BOOK REVIEWS 305

Afler Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. By Michael Gorra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1997.

It is a rare and welcome occasion to come across a book as readable and intel­ ligent as Michael Gorra's Afler Empire. Gorra unfolds his readings of the major works of Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and in a leisurely, acces­ sible manner, relatively free of the jargon and inflationary rhetoric so common in studies of . And despite this accessibility, Gorra does not sacrifice intellectual rigor or theoretical sophistication. After Empire examines Scott, Naipaul, and Rushdie principally to explicate how their work contributes to our understanding of postcolonial identity. Their novels are populated by a variety of hybrid figures, displaced persons, and "mimic men," notably Scott's Hari Kumar, the Macauleyesque "Indian English­ man"; Naipaul's Salim and Mr. Biswas; and Rushdie's Saleem and Saladin Chamcha. They are all, of course, emblematic figures of the postcolonial world, and their trials reflect the difficulties of that world, particularly when confronting the fantasy of ethnic homogeneity still clung to by those in the metropole. Such heterogeneous figures, Gorra suggests, defY the essentialized identity categories established by colonial culture. Gorra's selection of subjects is challenging because Scott, Naipaul, and Rush­ die have notoriously conflicting perspectives on postcoloniality. Rushdie, for example, has criticized Scott for having focused principally on the experience of the British in India and Naipaul for the self-loathing often attributed to his critical representations of Third World countries. Naipaul, on the other hand, has accused the postmodern/postcolonial aesthetic dependence on fantasy, typical of Rushdie's fiction, as a way of dodging the political realities of the postcolonial world. Gorra's aim is in part to mediate such disputes. His first main chapter---on Scott's Rqf Qyartet-for example, argues that Scott doesn't present an Orientalist portrait of India but an analysis of how the British defined a mythically homo­ geneous English identity in opposition to the subcontinent's "foreignness." Scott further portrays both how every insular British citizen was collusive in India's subjugation and how the British were responsible for what Gorra calls the "enormous balls-up of the demission of power" (30), which lead to communal massacres and partition. For Gorra, also, Scott's portrait of Hari Kumar makes The Jewel in the Crown the first antiessentialist account of national identity in modern British literature. The subsequent chapters on Naipaul and Rushdie demonstrate how they communicate similar ideas albeit through radically different styles. The chapter on Naipaul is the segment of this book probably bound to be of most interest. Gorra attempts in a limited fashion to defend Naipaul from those critics, Rushdie among them, who perceive him as the "white man's brown man." Naipaul, of course, is often criticized for having reproduced Orientalist views of developing countries and their peoples. Gorra recognizes

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Naipaul's shortcomings: his failure to credit the Caribbean with having shaped a culture of worth, and his participation in the kind of "Mricanist discourse," which fails to recognize the diversity of Mrica's many cultures and equates the continent as a whole with darkness and blankness. But Naipaul, Gorra argues, limits himself to the perceptions of his characters "to suggest how little the world that colonialism has left behind has to do with [Mrica] as such" (103). In its own way, Naipaul's work shows that there is no way to escape from or fully break with one's past-the colonial influence is inescapable; however, a certain amount of colonial mimicry is inevitable, although for Naipaul, unlike Rushdie, this mimicry cannot be a form of resistance. At times I found myself questioning to what extent Gorra believes his own defense of Naipaul. In his discussion of A Bend in the River, Gorra attributes a kind of doubly ironic register to Salim's naive nostalgia for a more peaceful colonial past, but just a page later backs away from this position, stating that we can't be sure we shouldn't take it literally. Such ambiguities, however, are perhaps necessary to how we view Naipaul, a writer whose experience, after all, has been of profound ambivalences. Gorra suggests that the complex and seemingly contradictory aspects of Naipaul's writing are a product of a nostalgic longing for a lost "pure time" which Naipaul nevertheless knows never existed. The discussion of Rushdie rehearses some of the by now familiar under­ standings of that writer's work: that we live in a world where metaphor can be as "real" or more "real" than literal reality; that individual identity is made up of a series of impersonations; and that Indian identity in particular (or post­ colonial identity in general) is hybrid, heterogeneous, or multiple. The more interesting element of these observations is the connection Gorra carefully draws between Rushdie's sprawling, inventive use of language and this hybrid iden­ tity. Rushdie, he argues, transforms traditional, standard English to both reflect the conflict between colony and metropolis and challenge the myth of the "goodness" of cultural purity and authenticity. Gorra is less enthusiastic, however, about Rushdie's stylistic reliance on the conventions of fantasy, the picaresque, and magic realism, preferring the more realist styles of Scott and Naipaul which he believes are truer to the serious­ ness of their subject matter. I cannot agree, however, with his implication that the fantastical material of Rushdie's work (as well as that of Marquez and oth­ ers) either distances us from the horror of what is being described or detracts from its political impact. Gorra does note that Rushdie dispels his illusions to make us think critically, but remains suspicious that such a book cannot make him care about "the individual characters to whom that history happens" (147). But in Midnight's Children, when Saleem's home and family are destroyed dur­ ing the Indo-Pakistani war, I find it an emotionally crushing moment. It is sim­ ilarly moving when he and the other children are captured and surgically deprived of their magical gifts, and in both instances the political critique of totalitarianism is evident. True, the fate of Rushdie's characters are often car­ toonish, as Gorra claims, but perhaps the cartoon is the signature genre of our times: Like Wild E. Coyote, we seem doomed always to repeat past mistakes.