedipal tyranny, the search for identity by the colonized people continually returns to the terms of opposition set by the colonial mother. In effect, the search for origins becomes for the subordinate a longing for an impossible purity and a yearning for the fullness of meaning that is not only uncritical but also politically suspect in that it can unwillingly serve the reactionary forces of communalism as witness the erection of more and more little enclaves and more and more hostility about people outside those enclaves all over the world.

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Nowhere is this danger greater than in colonial Algeria where schools either did not exist at all under French occupation or, if they did, were the domain of the privileged. The minority of the Algerian Arabs who were schooled memorized such passages as “our ancestors, the ancestors of the French, are the Gauls” and learned the principal roads, rivers, and valleys of France; the Mother country. Those who succeeded according to French standards were later described as évolués. Many of the intellectuals—like Shakespeare’s Caliban, whose profit from learning the English language was that he now “knew how to curse”—went on to become leaders in the independence movement. At the same time, however, France’s “oeuvre civilisatrice” in Algeria produced what Malek Haddad later described as “the most perfidious case of depersonalization in history, a case of cultural asphyxia” (1995: 23). Algeria, of course, was not alone in being subjected to this kind of intellectual terrorism. There was Black Africa, the Caribbean, The Dom-Tom. The adoption in 1996 of a text containing 36 articles by the Algerian Assembly installing Arabic as the official language of the people was an attempt to reclaim a e [zb (heritage), a language, a history, a culture, a “mémoire tatouée,” in Abdelkebir Khatibi’s phrase. The full realization of Arabic at the administrative level was completed in July of the same year, and carried out at the university level by 2000 (Benrabeh, 1995: 36–39). As Martin Heidegger put it, if “Language is the center of being,” then for Algeria, the implementation of Arabic as the native language means more than just the restoration of a past. Another example is that of India, where English literature was a major component in the ideology of nation building that was consolidated under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century. The universal humanism put forward by institutionalized literary studies was useful in the task of hegemonizing native élite culture. It offered, as Ania Loomba shrewdly put it, “a program of building a new man who would feel himself to be a citizen of the world while the very face of the world was being constructed in the mirror of the dominant culture of the West” (1991: 165). Conversely, it may be proposed that the enterprise of teaching English literature in India can be read as one of the texts of imperial governance, as brilliantly elucidated in Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India by Gauri Viswanathan, who reminds us that the argument about English literature, about its canon and about its curriculum, is necessarily as much an argument about things unseen and unsaid, about its submerged and excluded voices and about the powers outside the realm of literature, as it is about the displayed objects (1989: 118–142). Whereas in England literary education was a participant in the creation of a paternalistic, élitist culture designed to contain the challenges variously posed to the status quo by the working class, women, and mar-

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ginals, in India and elsewhere it not only helped colonial rule but shaped to a large extent what Fanon appropriately terms the “native bourgeoisie,” those who took over the reins of power after the white man’s exit but have done hardly anything to better the situation. They still display characteristics common to their counterparts in La Métropole: they are insular and insulated, incestuous, smug, contemptuous of the masses. They protect and nurture their own interests while professing egalitarianism, practicing their pernicious bourgeois system based on an overreliance on Western ideas and prescriptions that has eroded the Third World ethos and pretty much ruined it. “The triumphant natives,” Said observes of Third World liberation struggles, “soon enough found that they needed the West and that the idea of total independence was a nationalist fiction designed mainly for what Fanon calls the ‘nationalist bourgeoisie,’ who in turn often ran the new countries with a callous, exploitative tyranny reminiscent of the departed masters” (1993: 19). In point of fact, the native bourgeoisie has yet to recover from its colonial hangover. Democracy and nation-state have failed because the people the poor have elected rule— not represent—them. If all that that was wrong with the native bourgeoisie was a particularly bad hangover from colonialism, there might well be room for optimism. But the crisis goes deeper than expected. Take their growing consumerism or incapacity to govern and the case will be clear enough. (The two “open sores”—Algeria and Nigeria—among many are good examples of what I have in mind.) Interesting in this context is Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method in which he engages head-on in the project of decolonization by divesting himself of the illusion of origins and foreign thinking, a project that involves an extensive play with theoretical possibilities: “Those traditional conceptions of primacy such as source and origin, the principles of continuity and development, and those metaphors for originating authority such as author, discipline, and the will to truth are all the more or less canceled by Foucault” (1985: 297). In Said’s reading of Foucault the correlatives of the Western search for origins are several sets of ideas that need some unpacking here. Origins, authority, author, the Law of the Father: the quest for the moment of origin (in history, in collective consciousness) by its own inner logic moves insistently toward fixing a document that is made authoritative by scholarship and sealed by their commentaries that argue and debate but continue to affirm the authority of the initial discovery. Thus authority and all its connotations of authoritativeness, the chief of which is the system that sets up the author as model, is confirmed. Origins are also implicated in narrative and representation, in the novelistic model of successive continuity that gives formal reassurance of a beginning, middle, and end. This chain of begetting and fatherhood, mixing

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memory and desire, constitutes a patrimony that, in relation to the ideological operation of colonialism, becomes a celebration of the law of the empire, disguised so successfully as to be invisible. “This is all the more true in the case of the Arab world,” Said writes, “which for several centuries had been dominated by Ottoman or European colonialism. National independence for countries like Egypt and Morocco, say, meant that young people at last could be educated fully in the traditions, histories, languages, and cultures of their own particular Arab countries” (1991: 8). In my own case, for instance, I was educated entirely in French colonial schools in Tunisia and France, where all study focused on the history of French society, literature, and values. Much the same was true in the main French colonies, where it was assumed that native élites would be taught the rudiments of intellectual culture in the idioms and methods designed in effect to keep those native élites subservient to colonial rule, the superiority of European learning, and so forth. Until I was about sixteen I knew a great deal more about Camus’s L’Etranger and Gide than I did about Ibn Khaldoun’s al-Mukaddi’mah or the Tunisian poet Abu-al-Kacem A’Chabbi, and to me—irony of ironies—colonial consuls like Jules Ferry and missionaries like Charles de Foucauld were more familiar than al-emira al-Qahina and al-emir Abdel-Kader. These—authority, knowledge, the law of empire, colonialism—then would seem to be the ideological correlatives of the Western sign, the interlocking by which Western man fabricates his “self” into a coherent identity, positing himself as beginning and end of all knowledge and grandly naming it humanism. As Foucault formulates it: “Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject” (1972: 12). This Foucauldian position against the dominant humanist tradition has still to be evaluated in the perspective of our time, but what can be said at once without fear of contradiction is that it becomes particularly liberating for Said. He is no longer part of the endless speculations about a lost, pure, precolonial origin. This fact Said makes abundantly clear in his introduction to Orientalism that his purpose is not to recover a reality behind the European distortions and misrepresentations, but instead to focus steadily on the production of the Orient as a textual construct: “It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes” (1979: 20). In repudiating µ‘\^«[ or “what lies hidden in the Orientalist text,” Said is working toward a dismantling of the entire machinery of origins, in the sense that this machinery dictates a specific way of apprehending truth in terms of depths. Within this cognitive metaphor that clothes all our thinking, the past is perceived as z· \’«[, a surface, and analysis assumes the unconscious arrogance of discovering its depth or inner meaning.

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Some of these influential theoretical positions regarding origins have thus provided Said with a point of entry into the ongoing critique of colonialism. The Third World intellectual must grasp the entire cause-andeffect corollary of origins and the different knottings produced in it. It remains to be seen where Said’s claim to liberation leads: Can Said free himself and us entirely from the paradoxes of the Western philosophical tradition? If all roads lead to false origins, where does inquiry begin without being implicated in them? These are some of the questions my next remarks will attempt to address. There can be no argument about the fact that Said does liberate himself totally, not only from origins but also and perhaps more important from Western tradition as represented by Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and others, in that he breaks away from all forays to claim what he calls “an independent critical consciousness” (ibid., 326). But it is the second question that poses some difficulty: Said certainly sees the modern critic as more of a “wanderer,” a nomad, just as he sees knowledge in general as being “less formally embodied,” whether in a subject, a teacher, or a narrative. But is that enough to renounce the question of origins? Clearly, one cannot help noticing Said’s debt to Foucault, a debt that is most evident in his use of Foucauldian concepts like “discourse,” “field,” and, most of all, “archive.” The points of difference between the two, however, deserve particular attention. The contrast between Foucault’s antihumanism, which goes with his exclusively theoretical activism, and Said’s self-styled humanism that opts for an interventionist critical practice derived from the theorist’s respective historical position, location, constituency, and audience is clear. That Said should choose to live in New York is no accident; he, as a cultural critic, maintains for himself a perpetual distance from official discourses as well as from family quarrels of the Western philosophical tradition even though at times he speaks out as in the Culture Wars debate. Actually, not only Said but also Paul Rabinow, David Hoy, Ian Hacking, and other critics of a politically left persuasion, especially in Britain, have found in Foucault a way out of the Derridian mise-en-abîme that does not simply lead back to liberal humanism and traditional literary scholarship but also claims a certain engagement à la Sartre. Foucault’s concepts of all discourse as a field of contest for power has obvious attractions for those who, like Said, feel that criticism should have something instrumentally pertinent to say about such matters as imperialism, colonialism, the class-struggle, nationalism, and so on. Yet the very inclusiveness of Foucault’s theory makes it hardly more promising as a basis for action than Derrida’s critique of logocentrism or even deconstruction, about which Said writes: “It has always seemed to me that the supreme irony of what Derrida has called logocentrism is that its

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critique, deconstruction, is as insistent, as monotonous, and as inadvertently systematizing as logocentrism itself” (1985: 203). The question then becomes: If there were nothing but the struggle for power, then there would be no good reason to persuade people that they should give up some of their power for the greater good. Foucault, Said regretfully concludes, Takes a curiously passive and sterile view not so much of the use of power, but of how and why power is gained, used and held on to. . . . What one misses in Foucault is something resembling Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, historical blocks, ensembles of relationship done from the perspective of an engaged political worker for whom the fascinated description of exercised power is never a substitute for trying to change power relationships within society (1985: 203). Later, Said would reject Foucault mainly because he “seems actually to represent an irresistible colonizing movement that paradoxically fortifies the prestige of both the lonely individual scholar and the system that contains him.” He decides on Fanon instead because the latter moves “from confinement to liberation.” Although both Foucault and Fanon have Freud, Nietzsche, and Sartre as formative influences, Said feels that only “Fanon presents that formidable arsenal into anti-authoritarian service” (ibid., 221–222). None of this is surprising if you know Said. Fanon is valuable, too, for Said because of his insight into the persistence of colonial interests even in a decolonized world. But the lesson from Fanon Said finds most compelling is the “‘pitfalls of nationalist consciousness’” and the notion “that unless national consciousness at its moment of success was somehow changed into a social consciousness, the future would hold not liberation but an extension of imperialism” (1993: 278). Fanon teaches the postcolonial intellectual, in effect, to be wary of the native bourgeoisie and their loud cries of total national liberation, since such cries prove ultimately to be nothing more than some sort of nativism disguised in “nationalist fictions” designed to replace one form of tyranny with another. In order to overthrow such tyrannies and deconstruct such fictions, the intellectual in the decolonized world must strive for “the conversion, the transformation, of nationalist consciousness into political and social consciousness” (ibid., 267). With his experience as writer and intellectual in protest against oppression of any kind, Said may be said to have lived up to Fanon’s principle of the critic as conscience éveillée in solidarity with those who suffer at the hands of the oppressor. Insofar as the armed struggle and resistance to oppression produce or confirm particular and

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concrete kinds of political actions, Said sees Fanon’s work as providing a far better means than Foucault’s to understand neocolonial culture as a material network of connections between knowledge and power.

III What must be said immediately is how well, how enviably well, Said knows these actualities, their secrets, their pitfalls: that human injustice is not only not natural, but constructed, and occasionally even invented outright. This fact will be evident to anyone who has read his account of the manifold devious connections between the history of “serious” Western scholarship on the Orient and the uses to which it has been regularly put by government agencies, military strategists, and ideologues of various persuasions keen to exploit its handy repertoire of “Arab” cultural and character stereotypes. If further proof were needed, then the Gulf War undoubtedly provided it, with examples ranging from thinly veiled racist overtones to Bush’s anti-Saddam crusade to the usual array of media experts vying to explain how best to deal with these tricky individuals, and, of course, the fine frenzy of xenophobic sentiment witnessed in the rightwing popular tabloids. Few events in recent history have managed to create such an upsurge of irrational fears and phobias in the service of a Western neo-imperialist drive to reinforce the old ethnocentric values and certitudes. Confronted with such evidence, one can hardly deny the moral justice of Said’s case and the risk that must be courted by any commentator who sets out to analyze the Gulf War and its aftermath in terms of “enlightened” critical reason versus the forces of ignorance, prejudice, or unexamined popular belief. For such arguments can always be suspected of trading on the version of the typecast “us-and-them” attitude, a stance of superior knowledge or moral wisdom that all too readily perpetuates the cycle of oppression. Thus, in Said’s words, [T]here is a pattern of such contemptuous attitudes towards the Arab world, from the days of the British expeditionary force sent to Egypt in 1882 to put down the Orabi rebellion to the 1956 attack on Egypt undertaken by Anthony Eden in collusion with Israel and France— Eden’s attitude, delivered in the accents of petty and vengeful stubbornness, strangely prefigures Bush’s personalized hatred for Saddam Hussein. . . . Bush has treated Saddam as his personal Moby Dick, to be punished and destroyed.

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For decades in America there has been a cultural war against the Arabs and Islam; the most appalling racist caricatures of Arabs and Muslims have conveyed that they are all either terrorists or shaiks, and that the region is a large arid slum, fit only for profit or war. The very notion that there might be a history, a culture, a society—indeed many societies—to be thought of as interlocutor or as partner has never held the stage for more than a moment or two. A flow of trivial books by journalists has flooded the market, and has gained currency for a handful of dehumanizing stereotypes (1994: 236). Said’s critical spirit, at its best in this passage, is overwhelming, to say the least. This attitude of writing back with a vengeance is given a further pathological twist when the “subaltern” or the “subordinate” culture shows signs of producing its own secular or modernizing trends, its own high-grade technology and other such modes of “rational” adaptation to the pressures of global change. For the West then finds its interests threatened by a kind of parodic self-image whose challenge can only be met by overt militarist aggression or through the various techniques of demonization deployed against pawns like Mubarek and King Abdullah among others. Hence, what Said describes as “an attenuated example of those [Arabs] who in the past have incurred the wrath of a stern white man, a kind of Puritan superego whose errand into the wilderness knows few boundaries,” a situation in which “Saddam has become Hitler, the butcher of Baghdad, the madman who is to be brought low,” is proven true (1991: 7). The result is all too familiar: a sharp turnabout in strategic thinking whereby the ex-ally or protector of U.S. interests in the region becomes a menace to regional stability and a target of massive retaliatory action. What is played here, as Said remarks, is a version of the Frankenstein scenario, with the creators looking on in appalled fascination at their own distorted self-image. “There has seemed to be a kind of pleasure in the prospect of the Arabs as represented by Saddam at last getting their comeuppance. Scores would be settled with Palestinians, Arab nationalism, Islamic civilization. Most of these old enemies of the ‘West,’ it should be noted, had the further cheek to be anti-Israeli” (ibid.). And any notion that the image is not so distorted must be warded off with the maximum degree of strenuous disavowal. There is no denying the force of such arguments, especially when read against the background of Said’s impassioned yet meticulous scholarship. Said’s purpose, after all, is not just to devise an alternative rhetoric, dis-

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course, or language-game to set against the forms of racist prejudice that have so far governed Western perceptions of the Orient. Rather, it is to show the false, mendacious character of what passes for expert Occidental wisdom about Arab history, politics, and cultural values and to do so from a standpoint informed by a more profound and extensive knowledge of the documentary sources and more critical unillusioned grasp of the ideological issues involved. Such a work clearly does rest content with producing a mere counternarrative that happens to fit some exciting left-liberal agenda of cultural debate. No doubt Said’s argument owes something of its persuasive force to his command of large-scale narrative structures. His marshaling of detailed evidence into a powerful indictment of Western attitudes and policies would not make the point effectively if treated in a more dispersed or piecemeal form. “For Said,” Moore-Gilbert writes, “Western domination of the non-Western world is not some arbitrary phenomenon but a conscious and purposive process governed by the will and intention of individuals as well as by institutional imperatives” (1997: 37). Additionally, Said’s writings derive much of their authority from the rhetoric of moral anger, the stance of speaking on behalf of an oppressed and misrepresented culture, which Said uses to great effect against the voices of cynical U.S. and/or European realpolitik. One can readily concede the arguments about the Gulf War to the neopragmatists like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish and still hold on to the crucial premise: That there is a difference between truth and falsehood in such matters, and that honest scholarship is the alternative best equipped to maintain a due sense of that distinction. Otherwise, there simply would be no way to choose between the various compelling narratives or rhetorical strategies, aside from their degree of suave appeal in this or that cultural context. At the most basic level, what Said exposes are those symptoms of prejudicial thinking—manifest, obsessional motifs, manipulative rhetoric, undocumented blanket assertions, and so on—that signal the presence of an overriding drive to construct an image of the “Orient” in line with Western beliefs and policy interests. Beyond that, he locates a whole repertoire of stereotyped attributes, a system of exclusive binary oppositions in which the “West” connotes values of reason, enlightenment, progress, civilized conduct, while the “Orient” is shown in a negative or inverse relationship to those same values. Again, the Gulf War provides a showcase example of the way that these deep-laid cultural prejudices could be mobilized in the service of a moral crusade with insistent racist overtones: The whole premise of the way the war was prepared and is being fought is colonial: the assumption is that a small

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Third World country doesn’t have the right to resist America, which is white and superior. I submit that such notions are amoral, anachronistic, and supremely mischievous, since they not only make wars possible, but also prevent diplomacy and politics from playing the role they should (1995: 301). A bold position that brings to mind a comment once made by Cyril Connolly, who said: “Let us reflect whether there be any living writer whose silence we would consider a literary disaster” (quoted in Fisher, 1995: 65). Said’s silence would certainly be one. Despite the accruing violence against him, however, Said has remained closely connected with and urgently committed to his constituency and to the vocation of the humanist as witness while refusing the lures of power, money, and patronage. “At bottom,” he writes in Representations of the Intellectual, the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public (1994: 23). He has nobly lived up to these criteria during his long activity as the critic as a displaced talent. Said writes, moreover, in the explosive, unstable, and, as anthropologists like to point out, culturally disruptive world; a world in which the United Nations has become the West’s mercy mission to the flotsam of failed states the white man left behind; where old hatreds have been spurred on by nationalism and tribalism; where the United States has become the unchallenged Uncle Sam of a world that operates at its will. “The imperial stage is now the scene of a Pax Americana,” Tom Mitchell comments, “one that teaches the world to sing in the perfect harmony of international corporate culture, while dispatching its smart bombs to surgically cleanse trouble spots” (1993: 12). The absence of a moral allegory to keep same sort of balance accentuates the anxiety of being dominated. Said’s u\¸co $É and/or zÀéŸb (perseverance and deconstruction), almost his leading characteristic, is one thing the modern reader finds hard to take or to exploit in terms of his own “discourse.” Not that there is anything nightmarish about this world of Said, in the crude sense in which

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other critics have drawn it. For Said breathes into his world the vitality of poetic prose, cultural politics mixed with deep philosophical reflections on masterpieces like Kim, Heart of Darkness, Aida. He understands their dichotomies, and is particularly effective on what he terms the “sheer link” between a work of art (e.g., Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park) and its context where the passing reference to the distant slave-plantation of Antigua becomes the trope for the representation of Mansfield Park itself in all its intimacy and grace. He draws attention not so much to how to read, as to what is read and where it is written about and represented.17 In fine, Said is a “rare commodity” these days—a resolutely principled, political intellectual. His affirmations of emancipation and enlightenment have not been compromised by the end of “actually existing socialism” because their sources lie elsewhere: in the struggles of diverse peoples for democracy and justice. His comparative historical analyses of political culture and cultural politics are globalized rather than totalized. The achievement of his proposition is expressed, above all, in its distance from narrowly national visions of the political processes that promise social and economic transformation. Open-ended, clear, and modest about the limits of his own roles as a critic, commentator, and interpreter, Said has developed further the intercultural and outer-national approach signaled long ago in his influential essay on “Traveling Theory”: Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel—from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another. Cultural and intellectual life is usually nourished and often sustained by this circulation of ideas, and whether it takes the form of acknowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation, the movement of ideas and theories from one place to another is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity (1985: 226). The novel standpoint stresses the circulation and dissemination of cultural artifacts, oppositional ideas, and people. The border, the frontier, diaspora, are its central tropes. “[Culture and Imperialism] is an exile’s book,” Said announces. For objective reasons that I had no control over, I grew up as an Arab with a Western education. Ever since I can remember, I have felt that I belonged to both worlds, without being completely of one or the other. . . . Yet when I say “exile” I do not mean something sad or deprived. On

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the contrary belonging, as it were, to both sides of the imperial divide enables you to understand them more easily (1993: xxvii). Such stances of living on the borderline contribute to a refined politics of (dis)location that, in Said’s hands, becomes capable of supplementing the familiar Euro-modernist interest in time with an equivalent understanding of space and spatiality: the geography and cartography of identities and movements, systems of domination, and countercultures of resistance. More so than the previous essays, Culture and Imperialism is driven by “the new political conscience” generated within the overdeveloped world by the dissident sensibilities of peoples of color, the women’s movements, and ecological and anti-imperialist voices. Operating within a constellation of political identities that joyfully exceeds the closed, moribund world of class politics, these movements and voices converge to talk back with a vengeance as one voice. The essay examines the interactions between nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperialism and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. It also looks at the literatures of resistance produced within both the colonies and imperial centers by writers such as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Mark Twain. On the other fronts of the Said empire, one could read almost universally favorable parts of his other essays and profiles. The panic over “political correctness,” which replies to these new utopian hopes, is currently setting the terms for discussion of the future of the university as a humane institution and a vital symbol of the value of civilization. Said’s exemplary work gives the lie to the idea that the great canon of the West is imperiled by a tide of left-wing McCarthyism. However, while we are told that authentic scholarship is being debased by the tribunes of multiculturalism, there is a danger that Culture and Imperialism may be trivialized like Black Athena or The Invention of Tradition and read primarily as an elliptical and misguided intervention into the culture wars on American campuses. Those battles have far greater strategic significance than the jocose tone in which they are mimicked. But it would be a great shame if the breadth and imagination of such a book were reduced to the status of riposte to the right. For one thing, Edward Said is a long way from advocating anything like a wholesale transformation of literary scholarship. As a critic, Said casts a wide net. He writes once more about Conrad, whose idealism he found both distant and personally affecting. Starting with an admiring book on the selfimposed Polish exile, Said proceeded in his later years to rediscover for the intellectual public some of the talented but underestimated twentiethcentury Irish writers—Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin among others. His sympathies extend to other less known novelists, poets and essayists;

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he tries single-handedly to make known Tayeb Salih and Malek Alloula while paying handsome tribute to several African writers like Ngu˜ gi˜, Achebe, and Soyinka whose roots and outlooks resonate familiarly in his own experience. He makes ritual obeisance to other anti-colonial figures like Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, but is at the same time keen to reassure his readers that, regardless of the political aspirations of his work, he still appreciates the literary merit of the nineteenth-century texts he rereads and relocates amid the distinctive “structure of attitude and reference” that characterizes imperial power. Said rests his case as follows: “I have this strange attachment . . . to what I consider in a kind of dumb way ‘great art.’” Pressed by Michael Sprinker to elucidate his point further, he answers in a flabby tone: “There is an intrinsic interest in [canonical works], a kind of richness in them” (quoted in Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 66). The idea of aesthetics, like the concept of “race,” survives the narrative intact.18 He provocatively occupies the uncomfortable space between imperial domination and its negation by anti-colonial forces. This he does not to dismiss the great art of the West but, it would seem, in order to redeem it by locating it properly. Hence his reading of Mansfield Park, for example—”a novel I praise,” Said reminds us, “as much as I do all Jane Austen’s work” (1994: xi). Although the Austen case has been largely documented, I want to address one issue in particular—namely, that of the world Austen lived in and wrote about. While maintaining that imperialism does in fact structure the whole of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, Said attempts to define empire’s often hidden importance and agenda by showing that its centrality often goes unacknowledged within the texts of such novels themselves. It remains largely offstage, like Sir Thomas Bertram’s Antigua plantation in Mansfield Park.19 So peremptory a pronouncement by a brilliant literary critic who claimed all of world literature as his terrain clearly invites criticism. Let me start with the obvious. Because she wrote at a time of rapid social flux, Austen offers an unexpected illumination of our situation. In late eighteenth-century England the beginnings of the industrial revolution were dismantling the old organic forms of community and throwing identity into question. An aristocracy of birth was giving way to an aristocracy of wealth. Modern commerce, with global ambitions, was creating a fluid, contingent, modern sense of self. Roles were changing, roots were tearing, the definition of the individual was evolving. One fact in particular might help to explain why, for Austen, preserving social forms was as necessary as unmasking them. Two of her six brothers went into the navy, traveling around the world on matters military and colonial; both of them eventually became admirals. Austen especially loved and even identified with one of her seafaring brothers, Frank—think of Persuasion’s ideal

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union of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, whom she in large part based on Frank. Of her two other brothers, one was adopted by distant relations, taken from the Austen home, and eventually made the heir to a large fortune and estate. Such an opposing circumstance reminds one of Fanny Price’s introduction to Mansfield Park. She, too, is adopted and made to stand for the heir apparent to the estate (Tomalin, 1998). That is not to say that Austen approached the changing arrangements in her society and culture directly. She famously—or infamously—did not. She has even been faulted for barely referring to the dramatic historical events she lived through: the French and Romantic Revolutions, the Luddite Riots, and the Napoleonic Wars, the expansion of colonialism, slavery. Said accuses her of giving approval in Mansfield Park to the latter; according to him, Austen makes the restoration of order at the Bertrams’ plantation in Antigua the foundation for their eventual moral renovation at home. Yet Mansfield was where, in 1772, a court passed down a decision prohibiting the holding of black slaves in England. Austen decided to set an estate called Mansfield in a novel that makes the quiet, subordinated ungrasping decency of Fanny Price, its humbly born heroine, a reproach to the upper classes’ rapacious masculine activity. Austen’s ultrasensitive social and moral antennae could, among other things, obliquely register, and pass stern judgment on, history’s distant rumbling. The following short excerpt in which her sentences operate inwardly and outwardly at once captures her expository prose: “It often grieves me to the heart—to think of the contrast between them—to think that where nature has made so little difference, circumstances should have made so much” (1997: 122). The business with Sir Thomas and the West Indies—his visit is not described, only mentioned—can leave a present-day reader with a feeling of uneasiness. Shown to be the right-thinking if somewhat rigid overseer of social order, Sir Thomas goes off to the West Indies at a time when slave labor dominated those islands, so that his estate must have been based on slavery. Fanny Price even asks her uncle about the slave trade, but her question is met with a “dead silence.” The discomfort we may feel about this episode is likely to qualify the pleasure we take in reading Mansfield Park. But what degree of discomfort? Here the slave trade does fall within the novel’s boundaries of relevance, as (in my view) Australia does not with regard to Great Expectations, which finds its thematic fulfillment in the final willingness, after much resistance, of the snobbish young Pip to accept Magwitch as a sort of surrogate father. The main concern of the novel is with the way a sense of moral fraternity can overcome barriers of social caste, and for this trope it barely matters where Magwitch has come from or how he has made his money. We all knew what Australia stood for, a penal colony notorious for the hard life imposed on convicts sent from England;

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it is beyond the novel’s boundary of relevance. What matters is the relationship between convict and young swell. The distinction I am suggesting between Dickens vis-à-vis Australia and Jane Austen vis-à-vis the West Indies cannot be sustained by hard-and-fast evidence; it is what in sports is called a judgment call (as so many opinions about literature must be). So it seems to me that what happened to Magwitch in Australia does not centrally shape his relationship with Pip—which is based on a memory of kindness enacted many years ago. But that Jane Austen’s Sir Thomas draws his income from slaves while still being presented as an upright moral figure must affect our view of the novel. Said describes acutely the problem of Sir Thomas’s journey to the West Indies, yet he is also correct, I believe, in calling Mansfield Park a great novel. The two things—moral judgment and critical estimate—stand in Culture and Imperialism side by side, as discrete observations. But I wonder how it is possible to advance the moral judgment without, to some degree, affecting the critical estimate. Although it would be irresponsible to allow our moral uneasiness about the West Indies reference to negate our admiration for this novel, it seems implausible that we can simply align moral judgment and critical estimate as separate observations and let it go at that. Said approaches this problem, indeed, brings his readers to it, but then fails to confront it head-on. Said’s other target of provocation is Kipling. A similar difficulty arises regarding his sensitive analysis of that superb, much-maligned novel Kim. If Kipling in this novel accepts uncritically the benign role of British imperialism—and he does—how does that affect his marvelously sympathetic treatment of Indian life? Said recognizes the historical density of the novel and shows a rare ability to identify the peculiarities of Kipling’s cultural location. His concluding remarks show Said at his best, and demonstrate how a work of criticism can rise to the power of the text it reads: Kipling’s choice of the novel form and of his character Kim O’Hara to engage profoundly with an India that he loved but could not properly have—this is what we should keep resolutely as the book’s central meaning. Then we can read Kim as a great document of its historical moment and, too, an aesthetic milestone along the way to midnight August 14–15, 1947, a moment whose children have done so much to revise our sense of the past’s richness and its enduring problems (1993: 162). In a gesture of cultural compassion that raises questions rather than pretends to provide answers, Said subtly links Kipling with Rushdie (Suleri, 1994). He does not, however, seek to excuse the indifference of Gide or

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Conrad, an author who has provided him with his most abiding and obsessive metaphors, the colonialism of Forster and Camus, or the neocolonialism of Naipaul, but to shift cultural analysis so that such unsavory attributes do not become a source of fuel for the moralistic pseudo-political responses he rightly castigates as the “politics of blame.” For Said has always intended his readers to be instructed by the various comprehensive examples of the practice he provides. And if Jane Austen is the first such extended instance, Albert Camus is another. Here his interpretation does seem to be highly informative even if at times he falls short in his reading of the Algerian novelist. He fails to see the contradictions in a writer who was racked all his life by conflicting allegiances: to his mother, and yet to his “new” friends; to his pied-noir roots, and yet to the Arabs; to his pacifist instincts, and yet to his macho hunger for action; to his wife and children, and yet to his need for sexual reassurance and his love for Maria Casarès; to his ideals, and yet to his distorted truth.20 One of the most attractive aspects of Said’s reading of Camus is his plain discomfort with the way(s) in which Western critics (Walzer and O’Brien, to mention a few of the better-known names) have read and/or interpreted the pied-noir novelist and his uneasy relationship with Algeria and the indigènes who do not get to tell the stories they have. As a matter of fact, they are scarcely perceived as capable of having stories, their stories are not so much refused as ruled out, unimaginable as pieces of recognized history. At times, Said is tentative and seems to be groping for an alternative theory (of reading), or at least a general mode for articulating the relationship; at others, he is impatient, even dismissive of those who “read Camus outside of the colonial context, with no indication of the rather contested history of which he was a part” (1994: 75). Said recalls Roland Barthes’s description of Camus’s style in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture as écriture blanche, but he would be better off evoking Barthes’s “Can we ever . . . read [a writer] in all innocence? Can we ever want to?” (1964: 10). Said, like Barthes, knows that authors and texts do not exist in isolation, and “the morality of fiction,” in Nadine Gordimer’s phrase—its inherent need to loot quotidian reality—is frequently questioned by readers and critics alike. What is, however, important about Said’s “contrapuntal reading” of works of literature—a reading in which ordinarily separate histories are allowed to play against each other, to produce not harmony but a complicated polyphony—is not its occasional bluntness but the range of insight and argument it makes possible. There is no exaggeration in such a claim, and by analogy we recognize other missed or displaced configurations too. I do not think it is entirely unsporting of me to note that when Said crosses the English Channel and writes a scrupulous and painful chapter on Camus’s fiction and its relation to Algerian independence, he looks like

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a lawyer whose evidence is shaky. To have Said speak for himself: “Camus’s narratives have a negative vitality in which the tragic human seriousness of the colonial effort achieves its last great clarification before ruin overtakes it” (1993: 176). There is a lot of work for the reader to do here, and different readers will do different work. In trying to formulate an alternative reading, Said loses sight of the drama of impossible choices Camus found himself wrestling with and which his characters express so well: Rambert in La Peste is forced to choose between his private love and the social demands of plague-stricken Oran; Daru, the French Algerian schoolteacher and reluctant gaoler of the Arab prisoner in L’Exil et le royaume, offers his charge two possible itineraries, one road pointing to freedom, the other leading to incarceration and a murder trial at the hands of his colonial masters (bizarrely, the prisoner chooses the latter). And perhaps most memorably of all, the Renegade, shuttling between the singlemindedness and Eurocentrism of the Catholic seminary and the cult of the African fetish, finishes up mutilated and brutalized. From the outset, Said reminds us of Camus’s history as a colon, a piednoir; that he was born and grew up in Annaba in Arabic, Bône by the French; and that his novels are really expressions of the colonial predicament. He then goes on to advance several lines of commentary that might help us to understand Camus. For example, he suggests that we should read L’Etranger where Meursault kills the Arab, to whom Camus gives no name and no history, as an ideological fiction; and that the whole idea at the end of the novel where Meursault is put on trial is a lie in that no Frenchman was ever tried for killing an Arab in colonial Algeria. Yet despite his responsible reading, Said proves inadequate in understanding Camus’s portrayal of the trial in that it cannot be taken as a realistic account of the legal process in a French colonial courtroom any more than his hero’s apocalyptic experience during his ten-minute walk on the beach after a French luncheon in a setting of banal domesticity. Camus offers a recognizable account of the trial not as trial but as parody of the French judicial system. He goes into considerable detail in depicting its conventions and procedures ranging from the behavior of the participants, the cordial atmosphere in the courtroom where habitués greet each other as in a club, the formality and mechanical regularity of the procedure, the inflation of language perpetrated by both the prosecutor and the defense attorney, the sarcasms of the presiding judge to the browbeating of the witnesses, and the misleading truthfulness of their testimonies, culminating in Marie’s tearful protest: “They forced her to say the opposite of what she was thinking” (1960: 29). Camus builds a fortress of the French legal system with its own values. What invalidates the trial is its ease, its contempt for the court, its lack of remorse on behalf of the killer, its rhetorical glibness, its blindness to

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ambiguities, and its exclusion of any feeling for the real victim, since the only people who mattered to Camus were Europeans. Arabs were there to die. No more. Or as Julia Kristeva put it: “It doesn’t matter that Meursault killed an Arab—it could have been anyone” (quoted in Torgovnick, 1995: 11). A curious reading, to say the least! One further objects that Kristeva’s analysis of the novel proceeds without regard for archival evidence, so that speculation is paraded as historical fact. The same attitude is reflected in the shopkeeper in La Peste whose reaction to a news item concerning a young office worker who has killed an Arab on a beach proposes a solution of sweeping simplicity: “If they put all that rabble in jail . . . decent folks could breathe more freely.”21 Authority and discipline are not ends in themselves. Rather they are the necessary stuff of which colonialism is made. The note is perfectly struck in a description of the Arabs that comes near the middle of Le Premier homme where Cormery père fought in the Moroccan campaign in 1905 and witnessed barbaric killing. Two of his fellow soldiers were murdered and horribly mutilated by the natives, prompting the father to protest at the injustice of his coming out of an orphanage and poverty straight into a military uniform and horrific violence. His outcry culminates in the explosion of his anger: “‘Filthy race! What a race! All of them’” The same language of racial abuse rings out later in the chapter, this time half a century later during the Algerian revolution. In the wake of an armed resistance attack, a worker in the street calls out: “This filthy race” (1994: 67, 74). Notwithstanding the story of racism, the story of the plague, interestingly enough, is always interpreted as a parade or an allegory of the German occupation of France. In 1944, Camus acknowledged that the humiliations suffered by the French at the hands of the Germans meant that they must have incurred a loss of prestige in the eyes of the Algerian population. He nevertheless assumed that French rule should and would continue. To this end, he said, it would be very shortsighted if the French were to use force to reassert their authority over Algerian Arabs: “Our colonies will genuinely support us only when we convince them that their interests and ours are identical, and that we are not applying double standards: one giving justice to the people of France and one sustaining injustice towards the Empire” (1958: 48). The implicit suggestion that force was unnecessary presupposed that the natives would willingly follow French models and instructions, in practice through a policy of assimilation. Further on, Said elaborates a more convincing strategy. “My reading of Camus,” he writes, And certainly of his later stories, starts with the fact that he, in the late 1950s, was very much opposed to inde-

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pendence for Algeria. He in fact compared the FLN to Abdel Nasser in Egypt, after Suez, after 1956. . . . He denounced Muslim imperialism. So far from being an imperial observer of the human condition, Camus was a colonial witness. The irritating part of it is that he is never read that way (1994: 74–75). Here the point Said is making is sound, yet it lacks the depth and insight he offers in, for example, his reading of Mansfield Park or Heart of Darkness. Let me illustrate. Said nowhere mentions the fact that there are too many myths about Camus whose life was short, deceitful, often squalid, and ultimately pointless: even its physical delights merely made death a crueller joke. One of the most persistent of these myths, first propagated in Britain by Cyril Connolly’s introduction to the 1946 translation of L’Etranger, is that he “played a notable part in the French Resistance Movement” (in Fisher, 1995: 9). The much-photographed figure in a trench coat, with Humphrey Bogart features, certainly looks like Hollywood’s idea of an underground hero. In fact, Camus derailed no more trains than Sartre. What he did do, from the winter of 1943–1944 onward, was to help the Resistance circuit Combat with its clandestine newspaper of the same name. But it had been started three years earlier by Henri Frenay, and even after Camus joined he only gradually assumed a leading editorial role. A second myth is that his novel La Peste was simply an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France. This is a canard. To the novel’s first readers, it seemed obvious. The “plague” was the enemy; those who fought it were members of the Resistance. But even at the time, the metaphor seemed faulty. Sartre pointed out quite sensibly that disease is everyone’s impersonal enemy, whereas the Occupation was a complex phenomenon, involving temptation, collaboration, indifference, treachery, and moral choice.22 Only a strict Buddhist, unwilling to kill even bacteria, would have faced in the plague city the ethical conundrums that beset Resistance workers who knew or suspected that if they killed a Nazi the authorities would take savage revenge on civilian hostages. It is obvious then that Camus, who knew a great deal about guilt, was aware of the situation but chose to ignore it. So those of us who were reading La Peste as a straightforward allegory were being both too clever and too simpleminded—which goes for not only Sartre and O’Brien but also for Said, who writes: “La Peste [is] about the deaths of Arabs, deaths that highlight and silently inform the French characters’ difficulties of conscience and reflection” (1993: 181). Yet the novel contains no discussion whatsoever of political conditions in Algeria or the misery that ripped Oran apart where La Peste is set. Camus always disdained the city of Oran, “an ordinary town, nothing more. . . . The town

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itself is undeniably ugly”; and if Algiers never ceased to be “the pristine city,” Oran becomes “the black town” in Camus’ novel. The severe cholera epidemic of 1849 that caused widespread loss and ruin in Oran set the stage for its destructive history.23 Unlike Algiers, Oran turns its back to the sea; a reality Camus could not accept. He was unable to think beyond the mental horizons of his French background that looked onto the blue-purple Mediterranean sea. A third myth, still current, is that Camus was an existentialist. This is partly an offshoot of his being so often coupled with Sartre. The blurb of Joseph Laredo’s rather too creamy translation of L’Etranger even alleges that Sartre was co-editor with Camus of the postwar Combat.24 But the more time passes, the easier it becomes to see their essential differences. Even Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus’ only work of anything like “pure” philosophy, published in 1942, which expresses his reaction to the “absurdity” of a bleak, indifferent universe, was no existential “leap” into scurrying political activity; it was an exhortation “not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments”—the articulate man’s version of the lumpen “mustn’t grumble.” Perhaps, somewhere behind it, was an echo of his workworn mother, whom he chose over justice. Even so judicious a critic as Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing in 1970, saw fit to comment: “The defense of his mother required support for the French army’s pacification of Algeria” (1970: 104). But it was not so simple. Camus’ own position was inherently split. He was the pupille de la nation as a war orphan, saw the French presence as a historical given, and was not inclined to question it in any fundamental sense. In prewar Algeria, Camus had long championed the Arab underdog. He played what is called in Arabic µ¿z°œcé嶫[ ² \é« —the porte-parole of the oppressed. Yet while his first loyalties lay with the working-class French Algerians whose lifestyle he frequently idealized as something spontaneous and historically innocent, he campaigned passively as a journalist in 1939 on behalf of the destitute of Kabylia. Hence, the series of eleven articles, “Misères de la Kabylie.” He also strongly believed in a partitioned Algeria, and had backed Mendès-France and Ferhat Abbas while the colons were calling for his blood. As his novel, La Chute, makes clear, he realized the inescapable contradictions of his plight. The car crash that killed him in 1960 came too soon for him to see the sequel to Algerian independence; but history, he already knew, is not prodigal of happy endings. Said hints at all these counterarguments, but refuses to go into them: “Camus’s plain style and unadorned reporting of social situations,” he writes, “conceal rivetingly complex contradictions, contradictions unresolvable by rendering, as critics have done, his feelings of loyalty to French Algeria as a parable of the human condition” (1993: 185). He then goes on

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to show how Camus’ limitations as a writer who championed the cause of justice are “unacceptably paralyzing.” Of course, the whole essence of Camus’ position on the Algerian question was that there was no real reason why a choice between the safety of his mother and justice should be necessary. Justice and the French presence in Algeria were, he consistently argued, perfectly compatible. Yet another myth is that Camus was what is now quaintly called a “Cold War intellectual.” In 1951, the heyday of the Left Bank neutralism or fellow-traveling, when revolution still seemed to many a desirable goal, and the Russian Revolution a hopeful beginning, Camus published L’Homme révolté, an uneven survey of the advocates of revolt. It reaches a conclusion not unlike that of George Savile, Marquess of Halifax, the seventeenth-century “Trimmer”: “When the People contend for their Liberty, they seldom get anything by their Victory but new Masters.” This, naturally, drew down thunderbolts of Sartrean abuse, making permanent the breach between the two writers. As Sartre put it in what Olivier Todd calls his Sorbonnard tone: “You may have been poor once, but no longer; you are bourgeois like Jeanson and like me” (quoted in Todd, 1995: 331). Unlike Arthur Koestler, Camus was not performing a public autocritique of his past as a Communist, but tried to put utopian politics in its place. “Politics,” he insisted, “is not a religion; if it becomes one it becomes an inquisition” (1958: 23). Only those who believe in the primacy of politics, and dismiss other priorities as “reactionary,” could possibly regard L’Homme révolté as a Cold War tract. This has not prevented allegations that Camus was being subsidized by NATO or the CIA. One final myth bears a family resemblance to the “Cold Warrior” taunt. In 1957, at the height of the Algerian war, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience” (in Frenz, 1969; 567). In his Nobel address, Camus overlooked the opportunity to speak about Algeria, the war, the resistance movement, and all the determining influences that marked his childhood and youth in Algiers. He, instead, spoke of high European art and the way he saw and understood what he called “humble and universal truth,” of the writer “impassioned for justice,” while the country of his birth was going through unending misery. “Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered,” he added. The phrase strikes one as odd; it is in fact another lie. For how can a writer of his stature, especially at that time, claim to tell the truth and yet declare: “[A]s far as Algeria is concerned, national independence is a purely emotional formula” (1958: 45). For Camus, there had never been an Algerian people with a native history, culture and traditions, except, of course, for the pieds-noirs who

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had been coming here for more than a century, had ploughed and made furrows, deeper and deeper in some places, in others more and more wavy until a light earth covered them and the region reverted to wild vegetation, and they had procreated and disappeared. And the same for their sons. Then their sons and grand-sons found themselves on this land as it was when their forefathers arrived, with no past, or moral, or lesson, or religion, but happy to be so and to be so in the light (1994: 77). (Emphasis added.) So far from being an impartial observer of the human condition, Camus was a colonial witness and a committed anti-partisan of the FLN. He refused to give up the idea of an Algeria that was special to France, l’Algérie française. In point of fact, unlike France’s other colonies, Algeria was proclaimed by the Second Republic (1848–1851) as a whole and then incorporated into France legally and constitutionally. It was identical (at least in theory) to Calvados, Tarn-et-Garonne, or Bouches-du-Rhone. Henceforth all that distinguished Algeria, now fille de France, from the so-called hexagone (the roughly six-sided mass of European France) was precisely a hollow, a space, the enormous vacancy of the sea separating it from Maman-Fouance: outre-mer, outre-mère.25 Algeria would continue to be perceived, spoken of, and acted on, both locally and in Paris, since it became involved in a subordinate filial relationship with the Métropole under which the old androgynous mère-patrie, or what Derrida has perceptively called “La Ville-Capitale-Mère-patrie,” clearly lived on in the unconscious of “French” and “Algerians” alike. At this point, it would be difficult not to recall Said’s perceptive formula: “overlapping territories, intertwined histories.”26 It could not be any other way. For Camus, Algeria was “un pays sans leçon” and only the presence of the French could provide the lesson (quoted in Lenzini, 1987: 8). Additionally, if Camus’ commitment to the idea of French Algeria was the product of an unusually well-intentioned disposition, it also supposed the moral validity of French colonization. Camus’ trip to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize in 1957 was as much an occasion for controversy as celebration. A few days after the pomp and ceremony of the presentation, Camus addressed a group of young students and was unexpectedly harangued by an Algerian student berating the laureate for his silence on the question of the colonial war that was then raging in his native Algeria. The writer’s visceral response to the tirade is now a central part of Camusian mythology: “No cause, however right, will ever dissociate me from my mother, who is the greatest cause I know. . . .” (1989: 238). For some, the outburst spelt filial loyalty, for others,

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tribal obduracy in the face of manifest social injustice and military repression. In the minefield of French and Algerian public opinion surrounding the war, the words were more a provocation than a statement of vision and reconciliation. What the episode demonstrates is a very public and painful testing of Camus’ allegiance. Significantly, he couches the choice he exercises in the seemingly incompatible terms: la mère / justice, thereby marking an uneasy confusion of public and private concerns. Patrick McCarthy’s introduction to L’Etranger, which escaped Said, shows his intellectual and emotional involvement, remarkable in someone who was only nineteen when Camus died, which comes out most clearly in his discussion of Algeria. When Camus was growing up there, the extrovert attractions of sun and sea added piquancy for two reasons: his tuberculosis, which cut him off from careers in football and teaching and gave him an outsider’s envy and energy. And, as today can also be sensed in a country like Israel, the colonist’s vigor and underlying fear: “Usurpers in this land, the Europeans had become its legitimate owners. So they faced the deserts and the droughts. Yet they remained less authentic than the Arab who became an object of fascination and jealousy” (1982: 12). The words are McCarthy’s, but the sentiments pervade the depths of L’Etranger. The novel’s anti-hero, Meursault, shoots an Arab for no apparent reason, except for telling us about a racial category that he fears as a threat to his identity. After hearing that his mother has died, he turns, as McCarthy suggests, into at least one and possibly two other characters: from ignorance and indifference; he shifts to an awkward awareness of having “destroyed the harmony of the day,” and then to the role of “the imprisoned innocent”—neither nearly so convincing as the Meursault we first meet. McCarthy quibbles in comparing Meursault with his homonym “Mersault” in La Mort heureuse. For “Meursault” suggests a leap to death whereas “Mersault” hints at a leap into the sea, which Camus delighted in. The “happy death” is that of Meursault, despite the fact that he, too, has committed murder in cold blood. If there were no benevolent deity—if the answer to appeals for justice, as at the end of Le Malentendu, were a flat final “Non”—then Meursault’s indifference would become completely natural. The best one could hope to be was Sisyphus, with his joyless stoicism: the worst was this stony-eyed, numb-hearted, unapologetic killer. Meursault’s unruffled existence depends on his avoidance of public and self-scrutiny, and on his evasion of responsibility. The director of the old-age home and Salamanco act as an accomplice in helping him perpetuate the status quo. In their first interview, the director tells him: “You needn’t justify yourself, my dear boy. I’ve read your mother’s file. You couldn’t provide for all her needs. She needed a round-the-clock-nurse.

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Your salary is modest. And, all in all, she was happier here” (1960: 49). This is at worst another lie, at best a pious exaggeration, since we know that Madame Meursault was still a vigorous woman who, on her evening walks with Pérez, could tackle the four-kilometer round trip from the home to the village. As witnesses at the trial, however, both the director and Salamanco, despite their good will, give damaging testimony. One function of the trial, then, is to break down this complicity in the illusion of innocence that Meursault had effortlessly obtained from others and in turn extended to them, as when he agreed with Raymond’s self-exonerating assessment of his brutality to his mistress, “She’s the one who did me wrong. It was not my fault” (ibid., 52). In Camus, the ambiguity of innocence and guilt is not so easily resolved, no matter how genuinely Said means and experiences the sense of revision, insinuated into the lines of his otherwise penetrating reading. The problem of translation at work is obvious here. Its weakness lies not in the elaborate counternarrative Said provides but in a misprision or slip in his thinking—namely, Camus’ background. The details of his early upbringing in Algiers in a poor European family—his mother was a domestic, his father died as a result of wounds received in the Battle of the Marne—are well known, especially with the posthumous publication in 1994 of Camus’ fictionalized autobiography, Le Premier homme.27 But as Olivier Todd has shrewdly demonstrated in recreating the mentalité and outlook of the petits colons, who were taught to see France as having civilized an anarchic indigenous population, Camus was blinded by his own insights about his native Algeria. The centenary of the French presence in Algeria in 1930 provides a telling illustration of the triumphalist colonial mentality, with Louis Bertrand of the Académie Française musing: “I wonder whether for us, twentieth-century French people, there is any more glorious century than that of our conquest of Algeria”; in the same vein, the Bishop of Oran invited Europeans and Algerians alike “to come together as one under the flag of Christ’s beloved France.” To counterbalance the imperial grandeur, the exposition coloniale organized in Paris was opposed by Léon Blum as well as by the Surrealists. Significantly, these contrasting French attitudes, alternatively celebrating and shunning the colony, anticipate the cleavage in French life brought about by the Algerian revolution a quarter of a century later (quoted in Todd, 1995: 543–544). The effect of Said’s private revelations is to renew interest in Camus’ imaginary world, which includes Sisyphus and Prometheus and muddles the humanist legacy they represent—namely, Don Juan. But the figure of Don Juan is also part of Camus’ abiding fascination with Spanishness, what Todd aptly terms “Spain, that second home, mythical, in the blood.” In what for the petit colon-turned-celebrity was the difficult search for cul-

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tural identity, indeed the battle to belong to Spain, the country of origin of his maternal ancestors, comes to stand mythologically as a place of adoption next to his native Algeria. The mood of defection is further underscored at another level in the Carnets, as Camus opts for the Spanish side of his family represented by his mother: “All my life, through the person France has made of me, I have tried tirelessly to return to what Spain left in my blood, which I believe to be the truth” (1989: 183). Writing to Kateb Yacine, the Algerian poet, Camus pleads for dialogue and for the recognition of what he sees—with a stubborn naivete—as a shared e[zb (heritage): “You and I were born in the same place. Whatever quarrels there may be, that makes us alike.” But at the same time, he opposes the selfguilt of the Kabyle Christian poet Jean Amrouche, who, at the eleventh hour of the colonial narrative, can see no place left in The Maghreb for French Algerians. In Amrouche’s case, the self-loathing is acute: “Men like me are monsters, history’s mistakes,” and again “Colonial France is racist, greedy, oppressive, inhuman, destructive.” Camus countered this charge, appealing beyond history, and apparently in all sincerity, to the poetry of a shared landscape and destiny. Additionally, he was scathing about the injustice of stereotyping, lambasting the French press for giving the impression that Algeria contained a million colons with a whip in one hand and a cigar in the other. Indeed, his defense of the petits blancs remained as obdurate as the group he was describing, while for that section of French society that most opposed them, the “soft Left,” he reserved the condescending macho label of la gauche femelle (ibid., 397). The figure that emerges from Said’s revision is one often bruised by collisions and tests of loyalty. In contextualizing him for us, Said recreates the mentalité of the age, even if he does not succeed in showing Camus’ concealed side. What is most striking in Culture and Imperialism is Said’s appetite for novels that are intellectually challenging and construct their plots against a background of crucial historical moments, even when their politics are conservative or reactionary, as is the case in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, André Gide’s L’Immoraliste, and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Yet, when he confronts Pierre Loti’s L’Inde (sans les Anglais), a novel lacking the intellectual force or historical significance of those earlier works, Said rejects the fashionable disparagement of the author’s crude style and halfbaked ideas. In Loti, he insists, “We read a travel narrative based on a journey across India in which the ruling English are deliberately, even spitefully, not once mentioned, as if to suggest that only the natives are to be seen, whereas of course India was an exclusively British (and certainly not a French) possession” (1993: 189). All of which is another way of suggesting that Loti’s settings are more banal than Conrad’s, say, yet his narrative voice embodies a universal quality shared by all colonials at the time. That

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Said is doing something new here can best be seen by the fact that one gropes in vain with these reactionary writers for resemblance: whether one likes his contrapuntal procedure or not, one is bound to admit that Empire has always been the theme he has made his own, not least, I have often felt, because he can bring to it a sympathy for rulers, rascals, and ruled (and, indeed, can enact the imperial imposition for order on ragamuffin surfaces, and catch its juxtaposition in his whimsically variational prose). But what ennobles his writings on the Empire is that he can bring into every sentence the firmness of the administrator, the mischief of the renegade, and the wondering sweetness of the local subject. In Culture and Imperialism, he achieves what all of us aspire to, which is to write with one foot inside the worlds he describes, and one foot out, and it is not hard to see that the Empire, in its best moments, was renarrated through and through.

IV Nevertheless, the prestige of Said and the sheer influence of his thought on (English) literature and culture marks both a new phase and one of the high points of the postcolonial movement. Anyone who has studied literature and/or culture cannot, when confronted by his method, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievement, stemming from individual talent, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument(s)—with that craftsmanship of the artisan as perseverer and/or deconstructionist in which postcolonialists take pride. He is a tutelary figure for dozens of artists who constitute, in a free-form way, a postcolonial emergent arts scene. Culture and Imperialism crowns a long and prolific writing career. It is an astonishingly learned, versatile study, which sweeps from Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, C.L.R. James to Fanon, English literature to Verdian opera, brash journalism to political activism. Its chapters are less phases of an unfolding case than lavish textual tapestries, dense works in which Nietzsche, Williams, Naipaul, and Midnight’s Children are packed cheek by jowl. From aesthetics to Season of Migration to the North, Foucauldian recovery to Fanonist resistance the Empire motif is turned like a crystal to the light to display its various facets. If its economies of negotiation, circulation, and exchange can shed light on the fixity of the dividing lines between domination and resistance, it can also run to earth in the politics of postmodernism or contemporary nationalism as well as a number of related matters, all couched in a suave, thought-flow, dense style. Some of the essay’s connections between past and present subjugation, as certain parts of the conclusion might suggest, have a modish ring, and there are parts of its treatment of hybridity (a topic well-nigh de rigueur in writing

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these days) that concede rather a little to exoticism. But this Culture and Imperialism is a major work of literary scholarship, daunting in scope and subtle in perception, whose parts seem to profit from never quite adding up to the whole toward which they gesture. Under Said’s influence, literary criticism flirted half heartedly with structuralism, emerged from a brief affair with Marxism into the grip of Raymond Williams, moved straight through Vico, Gramsci, and Foucault to culture studies, dived into anthropology and teetered on the brink of postmodernism. Said himself emerged as the architect of a new field— namely, postcolonial literature, a revisionist current of Commonwealth literature that scandalized traditionalists with its new relish for readings, analysis, and interpretation. He became a pioneer in “new” readings of canonical texts while loathing insularity and parochialism as well as disdaining “flat-minded” approaches; an avant-guardist who had been hopping from one cultural cutting edge to another for more than three decades. One may well say that what has been unchanging about Said is his open-endedness. This is no doubt partly a matter of temperament and conviction, but also perhaps a matter of his colonial origins. The move from the Middle East to the United States was one between clashing cultural frames, whose partial, perspectival nature he was thus more likely to spot than, say, an American, reared within a wall-to-wall working-class milieu. Said was pitched between conceptual frames as well as countries, alert to the rough edges of any single doctrinal system, as heterodox in theory as he was hybrid in culture. It is no accident that he started with a doctoral dissertation on Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, hardly the most congenial of topics but of obvious appeal to a student of intercultural relations. As he put it: I felt, first coming across Conrad when I was a teenager, that in a certain sense I was reading, not so much my own story, but a story written out of bits of my life and put together in a haunting and fantastically obsessive way. He has a particular kind of vision which increases in intensity every time I read him, so that now it’s almost unbearable for me to read him (in Salusinszky, 1987: 67). His suspicion of fully fledged systems (Frye, Derrida, Fish) is also, ironically enough, characteristically English. The most obviously alluring creed for Said, some sort of Marxism, was one with a notoriously vexed relation to the conditions of the colonized, so that he was bound to come at it lefthandedly. He never reneged on revolutionary Marxism, since he was never much of a Marxist in the first place.28 In postcolonial conditions,

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culture is a vital medium of power, and culture had never exactly been Marxism’s strongest point. If culture is integral to colonial power, however, it is equally central to advanced capitalism, so that Said was able to transport his “culturalism” from the colonial periphery to the metropolitan center. The colonial background that set him askew to classical capitalism—he sprang from the liberal Arab upper class and inherited its habits of thought along with its assumptions of privilege—was also, paradoxically, what lent power to his elbow as a commentator on a media-ridden, post-imperial West for which culture has become increasingly a significant political issue, and which is now undergoing in its own way the kind of identity crisis it once induced in its colonials. By pure chance, Said’s move to America coincided with the dreadfully corrupt King Farouk’s waddle off to Europe and Gamal Abdel Nasser and his free officers’ takeover. Nothing is more native to the colonies than getting out of them. Displacement was to throw up problems of culture and identity in the metropolitan heartland that Said, as an intellectual as well as an exile, was peculiarly well placed to dissect—so that in this sense, too, the margins shifted with him to the center. His in-betweenness meant a heightened awareness of questions about his own as well as other cultures and peoples. Nowhere is this feeling more poignant than in Said’s recalling the relationship that tied him to his music teacher, Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who emigrated to Egypt during the 1930s, carrying with him a whole transplanted tradition of pianism and pedagogy. Further on, Said speaks of their friendship in nostalgic terms: “its bases had shifted to a Cairo of splendid people, charming clothes, magnificent parties, all of which had disappeared.” He also evokes Tiegerman’s other gifted student, A stunningly fluent and accomplished young married woman, a mother of four, who played with her head completely enclosed in the pious veil of a devout Muslim. Neither Tiegerman nor I could understand this amphibious woman, who with a part of her body could dash through the Appassionata and with another venerated God by hiding her face. He concludes: Like Tiegerman, she was an untransplantable emanation of Cairo’s genius; unlike him, her particular branch of the city’s history has endured and even triumphed. For a brief moment then, the conjunction of ultra-European and

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ultra-Islamic Arab cultures brought forth a highlighted image that typified the Cairo of my early years.29 Said insists that his compromised theory about displacement is to belong nowhere. The end result, however, may not satisfy those who “belong” somewhere. Reading the world in terms of culture is a familiar habit of the colonial subject, but it is also an occupational hazard of the metropolitan literary intellectual, and Said happened to be both. He was, however, to blossom into a different species of critic altogether, an aesthete you may say, as Representations of the Intellectual and Musical Elaborations amply testifies. Far more than Michel Foucault or even Raymond Williams, and more persistently than any Third World intellectual, Said has been that other fine instance of the strategic intellectual, theorist as mediator and interventionist, political activist and commentator bringing the more arcane »Ÿ zœ°«[ (knowledge) to bear on questions of televisual imagery and culture. Nimble, mercurial, and tirelessly up-to-date, he has nipped from one burgeoning topical issue to another, turning up wherever the action is, like a cross between a father figure and Mr. Fixit. In some forty years of u\¸cjÉ (perseverance), Said has become an icon of the kind found in Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Raymond Williams in their heyday. His elective genre is the essay, that most supple, tactical of literary forms, and he fashions it with a rare blend of metaphorical flourish and polemical punch. In contrast with the identikit style of many of his acolytes, Said pitches his tone somewhere between heavy-duty theory and learned journalism, at once quick-footed and high-minded, erudite and specialist. He is an original thinker as well as a brilliant bricoleur, an imaginative reinventor of his own ideas. Indeed, he shares with critics like Williams a certain impatience with abstract notions, in which one can detect both the political activist and the residual Jamesian. His concrete, contextualizing style of thought marks yet another fortunate conjuncture between what seems psychologically native to him, and what the age demands. This intellectual range is reflected in his personal serenity of being, which seems to contain multitudes; but if he resembles Williams in his apparent equipoise, he combines it with the irenic and engagé together. “The intellectual must maintain a margin of independence and must be an instrument of resurrecting ‘lost memory,’” he writes (1996: 177). His role as a contemporary intellectual is to extract from the language of the community and of the homeland an idiom capable of articulating both the principles that Julien Benda spoke of some eighty years ago as well as the broad moral interests that define Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual as affiliated not with a privileged, but a grassroots movement. And what is

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perhaps still important, the role of the intellectual for Said is that of witnessing against the misuses of history and the injustices of the time that befall the oppressed. As Milan Kundera once put it: “The writer has original ideas and an inimitable voice.” Certainly Said is a writer in Kundera’s sense. I am not suggesting that he pushes his ideas at us, or that there is something inartistic, insufficiently ludic, about his asking us to think so hard. Only that he uses his works to focus on quite specific questions, rather than allowing his questions to arise, if at all, from a world imagined for its own multifarious sake.

Part Two

Reading the Tradition of the Postcolonial

This sort of Signifyin(g) revision serves, if successful, to create a space for the revising text. It also alters fundamentally the way we read the tradition, by defining the relation of the text at hand to the tradition. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 125.

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Chapter Four

V. S. NAIPAUL: A CRITIQUE OF THE POSTCOLONIAL SIGN The work of V.S. Naipaul is inscribed indelibly with colonial and postcolonial reality. Trinidad served as the initial site for the elaboration of his major problematic (“Who or what am I in this colonial world?”), only to be overtaken by the larger post-colonial world when the author required a larger field in which to develop his doctrines more fully. Trinidad therefore gives way to India, Africa, South America, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and England. The emphasis changed, but the central content of his doctrines remained the same. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading, 17.

Postcolonial discourse today is so unstable as to split quite dramatically into fundamentally discrepant meanings. On the one hand it reverberates against a whole background of colonial conflict in which it searches for itself, and on the other it is driven desperately to fit within the categories formulated by colonial authority. Migrating from the academic periphery to the center, the current orthodoxy of postcolonial discourse has advanced to the point at which certain doctrines concerning agency, hybridity, ambivalence mimic ironically what they are supposed to denounce: the master discourse of hegemonic Europe and America. As Arif Dirlik has accurately shown, the North/South division after the collapse of the Soviet Union is 185

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one between the First World of transnational capital and a Third World of underdevelopment, with the Second World subsumed into the latter within the configuration of a globalized capitalist economy. Of course, Dirlik goes on to demonstrate, there are still “internal” colonies within the advanced West, not only American Indian reservations but “inner cities” inhabited by what has been called “the truly disadvantaged,” the now proverbial lumpen “underclass”: Maghrebians in France, Indians in Britain, Turks in Germany, Hispanics in the United States.1 Postcoloniality is therefore a moment in this worldwide crisis of late imperial culture. Cultural practice registers this historical moment as difference, hybridity, fragmentation—the illusory and often deceptive manifestations of a process of large-scale changes. The postcolonial writer on the other hand labors under the burden of limitations shared by the white bourgeois feminist who, in Maivan Lam’s words, has yet to come to terms “with her given status as heir of an imperial-colonial order” that has subjugated people of color (1994: 871). In the discursive realm of floating signifiers and exorbitant metaphors, the asymmetry of power and resources between hegemonic blocs and subaltern groups (racialized minorities in the Métropoles and in the “Third World”) is no longer objective and may have disappeared all together. What postcolonial discourse hides—racism and exploitation—assumes center stage. One must therefore think of it as the cultural logic of this mixture and multilayering of forms taken as the ethos of late modernity, a logic distanced from its grounding in the unsynchronized interaction between the civilizations of the colonial powers and of the colonized subalterns. It follows that this situation of discourse hardly puts equals faceto-face. Rather, discourse often puts one interlocutor above another. V. S. Naipaul sums up the scene quite intelligently: “If I were an English person trying to be a writer, I wouldn’t know how to start.”2 He, as the dean of the old postcolonial debate, has points to make, but so do other novelists. James Joyce, before him, wrestled with English, its laws and situations. Stephen Dedalus expounds—as he expounds everything else—with extraordinary brio and élan. The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. . . . My soul frets in the shadow of his language (1964: 189).

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That both Stephen and Joyce’s “English” may be thought to be ambiguous because of their respective upbringings in Ireland is neither a disadvantage nor any definitive advantage. It is not just, as Stephen jokes, that “they speak the best English” in Lower Drumcondra or only that his sense of the English language, as he explains it in his discussion with the Dean, is that of a colonized subject, that “it will always be for me an acquired speech” (ibid., 190). Stephen’s Irishness is as ambiguous as his English. In preIndependence Ireland he has as much in common with the resident of any other provincial British city as with the post-independence American, Indian, or Australian citizen. Either experience may underpin the sense of detachment, displacement, and self-consciousness that predates his flight into exile at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and shows itself from the beginning most of all in his sensitivity to the material of words. Joyce on the other hand was an experimenter in pure form—form divorced from content. And his point about discourse may have a double meaning: discourse as discourse and discourse as vocabulary, of the differing meanings or associations of words. The intellectual experience of discourse might be hard to anticipate from its opening. Little could be more startling than the accomplished mixture of language that greets the reader and draws a conceptual map of the writer’s consciousness. The device instantly universalizes his experimentation with linguistic mélange as a means of literary representation.3 For in his attempt at garden, house, plantation, gender, estate, for example, which mean one thing in the metropolis and something quite different to the people from the periphery, say Trinidad, a colony settled for the purpose of plantation agriculture, Naipaul begins by asking: How, then, could I write honestly or fairly if the very words I used, with private meanings for me, were yet for the reader outside shot through with the associations of the older literature? I felt that truly to render what I saw, I had to define myself as a writer or narrator; I had to reinterpret things. . . . My aim was truth, truth to a particular experience, containing a definition of the writing self (1964: 11). With this insight everyone reads his or her own Naipaul, depending on his or her nature, depending on his or her constituency, depending on his or her location, depending on his or her need. Some people might pick up certain half-buried truths and not see others that are more prominent. This is certainly the case with Derek Walcott, who has most memorably voiced the charges against Naipaul: “You spit on your people, / your people applaud, / your former oppressors laurel you. / The thorns biting your

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forehead / are contempt / disguised as concern” (1986: 364). Yet such attacks have too often been cries of outrage and of betrayal, as Selwyn Cudjoe’s contention that Naipaul’s “lack of identification with the national struggles of Third World people” is a mark of his “neurotic indulgence.”4 Both views, that is, depend on his not being white; both views proceed, in an ultimately sterile debate, from Naipaul’s’ refusal to conform to the role a “brown” writer is expected to play. As for Said, the most brazenly impious of the postcolonial literary avant-garde, Naipaul is “a scavenger.” The assailment is of course important and I will return to it in Section Three. Although critics like Cudjoe, Walcott, Said, and others find Naipaul distasteful, they are the ones who so extravagantly define him. No other writer with such casual intimacy as he, for all his delicate soundings of formal and informal colonial relations, finds himself in the vulnerable spot where society touches the root of self. And few writers are at the same time so quietly fearsome and so intensely determined to tell the truth in forthright, self-conscious terms: “There are two kinds of truth: I couldn’t take the real life I saw in Wiltshire and hang philosophical ideas about change on it. You can’t do it, legally or imaginatively, so you create your own construct, which sums up the truth” (1994: 4). The effect is not egotistical; it is on the vocation of writing rather than on his own status as writer that Naipaul has habitually insisted. He writes as if he doesn’t “have a side, doesn’t have a country, doesn’t have a community; one [who] is entirely an individual,” a figure who has in consequence achieved a nearly Brahminical “ideal of non-attachment” (1996: 23). The narrative shows how good he is at dealing with displacement, isolation, and loneliness. In posing the problem of a writer like Naipaul who cannot look away from what he sees (to do that is to create his own area of darkness, a tragic thing for a man whose intellectual clarity and courage have floodlit the literary landscape of our time), I found myself wrestling with his vivid evocation of the sense of loss and rupture, memory and home, fantasy and sexual grace. Then there is the personal and political anarchy between Naipaul the ethnic subject whose passion to blame the victims of colonialism gets its due in a new life every time he writes about matters pertaining to the Third World and Naipaul the almost Englishman whose attitude has recently signaled, in some way, a change of direction. “You have to write a different book from thirty years ago,” he tells Aamer Hussein, “you can’t write the same book. Because you change, your knowledge of the world changes, and the forms have to change to meet the demands of the material you’ve accumulated” (1994: 3). But has Naipaul really changed? A footnote to this claim is worth registering: Naipaul comments that the world is a safer place for those who know where they are going. He explains with delicious offhand aplomb:

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History is an interplay of various peoples, and it’s gone on for ever. I can think of no culture that’s been left to itself. It’s a very simple view of borrowing just began the other day with the European expansion. Think of all that was brought back by the crusaders from the Middle East. The tiles in churches, the pulpit, all that comes from the mosque. Think of the food we eat and the Arabian coffee and Chinese tea and Mexican chocolate we drink. There’s always been this interplay. It continues, but there remain areas of particularity. If you take some literary form without fully understanding its origins and apply it to your own culture, it wouldn’t necessarily work. You can’t apply George Eliot county society to Burma, or India, for example, but people do try (ibid., 4). These “overlapping territories, intertwined histories,” on the one hand, and, differences on the other, in Said’s totemic phrase, arise as we think of a writer with Naipaul’s legendary piques and eccentricities, as someone who leaves his brain behind, back in the study, pressed against the screen of an electronic informer, stuck there like some relentless suction cup, immovable, still trying to make out what will happen next. To examine them, we might unpack a series of interdictions prohibiting such crossings, the kinds of interdictions that appear as historical and social proscriptions, reminding us that, like form and content, the writer and the man cannot be considered apart from each other.5

I Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once pointed out that the term “Indian” is the product of colonial discourse and as a category of identity involves a particular material history of subject constitution by alien forces that cannot be wished away: names “like ‘Asian’ . . . are not anchored in identities. They are incessant fields of recoding that secure identities.” In this respect, Spivak strongly corroborates Gyan Prakash’s argument that the postcolonial subject has been thoroughly “worked over” by colonialism and its legacies is perceptive, to say the least. This can be interpreted to mean that the fetishization of such names as “Indian” or “Asian” as pure essences collapses important class and gender distinctions and inequalities within the master narrative of national or ethnic origin; too much emphasis on the latter conflicts with Spivak’s demand for a persistent acknowledgment of the heterogeneity of “individual” identity. Spivak fails, however, to note that “Indian” is a word that English-speaking colonists have scattered rather

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too casually about the globe. As the title of the poet Gieve Patel, whose poetry tries to reconcile conflicting identities, perceptively tells us: “The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He Being Neither Muslim Nor Hindu . . .” (1993: 202–203). V. S. Naipaul is an “East Indian,” but not from the Dutch East Indies; nor is he an Anglo-Indian, a Red Indian, or an Amerindian. He is of Hindu stock, born and bred in the West Indies. His grandfather went to Trinidad from Uttar Pradesh, as an indentured laborer; his father became a reporter for the Trinidadian Guardian and a writer of short stories, “not for money or fame (there was no local market), but out of some private need,” Naipaul writes. “Not formally educated, a nibbler of books rather than a reader, my father worshipped writing and writers. He made the vocation of the writer seem the noblest in the world; and I decided to be that noble thing” (1973: 11). It was colonial Trinidad, he records, that helped him become a writer, by sending him to England: but it was self-governing Trinidad that sent him on “a colonial tour in 1960—and by this accident [he] became a traveller.” And even though he is now more Wiltshire than Trinidad; Trinidad remains his obsession, his crown of thorns. “It’s quite helpless, really,” he claims. “I can’t do otherwise. I’ve lived there so long mentally. That leaving home was an immensity. I’ve been trying all my life to express that, the bigness of that. The central experience of my life.”6 Much of his fiction and travel writing reflect a strong interest in “unhousing and remaining unhoused,” in people who are at once free and yet also “cut off from a supporting world”; and indeed in the question of where he, and people in like case, colonials and ex-colonials, fit in. Do they belong to the “center” or are they still on the edge? If they are “outsiders,” where is the inside, the “center”? Insofar as the “center” is just as heterogeneous and unstable, in terms of its class, gender, and even ethnic identities, as the “periphery,” the matrices of appositional alliance have become potentially almost infinitely complex, so that various groups can at one time be part of the “center,” at other times of the “periphery,” and, at moments, of both simultaneously. “Put the question like this: does Naipaul’s building himself a house on Salisbury Plain stand as a betrayal of Trinidad, or does it rather alter one’s conception of the English countryside?” Gora asks and replies with equal aplomb, “[Naipaul] himself sees his presence there as a perpetual novelty, an alteration of its human community” (1997: 92). Naipaul has produced both fiction and nonfiction for more than four decades. The links between them have been close. Articles he published in The Sunday Times about Malcolm X and the Black Power killings in Trinidad metamorphosed into Guerillas, his fierce fiction about homicidal “revolutionaries” in the West Indies; “A New King for the Congo,” reporting on Mobutu’s Zaire for The New York Review of Books, supplied the basis for his finest book, A Bend in the River. Further weakening the boundaries between

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fiction and nonfiction, many of Naipaul’s books appear heavily autobiographical (Dissanayake & Wickramagamage, 1993: 44–45). Habitually, they focus on restless, rootless colonials, often with a pen in their hands, who act as surrogates for the author. “It was my hope,” Naipaul writes, to give expression to the restlessness, the deep disorder, which the great explorations, the overthrown in three continents of established social organizations, the unnatural bringing together of peoples who could achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors, it was my hope to give partial expression to the restlessness which this great upheaval has brought about. The empires of our time were short-lived, but they altered the world for ever; their passing away is their least significant feature (1987: 32). The Enigma of Arrival (and A Way in the World with which I will deal later) take the question of nomadology a stage further. Although its subtitle insists that it is “a novel in five sections,” it reads as something scarcely fictional. Still more than the “Prologue to an Autobiography” in Finding the Center, it seems an exercise in self-assessment. Self-scrutiny can easily become self-regard, something Naipaul has been accused of in the past. Here, self-pity sometimes seems dangerously close. When the novel opens, its unnamed narrator, having just moved into new quarters, experiences days of such heavy rain that “he could hardly see where [he] was” (1987: 35). For much of the novel, he stays shut in by damp mists of despondency and loneliness. Uninterrupted introspection is the norm in what a morbidly solipsistic work can be. Solitude has always rather sealed off Naipaul’s protagonists. Even his jaunty first novel, Miguel Street, typed in a crowded office when he was working for the BBC Caribbean Service in Langham Place, conveys a sense of loneliness. On the surface, its Trinidad street community is extrovert, swarming, warm, noisy, and nosy. But links in the ramshackle society portrayed are loose: at the end of almost every chapter, someone drifts away. Feuds and resentments split the togetherness. Many of Miguel Street’s residents, such as the two central figures who clownishly model themselves on Humphrey Bogart and Rex Harrison, are removed from others behind a carapace of eccentricity. Even the narrative’s format, each chapter comprising a separate story that singles out a different individual for inspection, operates a sort of segregation. At the end, the narrator, always on the edge of things, leaves alone for England. Typically, when Naipaul in Finding the Center tells of tracking down the original one of the Miguel Street

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characters in later life, their reunion, which the man tries to dodge, reveals present distance, not past intimacy. Being lonely in a crowd is the standard plight in Naipaul’s work. His travelogues characteristically show him as a harassed misfit in teeming, often overpopulated societies, and silhouette cameos of dissident individuals against a canvas of mass movements and herd responses. In the novel that is most packed with people, A House for Mr. Biswas, the hero is rarely alone and almost always lonely. Marriage into an extended, almost tribal, devoutly reactionary Hindu family pushes this progressive, rationalistic man in on himself. Irately expressed irony and intelligence cut him off from those around him until he seems a foreigner in his own home and often absents himself from it. Elsewhere, a string of exiles, expatriates, and hotel-dwellers file their solitary way through Naipaul’s narratives. Some of his liveliest shorter pieces are stories that consist of monologues delivered by displaced persons: a Hindu who has converted to Presbyterianism, a Bombay domestic transported to Washington, a West Indian adrift in England (1962: 79). Two of these telling tales appear in the collection In a Free State. Its title novella works particularly bleak variations on the theme of lack of rapport, as a couple of formerly casual acquaintances, Bobby and Linda, are flung together on a risky journey through a newly independent African country riven by civil war. Penned together in a car that is hemmed in by thick forest and torrential rain, they still stay worlds apart. Bobby, a comfy paternalistic homosexual keen on African boys, quivers with antipathy at evidence of Linda’s sexual hunger. Outside, the tribal violence they are trying to escape from highlights the frailty and artificiality of their colonial connections with the country (1971). By the time of Naipaul’s next novel, A Bend in the River, the picture has darkened further. Now it is an African who is finally dispossessed and on the run from other Africans. The narrator of The Enigma of Arrival is also a refugee and living in “a kind of limbo.” Born into the colonial world of Trinidad, he was reared, he explains, among its Hindu minority that had been plucked from their peasant life in India several generations back and transferred to the West Indies as an indentured laborer. All this sounds exactly like Naipaul’s own autobiography, as does what follows. A scholarship takes the narrator from his disoriented community to the “dreariness” of Oxford and the “greater dreariness” of metropolitan bed-sitter life. Severed from a rootless background, he has sought revitalization in travel. But years of journeying and journal-keeping have taken their toll. Worn down, he is devastated when a publisher scorns a historical enterprise—sounding like Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado. After collapsing into deathly depression, he takes

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refuge, almost at random, in a rented cottage on what was once a great Edwardian estate in Wiltshire. As he recuperates, he fights off feelings that he has become immaterial, by taking stock of his past and working on some new books (1987: 37). When not mulling over his career, the narrator mooches round the vicinity and surveys in minute detail the two houses he successively inhabits. Like much of the novel, this seems an extension of what earlier works anticipated. Place has invariably obsessed this chronicler of displacement; houses have always been symbolic structures in his fiction. Even in real life, Naipaul keeps two places in London—one an airy duplex with lots of polished blond wood, the other a tiny place he has had for over twenty years, where, he says, “I go and sit and sometimes I take in the silence. Just to be alone. Not to hear voices.” Speaking of his home in Wiltshire, Naipaul describes it as “a house of work” (Schiff, 1994: 63–64). It is no accident that the title of his first novel put its emphasis on location, Miguel Street, or that his evocation of his family’s Trinidadian past is called A House for Mr. Biswas. Whereas the former novel is written in a language not as a broken attempt at higher correctness but as an extravagant game of image and sound—it is a record of the unique explosion that occurred when peoples from the Old World with an intensely musical and oral culture came up hard against the King James Bible and the sweet-talking white English, under conditions that denied them all outlet for their visions and gifts except the transformation of the English language into song. Every section of the latter novel, in fact, is built around an edifice: Hanuman House, aptly named after the monkey-god, where the chattering Tulsi family teem; The Chase, a decrepit store; Green Vale, a laborer’s barracks; and so on. Epitomizing Naipaul’s view of colonial society, when Mr. Biswas, after a transient life in other people’s properties, at last acquires a house of his own, it is jerry-built, precarious, a rickety parody of grand European premises. He ponders over the humiliation of how “terrible it would have been . . . to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated” (1961: 13–14). Wondering at the size and amenity of houses inhabited by some blacks in A Turn in the South, Naipaul remarks that “the houses I was taken to were bigger than the houses many people in Trinidad or England might have lived in. But still, in the past there was that point where darkness fell, the historical darkness, even here, which was home” (1989: 83). The shadow of slavery falls not once but repeatedly in the life of subaltern communities. The black people of the American South lost something of their sense of home by their mid-nineteenth-century emancipation, and something more by the newly acquired freedoms of the Martin Luther

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King era. What they lost was not religion, for both they and the white community have plenty of that, mainly fundamentalist, but a culture of which religion was a great part but only a part. Desegregation was good, but already the historical darkness has fallen on the spirit that animated it. Civil rights protests are still necessary, and still occur, but they are now formalized, like advertising stunts or tourist attractions, events that repeat the great symbolic marches of history but without standing for much beyond the events they themselves are. Naipaul puts it this way: “For twenty-five years . . . I’ve wanted to portray the slave society, the new society that had been created with its new calendars on this aboriginal land, and was the parent of the one I grew up in” (1994: 4). Having written Miguel Street three decades before A Turn in the South, about the former slave colonies of the Caribbean, Naipaul now writes about the slave states of the American South East. But the Caribbean states, when the colonists moved out, were left to their own predicament, self-governing and largely black; the American black was in a quite different position, relieved of certain disabilities but still inescapably a homeless underclass in a white country, needing to make the adaptations necessary to minorities, and even when well-off lacking the measure of wealth that gives power. We thought that once we had the same rights all our problems were over. What happened was that we retained eighty per cent of the historical problem we had, and that now we also had to deal with all of those things associated with being white (Naipaul, 1990: 99). Neither situation, Caribbean nor American, is enviable, but in some ways it seems the American blacks have the worse deal. For instance, individual educational advancement can be impeded by the envy of one’s peers: people should not get above themselves. Blacks like heroes but are oppressed by demons, by continuing white indifference or contempt, which infects them so that they have the same feelings, or lack of feeling, about themselves, even if they are successful and respected politicians. The Caribbean, though also indelibly marked by the inherited disease of slavery, looks almost fortunate by contrast (ibid., 101). Buildings often signal the state of a society in Naipaul’s work. Crumbling foreign styles of architecture, a battered belle époque bridge in Montevideo, Belgian villas reverting to bush settlements in the Congo, stand as reminders of what has happened to colonialism. In revolutionary Iran, it is explained to him, there is to be purely Islamic architecture with “water closets . . . so arranged as to make the seat not to face the city of Mecca

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either from his front or back side” (1982: 79). In The Enigma of Arrival, the landed mansion standing at the center of the story is seen as the image of Edwardian spaciousness and security. Formerly, with the exception of his off-center-seeming English novel, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, Naipaul scrutinizes what he regards as hastily flung up and now tumbledown postcolonial societies: West Indian islands smothering into mob violence, South American nations succumbing to bankruptcy and anarchy, African upheaval, Middle and Far Eastern countries in desperate ferment. Now, the colonial situates himself at what he sees as the heart of the Old Empire. Where impermanence and lack of tradition tormented him on his travels, fixity (a sense of chez-soi) and inherited responses eventually provide solace. Ironically, Naipaul’s pilgrimage in An Area of Darkness to what he had thought of as his true cultural home, “ancestral” India, dealt him his greatest shock of dislocation. Hoping to find a society endowed with a completeness and shape lacking in the muddle of Trinidad, he encountered chaos on a subcontinental scale: devoid of genuine coherence, he came to think, the nation disastrously kowtowed to the parody principles of caste and taboo. And the creation of that disillusionment is due above all to a “world where men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it” (1980: 3). In The Enigma of Arrival, he finds himself feeling most at home where he might least have expected to be. In contrast to the crude colonial societies he has described in narrative after narrative, he explores an environment where everything rests on a rich substratum of antiquity. Here, almost uniquely in his writings, people “still have the idea of being successors and inheritors” (1987: 145). The landscape is as much a matter of history as geography. Barrows gently obtrude. The old wagon and coach roads are still open. A Victorian church looms from a pre-medieval foundation. When the narrative sporadically tries to give the characters independent life, it does so by injections of sensationalism. A sullenly sexy woman observed sunbathing in a cottage garden runs away from her home with a central-heating contractor, we are abruptly informed; then, as abruptly, she returns to her husband; then, in a sudden stab of melodrama, it is announced that he has murdered her with a kitchen knife. This outburst of gory carnality among minor characters adds no real substance to the narrative. But it is typical that sex should breed calamity (another strand of narrative tells of a local housewife’s descent into neardementia after her husband takes up with a “fancy woman”). Marriages, from the bigamy and wife-beatings of Miguel Street onward, have always appeared unappealing in Naipaul’s novels. The big mistake made by the elderly bachelor hero of Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is to try to

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fend off feelings of disorientation brought on by his retirement from work and wedding a young widow. An Indian in one story believes he has lost his soul by marrying a black woman in order to avoid deportation from America. In another, a West Indian horrifiedly watches his brother walk down the aisle with a girl “in white . . . like somebody dead” (1963: 78). Affairs and casual sex emerge as equally unalluring. Salim, in A Bend in the River, has joyless sessions with prostitutes, like numerous Naipaul protagonists, and even the more passionate relationship he has with a Belgian expatriate, Yvette, ends in brutality and ugliness: he battered her face and “spat on her between her legs until [he] had no more spit.” Homosexuals fare no better: when Bobby of In a Free State accosts a young African, “the Zulu spat in his face” (1971: 99). The upshot is: in Naipaul’s anaphrodisiac world, sexual letdown lurks everywhere, including in the real life. This is how he describes his panting teenage sexuality. It is rendered in a self-consciously hyper-adolescent prose of wanting to seduce a female. There was a kind of tremendous sexual soif, very unfulfilled. And I was a very passionate man. I wasn’t spurned; it was incompetence. I didn’t know how to seduce the girl. There were many girls who were very friendly, and I didn’t know how to cope with it. I was untutored. One would like to drive forward, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know about the physical act of seduction, you see. I didn’t know, because I’d never been told. I was too shy. And I don’t know how people learn about the act of seduction, really; I still don’t know. So I became a great prostitute man, which, as you know, is highly unsatisfactory. It’s the most unsatisfying form of sex. Terrible. There is nothing in it. . . . It’s nothing; it’s worthless. However much you tell yourself otherwise, it’s worthless (Schiff, 1994: 66). Because he was locked into a male-centered mind-frame, Naipaul’s phantasms, tied up with longing for the female, are bred by erotic craving for her body. His fear of death shows that the death instinct is the original source of his anxiety, which he deflects onto the original external object: the breast. His pantheon of “breast-envy” looms large in his consciousness. Sexuality is not at the center of Naipaul’s work, but it is near the center, and it deserves a more accurate and knowing treatment than it has received in the past. The more we learn about this sphinx-like writer, the more tricks and wonders we find in his gloriously egotistical prose.

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According to Charles Rycroft, “The breast” is the object of ORAL wishes, IMPULSES, PHANTASIES, and ANXIETIES and is synonymous with “the MOTHER.” . . . “Splitting of the breast” refers to the psychological process by which the infant divides its image of a complete breast into two, one part becoming “the GOOD breast,” conceived to be perfect, lovable, and all-satisfying, the other part being conceived to be hateful and rejecting (“the BAD breast”) (1973: 63). As a defining part of the female body, the breast has been coded with both “good” and “bad.” Eve, we remember from Genesis, was both the honored mother of the human race and the archetypal female temptress. When the “good” breast model is in the ascendance, the accent falls on its power to nourish infants. When the “bad” vision dominates, the breast is an agent of enticement and even aggression. This was the position taken by the prophet Ezekiel, who represented the biblical cities of Jerusalem and Samaria as wanton harlots with sinful breasts.7 And it was true for Shakespeare when he created the monstrous figure of Lady Macbeth, to mention only the most memorable of his “bad-breasted” women. In the psychoanalytic scheme of things, breasts are the source of a person’s deepest emotions. Freud posited that sucking at the breast was not only the child’s first activity, but also “the starting point of the whole of sexual life” (1955: Vol. XVI: 314). For Freud and his followers, human psychology was categorically constructed around the breast and the penis. He always thought of the former as the child’s first “erotogenic zone.” From an initial oral stage at the breast, a normal child would inexorably proceed to anal and genital stages. The pleasurable erotic sensation of sucking at the breast was thought to persist in many unconscious forms throughout an individual’s life. In one of those pithy expressions for which Freud is famous, he spoke of adult love as a return to the maternal breast: “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” (ibid., Vol. VII, 222). He was convinced that sexuality began at the breast and that the mother was in some way the child’s “first seducer” (ibid., Vol. XXIII, 188). Breasts figure prominently in Freud’s basic theory of psychoneurosis, which has its roots in “perverse” sexual development. By “perverse” he means anything that does not lead to the primacy of genital functions over all other adult expressions of heterosexuality. To illustrate how early and later meanings attached to the breast can be confused, Freud often cited an anecdote about a young man who was a great admirer of beautiful women. When the man remembered the good-looking wet nurse who had

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suckled him when he was a baby, he remarked, “I’m sorry that I didn’t make a better use of my opportunity” (ibid., Vol. IV: 204). The breast, then, offers a psychoanalytic paradigm for the Garden of Eden. Once we were all sated in paradise. Later, we were all ejected from the maternal breast (or bottle) and forced to wander in a nonmammary wilderness. As adults, we endlessly seek the comfort of the original bosom, finding it in sexual union, which Freud considers something of a grown-up substitute for the earlier pleasure. “No one,” he remarks, “who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life” (ibid., Vol. III: 182).8 A claim one cannot disagree with. Had Freud been a woman, however, he might have developed a breast-envy theory, instead of his penis-envy one. The same might be true of Naipaul, who harbors the fantasy of the breast that seems to inspire in his male characters both a desire and a rage. The first sentiment usually translates into a need to touch or suck women’s breasts, and the bigger the better. The second sentiment results in self-contempt, which is sometimes displaced into acts of violence against female characters, with breasts specifically targeted for abuse. Naipaul’s recurrent source of erotic dismay, for instance, is the smallness of European women’s breasts. The “poor little breasts,” he calls them, attached to emancipated neurotics receive frequent pitying notice. Scornful attention is drawn to the “topless breastless” women tourists sunbathing in an African hotel. “The self-supporting cut apples of the austere French ideal” are dismissed as utterly untempting by the exiled West Indian politician, Ralph Singh, in The Mimic Men, who “could have stayed for ever at a woman’s breasts, if they were full and had a hint of weight that required support.” But when he marries a woman equipped with large breasts and painted nipples, he discovers that her voluptuous rejoicing in her female contours stems from secret lesbianism. A bizarre final scene administers further aversion therapy for his preference: as an apparently curvaceous prostitute undresses for him, her breasts “casted heavily down. They were enormous, they were grotesque, empty starved sacks . . . wide flabby scabbards which hung down to her middle.”9 As if the woman’s fully exposed breasts were treated as an intrinsic part of her worth as an individual. What do these cryptic notes, penned with the urgency of a novelist approaching old age, mean? We may find an answer to that question in The Enigma of Arrival where a heterosexual carries out murder and a homosexual commits suicide while the central figure wisely remains celibate. The narrative symbolically pairs him, though, with another solitary. His landlord, the estate-owner, is, it transpires, a homosexual recluse. And though

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he and the narrator never meet, he is presented as an inverted image of his tenant. “An empire lay between us,” the narrator ruminates (Naipaul, 1987: 87). One man is a homosexual, imperialist, a dilettante; the other is heterosexual, colonial, a professional writer whose eye has traveled perceptively over a vast variety of scenes, and his writing has dealt with society after society. It turns out to be a catastrophe in which everything has been pulled back through the same framework of thought. “Every exploration . . . added to my knowledge,” Naipaul asserts (Schiff, 1994: 61). And that includes an earlier traumatic loss of face that apparently lay behind his father looking into the mirror and seeing no one there. The experience heralded a nervous breakdown. An irreverently campaigning reformer and scorner of superstitions, Seepersad Naipaul had been terrorized by more orthodox fellow Hindus into beheading a goat as a sacrifice to Kali, the Hindu God of death and destruction. Naipaul, who recounts the episode in Finding the Center, often reflects a similar fear of losing identity. Regarding his writing as a way of allaying this dread, he suggests that both impulses were a legacy from his father, awakening literary ambitions in his son, he also imbued him with “fear of extinction.” That fear, Naipaul remarks, “could only be combatted by the exercise of the vocation,” a vocation magisterially evident in one of his letters to Paul Theroux of January 7, 1970, in which he writes: Unless you understand the destitution I have been writing about, which is total, you will misinterpret. . . . You write the book first; then you live out the truth. Think of it like this: imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write . . . he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn’t exist. . . . Try to understand this and see the effort to make art out of this destitution and alienation (every object the colonial uses presupposes a totally different world from the one the colonial knows). The question . . . is: Is this alienation, however, honestly realised, enough for art? Has art resulted? Is it too private to be of value? (1995: 148). Whether art has resulted, we are not sure. One thing we are certain about, though, is that struggle may not be won but the chronicle of the struggle is victory enough. Naipaul has remarked that his career began with the terror that he might have nothing to say, and that, if he did, he might never find the means to say it. By now he has more than laid that anxiety to rest and this is despite the extreme exhaustion that depletes him with the

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conclusion of a book and of which he speaks whenever he is interviewed. Lately he said that he may not write again. It is possible that he fears becoming like his character in A Way in the World, the black revolutionary Lebrun, who “in extreme old age” can remember the story he is expected to tell his interviewers but tends to forget the point.

II The mixture of skepticism and satire, unwillingness and curiosity, with which Naipaul sets out to write is recorded early in the notebooks, and then carefully prepared for what is to come. “I’m passionate about accuracy,” he claims. “I’ll never alter a word that people spoke; I take it down by hand, and I don’t change it” (1994: 3). Yet just as important is the fastidious purity of his sentence. It is periodic and yet direct. The words seem as if they have been dropped calmly and precisely into place. His measured tone—his “grimly perfect grammar,” in Sara Suleri’s phrase—suggests above all his confidence in his own judicious appraisal of the world. He is not, by temperament, an enthusiastic traveler, but a seemingly bored one constantly surprising in himself a hunger to be entertained. His enthusiasms are reserved, subtle, and genuine; moments of private discovery and unexpected identification are communicated with a wonder that is both deeply felt and detached. Here, in a bazaar in Delhi, a detail from memory, from past journeys through a fictional world, crystalizes. The process of discovering, for oneself, a world one has hitherto known only in books, of identifying real scenes and real landscapes one has only read about in novels and poems— this is something that most colonial writers have experienced, and some, such as Nirad Chaudhuri, have written about vividly (1975: 322–323). The experience of the transformation of literature into reality can be as magical and mysterious as the transformation of reality into literature. “People think that one is a very serious, dour, gloomy man, but one is full of humor,” Naipaul informs us. “That tone is always available to the writer. The humor is always available, waiting to bubble up, when it’s needed” (Schiff, 1994: 63). True, insofar as there are different kinds of humor in all Naipaul’ novels. The humor can be a form of disguised irritation, a venting of spleen in alien surroundings, or simply a sense of discovery: To arrive at a place without knowing anyone there, and sometimes without an introduction; to learn how to move among strangers for the short time one could afford to be among them; to hold oneself in constant readiness for adventure or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried along,

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up to a point, by accidents; and consciously to follow up other impulses—that could be as creative and imaginative a procedure as the writing that came after. . . . Always, at the beginning, there was the possibility of failure—of not finding anything, not getting started on the chain of accidents and encounters (1984: 12). Humor can also be spontaneous and even surreal in its unexpected associations: “Aziz and I have taken to going about upon an elephant in a very dégagé manner” (1991: 3). And it can express the weariness and confusion of traveling through unknown terrain: at such times, it is a form of tolerance of the strange country and of one’s own unsuspected weaknesses. Interestingly, such entries have that knowing bewilderment we associate with Kafka: the unsettling experience of alienation from one’s surroundings, which was to become an important metaphor for the great modern writers, is here, often, a real experience—not myth, but actuality: And for the first time in my life I was one of the crowd. There was nothing in my appearance or dress to distinguish me from the crowd eternally hurrying into Churchgate Station. In Trinidad to be an Indian was to be distinctive. To be anything there was distinctive; difference was each man’s attribute. To be an Indian in England was distinctive; in Egypt it was more so. Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited a special quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality. Again and again I was caught. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd. I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me. I felt the need to impose myself, and didn’t know how.10 A writer who can observe with this kind of sensitivity and acuteness has no business withdrawing from the world. India, he says, was like a neurosis for him, in his childhood imagination, “a most fearful place.” He has met it with pain and bewilderment and his response has been criticism, the telling of truths no one has been willing to tell and not many to listen to. In doing so, he has attempted to diffuse the old neurosis, to retreat to a place in his mind where it cannot conduct its confusion to him any longer. But maya, the Indian notion of the world as illusion, is the most fatal illusion of all. It may serve as a battlement against pain for those who watch, but it falsifies, and it subverts the possibilities. India’s mutinies are not the

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heroic attempts of individuals reaching for their own lives but a resurgence of the old collectivism, fractured into competing narratives: fundamentalisms, tribalisms, nationalisms. (I will come back to this point later.) Naipaul’s first novels were significantly emphatic, that most stylized of genres, and A Way in the World could be mistaken for one if it did not take place in turn-of-the-sixteenth-century New World. Not that the elements of its style—a widely admired ear for dialogue—are quite what they appear. His dialogue does have a distinctively vernacular flavor, but the effect depends largely on the elided conditional—a knack for dropping “ifs” and “whens”. Naipaul shows his usual flair for characters, and he is good with history writ large—he evokes a bygone world of treachery and danger. When he describes how Raleigh and Miranda are unmasked in their conquistadorial deceits, and are in turn deceived as their ambitions unravel, we see him adding a new turn to the bitter farce of failed colonial mimicry that has been a leitmotif throughout his work. For, if the men whom the postcolonials seek to mimic are themselves “mimic men,” the only hope for individual authenticity resides in mimicking something that has only been imagined but never realized. This may seem a more forgiving view of human folly than we have come to expect of Naipaul, but it is in fact also his bleakest. Yet even now, as he sums up his life’s work, he is careful to include himself in the group portrait he is painting: Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. . . . We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves (1994: 176). Naipaul recognizes that he, too, will become an ancestral figure—that, however potently and truthfully he renders his account, it is finally only a way in the world, not the way. Throughout the novel, and especially in the first and final chapters, he leaves no room for doubt that what he calls “the mess”—the bloody cycle of racial, caste, and cultural conquest and revenge that has defined the history he writes—is far from spent, and will continue after he is no longer around. A Way in the World continues in a mood of somber self-reflection. Billed as a novel, it lacks the customary narrative or plot one associates with the form.11 Instead, autobiography and history are once more combined to form a kind of sustained meditation on Naipaul’s Caribbean origins, tracing the process of his own development as a persona and as a

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writer. Naipaul envisions Sir Walter Raleigh and the Venezuelan revolutionary and adventurer Miranda as precursors of his own journey from Trinidad to Oxford, from the obscurity of the margins to worldwide fame. These sections Naipaul presents in dialogue, as a kind of play or screenplay, though one that defies production. Here, Naipaul seemingly eschews anything as mundane as fictional entertainment; he is intent on defining the cultural and political forces of empire that ultimately produced both his work and character. The novel is more conventionally novelistic when Naipaul describes his relations with a fictional British writer of the 1930s named Foster Morris who, equal parts generosity and condescension, takes the fledgling Trinidadian under his wing at the start of his career. Other early influences are recalled in Lebrun, a failed West Indian radical, and Blair, a pioneer Trinidadian Black Power politician. In this novel, Naipaul jettisons Conrad as a model in favor of Proust. As usual, his insight is dazzling. “They only feel rich,” he observes of Trinidad’s early plantation owners, “if everybody else around them is in rags” (1994: 45). However, much readerly patience is required as Naipaul parades us through Raleigh and Miranda’s difficulties with heat, disease, and treachery in the kind of detail that could only interest a professional historian. Nevertheless, Naipaul seems to have embarked on an autobiographical quest every bit as epic as the travels that took him around the globe. If it sometimes seems vainglorious that he has marked out generals and military governors as his own predecessors, one only has to recall Conrad’s dictum that writing a good novel takes equivalent courage and determination as conquering a colony. For Naipaul, this obsessed writer at a moment of supreme fulfillment, yet still oddly anxious, as though fearful of some possible lack, some inconceivable failure, the bluff and affable manner of Foster Morris, the failed writer, cannot hide the evidence of an inner incompleteness—”the dimness of the eye, the withdrawal, the man removed” (ibid., 96). At the end of his life, despite his status as prophet of black liberation, Lebrun is still “on the run” from the same colonial origins and still liable to show it at moments when he is caught off balance: “the old man . . . expressing old hurt” (ibid., 119). Naipaul’s sympathy for the fragile men who populate his narrative is tempered by his sense of the harm they are capable of doing. A Way in the World includes only one man who, we are given to feel, Naipaul would accept as a teacher: the gentle De Groot, who represents no threat. Otherwise there are no characters in the novel to set the standard by which the sad men are found wanting, only Naipaul himself. Meanwhile, the elegist in him writes not only out of a love for the delicate beauty and complexity of the world and a desire to mourn its transience, but out of fear of the future (“worrying always about finding the matter

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for the next novel, and then the one after that”) and a distrust of the present (“We don’t always know what we are doing now. We can just get dragged along,” as General Hislop says to Miranda (ibid., 213). Naipaul fares on men who have run away from the past, but he writes as a man who has run away into it. His political conservatism is not just the fruit of his wisdom but also the expression of his insecurity. Like Mr. Biswas, he is in search of a home. He wanders the world, anxiously fingering his British passport, “always nervous, when I was travelling, of losing it,” he informs us, “and doubting whether, if I lost it, I would be able to explain myself to anyone in authority.” To such a man the crowd is “unreadable” and threatens to swallow him up. He cannot “support the idea of being part of a group” and recoils when he is invited to join a cause.12 Naipaul may be the last of a special breed of wide-ranging literarypolitical postcolonial writers who have inspected the successor states and reported their findings with a severity that seems designed to challenge the paternalist sentimentality that comes so easily to those of us who think of ourselves as descendants of the white imperialists.13 The late Mobutu Sese Seko is a case in point. He stood for what Eqbal Ahmad terms “the new pathology of power” that gives rise to national security states, to dictatorships, oligarchies, one-party systems. A long-time despot, the epitome of the Third World “hollow man” who governs by theft and fear, a ruler of a vast African land—bigger than France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Britain combined—Mobutu was ruthless and cruel. Like Leopold II before him, he used his dictatorship as a license to print money while draining huge private fortunes from the territory, and like Leopold II, he renamed a large African lake in honor of himself. Some of the sources of the current bloodshed in the Great Lakes Region stem directly from his mismanagement. In running what was then called Zaire as a business for himself and his entourage, Mobutu was merely following the pattern set by Leopold II, a century ago.14 When Salim, the protagonist, in A Bend in the River realizes what could happen to him under a dictator like Mobutu, that he could end mercilessly killed like the rest of the subjects, he decides to emigrate. From an East African Muslim Indian family, Salim drifts into the interior ruled by the Big Man, then leaves the place forlorn and completely dejected. Naipaul’s ideological point is that the triumph of nationalism in the Third World not only “suppresses the very real tensions . . . unresolved” in the postcolonial state, but also eliminates the last hope of resistance against it, as well as the last civilizing traces of Western influence. For Naipaul, the Third World is teeming with men like Mobutu; men who have yet to recover from their colonial hangover. They display characteristics common to their counterparts in many former colonies: they are insular and insulated, incestuous, smug, and contemptuous of the masses. They profess

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egalitarianism while siphoning off their countries’s natural riches. In fine, they are “half-made” and therefore badly in need of “Big Brother’s” help. Naipaul thinks he is justified in pronouncing his sentence. “Mattresses and cushions were made, and possibly sold,” so he writes in A House for Mr. Biswas, “and in that comma,” Gora adds, “lies all the heartbreak of the developing world” (1997: 71). As he began imagining how this historical material about what he calls “Bush Men” might generate works of fiction, Naipaul bumped into one of the banes of creative artists everywhere: the intrusion of the Third World into the space of private concentration. He dived headlong into this field of intellectual possibility. But does this endeavor reflect honest human complexity or colonial confusion? In what world, if any, is Naipaul ever at home? We may never know the answer to these questions even if we attempt one, insofar as we cannot escape feeling that Naipaul’s works are created in a state of battlement. At times, it seems as though the whole edifice of what he writes, the pugnacious virtue of it, is an armor he has put on to rebuff the world in his own struggle for regard and against disregard. At other times he resembles his character Blair, who made a good career for himself as a spokesman for the black cause, but met his end, ironically, at the hands of the agents of a black African state which he had come to advise. His body was found in a banana plantation. It had a special atmosphere. Old banana leaves, quickly drying and breaking down, and many inches thick, were used as a mulch. To walk on this mulch was like walking on a very thick, soft carpet. It deadened footsteps and seemed to absorb all other sound, and you very quickly began to feel uncertain of your footing. In the version of this death I carried in my imagination I saw Blair alive in that Banana plantation, a big man floundering about in silence in his big, shiny-soled leather shoes in the soft mulch, between his sure-footed attackers. There would have been a moment in that great silence when he would have known that he was being destroyed, that his attackers intended to go to the limit; and he would have known why.15 A grim reminder of the horror of the past, whether the ancestor was a plantation owner or an indentured laborer. Finally, at other times still, Naipaul seems to come to terms with his own shortcomings. After he was knighted for his services to literature, he went once more to India, and wrote India: A Million Mutinies Now, which

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may be thought to make amends for what had been said in the past, at least as far as India was concerned. It’s an account of a civilization at a hinge moment. . . . The idea came to me that the truth about India wasn’t what I thought about India, it’s what they are living through. That is the great discovery; I moved to it slowly through earlier books, the books about the Islamic countries and the Deep South (ibid., 64). Naipaul expounds that he has come to see what was hidden from him before: that a change has been in train since the nineteenth-century mutiny and that it has accelerated since independence; that the country has been restored to an ancient self, while gaining a new freedom and selfconsciousness—qualities that, India being India, have been attended, but not so far endangered, by rage, disorder, “a million mutinies.” The novel does not argue for, or otherwise enforce, these conclusions, though they are anticipated at various turns in the multilateral discussion it presents.16 In point of fact, all three novels An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now are in their different ways remarkable. Together, they communicate a progress from youth to age, an accession of prudence and reserve, the airing and suspension of an exigent authorial self. The more sympathetic and less censorious tone of the third volume may well reflect a greater maturity. In it, Naipaul speaks approvingly of the emergence of “a central will, a central intellect, a national idea,” and disarmingly, even movingly, confesses to the atavistic edginess of mood in which he made his first trip almost thirty years earlier: “The India of my fantasy and heart was something lost and irrecoverable. . . . On that first journey, I was a fearful traveller” (1990: 211). His long residence in Wiltshire seems to have deepened his understanding of himself in relation to the beloved and hated country of his ancestors. What is best about the third volume of the series on India is its focus on “the creative urge” and growing quality of India itself as opposed to the uncompromisingly harsh yet honest account of the poverty, superstition, and cruelty he had seen there during his first visit. “It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad” (1964: 105). Or to his second account, a bitter analysis of a culture coming “face to face with its own emptiness.” According to Naipaul, in a “wounded civilization,” “an ugly world, a jungle,” a disorderly, overgrown, untended, and abhorred condition of humanity, unpruned by the careful shears of civilization, one is never self-sufficient. And the picaroon society, being without standards of its own, becomes a garbage can in

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which the detritus of other cultures can be thrown. Both An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization created an outcry. Naipaul was branded a neocolonial, uncomprehending, and, above all, uncompassionate. But he had himself said that contempt was what he had to fight against, and his writing remained scornful not only of India but also of the rest of the Third World. Yet there are disturbing glimmers in those earlier books of a dark temptation to give way to a current of uncritical thinking. “Men might rebel,” he adds, “but in the end they make their peace.”17 An Area of Darkness ends with a half-regret that he could not grasp the despairing Indian sense of life as an illusion. Nevertheless, his three volumes on India are key texts, and not only because of the hackles they have raised. (Kanga, 1990).

III Naipaul—resident off and on in England, yet always on the move, revisiting his Caribbean and Indian roots, shifting through the debris of colonialism, remorselessly judging the illusions and cruelties of independent states and the new true believers—is both a figure of modern intellectual displacement and travel writing. Compare him to another much discussed transplanted Indian writer (Salman Rushdie), and the drama is immediately heightened, the contest fully situated. Both are Third World natives, both displaced Indians, both eminent writers in English, both restless migrants to the world’s trouble spots, analysts of problems that will not go away (Said, 1987). Their elective genre is the novel, and they fashion it with a rare difference, which of course points to a difference between their conceptions of its form: Rushdie uses it to articulate a sense of national identity, whereas Naipaul uses it to claim for his character (I am thinking of Mr. Biswas) the sense of individual dignity that colonialism would deny him. Both approaches seem to me valid, but Rushdie’s does have the advantage of dealing with the full weight of what Homi Bhabha would call the character’s “historical and political significance.” Unlike Rushdie, however, Naipaul has been after the scraps of the Empire and perhaps more important after the Third World’s failures, its tawdry hypocrisies, its sordid tyrannies. “He became the writer to whom many in Europe and North America looked for authoritative reports on the state of the third world,” Michael Gora writes in a style blending archness and directness to striking effect, “believing that because of what Irving Howe called the ‘steely perspective’ of his attacks on that world—attacks by someone with his biography—they must necessarily carry the note of truth. And the angrier the attacks grew, the more they were taken as a sign of his own impartiality” (1997: 72). The game of masks is a common one in literature, but

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it is difficult to think of another writer who is strongly divided against himself, oscillating between the grand and the abject. Naipaul delights in playing outsized roles: scourge of Third World humanity, pillar of Western representation of it. He also makes himself the poet of the witheredhearted novelists, the godfather of “the death of the novel,” as Rushdie once put it. In old age, as his eminence swells to absurd proportions, he becomes openly mischievous, purveying the erotic comedy of holy sinner and the unfinished confessions of a man of confidence. But the bravery— its grandeurs, sorrows, sly wit—still amazes. “Naipaul,” Edward Said observes, A remarkably gifted travel writer and novelist, successfully dramatizes an ideological position in the West from which it is possible to indict the postcolonial states for having succeeded unconditionally in gaining independence. His attack on the postcolonial world for its religious fanaticism, degenerate politics, and fundamental inferiority is part of a fundamental disenchantment with the Third World that overtook many people during the 1970s and 1980s (1994: 49). By describing him in such terms, Said appears a blithely staunch ally of the victims Naipaul continues to blame. The charge is, however, aimed less at Naipaul the novelist than at the circumstances that created him. But the temptation to treat a writer like Naipaul, the way Said does, for example, with his betrayals, deceptions, and truths, as a kind of holy guru who writes about the Third World as if it were an enormous Disneyland for the Western mind, or as a vast trampoline for Western leaps into the obscure and the mystical, can be misleading. Such temptations prevent many critics, including Said, from ever really looking at Naipaul objectively insofar as he does at times attack things worth attacking. As one leading South Indian novelist put it rather well: “I’m anti-Naipaul when I visit the West, but I’m pro-Naipaul back home” (Rushdie, 265). We need to come to terms with this claim. Let me go back to the basics. The novel (A Bend in the River) that Said deals with overlooks three things that would contradict the notion presented by him—namely, that Naipaul is a neocolonial whose works expound the view that the Third World has benefited from the civilizing mission (hospitals, schools, roads, railways, education, democracy). The narrator mentions a European priest favorably because he seems to have sympathy with an understanding of African culture; this priest is later found beheaded. However, it turns out that the priest has been a serious collector of African art for Europe, so his sympathy for African culture

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is an exploitative one. Second, an old friend of the narrator from East Africa turns up in Zaire working for a radical educational project funded by an American foundation. Later, this friend is disillusioned because when he visited his sponsor in America, he found nothing of Africa in his house. Third, the narrator makes the comment that the Europeans want it all: to have slavery and to have statues erected to them for abolishing slavery. Given the deliberate Conradian echoes in the novel, the priest would seem to be an updated Kurtz, from Conrad’s Holroyd, who finances a silver mine in the Third World (Costaguana) as a hobby. The narrator’s brutalizing of his lover, a Belgian woman, is not to be taken as Naipaul’s misogyny: it must be be seen in the context of a movement toward perhaps a distorted self-discovery by the narrator, that he has a colonial hankering for whiteness. Given my use of “signifying,” the latter idea includes the extent to which the oppressed writer has to use strategy with the language of the colonizer to get his or her message across. Then, the question that arises can be formulated as follows: Could Naipaul be using a trickster strategy of narrative? Could his essay on Mobutu, for example, have been written in such a way that it would appear to reinforce European prejudices that the Third World was innately backward—or else his trip to Africa would not have been funded—and then he used the same experience to write a novel that appeared to say the same thing but underneath was undermining colonialism and neocolonialism? In this connection, the strategy Conrad, whom Achebe accused of “racism,” must have had to employ as an outsider (a Pole) trying to publish an anti-imperialist text in English at the height of the British Empire is an astute one to say the least. Contrary to what Said thinks, as we read on, this interpretation begins to matter more than the charged view he brings to the table. It is true that in In a Free State, Guerillas, and A Bend in the River, Naipaul is more scornful of the desperate unpreparedness for self-rule that haunted Third World nations. Imported corruption had given way to home made corruption, a debilitating cycle of revolutions and counterrevolutions, and he is all the more merciless in his examination of the price paid by his characters for their mislaid hopes in tyrannical personality cults. “You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time” (1980: 34). Salim in A Bend in the River knows that out there anarchy is the rule of the game. Unafraid of the politically incorrect word “primitive,” Naipaul portrays the postcolonials as people without a guiding sense of history, who had passed from millennia in the bush, through centuries of colonial humiliation, to emerge at the dawn of independence with barely a clue as to how to conduct themselves in the contemporary world. The resulting anarchy, as he describes it in his report on the Ivory Coast, The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,

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bears less resemblance to any modern politics than to the ancient, and largely fragmented, spirit cultures of animistic, magic-driven, fetish religions. In fine, “postcolonials are chamchas, the Urdu word for ‘spoon’ and slang for ‘sycophant,’ the name Rushdie gives to the main character of The Satanic Verses, an Indian-born professional mimic, a man with a thousand voices who in private life has remade himself as an Englishman—accent, bowler hat, member of the Garrick Club” (Gora, 1994). Naipaul’s target is that Third World nations who in the past incurred the wrath of the stern European white man, a kind of Puritan superego whose errand into the wilderness knew few boundaries, are today in most cases a fragile shell of exploded aspirations, a constitutional garbage can of shattered loyalties, a cemetery of projects without a future. In other situations, governments without talent and politicians without conscience wade ever deeper into the miseries of failure. Many explanations have been offered, but it is Ikem—the hero of Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah—who finds the central reason for this failure before he, too, has to meet the killers. The reason “can’t be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly intolerable: it isn’t the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is: it isn’t even this second-class hand-me-down capitalism, ludicrous and doomed.” These are the effects of failure; the cause is elsewhere. It rests, Ikem concludes, “in the failure of our rulers to reestablish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being” (1988: 145). The root failure, in short, lies in the workings of a nation-state that has deprived its rulers of any sufficient legitimacy with the people whom they are supposed to serve and protect. This handed down “structure of feeling” that informs so much of Naipaul’s writings has seldom managed to become more than a product of largely alien creation. For postcolonial independence, tragically or otherwise, the Third World nation-state has had to play Hamlet without the prince. Another product of a colonially based education that did not prevent independent thinking, Achebe, who assessed his own indigenous culture that, as he could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears was far away from the uncreative heathenism ascribed to it in European books, set about writing his own version of the African past and present, derived from the stories, languages, and festivals that surrounded him in his early life.18 Unlike Achebe, when Naipaul writes about the Third World, he sees it through Western eyes, although it must be said that there is also a Western perception of the Third World that celebrates its incomplete industrialization and retention of ways of life that evoke a nostalgia for Europe’s rural past. And because the obstacles his characters face are also his own, he refuses to excuse them any more than the harsh reality they inhabit will

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excuse them, for their sloppiness and failures. As he put it to the author of a profile of him in The New Yorker: People are not intelligent enough in their analysis of what’s wrong with their societies. They only know about their enemies. My attitude has always been different: that one must look inward and understand why one is weak, why a culture like mine or like the one in India, from which I come ancestrally—why they are so without protection in the world. And this has taken me to a higher global understanding of things (Schiff, 1994: 67). An unsentimental attitude to which his critics retort: your characters do not enjoy your advantages and critical distance from the circumstances that defeat them. You are in fact blaming the victims. In his aversion to Naipaul, Said is true to his own inclinations. He labels him a “scavenger.”19 Worse, he accuses him of cynically perpetuating a minstrel tradition meant to make white audiences laugh at the natives. Derek Walcott, in whose poetry manners are often nonblunt instruments of destruction, can be condescending about Naipaul, though he has acknowledged his genius as the best prose writer in English living today: The myth of Naipaul as a phenomenon, as a singular, contradictory genius who survived the cane fields and the bush at great cost, has long been a farce. It is a myth he chooses to encourage—though he alone knows why, since the existence of other writers in no way diminishes his gift. . . . There is something alarmingly venal in all this dislocation and despair. Besides, it is not true. There is, instead, another truth. Naipaul’s prejudice. Frankness does not absolve him of it. Of course prejudice comes from history, from the hoarded genealogy of the tribe; yet if Naipaul’s attitude toward Negroes, with its nasty little sneers . . . was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness? Who would have exalted that ‘honesty’ for which he is praised as our only incorruptible writer from the Third World?20 No one, it seems, has ever been neutral or aloof about V. S. Naipaul. Selwyn Cudjoe goes farther afield than either Said or Walcott in describing Naipaul as an “apologist for the imperial world order,” scornful of Caribbean culture values and even, in his response to his native Trinidad, “psychotic”

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(1988: 37). The only booklength assessment to date of Naipaul grounded in contemporary literary theory, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading offers a responsible “new historicist” reading (one that locates the author’s work in the sociocultural context of colonialism and postcolonialism) as a corrective to earlier “idealist” interpretations, those that neglected the ideological and cultural determinants of Naipaul’s works and saw only his technical virtuosity, not his limitations. A Trinidadian native, Cudjoe presents an extended analysis of what he terms Naipaul’s “increasing identification with the dominant imperialist ideology and racist preoccupation of the time” (Ibid., 82). Cudjoe’s overall aim is polemical—to demonstrate to First World scholars and critics that despite Naipaul’s ethnic and national background, he evinces a growing racism and misanthropy that invalidate his so-called expertise in postcolonial societies. Cudjoe contends that the impetus behind most of Naipaul’s writing is his ambivalent relationship with his original home, Trinidad; his work should therefore be studied in the context both of Caribbean literary and historical tradition and the larger field of postcolonial discourse. Basing his analysis on a thorough knowledge of West Indian literature and Hindu philosophy, he demonstrates the evolution of Naipaul’s vision from a productive ambivalence toward the Third World in the early texts to what he deems a “morbid” self-preoccupation and “nihilistic” crude racism. He adds that Naipaul is so interested in himself and in the stature he has gained as a writer that he is “not remotely concerned with the developmental possibilities of Third World people.” Naipaul has accepted the European stereotype of the “savage,” thinks of blacks as “monkeys pleading for evolution” and having a horror of the “bush.” A chronological survey of Naipaul’s works leads Cudjoe to the conclusion that Naipaul has hysterically displaced “the reality of the postcolonial world,” even while in London and New York authoritative voices claim that he, almost alone, understands it (1988: 45–47). In doing so, Cudjoe joins Fawzia Mustafa’s argument that Naipaul has constructed his career in terms of an Aristotelian plot, “the resolution of which is a culmination of all that has preceded it, and which accords the hero initiation into an elect group” (1995: 7). That simultaneous tearing down of the Naipaul edifice is finally the subject of Rob Nixon. In London Calling, he unmasks what he regards as the falsity of Naipaul’s position as a disinterested observer of, and expert on, the Third World. Nixon reacts to such metropolitan judgments as “unarguably the most brilliant interpreter in English of the maelstrom of the Third World, its Solzhenitsyn.” How has such “distinctive authority” been achieved when, in his view, Naipaul complies so willingly but so disablingly with “imperialist discursive traditions.” Nixon explains it in part as a result of the author’s repeated insistence that he is always on his own,

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a displaced, homeless citizen of the world, an unprejudiced observer, a marginal man, untainted by ideology. He admits that there had to be an enormous initial effort for Naipaul to become a writer at all, an effort requiring him to break away from his roots. But having won acceptance in the metropolis he allowed independence of mind to degenerate into bigotry, and “a disfiguring anger” against his native heritage and people of his like. So he now gives comfort to those who like to believe that “the problems of postcolonial nations are largely self-inflicted.” There is shrewd analysis of certain of Naipaul’s habitual expressions, his use of such words as “mimicry,” “parasitism,” “barbaric,” “primitive,” “selfviolation,” “exile” (rather than “expatriate,” “emigrant,” or the like). It is sometimes said that Naipaul can be as tough on the First as on the Third World, but that is not so, Nixon expounds. When he gets round to England (in The Enigma of Arrival) and America (in A Turn in the South) his tone becomes “unprecedentedly benign.”21 Both these books, the former by a Trinidadian Hindu literary theorist living and working in the United States, the latter by an American literary intellectual, show their authors’ assiduous archival research and scrupulously up-to-date documentation, argument, and flair. Like Said and Walcott, Cudjoe and Nixon fall short, however, in trying to understand how the advent of Naipaul was a political event as much as a literary one. In what was called “Commonwealth Literature,” after all, there was nothing new in the image of the native as an inarticulate savage for whom theft, rape, and murder were nearly inevitable means of expression. “Commonwealth Literature, ” which Naipaul along with Lloyd Fernando, Clark Blaise, and Salman Rushdie reject, was filled with such portraits. In the making of a revolution, all that had shifted was the author’s color and the blame. Neither do they (Said and co.) see how Naipaul’s late works do in fact bear witness to his slow, bitter, and painful realization of the inauthenticity of his early education, at its best, a secondhand and second-rate one. Michael Gora captures the latter view with dash and brio: School reading lists are narrow, and in the colonies they were indeed used to provide a justification, in the realm of “culture,” for the fact of British rule. . . . Mimicry may be servitude, but so is an insistence on one’s own marginal status, and to resist the canon is above all to accept the permanence of that marginality (1997: 92). Having grown up in “small, remote and unimportant” Trinidad and because Trinidad was a “formless, unmade society . . . without mythology,”

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Naipaul sees it as he does the rest of the Third World as an area of darkness surrounding the poorly lighted space of his childhood experience. Put differently, Naipaul is a good example of a white man’s brown man who in his youth was exposed to a typical colonial education, transmitted out of context to an uncritical and passive clientele, a victim of unrecognized and much-prized imperial propaganda. Gora expresses its shortcomings best: For the universalist rhetoric of a colonial education, with its emphasis on a “great tradition” that always somehow turns out to be English, works by denying the value of a specifically colonial experience. Homi Bhabha has worried that the incorporation of A House for Mr. Biswas into such a tradition has come at the cost of ignoring that specificity. Suleri finds that anxiety in Naipaul himself, suggesting that his own relation to the canon remains antagonistic. Gora goes on quoting Suleri as saying: “‘The literary becomes an equal participant in the outrage of colonial history’” (ibid., 91). Many recipients of such an education internalized imperial, English values underpinned by the belief in the inherent superiority of European civilization. Such cultural hybrids, whose landscapes were permanently colonized by the English language and English literary culture, would almost inevitably feel themselves to be misfits in their indigenous culture, the way Naipaul does, for instance, distanced and alienated by a superimposed sensibility. For “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content,” Fanon expounds. “By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it” (1961: 210). That in the process colonialism ends up creating not individuals but types that “cannot quite overcome the abstractions from which they sprung” as R. P. Blackmur would have it. Ironically, self-realization by the culturally dispossessed of former colonies seems possible only after long years spent in the so-called “mother country,” whose cultural mores bear little resemblance, it begins to seem, to the ideas embedded in distorted but vitally influential colonial textbooks.22 Sara Suleri suggests that Naipaul destabilizes the canon by seeking to join it. The dilemma that colonial education raises is captured in The Mimic Men when Ralph Singh reminisces about his Caribbean childhood. He intones that the vocabulary of reference and value originated from outside the world he came from. One day in school, during his teacher’s evocation of Canada, Singh ruminates:

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There, in Liege in a traffic jam, on the snowy slopes of the Laurentians, was the true, pure world. We, here on our island, handling books printed in this world, and using its goods, had been abandoned and forgotten. We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new (1969: 146). While I share Said’s argument that Naipaul is a “scavenger,” I, however, maintain that he, like other writers as diverse as Paul Theroux and William Boyd, Patrick Marnham or Shiva Naipaul, sits squarely within archival Western traditions established in the colonial period—which are most readily identifiable with Conrad and Evelyn Waugh, respectively. He, like them, can hardly disguise his contempt for what he regards as the jerrybuilt societies of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In his works on the Third World, the Naipaul tone is tart to the point of downright sourness. It is what Selwyn Cudjoe has aptly termed “definite hostility.” He maintains that Naipaul “must be understood as a product of his history and his time, as a writer who has aligned himself with the values and preoccupations of the dominant Western culture” (1988: 133). For Cudjoe, not only is Naipaul a writer’s writer, he is the misanthrope’s misanthrope. Yet, as Suleri has perceptively demonstrated, the time has come for such critiques to be prepared to admit that “Naipaul has already been there before them, and has been exquisitely angry at himself” at the way in which his very existence requires that self-betrayal (1989: 48). It is important not to blink at what he had to face and how it made him feel. Anger, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world we (postcolonials) came from. It is the world Naipaul rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves— pulling up roots, moving about, writing—that have given us something entirely new. And who is to say that this is not an achievement?

IV Nobody is what at first he seems in Naipaul’s territory. Each of his beleaguered characters flee their place of origin, shifts identities, and returns to find that they and the place are no longer what they were at parting. Yet if centuries of mixing have made the world Naipaul describes quite restless, his narrative charts his characters’ rises and falls with a detached sympathy. It shows a new kind of nonlinear history for a people who have not lived in a world of linear progression. The lesson is simple: nomadology

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“is the primal human experience.”23 Under the circumstances, the quest for one’s place, one’s home, which was a central concern in A House for Mr. Biswas, for example, is doomed to prove illusory in A Way in the World. As the title suggests, Naipaul now believes that the best one can hope for—a great deal in his estimation—is to find one’s way. Naipaul premises his work on the paradigm given by the cultural and social upheaval within and/or after colonialism. It is expressed well in the following excerpt. Immediately after the cassava-bread reverie, Naipaul’s “narrator” arrives at his destination, where, he is startled to see almost naked white boys with bows and the small Indian arrows hiding behind the grass and boulder at the water’s edge. Not the arrows of the craft shops on the coast: the real arrows, from the forest. . . . There is no mystery: the children are from the new settlement in the clearing. They are playing at being Indians. The narrator is expected (1994: 189). In a few strokes, Naipaul has bounced from the opening of Heart of Darkness, with Marlow cogitating on the Thames, to the climax of that novella: Marlow’s encounter with the white hunter, Kurtz, who became brutal in pursuit of ivory to build up Europe. But he has jumped beyond Conrad’s early twentieth-century view of the colonial world to the post-imperial inversions of century’s end. “They are playing at being Indians. The narrator is expected.” The horror Kurtz found in the premodern jungle has become a masquerade and, as Naipaul unravels it, the confusion of identities wrought by displacement proves a very complicated echo chamber. But no matter how we interpret Naipaul, as a colonial or neocolonial who depresses us with his negative labels, we must understand his plight as a writer whose raison d’être is to deliver the truth, sour though it may be. Hence rises Naipaul the sign-writer in the aftermath of Empire, the only writer ever with the exception, perhaps, of C.L.R. James, whose early formation in British colonial schools brought forth a wonderful appreciation of English culture as well as a serious disagreement with it, and, who at the other end of the spectrum in a harmonious and ingenious fusion of anecdote, report, analysis, and comment, conjugated resistance, literature, sport, and politics. In Naipaul we find both the gifted storyteller, the “scavenger,” the elegist, the lover and/or hater of beings and destinies, and the journalist to boot who is not afraid to raise disturbing questions about our predicament even if at times he does it in a wholesale manner. Naipaul knows the laws of artistic daring: not only does he listen to the world but seems to prevent it from drifting apart. He keeps fading in and

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out of it while it defines itself in the experiences of its people and their dreadfulness. Energized by the tension between a feeling of belonging to the Third World and rejecting it, Naipaul remains its scourge. The dialectical contradictions that jolt us along the way while we read him may, in fact, be viewed as a means of speeding up a process that, in other forms of literature or in life itself, may proceed in a far more gradual and continuous way. Between Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce shifts from a traditionally novelistic, slowly evolving conception of growth to one that is essentially dramatic and dialectical. Naipaul, too, depends for his effectiveness on formal language, not merely in its cadences, but in its reflection on the world. There can be no second thoughts on that. Given his acute sense of home-lessness, of what was left behind, it is all the more remarkable that he manages to order and express perceptions of his immediate surroundings with such energy, and even converts his occasional sense of exhaustion into humor. It is as if he transcended the alienness of his surroundings not by denying them, but by responding to them: ultimately, it is his own sense of enjoyment in the journey that is transmitted, in certain memorable moments, to the reader. Speaking of difference, he observes: “All my life I have expected some recognition of my difference.” The price one pays for being different can be costly. Naipaul is that individual with a vocation for the art of representation, whether that is talking, writing, or witnessing. And that vocation is important to the extent that it is publicly recognizable and involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability. If he invites scorn it is because he speaks out for his belief, its cruel crowds, and the itinerant grotesques that prey on them. For anyone who looks at his difficult life and extraordinary legacy straight on, it is nearly impossible to get this disarming conjurer to represent any cause except the freedom to write what he wanted. In the upshot, when Naipaul tries to shy away from the truth, he is working hardest to bring the truth to life. Great storytellers enthrall their readers by playing their cards close to the vest. Naipaul, among the very greatest of storytellers, always begins in an innocuous, convivial tone: Mr. Biswas remembers a time long ago. His incessant hesitations—“almost,” “scarcely,” “so to speak,” “in a certain sense”—are the quiet touches by which his voice acquires personality on the page. They are creases in the impassive exterior, the beginnings of a smile, or a scream. The reader is suddenly spooked by a quick increase in tension, a silent entry of emotion. Desire is the more present for not being spoken straight out. Naipaul reveals himself most when he writes of Mr. Biswas that the poet’s traditional literary forms prevent full disclosure. He (Mr. Biswas) is one whose representative status has been naturalized in the narrative. His dispossession

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can easily be read in terms of his colonized status, but Naipaul asks us to take it first as a function of his individual biography. It is a clever symbolic maneuver. It underlines the teaching of the novel as a “house fit for free characters to live in,” to adapt from Henry James, which is that the only ancestry we can know is in the here and now, that it does not matter to God who our grandparents were. (Gora, 1997). But it is also a brilliant twist on the tradition of postcolonial fiction to which A House for Mr. Biswas, up to that point, had seemed to belong. It symbolically explodes one of the myths of belonging and its opposite, unbelonging. And it is Naipaul at his novelistic best.

Chapter Five

FEAR OF THE OTHER, LOATHING THE SIMILAR Everyone in every place needs a boundary. In America the boundary is the phrase “I am not black.” Jamaica Kincaid, “The Little Revenge from the Periphery,” 73.

In the age of super power, under the “footprint” of the partisan simplifications beamed down to us from satellites, we can no longer easily draw one solid line of demarcation between the inside and the outside of a work of art. Sometimes it is even impossible to distinguish between form and background, text and context insofar as context itself has been “textualized”: George Bataille and Maurice Blanchot define the work of art as being “out of work”; Hans Robert Jauss moves it outward toward its reception; Gérard Genette is concerned with the editorial procedures by which a text is severed from its author—the “paratextual,” external presentation that makes a book out of it; Jacques Derrida insists on margins, on frames, on the parergon, the “hors-livre” or “outwork”; Umberto Eco uses what he calls the “lunatic linguistics” of the quest for the perfect, pre-Babel language as a magnifying glass to scrutinize the intertangled nature of “common sense and lunacy, truth and error, visionary intelligence and what now seems to us stupidity.”1 We learn, for example, that the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s fever-dream exegeses of hieroglyphics, written in support of his conviction that ancient Egyptian was the original, Adamic language, laid the cornerstone for 219

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modern Egyptology (1998: 45–46). Ironically, Eco himself is a peerless weaver of intertextual webs, effortlessly leaping from philosophic language concocted in the seventeenth century by John Wilkins to Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional embroidery of Wilkins’s ideas to Michel Foucault’s citation, in The Order of Things, of Borges’s invention (1966: 61–64). The operative mode is that of the mise en abime. Cultural theorists like Frederic Jameson and Perry Anderson are liable to overrate the importance of the political commitments of high-profile artists, critics, and philosophers to say nothing of adepts with less definite portfolios. This tendency is a natural accompaniment of their intellectualism, but it leads them to overrate in turn the social influence of works of art. At the same time, they now underrate the effects of ideology—the “bridge of excuses,” as Václav Havel called it, between a government and a people or a culture and its participants. What is missing in their account is any evidence of the feelings, or even, for it would be something, the false consciousness of the feelings of people implicated in the system. All that is submerged in a theory whose demand is that people be known as obedient consumers, or exploited consumers whose revolt can only emerge through modified acts of consumption.2 Some interesting questions have no chance of being answered in this explanatory mode. Are people willing participants in the mesh of images that is offered to those who accept it as a total environment? And are they so all the way down the line: from the morning television montage of global hot spots, to the afternoon trip to the cashpoint, to the evening dose of the mood-altering drug? Political and literary critics are succumbing faster than necessary to the cant of the virtual. The surrender may be carried out with complacency by a theorist innocent of ideas, for whom it signifies only the triumph of engineered sensations. It must be undertaken with a more troubled satisfaction by a Marxist. On the current view, postmodernism, site of total delusion and total reification, enters history to complete the work of decomposition already in progress in the global market. The pleasure of the result relates to an old slogan: “Don’t build on the good old days, build on the bad new days,” a slogan that matched a policy of the 1930—the attack on “social fascism”—by which the German Communist Party broke down social democracy in order to stage a purer confrontation with the Nazis, a strategy that at its first trial did not work out well. Perhaps
iz
ek, 1999) its second will be luckier. (Eagleton, 1998; Z Of course, owning a piece of the past, say, Andy Warhol’s Tunafish Disaster or The Mexicans’ Manner of Dancing, a watercolor from the 1583–1587 Codex Tovar manuscript history of the Aztecs, has been a means of leapfrogging up the social ladder since the rise of the bourgeoisie. But now, when the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s students are asking him if the phrase “Second World War” means that there was a First World War and

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critics are declaring the loss of the legitimizing power of the narratives of Western emancipation and enlightenment, it is the very notion of history itself that seems increasingly precious. The Pottery Barn catalogue is a veritable shrine to the time before Microsoft and Nike, when things, from everyday objects to human emotions, had more heft, seemed more grounded, somehow. The Fall 1998 issue offers a facsimile of an antique clock, “a reminder of a time when travel accessories were objects of beauty”; “a classic telephone” based on a 1937 model, its touch-tone buttons slyly concealed in a purely decorative rotary dial; and models of vintage aircraft that “recall a time when flying was an adventure,” each handmade from distressed tin and iron (23–24). Pronouncements of the end of history simply contribute another event to the history they (the critics) declare over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his mailbag. They are selfdisconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes that, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, what we have here is a slowly built-up picture with literature wanting to be everything—but beside itself. As a result, the question today is no longer, as it was for Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is literature?” but rather, “What is not?” insofar as the space of literature is mapped according to more complex and more delicate strategies, which, though not denying the inescapable partisanships that go with the politics of language, are no longer contained by national politics. The focus has shifted from the assertion of borders through literature and the presentation of audience (postccolonial, postmodern, African-American, gay and lesbian, native, feminist, “Behalfist,”) within borders, to a questioning that results in the proliferation of those borders. The problem with trying to characterize our era in these terms is that it is almost impossible not to lapse into high cliché. Historical textbooks always seem to make three claims about the era they are dealing with: it was a period of change; and it was essentially a transitional epoch; and the middle classes went on rising. Since all this is truer of the late twentieth century than of any other time, the clichés are bound to be compounded. Fragmentation, a sense of space shrunken and time accelerated, giddying technological advance, the crumbling of moral certitudes, the rise of the faceless masses, the human individual as fractured, estranged, disoriented: all this is now as drearily familiar a discourse as the Elizabethan world picture, if somewhat more accurate. What remains important, however, is the spectacle of the author and the happening before our eyes of his or her book as the “book of the author,” in the same way that we talk about the “book of the film,” something to which we are subsequently incited and that gains its impact from

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its reactivation of what we first saw, the true substance. No longer dead, the author has now become the very condition of the book’s reality, its mediatized life. The question then becomes: What should a man or woman famous for having wished the author dead wish for himself or herself once he or she becomes a dead author? To leave no trace behind would seem right. But if Roland Barthes was hostile to the neighborly image of the author as an extra-textual being, he took pleasure in the thought of himself returning as a biographical subject (i.e., object) once he was dead. In the preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, he laid down the quite meetable conditions under which he would agree to pass into the hands of futurity: “Were I a writer, and dead, how I would like my life to be reduced, by the attentions of a friendly, carefree biographer, to a few details, a few tastes, a few inflections, let’s say ‘biographemes’” (1976: 65). At the end of the same book, by way of illustrating the kind of casual memorial he had in mind, he includes “lives” of two of its subjects, Sade and Fourier, a few numbered “biographemes,” strewn through space “like the atoms of Epicurus” (67). Epicurus’s atoms were hooked and Barthes’s typically sensuous fancy was that these errant particles might link up with hospitable fellow atoms in the living, so ensuring a small measure of—fragmentary—survival. There was to be no coming after death as an entity; the posthumous condition that Barthes imagined for himself was a sociable version of the one he had sought to inflict most unsociably on the humanist notion of the integral author. “What is literature?” Sartre asked just after the war, defining its value in terms of freedom and commitment. Some half a century later, the question becomes: What state is it in? “Where is it at?” The necessary challenge to the assumptions of literature as value too readily gives way to the refusal of all idea of value; the problems of posing and creating values for the practices of writing that “literature” names, or named, and that must henceforth be grasped in full awareness of determinations such as class, race, gender, and sex, into a free-floating mobility. It is a measure of how embattled this matter of literature has become that it is virtually impossible to say anything simple about it insofar as books have become the cultural commodities they are, in ceaseless supply as their authors come and go with them. Literary prizes, on the other hand, are rosettes in the careers of writers—the whole circulation and exchange—of the literary, a culmination that simultaneously shows up all the institutions of literature that precede and surround it, from the editors and/or publishers to the awarding establishments to the advertising agencies to the price tags to the bestsellers list. This virtual reality can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of copies sold in the polyglot global village; but it is more, too, than that simple measure. For a moment, the book becomes part of what

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has been read; it is recognizable, discussable, knowable—it has happened. An inherent feature of what marketers call a “power brand,” to be sure, is that this very status of the author and/or book comes to seem inevitable and natural: we take it for granted that Toni Morrison is Toni Morrison because she is Toni Morrison. And yet neither her literariness nor her affability suffices to explain her global ubiquity. Fame is not fungible. Different celebrities are repositories of different values: Bill Cosby does not mean the same thing as Michael Jordan or Imran Khan. Celebrities own their meanings because they have created them on the public stage by dint of intense and repeated performance. Yet meaning still travels in one direction, from the celebrity (the writer) to the by-product (the book) and on to the consumer (the reader). Thus does meaning circulate in the consumer society. The most profound meditation on a literary prize not won belongs to Norman Mailer, who devoted the opening scenes of his 1971 book, The Prisoner of Sex, to his reaction on learning that he might soon be permitted to slip the letters “FNPW” (Famous Nobel Prize Winner) in front of his name. “After twenty-one years of public life,” Mailer wrote of himself, “he had the equivalent of a Geiger counter in his brain to measure the radiation of advancements and awards in the various salients, wedges, and vectors of that aesthetic battlefield known as the literary pie” (35). The most celebrated of prizes, and the richest—now worth a gold medal, more than a million dollars, and priceless scientific prestige—the Nobel Prize, unlike an academic award, is not a recognition of immediate achievement. The academic community takes years to acknowledge genius. In the sciences, for example, every finding must be replicated and every judgment confirmed, with the result that even the most brilliant young researcher is rarely honored before middle age. It was a sweet victory for the fifty-fiveyear-old American neurologist and biochemist Stanley B. Prusiner to win the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology. He was honored “for discovery of prions—a new biological principle of infection” (Rhodes, 1997: 54). Originally intended for writing that displays a quixotic penchant, the Nobel Prize for Literature became immediately controversial as a tombstone memorial that excluded the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. No one writing in China has won the prize until 2000, and many writers were mistakenly told that they would be the first. There is a tradition of such disappointments—victory parties given in vain, rumors that disappear into the ether.3 This attitude of controversy and bungling has led people to believe that the award is given for “political” reasons, and that, in a lean year, the judges think that it is “so-and-so’s turn” so he (it is nearly always a man) had better have it, faute de mieux. But, of course, the Nobel was invented as “do-goodism”; it has always been

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“tainted,” in Albert Murray’s formula, with politics, and the politics have always been left-of-center.4 The prize has, of course, gone to some of the finest writers of the century—W. B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett—but somehow that has never dispelled the controversy. Neither Jorge Luis Borges nor Graham Greene received the honor, and it was bestowed on many writers (Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck, for example) whose accomplishments seemed thin at the time and even thinner today. And, lest we forget, in the first forty-five years, only two people from outside Europe and the United States won the prize, but since 1982, Nobel’s intentions have been interpreted with a sufficiently wide latitude to encompass the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, and Seamus Heaney among others.5 But why so very late? Toni Morrison, who in 1993 became the first African-American to receive the prize, attempts an answer: If a white male wins it, they would not say it’s political. So I can’t take the criticism seriously. I know and you know that if an African-American wins it, or somebody from a Third World country wins it—somebody who is not from America, the center of the universe—they say it’s political. “Political” is a real word, and it has real meaning. But it is a term here that is sly and suggests something not superior. When it is used this way, it is a racist term (quoted in Specter, 1998: 52). How can the award not matter? It is the fashion to laugh and say we (subalterns) are above it. But we are not, in that the Nobel Prize for literature— this may not come as a surprise to Morrison who is otherwise justified in her criticism of the politics of anointing that plays an important role in the prize decisions—did not begin to go to North American writers until 1930, or to South American ones until after the late 1960s even if U.S. literature has been accepted as a serious and independent component of world literature for at least 150 years. In addition, It is now possible to assemble an anthology entirely composed of “modified” Americans—African, Arabic, Spanish, Asian, and “Native.” Here is a partial list from the table of contents of a new freshman anthology edited for Norton by J. Paul Hunter: Jamaica Kincaid, Luis Cabalquinto, Ray Young Bear, Cathy Song, Agha Shahid, Leslie Silko, Mitsuye Yamada, Bharati Mukherjee, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Mary TallMountain. Paul Hunter

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asks: “What is a professor of English supposed to do with such a list?” More, I suspect, than apply a new paradigm, though that will certainly happen (Mitchell, 1992: 15). South American writing, on the other hand, had difficulty in making an impact outside the Iberian language zone, but it made a major breakthrough in the second half of the present century, and is today in some ways more influential internationally than that of the United States. The hopes of raw talent in imaginative writing survive better there than anywhere else in the world. South America is the last bastion of the left in the world. For this reason its literature has so far escaped the worst consequences of the privatization of the imagination. In fine, “The literary map of the Americas,” W.J.T. Mitchell writes, “is in even greater flux. A mere recitation of the familiar names—Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar—is enough to suggest a literary translation from South to North, from Latin to English” (ibid.). This is, then, another example of the subversion of Western literature enunciated so majestically by Wole Soyinka, who repudiates myths of origin in his invocation of “universal verities” contained in the worldview or “self-apprehension” of indigenous peoples (1988: 310). In South America, Western literature is read and sold abundantly. It has been for half a century. But only in the last three decades has South American literature made its way to the Western market. To imagine in the early 1960s that a South American writer would one day influence his or her Western (U.S. in particular) counterpart was implausible. Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos could stamp their signature south of the Rio Grande, but to think that someone like Cortázar would have an impact on a writer from New York, London, or Paris seemed out of the question. Today not only John Barth but Salman Rushdie and Tahar Ben Jelloun acknowledge the influence of García Márquez in their works, and Susan Sontag has paid handsome tribute to her Brazilian idol, Machado de Assis, showing how essential he has been in her development as a writer. South America is still literature’s fascinating Old and New World, a place for new imaginative voyages of discovery. Compared to the Americas, Africa had to wait until 1986, the year Wole Soyinka became the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature (subsequently won in 1988 by Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt and in 1991 by Nadine Gordimer of South Africa). In his Nobel address Soyinka spoke of how the past must address its present, hybridity, the meeting of cultures, and asked this question: “What did Africa get from the West since Independence? Nothing but Eurocentric world history, the conviction that a few Western and Central European countries were destined to

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conquer and rule the globe, Euromegalomania” 1988 (327). An amusing sign of this Euromegalomania is to be found in the disparity between the interest taken in Arabic literature and that in other literatures outside the Atlantic and which can be seen in the treatment afforded Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab writer to win the Nobel, and his work in English after 1988. Doubleday acquired the rights to much of his literary production and a few months later began to introduce a handful of his stories and novels, including the first volume of his major work, the Cairo Trilogy, in what appeared to be new editions. In fact, with one exception, the translations were exactly the ones that had been available all along in England, some quite good but most either indifferent or poor. Clearly the idea was to capitalize on and market this “new” and exotic enough product, but not at the cost of a retranslation. Now that the act has worn thin, Mahfouz has more or less been dropped from discussion, without having provoked even the more venturesome literati into finding out which other writers in Arabic might be worth looking into.6 Many of us (subalterns) are impatient for a subaltern writer to win the Nobel or any other literary prize. When the novelist Patrick White was awarded the Nobel in 1973, hurt feelings of pan-subaltern pride among our literati, akin to a bad case of sibling rivalry, were particularly intense. If somebody from Australia (a former white dominion) could be a winner, surely our own “world class” literature could produce a deserving Nobel laureate. A diverting subaltern parlor would be to produce a list of such potential winners. The name Pramoedya Ananta Toer has been perennially on the lips of those experts who compile the lists of nominees for the prize in literature. He is indisputably the leading candidate for Southeast Asia, which has not yet had its turn in Stockholm. Given the Academy’s tendency to select writers with inflated reputations, players could amuse themselves picking those writers they think would be the likeliest candidates for the honor. The lucky candidate, if past experience is a guide, might not find the honor an unalloyed pleasure. Samuel Beckett, who regarded the Nobel Prize and world fame as disastrous, strove ferociously to keep at bay a more and more devouring journalistic-academic industry, to find refuge in the solitude essential to his writings. Of course, a winner from the margin could attempt to take the curse off the prize by refusing to accept it, as Jean-Paul Sartre did in 1964. Sartre’s reasons for refusal were fairly convoluted—amounting, in reality, to a protection of his existentialist mystique. That lonely and relentless destroyer of bourgeois illusions was not about to make the trip to Sweden, deliver the usual platitudinous speech, and accept prize money in public. That would be almost as silly as framing the Nobel Prize gold medal and diploma and hanging them on the wall of his Paris flat. Due to

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his conception of the writer’s place in society, Sartre always declined official honors and thus his refusal of the prize was not unprecedented. He had similarly turned down membership in La Légion d’honneur, had not desired to enter Le Collège de France. He stated that a writer’s accepting such honors would be to associate his or her personal commitments with the awarding institutions, and that, above all, a writer should not allow himself to be turned into a monument. Sartre listed his belief that interchange between East and West, North and South must take place between men and women and between cultures without intervention of institutions. For him, since the conferment of past prizes did not represent equally writers of all ideologies and nations, he felt that his acceptance might be undesirably and unjustly interpreted.7 After his death, his surviving relatives made the pilgrimage to Stockholm to demand the money that goes with the prize. They were rebuffed. Nearly four decades after Sartre declined to accept the Nobel, literary prizes are defying anachronism by resolutely turning themselves into large promotional ventures in which publishing-trade pressures outweigh—in fact largely define—literary judgment. And sales are bigger and more real by virtue of advertising and receptive audiences; independent by virtue of the same anachronism or lobby. The book-event needs a book with events (Roland Barthes’s “from work to text,” the text as order of the signifier, resistant to consumption, shifts the media’s “from book to event”); the book as signified, programmed to appear.8 Like the by-product (i.e., book), the author has become a hot commodity, making fortunes for television networks, rescuing careers, and even providing publishing houses with opportunities to make more money than they have ever had. It is easy to lose sight of Morrison and/or Rushdie, for example, as the cultural icons they are, in the way that it is hard to take in the Empire State Building from its base. They are the planet’s two most successful brands, as ubiquitous as the ground underfoot—or the building overhead—and sometimes as unnoticeable. In tandem, they are elevated far beyond their peers, and not just through visibility alone. They possess what is known in social psychology as “spontaneous trait transference,” but you might as well call it the Rushdie and/or Morrison Effect. Fame, not water, is the universal solvent. What to do with the fact that the voices and the faces of Western corporate capitalism belong to an African-American and an Anglo-Indian—very dark and very female and very male ones at that? Why should the discussion of a book (Midnight’s Children or Beloved, e.g.) make appealing television? Within this set of questions are issues that can remake and unmake both the author and his or her worth. Morrison’s price tags not only reflect her extraordinary utility as an endorser; she may even contribute to it. There is a school of thought that says the cost of advertising must be

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considered part of the content of the advertising—that the key message of full exposure is: “Look how much we are spending on this one (exposure)!” Marshall McLuhan did not get it quite right: the medium is not the message; the modus is the message. And the value of the celebrity endorsement? In this regard, nothing could be more revealing than Toni Morrison’s question and answer. What is important about this craft [of writing] that it dominates me and my colleagues? A craft that appears solitary but needs another for its completion. A craft that signals independence but relies totally on an industry. . . . It is a business, of course, in which there is feasting, and even some coin; there is drama and high, high spirits. There is celebration and anguish, there are flukes and errors in judgment; there is brilliance and unbridled ego. But there is the costume. Underneath the cut of bright and dazzling cloth, pulsing beneath the jewelry, the life of the book world is quite serious. Its real life is about creating and producing and distributing knowledge (1997: 16–17). The fact that someone is the Nobel laureate—the one whose services are known to be the priciest—means that, whatever the by-product, he or she can be relied on to send a message so long as he or she can make the constant, melodious effort to reconcile the environment in which intellectual work is done with the intention and method of ensuring that “no encroachment of private wealth, government control, or cultural expediency can interfere with what gets written and published” (17). As we all know, this claim is more utopian than real. As we enter the world that writers like Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie are beginning to create, they—and many others like them—show every sign of making “new” literature happen. They are also models of “affirmative action” in the highest degree, for both of whom are affirmative and active. A case in point is Morrison herself. Something amazing happened to her reputation in the United States. Over the last ten years, since the publication of Beloved, her fifth novel, she has been catapulted from the teeming ranks of well-known, well-respected fiction writers, to the thin-aired plane reserved for America’s deities and seers. Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 had something to do with this fame, of course, but Morrison’s status in American culture goes beyond, and is certainly not reducible to, the approbation of the Swedes. She appeared on the cover of The New York Review of Books and Time magazine. She is required reading in American colleges and universities, and very probably

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the subject of more doctoral dissertations than any other contemporary American writer. In the great halls of the New York Public Library, an extract from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech has been graven on the stone wall. For Morrison, the last tribute is, I suspect, particularly gratifying. Much of her fiction, with its biblical rhythms, ancestral-sounding wisdom, and flashes of rhapsodic poetry, has seemed to strive precisely for this sort of lapidary status. She is Oprah Winfrey’s favorite author. In gratitude for that honor, she has made several papal appearances on Oprah’s book club, delivering gnomic verities about literature and life to a slightly confounded, but droolingly reverent studio audience. Morrison laughs now at the media event, in terms of mass recognition and celebrity transaction, that affected her life more dramatically than did the Nobel Prize, the selection, in December 1996, of her 1977 novel Song of Solomon as the second offering of Oprah’s book club. “I’d never heard of such a thing,” she intones, “and when someone called, all excited, with the news, all I could think was, ‘Who’s going to buy a book because of Oprah?’” The answer came sooner than she had expected, and with a surprise, too. “A million copies of that book sold,” she adds. “And sales of my other books in paperback jumped about 25%.”9 With sales soaring in the hundreds of thousands, Morrison, of course, becomes a national monument, an icon of some sort, the embodiment of the African-American culture in one of its most influential versions of itself, as if Sidney Bechet had met the Archduke Trio or Ellington gone baroque; an oeuvre that wrote itself by talking to us, a story that confided: “I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. . . . Look, look. Look where your hands are. Now” (Morrison, 1992: 78). The value (of language) and investment (of capital) are there, the point is to make them net worth. And we do get them simultaneously, in flashes of lyric lightning; in raptures, seizures, or eruptions of volcanic consciousness. “You thought we were hot lava,” the narrator whispers in Paradise, “and when they broke us down into sand, you ran” (Morrison, 1998: 23). The name “Toni Morrison” becomes, momentarily, an event, but her work carries on an idea of “new” écriture, of “new” literature, before or beyond the “television” medium, to speak of and for her people and narrate their experience of slavery. Thus Morrison, like all the other Nobel laureates in the postage stamp, was persuaded, even after winning the award, to forego her seclusion and appear on television. The other side of the balance sheet however is an ironic one insofar as the current reality is spectacularized by the writer, who assumes her work as simply the sum of her appearances. In the process, literature becomes a massive accelerated

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production, coming and going every week. The national capital (Morrison) is made over to the reading public: the media now wields, literature for the small shareholder. The upshot is that Winfrey and Morrison’s aim, what they respond to and create, is a medium literature, writers and works as bearers of effective intermediary messages, good for circulation and exchange, literature as porte-parole of an audience, a constituency, a people; in fine, a world. Behind the glamor and the fanfare of the media, though, lies one of history’s ironies. For in writers like Morrison one can notice the rise of the subaltern voice. Her novels capture the challenge faced by African-Americans to take control of their own lives, in particular the triumph of black women over extraordinary obstacles. And while she writes in a postmodern language, she nevertheless feels herself organically connected to the masses. In so doing, she sets herself the revisionist, critical task of dealing frontally with subordination, using the techniques, discourses, and weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved exclusively for the white male European. Her work is, on its merits, only apparently dependent (and by no means parasitic) on mainstream Western discourses; the result of its originality and creativity has been the transformation of the very terrain of the discipline of literature. Precisely because I have selected Morrison as an exemplar of a writer who uses her fame as a kite instead of a wheelbarrow, I plan to draw on others who have made the awarding establishments want to retire their prizes. Morrison indulges in the infinite hospitality of language and writing as a craft that signals independence of the mind, although she may be a more impressive writer than Salman Rushdie, say, because her magic is so realistic, in a sense, and her symbols are so far from arbitrary; by the same token she has often seemed a less transporting writer than he, who tends to stress the exotic and profit by it. Nevertheless, she performs similar kinds of alchemy (Gora, 1994). To understand how this happens—the act of fathering and/or mothering and giving birth to an idea, the act of violence (of the letter) at the heart of Morrison’s work, the wound that will not heal—we must first know the template’s design. The Sulas and the Consolatas “live in the proximity of disavowal: it [is] . . . always the temptation above all with those who are persecuted, re-marked,” to cite Hélène Cixous (1997: 264). In either case, ethnicity is at the fore early on—racism prevented good subaltern writing from being accepted and lauded in the West. Politics through economics (neocolonialism) becomes the focus. It lays the rules for the subaltern writer who is rediscovered as an “exotic” Other to be marketed, circulated, and made ready for the consumer in the superstores and megastores where “eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s

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food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong-Kong: knowledge is a matter of TV games” (Lyotard, 1986: 22).10 This hyperreality that Jean-François Lyotard describes so well can lead to a discussion concerning the will to situate oneself in a specific ethnical field; one can judge the work as that of a witness to a given historical configuration. Herein lies the larger, more important task for theory—a return to the formalism of belles lettres and a cultural examination of the role of editors, marketers, and publishers on shaping audience and taste. What struck me while reading Le Postmodernisme expliqué aux enfants was that Lyotard, wrongly predicting egalitarianism between the West and the rest, nevertheless puts his finger on exactly the mechanisms by which late twentieth-century, high-tech capitalism absorbs and nullifies any idea, gesture, word, or image. The electronic revolution has, in fact, been televised, put on video, and the subaltern writer has now himself or herself been bound, packaged, and priced. And if he or she is like Saleem Sinai, who knows how to circulate his product, then who benefits from the sale? Is it the subaltern consumer, who, in languishing to find the stable, cannot afford to acquire the by-product (i.e., book), or is it the cosmopolitan Western one who buys, reads, and takes the very same by-product as far as the “bedroom where the real things happen?” (Todorov, 1978: 223). How “free” is the peripheral recipient of literary awards from the West and its influence? How are we to map out his or her migratory patterns and where is the front line? What is the most significant aspect of their works and how are we to explain their craft of writing as a serious agent of social change? How magic is their (ir)realism? Morrison knows that the ability to define the meaning of the past grants the power to define the meaning of the present and/or future; she understands that a people without a collective historical memory are easily manipulated through myths of the present. To lack a narrative of one’s own past, from the personal to the national level, is to fall victim to the pseudohistorical representations of others. Each culture needs to see the present as history and to create its own narrative that secures its meaning and identity within time. While Morrison engages these questions with brio and élan throughout her work, she also challenges the claim that there are sharp lines between modern and postmodern, colonial and postcolonial, local and global. For her, the differences between memory and lack of memory are best understood as competing narratives within narrative itself—responses that attempt to articulate Hegelian and Nietzschean visions of history. She teaches us to imagine the lost history of her people, to read the signs of a tradition that affirms itself “by great labor” alone, in T. S. Eliot’s lapidary formula, and to hear the deepest chords of exclusion and infinite solitude.

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I What are the dialectics of race in present-day America? What is the anomalous, or ambivalent location of racial difference, and how can it be articulated? And how can a relation between blackness and whiteness be achieved? How can we restore a third dimension to hard-set profiles In short, when does a life bend toward freedom? A useful starting point for grappling with this set of questions is to read Toni Morrison’s Paradise and her essays on race, but to read against the grain. In Le Discours Antillais, Edouard Glissant writes that opacity is a positive virtue in the literatures of the Antilles. Créolité takes possession of the language of the colonial oppressor and distorts it, using it to construct a black culture inscrutable to outsiders. This spirit of creative distortion permeates all the literature of the Antilles, he maintains. Far from impeding the creativity of Caribbean writers, the coinages and unclarity arising from cultural conflict represent a source of inspiration for Caribbean fiction in both French and Créolité (1981: 334). One might apply Glissant’s insight to many other macaronic literatures and the cultures from which they have emerged. Political and linguistic upheaval inspired Rabelais, for example, to flights of sublime bricolage. Gutter slang, foreign languages, and humanist rhetoric fuse in the raunchy mélange of Gargantua and Pantagruel. More recently, writers like Toni Morrison have used their idioms of pop culture, urban energy and the street, of ethnic minorities and the poor to beget a language that is conscious not least of its linguistic ambivalence. Much like Glissant’s Créolité speakers, these writers resist interpretation. They tempt it, as well, in our trophy-driven culture, with the crazy vitality of their impenitent gift for language: from the way rutputty and khichri and funtoosh! are smuggled into standard English the way Salman Rushdie, for example, wants them to, to the delight Morrison takes in “nation’hood” and “rememory” (as a verb) and the multiple sounds of our promiscuous pop culture. The ravages of racial division in the United States, the de facto segregation of populations who are more or less yoked together by the demography and demagoguery of “democracy,” turns black and white into stark alternatives. In this silhouette of desperate subjects, laid out into two dimensions, there is a need for a break of new life: I have rarely seen this hope better realized than in the words of Toni Morrison. In matters of race and gender, it is now possible and necessary, as it seemed never to have been before, to speak about these matters without the barriers, the silences, the embarrassing gaps in discourse. It is clear to the most re-

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ductionist intellect that black people think differently from one another; it is also clear that the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed. A conversation, a serious exchange, between black men and women, has begun in a new arena and the contestants defy the mold. Nor is it as easy to be split along racial lines, as the alliances and coalitions between white and black women, and the conflicts among black women, and black men . . . prove. (1992: v). As the passage indicates, there is a clear method in the way Morrison represents inspired opacity. She combines the copious detail of a historian with the vivid portrayals of a storyteller in her investigation of the tragic past of the African-American in white America. Contrary to other Nobel laureates, except perhaps for the magical Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison has pursued a project of writing far from the expediencies and maneuverings of the center scene, across a range of more than half a dozen novels and a handful of essays that represent a worked intensity of experience and language, a particular literary achievement not easily adaptable to any given context. Insofar as magical realism is also political realism, readers not acquainted with the history of her people may not realize that every book sites itself within specific social, historical, and political frameworks. In some works—as with Paradise—this is plain enough. The novel shows Morrison shining on as magic a realist as they come, in defiance of dull-wittedness, prejudice, and stereotype, a celebration of her native African-America. She does it in the tradition of Ralph Ellison, and in Paradise, as in all her fiction, character and incident are subordinated to, and in the service of, the novel’s central symbols. Deacon and Steward are not so much characters in their own right as representatives of the two complementary yet opposing faces of Ruby; Richard Misner is a little more than a mouthpiece for the views espoused by young liberals in the 1960s; Consolata, the mother figure at the convent, is an almost pure consciousness, the embodiment of an abstract longing for home. Morrison applied this symbolist technique to perfection in Song of Solomon. In Beloved, she carried it beyond its usefulness; its characters—Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Baby Suggs—were so obviously constructed to fulfill their allotted symbolic roles that they lost any human reality and the story’s emotional force was blunted. In Paradise, however, the symbolic construction works well, partly because Morrison has skilfully mixed symbolic characters like the Morgan brothers and Consolata with real and often heartbreaking ones. Mavis and Seneca, for example, are living and breathing women, sloppy, inadequate, and tragic.

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The power of these imagined women to move us and to impress themselves on our memory points to a curious fact: Morrison, for all the complex technical work and linguistic innovations with which she fills her novels, is at her most emotionally forceful when she writes the most simply. It is impossible not to admire the skill and panache with which she wrote Jazz: her aim was obviously to produce a prose poem, an evocation of the aura and lilt of the jazz music that filled the air of Harlem in the 1920s. She succeeded magnificently, but as fiction Jazz fails to move forward, despite the tragic events it narrates; it lacks the essential honesty that Morrison demonstrated so memorably, so straightforwardly, in her first novel, The Bluest Eye. She has always sought to fill her fiction with poetry. In The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby, the poetry enriched the work and made it complete; in the later novels like Beloved and Jazz, the incantatory stylistics became more forced and self-conscious, ultimately stealing focus from the characters, who fought in vain to hold center stage. Fiction, after all, is not poetry; the author has created characters and has an obligation to maintain their integrity and reality (Kundera, 1988:9). The history of the forms of individual consciousness, the social contradictions immanent in the language of the psyche, the dynamic interconnections of social existence registered in the flows of desire and flux of lived experience—all these axioms found in Morrison can be used to explain the collectivist impulse behind artistic representation. In the peripheral margin, this impulse is very much alive. It has escaped complete dissolution by the leveling “magic realism” of exchange-value in the marketplace. And so far as one can calculate from this distance, the force of reification has not yet sublimated or transmogrified its inhabitants into free-floating signifiers or aleatory simulacra. Needless to add that, in Morrison, magic realism itself is nothing more than the conveying of everyday life to a world so distant that it takes realism for surrealism; as García Márquez discovered, the simple transcription of life in a superstitious and god-filled village will seem as otherworldly to us as our television images and knickknacks seem to a Colombian villager: that is the quid pro quo of modern imaginative trade routes. Magic realism is about transubstantiation—the turning of one man’s water into another man’s wine.11 Women writers like Morrison and her “successors were able,” Henry Louis Gates explains, “simultaneously, to reach a large, traditionally middle-class, white female readership plus a new black female audience that had been largely untapped. The growth of this community of readers,” he continues, has resulted in an unrivaled number of novels by and about black women since 1980, as well as an unprecedent-

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edly large African American market for books about every aspect of the black experience. While it is always arbitrary to try to date a cultural movement, it seems reasonable to note an upsurge in black creativity in 1987, the year in which August Wilson’s Fences premiered on Broadway and Toni Morrison published her masterpiece, Beloved (1977: 4). There is a distinctly canned feel to this whirlwind trip around black thought since the late nineteenth century. Gates pursues what he calls “Harlem on our minds” through many generations of black scholars from the late nineteenth century to the present. He starts with a quote that dates back to 1889, in which the anonymous writer foretells the role AfricanAmerican female writers would play in the making of a new art: Fate keeps revenge in store. It was a woman who, taking the wrongs of the African as her theme, wrote the novel that awakened the world to their reality, and why should not the coming novelist be a woman as well as an African? She—the woman of that race—has some claims on Fate which are not yet paid up (1997: 2). The writer, the reviewer went on to prophesy, would emerge at the forefront of a veritable renaissance in blackface. Not only was he right in his prophesy about the burgeoning of black art but also quite accurate about the black female voice who “has some claims on Fate” insofar as in the last decade alone, black artists have won an unprecedented number of prizes, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, National Book Awards, and PEN/Faulkner Awards. The culmination of these achievements, of course, was Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize. With all these prizes, it is difficult not to acknowledge the signs that African-Americans are claiming their share of the American and/or European pie. Morrison is the first African-American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In her case, “You could say,” Derek Walcott reminds us, “‘O, yes, it was time the prize was given to a black woman’” (quoted in Kirn, 1998: 59). It is therefore a delight to be able to celebrate the quality of a growing oeuvre, whose status has long been argued over, but that has, in the last quarter of a century or so, began to merit a place alongside the most flourishing literatures in the world. She is a good example of the subordinate or subaltern writer who has used memory’s smoky mirror as the prime instrument turned on the history of AfricanAmericans, but not without struggle. “There were plenty of roadblocks

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along the way,” she recalls of her career and life. “The world back then didn’t expect much from a little black girl” (quoted in Gray, 1998: 60). In its shadowed and unreliable depths she has searched out her material, reflections of ourselves; and from The Bluest Eye, her first novel, to Paradise she has been scrying for glimpses of troubled histories of slavery, (domestic) violence, rape, injustice, racism. Nowhere is the latter trope more amply illustrated than in Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, a collection of essays Morrison edited in 1992. It stands as a living testimony to racial myth—the myth that black men are capable of transforming themselves in an instant from smiling sycophants into irrational beasts. For, without the myth, the evidence fails to cohere. Morrison expounds: The official story has thrown Mr. Simpson into that representative role. He is not an individual who underwent and was acquitted from a murder trial. He has become the whole race needing correction, incarceration, censoring, silencing; the race that needs its civil rights disassembled; the race that is sign and symbol of domestic violence; the race that has made trial by jury a luxury rather than a right and placed affirmative action legislation in even greater jeopardy. This is the consequence and function of official stories: to impose the will of a dominant culture. It is Birth of Nation writ large—menacingly and pointedly for the ‘hood (1997: xxviii). The essay casts a chilling glance on the script and spectacle of the O. J. Simpson affair, which has demonstrated, like never before—not even in a fictitious world like the one Richard Wright paints in Native Son, where Bigger Thomas, who after driving the drunken daughter Mary Dalton home one night, tries to put her to bed, all done in innocence, but so as to avoid detection by her blind mother, who enters the room, suffocates her—the spectacle of race and sex in corporate America where the feverish rush of media and markets to sell, and the public to buy, any and every commodity is bordering on madness. It is in reading Birth of a Nation’hood that one may lay hold of a worthwhile strand in the narrative, which brings together a tantalizing deconstruction of one of the most wretchedly aspersive race trials of recent times—namely, the acquittal of O. J. Simpson in the case of the murder of Nicole Simpson and her male friend, Ron Goldman. Here, Morrison plays the witness to what Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw has aptly called “color-blind dreams and racial nightmares” (1992: 97).

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The man on trial is none but a famous athlete who became—thanks to a delightful, long-running television commercial—white America’s teddy bear. How cuddly he was, how handsome and rich. He flashed a wonderful smile of infinite reassurance; spoke standard American English with a standard American accent. The real O. J. Simpson, who had grown up in poverty, embodied one of America’s favorite stories about itself. Before his first trial began, before a shred of evidence had been formally presented, well-dressed white feminists in Los Angeles called for the death penalty. The teddy bear had changed into a big black male, with a big knife, who had virtually decapitated a beautiful blonde with whom he had slept, and who, according to her best friend, had a yen for black men, even as Simpson himself gravitated toward blondes. And as our lovable crossover black disappeared, almost overnight, into his place stepped a fearsome mythical figure embodying a long-standing American anxiety over race in which the media was used as lynch-mob leader just as it was used against Mike Tyson and Clarence Thomas. Morrison makes the point perceptively: “The gargantuanism of the trial—its invention of wild dogs and angels, stick figures and clowns, its out-lawry—aroused immediate suspicion. Examining the weight the case has come to have, one is struck by how quickly guilt was the popular verdict” (xiii). She tellingly shows how race in America has long had symbolic as well as empirical reality. Justice, nevertheless, as we all agree, should be color-blind. In the Simpson case, however, the true defendant was surely unreal: he was a symbol, and his criminal case was a spectacular historical marker of poetic justice. In the symbolic case, the defendant represented the black victims of American history—no matter that the actual O. J. Simpson was badly cast in the victim’s role. It was white America’s historical treatment of blacks that was on trial: that was the case before the jury, which by virtue of its extreme racial imbalance was uniquely equipped to try it and render the kind of justice that no racially representative jury could have rendered. The prosecution ignored the symbolic case, the defense did not, and proceeded to try it, perhaps even knowing that racial injustice played no significant role in the actual Simpson matter. The prosecution never had a chance, nor should it have had a chance, because the prosecution was a symbolic party to real historical crimes (Williams, 1997: 273–280). So why consider (a certain category of) human beings a mere reservoir of raw materials: metals, fibers, and phosphates, when, alive, they could produce a much greater value? What white America needed to do then, with no more whining and moaning, was to swallow what seemed to it to be a palpably bad verdict. White America has long needed to face something: a criminal case in which it seems ridiculously obvious that a black man has committed some horrific crime, and a mostly black jury lets him walk free. For centuries, in

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America, blacks have had to swallow the counterpart of that disgusting meal. Black men have been lynched for less. Richard Wright understood the problem well when he exposed the racist forces arrayed against black achievement in Native Son, which was published on March 1, 1940. Then, as in 1995, the year of the trial of the century, its truth was certified. Ishmael Reed sums up the instance quite poignantly: Bigger Thomas gets into trouble because this poor black stepped out of the box that society had created for him. While his friends are petty thieves, he gets a job working as a chauffeur, which, in view of what was expected of him, was a step up. He is surrounded by liberals who are interested in his welfare and who give him lectures about self-improvement. Stepping beyond his bounds was the kind of adventure that got his creator, Richard Wright, into trouble. When he left the themes that made him famous—the conflicts between white and black Americans—and abandoned the United States for Europe, Wright was written off by the critics and dismissed as a one-novel writer, that novel being Native Son, when The Outsider, written in exile, might have been his best novel. Simpson’s troubles may have also arisen from his transcending the fate that awaited him had he not been a talented athlete: imprisonment, death, or a slave to a lowpaying service job (1997: 194). By comparing Simpson to Bigger, Reed brings the question of race into the surgery or the emergency room and treats it for what it is: an American public-health crisis. There is, however, one other explanatory possibility that neither Morrison nor Reed speaks about—namely, that white America needs the experience, now and then, of having “injustice” shoved down its throat, by blacks, in a case of exceptional notoriety, and in the name of the justice system itself. And then we will try to recall, during this experience of force-feeding, the fires, the lynchings, the pokings, the rapes, the floggings, the castrations, and, at the very least, those white juries that released the white killer of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, though his fingerprints were found all over the murder weapon, though he bragged of what he had done and the white juries were told of his bragging.12 In the Simpson case, the order of things is reversed. Morrison explains: The narrative of the entertainment media and their “breaking story” confederates was powerfully insistent on guilt,

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so uninterested in any other scenario, it began to look like a media pogrom, a lynching with its iconography intact: a chase, a cuffing, a mob, name calling, a white female victim, and most of all the heat, the panting that flared nostrils of a pack already eager to convict (1997: xiii). It is fascinating, in reading Morrison, Reed, Williams, and other contributors to Birth of a Nation’hood, to be able to discern and detect the outlines of writing back with a vengeance. This is the point to keep one’s eye on; because one must drop everything and think exclusively about white America and its “loss of innocence.” I have read that the country lost said innocence in the Civil War, in the Spanish-American War, in the First World War, during Prohibition, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and Irangate, in the Gulf War. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City and Operation Desert Fox. The attacks on the Afghan camps and the Khartoum pharmaceutical factory were certainly Monica-related. Uncle Sam dispatched seventy-nine of the world’s most sophisticated cruise missiles against a few mud-brick houses and a small factory. Damage was inflicted on innocent civilians, Osama Ben Laden was turned into a global hero for the like-minded, and Clinton won only a twenty-four-hour respite from his troubles. Behind the fin-de-siècle postmodern parable of sex lies a brief account of the Bill/Monica/Ken endgame: the lovesick teenager, the starstruck green girl, and the corporate Wolf Man—another instance of the “reflexivization” of everyday sexual seduction in today’s “risk society”
iz
ek, 1999). Needless to add that the heavily mediatized sex show has al(Z ready been consigned to history’s footnotes, odd refugees from a surreal crisis in a world shaped by the excess of the end of the millennium. That this particular deluge is all mixed up with adult sexuality, and also with the repression of it, is quintessentially American as well—it being the nature of Puritanism to produce a world that repudiates sexuality but is also thoroughly sexualized. Innocence for sale! And what of the other innocence? The one involving the victims of slavery and genocide, lynching, murder, high crimes and misdemeanors at home and abroad, terror of being cut by a rival, or by simple fear of the contents of the FBI or the CIA private dossiers. Tzvetan Todorov sums up the case elegantly: The very identity of the United States as a nation rests on these two great crimes (the extermination of the Indians and the enslavement of Blacks) whose after-effects are still felt in American daily life today, in the form of the cult of

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violence and in the transformation of cities into juxtaposed, hostile ghettos (1997: 7). Facing the vast wreckage of slavery and genocide, the United States has another bill (justice and fairplay) coming due, to the descendants of its slaves as well as to those of its Native Americans, which it is morally obliged to redeem. For there is something crazy about thinking about race in America, and Toni Morrison is among the first to surgically deal with it even if she, like Wright, writes from the subaltern’s point of view whose “status has been deeply internalized,” as Sara Suleri would have it (1989: 216). In her lectures on American literature, Playing in the Dark, Morrison wrote of the “tacit agreement among literary scholars” that American culture and classic American literature can be considered “without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States.” This agreement, she observes, is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country’s literature. The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination (1993: 23). Her investigation demonstrates the consequences of this omission within the literature itself and suggests how different American literature looks when read with a consciousness of it. How might we read a story like Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” for example, with its portrait of a homespun colonial community that has collectively and matter-of-factly sold its soul to the devil? Her lectures also reflect on the roles of blacks in canonical American fiction as well as literary criticism. “There is no romance free of what Herman Melville called ‘the power of blackness,’” she writes, especially not in a country in which there was a resident population, already black, on which the imagination could play; through which historical, moral, metaphysical, and social fears, problems, and dichotomies could be articulated. . . . The fabrication of an Africanist persona is . . . an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity (1993: 45).

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What this implies is that the heroic black tradition is common to most parts if not all of white America. Within this tradition may be grouped, at any level of its development, the epic, saga, praise-chants, ballads, the blues, and so on. In all her works, though, much of that battered status is remedied in language. As the Caribbean critic E. K. Brathwaite perceptively put it: “It was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by his master, and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he perhaps most successfully rebelled” (1984: 13). Morrison’s novels are glittering examples of how Caliban is turning his master’s speech on him. It is the semiotic sphere that she characteristically engages and within which she operates. Before Beloved, the African-American canon was wounded, incomplete. Until Beloved, our imagination of America had a heart-sized hole in it big enough to die from, as if we had never seen black boys “hanging from the most beautiful sycamore trees in the world” (1988: 112). And, finally, Jazz arrived. Filled with dense genuine prose, it won Morrison the Nobel Prize, which she described as “a tremor of delight.” The Nobel Academy eulogized Morrison “who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality” (quoted in Argand, 1993: 39). In her lecture to the Swedish Academy and the world of letters, Morrison had spoken against the punishing speech of the organs of obedience, used to “sanction ignorance and preserve privilege”; against the “obscuring” and “oppressive” language of state, the “calcified language of the academy,” the “faux-language of the mindless media,” the “policing languages” of “racist mastery” and the “seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like pâté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words.” Rather than these obscenities, she proposed a tongue that “archs toward the place where meaning may lie.” Word-work is sublime, she said, “because it is generative; it makes the meaning that secures our difference, our human difference.” Death may be the meaning of life, but language is its measure. Language alone “protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation” (1993: 15–16). Morrison also reminded her audience of the magic of language while honoring and celebrating telling as an essential ingredient in our lives, using the mesmerizing four words “once upon a time,” without pinning down her tale to a particular time or place. When we cease to be stimulated and excited by the enchantment those words evoke from being read to us in childhood, language no longer lives for us. As her parable, Morrison takes the story of a blind woman confronted in her house by some youngsters, one of whom says to her: “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead” (1993: 18). The lesson Morrison

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draws from her meditation is a desperate one, and yet her reader emerges strengthened from the pages that lead up to it. By what miracle? Light streams from the very manner in which she explores the archetypal situation—the bird may stand for the human spirit—from several points of view, making the simplest of images resonate with profundity and ambiguity, so that it becomes a metaphor for the human condition. Her writing is as concentrated as poetry; it has the gravitas of a biblical text, to be read again and again. She glorifies the African-American idiom, the coinage of black words: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives” (1993: 22). In its bluntest form, Morrison asserts that the truest Americans are black Americans; for much of what is distinctive about America’s “national character” is rooted in the hybridity of its people. Her view of blackness and idiom chimes with that of Ralph Ellison who wrote: “the very sound of American English is derived from the timbre of the African voice and the listening habits of the African ear. If there is such a thing as a Yale accent, there is a Negro wail in it” (1993: 16). The lesson Morrison’s protagonists learn while claiming their heritage is: the whitest white is made by adding a drop of black. They thus confirm what Richard Rodriguez has aptly called “The Color Brown.” I excerpt from one of his impassioned and astute essays that pinpoints the question of race with great panache: To deny the possibility of Brown, white racists concocted the one-drop theory, as it was called. Its aim was to keep the African slave a slave. Regardless of how lightskinned, how brown you may be, regardless of how racially mixed, you remained African if you carried a single drop of African blood. In fact, America was never just white and black. From the first day that African slaves were brought to these shores against their will there was a complicating third race: The Indian. The Indian who fought against the European also married the European. The European married, too, the African. Every African-American I’ve ever known has told me somewhere in the course of our friendship, by the way, did you know that my grandmother was Cherokee, my greatgrandfather was Sioux? The African-Indian marriage is the great unwritten chapter in American history. . . . It is a mark of true emancipation that two of this nation’s most prominent African-Americans, Colin Powell and Tiger Woods, are now able to speak so easily about

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their racial complexity. The Clinton administration has announced that in future we Americans will be able to describe ourselves on census forms as belonging to more than one race (1998: 1–2). Rodriguez shows some discomfort with the white/black duality of race. Americans, whether white or black, seem to be locked in a double bind. Rodriguez, who is right to introduce a third and a fourth color—brown and yellow—into the picture, aims at breaking down the theory and practice that has been excluding other shadings of color and highjacking for generations the word “American” as tacitly connoting white. Morrison, for her part, has inverted the cultural assumptions and the verbal conventions: in her discourse; “American,” roughly speaking, means “black.” At the heart of her African-American endeavor is a breathtaking act of cultural transformation. One might as a result be tempted to regard Jazz as one of Mark Twain’s classics that “everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” But, aside from being one of Morrison’s finest novels, Jazz continues to hold its audience in an exemplary way, for lives need narrative, and narrative is composed of language. That is why we crave for a “new” literature. Far from being an efflorescence in a desert, such literature is a product of a rich, ancient, and still vigorously thriving indigenous literary tradition—the oral poetry and narrative of the subaltern. It is independent of Western models and attitudes, and while reserving the right to make selective use of them, draws its main nourishment from local sources. Morrison’s kind of writing aims to map out by example the true dimensions of the field of the African-American idiom in the United States and so change the official view of “what subaltern writing is.” It breaks with the deplorable habit of putting oral literature into a kind of introductory ghetto that serves as “background” to the development of what is felt to be the real (written, modernist) literature. In that sense, the core of Toni Morrison’s oeuvre is not ressentiment, but an affectionate contention with Faulkner for the right to represent African-America. That impulse to contend is part of a grander effort to discover the bases of an integral identity different from the formerly dependent, derivative one. Caliban, according to George Lamming, “is the excluded, that which is eternally below possibility. . . . He is seen as an occasion, a state of existence which can be appropriated and exploited to the purposes of another’s own development” (1984: 107). If that is so, then Caliban must be shown to have a history that can be perceived on its own, as the result of Caliban’s own effort. One must, in Lamming’s view, “explode Prospero’s old myth” by christening “language afresh”; but this cannot occur “until we show language as the product of human endeavor; until we make available to all the result of

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certain enterprises undertaken by men who are still regarded as the unfortunate descendants of languageless and deformed slaves” (119). Just so, warning us against mythic thinking, Morrison writes strongly against it. Mythic thinking, after all, is precisely what the small black town in Paradise is dying from. It has become the victim of its own legend. One of the novel’s sections is about a woman named Patricia who has devoted her life to reconstructing the genealogy of the town since its founding. Patricia labors away for years, like García Márquez’s José Arcadio Buendía whose degeneration is the cause for Macondo’s destruction in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in thrall to the mysteries of descent and inheritance. Then one day she realizes that belief in the magic of blood is what is destroying the community she has been trying to memorialize with her research, and that genealogy is spurious anyway, since people lie about their lives. So she collects all her papers and carries them out into the yard to burn: “She had to tear the covers off the composition note-books and hold them slant with a stick so they would not smother the fire. . . . Did they really think they could keep this up? The numbers, the bloodlines, the who fucks who? All those generations . . . kept going, just to end up narrow as bale wire?” (Morrison, 1998: 205). The notebooks that Patricia burns contain the author’s meditation on brave words like “poise,” “light,” “wisdom,” “deference,” “generosity,” “felicity,” and “trust.” To these, we must add “solace.” Like Schopenhauer and the sorrow songs, Paradise seeks consolation. Part history and part Dreamtime, part opera, part Matisse, it would be surpassing and transcendent if only for the notion of a “Disallowing.” But its rainbow parabola also includes uprooting and Trails of Tears, Vietnam and civil rights, patriarchy and ancestor worship, abduction and sanctuary, migration and abandonment, sex and ghosts. Considering degrees of blackness, it raises a ruckus and rewrites God. Morrison elucidates: “Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game. God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby” (1998: 9). In a house shaped like a cartridge, in a state shaped like a gun, the fathers and sons of the nearby all-black town of Ruby shoot down running women as if they were shooting deer. “They shoot the white girl first” (1998: 3). Not the least of many mysteries in Paradise is how hard it is to figure out which of the five women attacked by a fearful lynching party in a former convent in a godforsaken Oklahoma in the 1970s is, in fact, white. We do know the lynchers are “blue-black people,” called “8-rock” after coal at the deepest level of the mines. To understand how it happens, the act of violence at the heart of Paradise, we must think of Pecola in The Bluest Eye, pregnant with her father’s

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baby, believing that if only she had blue eyes she would be loved as much as Bojangles had loved Shirley Temple; of Sula in Sula, who, when she loved a man, rubbed the black off his bones down to gold leaf, then scraped away the gold to discover alabaster, then tapped with a hammer at the alabaster till it cracked like ice, and what you felt was fertile loam; of Milkman in Song of Solomon, who went south from Detroit to a ruined plantation and a cave of the dead, who learned from blue silk wings, red velvet rose petals, a children’s riddle song, and a bag of human bones not only his own true name but also how to fly . . . all the way back to Africa; of the horseback ghosts of the blind slaves in Tar Baby, where Caliban got another chance against Prospero; of Sethe in Beloved like a black Medea with a handsaw, and Denver, who swallowed her sister’s blood, and Beloved swimming up from blue water to eat all the sugar in the world; Beloved, that ghost story, mother epic, folk fable, fairy-tale incantation of lost children, men like centaurs, lunatic history and babies offered up like hummingbirds to shameful gods; of Jazz which happens to be the story (based on a real event) of a mild-mannered, likable, law-abiding, middleaged black man who stalks and kills, as though she were a wild animal, his former mistress, a much younger and lighter-complexioned woman who has gotten bored with his attentions. (Here one ought to pay a small debt of honor to these novels.) For now I want to reflect on Paradise, Morrison’s first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize, and possibly her best work of fiction to date. An essay Morrison wrote in 1971, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” is a brilliant laying out of the ways in which the interests of black women are not the same as the interests of either white women—“Black women have found it impossible to respect white women,” she calmly explained—or black men. For centuries in America, she argues, the black woman had nothing to fall back on—“not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself” (1971: 33). What is most striking about Paradise is that it takes up the trope of the plight of the black woman that the author dealt with only too hastily in her otherwise provocative 1971 essay (Argand, 1993: 38). The male–female dichotomy, for example, with the male represented as rigid and legalistic, the female as mysterious and “other,” irrationally threatening to the male, had been on the author’s mind for quite some time. She (the female) resembles the community, one that epitomizes everything Ruby most distrusts and fears. A broken-down convent, once a school for the purpose of Christinizing and domesticating Arapaho Indian girls, is now home to a motley group of women—drifters who have come together almost by chance. Something happens in 1976 to this haphazard, ad hoc community

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of “women who chose their own company,” these wild-thing Sulas—to Consolata in the cellar, with her wine bottle and her bat vision; to Seneca in the bathtub, the “queen of scars,” making thin red slits in her skin with a safety pin; to Mavis, who hears her asphyxiated twins laughing in the dark; to Gigi/Grace, who seeks buried treasure; to Pallas/Divine, who could be carrying a lamb, a baby, or a jaguar. They are suddenly full of “loud dreaming.” They chalk their bodies on the basement floor, shave their heads, and dance like holy women in the hot rain: “If you have a place that you should be in and somebody who loves you waiting there, then go. If not stay here and follow me. Someone could want to meet you” (Morrison, 1998: 47). These women are an unprepossessing group, what the world would label losers. But they are benign; indeed, over the years they have a history of giving sustenance and aid to those whom the grimly righteous ethos of Ruby has failed: a pregnant teenager, a mother gone mad from tending her incurably ill children, an unhappy girl designated as the town whore. While paying homage to their anguish, Morrison makes it clear that they are, in fact, a rather feckless, sloppy lot. Far from having been sanctified by their pain, they are shown to be lazy, shallow, quarrelsome, and dim. Nevertheless, the women of the convent represent something fearsome to Ruby’s town fathers: disorder, deception, and drift, “the three d’s that paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift” (1998: 56). Perhaps worse yet, they were women who had turned away from men— “not women locked safely away from men; but worse, women who chose themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven” (1998: 63). As the town of Ruby, fatally cut off from the larger world that might give it meaning, begins to rot from within, it seizes on the convent as the center and the cause of all evil in the community. A violent confrontation between the men of Ruby and the women of the convent is inevitable, but, when it occurs, the results are unexpected, both tragic and oddly regenerative. Think of the midwife Lone who teaches Consolata how to raise the dead; Dovey who has a “Friend” who visits her in the garden on his way to someplace else; the fire-ruined house in the wilderness where Deacon meets his secret love is full of ash people, fishmen, nether shapes, and a girl with butterfly wings three feet long. And in the meadow where the convent women run from the guns of Ruby, there is a door. On the other side of the door are Solace and Piedade, who will bathe them in emerald water and bring shepherds with colored birds on their shoulders “down from the mountains to remember their lives in her songs” (1998: 111). To speak of magic realism in Morrison is to speak of an exceptionally complex and fertile imagination that turns horror stories into fairy tales and blessings into curses.

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In the past, Morrison defended the frequent resort to the supernatural in her novels as a means of enlarging the narrowness of the purely empirical worldview. Angels and ghosts are her way of cleansing the doors of perception to show us the infinite. But magic realism is a dangerous drug. Too heavy a reliance on its charms begins to look like the opposite of imagination—the grown-up equivalent of “And then he woke up and realized it had all been a dream” (1998: 71). It can also result in a rather deadly liberalism. In Paradise, the biblical allusions that have hitherto remained latent in the dense specificity of the plot coalesce into stark allegory. Buried themes of sacrifice and redemption are yanked rudely to the surface with a flurry of actual resurrections. The prose turns a furious purple. The town of Ruby remains an enigma to the reader; it is a utopia the like of which is impossible to realize. In many ways, it does indeed seem to be paradise. There is a firm common standard of propriety. Ruby has no crime; bad behavior among the young is firmly dealt with by the community itself, and there is no need for any sort of police. A tired housewife can take a solitary midnight stroll without a second thought. No one goes hungry: if a family’s crop is ruined, or its barn burned, the neighbors make up the loss with unthinking generosity. To Ruby’s modern inhabitants, as to its Old Fathers, [h]ere freedom was not entertainment, like a carnival or a hoedown that you can count on once a year. Nor was it the table droppings from the entitled. Here freedom was a test administered by the natural world that a man had to take for himself every day. And if he passed enough tests long enough, he was king (1998: 89). Although Morrison does not say so, the ancients believed that rubies were an antidote to poison, warded off plague, banished grief, and diverted the mind from evil thoughts. A “perfect ruby” was the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists. We may also remember Dorothy’s slippers in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Ruby, Oklahoma, is likewise a refuge, as well as a fortress, Erewhon and Shangri-La, not to mention the promised land of Canaan.13 Morrison’s Ruby is the last stop in a long line that began with the passage from Africa, which included landfall, slavery and civil war, Emancipation and Reconstruction—a proud community of freedmen, of gunsmiths, seamstresses, lacemakers, cobblers, ironmongers, and masons: They were extraordinary. They had served, picked, plowed and traded in Louisiana since 1755, when it included Mississippi; and when it was divided into states

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they had helped govern both from 1868 to 1875, after which they had been reduced to field labor. . . . They had denied each other nothing, bowed to no one, knelt only to their Maker (Morrison, 1998: 12). The price that must be paid for such a paradise is that of utter isolation. Strangers, by common accord, are not welcome in Ruby. “How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness,” a character reflects in Paradise, and “how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it” (1998: 77). The history of human civilization is fraught with efforts, inevitably vain, to establish utopias and distopias of one sort or another, and the tales of their undoings always tell us a great deal about human nature, from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.14 Morrison’s utopia—the all-black town of Ruby, population 360—proves no more impervious to the outside world than any other. Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, with its king, queen, princess, cooks, courtiers, grooms, even horses sleeping heavily behind its impenetrable wall of briers, Ruby and its inhabitants exist in a state of enchanted but doomed perfection until 1890, when fifteen families, armed with advertisements of cheap land for homesteading—at the expense, of course, of the Choctaw, Cree, and Arapaho who had lived there for centuries—“took that history, those years, each other and their incorruptible worthiness” and walked to Oklahoma to build their communal kitchen, to inscribe on the brick altar of an oven a ferocious prophecy: “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” seed their fields and their women, make a home they called Haven—one of many all-black towns in the territory of the time, like Taft, Nicodemus, Langston City, and Mound Bayou (Morrison, 1998: 180). Following a specter into the wilderness, they had endured black-skinned bandits, “time-sharing shoes,” rejection by poor whites and rich Choctaw, yard-dog attacks, and the jeers of prostitutes. What they had not prepared for—a humiliation that more than rankled, that “threatened to crack open their bones”—was the “contemptuous dismissal” they received from Negro towns already built. This was the infamous “Disallowing.” And the reason for it is the secret of Ruby, which is where nine of these families went next, in 1945, after the men came home from the war to Haven, to find America unchanged: “Out there where your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled” (1998: 201). Disallowed like the ex-slaves, the ex-soldiers dismantled their oven, shouldered their guns, pulled up their stakes, and struck out again. Named after Ruby Morgan, the town of Ruby is prosperous: wide streets, pastel houses, enormous lawns, many churches (if only a single bank), and flower gardens “snowed with butterflies.” Because nobody has

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died in Ruby since sweet, modest Ruby Morgan fell ill on the journey from Haven to the new community, immediately after World War II no local hospital would accept a black person in the wards; only one nurse tried to contact a doctor for her, and that doctor turned out to be a veterinarian. When Ruby died, her heartbroken brothers, the twins Deacon and Steward, made a pact with God that He, and the world, should leave the town of Ruby alone. “A prayer in the form of a deal, no less, with God, no less, which He seemed to honor until 1969” (238). But the reader should know that something else is happening in Ruby. A new reverend, a veteran of the civil rights movement, messes with the children. Somebody paints, on their sacred oven, a jet-black fist with red fingernails. Not only do daughters refuse to get out of bed, and brides disappear on their honeymoons, but the women of Ruby begin to question the Fathers, who get angrier and noisier: They dug the clay—not you. They carried the hod—not you. They mixed the mortar—not a one of you. They made good strong brick for that oven when their own shelter was sticks and sod. You understand what I’m telling you? . . . Act short with me all you want, you in long trouble if you think you can disrespect a row you never hoed (1998: 297). Naturally, the convent women will be blamed. They had after all shown up at a wedding reception to which they should never have been invited in the first place, “looking like go-go girls: pink shorts, see-through skirts; painted eyes, no lipstick; obviously no underwear; no stockings.” And our own women, who cannot drive, had been seen on foot on the road going to or coming from secret visits there—for vegetables, for pies, and maybe even for abortions. “The stallions were fighting about who controlled the mares and their foals,” thinks Billie Delia, who as a child rode bare-bottomed on a horse until they reviled her for it. Graven idols, black arts, narcotic herbs, lesbian sex! Besides—“out here under skies so star-packed it was disgraceful; out here where the wind handled you like a man”—the women of the convent are not 8-rock (1998: 188). Morrison explains: For generations they had believed the division they fought to close was free against slave and rich against poor. Usually, but not always, white against black. Now they saw a new separation: light-skinned against black. . . . The sign of racial purity they had taken for granted had become a stain. The scattering that alarmed Zechariah because he

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believed it would deplete them was now an even more dangerous level of evil, for if they broke apart and were disvalued by the impure, then, certain as death, those ten generations would disturb their children’s peace throughout eternity (1998: 302). This is it: the prose is proving to be an important body of work, and, indeed, this “new,” burgeoning narrative represents perhaps the most valuable contribution the edge has yet made to the world of books. The long-term outcome of such profoundly hybrid voices as Morrison’s has been a radically introspective shift toward another way of telling, to adapt freely from John Berger, a radical historicising of the novel; and a quite new interest in the slave experience, as cultures came no longer to be conceived in holistic terms as units or patterns, but as densely cross-cutting, fragmentary, constructed nets of undecidable, ambiguous texts and discourses.

II The narrative of rupture promulgated in Paradise and Morrison’s previous novels provide ideological underpinning for the female AfricanAmerican voice to recover an identity doubly alienated. It also captures the struggle of the downtrodden subaltern for autonomy and spiritual wholeness. In the process, no longer is African-American literature confined in any way possible. Indeed the twentieth century American technological revolution and the Northward (and eventually westward) migration it spawned, coupled with increasing levels of educational achievement by greater numbers of people, has speeded the procedure of reclaiming a heritage. It has extended the notion of who African-Americans are and where and how they live. One striking feature is the strength of its voice. An interesting example of this narrative can be found in the texture of Gates’s Colored People.15 Gates’s memoir is an instance of the young black scholar who is linguistically sophisticated to a degree unthinkable for his forebears, and thus capable not merely of talking and living with the objects of his studies, but of exploiting black historical texts, chronicles, archives, films, comic books, folk epics, kindergarten manuals, black humor, and even sport for the sake of renarrating the experience of slavery as well as writing back with a vengeance.16 In the memoir, one may see the personal and political passions that animate him and stand central to his career as a critic and a scholar. Its title captures his main interests, which have evolved over the last two decades or so from the issue of authentic black expression to the larger question of what is authentic

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“blackness,” especially for a black man. The problem is a personal one. He mentions it in interviews, in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, in his work on the rise and fall of black Britain, in his essays on Josephine Baker, Juan Latino, the “Ethiopian humanist,” Louis Farrakhan, and Michael Jordan. In dealing with such matters, Gates finds himself in a difficult position, for he posits, and then balefully argues against, the assertion that legitimate and authentic culture in America is perceived only as white culture while the conditions of American blacks worsen inexorably. As Gates himself observes: “Thirteen decades have passed since Emancipation, and half of our black men between twenty-four and thirty-five are without full-time employment. One black man graduates from college for every hundred who go to jail. Almost half of black children live in poverty” (1997: 47). This plight extends even to the black artist, writer, scholar, or politician, who cannot define himself or herself freely, but must work within a complex role that already has been established for him or her—that of the outsider, the outlaw, someone sitting on the edge. This is what C.L.R. James has shrewdly called “the tradition of the oppressed” that teaches, Morrison informs us, that the racist [like Captain Delano in Benito Cereno] can jump from the view of the slave, Babo, as “naturally docile, made for servitude” to “savage cannibal” without any gesture toward what may lie in between the two conclusions, or any explanation of the jump from puppy to monster, so the truth of Babo’s situation—that he is leading a surreptitious rebellion aboard the slave ship, that he is a clever man who wants to be free never enters the equation (1992: xv). This issue of exclusion, an enforced and disempowering identity, haunts black American writers, of course, but for a handful of them it remains secondary. It is certainly not enough to think of a world in which there has been discrimination, but in which now we have seen the error of our ways and resolved to put it behind us. Injustice on the scale that racism has involved—genocide, expropriation, imperial brutality, chattel slavery, apartheid, and segregation—is not something that evaporates in the light of our good intentions. Such evils inflict terrible harm on their immediate victims. But they can also lay a curse on a country: a curse that is never easily or unambiguously lifted, but lingers on in memory, culture, and the thousand and one ways in which what has happened to a people in the past infects the capillaries that nourish their future. The biblical prophets

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understood that curse as God’s judgment on injustice. Part of what is wrong with one generation’s wickedness is that it blights the future for later generations. “Woe betide those who enact unjust laws, depriving the poor of justice, plundering the widow and despoiling the fatherless! What will you do when called to account? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your children?” (1987: 10:1–3). We do not have to see our predicament in a biblical light, though in the past this has lent a certain grandeur to such occasions as Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the British administration in India, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We do not need theology or metaphysics to understand the enduring legacy of slavery or colonial brutality. We know the social dynamics. In the United States, for example, slavery and segregation were, for a whole people, forms of legislated hopelessness. These arrangements (and the violence and terror that supported them) were designed to keep blacks “in their place,” to defeat any attempt by slaves or their descendants to make something of themselves. What does this do to a people over six or seven generations in a competitive society like the United States, where hope and opportunity are transmitted through families, and where the normal mechanism of social mobility is for people to work, save, and generate hope out of nothing, not for their own prosperity but for the imagined future of their children? When the legal barriers are lifted and the violence suppressed, some sort of hope may return, opportunities may open up, and after a generation or two there may be some success stories. But the situation is not as it was before the injustice or as it would have been had the injustice never been perpetrated. It is fatuous to think that hope, and the intergenerational connections that nourish hope, can survive such injustice unscathed and reappear magically to vindicate the good intentions of those whose ancestors did their best to destroy it. Is race therefore something we could learn not to notice? And if we did, who would pay the price of its not being noticed? Whites? In his Introduction to Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, David Wilkins observes that the white citizens of America and Britain mostly do not see themselves as having a race. Their culture is just “British culture” or “American culture” or, unselfconsciously, simply the way things are. Not only Wilkins but also Anthony Appiah, Amy Gutmann, Patricia Williams, and others are suspicious of white proposals to create a color-blind world, what Williams calls a “prematurely imagined community,” characterized by “the majoritarian privilege of never noticing oneself,” “the profoundly invested disingenuousness” of racial denial, and “all the while, a kind of pleading behind the eyes, a twisting of nervously clutched hankies”—“Race is nothing to us:

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would that it were also nothing to you.”17 Is it even reasonable to ask those who have been harmed by race to put their race-consciousness aside? Williams makes it clear that one still cannot survive as a black person in America or England without being watchful where color is concerned. A black woman with her child must prepare to be humiliated in front of him or her. A young black man must expect to be stopped more often by the police. A person of color knows that the fact of his or her color will register every time in the eyes of strangers, officials, shop assistants, even friends and colleagues. Since race looms so large in the lives of those who may be harmed by it, it seems unfair to say that they are to make nothing positive of it—a badge of honor or a basis of solidarity. Toni Morrison is well known for her misgivings about this sort of makeover—race as affirmative identity among those most likely to be affected by racism. One facet of her career as a teacher and/or writer is precisely the awareness with which she elucidates the grim miasma of race. Nothing gives us a sharper impression of the depth of one’s era and of the writer’s own aesthetic principles than a deconstruction of some of her works, which I have attempted to do. It is no exaggeration to say that Morrison, who was once viewed as writing against the grain of American literature, has been incorporated into it, indeed claimed in a variety of ways, into it, which means that a black woman, writing in English, has been recognized as equal to the best writers worldwide. In the best of worlds, her success may open doors for young writers following after her, something that she has indicated is crucial to her. Most important, her success signals the permanent arrival of the African-American idiom onto the stage of world literature, a development that will make it impossible in the future to exclude it. The recognition of her work is simultaneously a recognition of the cultural nationalism that is made implicit in her novels. And if Rushdie is a first-class fabulator, in that his novels have tended to be filled with puns and verbal games, buffoonery, and scenes of slapstick comedy, Morrison is an innovator. She intertwines traditions and overlaps territories by drawing on magic realism in addition to various folklores: rivers experience the pain of being rerouted, swamp trees are inhabited by invisible women who represent an ancient tradition, butterflies and champion daisy trees have the power of speech, ants marshal for war. Morrison’s career, Gates announces, Is an anomaly in a crucial aspect: Her writing is at once difficult and popular. A subtle craftsperson and a compelling weaver of tales, she “tells a good story,” but the stories she tells are not calculated to please. Narratives of

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incestuous rape (The Bluest Eye), of a mother’s abuse of her son (Tar Baby) or murder of her daughter (Beloved), or of a man’s murder of his lover (Jazz)—these do not on the surface seem to be the sort of stories to attract the wide readership that Morrison commands (1993: x). The argument Gates develops is that Morrison’s novels have been constructed, and are magically unsettled, by the unique character of historical memory for African-Americans. That is, Morrison has wanted to account for the black experience that has been ignored or quite inadequately narrated by white historians and novelists. More significantly, to do that she has needed to confront precisely those aspects of the experience that have blocked memory, made remembering intolerable and memories inexpressible, literally unspeakable. Indeed, the verb “rememory” has been invented in Beloved to stand for something like a willed remembering that includes its own strenuous reluctance to return to the past. Morrison’s characters are rooted in a known physical world, shared and chorally spoken for. In such a world even the hardest daily tasks may be welcomed, for there is “nothing better than to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past” (1987: 256). It is with the sudden and inescapable eruptions of the past into the present, however, and with the capacities of people to live with and rework the impossibly painful and humiliating experience of subordination, that her fiction is concerned. White guilt and breast-beating drop away to become a backcloth, an incomprehensible cause; the terrifying “What are these people?” is a question one of her characters raises and cannot answer. Unlike white romance, which is “composed of the Constant Loves and invincible Courages of heroes, heroines, kings and queens,” black romance pays its debt to blues music, the rhythms and the melancholy pleasures of life in the ghetto that Morrison has so magically transformed into a narrative of romance. An explorer of things in the past and/or present, she has claimed new sources and new kinds of reading as the inspiration for a thriving new literature. “Here we have a genuine potential for an emergent writing,” Edward Said notes, Which in its awareness of obstacles and steps marks the sense of a beginning. It paints the reality of the surrounding environment: harsh, desperate, unforgiving, hopeless. Hers are not new master discourses, strong new narratives, but a new way of telling of sorrow and joy, tears and laughter, belonging and its opposite, unbelonging (1993: 334).

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Or, to put it differently, Morrison’s narrative is a bazaar of magic variations and polymorphous drives. In Beloved, for example, the house is malevolent and throws the sideboard across the sitting-room, or Milkman Dead is suckled by his mother till he is a grown-up. In Paradise, a strain of portentous lyricism is never very far from the surface. But as the novel’s magico-Christian message lumbers into view, it threatens to take over. The characters increasingly abandon idiomatic speech for a mythic KingdomCome parlance, while the narrative itself dissolves in Adrienne Rich-ish poetry. Take this sentence: “Consolata listened to the refusing silence, more wondering than annoyed by the sky, in plumage now, gold and bluegreen, strutting like requited love on the horizon” (1998: 241). Or this one; “Speeding toward the unforeseeable, sitting next to him who was darker than the darkness they split, Consolata let the feathers unfold and come unstuck from the walls of a stone-cold womb” (1998: 243). Some people go shivery with pleasure reading this fine writing. And if “music has helped us to overcome three hundred years of oppression,” Morrison observes, “it is now up to the novel to assume that role, to play new sounds, to start anew the investigation” (quoted in Argand, 1993: 40). It is in this sense that Morrison’s endeavor is new in the gist of sufficient substance and uniqueness to make a difference in the development of humankind. All her novels explore in rich vocabulary and cold-blooded detail the story of brokenhearted rural African-Americans. Reading her over the years, one is struck by her undiminished capacity for a remarkably contrapuntal, many-voiced self-articulation. For her, every performance seems to have been painful: the work she composed seems to be advancing an argument, making a point, creating a percipient form that unfolds deliberately and self-consciously before the reader. There is always a sense of wonderful organization in Morrison’s writings, an organization that completely eschews narrative effects, color, writing, but relies instead on articulation, clarity of voice, mastery and control of each sound. The following excerpt shows this particular way of seeing: This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn’t say exactly why, considering the colored people he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers,

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veterans, hill men, posses and merry makers. . . . Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot—with a woman, or a family—for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski Country, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia (1987: 123). Morrison is the author at the “crossroads”—noon—the most potent hour of African-American culture, when morning merges into afternoon. The crossroads itself is a site of creative imagination for her: “This is where the spirits meet the humans, the water meets the land, the child meets the adult—these are the zones of power, and I think this is where stories are created.”18 It is, in a sense, the place where she first staked her claim to the novel. Hers stretches now far beyond the boundaries of the plantation and the small southern town. Additionally, this is a time when African-American literary critics with stature, such as Gates, Cornel West, bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Houston Baker, Jr., and Shirley Anne Williams, to name but a few of the better known ones, have validated the significance and essentiality of AfricanAmerican literature as a fundamental aspect of the American canon. Their experiences as writers have taken them deeper into their communities and dispersed them further into the outer reaches of American society at large. In the process, they put their energies on new terrains, new realities, new ways of telling and/or narrating. Gates put it succinctly: The grandchildren of Du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” those who were able to profit from the affirmative action programs implemented in the late sixties that are facing such a harsh onslaught today, have thus for the past decade been in the midst of a great period of artistic productivity, much of it centered in New York. The signs of cultural vibrancy are unmistakable in dance, Bill T. Jones and Judith Jamison; in literature, Toni Morrison and Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley and John Edgar Wideman; in drama, August Wilson; in poetry, Rita Dove; in opera, Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis; in Jazz, Wynton Marsalis and Cassandra Wilson; public intellectuals such as Cornel West and bell hooks, Greg Tate and Lisa Jones; the visual artists Martin Puryear and Lorna Simpson; the rap musicians Public Eenemy and Queen Latifah; the filmmakers Spike Lee, Julie Dash, and John Singleton—the list is stunningly long. From television to op-ed pages, from the

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academy to hip-hop, never before have so many black artists and intellectuals achieved so much success in so very many fields (1997: 5). In Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Gates lavishly illustrates the paradox of this representation, and representativeness, of “blackness.” This paradox is embodied in a norm raging against itself, a paradox of racialized subjectivity forever playing Freud’s fort/da game in the space between what can be symbolized and what must remain spectral. Gates’s argument, as I understand it, does not suggest that, somewhere over the rainbow, behind or beyond the “inauthentic,” lies the aura of the sincere and the true. What emerges most forcefully for the reader from his portraits of black men bearing the “burden of representation” (including James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Anatole Broyard, and others) is the stark confrontation between the “social fantasy” of race or masculinity that projects them into the public sphere—fort!—and the eerie awareness that a sense of “agency,” any deliberative or subversive action, must be derived from working, at once, within and without those very mechanisms of “representation,” or strategies of regulation and discrimination—da! It is as if home is territory of both disorientation and relocation, with all the fragility and fecundity implied by such a double take (Bhabha, 1998).

III In The Transformation of the Avant-Garde, dealing with the history of art world from 1940 to 1985, Sarah Crane reflects on the differences between success in the literary marketplace and success for the visual artist. Because novels sell at much lower prices than paintings or other artworks, the market for literature is much greater and commercial success comes from volume of sales. For visual artists, on the other hand, it comes from selling, for a high unit price, to an élite of collectors and museums, who are guided in their opinions and tastes by currents they pick up from within the art world itself. As a result, rich and successful artists are often militantly avant-garde in their commitments or their general approach, whereas best-selling writers tend to write “in the tradition of the realistic novel” and avant-garde writers cannot seriously hope for much commercial success (1987: 67–69). When it does come, as it did in the case of Morrison, it is because of the content rather than the form. The success of Beloved is due in major part to experimental writing in which everything is sacrificed to clarity of thought and expression, born of deep and obviously painful introspection. It takes courage to bring this method, and the chilly, even desolate analytical style that comes with it, to bear on an inquiry into

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one’s own past. And there is “The push or tension [which] comes from the surrounding environment,” Edward Said informs us, “—the imperialist power that would otherwise compel you to disappear or to accept some miniature version of yourself as a doctrine to be passed out on a course syllabus” (1993: 334). Morrison writes, Said seems to hint, not to express herself, but to communicate with a scattered community of readers, finding more hope in “the meaningfulness of the world,” to adopt a phrase from Hannah Arendt, than she had in the past. Her genuinely radical effort to write back with a vengeance can be seen in “the remarkable universalizing of the African-American experience as it emerges in such brilliant detail in . . . Tar Baby and Beloved” (ibid.). And if Virginia Woolf became famous and successful long after her death because of public fascination with the Bloomsbury lifestyle and because of the attention paid to women writers by the women’s movement; Ann Petry, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, all had to undergo racism, exclusion, and prosecution for their work before notoriety could be translated into celebrity, marginality into the mainstream; Morrison’s place in history is assured thanks to her insertion into the experience of renarration of history from her point of view, in terms of either feeding into it or of branching out from it, rather than a result of her postulating a specific avant-garde tradition or even option. She is resolutely like other writers of her time, at ease with mass communication, and increasingly contemptuous of any other political forum. She holds out her hand to what might have been called the enemy or the oppressor—the forces of subjugation and capital respectively. She toils over her ideas, messages, and titles and hammers them home until the cultural consumer buys the book, marks the occasion, or switches on the television set. She makes her pitch to youth and newness but, far from being teenage rebels, the youth in question are the staid, talented generation of young writers that has begun to emerge. It includes Ntozake Shange, Rita Dove, Anjana Appachana, Mikey Smith, Kamau Brathwaite, Gloria Naylor, and many others. They, like Morrison, bear their past within them—as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigation for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending toward a . . . future, as urgently reinterpretable and redeployable experiences, in which the formerly silent [subordinate] . . . speaks and acts on territory reclaimed as part of a general movement of resistance, from the [subordinator] . . . (ibid., 212). There was a time when two black minds of powers and ways of describing the world, comparable to Morrison, coexisted. James Baldwin was born in

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1924, Frantz Fanon in 1925. Baldwin, in Harlem, American; Fanon in Martinique, French. Each man provided a radical intellectual voice for the postwar movements for decolonization. Probably because I come from a former French colony myself, I have no difficulty regarding the AfricanAmerican civil rights movement as a movement for decolonization, the only difference being that the colonized live in the so-called Mother country. The condition of the native—by which Fanon meant the colonized person—is a nervous condition. The condition of the “native son” or daughter—whether Bigger Thomas or Sula—is one of edginess, nervousness. For the native son and/or daughter, including Baldwin, Fanon, and Morrison, to engage in truth, to take truth to the extreme, to speak the depths of what he or she has witnessed and what he or she foresees, demands a radical decolonization of the self. In the process they make language honest, strip it of “ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place deviousness [is] clarity” (quoted in Diefendorf, 1996: 60). Fanon, in Les damnés de la terre, sets forth three phases of the native writer. In the first stage the “native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power.” In the second phase, “we find that the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is.” Fanon refers to this phase as creating literature of “just-before-the-battle.” Finally, he describes the third phase, which he calls the “fighting phase,” in which the writer will “shake the people” (1961: 34, 65, 89). In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin speaks of the dilemma faced by him as a black American writer in the following terms: I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West. . . . And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. . . . I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself (1998: 43). And with this realization, he was made aware of one other thing: What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people;

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on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world (ibid., 51). If the black or native writer stops at the first phase, or remains in a colonized state, he or she produces work that Baldwin characterizes as “so pallid and so harsh.” Pallid because the work lacks energy, originality; harsh perhaps in its fealty to stereotype. If the writer produces work that imitates or is derivative of the literature, culture, and social fabric of the colonizer, then he or she experiences literally a failure of the imagination. Such literature only draws attention, and possibly approval, to itself. But it accomplishes nothing. It is in no way transformative. And Fanon who footnotes: When I search for man in European technique and style, I see succession of negations of man, an avalanche of murders. Movement through the second phase of finding the self, and the third phase, shaking people, while retaining what is useful from the first phase, requires innovation with regard to form as well as content (1961: 101). Writing in the 1930s from Paris, where he was studying as a “good little” colonial but had the great fortune to meet Senghor, Césaire broke linguistic bounds similarly. In his Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire’s colonized mind exploded, and he twisted the mother tongue into a wildness and fury of imagery that the Europeans had no other choice but to call surrealism, in an attempt to control it and its author. It was so much more. Like Baldwin, Césaire was gazing into something without averting his eyes and devising a way of writing about it that would free him and bring the reader within the walls of colonization. The reader inhabits the colony—hardly paradise, infernal, dark, volcanic—and witnesses the colonized, the sunlessness of their landscape.19 Like Baldwin, Fanon, and Césaire before her, early in her career, Morrison began creating a subaltern literary language that synthesized elements of several subaltern art forms. As with nation-language, she stretched her means of expression across, over and under subaltern expression: from music, the blues and especially gospel; from literature, the slave narrative—the origin of subaltern autobiography—and a new way of telling. Sometimes her writing is entrusted with a mission, with the cadence of call and response. Her recording of herself as witness to her life and time relates to the subaltern narrative, especially her remarkable Beloved, located as it is in the landscape of history of resistance. In Morrison, literature loses an author in order to find a figure: someone who represents a quest not for indi-

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vidual identity but for a lost initiative whose recovery has become a project for an entire generation. She is the conscience of her people. Such a philosophy, as she has often insisted, is inscribed everywhere in the artistic practices of African-American peoples. Morrison has written the rules. In her narrative, we locate fame unsullied by the alloy of history, language, or any mediation but the mind’s own. In one magical package, she is both Du Bois and Neale Hurston. But if the West’s power brands helped ensure her status as international power equity of the world of writing, she—and the sense we have that she is ours—has become some of those things that constitute our identity as subalterns, as citizens of the once subordinated society. Trait transference is not a one-stop affair. And the work of what we call globalism, and what the rest of the world knows as Westernization, is never done. It is a spectacle of kitsch—and, yes, of utter physical transcendence. Gazing for a spell at her multiple ways of storytelling, one feels somehow uplifted by the procession of images, metaphors, similes, and other ways of writing back that serve those of us who only stand and cheer on to victory of justice for all. For her, and perhaps for us (readers), the only truthful way to write is as a diversity of colors, tastes, and sensibilities—united only by a common history and, at times, a common enemy. As a writer, she knows that depicting the lives of the subaltern with unsparing intimacy might just be the most revolutionary thing she could do. Pitched adroitly in style between culture and society, her work stitches together the topics of the “monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like two halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice.” Embracing the besieged metropolitan tongue, she insists: “It is the language which is the empire, and great [writers] are not its vassals but its princes.” For her, “maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor” (Walcott, 1998: 211). In the process, her art resembles a broken vase, more lovingly reassembled for having once been shattered. She exalts in the “shipwreck of fragments” bequeathed to her culture as “writers’ heaven.” It may well be that the most interesting literature of the latter part of this century cannot be said to have originated in the great literary centers, but is actually the work of outsiders, starting with Morrison, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions. It may also be because a “disorientation is taking place. . . . Because the native, the exotic, the victim, the noble savage is looking back, returning a stare” (Ibid., 199). In the event, he and/or she forms a powerful part of that recentering gaze.

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Chapter Six

ON FRICTION IN FICTION: MY AUNT IS A MAN I miss Ambi, the word: ambi—two, tous les deux, tous deux, les deux Both sides Thinking of/on both sides. Hélène Cixous, Inter Views, 24.

An impressive literature in French is now present in all the many countries that were once French colonies, in some of which (Québec, Martinique, Guadeloupe, La Nouvelle Calédonie) French is the lingua franca; in Haiti partly so, with Créole jostling French. In West Africa and Les Antilles, literature in French coexists with literature in other languages, but if we think of Léopold Sedar Senghor, Mobyem Mikanza, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Édouard Glissant among others we are really talking about an estimably substantial library of French-language but non-French works. “The same is roughly true of other former French colonies,” Edward Said notes, “where the paradox of literature in French but directed against colonial France is still as lively and invigorating as it was when it first appeared one or two generations ago” (Hazoume followed by Fanon and Memmi).1 This is also the case in the Arab world, Said goes on to argue, once divided unequally between British and French colonialism. In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, many distinguished Arab writers produce work only in French: Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Nabil Farès, Rabah Belamri, Fatima Mernissi, 263

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Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar Djaout, Fethi Ben Slama, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Rashid Boujedra, Malek Alloula, Mehdi Charef, and others are the names one can think of. “Yet in all these three countries political independence from France brought forth a new literature in Arabic,” Said adds, with poetry, fiction, criticism, history, political analysis, and memoirs now circulating not only locally but throughout the rest of the Arab world. There has long been a significant Lebanese literature in French, coexisting, if unevenly, with a more impressive Arab production. Some of this FrancoLebanese literature, for instance the essays of Michel Chiha, had important political consequences, furnishing the Maronite community with a sense of identity in a predominantly Sunni Arab environment. But this is not to detract from the literary merit of other writers: Georges Shehadé, Etel Adnan, Nadia Tueni, Amin Maalouf, and the 1995 Goncourt prize winner, Salah Stétié, whose work in French is no less Lebanese or even Arab (2000: 406).2 The accent throughout his essay is more on Anglophone than on a Francophone literature, with which he deals only schematically. In the period before political independence, Francophone prose was typically elevated, extravagant, mythopoeic, laced with surreal fantasy or utopian symbolism. It bore the style of an aspirant revolutionary people, as insecure as it was effervescent. One could hear in this rollicking rhetoric the bluster of the underdog, as Césaire, Memmi, Senghor, and others tried to compensate for their political marginality with verbal brio. If their language was French, then they would have to use it in an estranging way, defiantly asserting their cultural difference. Although some of the old style French survived independence, it gradually gave way to the plainer, more disenchanted idiom of Patrick Chamoiseau or the self-parodic minimalism of Rachid Boujedra, so fearful of writing in French à la Gide that he ceased to write in French altogether. What is most distinctive about these literary agents provocateurs’ writing is the peculiar flavor of their prose. It is written in a heady and unsteady French, one infiltrated with the gist and germ of Charabia and Créole respectively.3 Indeed, their rhetorical effulgence stems as much from the everyday idiom of the margins as from the nocturnal narrations of the conteurs. On the other hand, their abundant wordplay and twists of phrase sound (for they are written to be read aloud) fantastically outlandish to French ears. It might be true to say, after Milan Kundera, that French is being “Confiantized,” made new by writers with the freedom of a bilingual who refuses absolute authority to either of his languages, and who has the courage to disobey them both.

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These writers represent the wide, international arm of the defense of the French language, otherwise called francophonie, which, once proposed with a conviction of the value of French as the language of revolutionary ideals and principles of liberation, has today become the term for an identity to be forged and maintained against U.S. political and cultural expansionism, for strategic and economic postmodern grouping in which France can hold on to a role as “Maman Fouance,” in Chamoiseau’s celebrated formula; this at the moment when the last remnants of its empire are torn by the struggle for independence—FLNKS (Front de Libération Nationale Kanak Socialiste) is a case in point.4 While the French want to maintain their presence in La Nouvelle Calédonie (a site for nuclear testing), in France we commonly encounter stereotyping, discrimination, xenophobia, and rejection of exiles and émigrés who made the journey North, and that includes the Francophone writer who, every day, faces problems of definition. He or she is described and redescribed, sloganized and falsified, until, for the howling combatants, the writer almost ceases to exist. He or she becomes a sort of myth, an empty vessel into which the world can pour its prejudices, its poison, and its hate. To try to understand this context, especially in France, a country that has yet to come to terms with its shady past and/or present, is to carve a sea of questions: What does it mean to be “Antillean” or “Maghrebian” inside France today? How can culture be preserved without becoming ossified? How should Francophone writers see the need for change within themselves and their community without seeming to play into the hands of their racial enemies? What are the consequences, both theoretical and practical, for refusing to make any concessions to Western influences? How can the Francophone writer liberate himself or herself, and make a claim that rends ambivalent the question of (un)belonging, putting identities to rout? Is it difficult to define oneself in a transnationality nurtured from all directions? Although Tahar Ben Jelloun will serve as my exempli gratia, I shall draw on Abdelkebir Khatibi for another insight—namely, writing in the pluri-langue. In letting these two writers play off each other this way, it is my interpretative aim (in the broadest sense) to make concurrent their worldview, with its ancestral culture—its thousand-year-old tradition, the imposing gods, Orality—weighing on it. Ben Jelloun is not immediately easy to read: he does not really provide plots to follow, or characters to identify with. His terrain is that of the dispossessed; his characters remain exiled from family, gender, tribe, or nation. His reputation outside the francophone world is largely based on the two intertwined narratives of the fantastic, which have earned him the inevitable comparisons with Márquez, Borges, and Rushdie.5 The distinctive feature of his work is, however, a consuming obsession with language. Dense with allusion, metaphor, and echoes of his native Arabic, his texts are deeply inscribed with his migrant sensibility. One of the sophistications

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of his narrative arrangements—aside from the central conceit that revelation leads to concealment, straightforwardness to complication—is that the characters’ ability to eavesdrop on one another changes continually, as does their knowledge of what is going on. When they reintroduce themselves at the beginning of the novel, say, La Nuit de l’Erreur, the effect is almost Beckettian, voices criss-crossing through the darkness; the characters bicker with one another and their complicity deliberately excludes the audience and/or reader. These matters should not, however, be severed from our understanding of the pluri-langue, any more than literature can be chopped off from history and society. One reasoned and felt response to this point, which cuts across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and indeed to the parallel challenge and burden of the experience of cultural displacement, is displayed in Khatibi’s Amour bilingue (²À³ \ä8 鬫[ ¢äÀƒ—), which offers the most articulate and defiant graphic and symbolic rendition of the plurilangue the reader can be expected to decipher. As Samia Mehrez has perceptively demonstrated, “the inscription in Arabic calligraphy, which appears in bold letters at the center of the book cover, remains semireadable for the monolingual, as does the text itself, if the reader fails to decode its pluri-lingual narrative” (1991; 251). It is what Khatibi aptly calls “langue de l’autre.” The complete significance of the inscription in Arabic can only be understood in its relationship with ²[z䤫[ (the Koran). This is but the beginning of a series of demands that are put on the reader, even as he gazes at the novel.6 In this context, ²[z䣫[ itself deals best with the question of the pluri-langue. It is controlled by two paradigmatic imperatives, Çz£É (read or recite) and ª£ (tell) (1991: 275). In order to clarify these imperatives, which obviously control the circumstantial and historical appearance of ²[z䤫[, and since they must also control uses (i.e., readings) of the text thereafter, I would like to draw on a set of distinctions from the medieval Andalusian grammarian Ibn Hazm, who connects his analysis of the imperative mode with a juridical notion of u 8n, a word meaning both a logic-grammatical definition and a limit. For Ibn Hazm, what transpires in the imperative mode, between the injunctions to read and write, is the delivery of a z_ $r (utterance), which is the verbal realization of a signifying intention, or m\À³ . Although it is a text generative of scholastic tradition, ²[z䤫[ insists on its own orality and warns against writing: it is a ²[zä£ (oral recitation), not merely a ¡n‡¯ (written text) (Said, 1983). Ibn Hazm’s work constitutes a set of brilliant explorations of how the historical bases of epistemology either enable, or block, the making of utterances. Statements traverse the distance between silence and regulated verbal assertion. In Ibn Hazm, we can never accede to complete speech or full utterance, or to complete silence,

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since as students of texts we deal only with language and its representations. Utterance is governed by rules of formation, which are difficult to learn, yet impossible to evade; nevertheless what Ibn Hazm called ± ا, which is the regulated production, exchange, and circulation of utterances (what his English translators render as statement), takes on and acquires the appearance of a social authority so complete as to legislate the practice of saying what there is to say, exactly and fully. What is excluded is unthinkable, in the first place, illegal and unacceptable in the second.7 In Khatibi’s Amour bilingue (²À³ \ä8 鬫[ ¢äÀƒ—), our full understanding of the word “amour” depends on the unreadable Arabic “¢Àƒ— ,” which comes from the noun “¢ 3ƒœ«[,” and can signify two things: on the one hand, it can mean earthly passion, and on the other (when read within the context of the Islamic mystical tradition), one of the higher stages of the Sufi experience. The French word “bilingue” is rendered by the plural µÄ³ \ä8鬫[. Hence the translation, which appears on the title page in Arabic calligraphy, is “µÄ³ \ä8 鬫[ ¢äÀƒ— .” The Arabic title can have more than one meaning, and it is in this respect that the French title depends on it for full significance. “The word µ \é䬫[,” Mehrez amply maintains, “can convey both the physical and figurative meanings of the word (tongue), that is, both the organ of speech and the language which it utters. µÄ³ \ä8鬫[ in the title can therefore be read as a sign for the two languages/tongues (langues), French and Arabic, which explains Khatibi’s translation of “bilingue” in the text. Or it can be read as a sign for the internal divisions within the Islamic culture itself: the division between orthodox, institutional Islamic discourse and popular Sufi tradition, which has always been marginalized and which Khatibi brings into the text as part of 鬫[ can also be decoded as the his total makeup of the pluri-langue. µÄ³ \ä8 division between classical Arabic, which represents high culture, and the dialects, which represent popular culture and have always been devalued.” To understand the pluri-langue in the narrative, one must first understand the intricate interplay on the title page.8 Amour bilingue (²À³ \ä8 鬫[ ¢äÀƒ—) then is a text that challenges our competence as readers. It ambitiously provokes us to decode the signs of a language formidably changing to meet greater challenges. One of the effects of the novel is to open up a different history of postcoloniality, one already outlined in Ombres japonaises. “If I were asked,” Khatibi raises the question and answers with equal aplomb, “is your story a nouveau roman, or, better, a bi-novel new novel? I’d reply that the novel never had any affection for me. We don’t have the same history” (1988: 27). Alternately, his reformulation of the linguistic sign is itself an attempt to release the idea’s redemptive potential and thereby sketch the possibility of postcoloniality’s resistance to the entropic condition of postmodernity. Khatibi is

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fascinated by the patterns of repetition/variation and symmetry/asymmetry that create a typical Hitchcock-like sequence, and, by extension, any successful sequence, its strangely effective mix of order and dynamism. His postcolonialism is not a dirge but a genealogy: its subject matter is not the obsolescence of the old subject matter, but rather the novelist’s relationships to subject matter—first other novelists, then the self. This also describes the arc of Nietzsche’s career. Nevertheless, Amour bilingue (²À³ \ä8 鬫[ ¢äÀƒ—) is perhaps best understood in the nouveau roman tradition. Its texture reminds us of the hermetic dialogues of Alain Renais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad. The novel weaves through themes of love and memory with glimpses of a tale of ¢ƒ— (amorous grief) and separation of two selves, two cultures and two languages, converging and finally disjoining—the shadowy protagonists embodying the author’s attraction/rejection of French culture/acculturation and his creative immersion in his adopted language. The ideal reader of a novel like Amour bilingue (²À³ \ä8 鬫[ ¢äÀƒ—) is the one who shares this position of in-between. Khatibi explains: So long as the theory of translation, of the bi-langue and the pluri-langue has not advanced, certain Maghrebian texts will remain impregnable through a formal or functional approach, to assume the French language, yes, in order to name this flaw, and this pleasure of the foreigner who is obliged to work in the margin, that is to say for his own account, alone (in Gontard, 1988: 8). Like the author/narrator who defies madness and death to demonstrate that colonization is ultimately an epistemological assault on culture’s signsystem, writing in the pluri-langue operates to disfigure the effects of the assault while at the same time liberates the repressed elements of the author’s forgotten history as well as redeems his marred identity through patterns of ins and outs across the narrative. Khatibi’s elaborate deployment of other ways of writing back allows for the pluri-langue as part of claiming a e [zb (heritage) in which the writer must speak in more than one voice, more than one univocal point of view; in a pluri-vocal one and with articulations, too; a polysemous voice. In the process, it reveals itself “une pensée autre.” Khatibi expounds: “At school, with a secular education imposed on my religious background, I became a Triglot: I read French without being able to speak it, I played with some fragments of written Arabic, and I spoke the dialect as my everyday language” (1997: 24). Just as Khatibi is forced to accept his colonial past, which he parodies so well here, so does he live his pluri-linguism and the crisis of identity that accompanies it.

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We well know the colonial imagination: juxtapose, compartmentalize, militarize, divide the city into ethnic areas, stand up the culture of the colonized people. In discovering their alienation such a people will wander, distraught, in the crushed space of their own history. And there is nothing more atrocious than the shattering of memory (Khatibi, 1988: 167). Where in the middle of this confusion is coherence and continuity? Near the end of La Mémoire tatouée, the narrator encapsulates his attitude toward his bilingualism and biculturalism in the following terms: “The Occident is part of me that I can deny only to the extent that I war against all occidents and orients that oppress and disenchant me.”9 The subtitle of La Mémoire tatouée is: Autobiographie d’un décolonisé,” where “décolonisé” signifies a gesture toward a double belonging. It is meant as an exercise in memory, a way of getting to a past that is Khatibi’s own in the first place. Let me now jump abruptly back to Tahar Ben Jelloun with whom I am much concerned in this chapter. It is no pretense to say that Ben Jelloun has been a presence in Francophone Maghrebian literature for some time. He has published a number of novels and essays, books of poetry, and has written articles for Le Monde. He co-founded the influential community arts journal, Souffles, and has been active in regional and community affairs, particularly in the Paris area, where he lives. With writers like Abdelkebir Khatibi, he shares a commitment not only to writing in the pluri-langue but also to local territories of the imagination and their distinct idioms, giving us access to a set of rich dialects and views of the world, on the one hand, and, on the other, setting up a healthy opposition to the Paris/Province nexus as the center of the French writer’s world. Transformation and metamorphosis have always been central to his work, whether he is exploring the fungibility of gender designations, embalming himself in a cocoon, or intervening in the work of nature. For Ben Jelloun, transformation inevitably has a sexual dimension that opens onto questions of desire. The territory he explores is precisely that which has been foreclosed by what Michel Foucault perceived as the Western obsession with an individual’s true sex—an obsession written in and around the body of the hermaphrodite. For centuries, it was widely acknowledged that a hermaphrodite had two sexes. Biological theories of sexuality, changes in juridical practice, and new forms of administrative control at the beginning of the eighteenth century led to a denial of the possibility that two sexes could exist in a single body: to each one sex and one alone. It is this notion of the true sex, a reflection of rigid norms that constrict identity and legislate the strict separation of the masculine and the feminine, that Ben Jelloun questions.

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Ben Jelloun also deals in an oblique way with the ever-present darkness of sexual and/or social ostracism; living close to his community provides special insights into that intractable situation. In addition, Ben Jelloun is in his way “experimental,” taking sentences in new directions while remaining faithful to the spoken language. In his works, his preoccupation has been physical and emotional displacement, family turmoil, transplantation, and the fraught nature of sexual relationships: all subjects of particular importance to a country (The Maghreb) that is undergoing a painful process of self-examination, as can be seen in the tension between men and women, ruler and ruled, North and South, wealth and poverty, that has forced us to look at the nature of Maghrebian society and the central and destructive role played by fundamentalism in the crucial area of sexuality. Ben Jelloun’s works are also concerned with the business of writing itself and with the writer’s struggle to find his own voice, which finally emerges with full force in novels like La Nuit sacrée and la Nuit de l’Erreur among others. Ben Jelloun has good reason to feel untroubled by the use of French. Like his predecessors, he entered the culturally charged territory of the pluri-langue and gender passing—the attempt of women to pass as men. Yet, in truth, many questions remain. First: What material does Maghrebian history and mythology make available for Maghrebian fiction in French, and what is the form that might transmute historical and mythological chaos into imaginative order? What led the author of Harrouda to spend the last quarter of his life writing fiction about gender passing, and why can’t he bring it to an end? Accused of selling out to the West, he responded that he was giving his life to ¹‡7¤«[ (the tale). For him, roleplaying is a protean form of freedom, which points up to Fanonist moral optimism about individual possibility and down to the gendered confidence woman. The main protagonist (Ahmed) of L’Enfant de sable, for example, appears in maleface before taking on his other manipulative role. He reappears in La Nuit sacrée—Ben Jelloun is explicit about the genealogy—as Zahra, the female hustler whose different disguises allow her to move freely around her neighborhood. La Nuit sacrée, which looks at first like a reversion to L’Enfant de sable, is in fact a supplement, insofar as a supplement is a surplus, with respect to the twin novel. It also indicates that the twin novel was lacking something. In other words, La Nuit sacrée intervenes as a postscript to L’Enfant de sable. It both replaces and substitutes it. (I will come back to the strange essence of the supplement, which is never present, here and now. For if it were, it would not be what it is, a deferral, taking and keeping the place of the other. I purpose to trace its pervasive operation in the unstable equilibrium of masturbation.) Because the two novels are interlocked and because I wish to underscore the literary two-in-

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one unfolding in the narrative, I at times use the word bi-novel to refer to both of them together. The same applies to Ahmed and/or Zahra. I shall refer to them individually and as two in one, sign of a shared narrative. Second: How should we understand the intertwined history of female and male in The Maghreb today in a way that, unlike minstrelsy, does justice to what Maghribi people make of the toxic and liberating mixture of freedom and oppression, equality and male supremacy? Underneath our recorded history, our unwritten history looms as its obscure alter ego, questioning even when not accusing its acclaimed double. What are we to make of the scarred female victims like Zahra, Fatouma, Harrouda, Zina? What about the unwritten struggle that shaped the female community as a whole? After all, what has been repressed is the history of women’s achievement as well as their subjugation borne by the series of oppositions “signe/blessure,” “circumcision/excision,” “hemorrhage/ mutilation,” “rape/castration,” that all coalesce in the word-acts that mark them, what one narrator has shrewdly called “au commencement la mutilation.” And finally, does winning a literary prize like Le Goncourt enable a turning away from Western hegemony and supremacy in literature (at least) to that other literature, the one that dares not speak its name? This literature, otherwise called postcolonial, is rooted in the subaltern’s quest to engage in a relentless erudition in order to be able to piece together his and/or her identity. Without wishing to answer all the questions raised here, I want my views on the subject to be as clear as possible.

I Sometimes called the “Booker de Paris,” Le Prix Goncourt is actually one of the oldest and most prestigious literary prizes anywhere. It is awarded by the Académie Goncourt, established in 1884 by the novelist Edmond de Goncourt (of les frères Goncourt fame), and the first prize was given in 1903. Laureates include Marcel Proust, André Malraux, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others. The prize is awarded for the outstanding prose work (in French) published in the preceding year, and novels are favored. In typically elegant Gallic style, the decision is made around November 20 at a traditional dinner. The Goncourt ritual is for the president of the Académie to interrupt dinner just long enough to announce the winner to an eagerly awaiting press outside the doors of the restaurant. The Académie’s president has a double vote in the case of a tie, as Antonine Maillet discovered in 1977 when her Les Cordes des bois was still tied in the fifth round. President Hervé Bazin cast his extra vote to put Didier Decoin’s John l’Enfer over the top. (Maillet eventually won the Goncourt in 1979, for Pélagie la charette.) The grand award amounts to no more than fifty French francs,

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but the winner can look forward to sales totaling 500,000 francs, apparently because the French intelligentsia would not be caught dead without a copy of the latest Prix Goncourt novel, whether they intended to read it or not. The prize confirms the intriguing intellectual solidarity that France was able to forge with its colonized peoples. The educated élite of the Francophone Third World man permanent outposts of Paris, with the Gallic adroitness of reducing reality to thought, and thought to language. Traditionally, the Goncourt prize honors a novel with a wide audience—that is, a novel not particularly interesting in terms of narrative technique. If one is to judge by a few recent Goncourt recipients like Dominique Fernandez’s Dans la main de l’ange or Frederick Tristan’s Les Égarés, the members of the Goncourt jury have relatively little regard for novelists who transcend the framework of the traditional novel as it has evolved in the West over the centuries, culminating in the Balzacian model. Or, to put it differently, a “good” novel in France is considered to involve the study of character analysis in a realist context, as if neither Joyce nor Faulkner had ever existed. Nor even the “nouveau roman” in France. Only a handful of emergent writers have thus far achieved Goncourt distinction. Ben Jelloun was the first to be chosen from one of France’s former colonies, Morocco (a former Protectorate), where French rule was not simply philanthropic and where, for the majority of people, the educational opportunities the colonial masters extended to favored factions were replaced by an implacable economic domination. Through a combination of coercion and dire necessity, many were forced into waged labor, and to find work they often had to leave home. Just as the Protectorate required labor, so metropolitan France demanded hands to furnish its industries; its so-called “true” sons and daughters alone were insufficient to meet the task, and the French looked to their overseas territories. Thus it was that Maghrebians heard the call of migration to the North. French labor recruiters searched people out in the wilderness of The Maghreb and found what Driss Chraibi has aptly called “les boucs” to be molded into skilled laborers. As Ben Jelloun writes, they were treated like animals, “On les confondait avec le bétail.” Later, he would document all such forms of cultural displacement, malaise, fragmentation, and exclusion in what he ironically called Hospitalité française and Le Racisme expliqué à ma fille. Ben Jelloun’s choice between disorder and rupture as topoi suggests the various fronts where a decolonization (of the mind) must take place under the guise of self-discovery. L’Enfant de sable/La Nuit sacrée (winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt) emphasizes the combined force of the colonized subject to set his/her energy free. However, decolonizing the mind cannot occur in a vacuum. It must be accompanied by une prise de conscience of the works that, across the generations, have never ceased to celebrate dissent

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and resistance. Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma is a good example. Harrouda is another. The bi-novel also brings such an awareness to the forefront. It reflects another duality: a Maghrebian who is attached by all his roots to an Arabic people and culture, Ben Jelloun is also a writer who has chosen to express himself in French and who, in turn, uses this borrowed language as a new way of seeing the world. It gives his fiction room to breathe. As a result, the form of the novel itself is transformed, perverted, by this dialectic of belonging and its opposite, unbelonging, where one finds something of the tale, chapters that are veritable songs, sentence rhythms, and linked images that are more reminiscent of poetry than of simple prose. In this way, Ben Jelloun challenges not only the colonial master but also the native male. It is useful to draw attention at this point to the fact that knowledge and pleasure in the Maghreb are simply disruptive, something produced by the other, the Maghrebian male in this case, to distort or to perturb the subjugated object; it is a vital auxiliary that sustains relationships of power between a so-called superior masculine sex and another 10 that is not even referred to by its proper name, Á 7 · (she.) The bi-novel revolves around the blurring of boundaries between orality-writing, prose/poetry, reality/fantasy, realism/allegory, µ‘\4è«[/ z· \Œ«[, langue/bi-langue, presence-absence.11 Adapting a narrative to such symbiotic relationships reflects the fact that the writer himself is at the crossroads of several cultures, and the bi-novel’s hero/heroine is a good expression of this dialectic of being both an insider and an outsider. Both mediator and androgyne, living on the margin of the female collective, Ahmed/Zahra is a complex character whose place in the tale proves to be ambivalent, to say the least. In what follows, first I will examine his/her evolution and role as a subversive character living a lie as well as in scorn of others, and, second, his/her self-affirmation as an active subject having gone through various stages before finally reclaiming her \¸³[vj¼ (being in the world). In this sense, he/she is very much reminiscent of Fatouma in Harrouda, who numerous details suggest is an avatar of Ahmed/Zahra herself, and who has spent her life disguised as a man but who in the end sheds her mask and turns to womanhood.12 This dilemma of two in one creates a flaw in the fiction itself. Making Ahmed/Zahra come to terms with her men means bundling them out of the narrative, which explores ambiguous feelings in an unambiguous world. The bi-novel’s matter-of-fact portrayal of the heroine’s physical cursing of her male lovers intensifies the horror of the abuse without being contrivedly clinical, which would be the mere inverse of sentimentalism. The mask of deceit that Ahmed/Zahra wears, on the other hand, reaches a substrate of common being in allowing the movement from “stereotype” to “archetype,” from malicious reductions of human complexity to abiding

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patterns of human existence that underlie gender, cultural, and religious differences. Far from confining the postcolonial novelist to his folk culture or demeaning misrepresentations of it, the gender crossing (or “my aunt is a man”) gave Ben Jelloun access to world literature. It allowed him to add to the “relatives” like Beckett, to whom he is thematically connected, the “ancestors” like Fellini and Giacometti, whom he could choose for himself. The female’s masking is motivated, Ben Jelloun once said, by a profound rejection of the image—gender face—created to usurp her identity. The mask of gender reversal, then, is a resource for postcolonial creative freedom. The burden his female characters continues to bear lies in the weight of an unfinished independence as well as in the guilt of failing to produce a new way of thinking and/or telling. Ben Jelloun’s technical skill has never been more apparent than in the bi-novel, in which his use of narrative forms demonstrates his modernity as well as his participation in a centuries-old tradition. Ever since the publication of Moha le fou, Moha le sage in 1978, Ben Jelloun has drawn attention to the self-representational narrative act by taking recourse to elements borrowed from traditional culture. For this reason, his narrative is rooted in an orality that is still very much alive in The Maghreb today, that of the storyteller and ¹¤¬n«[ (the circle of people listening to the storyteller).13 In L’Enfant de sable, no less than six storytellers share in recounting the story. This technique reappears in La Nuit sacrée: the return to the narrative space of Æ\´œ«[ ™¶¬^ square allows the author to integrate a veritable critique that calls to mind the most extreme experiments of postmodernism in what is currently defined as metafiction.14 A case in point is that of the storyteller without listeners who summons the crowd to create an audience. Each chapter in the novel establishes itself as a locus of desire. A different storyteller, who removes a whole series of diverse objects from his trunk (a cane, old photographs, an empty Coca-Cola bottle, a pair of English shoes), draws attention to the referential dimension of the story and to the search of verisimilitude on the basis of real signs. In the dispute that opposes a woman storyteller and her public, one can see how a subversive narrative pact functions and how it can disappoint listeners who are seeking no more than mere entertainment. The desire to depict the workings of the story by displaying its inner mechanisms is doubly interesting. In the first place, Ben Jelloun shows us that a narrative statement is above all the construction (or “montage”) of a fiction. We are after all living in the hyperreal, digital, and hypervisible world of narratives (advertisements, political speeches, cartoons, talk shows, electronic mail, the Internet, and cyber creations: Anna Nova, the virtual reality newscaster comes instantly to mind); it is dangerous to abandon yourself to what Jean Ricardou suitably calls the “euphoria of the

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narrative” (1973: 31). The “montage” does not reproduce the real: it produces the near-real, or the unreal. The other interesting fact about this technique is that it allows for all sorts of modal shifts. In La Nuit sacrée, for example, the reader moves from the fairy tale (in the chapter titled “A Very beautiful Day”) to a utopia (“The Perfumed Garden”); from realism to allegory and from the sentimental novel to fantasy narrative. Another aspect of Ben Jelloun’s narrative technique is a spatial (as opposed to chronological) structuring of events that gives his novels the appearance of symbolic itineraries. Whether in the case of Harrouda, La Prière de l’absent, L’Enfant de sable/La Nuit sacrée, or La Nuit de l’Erreur, the spatial montage of the narrative evokes a ritual initiatory path, at the end of which, and after having undergone many trials, the young person finally attains initiation to a higher realm of knowledge. This is how the child in La Prière de l’absent learns what freedom truly means: “At the end of the night, Yamna was speaking to the child: We are approaching the sands. Your grandmother Lalla Malika used to say: ‘Above all, liberty is dignity. To attain this essential form of liberty, we must free ourselves from a morality of greed and selfishness’” (1982: 165). Here Ben Jelloun gives expression to an immediate personal experience of emancipation. His view broaches a vital issue in the history of The Maghreb—namely, that of reclaiming an ideality. In the bi-novel, he goes farther afield: the subject announces itself in the prolonged, uninterrupted absence of an anonymous heroine, a woman who in broad daylight reverses the order of things. For in the real world in which the characters evolve, the “everyday” is a nightmare, a dead-end. One must know how to move about in the realm of darkness. Ahmed/Zahra crosses and breaks down the boundaries, throws off restraints, and creates for herself a face that is not veiled, but masked. It is not a question of anarchy, but of the freedom to think, to act, to move about, to believe in oneself. Three types of events occur during the itinerary: (a) dysphoric encounters that originate in aggression (Ahmed/Zahra’s rape and her later excision); (b) euphoric encounters that derive from generosity (the gradual substitution of a frank, trusting relationship between Ahmed/Zahra and Le Consul for the sadistic relationship of domination that links Le Consul to his tyrannical sister, l’Assise); and (c) a process of exchange. Thus the love affair that develops between the blind Consul, who is subject to L’Assise’s reign of terror, and Ahmed/Zahra, who has recently been freed from all constraints, remains ambiguous in the eyes of the reader. In fact, Le Consul’s blindness has fostered in him a rich tactile and emotional life, whereas Ahmed/Zahra, who can see, only knows reality in the form of falsehood, violence, and aggression. While she liberates Le Consul from his servitude, he enables her to discover love in a gentle and refined way.

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The entire allegory of the bi-novel arises, therefore, from this reversal of values surrounding the visible and the invisible. What one sees is often no more than a world of deceptive appearances. Truth is beyond the visible, and blindness can lead to deep insight. That is why Ahmed/Zahra during her imprisonment wears a blindfold to obliterate immediate reality and attain a more genuine knowledge. “One only sees well with the heart; the essential is invisible to the eyes” (Saint-Exupéry, 1946: 22). This is the core of the symbolic message that can be drawn from the structural arrangement of events in Ben Jelloun’s narrative. The early writings look, in retrospect, like preparations for the flight of L’Enfant de sable/La Nuit sacrée, but even in those days Ben Jelloun was writing about two people: Ahmed/Zahra and another, sexless one, who is more than just a sort of not Ahmed/Zahra, but a much less mythologized “enfant de sable,” a more “naturalistic” one, insofar as anything is naturalistic in Ben Jelloun. This is the doubleness that resembles something that is half black and half white, half man, half woman, half size, feminine but macho too. It is the “scientia sexualis” that Michel Foucault finds at the heart of the modern history of sexuality.15 Only when Ahmed/Zahra marries her cousin, Fatima, who is, as it happens, a female, does she disclose what lies beneath the masculine usurped attire. The reader then becomes aware of the scandalous shadow story. The obsession with all the trickery is to unsettle sexual differentiation: women who conceal the inward form of men and men who conceal the inward form of women. It does not, however, overturn the discourse on sexuality, which depends to a large extent on the clear distinction between the sexes. Even the much rarer cases of authentic hermaphroditism are not permitted to remain unresolved ambiguities. Ahmed/Zahra is an object of public interest, concern, and scrutiny because of this transformation. His/her socially articulated individuality, his/her emergence from the anonymous mass of men and women into the light of representation and circulation, is for the reader a moment of prodigious instability on the way to integration into the normal structures of gender and reproduction. Those structures are not, however, the secure, ontologically grounded bases for identity; on the contrary, they are themselves necessarily built up of sexual confusion, fiction, friction, and transformation. The bi-novel itself appears to be gendered: the prince-ss/protagonist is a female; the prince is her prize. Action is the masculine force of narrative, femininity the topoi and telos of its trajectory. The hero of the story is a heroine, a woman who is not content to be the landscape and object of the story, but who wrests control, takes action. She disguises herself as a man and breaks away from gender. The tale also provides a space for male fantasy chiefly in order to contain it. Cross-dressing is both a result of a cri-

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sis—the heroine conceals her identity to perform a masculine duty, to salvage honor (of her father, husband, lover, and sometimes her own)—and the crisis in itself—her desire to control events rather than merely react to them. When harmony is restored, the heroine reclaims her feminine identity with a vengeance. Ben Jelloun does not portray this gender uprooting as any kind of abdication or defeat but as an affirmation of the power of women to assert their right to equality with men. For L’Enfant de sable/La Nuit sacrée adheres to a narrative economy that articulates action as a feminine quality, even when performed by men. The transgressive nature of the story lies not in the tidy gender reversal but in its dreamlike quality and in its mythical landscape, dense with ambiguous metaphors and equivalents. The symbolism of what Alev Adil has called “She is a he” resonates because it is dark, ambivalent, and contradictory. Ben Jelloun seems to regard gender passing as an enduring sign of distinction, both in the sense of privilege and in the sense of differentiation. A man in Maghrebian society has symbolic and material advantages that no woman could hope to attain, and he has them by virtue of separating himself, first as a child and then as an adult, from women. Both the specific development of the work market and historicity constitute principal sources of overmasculinization in colonial societies. It is evident in the portrait of the colossally overblown figure of the patriarch, who has a whole ¡½zr (lamb) served up as the main course at a ¶zŒn (banquet), and who, having overslept one day, decides that the afternoon is really the morning, so that people have to stand outside his windows at night holding up cardboard cutouts of the sun. The story of the male persona (Ahmed) also answers to the demands of external authority, the exigencies of male force of law and order, whereas the veiled woman (Zahra) shrinks while remaining silent, hidden, and inaccessible: “I and a male other; I and a female other” (Ben Jelloun, 1985: 46). Luc de Heusch offers an insightful analysis of this state of affairs in Pourquoi l’épouser? Inscribed in the order of things, the father figure (whose domination of the practical symbolic order is manifest in myriad ways, including sexual rights over women, a sort of feudal droit de cuissage reducing the desire of the “son” to a reproductive instinct) continues to haunt The Maghreb as the sole figure of authority. This is particularly evident in political culture; almost all Arab dictators depict themselves as the fathers of their nation, thus culturally emphasizing the murder of potential rivals and dissidents as a means of liberation. In this way they can rule by fiat. At issue is nothing less than the true dimensions of the monster of dictatorship, for by testing the reality of le droit de cuissage and constructing a map of claims for and objections to it, we can measure, by a simple standard, the gradations of native seigniorial power that is abusive in the first place. In postulating a dictator’s right to the female body, le

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droit de cuissage tacitly opposes individual autonomy and personal freedom to a system of oppressive rights and makes these the very emblem of its existence and survival (Mudimbe, 1994). The situation very much resembles the one portrayed by Gabriel García Márquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch. The man scarcely knows the difference between reality and illusion, and were it not for the cruelty with which he treats his dependent cronies and hangers-on, the situation would be comic. In the process, women find themselves completely excluded from the legitimate power relations that can only exist between fathers and sons. Needless to add that social life is charged with signs that affirm the paternal authority of those in power. All other significant differential indices of individual existence—social class, religion, language—could, at least in imagination, be stripped away, only to reveal the underlying natural fact of sexual difference. But even here, of course, confusion is possible, for as the story of Ahmed/Zahra suggests, apparel may deceive the eyes of the most skilled observer. Yet beneath the apparel the body itself cannot lie. Paradoxically, the apparently fragile mutable social codes are almost always reinscribed. For despite her masked upbringing, Ahmed/Zahra does reveal her sexual difference. (And Ben Jelloun does not say this. It has to be inferred. He leaves a lot of inferring to the reader: it is an essential part of his style.) As a result, the foundation of all individuation turns out to be unstable and artificial at its origin. If there is a figure that dominates the narrative, and I think the reader inevitably has to conclude there is, it is all the more interesting for the way it is addressed. For Ben Jelloun found a miraculous method for dealing with the father figure in Maghrebian culture; a figure so oppressive that all change, all possibility of development, is stifled. The following opening paragraph describes how, in having renounced the male persona, Ahmed/Zahra renounces the “place of the father” and leads a solitary existence in a darkened room, avoiding the light of day, of lamps, even of the full moon, because it threatens him/her with exposure: [I]t stripped him bare, penetrated his skin and uncovered the shame and secret tears that lay beneath. He sensed it passing over his body like a flame that would consume his masks, a blade that would slowly strip off the veil of flesh that maintained between him and the others the necessary distance (1985: 56). The power of the patriarch stops time, and the narrative is thereby made to swirl and eddy around the story of his reign, creating by its nonlinear form an exact analogy for the feeling of endless stasis. Hajji Ahmed, deter-

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mined that his brothers shall not receive the bulk of his property, decides that his eighth child will be considered a boy regardless of gender. So, I resolved that the eighth birth would be a happy occasion. We would make a big to-do of it, and the celebrations would go on for seven days and seven nights. You will be a mother, a real mother, you will be a princess, because you will have delivered a boy. The child you bring into the world will be a male, a man. We will call him Ahmed, even if it is a girl! (ibid., 18). Great secrecy surrounds the birth of his eighth daughter, who is named Ahmed/Zahra and greeted with celebration as the long-awaited heir. How this deception is played and maintained through Ahmed/Zahra’s circumcision, trips to ®\\° 8 n«[, schooling, maturity, introduction to society, an increasingly important role in the family business, and marriage to his epileptic cousin (Fatima) to keep up appearances is imaginatively and entertainingly told. When Ahmed/Zahra dies, his or her journal is found, and his or her secret is revealed. The journal falls into the hands of a storyteller in Marrakesh, who in telling the tale intrigues his listeners, but disappears before it is finished. Members of his audience undertake to finish the story, each in his own style, until the storyteller returns.16 Tolstoy did away with Natasha in War and Peace, which is not to compare Ben Jelloun to Tolstoy: but Ben Jelloun has the gift of making his characters strange. He also has the gift of shaping a story line that brings out the plot with subtle changes of tempo and color so that the reader wants to know what happens next. To this end, although the liaison amoureuse between Zahra and Le Consul must somehow end in total failure—insofar as documentary detail and subjective perception, cold fact and warm flesh, are crammed into close proximity, a series of disjunctions reflected in the characters’ own dislocations—they are loners—the presiding metaphors are of discovery, unearthing, reconstruction, of Zahra’s life, of missing loved ones, of the past. And we might add from the point of view of the narrative voice, the relationship, visible and invisible at once, gives nothing away to reveal that the deception does in fact take place. But the oddity and the insurrectionary quality of this tale lie in the couple’s reluctance to allow any penetration or drift between them. They boast continually of their intention to be together, so that it is a sort of miracle that l’Assise never gets to hear about it; even though in the end the town’s code of morality eventually forces them out. They become outcasts at “home,” as it were. But Ahmed/Zahra does not succumb to pressure or enter a decline; on the contrary, she rebirths herself in the image of a freedom fighter as the following excerpt makes clear.

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I wept as I left prison. . . . I was glad that my eyes were wet with tears, for it had not been so long since that had happened. They were happy tears, because they came from a body being reborn, a body once again capable of feelings, of emotion. I wept because I was leaving a world where I had succeeded in finding a place. I wept because no one was waiting for me. I was free. And alone. I thought of the Consul, but I knew he had left town, that he had gone far away, to a place where he might free himself of our story (1987: 175). The whole scene is a magical catharsis of the Maghreb’s woes. Ahmed/ Zahra, the source of it all, appears to survive against all odds and with more calm than most. The manner in which the story is revealed is sometimes new even for Ben Jelloun, who uses the device of an “autodidacte,” a sensitive, trained clerical exegete who dies of grief. This narrator, the text hints, is Ben Jelloun himself: “On the desk lay a red folder and a package of sheets. . . . Le Consul kept a diary,” Ahmed/Zahra exclaims on entering his room. Le Consul is also a poet, believer, creator. He engages in lengthy dialogues with Ahmed/Zahra about Islam, Al Hallaj, freedom of speech, and tolerance. He quotes Zen: “In the beginning man has nothing.” I have no intention of identifying Ben Jelloun with Le Consul, knowing (without citing Flaubert) that he is at once every personage, male and female, and none of them, in every novel he has written, however compatible these personages might be to his own personality and conviction. But I think he might be ready to accept the exception that Le Consul’s insight of the Arab world today could be his own. The method is familiar from Ben Jelloun’s earlier work. It is therefore no surprise that the bi-novel probes slowly, painfully, but firmly through the mists of accurate memories (think of Ahmed/Zahra blindfolded in prison and her evocations of Le Consul’s kindness to her), equivocations, contradictory versions, trying to establish what happened and why the answers are only provisional. The effect of this retrospective method is to make the narrative strangely lyrical in tone, as if Ben Jelloun felt that he had drifted away from his roots, and could only write about them now through veils of formal difficulty. Whereas all his previous novels exude an air of absolute authority over the material, this one reeks of doubt. It reminds one of Chinua Achebe’s phrase: “The writer can only write, tell good stories, really” (1989: 29). And the triumph of the narrative is that this new hesitation, this abdication of Olympus, is turned to such introspective account, and becomes a source of strength: L’Enfant de sable/La

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Nuit sacrée, with its uncertainties, with its case-history format of breaking up the boundaries, is as fragile as the writer himself.17 As with Beckett, Ben Jelloun’s favored ground is not the broad historical sweep but the intense probing of an individual mind whose meanderings manage somehow to encompass the whole world of human preoccupation. It is no exaggeration to suggest that he brings to life Fellini-like images and characters: marginal, deformed, obsessed, perverse, and stubborn in their quest to change the world they live in; in fine, beings “stirred” by their search for their identity. There is a myth among men of great, even fatal, female power, an extreme and highly elaborate version of the woman-behind-the-throne story with which men who are determined to keep women off thrones, try to persuade them that they are in fact the rulers. The myth goes something like this: it may appear to the outside world that women in The Maghreb, shut up, buttoned up, veiled, draped, and confined to quarters, are singularly without power, but the truth is that confinement only enhances their power. Women really have so much secret power in Maghrebian life that they sit in the kitchen running the world while their menfolk are lying about in the living room (where the women are not allowed to go) eating sweets (which the women make) and chatting with guests (whom the women are not allowed to see). Women are so powerful, in fact, that men are in danger from the least contact; in danger of women’s magic, women’s sex, women’s (bad) intentions, which is one reason for keeping them shut away. John Erickson succinctly outlines this idea of the ironic relationship between men and women. “The process of unmaking and remaking of the female subject,” he writes, (or the fact of her never having been constituted as subject in the first place, except by being manipulated to serve the purposes of the male, indigenous and foreign) and her emergence from a void of absence provide the principal motif of Ben Jelloun’s narrative. It is closely related to the motif of hermaphroditism, with which it simultaneously unfolds. These two motifs allegorize the unmaking/ remaking by the feminine and postcolonial marginals of traditional, magisterial narratives of legitimation and most particularly of the infrastructures supporting the male, Eurocentric discourse of power (1993: 50). This is all the more true in the case of Harrouda, Zahra, and Zina: the better the reader gets to know them, the more he or she despises the folklore that makes them outcasts. Once they are deflowered, nobody cares about

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them; their bodies, suddenly mutilated, lose their currency. They, everyone says, are “dangerous.” They have a secret power. But the truth is that they really have no power at all except the imagined one of their freedom. They are scarred by a life that has suddenly turned into an illusion. The rape, torture, and excision that Ahmed/Zahra experiences, are treated as a completely expected occurrence, and the arrival of her sisters at the prison to excise her sends a chill through the reader. It reminds one of a collective act of murder. The door opened and five women filed in, as if in a play, all dressed identically: grey jellabas, white scarves concealing hair and foreheads, gloves, pale faces devoid of all makeup. They were all ugly, and exuded unease. I realized who they were; a select group of Muslim sisters, brutal and fanatical. They gathered around me. I opened my eyes wide and recognized my own sisters. . . . “We have come, five fingers of one hand, to put an end to a situation of usurpation and theft. . . . “Remember, you are nothing but a hole between two scrawny legs. We are going to plug up that hole forever. You are going to have a circumcision. Not fake this time, but real. Not a cut finger. No, we’re going to cut off that little thing that sticks out, and muzzle that hole with a needle and thread” (1989: 150–151). The narrative constantly poses the question of how horror can happen to any individual, let alone Zahra: beauty, it seems, can save no one. At its heart, the vision of humanity offered in La Nuit sacrée is profoundly pessimistic, although it is tempered by several moving depictions of heroism. Moreover, the author seems to be fully aware of how easily the damage, the condition that would certainly be called “being a woman,” could happen to the writer himself. He knows how quickly and inexplicably he, as a writer, could be disfigured and reduced just like Zahra has been, and he wants to understand why and how it happens. “How does one write,” he asks and answers, What does one express, reveal or denounce, in an Arab world that is in crisis, divided and ruined by war? An Arab world where certain states understand only dictatorship, censure and intimidate intellectuals, where most writers’ unions are the product of the government, where publishers neglect to pay royalties (1990: 5).

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Or, to put it otherwise, truth has been controlled to the point where it has ceased to be possible to find out what it is. The only truth in the Arab world today is that you are being lied to all the time. The ambiguity of two-ness—a girl, a boy; two minds, two solitudes, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body—turns to something else in Zina, the main protagonist in La Nuit de l’Erreur, who “represents beauty as well as adultery” (1997: 16). Zina is a double name covering all possibilities, love and hatred, faithfulness and betrayal, light and darkness.18 A curse hangs over her, for her grandfather died the day she was born, so that people were torn between expressing sympathy to her mother or congratulating her on the birth of her daughter. Zina grows to become a marginalized woman who seduces and destroys her lovers. Raped four times by four different men, Zina, the enchantress, takes her revenge on her aggressors, using their weakness against them, their cowardice and their burning desire while she tells the story, her story and its schemings. Once again, Ben Jelloun is innovative, using no less than eight storytellers to ward off ill fortune. Action takes place in three magical places: Fez in the 1940s with its snake charmers, ª [½7£ (qawa¯l), Á 7 ´j (jinnis), and …¿¼yu (marabouts); Tangier in the 1950s with its castaways, renegades, and mongrels; and present-day Chaonen with its broken hearts and dreams. To avoid the company of wheelers and dealers, Zina’s father decides, without knowing the reason behind his choice, to move to Tangier, where Zina grows up to become a university graduate. “Everyone of us has a secret,” she exclaims. “I was conceived on la Nuit de l’Erreur, a loveless night” (ibid., 23). The confessional passages like this one, rather than deepening the scope, detract from the writerly accomplishment, on which the writer’s doubts are liberally scattered. The only problem, we silently scream, is that self-laceration—a form of self-aggrandizement, however unintended—intrudes every time we start to get immersed in what Zina tells so well. Of her pain there is no question: it is bad enough to blind her to the worst effects of self-consciousness. Branded, persecuted, continually placed on the defensive, Maghrebian women, like Zina and Zahra, internalize their complexes, neuroses, and emotional wounds. Only they know the pain of rape. Night fell quickly. I felt the man approach me. . . . He grappled me by the hips. His tongue wandered across the back of my neck, then my shoulders; he knelt down. I remained standing. He kissed my loins. . . . With his teeth he unfastened the cord holding my pants. His face, bathed in sweat or tears, was pressed against my buttocks. . . . With

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a brutal movement he threw me to the ground. I let out a brief cry. He placed his left hand over my mouth. With the other, he held my face to the ground. I had neither the strength nor the desire to resist. I wasn’t thinking; I was free beneath the weight of this feverish body. For the first time, another body was mingling with my own. . . . The night was black. I felt a thick, warm liquid running down my thighs. The man uttered a guttural, beastlike sound. . . . His body pinned me to the ground. I slipped my right hand under my belly. I touched the liquid that was seeping out of me. It was blood (1987: 97). The discovery of the body is accompanied by the discovery of the couple, whose idealized representation contrasts starkly with the one the writer paints, and which in real life is dominated by the family structure with the men on top (Erickson, 1993: 48–55). Women writers from the Maghreb have already offered a detailed critique of their society and the historical conditioning that has taken place in it. Fatima Mernissi, Fadela M’rabet, Assia Djebar, Malika Mokedmi, and Zohra Mezgueldi, besides others, have inaugurated a period of self-examination from within their own traditions, a self-examination that not only calls these traditions into question, but also interrogates the modern use of power in postcolonial Maghreb. Perhaps the most telling clue concerning the plight of Maghrebi women anxious to liberate themselves from male dominance comes when Djebar announces that her work translates the polyphonic memory of the Maghrebian woman, “but from which language? from Arabic? From dialectal Arabic or from women’s Arabic, which would be the same as underground Arabic?” (1980: 7). Djebar evokes the heroines of Maghrebian history: Messaouda, Al-Kahina (the Queen-Mother of Berbers), Jamila Boupacha. The major difference between these women leaders and Ben Jelloun’s female characters is that his are post-independence figures. His revolt is thus directed against all the authority figures of today—the postindependence ruler, the father, the uncle, the brother, and sometimes even the son. And if colonialism was intimately entangled with sexual radicalism and the series of scandals and court cases that punctuated its progress were central to its project rather than occasional sideshows, postcolonialism seems to be following in the same footsteps. In this respect, Ben Jelloun’s work locates itself in the “great tradition” of literary avant-gardism where sexuality is always bound up with issues of power, violence, and pain, whether explicitly through sadomasochism and rape or implicitly through a generalized oppression. Women in Ben Jelloun are both sexually exploited and sexually voracious, an antonymy that generates a cascade of

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complex discourses, crystalized in the figure of the outlaw heroine like Zina or Zahra, flaunting her independence, defying her oppressors, and bolting in desperation, abject and humiliated. At the same time, the origin of the heroine’s sexual confusion and bitterness is always to be found in the nuclear family, in the complex of hollow but unremitting patriarchal authority, resented and yet supported by the desperately submissive mother. The father is a personalized ogre rather than a Lacanian instance of the Law, and the mother is a tragic ruin rather than a figure of filial identification. Or, to put it differently, the primal myth of patriarchy is seen as a machine for generating hysteria and violence. In Ben Jelloun, however, family romance is always inextricably involved with language. His method is worked out within a totalizing discourse in which he speaks from the position of the child, trapped within linguistic double binds and subject to linguistic imperatives that cast his whole identity into doubt. As a result, Maghrebian society comes across as a macrofamily of powerful rulers and powerless female subjects, terrorizing and terrorized, driving and driven mad—an extreme projection of the psychotic family, and its values, across the whole landscape of interpersonal relations.

II “From the point of view of what is still called the Third World,” Khatibi perceptively writes, we cannot claim that decolonization has succeeded in advancing a way of thinking that is radically critical vis-à-vis the ideological machine of imperialism and ethnocentrism, a decolonization which at the same time would also be a deconstruction of discourses which participate in various more or less hidden ways in the imperialist domination, understood in this case as the power of the word as well. Yes, we have not yet attained the decolonization of thought which, above and beyond a reversal of this power, would constitute the affirmation of a difference, an absolute and free subversion of the mind (1983: 47–48). Tahar Ben Jelloun may have brought off the decolonization of thought that Khatibi speaks about insofar as he remains unaffected by the fashions of French literature. Gratuitous literary games are the antithesis of his work. About reading Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, he notes: “I saw that literature was not at all for us and that it was a literature of crisis. Not a crisis of writing . . . but a crisis of relationships with the world” (1987:

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139). For that reason, Ben Jelloun refuses to acknowledge the influence of any contemporary writer except that of the film director, Luis Buñuel, whose work is characterized by a poetic, erotic, use of imagery, an astringent humor, and a hatred of religion often expressed in blasphemy.19 Ben Jelloun also pays handsome tribute to writers like Genet, Artaud, and Roland Barthes. His work shows a new semiotic, in which words and metaphors derive their meaning from a cultural universe to be discovered not in the nature of language, but in the author’s own background and the lived experiences of his countrymen and women. These are the great strokes by which he has diverted reality from his enthusiasts. You can call it magic realism, and he was for a time a member of that movement, along with Márquez, Grass, and Rushdie. But, more profoundly, he is loyal to the possibility of insight that the novel offered all those who have lived under Western hegemony. His vision of truth, which acknowledges the metaphysical problems involved in writing, but celebrates the distinctiveness of his own mutilated history, announces itself in a pluri-langue that is both lyrical and self-aware. In this way, Ben Jelloun convinces us that he is determined to communicate in a simple manner, without making concessions with regard to form or substance: “This is the most difficult thing to do,” he informs us. “For the novelist as for the film-maker, it is the work of an entire lifetime.”20 It is this quality, among others, that makes his work so permanently rereadable. Ben Jelloun is not in any sense a schematic writer, however; he prefers to trust in language and where it might take him. In Jour de silence à Tanger, it takes him into a kind of turmoil that he cannot quite clarify, and the novel sometimes reads like a first draft, overphilosophical and a little fey: Now that illness has taken up residence in his body like a gaunt, ugly old woman; now that he must deal with it, even as he pretends to be unaware of its existence, he finds himself facing solitude in its most intolerable form. He is all alone with himself now, without a witness, without a victim. . . . (1990: 63). Ben Jelloun cannot quite manage either the first sentence or the last phrase. In between, we get the short descriptive sentences he writes so well. In his exploration of an isolated mind “at home,” so to speak, Ben Jelloun approaches a territory more readily identified with Beckett or Handke than with the stalwarts of magic realism. However, the novel is linked to his earlier work by its alternately startling and subtle use of imagery. La Réclusion solitaire is a good example of what I mean. It focuses on a single central figure, an isolated migrant worker in France, but in this

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brief work he employs an entirely different method. Whereas in La Nuit sacrée he experimented with fragmented narrative and a subjective, erotic lyricism, in Jour de silence à Tanger he displays a mastery of compression in style and structure. His impersonation of the old man’s voice alternates between a modified third-person stream of consciousness and first-person monologue. Reading Jour de silence à Tanger after La Nuit de l’Erreur is like seeing an out-of-focus image suddenly slide into crystalline clarity. Only the odd authorial interjection or explanatory gesture mar the narrative flow, which signals its subject’s contradictions: misogyny and sexual adventure, the memory of love, misanthropy, friendship, trust, abandonment, and loss. The old man’s consciousness is a screen on which deftly juxtaposed images are projected: the swirl of a society in flux, homespun reflections on religion, philosophy, and life, the decay of home and city that mirror his inner disintegration. Ben Jelloun adroitly sidesteps the expatriate’s dilemma by reducing social comment to an impressionistic trace. The narrative is subdued but not abandoned; we know where we are at every second, there are no longueurs, and things move confidently, with a sure rhythm: “At any rate, I have dedicated myself permanently to solitude. I’ve never depended on anyone, I’ve always been on my own. Oh, I know that isn’t something to brag about. If I tell you these things, it’s simply so you won’t forget them” (Ben Jelloun, 1991: 8). That paragraph is packed with images, but nothing is superfluous. Ben Jelloun has found a way to reconcile his poetic instincts with the demands of prose, and to represent a teeming, painful consciousness without any incoherence.21 His austere, monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself and redolent of nothing else, belongs to the anti-Revivalist legacy, as do his political opinions. But how can he, a postcolonial writer avant la lettre, write in what Derrida eloquently calls the language of a triumphalist postmodernism, which derides much of The Maghreb’s history as Romantic junk, when in fact the cynic for whom its turbulent colonial history is merely embarrassing is the flipside of the idealist who blathers on about independence? When the pendulum swings, it always swings too far. The question posed here has no easy answer even if Ben Jelloun attempts one: “It seems to me that the language is secondary. Just write. Then write and work on the words” (2000: 13). But the theory and practice in The Maghreb today is that writers who reside outside of it and write in French remain, for the most part, non-Arab. They are treated with disdain or simply ignored. Khatibi put it trenchantly: “A national writer is someone who considers himself as such and who takes on that role . . . we have to wonder whether North African writers who have been living in France for over ten years, are still part of Maghrebian literature” (1979: 34). Or, to

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phrase it differently, to be outside of The Maghreb is to be en marge of its e [zb (heritage.) Whereas Khatibi may seem mildly critical in his stance against exclusion, Ben Jelloun answers back with a vengeance: One does not ask this kind of question, not so insistently at least, of writers living in two languages like Samuel Beckett, Cioran or Kundera, which implies that a European can emigrate, even exile himself or herself in another language, without having to be accountable to anyone for it. We can ask ourselves questions but who gives us the right to launch a cross-examination and come out with statements like “Arab writers who write in French are not Arab writers.” Personally, I have no insecurity about my Arab and Maghrebian identity, nor do I have the slightest unease or guilt about writing in French. Actually, we should be talking not about French language, but French languages (in Rollin, 1988: 140). This boundary-crossing of interdependence on the rim of the world, on the one hand, and the rock of dome, on the other, has yet another spin to it. For Ben Jelloun, it seems that the greatest force at work on his imagination is the presence of his mother. He elucidates: My mother . . . is sacred. I have a very strong relationship with my mother. And she does too with me. At any rate, I owe my writing to her. She, a complete illiterate, gave me my passion for writing. She never said “write!” But she told me so much about herself and her suffering . . . that I felt I had to write for her (Ibid., 138). The most revered of traditional Maghrebian roles, that of the mother, fills the avant-garde living space of the narrative. The mother, a magnificent creation, far from being a withered crone in a black ]\jn (hija¯b), is the writer’s voice. In an interview with André Rollin, Ben Jelloun maintains that his language is his mother’s. She speaks the way he writes. In this regard, he reminds us of another postcolonial writer—namely, Gabriel García Márquez, who met his grandmother for the first time when he was seven years old. His remark that nothing interesting ever happened to him after the encounter is revealing, to say the least. “She had an enormous house, full of ghosts. She was very superstitious and impressionable. . . . In every corner there were skeletons and memories, and after six in the evening you

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didn’t dare leave your room. It was a world of fantastic terrors” (quoted in Cordwell, 1987: 12). This could also be Ben Jelloun’s world. From the memory of that “civilisation, ma mère,” in Driss Chraïbi’s acclaimed formula, and using his mother’s narrative voice as his own linguistic lodestone, Ben Jelloun began working on variations on the simplest of themes with remarkable insight. The singularity of this method and the pleasure it gives are due to the very fruitful conjunction it manages to achieve. The connection between an individual writer and the tradition of which he or she is a part abounds. Ben Jelloun draws inspiration not only from his mother and writers like Beckett, Genet, Barthes, and others but also from the collective imagary of an age-old Maghrebian culture in which one finds an ensemble of elements like ¹8‡¤«[ (the tale), ²[z䤫[ (the Koran), ¹¬Ä« ¼ ¹¬Ä« ¡«[ (The Arabian Nights), suspenseful and full of excitement, oral folktales, ascetic or near-idolatrous practices of marabouts and places as well as imaginary figures. His stories tap into Arab and African legends like the imaginary she-demon Aïsha Kandisha, the famous Arab heroine who is capricious and all-too powerful, and causes mischief in unpredictable ways; Antara (the Jahilia poet); the well-known nameless Berber bandit chief, who also was a woman.22 The work is also violent, fantastic, convoluted in style, rich in images, and filled with metaphors and the metaphysical. They all emerge and go into the making of his writing. Nowhere are the sources and influences in their most basic, even abstract forms more obvious than in the use of tormenting images bordering on perversity and hallucination, like the one involving the breast, which force the reader to enter the writer’s phantasmagorical world: “I’ve always been obsessed with breasts. I admit it. I’m very fond of breasts, breasts of all sorts. There are those that can be held in the palm of a hand . . . but for me, I like to get lost in them. Perhaps I’ll write . . . an anthology of breasts (in Rollin, 1987: 139). But is writing not characterized precisely by its neurotic nature? There are at least two elements that define the imaginary in Ben Jelloun: phantasm and sex. He offers up the breast for the pleasure of the reader, with the intent of arousing him. Overeroticized, the breast’s sexual meaning begins to overshadow its maternal meaning. One may consider this obsession with the breast as a form of arrested babyhood. When we recall the breast discourse popularized by psychoanalysis, we are able to laugh at much that was once considered gospel. Few take literally Freud’s sacrosanct belief that the “child never gets over the pain of losing its mother’s breast” (1946: 22). According to Jungian analyst John Beebe, oral incestuous desire for the mother is not the only psychological meaning the breast can have.23 Children pass through various archetypal stages, with the meaning of the breast changing at each stage. First there is

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the positive-mother stage, then the negative-mother stage, then the father stage. At the positive-mother stage, the breast is experienced as nurturing and comforting; at the negative-mother stage, the breast becomes persecuting, smothering, or devouring and at the father stage, the breast substitutes are associated with creative and spiritual possibilities. Jungians believe that the man who develops the anima in himself will not be caught in the snare of breast envy, just as the woman who develops the animus in herself will not envy man his penis. She will have her own “phallic creativity.” Psychoanalysis can at least be credited with clarifying the way the breast functions in the human psyche as an overdetermined symbol, even if its interpretation has been limited to the nexus of sexual associations as is the case with Ben Jelloun. Ben Jelloun’s sexual images derive from an existential anguish that becomes obvious in the castration and/or excision complex from which several of his characters suffer. His account of “clitoridectomy” is what is in demand; no one wants to hear his Islamic apologia, socialist commentary, or perspectives on Arab women that do not reconfirm Western stereotypes. It would be, however, difficult to overstate the degree to which his views about sex are misrepresented to Western audiences. Yet this process does not work in one direction only. It builds on a complex dialectic—notably, that the nature of Ben Jelloun’s writing has radically changed in response to the appeal to and pressure of the Western marketplace. In fact, many feel that in writing L’Enfant de sable/La Nuit sacrée the way he did, Ben Jelloun wanted to appeal specifically to the Goncourt jury, the general public and the popular press. This cynical strategy appears to have tempered his work. Some even questioned the integrity of the Goncourt Committee and accused Ben Jelloun of selling out to the West by telling “exotic” stories. Rachid Boujedra, the most vocal, called him “un amuseur exotique.” It is true that the bi-novel represents the furthermost evolution of the “self-orientalizing text,” and that Ben Jelloun “could not have been privy to tell a story (incest, rape, prostitution, and even female excision) that [only] the center wishes to hear.” (1988: 13). For Boujedra, Ben Jelloun is doubly alienated: linguistically and culturally, which would normally preclude any possibility of being a writer at all, because such an alienation deprives the writer of all reason for being. He maintains that Ben Jelloun resolved this dilemma by resorting to folklorism and auto-exoticism and thus offers up as “pleasure of the text” the surviving debris of Maghrebian authenticity to the very violation of colonial authority. The critique may be justified. Yet Boujedra himself shares the central assumption of his examination of Ben Jelloun. For both the vehemence of that criticism and his own sense of exoticism’s deforming power grow out of a shared sense of the idea of a “people,” the word

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Zahra uses to describe the different racial groups who have suffered the “unnatural bringing together” of Empire. The other thing that struck me in reading Ben Jelloun is the shift in his passions, ambitions, faults, temptations. The effect is this: the fascination with doubleness that seems to unsettle sexual differentiation—gender metamorphosis—provides a link with the intention to write. Even the much rarer cases of hermaphroditism, like Ahmed/Zahra’s, are not permitted to remain unresolved ambiguities. They must speak truth to power in that writing becomes a kind of exorcism in which voices are mixed together without getting confused; they answer one another, tear one another to pieces, and bear within themselves parts of Zina, the inaccessible, the immortal. “It is when the normal is secure,” C. L. Barber writes, “that playful aberration is benign” (1994: 31). In Zina, Ben Jelloun evidently preferred a sexually active figure to one frozen in acknowledged androgyny (Ahmed/Zahra). Insofar as sex is always linked to violence in his writing, it involves the patriarchal phallus as a violator of women and a threat to the son’s virility (circumcision anxiety)—Ben Jelloun keeps exorcizing it by performance of magical rites and utterance of charms. Hence, the narrator in L’Enfant de sable explains: “I was in my father’s arms, and he offered me, legs spread slightly apart, to the circumciser. I still see the blood, the swift but skillful motion of my father, whose hand was bleeding. As for me, I too had spots of blood on my thighs, on my trousers” (1982: 114). For Ben Jelloun, the question of body image is central to all these considerations. Clearly it is difficult not to think of the obscene, extravagant, irreverent image of the female sexual organ. A cultural history of the breast, for example, fits within the context of the “reign of the phallus” that has dominated Western civilization for so long. Yet the breast has had its own simultaneous reign, one constructed from the fantasy of men, to be sure, but one that increasingly expresses the need and desire of the women to whom breasts ultimately belong. This male fantasy of the breast and/or female body is well articulated in the following passage in which female power/knowledge/pleasure dictates the rules of the game: I had no panties on and had had myself waxed. He kept sweating, probably from desire. I was standing up, with both legs wide open, waiting to receive his cock. With his clothes on, he was not free to move about as he would have liked. He was terrorized by the idea that someone might actually open the door because I had not locked it. I held him, forcing him to do what I wanted: to fuck standing up. He performed while whispering that I had a perfect body, a burning vagina and ash-colored eyes that

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tormented him. It was he who first described the exact color of my eyes. I wanted to be in this position, dominating him while receiving pleasure. I came quickly and bit him on the neck in order to stifle my gasps. He was embarrassed by the mark left on his neck. He told me that he would have to tell his wife that a bitch had bitten him (1997: 43). In this instance, Zina, in going after what she wants without shame or pudeur, manages to dampen the male fantasy of female arousal. In other instances (Harrouda, Fadela, Yamna, L’Assise), however, allusions to the ambivalent, mythological figure of Aïsha Kandisha clearly illustrates male anguish in the face of the devouring female, who is represented as scary because she challenges us to a kind of psychosexual wrestling match: Who will be the one who gets to suck? The power of women to do men grievous harm, and even kill them, is one of the givens of the female’s life, except that in The Maghreb these women are not necessarily human. Sometimes they are a\8À´j (imaginary beings, spirits), who strike at you, possess you, paralyze you with fright, and have to be appeased and exorcized by marabouts (male healers) with connections to dead male saints—men who got their power through their own rituals of intercession and devotion. In fact, they are tied to God.24 The marabouts may specialize in a particularly lively camel-footed she-demon by the name of Aïsha Kandisha, who is not real, but by all evidence is there. And she just about sums up what an invisible woman must be. She is capricious, and she is everywhere. Nobody (man or woman for that matter) shuts Aïsha Kandisha away and locks the door.25 In fact, Aïsha Kandisha has reclaimed for female comedy the phallic aggression that is traditionally associated with male humor, whose totem, the Fool’s scepter, is actually the penis. Even her physical posture in oral tales (she discards the apologetic feminine stance onstage and plants her feet firmly apart) suggests phallic power, which she insists is “really womb power that men stole.” “A man standing with his legs apart is impersonating a woman,” the legend goes on to explain, assuming the erect birth posture. “Men all have womb envy. Aïsha does not have penis envy. Her psychic penis is far larger than any man’s. Her attitude is that she has a vagina and therefore she has the bigger penis.”26 Such a representation of the female sexual organ brings to mind the graffiti that, in one of Ahmed/Zahra’s nightmares, links the image of the father with a powerful, castrating vagina dentata. This phantasmagorical relationship between sex and perversity stems, I believe, from a fundamental uneasiness, “pleasure being merely an illusion of our anxieties,” that is one of the key elements in the imaginary of Ben Jelloun.

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There is more to be noted. The plot in Les Yeux baissés is echoed in La Plus haute des solitudes, which shows the circumstances of Maghrebian immigrants, who, caught in the grip of a terrible sexual, physical, and mental loneliness, succeed in getting out of it. It was Frantz Fanon who drew attention to the problems facing Maghrebians in France. A psychiatrist by training, Fanon provides us with a link to Ben Jelloun, who in 1975 defended his own thesis on social psychiatry in Paris. Unlike Fanon, however, Ben Jelloun has no room for theoretical considerations and prefers to remain a witness, though not through naivete. La Plus haute des solitudes and La Réclusion solitaire examine the sexual neuroses resulting from male immigrant workers’ displacement and rootlessness. These men are deprived of the figure of the woman (mother, sister, wife, daughter), who plays a special role in Arab society. Their displacement produces hallucination and sexual frustration. The following is a marvelous instance of sexual deprivation. “The voice of a woman. A stranger. A wave washes over my eyes. The foam is blue. My cock rises. My legs tremble in the night. Desire? A madness and my fingers hold my crying prick. Desire? A vision of sparks and mirrors dancing on my body, on my dry tongue” (Ben Jelloun, 1988: 4). How does one generate this illusion? How is presence attained without really attaining it? We approach here the strange logic of the Derridean supplement, which harbors within itself two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary. The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. . . . But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [suppléant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place [tient lieu]. As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. This second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first. . . . Each of the two significations is [in turn] effaced or becomes discreetly vague in the presence of the other. But their common function is shown in this: whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-

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added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it (Derrida, 1976: 144–145). Let us take masturbation as in Ben Jelloun’s case study of uprooted Maghrebian workers in La Réclusion solitaire. Masturbation is dangerous precisely because it supplements the “natural” relationship; in other words, it is both added to and replaces nature. Each time nature fails us, the supplement is there to entice us, to restore through illusion and phantasm the absent presence. Thus, the supplement, by definition external and artificial, replaces nature and so becomes an integral part of it, to the point in fact where the artificial and the natural become inseparable, one and the same. Nature, in all its plenitude, then appears in its real form, that of myth only, and the pure origin, the metaphysical concept par excellence, is altogether undermined, since the supplement is no less originary than that which is natural. In other words, the supplement is in fact added to make up for a deficiency, but as such it reveals a lack, for since it is in excess, the supplement can never be adequate to the lack (“the supplement is exterior,” Derrida reminds us, “alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it”). It is Ben Jelloun’s passion for the truth that enables him to confront the demons of his own unconscious and to lift the multifundamentalist repression that weighs on sexuality inside as well as outside the Arab world today. It is this scientific probity, too, that makes him acknowledge the horrific scenes of rape and sexual molestation that some of his characters must undergo before they liberate themselves. In Ben Jelloun, the whole concept of pleasure (for the migrant worker) rests on the possibility of compensating for a primordial nonpresence by way of the supplement (i.e., masturbation). Once it is proven that the supplement is an integral part of nature, it becomes easy to show how in every instance its notion serves to demystify full presence. How does he achieve this validation, one may be tempted to ask. He first investigates the quest of migrant workers in France, principally the evidence left by their alienation in a closed-in environment, and then goes on to reflect on the ways in which Maghrebian women have been appropriated by competing narratives: the father, on the one hand, and the husband, on the other. Ben Jelloun, rightly so, devotes as much energy to reconstructing the life of the male émigré caught up in his solitude as he does to representing the female (back home) whose body has been censored, her desire repressed, her word forbidden, her image veiled, her reality denied under the mask of tradition. A woman in The Maghreb generally ceases to undergo oppression by male society only when she becomes an aged mother. Once married, she promptly loses her currency in the marketplace of human value. She is mainly as good as the baby-boys she produces, and

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she looks forward to getting old, getting ugly, getting cast aside into a kind of freedom of the ghetto. Today, Germaine Greer would call that freedom “crone culture.” In the upshot, the male may claim a certain ascendency over the female, but he too confronts the same subordinate position that prevailed under French colonial occupation, the same “perpetual phallic aggression” of the French male who ruled The Maghreb as the figure of authority: “[I]t is the repressive and foreign father who imposes himself on his ‘imaginary’ in the form of the police, the boss, the foreman, the unreadable technical manuals” (Erickson, 1993: 56). Judgment is not reserved for the colonizer alone; the finger is pointing at all those who collude in perpetuating injustice of all kinds. Mad Moha’s denunciation awaits all those who “live off the poor.”

III To speak of an “anxiety of influence,” to borrow a phrase from Harold Bloom, is to speak of something socially and ideologically actual. Because anxiety is at work in determining what is to be told in a well homogenized society like France, the emergent writer finds himself or herself living and writing in an unwelcoming place. One should add that in the Arab world today you can no longer take for granted that such places as hospitals, schools, universities, and government buildings will function as they do elsewhere or, if they do for a while, that they will continue to do so for long. Nor can one be certain that birth, marriage, death (recorded, certified, and registered in other societies) will in fact be noted or in any way commemorated. Rather, most aspects of life are negotiable and renegotiable, not just with money and social intercourse, but also with human lives. The Maghreb is littered with real, rusting examples of disconnection, with the remains of technologies that work well enough under First World conditions, but fail in the absence of supporting networks. Even a simple washing machine or hair dryer contains different parts that need periodic inspection, maintenance, and replacement. Corrosion, decay, or decomposition can render a commodity useless, even make it dangerous to those who possess it and to their environment since “they had only the habit of authority, without the energy or the education to back up that authority,” as Naipaul would have it.27 The Maghreb, like the rest of the Third World, has been at the receiving end of imperialist pressures, which the West, a purveyor of a commodity-oriented culture, is pleased to call “democratic liberalism.” In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said explains the relations between colonizer and colonized as follows: the “dominant society comes to depend uncritically on the natives and their territories perceived as in need of la mission civilisatrice” (1993: 233). There is some small value in

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being able to see the imperialist legacy that Said speaks about in its interdependent aspects on both sides of the great cultural divide between the West and the rest. Domination of the Third World by the First World simply did not end and it will not go away with decolonization or independence. It persists with extraordinary tenacity, and with much generosity it animates all the forces and institutions designed for subjugation as witness the following passage from Jour de silence à Tanger, where several centuries of Morocco’s hybrid culture are wiped out to make room for an invasion of foreign entertainment: [Moulay Ali] . . . asks the cleaning woman to switch on the television set. The picture is not very clear; his eyesight must be deteriorating. It’s an American film, dubbed into French. He has trouble understanding it. Why does Moroccan television, which begins the day with the national anthem and a reading from the Koran, devote so much of its time to American and French serials? He feels not only excluded but swindled. The films about cowboys, gangsters, and rich, decadent Americans mean nothing to him (1991: 9). For Ben Jelloun as for Moulay Ali, the present is the location of bitterness, despair, social anarchy, the loss of valued traditions, physical decay—a fact of life in the age of hybridized animals with human genes and early attempts at xenotransplantation (the man with the baboon bone marrow, the baby with the baboon heart) are haunted by premonitions of genetic apocalypse. The past remains the realm of pleasure and beauty. Life itself is the adversary; the vagaries of history and politics are subsumed by the brute metaphysic of the real. And, above all, something of the old, restless Ben Jelloun survives all kinds of apparent lapses into stasis in a Maghreb where the novel is both risky and highly problematic. Typically, its subjects are urgently ideological, and its concerns radically existential. This suggestion is underlined by the writer’s use of certain types of stock characters: the storyteller consumed by his sentences, the man with a woman’s breasts, the woman with the unshaven beard, the man’s body with several hyena heads, the blind troubadour, who says: “All the other companions were physically handicapped. There was the one-eyed man who chewed a piece of wood, the one-armed man who played the flute, the dwarf who walked on his hands, the blind who pretended to read, and then there was Fedela, the only woman in the group, a woman with a hefty chest and a girlish face” (Ben Jelloun, 1997: 16). Meanwhile, loyal to the mirror (or the blackboard)

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of a creative mind, Ben Jelloun keeps offering a view of life that is characteristically his own. This is how one storyteller puts it: Friends! Few are you that pursue this man’s story with me. But your number is of little consequence. Some have not returned this morning because they cannot accept the sacrilege that this character ventured. He dared to misappropriate a verse of the Al-Qur’a¯n. But he is no longer his own person. Indeed he has been lead off the path of his destiny, and if, in a moment of crisis, he allows himself to take liberty with a verse, a single verse, may we find it in ourselves to forgive him. Who are we to judge after all? God will take care of that (Ben Jelloun, 1987: 79). Ben Jelloun’s gift for the unforgettable visual hyperbole, for instance, the rise of fundamentalism propounded by muftis and politicos forcing authors to be named and/or silenced and books to be burned, offers no compromise. When the pupils question the authority of ²[z䤫[ (the Koran), the learned Consul attempts an erudite explanation. “The kids are terrible. I try to teach them the Koran as I would a beautiful poem, but they keep asking awkward questions, like, ‘Is it true that all Christians will go to hell?” or “Since Islam is the best religion, why did God wait so long to spread it?” I merely look up at the ceiling and repeat the question: “Why was Islam so late in coming?” Do you have any idea what the answer is?” “I’ve thought about it. But I’m like you, I like the Koran as an exquisite poem, and I detest people who exploit it like parasites and limit freedom of thought. They’re hypocrites. In fact, the Koran itself mentions them.” He quotes Verse Two of the Surat “The Hypocrites”: “‘They have made for themselves a veil of their oaths. They have barred men from the ways of salvation. Surely their deeds are marked in the corner of iniquity.’ Fanatical believers or hypocrites, what’s the difference? To me they’re alike. I like to stay away from them” (ibid., 72–73). Suffice it to add that in Ben Jelloun, there is always a character who denounces fanaticism. And because “intolerance is intolerable,” Ben Jelloun is particularly shocked to see Islam corrupted by politics and placed in the service of oppression. What is imperative for the novelist as for his protagonists is to speak against injustices of all kinds. He cites André Gide: “Intelligence is an understanding of

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the world.” Have we failed then to understand? “Not at all,” Ben Jelloun replies, “but I do not trust anyone who is capable of understanding everything. I do not wish to glorify the obscure and the incomprehensible. However, in life, nothing is simple. Human relationships are complex” (Gaillard, 1987: 44). In other words, appearances are the most perverse masking of the truth; one must therefore mistrust what seems obvious at first glance. Magic realism, at least as practiced by Ben Jelloun, is a development of surrealism that expresses a mutilated “Third World” consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has eloquently called “half-made” societies, where the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, public corruptions and private anguishes are more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called “First World,” where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what is really going on. In the work of Ben Jelloun, as in the world he describes, impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun. It is in “les bas-fonds” of such a world that Ahmed/Zahra discovers for the first time the pleasures of sexual intercourse with the sexually active blind Consul. I had already taken off my jellaba and my dress. I went quietly to the bed and undid the Consul’s saroual. I left the dim room light on, climbed up, and straddled him. Slowly I let him penetrate me, holding his shoulders to stop him from changing position. He came very quickly. I stayed on top of him, motionless, waiting for him to recover his energy. Not long afterwards, he had an enormous erection again. Complete lack of modesty or embarrassment made up for my inexperience. Desire directed my body by instinct, dictating the appropriate movements. I had gone mad. In a brothel with a blind man I was discovering pleasure for the first time in my life! He was insatiable. Neither of us said a word. I stifled my moans. I could not let him realize the deception (Ben Jelloun, 1987: 117–118). It would be a mistake to think of Ben Jelloun’s literary universe as an invented, self-referential, closed one. He is not writing about Middle Earth, but about the one we all inhabit. Ahmed/Zahra exists. She frees herself by fulfilling all the male sexual fantasies. She is even on top. That is magic. Or, to put it differently, in an extended sense, Ahmed/Zahra becomes a privileged surrogate metaphor for the writer striving to reconstruct an idiom expressive of his own perceptions and cultural specificity out of the shards

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and artifacts of the discourse, inherited from his French colonial antagonists, which he has undertaken to decolonize. Novels have always been tied to national states. Joyce’s Ulysses, Zola’s Germinal, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are good examples, but in the Arab world the modern state has been derived from the experience of colonialism, imposed from above and handed down, rather than earned through the travails of independence. It is no indictment of Ben Jelloun’s achievement to say that of the experimentations offered the postcolonial writer during the post-independence period, his has been the most innovative one. “My . . . novels” he contends, “have an original novelistic form. Original? That is not the right word! Different perhaps. In any case, it has nothing to do with Camus or Proust, or with the classical novel . . . or with contemporary Arab novels. It is my way of telling the story” (in Rollin, 1987: 139). From this perspective, Ben Jelloun’s work bids the “old school” of Maghrebian writers an inevitable and profoundly respectful adieu. He can be said to have taken the Francophone novel from a subaltern condition and fashioned it according to a new, emergent, fresh spirit; a spirit of resistance and liberation. In this respect, his stance of ironic aloofness, that mixture of eroticism, cynicism, and playfulness, is really a variant on postmodernism rather than on magic realism. The menace in Ben Jelloun’s fiction, however, wears a different, more distinctly male face than the moldering morbidity in Márquez, say, or the epic knife fights in Jorge Luis Borges. Ben Jelloun’s repeated recourse to drearily masculine worlds can be read as both an exposure of and homage to the dreaded father who wanted his daughter to be a boy. His fiction is a world in which the breasts of women stand behind the penises of men, somewhat obscured by phallic glory. Yet, like a half-buried goddess statue, the breast can claim that it was there earlier and has never lost its power. Ben Jelloun has always acknowledged the significance of the breast, without ceding an inch of the penis! Only one of his female characters (Zina in La Nuit de l’Erreur) would attempt to reorder the hierarchy and grant the breast preeminence. Some psychological dredging seems necessary to explain this highly cultivated and resourceful author’s fascination with colorful and complex characters like Zina. In one instance he compares her to the mythologized Aïsha Kandisha: a kind of “mangeuse d’hommes.” In doing so, Ben Jelloun hardly loses his enthusiasm for a mutilated yet somehow attractive traveling narrative. The blind Consul also fits the bill for he seems to represent for him the dogged and thankless pursuit of order and justice in a society increasingly short of both. Le Consul may also stand for the driving force of intellectual curiosity; he always presses to unravel the mystery, even when there is less than nothing in it for him.

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The resemblance to Le Consul does seem to preserve something of Ben Jelloun, one of the most humanely rueful Francophone writers living today. It also catches some of the character of his writing, which is much taken up with the idea of the rejoinder, the drama of wise words immediately rebutted. He loves dialogues, which can be enactments of rational activity, pushing for truth, unafraid of the constraints that would act on any actual conversation. In his hands they can also be risky arguments with himself—disputes in which some of his own beliefs are mocked with style. There are too many dialogues, in fact, and too little scenery, architecture, physiognomy, and other such appurtenances of magic realism. In some large sense, in some way to do with desire and death, Ben Jelloun appears like a conjuror with the energies of his epoch. Another way of putting it would be to say that he expresses his time and expresses it in terms for which his time is not ready perhaps. This partly explains his fascination for the Buñuel bug, which bit him long ago. He tells us that his discovery of Buñuel left him so bedazzled that he still has not recovered (Daoud, 1987: 60). He speaks of the shifts of time and point of view, the shady construction, the serpentineness that Buñuel at his best carries off in a kind of bardic transport. His use of alternate chapters, each conveying a “structure of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s maverick phrase, has become almost a tic; a nervous tic: the storyteller tells several stories at once, as if he did not trust a single story to be interesting and meaningful enough. Additionally, there are arresting, plausible evocations of young childhood memories, ravenous appetite for sex, the recalling of the old days when tellers, peddlers, and entertainers roved the Atlas mountains without fear. But they exist as adumbrations of some larger, more relaxed, less manipulative work, which is yet to be written. It has become fairly orthodox to observe—as anyone observes when talking about Joyce or Nabokov or Kundera—that Ben Jelloun’s bricolage is not unattached to his genius. His narrative is a study in grace and brutality, in his “madness” he invented the postcolonial tale, his mind is a settext in the Jungian analysis personality, his narrative is an erotic spectacle—narcissistic, instinctive, free—and his work captures the emerging rhythm of mind for a generation that is heading for the fearsome carnival of globocracy. But Ben Jelloun is a sleek gazelle trotting around the edge of a precipice; he is a primitive: How did he come to be the patron saint of ¹8 ‡¤«[ (the tale)? One gets a very strong sense of a brilliant man alone with his resentments. He is stranded among (un)natural sensations, which he evokes with all their sounds, smells, messes, rituals, habits, and violent changes. In the end there is only a buildup of losses in his otherwise sparse prose—loss of identity, loss of friends, loss of young lives to the terrible progress of new ideas.

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“To be a colonial,” Naipaul once wrote, “is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely, especially in the eyes of someone from the metropolitan country”—or someone trying to look through those eyes, someone with a passion to command its language (1984: 32).28 How does one transform mimicry into individuality? How, that is, does one create a self out of the ruins of subjugation? How does one move from dependency to development, when the tools of the latter are so often the chains of the former? The postcolonial writer sees the library shelves of the metropolis as a sign of his own irrelevance. So much has already been done! Yet he has no way to escape that sense of his own belatedness except by trying to fill a shelf of his own the way Mustapha Said does in Tayeb Salih’s memorable Season of Migration to the North, to pierce a window, also of his own, embracing the very thing that oppresses him. And that very understanding of the constancy of change allows Ben Jelloun to place himself within a history that once seemed to have no room for him, to be recognized at last as part of the literary landscape, and to be located in the line of writers that includes Beckett, Artaud, Barthes and others. In the process, he allows himself to stand outside the umbrella that shields or accommodates his contemporaries. Whether this is because his is genuinely different, or because he is objectively an outsider, the reader cannot say, but the fact is that although he went along with all sorts of colonial routines (schools, textbooks, exams, the French language) because he was made to, something private in him resisted them. His writings are a lively testimony to that resistance, couched in so many words, phrases, and stories of human beings and societies off the edge. They are one way of representing these societies and seeing them as a people, who are capable of feeling both happiness and suffering. That at bottom is Ben Jelloun’s quest: to articulate a new tradition that allows its multiple voices to speak for themselves.

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Notes

Introduction 1. I am grateful to the following for the formulation of some of the ideas developed in this introduction: Wood, Poster, Sosnoski, Gora, Nkosi, Said, Eagleton, Z
iz
ek, Kanga, and others. They have played a major part in the making of my views on postcolonial theory and practice. My sincere gratitude also goes to Wayne Tompkins for untangling many plaits in this book. 2. See Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–98 (London & New York: Verso, 1998); Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London & New York: Verso, 1998). 3. The problem, Summers believes, is that while it is easy to have any two out of the three (integration, insurance, sovereignty), it is very hard to have all three at the same time. The answer, he thinks, is to make other countries see that what is good for the United States is also good for them—in his own words, “to finesse sovereignty problems by highlighting the national benefits of internationally congenial behavior.” For a comprehensive view of the subject, see Thomas L. Freedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 378; John Vidal, “The Seeds of Wrath,” The Guardian on Line 23 June 1999: 1–15. 4. The old colonial powers maintained that the “rim of the world” should surrender its sovereignty in return for the benefits of “civilization.” 5. Lynne Mastnak, “Why Are You Leaving?” LRB 27 May 1999: 11–14. 6. I owe much gratitude to Homi Bhabha for the ideas I develop here. For more details, see Homi Bhabha, “The White Stuff,” Artforum (May 1998):21–24; “Qeen’s English,” Artforum (March 1997):25–26, 107. 7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Part One in particular.

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8. A third character, spectator and connoisseur of the monkey’s performances, is the sage old elephant, whose deadpan style of appreciation is impenetrable to the lion. Although even the elephant laughed out loud, his sheer size means the lion will not mess with him. 9. Jacques Derrida, “DifférAnce,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 1–27; Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 129–160. “DifférAnce” is an essay of major significance in Derrida’s oeuvre, relevant to his work on literature and everything else. 10. Rushdie, “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance,” 8; The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1989); Pico Iyer, “The Empire Writes Back,” Time 8 February 1993: 46–51. I am indeed grateful to Hayet Tabbane for bringing this essay to my attention. A true friend, Hayet was always present and with a smile too. 11. Both Said and Gates have moved away from their mentors. 12. Said’s method of “contrapuntal reading” can be seen in all his works but especially in Culture and Imperialism. His method has been largely documented in George M. Wilson, “Edward Said and Contrapuntal Reading,” Philosophy and Literature 18 (1994): 265–273. 13. “From the Classical age, the sign is the representativity of the representation insofar as it is representable.” In The Order of Things, 65. 14. Quoted in Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a Writer” and the traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 108. 15. I owe this remark to one of SUNY’s readers. I am most grateful to him or her for the insight. 16. Understood here in the tradition of Friday night Bouillon de culture hosted by Bernard Pivot on the French channel Antenne 2. 17. Joyce and Beckett may be considered the begetters of postcoloniality’s ambitions. It was their singular, though also profoundly Irish, cunning to bring into shaping collision the sphere of European literature with that of Greek mythology, the barroom bawdy, the circus, the music hall, and the Tour de France in the case of Beckett. See introduction to James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; rprt. New York: Vintage, 1966); Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (New York: Knopf, 1997). 18. Quoted in Winds Can Wake up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader, ed. Louis J. Parascandola (Wayne: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 34. 19. A cogent view is to be found in Richard Robbins, Sidelines Activist: Charles S. Johnson and the Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 176. 20. For more on the subject, see Another e.e. cummings: e.e. cummings with John Rocco, selected by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Liverlight, 1999), 82–83.

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21. Quoted in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1994), 27. 22. There is perspicacious view of this matter in Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (World of Art) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 23. 23. See W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, 31. 24. I am profoundly grateful to Nkosi for the formulation of some of the ideas I develop here and elsewhere. For more on the subject, see Lewis Nkosi, “An UnAmerican in New York,” LRB 24 August 2000: 30–32; “Underground People,” World Literature Today (Winter 1996): 133–138. 25. A good portrait of the rise of the black intellectual is to be found in Pride and Promise: The Harlem Renaissance, ed. Kathryn T. Cryan-Hicks (Discovery Enterprises, 1997), 23, 45–56. 26. For more on the subject, see The New Negro, ed. Alain LeRoy Locke (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 22–187 in particular. 27. See Clovis E. Semmes, Roots of Afrocentric Thought: A Reference Guide to Negro Digest/Black World, 1961–1976, Vol. 35 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1998), 91. 28. Quoted in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, 71. 29. See My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Gerald Lyn Early (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 34. 30. If the postcolonial tradition can be traced back to Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Amilcar Cabral among others, then a study that goes more deeply into the dynamic between scholarship and postcolonial imaginative writing and its impact on the resistance movement begs for investigation. The cultural exchange that took place among the surrealists and the Négritude poets is another case in point. Another no less important example is that great anti-authoritarian uprisings made their earliest advances, not by denying the humanitarian and universalist claims of the general dominant culture, but by attacking the adherents of that culture for failing to uphold their own declared standards, for failing to extend them to all, as opposed to a small fraction, of humanity. When one thinks of Joyce, Beckett, and Yeats, not to speak of Wilde and Shaw, one can only think of how badly they wanted an Irish cultural renaissance with a different new English as its language. Yeats once entertained the fine thought that reborn Dublin could be more like sixteenth-century Urbino than like London or that it might match the cultural unity achieved “by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect, from the 11th to the 13th century.” But he also believed that the world fell apart about the time of the birth of Shakespeare, and that civilization, not least in Dublin, had continued and accelerated that collapse into disunity. See Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 522. 31. My usage of the “subaltern” or the native or the colonized is constructed at the point of splitting, which is part of a wider argument about the construction of subordination. In situations in which the cultural difference—race, sexuality, class,

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location, generational or geographical specification—is the linchpin of a particular political edict or strategy, even the oppressor is constituted through splitting. 32. As Barthes observes in S/Z, the historical novel is a bricolage, the difficulty being to get the exact size of history within the fictional structure. 33. For reflections on this distinction, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 177. 34. This is most memorably argued in Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 1–20. Some of the issues raised by Achebe are well discussed by Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 269–274. 35. “Learning the Language,” Online Newshour 25 May 1998: 1–5; Patricia Williams, Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (London: Virago, 1997); Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Colour Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 111–145 in particular; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Much of this subject is well discussed by Peter Hulme in Colonial Encounters: Europe and its Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). See also his anthology with Neil L. Whitehead, Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Homi Bhabha, “The White Staff,” Artforum (May 1998): 21–24. 36. No one has yet analyzed in any extensive way why a later generation of black American thinkers and artists often lacks this essential artistic self-confidence. Gates himself touches on the issue, especially in writing about Murray and Baldwin, but ultimately does not meet it head-on. To begin to assess the problem would be to impute a failure, to condemn certain black writers of his generation. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), 4–6. 37. Gates, 1988: part one in particular 38. The list includes writers like Mustapha Matura, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Nurreddine Farah, and Rohinton Mistry among others and theorists such as Ania Loomba, Simon During, Bart Moore-Gilbert, and Robert Young. 39. Both Greenblatt and Said pay each their debt to Foucault in endearing terms. See Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, 3; “Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted,” Said observes in Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 23, respectively. 40. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1990), 1–16; Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 179–219 in particular; The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London & New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–49, 152–168, 213–225, 231–243, 277–293; “New Historicism, New Histories, and Others,” New Literary History (Spring 1990): 433–533.

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41. Derrida’s argument insists that each element of the opposition life/text is already not identical to itself, thereby compounding the complexities. See The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 44–45; Julia Kristeva, “Le sujet en procès,” in Polygone (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 55–106; Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 143–148. 42. See advance praise for Culture and Imperialism (1993). 43. No other critic has exploited the interview form the way Edward Said has. He used it to complement his work. 44. For a comprehensive view of this matter, see Edward Said, “East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism,” TLS 3 February 1995: 6. 45. I have relied on Sosnoski for the formulation of some of the questions I raise here. See his Modern Skeletons in Postmodern Closets: A Cultural Studies Alternative (Charlottesville, VA.: University Press of Virginia, 1995): 24–62; I am indeed indebted to him for some the interrogations in this chapter. Said has expressed no interest whatsoever in jazz. He may be said to do well in Puritan America because the Puritans need to be whipped from time to time so they can get on with their exploiting. (This is the suggestion in Ishmael Reed’s second novel, Yellow Black Radio Broke-Down, where Drag Gibson’s Chinese manservant is permitted to abuse him and to spit in his food.) 46. This bitter reality comes across quite clearly in Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. 47. For more on the subject, see Imre Karacs, “And the Nobel Prize for Stabbing in the Back Goes to . . . ,” The Independent 28 October 2000: 4. 48. For a brilliant study of this subject, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). My inclusion of Morrison shows that even American literature, let alone African-American literature, was once under the spell of the English. 49. The pivot event has yet to take place in an African francophone capital. An ironic evaluation of the celebrated dictée considering that the number of people who speak French in Africa alone is tenfold the number of those who speak it in La Métropole. Take away francophone Africa and the French language is no more.

Chapter One: Michel Foucault: Missionary of Transgression 1. Jorge Luis Borges, El acercamineto a Almotásim (Madrid: El Libro de Bolsillo, 1953); “Jorge Luis Borges,” propos recueillis par Pierre Assouline Écrire, lire et en parler, ed. Pierre Assouline (Paris: Laffont, 1985), 465–466. 2. Foucault’s most influential commentators in America, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, have divided his career into four stages: (1) early Heideggerian stage; (2) proto-structuralist or archaeological stage; (3) genealogical stage; (4) ethical stage; Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 9–12.

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3. Habermas’s criticism of Foucault’s “archaeological theory” is to be found in Lectures on the Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); for an interesting discussion of this question, see also George Friedman, The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 29–113. 4. Karl Marx, Der Archtzenhnte Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte (1852; Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1947), 22–34. Nietzsche’s analysis of texts in this light are everywhere in his work, but especially in The Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power. There are some perceptive comments on Marx and Kierkegaard scattered through Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Éditions Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 112–114; Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Éditions Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 34–65; Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” in Nietzsche, Colloque de Royaumont (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 184–185, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Dits et écrits, vol. II, 136–157. 5. A perceptive view of Sartre’s evolution as a philosopher is to be found in François Bernard et Pierre Barbès, La Soft-idéologie (Paris: Laffont, 1987), 25–32; Frederic Jameson’s essay on “Transformations,” in Sartre and the Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 99–111; Vincent Descombes, Le Même et l’autre: quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française 1933–1978 (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 1–87. 6. Whereas Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, essentially argues that the testing of scientific hypotheses takes place in a certain context (these are paradigms for each context that preclude others), Gaston Bachelard postulates scientific epochs dominated by specific scientific knowledge. For a general view of this matter, see Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Conguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1975), 23–31. 7. Some of these points are already examined with great perspicacity by A. J. Ayer, Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), 22–40. 8. “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982; rprt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 102; Michel Foucault, “Pouvoir et corps,” in Dits et écrit, vol. II, 754–760. 9. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), xi. (This is a translation of an abridged version of 1961 with some additional material.) 10. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 51. See also his Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault (Paris: Galilé, 1992). 11. Michel Foucault, The Care for the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 45–50; Dits et écrits, Vol. IV, 708–730; Vol. IV, 730–735. 12. The Chinese romance The Dream of the Red Chamber informs us how in China, in the old days, the houses of the nobility and of the rich were painted red; those of the common people were painted grey. 13. Edward Said praises Foucault in Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, 153–154.

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14. Beings are directed toward what Gilles Deleuze, in his commentary on Foucault, calls “the fold of being. Being as fold.” See his Michel Foucault, 177. 15. Jürgen Habermas argues that Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge belongs to means–end rationality, as for it, too, knowledge can never escape instrumentality. Foucault’s work cannot escape the modernity it deplores either: it can provide a basis neither for alternative truth-claims nor for the effective political action. For a cogent view of this matter, see Habermans, “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present,” in Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, 98–89; Lectures on the Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 104–111. 16. Foucault wanted to extend his study of the care for the self to that of responsibility, a fairly new term dating back to 1787. See François Ewald, “Foucault: étique et souci de soi,” Magazine Littéraire (Juillet–Août 1996): 22–25; Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Chapter Two: DerridAlgeriance; or, the Prosthesis of Deconstruction 1. “On nous regardait comme des bêtes noires: comment pouvait–on parler de l’Algérie aux ‘françaouis,’ alors qu’ils nous prenaient tous pour des fascistes qui avaient fait ‘suer le burnous’?” s’indigne Fernand Derrida, professeur de droit à Nice, descendant d’une famille juive ayant fuit l’Inquisition espagnole. For more on the origins of the Derrridas, see Sylviane Stein, “Soirs de ‘nostalgérie,’” L’Express 31 Janvier 1992: 34–35. 2. Geoffrey Bennington\Jacques Derrida, “Curriculum Vitae,” in Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 299–353. This section proved most helpful in formulating Derrida’s parentage, upbringing in Algeria, schoolboy experience, social class, and so on. 3. See “An Interview with Derrida,” trans. David Allison et al. in Derrida and Difference, eds. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 74; Jacques Derrida, “Philosophie: Derrida l’insoumi,” propos recueillis par Catherine David, Le Nouvel Observateur 9–15 Septembre 1983: 86; Jill Robbins, “Circumcising Confession: Derrida, Autobiography, Judaism,” Diacritics (Winter 1995): 31; Pierre Hebey, Alger 1898, la grande vague antijuive (Paris: Ed. Nil, 1996). 4. Khâgne and hypokhâgne are highly selective programs designed for extremely gifted students who end in the rue Ulm part of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). 5. Jean–Pierre Tison, “La nostalgérie d’une autre Algérie,” Lire (Mars 1995): 72; Marianne Payot, “Algérien à 50 ans!” Lire (Février 1995): 93. In a rather brief essay, “Parti pris pour l’Algérie,” Les Temps Modernes (Janvier–Février 1995): 233–242, Derrida tries to fill the gap left by his absence from the arena. 6. The most complete list is by Albert Laventure, in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). See also Points . . . Interviews, 1974–94, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Bennington\Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1990); Laventure, “A Jacques

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Derrida Bibliography 1962–1990,” Textual Practice (Spring 1991): 122–145. I have also included most works (essays, books, interviews) by and on Derrida since 1991. 7. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 856; Hugh Fausset, John Donne: A Study in Discord (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 166; Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Wilbur (New York: Dell Publishing, 1961), 24: Mustapha Marrouchi, “To Draw No Envy Ponge on thy Name,” Texte 5/6 (1986/87): 269–278. 8. Albert Memmi gives a detailed account of the important role played in French culture and the arts by Maghrebian writers. Those who come from Algeria compose more than half of them. For more details, see his Écrivains francophones du Maghreb (Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1985), 45–97. 9. Albert Camus, Actuelles III (Paris: Galimard, 1958), 171; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 169–186. 10. In a desperate gesture, Derrida signs a petition that calls for solidarity of the Algerians who for fear of being killed in Algeria must leave it and seek asylum in France among other countries. See “Appel,” Le Monde 25 Mars 1995: 18. 11. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 83; “Racism’s Last Word,” trans. Peggy Kamuf Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1985): 290–299. 12. I thank Alex Sherrington for helping me with the transcription in Hebrew. 13. There is an excellent analysis of Derrida’s meditation on circumcision in Jill Robbins, “Circumcising Confession: Derrida, Autobiography, Judaism,” Diacritics (Winter 1995): 31. 14. Bennington/Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 72–73. In “On Circumfession” Derrida remembers and reproduces pictures of tools used for circumcising. They date back to the sixteenth century, the time when his family had to leave Spain because of the Inquisition. He speaks of his paternal uncle, Eugène Eliahou Derrida “who must have carried me in his arms at the moment of this event without memory” (96). 15. Jill Robbins, “Circumcising Confession: Derrida, Autobiography, Judaism,” 28; in White Mythologies, 48–50, Young calls into question the idea of history, single history, or “World History.” He shows how the “Third World” appears as an unassimilable surplus to the narrative of the West. 16. Abu Abdallah Zanjani, Tarikh al-Qur’an (Cairo, 1935), 65–101; Harry Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 22–45; René Guénon, Aperçus sur l’ésotérisme islamique et le taoîse (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 17. In another no less important essay, it would indeed be useful to elaborate the different categories of the Other: the external Other (I–Thou), the historical Other (present I and past I), and the internal Other (the private as opposed to public Derrida, or Derridas’s two bodies).

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18. The triumphal postures of the West toward 1992 included everyone except Andalusian Spain—a cross-fertilized entity of Moors, Jews, Arabs, and Iberian Spain. It was left to Mahmoud Darwish to celebrate this cross-pollination in Au dernier soir sur cette terre, trans. Elias Sanbar (Paris: Actes Sud, 1994). 19. Walter Rodney gives a lucid account of how Europe impoverished Africa during centuries of occupation in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1972). 20. “L’Afrique aujourd’hui est ravagée par des guerres civiles, des querelles ethniques et des catastrophes climatiques. Les réfugiés font les frais, en outre, de la corruption et des excès par les autorités politiques de l’Occident,” writes RolandPierre Parignaux in “Enquête de pain et de paix,” Le Monde Diplomatique (Juin 1989): 7; Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Weidenfeld, 1992); Roland Oliver, The African Experience (London: Weidenfeld, 1992), 22–76. 21. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “America First,” LRB 7 January 1993: 10. Fernández-Armesto amplifies and develops this theme in his deeply reflective Columbus (New York: Vintage, 1994). 22. “America is deconstruction,” Derrida writes (“l’Amérique, mais c’est la déconstruction”). Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 14. 23. I am not suggesting that Soyinka, Mafouz, or Gordimer received the Nobel because they were serving Western interests. On the contrary, they are icons of resistance against domination from abroad and oppression from within. 24. See Du droit à la philosophie, 9; Jean Blain, “Le phénomène Derrida,” Lire (Mars 1994): 24–32. 25. Sartre’s model of the critic brings to mind the words of an even more hard-pressed critic of his own society, the Afrikaner writer André Brink, who might one day be driven into physical exile or even into a kind of moral exile, as it were, beyond his “brave whereas.” 26. Derrida, “Philosophie: Derrida l’insoumi,” 87. In “‘II courait mort’: Salut, salut. Notes pour un courrier aux Temps Modernes,” Les Temps Modernes (Mars–Avril–Mai 1996): 7–55, Derrida remembers Sartre and the enmity that was kept up between Sartre and Camus over a long period. Derrida comes across as apologetic and content that he did not take sides, even though one gets the impression that he was leaning toward the Camus camp. 27. Christian Schembré, L’Hommes à la mer (Paris: Lattès, 1990), 23. Schembré is not the only Algerian-born to break up the silence. There are others: Jean Noël Pancrazi, Madame Arnoul (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); Daniel Prévost, Le Pont de la révolte (Paris: Denoël, 1995). 28. No one has applied himself to the study of the French/Algerian trauma thirty years after the war like Benjamin Stora. For more details, see “Nous sommesnous tous tant haïs?” propos recueillis par Christian Hoche, L’Express 31 Janvier 1992: 40–43.

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29. A case in point is Bernard-Henry Levy. 30 Derrida’s first books, published in the late 1960s, constantly suggested leftist leanings. But the link between his abstract critique of the fundamental concepts of Western thought and any recognizable politics was opaque. Yet his explicit positions, in contrast to many French intellectuals, have been those of an honorable and honest socialist. 31. I am profoundly indebted to Terry Eagleton for the formulation of some of the ideas I develop in this and the previous paragraphs. For more details on the subject, see “The Contraditions of Postmodernism,” New Literary History (Winter 1997): 1–6; “The Right and the Good: Postmodernism and the Liberal State,” Textual Practice (Spring 1994): 1–10.

Chapter Three: Counternarratives, Recoveries, Refusals 1. For more details, see Edward Said, “Cairo and Alexandria,” Departures (May–June 1990), 1–11; “Between Worlds,” LRB 7 May 1998: 3–7; Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism (London & New York:Verso, 1997). 2. The episode is eloquently narrated in “Cairo Recalled: Growing Up in the Cultural Crosscurrents of 1940s Cairo,” House and Garden (April 1987): 20–32. 3. Edward Said, “East Isn’t East: The Impending End of the Age of Orientalism,” TLS 3 February 1995. The essay discusses the characterization of the book as anti-Western. Said expresses his regret of so simple a characterization, arguing that he nowhere says that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy, or uniformly the same in the work of all Orientalists. 4. For a detailed view of this matter, see Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992). 5. A genealogy of how Said is a man of many parts is to be found in Mustapha Marrouchi, “Rootprints,” The Dalhousie Review (Spring 1997): 67–97. 6. Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Literature, Politics, and Theory, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1986), 180; Dennis Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems,” in The Politics of Theory, eds. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983), 34; Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” The New York Review 24 June 1982: 49; James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255–277; Robert Young, “Disorienting Orientalism” in White Mythologies; Writing History and the West (London & New York: Routledge, 1990), 135; Jacques Berque, “Au-delà de l’Orientalisme,” Entretien avec Jacques Berques, Qantara 13 (Octobre–Novembre–Décembre 1994): 27–28. 7. Maxine Rodinson, “Fantômes et réalités de l’Orientalisme,” Qantara 13 (Octobre–Novembre–Décembre 1994): 15. 8. I am deeply indebted to Tom Nairn for the ideas I develop here. I owe this reference to Paul Bové, whom I thank wholeheartedly. For more details on Said’s Arab critics, see “Images-miroirs de l’Orientalisme,” Qantara 13 (Octobre–Novem-

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bre–Décembre 1994): 25–26; Sadek J. Al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin (London: Ithaca Press, 1981), 23–40; A. al-Saghir, al-Mustashriqun wa-I-Dirasat al-Qur’aniyya (Beirut, 1983); N. al-Bitar, Hudud al-Huwiyya al-Qawmiyya (Beirut, 1982); “Interview with Mohammed Arkoun and Bencheikh on ‘Orientalism and Modernity,’” in al-Fikr al-Mu’asir (Summer 1978). 9. Abdelkebir Khatibi gives a compelling mapping of the colonial city in “A Colonial Labyrinth,” Yale French Studies 2:83 (1993): 23. 10. E. San Juan, Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 228. San Juan is scathingly critical of Bhabha’s entire enterprise. 11. Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1994), 333; Benita Parry, “Signs of Our Times: A Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture,” Third Text (Autumn/Winter 1994): 6–7. 12. Bhabha’s gradual recognition of alternative methodological resources to those offered by the European theory that so dominates his early work can be found in essays like “How Newness Enters the World” and “Unpacking My Library . . . Again,” which cite Derek Walcott, W. E. du Bois and C.L.R. James among others. 13. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, 42–43. For an opposite but no less brilliant view of Said and the Far Orient, see Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” History and Theory 34:4 (December 1996): 96–118. 14. For an insightful view of this matter, see Ruth Padel, “Putting Words into Women’s Mouths: The Female Role in Opera,” LRB 23 January 1997: 12–18. 15. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, 35, 155, in particular, where Gilbert shows Ahmad’s double standard toward the West. 16. From “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas,” in ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles 1966–81 (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press, 1981). An idea of Harris’s unusual way of thinking even in the context of Third World literature can be found in an interview by Kerry L. Johnson in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 35:2 (London: Routledge, 1996). See also Wilson Harris and Andrew Bundy, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris (London: Routledge, 1999). 17. Michael Wood, “Lost Paradises,” The New York Review 3 March 1994: 44–47; Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1995): 805–821. 18. For more on the subject of “race” and “aesthetes,” see Alain Gresh, “Inventer Une mémoire Commune,” le Monde Diplomatique (Juillet-Août 2001): 96–97. 19. See Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said,” 805–821; George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953). 20. In the words of Roger Quillot, “comme par réflexe, Camus chercha refuge dans son enfance,” Quillot quotes from Camus’s letter to his teacher Louis Germain, reproduced in full in the appendix to Le Premier homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 327.

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21. The Collected Fiction of Albert Camus, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London. Hamish Hamilton, 1960), 82. Le Premier homme shows Camus portraying the Arabs as nameless servants. 22. See Jean Daniel, “Sartre-Camus: L’itinéraire d’Alger à Jérusalem,” Le Matin (Mai 1980): 30–31. 23. José Lenzini, L’Algérie de Camus (1987; rprt. Aix-en Provence: Édisud, 1988), 122. The disappearance of the Arab residents of Oran makes the city, O’Brien argues, “a ‘never was’ city whereas we should be able to think of it as a real city under an imagined plague.” See his Camus (London: Fontana-Collins, 1970), 47. 24. Albert Camus, The Outsider, trans. Joseph Laredo (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982). Compared with Stuart Gilbert’s translation of the same novel, Laredo’s comes across as more persuasive, less creamy. 25. I borrow the formula “Vuve la Fouance” from Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis (London: Granta, 1997), 197. 26. Irene Berelowitch, “Memoires,” Télérama hors-série Algérie (Mars 1995): 83; Benjamin Stora, “Guerre d’Algérie: les mémoires blessées,” L’Express 23 Décembre 1988: 56. 27. A perspicacious portrait of Camus is given in Robert Goodhand, “The Omphalos and the Phoenix: Symbolism of the Center in Camus’ La pierre qui pousse,” Studies in Short Fiction (Spring 1984): 117–126; “Albert Camus,” Lire 186 (Mars 1991): 123–134. 28. “I have been accused,” Said writes, “by colleagues of intemperate and even unseemly polemicism. To still others—and this concerns me more—it may seem that I am an undeclared Marxist, afraid of losing respectability and concerned by the contradictions entailed by the label ‘Marxist.’” Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 28. 29. Said, “Cairo Recalled,” House and Garden, 32; “Cairo and Alexandria,” Departures (May/June 1990): 1–15; “Between Worlds,” LRB 7 May 1998: 3–7.

Chapter Four: V. S. Naipaul: A Critique of the Postcolonial Sign 1. Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997); What Is a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, ed. Arif Dirlik (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993). 2. “Delivering the Truth: An Interview with V.S. Naipaul,” interview by Aamer Hussein, TLS 2 September 1994: 2; “On Being a Writer,” TLS 16 February 1996: 22. 3. One cannot understand Conrad’s hold on Naipaul without observing the lines of transmission, how an uprooted Anglicized Polish author came to leave his imprint on a Hindu family in the Caribbean. Naipaul recalls: “Conrad’s value to me is that he is someone who sixty or seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize today. I feel this about no other writer of the century.” See “Note on Borrowing from Conrad,” The New York Review of Books 16 December 1982: 38.

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4. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, V.S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 176. For the fullest dissection of Naipaul’s “impartiality,” see this book. 5. In fact, Naipaul talks about himself as if he were observing from afar the creature that bears his name. He says “one” instead of “I”; he refers to himself as “the writer” and sometimes as “the man.” “I do it instinctively,” he adds, “distinguishing between them, between writer and man. See “Delivering the Truth,” 2–3. 6. V. S. Naipaul, “An Inheritance,” Brick (Summer 1994): 11. Trinidad has become more real to the world because of A House for Mr. Biswas. 7. “The Book of Ezikiel” in The Old Testament (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1970), 973. 8. See also Interview with Dr. Dominique Gros, “Le Sein: Image du Paradis,” Le Nouvel Observateur 20–26 April 1995: 31. 9. Naipaul, The Mimic Men, 157. Here, Naipaul joins another novelist— namely, Tahar Ben Jelloun, in the deceptive appearances and illusive visions of women’s breasts. 10. Naipaul has had an obvious weakness for Victorian imperialism. Kipling stands as the writer (some kind of an imperial grandfather) who presented him with the most accurate description of India. “It was all there in Kipling, barring the epilogue of the Indian inheritance. A Journey was not really necessary. No writer was more honest and accurate.” See An Area of Darkness, 191. 11. “The literary novel is delivery, nowadays, a kind of mirror extravaganza itself, with, sometimes, major personal display. The idea of pinning down reality isn’t really there. It’s migrated perhaps to other forms. Perhaps something like the essay will give people reality about our confused, mixed world.” Naipaul “Delivering the Truth,” 3. 12. Quoted in Rob Nixon, London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 45. For such a man, any regulated state of affairs will be preferable to the chaos that results from an attempt to change things for the better. In nothing is this more true than in Naipaul’s disregard for women, as I demonstrated earlier, which is so nearly complete as to reduce what he has to say about humanity to an anatomy of the male psyche. 13. In The Mimic Men, an ambitious West Indian observes that the Caribbean Islands offer a bad start for a man who wants to make his mark in the great world. They are populated by “mimic men” who are part of “the suburbs of the world.” He quotes an old Greek proverb, to the effect that no man can be great unless he comes from a great city. In spite of that old Greek shoulder-chip proverb, it is people, original spirits, who make places real—Athens, Ithaca, or Lesbos, Streatham, Trinidad, or Yamoussoukro. 14. Mobutu’s profit sources, though diversified, were still mainly the territory’s natural resources, most notably in the mineral riches exploited since Leopold’s time: cobalt, copper, gold, diamonds, and more. See Michael Schatzberg, “Mobutu: ou l’incarnation du mal zairois,” African Affairs (October 1983): 569–573.

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15. Naipaul, A Way in the World, 278. His prose, Naipaul announces, can only be read at the rate of twenty or thirty pages a day: “You’ve got to rest after reading twenty good pages. You’ve got to stop and think.” And indeed, his writing repays such attention. See Schiff, “The Ultimate Exile,” 65. 16. I am profoundly indebted to Firdaus Kanga for the formulation of some of the ideas I develop here. See his review of India: A Million Mutinies Now in TLS 5 October 1990: 1059. 17. “V.S. Naipaul, Novelist as Thinker,” Interview by Alfred Kazin, The New York Times Book Review 1 May 1977: 20. 18. Quoted in “Assessing the Impact,” in Online Focus News Hour 2 April 1998: 3. The debate assembled Achebe, wa Thiong’o, Monde Muyangwa, and C. K. Ladzekpo. The panel was moderated by Elizabeth Farnsworth. 19. See Edward Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-colonial World,” Salmagundi (Spring–Summer 1986): 34. 20. Derek Walcot, “The Garden Path,” New Republic 13 April 1987: 27; Fred Halliday, “The Misanthrope,” The Nation 24 October 1981: 415–416; Edward Said, “Expectations of Inferiority,” New Statesman and Society 16 October 1981: 21–22; Chris Searle, “Naipaulicity: A Form of Cultural Imperialism,” Race and Class (Autumn 1984): 45–62; Alan Brien, “A Person of Refinement,” New Statesman and Society 13 March 1987: 26–27. 21. Nixon’s central premise is that Naipaul’s fundamental affiliation is to the London–New York metropolitan axis; what follows this thesis is a relentless, thorough, if only occasionally belabored, critique of Naipaul’s acerbic treatment of his subjects. Of course, it is well known that the critical response to Naipaul’s pronouncements are characterized by a clear cultural cleavage: Anglo-American critics celebrate him as the uncompromising truthteller; Third-World critics condemn him for insensitivity and arrogance that pander to Western prejudices. 22. See Loomba’s eminent essay “Overworlding the ‘Third World,’” Oxford Literary Review (1991), 164–193; Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest; Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) for a full version of the argument. 23. Philip Gourevitch, “Naipaul’s World,” Commentary (August 1994): 30. Gourevitch is most perceptive in claiming that Naipaul writes out of the experience of wandering not as futile but natural, not the mark of a “shipwreck” but simply a part of who one is. For Naipaul, it is as if India itself were but a “temporary accommodation,” its loss not to be lamented. My gratitude goes to Gourevitch for shaping some of my own ideas on Naipaul.

Chapter Five: Fear of the Other, Loathing the Similar 1. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 34–35; Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982), 11; Gérard Génette, Narrative Discourse, Figures III, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 99–110; Jacques Derrida, Of

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Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), 202; Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 99. 2. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1999); Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–98 (Lon
iz
ek, “You May!,” LRB 18 March 1999: 1–6. don: Verso, 1999); Slavoj Z 3. For a more comprehensive view of the Nobel, see Hans Wemer, “The Glittering Prizes: The Big Three,” The Toronto Star 16 December 1989: M15. 4. For more details on the subject, see The Cost of Letters: A Survey of Literary Living Standards, eds. Andrew Holgate and Honor Wilson-Fletcher (London: W. Magazine, 1998), 102–103; Ian Hamilton, “How Much?” LRB 18 June 1998: 7–8. 5. A detailed view of this matter is to be found in Guide to Literary Prizes, 1998, ed. Huw Molseed (London: Book Trust, 1998), 18–19. 6. Edward Said, “Goodbye to Mahfouz,” LRB 8 December 1988: 6. For an interesting discussion of the general question of the Nobel Prize, see Michael Specter, “The Nobel Syndrome,” The New Yorker 5 October 1998: 45–55. 7. Bernard Langlois, “Le Tonneau de Sartre,” Le Matin (Mai 1980), 6. Boris Pasternak is the other winner who rejected the Nobel Prize in 1964. He was pressured by the Soviet government to give it up. 8. Thus the Prix Goncourt, for example, guarantees sales of 250,000 or more as with Marguerite Duras, whose L’Amant (The Lover) in 1984 went through the award to media glory and sales of a million by the year’s end, helped no doubt by its Orientalism, eroticism, and French colonial setting. “For twenty years or so— but particularly after she hit the jackpot with the Goncourt Prize—Marguerite Duras was a literary monster” (14). Olivier Todd discusses Duras’s success and failure in “Mon Charabia,” LRB 4 March 1999: 14–15. 9. For a vivid sense of what effects this thesis has had in scholarly discussion of fame, see Paul Gray, “Paradise Found,” Time 19 January 1998: 60. 10. In the multilayered film narratives of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Hanif Kureishi offers a visual representation of the idea I attempt to explore here. 11. For a comprehensive view of magical realism, see Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, eds. Bernard McGirk and Richard Cardwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 33–45. 12. Reed Massengill, Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Maryanne Vollers, Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder and Trials of Byron de la Beckwith (Boston: Little Brown, 1995). 13. For more details on the subject, see L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago and New York: G. M. Hill, 1990); Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI Publishing, 1992). 14. In the Republic of Gilead, religious extremists control the state and have imposed a totalitarian regime characterized by forced adherence to rigid sex roles.

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Homosexuals are hanged for the crime of Gender Treachery. Women are enslaved and classified, according to their ability to reproduce, as “Handmaids,” “Marthas,” “Econowives,” or even “Unwomen.” All reading is forbidden to them, although women may listen as men read selected passages from the Bible. See Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985). 15. Hilton Als’s essay, The Women (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996); the reportage of Keith Richburg in Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1997) square up to the way in which the black individual is the perceived representative of his race and of “being black.” 16. Gates’s searching into the archive to document African-American history is a case in point. His essays cover a wide range: from figures in black to shades of blackness and ways of looking at a black man. Examples abound: “Net Worth,” The New Yorker 1 June 1998: 48–54; “Beyond the Color Line,” The New Yorker 7 September 1998: 82; “The Chitlin Circuit,” The New Yorker 3 February 1997: 44–56; “Harlem on Our Minds,” 1–13; “An Overview of Sources on the Life and Work of Juan Latino, the ‘Ethiopian Humanist,’” Research In African Literatures (Winter 1998): 14–51. 17. Patricia Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (London: Virago, 1997), 34; Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 111–145 in particular; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997). Much of this is well discussed by Peter Hulme in Colonial Encounters: Europe and Its Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). See also his anthology with Neil L. Whitehead, Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Homi Bhabha, “The White Staff,” Artforum (May 1998): 21–24. 18. Morrison’s way of telling at times reminds us of Wilson Harris’s. 19. For a useful overall view of Césaire’s political and literary influence, see Raphael Confiant, Aimé Césaire, une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1995); Gregson Davis, Aimé Césaire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Chapter Six: On Friction in Fiction: My Aunt Is a Man 1. For more on the subject, see polémique sur l’histoire coloniale le Monde Diplomatique (Jinllet-Août 2001). 2. Salah Stétié, Liban pluriel, Essai sur une culture conviviale (Beyrouth: Naufal, 1994); Eric Naulleau, “Salah Stétié, poète des deux rives,” Le Monde Diplomatique (Septembre 1996): 12. 3. Le Larousse defines the word “Charabia” as follows: “n. m. (de l’esp. algarabia, langue arabe). Fam. Langage à peu près ou totalement incompréhensible; style embrouillé (syn. fam. baragouin, jargon).” 4. See “Les Faux-Semblants du Caillou,” L’Express 5 Novembre 1998: 40–43.

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5. Thomas Spear, “Politics and Literature: An Interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun,” trans. Cecile Litherland Yale French Studies 83 (1993): 35–37; Mustapha Marrouchi, “Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries: Tahar Ben Jelloun,” trans. Patricia Geesey Research in African Literatures (Winter 1990): 71–85. 6. Abdelkebir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1983); Abdallah Mdarhri-Aloui, “Abdelkebir Khatibi: Writing a Dynamic Identity,” trans. Patricia Geesey Research in African Literatures (Summer 1992): 167–176; James McGuire, “Forked Tongues, Marginal Bodies: Writing as Translation in Khatibi,” Research in African Literatures (Spring 1992): 107–110. 7. Roger Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologies chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue (Paris: J. Vrin, 1956), 12–16. There is a clear, somewhat schematic account of Ibn Ginni, Ibn Mada, and others in Anis Fraiha, Nathariyat fil Lugha (Beirut: Al-Laktaba la Jam’iya, 1973). 8. I am profoundly indebted to Samia Mehrez for the formulation of some of the ideas I develop here. For more on the subject, see her “The Subversive Poetics of Radical Bilingualism: Postcolonial Francophone North Africa,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance. Ed. Dominick LaCapra. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991): 255–260. 9. Abdelkebir Khatibi, La Mémoire tatouée (Paris: Denoël, 1971), 54, 64, 118; Eric Sellin, “Obsession with the White Page, the Inability to Communicate, and Surface Aesthetics in the Development of Contemporary Maghrebian Fiction: Khatibi, Fares, and Meddeb,” International Journal of Middle East Studies (May 1988): 165–173. 10. In the Maghreb, the pronoun, “hia” refers to the wife and “houa” to the husband. 11. In L’Enfant de sable, the blind Troubadour identifies two coins: one is called Bâtène, the other Zahir, (175–176). There is a clear, somewhat schematic account of the problematic as to Bâtin/Zahir in Anis Fraitha, Nathariyat fil Lugha (Beirut: AlMaktaba al Jam’iya, 1973). The polemical point between the Zahirite and the Bâtinite schools is to be found in Ar-rad’ alal’ nuhat, ed. Shawki Daif (Cairo, 1974). The original text dates from 1180. 12. In La Nuit brisée (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1988), 23, Fethi Benslama supplies a useful definition for the concept of wijdan. See also “Virginity and Patriarch,” in Women and Islam, ed. Azizah al-Hibri (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982), 191. 13. Halqa simply means a “round table.” The presence of the halqa (made of a group of people, some standing others sitting) is vital to the narration of events; it is the place within which the story is reflected. Thus, in La Nuit sacrée the Man from the South succeeds in forming his own halqa: “And then there were those who had nothing to sell. They sat down on the ground, crossed their legs and waited” (13). 14. Linda Hutcheon defines metafiction in the following terms: “When the term postmodern is used these days to refer to fiction, it generally signifies metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way, selfreferential and auto-representational.” See her “Postmodern Paratextuality and History,” Texte 5/6 (1986–87): 310.

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15. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 53–73. Foucault argues for a large-scale shift in the modern period away from legal definitions of sexual roles to endlessly elaborated discursive revelations of the open secret of sexuality. 16. The story of Ahmed/Zahra is recounted by the multiple voices of a series of storytellers who often refer to his/her alleged diaries. 17. La Nuit de l’Erreur aside, L’Enfant de sable/La Nuit sacrée is perhaps the most complex of all Ben Jelloun’s novels, because of the many levels on which the story is told and because of its conspicuous oral and traditional heritage. 18. The doubleness of meaning in Zina brings to mind a popular saying in Arabic: “illi ikdha Zin ikdha att’hin” (he who marries beauty marries cuckoldry). 19. An excellent trajectory of the life of Buñuel is to be found in Luis Buñuel, An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 20. Ben Jelloun’s debt to Luis Buñuel is immense. In the interview with Zakia Daoud Ben Jelloun pays him handsome tribute. See Daoud. “Le Goncourt par Tahar,” Lamalif 194 (1987): 59–62; an excellent account of the work and influence that Buñuel had on an entire generation of artists is to be found in Gwyne Edwards, The Discrete Art of Luis Buñuel (London: Marian Boyars, 1982). 21. The carnivalesque backdrop of Ben Jelloun’s celebrated fictions is here replaced by the chaotic setting of contemporary urban Morocco, and the central figure, in contrast to the visionary Zahra, is an aging, embittered merchant of jellabas. 22. The phrase “My Aunt Is a Man” is of Egyptian origin. See Zakya Daoud, “Le Goncourt par Tahar,” Lamalif 194 (1987): 59–62. 23. See John E. Beebe’s introduction to Carl Jung, Aspects of the Masculine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), v. 24. Take the example of Hadj Brahim, a great fqih, a saint capable of ridding anyone of the worst witchcraft. See La Nuit de l’Erreur, 60–61. 25. In La Nuit de l’Erreur, Ben Jelloun refers to an ageless anonymous woman “la femme de Moulay” who looks like Aïsha Kandisha. Because she is possessed by spirits (djinns) her folks take her to see Moulay Abdesalaam who under the pretense of curing her keeps her out of sight and eventually marries her. 26. For more details on Aïsha Kandisha and her legend, see Ben Jelloun, La Nuit de l’Erreur (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 34–37. 27. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 34. Many of Naipaul’s novels expound the view that the Third World has benefited from the civilizing mission provided by historical colonialism. His rhetoric, along with the neocolonial Pascal Bruckner’s Tears of the White Man and the recent journalism of Fouad Ajami, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Elspeth Huxley reinforce that view. Naipaul is a new Conrad purveyor of the old comforting myths of race; Ajami and others stand for the griot storytelling caste for white people in the West. 28. I owe this insight to Michael Gora.

Selected Bibliography

Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: New Left Books, 1974. Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992. Al-Azm, Sadek J. “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse.” In Khamsin. London: Ithaca Press, 1981: 23–40. al-Saghir. al-Mustashriqun wa-I-Dirasat al-Qur’aniyya. Beirut, 1983. Al-Qur’an. Translated Ahmed Ali. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London & New York: Verso, 1998. Another e.e. cummings: e.e. cummings with John Rocco. Selected by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Liverlight, 1999. Appiah, Anthony, and Amy Gutman. Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Argand, Catherine. “Morrison, la rage d’écrire.” Lire (Décembre 1993): 37–40. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Edited by Philip Lopate. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Auebarch, Eric. Mimesis: The Representations of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard Trask. 1953. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Ayer, A. J. Logical Positivism. New York: Free Press, 1959. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse Typology in Prose.” In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Eds. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.

321

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Baldwin, James. Collected Essays and Early Novels & Stories. New York: Dial Press, 1998. Barthes, Roland. Le Degré zéro de l’écriture. 1953. Reprint, Paris: Seuil, 1964. ———. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970. ———. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975. ———. Sade, Fournier, Loyola. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. ———. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cope, 1977. ———. Image, Music, Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977. ———. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ———. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. ———. New Critical Essays. Translated by Ricahrd Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess, Selected Writings 1927–39. Translated by Allan Stoekl et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1985. Beckett, Samuel. Malone Dies. New York: Knopf, 1997. Benda, Julian. The Treason of the Intellectuals. Translated by Richard Aldington. New York: Norton, 1969. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. La Réclusion solitaire. Paris: Seuil, 1976. ———. La Plus haute des solitudes. Paris: Seuil, 1977. ———. Moha le fou, Moha le sage. Paris: Seuil, 1980. ———. La Prière de l’absent. Paris: Seuil, 1982. ———. Hospitalité française. Paris: Seuil, 1984. ———. L’Enfant de sable. Paris: Seuil, 1985. The Sand Child. Trans. Alan Sheridan. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989. ———. La Nuit sacrée. Paris: Seuil, 1987. The Sacred Night. Trans. Alan Sheridan. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989. ———. Jour de silence à Tanger. Paris: Seuil, 1990. ———. La Nuit de l’Erreur. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Bennington, Geoffrey\Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Bernard, François and Pierre Barbes. La Soft-idéologie. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Berque, Jacques. “Au-delà de l’Orientalisme.” Qantara 13 (Octobre-NovembreDécembre 1994): 27–28. Bhabha, Homi. “The White Stuff.” Artforum (May 1998): 21–24. ———. The Location of Culture. London, 1994.

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Blake, William. Complete Writings. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London: Longman, 1969. Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre à venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Boujedra, Rachid. “Le Goncourt et Tahar.” Le Monde 14 Mars 1988: 5. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. ———. Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. London & New York: Routledge, 1991. Brathwaite, E. K. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon, 1984. Brien, Alan. “A Person of Refinement.” New Statesman and Society 13 March 1987: 26–27. Camus, Albert. Actuelles I. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. ———. Actuelles III. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. ———. The Collected Fiction of Albert Camus. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960. ———. Carnets III. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. ———. Le Premier homme. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Césaire, Aimé. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946–82. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Cheney, Lynne. Humanities in America: A Report to the President, the Congress, and the American People. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1988. Chinweizu. The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite. New York: Random, 1975. Chipasula, Frank. Nightwatcher, Nightsong. London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986. Cixous, Hélène. Castration and Decapitation.” Translated by Annette Kuhn. Signs 7.1 (1981): 51–55. ———. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jensen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. “My Algeriance: In Other Words, To Depart Not To Arrive from Algeria.” Translated by Eric Prenowitz. TriQuarterly (Fall 1997): 241–268. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. Conteh-Morgan, John. “Albert Camus, Aimé Césaire and the Tragedy of Revolution.” African Literature Today 14 (1984): 49–59.

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Index

Abdel–Jouad, 35 Abdel–Kader, 156 Abraham, 97 Académie française, 176 A’Chabbi, 156 Achebe, 10, 27, 164–165, 209, 210, 280 n. 306 Adil, 277 Adorno, 132 Minima Moralia, 132 Africa, 149, 225 African, 149 African voice, 242 African American, 12, 224, 230 African American female writers, 235 African–American idiom, 242 Ahmad, 133, 142, 148–150, 204 In Theory, 148, 150 Alatas, 140 Al–Azm, 142, 143 Al-Azmeh, 142 Al Bitar, 143 Al-Kahina, 156, 284 Al Qasim, 135 Algeria, 43, 85, 154, 155, 173, 174 Algerian independence, 168 Algerian population, 170

Algerian resistance, 170 Algerian war, 173 Algeriance, 100 Fille de France, 174 Alloula, 91, 165, 264 Althusser, 94 Amis, 24 Amrouch, 93, 177 Anderson, 220 n. 303 Anglo-American slavery, 4, 42 Anglophone literature, 264 Antara (Jahilia poet), 289 Antillean, 265 Antilles, 263 Antonius, 140 Apartheid, 251 Appiah, 252 Aquinas, 125 Arab, 38, 159 Arab bourgeoisie, 155 Arab countries, 156 Arab predicament, 138 Arab world, 263, 294, 299 Arab writers, 288 Arabic, 266 Arabic culture, 149 Arabic language and literature, 154 Arabs, 160

335

336

INDEX

Arabian Nights, 289 Arac, 107 Archer-Shaw, 15 Arendt, 129 Argand, 241 Arkoun, 142 Artaud, 286 Attali, 94 Attar, 53 Atticism, 75 Auguste, (St.), 100 Austen, 163, 165–168, 178 Mansfield Park, 163, 165, 167, 171 Persuasion, 164 Australia, 164 Baker, Josephine, 15 Baker, Jr., 256 Bakhtin, 1, 7, 10 Baldwin, 19, 25, 29, 104, 257, 260 Notes, 259 Baraka, 19 Barber, 291, Barthes, 25, 53, 92, 131, 168, 222, 286 Auctor, 53 Bricolage, 22, 300 Bricoleur, 22, 47, 181 Compilator, 53 Pleasure of the Text, 21 Scriptor, 53 Bataille, 33, 96, 118, 219 Bazin, 271 Beckett, 14, 41, 274, 281, 288 n. 304 Beebe, 289 Bell, 164 Benda, 118, 181 Benjamen, 128 Ben Jelloun, 4, 6, 8, 9, 30, 32, 43, 265, 269, 270, 272, 274–278, 280, 286–288, 290, 291, 294, 296–299 Blessure, 271 Cross-dressing, 276 Enfant de sable, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277, 281, 291 Gender metamorphosis, 291

Harrouda, 270, 271, 275 Hermaphroditism, 291 Hijab, 288 Hospitalité française, 272 Jinnis, 283 Jour de silence, 286, 287, 296 Loneliness: sexual, physical, mental, 293 Marabouts, 283, 292 Moha, 274, 275, 276 My aunt is a man, 8 Nuit de l’erreur, 270, 271, 275, 283, 287, 299 Nuit sacrée, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277, 281, 282, 287 Orality-writing, 42, 272 Plus haute, 293 Prière, 275 Qawal, 283 Racisme expliqué, 272 Réclusion, 286, 293, 294 Signe, 271 Split narrative, 8 Yeux, 293 Benrabeh, 154 Berber, 31, 36, 44 Berber bandit chief, 289 Berhardt, 93 Berque, 94, 137, 138 Beurs writers, 31 Bhabha, 4, 25, 34, 37, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 207, 214 n. 303 Agency Ambivalence, 146, 147 Fantasy/denial, 145 Hybridity, 145, 147 Latent/Manifest, 143, 148 Location of Culture, 34, 145 Manifest, 143, 148 Mimicry, 146, 147 Postcolonial theory, 148 Psychoanalysis, 94 Theory, 69, 97 Blackmur, 114, 214 Blaise, 213 Blanchot, 112, 219

INDEX

Bloom, 13, 295 Anxiety of influence, 295 Blum, 176 Bogart, 191 Bokassa, 105 Borges, 53, 220, 224, 265 Bouillet, 140, 141 Boujedra, 43, 264, 290 Alienation, 290 Arab women, 289–290 Exoticism, 290 Islamic apologia, 289–290 Self-Orientalizing text, 289–290 Bombay, 201 Bourdieu, 23, 60, 88, 141 n. 306 Boyd, 215 Braithwaite, 241 Breast, 289 Breast envy, 289–290 Cultural History of the Breast, 291 Burroughs, 83 Bush, 159 Byron, 137 Cabezon, 102 Cabral, 152, 153, 152 Camus, 87, 94, 156, 168–177 Arab Algeria, 171 Carnets, 177 Cold War intellectual, 173 Colon, 171, 177 Colonial France, 177 Ecriture blanche, 168 Etranger, 169, 171, 172, 175 Exil et le royaume, 171 French colonialism, 171 Homme révolté, 173 Judicial system, 171 Left Bank neutralism, 173 Malentendu, 175 Mort heureuse, 175 Mythe, 172 Peste, 171 Petits blancs, 177 Pieds-noirs, 168, 171, 173 Premier homme, 170

337

Caribbean literature, 139, 149 Carlyle, 123 Cattleya, 78 Césaire, 28, 126, 264 Cahiers d’un retour, 260 Négritude, 17, 18 Surrealism, 176 Union des Travailleurs Nègres, 19 Chamoiseau, 263 Chandhuri, 200 Charef, 264 Chilha, 264 Chocolate Dandies, 15 Chraïbi, 289 Civilisation, ma mère, 289 Cioran, 288 Cixous, 94, 118, 119, 120, 135, 230, 263 Clarke, 140 Clifford, 137 Collège de France, 227 Columbus, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105 Connolly, 162, 171 Conrad, 27, 40, 100, 124, 150, 164, 168, 177–179, 203, 209, 215, 216 Heart of Darkness, 9, 150 Kurtz, 216 Cordwell, 289 Cosby, 223 Cotton Club, 15 Crane, 257 Créole, 264 Créolités bites, 265 Critical Theory, 82 Cudjoe, 185, 188, 211–213, 215 Cultural amphibian, 2 Culture wars, 157 Cummings, 15 Daoud, 300 Darwish, 135 David, 87, 88 De Assis, 225 De Beauvoir, 79, 142, 147, 271 Debray, 22 Decoin, 271 Defert, 52, 54

338

INDEX

De Foucauld, 156 De Heusch, 277 Delacroix, 94 Deleuze, 52, 54, 80–83, 152, 157 n. 309 Michel Foucault, 83 Delie, 78 Derrida, 4, 5, 9, 34, 55, 68–70, 85, 102, 105–124, 126–132, 152, 157, 174, 179, 219, 287, 293, 294 n. 304, n. 310 Cosmopolites de tous les pays, 183 Deconstruction, 34 De la grammatologie, 137 DerridAlgeriance, 185 DifférAnce, 12 n. 304 Mise-en-abïme, 157 Monolinguisme de l’autre, 36 Presence/absence, 8, 293 Signature, 35 Supplement, 270, 271, 275, 293–294 Trace, 35 Desani, 5 De Saussure, 5 Descartes, 54, 67, 68 Diaspora, 163 Diefendorf, 259 Dirlik, 146, 185–186 Dissanayake, 191 Djaout, 91, 264 Djebar, 264, 284 Doldhill, 80 Dreyfus/Rabonow, 64, 82, 83 Beyond, 82 D’Souza, 27 Du Bois, 15, 16, 261 n. 305 Dumézil, 52 Eagleton, 2, 60, 125 n. 312 Eco, 219, 220 Egypt, 201, 225 Hieroglyphics, 219 Eliot, George, 189 Eliot, T.S., 25, 108, 231 Ellison, 19, 29 Emancipation/Reconstruction, 247 Emerson, 14 Empire, 178

Engels, 2, 56 England, 201 English tongue, 30 Angreizi, 30 Ebonic-bubonic, 30 Hinglish, 30 Epicure, 74 Epicurus, 222 Épistémè, 58 Eribon, 52, 64, 76, 86, 96 Erickson, 281, 295 Ethnicity, 230 Eurocentric discourse, 281 European imperialism, 4 Ewald, 54 Ezekiel, 197 Fanon, 12, 145, 152, 153, 158, 159, 178, 214, 260, 263, 293 Black Skin, 145 Damnés, 145, 259 Domination, 70, 71, 76 Fantasy, 290 male fantasy/female power, 291 Farès, 264 Farouk, 180 Faulkner, 272 Fellini, 274 Ferhat Abbas, 172 Fernandez, 272 Fernando, 213 Ferry, 156 Flaubert, 140, 141, 144 F.L.N.K.S., 265 Forster, 168 Foucault, xi, 6, 8, 32–34, 51–60, 62–76, 78–84, 136, 147, 152, 153, 155–159, 179, 181, 220, 269 n. 308, n. 309 Age of psychiatry, 66 Archaeology, 83 Archéologie du savoir, 56, 61 Archive, 157 Birth of the Clinic, 59 Care for the Self, 74, 75 Criminal/good boy, 63 Culture de soi, 73

INDEX

Discourse, 157 Dits et écrits, 33, 51, 52, 84 Field, 157 Genealogy, 63, 83 Gouvernement, 33 Great Confinement, 66 Greek aphrodisia, 63 Histoire de la folie, 66, 70, 71 Homme de désir, 71 Inclusion/exclusion, 65 Insane/sane, 65 Knowledge, Language, Counter-Memory, 61 Madness, 66 Madness and Civilization, 59 Mentalité, 176 Mots et les choses, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60 Order of Things, 67 Phaedrus, 68 Pharmakon, 68, 69 Power/Knowledge/Pleasure, 29, 58, 61 Presence/absence, 65 Reign of terror, 147 Scientia sexualis, 276 Ship of Fools, 66 Sick/healthy, 65 Strong/weak, 65 Subjectivité et vérité, 73 Subjectivity, 63 Travaux, 33 Truth/falsehood, 65 Usage des plaisirs, 64, 70, 72, 78 Voluntary/Involuntary, 65 Western man, 156 Fourier, 222 France, 29 Championat du monde d’orthographe, 43 Charabia, 30 Dom-Tom, 154 Droit civilisateur, 3 Education in French, 156 Exposition coloniale, 176 French Algeria, 36, 172 French literature/language, 7

339

Grandeur de la France, 176 Mission civilisatrice, 55, 295 Nazi occupation of France, 170 Petit Nègre, 30 Petits colons, 176 Second Republic, 174 Francophone Francophone literature, 264 Francophone writer, 265 Francophonie, 263 Frege, 92 Frenz, 173 Freud, 79, 108, 125, 127, 151, 152, 158, 256, 289 Breast, 197, 198 fort/da, 257 Masturbation, 294 Phallic creativity, 289–290 Psychoanalysis, 289–290 Psychosexual, 292 Vagina Dentata, 292 Frye, 179 Fukuyuma, 221 Gaillard, 298 Galileo, 59 Gasché, 99 Gates, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 235 n. 303 Signifyin(g), 28, 234 The Signifying Monkey, 4 Thirteen Ways, 251 Gellner, 139, 140 Genet, 286 Genette, 219 Genovese, 103–104 German Communist Party, 220 Giacometti, 274 Gide, 94, 156, 167, 177, 264, 297 Glissant, 263 Le Discours, 232 Goethe, 1 Goncourt, 271, 272 Gora, 39, 205, 207, 213–214, 218 n. 303 Gordimer, 30, 168 Gordon, 59 Graas, 286

340

INDEX

Graff, 107 Gramsci, 31, 103–104, 158, 179, 181 Hegemony, 139, 158 Grand récit/petit récit, 2, 4 Gray, 236 Greek homosexuality, 80 Greenblatt, 12 n. 307 Greene, 224 Greer, 135, 295 Crone culture, 295 Phallic aggression, 295 Guha, 140 Gulf War, 159, 161 Baghdad, 160 Gutmann, 252 Habermas, 55, 58 Hermeneutics, 82 Hacking, 157 Haddad, 154 Halperin, 79 Handleman, 96 Hanson, 57 Hardy, 118 Harlem Renaissance, 15, 16, 18, 19 Harris, 150, 151 Harrison, 191 Havel, 114, 220 Hayford, 135 Heaney, 164, 224 Hegel, 61, 63 Heidegger, 33, 55, 56, 57, 59, 71, 108, 154 Hellinistic period, 75 Heterosexuality, 73 Hitchens, 36 Hobsbawm, 220 Hollow Men, 203 Big Men, 204 Bush Men, 205 Jungle, 206 Mobutu, 204, 209 Homer, 90 Hooks, 256 Horace, 78 Hors-livre, 219 Howe, 207

Hoy, 71, 72, 157 Hughes, 16, 19 Hussein, Amer, 188 Hussein, Sadam, 159, 160 Huxley, 90 Hybridity, 1, 225 Ibn Hazm, 266, 267 Ibn Khaldûn, 102 Al-Mukaddi’mah, 156 Ibsen, 223 IMF, WTO, 3 Imperial colonial order, 186 Ingrès, 94 Isabella la Catolica, 101 Ishiguro, 24 Islam, 296 Fundamentalism, 297 Islamic discourse, 267 Muftis, 297 Muslims, 160 Israel Israeli army, 149 Iyer, 22 Jacoby, 139 James, C.L.R., vi, 13, 108, 140, 141, 152, 153, 178, 216, 251 Cultural revolution, 152, 153 Marxism, 68, 70, 72, 179 James, Henry, 177 Jameson, 60, 220 n. 303 JanMohamed, 147 Jauss, 219 Jazz, 42 Jazz Age, 15 Jeanson, 173 Johnson, 15, 16 Jonah, 106 Jonson, 92, 186 Joyce, 108, 117, 186, 187, 217, 223, 272, 299, 300 Irishness, 187 Portrait, 187, 217 Ulysses, 298 Jung, 300

INDEX

Kafka, 121, 201 Kandisha, 289, 292, 299 Kanga, 207 Kant, 63, 82, 108 Kernan, 22 Khan, 223 Khassoggi, 134 Khatibi, 44, 116, 124, 137, 154, 264, 265–269, 273, 285, 287 Amour bilingue, 266, 267, 268 Bi-langue, 273 Deconstruction/Decolonization, 285 Mémoire tatouée, 154, 269 Ombres Japonaises, 267 Orality, 44, 265, 266 Orality-writing, 273 Pluri-langue, 43, 44, 265, 266, 268, 269, 286 Plurilinguism, 268 The Language of a Triumphalist Postmodernism, 287 Kincaid, 31, 219 King Abdullah, 160 King Hussein of Jordan, 134 King, Martin Luther, 194 Kipling, 53, 94, 167 Kim, 167 Kircher, 219 Koestler, 173 Koran, 266, 297, 289 Kossovo War Operation, 3 Kristeva, 170 Kuhn, 57, 58 n. 308 Kundera, 182, 234, 264, 288, 300 Lacan, 26, 52, 125, 126 Lam, 186 Lamming, 243 Lane, 144 Laroui, vi Lenin, 56 Leopold II, 204 Lévi-Strauss, 96 Lévy, 94 Lewis, 136, 137 Literary prizes, 222

341

Locke, 16–18 Loomba, 154 Loti, 177 Luke, 76 Lyotard Postmodernisme expliqué, 231 Maalouf, 264 MacKenzie, 139 Maghreb, 272, 273, 277, 281, 288, 294, 295 Algeria, 263 Independence, 299 Maghrebian authenticity, 290 Maghrebian culture, 278 Maghrebian identity, 288 Maghrebian life, 281 Maghrebian literuature, 287 Maghrebian male, 273 Maghrebian society, 270, 271, 275, 285 Maghrebian women, 283, 294 Moroccan campaign, 170 Morocco, 263 Tunisia, 156, 263 Mahfouz, 105 Mailer, 223, 224, 225 Maillet, 271 Malek, 142 Mallarmé, 108 Malraux, 52, 271 Maman Fouance, 265 Mann, 76 Aschenbach, 76, 77 Death in Venice, 76 Tadzio, 76, 77 Marc-Aurèle, 74 Marnham, 215 Márquez, 234, 265, 278, 286, 244 Autumn of the Patriarch, 278 Magic realism, 286, 298, 234 One Hundred, 244 Marx, 2, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 108 n. 308 Marxism, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62 Marxist, 2, 179, 220 Marxist historian, 60 Marxist interpretation, 32

342 Mastnak, 3 Matzneff, 77, 78 Maya, 201 McCarthy, 175 McDonald, 230 McKay, 17, 19 McLuhan, 228 Meddeb, 45 Mehrez, 267 Memmi, 12, 263 Mendés-France, 172 Mentalité, 80 Mernissi,136, 151, 264 Messadi, 47 Métropole, 31, 155, 174, 186 Mezgueldi, 284 Middle East, 153, 179 Miller, 56 Minority, 25 Arabs in France, 186 Hispanics in the U.S., 186 Indians in Britain, 186 Turks in Germany, 186 Mitanda, 202, 203 Mitchell, 162, 225 Mitchell-Kernan, 6 Mobutu, 190, 204, 209 Mokedmi, 284 Moore, 248 Moore-Gilbert, 37, 92, 139, 140, 148, 150, 161, 165 n. 313 Morrison, vi, 4, 8, 9, 30, 41, 165, 223, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235 Beloved, 227, 228, 233, 241, 245, 254, 255, 257, 258, 260 Birth of a Nation’hood, 236, 237 Bluest Eye, 234, 236, 244 Jazz, 234, 241, 243, 245 Negro American history, 15 Paradise, 44, 229, 232, 244, 245, 247, 248, 255 Playing in the Dark, 240 Race-ing Justice, 238 Rememory, 8, 232, 254 Song of Solomon, 245 Sula, 245

INDEX

Tar Baby, 245, 258 Mother Periphery, 5, 219 Mubarek, 160 Mudimbe, 278 Mukherjee, 135 Murray, 19, 29, 224, 257 Mustafa, 212 NAACP, 15 Naboko, 300 Naipaul, Shiva, 215 Naipaul, V.S., 9, 10, 13, 38, 40, 94, 152, 168, 178, 185–196, 198–200, 202–218, 295, 301 Area, 195, 206, 207 Bend in the River, 39, 190, 192, 196, 204, 208, 209 Black power, 190 Colonial Trinidad, 39, 190 Crocodiles, 209 East-Indian, 190 Enigma, 191, 195, 198 Ethnic subject, 188 Finding, 191, 199 Guerillas, 190 Hinduism, 192 House, 192, 193, 205 In a Free, 192, 209 Indentured labourer, 39 India: A Million, 205 India: A Wounded, 205, 207 Loss, 192 Miguel, 193, 194, 195 Mimic Men, 39, 198 Mimicry, 213 Parasitism, 213 Primitive, 213 Stone, 195 Turn, 193, 194 Way, 191, 200–203 Nairn, 134, 135, 140 Napoleonic wars, 164 Nasser, 171, 180 National Book Award, 235 National Book Critics Circle Award, 235 Necolonialism, 152, 153

INDEX

Negro, 242 Negro Digest, 17 Negro wail, 242 Nerval, 149 “New” Literature, 229 New Negro, 15, 16 The New Negro, 16 n. 305 Ngu ¯ gi~, 105, 165 Nietzsche, 33, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 63, 80, 108, 127, 132, 152, 158, 178, 268 n. 308 Nixon, 212, 213, 214 Nkosi, 15, 16, 18 n. 305 Nkrumah, 19 Nobel Prize, 41, 174, 223, 226, 227, 235, 241 Cultural politics of the Nobel, 41 Nobel Address, 173 Nobel Laureate, 228 Nobel Prize for literature, 40, 224 Nomad, 157 Norris, 92, 107 North American writers, 224 North African, 287 Nouvelle Calédonie, 263 Nova, 274 O’Brien, 168, 171, 172 Olin Foundation, 27 Oprah Book Club, 229 Orient, 138, 156 Orientals, 149 Other, 11 Palestine, 38, 135, 149 Palestinian people, 153 Palestinians, 149 Paratextual, 219 Parody, 11 Patel, Gieve, 190 Pathak, 142, 150, 151 Paulin, 164 Paz, 77, 114 PEN/Faulkner Award, 235 Plato, 68, 69, 74, 75, 96, 108 Plutarch, 75

343

Pope, 137 Porter, 33, 136 Postcolonial discourse, 185 Poster, 33 n. 303 Postmodernism, 2, 19, 220 Powell, 15 Prashak, 189 Proust, 76, 77, 78, 92, 131, 223 La recherche, 76 Odette, 77, 78 Swann, 76, 77, 78 Prusiner, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 235 Quixote, 76, 68 Rabinow, 157 Raleigh, 202, 203 Rapaport, 112, 113 Reed, 6, 9 Flight to Canada, 9 Renan, 144 Ricardou, 274 Rich, 255 Robbe-Grillet, 285 Robbins, 97, 113 n. 304, n. 309 Robles, 94 Rodinson, 138 Rodriguez, 242 African-Indian, 242 Arapaho, 248 Choctaw, 248 Cherokee, 242 Color Brown, 242 Cree, 248 Indian, 242 Sioux, 242 White/Black duality of race, 242 Rollin, 288, 299 Rosfelder, 94 Rorty, 161 Roy, 93 Rushdie, vi, 5, 6, 14, 117, 165, 167, 207, 210, 213, 225, 227, 228, 230, 265, 286, 252

344

INDEX

Rushdie (continued), Chamcha-English, 5 Ground, 1, 3 Midnight’s Children, 227 Rycroft, 197 Sadat, 160 Said, 4, 6, 9, 17, 22, 25, 31–33, 38, 54, 55, 70, 81, 94, 107, 108, 115, 116, 124, 128, 133–145, 148–153, 155–172, 174, 176–182, 188, 189, 207, 208, 209, 211, 213, 215, 254, 263, 265, 295 n. 303, n. 304 After the Last Sky, 135 Beginnings, 35, 38, 155 Center/Periphery, 142 Contrapuntal method, 32, 136, 255 Contrapuntal reading, 168 Culture and Imperialism, 139, 141, 163, 165, 164, 167, 171, 177, 178, 179 Exile and estrangement, 136 Field work, 134 Ghezira Club, 134 Maronite community, 264 Musical Elaborations, 181 Orientalism, 33, 134, 142, 144, 148, 149, 150, 152, 156 Orientalist text, 156 Palestine, 135, 149 Pen and the Sword (The), 133 Representations of the Intellectual, 38, 162 Said phenomenon, 136 Traveling Theory, 167 Salih, 165, 301 Season of Migration in the South, 178, 301 Salusinszky, 179 San Juan Jr., 146 Sarrante, 285 Sartre, 41, 55, 57, 63, 105, 111, 115, 158, 171, 172, 173, 221–222, 226 Conscience éveillée, 158 Engagé, 181 Engagement à la Sartre, 157 Savile, 173

Scavenger, 211 Schembré, 116 Schiff, 193, 196, 199, 200, 211 Scholes, 107 Schopenhauer, 125 Segalen, 149 Sénèque, 74 Senghor, 263 Shakespeare, 92, 197 Sharif, 134 Sheridan, 59, 62 Sign, 23 Postcolonial, 185 Signifying, vi, 209 Signifying intention, 266 Signifying with a vengeance, iii, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 29–31, 42 Socrates, 74 Solzhenitsyn, 212 Sosnoski, 38 n. 303 Souffles, 269 South American writers, 224 Soyinka, 105, 165, 225 Spivak, 22, 134, 151, 189 Critique, vi, 34 Subaltern, 20, 37, 160 Subaltern subject-position, 42 Subordinate, 160 Sprinkler, 165 Stern, 94 Stora, 128 Structuralism, 82 Subaltern writing, 243 Suleri, 151, 167, 200, 214, 215 Rhetoric, 151 Theroux, 199, 215 Third World, 152, 153, 155, 224, 295 Domination of the Third World, 296 Tiegerman, 134, 180 Todd, 173, 176 Todorov, 231 Toer, 47, 226 Tolstoy, 223, 279, 299 Anna Karenina, 299 War and Peace, 279

INDEX

Trinidad, 185 Tristan, 272 Tunisia, 47 Twain, 164 United Nations, 162 United States, CIA, 173, 238 Pax Americana, 162 Political and cultural expansionism, 265 U.S. Literature, 224 U.S. Realpolitik, 161 U.S. imperialism Afghan camps, 238 Ben Laden, 238 Bill/Monica/Ken Endgame, 238 Clinton, 238 Gulf War, 238 Vansian, 100 Vechten, 15 Vico, 179 Viswanathan, 154 Masks of Conquest, 154 Walcott, 102, 103, 118, 121, 187, 188, 211, 213, 224, 235, 261 Walrond, 14, 17, 18 Waltzer, 168 Warhol, 220 Waugh, 215 West, Cornel, 47, 256 Out There, vi

345

West, vi, 111, 231 Imperialism, 158 Western discourse, 149 Western domination, 161 Western market, 225 Western reason vs. Eastern barbarism, 161 Western scholarship, 141 West Indies, 164 Wickramagamage, 191 Wiesel, 109 Wilkins, 220, 252 Williams, 32, 178, 179, 181 Structure of feeling, 300 Williams, Patricia, 115, 237, 252, 256 Wilson, August, 29, 235 Wittgenstein, 59 Wood, 18 n. 303 Wright, 19, 236 Native Son, 236 The Outsider, 238 Writing back with a vengeance, 6, 258 Xenophobia, 265 Yacine, 177, 263, 273 Yeats, 14, 108, 164 Young, 137 Zaire, 209 Zionism, Z
iz
ek, 125, 126, 127, 128 Zola, 299 Germinal, 298