500+ pages later, I finished The Glass Palace sitting in the window of our Beijing apartment building, and I’ll offer some preliminary reflections on the book now. I know Irene has this book, somewhere, so maybe this will be the beginning of a discussion.
First a note on Ghosh and a note on reading Ghosh as an anthropologist. I had the good fortune of having a long coffee with him with two boys in my program in the fall – he was a thoroughly kind, interested, and earnest person, and it was strange reading while also imagining the process of his writing – we talked, of course, about writing. Ghosh was trained as an anthropologist and became a novelist, and his books, I think, are inflected by a particular ethnographic imaginary that is rooted in a long of concerns that seem to leak through like inside jokes in my reading. There are elements of a postcolonial critique, and then, elements of a critique of the postcolonial critique; there is an extreme attention to detail and to the everyday; there is a deep and interesting relationship between the presentation of historical reality and its rendering as fiction. And in this book, there is something almost autobiographical – the book reads in one way as the working-through of a number of family ghosts, a set of questions of different kinds of heritage and inheritance (what if we were to read this with Specters of Marx?) – so already, for me, there is a fascinating question about historical and diasporic memory and the scale-making processes across time by which histories are seized as our own, by which the minutiae of everyday life and the world-historical events of war, revolution, and empire are articulated together, are made in the same process and yet, never fully articulate. But here, then, I’d be interested in wondering what people think about what it is to write history in the form of a novel, and specifically the politics of an authorship that wishes to claim nostalgia without at first making the simple but impossibly difficult move of equating nostalgia with a kind of false recognition or ideological veiling?
The book, then. The book is a history of families, it works the histories of kinship in with the trajectories of empire-making and –breaking, the flow of commodities within and beyond the empire, the complex movement of people and ideas in spaces that are experienced to be ever growing. The empire is a black hole, in that in the making of an imperial space it draws everything into itself. A powerful electromagnetic that has the special capacity to re-orient (the orient?). We start in Burma on the eve of its incorporation as part of British India, head east to Malaya and west to British India, characters travel through Europe and the US, live and die as refugees, escape the Japanese to Calcutta and Singapore. The novel is punctuated by the ordinary tragedies of death and rebirth, which themselves are traced through the dramas of incipient nationalisms, a subtle discussion of perspectives on the empire at the edge of its dissolution, and ultimately becomes a reflection on nation-as-kinship and kinship-as-history.
The relationship between the book and One Hundred Years of Solitude struck me, even as the book’s jacket compares it to Doctor Zhivago (A Doctor Zhivago for the Far East!). Rajkumar Raha and a handmaiden to the exiled Burmese royal family meet, briefly as children, and when Rajkumar makes a fortune by speculating teak and then rubber, he heads to India to search for her. The book traces descent and friendship across the British empire in Asia, starting after the collapse of Burmese sovereignty and ending after WWII, in the meantime, introducing a large cast of surprisingly well-developed characters, Burmese, Chinese, Indian, British, and American, and goes from state to army to plantation to the racialized antagonisms of imperial administration, transposed into the racialist nationalism of independence. The book ends on a strongly moral note – we stand, in the mid 1990s, outside the compound of the house-arrest of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, a 4 page chapter that I find worthy of exploring more – this is where I think a lot of things coalesce, including, I think, a self-consciousness of the book’s inevitable framing as “postcolonial literature,” and thus, a reflection on the temporalities of power and the discursive framings in which times are made and made to overlap.
Aung Sang Suu Kyi appears – “She was almost beautiful beyond belief” (541). When she speaks, “the delivery was completely unlike anything [Jaya] had ever heard. She laughed constantly and there was an electric brightness to her manner./The laughter is her charisma, Jaya thought” (542). Here is where it is – the aged Uncle Dinu, introverted and thoughtful, whose criticism of Indian nationalism is at odds with others in the book (and yet, who is vindicated, ironically, when nationalism turns into fascism and not the expected freedom) notes that she is the only politician he has ever trusted:
“Because she’s the only one who seems to understand what the place of politics is…what it ought to be…that while misrule and tyranny must be resisted, so too must politics itself…that it cannot be allowed to cannibalize all of life, all of existence. To me this is the most terrible indignity of our condition – not just in Burma, but in many other places too…that politics has invaded everything, spared nothing…religion, art, family…it has taken over everything…there is not escape from it…and yet, what could be more trivial, in the end? She understands this…only she…and this is what makes her much greater than a politician” (542).
Two pages from the end of the book! There is much to be commented upon here, especially the imagery of cannibalism, in all of its evolutionary pre-modernity, in its savagery and ruthlessness – but especially in cannibalism as a horrifying vision of a much more pervasive misrecognition of the value of human life. There is, to me, in this statement, a pervasive and glowing humanism and also its antithesis. It is first of all framed in the utopian imaginary of a world beyond the political, a world where everywhere the state, as a merely-human (and therefore in principle unnecessary) superstructure has imposed itself, drawn the multitude of human experiences into its irresistible embrace. There is here a strong parallel between ‘politics’ as an empty signifier and the symbolic-material violence of the Empire itself – that which pervades, that which orients all gazes to itself, which arrogates itself as the node through which all else must pass through to exist.
There is a utopian imagination of the state of nature here – I don’t think Ghosh would necessarily argue that because it seems like what he’s trying to do is rather yearn for a world where there are extra-political time-spaces. And yet – how can we sustain this vision without falling back on some notion of a patchwork of domains, touching without overlapping? Politics, art, religion, related but autonomous? I am conflicted with this – not because I disagree, but because it seems important to be able to argue for separation as a kind of metaphysical-empirical condition, and yet – and yet – what is the force of the political-as-separation in a book that ostensibly has been about the inflection of political, in one way or another, in all facets of life (and of their inflection in this abstract space of the political?). So, it seems like what Ghosh is advocating through Dinu’s reflection on Burmese democracy is a vision of government and self-negation – the state as that which will disappear. Note the deep resonance with some visions of Marxist history, where at the end of history, the state will be grasped only in its obsolescence – state-as-disappearance.
On what can this disappearance be legislated as an ethical/philosophical stance besides the artifice of the political itself? And so, there is a humanist stance here that sees in the dying of politics the liberation of a deeper human essence: to this, I want to say, “Resist!” in that we forget that the human itself is formed in relationship to the political (even if we concede that it is not formed in the political exclusively or worse, that it is formed by the political). And yet, there seems to be another kind of humanism at play which would see the artifice of politics itself as precisely that through which ‘human’ will be expressed, if we are falling back on a deeper vision of the human as a biological under-determination that is endowed with the capacity to create, where creativity and making will be that which limns to gap between human original incapacity and the demand to live.
I’ll stop. After suggesting some more interesting ways of thinking.
The Postcoloniality of the enterprise presents itself as a problem in the text – how do we think Postcoloniality in the mix of perspective that Ghosh offers, none of which necessarily becomes overtly hegemonic in the text?
What is the space- and epoch-making project of the text, and how might we think across and space and time, as Ghosh does, in considering new avenues for critique, but also new possibilities for creation? The latent notion of a radically different cartographic imaginary is at stake in this text, as it is in other texts of his.
Can we think of the relationship between intimacy, love, and duty in the text, as it relates to conflicting registers of filiation and affiliation? The family, the village, the nation, the state, the empire? The self?
Kinship, of course, remains a central engine of the text, but this is a kinship that is filtered through both descent and election, recognition and something that is not quite denial but closer to what Anne-Lise speaks of as the Open Secret.
And lastly, as a consistent concern of mine, I want to ask about mobility in this text, and the space of potential movement defined by the geographic pretensions of Empire, but also the technological innovations of rail and flight, wartime plays of strategic advantage, and the geographies defined by links of blood and friendship.
Sorry!
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