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

One thing that has emerged from my readings in and around critical responses to this literature is the strange correlation between them and the work of Deleuze, especially as he theorises about the fold. Rather than an inside and outside of national literature in which some are desi and some are not, this concept of being folded into a surface that has no real inside or outside seems a useful way to relate any regional language writing to the collective cloth that is the national culture.

The sometimes extraordinary correspondences between Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz and the Baroque and possible readings of the “new wave” of Indian English writing further allows us to think about what distinguishes a particularly postcolonial version of the Baroque, and whether reading Allan Sealy (for example) via Leibniz permits a rethinking of literary history in ways that empower postcolonial newness and difference without succumbing to the kind of global hybridity that Tabish Khair finds characterises Rushdie’s writing as a symptom of cosmopolitan alienation or simplified avoidance of real historical cultural struggle (86–87).

The disruption of the Great Chain of Being (the seamless, divinely ordered universe) that was a perhaps unintended effect of Baroque thought was, as Deleuze recognises, accompanied by a desperate attempt to provide for a Law beyond and through the bewildering variety of mundane phenomena. God is allowed to play tricks, “but he also furnishes the rules of the game” (Deleuze, The Fold 63). Postcolonial writing—at least if we take these Baroque samples of it—is both more aware of the game of power that underlies apparent chance, and simultaneously more open to chance as a necessary part of living with the absurdities and complexities of colonial history. Both the Baroque and the postcolonial see the world as “overflowing its frame” and resort to allegory as a means of allowing such proliferating diversity while gesturing at least towards a framing order outside of the text. Deleuze sees that allegory, in this mode, “uncovers nature as history according to the order of time. It produces a history from nature and transforms history into nature in a world that no longer has its centre” (Deleuze, The Fold 125). This sounds a lot like Stephen Slemon’s claims for allegory as a disruptive mode of postcolonial textuality.