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| May 09, 2008 |
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by Rishona Zimring In 1871-2, George Eliot published in serial form a monumental novel, Middlemarch. The novel was set in the recent past: about forty years previously, in what was known as the era of reform, the 1830s. Eliot's huge novel took her readers into a small place. Fictional Middlemarch was a provincial town with intricately interconnected bloodlines and a social life that delicately reverberated with the motions of the universe outside: the echoes of the French Revolution, the splash of Romanticism, labor uprisings, the coming of the railway. She folded the recent past into the contemporary, charting, without nostalgia, the evolution of the present.
In Middlemarch, neither the characters nor society could escape the past. Such was the lesson of 19th-century Britain's passion for history. Faith in historical explanation provided a foundation for the novel's narrative mode. Readers embraced Sir Walter Scott's historical novels at the beginning of the 19th century, and throughout the Victorian period historical comparisons between contemporary Britain and the Roman Empire put the past to ideological use. History was the dominant idea of the 19th century; historical consciousness was a mode of self-consciousness. Thomas Carlyle wrote in his 1829 essay "On History": "The Past is the true fountain of knowledge . . . [W]e do nothing but enact history, we say little but recite it: nay, rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual life is built thereon." As a translator of German philosophy as well as a novelist, George Eliot was one of the disseminators in England of the Hegelian philosophy of history as the process of Spirit actualizing itself. In its self-realization, Spirit is embodied politically and socially in the state, or unity of individual and collective. Through such metaphors as the web, tree, family, and labyrinth, Eliot's novels drew individual readers into a set of relations and affinities, into continuity with a larger whole. Though Eliot may seem like a distant figure, and the 19th century very different from the present one about to end, there are certain continuities that bear consideration. One is the affinity between the historical consciousness of the 19th-century philosophical novel represented by Eliot and that of novels currently honored by the Booker Prize in this, the supposedly ahistorical late 20th century. Recently, winners of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize have been looking back, like Eliot, to the time just before now. Four recent prize-winning novels - Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things - reveal a persistent urging to look back. These novels put their characters on the map of the twentieth century, with its shattering political master narratives of great wars and decolonization. And shifting between past and present, they make not just the past, but memory itself, the novelist's terrain for exploration. Thirty-one years old this year, Britain's Booker Prize is more than just a literary prize. In England, it is a media event. Begun in 1967 in imitation of France's Prix Goncourt, the Booker has been compared to the Academy Awards; the winner is announced at a televised celebrity dinner which marks the end of a suspenseful period of substantial press coverage and betting. In the fall, when the Booker coverage heats up, the British press launches its version of fierce culture wars. Critics and journalists routinely pan the choices for the short list (six novels) and the prize itself, accusing the judges of both bad taste and bad business acumen. If the short list novels don't sell well after the announcement, the Booker panel is accused of misjudgement. The panels are typically made up of novelists, academics, and literary journalists; in 1997, the youngest member of the team (aged 31) wrote of his unease about the rest of the panel's literary insiderness and establishment feel. That panel was chaired by venerable Cambridge professor Gillian Beer, who, as it happens, is an expert on 19th-century narrative; the book that catapulted her to academic fame, Darwin's Plots, traces evolutionary narrative in a range of texts, including those of George Eliot. While some accuse the Booker of being too establishment, others decry its crass commercialism. There is no doubt that the Booker is a reminder that Literature-with-a-capital-L, though we may think of it as a sacred realm apart, swims in the sea of advertising, display, celebrity status - in a word, the market. This market is a global one, and the Booker Prize reflects it. The only English-language works excluded from consideration are those written by Americans, and the Booker has consistently accorded recognition to writers who live or grew up outside England. Winners include: V. S. Naipaul (In a Free State, 1973); Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, 1981); J. M. Coetzee, (The Life and Times of Michael K., 1983); Keri Hulme (The Bone People, 1985); Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda, 1988); Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, 1989); Ben Okri (The Famished Road, 1991); Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient, 1992); Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997). Geographically, the list looks like this: India/Trinidad; Bombay/London; South Africa; Maori New Zealand; Australia/NewYork; Japan /England; Nigeria; SriLanka/Canada; and Kerala; a southern state in India (where Roy, who now lives in New Delhi, grew up, and sets her novel). It has been fairly consistent of the Booker to recognize fiction that concerns Britain's colonial past. Three winners from the 1970s concern the British in India (perhaps the biggest and most exotic sore on the British colonial conscience, which has other worries, such as the conflict in Ireland, closer to home): J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973); Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust (1975); and Paul Scott's Staying On (1977). The Booker has been accused of exoticism. Surely there is some truth to this. It is easy to read about third-world strife in the comfort of one's own first-world living room. Western liberals do so all the time when they read establishment newspapers and magazines, often with an uneasy mix of guilt and a sense of moral superiority. The charge of exoticism is particularly loaded and apt given that the Booker is sponsored by the Booker-McConnell company, a huge, multinational agribusiness headquartered in London. The company is a convenient symbol of the economics of British imperialism; formed in 1834, it provided services to Caribbean sugar plantations. The opportunity to throw the Booker's past into the limelight has not gone unmissed: in 1972, winner John Berger donated half his prize-money to the Black Panthers, clarifying in his acceptance speech that "they have links with the struggle in Guyana, the seat of Booker McConnell's wealth." The Booker's implication in a system of exploitation is tied of course to the fact that so many writers write in English, the language of the colonizer that can also be the language of anti-imperialism. That the prize recognizes writers from former colonies indicates not only exoticism emanating from a European cosmopolitan mentality but also the fact that so much literature is being written by artists and intellectuals from those former colonies and is finding its way into international readership through enterprising publishing houses. Some would argue that Britain is attempting to become a more pluralist society. Or, one might say that since the novel by its very nature offers escape, it should take us to faraway places heretofore unexplored by its readers. There is something besides commodified otherness that the recent Booker winners have in common. As novels of retrospection, they ask their readers to take the risk of Orpheus: to look back. Orpheus paid the price for gazing behind him by losing Eurydice; if there was compensation, it was found in lyric. Retrospection is one of poetry's richest lodes. The novels under discussion are exotic: they make the past different and call it into question. They make the past anew, re-covering and dis-covering what might otherwise disappear by venturing into the shady terrain of memory. "History is always ambiguous," writes Rushdie. Warning against reading his novel Midnight's Children as historical guidebook, Rushdie points to an appreciation of that novel's real subject: how individuals make the past, using memory as a tool. Ishiguro, Ondaatje, Rushdie, and Roy have all been honored for books that give significant dimension to the contemporary moment by presenting recent pasts still within reach of living individuals' memories. Taken as a group, these four novels evince a striking double vision of this period, the last sixty years or so. On the one hand, it is an end: the death of the British Empire (of which we were once again reminded last year with the departure of the British from Hong Kong), told from the point of view of those who are aging. Even the titles of Ishiguro's and Ondaatje's novels point to this: The Remains of the Day and The English Patient present us with twilight and sickness. On the other hand, a beginning: the emergence of new nations and breaks with tradition, told retrospectively as glances back to childhood. Midnight's children are those who were born at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, the date of India's independence from Britain. The "small things" of Roy's title are, among other things, a pair of young twins whose lives are affected by dramatic changes around 1969. Neither novel presents childhood sentimentally; in both cases, the journey to childhood necessitates recognition of violence as well as vibrant imagination. Each of these novels runs the risk of coming across as nostalgic; yet each in its own way reveals the past to be not a dead end, but a living, sometimes dangerous, presence. The narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day seems to embody the nostalgic clichés of Englishness that have become so viable commercially: stability, aristocracy, heritage. Stevens, a butler, is the very emblem of tradition and restraint. His is a voice of the utmost propriety and affection. One is hard-pressed not to feel fond of this butler because he himself is so fond of others. He is at the same time extremely fond of tradition, even though he protests early on that "there is no virtue at all in clinging as some do to tradition for its own sake." We begin the novel as the aging butler sets out on a present-day journey to meet one of his colleagues from the household staff in the 1930s heyday of a great English country house, Darlington Hall. As Stevens travels by car in the unaccustomed position of tourist, he muses on the history of his relationship with Miss Kenton and of Darlington Hall's upper-class inhabitants and guests. Ishiguro's subtle foray into history as it is observed from the servants' quarters is a striking exposé of British society told from the inside. Imagine the seat of power, the novel says-the heart of empire. It is a house with servants. What happens if you tell about power from the servant's point of view? The answer, in this case, is that the servant's will not be a voice of criticism or resentment. Rather, the butler's voice is one of admiration and respect for what he sees as the paramount dignity and rectitude of his employer. The butler's rational, observant, fond and responsible point of view refuses to condemn the order with which he feels so comfortable. Readers, too, might like to think of themselves as rational, observant, fond and responsible. Ishiguro's novel demands that we both identify with and distance ourselves from Stevens. He is an apologist for his master's anti-Semitism and association with British Fascists and German Nazis. The butler's story reveals a 1930s Britain moving towards war on a map with grey areas between Allies and Axis. This middle ground is the more ambiguous, dangerous territory that retrospection uncovers. Ishiguro sets his novel of reminiscence and self-reflection in a suggestive geography: the removal from Darlington Hall to a seaside resort, its pier lit up as night falls, provides the distance for meditation. The act of looking back is relayed spatially as well as temporally. Whenever we gaze at ruins or drift through museums, our actions as tourists have the potential to open up the past to new understandings. The Remains of the Day promises neither consolation nor redemption out of such travels, but it makes the trip to the beginning of World War II seem not only intriguing and necessary, but quietly urgent. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient also looks back at World War II - in this case, its end. Ondaatje's novel is a pastiche of stories belonging to four characters brought together by accident at war's end in a crumbling Italian villa. A badly burnt man lies in bed, tended by a Canadian nurse, Hana. Gradually, his story is revealed. It is the tale of archaeologists working in the desert, innocent adventurers oblivious to politics in their romantic quests. While the film emphasized the passionate adulterous love affair between the "English" patient (the Hungarian adventurer Almásy) and Katharine Clifton, the wife of one of the explorers, the novel gives equal weight to the others who have come to the villa. Kip (Kirpal Singh) is an Indian, expert in defusing bombs. His memory, more than Almásy's, is the vessel that holds this story. Kip is the link between then and now, the characters and ourselves. Significantly, it is in his consciousness that terror flares up; he, most dramatically, seems to move through the war from innocence to knowledge. It is through him that we see World War II as the dawn of the nuclear age, erupting continuously into our present rather than contained in a museum. Through him we feel the pain of the recent past's continuing relevance, and realize that the "end" of World War II is in some ways just a beginning. The English Patient's doomed lovers, Almásy and Katherine, live in imitation of past heroes. Homer and Herodotus loom in the background. Almásy compares himself to Odysseus. Katherine Clifton sees herself as the wife of King Candaules, who wanted to inspire jealousy through his beautiful wife. Joining those whose stories are recorded in legend, Almásy and Katherine become larger than life; their existence takes on epic proportions. But their story is a tragedy, as well. Having crossed certain lines, they cannot return. Late in the novel, Homer and Herodotus are joined by Tolstoy, Almásy and Katherine becoming Vronsky and Anna Karenina. Ondaatje gives his readers an ironic history lesson. Modern-day romantics turn unwittingly to ancient powers, Greece and Rome, for inspiration. To do so is to enter into the fall of empires and the archaeology of ruins. The English Patient prods us to consider what we can make of the past. We can live epic lives devoted to imitations of grandiosity, but run the risk of imitating tragedy. We can also move forward as Kip does, taking risks to save others, uncertain as to what lies ahead. Kip's landscape is literally mined, ready to explode: the past is a series of invisible bombs, set to go off. He also has enough knowledge to prevent destruction, at least some of the time. Yet the agony of his position is that his mechanical expertise is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the age of nuclear war. Still, we are to honor his altruism. One of the novel's retrospective gestures is to tell a story that has not been told before, whether by Homer or Herodotus or latter-day poets and historians. Ondaatje includes a snippet of historical narrative to make his point: "This was the Heroic Age of bomb disposal. . . . It was, however, a Heroic Age whose protagonists remained obscure, since their actions were kept from the public for reasons of security . . . ." In his dream-like, fragmentary collection of memories, Ondaatje has invented a story for those who have remained, heretofore, in the shadows. Ishiguro and Ondaatje have written novels that chart the end of the British Empire as symbolized by characters who fail. Stevens, the overly-obedient butler, the romantic adventurers in the desert blinded by egotism: these individuals live for an ideal shown to be not only obsolete, but harmful. The novels are also seductively melancholy, lyrical and elegiac; the Booker Prize has recognized works that lure readers with a slightly wistful, if still critical, farewell. Yet as Ondaatje's novel so pointedly makes clear, this is not just an end, it is also a beginning. We can look back to the period of World War II as the waning of the Empire, the victory of the Allies, the invention of nuclear warfare. To see it as all three, and more, is to wrestle with the dimensions of the contemporary. Midnight's Children looks back to the same time period, but, taking place on another continent, it pivots around August 15, 1947, the date of India's independence from British rule. Salman Rushdie's immense, exuberant novel (winner of the 25th-anniversary Booker of Bookers) is narrated by Saleem Sinai, who sees himself as, alternately, historian, prophet and liar. Born at the precise moment of India's independence, he announces that he is "handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country." Posing as historical allegory and rife with political details, the novel also tells its readers to be skeptical. Saleem is remembering his past, and telling a historical tale, but, as Rushdie himself has written of this novel, "one of the simplest truths about any set of memories is that many of them will be false" ("'Errata': Or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight's Children"). We are warned, as it were, that retrospection is fantastically imaginative. Pausing here and there throughout the story, Saleem addresses the reader with playful and wonderfully neurotic musings on the making of fiction and the telling of history. His metaphor: pickling. This is straightforward, hit-you-over-the-head symbolism, and it works. Why not include, indeed, structure the whole novel around, interludes that take us right to the deadweight heart of remembering? After all, memory is stimulated by intense smells and tastes. The pickling episodes, and his narrator's sensitive nose, are to Rushdie what the madeleine was to Proust. From the novel's beginning, when Saleem's grandfather kneels down to pray, hits his nose, and the nosebleed becomes the drip drop of genuine rubies and diamonds, we enter that realm where what happens to the body is allowed to be fanstastic. Breaking out of strict codes of realism, Rushdie creates a view very adult in its detailed attention to politics and finance and simultaneously childlike in its perceptions of physical delights and terrors. When noses run in this novel, they don't just drip: they pour ("from my nose there flowed a shining cascade of goo"). "Midnight's children" are endowed with magical powers, such as telepathy, which derive from the accident of their birthdate, their condition of being "handcuffed to history." In exchange for checking our restraint at the door, we are treated to the delights of a playful author's indulgence in such excess. Or is such surrealism really a journey into the truth of matters? The fantastical world of the child's imagination is no less genuine than what we call the sober realities of history and politics. Rushdie is interested in the power of language to shape the world, so he sets his country's past side by side with Saleem's remembrance of the wide-eyed adventures and huge egotism of childhood ("'I am the bomb in Bombay . . .watch me explode!'" says Saleem; "the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world"). Puns and wordplay carry tremendous energies. The novel constantly makes us aware of how much language shapes perception. Rushdie's own language is suffused with the energies of slogans and commodities. He appreciates exposure to the meshes of the modern marketplace, with its bustling molecules of imagery colliding to produce unexpected juxtapositions and fusions. Midnight's children go to the movies: "'Swashbuckling!' we'd say to one another afterwards, playing movie critic; and 'A rumbustious, bawdy romp!'-although we were ignorant of swashbuckles and bawdiness." Language creates experience, not the other way around: Rushdie's novel is a tribute to this gift. He knows, perhaps more than most, how dangerous this gift can be. In February of 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a death sentence, on Rushdie in response to The Satanic Verses, giving prophetic resonance to Rushdie's words in his essay "Outside the Whale": "we are all irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and politics." Rushdie's novel does not exclude children from that "we." The terrors and wonders of non-innocent childhood take center stage in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Like Rushdie, Roy asks us to explore the territory of childhood perceptions and the intensity of words at that stage when one's manipulations of language seem like the most powerful (if not the only) way to make the world. The story of a pair of twins, now in their 30s, the novel takes us back to their early years in the southern Indian state of Kerala, eventually uncovering the mysteries of their present sadness. The novel is a bit of a detective story with a complex, non-chronological narrative order for which Roy has been compared with Faulkner. More striking, however, is its lavish attention to the children's world of intense emotions, adversarial adults, perplexing and cruel rules, contrasting tastes of joy. Intensely perceptive and intelligent, the twins are constantly deciphering the foreign language of adults, inventively renaming people and things, and showing themselves to be ardent and utterly vulnerable artists. They are constantly quoting and misquoting, speaking both Malayalam, Kerala's local language, and English. Among their sources: Heart of Darkness, Dickens, the Oxford English Dictionary, Shakespeare, Kipling, Elvis Presley, and, most often, The Sound of Music. In the form of musical lyrics (and go-go boots), 1960s pop culture infuses the world of the twins with a kind of bright non-referential whimsy; where such items come from matters less than their free-floating availability as props in the made-up world of children. What lies in allusion? From the child's point of view, The Sound of Music allows one to identify with the most disobedient character, Maria, the wayward nun. Disobedience is the key to the appeal of the young twins, especially the girl twin, Rahel, whose consciousness is central. When asked by her mother to greet people at the airport, she refuses to be polite. Instead, she wraps herself in a curtain and refuses to emerge. She is willful and stubborn; one feels that, though she is punished by the fear that her disobedience will cause her to lose love, in the long run she will be well served by her independence in the game of survival and the protection of her soul. The God of Small Things (who is also named in the novel The God of Loss) presides over the small twins. What does disobedience have to do with retrospection? Roy's novel suggests that the past contains potent energies - such as a child's rebelliousness. That is an energy, along with their mother's unlawful passion (one of the secrets the novel eventually reveals), that temporarily eludes the violent force of the state. The novel, reveling in codes and word play, spells it out: Politeness, Obedience, Loyalty, Intelligence, Courtesy, Efficiency. Through Rahel in particular, Roy's novel celebrates and mourns the vital subversiveness of childhood. It acknowledges that violence gets covered up. It makes the journey to the past the discovery of creativity itself, both exhilarating and terrifying. Most of Roy's novel takes place about 30 years ago, in 1969. It is a period reverberating with Marxist marches and war with China. Though Roy has often been compared to Faulkner, Dickens, and Joyce for her narrative experimentation and challenging style, I have yet to see her compared to George Eliot. The one seems exotic and modern, after all; the other, as staid and Victorian as can be. Yet both The God of Small Things and Middlemarch take their readers back thirty years or so, to an era of tumultuous change (isn't this how we think of the '60s?) and a provincial place removed from center stage which nonetheless registers shock waves of international political conflict and modernization. And both authors, in looking back, tell stories of passionate, rebellious women who break the rules and pay for it. Their triumph lingers along with their suffering. Across the river from where the twins live is a place they call the History House. Though they are told consoling stories of an ancient Earth Woman to whom contemporary history ("the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge") is just the blink of an eye, they are more fascinated by the History House, which Roy describes as "so much closer to hand." It lingers: "They smelled its smell and never forgot it. History's smell. Like old roses on a breeze. It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colors. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness of eyes." In Roy's novel, the History House is a dangerous place. It lures the twins towards a fearsome yet necessary knowledge. To know contemporary history, Roy tells us, is to recognize the traumas behind silences and stares. The 19th century's faith in history's redemptive power is shaken now. Like Eliot, the contemporary novelists under discussion work in a narrative mode that makes the past inescapable. Absent, however, is the underlying promise that history involves the progress of Spirit embodied in the state. Much of the historical allegory of Midnight's Children, for example, is concerned with the problem of Partition. Saleem Sinai dreams repeatedly about Kashmir, in images of "mountains like angry jaws," and his story ends with the dark statement that midnight's children, both masters and victims of their times, are unable to live or die in peace. The ending of Ondaatje's novel dwells on the inexorable separation of Kip and Hana, two healers once in love with each other. And Ishiguro's narrator sits apart from the crowd at the end of his story, wondering if, at this late age, he might learn how to banter, talk to his master, and thus join in the new democratic order of things. In all these retrospective novels, the journey to the past is not necessarily the unification of the individual and the collective, or at least not unproblematically so. Each one offers the knowledge that joining in history comes at the cost of violence and war. This awareness - perhaps that which defines the 20th century's historical consciousness, less optimistically than the 19th century's - is something the Booker Prize has brought onto the stage of literary celebrity. |
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