Extravagant Postcolonialism: Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction, 1958–1988

By Brian T. May

Brian T. May argues that, contrary to widely held assumptions of postcolonial literary criticism, a distinctive subset of postcolonial novels significantly values and scrupulously explores a healthy individuality. These "extravagant" postcolonial works focus less on collective social reality than on the intimate subjectivity of their characters. Their authors, most of whom received some portion of a canonical western education, do not subordinate the ambitions of their fiction to explicit political causes so much as create a cosmopolitan rhetorical focus suitable to their western-educated, western-trained, audiences.

May pursues this argument by scrutinizing novels composed during the thirty-year postindependence, postcolonial era of Anglophone fiction, a period that began with the Nigerian Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and that ended, many would say, with the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 publication of the Rushdie Fatwa. May contends that the postcolonial authors under consideration—Naipaul, Rushdie, Achebe, Rhys, Gordimer, and Coetzee—inherited modernism and refashioned it. His account of their work demonstrates how it reflects and transfigures modernists such as Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett. Tracing the influence of humanistic values and charting the ethical and aesthetic significance of individualism, May demonstrates that these works of "extravagant postcolonialism" represent less a departure from than a continuation and evolution of modernism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611173802

Brian T. May

Brian T. May, an associate professor of English at Northern Illinois University, has published on Edwardian, modernist, and postcolonial literature in such journals as ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Twentieth Century Literature, and Contemporary Literature. The editor of a special issue of Studies in the Novel entitled “Postcolonialism, History, and the Novel,” May is also the author of The Modernist as Pragmatist: E. M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism.

Book preview

Extravagant Postcolonialism

EXTRAVAGANT POSTCOLONIALISM

Modernism and Modernity in Anglophone Fiction 1958–1988

BRIAN MAY

The University of South Carolina Press

© 2014 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14         10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

May, Brian, 1959– author.

Extravagant postcolonialism : modernism and modernity in anglophone fiction, 1958–1988 / Brian May.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61117-379-6 (hardbound : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61117-380-2 (ebook) 1. Commonwealth fiction (English)—History and criticism. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Modernism (Literature) I. Title.

PR9084M39 2014

823.009’9171241—dc23

2014004289

Jacket illustration: base illustration by hpkalyani at www.istockphoto.com

To my family, Catherine Kelly May, Robert Talbott May, William Shortell May, and Elizabeth Howe Talbott-May

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

Memorials to Modernity: Postcolonial Pilgrimage in V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie

2

Chinua Achebe: Tradition and the Talent for Individuality

3

Modernism Re(d-)dressed: Interrogativity and Individuality in Jean Rhys

4

Nadine Gordimer: The Conservationist as Conversationist

5

J. M. Coetzee: A Question of the Body, and an Answer

Conclusion: Postcolonial Modernism, Postcolonial Humanism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of the introduction first appeared as Extravagant Postcolonialism: Ethics and Individualism in Anglophonic, Anglocentric Postcolonial Fiction; Or, ‘What Was (This) Postcolonialism?,’ ELH: English Literary History 75.4 (Winter 2008): 899–937. Most of what is now chapter 1 was published as Memorials to Modernity: Postcolonial Pilgrimage in Naipaul and Rushdie, ELH: English Literary History 68.1 (Spring 2001): 241–265. And a good deal of chapter five appeared as J. M. Coetzee and the Question of the Body, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 47.2 (Summer 2001): 391–420. I thank the editors of ELH and MFS as well as Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint. I also thank my editor at the University of South Carolina Press, Jim Denton, and Linda Haines Fogle, assistant director for operations, for their patience and consideration. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of English, Northern Illinois University, funded the color insert: many thanks.

Northern Illinois University also provided a sabbatical leave that enabled me to write an important part of the book; another leave gave me time to finish it. But the book began earlier and elsewhere, and my honors students from the nineties and the University of North Texas, so many from the music school, so many unforgettable, Priscilla and Sarah, Nicole, Matt, Carl, Stephen, John, Mario, Joel, Ryan, and, yes, Tybalt (whereabouts unknown), will recognize these analyses and arguments. It was good for the high concept that it had to find footing in the rich, raw terrain of the undergraduate classroom. As myself a raw youth I found my feet only with the help of Patricia Blaszak, Robert Bailey, Cheryl Worsham, Alice Loftin, James Lynch, Michael Squires, Arthur Kirsch, and Irvin Ehrenpreis; my thanks to these mentors. Thanks, also, to Ron Strickland, Ron Fortune, Daniel Morris, Peter Richardson, the late Scott Simpkins, Richard Begam (who summoned Cardinal Bellarmine as I was writing chapter 1), and the anonymous readers for the journals mentioned above, a number of whom were kind enough to comment upon early portions of the book but none of whom, however kind, should be held responsible for the shape it has assumed. My most extravagant thanks are reserved, of course, for Kelly, Bob, Will and Betsy, each incomparable, inimitable, inestimable, irreducibly individual, and irreplaceable.

Introduction

…

The notion of the individual—, exclaims Satya Mohanty in a 2008 interview, that’s a horribly tainted Western idea, isn’t it?¹ In so exclaiming, Mohanty points to one of the more resolutely unexamined (and exasperating?) assumptions that have governed literary criticism over the past quarter-century, one that Mohanty finds wondrous, fabulous: why would we think that, say, Indian, Chinese, or Native American cultures didn’t value the notion of healthy individuality? It’s a myth that they didn’t; in fact, if you go to the cultural practices and texts, you see rich notions of individuality in all kinds of cultures. This discussion is dedicated to the proposition that rich notions … of healthy individuality may indeed be found valued in those particular cultural practices, those particular texts known as postcolonial novels, particularly in a certain grouping of them. The assumption judged mythical by Mohanty is one made with respect to all kinds of non-Western cultures, all sorts of non-Western cultural practices, all manner of non-Western novels. How much more richly trammeled in the realms of myth, then, the same assumption when the novels in question are unabashedly Anglocentric Anglophone novels, what have been described and sometimes spurned as the most canonical of the putative postcolonial anticanon, the most Western—to the point that it may seem a mistake to term them non-Western?

One reaction to such putatively non-Western novels that do not spurn the notion of the individual is to spurn them. But in Extravagant Postcolonialism—what I mean by extravagant soon will become clear—my ambition is to do otherwise. I aim to study a particular region of modernity that remains fairly obscure, thereby providing a window on a particular, peculiar modern subject(ivity). To that end, significant novels by Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coeztee, Nadine Gordimer, Jean Rhys, and Chinua Achebe, novels that propose rich notions of individuality, I richly explore. That is, I explore rich individualities, these novels’ characters being, so many of them, characters. Coetzee’s Magistrate, Rushdie’s Mirza, Achebe’s Obi Okonkwo, to name a few, exhibit a protean excess of personality that spills into their adjacencies and makes vehicles of the objects (some being vehicles) that they find there. Trying to find themselves, they often rove, undertaking pilgrimages (chapter one discusses postcolonial pilgrimage), journeys, trips, treks, and tours, on foot (padyatra), by train, plane, or car, sometimes exhibiting extravagant behavior of the worst sort (Gordimer’s Mehring criminally gropes at thirty thousand feet). Achebe’s Obi Okonkwo, who turns criminal and is sent to prison, has a problem with locomotion (chapter two explains); if these characters often rove, they sometimes rave. If they cannot stay put, they also fail to fit in. Even when they are mimic men—Extravagant Postcolonialism is in part a study of a particular corner of postcolonial masculinity—they are mimic men with tenuous commitments and bad consciences, full of self-blame and self-contempt.

What is most distinctive about these distinctive characters postcolonial criticism has tended to ignore or to explain in other ways, treating character as a largely social and cultural construction—a tendency that I will try to resist. The habit in postcolonial criticism has been to define oddity and eccentricity as symptoms of a social and political condition, which at times they certainly are, rather than as expressions of creative idiosyncrasy, which at other times, as I shall argue, they may rather be. Even with the more decidedly Anglocentric novels that I shall be discussing, the critical focus has typically fallen, as one critic phrases it, on a collective social reality more than on (say) an individual’s existential crisis.² Again and again particular and peculiar forms of individuality have been ignored in favor of yet another inquiry into forms of postcolonial collectivity.

I recognize that the particular and the peculiar can themselves become fetish-objects of an obeisant attention. Individuality, eccentricity, oddity—how far are we from idiosyncrasy, irresponsibility, insanity? Certainly these, too, can be forms of individuality. Are they thus goods in themselves? Given the habit of viewing the postcolonial in general as a collective phenomenon, a somewhat discrepant interest such as my own—an interest in what I shall show to be a fairly small subset of the larger postcolonial phenomenon, in a suprapolitical (in Karl Jaspers’s phrase), ethical universalist (in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s phrase), humanist, modernist (epiphanic, in Charles Taylor’s phrase), and above all individualist postcolonialism, an eccentric, extravagant postcolonialism, indeed—may itself appear to be eccentric.³ Not that eccentricity should be taken for inauthenticity, even if one disagrees with John Stuart Mill that the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained.⁴ Yet, whatever one thinks of eccentricity, my very interest in it may appear less eccentric once we take note of a similar interest expressed by one of the most influential thinkers centrally associated with the postcolonial, one of the so-called Holy Trinity, namely Edward Said.⁵

For Extravagant Postcolonialism is not other than Saidian in the complex sense determined by Said’s later work. This work being explicitly defined by Said himself as humanistic, Extravagant Postcolonialism sustains Saidian postcolonialism’s conception or at least intimation of a postcolonial humanism, one of those new humanisms, as Emily Apter calls them—a "welthumanism proper to secular criticism in a worlded" era.⁶ Clearly a humanism of this "welt-sort will entail a transnational politics on behalf of the group or the collective or even the multitude, one built on revolutionary social formations and subjectivities.⁷ But it may also prescribe, if Said’s version of it is indicative, an unequivocal, unconditional, raw celebration of human will and agency wherever they may be found, and even when the will and agency in question, the subjectivities," are found to be too quirky, too idiosyncratic, too heedless, too individualistic, too extravagant, to be considered deliberately, programmatically revolutionary.⁸ That is, Saidian welt-humanism exhibits not just what Apter terms a transnational, multitudinous inclusiveness but also an interest in a specifically individual agency and achievement.⁹ Apter herself mentions how in his introduction to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis Said offers a moving account of Auerbachian humanism, capturing a sense of the vulnerability of subjectivity, or ‘individuality,’ in Auerbach’s magnum opus.¹⁰ Indeed, one might regard these two elements of Said’s welt-humanism, the collectivist and the individualist/subjectivist, as equally essential to any sort of humanism, welt or other, worthy of the title; one might even regard the latter, less obviously revolutionary of the two as the more essential one, given its specification of common human qualities (for example, will and agency) without which humanist political activists could not build transnational campaigns. In any event, this latter, less collectivist element is my topic here. The eccentric element in the postcolonial novel being precisely my focus, my premise being that eccentricity is more or less equivalent to extravagance, I follow this second of the two Saidian-humanist prescriptions, the first, more baldly political one having attracted numerous followers heretofore.

But what if we regard the later Said not as a divinity but as a fallen angel turned all too human(ist), his celebration of Auerbach (!) signifying his having moved from the center of the movement he helped to found—an eccentric Said, indeed, being prototype of a post-postcolonialism? Here one of the questions prompted by my title becomes urgent. Extravagant Postcolonialism: the question in what sense extravagant I shall be answering at some length in this, what is an exposition as well as an introduction. But there is another question bound to cross the path of even the most vagrant reader of this book, the question prompted by the phrase’s other substantive term, postcolonialism. An "extravagant postcolonialism? Postcolonialism" in what sense? No brief invocation of Said will be enough to answer this question.

The titular term postcolonialism is of course justified if the following fictions, each of which is studied thoroughly in this book, may be deemed significantly postcolonial: Chinua Achebe’s duet, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. But what makes these texts significantly postcolonial texts? What, aside from their having been recognized as significantly, even as definitively postcolonial? The question, of course, is that of what makes a work, whatever the work, whatever its genre, sharply indicative of the postcolonial—sharply indicative rather than vaguely resonant, sharply indicative rather than entirely unrepresentative. And there is the yet more fundamental question of what is meant by postcolonial, to begin with, a term that has proved by all accounts notoriously difficult to define.¹¹

For one thing, as most would agree, these texts were written in the aftermath of what Barbara Fuchs and David J. Baker (among others) term high imperialism, an aftermath that these works address topically (if sometimes only figuratively or allegorically), substantially (at some length and in some depth), and critically (not neutrally). Which is to say, historically and thematically, as it were, they occupy a period that we may term, adapting Fuchs and Baker, high postcolonialism.¹² This period began perhaps with Achebe in the late 1950s and continued for three or more decades, the 9/11 attacks only certifying a change in attitude that began with the Fatwa—hence my own end-date of convenience, 1988 (symptomatically, perhaps, the same year but one often cited as inaugurating the academic field of postcolonial studies, what with the publication of The Empire Writes Back).¹³ Few would say that postcolonialism, at least in the form of the recognizably postcolonial novel, continues in its original form to this day (note, for example, Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge’s important 2005 commentary, What was Postcolonialism?*). However and whenever one dates the putative ending of the period (the term period itself is rejected out of hand by some), it is clear that a number of Anglophone novels that have been found important and judged to be significantly different from those Anglophone novels that came before (and perhaps after) were written in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, novels that attracted to themselves this very term, postcolonial. Most eminent Anglophone writers of these novels, members of a group that among others includes Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, V. S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and Ruth Prawyer Jhabvala, were doing their defining work during these years.

Of course, to define postcolonialism thus periodically, as if denominating just another of the well-established historical trajectories that go by such names as Romanticism, Victorianism, and Modernism, is to court a certain objection—namely a charge of historiographical dubiousness.¹⁴ Beyond the problems that arise with all such acts of literary periodization, of course, are those proper to the construction of the larger, indeed foundational cultural and historical period that subsumes the literary as well as other media. For there are those who question the very premise that there is or was a postcolonial era, a single distinct postcolonial epoch. Fuchs and Baker, for example, complain that all too often "only the colonialism informed by Western universals and its aftermath are [regarded as] relevant for scholarly considerations of colonialism and postcoloniality."¹⁵ Criticizing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference for just this inability to transcend the moment of ‘modernity,’ Fuchs and Baker regard as presumptuous all attempts to tell an overarching story of a single, progressive ‘historical development,’ especially when that development is associated, more or less exclusively, with the high imperialism of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, and with its aftermath.¹⁶ Such being my own exclusive focus, what with my construction of a high postcolonialism in the space of which is plotted an ethics of aesthetic and affective vagrancy, I here recognize the necessity of, if certainly not outright rejection of the term postcolonial, clear admission and delineation of its partiality. Hence the modifier, the qualifier, in my subtitle: what was postcolonialism, this postcolonialism, this particular (extravagant) form of a phenomenon that was undeniably multiform, even radically heterogeneous?¹⁷

But beyond this historiographical difficulty with the definition of postcolonialism just offered lies a second, equally insistent difficulty, one that has less to do with historiographical narrowness than with conceptual vagueness. This is the problem caused by characterizing significantly postcolonial fiction merely as fiction that, inhabiting a certain historical period, a certain aftermath, makes that aftermath its topic. For the significantly postcolonial work, many would agree, has to do more than merely address that phenomenon; it must also address that phenomenon in a certain way or ways. It must exhibit a particular, an authentically postcolonial, response or one of a particular set of such responses to that phenomenon. And what I take to be one of those proper responses may be sharply delineated by contrasting two characterizations of the postcolonial, one offered by Stuart Hall, the other, for my purposes a more authentic one, as I argue, being offered by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Hall characterizes the postcolonial broadly and suggestively: it is something new, yes, but it is also what it is because something else has happened; "it is after a certain kind of colonialism, after a certain moment of high imperialism and colonial occupation—in the wake of it, in the shadow of it, inflected by it."¹⁸ Thus Hall’s postcolonial thinkers, whether intellectuals, theorists, writers, or artists (and there are a great number of them, postcolonialism being so defined), try in various ways to make it new, jumping or riding that wake, seeking a kind of balance in the cultural turbulence, exploring, enlightening that space of shadow, inflecting that inflection. For Hall, clearly, thinking postcolonial does not require that one try to fight the waves, to throw off those shadows (or stamp them out), or to dis-inf(l)ect. For Kwame Anthony Appiah, on the other hand, thinking postcolonial does require a certain decision with respect to these space-clearing gesture[s]—that one not try to make them, that indeed one go on to reject the nativist, nationalist, realist, and even optimist aspirations behind them.¹⁹ Postcoloniality, asserts Appiah, "is after all of this, after and against any nativist-nationalist-realist-optimist program that would try to eradicate lingering forms of Hall’s imperial and colonial something else so as to substitute for Hall’s something new something old, something recovered or resurrected, something original.²⁰ Substituting for the nativist-nationalist-realist-optimist farrago the ethical universal[ist], the humanis[t], Appiah’s postcolonial thinkers, a distinct subset of Hall’s, tend to subordinate politics to ethics and promote aesthetics; they clear a little space for, for example, a non-nativist and -nationalist pan-African postcolonialism (ironically, they do so by Widening the split, one evident to many in Hall’s big tent, between postcolonial literature and postcolonial theory).²¹ Yet Appiah narrows even further, applauding especially that subset of his subset, those fewer still among his fewer, who deconstruct a formative binarism of [African, for example] Self and [monolithic Western] Other.²² These are those who refuse what they regard as a narrow Africanist aspiration as well as the aspirations of the nativist-nationalist-realist-optimist. Though Appiah does not make this precise point, it may be that they do so in order to follow the universalist and humanist alternative as it stretches unmistakably beyond the imaginary borderlines of any African or pan-African (or other sort of ethnicist," as we may call it) community. Such postcolonials counter or at least supplement Western humanism with what they hope to be a more authentic humanism, one that throws the door open to those who once shut them out.²³

We may term such postcolonials, for want of a better phrase, universalist postcolonials, and it is among such non-nativist-nationalist-realist-optimist-ethnicist, such indeed globalist, humanist, ethicist postcolonials, that we may find the extravagant postcolonial novelists who are my concern.²⁴ For, when all is said, as I shall demonstrate, extravagantly postcolonial fiction exhibits as profound and formative an interest in the ethics of the human individual, "wherever it [the individual] may be found, as in the politics of the collective.²⁵ Indeed, and here I may part company with Appiah (see the next section), I will define extravagant postcolonialism" as a literary constellation made up of those who tend to seek aesthetic, affective, and moral space within or without, next to, near, but most certainly beyond (as in, if nothing more, not entirely subsumed by) the collective, the social, the political. In passing, I should note that the term constellation is meant to suggest my humble sense of a set of Wittgensteinian family likenesses—a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail—among these authors rather than anything approaching to an essential identity.²⁶ Most simply put, then, here studied is a constellation, a collocation of those who refuse to keep the critical focus … on a collective social reality more than on (say) an individual’s existential crisis.²⁷ Accordingly, it will be the business of many of the following pages to elucidate what Zubin Meer in Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity calls the intimate subjectivity of the postcolonial characters populating these authors’ works.²⁸

We may now briefly note, somewhat polemically, how these authors’ own private lives have often exhibited a certain detachment from the urgencies of postcolonial national or at least collective social ambition. Such personal disengagement has consorted and comported with a certain so-called failure—the failure of sophisticated, acculturated postcolonial authors, brought on by first-world sophistication, acculturation, assimilation, cooptation, and so on, to write proper, Fredric Jamesonian third-world national allegory, the sort of writing focused on what John Marx terms repudiation (as opposed to revision) of the West for purposes of nation building.²⁹ But what if repudiation is simply not the central and compelling rhetorical purpose from which smaller purposes radiate? What if the third-world subject simply does not find more or less single-minded occupation of the nationalist/collective framework, for all its hypervisibility and seeming inescapability, exhaustively satisfying?³⁰

Clearly our extravagant postcolonial authors have not always found it exhaustively satisfying—hence, what has sometimes been regretted, not just their interest in revision over repudiation but also simply their international breadth, their cosmopolitan, overseas, often Anglo-metropolitan vocational and rhetorical focus.³¹ This is a focus that suggests something other than a consuming Sartrean or Fanonian commitment, signifying rather their membership in what Appiah (ungenerously) characterizes as a comprador intelligentsia, a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities.³² Dubious as Appiah’s assignment of a simple and selfish economic motive may be, it serves to pry open the more or less Sartrean container into which many of these extravagant postcolonial writers and thinkers have been placed. With the exception of, at certain times in her career, Gordimer, these are not writers famous for subordinating the elements and ambitions of their fiction to explicit and specific political causes. When push comes to shove, as I shall argue in the next section, the novel as genre does not encourage such subordination, and these authors are novelists. Novelists or not, certainly their aesthetic-vocational careers, at any rate, do not suggest the original and enduring supervening of an essentially political motive even as they do express obvious political commitments (to be sure, Achebe, for example, has been at times a politician, both a political activist and an elected official).

As John Marx reports, The most abiding criticism of those writers and readers who privilege revision [over repudiation] is that their activity transforms postcolonial literature into a stridently elite category, one that presumes a thoroughly canonical education and that cannot help but be oriented toward Western—or ‘Westernized’—readers.³³ The fact is that, for better or for worse, most such writers and readers themselves were provided precisely that education. Many of these extraordinary writing careers began with formative vocational years spent not wholly in Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town, Mumbai, or Port-of-Spain but also in London, Paris, Boston, New York, or Washington, D.C., usually in school. More than one happy careerist was once an excellent young student who won a study-abroad scholarship; more than one excelled in a foreign-built colonial educational institution of one kind or another. The Igbo and Umuofian Achebe, for example, grew up in a British-protected place he calls British colonial Nigeria and was educated at St. Philip’s C.M.S. Academy and Government College, Umuahia—which he calls without irony a first-class boarding school … set up … by the British.³⁴ It betrays no disrespect to one who has suffered periodic sentences of enforced exile and who has been at times a virtual political refugee to note that, though he did not have much choice in the matter of where to go to school, he has had a good deal of choice in the matter of where to teach and live since becoming one of the world’s most famous authors, and he has gone pretty far West (west and north, to be exact). The fact is that Achebe was in September 2009 David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, U.S.A., having been Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 12504, USA) for the previous nineteen years and having taught at the University of Massachusetts (USA) and the University of Connecticut (also USA) before that. Achebe’s professional choices have not betrayed sharp wariness of the West, acute anxiety in the face of its subtle conscriptions and assimilations. Coetzee’s autobiographical Youth devotes substantial attention to the young Coetzee’s failure to thrive in the corporate culture of the London office of IBM, the one to which, full of hope, he fled from his native country; at one point, Coetzee’s only friend is a fellow emigre Ganapathy, an Indian even more out of sorts than himself, being unable even to keep himself fed.³⁵ The young Coetzee’s remedy? He moves back to South Africa, buys a remote farm, and tries to reimagine and reconstruct Boer life on some line, whether pre-, post-, or somehow extra-apartheid? Rather, he moves to Austin, Texas, to study linguistics; he moves to Buffalo, New York, to become a professor in an American university; he returns to South Africa but spends a number of years abroad in visiting professorships here and there; now he lives in Adelaide, Australia. Rushdie, having moved to Manhattan, exclaims that discovery is fun…. I am incredibly open to everything.³⁶ Rushdie now is recognizably a New Yorker. Even their formative years of literary apprenticeship are not notable for an insistence on sustaining in their own private lives (by choice of place of residence, choice of friends and associates, choice of romantic involvements, or whatever else) some version of natal, native, or colonial identity; in their early careers, especially, these writers indeed sustained their largely Western academic training by way of a Western-style preoccupation with European and especially English literature. For example, they demonstrated an ambition to become major English authors, to win prestige in the Anglo-American literary world. Often such ambition was signaled by enthusiastic participation in the Booker Award contest; even the most renegade among them (Arundhati Roy, for example, who of course falls beyond my convenient historical marker, 1988) have not refused when offered the usual major prizes, a fact not lost on a number of recent critics.³⁷ Neither Gordimer nor Coetzee refused the Nobel Prize; nor did Naipaul, of course; neither will Rushdie if and when the time comes. They also betray in various ways a cosmopolitan rhetorical focus, the intended audience for their fiction being often enough in at least some part the elite, well-educated, Western-trained intelligentsia to which they themselves belong.

It could be objected, with a killing emphasis, that this project shamelessly presumes a more or less complete Westernization—that it tends to behave as if everything we need to know about these [extravagantly] postcolonial characters comes from their respective plots, and a good knowledge of humanism and Modernism.³⁸ For, rather than establishing any sort of [non-Western] social, political or cultural backdrop for [these] readings, [this book often] insists that we treat them in a vacuum.³⁹ Though I find this an unfair assessment, especially with respect to my individual chapters (they discuss at least in passing such extrahumanist, extramodernist, and extra-plot matters as the Haj or padyatra [Rushdie], the Armarnath pilgrimage [Naipaul], racism against South Indians and Dravidians [also Naipaul], the Igbo sense of the art weapon [Achebe], the Igbo respect for the individual talent [also Achebe], the West Indian concept of beke [Rhys], the Afrikaner sense of the South African multicultural complex [Gordimer], the Afrikaner sense of proper daughterhood [Coetzee])—though, again, I believe that this assessment overlooks my discussion’s substantial engagement with the social and political worlds in which these novels were written, I plead guilty to a slightly different charge. Where these extravagantly postcolonial novels are concerned, this project does assume that humanism and modernism, for example, are important explanatory contexts. It does proceed as if a subtle knowledge of Euro-, chiefly Anglo-humanism, -individualism, and -modernism playing over the products of close attention to these literary texts may in itself provide new and valuable readings of them, if but readings intended to supplement rather than to supersede. The premise is that these authors enjoyed formative contact with Anglo-humanists and -modernists and that this contact was in many instances salutary, constructive, generative, creative. Like the event of Coetzee’s encountering Breton and writing a scholarly article about him in the 1970s, Coetzee’s 1960s reading of Beckett in the Manuscripts Room of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin—something Coetzee discusses in a New York Times essay with the suggestive title How I Learned about America—and Africa—in Texas⁴⁰—was not an imaginary or ethereal episode best ignored; it mattered, as did Achebe’s encounter with Yeats, Rushdie’s reading in Nietzsche, Gordimer’s thorough knowledge of Joyce and Conrad, and so on. To direct attention pointedly (not, after all, exclusively) to what these postcolonial authors made of the philosophical and literary and aesthetic materials that they found so fascinating and empowering (albeit also in some cases irritating and exasperating), even when in so doing attention is shifted from certain social and political backdrop[s], is scarcely to treat [these novels] in a vacuum. And again, my attention to Coetzee’s Bretonian backdrop, for example, is not so insistent that it leads me to overlook his socially and politically charged portrait of a colonial drudge-maiden.

Where modernism in particular is concerned, to be perfectly clear, my premise in these chapters is not that modernism assimilated these postcolonial authors but that these authors received and refashioned modernism. My aim is to show how these extravagantly postcolonial fictions suggest a kind of postcolonial modernism (or, perhaps, modernist postcolonialism) alongside a certain concept of postcolonial individualism (extravagant postcolonial modernism I find aiding and abetting extravagant postcolonial individualism). Thus I hope to contribute to a relatively new project of rethinking the relationship between postcolonialism and modernism as not simply conflictual—as, indeed, often quite the reverse. The editors of the well-received 2007 Duke University Press collection Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939 remark that a collection of essays strikingly different from their own could be produced, one that would view modernism from outside [their own] largely metropolitan perspective and that would explore how non-European writers like Coetzee, Desai, Emecheta, Naipaul, Ngugi, Rhys, Rushdie, Roy, Walcott and others adapted and transformed modernism.⁴¹ Such a book is in certain ways precisely what I am offering. As I note in my chapter summaries and as the chapters themselves bear out, Extravagant Postcolonialism explores how Rushdie and Naipaul adapt and transform—indeed, often trope and trump—Friedrich Nietzsche and Joseph Conrad, among others, how Achebe tropes and transfigures Yeats and Eliot, how Rhys recasts Bergson and incorporates Proust, how Gordimer use[s] (Gordimer’s own word) Joyce, and how Coetzee abuts and ablates Beckett and makes synecdoches of surrealists like Breton and Magritte.⁴² One of the formative ambitions of this study is a degree of attentiveness to concrete literary detail perhaps unusual in postcolonial literary criticism, especially where modernism and its influence are in question. Nowhere is my own scrutiny sharper than in my account of how these postcolonials engage the modernists who went before them.

Of course, were I aiming to offer commentary on the postcolonial, in general, rather than on a kind of postcolonial modernism in particular, a certain question would arise: why choose these postcolonials, these postcolonial novels and novelists, all of whom and which are Anglophonic, the great majority being definable, albeit more arguably, as Anglocentric? This, the issue of selection, is an unquestionably difficult, long-standing, and still volatile issue that admits of no fully satisfying answer. Indeed, the difficulty endemic to the very act of selection has only been exacerbated in our era of globalization. The problem of comparability, which has always been with us, is now only more intense; as Jonathan Culler asks, What, in this newly globalized space, justifies bringing texts together?⁴³ And what, we might add, justifies not bringing certain other texts into the mix? One reply to this query points out that academic literary postcolonialism proper has so often been, after all, an Anglophone affair. Many of the particular novels most often studied by those concerned to frame the phenomenon of the postcolonial have been written not in a native language such as Hindi or Swahili or in the colonialists’ French or Belgian or German, for example, but in the King’s English, and, not by accident, many of these novelists hailing from a British-protected background of some sort. Of course, to say all of this is scarcely to offer a satisfying defense of the choice to study these particular novels yet again. The better answer to Culler, then, largely eschews a defense and offers in its stead what Gayatri Spivak calls a scrupulous declaration of interest.⁴⁴ As I have tried to signal by way of a repeated use of the phrase, extravagant postcolonialism, this study does not attempt to characterize all existing modes of postcolonial expression—if such a thing were possible. Rather, I am concerned with what Michael Levenson calls the fate of individuality in the postcolonial era, especially as that fate is entangled with the fate of modernism. Perforce the postcolonial novelists most deliberately engaged with the legacies of individualism and of modernism are indeed the Anglophonic, Anglocentric, extravagant postcolonial novelists I have named.

Final among the objections to my approach that I shall register here is the complaint that the argument proceeds as if what applies for particular novelists/texts is the same everywhere.⁴⁵ This, also an issue of selection, is what we might call the geographical issue created by the choice to