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Volume 1: Imaginative Promptings: on 'Translating' Volume 1: Imaginative Promptings: on ‘translating’ Paul et Virginie Volume 2: Genie and Paul: A Novel Natasha Soobramanien PhD in Creative and Critical Writing University of East Anglia Faculty of Arts and Humanities September 2010 Abstract This thesis comprises a novel, Genie and Paul, and a critical commentary which posits Genie and Paul as a ‘translation’ of J. J. H. Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s, Paul et Virginie, an eighteenth-century French novel set in colonial Mauritius. Genie and Paul explores its British Mauritian protagonists’ complex sense of cultural identity, with reference to Paul et Virginie, a novel of great personal significance to me. In my critical commentary, I explore the ways in which my novel creatively engages with Paul et Virginie, and make a case for using the term ‘translation’ to define my rewriting of it, with reference to the growing body of postcolonial literary translation theory. I examine the significance of Paul et Virginie to the development of my identity as a writer, and argue that my ‘translation’ is an effective method of negotiating my complex relationship both to Mauritius, and to the European literary canon. I contextualise this discussion by looking at writers who share a similarly equivocal relationship with their cultural background, chiefly V.S. Naipaul and Pankaj Mishra. I consider how these writers’ backgrounds inflect their respective relationships with literary tradition, and examine the strategies they have employed to negotiate this. Whereas Naipaul has been initially reluctant to admit to literary influences, Mishra overtly acknowledges his in The Romantics, his autobiographical first novel. I show how this novel is a ‘translation’ of a key text in Mishra’s personal canon, Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, and I use this discussion as a model for the analysis of my own ‘translation’ of Paul et Virginie. 2 Contents Volume 1: Imaginative Promptings: on ‘translating’ Paul et Virginie Introduction 6 Chapter One 1. Looking for a model 9 2. A translated being 10 3. An act of faith 12 4. Naipaul’s search for a tradition 14 5. Disowning and owning tradition 18 6. Gained in translation 22 Chapter Two 1. Introduction 23 2. Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics 23 (i) Translation and new writing in India 24 (ii) A tale of two readings 27 (iii) Reading and translation in Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics 28 (iv) Reading as translation 34 (v) The Romantics as translation of A Sentimental Education 35 - Characterisation 36 - Irony and point-of-view 37 - Thematic translation 39 2. Translating experience: ‘Benares: Learning to Read’ 41 (i) Translating experience into myth 43 (ii) Self-mythology and the writer’s autobiographical narrative 45 (iii) ‘Why are you Indians reading these Americans?’ 48 (iv) Cosmopolitan postcolonialism: creating a new tradition 49 Chapter Three 3 1. 1995: the personal and the political 54 2. Genie and Paul: from the personal to the political 56 3. Paul et Virginie: a brief overview 57 4. Paul et Virginie and Genie and Paul 59 5. Translating Paul et Virginie 60 (i) Structure, style and voice 60 (ii) Characterisation and narrative 63 (iii) Themes 65 6. Paul et Virginie in Genie and Paul 67 Conclusion 71 Bibliography 77 Volume 2: Genie & Paul: A Novel 80 4 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the generous support of my first reader, Luke Williams. I also wish to offer my thanks to Andrew Cowan and John Thieme, my supervisors, and to my good friends, Richard Misek and Caroline Woodley. Thanks are also due to my family. 5 Volume 1: Imaginative Promptings: on ‘translating’ Paul et Virginie Introduction ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ is what its title says. It is not an autobiography, a story of a life or deeds done. It is an account of something less easily seized: my literary beginnings and the imaginative promptings of my many-sided background.1 This critical commentary is an examination of the relationship between my novel, Genie and Paul, and the eighteenth-century French pastoral romance, Paul et Virginie2 by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Genie and Paul is a rewriting, or, as I will show, a kind of translation, of this text. In this commentary I will explore how the ‘imaginative promptings’ of my own ‘many-sided background’ informed the writing of my novel. I will present this discussion in the context of a broader consideration of the writerly impulse as a combined series of ‘imaginative promptings’ emanating from the proto-writer’s sense of cultural complexity, or even confusion. When I set out to write an account of the relationship between my own novel and Paul et Virginie, I soon realised it was an exercise in post-rationalisation: it is only since completing Genie and Paul that I have been able to consider the critical issues involved in its writing – my reasons for writing it, the decisions I made during the writing process, and the techniques I employed to realise it. This post-rationalisation involved ever deeper levels of regression: in considering the relationship which exists between Genie and Paul and Paul et Virginie, I was obliged to consider my personal relationship with the original text, and in so doing acknowledge the role it had played in my development as a writer: representing, perhaps, one aspect of the ‘many-sided background’ which has led me to become a writer. Or perhaps, since I have used this text as the basis of my first novel, arguably an ‘imaginative prompting’ itself. 1 Naipaul, V.S., ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’, in Literary Occasions: Essays, (London: Picador, 2003), p. 55 2 St. Pierre, Jean-Jacques Bernadin Henri de, Paul et Virginie, (Paris: Louis Janet, 1924) 6 At this point, I stopped looking back. I started reading essays by writers examining their experiences of becoming writers, and of writing their first novels. That I should gravitate towards self-reflexive writers is no surprise, given my undertaking here. Three of these writers in particular seemed to articulate, in different ways, experiences and approaches with which I could closely identify: V.S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi and Pankaj Mishra, writers whose fiction I was already familiar with, and whose sensibilities appealed to me. It was at this point I realised my exercise in post-rationalisation, originally intended to explore the links between my first novel and a book I read as a teenager, Paul et Virginie, was in fact leading me to consider links between more fundamental concepts relating to my writing practice: concepts found in the work of these writers, who collectively had triggered in me a realisation regarding these ‘links’. These concepts could be characterised as literary tradition, cultural identity, literary influence and the notion of the writerly vocation. This commentary, then, is a setting out and an examining of these concepts, and a tracing of the relationship between them; a kind of literary or intellectual genealogy of Genie and Paul and its ‘many- sided background’. In Chapter One I will examine briefly what the above writers share in terms of approach and ideology and the extent to which I identify with these. To be a writer of literary fiction is to have a sense of literary tradition – the notion that one’s practice is part of a continuing conversation with existing work. I will argue that these writers share to some degree a problematised sense of literary tradition and will consider the extent to which this is attributable to their respective cultural identities. I shall also explore the extent to which this tension between literary tradition and cultural identity has impacted on their work, before discussing my own position in this regard. I will look at the role that formative reading experiences have played in the development of these writers’ sense of literary tradition (it perhaps worth nothing that all three writers discuss their formative reading experiences), and in my own, and will examine the related concept of the writer’s personal canon: the selection of books which a writer acknowledges as an influence – direct or otherwise – on their work. I will establish the extent to which writers whose practice has been informed by a problematised sense of literary tradition might arguably form a tradition of their own, and the extent to which I might situate my own practice within this tradition. The concepts outlined in Chapter One – literary tradition, cultural identity, 7 formative reading experiences and the personal canon – form a tributary of themes which feed into the central theme of Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics3: reading as an act of cultural translation, or, as I will later show, an act of cannibalistic translation. In Chapter Two, I will offer a close examination of this theme as it plays out in Mishra’s novel, with reference to the actual act of ‘cannibalistic translation’ which I believe the text itself effects: The Romantics heavily references Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education4. I will argue, with reference to Mishra’s essay, ‘Benares: Learning to Read’, that Mishra’s appropriation of Flaubert’s novel itself constitutes an act of cannibalistic translation. In defining the parameters of the relationship between the two texts, I will establish a critical framework for discussing in detail the relationship between my own novel and Paul et Virginie, which will comprise Chapter Three. 3 Mishra, Pankaj, The Romantics, (London: Picador, 1999) 4 Flaubert, Gustave, A Sentimental Education, trans. Douglass Parmée, (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1989) 8 Chapter One 1. Looking for a Model There is a type of literary writer who is characterised by a certain self-consciousness, a pronounced sense of vocation, a preoccupation with what it means to be a writer5. Such writers may be identified by their habit of writing almost compulsively – in the sense that the confessional often gives off the whiff of compulsion – about their own practice.
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