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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Supriya Nair, Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. x + 171 pp. $34.95.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass."(1)
The twentieth-century dislike (hatred, rather) of colonialism, however, is the rage of Caliban seeing or not seeing his own face in a glass. Yet as the twentieth century draws to a close, one wonders: has Caliban put away his rage? He hasn't put away the "glass"; he is still looking in the Western cultural mirror. But what he sees, or doesn't see, whether it be the typical Eurocentric distortion or, perhaps worse, a Western historical record that simply ignores him, may have ceased to drive him mad.
Of course, it was some thirty years ago that postcolonial intellectuals began wresting "Caliban," as complex symbol, from social satirists like Wilde, much to the irritation of many a recent traditionalist (though perhaps anticipated by James Joyce with his "Patsy Caliban").(2) Soon Caliban ceased to represent Matthew Arnold's nineteenth-century Philistine staring stolidly and stupidly at art. He became, by contrast, an "inaugural figure," the very type of the intrepid colonial victim "who sheds his current servitude and physical disfigurements in the process of discovering his essential, precolonial self."(3) And for years now this new Caliban has walked abroad. Yet as the nineties draw to a close, one notices a new new Caliban on the scene, one who does not "nourish and require" the old so much as upstage him. If the old new Caliban was enraged equally by seeing and by not seeing his face in the Western mirror, the new new Caliban is smoother, cooler, cannier, more pragmatic--less concerned about essences and more aware of the "dangers of chauvinism and xenophobia" (Said 214), for example. One might even think that he had forgotten how to curse. Having hung his rage on a nail, he is trying to get his hands on the mirror for once in a way. These two contemporary Calibans do not have a lot to say to each other, but we may bring both into sharper relief by trying to look at them at the same time.
This stereoscopic task may be undertaken by juxtaposing two recent studies, Supriya Nair's Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History and Michael Gorra's After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie, both of which address putatively key texts of the kind of literature the two authors call "postcolonial." Another conspicuous connection lies in their common attempt to transfigure a long-established Caribbean reputation. But their important commonalities are few. Their chief methods, aims, attitudes, and contributions could not be more at odds. Methodologically, for example, Nair's study comes across as the latest words of the old new Caliban. She attempts to reestablish George Lamming's eclipsed reputation by means of a single-minded survey of Lamming's fiction that is thorough and particular, if achronological, and the book has an urgency about it that suggests serious intellectual and political engagement, resistance, intervention. Gorra's light touch, in contrast, plays over but a few rich episodes, passages, and characters in just a handful of V. S. Naipaul's "long line of books" (96), some fifteen major works, and it is not hard to see a new new Caliban in the relative ease and elegance of the performance. Nair's scrutiny of the Lamming corpus is a riveting, territory by territory; Gorra's chapter on Naipaul, like his chapters on Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie, takes a view long and wide even as it is zooming in upon representative lone figures (Scott's Hari Kumar, Naipaul's Mr. Biswas and Salim, Rushdie's Saleem Sinai).
Among Gorra's chapters it is indeed the one devoted to Naipaul, the very one that would give Nair the most trouble, that will garner most of my attention here. Gorra's remarkable breadth--a Brit, an Indian, and a West Indian--itself suggests the new new Caliban's postnationalist and -nativist approach. Yet that approach is on display most centrally and controversially in the Naipaul chapter. The magisterial Gorra shapes Scott and Rushdie into the before and after of a story whose center is Naipaul, and the chapters devoted to these two authors offer engaging accounts of their major preoccupations. But the Scott and Rushdie chapters (especially the Rushdie, with its fairly predictable discussion of how Rushdie "uses the essential impurity of his own Angrezi to challenge" colonialist and nativist ideologies [140]) offer more cogent consolidation than interpretation remarkably new and original. Gorra's discussion of how Scott creates an imperial version of homosocial panic and rage offers remarkable conclusions about The Day of the Scorpion, especially about the scene in which the British policeman Merrick beats the Anglicized Hari Kumar bloody over a trestle and then, standing behind him, "daubs Hari's genitals with Hari's own blood" (55). In the "act of colonial buggery," Gorra writes, "the British have also buggered themselves" (53, 55). But, again, it is the chapter on Naipaul, which sustains Sara Suleri's recent reconsideration and rehabilitation, that displays the book's sharpest rhetorical edge. That is also the place where one notes the most significant difference between Gorra's achievement and Nair's.
Gorra's edge is likely to be celebrated not...
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