Introduction Chapter 1
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Notes Introduction 1. Heidegger’s connection with fascism in the early 1930s (latest revealed in anti-Semitic expressions in the newly published black notebooks), remains problematic indeed. Yet at the same time Heidegger’s anti- ideological and life-affirming philosophy of Dasein, Being, place, lan- guage, and literature also remains strikingly incompatible with fascist ideology and biopolitics. Over the years, accusations of Heidegger as fascist and an anti-Semite have been met with as many defenses by friends, former students, intellectuals, and philosophers (influen- tial names on the accusing side include Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Emanual Levinas, while defenders include Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and (also his lover) Hannah Arendt). Chapter 1 1. Eric Prieto has recently made a brief survey of the role of place and space in postcolonial studies. He points to a “discursive emphasis” in postcolonial studies, or “a form of discursive critique” that characterizes the field with its “focus on the ideological machinery of colonialism and its legacy” (Prieto, 2012, 154). According to Prieto, the “discursive turn” in postcolonial studies began with Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 (Prieto, 2012, 142). However, Prieto does not mention the phenomenologically oriented approaches to literature that will play a role later in this study (Walcott, Harris, Dennis Lee, and others). 2. I am speaking here of theory and literary readings and not the art itself. Although the sensuous body and body–place relations (as some- thing more than cultural–political relations) are commonly overlooked in contemporary analyses of postcolonial literatures, it invariably plays a role in postcolonial works of art (including works in-between the colo- nial and the postcolonial, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Blixen’s Out of Africa) and is frequently quite prevalent in the literary criti- cism of a range of writers themselves (accordingly, the topo-poetics that inspires the literary analyses to follow later will blend with ideas of place, body, and literature as expressed by writers like Patrick White, Dennis Lee, Wilson Harris, and Derek Walcott). 248 Notes Chapter 2 1. Salman Rushdie demonstrates this brilliantly in The Satanic Verses,ina memorable scene in which immigrants come to appear—perceptually— in the physical shape of racist stereotypes produced by English imperi- alist nationalism (Rushdie, 1988, 164–69). 2. We may appreciate deconstruction as a critique of interpretation too. It challenges any assumption that we can ever arrive at final meanings in language and in that way exposes the interhuman power relation involved in defining and interpreting each other and the world’s phe- nomena. The only problem here is that deconstruction generally leaves us with a human–world relation that seems as disembodied as ego-logic regimes of meaning-production. One meaning is challenged by many meanings, shifting, unruly meanings, or deferred meanings, which is not caused by the influence of a reality outside the ego, but, precisely, to borrow a fine explanation from Simon Critchley, by the “linguistic idealist” position “that there is no (or there is no reference to) a subject- independent reality prior to language or discourse” (Critchley, 2004, 225). See also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s The Production of Presence (2004) for a criticism of Western meaning-culture and the hermeneu- tics of interpretation coupled with an exploration of the ways in which art affects us bodily and affectively (Gumbrecht, 2004). 3. Dufrenne suggests that we make a distinction between culture and ide- ology: whereas culture interrelates with nature, this is not the case with ideology (Dufrenne, 1976b, 126; 1972, 130–33). Chapter 3 1. Mignolo explains this a little further: “Although Kant insisted that knowledge starts from the senses and experiences, he assumed that there was a universal formula and therefore that all human senses and experiences would lead to the same reasoning and conception of the world” (Mignolo, 2011a, 187). 2. Mignolo deliberately chooses the term “demodern” and not “postmodern,” as, to him, the postmodern “is still caught into the web of ‘progress and development’ ” (Mignolo, 2012, n.p.). 3. I have chosen not to include the perspective of eco-criticism in this book, although it is of obvious relevance. What I call a topo-poetics easily lends itself to the ongoing endeavor of bringing the different critical fields of postcolonialism and eco-criticism together. With refer- ence to Rob Nixon and Susie O’Brien, Ursula Heise points to a few of several great distinctions in the general orientations of the two fields: eco-criticism favors place and the wild, while postcolonial criticism is generally more concerned with issues of displacement and metropoli- tan locales; eco-criticism tends to investigate human–nature relations Notes 249 (while forgetting the historical perspective), postcolonial studies tend to examine human–human relations with extreme attention to the importance of history and with a preference for post-structural anal- yses of identity (while forgetting human–nature relations); and, finally, eco-criticism is oriented toward local–global interrelations, while post- colonialism emphasizes local–global tensions and disruptions (Heise, 2010, 253). Clearly, the current study of topo-poetics opens a sphere within which these different orientations can meet. It also clearly shares Heise’s belief that if “the aesthetic transformation of the real has a par- ticular potential for reshaping the individual and collective ecosocial imaginary, then the way in which aesthetic forms relate to cultural as well as biological structures deserves our particular attention” (Heise, 2010, 258). Chapter 4 1. Westphal’s reference to a “plurality of perceptions of space” makes a dif- ference here. It would tally with a topo-poetic reading to the extent that perceptions of space are not produced by “systems of represen- tation” only but in the interaction of “systems of representation” and the influence on such “systems of representation” by the preconceptual phenomenality of things and places. 2. Dufrenne says the same thing in a different way: “the word is a sign, but it is more than a sign. The word simultaneously says and shows, and what it shows is different from what it says” (Dufrenne, 1953, 126). The way Dufrenne reads nouns poetically in poetry may in many cases go for the novel as well: Poetically, nouns “evoke” more than they “name,” they “create an atmosphere” (Dufrenne, 1976b, 124). But as Dufrenne’s formulation indicates (“evoke,” “create atmosphere”), we must listen to something else than what the noun says (“names”), its verbal meaning, what it is meant to say. We must listen, or sense the “more” of its evocation in a silence beyond or, rather, next to the “clatter” of its conceptual or sociocultural meaning. Chapter 5 1. Coetzee’s novel in this way illuminates Judith Butler’s analysis of the biopolitics as arising in a society from a group’s renouncement of its own vulnerability or the natural precariousness that all humans share. A social group’s renouncement of its own vulnerability comes with a perpetual need to “immunize itself against the thought of its own precariousness” (Butler, 2010, 48). Immunization or denial of vul- nerability takes form as “a fantasy of mastery” (Butler, 2006, 29): an extreme self-possession, bent on immunizing itself against any- thing that may disturb its unified self-image. Acts of violence become 250 Notes essential, directed against all kinds of perceived or imagined threats, accompanied by the assertion of one’s “own righteous destructive- ness” (Butler, 2010, 48). Sociopolitical differentiations are created, resulting in “precarity” (a greater exposure to physical suffering and death in some social groups for the benefit of greater security in other social groups). In reaction against the “fantasy of mastery,” Butler observes how “we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bod- ily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own,” and acknowledging one’s own natural vulnerability (precariousness) can in this analysis produce the desire for nonviolent inter-relations (Butler, 2006, 28). 2. The original text is of course in Afrikaans and Coetzee renames the land in Afrikaans. As I am dealing with the English text, I will look at English as the language of imperial conquest, but the general observa- tions I make about imperial signification could also be made in analyses of Afrikaans as the language of conquest. Chapter 7 1. Boehmer notes how the local synecdocially signifies the national whole in a number of the prototypes of postcolonial national works: In Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), the Kenyan nation is imagined through the Gikuyu people, any internal differences being masked by “the imperatives of resistance” (Boehmer, 1995, 183). In fact, Ngugi personifies the nation in a single character, Mumbi. The same is the case with Muhdi in Sol Plaatje’s novel of the same name from 1930 (Boehmer, 1995, 98). Chapter 9 1. An article that is often mentioned in relation to Lee’s is Robert Kroetsch’s “Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction” (1974), which reviews Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), David Staunton’s The Manticore (1972), and Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1972). All three of these novels (in Kroetsch’s reading) remarkably explore the “uninventing of the world” (Kroetsch’s key word) to redis- cover more primitive and immediate relations to natural space “beyond thinking” that “uncreates [humans] into existence” and foreclose “the old obsessive notion of identity, of ego” (Kroetsch, 1974, 43, 44, 45). 2. Whereas Coetzee only finds “corrupt and false” writings of the land in South African literature, he has a different experience with Australian landscapes in Patrick White’s writings, and in Voss in particular. In the essay “Homage” (1993), he observes that White is “a writer who could go into the heart of the country and return with a version of that country powerful enough for his readers to believe in and take a lead from” (Coetzee, 1993, 7).