Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Breaking the spell of magic realism

if we follow this logic, no country should be reduced to metaphors of
anthills, no country should lambast its "giants" no country should
rattle its bones--and all the great writers in africa should hang their
heads in shame. there is no literature when the authors or filmmakers
must dance to the call of the nation-state. when cuba or algeria tried
to impose their regimen on cinema, it impoverished the filmmakers' work.
there is nothing special about a subcontinent that it can't submit to
the critique and be called to shame. i am no fan of naipaul, but i'd
rather have the curmudgeon than have him turn sycophant.
ken

On 10/1/11 7:12 PM, Tracy Flemming wrote:
> TFT CURRENT ISSUE| September 30 - October 06, 2011 - Vol. XXIII, No.
> 33
>
> Books By Catriona Luke
>
> The Booker prize and its literary passengers are approaching their
> sell-by date, says Catriona Luke
>
> Breaking the spell of magic realism
>
> VS Naipaul with his Nobel Prize
>
> Booker time again in London. Oh no. Back in the jug agane (back at
> school, 'jug' is slang for jail) as Molesworth saye. Who says that
> tyrannies and their followers don't come in literary form too. The
> long shadow of the Man Booker prize is most closely associated with
> Salman Rushdie, who also won Booker of Bookers in 1993, and perhaps
> also with VS Naipaul, the magic realist on valium, and neither have
> done more to subvert literary truth and suppress a creative generation
> in Pakistan and India.
>
> The long shadow of the Man Booker prize is most closely associated
> with Salman Rushdie, who won Booker of Bookers in 1993, and perhaps
> also with VS Naipaul, the magic realist on valium
>
> Despite the sales that it brings - 250,000 copies for last year's
> winner - Booker, with its high regard for modernism, has led the
> process as well as inflating literary prejudices and pandering to
> Western illusions. But for a long time before the publishers or the
> judges noticed it has been in decline. The majority of its winners are
> unreadable and the public thinks so too. Who today can remember John
> Berger's G (1972), David Storey's Saville (1976), Barry Unsworth's
> Sacred Hunger (1992), James Kelman's How Late it was, How Late (1994),
> John Banville's The Sea (2005)? A handful of winners have been turned
> into films more successful than the original books: Ruth Prawer
> Jhabvala's Heat and Dust, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day,
> Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark, Michael Ondaatje's The English
> Patient. Yann Martel's The Life of Pi is being filmed in India at the
> moment.
>
> Article Box
> Salman Rushdie - children accept Booker of Bookers prize on his behalf
>
> Salman Rushdie - children accept Booker of Bookers prize on his behalf
> Article Box
>
> Most successfully Booker has sponsored writers who worship the grim
> realism in which they so rarely partake. There's a contradiction in
> writers producing disdainful allegorical satire when their own
> circumstances are so comfortable. Rushdie had been at it a long time
> before a fatwa landed on his head for The Satanic Verses. Having been
> protected by the British state (it cost millions of pounds), in 2000
> he jumped country to the US. His muse, which he found first on Juhu
> beach ("she delivered herself of that astonishing tirade against the
> whole of India, past, present and future" - The Ground Beneath Her
> Feet) kept deserting him, popping up for a time in Britain and then in
> the US, but I think quite a few people have paid quite heavily for
> this artistic peregrination, and none more so than a generation of
> Pakistani and Indian writers.
>
> In the ten years of the new century the Rushdie-Naipaul spell has
> begun to be broken, and in Pakistan before India
>
> No country - think of its ordinary people - really deserves a novel
> called Shame. For better or worse the book bit into Pakistan's
> literary and national psyche; and it pandered to the West's obsession
> with good and evil. Once you had added Naipaul's Beyond Belief, a
> nonfiction interrogation of the "converted peoples", the die was cast.
> A vain hope that Pakistan's description as "the most dangerous country
> in the world" was not compounded by a state department official's down-
> time reading habits in Foggy Bottom, any more than that being short of
> maps the Pentagon used a Lonely Planet guide to draw up plans for the
> invasion of Iraq. (They did.)
>
> In India publishers complain of slush piles twinkling under the sag of
> magic realism fables, but in Pakistan the combined weight of Rushdie
> and Naipaul - although there's a great antidote in Hanif Kureishi's
> Karachi chapter of Dreaming and Scheming, which is concurrent with
> Rushdie - pretty much reduced readers and novelists to a literary
> silence.
>
> Article Box
> Books from the Booker Prize 2009 shortlist
>
> Books from the Booker Prize 2009 shortlist
> Article Box
>
> There's a contradiction in writers producing disdainful allegorical
> satire when their own circumstances are so comfortable
>
> People were inclined to accept, on the basis that what they had to say
> was so dark and painful, that what these authors had written was
> accurate. Time to crack open a few myths. Magic realism always worked
> better in the hands of South American writers, where it sprang out of
> an idiosyncratic Spanish and Portuguese folk-culture conjoined with
> Catholicism. Cold satire even heavy with literary allusion is an odd
> graft-on to the subcontinent's many softnesses and fluidities. The
> political processes may be in turmoil, but Pakistan, India and
> Bangladesh have warm funny people. Rushdie and Naipaul produced novels
> of chill statelessness and dispossession, in fact personal panoramas,
> but with the guns turned outwards to political elites in Rushdie's
> case, and on to the ordinary people in Naipaul's. People believed this
> and worshiped it as high art.
>
> Article Box
> Books from the Booker Prize 2010 shortlist
>
> Books from the Booker Prize 2010 shortlist
> Article Box
>
> Cold satire even heavy with literary allusion is an odd graft-on to
> the subcontinent's many softnesses and fluidities
>
> It isn't the first time that coldness and omniscience have lassoed the
> landscape. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones when it was published in 1749
> was held responsible for two earth tremors that hit London in rapid
> succession on account of its 'fetid foundling' and gentle satires on
> corruption and hypocrisy. Fielding, the most gorgeous and generous of
> men who as a magistrate also got down and dirty among the spittle of
> the poor to reform the legal system, had broken the mould the other
> way, out of the empty political satires of the eighteenth century and
> into a new era of storytelling. For this all hell broke loose. The
> literary edifices of dark satire could not stand the light of humanity
> pouring in through the window. It offended their one-party state.
> Dude, being drop dead cool in the eighteenth century meant being
> cynical and hard-shelled. (Although see if you can spot the 1981 book
> that took this style from Fielding: "Reader, take care, I have
> inadvisedly led thee to the top of a high a hill as Mr Allworthy's,
> and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well
> know. However, let us e'en venture to slide down together, for Miss
> Bridget rings her bell, and Mr Allworthy is summoned to breakfast,
> where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your
> company".)
>
> In the ten years of the new century the Rushdie-Naipaul spell has
> begun to be broken, and in Pakistan before India. With it is going the
> whole post-modernist fug, as well as the most tenuous of geopolitical
> oxymorons - good and evil, wars on terror, great satans, etc. In the
> hands of Pakistani journalists, writers and novelists the whole tone
> has begun to shift. Humane, funny, honest, subtle, moral, inclusive,
> the fire that has caught hold is of a people's spirit, a topic
> resembling garlic to a vampire for Rushdie, Naipaul and Booker.
>
> Rushdie with a book of memoirs to plug has switched to twitter. His
> feed shows, without intention, that literary dictators are also liable
> to tumble, that the once so powerful can finally be reduced to playing
> scrabble with Kylie Minogue, surrounded by groupies. Power and
> ambition, dear reader, are not the exclusive property of the political
> classes.
>
> Catriona Luke is an editor and writer based in London. She can be
> reached at catrionafluke@yahoo.co.uk
>

--
kenneth w. harrow
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu

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