Lo sguardo dell'altro:
Le letterature postcoloniali
(The gaze of the other: Postcolonial literatures)

by Silvia Albertazzi

Rome, Carocci, 2000, pp. 200,
ISBN 88-430-1604-0, Lire 34000
www.carocci.it

Reviewed by Christopher Rollason

[Editor's intro: "Christopher Rollason graduated in
English from Trinity College, Cambridge, and
obtained his Ph.D. from York University, England,
with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe. A former lecturer
in English at Coimbra University, Portugal, he is
currently an international official, and publishes
regularly on the Internet." -- c.j.s.wallia]

A mid-twenty-first-century historian, looking back on the twentieth century
and wishing to choose two works of literature to represent that century's
second half - but as literature, not as best-sellers or succès de scandale -
would, in all probability, single out Gabriel García Márquez's Cien años de
soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude; 1967), and Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children (1981). These two novels, acclaimed by readers and
critics, and absorbed as influences by writers worldwide, brought their
authors worldwide fame and, respectively, the Nobel and Booker Prizes. In
addition, the future historian would surely remark that both are written in
the magic-realist mode that mingles naturalistic and fantastic elements,
and, above all, that both arise out of narrative traditions which are not
those of the economically and politically hegemonic Western world, and
accordingly refuse to obey the conventions of Euro-American realist fiction.

Cien años de soledad emerged from the previously unknown milieu of Colombian
literature; Midnight's Children, though first published in Britain, would
have been unthinkable without its author's first-hand knowledge of his
native Indian subcontinent. The celebrated 'Latin American boom' and the
comparable rise to prominence of 'Indo-Anglian' writing which followed in
the wake of the two novels' respective success have been the most visible
manifestations of what has come to be called 'postcolonial' literature - a
phenomenon typically overlapping with the magic-realist genre.

Silvia Albertazzi is a lecturer at the University of Bologna and head of the
'Centro studi sulle letterature omeoglotte dei Paesi extraeuropei' (Centre
for the study of the literatures in European languages of non-European
countries) of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures of
that university's Faculty of Foreign Languages. Her new study is an
ambitious endeavour to define, understand and promote the phenomenon of
postcolonial writing; it is also the fruit of immense reading in the field.
A contagious enthusiasm for the subject shines through her pages, and,
indeed, she effectively suggests that this literature embodies humanity's
best hopes and aspirations for the new millennium: 'Caduti i valori
universali, i modelli assoluti della classe media intellettuale europea,
crollati i centri, allo scrittore . non resta che cercare di esprimere, una
volta di più, "un mondo nuovo in procinto di crearsi"' ('Now that universal
values have collapsed along with the absolute models of the European
intellectual middle class, now that the centres have failed to hold, the
writer's task . can only be to attempt to express, once more, "a new world
about to be born"'; p. 168: the embedded quotation is from Carlos Fuentes).

The attraction of postcolonial/magic-realist writing is undeniable: it
offers the possibility of superseding many of the sterile oppositions that
continue to plague metropolitan thinking on culture - of transcending the
polarities of traditional/avant-garde, written/oral, high culture/low
culture, even East/West and North/South. The fictions of García Márquez,
Julio Cortázar, Rushdie, Vikram Chandra or Anita Desai combine a highly
readable narrative impetus with the experimental fusion of genres and
registers; they are written texts which draw on the riches of oral
storytelling traditions; they import elements from mass-cultural forms such
as cinema or popular song; they couple intense local awareness with a wider
global consciousness. On a theoretical level, magic realism can even be seen
as offering a posthumous solution to the endless 'realism vs.
modernism'/'Lukács vs. Brecht' controversies that bedevilled western Marxism
in its latter years.

The discussion of so wide-ranging and diffuse a body of writing, however,
inevitably poses a number of theoretical and practical problems, with which
Albertazzi's study valiantly grapples. These problems relate, in particular,
to the wider areas of geopolitics, language, genre and canon.

The geopolitical question is far from innocent. One may start by asking
whether the term 'third world' is of any great use today: this term, coined
for a two-superpower world that no longer exists, now raises the problem of
where, if anywhere, the 'second world' lies; it also obscures such
incontestable phenomena within the old 'developing world' as 'new industrial
countries', uneven development or IT lift-off in countries such as India.
Albertazzi, while invoking 'il Terzo Mondo' on occasion, in practice wisely
prefers 'postcolonial' as her key defining term. Indeed, she does not
confine the 'postcolonial' space to the developing countries, choosing,
rather, to include Canadian and Australian writers (Leonard Cohen, Margaret
Atwood, Peter Carey) within its purview - drawing a distinction between
'colonie d'insediamento' (settler colonies) and 'colonie d'invasione'
(invader colonies; p. 59), but including the literatures of both within the
postcolonial orbit. This might appear controversial: diehard third-worldists
could object on the grounds that Canada and Australia are developed,
first-world countries. It can, however, be counter-argued that the
literatures of the white settler colonies have traditionally been
overshadowed by the 'major' literatures of Britain and the US (and, for
Quebec, France); and, in the Canadian case, that today NAFTA threatens a de
facto economic and cultural colonisation by the US.

Effectively, then, Albertazzi defines postcolonial writing as comprising all
texts in European languages (generally English, French, Spanish or
Portuguese) that do not originate in Europe or the United States. This does,
however, leave a question-mark hanging over the exact definition of
centre-versus-periphery. Where, for instance, should one place a novel like
Mircea Eliade's Maitreyi (1933), the ironic narrative of a failed
'East-West' amour in Calcutta, written in Romanian and, therefore, a case of
the 'Orient' viewed through a peripheral, rather than a hegemonic, European
prism? The case of another 'minor' European literature, that of Portugal, is
also problematic. Albertazzi discusses José Saramago's A Jangada de Pedra
(The Stone Raft; 1986) as an instance of European writing influenced or
contaminated by postcolonial magic realism (pp. 165-166); however, other
works of Portugal's Nobel laureate, notably the superb Memorial do Convento
(Baltasar and Blimunda; 1982), can actually be taken as consummate instances
of magic realism rivalling García Márquez - whose own Del amor y otros
demonios (Of Love and Other Demons; 1994), seems, indeed, to bear the marks
of Memorial do Convento, as both focus on the Inquisition and the resistance
of a magically gifted woman. Portugal was of course itself a colonial power
for 400 years, but, conversely, its history in the twentieth century was
scarred by phenomena - dictatorship, isolation, mass illiteracy - that
parallel the experience of many Latin American countries. Saramago's
writings and his non-literary campaigns, too, powerfully exhibit those
characteristics of solidarity and commitment that Albertazzi sees as
typifying postcolonial writers. A term such as 'peripheral literatures'
could, perhaps, be proposed as a possible alternative to the lexicon of
postcolonialism.

Another factor in the definition of the postcolonial is language. This, too,
is controversial. The writers discussed by Albertazzi almost invariably
write in European, not local languages. There are good practical reasons for
this - the need or desire for a wider audience, the lingua franca role of
English or French as a mediator between a multitude of competing (and often
mutually incomprehensible) autochthonous tongues. Some, however, continue to
object to the 'imperialist' use of alien languages: Albertazzi cites the
arguments of Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a noted champion of the view that
African writers should publish in African languages (p. 108). Rabindranath
Tagore, still India's only Nobel-winning writer, wrote - friend of Yeats
though he was - in Bengali, not English, and today Amitav Ghosh, who has
thus far published in English, is on record as saying he will eventually
shift to writing directly in, again, Bengali. Against the hardline position,
however, it may be contended - and this is the line pursued by Albertazzi -
that the postcolonial writer who creates in a European language typically
modifies the nature of that language: 'Nelle mani dell'autore postcoloniale
la lingua del dominatore acquista una vitalità che spesso è assente dall'uso
europeo' ('In the hands of the postcolonial writer the language of the
dominator takes on a vitality that is often absent from European usage'; p.
107). As she rightly stresses, in postcolonial hands the metropolitan
language is refashioned, enriched with localisms but also expanded by the
resurrection of terms and constructions considered archaic or precious in
Europe. In particular, such reinvigoration of English by its second-language
practitioners stands in stark contrast to what Albertazzi denounces as
'l'esperantizzazione dell'inglese' ('the reduction of English to Esperanto
status'; p. 106), at the hands of both native and non-native speakers.

On the matter of genre, Albertazzi wishes to distinguish
postcolonial/magic-realist fiction from both realism and postmodernism. She
makes repeated reference to something called 'Western realism' or 'bourgeois
realism' ('la tradizione borghese europea' - 'the European bourgeois
tradition'; p. 33), from which postcolonial texts diverge by their open and
unashamed use of the fantastic, the allegorical and the miraculous, their
recourse to pastiche and intertextuality, and their hybridation of narrative
registers - a case in point being Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1996),
which mingles conventional realism with historical fiction, science fiction,
mystery fiction and ghost story. It is actually dubious whether 'Western
realism' exists as a unproblematic, homogeneous genre: the text usually
considered the first European novel, Don Quixote, is highly and
self-consciously parodic and metafictional, while the works of Scott,
Dickens and Balzac all contain marked non-realist elements. Nonetheless,
Western realist novels most certainly do exist aplenty, and it is
crystal-clear that a novel like Ghosh's is not telling the same kind of
story as Le Rouge et le Noir, Middlemarch or The Great Gatsby. Albertazzi
further insists (pp. 151-159) on distinguishing between postcolonial and
postmodernist, arguing forcibly that while European and US postmodernist
fictions (Umberto Eco, John Barth) share certain characteristics
(self-reflectiveness, pastiche) with a Chandra or a García Márquez, what is
absent from the Euro-American texts is the element of dialogue with oral and
popular traditions. Certainly, if Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and
Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) both rewrite and relativise
history through self-reflective fiction, the linear, rationalist course of
Barth's narrative implies completely different thought-processes from the
intricate spirals of Chandra's story-telling, with its entwining, circular
and Chinese-box elements rooted in the Indian epic tradition.

Definition inevitably shades into evaluation, and the very success of
numerous postcolonial writers raises the question of their possible
insertion into a canon. The notion of canon is today impugned by the extreme
relativists who reject all aesthetic evaluation, while metropolitan feminist
and minority critics question the validity of the traditional Western canon.
Albertazzi crosses swords with that canon's most eloquent defender, Harold
Bloom, considering his defence of the traditional standpoint (The Western
Canon, 1994; London, Macmillan, 1995) to be excessively 'eurocentric' (p.
118) and hence inimical to a proper appreciation of postcolonial writing. To
be fair, Borges and Neruda are actually among the twenty-six chosen canonic
writers whom Bloom discusses in detail, and the reading-list at the end of
his book includes two pages' worth of postcolonial or non-metropolitan
texts, totalling 91 volumes (Bloom, pp. 559-560). The question might
usefully be posed in different terms: pace the relativists, the very fact of
mentioning one writer or text more than another, or choosing particular
texts on which to centre a debate, effectively creates some kind of canon.
In practice, a postcolonial canon already exists; Albertazzi's own index
cites Rushdie 27 times, more than any other name, and a canon could be
constructed from her book centring on Rushdie, Chandra, Carey, García
Márquez and others. The most interesting question may well be whether and
how the existing postcolonial examples will stimulate new writers to create
a canon of twenty-first-century 'world writing' that will somehow be other
in spirit - more open, more ecumenical - than the Western canon of earlier
centuries.

Here Albertazzi's perspective is essentially optimistic. She believes the
postcolonial vision is already 'contaminating' metropolitan writers for the
better - 'lo scrittore occidentale riscopre il gusto della narrazione, del
racconto tradizionale' ('Western writers are rediscovering the pleasure of
narration, of the traditional tale'; p. 167) - and looks forward to the
emergence of a true 'world literature' for the new millennium: 'Oggi come
mai prima, la letteratura non appare più limitata da confini geografici o
intellettuali' ('Today as never before, literature seems no longer to be
limited by geographical or intellectual confines'; p. 168).

This study goes a long way towards laying the theoretical and critical bases
for such a planetary flowering. A useful and practical next step could now
be to establish precisely how the 'new literatures' may be influencing and
changing reading patterns worldwide. It would be interesting to know just
who, in the West and in the emerging world, is reading these books, and how;
whether they are inciting readers to become writers themselves; what role
information technology is playing in their diffusion; and whether
postcolonial writing, with its oral and popular roots, may yet prove a vital
weapon in a possible fightback of the written word in the coming century -
as already heralded by the Internet - against the global dictatorship of the
audiovisual, so characteristic of the century that has closed.