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