Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (142 page)

In his films, Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) embodied a bit of Desai, a part of Narayan, and aspects of Rushdie and Naipul, and this is because he was more than a filmmaker. He was a commercial artist, a book designer, an author of children’s books and science fiction, and a celebrated musician. He began as a filmmaker when, in 1945, he was asked to illustrate a children’s version of a popular novel,
Pather Panchali.
³⁷
Ray had the idea instead of turning the novel into a film; he set about it with no experience of filmmaking, trying his hand at weekends (it never had a proper script).
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The project took ten years and was only finished after Ray several times ran out of money, when the Bengali government stepped in with funds.
³⁹
Despite its unpropitious beginnings, the film was a triumph and became the first in a trilogy of trilogies, for which Ray became famous: the Apu Trilogy (
Aparajito
, 1956, with music by Ravi Shankar, and
The World of Apu,
1960), the Awakening Woman trilogy (including, most notably,
Charulata,
‘The Lonely Wife,’ 1964, still very popular), and a trilogy of ‘city’ films, which included
The Middleman
(1975).
⁴⁰
Ray’s films have also
been described as a mixture of Henry James and Anton Chekhov, though they are marked by an emotional generosity that James, certainly, rarely showed. But the strength of Ray lies in his telling of ordinary stories (of a family trying to survive, in
Pather
; of an affair between a woman and her husband’s young cousin, in
Charulata
; of a businessman expected to provide a client with a woman in
The Middleman)
in extraordinary detail, lovingly observed. His biographer has pointed out that there are few, if any, villains in Ray’s world because he sees everyone’s point of view. Ray was just as aware of India’s failings as the other writers, but he seems to have been more comfortable with the contradictions.
⁴¹

The award of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Nigerian writer and dramatist Wole Soyinka, and then to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, in 1991, the same year that Ben Okri, another Nigerian, won the Booker Prize, shows that African writing has at last been recognised by what we may call the Western literary ‘establishment.’ At the same time, contemporary African literature has nothing like the same following, worldwide, as does Indian or South American literature. In his
Myth, Literature and the African World
(1976), Soyinka, who had studied in Britain and read plays for the Royal Court Theatre, did his best to make many fellow writers more visible in a Western context.
⁴²

Soyinka was trying to do for literature what Basil Davidson had done for African archaeology, not just in the book referred to but in his own poetry and plays. In fact, it was Soyinka’s choice of literature – in particular theatre – that finally won the Nobel Prize for him, rather than for Chinua Achebe. (Achebe’s novel
Anthills of the Savannah
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.) Soyinka was part of the generation of brilliant writers who studied at Ibadan University College in the period before independence, together with Cyprian Ekwensi, Christopher Okigbo, and John Pepper Clark, some of whose works he covered in
Myth, Literature and the African World.
In that book, his secondary aim, after rendering these writers visible to an international audience, was to do two things: first, to show black African literature as its own thing, having themes in common with other great literatures, and just as rich, complex and intelligent. At the same time, Soyinka, in discussing such entities as Duro Ladipo’s Yoruba plays, or Obotunde Ijimere’s
Imprisonment of Obatala,
or Ousmane Sembene’s
God’s Bits of Wood,
stressed the particular strengths of African literature, the ways in which it differs from its Western counterparts.
⁴³
Here, he stresses the
collective
experience of ritual, the way the individualism of the West is alien to African experience. In the African social contract, community life comes first, and Soyinka explains the impact of ritual by analogy at one point, in order to bring home how vivid it is: ‘Let us say he [the protagonist in a story] is a tragic character: at the first sign of a check in the momentum of a tragic declamation, his audience becomes nervous for him, wondering – has he forgotten his line? Has he blacked out? Characters undertake acts on behalf of the community, and the welfare of the protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community.’
⁴⁴
Soyinka’s point is that whatever story is set out in African literature, the
experience
is different.

Soyinka is both a creative writer and a critic. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, literary and cultural criticism has been both exceptionally fertile and exceptionally controversial. This is particularly true of three areas, all related: postcolonial criticism, postmodern criticism, and the development of the discipline known as cultural studies.

In postcolonial criticism two figures stand out: Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Across several works, but especially in
Orientalism
(1978),
Covering Islam
(1981), and ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, (1986), Said, writing as a Palestinian academic on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, explored the way the Orient’ has been conceived in the West, especially since the beginning of ‘Oriental studies’ early in the nineteenth century.
⁴⁵
He examined the writings of scholars, politicians, novelists, and even painters, from Silvestre de Sacy, whose
Chrestomathie arabe
was published in 1806, through Gustave Flaubert, Arthur James Balfour, and T. E. Lawrence, right up to academic books published in the 1960s and 1970s. The jacket of his title shows a young boy, naked except for a large snake wrapped around him, standing on a carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. A detail from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s
Snake Charmer
(1870), it illustrates Said’s argument exactly. For this is an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and oversimplification. Said’s argument is that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practised in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. In this way the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an imaginative demonology of ‘the mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational. Said shows that de Sacy was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In
Madame Bovary,
Emma pines for what, in her drab and harried bourgeois life, she does not have – ‘Oriental clichés: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on.’
⁴⁶
In Joseph Conrad’s
Victory,
he makes the heroine, Alma, irresistibly attractive to men – by the mid-nineteenth century, the name evoked dancers who were also prostitutes. But, Said reminds us,
Alemah
in Arabic means ‘learned woman’; it was the name used in Egyptian society for women who were accomplished reciters of poetry. Even in recent times, says Said, especially since the Arab-Israeli wars, the situation has hardly improved. He quotes a 1972 issue of the
American Journal of Psychiatry
in which an essay entitled ‘The Arab World’ was published by a retired member of the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence. In four pages, the author provides a psychological portrait of more than 100 million people, across 1,300 years, using exactly four sources: two books, and two newspaper articles.
⁴⁷
Said stresses the sheer preposterousness of such an exercise, calls for a greater understanding of ‘Oriental’ literatures (which he shows to be sadly lacking in Oriental departments in Western universities)
and allies himself with Clifford Geertz’s approach to anthropology and international study, in particular his notion of ‘thick description.’
⁴⁸
As with the views of Martin Bernal on the African origins of classical civilisation discussed in the next chapter, Said’s arguments have been fiercely contested by distinguished orientalists such as Albert Hourani.

As a critic, an Indian, and a woman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has become one of the more prominent postcolonial writers, perhaps most influential as one of the editors of the celebrated journal
Subaltern Studies.
This word,
subaltern,
neatly ironical, refers to that low rank of the army, especially the Imperial Army of Britain, which was subordinate to the officer class – so low, in fact, that if a subaltern wanted to speak, he (always a he) had to ask permission. Subaltern studies is a variety of historiography that is frankly revisionist, seeking to provide an alternative history of India, a new voice somewhat analogous to the British Marxist historians, retelling the story ‘from the bottom up.’ Gayatri Spivak, who like Rushdie, Desai, and so many other Indian intellectuals, divides her time between India and the West, combines an essentially feminist view of the world with neo-Marxist flavouring derived from Derrida and Foucault.
⁴⁹
The chief achievement of this group has been, first, gaining access to the raw material of the Raj, without which no revision would have been possible, and second, confronting what many have regarded as the failure of Indian culture to hitherto produce a rival system to the British one.
⁵⁰
In historiography, for example, subaltern scholars have revisited a number of so-called mutinies against the British when, according to the imperial accounts, ‘bands’ of ‘fanatics’ rose up and were defeated.
⁵¹
These are now explained in terms of contemporaneous religious beliefs, marriage/sexual practices, and the economic needs of empire. Five volumes of
Subaltern Studies
were published in the 1980s, to great acclaim among scholars, providing an alternative historiography to what is now called colonialist knowledge.
⁵²

Underlying much of the postcolonial movement, not to mention the postmodern sensibility, was a phrase that the American critic Fredric Jameson gave to one of his books in 1981,
The Political Unconscious.
⁵³
Postcolonial and postmodern criticism derived much of its strength from Raymond Williams’s earlier arguments that ‘serious’ literature should not be read in any way different from popular literature, and that the same is true of all art. This position was set out most fully in two celebrated articles published in
New Left Review,
one in 1984 by Jameson, entitled ‘Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’ and the other, in 1985, by Terry Eagleton, professor of English at Oxford, entitled ‘Against the Grain.’ Jameson’s argument was that all ideologies are ‘strategies of containment,’ which enable a society ‘to provide an explanation of itself which suppresses its underlying contradictions.’
⁵⁴
The certainties of the nineteenth-century novel, for example, were designed to reassure the middle classes that their orderly class system would endure. Hemingway’s novels, on the other hand, with their spare, short sentences, obsessed with machismo, had to be set in exotic foreign countries because he couldn’t fit into America’s self-image as a complex, technologically sophisticated society. Jameson’s second
major argument was that the postmodern sensibility was by the mid-1990s not merely one way of looking at the world but the dominant one, and that this was because it was the logical outcome of late capitalism.
⁵⁵
In this late stage, he said, society has finally abolished the distinction between high culture and mass culture – we have instead a culture that many decry as ‘degraded’ but younger people espouse enthusiastically: kitsch, schlock, pulp fiction and TV,
Reader’s Digest.
The first to appreciate this was Andy Warhol. The point, Jameson says, is that late capitalism recognises that art is, above all, a
commodity,
something to be bought and sold.

Eagleton was more aggressively Marxist. The distinction between high art and popular/mass art was one of the oldest certainties, he said, and the fact that it has been undermined is an aid to the socialist, because it helps ‘expose the rhetorical structures by which non-socialist works produce politically undesirable effects.’
⁵⁶
In late capitalism, Eagleton writes, commodities have become fetishes, and he includes artistic commodities with the others. This is a new aesthetic category with no precursors.

Critics like Jameson and Stanley Fish, his colleague, then at Duke University in North Carolina and now at the University of Illinois in Chicago, paid as much attention in their work to other media besides books – that went without saying. Films, television, comic books, advertising … all these were systems of signs.
⁵⁷
The early work of Raymond Williams, postcolonialism, and postmodern literary theory, together with the theories of such French authors as Barthes, Lyotard, Lacan, Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, plus the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, therefore came together to create a new discipline, cultural studies. This is not the same as media studies, but they both stem from the same impulse. The fundamental idea behind both is, as was mentioned above, and to return to Jameson’s phrase, the political unconscious – that works of the imagination are not ‘privileged’ in any way, to use the favoured term, that they are just as much a product of their context and environment as anything else, are subject to market forces, and therefore cannot avoid having an ideological or political angle. It is the aim of cultural studies to render this hidden agenda visible, peeling away one of the final layers of self-consciousness.