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The “situated” or contextualised reading of fiction that postcolonial critics have insisted on has certainly led to a relativised conception of literary history and critical value, but it has not produced a solid theoretical basis for moving beyond a model that tacitly leaves some yardstick as the determining priority of literary judgement. We can, for example, allow into the field of literary worth a Vincent Eri or an Amos Tutuola (as pioneering writers from Papua New Guinea and Nigeria, respectively) if we see, thanks to Vico and Taine, a pattern in their work that is different from the well-crafted nineteenth-century novel on which most contemporary criticism is founded. We can suggest that such works are to be placed in a similar position on their own literary timelines to that of Chaucer (cultural syncretiser, polyglot experimenter, transitional scribe of the oral) in British literary history. Such a placement, however, carries with it the assumption of a governing model of textual development, and leaves the English canon installed as the universal Greenwich Meridian marker of literary judgement. History operates here as a given, prior to and determining cultural difference.
The fictions of Heracletian flux and ongoing self-correction such as Sealy, Rushdie, and Desani create open up the possibility of our conceiving a relationship between history and culture that is more of a two-way dynamic. The echoes of Leibniz draw us to consider a model of history itself that goes beyond a relativised centre-periphery set of developmental timelines. As Deleuze has it, “Leibniz in no way reintroduces a duality that would turn our relative world into the reflection of a more profound, absolute world: to the contrary, he turns our relative world into the only existing world” (The Fold 60). Order occurs within sets of terms, but these are part of “a calculus of infinite series ruled by convergences and divergences”; each series may connect with another, but they “are not convergent, in other words, they do not pass through common values” (61).