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MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY RECONSIDERING PAUL SCOTT’S THE RAJ QUARTET: HISTORY, GENRE, AND CRITICISM A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY OF MIDDLE TENNESSE STATE UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY WILSON W. ONSTOTT MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE MAY 2014 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, this project would not have been possible without the mentoring and guidance of Dr. Robert Petersen. He has been a source of support and inspiration throughout this lengthy process. He has graciously donated countless hours of his time to this project, and I owe him a debt that I fear I shall never be able to fully repay. I would also like to thank Dr. James Comas for his thorough and consistent direction throughout the drafting and editing of this dissertation. Additionally, I must thank Dr. Jill Hague for her interest and involvement as a committee member; she has been instrumental to this work’s completion. Furthermore, Dr. Allen Hibbard brought a substantial amount of insight to this project, and his recommendations for research helped to shape its form and direction. Moreover, I cannot adequately express my gratitude to all of the committee members for their extensive commentary, instruction, and support. Over the course of writing and researching this dissertation, I have become indebted to a great number of other individuals at MTSU, and I am tremendously grateful for all of the guidance that I have received along the way. I am thankful for the all of the assistance that I have received from the English Department at MTSU. I would like to thank the Department Chair, Dr. Tom Strawman, the Graduate Studies Directory, Dr. David Lavery, the former Graduate Studies Director, Dr. Kevin Donovan, and all of the other professors who have mentored me throughout my time here. I would also like to thank my family for their overwhelming support over the course of my education. My father and mother, Tom and Mary Dudley Onstott, and my grandfather, Edwin Bryant, have been thoroughly patient throughout this process, and I i am profoundly thankful for the love and personal assurance that they have provided throughout my life. Finally, I must thank my wife Kristen. She has been a constant source of stability over the duration of my doctoral program; with love and friendship, she has helped me through many difficult and stressful periods. ii ABSTRACT This study examines conceptions of history, race, and colonial culture in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet (1966-75), and via comparative textual analysis, advances a critical reconsideration of Scott’s unique contribution to the coevolution of British and postcolonial literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Following recent critical arguments that have criticized the blatant anti-colonial agenda currently discernible in various branches of postcolonial studies, this work challenges the commonly held critical notion that the Quartet exhibits nostalgia for empire and contests Scott’s proscriptive designation as either a neo-colonialist or an imperial apologist. Since its publication, critics have drawn parallels between the Quartet and the work of earlier writers of Anglo-Indian fiction, such as Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster. Unfavorable comparisons between the Quartet and earlier imperialist narratives intensified in the mid 1980s, after an adapted mini-series of the text aired on British television between 1984 and 1985. Notable postcolonial writer and critic Salman Rushdie published a scathing critique of both the film and the text, in which he characterizes the story as derivative and Scott’s vision of imperial history as myopic and crypto-racist. To a substantial degree, Rushdie’s influential essay has crystallized the current critical opinion of Scott’s work within postcolonial and British literary studies. This study dually addresses limited critical judgments of Scott and expands the scope of existing critical approaches to the text. Chapter I examines how the Quartet problematizes many of the traditional thematic motifs of earlier colonial fictions and demonstrates how the text destabilizes the imperial mythos that informed the writings of iii Kipling and Forster. Chapter II analyzes Scott’s novel in light of recent studies that utilize Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the literary chronotope and delineates how Scott’s approach to the historical novel differentiates the Quartet from other mid-century sequence novels that also deal with the British Empire’s demise within the colonial sphere. Chapter III focuses on the transitional aspects of Scott’s writing in terms of the corresponding development of postcolonial sensibility and early postmodern stylistics displayed in the Quartet; this chapter also examines how the text’s revisionist attitude toward traditional methods of historiography anticipates the concerns of later twentieth- century British writers. Chapter IV provides an expanded postcolonial consideration of the Quartet, which involves a critical comparison between the text and the film, a response to Rushdie’s critique, and a comparison between the Quartet and Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), which explores their similar approaches to historical representation. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I WRITING IN THE WAKE OF EMPIRE: SCOTT, KIPLING, FORSTER....................17 CHAPTER II THE LONG GOODBYE: CONSTRUCTING TIME, SPACE, HISTORY, AND THE SEQUENCE NOVEL AT MID-CENTURY..................................................................65 CHAPTER III REVISING THE PAST AND ANTICIPATING THE FUTURE: PAUL SCOTT AND POSTMODERNISM...................................................................................................127 CHAPTER IV REVIVING THE RAJ QUARTET: CINEMATIC MISAPPROPRIATION AND THE SHARED POSTCOLONIAL VISION OF PAUL SCOTT AND SALMAN RUSHDIE ....................................................................................................................................182 CONCLUSION...........................................................................................................210 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................219 v 1 INTRODUCTION Paul Scott’s large-scale novel sequence, The Raj Quartet (1966-75), which examines the twilight years of British colonial rule in India, evinces a revelatory vision of imperial history and exposes a significant paradigm shift in British cultural consciousness; the four novels not only indicate a transition from colonialist to post- colonial modes of thought and representation, but they also crystallize the initial mid- century skepticism of earlier narratives of empire and address many of the fundamental concerns that presently dominate postcolonial studies. From its inception, The Raj Quartet has been compared to the work of earlier writers such as Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster, and as a consequence, it is frequently characterized as a derivative text— the thematic coda of an outdated mode of colonialist writing. Indeed, the introduction to the latest edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After (2006) iterates this sentiment with its singular mention of the work as “nostalgia for old imperial days” (Stallworthy and Ramazani 1841). In wake of the postcolonial explosion in the second half of the twentieth century, literary critical expositions by theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha have tended to focus on either the earlier voices that established the Orientalist discourse of European imperial dominance, such as Kipling and Forster, or on voices of the formerly colonized, such as Chinua Achebe, Jean Rhys, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie. Within critical models that adopt a rigid approach to generic categorization, Scott’s work does not easily align with increasingly intransigent labels like “colonialist,” “neo-colonial,” or “postcolonial,” and, therefore, he maintains a 2 peripheral position in postcolonial literary studies, with the result that postcolonial critics have largely ignored the Quartet. Furthermore, a number of recent critical assessments that explore the Quartet from a postcolonial perspective do so from positions that impose various anti-colonial agendas on the text, thereby enforcing proscriptive generic categorization. Consequently, Scott’s inaccurate reputation as a late imperial apologist has put him at risk of falling into the critical shadows. In the introduction to his 1998 book, Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet: History and Division, Peter Childs provides an insightful survey of the various critical readings of Scott’s Quartet: Critical views on Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet have varied enormously. Edward Said uses the epithet “great” and M. M. Mahood describes it as “an imaginative creation of Tolstoyan breadth and depth,” while William Walsh decides it is “not an authentic literary experience of a particularly significant kind.” The British historian Antony Copley argues that the Quartet is “quite possibly the best novel we are likely to get on the whole mixed sad tale of decolonization,” while the Sri Lankan writer, Tarzie Vittachi, believes that Scott did for India what “Dostoevsky did for the Russia of his time, and Gabriel García Márquez for the Andes of his.” The only consensus to be found reflects Margaret