Funny Language in Ishiguro and Roy

In Chow’s essay on comparing international literature, he makes the statement: “Language is the house of being”. A criterion for winning the Booker prize is that the book be written in English; however, some of the winning authors spoke a language other than English first or else are truly bilingual in the sense that they spoke a language in addition to English growing up. Two such authors are Roy and Ishiguro. Can a person who grew up speaking a language other than English truly “write” in English? Some unanswerable questions are, does the author think in a different language, then transcribe the story into English? What gets lost in translation? Both of the novels we read in class by these authors address the issue of language. Mr. Stevens in _The Remains of the Day_ is unable to fully utilize the English language because he cannot “banter”; his language is too perfect. This is symbolic of his inability to access a mode of communication deeper than language. Ishiguro’s novel is hailed as quintessentially British, but is its perfection symptomatic of a lack of something deeper than what is quintessentially British? To the two children in Roy’s novel, English represents the anglophilic problem of their family. The children alone are able to play with and mock the language, and they only can see the permeating nature of their family’s obsession with the English although they are not aware of its repercussions.

-Katie Roberts

Representation in the Postcolonial Exotic

In this paper I will explore the concept of representation in the postcolonial consciousness and the different manners in which Coetzee, Ishiguro and Desai approach it in their novels. According to Rebecca Walkowitz, “Ishiguro is unwilling to reduce his narratives to a single, transparent event because in a world of political interpretations such truth is a kind of deception.” Each of the aforementioned writers approaches representation in their novels in such a way as to dispel such deception. When Ishiguro undoes what is seemingly a national allegory, Coetzee’s symbols are written to be both accepted and rejected immediately and Desai reveals the artificiality of borders in a book spent exploring the idea of nation and identity, the writers are making significant statements about and critiques of representation. “The exotic functions dialectically as a symbolic system, domesticating the foreign, the culturally different and the extraordinary so that the ‘phenomena to which they … apply begin to be structured in a way that makes them comprehensible and possibly predictable” (Huggan). If the Booker prizes “otherness” then these writers attempt to take apart the structure that has made the exotic “comprehensible and possible predictable.” In addition to analyzing each writer’s approach and use of representation, this paper will attempt to relate all to each other and explore how they complicate each others’ work and the contradictions which arise.

- Yasmin Or

Inherit the Earth: Tropes of Body and Land in Two South African Novels

My paper will take on the two dominant tropes of Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: sexual violence and rural conservation. Each novel figures the land as a feminine body and, in turn, the female body as a site of cultivation or plundering, often in ways that make it unclear which of the two is being discussed literally and which figuratively. By doing so, Coetzee and Gordimer imply a complex and troubled relationship between the two things, both as abstract symbols and as actual, physical presences.

In this paper, I’d like to examine the ways in which the authors invoke, further, and even recreate this mythology of the body-as-farm and farm-as-body. In particular, I’d like to suggest that each writer reproduces the historical construct of the rural earth as an “ideal rape victim” in order to show the ways in which this myth is both perennially alluring and violently unsustainable.

We might say that Booker Prizewinners tend to be novels that share three distinct ambitions: literary, political, and cultural. A comparative analysis of The Conservationist and Disgrace will hopefully illuminate the ways in which each of these ambitions is directly in conversation with the tropes of rape and conservation. I will discuss the aesthetic treatments of these tropes, the existence of the novels as artifacts of a distinct (apartheid-era) political moment, and as cultural expressions of the oldest narrative around: Eden and the entry of the serpent.

-Molly Young

The Desert as a Centrifugal Force in The English Patient and In a Free State

My paper takes an image from the film version of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient as a jumping-off point. In a key transition sequence, images of writing morph into images of bodies and then into images of the desert. An interesting relationship between writing, the body, and the desert emerges when these images are considered under a postcolonial context. Both Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) and V.S. Naipaul (In a Free State) structure their novels around an empty space. For Ondaatje, this space is a desert that members of the Geographical Society attempt to map out as part of the colonial project. For Naipaul, this space is a nameless African country which his Western characters perceive as physically and culturally empty. I would like to examine the role these empty spaces play in the larger postcolonial context of each novel. Both novels seem to make a commentary about writing in the process of examining Western perceptions of the desert. Important questions emerge about power structures:  Who has the authority to “mark” bodies or map out spaces? Who controls the resources by which to disseminate information about previously unexplored spaces, and what kind of power dynamic does this set up? The Booker Prize and its system of prizing may serve as another lens through which the relationship between these two texts may be explored.

 

- Sophie O’Connell

Romantic Poetry, Ladies, and Dogs in Disgrace and The Siege of Krishnapur

My paper explores the similarities between J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace by examining the novels’ principle male characters. George Fleury and David Lurie have much in common in terms of their relationships with romantic poetry, women, and dogs. Placed in insolated territories (a compound and a farm), both men are given space for intellectual musings. It is through their “aerial poetic thoughts” that theses “melancholy fellow(s)” reveal their understanding of beauty and the role of females. Lucy Hughes and Lucy Lurie have more in common than just their first names, and it is by examining Fleury and David’s interactions with these two “ruined women” that insight into their characters can be gained. In a tumultuous landscape of mutiny and rape, both men find themselves thrust into the company of canines. The dog’s presence, from Chloë to Bev Shaw’s crippled patients, serve as barking catalysts. Although neither man “particularly cares for dogs,” they find themselves in situations in which they are forced to question their relation to animals. In their endeavors, both men essentially play out the fate of Bhabha’s “mimic man.” Their lofty and romanticized ideals are “almost, but not quite” enough to save them from lives that are both fragile and grotesque. Fleury and David’s relationships with romantic poetry, women, and dogs shed insight on their “melancholy” characters.

Historical Representation in Midnight’s Children and The Inheritance of Loss

My paper considers the way in which traditional historical representation is complicated in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Specifically, I would like to explore how the representation of history in these two novels relates to Graham Huggan’s idea of a “counter-memory” which, he argues, transforms history into “an exotic cultural spectacle.” In doing so, historical facts are disregarded, with the exception of those that can be manipulated and reinvented to meet the ideological requirements of the dominant culture. Both of these novels blur the boundaries between history and fiction and create a narrative space in which histories can be explored and reconfigured. The “counter-memories” developed by both Rushdie and Desai are self-consciously concerned with historical revisionism and enter into direct conversation with the West’s perception of Eastern history. Rather than operating in direct opposition to traditional historical representation however, I would like to argue that both of these works generate novel forms of historical commentary which are amenable to a marketable representation of Indian history.

- Anne van Beuningen

The Role of the Mimic Man in The Inheritance of Loss and The English Patient

In the article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Homi Bhabha posits that the concept of mimicry in post-colonial literature “is constructed around an ambivalence.” Taking into account the ambiguous yet common form of the mimic man in post-colonial literature, my paper will examine how the mimic man is determined in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. The two Booker Prize winning novels transcend the traditional standards of mimicry and the idea of “almost the same but not white,” in that they both deal with racial hierarchies beyond the traditional colonizer versus colonized relationship. For example, Ondaatje’s English patient is Eastern European, which creates a white versus white conflict, while the character of the Judge in Desai’s novel is an English educated Indian living in a predominantly Nepalese village. The idea of ethnic hierarchy is implicit in the concept of mimicry, but I will explore whether the texts are able to undo this racial hierarchy or whether they simply perpetuate it.

Katie Jennings

Exoticism in Reverse: Perceptions of the British in Post-Colonial Novels

Graham Huggins defines exoticism as a “mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders people, places, and objects strange even as it domesticates them.” While this concept usually refers to the perception of Eastern cultures by Western society, aspects of English culture are often exotified in post-colonial literature. The characters of novels such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things or V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State marvel at the language, clothing, and culture that they associate with Westerners. In this paper, I would like to explore the way in which common English words and objects are treated by non-English characters. I would also like to compare the point of view of foreigners to the point of view of a child, depicted in Roddy Doyle’s novel Paddy Clarke Ha ha ha. In both situations, aspects of Western culture are misinterpreted and glorified under the assumption that this lifestyle is superior. Whether the end result is disappointment or a confirmation of this view, each of these novels offers its British readership an opportunity to wonder at and question what they consider ordinary.

–Alexandra Dreyzin

The Architecture of Language in The God of Small Things and The Inheritance of Loss

My paper considers the structural and formal language choices in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Both novels use architectural forms and motifs to construct a story of boundaries and permeation, where the language itself mimics the buildings and homes so central to the novels—the once-grand mansions of Jemubhai and Mammachi, Biju’s basements, Velutha’s cabin, and the History house-turned hotel. As a political revolution threatens the privileged positions of the hybrids Jemubhai, Noni and Lola, and a tragedy in Kerala creates a Sophie mol-shaped hole in the universe, the language itself dissolves and decays, as boundaries become artificial, no longer able to contain the bursting life within them. For two novels with such an investment in space—movement and mobility, negative space and holes, even the separation between individuals—I plan to research the ways that language can be read as another sort of space, an architectural creation, that combines fragments—sentences, words, punctuation—like building materials. Timothy Brennan’s notion of the novel as “a clearly bordered work of art that was crucial in defining the nation as an ‘imagined community’” can be directly applied to these novels, where the creation of houses, a mini imprint of the nation, is constructed through words themselves. 

-Allison Zimmer

Past, Present, Future

Time plays a significant role in The Inheritance of Loss. Just as the theme of being borderless pervades the ideas of identity and culture, it manages to pervade the concept of time. The past, present and future all mesh into one another, and we come to understand the importance of the present through what the characters inherit from the past.

On Sai’s first night at Cho Oyu, “she had a fearful feeling of having entered a space so big it reached both backward and forward in time” (39). This is an apt description of how I felt while reading this book. In this prodigious novel of Desai’s, time has become a fluid thing, allowed to mix with the waters of the past and future. However, it is what each character brings from the past – their inheritance – that shapes their present circumstances.

Sai’s grandfather, the judge, is both a despicable and tragic figure. The prejudicial treatment and rejection he experienced while studying at Cambridge return him to India a changed man. “He envied the English. He loathed Indians. He worked at being English with the passion of hatred and for what he would become, he would be despised by absolutely everyone, English and Indians, both” (131). When we meet the judge he has already lost his place in India and is living a crumbling existence. Cho Oyu, the house of grandeur past, built by a colonizing Scotsman, is being slowly eaten away from the inside by termites. Similarly, the judge is slowly wasting away. The English ideals he strove to embody alienated him wherever he went and in the end, he became a shell of a man, chained to the ghosts of his past.

Sai, at just sixteen, has already inherited a loss of significant proportions. She lost both her parents as a small child and now she has lost a love. But her most significant inheritance, in my mind, is from her grandfather. The alienation she feels from both the East and the West.

“Sai arrived and [the judge] was worried that she would incite a dormant hatred in his nature, that he would wish to rid himself of her or treat her as he had her mother, her grandmother. But Sai, it had turned out, was more his kin that he had though imaginable. There was something familiar about her; she had the same accent and manners. She was a westernized Indian brought up by English nuns, an estranged Indian living I India. The journey he had started so long ago had continued in his descendants” (230).

Straddled between cultures of the East and West, she has inherited a space that belongs nowhere. It is what ultimately drives her from Gyan, but more importantly, it is a conflict of identity that prevents her from understanding herself. Again, the past is inextricably bound up with the present and even the future, since it is a conflict Sai will have to resolve in order to understand herself.

-Yasmin