Haunting the Tradition of the Novel : Generic Double Play in Diasporic

HAUNTING THE TRADITION OF THE NOVEL: GENERIC DOUBLE PLAY IN DIASPORIC FICTION by Shan Qiang He B.A., Shanghai International Studies University, 1982 M.A., Shanghai International Studies University, 1985 M.A., Simon Fraser University, 1989 THESIS SUBMlTIED IN PARTIAL FULFLLLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF in the Department of English @ ShanQiang He SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY April 1995 All rights reserved This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. Approval Name: Shan Qiang He Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Title of thesis: Haunting the Tradition of the Novel: Generic Double Play in Diasporic Fiction Examining Committee: Chair: Prof Paul Budra Prof Paul Delany Senior Supervisor Prof Samuel Wong Department of English Prof Paul Matthew St Pierre Department of English Prof Gail Faurschou School of Communication Faculty of Applied Sciences Prof Sneja Gunew External Examiner Department of English University of Victoria Date Approved: April 10, 1995 PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser Universi the right to lend my thesis, pro'ect or extended essay (the title oB which is shown below) to users o f' the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is,understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. v Title of Thesis/Project/Extended Essay Author: (signature) April 13, 1995 (date) iii Abstract Haunting the Tradition of the Novel: Generic Double Play in Diasporic Fiction grows out of an interest in current theories of colonial and postcolonial discourse, especially the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, as well as in global mass migrations and the resulting mixture of cultures that has contributed to the dynamism of new literatures in English. The dilemma for minority literature written under the hegemony of Western culture lies in conflictual impulses around the problem of representation: how to represent the subaltern through generic conventions of the novel that are inevitably implicated in a history of racial and cultural oppression. The dissertation traces this dilemma to the origins of the English novel in the colonial scene of early European modernity, and views the question of representation as a function of literary genealogy and of literary institutions operating without a clear center of authority. It discusses a particular feature--"generic doublesw--indiasporic fiction that plays with novelistic convention in subtle acts of repetition subverted by the specter of difference. More specifically, the project explores generic doubles in four diasporic novelists: Timothy Mo, George Lamming, Hualing Nieh and Salman Rushdie. Mots "realist" novels The Monkey King and Sour Sweet are read into the tradition of the eighteenth century novel, amid the generic expectations of the Bildungsroman, adventure tales and the providential romance and their ideological implications within European modernity, thereby resulting in a kind of cultural aporia between tradition and assimilation, between European "originality" and Third World belatedness. Lamming's The Emigrants is read as an engagement with the vernacular feature in the tradition of the novel. The rise of English vernacular in the eighteenth-century is both democratic in appeal and nationalist in its political construction, a split all the more obvious when inherited by diasporic writers like Lamming who introduces Black dialects into the novel and problematizes its language- constructed, racialized subjectivity. The novel as a cultural product of European modernity is interrogated by the Chinese diasporic woman writer Hualing Nieh in Mulberry and Peach, which, through post-modem schizophrenic linguistic play, explores the juncture between patriarchy and modernity that splits the Chines woman's psyche. The excitement and danger of generic double play are attested to by Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses as the epitome of migrant, diasporic fiction. Rushdie's text consciously mixes styles and genres, and turns both realism and (post)modernism into objects for representation in an attempt to evoke the anti-systemic forces of the migrant communities whose voices are all too easily appropriated in the postmodern age of media manipulation. Turned into a media event itself, however, the text also shows the limitations and the danger in appropriating European avant-garde forms and postmodern techniques. Thus, while the dissertation argues for generic double play as a post-colonial strategy of subversion within the double bind of Caliban's appropriation of Prospero's language, the play itself needs to maintain a supplementary space haunted by the other. Dedication To Ping and Daniel Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to my writing of this dissertation. I want to express my gratitude to my advisory committee for their patient and valuable work, to Paul Delany for his sustaining and nurturing encouragement over many years, and to Samuel Wong for his challenging and stimulating proddings and questions. Malcolm Page suggested the initial reading list of diasporic writers. Seminars with Homi Bhabha and Gayam Spivak at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College (1993) revolutionized my thinking about post-coloniality and diaspora. Intellectual discussions and moral support from my fellow graduate students Chris Bracken, Scott McFarlane, Karlyn Koh, and Glen Lowry proved an invaluable source of joy and discovery. I also want to thank the graduate program of the English Department for various supports, teaching assistantships and awards. Last but not least, my gratitude goes to my wife Ping for taking care of the whole family and giving me the time and leisure for this project over many years. Table of Contents .. Approval.. .......................................................................................... .ii ... Abstract.. .......................................................................................... .ill Dedication .......................................................................................... v Acknowledgments. ................................................................................vi Introduction ......................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Generic Conventions: Mimesis, Mimicry and Cultural Difference.. .........7 Chapter Two: Tradition and Assimilation: Timothy Mo's Agonistic Yin and Yang in Sour Sweet ...........................................45 Chapter Three: Colonial Modernity in Timothy Mo's The Monkey King ..................75 Chapter Four Heteroglossia and Cultural Translation in George Lamming's The Emigrants........................................ ...I 00 Chapter Five: The Woman That Is Not One --The Schizophrenic World in Hualing Nieh's Mulberry and Peach ..... 141 Chapter Six: The Satanic Verses: The Interstitial Space of the Migrant World........... 180 Postscript: The Souls of the Dead .............................................................. 212 Bibliography.. ................................................................................... .222 Introduction Edward Said's recent book, Culture and Imperialism (1993), an overview of colonial and postcolonial discourses from the days of European colonialism and Western empire to the contemporary politics of cultural difference, ends with a section on "Movements and Migrations": As the struggle for independence produced new states and new boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, and vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging structures of institutional power, rejected by the established order for their intransigence and obdurate rebelliousness.... [IJtis no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted hmthe settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. (332) Central to this emergent phenomenon is the post-colonial space "in between," the space of diffbrance as a site of cultural exclusion as well as subaltern resistance through various subject positions. Such key terms as "exilic energies," "the migrant," "the political figure between ..." or "the anti-systematic movements" do not point to yet another institution; instead they are incarnated in the "in-between" figure: the migrant and the artist in exile. It is a humanism qualified by homelessness. If Said's Orientalism exposes the European subjection of the Oriental "other," the migrant's self-subjectivation does not return an unproblematic "humanized" subject. An "in-between" homelessness means the subject is always differingldeferred, though this subject does have a historical specficity in an age of mass migration and displacement, of minority cultural resistance and political alliance across different subaltern subject positions.

Load more