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

This multiplying of literary tradition (perhaps syncretising rather than hybridising?) is an advance on thinking of all novels or all novels in English as willy-nilly being shackled to the great Literary Chain of Being, but it does not do away with the comparative judgement of relative positioning determined by canonical figures and their work.

Helen Tiffin attempts a rejection of Leavisite Anglocentrism by moving away from an evaluative criticism in which novelty is ranked according to its acceptability in terms of a canonical status quo (Fenimore Cooper as the American Scott, Narayan as the Indian Jane Austen). She turns to a descriptive and contextualised “sociological” criticism informed by history, in which comparison is based on similar textual function rather than some unspoken code of aesthetics founded on one class and culture (“Commonwealth Literature: Comparison and Judgment”). Stephen Slemon reassesses allegory, read previously as “handcuffed to history” insofar as the surface story is “read off ” against a preexisting set of principles or a particular narrative. Rather than a Third World literature being condemned to forever allegorising its own national formation (à la Fredric Jameson or Shashi Tharoor’s Great Indian Novel), Slemon sees postcolonial texts to be turning allegory around, so that the surface, fiction reveals the constructedness of its pre/text (“Postcolonial Allegory”). In this model, history only has meaning in terms of its relevance to the present; it can be reconstructed to serve other purposes than those originally intended. Bill Ashcroft later asks why postcolonial writers are constantly reimagining history and concludes that “[w]hatever the particular way in which [universalised, globalising] History dominates the local, it is fictional narrative which provides the most flexible and evocative response, principally because fiction is best able to reproduce the fundamentally allegorical nature of history itself ” (Ashcroft, “A Prophetic Vision of the Past” 228). While I do not altogether agree with his reading of The Great Indian Novel, Ashcroft’s use of Bhabha’s “transparency”—in which myth overlays history, but historical features remain visible through the screen—is a productive figure for thinking about this allegorical interaction of fiction and history.