LITR 5734 Colonial &
Postcolonial Literature
Lecture Notes
complete Forster, A Passage to India (through part III, "Temple"; 212-362)
| Orientalism handouts midterms > research postings poetry: Matt Richards for Walcott web review & assignments [break] discuss A Passage to India reading highlight: Cory Owen novel of manners, comedy of manners mysticism and symbolism outcomes?
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Thursday, 6 March: complete Forster, A Passage to India (through part III, "Temple"; 212-362)
· Reading highlight for Passage to India: Cory Owen
· Poetry reading from Walcott: "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" (91)
reader: Matt Richards
· Web review: Partition of India
midterms > research postings
All midterms returned over weekend
Several outstanding submissions, all serious work in unfamiliar areas
A few students responded to instructor’s “midterm notes”
Everyone welcome to follow up throughout semester or later
Most consistent advice: increase the dialogue or back-and-forth between texts, don't bog down in single text
As conclude A Passage to India, trying to take my own advice
Most of your work yet to come—
Purpose of unusual assignment:
require at least some scholarly research in grad course
course lost standard research project / "term paper" when it became summer school offering
recently back to regular semester but haven't restored large research project
course's primary goal is to model intertextual dialogue
careful of disrupting dialogue structure of course with external assignment
could be slacking, but maybe OK for M.A.-level research where most students are working other jobs
same assignment this summer in LITR 5731 Multicultural -- Immigrant
web review & assignments
combining a couple of web reviews, will continue next week
Thursday, 13 March: Begin Train to Pakistan. through page 116 (through Kalyug chapter, up to Mano Majra chapter)
· Web review: Punjab and the Sikhs; Khushwant Singh
· Dialogue between Passage to India & Train to Pakistan
leader: corey porter!
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film highlight: White Teeth (part 1)
presenter: Stephanie Wilcox
First Research Posting Due before or during Spring Break
Thursday, 20 March: No meeting—Spring Holidays
Thursday, 27 March: complete Train to Pakistan (through p. 181)
· Dialogue between Passage to India & Train to Pakistan
leader: Larry Stanley
book highlights: Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine
presenter: Cory Owen
both both classes on Train to Pakistan
bring to class both Train to Pakistan and A Passage to India
dialogue between two novels, but be ready for what we did with Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart--discuss how reading the second novel changes the first novel, or sheds light on it--i. e., dialogue / intertextuality
What was Forster able to see or not see about Indian society? What does Singh see that Forster couldn't?
What survives of the British? (As I recall, no British people actually appear in Train to Pakistan, but the government, the trains, and many off the changing ways are all remnants of British colonialism.)
purpose of Train to Pakistan: postcolonial text in response to A Passage to India
Previous texts in this position:
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1979)
Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997)
Hinduism a polytheistic religion
India a poly-ethnic nation
somewhat like United States in size + democracy
but very different, especially in age of cultures--whole different relation to time
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India |
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The Mutiny of 1857, a. k. a. "The Sepoy Mutiny" or "The Insurrection of 1857"
Partition of India, 1947
student presentation on partition (2005; undocumented)
The Punjab and the Sikhs
Punjab history at Encyclopedia.com
BBC Guide to Religions: the Khalsa
Wikipedia article on the Punjab
discussion: Cory Owen on Passage to India
1b. Historicism: To counter challenges to global knowledge and planetary identity by enhancing knowledge and identifying persistent oppositional themes or identities in cross-cultural dialogues:
1c. To model and mediate the “culture wars” between the “old canon” of Western classics and the “new canon” of multicultural literature by studying these traditions together rather than separately.
And though sometimes at the back of his mind he felt that Fielding had made sacrifices for him, it was all confused with his genuine hatred of the English. “I am an Indian at last,” he though, standing motionless in the rain. 293
Compare to:
“Yes, yes, I made a foolish blunder; despise me and feel cold. I thought you married my enemy. I never read your letter. Mahmoud Ali deceived me. . .I forgive Mahmoud Ali all things, because he loved me.” 302
Compare to:
“Clear out you fellows, double quick, I saw. We may hate one another, but we hate you most.” 322
“Don’t you think me unkind any more?”
“No”
“How can you tell, you strange fellow?”
“Can you always tell whether a stranger is your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are an Oriental.” He unclasped as he spoke, with a little shudder. 311
Compare to:
“You understand me, you know what others feel. Oh, if others resembled you!”
Rather surprised, she replied: “I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them.”
“Then you are an Oriental.” 23
· Web review: Punjab and the Sikhs (Sikhism is one of those many native Indian religions. Khushwant Singh, author of Train to Pakistan, is a Sikh. The novel takes place in the Punjab or "Five Rivers" region, which was divided in Partition of Pakistan and India.)
Train to Pakistan does not enjoy as high a status or cachet as the previous novels, but reasons to include:
It's earlier--published 1956, so very close to actual Partition of India in 1947.
Khushwant Singh, the author, is of the Independence generation; Rushdie and Roy are born at or after Independence
Both Midnight's Children and God of Small Things are therefore postcolonial, but some students complained that the postcolonial era was becoming so broad or spacious that it was losing its specificity
Related problem: students weren't getting sense of actual Partition of India, which was too enormous an historical event to glide over
Train to Pakistan was the best novel I knew of that described events related to the Partition, even though it describes them in something of a backwater area
How do I know about this novel?
In my Master's Degree at Appalachian State in Boone NC in the late 70s I took a course on Literature of India taught by Dr. Donald Franz
I liked the classical traditional Indian literature very well (e. g., Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, Songs to Krishna, Shakuntala), but much of the 20th century fiction wasn't impressive--more like folk tales, with lots of wandering plots and cultural references meaningless to an outsider
But I remembered liking Train to Pakistan better, if only because its prose was plainer (Singh was a journalist) and its plot seemed more focused.
Re-read novel this summer, found the plot a little slower than I remembered it, but still some well-focused scenes and characters, plus a powerful concluding action.
Now I see that it's mostly a guy's novel, but I was a 20-something guy then and couldn't tell the difference
And the story isn't anti-woman as much as women are secondary characters--
Not as great a novel as Things Fall Apart, but character of Jugga is somewhat reminiscent of Okonkwo
I'll try to give you some more information about Indian literature and postcolonial writers.
What I liked better about Train to Pakistan this time:
contrast-conflict between increasingly urbanized intellectual culture and local traditional culture
sense of history happening somewhere else but starting to get closer (compare us and climate change)
comedy and symbolism in A Passage to India
novel
of manners
Forster: novel of manners
From Georgeann's web review:
"The tradition of the novel of manners, with its emphasis on the conventions of a particular group of people in a particular time and place, persists in such works as Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence (1920), John O'Hara's Butterfield 8 (1935), and John Updike's Couples (1967)."
"Forster's fiction, conservative in form, is in the English tradition of the novel of manners. He explores the emotional and sensual deficiencies of the English middle class, developing his themes by means of irony, wit, and symbolism. . . . His last and most widely acclaimed novel, A Passage to India (1924), treats the relations between a group of British colonials and native Indians and considers the difficulty of forming human relationships, of "connecting"; the novel also explores the nature of external and internal reality."
Jane Austen
Edith Wharton
Henry James
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities
7 Hamidullah disagreed, but with so many reservations that there was no friction between them
7
They come out intending to be gentlemen
8 They meant . . .
11 neither a servant nor an equal
43 as if they sought for a new formula which neither East nor West could provide
50 the conventions have greater force
51 go against my class
61 convenient lie; insult?
Moral / ethical significance of manners?
161
their conversation—their civilization; cf. 279
53 the desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God
Novel of Manners partly descended from earlier
Comedy of Manners
Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost
Much Ado about Nothing
Moliere, Tartuffe
The Bourgeois Gentleman
esp. Restoration Comedy
Congreve, The Way of the World 1700
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer 1773
Sheridan, The Rivals 1775
Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest 1895
Barry, The Philadelphia Story 1939
preoccupied with codes of upper and middle classes
manners and conventions of an artificial, highly sophisticated society
satire against wannabes
satire
of aberrations of social behavior
How is A
Passage to India structured as a comedy?
+ what is significance of manners?
Comedy not as humor or ha-ha but rather as a story-pattern or narrative genre with identifiable "conventions"
purpose of question: arguing from / with a working definition
purpose is not to make the example fit, but rather to "measure" the example according to the yardstick, observing how it fits but also how it escapes
genre not a set of rules but a method of description
from the handout
“Narrative genre” refers to the kind of story or plot that a work of literature tells or enacts. The source for such literary criticism is Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), according to which there are four basic story lines:
- Tragedy
- Comedy
- Romance
- Satire
Though distinct, these narratives often work in combination—for instance, romantic comedy. Or an episode of one narrative genre may appear in another, like the comic gravedigger’s scene in the tragedy of Hamlet.
Comedy. This story-line also often begins with a problem or a mistake (as in mistaken identity), but the problem is less significant than tragedy. The problem may involve a recognizable social situation, but unlike tragedy, the problem does not intimately threaten or shake the audience, the state, or the larger world. The problem often takes the form of mistaken or false identity: one person being taken for another, disguises, cross-dressing, dressing up or down. The action consists of characters trying to resolve the problem or live up to the demands of the false identity, or of other characters trying to reconcile the “new identity” with the “old identity.” Comedy ends with the problem overcome or the disguise abandoned. Usually the problem was simply “a misunderstanding” rather than a tragic error. The concluding action of a comedy is easy to identify. Characters join in marriage, song, dance, or a party, demonstrating a restoration of unity. (TV "situation comedies" like Friends or The Cosby Show end with the characters re-uniting in a living room or some other common space.) . . .
from A Passage to India
11 if men refuse to marry . . . .
54 succeed in getting married?
54 succeed in getting married?
235 did she love him? + cave
252 disaster in cave + engagement
266-7 cf. Cave & offer of marriage [comedy]
294 I like you so very much
360 next European war . . . our time
361 India shall be a nation
362 half kissing him
362 holding him affectionately
362 horses didn't want it, swerved apart
Forster as symbolist author?
Forster's development of novel also includes a poetic element, not just in landscape painting, but more in his recurring focus on particular symbols
symbol (sim-bol): a symbol is a word or object that stands for another word or object. The object or word can be seen with the eye or not visible. For example a dove stands for Peace. The dove can be seen and peace cannot.
Symbol. Something that on the surface is its literal self but which also has another meaning or even several meanings. For example, a sword may be a sword and also symbolize justice. A symbol may be said to embody an idea.
+ Symboliste movement in 19c France--influenced by Poe, influenced English authors like Eliot, Forster, maybe Conrad
Echoes,
karma, etc.
196 nothing can be performed in isolation
225 my echo's better
229 she has started the machinery
231 something very old and small--worm itself
237 court to court . . . consequences
254 I am not quite sure
256 something . . .
264 [karma?]
265 x-secrets, x-echo
277 cf. 283 exist not in ourselves but in terms of each others' minds
307 Everything echoes now; there's no stopping the echo. The original sound may be harmless, but the echo is always evil.
34 wasp
38 wasp
321 he remembered a wasp seen he forgot where, perhaps on a stone. He loved the wasp equally
outcomes of symbolism: unifying device, somewhat mystical
Despite the remaining divisions between India and England, a glimpse of a unified future
Compare Whitman in "Passage to India"--insistence on rounding of globe, sense of oneness in larger vision
Bakhtin 297-8 . . . the very movement of the poetic symbol (for example, the unfolding of a metaphor) presumes precisely this unity of language, an unmediated correspondence with its object. Social diversity of speech, were it to arise in the work and stratify its language, would make impossible both the normal development and the activity of symbols within it.
Leftover notes from previous classes
discussion: Betsy on Passage to India
Discussion starter(s) for Passage to India: Betsy Barnes
Ø
In the context of A
Passage to India, why can’t Aziz and Fielding be friends?
Chapter XXXVII
But the horses
didn't want it-they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks
through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the
palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they
issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their
hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.’
Ø
What are specific
examples of culture separating the two friends?
Chapter XXXVI
‘Yes, your
mother was my best friend in all the world.’ He was silent, puzzled by his own
great gratitude. What did this eternal goodness of Mrs. Moore amount to? To
nothing, if brought to the test of though. She had not borne witness in his
favour, nor visited him in the prison, yet she had stolen to the depths of his
heart, and he always adored her. ‘This is our monsoon, the best weather,’ he
said, while the lights of the procession waved as though embroidered on an
agitated curtain. ‘How I wish she could have seen them, our rains.
Chapter XIII
These hills
look romantic in certain lights and at suitable distances, and seen of an
evening from the upper veranda of the Club they caused Miss Quested to say
conversationally to Miss Derek that she should like to have gone, that Dr. Aziz
at Mr. Fielding’s had said he would arrange something, and that Indians seem
rather forgetful. She was over heard by the servant who offered them vermouths.
This servant understood English. And he was not exactly a spy, but he kept his
ears open, and Mahmoud Ali did not exactly bribe him, but did encourage him to
come and squat with his own servants, and would happen to stroll their way when
he was there. As the story traveled, it accreted emotion, and Aziz learned with
horror that the ladies were deeply offended with him, and had expected an
invitation daily. He thought his facile remark had been forgotten.