Slow Erosions

Focusing on Seamus Heaney’s poetry, this chapter explores the limitations of Irish postcolonial criticism. Acknowledging the invigorating influence of Said on Irish critics, it nevertheless argues that an overemphasis on Ireland’s colonial and “postcolonial” status has restricted attention to the nation and its political history. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger permits a global reframing of Irish culture that emphasizes transnational flows of money, people, culture, and literature. While Heaney’s poetry may seem archaic (rather than avant-garde), this chapter finds it creatively engages with transimperial affiliations. Rather than reading Heaney as a provincial northern Irish poet rooted in the native soil, the chapter emphasizes the poet’s embrace of mobility, fluidity, and non-Irish sites. Underscoring Heaney’s indebtedness to Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett—whose works represented the circulations of seafaring cultural exchange—the chapter discovers in Heaney’s meditations on oceanic networks a corrective to the narrow critical focus on decolonization and nationhood.

“(The Knocking) Has Never Stopped”

Arguing against critics who situate Jean Rhys in either the modernist or postcolonial camps, this chapter suggests that these movements complement and reinforce one another. In “Again the Antilles” (1927), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys consistently employs ellipsis, narrative fragmentation, and multiple narrators to unmask the ideological underpinnings of plantocratic ideology. Of special interest to Rhys are modernity’s discontinuities, which extend to the rigid binaries of the Caribbean: white and black, master and slave, colonizer and colonized. Unable to fit easily into any of these categories, Rhys’s heroines become “marooned in ruinous subject positions.” Although her work is sometimes read as a form of revisionism that exculpates the colonial class, Rhys not only enables the colonized to speak—most memorably through the character of Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea—but also exposes the ways in which official discourse ratifies the logic and legacy of colonialism.

Rushdie and the Art of Modernism

This chapter positions The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—the first full-fledged novel Salman Rushdie wrote following the 1989 fatwa—in relation to criticisms of modernism advanced not only by Ayatollah Khomeini but also by scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. It is significant that the novel’s subject is modernism itself, represented by Aurora Zogoiby, whose work synthesizes virtually every avant-garde movement, from fauvism, surrealism, and Dadaism to cubism, expressionism, and abstractionism. In offering a history of twentieth-century art, Rushdie explores how modernism can retain its aesthetic autonomy while giving voice to its social and political commitments. The chapter concludes by examining two aspects of the novel that are usually considered postmodern: the figure of the palimpsest and Moraes’s accelerated aging. The former is associated with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot’s mythic method, while the latter—with its sense of accelerated temporality—functions as a metaphor for modernism itself.

Reading Ngũgĩ Reading Conrad

This chapter considers points of intersection between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Joseph Conrad. By Ngũgĩ’s own account, his rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) as A Grain of Wheat (1967) triggered a crisis of audience that ultimately led him to abandon English for his native Gikuyu. To further complicate the question of influence, Wollaeger also examines the relationship between two works of nonfiction: Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986). At the heart of Ngũgĩ’s attempt to fashion premodern tribalism into a utopian space are two problems that still animate critical discussion. What is the status of the local and the indigenous? Does attention to influence reinstate a center-periphery model in postcolonial criticism? This chapter shows the extent to which Conrad and Ngũgĩ both anticipate and generate theoretical models later used to articulate modernism and postcolonialism as fields of inquiry.

Samuel Beckett and the Colonial Gag

Focusing on The Unnamable (1953) and Act Without Words I (1956), this chapter draws on Giorgio Agamben’s writings on “gesture” and the “gag” to illuminate the “peculiarly oblique forms of Beckett’s postcolonial political engagements.” Attending to Beckett’s characters, who depend on gesture to counter their muteness, the chapter suggests that Beckett’s postcolonial politics—his engagements with decolonization in Indochina, Algeria, West Africa, and Ireland—is muted, gagged, and indirect. In keeping with Agamben’s articulation of the prelinguistic power of the gesture, its “archetypal openness that points beyond nation, tradition and political domination,” the chapter argues that Beckett’s evasive and anagogic approach to postcolonial issues may announce an even more radical break with modernity and modern politics than those advocated by Beckett’s more avowedly political postcolonial critics. By means of the gesture and the gag, Beckett points the way not just beyond the postcolonial condition, but, potentially, beyond modern politics altogether.

Modernism in Chinua Achebe’s African Tetralogy

Analyzing Chinua Achebe’s tetralogy of novels, this chapter shows how Achebe addresses one of the central issues of both modernism and postcolonialism: the organization and conceptualization of time. Things Fall Apart (1958) and No Longer at Ease (1960) present snapshot moments of arrested temporality that Achebe treats with the modernist techniques of imagism and epiphany. Taking a more pessimistic turn, Arrow of God (1964) grounds the handling of sequentiality not in Igbo ideas of cyclical change but in Spenglerian, Yeatsian, and Eliotic notions of apocalypse, in which endings do not mark new beginnings but a point of terminal cessation. Finally, Man of the People (1966) further modifies this version of time, replacing the cultural collapse of the previous novel with the more affirmative vision of community and village life found in Eliot’s “East Coker.” In sum, the chapter traces the tetralogy’s evolution of divergent and competing notions of time, especially as they relate to Igboland and more generally to postcolonialism.

Michael Ondaatje Tricks the Eye

Focusing on In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), and The Cat’s Table (2011), this chapter examines Ondaatje’s modernist, indeed Conradian, engagement with the unreliability of individual cognition and subjective impression. Ondaatje’s characters typically fail to recognize their view of the world depends on acts of “enframing.” Blindness to their situated perspectives leaves them vulnerable to political violence and social injustice, including colonialism and imperialism. The chapter argues that the modernist lesson is that perception is always a game of frames, so the eye needs to keep seeking the edge. The postcolonial lesson is that an eye that does not move becomes complicit with nationalism and empire building. Ondaatje’s efforts to look more closely at the hidden mechanisms that shape social life represent his attempt to apply the formal and thematic concerns of modernism to the politics of colonialism and the challenges of global modernity.

Walcott, Woolf, and Joyce

This chapter on Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) examines the Caribbean poet’s ambivalent relationship with Anglophone modernism. It cautions that Walcott’s epic ambition to found a new tradition of Caribbean writing makes him reluctant simply to affirm or imitate the European cultural heritage of modernism. Walcott’s fraught relationship with modernism underscores his objections to the imperial violence and oppressive colonial institutions with which he associates Anglophone modernism. Focusing on Walcott’s complex use of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses, the chapter examines how the poet manipulates the literary tropes, myths, literary figures, and above all the names (of characters and places) that he borrows from his Anglophone predecessors. The chapter concludes that Walcott’s inventive refashioning of his literary borrowings allows him to gesture “through and against European modernism.” Walcott thus creates a New World literary aesthetic by sublating Anglophone modernism, “absorbing, transforming and rejecting metropolitan aesthetic practices.”

Locating Gordimer

This chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s postcolonialism in relation to modernism, realism, and the writings of J. M. Coetzee. Especially significant in this context is the “unrepresentability” of the cultural Other, a figure exemplified by the mute and mutilated figure of Friday in Coetzee’s Foe (1986). Gordimer addresses this issue in scenes in Burger’s Daughter (1979) and July’s People (1981), in which black men speak their minds to white women. Unlike Coetzee, Gordimer underscores not the impossibility of communication or representation, but a shift in power relations that enables black speech. The chapter concludes by focusing on two works that inaugurated contrasting views of postcolonialism: Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974) and Gordimer’s The Black Interpreters (1973). The former treats history as an “ungraspable” series of abyssal texts, while the latter validates critical realism within the context of European Marxism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Gordimer represents a form of “modernist realism” or “realist modernism.”

Kafka and Coetzee

This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the chapter calls the “Kafka effect,” a form of writing that stands apart from the world and refuses to judge it. The chapter examines three aspects of Coetzee’s work: his spare and minimalist style, his handling of authorial figures, and his turn toward the “reverse Bildungsroman.” Despite Coetzee’s “will to neutrality,” novels like Life and Times of Michael K (1983), The Master of Petersburg (1995), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005) ultimately take an ethical turn, in which the style is engaged rather than detached, authorial figures develop sympathy for marginalized groups, and central characters become members of subaltern communities. In other words, Coetzee’s commitment to postcolonialism both complicates and qualifies his commitment to Kafka’s modernism.