| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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However, as the narration of Midnight’s Children also makes clear, the individual has a large impact on the landscape around him, questioning its reality, interrogating the certainty of its wholeness.
As well as focusing on the notion of the colonial subject, the three post-colonial writers under examination also bring into question the notion of “country,” “homeland,” and “nation”—all of which are explicitly linked in these novels to a concept of “landscape” (whether physical or imaginary). It is not simply the case that such landscapes make the man, and that man is entirely dependent on the cultural edifice that is represented by a landscape or the notion of a “national” culture. The individual subjectivity also has a part to play in the construction of the landscape and the nation. This, of course, is one of the central tenets of literary theory, one of which main aims is the dislocation (and, therefore, demystification) of the notion of any kind of set geographical landscape and conception of the nation or national culture as a stable and given reality. As Benedict Anderson points out in his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism , the nation is not a simple and incontrovertible given. Rather, “it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”9 It is simply the imagined nature of the national body—the very fact that it is a creation from a subjective community—that makes it appear as though it were a sovereign structure, free from any creative process and a static reality. Therefore, when we speak of a subjectivity that is created by the social roles that it performs and the place of these social roles in a notion of nationality, ethnicity, or culture, it must be made quite clear that not one of these constructions is, in itself a static base. What the three novelists show again and again is the ability of their characters to subjectively transform the landscapes of which they are a part.
V. S. Naipaul’s narrator in The Enigma of Arrival looks across the country scene of his newly acquired home of England (as well as remembering the landscape of his native Trinidad) and says, “Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself.