Pankaj Mishra quote

Like many writers of non-western backgrounds in the west, Rushdie had suffered the ambiguous fate of being hastily appointed as a representative and spokesperson of India, South Asia, the "third world", multiculturalism, the immigrant condition – whatever seemed alien and incomprehensible to the white majority. In reality, there was little in common between Rushdie, an atheistic, Cambridge-educated upper-class intellectual from Bombay, and the devout guest-worker from Anatolia (representative of the mostly working-class Muslims of rural origins who had been imported to service Europe's post-war economies), or the Pakistani trade unionist chased out by the torturers of Zia ul-Haq, the CIA-backed radical Islamist who had spent most of the 1980s facilitating an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.

Pankaj Mishra, reviewing Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton in The Guardian

Harlan Ellison quote

We have only to look around us, at the fissures in the rock-wall of our times, to know that we have created for ourselves a madhouse of irrationality and despair. The lunacies of our world erupt daily like boils on the diseased body of civilisation. Is it, hopefully, the reawakening of conscience, or, more likely the refracted pain of denying our souls? 

Alienation.

The keyowrd so easily bandied by sociologists and inept novelists alike. The explanation for racial strife, random violence, mass amdness, the rape of our planet. man feels cut off. He feels denied. he feels alone. He is alienated.

Harlan Ellison, All the Sounds of Fear

'A cliched view of India...'

Another amazon review, from about two years ago:

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Failures...

Geoff Dyer's fiction has never been much concerned with plot. The opening of the second part of his latest attempt pokes fun at this tendency, observing that the phone call which sets in motion the chain of events could have been much more dramatic, could have in fact lent "narrative causality...albeit of a not very novel kind", but is instead only a call from an editor at a perfectly respectable time in the afternoon. Nor has he ever been much interested in character, although previous novels such as The Colour of Memory and Paris, Trance at least made an effort at creating individual characters with at least some semblance of independence from the author. Here there is less of a gap. Jeff is almost Geoff, clearly an extrapolation of parts of his author, although "Needless to say, Jeff's opinions about art are not Geoff's, or not consistently so at any rate," as he puts it in an afterword. So too is the unnamed narrator from the second half, whose narrative voice is so close to his author's that I'm sure I spotted lines reused from Geoff Dyer's own journalism. 

No, the element of fiction Dyer is most interested in lies in the variations, the cultural observations which arise from interacting with both the many writers and artists with which the text is littered, and from a confrontation with a finely observed sense of place. He is most concerned with developing and defining his own particular sensibility, and I suspect a reader's enjoyment of his work will largely depend on their response to that sensibility, one which glories in having taken a life off, and enjoys both the consequent happiness and unhappinesses, the resultant contradictions. There can't be a modern English writer who is quite so in love with the idea of failure. Out of Sheer Rage concludes with the salutary reminder that all such works, studies of the life and work of D H Lawrence and the like, are really nothing more than a means of avoiding confronting the depression he claims to have experienced during the writing of the book. And his earlier fiction, particularly Paris, Trance, similarly celebrates the personal failures of their characters, although in a more lyrical manner. Pleasure is only a means of avoiding the emptiness which underlies everything, and sometimes the pleasure can even reside in giving up and letting go, or at least in the desire to do so. 

He is also, it has to be said, an extremely funny writer.

A fairly short review. If I remember correctly, it was a book for which amazon already had a good number of reviews. I've got a much longer review of Working the Room, which goes into more depth about what I like and dislike about his writing. Hopefully get around to finishing it one of these days.

I notice that my review, such as it is, doesn't mention anything about his depiction of India. The title of this post comes from a piece about looking at all of his work which I think was published around the publication of his most recent collection in the States. I'm unable to find it now, and frankly, can't really be bothered. So I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the general criticism, which I think at least one or two of amazon's reviewers also made, is that the depiction of India is rather stereotyped, full of cliches.

Well, maybe, it's nearly two years ago since I read the book myself, so it's difficult for me to comment. I do though have a memory of reading out a few particularly funny bits to my wife where he describes Varanasi (which she has visited herself) and the part where he compares Hindu mythology to Marvel comics, and she found them all really funny. I think sometimes we can be a bit over sensitive to criticism of a foreign country which someone who actually grew up there just won't see. Or perhaps his depiction of Varanasi really is insulting. Certainly I don't think 'Death in Varanasi' contains anything nearly so insulting as the claim made by one amazon reviewer that the narator of the story is 'going native'. Now that is insulting.

Thinking about colonialism in Robert Silverberg's 'Downward to the Earth'

It's slightly ironic perhaps that the book I was reading whilst writing my previous few posts was Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth, a science fiction novel which is explicitly engaged with issues of colonisation in it's depiction of the alien planet Belzagor and it's sentient alien species the Nildoror and the Sulidoror. Since any consideration of fiction written by British writers about India is in some sense going to be related to issues our history of colonialism in the country. Even Mark Tully's book, in it's autobiographical introduction, contrasts his own position with that of the British who served in the army of clerks which administered the Raj. It was published soon after he left employment with the BBC, so it's understandable that he might have wanted to have set out his reasons for staying in the country rather than returning to Britain, a situation analogous to those British subjects who chose to stay on in India after 1947.

I've read little of Robert Silverberg's work to date, but from reading Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree years ago, around the time when I still thought of myself as primariliy a reader of science fiction, I know that the best period of his fiction was between 1967 and 1976, when he transformed himself from a writer of competent adventure fiction into a much more 'literary' writer, often exploring themes of alienation. 'Sombre period Silverberg' as Aldiss and Windgrove dub it. Both Clute and Nicholls' Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Wikipedia essentially concur with such a view. It's clear from the dates that the beginning of this 'classic period' of Silverberg's fiction coincided with the heyday of science fiction's New Wave. Like Ursula LeGuin, I don't see Silverberg as part of the New Wave exactly, rather they existed more in parallel. In their work, we still have all the old genre stand-bys: spaceships, alien planets and races, lasers, robots, but depicted with a more literary quality of language than most earlier writers in the genre achieved.

In some ways, whilst this begins as a novel explicitly engaged with colonialism, it then becomes something else. It takes place in a world in which it is already implicitly assumed that colonialism is inherently wrong; the human colonists have already withdrawn from the alien world after they discovered that the alien elephants they had exploited were actually sentient. Yet references to Kipling and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the fact that it was a private company engaged in the exploitation of the planet's sentient alien species clearly allude to the way in which the history of imperialism is intimately bound up with that of capitalism, all suggests that the novel is engaged with metaphors for real world colonialism.

Yet there's something inherently problematic about using science fiction in such a way, and Silverberg is sensible enough to include a critique of this in an aside within the novel itself when a rather unpleasant human tourist suggests that there was a difference between the colonisation of Africans and that of aliens who mostly resemble elephants. The problem with using science fiction metaphors to engage with real world problems is that it's also a largely realist genre, where within the context of the narrative the alien planet is a real place. Certainly, any novel which is so indebted to the classic tropes of science fiction's previous era is going to have a similar problem. The alien jungle in which most of the narrative of Downward to the Earth takes place is depicted with a marvellous fecundity, replete with images of body horror and of overflowing alien life. As far as the narrative is concerned, it's a 'real' place. World-building is a large part of the appeal of any science-fiction.

The problem with attempting to map the exploitation of alien species onto real world colonisation is that the victims of human imperialism and colonialism didn't belong to another species, but were other humans. Obviously, there's an equally long history of racial and cultural 'othering' which continues to this day and has served to justify our histories of imperialism and colonialism. Many of the victims of colonialism are reduced to the status (literally as well as metaphorically) of animals, but that's also a historical process, one which is done to people who actually belong to the same species, differing only by the colour of skin, language or culture. Which is why such a process has to be carried out, to obscure the basic fact that we all belong to the same species and that there's rather more ways in which we resemble each other than those in which we differ. That is a little harder to sustain when your alien looks like an elephant.

Another related problem with this trope is that it can result in a form of wish fulfilment, most recently seen in James Cameron's Avatar, in which the alien species has access to some kind of transcendent mystical power which ultimately defeats the invading humans (which raises a further question of why this force only intervenes when things have got into a particularly poor state for the 'good' aliens; if it was there all along, then why didn't it intervene earlier?). Obviously you can fight your way out of an empire, history gives us plenty of examples of that, but reducing such a conflict to the status of an (all too literal) deus ex machina does tend to be rather insulting to the real world suffering of people engaged in such conflicts in both the past and the present (this is why I like Caitlin Kiernan's reading of Avatar: she elides any metaphorical weight of human colonisation and reads it as the purely misanthropic idealisation of the natural world taking its revenge on exploitative humanity; it's still a form of wish fulfilment, but one entirely in keeping with the logic of the invented world).

It's probably a little naive to assume that a private company would just pack up and desist from exploiting profitable resources simply because they've discovered that an alien species is sentient, as has apparently occurred before the beginning of Silverberg's novel, but then as I observed up above, the issues of colonialism are something of a feint, as the novel climaxes in something which, whilst wholly in keeping with the reality of the world in which the narrative occurs, is also purely metaphorical, speaking in a language of Biblical cadence to a yearning for transcendence and a meeting between opposites which is unexpectedly lovely and hopeful. And perhaps that does finally hold out something to the real world: a hope for a way in which we might begin to heal some the wounds left by our history.