The Columbia History of the British Novel

professional mimic who can do a thousand English voices precisely because no one of them is authentically his own.

Both writers attended English universities, have settled and married in Britain, and have found their material in the experience of migrants and exiles. Both deal with characters whose lives, in Rushdie's words, have been 'handcuffed to history,' and thereby 'transformed into grotesquery.' Both are masters of a black and astringent comedy that grows from the confrontation of one culture with another: the way -652- Africa, India, and the West collide but do not cohere in A Bend in the River, or the meeting of the totalizing system of Islam with the pluralism of postcolonial society in The Satanic Verses. And both are enormously controversial, though Naipaul's attackers, who see his critique of the third world as a form of blaming the victim, have at least read him; most of the Muslims who condemn Rushdie for what they call the blasphemy of The Satanic Verses have not. They see the same phenomena-and yet present radically different visions of the possibilities for the self in a postcolonial world.

Novelists like the Nigerian Achebe or the Indian R. K. Narayan draw heavily on indigenous narrative traditions, oral storytelling in particular. Naipaul, in contrast, has always insisted on the impossibility of any tradition fully surviving the disruptions of imperialism. At their initiation, Brahmin boys are told to go to Benares and study; they take a few ritual steps on the way, and are then called back. But Ganesh Ramsumair in Naipaul's first novel, The Mystic Masseur (1957), keeps on walking. 'Stop behaving stupid,' his relatives tell him. 'You think you really going to Benares? That is in India… and this is Trinidad.' Naipaul plays the scene for laughter, but the point remains. His characters have the values of one world but must live in another, in a world of conflicting and interpenetrating cultures, and they can never quite get over it. For the disruptions of empire have created a sense of violation, of estrangement from one's origins, and a consequent longing for an idealized home that has made tragedy inevitable. The title figure of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) may be rendered homeless by his financial dependence on his wife's family, but he also provides an emblem for all those to whom history has done the same thing.

Just as the white English in The Jewel and the Crown see Hari Kumar as someone pretending to be English, so most of Naipaul's characters stand as examples of what he calls a 'mimic man.' For in their 'wounded civilization [s]' all terms of value and reference seem to come from outside, from the West. They mimic its manners-Ganesh Ramsumair eventually changes his name to G. Ramsey Muir-but they are not so much men who mimic as they are mimics of men, 'pretend[ing] to be real.' Jimmy Ahmed in Guerrillas (1975) preaches a form of black power (for all that he is half-Chinese) but feels powerful himself only when he attracts the attention of whites. He sees his success solely in terms of his acceptance in the metropolis; and the contempt with which he treats white people is an act of self-contempt as well. The narrator Salim in A -653- Bend in the River becomes so fascinated by 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. Neither man is whole, sufficient unto himself. They are instead dependent, at best 'half-made,' an imitation of what a man should be. So too the societies from which they come remain dependent on metropolitan values-or rather on the value the metropolis places on them, on their bauxite and sugar and trade.

For Salim the world has no place for 'men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing.' But in a wounded civilization how can anyone make the self into something other than a mimic of a man? How does one move from dependency to development when the tools of the latter are so often the chains of the former? The colonial writer sees the library shelves of the metropolis as a sign of his own inconsequentiality. Yet he has no way to escape that sense of his own belatedness except by trying to fill a shelf of his own, embracing the very thing that oppresses him. And over the years Naipaul has filled that shelf. The early comic novels have given way to the bleak first-person narration of The Mimic Men or A Bend in the River, the number of travel books has increased-three on India alone-while the production of novels has slowed; the work has grown increasingly autobiographical, until in The Enigma of Arrival (1987) the line between fiction and memoir disappears. But always Naipaul has had the virtues of both continuity and surprise; however often he has revisited the same themes, the same places, his work has never stood still.

Rushdie's novels are as keenly attuned as Naipaul's to issues of cultural fracture, of worlds and histories and values in collision. Yet his work suggests not a tragic awareness but a ready acceptance of the fact that cultures are never inviolate. 'Perhaps we are all,' he writes, 'black and brown and white, leaking into one another… like flavours when you cook.' Hence his gloriously ramshackle sentences, in which Bombay street slang flirts with Oxbridge English, a style in which, as in the poems of Baal in The Satanic Verses, 'the demotic force[s] its way into lines of classical purity and images of love [are] constantly degraded by the intrusions of elements of farce.' That style grows from Rushdie's attempt in Midnight's Children to use the English language as a way of imagining a form for India itself, 'that 5000 year old country that has never before existed.' But to do that he must first free English from its colonial past, remaking it into a new Indian language -654- called Angrezi, the master's tongue appropriated for his own subversive purposes. Yet Angrezi's essential impurity contests not just the ideology of colonialism but that of India's 'folkloristic straitjacket' as well. For Rushdie's refashioning of the language puts English at the heart of modern India's national identity in a way that challenges the nativist assumption that one can be perfectly non-Western. His style is an attempt to acknowledge India's heterogeneous history and complex heritage, to envision a structure in which all its multiple divisions of region and religion and language and caste can be contained. And his work as a whole stands as a model of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the «dialogic» novel: a linguistic carnival, a polyphony of voices that turns all ideological certainties upside down, a quite literally heteroglot forum for an encounter not just between opposing characters but between different beliefs, languages, levels of discourse, and indeed whole cultures.

The Satanic Verses takes up such issues through its critique of the ideal of cultural purity, the 'terrifying singularity' of Islam, in a way that enacts within the novel itself the very storm that has grown up around it. It recasts Midnight's Children in terms of the individual migrant whom Rushdie takes as the emblematic figure of our times. Migration makes the self indeterminate. For the migrant has chosen to translate one identity into another, and in doing so has set out 'to make himself up.' What Rushdie suggests is that such postcolonial selves should actively choose the hand that history has dealt them. If for Naipaul mimicry is a sign of cultural violation, for Rushdie a self-conscious mimicry becomes a way to shuttle between the hybrid selves of the postcolonial condition, to acknowledge that one lives in two worlds at once. And in that acceptance of discontinuity he sees not tragedy but liberation. It does not help the postcolonial man or woman surmount dependency so much as it denies its relevance, for without an ideal of cultural purity against which to measure the self, there can be no mimicry per se. Instead Rushdie posits a self that is rather like one of his own sentences, Indian and yet English too. And indeed he suggests that we all reject what Lawrence called 'the old stable ego of the character' and learn instead to revel in its instability, even as we do in his style. The self becomes a pastiche, like the India Rushdie describes as 'borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit,' a collage, a set of masks improvised for different occasions. It is the point at which the postcolonial and the postmodern coalesce. -655-

Where Naipaul sees a cultural violation, Rushdie sees at least the possibility of freedom from an imprisoning authenticity. The pursuit of such an authenticity has led, in India, to the rise of linguistic and religious separatism on the one hand, and Hindu fundamentalism on the other. It has led, most famously, to the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against The Satanic Verses, to demands for its author's death, and to Rushdie's continued life in hiding. And in England it has led to the nativism of the National Front, with its cries of 'Wogs out!' Throughout this chapter we have seen the ways in which English writers drew, blurred, and insisted on the lines of racial difference that separated them from the subject peoples of their empire. Rushdie's work challenges those barriers, and in doing so helps construct an identity for a kind of man or woman that Kipling could not have imagined. Along with several other writers of his generation-Timothy Mo, Hanif Kureishi, Caryl Phillips-he shows the ways in which it is possible to be English and yet not white. And that is even one of Naipaul's themes in The Enigma of Arrival, an account of how he finally came to see himself at home in the chalk hills of Wiltshire.'They have the power of description,' a tiger-headed character in The Satanic Verses says of the white British society in which he lives, 'and we succumb to the pictures they construct.' For seeing India, or Africa, or the Caribbean is indeed a way of ruling them. One consequence of the end of the British Empire is that they have started to describe themselves.

Michael Gorra

Selected Bibliography

Appiah Kwame Anthony. In My Father's House. Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.