Postcolonial Literary History and Indian English Fiction By Paul ...

This, to me, suggests something quite different. Instead of the Norton Anthology of English Literature remaining the “gold standard” as it reproduces itself in ever more hyphenated subsets of literary currency (of American Literature, Black American Literature, Women’s American Literature, Black Women’s American Literature, etc.), the literary histories of different cultural sets can have their own configurations in which similar patterns may be detected, but do not imply necessary filiations to prior authority.

Helen Tiffin—in her quest for a theory of literary value that escapes a canonical pretence of pure, self-evident aesthetic merit, free of historical taint (and the idea of a critical priesthood of gentlefolk and professionals who have to be initiated into the mysteries of Art to detect such self-evident values)—moves to descriptive sociology as a more appropriate model for postcolonial critical placement of texts. She also adopts a model of analogies from biological science—this text has the function of a foot, but it is a horse’s foot and is structurally different from a human foot (“Commonwealth Literature” 30). Her line of thought is taken up by Deleuze, following Leibniz’s differential calculus:

‘In the context of literary history, doing away with evolutionary models may be a practical impossibility (the cultural capital permeating book reviewing, publishing, and the consumption of texts suggests that discourses of arrival and fulfilment underpinning ascription of value to new work will not easily disappear). However, until there is some kind of theoretical model breaking down time and history as a validating preexisting universal, such practices certainly will continue to have a prejudicial effect on the literary judgements that go with constructions of literary histories.

While its parodic allegory and epic scope implies both a prior authority and a totalising reach—more so than the more disorderly and intertextually irreverent work of Rushdie and Sealy—Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel concludes by confessing error and starting again.