Translation, the Hoax, and the Postcolonial Novel in a Global Age

By

Christopher Robert Holmes

B.A., Bates College, 1996

M.A.T., Brown University, 2000

M.A., Middlebury College, 2005

Dissertation

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2012

© Copyright 2011 Christopher R. Holmes

C.V. Christopher Robert Holmes Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 18, 1974.

Education Ph.D Brown University, Department of Literatures and Cultures in English, 2011 M.A. Middlebury College, Bread Loaf School of English, 2005 M.A.T Brown University, Department of Education, 2000 B.A. Bates College, East Asian Languages and Literatures, cum laude, 1996

Publications 2011. “What the World Leaves Behind: Ready-Made Translations and the Closed Book in the Postcolonial Novel.” Literature, Translation, and Geography: The New Comparative Horizons. Ed. Stefan Helgesson. New York: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Teaching Experience Teaching Fellow, Brown University, Department of English Prizing the Postcolonial (British/Anglophone Literature, 1969-present), Spring 2008 Critical Reading and Writing: The Academic Essay, Fall 2007

Instructor, Brown University, Summer Studies Program “Putting Ideas into Words” (Composition), Summer 2006, 2009 “The Essay” (Composition), Summer 2007

Teaching Assistant, Brown University, Department of English “The Rise of Realism in American Fiction.” Professor Stuart Burrows, Fall 2010 “Writing War.” Professor Ravit Reichman, Spring 2006, 2011 “Modern Fiction and Photography.” Professor Stuart Burrows, Fall 2006

Honors and Fellowships The President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, Brown University, 2010-2011 Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, University of Witwatersrand, July 2011 Edward T. and Theckla Jones Brackett Fellowship, Brown University, 2009-2010 Mellon Graduate Workshop Fellowship, Brown University, 2009-2010 Roland G. D. Richardson Fellowship, Brown University, 2008-2009 Summer Fellowship, Brown University, 2006-2008 University Fellowship, Brown University, 2005

iv Acknowledgements

This dissertation came to me as a surprise. A trip to Uppsala, Sweden in June of 2008 for a conference entitled “Literature, Geography, and Translation: The New Comparative

Horizons” brought to first bloom the seeds of this project. My initial interest had been in pursuing a dissertation on the influence of poststructuralism on style in the postcolonial novel. The initial steps towards a stylistic analysis of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly

Gang left me feeling like there was an ineffable event of style that was impossible to pinpoint in the rhetorical tropes and syntactical flourishes I was so interested in investigating.

Were it not for the valuable insights on my Carey work by participants in the

Uppsala conference, I would have pursued a large-scale work that would have left me unsatisfied. I was lucky enough to find two interlocutors in Sweden who continue to be sounding boards for the dissertation on translation, and all my subsequent work on postcolonial and world literature. To Stefan Helgesson and Ania Spyra, I owe a great debt for the generosity with which they advised me, and continue to shape my work, even from a far.

Completed dissertations never happen in a vacuum. While the writing often happens alone, the revision and rewriting happened for me in the company of a collegial and supportive grad school cohort at Brown University. In that nurturing environment, I found friends and co-conspirators who joined me at the latest and earliest hours at the Rock, the

RISD library, the Sci Li, and endless coffee shops around Providence and Boston. In particular, the members of my dissertation writing groups were a constant source of humor and deft criticism at the prickliest moments of my writing process. Corey McEleneyDaniel

Block, Wendy Lee, Sarah Osment, Stephanie Tilden, and Magali Armillas-Tiseyra shared so

v much of their own work over the course of these past six years, and you will find evidence of their fingerprints and marginalia, even under erasure, on every page of this project.

Khristina Gonzalez and I had the rather madcap idea of throwing in a application for a Mellon Graduate Workshop Fellowship in 2009-10, and to our utter surprise and consternation, we were awarded the Fellowship for a seminar entitled, “The Politics Form:

Practices of Misreading.” Together we forged a pretty wonderful year of seminars and invited speakers despite our total lack of experience in any such venture. Our invited plenary speakers exceeded our every expectation, and Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers) and Jacques

Lezra (NYU) capped off what was a seminal moment in my graduate career. The final project drew on the wealth of Brown’s graduate and faculty scholarship to drive our own projects, and I learned from that micro-example what a faculty committee could be at its best.

I relied so regularly on the consul of friends at Brown that there are too many to mention here. I will say that my days of writing with Rebecca Summerhays, Laurel Rayburn,

Wendy Lee, and Sarah Osment were some of the finest hours in an often-overwhelming six years. I thank them for long line of conversations that made my thinking clearer and my life infinitely more satisfying. And of course, my two brilliant classmates, Corey McEleney and

Jay Zysk, were a constant source of support and friendship. Without the hours of readings, debates, theory groups, and social times away from the work, there would be no dissertation, only resignation.

To my committee, I offer my most sincere thanks for everything they have done for me. To Ravit Reichman for modeling such extraordinary teaching, and reading my work with such an elegant eye for argument, and her infinite catalogue of Modernist theory, always on the tip of her tongue; to Paul Armstrong who cuts through the most opaque theory with a

vi clear mind and great sense of the important moments in what and how we read; to Rey

Chow and her ability to ask the biggest, hardest, and most important questions of my work and to consul me on life as a academic; and to Olakunle George who shaped this project at every turn, and who taught me that literature always speaks back to theory, and often with more to say, it was his stewardship of my writing that helped me grow the most, even when others doubted me that I will remember and treasure; to each, all my thanks and my gratitude. May I someday return some of these debts.

vii Table of Contents

Vita iv

Acknowledgments v

Introduction: Translation in the Age of Obama 1

Chapter 1: What the World Leaves Behind 21

Chapter 2: The Afterlife of Forgery 69

Chapter 3: Turning Japanese 122

Chapter 4: With His Back to Africa 182

Epilogue: The Novel Without Translation 246

Bibliography 252

viii Translation, the Hoax, and the Postcolonial Novel in a Global Age: Introduction

President Mau Mau: Translation in the Age of Obama

En route to what would become one of the more embarrassing openings of a presidential campaign in US history, Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House during the Clinton administration, offered some historical context for the presidency of Barack

1 Obama. Barack Obama’s candidacy and subsequent first term as president had, for

Gingrich, been one of the great con jobs of American history:

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich asked. "That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior." “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich added. “I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was 2 true,” Gingrich continues… “He was authentically dishonest.” (2010)

Gingrich explains that by sheer cunning and forgery Obama had convinced voters in the

United States that he shared their cultural traditions and values, all the while envisioning a world as only a Kenyan resisting British imperialism could. How did Gingrich come to this astonishing conclusion? According to his logic—a logic that proves less marginalized than one would hope—he simply read history through just the right lens, and found a historical

1 Grier, Peter. 2011. “Is Newt Gingrich’s Presidential Campaign the Worst Ever?” Christian Science Monitor Online. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2011/0610/Is-Newt-Gingrich-s-presidential- campaign-the-worst-ever 2 Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/12/gingrich-obama-kenyan- worldview_n_713686.html Gingrich was expanding on comments made by the conservative public intellectual Dinesh D’Souza in a special issue of Forbes magazine devoted to “How Obama Thinks.” D’Souza referred to Obama as the “last anticolonial” in a historical moment where colonialism is dead. Dinesh D'Souza, 09.09.10, 05:40 PM EDT Forbes Magazine. September 27, 2010

1 context through which to translate Obama into our Mau Mau president.3

I’ve reproduced Gingrich’s fallacious argument in order to lay the groundwork for a theory of cultural translation that requires precisely this kind of con job. I’m not, of course, referring to Obama’s success as a political figure as a con, but rather to Gingrich’s hoax of essentializing identity and cultural knowledge as a particular lens through which the world is understood. There are two acts of reading here. One that describes Gingrich’s context for understanding Obama’s worldview: a translation from Kenya. The other describes reading translation according to absolutes of origin whereby Obama is Kenya. The predicament of the latter shares the anxiety that Rey Chow notably described in the Western scholar discovering “the discomfiting fact that the natives are no longer staying in their frames”

(1994, 28).4

To take Gingrich at his word would be to assume that Obama has taken the presidency in order to delegitimize the United States and more generally the West’s cultural and political power in the world. Taking the content of Gingrich’s commentary seriously would be to indulge in a racist fantasy that rejects an African-American president on the basis of his father’s Kenyan nationality, on the grounds that having a parent who was born elsewhere deprives you of the cultural knowledge needed to see the world as an American.

Any response at all unwittingly legitimizes the notion of a purely American cultural knowledge to which only the natural-born have access. Gingrich’s mêlée merely repackages the argument over Obama’s birth certificate in quasi-historical language, and then trots it out

3 Gingrich was not alone in raising the possibility of a Mau Mau world-view guiding the president’s actions in the White House. Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee argued that having been raised in Kenya (this is, of course, patently a falsehood) made Obama see the Kikuyu uprising against the British as rebellion rather than terrorism: “his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather” (2011). Walsh, Joan. 2011. “Mike Huckabee’s Mau Mau Fantasies,” Salon.com. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2011/03/02/mike_huckabee_mau_mau_fantasies 4 Chow, Rey. 1994. Writing Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

2 as an academic thesis on the illegitimacy of his presidency. Instead, let us interrogate the logic of origins at work here in order that we might have a instructive example of the kinds of cultural translation that have engaged postcolonial politics in the argument over how we characterize and locate certain texts and authors as world literature.

The logic of Gingrich’s reading of Obama rests, I believe, on the notion that one can be authentically dishonest, that one can produce a hoax from authentic materials. The con that Obama allegedly pulls off requires that he spend his life and career “working very hard” to doctor an American identity, or what Gingrich refers to as “being normal” and sharing the values of moderation, bipartisanship, and transparency. Leaving aside the fact that these criteria, strictly drawn, would disqualify nearly every member of congress (bipartisanship!), there is the perplexing notion that one might develop the appearance of transparency as a put-on or ruse.

Imagine this ruse of transparency for a moment as we might an art forgery. We could find an acceptable argument for an art forger having worked hard his entire life to copy and imitate the brush strokes, the style, and the sensibility of an artist of some renown, and in doing achieving a level of imitation nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. This type of forgery would not concern the copy of an existing work of art, the Mona Lisa for example, but a work offered as a newly discovered piece by the artist. Suppose this hoaxed work is then accepted as authentic, hung in a museum or perhaps a private home, and appreciated by many as a representative work of art by X renowned artist. If the forgery remains undiscovered, the fake work becomes part of the canon increasing the fame and audience for X artist. If the hoax is revealed, the art is considered worthless, a failed attempt to usurp the very essence of another artist’s identity. There is only shame for the forger and the death of the artwork.

3 Now change the terms of this hypothesis on forgery. Change art forger to translator and hoaxed-work to translation. The value judgments have changed. The translator who has toiled to adopt the style and sensibility of renowned author X is lauded for his faithfulness to the original. Not only does the translation broaden the geographic and cultural audience for the author’s work, it ensures the vitality of the individual work of art in another language.

Popular wisdom argues that the successful translation will read transparently, shielding the reader from the process of estranging the text from its original language, hiding away the

5 mechanisms required to draw meaning and sensibility across a great divide. Translator and author share the innocent dream of an unmediated conversation between the text and the reader carried through via the translation. Thus, translation operates according to the ruse of transparency, which necessarily obscures all traces of its original work.

Such is the grand con game at work in the translation—a hoax in which we are willing participants, trading one object of knowledge composed in a voice, style, and milieu dependent on a particular language for its existence, for another that claims fidelity to that voice, style, and milieu while abandoning the original language. The hoax of translation, however, requires none of the sustained cover-up of the art forgery, though the illusion of authenticity clings to the copy like the signature at the bottom of the painting. With every translation comes the assumption of change so fundamental that the audacity of the act comes not with the failure to be like the original, but with the very notion that there could be any similarity whatsoever. But Gingrich does not accuse Obama of failing to be faithful to

5 This is a purposefully naïve generalization that avoids decades of rich debate on the value of “foreignizing” translations so that the text retains the sensibility of a distance from its cultural and linguistic origins. Venuti and others have argued convincingly for keeping the original alive in translation, rather than “domesticating” the work wholesale for the particular cultural, historical, and linguistic needs of a reading public. The argument for foreignization of the translation is, in part, an anti-imperial argument against the possession and transformation of cultural knowledge. It is an argument that has reshaped the field of Translation Studies, and work with postcolonial literatures in translation. This rich Venuti, Lawrence. 1994. The Translator's Invisibility. New York and London: Routledge.

4 his origins. Quite the contrary, he argues that Obama is absolutely faithful to those origins, origins that require a certain kind of translation, and translator, in order to authenticate the

6 politics and policies of his presidency. Gingrich purposefully misreads translation by assuming that the translation (Obama) can be authenticated, located; he displaces the hoax of translation, for the hoax of origins.

If transparent origins are a problem for contemporary politics, they are equally so for literature, where issues of origin and destination are played out in the form and content of the postcolonial novel. I have taken up Gingrich’s misreading of translation—let’s call it by its name: a racist misreading—to illustrate a particular bind for the contemporary postcolonial novel in an age when literature is understood to think and act globally. Criticism of novels invested in postcolonial questions is too often guilty of the same essentialization of origins that we see with Gingrich—the belief that a primal cultural heritage determines one’s worldview, and that this heritage can be distilled into a legible whole if read correctly— though the implications and intentions in the two cases are qualitatively different.

When a review of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) finds the novel lacking because its expatriate Indian author narrates cultural knowledge that his characters should not know, we understand the claim of “falsity” to be an issue of how translation is

6 On the day of the 2008 presidential election, anticipation of the possibility of an Obama presidency was an international affair. In particular, cities in Indonesia and Kenya held widespread booster rallies and ultimately victory celebrations as news of Obama’s defeat of John McCain went viral. Obama’s two years of education in Indonesian schools and his Kenyan-born father seemed to make him a citizen of the world, capable of engendering vicarious celebration with places and cultures largely foreign to him. Here the New York Times reports on parallel voting in Obama’s father’s home town, and again there is the assertion of a translation-hoax at work: “Kisumu is the epicenter of Kenya’s Obamaland. It’s the area where Senator Barack Obama’s father was born. By Friday morning, people were already squeezed around TVs and in bars and holding up radios, listening to the news broadcasts about the American election, which had yet to even start…There was even some mock voting in Kisumu” (Nytimes.com 2008). There is no analogous claim of a fraudulent authenticity in these celebrations, but there is certainly the sense that Obama, though not a Kenyan citizen, can in some fashion speak to Kenyan society in a way that a candidate of different parentage might not be able to. Enacting a mock vote dramatizes the global response to a candidate who was perceived by many as a candidate of the world. Translation is performed in that mock vote. We know that the powerful symbolism of casting a vote in Obamaland does not carry a one-to-one relationship with a vote cast in the United States, but it nevertheless enacts the transformative process of translation, the hoax of claiming the original in the copy.

5 understood in the postcolonial novel. Such a critique places certain demands of authenticity on a work of imaginative fiction that happens to be set in an actual postcolonial locality.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s review makes the terms of his cultural critique stark, probing exactly what the novel claims to know, and how that knowledge is mediated and restricted by language: “It means having a character who cannot read Urdu, and certainly has no notion of

Persian, tell us that his favourite poets include Jalaluddin Rumi and Mirza Ghalib” (2008,

43).7 With an uncomfortable echo of Gingrich, he accuses Adiga of being “authentically dishonest,” of claiming knowledge about a particular locality in India, when his vantage on that locality is foreign.

The critique focuses on misbegotten cultural knowledge, in this case a poetic tradition with which the protagonist should not be familiar, and the limits of fictionality to engage historical reality. He appears to be responding, as well, to the awarding of the Man

Booker Prize which praised The White Tiger for offering us “a different aspect of India”; an

8 India implicitly legible outside the contexts of Hindi, Urdu, or even Persian. For

Subrahmanyam, Adiga’s novel was translated wrongly from the moment of its instantiation and the resulting reads the protagonist’s narrative as silence: “We can’t hear Balram Halwai’s voice here,” writes Subrahmanyam, “because the author seems to have no access to it” (43).

While not offering the same kind of vitriol, Subrahmanyam borrows some of

Gingrich’s logic, finding illegitimacy in the form of Adiga’s literary representation of the state

7 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2008. “Diary,” London Review of Books. Vol. 30. No. 21.6, November 2008. pps. 42-43. 8 Literary prizes, especially those which claim an international scope, pose a particular problem for the notion of cultural translatability. Rebecca Walkowitz details the eccentricity of W.G. Sebald’s life as a prize-winner, citing him both as an exception and the rule of the transnational author: “In 2001, Sebald published Austerlitz, for which he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States, the Foreign Fiction prize from the London Independent, and the Koret prize for Jewish literature, though Sebald was not Jewish; in addition, the novel was short-listed for the prestigious W.H. Smith literary prize, which in forty years of competition has never gone to a contemporary work composed in a language other than English” (2006, 1).

6 of modern urban India. The material locality is always-already overwriting Adiga’s imaginative geography from the moment he appears to drift outside the bounds of what literature is allowed to imagine. We find a corollary in the mistranslation of Obama, who for

Gingrich is always reading the world as an anti-colonial despite the guise of Americana with which he obscures his machinations. The substantive difference comes with change in discourse, political demagoguery in the case of Gingrich and the cultural relevancy of contemporary Indian literature, but the implications of both arguments are clear: translation is never innocent. Our ability as critics to confront the cultural and historical knowledge we claim in/from literature has implications on reading postcolonial novels in an age increasingly defined by globality. An untroubled relationship to translation is just as likely to reinscribe cultural domains along imperial lines in the name of worldliness, as it is to restrict the reading of postcolonial texts along perceived lines of national culture. This can be seen in the eagerness with which the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is discussed as having a

Japanese style, and in the frequency with which certain critics dismiss J.M. Coetzee’s South

African novels as “Eurocentric,” and foreign to the concerns of Africa.

For novelists engaging postcolonial territories in their work—arguably the status of most contemporary literature—the question of how cultural knowledge translates across borders and boundaries, languages and literatures, presents a number of pressing concerns for the project of canonizing a world literature. Primary among them, the anticipation of translation into a global network as a linguistic and cultural inevitability, in which certain

9 texts will necessarily travel more easily, or even, that some are “born” translated. Such a transparency of form and content—novels written, as Kazuo Ishiguro quipped in an

9 Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2007. “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 40(3), 216-239.

7 interview on translation, without the puns that might elude a Dane10—raise the specter of indebtedness, and dependence written along lines of imperial hegemony. Indeed, Graham

Huggan, Berthold Schoene and others have described the homogeneity of so-called

“exoticist aesthetics,” as “practically unavoidable” for the successful postcolonial writer

(Shoene 2011, 129; Huggan 2007). Increasingly, when approaching the form of the contemporary novel we find ourselves asking: Who or what is the global force for which we write, and what might be the stakes of such a profound influence on the shape of the literary text? For Peter Hitchcock, an untroubled assent to the globalization of literatures mirrors the colonial epistemologies that “offered a world to be inscribed” or even, at its worst, “a jungle book” of prefabricated exoticisms (Hitchcock 2010, 9, 10). Work by Sanjay Krishnan and others on reading the global and the prizing of commodifiable exoticisms in literature has begun to stress the ways “in which the ‘global’ has been uncritically assimilated…to a

11 transparent comprehension of the world” (Krishnan 1).

My goal in this project is to review and intervene in the two fields most prominently engaged with the problem and potential of a global circulation of literary texts: postcolonial studies and world literature. Postcolonial critiques tend to be judged in terms of their sensitivity to historical/cultural particularity. In contrast, methodologies for reading world literature tend to focus on the mutability of literary forms that broach linguistic and cultural boundaries. In this equation, postcoloniality is associated with an absolute specificity of cultural context. Its untranslatability is its resistance. My project moves beyond the unhelpful binarism whereby locally-fixed form is opposed to globally-mobile form. I examine this problem of reading as a problem for translation—not in its functional,

10 http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/ishiguro.html 11 Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia. New York: Columbia UP. Huggan. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic. London: Routledge. Krishnan. 2010.

8 linguistic sense, but as a metaphorical, formal process. Translation as a formal quality and event in the text participates in the ambition of postcolonial writers like Njabulo Ndebele to

“search for ways of thinking, ways of perception, that will help to break down the closed epistemological structures” of colonialism, and to “free the entire social imagination”

12 (Ndebele 65). To my mind, freeing the imagination means preserving the ability for an individual novelist to encounter the world in a frame that is never pre-determined, with cultural knowledge that is never singular.

The Forms of Translation

Translation is the form of our existence in the community of the world. It is also the necessarily flawed method through which we experience that community—the bucket full of holes that we keep dragging back to the well hoping to catch the right amount or just enough sense of the thing to carry on. Translation is also our pharmakon—medicine and poison at the same time—the thing we must drink knowing that it will not heal us, but rather, in the best cases, will render us insensible to the original problem: the absent original.

That problem, played out across an infinite variety of cultural forms, is the problem of knowing others, and our relationship to the form of that knowing. Translation is at the nexus of a particularly piqued moment of critical debate about the place of the postcolonial novel in circulations that increasingly forgo national tradition in favor of a global or world literature.

In my analysis of recent theories of world literature and the response and repositioning of postcolonial literary studies to those theories, I argue that translation is not a symptom, not simply a process enacted by characters in a novel, but part of the event of the

12 Ndebele, Njabulo. 2006. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. University Of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

9 work. As such, it requires a reconceptualization of form’s relationship to the knowledge we claim to draw from texts. Rather than translating out cultural information (what could be called transmission), the focus needs to be on translating in competing modes of the historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic. Understanding translation as a form avoids the tautological function of assimilating the foreign (postcolonial) into the known (the globe) and instead imagines an unfinished line of dialogue between points of contact. It is both a catalyst to new modes of thinking and understanding, and the performance of making knowledge new.

Translation is simultaneously the great problem and potential for the author always imagining another reader or reading public. The novel that engages translation as form is best said to be translating rather than translated, in-process rather than completed. Jean Luc

Nancy’s refiguring of interpretation as the envelop with folds upon folds that overlap, rather than eclipsing one another, is a near perfect illustration of what it means for the novel to be translating: “It is not a matter of pulling meaning out of its envelope—for then it would immediately become good only for discarding—but rather of developing the enveloping as such: spreading it out, but by ceaselessly refolding upon itself whatever is deployed” (2009,

13 21).

I focus primarily on novels that imagine crossing national boundaries and gaining a readership outside their country of origin, even if the authors are not themselves transnational. Although my primary materials are in English, the novels I discuss are themselves already in a state of translation, not necessarily inter-lingual translation, though some of them are multilingual or pluralingual texts,14 but translation as a formal state of

13 Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2009. On the Commerce of Thinking. New York: Fordham UP. 14 Brian Lennon defines “strong” pluralingualism as “the interpolation into English of significant quantities of a language or languages other than English” (Lennon 9).

10 unrest, a dialogue between aesthetic, formal, and narrative dimensions of the text. As such, I address an overarching question: At a moment when the globalization of cultural forms seems to demand a transparency of cultural difference from the novel, how do we read those novels which might have earlier been called postcolonial, which have become unsure of their cultural, historical, and linguistic corpus?

Absolutely Global: the Future of the Postcolonial

In the past three decades, nothing has so reimagined the value and efficacy of literary studies more than the return of a classification and field of study known broadly as World

Literature. This new World Literature locates its heritage in the socio-economic phenomenon of globalization, which since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been responsible for the ever-increasing speed with which people, cultures, and technologies cross national boundaries. And, as well, in the institutional desire of departments of English and

Comparative Literature to move away from a Eurocentric emphasis on national traditions, and in doing so significantly broaden the exposure to literatures outside of the United States and Europe. Rekindled by claims like Franco Moretti’s that “the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system,” the question of how and why one is conscious of distinctions between national literary traditions has again become a principle concern in

15 comparative literary studies (2000, 68).

15 Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, No. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 2000). Recent critical studies of world literature as a rubric for comparison include: Benedict Anderson, Specters of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (1998), who defends nationalism as the most reliable force of an individual’s experience of the world; Gayatri Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) which posits a planetary system that demands close-reading, broadly, across a large number of languages; this contrasts immediately with Moretti’s project of “distance” reading in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005) whereby “the more ambitious the project, the greater the distance must be;” David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? (2003), which describes texts as “world” which cross any boundary of origin; Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (2005), which seeks to read the metropolitan centers of Paris and London as sin qua non in their operation as cultural nexuses; Emily Apter’s theory of global translatio as

11 My project makes its intercession with literature written precisely at this moment of institutional soul-searching over the turn to the world in the field of post-1945 Anglophone literature. We see in the critical modes of postcolonial literary studies and theories of world literature the simultaneous death and rebirth of the nation as the geographic and cultural home for the contemporary novel. This odd phoenix burnt halfway up has made constituting fields like Anglophone literature a difficult and exciting undertaking. Attempts to understand the minute locality of particular texts have come up against the desire to see how those local forms translate and circulate beyond their origins. The result is a critical landscape split as to how postcolonial concerns for national culture can co-exist with global desire for texts that circulate and read legibly outside of their national origins.

My examination of the move towards a world system of literature details the arguments over what do with postcolonial difference and how various methodologies for reading in comparative framework deal with issues of translatability of cultural knowledge.

Emily Apter reminds us that Moretti is a remarkable spokesperson for but one variant of the field of new comparative studies, one that is indelibly intertwined with postcolonial theory and literature. There are, in fact, innumerable rubrics of response to a new comparativism, as many variations on world literature as there are ways of experiencing the globe. A brief survey of recent contributions would include: “ ‘global lit’ (inflected by Jameson, Masao

Miyoshi), ‘Cosmopolitanism’ (given its imprimatur by Robbins and Brennan), ‘World lit’

(revived by Damrosch and Moretti), ‘Literary Transnationalism’ (Spivak) and comparative postcolonial and Diaspora studies (indelibly marked by Said, Bhabha, Francoise Lionnet, and

it gave rise to world literature during Auerbach’s tenure in Istanbul, circa 1903 in The Translation Zone (2006); Wai-Chi Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006); and Rey Chow’s The Age of the World Target (2006), which elucidates the role of Area Studies, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism in the establishment of a new theoretical model of comparative studies.

12 16 Rey Chow)’ ” (Apter 2006, 42).

This turn or return17 to world literature has broached institutional and political territory long held by postcolonial studies, and in so doing, offered a conceptual challenge to the latter, particularly concerning the status of writers whose works travel across cultural and geographic boundaries. The reemergence of a critical interest in world literature has forced a consideration of the place of such novels in the larger globalization of cultural forms.

Whether the novel form loses or gains in its circulation outside of national origins has increasingly become point of contention in postcolonial literary studies. Paul Jay looks at the relationship between postcolonial and world literatures through the lens of globalization, identifying the fracture in how globalization is handled discursively:

The whole question of…what the relationship ought to be between postcolonial and globalization studies, is a vexing one, and critics have taken a range of positions on the problem, from Simon During’s insistence that globalization theory can be a tool for redescribing the entire history of colonization, decolonization, and postcoloniality to Masao Miyoshi’s insistence that globalization as both a socioeconomic process and a field of study can only have corrupting influence on work in the humanities and 18 social sciences. (2010, 7).

Of principal interest to me in this study are the ways in which individual authors and texts manage to redescribe post/colonial history even as they confront the corruptive or transforming elements of globalization. They do this work at the level of form. But just as globalization and the global imaginary have prompted a rethinking of methods for approaching the text of world literature, so too has the contemporary postcolonial novel asked us to reimagine form as the response and the rejoinder to new expectations for

16 Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone. Princeton: Princeton UP. 17 Significant work has been done tracing the evolving forms of world literature in its major epochs as a dominant mode literary studies. Studies with significant analysis of Goethe’s concept of a weltliteratur (1827) include: Damrosch (2003); Moretti (2000); Casanova, “Literature as World” (2005); Apter (2006); Dimock (2006). 18 Jay, Paul. 2010. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

13 translation.

It is my view that much of the debate over the postcolonial novel and its relationship to globalization and the concept of a world circulation of literature is based on a false distinction between forms that travel and those too local to move. Because novelists never think so simply about the bounds of their imaginative worlds, my project revises this narrative by examining recent postcolonial and Anglophone fiction that firstly, is written by

19 writers of both contested origin and audience ; secondly, engages both the nation and the world as concepts in flux that are deeply interdependent in both the literature and its accompanying criticism; and lastly, is preoccupied with translation both as narrative content that engages postcolonial problems raised in the novel, and as a dialogue of forms within a single novel, what I am calling the translating novel.

I will define the translating novel as one where form negotiates the terms of the novel’s engagement with the local and global, and negotiation, as Derrida reminds us, derives

20 from “neg-otium, not-ease, not-quiet - . . . no leisure” (2002, 11). The disquiet of translation in the novel means that neither global nor local vantages are subordinated, allowing us to read form and style as capable of responding to the imaginative idea of the world as never reducible to a single argument or voice. The contested national and transnational status of these writers allows them a particular vantage on the question of translation, and as such,

19 There are arguments to be made for classifying my primary texts as simply contemporary British literature, based principally on the expansive institutional and literary borders claimed by the field of British Commonwealth literature. There are a number of problems with such a designation. To imagine, for example, J.M. Coetzee as a British writer is itself an act of colonial fantasy, requiring the return of South Africa to Commonwealth status. And yet, it is indeed Coetzee’s English language and Afrikaner heritage, his Australian passport, and his American professorships that both mark him as a member of the cadre of progressive white writers who saw themselves positioned to write against Apartheid, and, simultaneously, exiles him from that very group to a strata of global novelists who win British literary awards, and an Anglophone readership interested in reading about foreign cultures in a domesticated form. As his own particular response, Coetzee takes up Defoe in his novel Foe, pressing deeply into those footprints left on what Crusoe thought was his island, his land, his Friday. 20 Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001. Stanford: Stanford UP.

14 they anticipate the form of their work as translatable, and texture the form of that circulation. They engage translation with all of its problematic assumptions, and complicated possibilities for communication and community, and open a dialogue within the narrative itself whereby forms circulate between opacity and transparency, globality and locality. The dynamic of this constant intra-textual translation produces the effect of multiple concurrent readings of the text, each of which will have access to a different set of cultural knowledges and thus face different difficulties in approaching the form of the novel.

With its comparative approach to transnational novelists, my dissertation joins a growing body of studies of contemporary literature that address the need the move beyond the limited categories of national and global literatures. My response to this insufficiency in the criticism has two major implications. The first asserts a future for the postcolonial as a form and subject within the transnational novel; its form, as such, disturbs world literature’s claim to knowledge that transcends the nation. The second argues for translation as a series of forms, which offer a way of reading a novel in dialogue with itself—grappling with the stories it must share, but cannot possess—a translating novel. The novelists in my project thus experiment with tropes of translation in ways that refuse both the logic of global circulation that undergirds some theories of world literature, and the demand for resistance and untranslatability (such as one finds in theories of postcolonial particularity).

As a basic assumption of the value of translation, we expect translation to in some fashion substitute for the original—to hoax us into believing we have access to that original text, merely in a less foreign form. In a process analogous to how déjà vu recalls something we falsely believe we have already encountered, the translated text allows us to imagine the authentic distilled into accessible form. Whereas this is the very problem—that is, the potential as well as the challenge—of linguistic translation, it is the great asset of translation

15 as trope. The forms of tropological translation explored in this project complicate the assumption that form is either local or global, inscrutable or legible, and in doing so make room for new dialogue about postcolonial communities imagined in novels of the world.

I want to develop a theoretical and methodological framework for studying how the trope of translation broadly, and the translating novel specifically, help us understand how transnational writers dissolve the opposition between postcolonial localism, on the one hand, and globalism, on the other. Such a methodology assumes the stakes of world literature as equally dependent on theorizing the trajectory of many texts as they move into and out of national circulation, and the formal response to those trajectories that we find in a single novel. I follow Moretti’s push towards a planetary system for literary studies with several questions. Moretti lays down the figurative glove: “The question is not really what we should do—the question is how. What does it mean, studying world literature? How do we

21 do it?” (2000). And his answer is in part a call to translators to make more and more texts available for his project of “distance reading.” But this is too much an ends-means project for the work of literature, and for that matter, for the work of translation.

In Four Parts

In the chapters to follow, I position the hoax of translation as the functional accomplice to an untroubled turn to the world. By taking translation as both the functional necessity in approaching texts from different cultural contexts, and as the formal negotiation of what it means to think of any single text as a world literature, I look to the individual novel to set the terms for the “how” of Moretti’s formulation on approaching a newly global literature. Thus, world literature as a classification and a mode of reading contemporary

21 Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1, January-February 2000.

16 literature depends on the individual novel to set the terms of engagement. My methodology looks to translation as an internal-mechanism for broaching an ongoing dialogue, departing from Moretti in favor of something like Stephen Clingman’s description of a “way to understand the complexities of identity and location…something even like a mechanism for

22 rethinking their interactions” (2009). Because translation must fashion itself as a never- ending interaction between an original idea and the future proliferations of that idea in un- anticipatable forms, its crucial quality is its refusal to finish its work. Translation is perpetual motion, and so too is the form of the novel as it thinks and rethinks its way in the world.

In the first chapter, “What Gets Left Behind: The Postcolonial in a Global Age,” I argue that scenes of reading unreadable texts, objects, and people in Higher Ground (1989),

The Restless Supermarket (2000), Anil’s Ghost (2001), The English Patient (1992), and The White

Tiger (2008) problematize the kinds of knowledge we claim from postcolonial novels. By bringing into relief world literature’s positivistic account of culture as translatable, I examine how these novels imagine contact with cultural difference as recognition without possession.

The all-encompassing social violence of Apartheid, genocide, and abject poverty would seem to overwhelm a novel’s formal conceits, forcing an open-book reckoning with certain ethical dilemmas. In stark contrast to this expectation of open-access cultural knowledge, novels by

Caryl Phillips, Ivan Vladislavic, Michael Ondaatje, and Aravind Adiga see value in a formal holding back. The persistence of unreadable stories at the center of narratives driven by inevitable social violence has the effect of withholding the ground for authentication. Thus,

I examine these works as translating novels, texts that refuse the fixed binary between local and global texts, and which present a space of incomplete and in-process knowledge from which we can grapple with the postcolonial in an age of the world.

22 Clingman, Stephen. 2009. The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford: Oxford UP.

17 To understand why Peter Carey’s novels True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and My

Life as a Fake (2003) translate the documents of colonial/literary barbarism into the frame of the novel, I examine the peculiar entity of the literary hoax. In my second chapter, “The

Afterlife of the Hoax: Peter Carey and the Hoax of Translation,” I consider the literary hoax both as a subject of consuming interest for Carey’s narrators, and as a form that offers a vantage on how postcolonial culture is mediated in the Anglophone novel. By looking at the afterlife of several infamous literary hoaxes—those fictions and poems that live on after the revelation of their fraudulence—I show how Carey hoaxes cultural knowledge in the novel by refusing to authenticate specific forms of the postcolonial. The competing documents of the novel—the diary, the letter, and the police record in True History—all bear the signs of annotation, marginalia, and erasure, that is to say, the signal of other readers who continually alter the language and context of the documents that make up the narrative. I argue that

Carey’s True History and Fake exist in a form of perpetual translation that refuses to inscribe a single document or form as authentic, and which is always marked by the signs other readers.

My chapter on Kazuo Ishiguro, “‘Turning Japanese’: Asian Clones in Ishiguro,” continues the exploration of fakery as a tacit function of translation in the novel. I examine how the critical interest in Ishiguro’s supposed Japonisme, the buried stylistic influence that marks his difference from British “tradition,” is a particular kind of hoax. I argue for

Japonisme and Britishness in Ishiguro as the twin floating signifiers of imaginary difference that pretend at cultural context while undoing authenticity. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

(2005) dramatizes the anticipation of a form that will signify inassimilable difference. What is referenced as the novel’s passive affect, its refusal to incorporate Science Fiction’s generic tropes, evidence of a Japanese stylistic heritage, or moral pabulum into a plot of largely

18 domestic fiction, in fact sheds light on the place of the postcolonial in his work. Engaging

Barthes’s Empire of Signs and the turn to Japan in Wilde and Baudrillard, as well as more recent work by Eric Hayot, and Christopher Bush on the narrative potential for illusory signs of Asian-difference to imagine new forms of community, I argue that Ishiguro pursues an effect of form as a pivot that translates between the evacuation of cultural context on one edge, and the translation of that context into counterintuitive spaces on the other. Ishiguro’s novels turn away from the facile label of “British with a difference,” and instead beg the question: can cultural context be both authentic and artificial?

My culminating chapter, “With His Back To Africa: Coetzee’s Bookishness,” argues

JM Coetzee’s most controversial “South Africa” novel, Disgrace (1999), challenges the notion that form in the novel carries a singular politics. The linguistic play of Coetzee’s novels has made him an uncomfortable fit in the canon of realist political novels that dominated South

African fiction in the years under Apartheid; indeed, critics like Benita Parry have generalized this discomfort to a political claim that Coetzee’s work “turns its face from Africa.” Despite being positioned by critics as either postmodern linguistic experiment (read apolitical), or political allegory, Coetzee’s novels present a dialogue of irresolvable forms that resist easy categorization. I argue that Coetzee’s bookishness—that is, his supposedly undue emphasis on the linguistic potential of the literary at the expense of material reality—in fact amounts to an attempt to understand social fracture via the effect of form, rather than the account of form. In the example of the comic opera composed at the heart of Disgrace’s narrative, we see a formal conceit that refuses to engage the pathos of the broader plot of racial violence in post-Apartheid Cape Town. A paratext within the novel, the opera plays at Romantic poetry, lyrical ballad, and an aria composed for a dog, eschewing even the barest sensibility of the looming social violence that propels the narrative. And yet, as a mistranslation of the

19 context of South Africa, it carries over anyway as a narrative mark of uneasy flux. It is at once an example of the main character’s profound misunderstanding of his cultural moment, and a critique of how realist form is read as singular political resistance.

20 Chapter I: What Gets Left Behind: The Postcolonial in a Global Age

Parvo in Multum: Little in Much

The world is a particular kind of problem in Jorge Borges’s short story “The Aleph.”

The protagonist, a writer of little commercial success, and great personal loss (the death of his love Beatriz) takes up a rival author’s offer to see the world in a single divine image, which will include all possible visions in a transparent “unbounded” moment. As with so much of Borges’s short work, the elements of science fiction in the story are a dodge of the particular, often lyrical anxieties of a writer struggling to understand the place of his work in an infinite circulation of competing literary works. The bookishness of Borges’s work, its interest in the boundaries of the literary, often figured as the writer struggling to understand the futurity of his own work, shows up in this and other stories as the obsessive, grail-like quest for a certain totalizing knowledge with which to see the world and then represent it.

Grail-like, that is, if we imagine the chalice as a book. In the case of “The Aleph,” this juxtaposition of the marvelous image of the world consumed in one totalizing vision, set against the limitations of literary form, burns in the narrator’s brain like the “alchemist or

Kabalist” who would see the base elements of their craft turned to gold. As we would expect from Borges, a particular parody takes flight in “The Aleph,” one that aligns the search for the “multum in parvo [GK: much in little] made flesh” with the more modest insights of the provincial writer (282).1

The protagonist’s conversations with the glib, but commercially successful writer

Carlos Argentio Daneri, recall the problem of translation and translatability for the writer of a worldly fiction. The story’s parody of translation—the conceit of a style so unspecific that

1 Borges, Jorge. 1998. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking.

21 it could avail itself to instantaneous comprehension no matter the audience—offers the gift of the Aleph as a deeply undesirable transparency in the style of Daneri’s poetry. The very aspect of style that assures Daneri’s success with a world audience, his infinite translatability, denudes all force of the poetry in the original. Daneri’s work holds meaning only as it is moving elsewhere.

The discovery that Daneri is in possession of a divine artifact, in his basement, that allows him to encounter an image of the world with all components seen simultaneously is bounded by fraught discussion of Daneri’s intention to “versify the entire planet” (277).2

This impulse for a formal equivalent to a pre-Babel language is understood by Daneri to be a combination of “formal perfection and scientific rigor,” that could, in essence, anticipate the reader of his work, “putting a question in his mouth” (278). Though Borges takes pains to provide examples of Daneri’s laughable poesy, wincing along with us at the vulgar replacement of adjectives with synonyms chosen with artless whimsy: azure for blue, etc., the voraciousness of Daneri’s desire for knowledge of everywhere at once seems an unveiled critique of Enlightenment rationality.

Borges’s position in the argument over a versification of the world is all too apparent in his merciless treatment of Daneri who spends his days working at “an illegible library.” This inscrutable place of employment seems a paean to Daneri’s poetic form, and to the uncertainty of form’s ability to recount experience or to translate language outside the absolute locality of its origins. What could possibly come of a library where comprehension is beside the point? In Borges’s throwaway image of the illegible library, una biblioteca illegible in the Spanish, there rests a library whose stacks are closed to us, much like Borges’s own

2 Heidegger’s “world picture,” considered alongside the versification of the world, gives force to the notion of a form so infinite that it might encompass all other forms.

22 “Library of Babel,” a place of reference where the concordance has gone missing somewhere along the way; a place where one can go for days without encountering a librarian, and where the books contain the infinite of language, if only you could read them all simultaneously.

Eco describes the Borgesian Library in contrast to Quixote’s universe, which the chivalric assumed would mirror his library of Romances: “Borges, less of an idealist, decided that his library was like the universe” (On Literature 105).3 The universe in this formulation represented by the deeply felt conviction and fear that those of “you who read me…” might not understand my language (Borges 118). Whereas Daneri sees the possibility of a formal transparency that would free up poetic style to speak both to and for the world, Borges’s narrator sees only the absolute limits of his own work to recall the fading image of his lost love Beatriz. Held up as analogous to the Aleph itself, an imagine of the divine cooped up in

Daneri’s cellar, the versification of the world promises all images of Beatriz visible “at once.”

When our aggrieved author finally accedes to the vision of the world promised in the Aleph, what he sees illustrates what the form of the world leaves behind, the “little in the much,” the parvo in multum (as opposed to multum in parvo). Fascinating in the litany of what simultaneously constitutes a vision of the world are the details that carry over, including: an

“English translation of Pliny” (a text of Roman history), which he was able to observe vivisected like a patient upon the table— “every letter of every page at once” (283). One can only conjecture what this crowd of syntactical atoms might look like. Above all, it would certainly be unreadable, if not thoroughly illegible. This vision is followed upon by the narrator’s childhood memory of imagining “the letters of the closed book scrambled up together over night” (283). If, as I and others claim, the novel has the capacity to imagine the world (counterfactually and otherwise), is part of that imaginative space closed up,

3 Eco, Umberto. 2005. On Literature. New York: Mariner Books.

23 formally off-limits? The false certainty that a form of the world might offer itself up as the open book ready for our perusal, as transparent and simultaneous as an “unbounded moment” where “all places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist,” stops being a moment of Borgesian fantasty when we consider the implications for how knowledge is imagined to translate into and out of literature (283, 281).

The “inalienable” Aleph promises a world of translatable knowledge, the movement of the singular into the general, even to the extent of making space for every letter of every word in a literary work splashed across the page. But this is of course the hoax of the Aleph as a divine oracle. The Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, holds an inviolable space in that lexicon as the unvoiced letter. Its divinity springs not from what it offers up as the Commandments of God, but from what it withholds as the sacred and inalienably particular of language, and of translation. Importantly, the Aleph requires juxtaposition with another letter to mean. The Aleph is the unutterable letter of Borges’s closed book of the world. Just as the simultaneity of the Aleph’s vision of the world cannot recall the lost images of the narrator’s Beatriz, the form of Daneri’s poetry cannot anticipate the reader except as one of many translators who will encounter form like an unexplored wing in the

Library of Babel. Eco reminds us that “just as in the ‘Library of Babel’ one can only be in one hexagon at a time, in the world we live in we could speak only of what is around us depending on the place we are in, pointing with our fingers at what surrounds us” (1998,

108). If Eco’s reading seems quaint, a call to understand the limitations of our vantage point on the world, it is so because of its persistence as a necessary question for world literature.

To quote David Damrosch’s opening question for his study of world literature: “which literature, whose world?” (1).4

4 David Damrosch. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

24 The inhospitality of literary forms remains central to the study of the Modernists, with whom the Argentinean Borges found much commonality5, but there exists in this fictional meditation on the possibilities for a worldly form a comment on the closure of translatability. The library of Borges’s imagination holds the possibility of a certain kind of book tucked into the stacks; it is a text that withstands translation and points to the spectre of some originary knowledge, out of reach, even as it claims a reading of the world. It is crucial that this text remains closed, not in the sense of total absence, but in the fashion of

Borges’s closed book—a powerful possibility for reading the illegible, the unpossessable, the untranslatable. In this way, Borges takes up the problem of reading texts we cannot or should not possess. He anticipates the problem of translation of knowledge by figuring his fictional world as an illegible library and a closed book. The narrative effect of the presence of illegible texts in the legible narrative makes visible our process of valuing certain kinds of knowledge that we can claim from our reading.

….

“I do not feel like a traitor, I feel like a fool.” (Higher Ground)

From the first pages of Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground (1989), a tripartite novel comprised of three distinct narratives of the African slave trade, the American civil rights movement, and a Holocaust survivor in Britain, we understand the violence of translation as the bridge between the geographic, chronological, cultural differences of the narrative sections to follow. Looking upon the new crop of slaves gathered from various African

5 Eco remarks upon Borges’s “Invocation of Joyce,” that although the two took drastically different approaches to formal experimentation (Eco argues that while Joyce was at the formal avant guarde, that Borges operated in the realm of experimental imagination), they were engaging notions of the effect of possibility previously unimagined. Borges writes of his indebtedness as a kind of literary salvation: “What does my lost generation matter,/That lovely mirror,/If it was justified by your books. I am the others. I am all those/That your obstinate rigor rescues./I am those you do not know and those you save” (1998, 112).

25 ports, an African translator working for the British slavers considers what his work will mean: “it is a game of high stakes, this man and nature, uneven in odds, the result inevitable, the struggle futile. But we persist, each in our own way, some with more blind stupidity than others” (11).6 The translator has been charged, as the vile bargain that preserves his freedom from the slave block, with identifying the diversity of languages among the captives in order to “arrang[e] the shackling of one man to another man of a different tribe and language…

[so that] that difficulties of communication might further induce isolation” (57). His service to the slave traders is thus contextualized as forced blindness and babel, as the condition of survival in the encounter with imperialism. Rather than searching for a commonality of juxtaposed languages, the translator arranges the members of the chain gain according to linguistic difference; the slaves are thus bracketed both by a steel collar and by languages, dialects, and cultures alien to them. The translation work, such as it is, forces an anti- correspondence, a purposeful misalignment of languages and men that nevertheless serves a pernicious functionality. The act itself is heinous, and nothing in the narrative to follow will excuse the treason of the translator’s work despite his conviction that he is but “an ordinary man, doing an extraordinary job in difficult times” (24). But if we examine this moment as a conceptual structure, one that is the dominant form of Phillips writing—the arrangement of incomparable stories in a single novel—we begin to see that Phillips’s work with the narrative effect of untranslatables provides a powerful counter-form to what reads as the treason of translation in the first section of the novel.

Far from broaching understanding, translation in Higher Ground is a catalyst to violence. It facilitates the rape and torture of a young girl from the translator’s own locale village, the mollification of dissent among the enslaved, and collaboration between corrupt

Phillips, Caryl. 1995. Higher Ground. New York: Vintage.

26 tribal chiefs and the colonial garrison; translation in Phillips’s novel oils the machinery of the slave trade and leaves bodies as its remainder. I want to argue that this is not the full story of translation in Phillips’s novel; the dialogue of translating forms in the novel (third-person, epistolary, first-person) point to something like the neutral space of mutual inadequacy.

Phillips is a novelist obsessively interested in drawing a commonality of experience— often-traumatic experience—through different cultural and chronological filters. He has, at times, been criticized for what can seem like an ahistorical glibness in bringing together such vastly different experiences with little reference to their incommensurability. Such a critique might well help us to re-conceive the treason of the translation in Higher Ground, fixing incomparable languages and cultures to one another under the glare of a British audience. If

Higher Ground offers us only the indigestible exchange of the native translator—language for life—this is a story we have heard before. But if, as I argue, Phillips is interested in how novels broach dialogues between unpalatable choices, then we can begin to read the problems and fortunes of the postcolonial novel as profoundly linked to the complications of translation as a form.

Quintessentially a transnational writer in the sense of writing about one place from another, Phillips offers a form of translation conflicted with its own functionality; one notes the variety of citizenships claimed in Phillips’s author bios: Caribbean-born, raised in Leeds

(UK), professor at universities across the British Commonwealth, and now at Yale—a collection of stamps on the passport page of the transnational writer. Phillips plays out the difficulty of translating one’s national and cultural identity as a writer in the translational quandaries he dramatizes in his novels.

Despite the rather myopic moral of translator-as-traitor that our narrative seems to offer, the dominant formal mode of each scene of translation in the novel is intransigence:

27 the refusal of cultural knowledge to assimilate into a comprehensible unity even as it appears to have an absolute narrative effect. The fantasy of colonial incorporation—translating cultural resources and knowledge into a larger Western episteme—is collapsed whenever the possession of particular knowledge is necessary in the novel. Formally, the novel seems to directly confront what Foucault saw as the inherent movement of discourse towards coherence:

The history of ideas [he writes in The Archaeology of Knowledge] credits the discourse that it analyzes with coherence. If it happens to notice an irregularity in the use of the words, several incompatible propositions, a set of meanings that do not adjust to one another, concepts that cannot be systematized together, then it regards it as its duty to find, at a deeper level, a principle of cohesion that organizes the discourse and restores to it its hidden unity. (The Archaeology of Knowledge 149)7

In Foucault’s formulation, the history of ideas is a translating force, systemizing and assimilating discourse so as to perpetually uncover its “hidden unity.” While I argue the root of world literature theory still operates according to this principal of epistemological unity, the novels pulled into its theoretical circulation across national boundaries understand literature’s relationship to knowledge quite differently. Specifically, the potential for the trope of translation to offer knowledge as a narrative force that cannot be incorporated into a unifying discourse. With that in mind, I’ll turn to a moment in the novel that dramatizes translation as form.

Lewis, the brutal colonial officer overseeing the unnamed African slaving port in

Higher Ground, offers the African translator a letter in order that he might take possession of a young local girl, “with some guise of purpose” (55). The letter is blank. In a “cruel joke” on the translator’s hard won skills with the English language, the first letter he has ever received contains “no words.” Still the letter carries narrative weight—it affects the signs of a

Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Archeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

28 transaction allowing Lewis to take the girl as his property—but it also has a formal significance as the erasure of correspondence. For as much as the reader is asked to sympathize with the agony of the translator’s treason, Phillips has made sure that nothing linguistic transpires in the act itself. Later we follow the translator as he reads a passage from

“somewhere near the middle” of the English Bible only to find that he understands “the words but not the context” (51). When he is himself ultimately enslaved for working to free the tortured girl, the translator hears the song of those preparing for the journey to bondage, though he has “long since forgotten the words to their songs” (59). The novel’s translator, the conduit through which imperialism would claim possession of language, exists in an absence of meaningful syntax. He is as much the letter emptied of words, as the traitor offering knowledge in exchange for survival.

There is real pathos in the tragedy of Phillips’s translator, but it is the tragedy of the fool who imagines his treachery as the passing on of private cultural knowledge—an open book handed over to be perused and acted upon. While it is doubtless the cause of the translator’s ultimate downfall, translation in the novel passes on little of value and seemingly offers only intercultural impasse. The episteme of cultural knowledge in Higher Ground is without a corresponding body of translated knowledge. As such, the trope of translation works counterfactually within the larger frame of narrative movement. Things get moved without being passed on. The barbarity of imperialism is reckoned with in the violence of slavery in the novel, but that record precludes imperialism’s larger discursive aim of assimilation of knowledge into a singular archive. The language and culture of the colonized comes up translated as the blank page. To read this counterform—not unlike the counterfeit and the hoax that I examine in earlier chapters—is to engage critically with a trope of translation in the Anglophone novel as the space for reading what we cannot or

29 should not hope to take away. It is as Peter Hitchcock notes of translation’s great sleight of hand: “it promises a world but can only hint at its extent” (2010, 41). And this is so often our predicament as readers of the British novel that occupies postcolonial space—it is clear that the world continues to map circulations for material culture, to order and arrange knowledge according to differences, but it is naïve to mistake this circulation for transaction.

Our nameless translator’s final summation turns from foolishness to revelation. As he is paraded on the auction platform to be “prodded and jabbed” by potential buyers, he elects to dismiss the meaning of the language that will carry his sentence: “I have decided to feign ignorance of their language. I erase all expression” (59). This is the sort of agency that only a fool could carry out, but the fool and his foolishness are soon parted, as we understand the translator to have grasped his limits as a narrator of this story—and the limits of knowledge are thus passed on, translated, into the next section of the novel.

Translation is the omnipresent problem that the contemporary novel cannot escape.

Its potential as a force for understanding and commonality is intertwined with its association with imperialism’s voracious appetite for the cultural and linguistic resources of the colonies.

Translation’s conflicted history and contested value as a tool for common understanding make it ironically well suited for addressing the problem of the postcolonial for theories of world literature. For a growing number of scholars of world literature, globalization, and postcolonial literatures, translation has become the methodology of choice for understanding the effects of more and more novels being drawn into the global circulation of Anglophone literature. As a result, translation has become an unusually flexible term, often wielded at a great remove from the functions and processes of interlinguistic movement from origin to target language.

30 As a literary trope, it has become closely associated with the mobility and mutability of cultural knowledge. At times this concerns a foreign language interspersed throughout a text’s dominant language, translating an inassimilable sign of difference into the logic of the narrative voice. Ania Spyra’s theory of “cosmopoetics” explores the significant broadening of possibilities for reading texts that refuse to “translate… multilingual life into just one language and one accent.”8 Scholars have increasingly pointed to multilingualism as the accepted state of being for more and more of the world, even outside metropolitan areas, thus making most literary texts already in the act of being translated. In the multilingual text, translation is cosmopolitanism as a state of being and, translation as it might be spoken.

Translation, of late, has become a rather flexible term, often conceived of at a great remove from the functions and processes of interlinguistic movement from origin to target language. As a literary trope, it is often associated with the mobility and mutability of cultural knowledge in the novel. At times this concerns a foreign language interspersed throughout a text’s dominant language, translating an inassimilable sign of difference into the logic of the narrative voice. Coetzee’s In The Heart of the Country is written with swaths of untranslated

Afrikaans bracketing the English narrative, as if to remind us that there are questions of language politics at work in what the novel asserts as a narrative of domestic fiction.9 Critical interest in this brand of translation has provoked a nuanced examination of how postcolonial texts are read within an increasingly globalized field of Anglophone fiction.

Complicating the cosmopolitan impulse in theories of multilingualism in the novel, Bella

8 Ania Spyra. 2011. NB. This citation references Professor Spyra’s article for a collection to be published with Cambridge Scholars Press in 2011, and should be cited as such. The reference is made with her permission.

9 The crucial question of the dominance of colonial languages in the texts of world literature is more broadly taken up in these works: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind. London: Heineman; Derrida, Jacques; Nixon, Rob; McClintock, Anne. “Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,” (“Racism’s Last Word”) Race, Writing, and Difference. 1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Gikandi, Simon. 1996. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP.

31 Brodzki defines cultural translation apart from more intralingual work in the novel, as

“involving the transfer of a narrative or text from one signifying form to another, the transporting of texts from one historical context to another, and the tracking of the migration of meanings from one cultural space to another.”10 Her emphasis on how forms signify cultural contexts and spaces presents the possibility that a single novel can exist in one context while signifying another. In his argument about how intra-novelistic migration can be decolonized, Olakunle George makes a claim for the “deconstructive” possibilities of cultural translations that “first reject essentialist notions of originality that serve Eurocentric representations of formerly colonized societies” (345).11

I am focusing attention on cultural translation in order to examine a specific

“signifying form,” one which allows for the inclusion of narratives that can encompass an illegible, inaccessible, or inassimilable text at the center of their very legibility. It is a text— often a book, sometimes text-as-language, occasionally an abstract textuality—that may be read and understood by other characters, but which remains inaccessible, foreign, and ultimately closed off to the reader of the complete narrative. This trope, following George’s deconstructive claim, refuses to privilege models of Eurocentric originality by reimagining translation as a text in the constant state of being re-read.

The return of world literature as a methodology for interrogating the quasi-porous division between national and transnational systems of literary circulation has brought translation to the fore. The primary questions of citizenship and belonging, circulation and location, readership and reading all hinge on the place of translation in the critic’s work.

10 Bella Brodzki. 2007. Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Stanford; Stanford UP, 4 (my emphasis). Wai-Chee Dimock ties both of these translations together with the concept of the “foreign quotation” in Dante, which stands outside the “border patrol” of nation-centric politics (2006, 181). Dimock, Wai Chee. 2006. Literature for the Planet. Princeton: Princeton UP. 11 Olakunle George. 2005. “Achebe’s Arrow of God: The Narrative of Conversion,” Comparative Literature Studies- Volume 42, No. 4, pps. 344-362.

32 Works on the “world” in world literature by Casanova, Damrosch, Dimock, Moretti,

Walkowitz, and others have each claimed a particular vantage on the generic qualities of the

“worldly” novel: what Moretti calls “distance reading,” as the perspective from which to understand literary “interference” and the compromise between foreign forms and local materials (58); Dimock’s notion of an “unsynchronized” relationship between “the literary and the territorial” (175); Casanova’s argument for space as a “conceptual means” for thinking literature as world; Damrosch’s formulation of “the cultural norms and needs” that

“profoundly shape the selection of works” that become world literature (26).12 While vastly dissimilar in the form and politics of their methodologies, each of these conceptualizations of world literature operates according to some theory about how we can understand dissimilar texts through a translation onto common ground.

If only we read with X in mind as the common factor of comparativity, each would say, then we can incorporate specific difference (historical, formal, linguistic, inevitably postcolonial) as part of a larger commonality. This commonality, drawn from alternating perspectives on the local and the global as interdependent entities, operates according to a positivistic account of culture as available knowledge; it is there for the reading. Natalie

Melas takes up Damrosch’s question of “Whose Literature? Which World?” as a problem of vestigial colonial control over systems of knowledge, specifically the accumulation and organization of literary texts according to arbitrary conceptions of “the world.” According to

Melas, the domain of the Western critic continues on as the “privileged denizen of empire” granted an unquestioned “authority to encompass comparatively all the literature in the world is thus reserved implicitly and without argument to the Western scholar . . .” (2007,

12 Franco Moretti. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, 1, Jan Feb (2000), pps. 54-68; Wai-Chee Dimock. 2005. “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA, 116:1, Jan (2001), pps.173-188; Pascale Casanova. 2005. “Literature as a World,” New Left Review, 31, Jan Feb (2005), pp. 71-90; and David Damrosch. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP; respectively.

33 23).13 The world, then, remains the cartographic imperative of the West, carving out literary domains often along long-erased lines of imperial territory. “Whose literature,” thus seems a rhetorical question, and yet writers from the postcolony increasingly address the political, cultural, and linguistic conundrums of imagining the world with undeterred force. Demand for writing that “translates” (in its broadest sense) reflects a globalization of cultural forms that is a good more complex than a simple re-inscription of colonial boundaries. If the contemporary novel is increasingly an object to be translated and translatable, will there be a remainder from this process? And might we read this as a formal remainder? Are there things that don’t cross over, that are illegible, incomprehensible, and yet still have a form?

And how can this form help us understand the inchoate communities in the novel that are neither nations nor world?

We see a largely untroubled inevitability of translation as a state of being for the literary work even in the radically different foci of Moretti and Dimock. For Moretti, the material circulation of genres weeds out formal characteristics that fail to give birth to a readership. Dimock, meanwhile, analyzes the phenomenological potential for texts that imagine a world often at odds with cultural and political gatekeepers of the text’s historical moment. Neither the distance of Moretti nor the focus of Dimock alters the conceptual structure of translation as the catalyst to understanding and ultimately transforming difference.

13 Melas, Natalie. 2007. All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison. Stanford, Stanford UP. Emily Apter reads the problematic of this comparison as one of translation; she writes: “taking translingual perspectivism as an a priori, Saidian humanism pivots on the vision of the intellectual who refuses to see languages and cultures in isolation” (2008, 59).

34 The possession and transformation of cultural knowledge is explicitly and implicitly a dilemma for the postcolonial novel that comes to circulate in a global system.14 In the rush to authenticate a specific definition of the novel “in the age of” the world, the globe, the planet, etc., there has been an uncritical treatment of the claims to knowledge in the processes of translation.15 Hayden White registers this effort to “purchase ‘comprehension’” of the “object of study” as an uneasy trade-off resulting in the restriction of the “kinds of phenomena… include[d] in a given account” (2008, 731).16 White’s emphasis on

“comprehension” as that which is “purchased” by the world system translating from the national to the transnational raises the question: purchased at what cost and by whom?

When White argues that “future histor[ies] of literature” will have to grapple with “the ways in which literature undergoes a change of ‘substance’ as it takes on a form that will permit” its entry into a world system (734), he suggests that the cost is both formal and essential.

Certain untranslatables will have to be assimilated. The globalization of culture is not by any means a monological process, but in contemporary theories of world literature there is an abiding interest in the text that translates. The narratives within such a text must remain an open book, their form an encyclopedia of knowledge capable of imparting revelation of difference to the systems within which they circulate.

Franco Moretti has insisted on a number of occasions that world literature is no longer

14 Emily Apter. “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History, Vol. 39, No. 3, Summer 2008, 581- 598. Apter reads the dilemma as a binary: “Literary history’s cartographic catalogue is either constrained by the national habitus or thrown into the vast agglomerative catchall of ‘world literature’” (581). 15 Sanjay Krishnan interrogates “the ways in which the ‘global’ has been uncritically assimilated, in the humanities and social sciences, to a transparent comprehension of the world (1). Such cultural legibility subjects “things and peoples… to a form of representation in which they are laid before the comprehensive gaze of the trained viewer” (2). 2007. Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia. New York: Columbia University Press.

16 Hayden White 2008. “Commentary: ‘With no particular place to go’: Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture,” New Literary History (2008), 39: 727-745.

35 a question—“the literature around us is now unmistakably a planetary system, ” rather “it’s a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method” (54). The constitution of this problem hinges, I would argue, on how we understand the function of translation. If translation transforms a text’s literary singularity into a transportable form (often English), this raises several questions about the language of the translated text, both before and after its transformation. Firstly, what are the characteristics of literary texts that qualify them as translatable? Secondly, do authors of a certain international ambition write in forms that carry across linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries more easily than “provincial” forms?

And finally, can we possibly measure the gains and losses involved for texts that are translated into new communities of readers and critics?17 Rather than propose a theoretical methodology that might appear to encompass all these questions, and thus to falsely universalize the forms read in the novels to follow. I will suggest that form-in-translation, as the dominant mode of the transnational novel, is constantly refashioning the grounds for associations between the local and the global, between the untranslatable and the translatable. Depending on those shifting, intra-textual grounds, the answers to these questions will shift and mutate, but the emphasis on translation as a form remains a critical and overlooked criterion for responding to these questions.

As she comes to terms with translation as the modus operandi of new forms of comparativity in The Translation Zone, Apter sees the first question as a given: “clearly some originals qualify as better candidates for translation than do others,” and that the ambition for translatability can “consciously or unconsciously” take the form of “writing for international markets; building translatability into their textuality,” thus answering the

17 Apter traces a number of rubrics of response to new comparativism: “‘global lit’ (inflected by Jameson, Masao Miyoshi), ‘Cosmopolitanism’ (given its imprimatur by Robbins and Brennan), ‘World lit’ (revived by Damrosch and Moretti), ‘Literary Transnationalism’ (Spivak) and comparative postcolonial and Diaspora studies (indelibly marked by Said, Bhabha, Francoise Lionnet, and Rey Chow” (2006, 14).

36 question of the second point (101). For Damrosch in his literary history of the text of world literature, the first and third points are codependent and dynamic; the text that gains in translation is de facto a work of world literature: “As it moves into the sphere of world literature, far from inevitably suffering a loss of authenticity or essence, a work can gain in many ways,” but equally “a given work can enter into world literature and then fall out of it again if it shifts beyond a threshold point along either axis, the literary or the worldly” (2003,

1).18 Thus a single text can gain and lose as a translation depending on its reflection of a certain zeitgeist of the literary or the “worldly” in its historical moment. The ready agreement in contemporary theories of world literature that certain texts fit the part of the translatable object returns us to the epistemological question raised by Hitchcock: in what way does translatability replicate the colonial episteme which “offered a world to be inscribed”?

For a transnational writer who imagines his work as mobile, translatable, the form of the novel must in a sense mobilize the subject matter; he must prepare the subject for inscription. The question of representing the subaltern becomes exponentially more complicated and problematic once representation is understood as “prepared” for translation. Australian Aboriginals are a particularly apt example of the fragility of representation—even their term of reference requires a reckoning with (ab)originality as a denotation of racial, linguistic, and cultural difference. Such postcolonial transformations of difference in translation produce extraordinary slippages in the target text. For example,

African-American dialects are often transposed as Tohoku-ben in Japanese, a regional dialect that connotes linguistic difference (Tohoku-ben is know for its languid cadence), and class difference (Tohoku-cho is a rural, agriculturally-sustained province of Japan), but which elides

18 Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP.

37 racial difference entirely.19 I find Assia Djebar’s definition of form as “a certain kind of rigor and precision in one’s thinking” particularly convincing, but I find few studies that have adequately handled the necessity of confronting imprecision of form. There must be room in translatable form to encompass imprecision. In order to better understand the stakes of cultural imprecision as a problem of the translating novel, it will be helpful to examine a now infamous critical response to the so-called “international” form of poetry in translation.

In thinking through how this most recent return to world literature brings novels of different national traditions into unlikely dialogue, Stephen Clingman writes that “we need a new way to understand the complexities of identity and location…something even like a mechanism for rethinking their interactions” (2010, 211). Surely such a rethinking is crucial for a post-national British literature, but the metaphor of mechanization is courter to how I read translation’s possibility for unpacking the illusion of uniformity in cultural knowledge.

Steven Owen’s review of works by the Chinese poet Bei Dao has stirred a great deal of serious critical dialogue about the effects of translation on the text of world literature.20

Part paean to a particular tradition of Chinese poetry to which Owen is sympathetic, part biting critique of Chinese poets whose work “all but translates themselves” into a Western literary marketplace, Owen’s review of The August Sleepwalker has become a test case for how national literatures move into and out of world systems of circulation, and at what cost. For

Owen, the style of dissident poet Bei Dao is a particular kind of spectacle of translatability recognizable by genres and tropes borrowed from European Modernism and Romanticism, but thoroughly lacking in national character. Bei Dao’s poetry is decoration without

19 My colleague Kimiko Hiranuma (Doshisha University) and I have begun a study of 19th century African American novels (particularly the fiction of Charles Chestnutt) and the critical life of those texts in Japanese. 20 Owen, Steven. 1990. “The Anxiety of Global Influence: What is World Poetry?” The New Republic, Nov. 19, 1990: 28-32.

38 substance. The poems have “moments of beauty,” he writes, but are so insubstantial as to be incapable of “leaving a trance that might constitute a history” (28). The Chinese poet writing for an international audience (almost always European or American) disappoints Owen on two counts: first, he must imagine his poetry within the hegemonic domain of Western poetry, following models that will remain “imperfectly understood” (Yeh 1); and second, the poet must abandon historical tradition in favor of translatability.21 In the most pejorative sense, “[t]he poetry of The August Sleepwalker is a poetry written to travel well” (Owen 31). In contrast to its traditional counterpart, “the international poem… is an intricate shape on a blank background without frontiers, a shape that undergoes metamorphoses” (24). Bei Dao’s poetry-for-translation “entails the erasure of local literary and cultural history, leaving the writer with no vital tradition to work from. This new world poetry floats free of context, merely decorated with a little local ethnic color” (Damrosch 2003, 21).

Owen’s claim that Bei Dao’s poetry stands outside of history, indeed that it is merely decoration on a “blank background” easily mistaken for “translations from a Slovak or an

Estonian,” brought strong retorts from Rey Chow and Michelle Yeh (Owen 30-1). Both point to the latent Orientalism in Owen’s categorization of the Chinese poet as either authentically traditionalist or imperfectly modern.22 If we can somewhat too easily group Bei

Dao into Apter’s category of “popular non-Western authors openly accused of pandering to the interests of commercialized internationalism,” might there be something particular about

Owen’s conception of translation and translatability that sustains his argument? (101). What if, I am asking, Owen misreads his own categorization of translation as a form, rather than as process?

21 Michelle Yeh. 1991. “The Anxiety of Difference: A Rejoinder.” Jintian 1 (1991): 94-96. 22 Chow, Rey. 1993. Writing Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana UP. pps. 1-7.

39 The question of how and why texts translate across boundaries is not limited to poetry, or to literature that moves from non-Western to Western audiences, nor is it a particularly new question. Stephen Clingman helps place the Owen debate in the context of debates about national specificity and global multiplicity, reminding us that discussions about

“the end of national sovereignty in a global context…have been a fact of life for centuries for most of the world’s populations” (2009, 5).23 Clingman goes on to write that “we need a new way to understand the complexities of identity and location…something even like a mechanism for rethinking their interactions” (6). While Clingman plumbs the “grammar of identity” for syntactical evidence of where such a mechanism might lie, Rita Felski takes a considerably broader view on the issue of textual interactions. For Felski who brackets her comments with a title taken from Latour, “Context Stinks,” the multi-axis of literary value is both a “form of social knowledge,” and the capacity for “sociability and worldliness.” Her formalist account of the literary object offers the text as “not as something to be known, but something to know with,” a claim that would shift the emphasis from symptomatic readings of identity in a text, to treating the text as an agent for social exchange.24 Both Clingman and

Felski address the unanticipated associations that a text will have as it “resonates” across temporal and spatial boundaries, but neither anticipates the effect of the globalization of cultural knowledge on how form associates with itself.

Without intending to, Owen has offered translation as that mechanism for self- association.25 Translation as a form operates at odds with the limitations imagined by Owen.

23 Stephen Clingman. 2009. The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary. Oxford: Oxford UP. 24 Rita Felski. 2010. “Context Stinks.” Lecture. Brown University, 11.17.10. 25 I would hasten to argue that our emphasis as readers should be on Clingman’s aptly termed “rethinking” rather than on the more facile use of “understanding,” if only to avoid very pitfalls of claiming possession of certain discourses of knowledge.

40 Michelle Yeh’s criticism draws out this implicit delimitation of forms as the Chinese poet’s choice to either turn backward toward a tradition and poetic heritage that will imbue his work with a particular national character (specifically one that Owen can identify with), or look forward toward the “modern” West and onward to a “world” poetry of beguiling shapes on a blank background. In his desire to take up tropes of modern Western form,

Owen would tell us, Bei Dao has produced poetry that stands with its back to China.

Locatable form is Owen’s test question for authenticity in Chinese poetry, and Bei Dao has failed that test. Yet influence, as Yeh reminds us, “involves a far more complicated process than simple transmission of a literary model from one culture to another” (3). Within a single poet, Yeh argues, is the capacity to inhabit forms that are simultaneously traditionally

Chinese and Modern, adopting Western tropes as a way “of provid[ing] answers to questions raised on their own” (Chow 1993, 5).26

Translation, in this case, happens in the moment of instantiation, precisely when the poet gives form to his thought. That form might be contextualized within a national tradition, but it might just as well exceed such a context. I take issue with Owen not on the grounds of his naïve engagement with Bei Dao’s supposed misunderstood-Modernism—his sentiments are shockingly similar in nature to the claims made by the perpetrators of the Ern

Malley hoax (described in detail in the previous chapter), who accused Modernists of a belabored “fashion” at the expense of history and tradition—but for the implicit assertion he makes about reading China.27 What Owen reads in the poets of Chinese tradition as a line of

26 Rey Chow furthers this case, drawing on Naoki Sakai to refute the binarism of Owen’s argument: “Contrary to what has been advertised on both sides, universalism and particularism reinforce and supplement each other; they are never in real conflict” (in Chow 1993, 5). 27 Said’s analysis of d’Herbelot’s Biblothèque Orientale casts this type of interpretative essentialism in its broader context: “the work ‘confirms readers prejudices,’ setting forth the Orient for the European reader to behold: it creates ‘the Orient’ as an enclosed ‘stage on which the whole East is confined.’” in 2004. “The Order of Oriental Knowledge,”Debating World Literature. edit. Christopher Prendergast. New York: Verso, p.235.

41 verse stretching backwards through unbroken history is the effect of translation: the ghostly presence of a original text to which we have no access, but believe we have previously encountered. Owen’s profound misreading is therefore ironically an archetypal effect of translation.

If the postcolonial writer’s hesitation in drawing minority characters into his narrative imaginary can be understood as a fear of mistranslation of the colonial subject, claiming possession of a history not his own, Owen’s anxiety is quite the opposite. It is the very unavailability of “tradition” in Bei Dao’s poetry that unsettles Owen. Bei Dao’s poems have closed something off from the interpretative structures used by Owen and others to imagine a primordial original poetry they call “history,” and thus Owen reads them as background-less. The expectation that poetry will proffer a studied and legible form, which

Owen can call “China,” is foiled by what he calls the “blank background” of Bei Dao’s work.

Bei Dao’s, and by extension the work of world literature, fails to live up to a rubric of

Owen’s Sinology and is thus cast off as form without history: “these could just as easily be translations from a Slovak or an Estonian(31). The trade-off in this formulation is clear: a broader (specifically Western) audience, in exchange for one’s national passport. Such impossible litmus tests are rarely raised for Anglophone writers, in part because the assumption of a broad readership in English has shielded them from these kinds of arbitrary judgments. This is, of course, not the case for the Anglophone writer from a postcolony, where the very choice of English as a medium of expression comes under scrutiny as a marker of both colonial hegemony and mimicry. What is less clear, but perhaps ultimately more telling as a formal conceit in postcolonial writing, is the place of translation in this exchange. Bei Dao’s failure to be legibly Chinese does not happen in the transposition from

Chinese to English—it happens in Chinese.

42 In his most contentious rhetorical move in the essay, Owen asks the literary critic to re-imagine translation as a form and not a process: “What if the poetry wasn’t lost in translation? What if this is it?” (Ibid.). With this move, we have made the radical shift from a work in translation to the work as translation, with translation the act having been performed at the moment in which the poem is discernable as a form. Translation is the “this is it” of form. In this regard, we can see in Owen the beginnings of a mechanism for rethinking how national and global associations occur at the level of form. Even as he critiques the poems that leave not a “trace that might constitute a history,” Owen unintentionally frees the literary work from having to offer up such “traces.” Form, as such, translates not into understanding, the static object of tradition that Owen claims to find in other poets, but into dynamic negotiation within the very figuration of the poem. If translation is the “this is it” of form, then it can be understood without an a priori original, neither nation nor world, understood instead by its intra-textual movements of form.

While she does not reference translation directly, Dimock’s notion of a text’s

“resonance” will be helpful here. Dimock’s resonance sees “the literary text becom[ing] a new semantic template, a new form of the legible, each time it crosses a national border”

(2003, 9). By placing the moment of translation at the root of form, my argument makes conceptual room for the illegibility as well as the legibility that carries over into the literary text’s new habitus. It is precisely the illegibility at the heart of the legible narrative that forces a reckoning with what we understand as the form of what we read; what I call the

“closed book” of world literature will help us make sense of the effects of translation within the novels read below. Such a counterintuitive reading of Owen’s claims about translatability presents form a good deal closer to the Indonesian author Pramoedya’s definition: “Form is an idea that imaginatively projects a means to narrate, a medium that would render its

43 subject discernible” (in Hitchcock 2010, 143). If we return to Yeh’s response to Owen for a moment, we can reframe the question of authenticity that I have been delineating. She asks of Owen’s reflections on stylistic influence: “China and the world, tradition and modernity, where does one end, where does the other begin?” (9). Perhaps the beginnings of an answer would be: they begin in the associations of form. And if we can consider translation as a trope in the contemporary novel, one that reads as a dynamic interchange between the local and the global, but without the assurances of absolute knowledge that particularism and globalism both implicitly claim, the kinds of associations made within a text become richer and more substantial.

The novels I consider here are difficult to categorize, and that in itself is a statement on the resistance to translation in these texts. To claim them as postcolonial is to invoke a spatial, temporal, and ideological specificity, a certain kind of relationship between their politics and form. If the postcolonial novel is a genre, it is peculiar one, which since the moment of its inculcation, has sought to shift, bruise, and undo the very conventions of the genre. Two of the novelists considered in this essay, Phillips and Ondaatje, are factually transnational: born into a postcolony (Caribbean and Sri Lanka), and, as writers, citizens of the metropole (New York and Toronto). The other, Ivan Vladislavic, has made the Hillbrow neighborhood of Johannesburg his home and the heart of his written work for the whole of his career. But as Stephen Clingman reminds us, “transnational fiction can be undertaken by a writer who never leaves home” (10).28 All three novelists dramatize the complications of reading for a post-national cosmopolitanism, while being aware of the author’s sustained interest in an abiding cultural specificity drawn from postcolonial experience. The four

28 Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) won the Alan Paton Award for Nonfiction, which cited his work as an example of South African writers “looking inwards in order to examine the outwards.”

44 novels considered in detail here paradoxically capture the metropole and the margin, the local and the global, translating between these modes of understanding through what

Damrosch would call their “doubly or multiply linked” audiences “at home and abroad”

(2003, 22).

This “both/and” tension draws out translation as a conceptual logic with which to consider postcoloniality as a persistent condition that is at once within and outside the systems about cultural knowledge that allow us to perceive a literary object as “worldly,” and it also precisely that which I want to draw out as an internal function of translation as form.

In his skeptical account of a postcolonial “genre” of the novel, Peter Hitchcock considers how the postcolonial writer’s imagination of the “possible reception of her work… structure[s] and texture[s] from within what the genre can, cannot, or will not say” (2003,

318).29 Hitchcock imagines texturing as a beveling of the straight edge of formal homogeneity within the genre, allowing for reading at a slant. And yet, what use is a genre that will not say, unless “genre” is in fact a place-holder for the work of translation in holding together the said and unsaid, the foreign and the known within a single text. To make an intervention for or against the postcolonial as a valuable literary category is to imagine the world in terms of translation and translatability; it is to consider the form of the novel as actively imagining its future circulations, and texturing the form of that circulation in a world that has very particular ideas about how it should look and behave.

This “both/and” tension draws out translation as a conceptual logic with which to consider postcoloniality as a persistent condition that is at once within and outside the systems about cultural knowledge that allow us to perceive a literary object as “worldly,” and

29 Hitchcock, Peter. 2003. “The Genre of Postcoloniality,” New Literary History, 2003, 34: 299-330. Hitchcock ultimately undoes his original formulation of a postcolonial genre of the novel by claiming that the novel is in fact the genre of the postcolonial

45 it also precisely that which I want to draw out as an internal function of translation as form.

And yet, what use is a genre that will not say, unless “genre” is in fact a place-holder for the work of translation in holding together the said and unsaid, the foreign and the known within a single text. To make an intervention for or against the postcolonial as a valuable literary category is to imagine the world in terms of translation and translatability; it is to consider the form of the novel as actively imagining its future circulations, and texturing the form of that circulation in a world that has very particular ideas about how it should look and behave.

The recent momentum to authenticate a specific definition of the novel “in the age of” the world, the globe, and the planet carries with it an interest in the translatability of certain kinds of knowledge.30 Hayden White registers this effort to “purchase

‘comprehension’” of the “object of study” as an uneasy trade off resulting in the restriction of the “kinds of phenomena… include[d] in a given account” (730).31 White’s emphasis on

“comprehension” as that which is “purchased” by the world system translating from the national to the transnational begs the question: purchased at what cost? When White argues that “future histor[ies] of literature” will have to grapple with “the ways in which literature undergoes a change of ‘substance’ as it takes on a form that will permit” its entry into a world system (734), he suggests that the cost is both formal and constitutional. Certain untranslatables will have to be assimilated. The form of the novel must remain an open book to the systems within which it circulates.

30 Sanjay Krishnan helpfully interrogates “the ways in which the ‘global’ has been uncritically assimilated, in the humanities and social sciences, to a transparent comprehension of the world (1). Such cultural legibility subjects “things and peoples… to a form of representation in which they are laid before the comprehensive gaze of the trained viewer” (2007, 2). Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia. New York: Columbia University Press.

31 Hayden White “Commentary: “‘With no particular place to go’: Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture,” New Literary History (2008), 39: 727-745.

46 As examples of a particularly rich and imaginative texturing of the novel form,

Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket (2001), Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and The

English Patient (1992) challenge specific notions within world literature theory for how cultural knowledge in the postcolonial novel should and could be translated. In these examples of contemporary literature, narrative existence of such untranslatable stories often takes the form of what I am calling the closed book, the object of knowledge that effects narrative development without making itself legible as part of that larger narrative. It is foreign in its indecipherability, but at home in the narrative; it is inassimilable. The closed book is a trope that demands a different kind of postcolonial reckoning with those untold, unreadable and therefore untranslatable stories that exist even within globalization’s increasing demand for translatable form.

Undoubtedly, the demand for transparent translation affects how the foreign, the subaltern, and the other exist and persist in the postcolonial novel that finds a world audience.

As a counter to this discomfiting transparency, the contemporary postcolonial novel is formally structured as in the process of being read without understanding. Or at least without complete understanding.32 It imagines intra-linguistic translation between variant discourses within the same novel, but in doing so, the novel understands the coexistence of non-complementary discourses that fail to find common ground. As Glissant says of his

“field of related singularities,” this incomplete understanding “does not act upon prime elements that are separable or reducible” (1997, 172).33 The untranslatable, sometimes illegible, form of the closed-book uproots those grounds for comparison that are based on

32 By positing a relationship between translation and understanding, I am actively engaging George Steiner’s famous chapter on “Understanding as Translation” in After Babel. I offer the complication that if translation is understanding, then surely we can understand something within a text as present, but incomprehensible. And that incomplete understanding is equally an effect of narrative.

33 Glissant, Édouard. 1997. The Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

47 the exchange of certain discourses of cultural knowledge. An analysis of the closed-book can intercede in the debate over how knowledge and possession of that knowledge has set postcolonial literary culture as subservient to the traditions and canons of Western knowledge. It is a hierarchy built upon the supposed translatability of cultural difference into a system of exchange; an exchange whereby GV Desani’s All About H. Hatter (1948) is contrasted derivatively to Joyce’s Ulysses,34 and where Things Fall Apart gets read as an ethnography35 of the “tribes of the Lower Niger.” Within such a system of epistemic inequality, the non-exchange of the closed-book then becomes its own manner of translation whereby the narrative may pass on information without presuming possession of that knowledge.36 In this way, non-exchange can still mean; it has a form that translates otherness into an incomparable (perhaps “violent”) proximity with the known.37

Our encounter with the defiance of the closed-book reads as an inaccessible story within the larger narrative. It is the book we cannot read, but that we understand as in a state of being read by others. The effect of this kind of reading represents an intermediary

34 John Marx. 2004. “Postcolonial literature and the Western literary canon,” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edit. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: CUP, 93.

35 Neil Larazus considers the knee-jerk critical reaction to African novels like Things Fall Apart, and Okri’s The Famished Road as a mistranslation of culture: “To construe a work in this way is to conjure up the essentialized image of a culture outside history and politics and to propose a unique affinity between the work in question and this culture” (2000, 689). “Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel” (review) MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 61, Number 4, December 2000.

36 Chow helpfully expands the definition of literary translation to include exchanges that are not merely inter- linguistic and can involve the process of narrative meaning making. She writes: “whereas the term ‘narrator’ focuses attention on the act of storytelling, ‘translator’ underscores the fact that storytelling, too, is a form of exchange, an exchange that may, under certain circumstances, be further specified as a transcription of one language (or system of literacy) into another, but which does not have to be confined to such transcription exclusively” (569, my emphasis). My interest is in how the translation can bring about a non-exchange that still carries meaning. Chow, Rey. 2008. “Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence),” New Literary History. Volume 39, Number 3 (Summer 2008), 565-580.

37 The unreadable text-within-a-text is not unlike what Ann-Lise François has termed an “open secret… a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted upon” (1). Ann-Lise Francois. 2007. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

48 between the extremes of the translation debate in which translatability determines the parameters of world literature. The closed-book shares an affinity with one pole of this debate, Emily Apter’s translation of untranslatables. Of particular importance is the category of translated knowledge that she defines as “the non-carryover that carries over nonetheless, or that transmits at a half-crocked semantic angle” (“Untranslatables” 587). The closed- book builds upon and nuances this project of “keep[ing] the untranslatable fully alive in the translation,” and broadens the question how world systems are disrupted by the persistence of untranslated knowledge.

In order to consider world literature’s relationship to the postcolonial novel in earnest, it is crucial to understand the workings of a translation theory that stands in opposition to the formal possibilities of the closed book. Owen’s claim that some

“internationalist” poetry translates itself by adopting Western forms, thus evacuating tradition and history from its verse can be better understood as a certain kind of misreading of world literature when juxtaposed with a more recent theory of self-translating literature.

Rebecca Walkowitz contextualizes her theory of “Comparison Literature” with a question for Damrosch’s point about the birth of the literary work: that “virtually all literary works are born within what we would now call a national literature” (2007, 218). She complicates this claim for the nation as a single point of origin by posing the question of what we might do with “contemporary texts, written by migrants and for an international audience, that exist from the beginning in several places” (223)?38 Walkowitz’s definition of the worldly text comes out of her notion of the network as the translator, moving texts in and out of literary systems: “It is because of the network, the several literary systems that share a single text,

38 Rebecca Walkowitz. 2007. “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature,” Novel: A Forum On Fiction, Volume 40, Number 3 (Summer 2007), 216-239.

49 that the work can be categorized as world literature” (217). Her rejoinder to Damrosch emphasizes the network as the translating entity that texts respond to—certain texts not only authorize their own translation into other languages and literary networks, but are also purposefully written so as to facilitate the birth of multiple translated copies of themselves within the network. The copies then circulate in “several literary systems,” each of which claims the work as its own. Importantly for Walkowitz, the novels of comparison literature share a stylistic malleability, what she calls, borrowing from Kazuo Ishiguro, an

“unimaginable largeness” of form. Writers, in this case, imagine the formal qualities of their novels as translatable, both in the broader linguistic sense, and on the level of narrative allusiveness. They make room for “the future ‘associations’ [of] those who read translated works” (220). And they “calculate… the transnational contexts of [their] own production, circulation, and study” (223). The novels of writers like Ishiguro and Coetzee are, in

Walkowitz’s estimation, “written for translation” (Ibid.). This particular genre of translation depends on an innovative openness of form and content. For Walkowitz, it is an intentional openness that approaches a fungibility of style.

It is an extraordinary claim and one that treats the novel as an object to be read according to an architecture of structural transparency whereby the content becomes subsidiary and negotiated. Walkowitz’s new world literature must first and foremost read like an open book. “Comparison” novels are reducible to “‘shape, structure, and vision’… rather than to ‘sentences’ and ‘phrases’” (Ishiguro in Walkowitz, 219). The transnational novel offers itself up to the world by translating out its inaccessible style—in this case the unreadable stories within the narrative—in return for the uniqueness of the world system that will draw it into ever-proliferating webs of comparison. Hitchcock makes clear the politics of this sort of open-book ideology of translation into the “world” with no shortage

50 of biting sarcasm: “At the very least it allows one to consume postcolonialism without the nasty taste of social struggle” (2010, 5). The question that “comparison literature” raises for the novel is one of form’s relationship to a network of literary circulation returning us to my initial set of questions for the problem of translation in world literature: do contemporary novelists produce work according to global demands for translatability, and if so, how does that alter how we read the language, even the style, of the contemporary postcolonial novel?

The presence of the closed book within the postcolonial novel points to a major fault within this theory. The mote in the world’s eye, as it were, is the absence of what Rey

Chow has claimed as the broader parameters of cultural and linguistic translation: “a consideration of such illegible things as accent, tone, texture, habit… and ultimately the unsaid” (2008, 568). To this list I would add the unreadable as a primary narrative trope with which to complicate the problem of circulation. The unreadable is not traceable by a single syntactical footprint—neither unimaginably large, nor infinitesimally small—but rather by the effect or sensibility that remains as evidence of its improbable carry over.

To make an intervention for or against the postcolonial as a valuable literary category that has an indelible relationship to novels we read and teach as British, is to imagine the world in terms of translation and translatability; and as such, form of the translating-novel allows for the active imagining of its future circulations, and texturing of the form of that circulation in a world that has very particular ideas about how it should look and behave.

Translation as a series of forms in dialogue demands a different kind of reckoning with those untold, unreadable and therefore untranslatable stories that exist even within globalization’s increasing demand for translatable form. And in such a reckoning, it opens the space of literature as a neutral ground where our own reading takes its place alongside the reading we cannot know or that has yet to come.

51 Reading the unreadable or what I’ve been calling the closed book operates analogously to Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle,” in which we might know the direction of a subatomic particle, or even where it has been, but we are never certain of its precise location at present. In part, we are undecided about the form of such a novel because the very act of our reading has contributed to its uncertainty—we have disturbed the very thing we wished to locate. The only common ground that remains for comparison (both within and without the novel) is uncertainty and, to invoke Reinhard once more, responsibility to the “virtues” of that uncertainty. If we apply Reinhard’s argument for responsibility to unknown neighbors to texts, then responsibility extends even to the possibility of community-minded novels: “responsibility for the neighbor does not arise from my acknowledgement of him or her as like me, as a member of a common ‘genus,’ where similarity would be defined in terms of…formal, ontic, or ontological similarity…Rather my responsibility for the neighbor deriv[es] from his or her simultaneous proximity and alterity”

(791). And so we begin to see the potential for uncertain associations that occur on the level of form.

Walkowitz’s understanding of systems of comparison as a priori to the imaginary space of the novel makes this formal community within a single text impossible. While

Walkowitz is judicious in noting how these novels respond to, rather than submit to, the inevitability of being translated into different literary systems, there is ultimately no doubt about the fate of narrative uncertainty—it must be read as “structurally, thematically, and politically comparative.” To better understand how Walkowitz treats the novels of

“comparison literature,” I will examine her most forceful, and ultimately flawed example:

J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarians.

52 Walkowitz richly details Coetzee’s correspondence with his Chinese translator regarding the mention of a “summer palace” in the early moments of the novel. The translator presses Coetzee to reveal any intentionality as to the novel’s allusion to the

Chinese emperor’s “old summer palace.” Unsurprisingly, Coetzee defers an answer, writing in response only that: “‘The words are written. I cannot control the associations they awake’” (Coetzee in Walkowitz, 220). Walkowitz rejects the notion that Coetzee’s “words will proliferate willy-nilly in the minds of readers,” and instead argues that Coetzee anticipates his readership as inhospitable to ambiguity.39 Her argument turns on her assurance that “the readers he is thinking about are translators and those who read translated works,” and thus concerned with a “definitive” translation (220). The Coetzee argument frees Walkowitz to examine the role of the translator as pivotal in pushing readers towards a specific, concrete allusion, and away from allegory. In this dialectic between Coetzee and his many translators, the palace begins its existence as the palace of the imagination, and culminates as a definitive allusion to the Chinese summer palace. This “culmination” will repeat again and again with different definitive results depending, almost exclusively, on the caprices of the particular world system within which it circulates. The fate of the

“comparison literature” novel begins as translatable style and persists as innumerable definitive copies, or as Walkowitz distills it: “uniqueness can persist in the world, but only in comparative forms” (235). For Walkowitz, the paradox of the definitive copy, drawn from her examination of the clones in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, is resolved in reading

39 Beginning with Coetzee’s earliest works we find counters to this argument. Most obviously, In The Heart of the Country’s (1977) swaths of untranslated Afrikaans set within the novel’s English language narrative signal Coetzee’s larger project of defamiliarization of the reader from expectations for comprehension. Derek Attridge argues that this is not merely Coetzee writing for a particular audience, but as well that “to encounter the juxtaposition between the two languages is to be made aware of the main narrative’s mediation via English, and via the European fictional tradition” (2004, 12). JM Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

53 masterpieces of appearance (235). It is thus that Comparison Literature, and the broader formal claims of world literature theory, fail to imagine the individual novel as resisting such transparency. For even if we were to agree that certain writers anticipate the future uniqueness of translated versions of their text, the presence of the illegible text complicates this ready-made translatability, denies the prefab architecture of the world system, and demonstrates how uniqueness exists outside the system of circulation.

“Supermarket Pastoral”: Vladislavic’s Restless Supermarket

Novels should not be expected to solve the riddles of nations (and neither should nations for that matter). Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space

Ivan Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket parodies exactly the kind of interpretative

Calvinism—the born translated—that Walkowitz’s “Comparison Literature” espouses, and in doing so makes clear the possibilities of the closed book as a formal response to the necessity of translatability. Aubrey Tearle, Vladislavic’s politically retrograde narrator, is a retired proofreader, most recently of the telephone directory, living at the interregnum immediately preceding the end of Apartheid. He is a self-styled linguistic-perfectionist whiling away his days writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper decrying the lack of standards in the prose and font choices, disputing the misalignment of across and down clues in the crossword, and ignoring the crashing tide of political change breaking just at his horizon. An enemy of error in all forms, Tearle reduces Johannesburg’s violent response to the waning days of Apartheid to a series of lexicographical errors, obsessively searching for what he calls the “corrigenda,” those things that “await his correction.” Tearle’s search is not limited to texts; he “mines” the clientele of his constant haunt, the absurdly ersatz Café

54 Europa, for “misuse” of dictionary English (182).40 “I never lost sight of my main purpose,”

Tearle writes of his occupation, “which was to hold up examples of order and disorder, and thus contribute to the great task of maintaining order where it already existed” (98).

This incessant ordering of language according to the Concise OED—a volume substantial enough to ultimately deflect a bullet away from Tearle’s heart—allows Tearle to imagine a world where difference can be edited out, deleted from the final categorization of words and things. All the “spoilt material, repetitious and dull verbiage, misplaced stops, misspellings, solecisms, anacolutha” might be drawn through the “insatiable and unshuttable maw” of the proofreader’s delete mark (188). Tearle’s fundamentalism comes out of “a sincere wish to document, so allowing for comparison and improvement” (97). It is no small thing, the corollary Tearle establishes between comparison and the possibility of editing out error, for at the very least it plays at linguistic eugenics. Note the slippage from editorial deletion to pogrom: “Imagine, if you can, the mountain of delenda purged from the galleys of the world. Who would build on such a landfill?” (188). As an extreme of the translation debate, Tearle’s vision of linguistic purity squeezes the world through that delete mark’s

“insatiable maw” in order to ensure that the proximate can always be the known, and the disorder, ordered. There is little effort required to engage the histories of genocide in Africa in such an image, but this is not the novel’s last word.

It is of course the dictionary that rests at the heart of the matter. As an ordering structure that must rationalize exclusion on the basis of correction, Tearle’s OED discounts what it cannot read. He equates misuse with “so much barbarism” (153). Thus cultural heterogeneity, operating so often outside the prescriptive rules of dictionary language, is adjudged by its uncivilized error, rather than by its performance. Language as a source of

40 Vladislavic, Ivan. 2001. The Restless Supermarket. Claremont (South Africa): David Phillip Publishers.

55 cultural knowledge is, indeed, beside the point for Tearle who brags: “I myself once proofread the Pentateuch in isiZulu, against the original (I don’t have a word of the language) and against the grain—and made only one error” (327). The question remains, how would he know? How would error present itself when every matter of the text is closed to him? His revelation, that sometimes “it is better not to know the language at all,” is for

Tearle one of the “saddest things” (329), and indeed it is the pathos of the novel that the form of misunderstanding, the grain of knowledge that is foreign to us, must preserve itself against the systems of comparison that will amend or delete those corrigenda that resist correction.

How then does The Restless Supermarket, a novel that cannot narrate the end of

Apartheid except as a “massive disturbance that resisted correction” (219), preserve some matter of cultural knowledge from the proofreader’s mark? My argument lies with the restless interior of the novel, the purported life’s work of Aubrey Tearle—his “Proofreader’s

Derby.” Tearle has composed the Derby as a testing ground, a prose contest, for the would- be proofreader to hone his craft. Written as a piece of short fiction meant to contain untold purposeful errors, Tearle has imagined the Derby as place of possible of perfection where corrigenda have slipped in like the traces of an illicit visitor. The reader has already been playing proofreader for Tearle by the time he reaches the Derby section—Tearle’s letters and turns of phrase are plagued with false etymologies and solecisms (“wanton dumplings” and

“muslin fundamentalists,” 227), which color and ironize his descriptions of the Hillbrow neighborhood. The Derby is both the instance of error and the opportunity to eliminate error; for it is also a competition that Tearle has conceived as the final test of proofreading.

The Derby holds the middle of the novel, but it is better understood as confined, constrained, ghettoized between the two sections of narrative devoted to Tearle. It’s a

56 narrative prison for every manner of linguistic crime that might creep into prose.

Importantly, the derby takes the guise of a fiction, for the novel form, according to Tearle, is the only hermetic container for error: “An error in the pages of a novel…may be compounded by reproduction, sometimes tens of thousands of times. Yet despite this wasteful abundance, the error itself seldom transcends the covers between which it is caught like a slow-moving insect” (107). The Derby is the book of errors that we never meet; it is both the material text at the center of the novel and the closed book of the narrative that we cannot read in the original. For the Derby has already been translated.

When, as readers, we approach the middle section of the novel, the Proofreader’s

Derby is presented to us in its “corrected” version, cleansed of its errors, and already “put to the proof.” The proofreader’s copy we encounter as the fifty-page delay in the narrative arc of Tearle’s pathetic life is meant to be the ordered, edited-clean copy guarding against the prolific error that might spill over into the other two sections of the novel. It has been purified and sanitized according to Tearle’s own system; it has been de-novelized, both made un-new and non-fiction. The novel has been tamed and contained. The narrative arc that has promised us Tearle’s raison d’être offers instead the specter of untold errors that we will never read, the remainder of a text that cannot be known except by its narrative effect. Tearle himself describes the Derby as “a scrap of canvas hacked from the frame” (124). And then, of course, there is reading the frame.

The great bugaboo of Tearle’s life, the comically named food mart, the “Restless

Supermarket,” plays its error across the boundaries of the three sections of the novel, most potently in the “corrected” Derby section. Named by its Greek owners for its late-night convenience, its rest-less-ness, Tearle cannot abide by the supermarket’s unwitting pun.

Confronted by Tearle in the first section of the narrative, the owner defends the name: “My

57 friend, we ollaways open. You come any day, twenty-four hour… [and Tearle’s retort]

‘Restless Supermarket’, it creates the wrong impression. One thinks of mess…of groceries jumbling themselves together, of willful chaos” (93). What Tearle describes is a space of uncertainty where difference can co-exist, co-inhabit in a willful chaos, and do so without the eventual assimilation to common ground. It is a community of others contained in language, but not defined by its container. When we return to the supermarket in the Proofreader’s

Derby section of the novel, canvas without its frame, we encounter translation as the dynamic feature of the restless form:

The interior of the Restless Supermarket was barely recognizable. The entire space was seething, alive with an indiscriminate, indefatigable jumble… all mingled into one substance, whose textures eluded them, being simultaneously soft and hard, fuzzy and sharp, perishable and indestructible. Each element remained vividly itself for as long as they focused on it, and then dissolved back into the irreducible compound as soon as they relaxed their attention. It was like trying to watch one wing in a wheeling flock… (246).

This scene reads easily as an allegory for the political and demographical changes in Tearle’s

South Africa, but as allegory its form is never static, it is willful chaos. The allegory is split and on the move; its language has both a social and linguistic significance that refuses to collapse into one or the other. Mike Marais’s conviction that Restless “enacts a state of permanent transition” 41 and is therefore an example of Nancy’s “inoperative community,”

“not calibrated on being-in-common,” but on singularity, seems at once fundamentally correct and willfully avoidant of the operative term for this kind of unfinishable community: translation (15-16).

Testing our Patients: Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and The English Patient

41 Marais, Mike. 2002. “Visions of Excess: Closure, Irony, and the Thought of Community in Ivan Vladislavic’s The Restless Supermarket. English in Africa, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Oct., 2002), pp. 101-117.

58

Eventually every writer discovered that his or her main struggle is with this one word: form. George Orwell, “England Your England”

In a plot preoccupied with the looming threat of violence from Sri Lanka’s civil war, it is the hieroglyphics of reading and being unreadable that puts into relief the problem of partial knowledge in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. Anil Tissera, raised in Sri Lanka and educated in England and the US (“where she felt completed”), returns to her country of birth as a forensic anthropologist searching out evidence of the human rights abuses perpetrated by Sri Lankan government forces. With her training in forensics, Anil is charged with speaking to and for the dead of a country that is no longer hers. The plot turns on her discovery of a body, temporarily referred to as “Sailor,” hidden away in the ruins of a culturally sensitive archeological site. Anil’s work as an agent for an international human rights organization requires a kind of necromancy—a communing with the remains of those who can longer advocate for themselves. In this way, Sailor is “representative of all the lost voices” of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war. Anil’s is both a practice of interpretation of specific texts and of particular ghosts, in the search for a communal response to injustice. The novel treats this conversation with the dead multitudes as a problem of languages, and of translation; it asks us how much we are willing to invest in Anil’s work with the specters of past violence when she is proven such an inadequate translator of knowledge? If Anil was

“complete” elsewhere, what kind of agent for community can she be in a place where she is necessarily fragmented?

We learn early on that Anil maintains only a basic grasp of Tamil, a language once her own, but which she can now “understand only a few words when it was spoken, relying mostly on the manner of speech to understand” those around her (23).42 The narratives she

42 Michael Ondaatje. 2001. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Vintage International.

59 stitches together from the bones and fragments of the dead are necessarily incomplete, relying on a fragmentary knowledge and a vague sensibility of “manner.” But as Joseph

Slaughter reminds us, “precisely whose identity and past is being unearthed remains fully ambiguous” even by the end of the narrative, thus making Anil’s own identity as much the puzzle of the narrative as Sailor’s (2007, 187).43 Slaughter’s “unearthed” has meaning as both

Anil’s work as a forensic scientist, and as the task of the critic, at least according the hermeneutics of suspicion. The particularity of what Anil unearths is mediated by Anil’s limitations as a reader of national cultures now foreign to her, and so she provides us an example of how reading the unreadable has both material and narrative effects. Anil’s fascination with the Amygdala, “the darker aspect of the brain,” is juxtaposed with the

“darker proof” of violence that Anil finds in certain poetic verses (134, 105). Anil is thus always reading as scientist and literary critic, drawing equally on verse and CAT scan to find the “darker proof.” Reading Anil’s work with full knowledge of her limitations as a translator, it begins to feel like the very colonial ventrioloquism she believes she is circumnavigating. “The political problem,” for the work of cultural translation within the space of a novel, “is who speaks and who is spoken for in the conflictual realm of the uttered and the unutterable” (Hitchcock 2010, 214). What shifts radically when we imagine translation as form in the moment of iteration, is that misinterpretation can carryover as a shift in how we read, but the tautology of the misreading that constantly self-perpetuates is broken.

We do well as readers to mine this dark divide between the manner and matter of language in a discussion of cultural translation in the postcolonial novel. For the relationship between the form of knowledge and its narrated content is at the nexus of what novels

43 Joseph Slaughter. 2007. Human Rights Inc.: the World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham UP.

60 interested in their extra-national translation take pains to imagine. Staging Anil’s repeated failure to place the unnamed bodies and to decipher the political ramifications of their deaths, Ondaatje makes room for imagining the potential of misreadings that translate as a narrative effect, rather than as an apocryphal historical record. It is where Anil’s “lack of tone” (23) makes her both incomprehensible to so many of the Sri Lankans whose knowledge she requires to pursue her work, and personified translation containing both the toneless world and the textured locality. The novel never settles its position as to Anil’s relationship to the forensic evidence she reads as the narrative pathos of the plot; she is by occupation a translator of cultural artifacts into narrative, with all the problems attached to such a position. We are reminded that “she can read a bucket of soil as if it were a complex historical novel,” and that such a reading can lead from “grains of evidence to their likely origin” (151). The relationship posited between reading soil like a novel, and extracting concrete evidence of origins from the individual grains is a difficult one to reconcile. If we follow her metaphorical logic, the soil is particular to Sri Lanka and thus requires a kind of fluency with the loam—a fluency that Anil obviates by relying on the foreign form of the historical novel to do the work of interpretation. Indeed, “Anil wished she could trade information…but she had long forgotten the subtleties of the language they once shared”

(170). The desire to translate is impossibly conflated with the desire to know, to “share information,” to give Sailor his original identity—precisely that which the translation, by its very dualistic nature, cannot hope to deliver. And so we must ask, what kind of translation is in play in Anil’s Ghost? Is the specter haunting the novel the particular violence of a nation at war with itself or the more general terror of reading the texts of cultural knowledge without understanding, at a loss for the words?

61 The answer set forth by the narrative is no answer at all. The novel offers us the closed-book of character as the beguiling of the very question of the translatability of culture. Anil’s belief that specific culture can be read into general form (civil war into international peace process), is doomed to repeat the logic of the nationalists: grand narrative truths about culture can be located by an authentic reader. If Anil can be crudely categorized by the internationalist perspective she brings to the narrative, than Palipana is the novel’s pure locality. Palipana is the infamous epigraphist and scholar of inscriptions who Anil seeks out for advice on the anonymous skeleton in her possession. Where Anil seems separated from the fullness of reading the texts of her homeland, Palipana is exquisitely intimate with them. He had “risen in the career…because he knew the languages…better than those above him” (80). And yet, Palipana’s singular knowledge, his irreducible readings of cultural artifacts, has “turn[ed] him gracelessly out of the establishment” of archeologists. It seems that his translations of ancient historical writings offer no original against which to test the translation, “they were a fiction” (81). And yet the novel appears at first to fully authenticate his work as the nearest thing to cultural neutrality in Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war. Palipana’s fluency with the languages at play seems to allow him to translate without offering up something translatable. The remainder for the legible narrative persists as the fiction of the closed book, for “no one could find the sentences he had quoted and translated from dying warriors, or any of the fragments from the social manifestos… or even the erotic verses in

Pali supposedly by lovers and confidants of the court mentioned but never quoted in the

Cūlavamsa” (Ibid., my emphasis).44

44 Interesting for this argument is the scholarship on the Culavamsa, the historical record of ancient kings of Sri Lanka, which makes the complicated claim that the text “does not consciously relate...false information.” Is it a logical possibility then to argue that a text can unconsciously relate falsehoods? Introduction, The Culavamsa: Being the More Recent Part of the Mahavamsa, W. Geiger, trans. C.M. Rickmers (London 1930).

62 When Anil meets Palipana he has gone blind, but this merely furthers his reputation as the “safest secret-holder,” no matter “whose secret it is” (86). His blindness only accentuates the inaccessible middle form of his translations, written “in large billowing script that was half language, half pageantry—the borders between them blurred” (94). Much like the decoration of the Kelly journals, Palipana’s translations of historical documents sought by both sides of the national conflict register in several forms at once. A counter-form to the expectations of translatability in the narrative, Palipana’s histories are legible only as a narrative effect. It would be a mistake to consider the decoration as a pure aesthetic, some form of sign that functions without signification; after all, it is not merely the pageantry that interests us, but the blur in between the words and pageant, which demands an exchange between two kinds of written knowledge in order to translate.45

It is important that these are translations of “interlinear texts,” unaccountably located in certain “hidden histories, intentionally lost” (105). The interlinear gloss of a translation is an analysis of the process of translation that is written between the transliteration, the letter- by-letter transcription from original to target language, and the translation itself; it is a visible manifestation of the doubleness inherent to any translation. But in this case, Palipana’s analysis of cultural knowledge that was deemed “illegal” at the time of its creation develops a parallel gloss, which appears to comment without access to the original. Ondaatje’s use of this middle form of interpretation—what Palipana’s critics call his “over- interpretation…[his] lies” (193)—drops the pretense of open translatability. Palipana is

45 The most forceful critique of this kind of aestheticization of the native character comes from Rey Chow in her analysis of Roland Barthes’s “language of the woodcutter.” Barthes imagines a pure language whereby the woodcutter communes directly with the tree that he fells with his hands. Chow rightly dispels this myth of inscrutability as agency, writing: “is not the woodcutter really a symptom of his own immateriality, a sign of his own foreclosure from a system that will simply go on “imagining” him—that is keeping him afloat utopically… in a nonplace?” (53). Palipana is no woodcutter, and the specialization of his knowledge (of languages and forms of languages) gives him a vantage on the archeological systems of reading and interpretation that make his agency incontestable within the narrative. Rey Chow. 2006. The Age of the World Target. Durham: Duke University Press.

63 working from a closed text. We are left only with the effect of a spectral original on

Palipana’s work. Palipana’s analysis may be untranslatable, but it nevertheless carries great meaning for the novel. His counsel allows Anil’s forensic work to proceed towards something like justice by the end of the novel, with the final “evidence” of a government execution coming back into her position. For that very reason, our reading must come to terms with Palipana, but that reckoning occurs only when we stop reading him according to degrees of translatability, and instead look to his work and the work of the novel—the pageant and the words, which defy assimilation into a single imaginative strain. The disjunct between Palipana’s gloss and the original text is mirrored in what the novel calls the “critical marginalia” inscribed in books kept in the hospital’s ersatz library (230). What Slaughter calls the practice of social reading (193, 194), is a kind of form at the margins of our knowledge of the text. We read the marginalia in the “medical texts and novels” as crucial to the apolitical nature of the doctors’ work on the wounded, tortured, and the dead. The mark of their reading is at once “illegal,” an anonymous stand against the singular discourses that fuel the war, and a parenthetical mode of translation whereby texts are always in the process of being read by others.

The novel has anticipated the specter of the “world” as its reader, but its solution is not to lay itself bare like “a patient etherized upon the table.” Our fragile solution, or better, our space for new questions, is the closed book of Palipana’s knowledge in our narrative midst, but just out of reach of our capacities. Our certainty is held in abeyance as we read over his shoulder, and at the apex of our interest, the novel offers the conjecture that, much like Ondaatje’s eponymous English Patient and his obsessively annotated copy of Herodotus’s histories, Palipana will be buried with his interlinear work sewn into his clothing (107).

64 Ondaatje’s most often translated novel, The English Patient (1992), illustrates the formal problem for cultural translation posed by the trope of the closed book. With the backdrop of an Italian villa that houses the transnational outcasts of the war (a spy, a thief, a nurse, and a bomb defuser), Hana, the French-Canadian nurse, sets out to decipher her

Indian love interest Kip via a series of staged readings of his intertexual literary history. The problem of translating allusions defines Hana’s search for definitive knowledge about the man she loves, but cannot ultimately possess. Her relationship with Kip relies on his translation into readable forms, though as we are reminded, she indeed sees “nothing to interpret” in him, and reads only the “neutral look on his face” (177).46 What we have learned from the eponymous English patient, to whom Hana reads imperial classics during his convalescence in the villa, is that though “many books open with an author’s assurance of order… Novels commenc[e] with hesitation or chaos” (93).

Chaos, as such, has its own circulation, one defined by its uncertainty and multiplicity, and which prompts translation at a loss for words, already imagining the necessary anarchy within any future, readable versions of itself. Here is Hana reading Kip: “She pulls down the copy of Kim from the library shelf and, standing against the piano, begins to write into the flyleaf in its last pages.” Hana’s notes in the “flyleaf” recount a story that Kip has told her about an ancient gun once used in wars against the Sikh in pre-partition Lahore. Her ardent marking of the novel is both narratively an allusion to Kipling’s Kim, and an imagining of Kip into a space of expected comparison.47 In between the two intertexts lies Hana’s

46 Michael Ondaatje. 1993. The English Patient. New York: Random House. 47 Joyce similarly ponders the space of the flyleaf in Portrait of the Artist (1916). Portrait’s Stephen Dedalus considers the flyleaf of his school geography textbook where his name and hometown are inscribed. In a meditation about nationality, Dedalus tries to read the space beyond the universe, the “nothing place” beyond the reach of the colonial geographies prescribed by the text: “He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was… That was he: and he read down the page

65 decoration—unreadable except for its effects on Hana. Reading Kim in concert with Hana’s writing Kip is a mise en abyme where there is no foundational reading, just a series of unavailable texts translated onto one another by Hana’s attempt to read the original in translation.48 In this sense, the effect of uncertainty on Hana is the effect of the original, as a spectral absence.

We can begin to see that the thematic performance of reading becomes a problem of form. Hana reading Kim while writing Kip makes private, perhaps ethical, demands on her, but equally fascinating is the reciprocal narrative effect, the destabilization of comparative systems that would assume the intertext Kim to be generative of the character Kip. Kipling’s

Kim is no longer a reference point; rather, the novel acts as a catalyst to reading on to something else—the Kipling novel is just one detour in an ecliptic system. To borrow from

Borges, “the original is not faithful to the translation” (1964, 140).49 We ultimately understand Kip as not a product of Hana’s compound reading, but as the uncertain space between the reading of Kim and the writing of Kip’s history.50 Any knowledge of Kip that

again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?” (13).

48 J. Hillis Miller imagines the problematic relationship to the “original” as the sentiments of a jealous lover. His paradoxical notion of a “shared secret,” that which is related without fluent understanding sets the stage for a conversation about the kinds of understanding available in translation. He describes this phenomenon by describing his work translating from the French: I want to feel at home there, to know it from the inside. But I cannot. I can only know it from the outside, as a “foreign language.” Even study of Littré or Robert gives me only an external an objective knowledge… (263). J. Hillis Miller. 2001. Others. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

49 Borges, Jorge. 1964. “About William Beckford's Vathek.” Austin: University of Texas Press.

50 As is so often the case, Derrida has already considered this space of uncertainty, and particularly its relationship to translatable knowledge. Though his subject is not explicitly postcolonial, Derrida addresses a space of great importance for the postcolonial novel—a future space of “not knowing.” In Spectres of Marx he writes: “This not-knowing is not a lacuna. No progress of knowledge could saturate an opening that must have nothing to do with knowing. Nor therefore with ignorance” (37). By explaining how a space free of the “progress of knowledge” can allow for the future arrival of otherness, Derrida has described the possibility of imaginative space that can include the known and the unknown.

66 we claim comes at the expense of those readings that remain uncertain, that require us to imagine the Kipling as “rubbed in the night like a magic lamp” (94). Or as the English patient asks of Hana, that we read Kipling by his “natural pauses,” rather than by the words on the page (Ibid.).51 Counter to the expectations of Comparison Literature, reading the closed book values the impact—political, historical, and literary—of the untranslatable that carries over as a type of community that stands outside possessible knowledge.

By juxtaposing the particular demands of anticipating translatability in one theory of world literature with examples of novelistic defiance of such anticipation, I offer not only a contrast, but as well, a neutral space within which to consider the particular novel in conversation with itself. These novels broach a conversation based on differences in play, not grounded in the assumption of similarity, but rather, a conversation about how otherness and claims to knowledge translate in the imagined world of the novel. It is an ethical dilemma akin to Peter Carey’s anxiety over representing the Aboriginal people of

Australia that I will take up in the next chapter. The conversation is thus characterized, at times, as being at a loss for words. But neutrality here should not be mistaken for the staid or the passive, for as Roland Barthes writes in his theory of The Neutral (1978): “there is a vitality of the Neutral: the Neutral plays on the razor's edge: in the will-to-live but outside of the will-to-possess” (14).52 In this way, we might consider the Neutral to be a mediating force between “everything is translatable,” the will-to-live in the network of comparison, and

“nothing is translatable,” existing outside the will-to-possess. The neutral then delimits one possibility for reading comparative networks, which include the postcolonial novel without

51 It is Derek Attridge who in addressing this effect of the literary locates alterity both in the strange singularity of the literary world, and in the estranging act of reading itself. The ethics of reading for Attridge is reading all out of sorts. 2004. JM Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 52 Barthes, Roland. 2007. The Neutral. New York: Coughlan Publishing.

67 dissolving difference: namely, its desire to remain outside the will-to-possess, while still engaging in the vitality of translation. A forceful examination of the closed book makes this

“razor’s edge” balancing act the very capability of the novel to hold in neutral balance spaces between the unique and the general, the local and the global, organized around what Apter calls “hubs of irreducible singularity” (584).53 The novel does so not as an imposition, but as a reckoning. And reckoning may well be the most appropriate word for the effect of reading the unreadable, especially when we consider that a reckoning implies both a rendering of a particular account, and a payment of a debt: to relate, to narrate, to tell, to read, and to pay up.

53 See also Hallward’s description of Glissant’s “field of related singularities” (123). Peter Hallward. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

68 Chapter II: The Afterlife of Forgery: Peter Carey and the Hoax of Translation

There is this whole issue for Australia of being on the periphery and having no cultural authority, of cultural authority being determined elsewhere—in New York or in London—and Australians have taken huge pleasure in undermining that authority and proving it wrong. Peter Carey

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Australian novelist Peter Carey responded to the question of “why aboriginal characters haven’t found their way into [his] novels,”1 by offering two contradictory statements on the representative capabilities of the postcolonial novel: “My job as a writer is to imagine what it is to be other,” to which he adds moments later, “I think I should stay away from imagining aboriginal people” (Guardian Podcasts 2008).2

The one statement appears to be an ethical negation of the other (in both senses of the word). Cast in Carey’s terms, imagination runs alongside a dangerous third rail of representational violence against the colonized. For Carey, the novelist’s vocation carries with it the possibility of a pernicious cross-cultural ventriloquism in telling stories that he would not consider his own. Shameem Black helpfully contextualizes this anxiety within a twentieth-century awareness of the kind of discursive violence detailed in Said’s Orientalism:

“Representing alterity is frequently understood as an act of discursive domination that replicates, in literary form, the violent operations of political, economic, and social inequality” (2010, 20).3 Carey’s apparent paradox is a question of cultural translation in the novel: how do you translate into fiction what you cannot or should not know? And how do you avoid reproducing the “violent operations” that have characterized colonial literatures?

1. The question is eerily similar to one asked by a fictional interviewer in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), where the eponymous Australian novelist is asked to give an account of the “fate of the Tasmanians,” specifically those exterminated “by her countrymen, her ancestors” (202-3). Her response turns on qualifications for what she calls the “secretary” work of representing their “voices” (ibid.). J.M. Coetzee. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking. 2. Interview with Peter Carey. The Guardian Unlimited: Books Podcast, guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 February 2008, 10.42 GMT. 3. Black, Shameem. 2009. Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others. New York: Columbia UP.

69 Carey attempts to nuance this imaginative impasse by explaining the role of inaccessible stories in his novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988):

Oscar and Lucinda is built around the notion of the Christian stories floating in a box [a glass church] through a landscape of Aboriginal stories… the Aboriginal stories will be destroyed and the Christian stories will flourish for a little while. (Guardian 2008)4

While remaining true to his basic tenet of not representing Aboriginal characters, Carey readily admits that those characters in fact exist within his novel as a kind of unreadable story, one which nevertheless has a powerful effect on the narrated story of Oscar and his glass church. There is a narrative parallel in the novel that invites the question of equivalence between the two incommensurate texts. Even so, Carey’s contradiction resolves into an uneasy juxtaposition of readable stories (the European narrative) and unreadable stories (the Aboriginal narrative that exists as a competing, non-equivalent to the European one). This narrative co-existence does not, however, produce a common ground for those stories, but rather preserves the uncommon singularity of the two making the juxtaposition powerful for what it cannot assimilate. The impasse, similar to what Kenneth Reinhard has called a “traumatic proximity,” deeply impacts how we claim certain knowledge from reading the postcolonial novel.5 This very trauma of what to do with the knowledge that resides within texts, but cannot be derived from those texts, puts a pointed question to the kinds of cultural translations with which recent world literature theory is concerned. It also provokes a reconsideration of the episteme of colonialism, which “offered a world to be inscribed”

(2010, 9).6

****

4. The pathos of the novel concerns Oscar’s ill-fated wager with Lucinda that he might transport a church constructed entirely of glass floated on a river through the Outback. 5. Kenneth Reinhard. 1995. “Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas,” Modern Language Notes 110.4. 6. Peter Hitchcock. 2010. The Long Space. Stanford: Stanford UP.

70

The Black Swan of Trespass

Now I find that once more I have shrunk To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream, I had read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters. Ern Malley, “Durer: Innsbruck, 1495”

All of it—Ethel, Ern, the poems, the life, everything—was a hoax, of course, the biggest literary hoax of the century. Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair

In October of 1943 in Melbourne, Australia, two modestly influential poets and academics set loose a literary experiment in the hopes of vanquishing what they saw as

Modernism’s plague on poetic language in the 20th century. James McAuley and Harold

Stewart fabricated a significant body of Modernist poetry, ominously titled The Darkening

Ecliptic, and the figurative body of a recently dead poet, Ern Malley. It was an experiment aimed at what the two hoaxers found to be “a lot of high-sounding nonsense” coming out in major presses of England and the Continent (178).7 The experiment sought to “test whether

‘real’ modernist poetry could be distinguished from fake” (2003, 178). Posing as the faux- author’s faux sister, Ethel Malley, McAuley and Stewart began a correspondence with Max

Harris, the young editor of Australia’s most plush literary magazine, Angry Penguins.8

Heralded as the long absent connective tissue between European and Australian Modernism, the poems were given their own special issue and brought out with fanfare.

7 Ryan, Judith. 1993. “After ‘Death of the Author.’” Cultures of Forgery. Ed. Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas. London and New York: Routledge. 8 Heyward, Michael. 1993. The Ern Malley Affair. London: Faber and Faber.

71 As is the case with any proper literary hoax, there is the inevitable moment of revelation when the veil is lifted and the poems become evidence rather than verse. The Ern

Malley hoax, fashioned as it was to dismiss the rise of the Modernist experiment, had unintended consequences that had little to do with Modernism, per se, and more to do with the power of language to deceive, to pervert, and to shame. Max Harris was disgraced and ultimately tried in court for publishing obscene poems, with the hoaxers being largely validated in their experiment and going on to publish acclaimed volumes of poetry in

Australia and Japan. But this is not the end of the story.

These fake poems have found a real life post the revelation of their inauthenticity.

They have been studied in earnest (or in Ern) by poets of renown, compared to the obscure and powerful verse of Geoffrey Hill, by none other than John Ashberry, and canonized, after a fashion, in most anthologies of modern Australian literature (though often with the author’s name in scare quotes).9 Harris republished The Darkening Ecliptic as a testament to his enduring faith, not in Malley, but in the ability of poetry to work in and beyond our conceptions of authorship. Indeed, for many Australians, “Malley became…a kind of folk hero” (Ryan 2003, 178). But the coat tails of this hoax have reached further than mere appreciation, indeed what I will call the “afterlife” of the Malley hoax has engendered a literary reckoning with conceptions of identity, authorship, authenticity, and finally with the value of the literary hoax as a function of literature broadly. As Michael Heyward put it in his influential history of the Ern Malley hoax, there are questions that remain even after all the facts of the case are known:

Who owns the copyright of The Darkening Ecliptic, the complete poems of Ernest Lalor Malley? The hoaxers? Max Harris? Ethel Malley? It was hard not to think that Harris had some kind of right to those poems… We don’t expect publishers of poetry to be pilloried in the international press. We

9 Ashberry, 1988 interview in Jacket magazine (http://jacketmagazine.com/02/jaiv1988.html)

72 don’t expect the state to prosecute them. We don’t expect poems to be written by nobody. (xvii)

The strange story of the Ern Malley Affair, the concoction of a deceased Modernist poet by two avowedly anti-Modernist poets for the purpose of humiliating the young publisher of an Australian poetry journal and pronouncing Modernism a hoax on the literary, makes for good storytelling on its own; very rarely is a hoax so absolutely swallowed with every barb and hook intact. But it is the afterlife of this hoax, the persistence of the poems, and the genesis of a novel about the hoax, that stirs up several pressing questions about the authenticity of the literary object in general, and the postcolonial novel in particular. If we contend with the concept of the hoax in the unique terms set forth by the literary hoax

(something quite different from the snake-oil salesman or the counterfeit dollar), we can begin to understand the principal action of the hoaxing as engaging theories of translation in the novel of world literature. In particular, we must interrogate the assumption that novels written by and about postcolonial subjects submit to an authentication of the cultural knowledge contained within, that they will turn transparent when just the right critical light is applied, demands interrogation. But in putting the screws to this particular notion of how cultural knowledge gets translated out of the literary and into a socio-political discourse that gets called the “real,” we encounter the form and politics of the hoax.

Let us begin with the understanding that “Durer: Innsbruck” is a real poem by a fake poet, the plaything of two vindictive imaginations bent on proving Modernism a fraud on poetry. This assumption requires several leaps of faith, the first and most potent being that if a piece of faked art persists beyond the duration of its fakery (after the scandal, as it were), than it must be made of more than simply evidence of its own failure to be. It has an afterlife of meaning that spans beyond the simple revelation of its hoaxing. Such an artifact

73 of the poetic hoax becomes, as the poem reminds us here in purple verse, “an interloper… the black swan of trespass on alien waters.” Such is the case, I will argue, with the postcolonial novel in an age of the world. The novel’s form disarms the revelation of absolutes of identity, history, and politics, presenting instead a landscape of negotiation between the expectations for form in the postcolonial novel.

This chapter will examine the implications of the figure of the hoax as a novel’s retort to the expectations for transparent knowledge, a hoax on cultural translation. By addressing a novel that is explicitly about a hoax and one that performs a hoax, we can think of postcolonial novels as the prevaricators of a great swindle—a hoax on the persistence of colonial epistemologies in reading the novels of others. This kind of hoax in the novel deflates expectations about how to translate the particular difference of a novel’s universe into a knowingness about the world. And in doing so, I argue that those novels offer something of great political value for a globalized world: a discourse of incomplete knowledge that speaks to the possibility of community without simple continuities or transparency. For the reader of postcolonial literature, the space of the imagination pursues something like a state of incomplete knowing. She reads to understand, but as with reading a translation, this understanding is always partial, there is always the primary text lurking in the shadows of our imagination, just out of reach. Godzich casts this as “the task of reading,” that “the reading must remain immanent; it must not let itself slowly drift toward the uncovering of the presumed content, the transcendental signified” (180).10 Aligned with such a task, the novel performs a dynamic covering and uncovering of “presumed content,” translating form in a manner that is neither surface, nor depth.

10 Godzich, Wlad. The Culture of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.

74 The literary hoax, like the translation, exists not as a vacuum of knowledge, but as a counterform of that knowledge, much like a counterfeit. We read the translation not for the real thing, but for the approximate mixture of form and content that will remind us of the original that we do not know. That “original,” on inspection will prove to be itself a copy— in a dynamic of infinite regress. Translation becomes the genuine only in its ability to counter the original in a convincing way, and in doing so, erase the very notion of originality.

Not far from the cognitive fakery of déjà vu, the ability of translation to recall something we are experiencing for the first time as though it has happened before is one of the great imaginative triumphs of reading. We are hoaxed not by illusions, not tricked by a magician’s slight of hand that defies our understanding of the world, but by the assertion of supplementary forms of knowledge that disrupt our assumptions about what constitutes the genuine, the original, and the knowable. Such a hoax is substantively different than the counterfeit dollar bill, but the necessary assumption of representational worth persists in both. The forged dollar reminds one of the particular form of currency, of value, but with a difference, often an imperceptible difference.11 The counterfeit bill must resemble the authentic currency enough to be accepted as carrying a value—it has to be representative enough to be transferrable, and in this way it is both similar and different from the effects of the literary hoax.

To write about the hoax of literature is inevitably to speak of truths in form, and the violation of those truths. Literary hoaxes cannot exist without the a priori assumption of rules for authenticity in the literary work. These rules are, of course, historically contingent. Hillel

Schwartz details the move from copying as the fundamental tool for developing artistic

11 Of course, one thinks here of différance and its repetition with a difference. Derrida’s reading of Baudelaire’s “Counterfeit Money” is meaningful here in its elaboration of the necessity of a gift appearing as such, and the hoax that underlies the process of indebtedness. 1992. Given Time 1.Counterfeit Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

75 genius—she notes Picasso’s turns through each major era and its archetype of painting forms before his entrée into Cubism—to the development of “copying as a political act of appropriation” (1998, 240).12 Concepts, like copyright, considered inviolable in contemporary literary criticism, were more fluid for Renaissance writers. Joshua Reynolds in

1774 discussed the process of copying as the prime creative function: “By imitation only, variety, and even originality of invention, is produced” (in Schwartz 1998, 249). To reveal a hoax is retroactively to claim the possibility of an authentic language and knowledge that can be distilled from our reading of fiction. Like the dollar bill that pretends at a gold standard long ago abandoned, the novel works with certain formal standards for representation of the real, in turns mimicking and distorting the expectations for those formal standards. My claim for the novel departs dramatically from this opposition of hoax and truth, and posits a shift away from certain Western epistemological paradigms for how we read for cultural knowledge in terms of their truths and fictions, and towards a politics of the incomplete.

The odd work of non-resemblance is at play in the Bloomsbury hoax of the HMS

Dreadnought and furthers the conceptual logic for the hoax of translation in the

12 Schwartz, Hillel. 1998. The Culture of the Copy. New York: Zone Books.

76 postcolonial novel.

Imagine for a moment the preposterous vision of Virginia Woolf and her brother

Adrian Stephen, Guy Ridley, Anthony Buxton and Duncan Grant dressed in blackface and vaguely tribal, African wraps, and speaking in gibberish to officers of one of Her Majesty’s great war vessels of the 20th century. On February Seventh, 1910, the Bloomsbury cadre gained admission to the HMS Dreadnought by claiming to be dignitaries from Abyssinia

(Contemporary Ethiopia and Eritrea), whereupon they were given an impressive and complete tour of one of Her Majesty’s most advanced ships of war. Notably, the hoaxers expressed appreciation for the highlights of the tour with a rousing “Bunga, Bunga”. Far from providing proof of a well-played imitation of African dignitaries, the photographic evidence of the hoax illuminates the non-reciprocality of the literary hoax, where attention to an authentic original or even a striking likeness is beside the point. How, one might ask, is

77 this a literary hoax? Surely the mere participation of literary figures does not in itself make a hoax literary, but the fact that these writers and artists found it completely unnecessary to imagine a model Abyssinian from which to draw their imitation is helpful in decoupling the hoax from related categories of the fake that rely exclusively on litmus tests for authenticity.

For example, Judith Ryan distances the literary hoax from the literary fraud on the basis of motivation. In contrast to McAuley and Stewart, “Chatterton’s medieval poetry and

Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’ texts were frauds. Chatterton and Macpherson stood to profit from their alleged ‘disoveries’” (1993, 179).

Hoaxing the colonial imperative for approaching what is different, what is other, as translatable approaches an ethics of reading. But it is also a theory of how novels anticipate the kinds of world/ly readings that will carry expectations for translatable knowledge, and stage the hoaxing of those expectations. As such, reading the hoax offers a critical mode that reinvigorates the claims for postcolonial readings of contemporary novels in English.

The literary hoax, in this case the infamous Ern Malley Affair in Australia, allows me to discuss how certain formal strategies in the novel play with the complicated nature of so- called genuine literary works. As the writer Alberto Manguel notes, the anxiety over how to navigate the increasingly interconnected world anticipates a reader who “unguided and bewildered, seek[s] a place in which comprehension (or faith in comprehension) has been set down in words” (A Reader on Reading).13 “Faith in comprehension” being both the contextualization of and the force of the hoax, we can read in certain contemporary novels by postcolonial writers an engagement with hoaxing as an awareness of the various literary circulations of their works, and the necessity of both comprehension and incomprehension in approaching those works. Referencing Ishiguro’s use of incorrect English grammar,

13 Manguel, Alberto. 2010. A Reader on Reading. New Haven: Yale UP.

78 Walkowitz argues that certain texts “will seem ‘foreign’ when they perform and require interpretation because readers attribute such efforts to a difference between cultures rather than to a difference within them” (Cosmopolitan Style 110). We can expand Walkowitz’s assertion in order to claim that those writers in fact translate their work into a style of the foreign in order to signal the closure of comprehension, and the beginning of the hoax.

Unlike the counterfeit bill, the counterfeit literary form does not become empty of value upon being revealed as a hoax. On the contrary, when the reader deciphers the foreign-ness of form, the text begins to mean something beyond resemblance (in Ishiguro’s case, it’s ESL

English)—it has an afterlife that persists even as resemblance fails. Once the reader becomes an actor in the perpetuation of the hoax, willing to read the incomplete, the indecipherable, and even the illegible, the force of the hoax begins to function very much the way translation works.

For K.K. Ruthven, the very possibility of literary hoaxes and forgeries constitutes the

“repressed text of literary studies,” fabrications that provoke an “indispensable critique of those cultural practices that foster the so-called genuine article” (Faking Literature 171). The hoax of the literature, here understood as a counterform/feit, occurs in the imaginative space that may contain both comprehension and illegibility. In this sense, literature’s translation between the ontological and the imaginative, and the reader’s transcription of that imaginary back into a co-existence with the ontological, is not unlike Paul Saint-Amour’s description of forgery, that it is a “misattribution,” and a “sin against authentic identity”

(100).14 But equally, the forgery, as Amour quotes Wilde, is “a brilliant if somewhat daring act of the imagination,” and, in Lukascian-terms, it is the sinful form for a fallen world (in

14 The Copywrights. 2003. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP.

79 Saint-Amour 101).15 Held as an internal tension within a novel, the sin of the imagination stages the contradiction of reading fiction as representative of the authentic, even as the narrative form constantly announces its work as fakery, forgery and hoax.

“Crudely Bound”: Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang

I had thought of Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty—as springing up with all parts absolute— till in a civil hour I was shown the original copy of it…How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! Interlined! Corrected! As if their words were mortal. Charles Lamb, on reading Lycidas in manuscript form

In the final pages of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), the pamphlet material that we are meant to read as a pastiche of diaries, notebooks, police records, and historical annotations of the life and death of the infamous horse-thief and outlaw Ned

Kelly, stages a peculiar moment of reading. This staging offers a partially obstructed view of the object to be read, whereby we may read only the effect of the text, while the text itself remains foreign to us, untranslated into the narrative, unreadable—the closed-book.

Thomas Curnow, who has betrayed Kelly to the authorities, is understood to lament his unwitting role in elevating Kelly to martyrdom as he leafs through the outlaw’s diaries. We read True History as a co-determinate text within a text; the history is already in motion, changing hands, and marked by annotations and marginalia that we cannot read— like a foreign Braille pressed into the margins of the legible narrative. The novel moves from

Curnow’s outrage at Kelly’s sudden celebrity, to what it calls the private effects that the journals had on Curnow despite his public outrage: “In private, his relationship with Ned

Kelly was more complicated and the souvenir [the stolen Kelly journals] seems to have made its own private demands upon his sympathy. Evidence provided by the manuscript suggests that… he continued to labour obsessively over the construction of the dead man’s

15 Georg Lukacs. 1974. Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press.

80 sentences” which he “decorated” with “small grey pencil marks” (364-5).16 This private labor, certainly none other than the labor of marking one’s reading, acts in concert with the

“demands” of the form to produce a space of consternation, a goading of the claims of equivalence in the evidence that the book plots for us. It is a style, here referred to as

“decoration,” at odds with the very rules set forth by the narrative structure and form, what

Wai-chee Dimock would call the “anarchic” space of literature as world (174).17 Though we read Curnow as drawn to the “construction of the dead man’s sentences,” we can read his decoration of the margins only as a narrative effect, as the “private demands upon his sympathy.”

It appears we have only understood half the story. The rest we read like tea leaves on the surface of Curnow’s response, a response to the private thoughts of Australia’s Irish horse-thief-hero that is now layered with annotations that seek to translate a true history into the true history (a distinction that Carey purposefully avoids in his title: True History…). Thus

Curnow’s inaccessible notes, his decoration of the journals, offers us counter evidence to the police annotations that translate each chapter of the diary into a substantiation of a criminal life. And so we read True History in that liminal space between the text and the intertext, the journal and the annotation, aware of a competing story, but deeply uncertain as to its constitution. We are left only the aftereffects of the text’s spectral other—the ghost in the text machine that reads “the dead man’s sentences” over our shoulder. Can the space between the untranslatable pencil marks in the margins and the material text be read? Might that space between a number of competing stories act as a counter-form (not unlike a counterfeit) to the expectation of possessible, translatable knowledge?

16 Carey, Peter. 2000. The True History of the Kelly Gang. Queensland: The University of Queensland Press. Hereafter cited as True History. 17 Dimock, Wai-chee. 2003. “Pre-national Time: Novel, Epic, Henry James.” The Henry James Review, Volume 24, Number 3, Fall 2003.

81 Peter Carey’s fictionalization of Australia’s most notorious literary hoax, the Ern

Malley affair, will help to further elucidate the hoax of cultural translation in the postcolonial novel. As a tangential, but pertinent extension of the Malley hoax’s afterlife to Carey’s broader historical concerns, there is the nexus of Ned Kelly and Ern Malley in the Australian artist Sidney Nolan’s portraiture. Both the forged and real figures of Australian myth

“embod[y] the true sorrow and pathos of our time” (Ryan 1998, 178).

Carey’s My Life as a Fake requires no previous knowledge of the Ern Malley hoax in order to follow the story, but as with reading any translation, some knowledge of the original goes a long way in making things both clearer and, paradoxically, more distant. To gloss quickly what was a sustained, and deeply complicated hoax of the Modernist poetry world by two anti-modernist poets, I will keep to the logistical aspects of the case as a point of entry into how a hoax gets translated into fiction. Eager to prove the Modernist movement as shallow and navel-gazing, interested merely in idle play with language with an aim only to dizzy and estrange, two Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart concocted a manuscript of poems, The Darkening Ecliptic, by the fictional autodidact and ostensible

Modernist genius, Ern Malley. McAuley and Stewart fabricated letters from Malley’s ingénue sister, who had come upon the manuscript after her brother’s untimely death from “grave’s disease.” The poems were submitted to the young editor of the up-in-coming Angry Penguins literary magazine, Max Harris, with the following narrative from the fictitious Ethel Malley:

Dear Sir, When I was going through my brother’s things after his death, I found some poetry he had written. I am no judge of it myself, but a friend who I showed it to thinks it is very good and told me it should be published. On his advice I am sending you some of the poems for an opinion.

Compelled by the work’s high Modernist pastiche and play, as well as its homegrown

Australian authorship, Max Harris immediately published a memorial edition of Penguins in

82 order to introduce Malley to the literary world. For Harris, The Darkening Ecliptic represented the missing link between the English modernist movement and Australia’s latent contribution to that movement. To Harris’s utter disappointment, the poems were generally poorly received with some intimation that Harris might have written them himself. When the hoax was officially revealed, McAuley and Stewart declared a cultural victory over what they saw as a bankrupt movement in British poetry. They derided Modernism’s distinctive style, adjudging it easily and accurately parodied in their Malley poems. Ironically, by the very nature of their disdain they managed also to credit Modernist style with a disarming affective influence. Modernism, they wrote, had a powerful hallucinatory effect, one that was fashioned precisely to incapacitate the reader of Modernist poetry. They belabored "its fashion,” the farce of form in Modernism that “rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination.” More than any other intrigue of the Ern Malley hoax, it is this treatise on the ill-effects of the Modernist style, specifically its ability to disable

“devotees” and render them susceptible to “absurdity,” which compels my interest in forged fashion and the literary hoax. The hoaxer’s implicit claim is that the counter to Modernism’s hallucinatory distraction is an original language which does not, perhaps cannot, affect the reader, but only instruct him.

Sometimes the afterlife of the forgery outlasts the value of the original. Indeed, many years after the hoax, as though he himself had been rendered insensible to absurdity,

Harris republished the Malley poems in 1961, writing that "[t]he myth is sometimes greater than its creators." Refashioned as a valuable absurdity, Ern Malley was born anew— the poet and his poems reborn from inauthenticity. The “daring act of the imagination” required for Harris to re-author fake poems and offer them as authentic works of Modernist virtuosity remains an ironic rejoinder to the fakers’ claim that Modernism produces nothing

83 but bits of “bait for the reader.” Harris goes from being hoaxed by a forgery, that which, quoting Amour, “sin[s] against authentic identity,” to being a plagiarist, who “sin[s] against originality” (100). While I am not concerned here with the facticity of the hoax, per se, my work with the novels of Peter Carey will explore how these cardinal sins of literary felicity

(plagiarism and forgery) are employed as a cancellation of transparency in translation, and as a fashioning of political space within a text, where absurdity and authenticity, comprehension and illegibility are necessarily interdependent.

Peter Carey’s re-authoring of the Malley affair in the form of a novel allows us to consider a particular performance of the hoax in a moment of translation. I have been setting the stage for a consideration of translation and hoax as parallel terms for the same conceptual framework, but I have yet to make a definitive claim for what that frame might contain. This chapter is directly preceded by a reading of Borges’s Aleph, the story of a writer haunted by the possibility of an omniscient vision of the world, one that might include the lost memories of his lost love. The juxtaposition of The Aleph with a meditation on translating hoaxes carves out space for two different discussions about what constitutes the frame of the world in world literature theory. Just as we do not read Aleph for the resolution of the veracity of its claims of an oracle that can subsume the world, we are similarly uninterested in the hoax’s claim to truthfulness—we read both for the contextualization of how the hoax comes into being. We read the hoax for its historical markings, but we are thoughtful enough to know that our readings will fall short of the omniscient historical reading claimed by the Aleph. We are the writer haunted by forgetfulness and loss. We long for the broad vision of the Aleph, but understand that its sight is analogous to the jumbled syntax of the pages of a closed book.

84 At this particular postcolonial moment, Carey’s novels are deeply concerned with the problem of discerning the real from the fake; often it’s a problem of documentation, sifting through texts, literary and otherwise, grasping at authentication in the space of fiction.

Diaries, journals, bibles, artwork, passports, history texts, tax forms, not to mention all the competing intertextual novels, are forever being read and re-read for evidence of inauthenticity—looking for the element of the forgery and the fake. Oscar and Lucinda (1983) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), both winners of the Booker Prize, take up documents of imperialism as they come into contact with competing possible and impossible texts of history; Theft (2006) grapples explicitly with art forgeries; His Illegal Self (2008) concerns the illicit travel of a 11 year old with a woman who may or not be his proper mother; and Bliss (1982) explores of hell of unoriginality in storytelling. Linked by a narrative concern with voices from the margins of culture, Carey’s novels rarely resemble each other except in their obsessive interest in all manner of hoaxes. This fascination is nowhere more explicit than in Carey’s reimagining of the Ern Malley hoax: My Life as a Fake

(2003).

At this point a word is necessary about my use of translation and hoax currently, and their value for considering the work of the novel. It must first be said that the genre of the literary hoax is a troublesome one and particularly mutable in definition; forgery, plagiarism, copyright, piracy, and the more vulgar theft, are all sins against originality in a world of definitive authorship. Translation raises complications for such a world. I am claiming translation as a form of narration, one that moves the reading across registers of the known and the foreign, signaling the legibility of certain pieces of information and the opacity of

85 others. Alone, this is hardly an original approach to translation as trope,18 but I hope to expand the reach of this formulation with an examination of the structure of this form as analogous to the structure of the hoax. Such a formalist approach allows a critique of interpretations that rely on a transparency of culture, specifically in postcolonial novels, something I’ve been calling reading the open book. This critique emerges from a particular formal tension between translation and the untranslatable—an internal conflict common to the literary in general, and explicitly a formal strategy in the postcolonial novel as it responds to and manipulates cultural literacy. Novels that dismantle authenticating readings are postcolonial by virtue of their interest in questions of comparative epistemologies. They command readings that not only acknowledge the influence of western conceptions of translatable knowledge, but also befuddle that tradition with the possibility for substantive difference in thinking—thinking about/through questions of nation, language, and the world.

The figure of the hoax, far from limiting the potential power of translation to resolution into target and origin languages, offers translation as the modus operandi of the novel. Translation, as such, both accounts both for the singularity of its imaginative world, as well as speaking back to the world/s that would claim it as assimilable to a particular tradition. It is after all translation’s partiality, its haunting other author, its missing original, that allies it with postcolonial fiction’s abiding interest in what cannot or should not be understood in a single text. The postcolonial novel’s wielding of the form of the hoax is not a claim against understanding, per se, but rather the development of an epistemology of the incomplete. The effect of the hoax is thus to undercut the assumption of translatable knowledge as comprehensibly legible, offering instead the possibilities of reading knowledge

18 For some recent examples of translation as literary form see: Chow, “Translator, Traitor. Translator, Mourner,” and Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System”

86 in process, never singular, and like the hoax itself, availed to afterlives that cannot be anticipated. Cultural authorship, cultural authority as claimed by the text and for the reader of novels of world literature operates according to the principle that most distinguishes translation, best understood in the Rolling Stones’ admonition that “you can’t always get what you want,” but sometimes you get what you read.

The sin of the forgerer is his violation of “authentic identity” by “annex[ing] another’s name to his own text” (Saint-Amour 100).19 At first glance, this could seem entirely the wrong term for a hoax in which there is no single original author that is stylistically mimicked. The entirety of the Malley hoax rests on the invention of an authorial persona who has produced Modernist form in a recognizable parody of other Modernist authors (in this case Dylan and Pound, among others). As such, it is not identity that is violated, but rather, a form. Ern Malley receives the fashion and the manner of the

Modernist that exists in the minds of McAuley and Stewart, an amalgam of the 20th century’s stylistic prestidigitators. What the hoaxers attempt is such an absolute comprehension of the stylistic patterns and patter of High Modernism, that they might translate that fashion and manner to poems of their own design. They seek to translate Modernism, like so much glossy veneer, onto the language of their poesy. As to its forgery, the nature of this translation is both creative and destructive. McAuley and Stewart translate not in order to offer the sense or sensibility of the original; on the contrary, they wish to show the bankruptcy of meaning in Modernist style. But in order to be successful in their hoax of translation, they must, in a sense, profit from its affective power to “render insensible” the

“devotee,” whom we might call the native speaker of the Modernist tongue.20 The reader

19 Saint-Amour, Paul. 2003. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 20 Hillel Schwartz locates the development of an “almost supernatural distinction between an original and a copy,” in the reaction against the almost incomprehensible copyright laws prior to 1800 (248). Crucial to the

87 must be incapable of “discriminating” the original from the fake. Forgery in translation sins differently. McAuley and Stewart are forgerers in the more literal sense of melding together the distinguishing, or expected, segments of language in order to claim a singular creation capable of hoaxing the reader. We cannot say that the Ern Malley poems were misconstructed as they had the intended effect of rendering Max Harris insensible to their forgery; the supposed clues left like muddy footprints on the body of the poems, read like the playful de-centering of meaning that Harris esteemed in the English Moderns, and as such, they read as true to form. Harris, for all his talent and ambition, could not discriminate the translation from the forgery: “the black swan of trespass on alien waters.”

To follow the logic of such a violation of style in Peter Carey’s novel is to give birth to a Frankenstein’s monster who will assert his authenticity in terms of the translation of form. Bill Ashcroft calls this the “liveliness” brought into being by “the elusive interaction of truth and lying” (31).21 The play between the authentic and the forged in the documents and characters of the novel stages a notion of forgery as the great question for translation: can authenticity be carried in language?

Translation as Monster

We discovered (late at night such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about translations, for they multiply the number of books. That was when my wife remembered a saying attributed to one of the heresiarchs of translation theory, Walter Benjamin. It was an astonishing claim, though literarily unremarkable, and she remembered it like this: A translation issues not so much from the life of an original as from its afterlife, and the translation of an important work of world literature marks its stage

inchoate forms of copyright was a sensibility, or what I would call haunting, of the original in the copy. Schwartz cites Justice William O. Bailey’s memorable sensitivity to the copy’s kinship to the original (reminiscent of pornography and “I know it when I see it”): “A copy is that which comes so near to the original as to give every person seeing it the idea created by the original” (Ibid.). 21 Ashcroft, Bill. 2004. “Reading Carey Reading Malley,” Who’s Who: Hoaxes, Imposture, and Identity Crises in Australian Literature. edit. Maggie Dolan and Carrie Dawson. Queensland: UQP.

88 of continued life. A theory of cannibals, I remarked. Or of vampires, she darkly suggested. (Andrew Hurley, “The Zahir and I”)22

Andrew Hurley’s dreamscape description of translating Borges and finding that translations work more like perpetually multiplying monsters than singular works of genius, takes my argument for the hoax of translation further into the imaginative form of the novel.

Hurley takes up the afterlife as not the remainder of translation, but as the primary function: producing ever-multiplying texts that derive from the afterlife, rather than the life, of the original. A ready cultural example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been translated into nearly every written language, but it is has also, notably, engendered (given birth to) translations that respond the filmic adaptations, which have misnamed the monster Frankenstein and changed the focus of the book entirely. There’s an argument that Dr. Frankenstein represents, himself, another kind of Enlightenment monster, bending the fury of nature to his limitless imagination. Whatever our perspective, we can trace the multiple births of

Frankenstein back to, not merely Shelley’s novel, but to its progeny and kin. Hurley’s assertions about the monstrosity of translation violate one of the fundamental axioms of translation theory: we do not translate from a translation. In the case of cultural translation in and from the novel, this may well be the most important theoretical shift in how we read.

Carey’s My Life As a Fake (2003), dramatizes the afterlives of the Ern Malley hoax, and in doing so, reframes the hoax as the primary function of literature. Fake begins with the basic outline of the Ern Malley story: an anti-Modernist poet makes up a manuscript of

Modernist poems in order to fool an editor into publishing them as an authentic addition to the Modernist tradition. In doing so, the publisher will be humiliated and forced to admit, at the very least, a lack of discriminating taste, and, at the most, the impropriety of Modernism as a form. But this is all largely back-story for the novel. When the novel begins, the hoax is

22 Hurley, Andrew. “The Zahir and I.” http://www.themodernword.com/borges/zahir_and_i.html

89 many years past, all but forgotten except by the principal players, but its afterlife is just beginning to blossom. Sarah Wode-Douglass, the editor of a small press literary magazine, pursues evidence of the infamous literary hoax to Malaysia (drawn in by the personal and financial interests of her mother’s ex-lover, the poet John Slater) in hopes of acquiring a previously unpublished manuscript of forgeries by the disgraced hoaxer, Christopher Chubb.

Wode-Douglass’s inquiries into the existence of the manuscript are part of a much larger intrigue surrounding the possibility that the fake poems were written by a real author. And while this scavenger hunt for a portfolio of fake poems follows a plotting not uncommon to the realist tradition, the hoaxer’s narrative of the scandal introduces an unsustainable contradiction to the story: the sudden appearance of Bob McCorkle, the made-up poet, arisen, Frankenstein monster-like, from the hoaxer’s writing table and claiming ownership of the fake poems. He is Ern Malley raised from the grave(s disease), and back for vengeance against the perpetrators of the hoax.

My Life as a Fake performs narrative translation as the juxtaposition of documents that must alternately be authenticated and disavowed. Put in the terms of this study, originals and copies, forgeries and the authentic must be distinguished in order for the narrative to establish expectations and limits for how it is to be read. This becomes a particularly complicated delimitation when it comes to pass that Douglass has agreed to write the biography of Chubb’s hoax, making her partially culpable for the enduring hoax.

The non-instrumentality of the novel’s documentation—the only instrument is the hoax— then exists in the space between those expectations and the singularity of a reading that cannot have access to any originals. This should not be confused with a possession of the text via interpretation, but rather, the tension between the text’s missing originals and the reader’s interest in cultural knowledge allows for “the oddly satisfying reprieve or ‘letdown’

90 from teleological expectations” that Barthes finds in the lover’s discourse (1979, 32).23 So how might one negotiate these seeming cross-purposes of the text—the need to authenticate narrative truths and the need to endorse fictionality as a conduit to the satisfaction of the incomplete?

It is my contention that the figure of the literary hoax brings to the fore the ways in which narratives stage their own failures to authenticate, and their purposeful failures to ground themselves in an absolute specificity (of culture, history, or language). This is therefore a problem for cultural translation that needs the novel to offer up specific knowledge. The hoax of translation in the postcolonial novel engages recent theories of world literature, especially those that hinge on the relative situatedness of novels as the rationale for literature’s circulation in multiple networks of readers and translators. The persistence of the un-authenticateable, the hoax that persists in its fakery even after the jig is up, complicates world literature with the distinct concerns of postcolonial theory.

Carey reads the hoax as “both the subject and key to the mystery of the poems” (57).

For Carey in Fake, this tension between the subject and the key manifests itself as a monstrous birth. The birth of a flesh and bone Bob McCorkle, the fabricated “author” of the hoax poetry, who emerges from the alchemical joining of Christopher Chubb’s narrative and the first-person narration of Sara Wode-Douglass, his would-be publisher. The story that will ultimately merge these two narrative strands is offered as its own peculiar self- hoaxing. Douglass, upon encountering the disgraced Chubb in a Malaysian bicycle repair shop, asks her companion John Slater if he recognizes Chubb, if he knows him. His answer,

“of course not,” is the first in a series of escalating episodes of (non)recognition and it is the

23 Barthes, Roland. 1979. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Hill and Wang.

91 catalyst to the novel’s precarious beginning: “And that is really where the story begins, for it was clear to me that he was lying” (13).

From this point of incredulity, we are asked to read everything and everyone in the novel as a potential fake. What shapes our reading, then, is not the unreliability of the narrator/narration, but rather the question of what precisely constitutes a hoax in fiction, and how the translation of the hoax-story onto Malaysia makes clear the postcolonial implications of hoaxing cultural authenticity in the novel. As the narrative is not and cannot be forthcoming about the reality of the fake poet coming to life to reclaim his plagiarized work, our reading must remain outside the circular logic of whether the plot is truth or fiction. The plot makes meaning in the manner of Chubb’s “phantom pregnancy” (20).

Even as Douglass’s first person account of the hoax is fully skeptical of the McCorkle’s virgin birth (or rather Zeusian birth— straight from the head of the poet)24, the novel must present the plotted fiction as in constant discord with its form. Consider the narrative’s assessment of the plot’s Frankeinstein monster: there was a “certain ‘Bob McCorkle’ who of course never existed but to whom our bitter little Australian gave a rangingly modern opus: life, death, a whole biography” (20). “Of course” McCorkle never existed— he is twice a fiction: once of Chubb’s self-delusions, and again, as a fabrication of the novel’s design. In one sense, the narrative is correct in its assessment that “Bob McCorkle must be born,” but whether that birth generates an opus or a body remains in doubt (40). Confronted with a series of un-authenticatables, we must instead read the functionality of the novel-as-hoax, that form that announces itself as a fake of reality, while continuing to compel not merely our attention, but our response. The response requires a kind of helplessness, as we struggle with our reading to take away either poem or person from the narrative. Missing the

24 Cf. The Satanic birth in Paradise Lost.

92 originals of the hoaxed poems, we are possessed by a narrative effect: the haunting of what cannot be fully authenticated, and the birth of this haunting other in the particular geography of postcolonial Malaysia. If we consider the novel’s two major intertexts, the Malley Affair and Shelley’s Frankenstein, we can gain some vantage on the intractability of the novel-as- hoax and its postcolonial implications.

I Prefer the Fake

The original is unfaithful to the translation. Borges

If this was his ‘real’ poetry, then I preferred the fake. True, these had none of the obfuscations that sometimes marred the ‘McCorkle.’ Nor did they have its life, its wildness… the sense that nothing on earth can matter but a poem. My Life as a Fake, 86

The translation of the real Ern Malley hoax into the fiction of Carey’s novel is of course contextualized by the epistemology of authenticity—the knowledge-based claims to the genuine in novels by or about postcolonial peoples. In his study of the “rhetorics of authenticity,” K.K. Ruthven describes the prevalence of the hoax in literature as a sublimation: “Literature avoids confronting the spectre of its own inauthenticity by displacing the problem on to some other medium and thematising it as fiction” (161). The literary hoax puts the question of authenticity into illuminating conflict with theories of representation, most of which see mimesis as marked by insufficiency.25 In the case of the

Carey novel, the spectre of inauthenticity is twinned with the spectre of insufficiency, not, as

Ruthven would argue, as a dodge of its own “inauthenticity,” but rather as a reckoning with

25 See Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1920) for the most colorful assessment of post-epic representation, namely: “the novel is the form for a world of absolute sinfulness.”

93 what J. Hillis Miller has called the “others” in the literary text.26 Ruthven’s interest in extra- textual/intertextual authentications, however, can be helpful to this reading. He claims that rhetorical play with conventions and intimations of autobiography “simulat[es] both the immediacy and authority of the personal testimony… Signs are read as referents in autobiography… because [they] refer to an extratextual reality” (150). If novels can play with authentication as an effect via autobiographical reference, what is the result when a fake autobiography is offered up?

The simile in the title of Carey’s novel, My Life as a Fake can help us imagine the conventions of the fake autobiography. My Life as a Fake’s title reminds us of a familiar device in autobiography. The “as a,” so common to the language of autobiography, plays at a vraisemblance meant to authenticate the transformative element(s) of an individual’s autobiography, e.g., “my life as” an actor, a politician, an ax-murderer, etc. We read, as

Nancy K. Miller and Barbara Johnson have so powerful theorized, the “as” as “is” in order to sustain the illusion of authenticity.27 “This is what I am, what I was, what I have become, precisely because the written account of my life will remind you of or appear as X.” Like the hoax, the simile in autobiography is both the subject and the key—the title itself authorizes the transformation detailed in the autobiography. It is a transition and a translation from the potential of the nascent self to the identifiable personhood of the writer.

The autobiography of a fake powerfully shifts this convention, reminding us of everything and nothing simultaneously and enacting only a neutral space of incomplete recognition. In this case, the autobiography of Chubb gets narrated by many voices in the

26 Miller takes his title, Others (2001), from the “plusiers voix” or many voices of Derrida’s “other.” Miller reads four of Derrida’s axioms about “l’autre” not to synthesize seemingly counter arguments into a singular mode of thinking about difference, but rather to read them as simultaneously constituative and deconstructive of the concept of the other. 27 Miller, Nancy K. 1991. Getting Personal. New York: Routledge; Johnson, Barbara. 1994. The Wake of Deconstruction. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

94 narrative, most powerfully by the monster of his imagination. The fake is, by his nature, the absence of authenticity tied ironically to a direct resemblance with his double; he is always shadowed by that which he cannot possibly be, but must, by his nature, resemble.28 The novel’s “fierce sarcastic title, My Life as a Fake” (256) replicates itself in Sara Wode-

Douglass’s narrative in the ironic title of Bob McCorkle’s manuscript of poems; ironic both in its revelation of the disputed hoax, and equally for the indubitable existence of McCorkle as a bodily presence in the narrative. The manuscript as titled, taken with the appearance of

McCorkle (in the narrative-flesh), is meant as a laughing rejoinder to the charge that the poems were fabricated. It is also, implicitly, a charge against autobiography as an authenticating genre within the literary. Douglass’s own narrative, begun with the admonishment that her source for the McCorkle story “was lying,” turns an evaluative gaze on her own “autobiographical” story: “I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptised in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously, made me who I was” (133, emphasis mine). Douglass can no longer recognize herself according to the terms of her narrative history. She has de-authenticated the very generic mode that allows her to operate as the narrative voice. Her perverted baptism paints a clear analogy to Christopher

Chubb’s consecration of the forged poems with the blood and body of “authorship.”

Chubb’s revelation of his act of creation (the McCorkle hoax) is strikingly reminiscent of

Douglass’s de-authentication: Chubb is “brought trembling to the abyss, where he might consider the blasphemous possibility that he had, with his own pen, created blood and bone and a beating heart” (152). These perverted baptisms— bringing to life the monstrosity of the hoax—constitute the “disconcerting knowledge” central to the event of literature and

28 Cf. Homi Bhabha’s figuration of the mimic man. 2004. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge.

95 have a particular importance when understood as a postcolonial reconsideration of the cultural knowledge of the novel.

Fake’s positioning of the literary hoax in direct tension with the claims of knowledge from texts with afterlives leads us to ask exactly what kind of monster the novel wants us to fear. The novel is ultimately an extended waiting period for a resolution that refuses to come.

There is never a definitive revelation of the hoaxers or even what the novel’s translation of this famous literary hoax might mean for our reading of the Ern Malley affair. Derrida has described this kind of event (though not in terms of a hoax) in turns as a “hauntology”: the

“waiting without expectation… the coming of an eminently real, concrete event, that is, [for] the most irreducibly heterogeneous otherness” (1994, 115)29; and as the polyphonic response called into being by the unexpected other: “l'autre appelle à venir et cela n'arrive qu'à plusieurs voix” [“The other brings into being that which arrives only as a polyphony of voices”] (Psyché: l’invention de l’autre).30 The polyphony and heterogeneity of the unexpected are powerful claims for the literary as it approaches otherness as an incomplete knolwedge.31

Derrida’s “hauntology,” characterized as the messianic without the messiah, imagines waiting without anticipation as the constituative principle of freedom. The literary event read as a hauntology depends on a “relationship to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated” (Spectres 65). If literature asks us to wait for what is to come, and if our readings are necessarily haunted by that prophecy, then the question that remains most forceful for our reading is: what do we do when the un-anticipatable arrives, but we cannot comprehend its coming? What happens to a reading when it must acknowledge its

29 Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. New York and London: Routledge. 30 Derrida. 2007. Psyché: l’invention de l’autre. Palo Alto: Sanford UP. 31 Certain theories of new world literature might well be categorized according to their response to this literary claim. In the case of Walkowitz’s “comparison literature,” world literature operates ironically as a delimiting of heterogeneity in otherness, even as it seeks to loosen the national binds on comparative literature. Thus, world literature may be logically read as a proliferation of possible comparisons, even as its theory of comparativity delimits the heterogeneity (the many voices) of the other.

96 lack of fluency, the illegibility of certain texts? Given that, for Derrida, the other arrives only as polyphony, how do we herald that arrival except as a collision of incomparables?32 The spectre that haunts in Spectres of Marx, according to Pheng Cheah, is “the original exposure of any body to alterity, not only in the maintenance of its already constituted form, but in the constitution of its very form, in the process of its self-identity, its being proper to itself” (387, my emphasis).33

Derrida, in anticipating otherness as the “absolutely contingent” that is nonetheless

“the constitution of its very form,” draws an unlikely equivalence between the hoax and translation—both of which require the co-existence of the paradoxical original-alterity. Like the hoax, which resembles only enough to fail in representing the original’s alterity, translation is always the insufficient that resembles only in our willingness to imagine an exposure to the original. Hillis Miller furthers this notion of haunting, describing a kind of séance, communing with the other: “the unique way in which the words on the pages as read serve as mediums… of the wholly other,” and “the other is always there and not there, in a species of ghostly semblance” (Others 4, my emphasis). Understood as on the order of a

“ghostly semblance,” the effect of the translation must, in a sense, provoke a hauntology— the sensibility of contact with the originial alterity. Being “proper to itself” then reads “self” doubled as the translation and its imagined convergence with the spectral original.

Responsibility for that which is inaccessible becomes the modus operandi of translation.

Cheah imagines this tension (self as other) through Derrida as an “alterity so radical” that it

32 For those who read a pronounced demarcation between the early and late Derrida, the messianic-turn surely belongs to the latter. Henry Staten, who considers the implications of Derrida’s “affirmative” deconstruction, writes that “the evocation of an inaccessible overfullness thows us from the ‘classical’ deconstruction of Of Grammatology, with its suspicion of fullnesses of all kinds, inaccessible ones in particular, into… valuation of the ‘experience of the impossible’” (111). Staten, Henry. 2005. “Tracking the ‘Native Informant’: Cultural Translation as the Horizon of Literary Translation,” Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. Edit. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005, pps. 111-126. 33 Cheah, Pheng. 2003. Spectral Nationality. New York: Columbia UP.

97 is “absolutely contingent” (ibid.). If there is no messiah in the messianic, “messianism that has been purged of content,” then contingency is the constitutive force in our interpretative claims, not authenticity (Cheah 390). In the hoax of the literary event, as with the translation, we understand the vitality of the radical absence, but, importantly, we read on.

The generative effect of this hauntology in Fake is the arrival of Bob McCorkle, the hoax that claims authentication, the original alterity of the narrative whose arrival is imminent while unanticipated. The narration of such an arrivant can perforce only be

“proper to itself,” since its form can only be recognized by the spectral-absence of comparison in the hoax. For hoaxes, by their nature as recognizable insufficiencies, necessitate comparison to an authentic before they can be revealed. In the case of the

McCorkle hoax, and by proxy the Malley affair, the fake poems become forgeries, or even plagiarisms, when the fabricated author arrives in the flesh.34 By staging the actual arrival of the unexpected, Fake brings into focus literature’s “problem” of translating the material into the space of the literary, what Derrida helps us imagine as the space of waiting for the unanticipatable.

Consider how McCorkle defines the nature of his arrival intertextually. Chasing down Chubb for a birth certificate to authenticate himself as “real” within the frame of the narrative hoax, McCorkle situates himself according to a history of poetic misconstruction:

And then he recited three lines from Paradise Lost in a voice which was very quiet, but terrifying: ‘Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man, Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote?’ Give me my bloody birth certificate. (95)

34 Because the poems cannot be evaluated for authenticity, the narrative oscillates between treating the manuscript as a forgery that copies the style of previous “original” McCorkles, and as the plagiarism of McCorkle poems by Christopher Chubb. Plagiarism, in this case, becomes an especially fraught problem of “misattribution.” Saint Amour’s definition of the plagiarist as one who “annexes another’s text to his own name,” applies only if we believe that McCorkle existed a priori to the publishing of his fake poems.

98 These lines of Satan’s in Milton are recognizable as the epigraph to Shelley’s Frankenstein

(1818 edition), and as the text of instruction for the eponymous monster. Frankenstein’s monster learns English from the texts of British canonical learning, chief among them

Paradise Lost. Bereft of human interaction because of his monstrous visage (“his eyes, if eyes they may be called…”), the monster has no access to society except through the seemingly random collection of books he acquires from the De Laceys’ impoverished cottage. Key to his language instruction is the reading aloud of Milton by the blind patriarch of the De Lacey family. From his hidden listening post, Frankenstein’s monster gains a vantage on his existence as the misbegotten child of doctor Frankenstein and begins to understand himself as incomplete, both in language and in humanity. He is but a forgery of a real man, tragic in his misconstruction, his infelicitous “moulding” from the clay—the poor translation of

Enlightenment science into bone and blood. Reading Milton as a Rosetta Stone for English is preposterous when we consider its endless, winding sentences and sine qua non syntax: nevertheless, its powerful reckoning with the arrival of the unexpected helps us understand the hauntology of translation.

Paradise Lost as a guide to the vernacular English of the country people reads here as analogous to proffering a birth certificate for the fabricated-author of a set of hoaxed poems.

In addition to his linguistic mistranslation, Miltonic to vernacular English, the monster also misreads Paradise Lost as history. Both seem to promise an authenticity of identity, but instead offer only a glimpse at how authenticity is produced in texts and inter-texts that are insufficient on their own for something like fluency. The text’s outlandish conceit—that a literary hoax might interpolate an author into the text of forged poetry—frames literary production in terms of creation, making a place for newness to enter the world. The misconstructions, the monstrous suturing of incommensurate pieces or parts, begin to

99 imitate the interpretative process of reading fictions as purposeful failures; failures, that is, to translate, to resemble, and to authenticate.

In Spectres, Derrida returns to his abiding interest in hospitality in a consideration of how one awaits the other, or what he calls “hospitality without reserve”:

Awaiting what one does not expect… hospitality without reserve [is] accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who will not be asked to commit… (65)

He goes on to describe this kind of unreserved hospitality in terms of space. It is a

“messianic opening to the event that cannot be awaited as such,” and this event of opening requires that “one must leave an empty place” (65). A consideration of Fake and Carey’s other hoax novels provides a textual argument through which to view the expectation that the form of the world novels must take the shape of empty places and spaces. Carey’s novels not only anticipate this expectation for a particular form, but also perform the failure of those expectations. Recent theories of world literature as a process, via which texts cross national boundaries and circulate in multiple networks of readers and translators, instrumentalize form as that which must anticipate its future translatability across cultural borders. Forms must be endless open. This transparent “open space” of world literature is the post-arrivant space, recognizable and therefore legible as the former space of the other. This is the hoax of world literature: we have read the arrival of the other and claim to know its form by the hole it has left.

Translating Babel

Translation becomes law, duty, and debt, but the debt one can no longer discharge. Such insolvency is found marked in the very name of Babel: Which at once translates and does not translate itself, belongs without belonging to a language… Such would be the Babelian performance. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel”

100 We have seen how the intertextual suturing of McCorkle from pieces of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein mirrors the notion of the literary hoax: McCorkle, as Malley, is both the subject and key to the hoax. There is not a hoax without a McCorkle (the spectre of resemblance to the real), and yet, for a McCorkle to arrive is to disabuse the hoax, to make it true. Think for a moment of this paradox in relation to translation, where the original text/language is the Malley/McCorkle arrivant. The translation is only recognized as such by the spectre of the original that hangs from its form. A text is only a translation when it contrasts an original text that is held in perpetual, near-sacred, relief. Derrida (1985), commenting on Benjamin’s concept of the “pure language” in “The Task of the Translator,” analogizes the inaccessible purity of the original language with the imagination of the sacred:

“Translation, the desire for translation, is not thinkable without this correspondence with a thought of God.” That desire for translation is then contradictorily a holding-at-bay of primary comparison, that of the original and the translation, in favor of a haunting comparison where the ghost of the original, like Hamlet’s father, always has his beaver down. For to enact an actual comparison with the sacred is to pull the curtain away, exposing the innate insufficiency of the juxtaposition, the hoax innate to the relationship between the two. The curtain, as such, is most certainly the literary style that like the poesy of the Malley poems inures us from our senses.

If the original were to arrive in recognizable form, the translation would become a hoax on the genuine article (the sacred, god, the pure alterity). Translation then, like the hoax, cannot operate except in the context of its failure to become what it imitates. Like the sacrifice of the idol, the hoax in the event of reading operates as a tension between the resemblance and difference. Ruthven accounts for this tension in interpretation as the hoax of the clue and its detection:

101 For in matters of interpretation, no ‘fact’ pre-exists the hypothesis that constructs it as such, and no ‘clue’ precedes a suspicion. You need either to know or at least suspect that ‘Ern Malley’ never existed before you can remove ‘evidence’ of that fact from the texts of his poems. (176)

This argument is equally applicable to translation, in that there is no suspicion of inadequacy until the spectre of originality is established. Translation as a narrative force, writes Chow,

“not only reports and transcribes the scene but, in the process of doing so, underwrites it in another code, another language/literacy, against which the original scene takes on a new kind of legibility as it is disparaged and devalued” (2008, 569).35 The “legibility” of the

“disparaged” in Fake derives from Douglass’s translation of the story of the McCorkle hoax into recognizable copies (we can say forgeries). She understands her complicity in this translation in the same terms that McAuley and Stewart use to frame the hoax of

Modernism: a form that “render[s] its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination.”

Wode-Douglass writes of her attempts to elicit the real from Christopher Chubb’s manuscript of fake poems as a process of being “rendered insensible”:

I had no understanding yet of what I was flirting with, no idea that Chubb’s story would soon send me traveling to Singapore and from there to Sydney and Melbourne in a vain attempt to establish the true nature of this gigantic man who had emerged, so I assumed, from the darkest recesses of Chubb’s disturbed imagination. (85, my emphasis)

McCorkle, the giant man of Chubb’s “disturbed imagination,” takes his form in the narrative as the legible spectre of translation’s failure. He is what we are not meant to see in the forging of the fake; he is the original clamoring for his due. It’s a translation not limited to

Chubb’s hoax, but rather delimited by the Douglass’s “attempt to establish the true nature” of that hoax. She writes of her relationship with Chubb that “quite likely I could not own to

35 Chow, Rey. 2008. “Translator, Traitor. Translator, Mourner,” NLH. Volume 39, Number 3, Summer 2008, pp. 565-580.

102 my growing involvement in his history, and was somehow embarrassed to see myself making such detailed notes, cross-examining him so rigorously… I had become his collaborator”

(204). It’s a collaboration marked in the text as the indelible sin. After one day-long bout of

“writing” Chubb’s history of McCorkle, Douglass rushes, Lady Macbeth-like, “to scrub the inkstains from [her] aching hands” (201). From the novel’s perspective, collaborative writing

(translating belonging from one narrative to another) as “involvement in history” becomes more monstrous than the monstrous McCorkle, misconstructed from the blood and bone of forged poesy. The figuration of McCorkle is in fact the alchemical by-product of the translation of the literary text (McCorkle/Malley poems) into a space of disturbing knowledge, disturbing for utter insufficiency in understanding poetry as single-tongued. For the language of the hoax is always a “Babelian performance.”

By translating itself into the style of the other, the hoax anticipates what cannot be anticipated, it belongs to what it cannot “properly” belong to—the alterity of original language. The literary hoax (forgery, fakery, and plagiarism), calls itself what it is not and plays at affecting resemblance to an “original.” Once the hoax is “revealed,” its affectations

(its style) are rendered as clues to its insufficiency, its inadequacy to the original. As with translation, this is ultimately the problem of babeling. Derrida deconstructs the historical value of Babel, the foundational Western myth of language’s fall, by treating its necessary doubleness as a proper name and a general term. Even the trope of the tower as a container for the multiplicity of incommensurate languages cannot signify simple confusion. Babel in its original tongue means “confusion,” but this literal translation cannot be separated from what the narrative has come to define as a proper noun for the story of the Tower of Babel.

“It is as if,” Derrida writes, “there were two words there, two homonyms one of which has the value of proper name and the other that of common noun” (“des Tours de Babel”

103 251).36 Meaningfully for this argument, he frames the in-between space as the place of active meaning making: “between the two”—the proper and general— exists “a translation which one can evaluate quite diversely” (251). The particularity of this intrusion between the two co-existing translations of meaning in Babel can be drawn out to envision how all translations, and further, all hoaxes can be understood in “diverse evaluations” of their in- betweenness. This in-betweenness of the literary hoax, defined on one side by the proper noun (Babel) and the generality of meaning on the other (confusion), challenges the theory of world literature’s departure from the assumed absolute specificity of the postcolonial novel. Rather than the singular space of the nation, particular to the point of untranslatability, opposing the infinite mobility of cultural forms in the world novel, the hoax offers us the space of incompleteness as an alternative to this binary.

The baby’s babble is not far from the concerns of our broad reach for the shared territory of the hoax and the translation, not to mention the echo of Babel. Inchoate language’s mimicry of the sounds and structures of “complete” language, even to the extent to which a child can imitate the sounds, gestures, and silences of storytelling, without

“meaning” anything, is an established marker of language development. Babble is endearing precisely for the reasons that a hoax is disconcerting—both affect a recognition of inadequacy. Held in unabated comparison to the complete form, the babble also makes meaning as a derivative, namely when an adult is reduced to a state of babbling, his language broken into imitative fragments of speech which are incapable of communicating anything but confusion and nonsense. Peter Carey’s novels are uniquely engaged in an experimental babble, one that plays at a comparability between the latter babble of broken, fragmented, plural (plusiers voix) language and the former babble that aims, but fails, at representation and

36 Derrida, Jacques. 1991. “Des Tours de Babel,” A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. New York: Columbia University Press.

104 signification. Both forms, Carey would seem to say, are powerful components of the

“disturbing” and “private” knowledge of reading. For only in the event of reading can such unlikely equivalents be staged.

The translated word belongs to two or more tongues simultaneously and even the inaccessibility of the original does not remove the spectre of originality from this equation.

Carey’s Fake plays this out in the fictionalization of the Malley affair. We’ve established that the Malley hoax is compelling, in part, because it is a hoax of form (Modernist style) that replicates the affective power of that form (rendering its devotees insensible to absurdity). It is equally interesting as a peculiar kind of forgery—one that imitates not an author, but the polyphonic voice of a style. In a fashion directly analogous to the unnatural birth of

McCorkle, the Malley hoax personifies and embodies the debt to an original that is never a singular entity. What makes the fictionalization of the Malley affair in Carey’s Fake doubly so a hoax, are the translations that this fictional narrative affects upon the original. By moving the hoax, en masse, with all of its dramatis personae, to Malaysia Carey allows for a defamiliarization of the hoax to a colonial geography. With this geographical estrangement comes a constant awareness that the language with which the hoax must be conveyed is foreign, itself an English hoax upon the colonized Malaysians. It is foreign to Chubb who speaks it while offering poems in English; foreign to Sarah Wode-Douglass who must transcribe the history of the hoax from Chubb’s adopted language into Australian English; foreign to McCorkle whose parody of Miltonic grammar makes him a native speaker of the

18th century; and finally foreign to Malaysia. While Malaysian and Chinese lurk on the outskirts of the narrative, Manglish (Malay-English) is the seductive index of otherness in the novel. To use the foreign idiom that the novel reserves for the bad behavior of the

Australians—Manglish is aiksy—it “acts up.”

105 The implied relationality of languages in the multilingual text leads me to Glissant and his lifelong pursuit of the “poetics of relation.” In particular, Glissant’s project of balancing the totality of tout monde with the “consensual opacities” of “all existing particulars in relation,” offers a way of thinking through the negotiations that literary works make with languages that are both present and under erasure. Poetic relation carves out territory in the binary between global and local thinking, operating as “a tool which mediates the passage from the simplicity of the world understood as a unicity to the complexity of the world as a totality.” In this schema for imagining the world, the relation to the other is always sustained, thus my interest in thinking about the novel as translating, moving not in a tautology towards a target, but rather, as Glissant writes in Poetic Intention, a form where “the End is

[perpetually] in relay” (2010, 18).37 For Glissant “creolization, gives us the most accessible idea possible of the Poetics of Relation” (1989, 561), and this is where we come to his turn from idealism in the concept of the world as relational opacities, to the postcolonial reality of building opacity within the structures of hegemony. “In every authorized language,” Glissant writes, there “you will build your language” (2010, 38). He has differentiated the slaver- routes of creole, from the cosmopolitan condition of multilingualism that in his later career seemed “the condition of most people of the world.” And in doing so, he offers the “ruse of creole,” the “secrecy and cunning,” of unauthorized languages to fragment the claims to originality and totality that colonial languages laid claim to.38

So why creole, and not multilingualism? For one thing, Creole operates in a perpetual state of imagining itself coming into being; “its genius,” Glissant writes, “is…its constant

37 Glissant, Edouard. 2010. Poetic Intention. Nightboat Books. 38 Cecilia Britton. 1999. Edouard Glissant and postcolonial theory: strategies of language and resistance. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

106 openness to change without ever becoming fixed” (1989, 561).39 Its ruse is not incompleteness, but rather its refusal to be systematized, and such is its relationality. Peter

Hallward summarized the ruse of creole as relationality not expressed in a system, but as

“liberation from any sort of representation” (2001, 124).40 If imperial politics in places like

Martinique was in part a process of establishing deficiencies in the colonized according to a systematic possession of language, the ruse of creole rends ownership of language from the master; it recognizes, as Derrida wrote of his French creole, otherness “as what resides within, as what constitutes language” (in “Monolingualism and the Other” 60, 224). For another, Glissant was never satisfied with French Creole, and its forced associations, but he was never unsure of creolization, as tactic for pursuing relation in the world.

Glissant is careful to differentiate creolization from hybridity; its relations are purposefully not demarcated, for “creolization appears to us as a metissage without limits— that is, something whose elements are multiplied and whose results are unforeseeable”

(1989, 561). And here we seem to be approaching the multilingual imaginary more clearly as the desire for a multiplication of languages in relation. “Language,” as phrased by Derrida in

Monolingualism of the Other, becomes a “type of translation involving target but no originary languages” (MO 60). What I’ve been calling the “translating novel” takes as its form this unceasing relationality of singularities. Its translation is never finished because it begins in the germ of language and thus in the instantiation of form. Seen in this light, the letter in

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, which would appear at first to accede to the hegemony of

English as the global language, instead reads English as a ruse on the languages we do not understand, but which nevertheless coexist in constant and unending translation in Balram

Halwai’s world. When at the climax of the novel, he is operating a call center in India for an

39 Glissant, Edouard. 1989. “Beyond Babel” World Literature Today Vol. 63, No. 4, Autumn. 40 Hallward, Peter. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial. Manchester: Manchester UP.

107 American company, even his new fluency and accent bring him no closer to the communication that he seeks across boundaries and cultures.

Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake prevaricates its own particular type of ruse, a creolization of the monolingual imaginary. My Life as a Fake is a particularly difficult novel to explain quickly. It is a fictionalization of a real literary hoax concerning real poems by a faked author, and it is written by an author whose expanding oeuvre includes every imaginable kind of fake, hoax, and ruse. This, as you would imagine, makes it difficult to talk about the novel as anything but an elaborate interweaving of fakery. Instead of trying to unravel the novel’s labyrinthine plotting, which includes the Frankenstein-like birth of said fake poet from the pages of his poetry, I’ll focus instead on Carey’s creolization of the novel.

To start, Carey’s novel is nonsensically set in Malaysia. That said, we don’t go to novels for rationality, only sensibility. And Carey is working with a particular kind of postcolonial sensibility that wants deeply to pursue the global, while preserving the kind of lost histories that the epistemological steamroller of colonialism has razed. And so, My Life as a Fake travels from Syndey to Brisbane, to London, and, finally, to Kuala Lumpur, looking for some definitive way of determining the authorship of a set of fake poems. Its movements are perpetually unsettled, exchanging the notion of travel as extracting knowledge, for something more like Glissant’s world as a relation: “as a composed necessity.

As the incomplete drama of that necessity” (PI 15). Glissant’s poetics of relation defines itself in terms of futurity, and in terms of a dramatic form that must always change to meet its particular necessity.

A brief explanation of Manglish and its history of acting up will be insufficient for grappling with those broader language issues that remain some of the most fraught for the

108 postcolonial world.41 I will nevertheless lay out a claim for the importance of Manglish to the novel’s structure of translating hoaxes while being aware of its particular relationship to

Malaysia’s colonial history. Manglish, the informal hybrid of Malay, English, Hokkai

Australian slang, Tamil, Cantonese, and Mandarin, uses English as its root form with mostly

Malay suffixes added on. While it is officially a portmanteau of Malay and English, it is commonly understood to be a stand-in for “mangled English.” For the Western audience, the most readily recognized grammatical structure is the “…”- lah affirmative ending. For example, “Don’t be foolish, lah.”42 How Manglish operates as a functional twinning of two languages is for our purposes a very persuasive analogy for how hoaxes operate as a whole; despite the incommensurability of Malay and English, syntactical meaning is conveyed. The babble/Babel of many languages is illustrated in a single utterance. In this dialectic, neither language is “proper to itself,” and yet continues to signify even as it is “mangled” or babbled by the competing language. Carey’s novel accentuates this model of the failed relationality that passes on nevertheless by asking the colonial language Manglish to stand in for the missing languages of the postcolonial other. Because the otherness stands outside the bounds of the novel’s imagination and because Manglish makes visible the inherent gaps in how language “means”—its relationality is unresolved and in effect unresolvable.

Sarah Wode-Douglass, the writer who seeks to determine a definitive copy of the faked poems hidden in Kuala Lumpur, writes of the hoaxer’s creole: “Later I discovered [his] was very proper Malaysian English, but on this first encounter, hearing it delivered in Chubb’s

41 Some of these issues are explained in relation to the struggle over English as primary literary language of South Africa in my chapter on JM Coetzee. Seminal texts of postcolonial studies take on the language program, offering many complications and few solutions. Of the contentious arguments over the afterlife of colonial English, Achebe and Ngugi’s positions are most illustrative (Achebe, "The African Writer and the English Language" (1964); Ngugi Decolonizing the Mind (1986)). 42 “lah” is a linguistic relative to the Mandarin "啦.”

109 Australian accent, I judged it not only illiterate but disturbingly false” (22, my emphasis). In doubt are not only Chubb’s intentions with the McCorkle manuscript in doubt, but also the fluency with which he conveys the hoax. Chubb’s accent, the polyphony of Australian

English and Manglish, reveals the mix of the colonial language, and the non-singularity of language itself. Thus, the “disturbingly false” sensibility of Chubb’s Manglish accent is not far from the “disturbing knowledge” of the hoax as it plays at creating “bone and blood” from the literary imagination. Both create a sensibility of falsity. Even the McCorkle manuscript in Chubb’s position—the poems so powerfully affecting that they might animate a poet from their syntactical imagination—is bracketed by the inherent translating form of the language. The McCorkle poems, written in English, are introduced in Manglish as if to announce their contested authorship—as if two languages were grappling for the same moment of meaning.

Borges’ Library of Babel with its hexagonal shelves purports to contain an infinite collection of books that together represent every possible organization of syntactical elements, in all known languages. Borges description of the Library’s indexicality helps us think through the paradox of how one language is proper to itself in its interlocution with another language: “To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity” (“The Library of Babel” 56).43

What might be drawn from such a labyrinthine concordance, from the infinite relationality of all languages, and therefore of all texts? Perhaps no more than the interdependence of every word in every distinct language system in the Library, and perhaps no less than an awareness of the arrivant that cannot arrive, except in many voices, many languages, many texts. If we argue for both hypotheses, then the question for novels, and in particular one

43 Borges, Jorge. 2007. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions.

110 novel about faking language, is whether any understanding is possible. In moving from text to text in the infinite library, is there ever anything more than the next text?

In the case of Chubb and McCorkle, hoaxer and monstrous hoax, how we understand their use of Manglish can be a powerful window into the hoax of literary style as a hoax upon the translation of novels into “world circulation” that claims a knowledge of what has already arrived. In Borges’s terms, world literature theory claims a single dictionary, a single translatability that will order all the claims to knowledge made in our

Library of Babel.

In the above discussion, I described Manglish as an index of otherness in the novel.

Index is a peculiar term here considering how My Life as a Fake problematizes the notion of the haunting non-arrival of the other. It is more peculiar still if we compare that ordering phenomenon in the novel to Borges’s infinite-index. The index, as I would like to approach it in relation to Fake, is an accounting of the style of otherness, a sensibility that is read as legible alterity. And much like the hoax, it is understood both by its claims to an identity and its failure to authenticate those claims. Only in the act of comparison is the duality of the hoax of style revealed. Wolfgang Iser explains the indexical/non-indexical nature of fiction as a series of non-equivalences posited by Hans Vaihinger:

According to its use fiction assumes three different shapes: (I) if equated with what it is meant to represent, fiction turns into dogmatism; (II) if used in order to investigate given realities, it turns into a hypothesis; (III) if its true nature is laid bare, it turns into a way of positing something that is in itself totally unreal yet serves as a means of ordering, measuring, and computing things that are real. (1993, 240, Iser’s emphasis)44

Iser adopts Vaihinger’s concept of “fiction as contradiction,” in part, because of how it imagines fiction changing the reader’s horizon of expectations (her “use” of the text) by interacting dialectically with those expectations to a counter-intuitive effect. He notes the

44 Iser, Wolfgang. 1993. Prospecting. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

111 way that Vaihinger puts “usefulness in jeopardy” by making what “appears to be useful a disguise” (Ibid.). I am most interested in the third iteration of this process of turning use into disguise—hoaxing functionality, so to speak. Iser asks that we confront indexicality in fiction—that which orders according to the principle of usefulness—as an elaborate disguising of which we are co-conspirators. This is not, however, a claim for the apoliticality of literature. On the contrary, by seating the potentiality of literature in the oscillating play between the reader and text, expectation and disruption, Iser’s literary is even more political.

While the nature of fiction “laid bare” is offered disingenuously as a basis for comparing between the real and “unreal,” it is clear that what Vaihinger suggests is not that a text’s nature can be laid bare, pinned open like a butterfly to the collection-board, but rather that interpretation must operate, at least in part, by comparing the fictive to “what it is meant to represent.”

To help illustrate what such a comparison might look like, I’ll briefly examine the violent disruption that occurs in the meeting of Chubb and McCorkle, creator and creation.

Not surprisingly, it is a moment of haunting. McCorkle offers as his authentication of the hoax-poems, a recitation for Chubb:

Chubb knew the poem, of course, but nothing had prepared him for this performance of it, the strange and passionate waving of his free arm, the twisting of the head… and the voice, which its original author had always imagined to be some variation of standard BBC English, was here so fierce and nasal, hoarse, ravaged by failure and regret. (81)

The poem McCorkle performs is the most infamous and oft-quoted of Ern Malley’s The

Darkening Ecliptic, “The Black Swan of Trespass,” reprinted exactly word-for-word in its novel-translation. My pun on novel is meant to conjure the effect of style as that which makes one identical performance of “Black Swan” different from another; the form of the

Malley hoax is novel for being written into a novel. This novelty is then replayed in

112 McCorkle’s performance of Chubb’s poem. Chubb “knew the poem, of course,” but what has been changed, what disarms him, is the style—the undeniable voice. It is hard not to hear Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in the distinguishing of the exact copy from the original. And it is here, in the impossibly beguiling universe of Borges’s short fiction, that we begin to understand that literature’s attention to questions of originality and the counterfeit is inseparable from the problems of cultural translation for the postcolonial world.

“The Inconceivable Middle Page”

Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves…The handling of this silky vade mecum would not be convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other analogous ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse. Borges, “The Library of Babel”

In his most recognizable fictionalization of a literary hoax, Borges conceives of a rewriting of Cervantes’s Don Quixote by the twentieth century author Pierre Menard in which the prose of the story will remain verbatim to the original Cervantes, with only the historical moment of reading fragments of the whole Quixote having changed.45 Menard offers an exact copy of the “Quixote,” only realized “through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” Key to the story’s conceit is the critical identification of a style of “ambiguity” in the comparison of the two identical copies: “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)”

(“Pierre Menard” 2007, 94). The comparison that Borges develops to a pointed absurdity

45 Borges was of course not the earliest hoaxer of the Quixote text. In writing the final sections of Quixote, Cervantes took into account the numerous pastiches of the first published parts of the novel, going as far as to have Quixote and Panza encounter the fake sequels in their adventures. He thus literalized the monstrous multi-births that Andrew Hurley refers to in his memoir of translating Borges. The afterlife of this hoax is ironically preserved in the body of the original work, something that Borges plays with extravagantly in the notion of a facsimile copy, posing as a rewriting with a striking likeness.

113 juxtaposes identical texts seemingly separated only by the event of being read in a contemporary moment. “The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard— quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time” (Ibid.). This evaluation of style as a translation of language into a contemporary context, and the “archaic” effect of that translation, tells us less about the literary hoax of Menard’s re-writing of Quixote, and more about the diabolically romanticized misreading of the hoax that Borges parodies so pointedly. The hoax of Menard’s Quixote is its fragmentary nature—its partial knowing and incompleteness— and the conflicted translation of knowledge that speaks only in ambiguities. Of course, we are meant to be stunned and shaken by the notion of a serious critical reckoning with what amounts to a copying of Cervantes’s masterpiece, but the bleeding edge of the parody resides with the “human limitations” that require Menard’s

“other,” his “subterranean” oeuvre to remain perpetually “unfinished” (90).46 If, as George

Steiner suggested, “translation is understanding,” than we must read Pierre Menard’s undertaking as complicating this axiom considerably—translation as the literary trope of understanding can only be incomplete. The space of the literary then plays within the gaps and rifts of this incompleteness, reminding us of the value of the incomplete. Menard’s epistolary account of his rewriting of Quixote epitomizes Borges’s insistence that our ability to read knowledge, to translate knowledge out of a space that imagines such hermeneutic work, is problematic at best, imperial at worst, and asks us to cast a shadow over that kind of dreamed-up transparency and to understand incompletely.

Consider Menard’s letter of complicity in his self-professed failure to “write” the

Quixote in the “early twentieth” century. His relationship to the seventeenth century novel

46 Borges. 1999. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin Books.

114 is “simplified by forgetfulness and indifference,” and “might well be the equivalent of the vague foreshadowing of a yet unwritten book” (92). Menard has “perhaps read [Quixote] cover to cover,” and has since then “glanced at the interludes” and “carefully reread certain chapters” (92, my emphasis). If we take anything from this textual relationship, it is the fragmentary nature of Menard’s knowledge of the text, his partial reading, so that even in the verbatim transcription of the passages he has re-read carefully, there is the effect of deficiency—a narrative effect that passes on not so much knowledge as the possibilities of absences in our knowledge. In this particular case, the “yet unwritten book.” In no sense do we read this unwritten text as recoverable from the absences in Menard’s “Quixote,” nor is it available to those of us more careful readers less likely to be so careless in our experiences with the Cervantes. Quite apart from the language of original and counterfeit (a

“fallacious attribution,” 95), even the known and the foreign (as Menard would speak of his own rendering of the Quixote), we understand Borges to be invested in the in-between space of the literary where unfinished and therefore perpetually possible comprehension is a literary capability. It is a capability that complicates the figuring of the world in certain “universal forms” of knowledge (91). As such the Quixote “is a contingent work; the Quixote is not necessary” (92), but the Quixote as the obvious missing book, the object of knowledge at the tip of our tongue but unuttered, is surely the reminder of translation’s work in hiding away, as well as sallying forth.

Borges’s work is unquestionably obsessive as it concerns the potential for possible unwritten or unattainable books. To open the Collected Fictions is to be likewise enthralled by the eternally missing text, the manuscript that through historical mishap or whim of fate has disappeared from the collective knowledge of the world of the Borges story. His narrators are librarians of Babel, searching diligently for the text that potentially makes meaning from

115 the absent materialisms of cultural discourse, and that “every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be” (95). This is unquestionably a parodic account of Western imperialism’s account of knowledge and its understanding of a world that contains a finitude of ideas, each graspable through the sensuous experience of the individual. Such a hoax on the imaginative capabilities of the literary work focuses on the narrator’s “reconstruction” of Menard’s “ripped up thousands of handwritten pages” in order to allow the original “to shine through” (94). As such, the narrator of “Pierre

Menard…” alerts us to his own adventure in reading the “palimpsest,” the in-between of reading and writing a text, the space between translation and the untranslatable:

I recall his square-ruled notebooks, his black crossings-out, his peculiar typographical symbols, and his insect-like handwriting. In the evening, he liked to go out for walks on the outskirts of Nimes; he would often carry along a notebook and make a cheery bonfire. (95)

At its most basic, “Pierre Menard” is the story of a hoax. We read the juxtaposed selections of Menard’s and Cervantes’s Quixote, and despite the commentary on “certain affectation[s],” we are infinitely aware of the plagiarism at work in Menard’s copy. But clearly this is not the point. Borges draws out this nonsensical hoax, making all the artifice of the copy legible on the page so as to acknowledge both the impossibility and necessity of translation; and as with Steiner, Borges’s translation refers to the understanding (historical, interpersonal, philosophical) that we desire, even in its haunting absence. Thus the performance of Chubb’s poem, the repetition with a stylistic difference, prompts us to consider what understanding gets carried over despite the hoax.

We might take the Chubb poem and Menard’s Quixote as meditations on Derrida’s

“iterability,” what J. Hillis Miller distills as the “possibility for every mark to be repeated and still to function as a meaningful mark in new contexts that are cut off entirely from the original context,” the context being “the ‘intention to communicate’ of the original maker of

116 the mark” (2001, 78).47 This blueprint seems written precisely to deconstruct the “new contexts” in which we encounter “the Quixote” in Borges. According to the logic of iterability, Cervantes’s Quixote “is already, from the beginning, divided within itself” (Miller

2001, 82). The “broaching and breeching” already present within the principle iteration disable the structural element of de-hoaxing, that is, the comparison between the original and the counterfeit. Since the original is already many copies, it is “the gaps within the utterance” that “undercut the classical opposition of fact and principle, the factual and the possible, necessity and possibility” (Speech Acts 83 and Limited Inc. 97). The result of this faulty comparison between the text and what it does forces a break with the “context and function” of the text “in any number of other contexts” (Speech Acts 83). However context shapes understanding in a literary text, at least as it concerns iteration, it does so swathed in darkness as the residual other that haunts our reading.

When, by nature of iteration within language, contexts cannot occur (except as a spectre or haunting), the hoax profits as a style and sensibility. Carey’s novel accentuates this model of absent comparison by asking the colonial language Manglish to stand in for the style of the postcolonial other. Because the otherness stands outside the bounds of the novel’s imagination and because Manglish makes visible the inherent gaps in how language

“means”—it is incomparable. I will make further claims about the space of reading and its relationship to incomparable alterity, but those claims rest first on the hoax of style in the world novel. It is the hoax of reading “worldliness” as a form of the contemporary novel.

On the contrary, worldliness is not the form of a novel, but rather, the effect of reading a

47 Miller, Hillis J. 2001. Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP. Miller raises iterability as Derrida’s response to J.L. Austin’s designation of the speech act as “words that do what they say” (2). Derrida’s instance that “the mark in general must be able to function in the absence of the sender” and therefore inscribe a “possibility in the functioning… of the mark,” complicates any straightforward application of Austin’s “doing things with words.” In the “doing” there’s always the possibility of repetition with a difference.

117 text into a system within which comparison relies always on the dream of authenticity legible within the text.

At this point in my reading, My Life as a Fake might be best understood as an unsolvable literary hoax that continually translates the impropriety of imitation into a style.

Because the novel re-imagines the history of a true literary hoax, contingency becomes the soul of allusion. The coexistence of the true hoax and the false or fictive hoax in the space of Carey’s novel allows for a constant interrogation of “truth in fiction.” What is being hoaxed and how the hoax imitates, fools, and undoes the authentic in fiction plays as a powerful counter-allusion, drawing the reader to reconsider how hoaxes have constituted the very nature of our reading. Our readings are translated from one plausible interpretation to another, each relying on our sense of style as indelible, un-counterfeitable, the one authentic voice amid the polyphony of fakery. What complicates this formulation of style as the original in the hoax is the effect of style. I have earlier attempted to distill the effect of style from more classic definitions of style as grammatization, rhetoric, and fashion. I have described style as the oscillating movement, what Iser called the “play,” between the reader’s expectation and the text’s denials, affirmations, and metamorphoses of those expectations.

That “to-and-fro movement” that gives rise to “the coexistence of the mutually exclusive.”

Iser goes on to recognize the extraordinary meaning potential in this “interpentration” of the mutually exclusive: “This tension ensuing from the attempt to resolve this ineradicable difference creates an aesthetic potential that… can never be adequately replaced by anything else (1993, 239-40). I will continue to argue for this tension as a formal space, a space full with uncertainty, understood not by its constitution, but by its potential effect. As with the movement of sub-atomic particles, we are almost always uncertain as to the direction and progress of form, and like Heinsenberg, we can only imagine style’s purpose, even in our

118 confidence that we have experienced it, felt it directing us. Style understood thusly, as an

Uncertainty Principle, cannot be authenticated, compared, or tracked. As an effect of an individual reading, it can only be reckoned with—noted for its power to have changed us, perhaps opened us, made us more adaptable to the encounter that is yet to come, the very hauntology of reading.

We can see this play of the Uncertainty Principle in the peculiar moment where

Douglass attempts to translate the “mangled” or better, babel’d syntax of Malay-English.

Douglass comments on Chubb’s formulation of a question with the common syntactical ending “…can or cannot?”: “Later I discovered this ‘can or cannot’ was very proper Malaysian

English, but on this first encounter, hearing it delivered in Chubb’s Australian accent, I judged it not only illiterate but disturbingly false” (22, my emphasis). The “can or cannot” idiom moves with uncertainty between the affirmation and negation—its liminality unsettles precisely because it cannot be proper to itself, because its nature is doubled. Not only are

Chubb’s intentions with the McCorkle manuscript in doubt, but as well, the very fluency with which he conveys the hoax. Chubb’s accent, the polyphony of Australian English and

Manglish, reveals the mix of the colonial language, and the non-singularity of language itself.

Thus, the “disturbingly false” sensibility of Chubb’s Manglish accent is not far from the

“disturbing knowledge” of the hoax as it plays at creating “bone and blood” from the literary imagination. Both create a sensibility of falsity. Even the McCorkle manuscript in Chubb’s position— the poems so powerfully affecting that they might animate a poet from their syntactical imagination—is bracketed by the non-singularity, the inherent Babelness of language. Notice how Chubb’s revelation of secret knowledge is surrounded by the curious hybrid grammar of Manglish: “Mem, I have something extraordinary to show you.

Absolutely unique. One kind only-lah” (23). The “extraordinary,” and the “absolutely

119 unique” are announced by the honorific “Mem,” and affirmed by the Malay suffix “lah.”

“Mem,” like Tuan, bears a considerable weight of colonial history; both were used as modes of polite address to English colonial officers. Much like the Hindi-Urdu Sahib and Pakka

Sahib, Mem evolved into a hybrid, marked by linguistic resistance to colonial hierarchy. What resonates as particular and peculiar about this utterance is not merely the colonial allusion, which is substantial, but the necessity of doubling what he claims to be the original, unique voice of his/McCorkle’s poems, with the pointedly mixed Manglish. The McCorkle poems, written in English, are introduced in Manglish as if to announce their contested authorship—as if two languages were grappling for the same moment of meaning.

In contrast to Chubb’s falsely accented Malay, Douglass finds nothing “the slightest bit false” in the McCorkle manuscript (26). And yet, she “wondered if the patois—Malay,

Urdu—was disguising something as common as cod Eliot. But that did not fit either, for you really cannot counterfeit a voice” (ibid.). Despite reading with “a full consciousness of the old man’s history,” Douglass can only authenticate the poem according to its effect on her, the “excitement in [the] blood which is the only thing an editor should trust” (27). The effect of style cannot be located in the printed words themselves; instead, it “slashed and stabbed its way across the page, at once familiar and alien.” Tracing its mark on her reading

(slashing and stabbing, no less), Douglass describes the uncertain effect of style—the paradox of its singular effect and its indefinable presence. Carey frames this moment of authentication of the hoax as an interpretation. The final verdict is held at bay, with only a reading of the intertextuality (“cod Eliot”) as part of the poem’s un-counterfeitable voice.

To read this moment of interpretation is to read the hoax of style, the “can or cannot” of play between the text and the reader and the affectation of an authentic voice.

The irresolvable contradiction of the novel resides in the “fact” of McCorkle’s narrative as

120 juxtaposed with the hoax that “the man is not the poems.” Nearly every scene of reading in the novel is preoccupied with resolving this contradiction. And yet, with each subsequent reading, it becomes clearer that the contradiction is the meaning. Resolving the hoax becomes increasingly less important than how we understand our participation in that hoax.

The McCorkle manuscript wears the marks of its many readings: “[t]he stolen book was fat with poetry, pulpy, puffy, interleaved with small blue markers” and later “[t]he pages held pressed flowers and leaves, all of them densely annotated,” and yet, Douglass can only hope to possess the poems by “record[ing] every remaining detail of his damn history” (212, 206).

This is of course the chimera of reading, that comparison can resolve the fact from the fiction, and thus possess the thing; we dream of authenticating the hoax—squeezing out a confession, eliciting a genuine voice from the uncertainty of style. This desire is inseparable from the impulse to understand the ethics of comparability, how we move texts into conversation with one another, and what we claim to understand, to possess as a result of that translation.

121 Chapter III: Turning Japanese: Ishiguro’s Asian Clones

A tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish. -- Time Magazine review of Never Let Me Go

I’m interested in the way words hide meaning. --Kazuo Ishiguro on style

In the previous chapter I began by offering a real poem by a fake author. This was of course a kind of dodge around the prickly concept of authorial identity, a notion made infinitely more complex by world literature’s interest in circulating particular kinds of locatable difference. After all, how does one begin to comment rationally about the cultural authenticity of an invented author? That is, of course, unless you examine the literary text associated with this faked author, and in doing so come to claim for that text particular formal and narrative associations. This is precisely the process by which the translated text is analyzed—as though it were offering the opportunity to grasp something of the original. Ern

Malley was the assumed name of two real poets who, pernicious intentions aside, authored a lasting collection of Australian modernist poetry. We read Malley’s Darkening Ecliptic as both the subject of a literary hoax and as the key to revealing that hoax. In this way, the hoax offers a model for how translation operates as a trope within the contemporary novel—as such, translation is both the formal mode at work in the novel and the necessary relationship that all literature has to its historical and cultural moment.1 Thus we see tropological translation working as a series of forms that shuttle narrative knowledge back and forth between competing readings of authenticating-documents in a novel. In this way the

1 It is Benjamin who first draws our attention to the concept of translation as a mode. He writes: “to comprehend it as a mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability” (“Task of the Translator” 70). I do not break from Benjamin, as much as I press the return to the “original” into service as an intra-textual movement whereby the “original” (the contemporary novel) understands itself as already translating, mediating between one moment of culture understanding, and another of inscrutability.

122 afterlife of a hoax, the irreducibility of the literary object to either a true or a false text, provides us with a way of approaching the questions that postcolonality raises for the global circulation of texts as carriers of knowledge.

In this chapter, I will consider a question of particular importance to current arguments about how the novel thinks in and around questions of national identity. Namely, how does the transnational writer offer an identity in his work? Analogously, how do critics go about claiming an identity for the work of a transnational writer? I will confront this question in the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, a writer simultaneously claimed for a new tradition of multicultural English writing, and pointed to as the sign of difference that announces

Englishness as a discursive artifice. In contrast to the trend in Ishiguro criticism that too often seeks to appraise the degree to which Ishiguro’s fictions are ruled by a latent Japonisme,

I approach Ishiguro, not according to a scale of Englishness and its difference(s), but rather as a writer interested in how the novel can think transnationally, without having to proffer itself up as authentically from elsewhere. By foregrounding the ways in which Ishiguro’s Never

Let Me Go (2005) refuses to be read as translatable into a singular identity politics, I argue that what gets read as “impersonality,” “passivity,” “evasiveness,” and “buried anguish,” in his novels is in fact the effect of form-in-translation, or what I have been calling the translating novel. Such a form does the work that Chakrabarty calls “breath[ing] heterogeneity into the world ‘imagination,’” to allow for the possibility that identity politics in the nation and the world is “constitutively not singular” (2000, 149).2

I have chosen to write on Ishiguro to foreground the demands that a certain kind of global thinking makes on the transnational novel. What I will be distinguishing as the global imaginary—related to, but not synonymous with globalization—reads texts for particular

2 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: PUP.

123 signposts of ethnic and cultural difference, difference that travels. The non-Western writer hoping to have an international audience must offer a locality in recognizable form, even— and this is the case with Ishiguro—when that author has no access to this locality.3 In those cases when signs of difference are not immediately available in the plotted content of the novels, the global imaginary delves down to the level of form, locating style-as-difference.

Ishiguro poses a problem for this kind of reading. His peculiar status as a British writer of

Japanese parentage whose later novels not only leave Japan as a geography and subject matter, but seem to eschew cultural difference entirely, makes him an uneasy fit in the contemporary pantheon of ethnic British writers.

This chapter will begin by developing the concept of the translating novel in

Ishiguro’s most recent and most genre-bending novel, Never Let Me Go. I will argue for the novel as both a direct response to the critical demand for legible signifiers of ethnicity in

Ishiguro’s later works, and as an allegory for the value of translation as a form that does not and cannot come to a resolution as either original or copy. As such, the novel translates without end, providing neither evidence of a latent Japanese style, nor a globally transparent form capable of reading across any cultural boundary.

My argument will turn on the predicament of the contemporary novel positioned between the demand of locatable authenticity and the expectation of translatability and mobility for an international audience. I have pursued this problematic in my first two chapters, looking carefully at how novels both anticipate these demands and reframe the demands through the effect of form. With my discussion of Ishiguro, I will further this intervention with an analysis of Ishiguro’s Japan-problem—the anticipation of Japonisme as a stylistic sensibility that signs as affectlessness or passivity. In order to historicize this kind of

3 “To Ishiguro… writing about England—indeed his inscription of Englishness—begins with the acknowledgement of the international destination of writing” (Neagu 5).

124 cultural exoticism, I will break down how the current global imaginary in literary studies has evolved from a Modernist interest in Japan (James and Wilde, Barthes and Baudrillard) and more broadly, the Orient, to a stand-in for an infinitely mobile sign of difference. Recent critical contributions to reading the Modernist’s interest in “oriental” forms by Eric Hayot and Christopher Bush allow me to detach this impulse from Japan as a material and geographic reality, and deal with the more fundamental problem of reading for authentic ethnicity in writers who are migrants, diasporic, or transnational. From this point of historical comparison I will detail how the phenomenon of translating the material reality of

Japan into what Barthes called “an Empire of Signs” takes new form in the expectation of

Japanese-style buried everywhere, like footsteps on the shore, in Ishiguro’s later novels.

I will proceed to a discussion of the clone’s existence as the liminal state of translation, exiled from an authentic original and aware of the coming moment of fundamental transformation. The clones of Hailsham School, a British boarding school charged with tending to their health and education, understand from “as long as [they] could remember” that they are destined to donate their organs so that non-clones that they will never meet will live extended lives. Their status is purgatorial in the purest sense. They are wholly separated from the society that provided their DNA, what Ishiguro calls their

“possibles.” And looming on their imminent horizon, the spectre of bodily translation: the

“donations” of their vital organs to an unseen circulation of parts for wholes. Such is the basic terror of Never Let Me Go, the literalization of Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs.”4 But, as I will argue, Ishiguro’s clones represent both the possibility and anxiety of the body without organs; they are reservoirs of potential connections, affects, and movements marked both by a desperate desire to understand their own origins and all the

4 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1986. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum Books.

125 while anticipating their future as vitality in pieces. This will allow me to refigure the clone as the in-process or in-translation state of form, existing as a dynamic potential between the two poles of translation i.e., origin (locality and difference) and target (mobility and legibility).

The Translating Novel

Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon, dance - anything to convince yourself that you're more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters. -- The Guardian (UK) review of Never Let Me Go

Translation is the method, mode, and form with which the contemporary critic can engage the non-singularity of the world imagination. Both central to our ability to comprehend and implicated in our failure to understand cultural knowledge other than our own, translation’s inherent deficit is also its greatest asset. Translation can inhabit the fault lines of transnational interactions in part because its very form is a fault line. To address the global imaginary as a frame through which we gain a vantage on the movements of the globalization of cultures and peoples ignores the frantic movement between comprehension and ignorance that is visualized as frame with definitive border. Translation brings into focus that movement such that it stops framing, and exists as Brownian Motion, visible as both random and purposeful movement of atomic molecules.

A particular formal convention in Ishiguro’s novels, particularly evident in Never Let

Me Go, directs how we might conceptualize translation towards something more like a dynamic effect of form, a Brownian Motion of irresolvable elements. Translation is too often called upon to represent the possibility and loss when something moves and in its movement loses something of its original form. We read translation as always-already in debt; even when we find great joy in our encounter with the translated text, there is the inevitable

126 spectre of its loss. To this point, I am claiming that the way people read Ishiguro is as if he has already been translated, as if he is already in debt to an a priori original of himself, more

Japanese than British.

To illustrate what a dynamic of form might look like in practice, I’ll read a moment in the novel in which Ishiguro explores the structures of cultural knowledge as they are being read. Never Let Me Go’s seeming fetish for authenticating objects and people has been well documented.5 In purposeful dissonance with the technological futurism of cloning people,

Ishiguro fills his world with technologies of ‘70s and ‘80s Britain, which in contrast seem quaint and antiquated. This is especially true with musical technologies. The clones of

Hailsham School attend to their LPs, cassettes, and notably, listen on that staple of the

1980’s personal music scene, the Walkman.

The Walkman’s importance to the novel and to this argument is less as technological anachronism, and more the nexus of a certain kind of aesthetic appreciation. Kathy H. and her clone schoolmates participate in a peculiar method of listening that is analogous to the work the novel does in refusing to offer monolithic declarations on the politics and ethics of being a clone. By sharing a single Walkman and “passing the headset around” the listeners experience a form that is partial and in-progress, but which nevertheless produces a narrative affect.

Okay, it sounds a stupid way to listen to music, but it created a really good feeling. You listened for maybe twenty seconds, took off the headset, passed it on. After a while, provided you kept the same tape going over and over, it was surprising how close it was to having heard all of it by yourself. (2005, 103)6

5 The 2007 special issue of Novel devoted to the work of Ishiguro plays with the notion of authenticity in a number of his novels, with a special emphasis on Never Let Me Go. In particular, Walkowitz, Robbins, and Bain comment in detail about the problem of authenticating identities in Ishiguro. 6 Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2005. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage.

127 This method of listening in parts to an in-process whole, of sharing a common cultural experience where the experience is different for each listener, and from each previous listening, is also a way of reading of the novel’s interest in the clone. And here we have our

Brownian Motion with the random elements of the musical experience moving in a circulation that appears to work as a whole. My argument for this chapter develops the concept of the translating novel by reading Never Let Me Go as a work in pieces that operates as an affective whole. As such, the novel’s clones become both an explicit critique of globalization’s troubling reduction of humans to useful products, and an allegory for how we read the contemporary novel as both infinitely particular to its local context, and, simultaneously, broadly framed for the expectation of a global audience and circulation.

We must then read as though the Walkman’s song is important as an authentic whole, while being constantly aware of the limiting factors on our experience of the work in pieces. We read for and as the clone: aware of an original context (DNA donors) and a future circulation outside that context (the disassembled clone used to extend the lifespan of others), but never with the expectation that we will have absolute access to the entirety of experience. Like the shared Walkman, form works “in circulation,” and there is almost always “a good atmosphere,” despite never “having heard all of it by yourself” (103).

Circulated reading, as one evolution of the translating novel, can help us read against the totalizing critiques of Ishiguro’s novels as withholding their essential Japaneseness, while simultaneously offering the possibilities for the novel that is at once a contextualized whole, and work in pieces.

As a response to that mode of reading, form in Ishiguro’s novels conducts irresolvable dynamic interchanges between conflicting terms like artificiality and originality;

Englishness and worldliness; authenticity and the fake; refusing to allow either term of the

128 binary to become an archetypal framework for how we should read. In a novel about clones, one would assume there must be a resolution as to whether we feel great empathy towards these characters because they are artificial, because they are copied, thus signaling within us a deep necessity for a stake in originality. Or to the contrary position, that we are indeed all copies, and that just as our DNA is always derivative, in our very affect and culture we are always just imitating. But neither of those positions is resolved in the novel. Indeed, Ishiguro refuses all such resolutions. As such, we read Never Let Me Go with an fulminating sense of anxiety and panic that never manages to crest the surface of the plot even at the apex of our outrage. We are denied the satisfaction either of a revolution against the global system that has relegated the characters to a life of abject sacrifice or a fully conceived landscape of tragedy where the local effects of a global nightmare could be mourned. Even the most positive reviews of the novel reference affectlessness as the dominant mode of the narrative.

This interpretative angst is performed with no shortage of melodrama in the Guardian review warning the would-be reader that “Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon…anything to convince yourself that you're more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters” (Harrison).7

I would argue that this kind of impulse towards finding a lack, a present affectlessness, follows from Ishiguro’s refusal to tell us how to feel about his cloned- characters. He will not definitively say that we should be sorry for them because they have been deeply robbed of their originality, nor ask us to see them as an example of the future possibilities for embracing our own artificiality while still having deeply important community relationships. Both of those positions exist within the novel, but the narrative’s refusal to grant one or the other privilege in elucidating the figure of the clone creates an

7 Harrison, John M. 2005. “Clone Alone,” Guardian, Saturday 26 February 2005.

129 affect of translation at its limits, pulled almost, but never completely to the breaking point.

In Ishiguro’s formal logic, to give up one of those sides and to stop the oscillation between those disparate points would be the same as Ishiguro offering up himself as either Japanese or British, rather than both and neither at the very same time. He certainly expresses little personal interest in either category, and does not wish his novels to resolve to either of those fixed points of understanding about how we read the clone.

This chapter sets up the ways in which the novel enters into these debates in order to show them as artificial to the workings of form, showing the terms of the debate to be pre- translated: already interpreted with certain structuring elements of identity decided upon in advance. The Hailsham school of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is a clone community that has no conception of itself in the larger society outside of the insularity of their provincial kinship. Despite being told from an early age that they are raised, like cultured cattle, to give up their organs for people they do not know, thus enabling the anonymous global culture outside their quotidian existence to live long and prosperous lives.

The Global Imaginary

What does it mean for the state of literatures in English that critics increasingly speak of the novel’s imaginative landscape as global, planetary, worldly, mondial? Is a new form of transnational writing refiguring the way we imagine circulations of information and culture as worldly? Are we once again in an age of thinking and feeling the globe because of the increasingly frantic movements of technology, culture, and people in a real-world globalization? Perhaps the only thing with which we can be assured of as the field turns—for better or for worse—towards increased study of something called “world literature,” is that translation will be both the capability and the downfall of all such comparative work.

130 Has the colossal over-usage of the term obfuscated more pressing questions as to the defining nature of our age? Even if it is the case, as Derrida reckons, that the term globalization (modialisation) “is the site of the most symptomatic uses and abuses of our time”

(2002, 372), can we afford to disregard its impact on communities, literary and otherwise?8

To address the centrality of the global in contemporary literature as what Khrisnan calls both

“a mode of thematization” and “a way of bringing the world into view” (2007, 4), it is necessary to delimit some of the defining characteristics of the term in its current usage. If, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, the contemporary novel takes as its postcolonial responsibility the opening of form to allow for the “unanticipatable” other, which can only arrive in many-voices (plusieurs voix), then it is the case that the all-eclipsing concept of the global endeavors to close off such a project.

I am distinguishing the concept of the global, an uncertain and highly pliable signifier wielded by literary scholars as a way of talking about cultural mobility in the novel, from what Brennan calls the “expansionist policy” of Western globalization.9 The latter is assuredly responsible for the emergence of the former, but as with translations, the distance between the two referents grows exponentially with each further transposing. Reading the distance between the two, the “slippage between connotation and code” in defining globalization, Brennan finds the global theory to be a “very specialized discursive formation” passing as old forms of inquiry (2006, 126).10 Indeed the slippage between concept and materiality seems for Khrisnan a symptom of the institutionalization and naturalization of a field of globalization, essentially causing the global to “cease [being] a perspective” and instead to be increasingly believed “to give access to things in themselves” (2010, 4-5). This

8 Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001. Edit./Trans. E. Rottenberg, Stanford: SUP. 9 Brennan, Timothy. 1997. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 10 Brennan, Timothy. 2006. Wars of Position: Cultural Politics on the Left and the Right. New York: Columbia UP.

131 takes the form of pronouncements about the absolute globality of our current state of being, this state being qualitatively and quantitatively different than every age prior. According to the logic of our new age of the globe, it is no longer proper to think only locally—our purview is the globe, the planet, and the world. And given the vast parameters required to think the world into view, a global imaginary, distant as it often is from the machinations of globalization, feels closest to an honest term for this new state of inquiry in literary studies.

To read recent work in comparative literature, cultural studies, and postcolonial literary studies is to be told unequivocally that we are living and working in a global age, and that we must adapt our vision and our reading to that dominant zeitgeist.11 Even those more historically sensitive approaches to globalization, those that identify precedents that demonstrate moments in antiquity consumed with thinking and feeling the globe, they still insist on the particularity of our cultural moment, even as they contextualize the properties of globalization back a millennium or more.12 Walter Mignolo epitomizes this schizophrenic mode of contextualizing globalization as both history and present when he couches his use of globalization in “two complementary ways: as a reference to the past half century and…to the past five hundred years of the modern world system” (2000, 279).13 Amitav Ghosh, one of the few contemporary critics who is also a central literary figure in the rise of the so-called global novel, has recently repositioned his previous work on his historicizing global routes of circulation (In an Antique Land) moving towards contemporaneity in the global mechanism:

“Today for the first time in history, a single ideal commands something close to absolute

11 A prominent critic of the rise of globalism, Pheng Cheah writes that “in contemporary cultural studies, postnationalism has become an increasingly popular trend” one that ignores the “necessity of popular nationalism as a an agent of ethio-political transformation in transnationalism” (1998, 32, 33). Cheah, Peng. 1998. “Introduction Part II,” Cosmopolitics. 12 To borrow from Jameson, globalization operates much in the way that Modernity “is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms” (2002, 35). Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity. New York and London: Verso Press. 13 Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton: PUP.

132 hegemony in the world…the impersonal mechanisms of a global marketplace” (2005, 136, my emphasis)14 Ghosh is quick to say that while this is indeed the dominant mode for much of the world’s people—awaiting the turn of the global marketplace—that it is not the way of the world to assent to dominance by capital. To read between the lines, Ghosh appears to be offering one way of considering a global way of thinking of the world, a way of grappling with the influence of a hegemonic marketplace on the life of the individual, without equating this to thinking globally.

Globalization undeniably has discernable effects on the economies that regulate the production and movement of cultural commodities—notably, the translatable objects of the literary market—but the material circumstances by which this increased flow and movement of people and ideas have come to pass, are largely left uncritiqued.15 As Mads Thomsen points out, critique of globality/globalization in world literature seems to rest unhelpfully on the far edges of the polemic; on one hand, cultural globalization is represented as a homogenizing force that levels all cultural difference, while on the other, globalization has the potential to move and appreciate local culture for an ever-proliferating international audience (2008, 12). Schoene reiterates this as the central problem for thinking about globalization—though it “is commonly held responsible for eliminating cultural difference and replacing it with worldwide homogeneity,” in actual fact, globalization appears to be

“perpetuating, and indeed considerably exacerbating, what looks suspiciously like the same old inequalities” (127).16 This exacerbation of old inequalities, much like Faulkner’s past that

“is not even past,” lives at what Urs Staheli calls the root contradiction of cultural

14 Ghosh, Amitav. 2005. Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of Turmoil in Our Times. New York: Houghton Mifflin Books. 15 Spivak differentiates between globality and globalization. The former “is invoked in the interest of the financialization of the globe, or globalization” (1998, 330). “Cultural Talks in the Hot Peace,” Cosmopolitics. 16 Derrida precedes Schoene in offering a critique of globalization’s perceived “opening” of Eurocentric models of difference: “the apparent homogenization often hides old and new inequalities and hegemonies that we must learn to detect behind their new features” (2002, 373).

133 globalization: it “is presented both as the leveling of all local differences and as providing the potential for local cultural products to be appreciated globally, which is seen as a positive effect” (Staheli 2000 in Thomsen 2008, 5). Beck reframes the local/global binary as a starkly negative choice: “if [global] culture is conceived as territorially circumscribed, then the question of plurality leads to a sterile false alternative: either universal sameness

(“McDonalidization”) or perspectives that resist comparison (incommensurability)” (2006,

29).17

Calls to read globally (in every sense imaginable) in a new age of World Literature, are trumpeted with regularity from the leading Western critics of contemporary literary studies: Moretti, Dimock, Chow, Casanova, Damrosch, Mads Thomsen, etc., and they come with manifesto-like prescriptions for the future of literature of the globe. For the most part, they follow Thomsen in offering an optimistic outlook on the potential for researching and teaching world literature that “takes seriously both cultural globalization and literature that can be characterized as transnational” (2008, 5).18 Parsing these admonitions one finds that there is relative agreement on the following paradox within that idealistic vision of the world as post-nation: we must begin to read globally, but our reading necessarily starts at home.19 In this vein, critics like Pheng Cheah and Weihsin Gui have made clear that “while these ideas of global and world literatures are illuminating, their emphasis on the mobile and fluid aspects of economic and cultural globalization may lead to a neglect of the abiding importance of the local and the national” (Gui 2009).20 For most of the world’s population,

17 Ulrich, Beck. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity. 18 Thomsen is careful to nuance this idealism by pointing out that few critics actually believe that “there will emerge a new global literary community that will solve every problem concerning peoples’ identities and the negative effects of globalization” (2008, 7). 19 Schoene on the cosmopolitan novel: “there is no world that does not commence at home, taking shape from ones singular emergence in the interplay with others” (2010, 130). 20 Gui, Weihsin. “Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Critical Realism in Contemporary World Literature,” Agora. http://castle.eiu.edu/agora/0809/Weihs.htm

134 the nation still provides or deprives the political subjectivity with which the individual understands locality, community, nation, and the world. Claiming a vantage on the world must then be contextualized by the position of the critic/author, lest the claim replicate

Enlightenment discourses of knowledge about other peoples in other lands. As a symptom of this persistent lack of context for the vantage of worldliness in the study of contemporary literature, an analysis of the most prominent architects of the theory of new world literature finds a minuscule list of names, and an enormous number of references to those few critics.21 One variant of a highly complex web of theoretical interventions into the idea of a world literature is being consistently overvalued. It just so happens, that this one loud voice in the theoretical conversation is dominated by Western critics who are dedicated to expanding the canon of literary studies, but who rarely question the dependent rubrics for their own study.

A critic approaching Damrosch’s larger question for world literature: “which literature, whose’s world?” (2007) I find my answer perpetually on hold for the very fact that my subject position allows only one vantage, and not the terrifying sight of Borges’s

“Aleph”: all the world in a single vision. This problem of wanting to read globally, but needing to do so from a restricted vantage, is recuperated by some cosmopolitical approaches that stress the potential for the “singular emergence,” i.e. writing from home, “in the interplay with others,” aka, the global exchange of cultural knowledge (Schoene 2010,

131). Indeed the “critical” (Cheah, Robbins, Schoene) and “rooted” (Beck, Appiah) cosmopolitanisms have attempted to bring a healthy dose of pragmatism to the necessary

21 I first became aware of my rather provincial vision of the theoretical network that I called World Literature Theory at a conference on translation and world literature in Uppsala, Sweden, where my asides about the “seminal” theories by Dimock, Damrosch, and Casanova were met with retorts about the marginality of such works in Scandinavia and prominence of a completely different, and equally provincial, set of “world” theorists. My project does not avoid these trappings of context, but I do, whenever possible, make reference to critics outside the small cadre of Western European and American critics.

135 idealism of cosmopolitanism. Those invested in these non-utopian cosmopolitanisms have increasingly turned to the novel as a form via which national vantage and the global imaginary produce a coexistence of difference, or what Appiah describes as an imperfect balance between local and global influences (2004). In Reading the Global (2008), Khrisnan offers what I find to be the most even-handed approach to literary work with the global:

If the global names a historically produced way of seeing that generates “reality effects” with profound material consequences for the people, the literary critic engages the means by which such a perspective, and the way it frames truth, is set up…This ability to produce fact, rather than the facts themselves, is what interests me. (2007, 5, Khrisnan’s emphasis)

In probing the soft underbelly of the concept of the global, or better, the discursive regime known as the global, Khrisnan’s “frame” of literary perspective on the “truths” of the global allows for the following underlying assumptions: 1. “As most people have experienced in one way or another, globalization is no illusion, but real, and propelled by strong forces – particularly those of economics and the media – and for better and for worse” (Thomsen

2008, 8), and 2. There is a global gestalt in the interlocutory fields of literary studies, and what

Robbins terms “feeling global” has precipitated some very broad and problematic parameters for how the study and comparison of what gets called world literature will happen in the coming years.22 This chapter examines one particular and peculiar frame of literary perspective on the global, one that attempts narration of a community clearly affected by globalization, but with little perspective as to its exceptionality within that persistent circulation.

Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go will in this way draw together two major nodes of the argument over world literature and bring them into active engagement at the level of form:

22 Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum International Publishing; Robbins, Bruce. 1999. Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York University Press.

136 First, if we claim a vantage on the global flows of people and cultural knowledge from a distance, can we understand that circulation on the micro-level, from the inside looking out; i.e., what would a fixed community look like in the midst of a global world. If the global imaginary of the novel is a “way of bringing the world into view,” are there forms of the imaginary that show communities affected by the global, but which are unsure as to its movements and motivations? Second, how does the model of translation shift and mutate in the form of the novel, thus disrupting commodifiable exoticism on the one hand (“born translated”), and pure locality of difference on the other (untranslatable at the cost of community outside national boundaries)? The answer to these two questions is an unequivocal “yes,” prompting the further question of whether our methods and categories for world literature are sufficient. As one direction for a new methodology, I am raising the issue of translatability of cultural knowledge at a critical crossroads with the global imaginary.

As I will show, such a nexus allows a novel such as Never Let Me Go to speak back to the extremes of the world literature debate and describe new territory for the irresolvable in the translating novel.

Never Let Me Go, like most of Ishiguro’s novels, is praised for what it does not do, what it holds back, and the pregnant absence at its center. For some critics this is a style that translates as an affect, a mode of feeling that hints at a profound depth to which we have no access. Such a style, as the critical wisdom suggests in its lead-up to arguments that pin

Ishiguro down (so much butterfly on the board), leads the reader to believe she has missed something, perhaps misunderstood something essential to the makeup of the text. This misunderstanding is for Walkowitz the effect of Ishiguro’s “effort to write ‘like a foreigner,’ if only to assert the necessity of translation even… in a novel that seems to be about a single

137 national culture” (2006, 112).23 The “effect of translation,” she goes on to argue, is attributed by Ishiguro’s readers as an “objective, definable ‘foreignness’,” a “difference between cultures, rather than a difference within them” (Ibid.). Walkowitz then takes up Chow in order to demonstrate that this desire for an unbridgeable, and definite difference, is in fact the longing for Ishiguro’s native. Extending Zîzek, Chow situates this desire within the frame of a particular colonial epistemology: the obsession with marking the other as fixed:

Our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold on to an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped,’ which is a not-so-innocent desire to seize control. (1993, 53)24

The “non-duped” readings of Ishiguro can be categorized by their interest in Ishiguro’s

Japonisme, the style of Japan that emerges in criticism as the effect of his foreignness of form.

Being duped by the inconsistencies of our own subjectivity as an ethics of reading is held at bay by the possibility of a definitive difference, a spectral Japan, lurking somewhere outside the vantage of narrative understanding. Even when this alterity is not particularized as Japan, it remains the spectre of misunderstanding, a delay in the revelation that would allow the critic and the reader to be ‘nonduped’. The spectral should not be mistaken for the dead, but it certainly is buried—buried in our own misunderstandings that we read as the effect of form, the veil drawn across the authentic Japan signified at the heart of his novels.

Susan Chira’s review of The Remains of the Day pauses to reflect on the implications for Ishiguro of being read as translated from the Japanese; she notes with pessimism that,

“whenever Kazuo Ishiguro goes on the road to promote his books, he has to spend much of his time explaining himself. People assume he writes in Japanese. He writes in English. They assume that his spare, elliptical style is in the tradition of Japanese poetry. It isn’t” (1989,

23 Walwowitz, Rebecca. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York; Columbia UP. 24 Chow, Rey. 1993. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

138 A1).25 Ishiguro is thus effectively haunted by an image of his work in a language he cannot understand.

In the clone community of Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro imagines what it would mean to be from both an identifiable locality (70’s Britain) and an absolute nowhere (a clone community with no understanding of its cultural context or historical importance).26 Such an impossible mode of belonging points at least partially to the invented geographic subject of

Japan that haunts so much of Ishiguro-criticism. Never Let Me Go engages the naïve critical block so intrigued by a supposed latent Japonisme in Ishiguro’s work by pointing to translation as a form capable of negotiating a global imaginary without resolving that imaginary into the invention of Japan. Never Let Me Go is quite simply Ishiguro’s answer to a critical bind that places him between a tradition of reading difference as a sign of the oriental, and the current interest in global novels that come already translated for an international audience. In opposition to the critical rush to resolve Ishiguro into a cultural authenticity or cultural commodity—what the novel chillingly analogizes to “completion”

(the final donation of organs that ends with the death of the cloned person)—we have the figure of the clone: neither origin nor trajectory, but holding both in tension. As with the negotiation I have outlined as the principle of dynamic form in the translating novel, the clone exists because of the fundamental necessity of originals and copies, but without

25 Chira, Susan. “The Need for Self-Deception,” New York Times Book Review, 8 Oct. 1989: 73. Ishiguro’s style is often compared to traditions of Japanese poetry and painting, with the most common suggestion being that his perceived affectlessness derives from the 18th century literary and cultural tradition of mono ga aware, roughly translated as the “pathos of things.” This Edo period term concerns a Japanese literary quality of wistfulness at the world’s ephemera. My point in raising this issue of stylistic allusion to a tradition that Ishiguro is largely unfamiliar with is not to dismiss the allusion outright, but rather to ask what kinds of presuppositions are made about a ethnic British writer that allow this kind of criticism to dominate. 26 It is only at the very end of the novel that Miss Emily definitively contextualizes Hailsham within a period of technological advances: “After the war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn’t time to take stock, to ask the sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously uncurable conditions” (262).

139 resolving or completing into either. In order to hint at literature’s potential as translating negotiation without resolution, I will introduce the figure of the clone as Ishiguro’s explicit critique of globalization, and his fascinating implicit critique of critical responses that reduce or translate his fiction to either latent authenticity or manufactured artificiality.

In turning away from the supposed Japaneseness at the heart of Ishiguro’s “buried anguish,” I am going to move the discussion towards a way of reading the logic of this sort of translation, rather than the error of its conclusions. To begin unpacking the underpinnings of cultural translation in the reception of Ishiguro and then his novelistic refiguring of that association, it will be helpful to examine the historical context for this kind of translation with examples of Japonisme in Modernist and Postmodernist writing. To set up these historical accounts as not merely strawmen, too easily immolated as Modernist

Orientalism, but rather as examples that bring into relief the assumptions of translation and translatability, I am going to draw upon what Eric Hayot defines as the “example effect.”

Hayot’s example-effect pauses the example at the very moment before a specific anecdote

(in this case, Japan) has resolved into generality, when the example can be considered “qua example” (2010, 28). 27 The missing term in his equation is very obviously translation. The particular example, the origin of meaning, and this is Hayot’s point, loses its integrity as a specific kind of knowledge in its move from specificity to generality. It has been translated, and, in some essential way, lost. Hayot’s project develops an innovative way of encountering examples without allowing them to become exemplars that stand in for possessible knowledge about other people and other geographies. He reads dramatizations of abject

Chinese bodies (depictions of tumors, tortures, and the “hypothetical Mandarin”) in order to de-normalize the translation from particularity to generality—the very subject of this chapter

27 Hayot, Eric. 2010. The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain. Oxford: Oxford UP.

140 and my larger project. Hayot’s primary example is Chinese pain, a ontological particularity that is superseded by the example-effect’s resolution into a broad abstraction and which ultimately matters very little to “the generality it illustrates” (the Western subject’s conjectures on modernity and sympathy). Crucial to his project of devaluing the generalization, Hayot “suspend[s] that process at precisely the moment at which the individual anecdote, citation, sentence, or episode threatens to cross over into general principle” (29). This illustration of the “example-effect” produced by Chinese pain, both a particular and general exemplar of sympathy in the Western subject, offers an ingenious mechanism for refiguring the problem of “Japan” in criticism of Ishiguro’s novels.

Hayot begins with the assumption that the “anecdote’s relation to language and history has allowed it to become the privileged epistemological form of much contemporary literary criticism” (2010, 30). He then separates the anecdote into its “details,” and the narrative of effect of those details that “testify to the presence of a world out ‘there,’ beyond the narrative necessities of a given story,” drawing on Barthes’s “reality effect” principle (27).

Hayot’s project, which dovetails perfectly with Christopher Bush’s interest in the signification of a Japanese style onto a European subject and geography, sets out to pause on the seemingly throwaway details of the anecdote and to

[r]ecognize that part of how [China qua example] functions in culture is precisely as the kind of thing that does not matter very much to the generality it illustrates, and which is consumed or interpreted by the vast majority of readers as the kind of arbitrary reference that might just as well have referred to something else. (29)

Hayot suggests that there is value in considering the example “as an example,” rather than discarding the details, in this case the hypothetical Mandarin in Balzac’s Le Pere Goriot, and to understand the generality as formed by the specificity of the example. In this way, the arbitrariness of the anecdote is recast as its historical specificity. It is his delimitation of a

141 particular process of interrupting the anecdote in its movement from detail to generality that is particularly helpful in imagining how clones dramatize the example effect of translation in

Never Let Me Go. Hayot suggests that interpretation can “suspend the process precisely at the moment at which the individual anecdote, citation, sentence, or episode threatens to cross over into general principle, there to be replaced by a rule or state of things that effectively erases the anecdote’s…importance qua itself” (29). Whereas Hayot suspends the example- effect of Chinese pain in order to take “seriously” the example as example or China as

China, I am interested in the negotiation between example and principle, particularity and generality, not as a suspension, but as a dynamic interchange. I take such negotiations as the value of literary form in moving between specificity and generality, refusing to complete at either scale. In doing so, the form of the translating novel anticipates the movement to generality, and does not suspend, but rather animates the implicit in-betweenness of translation allowing the novel to comment on the structures of originality and inauthenticity that it raises without itself privileging one or the other.

The Other, Nowhere

The Japan in question is neither an imaginary Japan—in which no one would be interested—nor the real Japan, which is inaccessible. Baudrillard, Radical Alterity

In writing about the specificity of Chinese suffering Modernist literature, Hayot notes that the understood arbitrariness of the example leads a reader to assume that “the mandarin, well, he could just as well have been Japanese, Aztec, or Lithuanian” (27), thus the example of the Chinamen statues in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day transform tout court into

Japanesemen in order to accommodate Ishiguro’s supposed native other. But what if, I am asking, translation in the novel invests itself simultaneously in the example and the

142 generality, and the effect of the two in concert? Indeed, the particular affect attributed to

Ishiguro’s “reserved” style might best be understood as the failure to resolve into authenticity or artificiality. We see Japanese example-effect wielded with a comparable frequency to China as a sign or “fabric of signs” that illustrates a principal of modernity, though in the case of Japan, the key term of engagement is “fashion,” rather than “pain.”

Oscar Wilde writes of the fin-de-siecle European obsession with a Japanese aesthetic that offered a fantasy of the Orient as translatable to any geography. He writes with recognizable elan, in The Decay of Lying (1891), of a Japan that can be removed from the particularity of geography and people, and worn as a fashion on the streets of London. I reproduce the quote here in order to illustrate the phantasmagoria of his vision:

And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio (sic). On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere… the whole of Japan is a pure invention…[T]he Japanese people are simply a mode of style (22).28

Wilde defines his theory of a Japanese-effect as distinct from the tourist who goes “to

Tokio,” who we would imagine has only the most superficial relationship to the Japanese people. This follows a certain general logic about tourism and the kind of cultural knowledge one gleans from a visit abroad. What startles is his claim for reading an “absolute” Japanese style on offer in England. Wilde translates for us a Japan understood according to the

“spirit” of the artists’ style, style transposable to the streets of Piccadilly, and available to be read by the Englishman on an “afternoon stroll.” The “spirit” of style, its translatability without the inhibitions of context, conflates an aesthetic sensibility with the occlusion of the

28 Wilde, Oscar. 2004. The Decay of Lying. New York: Kessinger.

143 geographic and cultural specificity of a real place, in this case, Meiji era Japan.29 If we return to the principle of Hayot’s example-effect, pausing the process of eclipsing the particular on the way to an abstraction, we find in Wilde’s reading of Japonisme abroad a claim for cultural translation that demands mobility from Japan, the particular geography and people. Wilde, as one representative of particular artistic response to a Japanese aesthetic, is easily critiqued for locating a pre-existing alterity within Western conceptions of novelty and beauty—after all, he readily admits to conceiving of Japan as “pure invention.” Such critique fails, however, to reckon with the effects of such translation. The Japanese-effect, as we might call it, persists as the confluence of Japan as an absolute style, and as stand-in for a conception of alterity in

Western aesthetics. Sussing out definitive originals and copies in Wilde’s translative move is thoroughly beside the point.

We see this stylization of Japan taken to the limits of the imagination in Henry

Miller’s introduction to Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Key. In Miller’s case, he is explicit in referencing Japanese style as both exemplar (a “newly discovered species”) and generality

(“like China”). In an anecdotal reading that would be largely unthinkable today, Miller writes:

I have a mixed reaction to Japanese art and literature. Sometimes I feel like what I am reading is happening on another planet or talking about a newly- discovered species. And sometimes I have the same feeling I had with China, that everything is familiar…the most universal of all the races on earth.

Both Miller and Wilde leave us asking what qualities of form an artistic tradition must possess in order to be both universally recognizable and yet so radically different as to promise a new “species” of style. The answer, as we can easily guess, has little to do with the

Japanese artist and much to do with the critical regime that has certain expectations for how non-Western texts must read as offering a locality of difference in a recognizable (read

29 Critiquing the discursive erasure of the geographical, material Orient as an epistemological project of colonialism is the great legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), and I am indebted to him for his still prescient study of the effects of claiming authenticity from postcolonial texts.

144 global) form. Tanizaki, to whom Ishiguro is occasionally compared stylistically,30 is for Miller capable of producing the effect of both reading the absolute difference of an alien culture, and the infinite familiarity of a universal culture. The question is then whether we imagine

Tanizaki as having purposefully fashioned a style that is in-between locality and globality from the raw materials of the Japanese language. Setting aside the difficulty of pinpointing such intentionality,31 we must ask what Miller’s expectations would be in reading a novel (in translation) from a national tradition foreign to him. As we have seen, the global imaginary has very particular ideas about how non-western authors should offer difference in their work, and the Modernist interest in a legible, mobile Japanese style clearly contributed to the kinds of formal demands made on writers entering the Western canon from elsewhere. As with Hayot’s critique of the anecdote of the “hypothetical mandarin,” Wilde and Miller’s consideration of a transposable Japanese style renders Japan unimportant and beside the point. And so, with Japan and China reduced to modes of style, figments of the global imaginary, what is it that we are talking about when we talk about Japan in Ishiguro?

Christopher Bush theorizes Wilde’s reading of a Japanese mode as that which

“serves as one of the ways in which the [Europeans] talked about what was new or vaguely foreign,” and more broadly, that most of the 19th century European interest in Japonisme did not reflect influence from a “proper geographic origin,” but rather, “sign[led] a difference”

(166).32 We can look to the critical consensus on the effect of “misunderstandings” and

30 Anthony Thwaite argues stridently for the comparison between Ishiguro and the two major figures of 20th century Japanese World Literature, Tanizaki and Kawabata (the latter of whom was Japan’s first Nobel Laureate): “There are distinct Japanese characteristics (like indirectness) in Ishiguro’s work, however much he may disclaim them” (Barry 2000, 10). Thwaite in Lewis, Barry. 2000. Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester: Manchester UP. 31 As it happens, his personal writings show Tanizaki was quite fascinated with Western culture in the post-Edo cultural opening of Japan. 32 Van Gogh’s indebtedness to Hokusai, just to name one prominent example. Bush, Christopher. 2005. “The Other of the Other?: Cultural Studies, Theory, and the Location of the Modernist Signifier,” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2005.

145 “foreignness” attributed to Ishiguro’s work, and see a clear continuity with the tradition of

Japonisme in the Western world’s treatment of the Asian subject/object. That critical interest in a difference that is signaled in the effect of form (“buried anguish”), and authenticated as pure locality (Japan), is little different than the Modernist interest in a Japanese influence on painting and realism. Bush broadens and textures the scope of this reading to include the specifically ideographic form of Chinese characters. Their pictographic quality avails them to an extra-syntactic form of legibility (looking at/for pictures), and their connection to an imagined Asia composed in symbols that can be decoded, describes a brand of translation that fully destabilizes the function of origins. In asserting that there was no “influence or reception of Chinese literature” on Modernist writing in the West, but rather a “formal

China that is structured in terms of a relationship-to,” Bush provides the language by which we understand Ishiguro’s form to be on the move, or rather, translating without access to originality, but equally dependant on a relationality to the structures of origin.

China/Japan/Ishiguro, signs of alterity in the historical development from Japonisme to the postcolonial novel in a global age, enter the domain of the contemporary novel as the dynamic movement, the oscillation between particularity and generality. And the both/and formulation of this manner of translation indeed removes the paradox from Victor Segalen’s dream of a “real form” of China that is “beyond all reality” (in Bush 2009, 98).33

It would be impossible to ignore the contribution and complication of the Japanese- effect by Roland Barthes’s fantastical Empire of Signs. Barthes’s Empire is a theory of

Structuralism in the guise of a travelogue on modern Japan, and draws out the historical construction of the Japanese-effect into a structural methodology that will help situate the discussion of Ishiguro within the logic of translation-as-hoax. Barthes’s reflections on the

33 2009. Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media. Oxford: Oxford UP.

146 Japanese landscape read like a series of meditations on mimetic desire. He admits to writing on Japan as an expression of his “absolute demand for total alterity” (42).34 He writes of a dissonance between the open natural expanses and dense city spaces as akin to the poststructuralist account of the rupture of signification:

One might say that an age-old technique permits the landscape or the spectacle to produce itself, to occur in a pure significance, abrupt, empty, like a fracture. An Empire of Signs? Yes, if it is understood that these signs are empty and that the ritual is without a god. (211)35

Bush notes that, “Barthes’s text pushes the dislocation of the Orient to its limit, completing its transformation from the name of a place with a relatively specific location into a non-localized, rhetorical topos for the strangeness of here and now” (“The Other

Other” 168). I could imagine no better description for the topos of Ishiguro’s school of clones. Situated in the quasi-historical Britain of the 70’s, the Hailsham school exists in the

“non-localized” potential space of a clone-only world that has no connection to “normal” humanity, but nevertheless exists in a society entirely dependant on the architecture, language, art, and forms of that world.

The question that this clone community at the limits of “here and now” begs is whether literature has the ability to locate something outside of a “rhetorical topos,” since literary locale itself is, and must be, a figure of rhetoric. I do not mean to answer this question definitively, but rather to suggest that missing from Bush’s analysis is a consideration not of what literature can and should mean, but how it means in the first place.

And importantly, how it means multiply in a single instance. “In becoming Literature,” Bush writes of Barthes’s Mallarméan style, “all language becomes Chinese” (2009, 97). Barthes spoke openly about The Empire of Signs as an “expression of the absolute demand for total

34 Barthes, Roland. 1986. The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. New York: Hill and Wang. 35 Barthes, Roland. 1982. The Empire of Signs. Fr. L’Empire de Signs. New York: Hill and Wang.

147 alterity that [he] now needed” (1986), and in the demonstration of such a desire, he locates not Japan, though it is clear he had no designs on such a travelogue, but the spectre of otherness at the limit of the encounter with language. The project in Empire follows the logic of all of his post-formalist work in reading language’s failure to signify a knowable text.

Barthes’s Japan as a site of “pure significance” and godless ritual will help us begin to consider how the critique of Ishiguro’s style as a passive withholding produces a spectacle of

“pure significance” that critics read as Japan.

For the postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard, Japanese difference crosses a

“frontier” into radical alterity, the condition of the other in the era of technological advances in artificiality. In a series of lectures on artificial intelligence collected under the title Radical

Alterity, Baudrillard references a distinct instantiation of the Japanese-effect, neither imaginary nor real (2008, 49).36 Counter to my argument for a Japanese effect that has nothing to do with Japanese material culture or any definitive geography, Baudrillard offers

Japan as a site of infinite cultural hospitality, unencumbered by a particular sense of itself as authentic or original. In a series of deeply Orientalist declarations about “the secret” to

Japanese exceptionalism (i.e. its refusal of the logic of exceptionalism), Baudrillard relegates

Japanese art, culture, and semiotics to the status of the clone. Baudrillard carves a precarious path attempting both to evacuate the “virus” of origins and authenticity from a signifier he calls Japan, while intimating that no such evacuation is necessary since “nothing comes from

[Japan], from its being, its essence” (68). He writes: “all of its writing and religion come from somewhere else,” and that this is precisely what saves Japan from the technological virus that is “always deconstructing territories” (69). In the final analysis, Japan is left with nothing except the absence of illusions “of its own authenticity, its own desire, its own origins”

36 Baudrillard, Jean. 2008. Radical Alterity. LA: Semiotext(e).

148 (Ibid.). Japan-as-clone is not the mode of fashion we see on Wilde’s Piccadilly. Rather, it signifies as an articulation of the limit of translation, or rather translation after the fact. There is the spectre of some original culture and language from which Japan was spawned, and an immunity to the virus of authenticity—a shadow with no past and no future.

This is, to Baudrillard’s own admission, the “dead-end” of the “doube-image of

Japan” (58). It is also, pointedly, the dead-end of the already-translated, and the subject of

Ishiguro’s story of the clone. To require a work of literature to either empty itself of an essential nature and in doing so become the fantasy of fashion that we read in Wilde and

Barthes’ Japonisme, or to find in that work a pure inaccessibility of being, a radical alterity, is to imagine the dead walking, the life of the clone. But for all of his brazen certainty in reading alterity as preserved in the inauthenticity of Japan, he reminds us that “in the encounter with dead-ends,” there is the “possibility of going beyond them” (Ibid.). This is precisely the catalyst for my chapter, and for this project writ large: going beyond the limits imagined for the novel in an age of the globe. Yet, writers like Ishiguro shift the emphasis in my project from going beyond, to simply “going,” refusing the kinds of cultural closure the monolithically categorize texts as local or global. For that is the value of translation as a form: its ability to theorize with and against the critical models imposed by the already- translated mode of world literature.

I’ve previously engaged the spectre in Derrida’s terms of hospitality to the Other, as a way of imagining the necessity of thinking the original into existence in translation without possessing that original. In this case, the dominance of the global imaginary disrupts the crucial aspect of spectrality in Derrida, the necessity of waiting for an Other whose form cannot be anticipated; instead of making a space for the yet to come—the messianic without

149 the messiah—the spectre lurks as a form discernible to the right critical approach.37 The spectre is thus already delimited by the expectations of the reader. Novelists like Ishiguro are read as the already-translated. Such expectations for offering up a legible authenticity of identity are not particular to Ishiguro; in fact, they are too often the de facto mode of criticism for the Western critic of the Commonwealth writer. This is especially the case, when, as Huggan writes, a particular “glamorized cultural difference” is endorsed as an alibi for avoiding critique of the liberal Western subject (2001, 62). Salman Rushdie, commenting on the impossible identity bind of the contemporary British-Bangladeshi writer Monica Ali, flays Germaine Greer for her expectations of discernible ethnic flavor in Brick Lane— wanting Ali to flash the right passport, as it were—“to suit Greer…Ali is denied her heritage and belittled for her Britishness” (in Huggan 2001, xv).

This is tacitly the case in Shameem Black’s important recasting of Never Let Me Go as engaging an “inhuman aesthetics,” where despite her argument against an “aesthetics of detachment” in Ishiguro’s novels, she relies on the same tired moniker of the buried effect

(2009, 803).38 Black’s argument about the importance of the clone in figuring ethics ultimately steps off stage to make way for the deus ex machina of misunderstanding, normalized as the effect of Ishiguro’s form. Her penultimate account of the novel beckons the spectre: “As with all of Ishiguro's novels, what does not appear—what lurks on the fringes of the narrative—is often the most important specter in the story” (Ibid.). Black, even in reproducing this fascination with spectral misunderstandings, reminds us that it is

Ishiguro’s form that haunts, and that the paradox of the means to visibility in the literary text

(form) reads as the refusal of visibility.

37 Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. London and New York: Routledge. 38 Black, Shameem. 2009. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 2009, pp. 785-807

150 I am arguing for Ishiguro’s “buried anguish,” indeed his “treason,” as his tacit rejoinder to one of Benjamin’s most beguiling points in “The Task of the Translator.”39

Benjamin writes that in taking its place within the “reciprocal relationship between languages,” the translation “cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in [an] embryonic or intensive form… marked by convergence” (72). Ishiguro’s novels refuse all manner of convergences: The Unconsoled’s

“unearthly temporal abundance,” Steven’s professionalism as a mode of global misunderstanding in The Remains of the Day, and the cloned school children in Never Let Me

Go who search in vain for the “possibles” who might carry their original DNA and offer a by proxy meaning for their lives.40 And yet, there is the remainder of form, what gets called

Ishiguro’s passivity, but which engages Benjamin’s conviction that the translation bears the mark of “hidden relationship[s]” between languages and more broadly, cultures.

Walkowitz explains away this paradox by emphasizing authorial intention, focusing on

Ishiguro’s claim that he “focus[es] on ‘shape, structure, and vision,’ or what he calls

‘architecture,’ rather than sentences’ and ‘phrases’” (2008, 219). Such an “architecture,” allows Ishiguro to “survive translation,” and to persist in modes of comparativity rather than as a singular formal achievement (219, fn 8). Because its form disavows “shape,” the architecture that is attributed to Ishiguro is intangible; in fact, Walkowitz describes it as form

“written for translation,” and as such, produced as an aftereffect of translation into the global market (2008). According to Walkowitz, architecture in Ishiguro is the structural effect of certain demands on form, and as such, his novel are relegated to the status of

39 “Buried Anguish” is the effect of choice for most reviewers writing about Ishiguro’s narrative style, although “bafflement” runs a close second. Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style (2006) offers the most nuanced and intellectually rigorous treatment of Ishiguro’s form. She levies the epithet “treason” as a generative dialectic in Ishiguro’s work between “narratives that generate identities and the narratives that describe them” (111). 40 Bruce Robbins. “Very Busy Just Now: Globalization and Harriedness in Ishiguro's The Unconsoled,” p. 438.

151 ready-mades—figments of the global imaginary—visible only when we have decided that form is what is invisible, withheld, and delayed in the reading. The architecture of the global imaginary built of scaffolding with no brick or mortar, is premade to suit a very particular interest in locating missing (spectral) difference in writers with a global audience. Walkowitz,

Black, Fluet and others are then describing not the form best suited to linguistic/cultural translation as they might suggest, but rather form as the affective absence we attribute to a translation. The text they are reading has previously been moved, changed, mutated, and is thus misunderstood. Misunderstanding then becomes the symptom of a lost original, an original that can be authenticated in form, thus we return again to the spectre, the spectre of the global imaginary, and the arguments over how the imaginary might determine what forms find circulation outside of the nation.

Reading the transnational novel as an already-translated object is a problem drawn out further by Ishiguro’s self-professed position as a “‘kind of homeless writer,’ neither ‘a very

English Englishman’ nor ‘a very Japanese Japanese either’” (Ishiguro in Walkowitz 2006,

123). Being foreign to himself, then, might seem to set the stage for a collision between form and content, from which misunderstandings would inevitably arise. Indeed, Ishiguro’s public grappling with the idea of Japan as an imaginative space to which he feels an affective kinship has significantly impacted what Wai-Chew Sim diagnoses as the “zeal for tracking the Japaneseness of his writing” (2010, 113).41 In Ishiguro’s own terms, Japan stands in for the affective landscape of the imagination:

I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie[...]. In England I was all the time building up this picture in my head, an imaginary Japan. (1991, 110)42

41 Sim, Wai-Chew. 2010. Kazuo Ishiguro. Oxon: Routledge Press. 42 Interview with Kenzaburo Oe. “The Novelist in Today's World: A Conversation.” Boundary 2 18.3 (1991)

152 Biography aside, this is a demonstrable lesson in the global imaginary, “building up” Japan

(here again is our invisible architecture) from the distance of England, with only a sensibility from which to posit a connection to a foreign geography. It is my contention that the global imaginary too often obscures the work of the novel in offering the possibility of building structures of community that span local and global cultures without resolving into one or another. This is the possibility of form-in-translation. Rather than assuming that demands of the global marketplace have preordained the form of a work of literature, and thus merely a figment of the global imagination, I suggest that writers like Ishiguro see form as a dynamic interchange between the imagining of communities outside of the nation, and the local materials required to make those forms visible. This reconceptualization of form is not external to the text, nor is it necessarily the defining interest of the plot; instead, it is at the root of writing itself.

From the limited vantage that gets called the globe, Ishiguro’s novels are already translated (having already been born and died as translations), and as such they have always already completed the process of either being marketable or foreign, global or postcolonial, the two categories most easy assimilated to a global age. If, as I have noted in the introductory movements of this chapter, globalization effects real and dramatic change on the way that cultures encounter one another, and that the global imaginary derives from this real change, we must begin to handle two entities (circulation of the market and of the imagination) as conceptual relations inseparable from each other. Literary criticism has largely approached one or the other, and in the case of Walkowitz and Fluet this means treating Ishiguro as a figment of the global imaginary. This problem of a global relationship to the novel turns on the way we read translation as a conceptual figure, a “dynamic” that

153 helps us “rethink” the demands of globality on the form of the novel.43 To read translation as neither born nor dead, is to understand the desire for vitality outside the bounds of the nation, without offering form as a sacrifice to the global imaginary.

As Jean-Luc Nancy finds the cultural gesture powerfully “mixed,” so too does translation work “to affront, confront, transform, divert, develop, recompose, combine, rechannel” (2000, 151-2).44 Crucial to both Nancy’s characterization of what culture does, and to my sense of the translating novel, is the dynamism of each of these term, the refusal of stasis and stillness. In this way language in the form of the novel negotiates the terms of its engagement with the local and global, and negotiation, as Derrida reminds us, derives from “neg-otium, not-ease, not-quiet - . . . no leisure” (2002, 11).45 The disquiet of translation in the novel means that neither global nor local vantages are subordinated, allowing us to read form and style as capable of responding to the imaginative idea of Japan, without resolving into Japaneseness. As such, formal negotiation allows Ishiguro to respond to both the claims of hidden authenticity and performed exoticism in his fiction by figuring translation as perpetually on the move, irreducible to elements of original and target language. The clones of Never Let Me Go can in this way understand themselves as affected, wounded even, by global circulations they cannot comprehend, and as capable of producing parallel modes of circulation that rely on the local situatedness of their specific community.

If indeed, on some level, “we are all being globalized” (Bauman 1998, 1), then there is no deeper terror than imagining our very organic life being manipulated and usurped by

43 With this formulation of the “dynamic” of translation, I am directly indebted to the recent work of Tim Bewes on shame as the form of the postcolonial novel. It is his formulation of shame “which cannot be studied as such,” that I draw upon in imagining translation as the very form of writing in the contemporary novel, a form that borrowing from Bewes, “helps us to rethink a number of conceptual relations—most notably…the tension between the aesthetic and ethical claims of the modern novel” (2011, 39). Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: PUP. 44 Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 45 Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001. Stanford: Stanford UP.

154 that globalizing force. It is the terror of absolute negation of our authenticity and identity.

But a dual terror reveals us not merely as unwilling global citizens or playthings of a globalizing tide, but as ignorant provincials, unable to comprehend the movements and motivations of the global world that we are constantly reminded is at work all around us.

These terrors cohabitate in the narrative pathos and form of the transnational novel. To write at once understanding that translation is the great potential and cost of speaking to the world is to assume that one’s form will inevitably change and that much will be lost in that process. This change is one that cannot anticipated, cannot be structured or prefabricated.

Ishiguro’s clones are uniquely manufactured to help us understand the dual terror of the global imaginary: their very corporality is a constant reminder that their organs exist only to be harvested for “real” people, and their lives, an existential search for the “possible” authenticity at the atomic level of being in the DNA of their originals. But there is a third way of reading the clone. A way of reading that explicitly negotiates between the

Japaneseness in the critical reception of Ishiguro’s work, and the possibility of forms that enact a dynamic interchange between the fixed, localized culture and the mobility of a globalized culture.

If translation as the conceptual model for understanding how Ishiguro’s particular style is pressed into service, then it might at first seem very logical to find Japaneseness in the residual of the translation Ishiguro outlines. This logic ceases when we distinguish

Ishiguro’s fiction as having a different relationship to interpretation, than that of the confessional interview. Sartre via Rancière outlines this flaw in attributing an essence or

“organic” wholeness to works of art, here Proust, which “stubbornly refuse” the “organic satisfaction” we hope for in looking to “embrace all of its parts at a glance” (2011, 37). The developing picture in Ishiguro’s head that so many wish to totalize as the misunderstanding

155 of Japan, is refused in the absence of “arranging of spaces and opening of vistas.” He, like

Proust, “writes ‘pieces,’” not vantages (Ibid.), and those pieces are on the move.

What we talk about when we talk about Japan

“Well, I think the Japan that exists in that book is very much my own personal, imaginary Japan” Ishiguro, “Wave Pattern”46

“Mr Stevens, will you kindly look at the Chinamen behind you?” The Remains of the Day

The reader of an Ishiguro novel, whether the nominally Japanese early novels (Pale

View of Hills, 1982 and An Artist of the Floating World, 1986), the cosmopolitan wandering middle novels (The Unconsoled, 1995 and When We Were Orphans, 2000), or in the stubborn locality of what could be controversially called his English country house novels (The Remains of the Day, 1989 and Never Let Me Go, 2005), might be said to be haunted by the refusal of this affective landscape to signify a definitive difference in Ishiguro’s novels. What is missing from the accounts of detachment and spectrality that we read in Walkowitz, Black, and others, is a sense of the politics of how we misunderstand form in Ishiguro. It is as Rancière reminds us, part of literature’s imperative to teach us to choose our misunderstandings well

(2011, 45).47

Why might it be that critics have chosen to misunderstand Ishiguro so poorly, reflexively referring to the “fabric of signs” at the “fringe of [his] narratives” as Japan? Such poorly imagined misunderstandings appear to turn on the failure to understand translation as the rich conceptual figure at the heart of Ishiguro’s fiction. Readers of the particular misunderstanding that we attach to the global imaginary, would have us read Ishiguro—

46 Grand Street, No. 38 (1991), pps. 75-91. 47 Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The Politics of Literature. trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.

156 written in English and read in English—as we might a translation; thus conjuring the effect of the missing original, looming like the after-effect of his reclusive style (ostensibly

Japaneseness), hinting at an ur-text that is always out reach.

Out of Place: Ishiguro’s Chinamen I make it my business to acquaint myself with where objects properly belong in a house. The Chinamen, I would suppose, were polished by someone then replaced incorrectly. Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Much has been made of the “Chinamen” statuettes that show up as evidence of a deteriorating mind in Ishiguro’s Booker Prize winner The Remains of the Day. Whether or not readers should take them as symbolically attuned to Ishiguro’s identity politics has been the point of much discussion. Mr. Stevens, the head butler at Darlington Hall, refuses to recognize that his elderly father, the former butler, is no longer capable of performing the sizable tasks of cleaning and serving assigned to him. Steven’s embarrassment at his father’s aging culminates in a verbal standoff with Miss Kenton over the misplacement of a

“chinaman” statue. I have reproduced the exchange here to illustrate how a particular misunderstanding in the text can be extrapolated to a claim about the problem of being born-translated:

‘Mr. Stevens, that is the incorrect Chinaman, Would not agree? ‘Miss Kenton, I am very busy. I am surprised that you have nothing better to do than stand in corridors all day.’ ‘Mr. Stevens, is that the correct Chinaman or is it not?’ ‘Miss Kenton, I would ask you to keep your voice down.’ ‘And I would ask you, Mr. Stevens, to turn around and look at that Chinaman.’… ‘The fact is, Mr. Stevens, all the Chinamen in this house have been dirty for some time! And now, they are in the incorrect positions!’ (1993, 58-59)48

Just as Miss Kenton demands that Stevens “turn around and look at the Chinamen” behind him, we can imagine Ishiguro responding to the dominant critical call that he face up to his

48 Ishiguro, Kazuo. 1993. The Remains of the Day. New York; Vintage International Edition.

157 Japaneseness, the “Chinaman” that is “in the incorrect” position. Such a reading asks the

Chinaman to stand in directly for the failure of professionalism, and abstractly as the pregnant signifier of Asian difference at the heart of so much criticism of Ishiguro’s work.49

Pico Iyer hints at a form of multicultural identity that is inseparable from the formal structures of the work of art. It is a sea-change, Iyer writes, a “paradigm of the polycultural order…incarnating in his every sentence the effects of his mixed upbringing in England and

Japan” (68).50 Tomo Hattori has argued that this abstraction in fact plays at producing an iconography of Asian servitude, in the figure of the perfect servant.51 More specifically, he is a cog in the wheels of a perverse internationalism (Britain’s appeasement of Hitler) and the personification of the dual terrors of the global imaginary. He is both caged by the global market that makes his workplace also his home, and deeply unaware of his place within the circulation of international relations that swirls around the dinner tables that he so ably makes ready. Stevens as the hyper-loyal, insularly apolitical butler replicates certain Western fantasies of Asian docility and servitude. Similarly, Hattori reads the Chinaman as marker of the “regime of ethnicity” that dominates criticism of non-Western writers, demanding that they serve up legible signifiers of their ethnicity. It is a regime in which Ishiguro is

“simultaneously both credited for expertise that he does not necessarily have over Japanese culture and denied the capacity to write about the England he has lived in for all of his adult life” (1998, 221). Ishiguro’s work is thus always-already marked as translated; from the

49 A good deal of the most influential critical work on Ishiguro has emphasized the alternate forms of professionalism in his novels. See Robbins (2006); Fluet (2008); Bain (2008); and Babcock (2011). In particular, Robbins dystopian conception of “pure or absolute workplace: a workplace which is also a residence for those who work there and which thus precludes the daily contest between work and family that would otherwise seem so inescapable.” Robbins, Bruce. 2001. “Very Busy Just Now” Comparative Literature. Vol. 53, No. 4, Autumn. 50 Iyer, Pico. 1993. “The Empire Writes Back,” Time Magazine, Feb 8, 1993: 68-73. 51 Hattori, Tomo. 1998. “China Man Autoeroticism and the Remains of Asian America” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue: II (Spring, 1998), pp. 215-236.

158 moment of instantiation, form is already at a loss, and thus the critique of affectlessness and buried anguish operates on the presumption that misunderstanding the Chinamen leads to a revelation of Asian difference that constantly marks Ishiguro’s work as simultaneously foreign and incomplete. Form stops being potentiality, and becomes instead the problematic marker of our own fetish for authentic alterity in minority writing. To follow the ethnicity regime is to read “Japan” in Ishiguro’s work as we would the Chinaman: out of place, but always monumentally present.

The problem of the Chinaman, the abstracted sign of Asian difference, shows up in many of Ishiguro’s novels, but nowhere is the dialogue with this particular scene more resonant than in When We Were Orphans (2000). Nominally a detective novel—the main character, Christopher Banks, is indeed a detective—When We Were Orphans negotiates the dilemma of missing parentage and uncertain origins with a cosmopolitan reach. Banks’s

English parents raised him in colonial Shanghai, only to be wrapped up in an opium-trading debacle. Writing on the novel’s interest in repetition and imitation, Fluet finds Orphans

“resistant to the consolations of authenticity, transparency, or originality” (208). Certainly there is little consolation to be had in any of Ishiguro’s novels, least of all from authentic identity. That said, the later works are driven by a nearly singular obsession with the costs of that resistance to authenticity and originality. This will become most explicit in the clones’ search for their “possibles,” the non-cloned humans who might have provided their DNA.

In Orphans, Banks, now orphaned, finds himself transitioning from colonial school culture in Shanghai to an English public school where he reproduces a certain “mannerism” common amongst his new peers. He does so “with sufficient expertise that not a single of my fellows noticed anything odd…” (2000, 7).52 The value of influence, of course, travels

52 Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2000. When We Were Orphans. New York: Vintage.

159 only in one direction, and the lurking Chinaman in Bank’s past haunts his every interaction in England. In this scene, Colonel Chamberlain, a colonial officer who takes an interest in

Bank’s travel to live with his Aunt, assures Banks that his trip to England comes not a moment too soon:

Once you’ve settled in England, I dare say you’ll forget all this quickly enough. Shanghai’s not a bad place…I expect you’ve had about as much as you need. Much more, you’ll be turning into a chinaman. (29)

Even a proximity to the Chinese (and Japanese, to further expose the mode of Asian difference as profoundly undifferentiated) presents the possibility of contamination and, perhaps, imitation. Indeed, for Ishiguro, the Chinaman is what’s always behind you.

The imitation of mannerisms as a way of passing as a properly English is replicated with an intensely parodic tone in Never Let Me Go. In this case, imitation is expanded to include the very quality of being human. Kathy H. observes in her peers at the cottages a propensity for imitating small, intimate gestures they copy from TV shows. Since the clones are never, with the exception of their teachers at Hailsham School and the caretaker at the cottages, in social contact with non-clones, television presents the major visual culture from which they draw their models of normalcy. Here the narrator Kathy H. describes a social imitation of TV mannerisms by clone couples at the cottages:

At the cottages, though, when a couple were saying goodbye to each other there’d be hardly any words, never mind embraces or kisses. Instead, you slapped your partner’s arm near the elbow, lightly with the back of your knuckles, the way you might do to attract someone’s attention. (121)

It is a gesture that Kathy H. mocks in her peers as “not worth copying,” and indeed, the elbow-slap disappears as quickly as it arrives, leaving only the pathos of desire for a “normal life” (123-4). I’ll provocatively call this Ishiguro’s Japanese-effect, or rather his refusal to allow the example to resolve into archetype. The gesture itself is unrecognizable to the

Western reader, and is unlikely to be a cultural remnant from the 1980’s, when this particular

160 scene is meant to take place. It is a figment of the text’s cultural imagination. It operates as a translation without a referent—authenticity and originality are evacuated, and Ishiguro leaves us with the dramatization of irresolvable translation.53 The gesture is copied from one mode of global culture—the television show—and remade as a form of intimate connectivity that holds currency in this localized community. We have no idea where the gesture derives from, only that it is read and interpreted as a functional fake, and that we come to it in that state of translating. We might just as well say that the clones are watching Japanese television, so little does this cultural gesture register as particularly English. And this is precisely the point of the

Japanese-effect: its meaning comes not from its origins or future manifestations as a cultural object, but from its potential as a dynamic that refuses to resolve into either a figment of the global imaginary or a local custom.

As with the “double-image of Japan,” we “encounter the aggravation of dead-ends and the possibility of going beyond them” (Baudrillard 58). Ishiguro has caught the reader in an impossible bind of empathizing with characters who obsess over their authentic identities, even as they understand themselves as copies. It is precisely the dilemma of reading the translation—a form that carries the haunting spectre of an original outside the bounds of our reading—knowing that on the level of writing itself, something has already been lost.

And so the Japanese-effect follows the very same logic of the literary hoax. It translates without the consolation of an original and passes through as an effect of what Apter calls the

“half-crocked angle” of untranslatability. Assuredly it has nothing to do with Japan, but refers instead to the novel’s capacity to hold in tension contradictory impulses to make worldly generalities and hunger for local specificities in the same novel. Ishiguro refuses to

53 Referring to the obsession with “cheap exoticism” that drives our interest in Japanese hara-kiri, or ritualized suicide, Baudrillard identifies a “nowhere” place “where the rule is preferred to reality” (59). This nowhere place is the double-gesture of Japan—neither imaginary nor reality.

161 offer his novel as already-translated, thus preserving form as both responsive to the impulse towards global thinking (his Chinamen) and inassimilable to those very parameters.

In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro presses Wilde’s rhetorical invention of Japan, as a

“mode of style” that can be read anywhere, to its logical Zenith. He imagines for the clones of Hailsham a desire for identification with their original form—a Japanese-effect that refuses to resolve into either a locatable difference or into a vacuum of originality. The students are constantly reminded that they “were brought into this world for a purpose,” but the metaphysicality of that purpose is constantly joined to the ontological in the donated organs they will each be required to forfeit. We might read the clones’ fruitless struggling for a demonstrable origin (the “possible” DNA from which they are birthed) as Ishiguro’s dramatization of his uncertain relationship to a Japan he never knew. But such a facile reading ignores how the novel both shows the clones as affected by a global circulation, and equally that refuse identification with their role in that circulation. Ishiguro’s clones narrate, play, connive, and commune with one another even as they are raised with the constant awareness of their global purpose, a purpose that would inevitably carve them into useful pieces.

The crucial difference between Ishiguro’s critical bind and the delimiting of the clone’s existence is that translation in Never Let Me Go happens from the clones’ perspective.

Our vantage on the problems of artificiality and originality is experienced as an engagement with form, the form of the clone and the forms they create. Form makes visible both the nature of their suffering on a global regime that uses them for parts, and their struggle to create art and to care for the artistic value of their existence. Rather than have the clone persist as the already-translated, Ishiguro allows translation to persist as the clones’ unending formal engagement with the world. Ishiguro lets the clones read the world as form in

162 translation, as “a pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea” (2006, 119).

The connection between artistic form and the clones is made explicit in the exhibitions that the clone-students of Hailsham School can contribute their work to during their schooling. Unsurprisingly, critics read the exhibitions as part of the same system of circulation that destines the students to be valued only for their donate-able organs. We learn in the latter moments of the novel that the exhibitions were particular to Hailsham and part of a New Liberalism that hoped to “prove” if the clones “had souls at all” (260). But the logic of the exhibitions as a way of proving a particular liberal argument about the hidden individuality of the abject in society is outwitted by the way the clones continue to read and re-read each other’s artistic forms. From their earliest days as students at Hailsham, the cloned children save up tokens to purchase the poetry of other nine-year-olds: “funny little lines, all misspelt, in exercise books” (17). Kathy H. ponders the value of these poetry collections, wondering “why didn’t we just borrow it and copy it down” (Ibid.). The answer follows the logic of Ishiguro’s clones: artificial forms can find value in original forms in the space of negotiation between the two.

In a previous chapter I described the effect of translation operating similarly to that of déjà vu: the distinct feeling in reading the translated text that we have encountered the text before, in its original form. We see this replicated in the clones’ reflections on their purpose as organ donors:

Certainly, it feels like I always knew about donations in some vague way, even as early as six or seven. And it’s curious when were older and the guardians were giving talks, nothing came as a complete surprise. It was like we’d heard everything somewhere before. (83, Ishiguro’s emphasis)

But this is very particular kind of déjà vu, one that does not invoke the spectre of a previous original experience, as much as it brings into conversation the remembrance with the present

163 occurrence. The clones translate their experience as subjects of the globe, while fashioning a new imaginary that both engages and changes that relationship. Here Kathy H. remembers

Hailsham School after leaving for the cottages, but the recollection is uncanny:

We could see hills in the distance that reminded us of the ones in the distance at Hailsham, but they seemed to us oddly crooked, like when you draw a picture of a friend and it’s almost right but not quite, and the face on the sheet gives you the creeps. (119)

The déjà vu recollection of an original landscape most certainly evokes a spectre, but the spectre is crooked, and has been changed in the encounter.

Coming to Pieces

Just as the Japan in his early novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and A Pale View of Hills (1982) bore less of a resemblance to the real Japan than a minutely imagined place of the author's own creation, so the England in Never Let Me Go represents a sort of parallel universe with its own rules and dynamics. Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review

Never Let Me Go will help us reckon with the novel in pieces by literalizing its characters as pieces. The clones of Hailsham school, raised to donate their organs to the anonymous “natural” humans ostensibly living lives of quieter desperation, are educated to understand themselves as exceptional individuals who will paradoxically be valued for their component parts, for what they can give away, what they must sacrifice. Never Let Me Go does not aim to pick up the pieces, as such, but rather to conceive of a figure falling to pieces at the limits of the global imaginary. In the clone—indistinguishable in the novel from the work of art—we find the animation of translation as an effect. As with the global novel, the clone is pulled between the paradoxical demands of the world, asked to read as a broad

164 totality across national boundaries, while being dissectible as a discernible other. In this way, our interest in the alterity of the clone parallels our interest in the translation: something substantial has summoned an imperfect copy of itself, and that copy will signal its original with a form wholly imperfect to the task. That substantiality remains removed from us, just out of reach, even as we consider its copy from every vantage. Hitchcock furthers this connection, focusing on the absent mark of plentitude in a way that helps us imagine the clone as both the remainder of translation, and translation at its limits. Here he remarks on the always-double form of translation:

Translation is both a conditional limit and an extension: it is both a hierarchical and hegemonic cultural filter and a paradoxical mark of plentitude of that which translation has excluded. (Hitchcock 2010, 41)

Our first look at the clone reveals the limits of its translatability, and Ishiguro plays upon this by allowing his clones unfettered sexual activity knowing that they are incapable of reproducing. Clones are translation at the limit, and therefore the dead-end of the reproductive line. And yet, the clone is always the pregnant mark of substantiality, the afterlife of a plentitude so rich as to be capable of giving birth to a copy of itself. The clone, as with the translation, perpetually holds the space of the other. The double gesture of the clone plays itself out in the novel as the cruel irony of standing in for both the inevitability of the individual being touched, and in this case, vitally altered by the global movements of people and culture, while at the same time finding themselves blind to the motivations and movements of this larger circulation. Such is the paradox of many arguments for a global novel that prepares itself for translation in advance. To read broadly across cultural boundaries, the logic goes, is to offer form as infinitely translatable, clone-able no matter the context. Even then, the clone is always a stand-in for the imagined original.

165 If we abandon the clones to represent translation at its limit—already moved by a global circulation, and immobile because they have been so vitally changed—the dystopian plot of Ishiguro’s remains just that, dystopian. The predicament of Ishiguro’s critical binary reads either for a latent authenticity, a Japaneseness that presents as buried affect, or as infinite reproducibility of form. It is the predicament of the clone. It is in this blatant affinity for the clone that we find Ishiguro’s “pivot” on the axis of translation. Precisely because the figure of the translation, and further to this argument, the clone, cannot be reduced to either its totality (pure authenticity) or its parts (its resemblance to the original) it intensifies and dramatizes what Schoene and others point to as literature’s defining political mode: its

“capability to refuse or significantly recast its assigned role” (33).54 If we accept the impossibility of translating from a translation, then indeed, the clone is dead translation. But what if Ishiguro’s writing and his clones are both figured as the already-translated? This would essentially allow negotiation of the value of terms like authenticity without resolving to an absolute position, or to a claim of an authoritative vantage point. Being cloned can from this standpoint be recuperated as the form that refuses to resolve, that negotiates between the intransigence of absolutes, and that is translating, rather than translated.

We ask a translated text to offer some fashion of the original as a function of content, style, sound, or sensibility (though rarely do we ask those qualities to overlap. For example, translations of The Odyssey are famously praised for either their lively plotting or their “accurate” poesy, but never both). Peggy Kamuf reminds us that translation is the most potent representation of Derrida’s pharmacon—the always-already Other of language— medicine and poison both. “Like every good writer,” Kamuf writes, “Plato is engaged in

54 Dominic Head notes that this literary capacity is particularly apparent in the postcolonial writer’s struggle to “work ‘within exoticist codes of representation,” and who then “find ways of subverting these codes” (2008, 92). Head, Dominic. 2008. The State of the Novel. London: Blackwell.

166 translating, negotiating passages, operating substitutions between given points in his idiom”

(65).55 Thus, intra-linguistic translating, what Kamuf imagines as the very quality of literature, suspends meaning between the “first and second iteration of the word, the value or meaning,” and allows language to turn, as Derrida suggested, “on its strange and invisible pivot” (66). The problem for Kamuf is that translation is the inevitable “seal[ing] off” of the

“passage that has been opened up…between these contradictory senses” of the word (ibid.).

Peggy Kamuf raises the pivot as the problem of translation within the same language, which at first appears a mistranslation where one iteration is the true one. In Never Let Me Go the pivot never fully shifts to one side, and in the case of the clone, originality and artificiality are two halves of the same cloned whole.

The balanced pivot point of form is dramatized in Kathy H.’s relationship to the eponymous cassette single, “Never Let Me Go.” Her attachment to the tape is initially figured as the literalization of the song’s explicit longing for attachment. In one of the crucial early scenes of the clones at Hailsham, we see Kathy listening to the tape and cradling a pillow in her arms as if rocking a child: “it was one of those times I’d grabbed a pillow to stand in for the baby” (71). The affective temperature of this scene rises when Madame, the

Hailsham head, walks by Kathy’s room, witness to her rocking of the ersatz child. The pathos of the moment leads us to treat the clone as a state of deprivation: no physiological possibility of progeny (the students are taught the most mechanistic sex education where reproduction plays no role), and a lifespan that would make child rearing impossible. But that deprivation is then played out differently in the loss of the tape itself, the original object that is replaced with a copy.

Ruth, Kathy’s childhood friend at Hailsham and eventual rival in a love triangle,

55 Kamuf, Peggy. 2010. “Passing Strange: The Laws of Translation,” Profession, MLA (2010), pps. 64-71.

167 attempts to replace the tape that “disappeared a couple of months after the incident with

Madame” (73). The replacement, however, is an entirely different tape: “Kathy, it’s not your one. The one you lost. I tried to find it for you, but it’s really gone” (75). Kathy H says of

Ruth’s replacement tape (“not anything like Judy Bridgewater”) that because Ruth knew nothing about music it “might easily make up for the lost one” (76). But rather than mark this as an inability to read in the original, a failure to understand inadequacy of the copy, the structures for perceiving originality are mutated. The tape itself, so central to how we perceive the pathos of the clone, is itself translated back into “object” status. Kathy’s affective attachment to the song, to longing in the lyrics and the sorrowful music, seems suddenly transferred to the physical tape that bears no resemblance to the original. “I still have it now,” Kathy writes, “I don’t play it much because the music has nothing to do with anything. It’s an object…it’s become one of my most important possessions” (76). It is not a simple replacement, as it fails any test of relation to the original, and neither is it a substitution, as the form of attachment has radically changed. The affective register once created by the music of the song is now an affective attachment to the object of the tape.

Kathy’s relationship to this entirely unrelated object mirrors the reader’s relationship to translation. The process by which the original is replaced with a non-substitution still manages a narrative effect that creates a spectral originality. Access to the/an original becomes beside the point, as even without the form of the music, the tape crosses the threshold of meaningfully authentic. Kathy dissolves the predicament of the clone, i.e. the predicament of authenticity, by rejecting the terms of the tape’s authenticity. She doesn’t evacuate originality—the pathos of the original experience still hangs over the replacement—but she does reconstitute the form of the music as having a direct and ongoing relationship to the physical form of the cassette.

168 When later an actual replacement for the “Never Let Me Go” cassette emerges, the analogy of the clone to translation is furthered. On a trip to town from the cottages with

Tommy, her friend, and ultimately her lover, Kathy finds an actual replacement tape: “Then of course I found it. I’d been flicking through a row of cassette cases, my mind on other things, when suddenly there it was” (171). We would be foolish to treat this scene as a primal return of the original, for the tape seems less an artifact and more the result of a certain kind of thinking about authenticity and feeling. Ishiguro explicitly figures the tape as a body with a “spine, looking up” at Kathy, and leaning over on its “neighbor” (172). But the tape’s authenticity, whether or not it can reasonably stand-in for the missing original, is called into question. Tommy asks Kathy whether she thinks “it could be the same one. I mean the actual one. The one you lost” (Ibid.). Her response imagines the pivot rocking between the possibilities of originality and reproducibility: “For all I know, it might be… But I have to tell you, Tommy, there might be thousand of these knocking about” (Ibid.). The cloned tape, the substitution that does not resolve into either original or copy, has affective power precisely because of its both/and existence, and to return to the initial scene of listening in concert to the walkman, the thousands of potentially extant tapes are read as both the singular original tape and as all the implicit and explicit counter readings of the many.

Emily Apter endeavors to keep open these counter meanings in a call to the recognition of the “philosopheme” as that which crosses over without being translated. She re-imagines Derrida’s “pivot,” as not merely a teetering on the brink of something, but as a crossing over of doubled meaning, as a carrying on/over of the pivot itself: “the Greek-to-

Greek translation…whereby an apparent nontranslation translates nonetheless” (53).56 It is precisely the question of what to do with the pivot that leads me to a consideration of the

56 Apter, Emily. “Philosophical Translation and Untranslatability,” Profession, MLA (2010), pps. 50-63.

169 clone as precisely the point of pivot in Ishiguro’s work. The nontranslatability of the clone

(non-reproductive) that carries over anyway opens a particular vantage on the influence of the global imaginary, and by extension, globalization on texts and people. The primary question of my readings to follow will be: What would a novel look like fastened upon the pivot?

Never Let Me Go is ostensibly about the particular lives of characters who are clones; it is necessarily about the figure of the clone, and the workings of that figure at the abject limits of literature’s capacity to comment on its own circulation as a cultural object. With this in mind, I return to my central conceit, that Never Let Me Go operates as Ishiguro’s recasting of the critical Catch-22 to which his works have been subjected.

Schoene seats his argument on the cosmopolitan novel in Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetic politics, on literature’s “infinite resistance to everything that would bring it to completion”

(x). (Such is the impossibility of the critical position within which Ishiguro finds himself; they can only be meaningful in “useful” pieces, because the factor of loss at play in translating from the translation is deemed excessive).

Never Let Me Go can be read as Ishiguro’s response to this problem of the missing original in his work, the possible origins and future associations that his works will make. As such, we find a writer trapped between the two poles of everything is translatable, his

Japaneseness ready to be global, and a permanent stasis reduced to an incident of misunderstanding.

What Walkowitz manages with these two points of entry into the interpretation of

Ishiguro—misunderstanding as the effect of translation, and— is a model for how the global imaginary is a formal problem for the contemporary novel.

170 The figure of the translating novel that I have briefly alluded to in other chapters will help us to break the binary of the commodifiable form of difference (born translated) and the intransigent “misunderstandings” of latent difference just behind the veil of form.

Ishiguro’s clones are the most explicit response to the inevitability of translation in the global marketplace, and desire to live outside the “will-to-possess” delimited by Barthes’s theory of the Neutral. Never Let Me Go is at its heart a argument against reading the contemporary novel as already translated, and his clones, caught by their very nature between possibility and “completion,” reconceptualize the ways in which forms can translate from within, even at the abject limits of the global network where so much is asked of the novel. It is a Science

Fiction novel that imagines a world of almost absolute contemporaniety to 1990’s England.

As Wai-Chew Sim writes of its generic anomaly: “if it is the case that science fiction has a built-in penchant for escapism, Never Let Me Go counteracts this tendency through immersion in the commonplace” (83). Technological innovation beyond our present imagination, the imprimatur of science fiction as a genre, exists, with the startling exception of cloning technologies, as a haunting absence in the novel. To the contrary, the novel develops a hyper-nostalgic relationship to tape cassettes and books (Kathy H. notes that the success of adults at the cottages is measured by the number of books read and recounted)— the vestigial limbs of an earlier antiquated era. “We yearn for the science fiction and romantic aspects of Ishiguro's story to match and thrive. We want desperately for it to work, but somehow, in spite of all that, it never quite takes” (David Kipen, SF Chronicle).57 And despite the novel’s dependence on scientific innovations in the cloning of human DNA into vital, living clones who will be incrementally “harvested” for their organs, Never Let Me Go never gives us access to scenes of scientific awe where the spliced genes would give “birth”

57 www.sfgate.com/cgi bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/reviews/books/NEVER_LET_ME_GO.DTL#ixzz17d5fIfUd

171 to cloned children.58 Quite the contrary, the novel begins in medias res in the most banally realist setting of the English boarding school, scene of so many 20th century British texts.

The novel’s refusal to offer up the expected trappings of the science fiction genre mirrors its refusal to dramatize the outrage and trauma of the characters whose lives are lived only in the service of sacrifice of organs and ultimately, existence, for a separate and largely unseen population of non-clones, or originals, as it were. Critics of the novel are fascinated by what they read as alternately a “buried” affect, not unlike Stevens the butler’s impassive countenance in Ishiguro’s much-celebrated The Remains of the Day, or as the “already translated” effect of the novel written expressly to travel across cultural boundaries.

For those critics interested in how an English writer of Japanese birth might be read for a latent Japaneseness, Never Let Me Go is repressed, and waiting to be uprooted. It gets read as in some fashion hiding itself away from prying eyes and putting on a face for a certain audience of British readers. Bain points to the “peculiar mixture of intimacy and detachment between reader and narrator, and between narrators and everyone around them”

(242).59 Fluet characterizes this as the “bureaucratic, even actuarial eye” that Ishiguro brings to his representations of “the exterior limits of human endeavor in the aggregate” (285).60

Ishiguro, however, attests to an interest “in how words hide meaning,” which seems rather too playful for the actuarial eye, but certainly nods at an intention to detach or abstract the reader from meaning in the text. Indeed, the dominant mode of analysis in nearly all of

Ishiguro-criticism has been the attempt to locate within his stylistic imprint of detachment

58 This is expressly not the case in Romanek’s 2010 film adaptation of Never Let Me Go. Romanek lingers over scenes in sterile labs and operating rooms where the tools of future-possible technology harvest the organs of the Hailsham clones. By essentially offering up the novel as a dystopian science fiction, much of the pathos that comes from not being able to grasp one’s place in world is lost. Once we have worked out the exactititude of the horror of the clones’ “donations,” there is little more to care about in the film. 59 Bain, Alexander M. “International Settlements: Ishiguro, Shanghai, Humanitarianism,” Novel, vol. 40, no.3 (2007), pp. 240-61. 60 Fluet, Lisa. “Immaterial Labors: Ishiguro, Class, and Affect,” Novel, vol. 40, no.3 (2007), pp. 265-88.

172 an affect and ethos of his ethnic and cultural difference. Few credible voices of dissent have arisen in defiance of this monological reading of Ishiguo’s works, except to argue over what exactly he is detaching from.61 If we begin with the understanding that the experience of reading Ishiguro is in some manner the experience of detachment from feeling, from pathos, even from meaning, we might surmise that he is engaged in translation as a formal distancing, a redrawing of our horizon of expectations.

Adriana Neagu conjures this detachment in Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the

Day as the absence of signifying the nation:

Writing about England—indeed [Ishiguro’s] inscription of Englishness—begins with

the acknowledgement of the international destination of his writing… writing

England is an experience of detachment, rather than one of identification. Despite

the immediacy effect conveyed by the homodiegetic narrator, Ishiguro engages his

theme at several removes… [O]ne is drawn into a consideration of Englishness as a

‘place of the mind,’ a horizon of expectation. (5)62

I am particularly interested in Neagu’s formulation of an international audience as the rationale for writing England as “an experience of detachment.” What do we imagine as the form of the nation in detachment? Is detachment the experience of the nation by those not subject to its laws and languages, or is detachment the experience of the individual who is bound to the nation even as she understands herself as other?

Shameem Black locates a particular figuration of the clone in Emily Apter’s work on translation zones. The clone offers “a theory of translations with no originals, [Apter’s]

61 For counter examples see, Walkowitz (2006), Tomo Hattori. 1998. “China Man Autoeroticism and the Remains of Asian America” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 31, No. 2, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue: II (Spring, 1998), pp. 215-236, 62 Neagu, Adriana. “International Writing? Kazuo Ishiguro and the Introvert Identities of the Novel,” English, 2010, pp. 1-12.

173 description of language as a metaphoric clone resembles the principles that Ishiguro's work seems to support” (802).63 For Apter, the absence of measurable difference between the clone and the original brings the “whole category of originality—as an essentialist life form—[into] dispute” (213). But it is the seems to in Black’s summation that draws my attention. Reading Never Let Me Go one can say almost definitively that the novel does not seem to support any particular politics on language, globality, or anything else for that matter. It is at the points of great emotional upheaval where you desire and expect the novel to come to an authoritative statement that it proves itself irreducible. While I follow Black’s transposing of Apter’s “translation with no originals,” the novel refuses to let go of its dogged pursuit of the possibles that represent the clones’ and own authenticity. As the title forewarns us, the call to Never Let Go is a powerful one, voiced not only by the doomed clones holding on to threads of community, but as well by the structures of meaning in the novel that traverse positions of artificiality and authenticity, community and globality, technology and ontology, refusing to let go of any one position.

To return to the logic of not translating the already-translated, the figure of the clone offers both a comment on the violence of the marketplace in rending culture, language, and life from people otherwise unaware of their role within that circulation, and the possibility of a form that is neither rooted by an a priori original authenticity, nor a placeless figment of the imaginary. Rather, it is the dynamic of translating between local and global forms that allows a clone to narrate an existence to which it has no claim. Fluet writes of Ishiguro’s fictions that their emphasis on “imitation” has “created a body of work resistant to the consolations of authenticity, transparency, and originality” (208). It doesn’t take much of a conceptual leap to see that Fluet is describing the basic elements we ascribe to “innocent” translation.

63 Black, Shameem. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55, Number 4, Winter 2009, pp. 785-807

174 But I would take Fluet one further and say that Never Let Me Go offers not opacity and inauthenticity in opposition to these terms, but instead, an alternative to consolation in translation: and that is negotiation in translation (no rest). As such, Ishiguro neither writes to lament the absence of an originary sense of his own possible Japaneseness, nor does he imagine his work as inured to how works come to circulate outside their origins. For either position imagines translation as the already-translated of form.

Negotiation in Ishiguro is the capability of the work of art to hold at bay simplistic consolations of originality. To be consoled in translation is to abandon the implicit back and forth movement of translation and to accept that once copied into a new form the process of translation ends. Translation as negotiation stops being the movement from an original to a target (closed circuit) and is refigured as the dynamic movement between any number of positions which might alter the structure of an imaginary; in this case, the very recent formulation of a global imaginary. Thus, the clone’s irresolvable search for their “possibles”

(the non-clones from whom their DNA was originally taken). Never Let Me Go refuses one possible, and instead prompts possibilities that exist in the interplay between the material circulations of globalization, and the situated vantage of the global imaginary.

Ishiguro’s clones are the paradoxical manifestation of the need for translations and the impossibility of translating translations. Never Let Me Go stands as a powerful refutation of the interpretative demands made on Ishiguro’s novels; the cloning model of the global imaginary, monolithically applied to Ishiguro’s writing, presumes the form of his novels to be already translated; either they are derivative of an essential Japonisme so singular and so constituative of his language that even writing in English, Ishiguro must first translate himself from the Japanese. At the level of buried affect, Ishiguro is read for an exceptionality that cannot be perceived except as a spectral original to which we have no access. The flip

175 side of this model imagines a marketplace for cultural commodifiables powerful enough to give birth to the infinitely translatable, or the born-translated. From this vantage, Ishiguro’s texts are figments of the global imaginary, translatable into any context according to the particular needs of the reading audience. This model relies on translation as the always- already of form, the past and future of Ishiguro’s novels, with the present signifying only as the after-effect of translation that has already happened. Under such a bleak regime of translation, Ishiguro offers the novel as a clone.

The figuration of the clone signals everywhere in Never Let Me Go, and even before we have understood that the narrator and all her contemporaries are literal clones raised to donate their organs to non-cloned humans, we are treated to the looming corridors of an

English public school, Hailsham, a perfect imitation of that frequent landscape of the British novel. A landscape, however, not particularly well suited to capturing the geographies and circulations of globalization. But it is at Hailsham that the tension of the narrative plays out, a tension that responds to the global imaginary, drawing into play the paradoxical notion that a school for clones could cultivate exceptional models, exemplary copies. When the narrator

Kathy H. and her peers have left Hailsham for the relative freedom of the “cottages,” they are joined by students from other schools for cloned children. The reader, as well, is consistently interpolated as from a place “like Hailsham,” with Kathy H. asking whether

“you had ‘collections’ where you were from” (38). At that point, what indeed marks midlife for a teenage clone whose organs will soon be required, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are still asked to offer stories of Hailsham’s exceptionality to the other students from less

“prestigious” schools. Indeed, Hailsham is rumored to offer “deferrals” for students capable of proving the unprovable, that they are in love. I will return to this feature of Hailsham’s singularity and the problem of the exceptional clone later in the chapter.

176 Ishiguro’s exemplary clones narrate a world to which they have almost no access except as a radical locality. By giving narration of his novel over to a particular clone who speaks for an entire community while being wholly unaware of her origins in that community, Ishiguro explores translatability at its limits of the global imaginary. There is a theorization at work there between the possibility of the clone and of the novel that begins as a negotiation between two absolutes. First, novels are always limited to a very particular historical and cultural perspective. And second, novels are equally always responding to and transformed by modes of circulation outside those perspectives that they could have never anticipated.64 These conflictual absolutes find common ground in the integral work of theory to, as Wlad Godzich glosses it, “declare what ‘is’ even when what ‘is’ is absent or no one else was there to observe it” (1986, xv).65 Zîzek takes the point of observing the absent marker of

‘is’ to the limits of subjectivity, and without meaning to, accurately describes the perspective of the clone:

After losing all my effective predicates, I am nothing but a gaze paradoxically entitled to observe the world in which I do not exist…I find myself reduced to the evanescent point of thought contemplating the course of events during my absence, my non-being. (in Edelman 157)66

Ishiguro takes this note of theoretical solitude as his point of entry into theorizing clones as the refusal of the literary to resolve into either a local myopia or a global vaccum.

The ever present problem of making the novel mobile, translatable in the most visceral sense, is here dramatized as a narration fixed in a locality, but clearly manipulated in the most essential way by globalization. If we hold to the idea that Ishiguro’s clone helpfully illustrates

64 For instance, Isabel Hofmeyr’s study of the most unlikely global life of The Pilgrim’s Progress. 2007. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress. Series: Translation/Transnation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 65 Godzich, Wlad. 1986. “The Tiger on the Paper Mat,” Culture of Literacy. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 66 Edelman, Lee. 2010. “The Absence of Theory,” Differences, 20th Anniversary, Vol. 21, Num. 1, Spring 2010, pps. 141-169.

177 the problem of being translatable, or in the very particular case of Ishiguro’s work, being metonymic of Japanese style and “restraint,” translation here is deprived of any innocent transformations. The demands of a market for translations that can be carved up into useful commodities are parodied in the extreme in Ishiguro’s grim scenes of boarding school life in the first half of the novel. Hailsham students are educated to imagine themselves as exceptional individuals, capable of developing creativity and responsibility, but for the ironical purpose of being valued only in piecemeal, for the instrumental value of their various organs. Examined at its bare limit, Hailsham is no different than the less humane

“factory” schools that we hear about in vague terms later in the novel, those boarding schools distinguished from Hailsham in their total lack of interest in the cultivation of educated clones. Such places are efficient in the mechanization of the “harvesting” process, though less interested, we would imagine, in “donors staying ‘calm’” (3). Such differences are slight when we consider that Hailsham, and its model student Kathy H. are ultimately prized for their unique ability to produce willing donors, “hardly any of them…classified as

‘agitated’” (Ibid.).

In the England of Never Let Me Go, the minority culture of clones are reared both with an awareness of their ultimate purpose as “donated” organs for the needs of a global community with which they have no other interchange, and as experiments in the quality of the artistic soul of the artificial being. The beginning moves of the narrative describe

Hailsham as a place of refined education in the arts, a place where students “were encouraged to value each other’s work” (17). “Exhibitions” of those artworks deemed exemplary occur several times during the Hailsham academic year, and as such signal the novel’s interest in the relationship that the figure of the clone has to the work of art. The preparation and appreciation of original artworks was indeed what “made Hailsham so

178 special.”

Ishiguro’s response to the double-bind of the global imaginary is to formalize his novel as structures of thought to organize a way of thinking outside the principle that aesthetics in the global novel ultimately dissolve leaving us something to know. It is a mode of reading that is not devoted to revealing. Rather than offering glib solutions, Never Let Me Go establishes alternative ways of thinking and perceiving. In the case of appreciating art, this involves thinking in and through pieces, as opposed to totalities.

A Dream of Deferral Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Langston Hughes, “A Dream Deferred”

With the conflation of the clone and the work of art we come to a concluding moment that is not a conclusion at all. In a novel that indeed turns away from the expectations that the clones will react with outrage and horror at the inevitability of their circumstances, the lasting pathos is the knowledge that each student at Hailsham will end up “completing”— the novel’s horrifying euphemism for death from organ donation—and leave behind the wholeness of the self for a future as unrecognizable pieces. The totality of this process remains the one constant in the lives of Kathy H. and her Hailsham peers: to be a clone is to trade the unified self for the vitality of transformation into pieces. The narrative poses one counter-possibility to this truism: the circulated rumor among the students that a deferment of the date of “completion” might be obtained should two students be able to offer proof of their “true love” for one another.

The final dramatic scenes of the novel follow Kathy and Tommy, lovers now in the final stages of Tommy’s donations, having tracked down their former head teacher to ask formally for a deferment. Typical of Ishiguro’s novels, the news is not good, and Miss Emily

179 makes it clear that such deferments were only the by-product of the “humane, cultivated environments” the teachers and headmaster had established at Hailsham, which allowed them “to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being” (261). Miss

Emily responds to their plea with a bleak fatalism: “Look at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re educated and cultured” (Ibid.). Their destiny preordained circulation, the clones can take solace only in the dream of deferment, and then, at the last, even that dream is gone. My argument for Never Let Me Go as the refusal of the binary that claims Ishiguro’s work as either authentic or artificial, local or global, finds its last hurdle with novel’s own insistence on completion.

If the dream of deferment is analogous to the dynamism of form in the translating novel, which constantly defers definitive resolutions in favor of a negotiation of forms on the move, then the inevitable completion must signal the end of such a process. Miss Emily sets the limitations of the clone’s existence: “[T]his dream of yours, this dream of being able to defer. Such a thing would always have been beyond us to grant, even at the height of our influence” (Ibid.). In the rubric of translation’s functionality, the collapse of the original into the new language, new context, and new forms of the target is the text’s inevitable completion. I have theorized a formal response to this inevitability, describing the translating novel as the deferment of absolutes of the global and local readings of the contemporary transnational novel. If, as I have been arguing, Never Let Me Go imagines the possibilities of the clone as the liminality of authenticity and artificiality, the dream of deferral in the novel in the age of the globe, then that dream is seemingly interrupted by the global imaginary.

Even Kathy H., carer to her friends and her donors, is doomed to complete, but the novel, at the end, refuses to let her go. In the final moment of the novel, Kathy imagines seeing

Tommy again, a “fantasy” of life after completion: “I just waited a bit, then turned back to

180 the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be” (288). Like Hughes’s dream deferred, she “runs.” Her destination is purposefully unclear, and even in the dismal zeitgeist of Ishiguro’s dystopian England, we must admit to not knowing how things will turn out.

We only know that at the narrative’s conclusion, things are on the move. As with listening to the communal music on a single Walkman, we are reminded that reading happens always with something peering over your shoulder, wondering what will happen next.

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Chapter IV: With His Back To Africa: Coetzee’s Bookishness All criticism is translation and all translation is criticism. J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point

By taking up the postcolonial paradox of the aboriginal story that is both necessary to and missing from Peter Carey’s work, along with the intractable Japanese-effect in criticism of the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, I’ve been circling a broader issue of representation in the postcolonial novel. By this I mean, the critical bind that places the writer and his novel between locatable historical circumstance and allegorical play at the limits of representation.

The former is the novel’s accommodation of the untranslatable specificity of cultural, most often national, particularity, and the latter, an infinitely recognizable and translatable form that can be attributed or not to a cultural tradition depending on the critic. These are the positions, in their most vulgar generality, that tend to divide readings of postcolonial and world literature. Both positions are defined by their relationship to translation as a tropological figure and a linguistic functionality. And in the era of globalization, both assume the inevitability of translation across languages, borders, nations, and cultures, powerfully aware that from the moments of the text’s instantiation in form, it will have already moved, already have shifted its voice and its perspective. In response to the inevitability of translation, the contemporary postcolonial novel engages translation as simultaneously the capability and limitation of form in confronting historical change.

This chapter will begin by developing the concept of the decoy in J.M. Coetzee’s work. Extending the relationship between the hoax and translation, the decoy allows me to examine Coetzee’s most politically fraught novel, Disgrace, as a particular kind of literary stand-in. I will argue for the novel as both a response against the demand for realism as the unified political form of the South African novel, and as a refashioning of the relationship

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between the postcolonial novel in English and the intertext. As such, Disgrace’s antihero protagonist, David Lurie, reads Western intertexts (Romantic poets, primarily) as a context to post-apartheid South Africa, while the narrative establishes those same intertexts as decoys, remarkable primarily for their impotency in grasping historical change. With this dissonance between character and narrative, Disgrace develops an archive that does not merely substitute one set of texts for another, but rather shows them as always translating, always in the process of being read anew.

My argument will then engage the pitfalls of materialism and textualism, the primary competing positions in postcolonial literary studies, as a way of broaching new questions about the relationship of the contemporary novel to history and politics. Coetzee’s complicated connection to the Apartheid resistance movements in his native South Africa

(he left the country before the African National Congress came to power), and his avant- garde literary experiments, make him a nexus for the more polarizing arguments from both sides of the debate over locating history in the contemporary postcolonial novel. Even his so-called South African novels: Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Age of Iron, Disgrace, and

Summertime, seem at odds with the prevailing progressive views on historical engagement in the novel.

I have pursued this notion of the novel at odds with its circumstances in the first three chapters of this project, turning to translation, and to the figure of the translating novel to explain how form works with and against the demands made on contemporary literature.

With my readings of Coetzee’s Disgrace, and some of his more recent novels, I will further my intervention with an analysis of Coetzee’s placelessness—standing, as some would argue, with his back to South Africa’s pressing political needs, while engaging in literary experiments that rely on and reconfigure a European canon of texts and contexts. Cultural

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belonging in Coetzee’s novels refuses the stasis that would allow him to be read as an

African novelist, one hand, or as a prevaricator of postmodern abstractions, on the other.

His is the work of the decoy, the ever-changeable stand-in for the demands of an authentic locale and politics in the postcolonial novel. How this particular kind of decoy changes the demands on legible cultural knowledge becomes clear in Disgrace’s bookishness.

This project began with the assumption that translation is both the defining term for contemporary Anglophone literature, and the principal problem for that field. Whether it concerns the movement of texts between reading publics and critical modes or the possibilities for form that imagines the movement of language and culture outside of presumed origins, translation figures powerfully in the destiny of the particular novel and in the broader categories of contemporary literature. It is also, painfully, the reminder that in those crossings something is always left behind, lost in translation. Along with the study of translation as a defining term comes a reckoning with the presumptions of translation. The task of unpacking translation as a conceptual model for how novels imagine the world and their place within the circulations that get labeled global/worldly/planetary has occasioned a return to form. Examining how particular novels speak back to the critical trajectories that would reconstitute them according to the demands placed upon them to speak for, or counter to, presuppositions about culture and history contained in literature engages the most basic categories that we attribute to translation: the original and its other. It is between these hobbyhorses of translation theory that the figure of the hoax emerges as the most honest form of translation. As I have shown in the previous three chapters, it is in the functionality of the hoax that we find new possibilities for how form in the novel moves between structures of comprehension and the absence of comprehension, without collapsing into a mere open-book of cultural understanding or its negation. For as we have seen in the

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case of Ern Malley, and the great 20th century literary ruses, the hoax whispers of origin and copy in the very same breath.

The Demands of the Decoy

And decoy ducks, or duckoys: What did he, Robinson, know of decoy ducks? Nothing at all, until this man of his began sending in reports. Coetzee, Nobel Acceptance Speech

While the members of the Swedish Nobel Academy were very likely expecting textual fireworks when J.M. Coetzee came to accept his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, they were unlikely to be expecting ducks. Coetzee’s now infamous exposition on Defoe’s interest in the so-called “decoy ducks” of England, titled “He and His Man,” lit yet another fire under the representational fights that have been going on in studies of Coetzee’s fiction since the publication of Dusklands in 1974. To begin with, the speech, if one was to call it that, was a slap in the face of generic expectations for the Nobel in particular and the rubrics for international prizes in general.

The history of this most prestigious of literary prizes is inseparable from the history of world literature in translation. Of the strikingly small number of authors read in translation in the United States, Nobel winners account for a huge percentage of the publications and sales. This global canonization, as Tim Parks writes in his essay on the necessity of translatability in the contemporary novel, “is done with exactly the same logic, the same authority, as when the Vatican decides who is to be among the elect in heaven: that is to say, with no logic or authority at all” (2011).

Attention from the publishing houses of London and New York is the true reward for the Nobel winner who can expect near instantaneous translation of his canon into

English. In the last twenty years the phenomenon of translation into dozens of languages has allowed for the simultaneous publication of Nobel winners across the globe, in a panoply of

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languages, meaning that many works may have greater visibility and a greater reading audience internationally than in their home country. And the relationship between the prize and the necessity of translation, and therefore translatability, has become an increasingly reciprocal one—the Laureate’s work must, in some sense, be prepared for translation. This is not simply a matter of linguistic translatability, but as well, the availability of certain kinds of cultural representation legible as authentic to an audience largely unfamiliar with the national literary tradition of the author in question.1 Walkowitz, Damrosch, Moretti and others have made clear that “the global translation and circulation of literature has changed the production and theory of transnational fiction” (Walkowitz 2008, 217), and those new paradigms of circulation require new reading practices. Such practices must account for the ways in which cultural capital is allotted to each according to their translatability. Tim Parks offers this question for the future of reading world literatures in translation:

[W]hat kind of literature is it that reaches an international public, surviving what is now an industrialized translation process squeezed into the briefest possible time and paying little attention to questions of affinity between translator and text (to the point that many larger novels are split between a number of translators)? (2011)2

In his acceptance speech, Coetzee refused to deliver words translatable to the concept of canonizing an author of the world, offering instead a “curious performance” of translation at the limits of representation, refusing either realism or allegory, and offering, instead, ducks (Barnard 2010, 86). Considering the Nobel’s history of rewarding authors who can speak to a national tradition in a compartmentalizing, translatable way, so that they

1 As evidence, consider the unveiled essentialization of Yasunari Kawabata in the Nobel’s citation for the 1968 prize: “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.” “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1968.” Nobelprize.org. 20 Jun 2011. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1968/ 2 Parks, Tim. 2011. “The Nobel individual and the paradoxes of 'international literature',” The Times Literary Supplement, London, April 20. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7174216.ece

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might stand as the model of the national figure presentable to the world, the choice of

Coetzee, a South African living in Australia, was a departure.3 His curious performance makes visible the great irony of the king-making project of the Swedish Academy, that the mediation of these representative texts by a translator means that very few of the author’s newly acquired audience will read the real thing. They will be offered a decoy of the most miraculous quality: a translation that reminds them of an original that they have not read.

Even Coetzee’s Dutch and Afrikaans (Coetzee’s second native language) readers will likely encounter the text in translation, an appealing decoy that promises to stand in for an original text in English.

Coming as it did nearly a decade after the globally-celebrated end of apartheid and the rise of the ANC party in South Africa, and three years post the publication of his own controversial representation of the violent after-shocks of that transition, the novel Disgrace, one could have expected some oblique reference to his home country’s recent prominence on the international stage. After all, the Swedish Academy fashions itself as precisely that kind of staging ground. Coetzee, the Laureate, would be expected to speak a particular language of international responsibility at a moment of historical fracture, to speak the postcolonial writer’s language of personal politics. Such politics then create a mode of translation for the writer’s oeuvre, calling Waiting for the Barbarians and The Master of St.

Petersburg in from the cold of allegorical distance, and into the recognizable forms of political engagement that illuminate particular historical circumstances for a transnational reading audience. Instead, the speech offered a bookish pastiche of narratives from Defoe’s and

3 Huggan quotes Winegarten (1994) in a critique of the Swedish Academy’s preference for representative national literatures that look to “Europe as a locus of cultural activity and development,” and that inspire “intense patriotic gratification,” “akin to victory in international sporting events” (2001, 118). Coetzee could safely be said to inspire little patriotic excitement at home.

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Coetzee’s writing,4 an exposition on a flock of English decoy ducks on foreign soil who, despite an utter lack of fluency in the native languages, lure a group of foreign ducks back with them to England. Coetzee seemed to be daring the Swedes to break the code of his endless allusiveness, only to baffle them further with etymological asides.

The colonial allegory of the native ducks who are used to enslave their own is easy bait and offers some of the consolation of a possible metaphor for the imperial history of

South Africa, but as with many of Coetzee’s nods toward removing the veil of allegory, the historical motivation unravels under intense scrutiny.5 A great deal more interesting is

Coetzee’s purposeful collision of translation and translatability with the concept of the decoy, something that he naturalizes as the domesticated version of wild English ducks living on the fens: “the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys”

(2003). Decoys for Coetzee, and for Defoe under-erasure, are living, dynamic, and tame; they are hardly the dead-eyed wooden facsimiles that we have come to associate with modern duck hunting. They are raised, these duckoys, to attract other ducks from different lands and lure them to the fens of England. They are translations of the wild duck, now tame, and their resemblance to the original allows them to draw other ducks, other texts into their locale.

The question of originality becomes not only murky, but also irrelevant. What we are offered

4 “[T]he reports are drawn almost verbatim from Defoe’s A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain and A Journal of the Plague Year” (85). Barnard. 2010. “Coetzee In/And Afrikaans,” Journal of Literary Studies, 25: 4, 84-105. 5 Derek Attridge makes an appealing argument for the existence of the allegorical temptation in any work of fiction, and it is his notion of an interplay between the specific and the allegorical that furthers my sense of translation as the urge to move between compelling, if opposing, points in the same work: “The reader may become conscious of the power and allure of allegory, of the temptation to generalize or codify meaning, and at the same time gain a heightened awareness of the specificity and contingency of language and human experience as these resist such generalizations and codifications. In fact, a responsive reading of a literary work will always be alert to the possibility of allegorical meaning, to the constant leaking of meaning away from the literal” (61-62). Attridge, Derek. 2004. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: U Chicago Press.

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instead of the consolations of originality, are the uncertainties of negotiation, the ceaseless movement back and forth between work and translation, text and intertext, duck and decoy.

I am reproducing the opening paragraphs of the speech to provide some of the flavor of the absurdity and wonderment that the narrative conjures in this context. The precious meditation over the use of the word fen, problematic for its association with the

English countryside, aligns the refrain of the decoy and the duckoy with the hoax at the heart of translation. And taken as a retort to the demands of locatable national culture in the postcolonial novel, Coetzee’s seeming departure from the discourse of prizing global literatures becomes an illuminating comment on his own refusal to represent “rightly”:

The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen- men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys. Fens are tracts of wetland. There are tracts of wetland all over Europe, all over the world, but they are not named fens, fen is an English word, it will not migrate. These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand. Then when the season comes they are sent abroad to Holland and Germany. In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their kind, and, seeing how miserably these Dutch and German ducks live, how their rivers freeze in winter and their lands are covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language which they make them understand, that in England from where they come the case is quite otherwise. (2003)6

The title of the speech, “Him and His Man,” presents us with Robinson Crusoe and the matter of Friday, Crusoe’s “man” with whom he cohabitates on the “deserted” island, and who he instructs on the Lockean value of property rights and converts to Christianity as part of his training regime in the English language. The ducks of many variety (“teal and widgeon”), domesticated by the “decoy men,” are sent out to “kidnap” the ducks of Holland and

Germany, playing the part of Friday, who memorably aids Crusoe in exterminating the other

6 Coetzee. 2003. Nobel Speech. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture- e.html

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inhabitants of the island. Here the native informant ducks usher on his new flock to the

“great death engine of Halifax” that will cleanse the island of invaders (2003). Defoe’s Crusoe, as a founding narrative of colonial occupation, is a striking choice for Coetzee to ventriloquize. Allying his thoughts on documenting history with Crusoe’s makes Coetzee vulnerable to the critics whom already see him as passive and indifferent in his literary relationship to his homeland. Following the allusion that Coetzee sets as an unavoidable scheme for his speech, the use of native ducks to lure and kill other non-English ducks plays

Animal Farm with the diabolical island-cleansing the underwrites Crusoe’s dominance on his island. And indeed, translation, as Rita Barnard reminds us, is treason and “betrayal; if not always with such dire consequences as there are for the Dutch and German ducks” (2010,

86). The inherent betrayal of translation, the constitutive straying that must happen to enter the frame of a new language cannot be separated from the gains of translation. But in the language of ducks, translation is a hoax: communication “in a form of language which they make [the Dutch and German ducks] understand,” with no a priori conditions for comprehension. If such terms of comprehension are applied to the form of the postcolonial novel, it becomes difficult to differentiate between allegorical and realist representation; indeed, the decoy at the heart of this colonial narrative unseats the authority of the original in defining historical circumstance.

Mark Sanders makes of the Decoys something celebratory by turning to Attridge’s persistent refrain that Coetzee ought to be renowned for “his insistence that the writer also has the capacity to deceive, and to be deceived. Not to lie, simply, or to be lied to, although

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those are certainly possibilities—but to be inhabited, ‘possessed,’ by something that, when it speaks and speaks otherwise, speaks in order to mislead or seduce” (2009, 42).7

The seduction of languages we do not know is a form that carries enough performance of meaning to draw the ducks from their domestic ponds to the fens of

England where they will be “clubbed and plucked” by the fen-men; it both plays at language and is language. Importantly, it is language that cannot be transcribed in the text—we read

(or in this case listen) only to the narration of the ducks’ attempt to make themselves understood in a foreign language. It is presumably a form of language recognizable only in the broadest terms as a particular language; it might be louder, more forceful in tone, loosely grammatical and didactic in the fashion of a foreigner who speaks continually louder as a way of substituting for fluency in the native language. The imaginative step required to believe that we can imagine this form of language, without discernible rules for syntax and meaning, engages translation as a trope, a formal sign of transformation.

Translation in the case of duck to duck language is never resolved into English or

Dutch but holds the imaginative ground between languages where communication still manages to cross over. In this way, we can see the work of the decoy as that which manages to feign recognizable language as the guise that produces negotiation. The “like attracts like” functionality of the decoy adapts to the “unlike represents like” of translation. The decoy isn’t like the thing it attracts (a swan looks more like a living duck than any wooden replica) as much as it is unlike the duck in a fashion that forms relationality between two disconnected objects.

Whatever we imagine the sound and form of the ersatz language used between the ducks to be like in the text of Coetzee’s speech, it seems at a great remove from “the mark

7 Sanders, Mark. 2009. “The Writing Business: ‘He and His Man,’ Coetzee and Defoe,” Journal of Literary Studies. Volume 25, Issue 4, 2009, pps. 39-50.

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of history” implied in David Atwell’s analysis of the supposed tongue-less Friday in Foe8:

“Friday's enforced silence represents what a monocultural, metropolitan discourse cannot hear” (1993, 5).9 Atwell finds in Foe’s untranscribable speech the definitive “mark of South

Africa” firmly inscribed in a text “scrupulously aware of its own limited authority” (Ibid.).

Beyond the immediate problem of taking silence as de facto agency against linguistic and culturally oppressive colonial systems, there is the issue of engagement with Defoe’s Crusoe, one of the “founding narratives” and a “protype” for “colonial storytelling” (6).

What Coetzee’s oblique exposition on the decoy ducks of Defoe’s imagination provides us is a way of drawing together two untranslatable concepts under the banner of translation. The first is: how does the writer imagine his text as translatable across cultural and historical boundaries without reinscribing the epistemological violence that colonialism’s desire to know fixed in the mind of the West? Timothy Bewes argues convincingly that this is the great dilemma of the postcolonial writer, and that the shame of this impossible paradox—to continue to write with knowledge that the act itself follows rules of history- making drawn up by the imperial project—is the event of form in the contemporary novel.

(2011).10 To Coetzee’s specific example for the Swedish Academy, how does the writer pick up his pen to document the newly marked boundaries of his country and his people without making use of a language, a facility of writing, that was itself a means to knowing and

8 Marais and I are in agreement that no hard evidence exists within the novel to substantiate Friday’s supposed missing tongue, or indeed, for that matter, his alleged castration. Susan Barton looks away in disgust when she approaches Friday, chancing to see if the rumors of his castration are true: “The whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Friday's shoulders and enclosing him; Friday was the dark pillar at its centre. What had been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or, should I say, my eyes were open to what was present to them. I saw and believed I had seen”(119–20). This kind of “seeing,” the revelation that was present to Susan’s eyes, is radically different from sensorial vision. My argument reads these numerous accounts of seeing what was already present to the eye as a dramatization of reading the novel as the already-read object. In Coetzee’s case, he writes back to the critical traditions that have continued to read him as either latently political or with his “face turned from Africa,” already at the moment of placing pen to paper. Marais, Mike. 1998. “Writing with Eyes Shut: Ethics, Politics, and the Problem of the Other in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee,” English in Africa, Vol. 25, No. 1 (May, 1998), pp. 43-60. 9 Atwell, David. J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley: University of California Press. 10 Bewes, Timothy. 2011. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: Princeton UP.

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delimiting the Other? Coetzee’s example of decoy to describe the paradox of postcolonial writing, conflates picking up the pen to plucking a quill from the dead birds kidnapped from elsewhere: “All of this news of Lincolnshire his man writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills that he sharpens with his little pen-knife each day before a new bout with the page” (2003).

The very preparation for documentation of “all the news” requires violence against those who might themselves be newsworthy.

The figure of the decoy now frames this odd story in a number of different ways.

First, the decoy is a fake English duck trained and manipulated to provide a diabolical service to the decoy men. Caryl Phillips’s native translator, taken up extensively in my first chapter, narrates the intimate violence against community implicit to this type of translation.

Second, the decoy is the quill that is picked up to document experience even as the very act of picking/plucking up the quill erases and denies competing accounts and documents of material experience. And finally, there is the decoy of Coetzee’s speech itself, standing in for the expectations of translatable, locatable, legible commentary about the writer’s place and position in the struggle to represent without reproducing colonial epistemologies.

The critique internal to the story that we have heard before, both in Defoe and in

Coetzee’s most allusive novel, Foe (1986), speaks to the persistent critique, especially of

Coetzee’s earlier novels, that “he failed to offer a clear picture of ‘the play of historical forces’” at work in the ethical dilemmas played out in his fiction (Attwell in Bewes 2011,

139). And so the problem of what to do with the decoy ducks seems at once an allegory leading towards commentary on the historical violence perpetrated in South Africa, a critique of Defoe’s colonial exploration narratives, and a fraught pondering over choosing to write in one language over another. Each of these signifying problems has a history in Coetzee’s fiction—Age of Iron is explicitly about colonial and racial violence in South Africa, Foe spins

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out new forms that eclipse the Defoe master-narrative, and In The Heart of the Country experiments with cycling failures of representation in English and Afrikaans—but it is the long-shadow of the flock of decoys that colors our reading here. If any attempt to document history runs full-on into the “impossibility of reliable representation” (Black 2010, 202), isn’t any and every act of writing a performance of the limits of translation? And might we speak of that limit as the imperfection of the copy in speaking to the original? Aren’t all literary ducks decoys?

The question for this particular meditation on language and the hoax of translation, and for Coetzee’s work and its broader implications for postcolonial writing is what the particular demands of that sort of decoy might be. I have no interest in furthering the obstinate binary that forces readings of Coetzee as either satisfying the Nobel committee and speaking to/for South Africa at a time of fraught transition, such a preordained failure of conscience would only further the naïve claims of Nadine Gordimer and other white, liberal writers who find Coetzee’s work increasingly indifferent to the struggle for post-apartheid community in South Africa.11 Nor do I care to pursue a line of thinking that finds Coetzee’s experimental forms incapable or unwilling to engage political circumstances in and out of

Africa. Both the political and the apolitical are categories that mean very little for Coetzee personally, and for the purposes of my project, they are more useful as an illustration of translation’s decoy. To take either position on the novels considered here is to be outwitted by the texts’ refusal to be instrumentalized into discourses of history and politics. But this is not to say that Coetzee’s work baulks at commenting on the value of these discourses, only that that he sees fiction and fictionality as valuable in disrupting epistemologies that too

11 “Obstinate indifference” is Gordimer’s description of her own character Mehring’s attitude towards the living and working conditions of his black farmhands in The Conservationist, and it echoes in her lambasting of Coetzee’s materialist-indifference. Gordimer. 1983. New York and London: Penguin, 128.

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often found settled history in the midst of frantic translation. Coetzee is deeply political, thoroughly involved in the project of writing out of the epistemologies that propped up the colonial enterprise.

It is as Coetzee describes of the figure of the Hottentot “ingested” by history in his first novel, Dusklands: “that out there which my eye once enfolded and ingested and which now promises to enfold, ingest, and project me through itself as a speck on a field which we may call annihilation or alternatively, history” (1985, 81).12 If, for Coetzee, history inevitably annihilates its subject, translation’s ceaseless interchange between positions of authenticity and reproduction is the vitality that stands against such annihilation. The Hottentot (Khoi) exemplifies what for Coetzee is the inevitable conflation of history and annihilation (or the eclipsing of one history by another) as the primary function of Imperialist epistemology. My project argues for Coetzee’s turn to explicitly literary, and often counter-intuitive, documents as a way of pausing the move from document to annihilation. If Peter Carey’s fear of wrongly representing the Australian Aborigine can be called a fear of historical annihilation,

Coetzee’s abundant intertexts in Disgrace are the decoys that hold off annihilation. Rachel

Donadio, in a profile for the New York Times Book Review, unwittingly cuts to the quick writing of Coetzee’s Nobel speech: “Coetzee, true to form, gave an elliptical disquisition on decoy ducks” (2007, 35).13 In choosing to document, but not to annihilate, Coetzee makes no allegiances to the politics that press from the left and the right on the postcolonial novelist; instead, he is true to form. Form, in this sense, is that which negotiates between positions and holds a space for other voices, other languages, and other histories.

12 Coetzee. 1985. Dusklands. New York and London: Penguin. 13 Donadio, Rachel. 2007. Out of South Africa.

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In a State of Disgrace

I will make clear what exactly are the stakes of reading translation as the perpetual movement of forms in a reading of Coetzee’s controversial and acclaimed novel, Disgrace.

The novelists that I have considered in this project are characterized as world literature in their double-audience, at home and abroad, and postcolonial in their expectation of a transnational audience and refusal to offer commodifiable form to that readership. For many in the UK and US, Disgrace’s publication in 1999, and subsequent Booker Prize, heralded the coming of age of the South African novel on the world stage. The reception at home, however, was “less rapturous” (Donadio, 35). The materialist critique leveled by Nadine

Gordimer against Coetzee’s earlier novels was crystallized as South Africa’s position with the censure of Disgrace by the newly installed ANC leadership, and the charge that Coetzee had represented “as brutally as can be the white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man” (2000).14 Despite having lived abroad in the United States—eventually finding a more permanent home in Australia in 2003—Coetzee found himself the transnational author who, like his amanuensis in Youth, was unable to live without a country” (137).

The portrayal of the farm-hand Petrus, and the young black men who brutally rape

Lucy Lurie not withstanding, there are grounds for a strong reaction to Disgrace based exclusively on what Spivak and others will call the “relentless focalization” of the novel on the unpleasant, highly pedantic, misogynist, David Lurie (Spivak 2002, 24). Lurie, formerly professor of Romantic poetry, reassigned at the start of the novel to teach Communication classes, is the signal the text will have us read wrongly. The novel’s free indirect discourse binds us tightly to a narrative imaginative wholly unsuited to the task the novel sets before him. Lurie, like Defoe whittling his pen quill from the feathers of slaughtered ducks, will be

14 “ANC submission to the Human Rights Commission Hearings on Racism in the Media,” http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=2674

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asked to document South Africa in Cape Town and on the veld at the moment of transition, when the interregnum has finally passed and they are at last post-colony. As a translator- narrator, Lurie is a Miltonic Satan, charming and depraved with all the good lines.15 And as in

Milton, we fall with Lurie and are disgraced.

Of the very many problems the reader encounters in following the narrative of

David Lurie, professor of Romantic poetry, and, more recently, Communications, are the allusions he makes to Wordsworth, Blake, and Byron as a way of commenting on his present situation as a disgraced white man in still-unstable, post-apartheid South Africa. It is necessary to come to grips with this mistranslation of the texts of European aesthetics onto a radically political moment in South African history. For many critics, this is simply a matter of branding Disgrace as parodic or as textually-fetishistic, what I call his bookishness problem.

But bookishness, in this case, presents an intertext not as an authoritative voice, but as a decoy that draws with its familiarity and disrupts with its refusal to read right.

After starting an illicit affair with an undergraduate student, Lurie teaches a class on

Romanticist aesthetics to an uninterested class. After introducing Wordsworth writing on

Mount Blanc, he tries his hand at cultural relevancy, or rather, cultural translation. Here he compares the Alps to several mountains in South Africa, but turns to Kantian archetypes when this fails to leave an impression:

‘Wordsworth is writing about the Alps,’ he says. ‘We don’t have Alps in this country, but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Mountain, which we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory, Wordsworthian moments…’ (2000, 23).16

The revelatory moments “will not come unless the eye is half turned toward the great archetypes of the imagination we carry within us” (Ibid.). It is at this point in the pedagogy

15 Lurie does indeed speak with a “serpent’s tongue,” and follow “the Contessa into her underworld,” in the libretto of his Byronic opera. 16 Coetzee, J.M. 2000. Disgrace. New York: Penguin.

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that we understand that it is Lurie’s notion of the archetype that the narrative disrupts.

Seeing Mount Blanc requires a decoy—there must be a preexisting archetype of that vision or the vision will not come. The presumption that Lurie makes in drawing an equivalency between Table Mountain in Cape Town and Mount Blanc is that the archetype for the aesthetic vision of the South African peak will be the European one. Like the Hottentot in

Dusklands, Table Mountain will inevitably be eclipsed by history that documents according to

European archetypes for culture and beauty. Lurie’s admonition to his class speaks volumes.

As a way of preserving a singular vision, an unchanging beauty in the face of historical fracture, “it may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form” (22). Lurie’s disgrace and firing from his University position mark the dismissal of this self-delusion, but Coetzee’s decoys are never so simple as casting aside one set of archetypal texts for another.

Coetzee’s Englishes To choose a language is to choose a world. Frantz Fanon

Any interrogation of the critical framework constructed around the novels of J.M.

Coetzee must first come to terms with the paradox of the anti-apartheid writer who, unlike many of his fellow white, liberal writers, left South Africa to produce works in English in the

United States and Australia. Many of the central questions of representation prompted by

Coetzee’s novels can be distilled to the issue of how to write in a colonial language without reproducing the annihilating effects that the institutions predicated on the use of English abetted. Even if we accept Atwell’s general premise that Coetzee’s novels are “directed at understanding the conditions—linguistic, formal, historical, and political—governing the

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writing of fiction in South Africa,” we must still contend with that understanding as mediated by the fraught choice to write in English.17

Despite the seriousness with which critics, writers, and social commentators have taken up the continued prominence of English as the literary language of choice, South

African literature’s pained relationship to English as a language for artistic representation has hardly been resolved. How to engage with such a conflicting “inheritance” divides writers and splits disciplines. One thinks immediately of Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s call to abandon English departments in African Universities in favor of local languages representative of the diversity of postcolonial Africa as an essential component of the cultural decolonization of Africa.18 For Ngugi, the field of African letters cannot be free of the colonizing influence without rejecting the culturally imperial use of English as artistic lingua franca.19 Chinua Achebe’s defense of English as a legitimate language of African literature nuances Ngugi’s critique of English a remnant of cultural imperialism in

Decolonizing the Mind:

In the logic of colonization and decolonization [English] is actually a very powerful weapon in the fight to regain what was yours. English was the language of colonization itself. It is not simply something you use because you have it anyway; it is something which you can actively claim to use as an effective weapon, as a counterargument to colonization. (2000)20

17 This choice is ever-more complex when we consider that while the history of the English language in South Africa is a colonial history, speaking English in contemporary South Africa immediately marks you as other than Afrikaner. 18 Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 1986. Decolonizing The Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. New Hampshire: Heinemann. 19 Ngugi’s personal contribution to this language movement has been fraught with contradictions. While he has consistently sought to introduce his novels in his native Gikuyu, Ngugi has translated those original texts into English and taken full advantage of the commercial success that has accompanied that translation. Nicholas Brown challenges Ngugi directly on the basis of his claim for “authentic” and indigenous languages of Africa, particularly as they are meant to address a postcolonial condition of liberation from “productive forces of foreign control”. Brown counters this epistemological argument by claiming that the ontological experiences of the “worker” in “peasant life under multinational capitalism . . . do not originate in an African context in the same way African languages do.” Brown, Nicholas. 2005. Utopian Generations. Princeton: Princeton UP, 156. 20 Bacon, Katie. 2000. “An African Voice,” an interview with Chinua Achebe. The Atlantic Monthly. August 2, 2000.

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While both writers are explicitly aware of the complications implicit in the adoption of

English as an African literary language, the difference is in their understanding of how language carries and performs colonial discourse; here, Achebe is convinced of the power inherent in reclaiming the very language that has been thrust upon Africa.

Salman Rushdie calls attention to the destabilizing nature of English as a cultural apparatus, one that can challenge the very authenticity of English in its imperial form. He writes that contemporary English is “no longer an English language, but[that it] now grows from many roots; those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves” (Brennan, 171).21 For Rushdie, the fashioning of a postcolonial subject via the literary use of English presents the opportunity to problematize English as the de facto vehicle for establishing a category of Anglophone literature. Thus, as English becomes English(es), its very nature and naturalness is contested. Rushdie’s essay “Outside the Whale” (1984) figures that the postcolonial writer of British literature speaks directly to this inside-out transformation of English. V.S. Naipaul connects his role as the postcolonial traveler to his unique relationship to writing in English: “The migration, within the British

Empire, from India to Trinidad had given me the English language as my own, and a particular kind of education.”22 The language of migration returns us to the decoy, so that we might equally say that postcolonialism has revealed English(es) always in flight.

Ato Quayson understands the ambiguity of many distinct English(es) as such: “the very choice of the metropolitan language for the writing of post-colonial literatures secretes

21 Rushdie, Salman in Tim Brennan. 1990. “The National Longing for Form,” Nation and Narration, edit. Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 171. 22 Naipaul, V.S. (1987). See also Rey Chow who exposes “the multiple languages and cultural enclaves that already exist within English.” Chow. 1995. “In the Name of Comparative Literature,” ed. Charles Bernheimer. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 53.

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liminality into the inaugural act of post-colonialist representation itself” (124).23 It is this liminality, the dissolution of the inside/outside character of an imperial language that allows us to read Anglophone texts as neither possessing a static originary sense of themselves as in

English, nor an ultimate goal of representation free from specific linguistic markers of historical usage.24 Considering the material circumstances (colonial education systems; the capitalist marketplace; etc.) by which English has infiltrated the literary consciousness of the postcolony allows a fuller conceptualization of arguments within the field: namely the historical realities of colonialism and postcolonial literature’s ability to represent those circumstances. To limit a study to Anglophone African literature is to broach the issues of

English as an African language while excluding the enormous contributions of Lusophone and Francophone literatures to the field. Benita Parry argues for a disciplinary discrepancy in how “third world” literatures in English are categorized by literary studies, writing that while “commentaries on ‘Commonwealth’ or ‘new’ literatures had attempted to incorporate such texts into a common Anglophone tradition, postcolonial criticism was far more attentive to the politics of English, both as a language and as a corpus of texts” (2004, 72).

The corpus of texts that has come to be canonized as Africa’s world literature largely consists of texts written in English, and for some critics of Coetzee (he and Gordimer, arguably the most visible of South Africa’s writers internationally), that canon is representative of only a select minority. The critique then identifies both a linguistic and formal problem for African literature as a world literature. At times the problem reduces to a critique of English as the African literary language. For instance, Parry disparages Coetzee’s

23 Quayon, Ato. “Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart with an Evaluation of the Criticism Relating to It,” Research in African Literatures, Vol. 25, No. 4. (Winter, 1994), 117-136. 124. 24 This would apply equally to British Literature, writ large. Conrad and Joyce are not English by any standard of the Arnold or Eliot canon, and even for Woolf or Forster there would be no originary Englishness unless one is operating with an essentialist dogma. CF George, Kunle. 2003. Relocating Agency. Albany: SUNY Press. pps. 87-89.

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reliance on British English, “uninflected by South Africa’s many vernacular Englishes”

(Parry 1998, 150). But clearly the issue of form is broader than simply the selection of a written language and specific audience. Writing specifically of the problem of a readership for literatures in the endemic languages of South Africa, Lewis Nkosi traces the formal heritage of African writing in English: “writers in English and Afrikaans...have a ready access through these languages to European forms of experimentation,” they are “already hooked into European systems of aesthetic forms in a way not readily available to indigenous

African language literatures” (86-7).25 Nkosi addresses the particular teleological critique of

South African literature as writing that is limited in formal experimentation (i.e. realism as the de facto mode), while simultaneously being incapable of properly representing the volatile revolutionary movements just before and after the end of apartheid. For Coetzee, the problem of English for the postcolonial world, is the problem of choosing any language:

dissatisfaction with English would in truth hold for any other language, since the language being sought after is…an Adamic language, one in which Africa will naturally express itself…a language without a split between signifier and signified (1998, 9).26

This impossible bind for the South African writer writing in English is exemplified in

Jameson’s flashpoint essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”

(1986) in which he argues that “the popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before us, not immediately, but as though already-read” (66).27 While Jameson’s essay has been too often a straw man for those arguing against the West’s facile critique of the limiting nature of nationalisms on the postcolonial writer, his harshest assessment is reserved for the hegemonic nature of capital. The notion of the already-read is one that I have raised

25 Nkosi, Lewis. 1998. Writing South Africa: Literature, apartheid, and democracy, 1970-1995. ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP. 26 Coetzee. 1988. White Writing. New Haven: Yale UP. 27 Fredric Jameson. 1986. “The Third World Writer in the Age of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text. No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 65-88.

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as a particular problem for the transnational writer with a global audience. The kinds of demands placed on the postcolonial novel are qualitatively different from the expectations for example, of the contemporary America novel.28 In particular the demand for form that translates broadly the localities of culture in the writer’s country of origin, whether or not they have abandoned that national passport. This places a burden on the postcolonial writer to imagine exactly how subjects of a national character will translate across cultural boundaries. Thus, my emphasis on translation as the defining concept for examining and comparing postcolonial literatures in our particular moment of global imagining. The assumption that a writer originally from Sri Lanka, educated in England, and living in

Canada should offer a legible Sri Lankan-ness in the form and/or content of his writing— here I am thinking of Michael Ondaatje—is both preposterous, and yet, is the presupposition of much critical work in the field of world literature. These presuppositions are made before the text has been read, and sometimes without reading at all (cf. the fatwa against Rushdie’s Satanic Verses forbid owning a copy of the book, let alone reading it).

Coetzee presents an exception to this postcolonial phenomenon only in the directness with which he refuses the logic of incorporation in Jameson’s already-read. Directness is perhaps the wrong word, as Coetzee’s work fashions decoys as a response to the instrumentality of the postcolonial critique.

Mark Sanders, ventriloquizing Njabulo Ndebele, roots the success of Anglophone literature in South Africa to the decolonization of English. While he does not go so far as to challenge Ngugi’s call to decolonize the mind and separate academic work in Africa from the language of subjugation, he does suggest a parallel path to decolonization through non-

28 With the prominent exceptions being ethnic-American literature, which is constantly called upon to produce the “good” ethnic subject. CF Lee, Wendy. Same Difference: Repetition and the Problem of Multiracial Future in Contemporary US Fiction (unpublished dissertation, 2011).

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instrumentality. And while it is self-serving for the Anglophone specialist to find the solution to the problem of hegemonic English in English itself, I agree with Sanders, Attridge, Pechy, and others who find Coetzee, like Ndebele, employs form as a kind of anti- instrumentalization of literature. Ndebele goes further to suggest that: “there will be no

Anglophone literature by black South African writers until English is sufficiently freed from its functional use” (in Sanders “Disgrace,” 367).

Coetzee has made his personal thoughts on the particularity of decolonization in our present moment, and to his mind, neocolonialism works now almost exclusively through cultural hegemony: “there’s a process of intellectual colonization going on today that is far more massive and totalizing than anything that Victorian England could muster. It originates in the culture factories of the United States” (2000, 111).29 Dominick Head sees in Coetzee’s work “gestures that we might call ‘textual decolonizations’” (2009, 27). This chapter addresses the perception of Coetzee’s bookishness, his treatment of historical and political discourses as literary objects to be read and in the process translated, and the possibility of reading his novels as part of an archive where texts are never stable.

Derrida’s Shortcomings Negotiation—and this is what makes it terrible—must negotiate the nonnegotiable, to save its being nonnegotiable. Derrida, Negotiations: interventions and interviews

In order to contextualize the choice of English in Coetzee’s writing within the more distinctly literary debates about form and representation in his novels, it is helpful to consider one of the foundational debates over the institutionalization of postcolonial literary studies. The debate over the essential historical and cultural qualities of language and the

29 Coetzee. 2000. “Critic and Citizen: a response,” Paratexts 9(1), 109-111. There is a good deal of irony in Coetzee’s position on cultural hegemony, as his position within a contemporary canon of postmodernist writers at times draws speculation that “poststructuralist appropriation of postcolonial texts might be a form of cultural imperialism” (Head 2009, 27).

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ability to represent singularly with a word found a great catalyst in a public argument between the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the young South African literary critics

Rob Nixon and Anne McClintock in the journal Critical Inquiry. The latter pair was representative of a new wave of students of literary studies produced as a result of the coalescing of interdisciplinary fields engaged on the political front of anti-apartheid struggle.

The debate took place in the pages of University of Chicago’s Critical Inquiry in the form of several open letters between the parties and came to define the split in postcolonial literary studies between materialism (political, historicist, activist) and textualism (apolitical, poststructural, literary). The keywords I’ve used crudely generalize, and yet they remain the underlying rubric for much of the persistent debate as to the place of the literary in postcolonial studies.

Nixon and McClintock, at that time PhD students studying at Columbia (notably under Edward Said’s tenure), took issue with what they perceived to be the ahistorical deconstruction of the word apartheid in Derrida’s introductory critique of an art exhibit entitled, “Le Dernier Mot du Racisme.” Centered around the capacity of representation to perform in the political arena, Derrida takes up apartheid as both the signifier of a particular historical moment and a linguistic construct that is inevitably marked by palimpsest, played through discourses that attach significations to the word according to the ebb and flow of political tides. In his own terms from a different study, he negotiates the nonnegotiable by reading Apartheid as a word with a history, as well as a word with a politics. Nixon and

McClintock proposed to “remedy . . . shortcomings in” Derrida’s essay by integrating a number of discursive networks into Derrida’s contextualization of apartheid and South

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African resistance, namely, “discursive, political, economic, and historical analyses”(353).30

The “shortcomings” in question concerned what the materialist respondents termed “the symptomatic . . . severance of the word” from its genesis in particular historical circumstances, circumstances that spawned new definitions and pseudonyms for the policies of apartheid South Africa.31 Apartheid, in this reading, is too historically placed a term to be blurred by the deconstruction of its referentiality. To their minds, Derrida was “repulsed by the word [apartheid],” and rather than follow the trajectory of the word as having a historically contingent value, he pursued the word as linguistically meaningful outside of its discursive networks. We find a nearly identical line of argument to what Sarah Brouillette locates as “leftist thinkers,” who are “ ‘concerned about how easily Coetzee’s deconstructions can be appropriated by institutions of higher education, how remote they must seem to the arché and telos of black South African history’” (2007, 120). Derrida indeed staked much of his thesis on the notion that apartheid stood in for “the archival record of the unnameable,” a position that could be seen as at a remove from the telos of

South African history, had he not made the concept the inescapable form for reading any history (1986, 160).32 The archive of the unnameable will be of particular importance when we address Coetzee’s relationship to the particular historical immediacy of apartheid in the novel Disgrace (1999). But through the lens of expatriate South Africans considering the absolute material affects of apartheid on their nation, the archive, as such, had an undeniable

30 Derrida, Jacques; Nixon, Rob; McClintock, Anne. “Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,” (“Racism’s Last Word”) Race, Writing, and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1985), 353. 31 Ibid., 340. 32 1986. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 155-170.

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historical trajectory, and Derrida’s linguistic severance represented a willful blindness to, what for Nixon and McClintock, was locatable and present.33

Derrida writes in his response to the accusation of repulsion: “No, what I find repulsive is the thing that history has now linked to the word, which is why I propose keeping the word so that the history will not be forgotten. Don't separate word and history!”

(Ibid.). Derrida, in typical fashion, manages to occupy both sides of the argument. In occupying the historical position, he argues for treating apartheid, the word-cum-word, as having a particular meaning that can be examined at a remove from present usage of the term. As the consummate poststructuralist, Derrida holds that apartheid’s history is marked, perhaps under erasure, by European epistemologies: “the history of apartheid (its

“discourse” and its “reality,” the totality of its text) would have been impossible, unthinkable without the European concept and the European history of the state, without the European discourse on race” (1986, 165). What might seem like circular logic—keeping the word historically precise so as to avoid the present historical distortions of the word—exemplifies the paradox at the heart of the materialism/textualism debate for contemporary postcolonial literature. Language is always moving, crossing discourses, cultural modes, and historical periods, and yet even in its perpetual motion, it is the only recourse to mediating the immediacy of historical experience. Simon Gikandi employs Derrida to make a claim for poststructuralism as a form of reading that is textually productive, but limited: “We could not,” he writes, “understand how colonial subjects were represented in the colonial text by

33 Andre Brink defines the materialist argument along revolutionary lines: “Postmodernism’s focus on ‘mere’ textuality, these critics argue, removes literature from the materiality that underlies moral choice and historical praxis” (18). It is on these grounds that materialist critiques of Coetzee are based. My term bookishness can be defined as “mere textuality.” Brink, Andre. 1998. Writing South Africa: Literature, apartheid, and democracy, 1970-1995. ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP.

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comparing their representation with the real experience of colonialism since what we considered to be the real was only available to us through texts or discourses” (2004, 115).

This problem of limits becomes increasingly complex in the arena of fiction, where postcolonial responses to historical fracture carry particular weight outside literary discourse, often standing in for the absent and eclipsed history of the colonial periods. The claims by some materialists that language can be fixed in an absolute historical context are matched in fervency by poststructuralist claims that materialism brings to bear its own discursive mode to the interpretation of language. Derrida, for his part defends the deconstruction of an oppressive discourse, even as he positions himself as a Francophone Algerian Jew, well aware of the importance of historical and linguistic particularity in confronting colonial struggles.

For Derrida, the debate reaches an unprofitable end with the argument by Nixon and

McClintock for a purity of discourse in political analysis, which Derrida not so subtly analogizes to the separate homelands enforced under apartheid (“homelands of academic culture”). “Each must stick to his field,” he writes in a bruising conclusion, “none may transgress the limits of his territory” (170). And thus a strange theory of translatability emerges in the reaction between materialist calls to revolutionary language to dislodge apartheid (from politics and from its older meaning at the time of Jan Smut’s first use of the term in 1917) and poststructuralist demands that language be understood as moving into and out of discursive modes, with a sensitivity to those absences and erasures that epitomize both language and history. Derrida’s position cleaves to Coetzee’s on the subject of history as annihilation, and we find Benjamin’s infamous axiom shadowed here as well: “There is no

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document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256).34

The three align in calling for an archive that can be read as simultaneously documenting and annihilating material experience. If, as many contend, postcolonial literature bears some responsibility for precise representation of missing histories and annihilated cultures, the debate over proper representation prompts the question of whether that responsibility is abdicated in writing fiction, in the making of fake persons and things that live in real geographies? Or does the translation between the fake and the real produce a different kind of archive?

Despite Benjamin’s importance as a theorist of translation (“Task of the Translator” e.g.), rarely do these citations of the “document of barbarism” include the line that follows, in which Benjamin equates translation (very specifically transmission) with that same barbarism: “And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (Ibid.).35

For Benjamin, historical materialism begins first with the assumption that history is changing hands, being translated from one context to the next, with the possibility and probability of being manipulated in the process. As with Nixon and McClintock, the conflation of dynamism with the effacement of material history in Benjamin loses the potential to see the movement of history as the form of history, neither settled nor settling, neither inscribed nor erased. In the matter of apartheid’s value as a historically located term and a political reality, we find the two positions sharing the assumption that history is in translation—apartheid figures differently from discourse to discourse (its “vicissitudes”), marked by history. Rather than concentrate on locating the authentic origins of the word

34 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Illuminations. trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, New York. 35 Head argues that Coetzee’s defense of the “novelist’s art” challenges the received wisdom that “the anti- apartheid writer must find a mode that will facilitate the documentation of…an agreed history” (2009, 26).

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apartheid, or on following apartheid in its evolving forms as pseudonyms, its settled fakes that prevaricate the same policy with different language, the possibility of reckoning with the movement of translation leads us to literature. In a discussion of Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, translation as a tropological category allows us to imagine a dynamic archive where history is in perpetual movement. As well, how the critique of Coetzee as a textualist, as obsessively bookish in his representation of historical violence, offers an archive that resists the perpetuation of colonial epistemologies—an archive on the move, in translation.36 Here

Coetzee diverges from Peter Carey’s avowed self-prohibition against certain kinds of representation (in his case, the interiority of Australian aboriginals), writing via his protagonist in the novel Slow Man, that “the unimaginable is there to be imagined” (2006,

44).37

Coetzee’s History Problem History is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other. J.M. Coetzee, “The Novel Today” Critical approaches to the South African novel make interventions with both formal and historical approaches, but despite the implicit interconnectedness of these modes of reading, a polemic has developed which views them as conflicting.38 The South African novelist and academic Zoë Wicomb goes as far as to cast the two approaches as “one of the

36 While the literary dispute over representations of apartheid demonstrates the beginnings of a fissure between two well-intentioned fronts, it would be an oversight to ignore the catalyst of historical struggle in the origins of postcolonial studies. The initial anthologies that would become the basis for the so-called “literary turn” in postcolonial studies are consumed with questions of history and the immediacy of certain decolonization efforts, with particular emphasis on South Africa. These early collections include The Empire Writes Back, edit. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (1989); Nation and Narration, edit. Bhabha (1990); Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edit. Williams and Chrisman (1994); and Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Loomba (1998), each of which considers historical points of revolution alongside early forays into postcolonial literary theory. 37 Coetzee. 2006. Slow Man. New York: Penguin. 38 Immediate conflicting examples where critics engage in thoroughly formal readings for historical/political ends include: F. Jameson and his notion of “strategies of containment,” the formal iteration of ideology in a text as it contains the “utterance” of the text. The Political Unconscious (1981). Also noteworthy, is Derek Attridge’s resuscitation of formalism as a way of approaching the “event” of literature: “in my account, the other is not an entity at first, utterly inaccessible and then all too accessible”. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other” (1999).

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lasting struggles for representation that does not endorse the structures of colonialism”

(63).39 Often figured as a binary—between the aesthetic and the political, the formal and the material, the universal and the local, the poststructuralists and the protestors—the struggle over forms adequate to experience continually resonates in critical dialogues on postcolonial literatures. Even the most self-consciously theoretical of approaches to the African novel is compelled to situate that theory somewhere along the continuum of this discussion—it is no exaggeration to say that positioning is necessary for comment. Taking Wicomb further in defining the debate, Benita Parry understands it to be “volatile and contested,” more of a border war than a minor skirmish (6).40

If there is a figure most associated, or perhaps most targeted, in this border war over forms of representation in the South African novel, it is assuredly J.M. Coetzee. If Kazuo

Ishiguro elicits in his critics an attention to the latent mysteries of form, Coetzee brings out unrestrained hyperbole. Ironically for a writer who spurns the public eye, rarely granting interviews or book tours, Coetzee finds himself the archetypal writer for whatever project or politics is currently dominant in contemporary criticism. It is not uncommon to encounter in reviews and in prefatory material to monographs and collections Coetzee being wielded as a figure of the extremes. Axiomatic statements begin: “more than any other border-crossing fiction” (Black 2010, 200), Coetzee is “one of the most highly respected—and most frequently studied—contemporary authors” (Head 2009, ix), his fiction “remains unmatched in South African writing for its multivalence, formal inventiveness, and virtuoso self- interrogation of narrative production and authority,” (Atwell 1998, 166), and raising the bar on virtuosity, “Coetzee licenses me to wander…extravagantly in the territory of history and

39 Wicomb, Zoë. 1993. “Culture Beyond Color,” Transition, No. 60. 40 Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge.

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theory” (Pechy 1998, 57). Coetzee is the “most,” the “least,” the postmodern conscience, the traitor, the historian, and the recluse—often all at once and in the same review. It’s little wonder that when the hyperbole clears, Coetzee finds himself at the center of debates both about the future of the South African novel, and about the state of representation in the contemporary novel of world literature. It is my argument that Coetzee’s novels—bracketing for a moment his baffling public persona—resonate with such force because they refuse forms that translate as content. It is possible to find commonality both with Bewes’s position that “Apartheid is…a condition of possibility” for Coetzee’s novels (Bewes 2011,

159), while at the same time following Attridge’s theory of Coetzee’s non-instrumentality,

“not a lesson to be learned or a system to be deployed” (2004). The apparent dissonance between these two positions accounts for much of the sustained interest in Coetzee as the

South African expatriate writing in a form either at odds with or unequal to the history that provides the condition for his novels. The predicament of the postcolonial author bracketed by the historical immediacy of his circumstances and marked by a certain bookish inattention to reality is not exclusively Coetzee’s issue, but the intensity of the effect of a form at odds with its circumstances has placed Coetzee in the middle of a debate that has its roots in the founding of a discipline and that, at its extremes, divides history from literature.

André Brink describes the ongoing dilemma over reading Coetzee as story versus history, but it could just as easily have been text versus materiality: “the interminable debate between supporters and detractors of his work has carried the claims and counter-claims of

‘story-as-story’ versus ‘story-as-history’ of historicity versus (postmodernist) textuality, right through the transition from apartheid into…[the] ‘New South Africa’” (1998, 17). As a counter-claimant, none is more forceful than Benita Parry. Parry’s somewhat hyperbolic claim that Coetzee’s novels turn their backs on Africa has colored political critiques of

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Coetzee’s work, so that a New York Times Book Review of his novel Diary of a Bad Year, titled “Out of South Africa,” reads equally allusively to Isak Dinesen’s memoir and to Parry’s infamous critique.41 Parry is no stranger to enlisting the rhetoric of struggle to her side of the debate. A materialist reader of postcolonial texts, specifically from Anglophone Africa,

Parry joins a group of critics and theorists who are committed to a mode of political reading that privileges the local over the global, and the realist over the postmodern.42 Parry’s particular flavor of materialism equates a locatable politics with a certain brand of revolutionary realism, which she opposes with a rather limited reading of postmodernism as apolitical play with words. Her issues with Coetzee’s relationship to South Africa provide ample fodder for a discussion of the kinds of expectations we have of postcolonial texts and what role form might have in nuancing those expectations.

Parry’s wide-ranging critique of Coetzee’s novels echoes many of the sentiments in

Nixon and McClintock’s rebuke of Derrida. Her rigorous historical readings find Coetzee not lacking, but rather copious with epistemological registers unfit for the representation of

African life. Whereas David Atwell, the UK’s great chronicler of Coetzee’s life and works, looks to his novels as “directed at understanding the conditions—linguistic, formal, historical, and political—governing the writing of fiction in contemporary South Africa”

(1992, 3), Parry finds fault with the frame of that understanding. For Parry, Coetzee has become a figure of world literature, in part, because of his denial of African and postcolonial paradigms of historical thought: “the principals around which novelistic meaning is organized in Coetzee’s fictions owe nothing to knowledges which are not of European

41 Donadio, Rachel. 2007. “Out of South Africa,” The New York Times Book Review. Dec. 16, 2007. p. 35. 42 Robert Young frames the struggle over the nature of the discipline as a question of “whether the task of the critic is to locate evidence of historical examples of resistance . . . or whether the analysis of colonial discourse can itself make political interventions in terms of current understanding and analysis” (145). Young, Robert. 2001. Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction. London: Wiley-Blackwell Press.

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provenance” (1998, 150).43 By drawing exclusively from what Parry identifies as European modes of thought, Coetzee “inadvertently repeat[s] the exclusionary colonialist gestures which the novels also criticize” (150). The most Parry can concede of Coetzee’s intellectual resources is that he is “obliquely situated to the prevailing intellectual formations of his native land” (160-61). This oblique situation to one’s native resources parallels Homi

Bhabha’s definition of the power and problematic of cultural translation: “it is a moment when the subject matter or the content of a cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated in the act of translation” (1994, 227).44 Bhabha fails, however, to engage with translation as a priori alienation. Before translation can provoke alienation and distance, the basic assumption of its functionality has already alienated any essential sense of authenticity.

This is the hoax of innocent translation, overwhelmed by particular forms or circumstances too powerful to remain unaltered. Translation as I have conceived of it in this project, neither produces nor prevents alienation, but is itself a necessary alienation in the sense of the production of space between the text and the material circumstances that are the occasion of that text’s production. This alienating space in which Parry identifies South

Africa as the material reality confined to mere referent-status, is defamiliarized from “its spatial and temporal specificity denying it the identity of a social space and rejecting it as a site of cultural meanings” (1998, 161).

But while Parry is an exemplary materialist, materialism is hardly monolithic. Garrett

Stewart draws the materialist formal and historical concerns together as a “need to ask what subformations of diction and syntax tend to absorb the shock of macroeconomic anxieties”

43 Parry, Benita. 1998. “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee,” Writing South Africa: Literature, apartheid, and democracy, 1970-1995. ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly. Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP. 44 Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

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(258).45 In this way, Stewart opens the possibilities for Marxist critique of postmodernist experiment without reducing form to mere symptom. Stewart’s Marxist-formalism can be situated with Jameson’s The Political Unconscious as it reads the impact of economic anxieties on formal representation in fiction. Jed Esty associates his materialist study of late modernism with “a claim that imperial contraction changed English writing through a series of symbolic mediations between social conditions and artistic production;” thus, he envisions a much broader prism of “mediations” between the social and the aesthetic than the more commonly understood Marxist position. (2003, 7).46 This precise connection to the philosophical countenance of empire is furthered by Arjun Appadurai’s link between a

“master narrative of the Enlightenment” and its “internal logic . . . and relationship between reading, representation, and the public sphere” (2001, 629).47 Stewart, Esty, and Appadurai locate materialism in conversation with the development of postcolonial studies as a discourse of the humanities and the social sciences. And it is the tension implicit in such interdisciplinarity that ultimately grounds materialist literary studies in social science discourse. It is helpful here to note Edward Said’s focused call “to rejoin experience and culture” by reading “texts from the metropolitan center and from the peripheries contrapuntally, neither according privilege of objectivity to our side nor the encumbrance of subjectivity to theirs” (2007, 95).48 Natalie Melas positions her own reading of postcolonial texts in opposition to the “most strident” of “sociologically minded critics who fault the discipline for an aesthetic depoliticization and deradicalization of political movements” (39).

Neither of these positions argues that materialism is akin to anthropology or sociology, but

45 Stewart, Garrett. 2006. “The Foreign Offices of British Fiction,” Reading for Form. ed. Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 46 Esty, Jed. 2003. A Shrinking Island. Princeton: Princeton UP. 47 Appardurai in Gikandi, Simon. 2001. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:3, Summer 2001. 48 Said in Melas (2007), 95.

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that materialist critics read for narrative forms that most closely ally themselves with non- literary discourses as they comment on the political, the historical, and the social. Parry credits Edward Said for “the singular achievement to have brought ‘the rhetorical power of the textual readings offered by discourse analysis [together] with a ‘real’ world of domination and exploitation’” (2004, 69).49 Said’s major contributions to postcolonial studies can be seen as straddling the textualist-materialist divide, with Orientalism (1978) pioneering discourse analysis of the colonized East, and Culture and Imperialism (1993) which brings that analysis more deliberately to material questions of cultural resistance.

Simon Gikandi identifies the root of the opposition between the materialist and the poststructuralist positions as the complementarity of postcolonial literary theory and poststructuralism: “for some critics of postcolonial theory, its primary failure—its inability to account for the history and process of decolonization arises from its close affinity to poststructural theory” (2004, 97).50 “Almost by definition,” Stephanie Newell writes, “the two ‘posts’ of poststructuralism and postcolonialism are bound together, at times splintering into one another” (2006, 177). Dominic Head situates Coetzee as “a product of the post- structuralist/postmodernist turn” and sees this association as deeply complicating his relationship to the “complex field of postcolonial writing” (2009, 27).51 The dissonance between these deeply interwoven fields makes Coetzee appear “pulled in different directions, where the anti-colonial ethic is seen to be compromised by the new global imperialism of

49 Parry, Benita. 2004. “The insitutionalization of postcolonial studies,” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Edit. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 50 Gikandi, Simon. 2004. “Poststructuralism and postcolonial discourse,” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. George, Olakunle. Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters. Albany: SUNY press (2003), 54. 51 Attridge helpfully defines poststructuralism as “the theoretical wing” of postmodernism, thus giving us license to consider Coetzee as writer who’s use of postmodern literary techniques closely associates him with poststructuralist criticism (2004, 3).

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postmodernism” (Ibid.).52 This failure, as Gikandi reads it, is then understood as a misplaced interest in textuality, “because [postcolonialism] came to privilege the act of reading over politics...”53 A number of critics understand this affinity or shared heritage as a substantive conflict worthy of critical intervention: Aijaz Ahmad (1992), Elleke Boehmer (1995), Arif

Dirlik (1997), Olakunle George (2003), to name a few. Ahmad historicizes the “ideological affinity” between poststructuralism and postcolonialism as a decline “of the Marxist wing of the anti-imperialist movement,” specifically after “the degeneration of the Iranian state into clerical fascism...” (142).54 Criticism that sees ambivalence, slippage, mimicry, and other features of linguistic deconstruction as textual states of resistance is, for the materialists, occluding the concrete struggle that produces the text or that is represented within the text.55

Homi Bhabha’s work is often associated with a “textual fetishism,” “especially,” as Stephanie

Newell describes, “in his theorizations of colonial mimicry and ambivalence in which emphasis is placed upon individual resistance above collective anti-colonial struggle” (23).56

Bhabha’s introduction to Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1986) brought the theoretical debate over the relationship between language and resistance to a head. His readings of performativity in Fanon’s revolutionary language imply a rift between Fanon’s intellectual intentions and the desire amongst a certain anti-colonial reading public to read for calls to revolution in the Global South. That seductive reading, for Bhabha, “emptily echo[es] a

52 Head, Dominic. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge: CUP. 53 Ibid. 54 Ahmad in Neil Larson, “DetermiNation: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Ideology,” The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies. Edit. Afzal-Khan and Seshadri-Crooks. Durham: Duke UP (2000), 142. 55 R. Radhakrishnan begins his essay “Postmodernism and the Rest of the World,” by seeking new terrain for postmodernism’s “ambivalence” distant from what Aijaz Ahmad calls “a sign of postcolonial weakness or instability,” and looking instead to “politicize this given ambivalence and produce it agentially.” In The Pre- Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, 37. 56 Newell, Stephanie. 2006. West African Literature: Ways of Reading. Oxford: OUP.

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political spirit far from [Fanon’s] own” (1994, 112).57 The theoretical lexicon of poststructuralism marks Bhabha’s praise of Fanon (“doubling identity”, “uncertain intercies,” etc.), and Timothy Bewes particularizes Fanon’s language in opposition to a revolutionary, Satrean-humanism: “For Bhabha, the currency of Fanon’s work among an audience looking for a symbol of revolutionary spontaneity . . . represents another means of containment of a thinker whose great significance lies not in the strength of his fervor, but in the substance of his contradictions” (2003, 81).58

One might more accurately describe Coetzee as the subject of sustained poststructuralist theorization as part of a project of unseating metanarratives culpable in fixing certain colonial epistemologies. In other words, it is a project that would be deeply familiar to the materialist critic. That Coetzee’s novels avail themselves of a theory of reading which seeks to displace those metanarratives, and to the point of this project, not replace them with some alternative, useful discourse, seems unassailable, and yet this is not necessarily a case of formal estrangement in the fashion of Beckett and Gaddis. Many of Coetzee’s novels, while certainly engaged in difficult thinking, would not be categorized as formally difficult. And indeed later novels like Elizabeth Costello read as though they are in dialogue not with postmodernist form, per se, but with poststructuralist critics for whom the mixing of academic and literary discourses would seem readymade for analysis.

One of the great obstacles to saying anything new about Coetzee’s work is that

Coetzee the writer is branded so regularly as an/the example of postmodern allusiveness

(Robinson Crusoe and Roxana in Foe; Heart of Darkness in The Heart of the Country, all of Kafka in

The Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians, Dostoevsky’s and Demons in

57 Bhabha, Homi. “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. Edit. Chrisman, Laura et al. New York: Columbia University Press (1994), 112. 58 Bewes, Timothy. 2003. Reification, Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.

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Master of St. Petersburg, etc., with too many further to list here) that anything he writes is immediately greeted as a double for something else. The critic reads Coetzee as though the fix is in, and to some extent, this gives him the freedom to translate back and forth between registers of allegory, allusion, realism, and naturalism without ever committing to a single mode of writing. He is largely a victim of the popular usage of postmodernism to mean any writing by a contemporary author that isn’t strictly realist. In waging a convincing argument that Coetzee shares more in common with Modernism’s “formal singularity” as a means of intention towards representation of the other, Attridge points to Coetzee’s “use of non realist or anti realist devices, [his] allusiveness…and metafictional proclivities” as the rationale for the theoretical pigeonhole (2004, 2). However, his project quickly leaves such labels as postmodern and realist, as “they do not in themselves get us very far in dealing with the relation between form and politics” (3).

Graham Huggan identifies the claim of the materialist wing as countering “the tendency among postcolonial critics to sacrifice cultural and historical specificity to the blandishments of abstract theory” (2).59 Olakunle George helpfully posits the poststructuralist position in more productive and less oppositional terms, “where language and symbol may be shown abstracting a certain energy from the concrete,” thus making the

“struggle” about something that can be “abstract[ed]” from, rather than negated in, the text.60

While both poles of this continuum claim some vantage on ontological experience in the postcolonial condition,61 there is, among materialist critics, an authenticity accorded to

59 Huggan, Graham. 1997. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing at the Margins. London: Routledge. 60 George’s positioning of poststructuralism/postmodernism as engaged with the “concrete,” allies him loosely with Brenkman’s assertion that “[I]nnovations in the novel are a response to the unprecedented experiences and situations of human life in its varied modernities” (837). Brenkman, 2006. 61 As the numerous permutations of the word “postcolonial” have been co-opted for various ideological purposes, I have decided to rely on the thoughtful and finite definitions that Graham Huggan provides in The Post-Colonial Exotic (2001). Interestingly, Huggan marks his definitions according to the materialist/textualist

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literary texts which can be read as situating themselves within a particular historical moment, in turn often read as reflective of a necessary realism in the form of the text. This poses a particular problem for Coetzee and his decoy ducks. If the functionality of translation to some extent requires a relationship with the copy, the faked original, then the politico-ethical judgment for realism leaves Coetzee at best, apolitical, at worst, irrelevant. Edward Said admonishes such unmediated readings of history and form, cautioning the reader to value the constitution of the novel a priori the critical intervention: “texts impose limits and constraints upon their interpretation” and further, “the critic cannot speak without the mediation of writing” (1983, 9, 20).62 While materialism does not reject postmodern experimentation in South African literature out of hand, it is often perceived as myopically aesthetic, intellectually Eurocentric, and elitist in a fashion that obstructs the politics of decolonization. Thus, the materialist mode most often privileges a realist form and defines that realism in opposition to what it sees as the obsessive textual bookishness of the poststructuralist theorists. The divide between these two strongly held positions on the treatment of form and history in the South African novel often positions two white, liberal authors, whose works span the volatile historical moment between the anti-apartheid struggle and the rise of the ANC, as evocative of the polarities of the argument. Nadine

Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, South Africa’s favorite English daughter and Afrikaner prodigal son.

“I am not indifferent to this…this war. How can I be? It lives inside me and I live inside it.” Coetzee, Age of Iron

divide, claiming postcolonialism as the concerns of the lived experience of decolonization. “Postcoloniality, by contrast, implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification”. Said simply, Postcoloniality is the academic apparatus. 62 Said, Edward. 1983. The World, The Text, and The Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

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Stephen Clingman in his monograph on Gordimer claims her work for materialism by classifying her formal choices as “history from the inside” (1986, 1).63 Clingman reads history in Gordimer as perceptible just beneath the skin of form and fictionality; he sees her fiction as exceptional in its dialogue with history beyond his mode of reading: “Thus her characters are neither simple transplants of actually living persons, nor are they merely abstract fictional constructs” (9). Clingman joins other notable critics in defining Gordimer’s materialist concerns with lived experience in contrast to the mere abstraction of Coetzee’s postmodern linguistic experiments. As a strategy, materialist readings focus critical attention on the effect of postcolonialism on “real” bodies and the signification of those bodies in literary worlds.64 Clingman historicizes Gordimer as “contained by the moment” of history with which “she engages” (15). Clingman’s brand of Historicism assimilates literature into historical and political discourses such that any engagement with form distills to a blandly practical worth: “Gordimer’s work is valuable in so far as we are able to use it to explore

South African history” (Ibid.). This stark formulation does away with aesthetic engagement, aesthetics being only a means to historical understanding.65 The vulgar materialism of

Clingman is directly opposed by Attwell, and others who argue for Coetzee’s projects, which

“render the aesthetic more resilient, enabling it to speak to the political on more or less equal terms” (1998, 173). Attwell’s point resonates doubly here, both as a call to treat literary form as a competing discourse, and in his formulation of the “more or less” of that discursive

63 Clingman, Stephan. 1986. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside London: Allen and Unwin. 64 Clingman’s assertion about certain historical types raises the question of what defines Gordimer’s characters in their liminality between the historical and “abstract” fiction? How might they look or act to prove their verisimilitude without bleeding over into an “authentic” figure of world history. Would such a character act a little like de Klerk or Mandela, but diverge into unexpected behavior, and finally become truly individual to the world of the text? Or is this merely a question of dropping a fictional character into a contemporary historical situation and having them act “realistically”? 65 Michael Hanne uses Louis O. Mink to eloquently counter Clingman’s view of history inside the literary: “Most importantly, while many elements in a fictional narrative will be factual, it is also the case that…‘for fiction, there is no claim to be a true representation in any particular respect’”. Hanne, Michael. 1994. The Power of the Story. Providence: Berghahn Books.

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equality between aesthetics and politics. Without having to articulate with any fullness the

20th century arguments over the exact constitution of this relationship, notably the Frankfurt

School and German Marxist theorists’ powerful contributions, I will treat Attwell’s “more or less” as the effect of reading form and politics translationally, that is, working as a dynamic between historical circumstance and literary form with neither discourse assimilating into the other. The field as prescribed selects out the “more” or the “less” depending on its theoretical territory—Clingman and Parry, for example, find aesthetics less equal to the task than history. To read Coetzee as both less and more equal to the material circumstances that give rise to his fiction would be to read form as always on the move, a flock of decoys in flight alighting upon recognizable cultural representation only to move quickly again towards less recognizable horizons of understanding. Bewes has commented on this feature of

Coetzee writing, describing a never-settled dynamic between “transparency and opacity”

(2011, 152).

Gordimer, herself, sees the work of fiction closely associated with the manner of critical realism described by Anton Chekhov as the “essential gesture”: “a writer should not provide solutions, but rather describe a situation so truthfully that the reader can no longer evade it.”66 This in fact reverses Clingman’s formulation of containment; for Gordimer, the realism of her novels contains a historical situation “truthfully,” while for Clingman, history is the containing force and Gordimer, its vessel. Coetzee unsurprisingly diverges from

Clingman’s orthodoxy, locating Gordimer’s achievements not in the baldly political, but in the work of a “writer of conscience,” who finds herself “in an age when any transcendental basis for ethics (as for aesthetics) is being denied in the name of politics” (1992, 387-88).67

66 Anton Chekhov, quoted by Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers. 67 Attwell. David. 1992. Doubling the Point. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

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Gordimer’s estimation of Coetzee’ work is less sanguine. In a now infamous New

York Review of Books review of The Life and Times of Michael K, “The Idea of Gardening,”

Gordimer takes Coetzee to task for his novel’s “revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions” (1989, 3).68 She roundly criticizes what she perceives as Coetzee’s allegorical and utopian (in the literal, “no-place” sense that turns away from the political needs and struggles of South Africa) storyline of the political refugee Michael K.69 Derek

Attridge softens this critique considerably by noting the allegorical mode as one of many that are constructed only to be disregarded within the frame of the novel’s imagination. He notes of Disgrace (2000) that “like all Coetzee’s novels, it offers the temptation of an allegorical reading . . . and at the same time undercuts it, exposing such readings as part of the mechanistic attitude it finds wanting” (2004, 173).70

Michael K, Gordimer writes, is “passive,” “indifferent” to revolutionary movements against tyrannical governments, in this case, Apartheid South Africa under P.W. Botha.

Gordimer’s description of Coetzee’s relationship to history as a revulsion echoes Nixon and

McClintock’s accusation of Derrida’s unwillingness to confront the present reality of

68 Gordimer. 1989. “The Idea of Gardening,” New York Review of Books. Feb. 2, pg. 25. 69 Frederic Jameson falls under a similarly scathing critique for his argument that third world literatures can only be read as allegory. He distinguishes this generic tradition from what he calls “the western machineries of representation, such as the novel” (69). A more generous reading sees Jameson as wanting to reposition materialist criticism as a “situational consciousness” of historical circumstances; in the example of the “third world,” this consciousness operates politically as a response relates to the postcolonial “nightmare” (85). C.L Innes ascribes Jameson’s misstep to an instance of “outsider reading practice.” She charges him with the naïve assumption that “characters and plot represent a whole nation’s values and history—in other words, the native writer and his or her characters become native informants who speak for the race or society as a whole” (206). Innes, C.L. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. For examples of allegory in postcolonial novels see: Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Vera’s Butterfly Burning, and Rushdie’s Shame (1983). Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, 15 (1986). 70 Attridge, Derek. 2004. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: U. Chicago Press. Attridge here engages in a direct political confrontation with the reception of Coetzee’s Disgrace by the majority of South African critics who read the novel as abjectly racist, in particular because of its essentializing of black difference in the unrepentant trio of rapists. By denying allegory a productive totality, or what Dominic Head calls the “coinciding use and interrogation of its procedures,” Attridge argues for Coetzee’s denial of the allegorical erasure of the particular black subject. Attridge continues to develop this argument in his chapter, “Against Allegory” (2004).

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Apartheid, his disgust at the word itself. The two examples represent a radical materialist standard for fictional engagement with social discourses. Gordimer goes further, too far by half in my estimation, to criticize the use of allegorical form as a way of shirking the writer’s duty, finding in Coetzee “a desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences” (6). Sarah Brouillette places Gordimer’s critique within a pattern of

South African writing about Coetzee which has “entailed a preference for the realist mode, especially that which is defined as social realism or Lukácsian critical realism” (2007, 119), clearly a formal approach that Coetzee at the very least departs from, if not actively deconstructing the notion of realism in the novel as an extra-literary discourse. Any assessment of Gordimer’s public critiques must take into consideration the “state of emergency” in South African at that time of their writing. What Gordimer, quoting Gramsci, called the “Interregnum” of Apartheid history was demarcated by intensive guerilla fighting by the military arm of the ANC, bombings and kidnappings of anti-Apartheid leaders and intellectuals by the South African government (often violating sovereign borders in

Botswana and Zimbabwe). Gordimer’s fiction finds great imaginative space in non-realist forms, and the political critiques within those novels are never so black and white as her indictments of Coetzee in other discourses. Indeed, Gordimer’s critique is generative for

Coetzee; he needs the binary that she fastens around revolutionary materialism and

“indifferent” postmodernism, in order to fashion his novelistic escape of that very binary.

Brouillette’s framing of Gordimer’s critique as an attempt to “locate” Coetzee in the specifics of a particular South African historical conjuncture cannot be separated from the necessity (for many materialists) for transparent political/historical engagement in a literary text, a transparency frequently asserted for realist novels. Sarah Brouillette notes that

Coetzee

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Identifie[s] with Mario Vargas Llosa’s statement that literature is a ‘living, systematic, inevitable contradiction of all that exists’; it stands against what Coetzee calls ‘both the bureaucrat-censor in the hire of tyranny, and . . . the revolutionary scheming to enroll the writer in the grand army of the revolution. (124)

This association of realism with the censor and the revolutionary maps out a liminal space in which literature, for Coetzee, can speak to the real by the very nature of its exceptionality from those discourses, by its ability to hold those discourses of the bureaucrat and the insurgent in dynamic balance in the act of translation. Llosa and Coetzee’s position is also very clearly a political one, a politics of anti-instrumentalization in the production of literature. Both dismiss propaganda in the guise of literature, and in the same breath distance themselves from the “baldly” revolutionary novel. We must then ask what this in-between space of literature would look/act like.71

For Attwell, the space is temporal, a “suspension of historical time,” that “can be said to have a reciprocal effect on our perceptions of what is socially possible” (1998, 175).

Translation is the means to such a space of social possibility, but rather than figuring the

71 Within the larger frame of materialist criticism, Clingman’s anti-aesthetic position is complicated by those who find intermediary positions in the question of a relationship between history and form. While Gordimer’s novels stand as the archetypal materialist fiction for Clingman, Njabulo Ndebele’s work is harder to position within that rubric. Stephan Helgesson approaches Ndebele’s Fools and Other Stories (1983) as concerned with formal experimentation in the face of historical specificity. He addresses Ndebele’s purposeful manipulation of novel forms, specifically the bildungsroman: “If the bildungsroman deals with the emergence of the individual in society, Ndebele focuses on the difficulty for such an emergence to occur” (2004, 81). Here a different sort of materialism takes history as producing ruptures in form.71 Ndebele considers the relationship of protest fiction in South Africa to the materialism debate in his non-fiction work The Rediscovery of the Ordinary. He describes the relationship of the black reader to a specific aesthetic in the protest tradition: “the aesthetics of reading this literature, for the black reader, is the aesthetics of recognition, understanding, historical documentation, and indictment” (46). For Ndebele, the limiting nature of the protest novel, or what he terms the “spectacular” novel’s “complete lack of causality,” is in fact the sign of its aesthetic relationship to a specific black readership that reads the protest novel as documenting struggles that cannot find voice in other genres. Rediscovery of The Ordinary goes on to argue for the potential of creativity to return the black individual’s consciousness to preeminence in the novel, but is careful to make clear that any “newness will be based on a direct concern with the way people actually live” (55).

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space as a pause for “those things…which in a revolutionary situation there is literally no time (Ibid.), translation illuminates already existing space by preventing closure.72

Gikandi goes on to collapse some of the rigidity in the origins of the debate over deconstructive reading in the post-colony, claiming “both sides in this debate are united by their recognition that postcolonial discourse emerged within the larger institutions of

European . . . theory after structuralism” and then more dramatically: “a postcolonial discourse is unthinkable without poststructuralist theory” (Ibid.). Rey Chow argues that poststructuralism’s “bracketing of referentiality is crucial because adherence to referentiality has often led to a conservative clinging to a ‘reality’ which is presumed to exist, in some unchanging manner, independently of language and signification” (2006, 47). 73

In The Age of Iron (1990), Mrs. Curren speaks, as it were, Coetzee’s complex answer back to the requirement of a social-realist placement in his fiction. She says of her relationship to circumstances of black Africans: “I am not indifferent to this . . . this war.

How can I be? It lives inside me and I live inside it” (103).74 This dialectic of historical

72 Theophilus Mokhuba finds little nuance in Ndebele’s arguments about the limitations of the protest tradition. Compelling for this essay are the unusual terms by which Mokhuba critiques Ndebele, namely that certain historical moments negate otherwise productive literary arguments; in this case, Apartheid renders Ndebele’s argument “inappropriate”: The argument against Ndebele's criticism of South African protest literature has nothing to do with the validity of his argument. On the contrary, I think, to some degree and a different scenario to Apartheid permitting, much sense can be derived from his opinions about literary art. What one may object to, however, are the unwarranted attacks on black South African writers such as Miriam Tlali, Sepamla and Mutloatse. So, although one may agree with some of the points he makes, other of his claims are quite inappropriate. Mokhuba, Theophilus. “A Critique of Njabuolo Ndebele's Criticism of Protest Fiction,” The Postcolonial Literature and Culture Web. The University Scholars Programme, The National University of Singapore: http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/ndebele/mukhuba1.html

73 Chow, Rey. 2006. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham: Duke UP. Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 9. 74 Coetzee. 1990. The Age of Iron. New York: Penguin. Chinua Achebe circumscribes the tasks of censor and the revolutionary when he writes of the duty of the writer to act as the “sensitive point of his community”: “The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done. In fact he should march right in front” (1974, 45). It

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fracture of the impact on the individual and the individual as a compositional fragment of that larger history should not be read here as entirely sincere; indeed, to do so would be to neatly perform the very referentialist move that Coetzee writes against in the postcolonial novel. To take Curren at her word is to make her a mere mouth-piece for the “political”

Coetzee, and wrench her from fictional-context. This is the point of Coetzee’s decoys, they remind us of a supposed original (for example, the Mount Blanc that Lurie wants us to keep in mind as we look at Table Mountain), while unseating the very epistemological structures that originality rests upon. In this case the supposed progressive politics of Mrs. Curren—a decoy for Coetzee’s latent politics—negotiates with and against the utter lack of a common ground for communication between Curren and her racially-ambiguous house guest,

Vercueil.

As with all of Coetzee’s narrations, Mrs. Curren’s voice deconstructs the assumptions of the discrete individual’s relationship to historical circumstance. Similarly, in one of the most beguiling narrative personas of the 20th century75, In The Heart of Country’s

Magda delimits historical transparency by formally obscuring every plot element in the novel with a narrative madness. As if speaking directly to Gordimer’s critique, Magda exclaims:

“language is no medium for desire,” and later in a seeming contradiction: “Tell me! Speak!

Why do you never say anything?” (26, 118).76 The meta-awareness of language’s failure to reveal an underlying desire in the novel is most often treated as Coetzee’s abiding interest in discourse and textuality to the estrangement of historical materiality, an estrangement which

is an unfortunate choice of words (re-education, march), but in contrast to his problematic statements comparing writer to solider, Achebe’s fiction works much more subtly in defying the language of the totalitarian regime. 75 Perhaps matched only by Charles Kinbote Nabokov’s egomaniacal, homicidal narrator in Pale Fire. 76 1976. In The Heart of the Country. New York: Penguin.

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has been read by some as obstructionism to a particular political/revolutionary movement.77

But to truly confront the issue of an in-between relationality, between politics and form, and between form and form, requires that we revisit Coetzee’s most explicitly realist text,

Disgrace, a novel that engages the violence of historical transition while refusing Achebe’s call to “march right in front,” of the present social movement (1974, 45).

I cannot speak, can only lecture. Coetzee, Age of Iron

I have positioned Coetzee as the writer at the center of an instructive argument about the place of the literary in postcolonial studies in order to dismiss some of the overblown influence of the two competing visions, and to demonstrate how Coetzee’s fiction speaks back to these imaginatively limited theories. This is not to say that Coetzee is unaware of the critical debate going on around him; indeed, his novels seem explicitly situated “in the literary and political crises over the reliability of linguistic signifiers” (Black

2010, 201). This both ensures undiminished attention from the critics invested in the debate over form and politics, and allows him the ability to reframe the terms of the debate. The debate over postcolonial history in the novel and the ethics of certain kinds of epistemologies of representation predates Coetzee’s entrance on the stage, but it has been nuanced and developed with the reception of each new novel. In particular, it is Coetzee’s staging what Black calls a “series of attempts to imagine the lives of others across historically oppressive social borders” (Ibid.), that offers a challenge to the supposed impotency of

77 Ibid., 25. Rita Barnard is both typical and atypical of this critical trend. Barnard engages Heart first on the level of its perceived lack of positionality to the Apartheid conflict, writing that if we take the novel at its postmodern “self canceling segments” then Heart “seems to have nothing at its heart”.77 She points to the novel’s own formulation of place as a “ ‘speculative . . . geography’”.77 And yet, in a surprising turn from this traditional approach, Barnard attempts what might be best termed a recuperation of Coetzee from his own “speculative geography”. She writes of the novel that mere “generic instability does not make Heart only available to deconstructive reading”.

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formal experimentation to engage historical crisis. It remains to be seen whether in staging these ethically fraught, formal experiments with the novel Coetzee offers a particular solution for the problem of writing without reinscribing the violence of imperialism.

The answer depends very much on how we define the relationship of the novel to translation. My fundamental project has been to demonstrate that the novelist must increasingly grapple with the necessity of translation as a function of an increasingly transnational reading audience for postcolonial writers, and as a form that figures cultural knowledge as never static nor singular, but always dynamic. Translational form or the translating novel, as I’ve been calling it, operates at a linguistic level much as Coetzee’s vision of the work of the translator in “mov[ing] back and forth between circles of the two languages, trying to bring with him, at each move the memory or the feel…he wishes to translate” (1992, 182). By existing simultaneously in multiple registers of culture and language, the novel can manage the “complex matter of pleasing and satisfying and challenging and extorting and wooing and feeding and sometimes even putting to death”

(Coetzee 1996, 37).78 These movements of the translating novel prevent the mode of cultural imperialism that reads for purely essentializing purposes—those that engage the novel only to reaffirm assumed and preconstituted cultural understandings.

Coetzee differs from Ondaatje, Carey, and Ishiguro, in the explicitness with which he engages translation as a plotted element in his novels, and in the failure of those explicit translations to bridge cultures, communities, and differences. Bewes characterizes these failures as the “mortifications” which “frequently take place in the presence of radically defined ‘others,’ including the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians; Friday in Foe, Petrus in Disgrace; and, in Age of Iron…Florence, Bheki, and Vercueil” (2011, 159). Such shameful

78 Coetzee. 1996. Giving Offense. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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non-encounters are often linguistic, the most infamous being David Lurie’s late realization that “Italian and French would not save him here in darkest Africa” (1999, 95). The tendency is for critics to recuperate these failures of translational community as “ethically productive moments of failure” (Marais in Black, 218), or to claim the failures as “a certain abject particularity of South African history” that halts “the endlessness of textuality” of his writing (Atwell 1992, 11). These positions fall into the same theoretical camps that reduce

Coetzee’s writing to either form or politics, to a discourse that can be understood as either more or less capable when compared to social discourses that claim to document the real.

We avoid the failings of these modes of criticism only when we stop thinking of translation according to trajectories and transmissions, and begin to imagine the failure of translation as its greatest potential. For translation as the form of the novel fails only in completion, in ending conclusively, and thus finishing translation. It is, after all, the finished translation that

Coetzee decries in the Afrikaner theft of the “myth of the Israelities wandering Palestine,” and its repackaging as the Afrikaner ‘wandering’ tribes” that colonized the Cape (1988, 3).79

Why does Coetzee stand before the Nobel committee and wax poetic on eccentricities of Defoe’s decoy ducks? He does so not as a revaluing of Defoe or Crusoe, but as a translating of “a set of knowledges, truth criteria and sociocultural values pertaining to modernity and transferred through Western imperialism” (Helgesson 27) onto a social fabric where they read wrong and are thus re-read under new conditions, in new languages and cultures.80 We are forced through the discursive hoax of reading Defoe through Coetzee through Foe to discard the notion of a foundational, original text, and assume a perpetual, unending project of re-reading forms.

79 Coetzee. 1988. White Writing. New Haven: Yale UP. 80 Helgesson frames this set of discursive knowledges in order to claim a “catachrestic agency,” the power of non-colonial discourses to disrupt what Spivak calls “the Enlightenment episteme” (27). I contend that the very notion of agency in literary discourse collapses the imaginative potential for Coetzee’s novels.

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Understanding the volatility of the historical circumstances of South Africa a mere five years post apartheid, we must ask why Coetzee would set such an impotent narrator in what Pechey calls that “new, terrifyingly unmarked temporal frontier of decolonization”

(2002, 378).81 Having laid out the foundational debate over textualism and materialism in the postcolonial novel, there is little doubt that Lurie, at first glance, stands in for every possible flaw of the poststructuralist reader. He, like Coetzee, is bookish to the point of blindness from the material inequalities that surround him, a bitter grammarian who conjugates verbs to rationalize sexual harassment and brutish arrogance. And the texts to which he turns as models for understanding history, culture, and language—Byron, Blake, Wordsworth—are precisely the archive to which Parry points in her critique of Coetzee’s unrelenting

Eurocentrism. I’ll repeat her claim to emphasize the irony: “the principles around which novelistic meaning is organized…owe nothing to knowledges which are not of European provenance.” Under this rubric, Lurie, and Coetzee by extension, can only reinscribe the very inequalities of the imperial epistemology that postcolonial literatures have sought to erase. An author, a novel, and a translator doomed to fail by the abject limits of novelistic meaning.

But what if preordained failure presents us with the possibility of reading a text between form and the event of form. What if Disgrace misreads all content in order to be

“true to form”? If this is the case, and if translation is the dominant mode of Coetzee’s work, might not we be able to read Disgrace as a comment, perhaps even an ethical one, on unsettled history. I’ve said before that translation in the novel fails only when it rests, when it stops negotiating between languages, between original and target, between form and content.

81 Pechey, Graham. 2002. “Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case Of Disgrace,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Volume 4, Issue 3, 2002, pps. 374 – 383.

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The reading that follows shows a novel thinking through the possibilities for reading history through an unending circulation of forms.

“I am not just trying to save my skin. If that is what you think, you miss the point entirely.” Coetzee, Disgrace I begin by taking up the problem of mistranslating South Africa using texts from the colonial archive. From the very first sentence of Disgrace we are treated to the content and syntax of such a mistranslation, but as I will show, this perhaps misses the point entirely. With all too familiar cadence, Coetzee prepares us to read wrong alongside Lurie, to be lured into reading the texts we know. He begins: “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1).82 Despite the unfamiliar territory, the line evokes for us perhaps the most famous line in British literature: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”

(Pride and Prejudice). The undeniable echo of Austen is dissonant with the context—the paying of a Muslim prostitute for a weekly assignation—and from this opening moment we will find a novel resisting singular or symptomatic interpretation of its intertexs. With its cycling texts and intertexts all set in a background of sexual and racial violence and fraught social change, Disgrace can be “seen to explore the relationship between the original and the translated, between transition and translation, and how this is underpinned by” (Wicomb

2002, 213) the novel’s failure read as progressive social history.

Dominic Head finds the contrast between the “immediate (and depressing) political dimension” in Disgrace and the disruption of “pre-given social patterns” and “templates of meaning,” to be a sign of Coetzee’s distrust of interpretation in general (2009, 78). “What can it ever be,” remarks Coetzee, “but either betrayal or an overpowering of its object? How often is there an equal marriage?” (1992, 61). But Coetzee’s equating of interpretation and

82 Coetzee. 1999. Disgrace. New York and London: Penguin Books.

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translation—“all criticism is translation…”—complicates the facile reading of Coetzee as simply anti-interpretation. Betrayal and inequality are both fundamental assumptions of translation—we read a translation with the spectre of the already-betrayed original-- indeed the burden of equality between the original and the copy would dissolve the functionality of translation altogether. And yet the failure of translation between the retrograde politics of

Disgrace’s narrative voice, and the novel’s formal experiment, forces the reader to suspend desire for intentionality or else treat Coetzee as a political holdover from the colonial period.

We read Disgrace wishing for a different narrator, and hopefully, understanding that competing interpretations are present in the novel. To this end, I will argue that Disgrace is in a state of being read by others, even as the focalization of the narrative presses us to a single vision of events.

Rita Barnard approaches the missing bridge between form and content in Coetzee’s

In the Heart of the Country as the absence of Afrikaans. Absence both in terms of the erasure of

Afrikaans from the European editions of the novel, and in the formal quality of reading

Afrikaans as under erasure in the English narration. The novel, she writes, is “an experimental foregrounding of the constraints of language and language choice and a rupturing of the conventions of realism” (2009, 100). She addresses Magda’s exposition of her childhood in a language improper to the memory (English substitutes for Afrikaans).

“Some of the most poetic passages in the novel, though rendered in English in both versions of the text, are in a sense already translated, imperfectly redolent of a linguistic and social world the speaker has been forced to abandon” (99, my emphasis).83 Already translated in this case is not the already-read of Jameson’s necessary allegory, nor is it simply that the passage is redolent (stinks!) of absent Afrikaans. Instead, Coetzee’s choice to refract Afrikaans through

83 The South African edition of In The Heart of the Country contained large passages of untranslated Afrikaans, which were translated into English for the UK and US publications.

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English, to have English feel like Afrikaans, is the choice to see and hear English differently.

Rather than already translated, the English reads as if it were in-translation, between the two languages, negotiating, grappling for meaning-making structures appropriate to a memory that exists in between the two. It is not foreign to us, but neither is it familiar—translation is still ongoing.

And here I depart from Barnard in finding not a “dream of exit from closed systems” (102), but the performance of that exit in the unfinished translation of Magda’s subject position. 84 As Magda considers the fantastical flying machines that pass back and forth over her farm, the binary of origin and target language is further broken by the entrance of a third language: “The voices speak to me out of machines that fly in the sky.

They speak to me in Spanish” (1982, 126).85 The novel is precisely not a closed-system because it allows the imaginative possibility of another reading and a different translation, one already in progress. Figment of her imagination or not, the flying machines produce language that is incomprehensible to Magda, but which signifies as language nevertheless, even as the definitive Spanish that she believe she hears.

The document of Magda’s life on a remote South African farm with her father and two servants is meant to be in Afrikaans, but translates as English thinking of Afrikaans, and finally is inhabited by Spanish. Those flying machines that crisscross the sky offer us a vision of a flock of decoys. They are not the heralds of some future domination and occupation, but a negotiation between ways of seeing and representing South Africa, a negotiation that exists in many voices, and many languages. Crucially the dynamic nature of translation in

84 Barnard brings this same desire for containment to what she terms Coetzee’s “anti-illusionism” (2007, 25). Hers is simply a broader reaching strategy that claims to cast aside formal estrangements (whereas Clingman finds them obstructionist) in order that “we may localize Coetzee’s atopic strategies and recognize not only a historical but an ethical impulse” in his novels (Ibid.). If only we could hold him still long enough, she argues, we could read the authentic locality hiding just at the edge of formal abstraction. Barnard offers us something like innocent translation with the authentic original always on offer. 85 Coetzee. 1982. In The Heart of the Country. New York and London: Penguin Books.

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holding many registers in tension without collapsing into one or the other offers space to consider how reading material culture in the novel never happens singularly. By offering other readers and other languages, In The Heart of the Country performs a negotiation of historical transition, rather than an enacting of historical annihilation.86

For Zoe Wicomb, whose article “Translations in the Yard of Africa” (2002) is the most sustained analysis of translation as a cultural form and function in Disgrace, Lurie represents “the white colonial condition—for whom the need to match up, the reminder of an inevitable cultural hybridity, is always a humiliation, a reduction, and in terms of translation, a failure” (2002, 212).87 There can be ready agreement that Lurie fails according to his standards for the producing the ideal of representation. The novel makes it clear that for Lurie to be successful in documenting the newly postcolonial South Africa would replicate the epistemological closure that allowed a rationale for wholesale slaughter of another people. Moreover, he fails almost any measure for ethical behavior. His teachings and musings on the sublime of Romantic poetics collide endlessly with the violent implications of putting the “vision of Eros” into practice in a place that was too often victim of the imperialist desire to know, to make beautiful, and to thus possess what was other to them. Lurie will describe himself in Baudelairean terms as a man of the city…where “eros stalks and glances flash like arrows” (6). Though he may be alienated by the city, The Parisian

Prowler of Lurie’s Romantic mind claims an imaginative possession of all those whom he stalks. It would be difficult to imagine a less appropriate commentator on the inchoate days of a new South Africa, and indeed Coetzee seems to want to push the limits of the argument

86 In contrast to the polyphony of the archive (always signifying another reading, another language), Clingman’s “history from the inside” offers a closed-system that even accepting the claim for Gordimer’s progressive political vision of democratic rule in South Africa, manufactures the same type of hegemonic cultural readings that marked imperial rule. For Clingman, the right reader, with the right archive of texts can draw away the veil of form and reveal a singular history. 87 Wicomb, Zoe. 2002. “Translations in the Yard of Africa.” Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap 18.3–4 (2002): 209–23.

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for an ethical responsibility of forms that can speak alongside and separate from the politics of the novel’s content. The limits are tied directly to the problem of Coetzee’s bookishness, his perceived passivity and indifference to the material inequalities of black South Africans in his novels. Coetzee’s relentless intertextual conversation with European intellectual history is for many a way of rewriting the history of colonization “in terms of a particular master code…codified by European ideology” (Huggan 1997, 70).

Even if we find a more productive argument for intertext as an “internal device to undermine the authority of the narrative voice” (Wicomb 2002, 220) in Disgrace, we are left with the problem of the archive of Romantic texts through which Lurie translates South

Africa into his narrative. It is Derek Attridge who has most forcefully taken up the ethics in the formal testing ground of Coetzee novels. He finds in Coetzee a “variety of formal devices that disrupt the realistic surface of the writing, reminding the reader forcibly of the conventionality of the fictional text and inhibiting any straightforward drawing of moral or political conclusions” (2004, 13). We run into trouble when Attridge pairs this inhibiting with the suggestion that with those formal disruptions of symptomatic readings for history and politics Coetzee is confronting “ethical demands of otherness.” If the demands of otherness require some manner of Smithian moral sentiment then the novel is in danger of failing the rubric of sympathy that Jane Taylor lays out as a principal rationale for imperialism in her review of Disgrace:

The principal consequence of this failure of sympathetic identification with other beings is violence. In fact, the sealing off of imaginative identification is a necessary precondition for us to engage in the long-term and sustained business of slaughter. (1999, 25)88

Even Bakhtin’s desire to position “challenges to representation within representation” as non-threatening to “what is beyond representation,” still in Pechey’s gloss “reinforces” the

88 Taylor, Jane. 1999. “The Impossibility of Ethical Action.” Mail & Guardian 23 July 1999-29 July.

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extra-discursive reality’s “claim upon our attention” (1998, 61). In which case, Disgrace calls out for attention to what Attwell calls the “apparent unreality of its aesthetic code” (1998,

175).

In order for us to follow Attridge’s fundamental claim of formal innovation as literature’s singular mode of ethical testing, we must come to terms with the relationship between the intertexual archive with which Lurie narrates, and his seeming failure to sympathize with the novel’s others. The mediating factor in this discussion is perhaps the absence of calm.

When Lurie, followed on by the echoes in the first line of Austen, enters the rooms of Windsor Estates he meets Soraya, his “exotic” escort, and we see the descriptions of the room and Soraya bend towards each other, overlapping in a pernicious manner. The assignation room is “pleasant smelling and softly lit,” while Soraya is “honey-brown, unmarked by the sun” (1); Soraya, like the room, is softly lit, unmarked by the sun. Recalling

Barnard’s dream of an exit from the closed system, we find the description stifling, claustrophobic. We soon realize this is no anonymous room. Lurie cites Baudelaire in his description of the room, but with a meaningful difference: “Thursday has become an oasis of luxe et volupte” (1). This loosely translates as luxury and pleasure, but the reference to the

Baudelaire poem “Invitation to a Voyage” is distinctly missing the word calm, the “peace,” which marks the epistemological assurance with which he orders and composes the beauty of the foreign geography. The refrain from the 1954 translation of Les Fleur du Mal reads

“There all is order and beauty,/Luxury, peace, and pleasure.” Luxe, calm, et volupté. In the absence of calm the narrative’s conception of Lurie’s Romantic impulse is unsettled. And there is unrest in the Windsor Estates, a place we are initially meant to read as a refuge set

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apart from everything surrounding it, hermetically sealed like the form of a poem. But we notice that it is Thursday that has become the oasis, and not Soraya nor even the place itself.

We learn of Lurie’s vague discomfort at the fact that, in the most literal terms, the escort company owns both the room and Soraya, but this definitive truth is not carried through to an awareness that Lurie is thus logically part owner; instead we are treated to

Lurie’s delusional sense of Soraya as an equal partner in this transaction of money for sex.

She is described as “quiet and docile,” he quotes Verdi’s Rigoletto to further the description of

“la donna e mobile” (the woman as fickle, movable), and then later still she is found

“compliant, pliant” (3,5). Finally and most hallucinatory is Lurie’s insistence that Soraya, the prostitute that he imagines as clay, ready to be molded, has an emotional connection to him beyond the transaction. Only Lurie, professor of Wordsworth and Byron, could levy this archive of Romantic Orientalism with such brutal misogyny and still find in Soraya a grain of

“affinity with him,” which “can surely not be feigned” (3).

Coetzee borrows heavily from Wordsworth both as the signifier of poetry with which Lurie’s students find little affinity, and as the broader measure of cultural translation that he productively misreads. Teaching Byron does not bring Lurie closer to the Romantic ideal, and in his ever-growing fascination with resurrecting Byron in his absurd, mongrel opera (literally with an aria for a dog), David Lurie plays at mistranslation through numerous cultural discourses all of which are made to signify as Orientalism. Moments after his failures with Byron in the classroom, he encounters his student Melanie Isaacs: “She smiles back, bobbing her head, her smile sly rather than shy. She is small and thin, with close-cropped black hair, wide, almost Chinese cheekbones, large, dark eyes” (11). The “Chinese cheekbones”, the “large, dark eyes” are almost laughable parodies of Orientalism; Melanie is

Chinese precisely because Lurie has already imagined her as such, passed on reality for the

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“fabric of signs” that are archetypal Chinese in his mind. In passing, he refers to her as

“Melanie-Melani, with her baubles from Oriental Plaza and her blind spot for Wordsworth”

(37). While Melaine might quite accurately be said to be blind to Wordsworth (she is a comically lackluster student), her blind spot is captured in the enfolding of the narrative that seems at first entirely focalized around Lurie. Lurie’s ultimate seduction and rape of Melanie is thus inseparable from his academic and pedagogical choice of texts. Despite the fact that

Lurie fails any test as a reasonable translator of his own historical moment (his languages, his politics, his texts are all wrong), “the narrative events nevertheless trade in translations”

(219). Lurie’s representational choices have concrete and violent effects on other characters in the novel.

We, like Lurie, exasperatedly ask: “What is to be done? Nothing that he, the one- time teacher of communications, can see. Nothing short of starting all over again with ABC”

(Coetzee 129).89 This alienation from the epistemological register of the narrative recapitulates a particular postcolonial problem. How can the story of even the most particular South African moment be trusted to the representational archives responsible for systematic oppression? We could, like Parry, judge Coetzee so overly committed to play with intertext and palimpsest that he stands with his “face turned from Africa,” or we could place

Disgrace within the context of the postcolonial novel’s struggle to account for language that seems outmatched by its subject matter in the extra-discursive reality. We could start all over at ABC.

89 The significant issue of corporate academia’s move towards instrumental language as the de facto pedagogy doubles the problematic “context” of Lurie’s disgrace. Lurie’s Romanticist, aestheticist ideology of the Humanities is without a place in the larger context of the contemporary University. So even as Lurie’s use of Romantic verse for pernicious acts makes him explicitly an anti-hero, his championing of more idealized sense of the academy reads quite differently.

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The Perfective “The ruse of an end,” again and again. Coetzee, Disgrace In his brilliant account of Disgrace as a “grammar lesson,” Mark Sanders asks us to reconsider our judgment of the form and content as less a problem of the epistemological register of the narration, and more a staging of disgrace as a temporal inevitability of the novel. Disgrace like melancholy bears no expiration date, its primary quality is that of perpetuation. It is a state of being and one that Sanders sees as the primary syntactical form of the novel: “What matters is not so much the successful temporal ordering of events and actions as their lack of completion” (2002, 365).90 And that lack of completion comes as a syntactical disgrace, “a deprivation or restriction of access to the perfective and its resources” (369). This disgrace, in my reading, especially as it is aligned with the non- perfective, is the sign of Nancy’s folding and enveloping in the narrative, making room for negotiation with what appears nonnegotiable in the novel.

The perfective tense that Sanders refers to is the most prominent bookish quality of

David Lurie’s narrative imagination. Lurie returns time and again—like a verbal tic—to the grammatical declension of words to their perfective. Words that are crucial to his descriptions of his historical moment, and of his disgrace. The perfective is the completed verb, “an action carried through to its conclusion” (Disgrace 71). One employs the perfective to denote the closure and finishing point of an act. For our purposes, this impulse can be read as a corollary to impulse to possess in the Romantic aesthetic. Lurie reminds us that

Wordsworth comes upon Mount Blanc in the Prelude, and finds the image “had usurped upon a living thought/That never more could be” (21). Lurie adds this representational commentary for his class of jaded students: “Usurp, to take over entirely, is the perfective of

90 Sanders, Mark. 2002. “Disgrace,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Volume 4, Issue 3. pps. 364-73.

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usurp upon: usurping completes the act of usurping upon” (Ibid.). He claims for the Alps, the dominant aesthetic of the Romantic poets, a colonizing influence. A possessing power so complete that the living thought is eclipsed by the soulless image. But it is Lurie who switches the tense to the perfective, and not Wordsworth. Lurie alone seeks to translate the totality of the aesthetic vision to the detriment of any other image.

Lurie attaches a value to the closure inherent to the perfective, but it is closure the narrative imagination in Disgrace balks at. Sanders notes of the many instances of the perfective in the text: “before its syntax can be completed…the perfective is sundered by an aside alerting the reader that the action narrated is not over” (2002, 364). This aside is more often than not mockery of Lurie by Petrus and Lucy, drawing attention to the absent languages and conversations that have read the events and texts of Disgrace differently. Our inaugural connection to the perfective, having “solved the problem of sex,” has already taught us how to defer the closure of the perfect. For in that same tentative declaration, which will soon be proven false, we have the aside of “to his mind” (1). He has solved the problem “to his mind.” Coetzee has allowed a sliver of light to shine between the free indirect discourse narration that at first seems inseparable from Lurie and Lurie’s imagination, and he asks us to inhabit that space even with the novel’s “relentless focalization.” We must remember that Lurie has “a book to complete, a sort of book” (167): a book, an opera, and a eulogy.

This “sort of book” fails to find a single genre through which to speak, recalling

Magda’s discovery of her father’s chest of secrets, a pastiche of documents each with its own signification of authenticity—a deed, a will, love poem, and a diary—each insufficient to represent a totality, to possess the singular voice of representation of her father’s being.

Magda says of her own text, “I am a spinster with a locked diary, but I am more than that. I

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am an uneasy consciousness but I am more than that too” (3). And so we begin to read knowing that the “more than that too” compels our attention despite its illegibility.

Graham Pechey writes of this text-excessive-of-text as a kind of alternative archive:

“What [Disgrace’s] narrative records is…his experimentation with alterative words to capture a particular feeling-tone of experience…an inner style” (2002, 378). To which I would add that the inner style of Disgrace allows us to de-focalize from Lurie, to understand that the novel reads Lurie along with us and finds his intertextual archive lacking. And in its estimation of Lurie, the novel makes room for other readings, other languages, other redemptions. It is not for a later time when disgrace has passed from Lurie and from South

Africa, but in the simultaneity that translation allows. Even when Lurie practices the perfective with every intention of placing a final period in an episode, the narrative suggests another tense.

Sanders returns to the perfective tense as a way of reading the narrative “elaborating, in its own way, upon disgrace” (2002, 364), its failure to bring closure Lurie’s actions. In the increasingly disturbing repetition of the perfective of “to burn,” Lurie’s attempts to foreclose language, the novel “performs a motivated privation” (Sanders 369). At first Lurie plays at pedagogical closure, instructing his students on the difference between “drink and drink up.

Burned and burnt” (71) so as to settle the matter of how one reads the Romantics. After an attack on his daughter’s farm where Lurie is doused in lighter fluid and lit afire, “he beats out the last of the flames on his clothes” (96). This translates into cruel irony in his attempt at making amends with Melanie’s father months after the attack: “It was the kind of flame your daughter kindled in me. Not hot enough to burn me up, but real: real fire. Burned—burnt— burned up” (166). And in his extraordinary self-delusion in thinking this might salve the wound he begs: “I’m sorry. It’s outrageous, I know. That’s the end. That’s all I wanted to

242

say…” (Ibid.). More than any forgiveness, he desires the end, the closure of language around history that persists in the form of messy transition. But this is precisely what the narrative refuses.

In bringing us nearly identical performances of the perfective tense—burnt, burned up—the narrative “employ[s] a ruse of an end, a formal trick of narrative or social closure, when things are far from over” (Sander 371). I have argued in various readings throughout this project that translation cannot be understood without the assumption of a willing hoax on ourselves. In return for the fantasy of mediated connection an original text, we accept the copy, the fake, the impossibly dissimilar translation. And under this rubric, the perfective operates with the assumption that whatever is closed-off by Lurie’s language exists in an equal and competing language, however estranged Lurie may be from that language.

Translation is never perfective, never merely a transmission of one set of values and knowledges from one language to another. Such a text would be incomprehensible. It would require every functional syntactic value of the original language, and as such, it would be

Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote, the identical text pretending at historical difference.

Disgrace’s ending further dispels the notion of a perfective reading of the novel.

Lucy’s child-of-rape will be born into a wholly different kind of community. She has taken up a contract with Petrus that will cede her land to him in something like an affable protection scheme, whereby she will become part of his family. Much has been written about the pastoral depictions of Lucy’s final tending of the land that is no longer her’s as her first step in completing the contract with Petrus. But before we can reject the contract, we must understand that Lurie’s narrative cannot read the language of this agreement. In a knowing passage earlier in the novel, Lurie comments on what he sees as Petrus’s erroneous use of the word “benefactor” (ironic in that Lucy will ultimately rely on Petrus as her benefactor):

243

“The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites. Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them” (129). Read straight, this is Lurie’s distaste for the antiquated meanings of the word, but it is, in truth, his anxiety at encountering his own language as foreign that is at work here.

He has fallen for the decoy, and taken the likeness of the word benefactor, a word that has very definitive and pragmatic meaning for Petrus, and assumed its misuse.

Lurie sees his daughter Lucy “at work among the flowers,” a false pastoral that he wants to read as the mistranslation of poetry onto a scheme that will draw Lucy out of his own narrative and into Petrus’s. In the “magenta, carnelian, ash-blue” of the scene Lurie is desperate for something that he can foreclose upon, make perfective in the end. But “of

Petrus,” “there is no sign;” there’s nothing to read but the archetype of the pastoral (217).

Lurie has been rendered an intertext to a narrative negotiation that he is no longer part of. In a novel entirely occupied with translation as the closure of historical negotiation in Lurie’s myopic narrative, we have in this final moment signs of a negotiation that has persisted despite the Lurie’s foreclosure. In the shadow of this new language of contracts and benefactors, Lurie has been rendered obsolete. His Byron of infinite, salacious fertility of prose and sex has run dry.

Coetzee’s triology of “autrebiographies,” concludes with Summertime (2009), the story of a young English biographer researching the life of the writer, J.M. Coetzee.91 The opening sequence describes a cross-border house invasion and killing of exiled ANC leaders living in

Botswana. It is first alleged that the killers were black, but they were witnessed speaking

Afrikaans, “perhaps whites in blackface” (2009, 3).92 After his father refuses to engage him on the horror of the slaughtered family, likely killed by the Apartheid government, the

91 “Autrebiography” is Coetzee’s neologism for the other-biography, the fictionalized biography. 92 Coetzee. 2009. Summertime. London: Harvill Secker.

244

character Coetzee conjectures on the state of Apartheid South Africa as a space of non- reading:

Once upon a time he used to think that the men who dreamed up the South African version of public order, who brought into being the vast system of labour reserves and internal passports and satellite townships, had based their vision on a tragic misreading of history…Yet to say they had misread history was in itself misleading. For they had read no history at all. On the contrary, they turned their backs on it. (5)

History is eclipsed here by the absence of reading. Misreading signals the process of translation, so that even errant reading engages a text. Literature’s relationship to history is thus valuable as a dialogue without end. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes in The Inoperative

Community, “the text that recounts its own story recounts an unfinished story: it recounts it interrupted and it essentially interrupts its own recitation” (1991, 65).93 For Nancy, the fact of the text’s recounting of itself as unfinished, dramatizes the “being-in-common,” the common exposure of singular individuals, even if that exposure is merely the approaching of the “limit” of inscription.

The nominal biographer of Summertime marks his text, Coetzee’s fiction, with notations for the future filling in of gaps in the narrative. The narrative asides are set off from the rest of the text by indentation and italics, and the one that follows this account of

Afrikaner history above, reads as follows: “To be expanded on: his father’s response to the times as compared to his own; their differences, their (overriding) similarities” (6). This addendum marks in the purest form the event of reading the novel-in-translation, and draws together for us Nancy’s self-interrupting text and Coetzee’s project of the failure of linguistic closure. We have no access to this expansion of the text, and yet we understand it to be ongoing and crucially non-perfective. The “ruse of an end,” is played again and again by the promise of expansive form.

93 Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

245 The Novel Without Translation: An Epilogue

The episode “Darmok” from the long-running television series Star Trek Next

Generation has a rather generic plot—the Starship Enterprise encounters an unfamiliar, quasi- human life form, and after a series of seemingly unavoidable misunderstandings, the best minds and sturdiest constitutions of the crew are employed to bridge, repair, or restore relations and bring a temporary peace and harmony to their quadrant of the galaxy.

However, what I find lasting is the way it lays the stakes of such encounters at the feet of translation.

The Darmok of the title refers to one half of a phrase, “Darmock and Jalad at

Tanagra,” repeated over and over by the commander of an unfamiliar spacecraft in an attempt to communicate with the crew of the baffled Enterprise. The “universal translator” that typically makes quick work of foreign languages on the show, translating them instantly into the lingua franca of Intergalactic English, encounters difficulty when it becomes clear that the language is comprised exclusively of metaphors that require a lifetime of cultural understanding to decode.1 Prepositions and pronouns are translated, but so much of the language is proper names and places that very little is actually translatable. Deciphering the phrase “Darmok and Jalad” turns out to be the elusive Rosetta Stone for the language of this newly discovered species (though “alien,” they are uncannily humanoid; the Star Trek imagination hits a wall with any creature that’s not a biped, with a recognizable head and torso), both in the sense that it reveals the language as a series of historical allegories—

Darmock and Jalad are two generals from opposing sides of a great, interplanetary dispute who met in a place called Tanagra—and in that phrase itself becomes an allegory for the plot

1 More recent science fiction series have predicted the fall of global English, having their characters speak a creole of languages more likely to be contenders for the lingua franca of a future world. Notably, the world of Firefly speaks a mixture of Mandarin and an antiquated, frontier English.

246 of the episode. Captain Picard must meet his greatest foe in circumstances of mutual peril and find a shared linguistic bond that will make his foe his ally. In order to accomplish this, he must translate a language made up entirely of historical allusions wielded as allegories for present circumstances. In other words, it is a language like every other.

By inventing an untranslatable language that links every utterance to a rich and complex history of a specific place and people, Star Trek dramatizes the essential contradiction of translation: its imminent, global necessity and its impossibility. How can we understand the other without knowing his culture, his language, his metaphors? And how do we persist in the world without a relationality to others, what Christopher Watkin, invoking

Nancy, describes as the “irreducible primordiality of being-with” (2007, 54).2 The answer to both questions is obvious: we cannot and we must, thus Emily Apter’s daunting list of axioms that begins with “Nothing is Translatable,” and ends with “Everything is

Translatable.” The essayist Dave Barry once quipped that “[t]he best way to learn Japanese is to be born as a Japanese baby, in Japan, raised by a Japanese family” (1992). Setting aside the sarcasm, he is quite right, and yet we go on learning languages that are not our own. The best solution to the problem of Darmok and Jalad would be a time machine that would allow

Picard to return to the moment of linguistic genesis when Darmok met Jalad at Tanagra, then and only then would the phrase resonate with past and present in equal force, the allusion carrying through to the description. Without time travel, the solution is less clear and Picard’s ultimate translation of Darmok comes not from understanding—the complete understanding of being in and of a culture—but from shared lack of understanding, and the sharing of cultural metaphors.

2 Watkin, Christopher. 2007. “A Different Alterity: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Singular Plural.” Paragraph 30:2, pp. 50-64.

247 This project has focused on the role of literature in exploring the inevitable dilemma of translation and presenting form as a way of mediating between the binary of “everything is translatable and nothing is translatable. Such is the primacy of literature in mediating and containing both the translatable and untranslatable in a narrative form that is legible and the carries on despite its contradictions. I have emphasized two key qualities of form in my readings of postcolonial/world literature in this project: negotiation and the unfinishable, both of which describe a particular category of novel that I’ve been calling the translating novel. The two terms are co-dependent—negotiation suggests the unsettling of closed accounts, and the unfinishable must perpetually renegotiate its terms of existence to forestall closure—and together they recondition our relationship to translation.

I began by identifying a formal strategy in the contemporary novel that might, at first glance, be read as a foreclosure of cultural translation. The closed-book of form, the dramatization of incomplete knowledge in our reading, does indeed ask us to reconsider what cultural information we believe we can take away from novels read across boundaries, but the revelation of the closed-book is not the end of understanding. Rather, the encounter with the closed-book forces us to read alongside other readers, with other cultural needs and knowledges, thus beginning a negotiation that is ongoing and always premised upon the

“being in-common,” the coexistence of meaning, without assimilation. My readings of

Phillips, Vladislavic, and Ondaatje show the novel’s engagement with the vitality of translation, that vitality being distinguished not by a transmission of cultural knowledge, but by the back and forth negotiation between knowing and not knowing with no resolution, only negotiation.

248 The translating novel meets the challenge of presenting a world that will be recognizable, in some fashion, to readers from a variety of national and transnational affinities, but never by offering something baldly transparent. I turned to the hoax in Peter

Carey’s fiction as a way of further redefining what it means to be authentic in the context of postcolonial concerns in novels of the globe. As its own particular form of negotiation, the literary hoax holds in tension the notion of authenticity with the inherent inauthenticity of the novel’s form and content. That tension, I argue, produces an uncommon space for cultural knowledge in the novel to be both the “as is,” and “as it might be” of other people and other spaces. Translation, in this context, is what remains as the afterlife of reading once we have abandoned the quest for recognition of the authentic original beyond representation, and turn instead to the way the novel cycles us between many forms and many voices of authenticity. This is nowhere more powerfully dramatized than in Carey’s imagining of the birth of an authentic author to read his fake poems—an orchestrated performance of forms making narrative out of registers both familiar and foreign:

Chubb knew the poem, of course, but nothing had prepared him for this performance of it, the strange and passionate waving of his free arm, the twisting of the head… and the voice, which its original author had always imagined to be some variation of standard BBC English, was here so fierce and nasal, hoarse, ravaged by failure and regret. (81) Ishiguro’s clones further the performance of translation as a negotiation of originality and artificiality, but do so with the spectre of a particular mode of reading the global. The global imaginary, as I have argued, derives from the accelerated movements of technology, people, and culture that define contemporary globalization, and, as such, seeks to authenticate and circulate legible signs of authenticity. In the case of Ishiguro, the global imaginary has consistently attempted to locate a latent Japaneseness in the British writer’s novels, authenticity being predetermined by a Western mode of reading for the cultural

249 original in ethnic British and American writers. The clone, and the novel-as-clone, show

Ishiguro’s experiment with the translating novel as a response to critical methodologies that reduce form to a “fabric of signs,” always signifying identity.

Each chapter of this project has explicitly or implicitly contrasted the needs of the postcolonial and the global for certain kinds of translatable knowledge in the novel. Because

I have primarily explored intra-lingual translation, there is inherently a kind of provinciality to this study. But it is also too easy to mistake a global literature for worldliness, for even the most broad-reaching of novels are still necessarily relying on a principle of comparison where one culture is the primary intertext, and others are secondary, if essentially so. No author dramatizes the problematic of speaking from one position, even when that position has eclipsed others, than J.M. Coetzee.

If, as Franco Moretti would encourage us to believe, the novel is literature’s “first truly planetary form,” always searching for the “right language for the next generation of readers” (2006, 9), are we to understand that the novel is always speaking a different, singular language or that the novel’s form can hold many languages, many forms? My reading of

Disgrace proposes this question to one of the most repugnant narrative voices in postcolonial fiction, David Lurie, who’s narrative imagination lures us into believing that we are simply reading the wrong texts, in the wrong languages, when the problem is much more fundamental. Disgrace does indeed hold many languages and texts, but those texts are insufficient to comprehend the cultural fracture and change that drives much of the novel’s plot and pathos. What remains for us as readers, disabused of the primacy of European intellectual history as the key to reading South African postcolonial trauma, is the assuredness that this story, this translation of a particular moment into a fictional moment,

250 refuses an ending, turns its back not on Africa, but instead on Lurie’s easy readings of the pastoral and the Romantic. If anything is truly disgraced in Coetzee’s novel, it is the idea of the perfective, the closing off of action and thought as an aftereffect of translation.

In the penultimate moments of “Darmok,” Picard begins an unsteady narrative negotiation with his alien counterpart. Upon realizing that the depth and breadth of history concealed within the historical analogy “Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra” extends far beyond his capacities for comprehension, Picard turns away from translation in its most naïve functionality, and offers instead a negotiation of non-negotiables. He begins to recount the foundational epic of Gilgamesh as a way of offering a formal agreement to mutual incomprehension that will, in the end, bridge an understanding of the equal depth of both traditions. Translation has not, in this case, occurred—it is occurring, translating two traditions into neutral ground that refuses a foreclosure of one into the other.

In making a claim for the novel’s complication of the terms and duration of translation, there is the risk of losing the necessity of that complicated, unfinishable process.

The life of the text and its formal negotiations is staked with the vitality of translation, and our willingness to read, often, at a loss for words. And so I leave off this project, for the time being, with the most eloquent call to translate. A call as clear-eyed and resolute as any, even understanding the limits of our capabilities:

How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us…capable of speaking to all human beings. (2011, 241)3

3 Bolano, Roberto. 2011. Between the Parentheses. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. New York: New Directions Books.

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