Abstract
This introductory chapter outlines the focus of each of the author-specific chapters which will follow and explain what links the four novelists who provide the focus of this study, as well as the senses in which it is productive to consider them as postcolonial authors. It also explains and justifies the methodology of this book, discussing the writings on food and meaning of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Roland Barthes, and Catherine Gallagher, examining William Empson’s concept of ‘double irony’, offering a brief account of the development of postcolonial literary studies as a field, and providing close readings of Dickens’s Great Expectations, Joseph Conrad’s ‘Falk’, and H.G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly.
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Notes
- 1.
V.S. Naipaul, ‘Jasmine’, The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (London: Deutsch, 1972), pp.23–9 (p.24). See Margaret Shenfield, ‘Mr Biswas and Mr Polly’, English, XXIII.117 (1974), 95–100; Anthony Boxill, ‘Mr Biswas, Mr Polly and the Problem of V.S. Naipaul’s Sources’, Ariel, 8.3 (1977), 9–41; John Carthew, ‘Adapting to Trinidad: Mr Biswas and Mr Polly Revisited’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XIII.1 (1978), 58–64; Martin Fido, ‘Mr Biswas and Mr Polly’, Ariel, 5.4 (1974), 30–7.
- 2.
H.G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly (London: Penguin, 1946), pp.7, 154. All subsequent page references are to this edition. V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (London: Penguin, 2000), pp.437, 140. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 3.
See Nigel O. Bolland, ‘Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History’, in Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, ed. Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002), pp.15–46 (pp.33–5). Observing that ‘the practice of magic, or obeah’ in the Caribbean is often straightforwardly cited as ‘an example of continuity’ with African cultural practices, Bolland reminds us that it is important to register significant ‘varieties in the practice of obeah in Africa and the Caribbean’ and the ‘crucial’ differences in the social context in which such ‘magical practices’ are undertaken in different parts of the Caribbean and different parts of Africa (p.34). These are not, it seems, questions which much trouble Mr Polly (or H.G. Wells), for whom the associations of the term seem primarily comic and/or mildly sinister.
- 4.
Michael Scott, Tom Cringle’s Log (London: Blackie and Son, 1895).
- 5.
The establishment of this system is described by Richard B. Sheridan in Sugar and Slavery : An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Kingston: Canoe Press, 1994), and in Lizzie Collingham’s chapter on ‘How the West Indian Sugar Islands Drove the Growth of the First British Empire’, in The Hungry Empire : How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (London: Bodley Head, 2017), pp.41–5. For a fuller discussion of the political and scientific context of Wells’s interest in indigestion, see Paul Vlitos, ‘Unseen Battles: H.G. Wells and Autointoxication Theory’, Wellsian, 36 (2013), 25–38.
- 6.
V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Picador, 2002), pp.27, 28.
- 7.
Bhabha, ‘Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism’, in The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Sussex, NJ: Harvester/Barnes and Noble Books, 1984), pp.116–7.
- 8.
Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), pp.36–46.
- 9.
In the conclusion to my chapter on Naipaul , I shall also be addressing the question of why it is these particular novels, this particular era of his fictional writing so exclusively, in which his fictional meals operate in this particular way. To preview my argument in brief, I shall be suggesting that it is only in certain novels from a specific period of his writing, only in particular examples of his early comic fiction set in Trinidad, in which Naipaul’s fiction fully commits itself to investigating the multiple ways in which food acquires meaning in relation to varied and various political, social, historical, and cultural discourses and patterns of behaviour, not to mention in relation to the economic significance of food and the physical necessity of eating, and as a result it is only in these novels that Naipaul’s depictions of food and eating invite readings which undercut or complicate the sweeping cultural generalizations of his non-fiction. The set-piece meals which punctuate the novels under discussion in my chapter on Naipaul are simply not present in his later fiction, nor does the way he writes about food in his later fictional depictions of life in London or Africa (e.g.) ever attempt a similarly nuanced reading of what is being eaten and the ways this might acquire meaning. It is specifically, I shall suggest, the way Naipaul writes about food and eating in The Mystic Masseur , A House for Mr Biswas , and The Mimic Men which has proved so inspiring, flexible, and suggestive a model for many of the writers who are discussed in the chapters that follow. One exception to my focus on these examples of Naipaul’s early fiction will be the discussion in Chapter Four of his 1987 novel The Enigma of Arrival , the depictions of food and eating in which I shall be arguing offer an important point of comparison for the ways in which Salman Rushdie writes about food and eating in The Satanic Verses .
- 10.
Anita Desai, ‘A Coat of Many Colours ’, in South Asian English: Structure, Use and Users, ed. Robert J. Baumgardner (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp.221–30 (II 221).
- 11.
Shyamala A. Narayan and John Mee, ‘Novelists of the 1950s and 1960s’, in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (London: Hurst, 2003), pp.219–31 (p.227).
- 12.
Anita Desai, Bye-Bye Blackbird (Delhi: Vision Books, 1985), p.15.
- 13.
Anita Desai, ‘The Rage for the Raj’, The New Republic, 25 November 1985, pp.26–30 (p.29).
- 14.
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (London: Deutsch, 1982), p.95. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 15.
Edward W. Said , Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p.84.
- 16.
David Yip, ‘Introduction’, Sour Sweet, TextPlus edn (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), pp.v–x (p.vi).
- 17.
Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p.324.
- 18.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995), p.459. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, rev. edn (London: Granta Books/Penguin, 1992), pp.87–101 (p.90).
- 19.
David Burton, The Raj at Table : A Culinary History of the British in India (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993). Sharmila Sen, ‘Eating India: Literary and Cultural Consumptions of the Subcontinent’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale, 2000). Sen examines Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Anita Desai’s In Custody (1984), George Francklin Atkinson’s Curry and Rice on Forty Plates (1859) and David Dabydeen’s The Counting House (1996). The relationship between Sen’s work and this thesis will be addressed in the chapters on Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie.
- 20.
Joyce P. Westrip, An ABC of Indian Food (Totnes: Prospect, 1996), p.45.
- 21.
See Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001) and Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 22.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times, and the Trials of Cultural Translation’, in The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.212–35 (p.224). Bhabha quotes from Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998), p.246.
- 23.
Bhabha, ‘How Newness Enters the World’, p.235. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Locations of Culture’, in The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.1–18 (p.4).
- 24.
Salman Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’, in Imaginary Homelands, pp.393–414 (p.403).
- 25.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998) p.246.
- 26.
Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Vintage, 1996), p.296.
- 27.
V.S. Naipaul, address delivered 6 December 1985, published as ‘My Brother’s Tragic Sense’, Spectator, 24 January 1987, pp.22–3 (p.22).
- 28.
Anita Desai, ‘Games at Twilight’, in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947–1997, ed. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (London: Vintage, 1997), pp.121–9. Anita Desai includes an extract from Rushdie’s Shame in ‘Indian Fiction Today’, Daedalus, 118.4 (Fall 1989), 207–31 (pp.220–4).
- 29.
Benita Parry, ‘The Postcolonial: Conceptual Category or Chimera?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 27 (1997), 3–21 (p.3).
- 30.
Neil Lazarus, ‘Introducing Postcolonial Studies’, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.1–16 (pp.1–2). In the same collection, Benita Parry traces the evolution of the field in ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies ’, pp.66–80. Lazarus recaps and extends his history of the term ‘postcolonial’ in The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.10–4. Other attempts to define the term and trace its history include Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989), Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory (London: Verso, 1997), and Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). Robert Young’s White Mythologies—Writing History the West (London: Routledge, 1990) focuses on the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha , and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, while his Postcolonialism : An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) stresses what he sees as the field’s underacknowledged debts to Marxism. Ato Quayson’s Postcolonialism : Theory, Practice or Process? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) traces a complementary history of the term as Lazarus , pp.1–22. As Elleke Boehmer has noted, the terms ‘Imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ should always be differentiated. In this book I follow her distinction between imperialism, ‘the authority assumed by a state over another territory—authority expressed in pageantry and symbolism, as well as in military power’, and colonialism, which ‘involves the consolidation of imperial power, […] manifested in the settlement of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands’. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp.2, 3.
- 31.
Lazarus, ‘Introducing Postcolonial Studies’, p.2.
- 32.
Lazarus, ‘Introducing Postcolonial Studies’, p.2.
- 33.
Ato Quayson discusses the vanishing hyphen in ‘post-colonial’/‘postcolonial’ in his Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process, p.1. In this book I follow Quayson’s preference for the unhyphenated version, ‘mainly to distinguish it from its more chronologically inflected predecessor and also to indicate a tendency […] that seems to be gaining dominance in the field’ (p.1).
- 34.
Lazarus, ‘Introducing Postcolonial Studies’, p.3.
- 35.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency’, in The Location Culture, pp.171–97 (p.171).
- 36.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Post-Modern Condition: the End of Politics?’, in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), p.17–34 (p.31). Benita Parry discusses Bhabha and Spivak in ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’, p.67.
- 37.
Benita Parry, ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’, p.72.
- 38.
Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), p.ix. See also Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, pp.12–5 and Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, eds., Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 39.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p.38.
- 40.
In the selection of authors on whom I have chosen to focus, and in the ways in which I contextualize their work, and in the close attention I pay to the textual specificities of their fiction I also hope to remain attentive to the reservations in relation to Postcolonial Studies raised by critics working in the field of World Literature—for instance Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s suggestion of the limitations of the postcolonial paradigm in shaping which contemporary and historical texts from around the world receive critical attention and the kinds of critical attention they receive, and Pascale Casanova’s concern that by positing ‘a direct link between literature and history’, Postcolonial Studies ‘runs the risk of reducing the literary to the political’. See Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as a World’, New Left Review, 31 (2005), 71–90 (p.71); Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008). For an overview of such debates and discussions, see also Stefan Helgesson, ‘Postcolonialism and World Literature: Rethinking the Boundaries’, Interventions, 16.4 (2014), 483–500.
- 41.
Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Orientalism and After’, in Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London/New York: Verso, 1992), pp.159–219 (p.171).
- 42.
Sara Suleri, ‘Naipaul’s Arrival’, in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.149–73.
- 43.
See Masao Miyoshi, ‘A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline the Nation State’, Critical Inquiry, 19.4 (1993), 726–51. Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third old Criticism in the Age of Multinational Criticism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). Both cited by ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’, p.67.
- 44.
Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry (Winter 1998), 328–56.
- 45.
Ross G. Forman, ‘Celestial Seasonings: The British Reception of Chinese Food in the Late Nineteenth Century’, paper delivered as part of ‘Cooking Culture: Food and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century’ (29–30 July 2004, Institute of English Studies, London). See also Ross G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 46.
Joseph Conrad, ‘Falk’, in Typhoon and Other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.77–145 (p.98, 78). All subsequent page references are to this edition. Watts identifies the seaport as Bangkok (p.224). Schomberg first appeared in Lord Jim (1900) and plays a significant role in Victory (1915).
- 47.
A table d’hôte is ‘a meal served at a set time and set rate in a hotel or restaurant’. See Cedric Watts, ‘Glossary’, in Typhoon and Other Tales, pp.233–42 (p.241).
- 48.
Roland Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’, in Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, trans. Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum, vol. 5 (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp.167–73 (p.167).
- 49.
Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’, p.168.
- 50.
Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’, p.168.
- 51.
Mary Douglas, ‘Food as an Art Form’, Studio International (September 1974), 83–8 (p.84). She develops and uses this approach in her essay ‘Deciphering a Meal’, in Implicit Meanings : Essays in Anthropology (London/Henley/Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp.249–75.
- 52.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology , trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (London: Peregrine, 1977), pp.85–7, although Lévi-Strauss himself suggests that his attempt to interpret food structurally is a ‘somewhat flimsy example’ of his method at work (p.87).
- 53.
Quoted in translation by Stephen Mennell, Anne Murcott, and Anneke H. van Otterloo’s The Sociology of Food: Eating, Diet and Culture (London: SAGE, 1992), p.20. Claude Fischler, L’Homnivore: le gout, la cuisine et le corps, nouvelle edition corrigée (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1993), p.17.
- 54.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘The Culinary Triangle’, Partisan Review, 33 (1966), 586–95 (p.590). Lévi-Strauss later complicated this triangle in his Mythologiques, which attends to the significance of the methods of cooking used in transforming the raw into the cooked.
- 55.
Douglas, ‘Deciphering a Meal’, p.250.
- 56.
Barthes, ‘Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’, p.168.
- 57.
David Trotter, Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.239.
- 58.
Trotter, p.234. Trotter focuses upon Bel-Ami (1885) and Fort comme la mort (1889).
- 59.
Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists : Starving, Writing and Imprisonment (London: Virago, 1993), p.24.
- 60.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (London: Penguin, 1965), p.180. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 61.
For a complementary extended discussion of the depictions of food and eating in A House for Mr Biswas in relation to the concept of universality, issues of cultural specificity, and Naipaul’s non-fictional discussions of the work of Charles Dickens, see Paul Vlitos, ‘Dining with Dickens in Trinidad’, Shiron, 43 (2006), 41–63.
- 62.
Roland Barthes, ‘Steak and Chips’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Layers (London: Vintage, 2000), pp.62–4 (p.64). Barthes, ‘Wine and Milk’, in Mythologies, pp.58–61 (p.59).
- 63.
Barthes, ‘Wine and Milk’, p.59.
- 64.
Barthes, ‘Wine and Milk’, p.59.
- 65.
Jonathan Culler, Barthes: A Very Short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.26.
- 66.
Barthes, ‘Wine and Milk’, p.61.
- 67.
As Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas note in the introduction to their Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia, there exists an ‘array of work that interrogates culinary cultures (separate from agricultural food production) to address issues of globalization, nation-making, nation-breaking, and beyond’. The survey they offer of studies in this field focusing on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora includes the anthropological writing of Arjun Appadurai (with which I engage in my chapter on Timothy Mo), the ‘heavily theorized’ literary criticism of Parama Roy (discussed in my chapter on Rushdie and my conclusion) and the historical work of K.T. Achaya (on which I also draw in my chapter on Rushdie ) and of Nupur Chaudhuri, Margaret Strobel, and Susan Zlotnick (with which I engage in my chapter on Desai ). See Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas, ‘Introduction’ to Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia , ed. Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp.5, 12, 15.
- 68.
Barthes , ‘Wine and Milk’, p.59. Similar issues are at stake in controversial recent attempts by some right-wing local politicians in France to remove from school lunch menus the pork-free option. Part of the context for this provocative political gesture can be found in the long history of the association in France between pork dishes and the concept of laïcité, a history suggestively traced by Robert D. Priest in ‘Secularism and Sausages’, 23 March 2016, <https://blog.oup.com/2016/03/secularism-and-sausages-france/> [accessed 13 February 2017].
- 69.
Isabella Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, rev. edn (London: Ward Lock, 1888), p.1331. Nicola Humble observes that the editions of Beeton’s work vary widely in their contents in ‘Reading Victorian Cookbooks’, paper delivered as part of ‘Cooking Culture: Food and option in the Nineteenth Century’ (Institute of English Studies, 29–30 July 2004). Beeton is cited here to suggest the ways in which, as Barthes argues, such myths are repeated ‘a thousand times’ in different contexts.
- 70.
Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’, in Jessie Conrad’s Handbook of Cookery for a Small House (London: Heinemann, 1923), pp.v–viii (p.vi). Conrad’s preface is discussed in Tony Tanner, ‘“Gnawed Bones” and “Artless Tales”—Eating and Narrative in Conrad’, in Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration, ed. Norman Sherry (London/Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), pp.17–36 (p.17).
- 71.
See Redmond O’Hanlon, ‘Knife, Falk and Sexual Selection’, Essays in Criticism, XXXI.2 (April 1981), 127–41, and Walter E. Anderson, ‘“Falk”: Conrad’s Tale of Evolution’, Studies in Short Fiction, 25.2 (Spring 1988), 101–8. Both are cited in Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan’s The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.96.
- 72.
Tanner, ‘“Gnawed Bones” and “Artless Tales”—Eating and Narrative in Conrad’, p.22.
- 73.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), VII (1901–5), pp.123–245 (p.198).
- 74.
Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt, Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, int. R.E. Money-Kyrle (New York: Delta, 1977), p.290. Quoted in Ellmann, p.38.
- 75.
Ellmann, p.39.
- 76.
Karl Marx, Capital, trans. B. Fowkes, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p.342.
- 77.
For a more extended discussion of the relationship between ‘Falk’ and contemporary discourses surrounding dining and cannibalism, see Paul Vlitos, ‘Conrad’s Ideas of Gastronomy: Dining in “Falk”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36.2 (2008), 433–49.
- 78.
Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Potato in the Materialist Imagination ’, in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practising New Historicism (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.110–35 (p.111).
- 79.
Redcliffe N. Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, rev. edn, ed. J.G. Hawkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
- 80.
Gallagher, ‘The Potato in the Materialist Imagination’, p.111.
- 81.
Gallagher, ‘The Potato in the Materialist Imagination’, pp.111–2.
- 82.
William Empson, ‘Tom Jones’, in Using Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), pp.131–57 (p.132).
- 83.
As Christopher Norris points out in ‘Empson as Literary Theorist: From Ambiguity to Complex words and Beyond’, in William Empson: The Critical Achievement, ed. Christopher Norris and Nigel Map (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp.1–120 (p.18).
- 84.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World , trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1968), p.317.
- 85.
Ellmann, p.30. On Hegel, Feurbach, Marx, Freud, Klein, see pp.30–41.
- 86.
In contrast, drinking plays an important role as an index of sociability in the work of writers such as Naipaul’s British contemporary Kingsley Amis. Amis’s The Old Devils, for example, is a series of mock-heroic drinking bouts in the same way that Great Expectations is a series of meals, revelatory of character, class, and, in Amis’s novel, age.
- 87.
Timothy Mo, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (London: Paddleless Press, 1995), p.279. All subsequent page references are to this edition. This is just a sample of the novel’s insistent punning on the theme of bowels, defecation, and the dumping of waste—‘Philippine politics’ is described as ‘a cesspit’ [223], the chief local natural resource is a mineral called ‘sodomite’ [246]—all of which seems directed at the same satirical point. ‘What a tip! Talk about the Turd World!’ comments one Australian character on arrival in the Philippines [162]. The novel’s revelation that a European company is paying to deposit its waste in the Philippines is a direct nod to the infamous leaked 1991 memo in which Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, argued that the ‘economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that’. Quoted in Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.34.
- 88.
In what is perhaps a nod to Naipaul’s obsession, Saleem Sinai observes admiringly in Midnight’s Children as a public defecator produces ‘the longest turd I have ever seen’ (p.457). A similarly wry take on global differences in toilet habits can be found in Rohinton Mistry’s story ‘Squatter’, in which Sarosh, an expatriate Indian, finds that after ten years in Toronto he is still unable to defecate unless he climbs up upon the toilet to ‘simulate the squat of our Indian latrines’. Despite ‘[o]btaining his new citizenship’ as a Canadian, Sarosh feels in the lavatories at work that he is ‘a foreign presence in the stall, not doing things in the conventional way’ and detects ‘something malodorous in the air: the presence of xenophobia and hostility’. When even the local ‘Multicultural Department’ is unable to help him (their suggestion is that he has inserted into his bowel a remote-controlled device controlled by ‘an external handheld transmitter similar to the ones used for automatic garage door openers’), Sarosh eventually decides to return to India. Here, strikingly, the very issues of identity and community that are explored through food and eating in the novels on which I focus in this book are examined not through how characters eat but how a character defecates —and in reading Mistry’s story we should remind ourselves that (as Parama Roy has observed) one of the ways in which colonial discourse characterized the ‘Indian male’ was in relation to ‘the failure to manage bodily waste in accordance with the dictates of civilization’. See Rohinton Mistry, ‘Squatter’, in Tales from Firozsha Baag (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp.143–69 (pp.153, 156, 160) and Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts : Appetites, Aversions and the Postcolonial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p.58. When, in contrast, Mr Biswas accidentally relieves himself in an inappropriate place in Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas although this incident has far-reaching repercussions for him as an individual, this is presented as a purely personal mishap, one to which no wider cultural significance or resonances are attached.
- 89.
The ways in which the language of eating is reflected in the language of sexual desire will not be a focus of this thesis. It plays only a marginal part in these novels in relation to the other meanings which are repeatedly associated with food.
- 90.
In Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London/New York: Verso, 2001), Mike Davis examines the ways in which the colonial powers failed to respond to, helped produce, and turned to their advantage three global subsistence crises in the second half of the nineteenth century. He claims that ‘The great famines are the missing pages […] in virtually every overview of the Victorian era’ (p.8). Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas suggest that in this regard Davis is pursuing ‘the argument of the first generation of Indian nationalist economists such as Dadabhai Naoroji in Poverty and un-British Rule in India (1901)’ and discuss his work alongside the Amartya Sen’s Nobel-Prize-winning work on the political economy of hunger. See Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas, ‘Introduction’ to Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia, ed. Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p.12 and Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines : An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). A complementary historical approach to that of Mike Davis is offered by James Vernon, who explores in Hunger: A History (2007) how ‘the meaning of hunger’ in Britain has ‘changed over time’ with a particular interest in how ‘the meanings and politics of hunger in Britain were decisively shaped in broader imperial and international contexts’. See James Vernon, Hunger: A History (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2007), p.ix.
- 91.
Terry Eagleton, ‘Heathcliff and the Great Hunger’, in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London/New York: Verso, 1995), pp.1–26 (pp.12–3). In contrast, a study of hunger and starvation in postcolonial literature would have a sizeable body of material to draw upon. In English-language South Asian literature, for example, hunger plays a prominent role in different ways in novels such as Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1955) and A Handful of Rice (1966), Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! (1947), and R.K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958). Usha Pathania compares Markandaya and Desai in Human Bonds and Bondages: The Fiction of Anita Desai and Kamala Markandaya (Delhi: Kanishka, 1992). Hunger is also an insistent presence in No Pain Like This Body, a 1972 novel by the Trinidadian novelist Harold Ladoo set in a rural district of the fictional ‘Carib Island’. Unlike the interest in communal and familial commensality demonstrated in the novels by Samuel Selvon and V.S. Naipaul discussed in this book, the emphasis in Ladoo’s work is on the absence of food and on the hierarchies of gender and age which determine who in the family on which the novel focuses gets most and least to eat. Drinking—chiefly that of the family’s father—also plays a much larger role in No Pain Like This Body than in the novels discussed in this book. Indeed, in both these regards one way of reading Ladoo’s novel is as a corrective to the portraits of rural life for Indian plantation labourers and their descendants in the Caribbean offered by Selvon and Naipaul .
- 92.
Margaret Kelleher’s The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997).
- 93.
Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers! (1947) in English and Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay’s Manwantar (1944) in Bengali are her key texts.
- 94.
Susan George, How the Other Half Dies (London: Penguin, 1976), p.16. See also The Political Economy of Hunger, ed. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), in particular volume one: Entitlement and Well-Being.
- 95.
Anita Desai, In Custody (London: Vintage, 1999), p.140.
- 96.
It is in this regard that the concerns of the novels under discussion in this book coincide most close with the concerns of those scholars and activists involved in the Food Justice movement, those—including Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi—whose focus is upon ‘ensuring that the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown and produced transported and distributed, and accessed and eaten are shared fairly’ and on examining the ‘food system’ from ‘seed-to-table’ with an eye to ‘issues of access, justice, and environmental well-being’. An introduction to and overview of the movement is provided in Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010), p.8.
- 97.
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, p.ix.
- 98.
David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialisation of Intimacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p.14.
- 99.
David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship , p.19. The two love affairs in which Binh is involved over the course of the novel are with a French chef in the kitchen of the governor-general of colonial Saigon and with Dr Marcus Lattimore, an acquaintance of Stein and Toklas.
- 100.
Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (London: Vintage, 2004), pp.17, 19. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 101.
Matters are further complicated, in this regard, by the fact that in the novel Gertrude Stein is also writing a book about Binh, a book also entitled The Book of Salt , of which Binh steals the manuscript and about which he is told that ‘Stein captured you perfectly’ [238]. The obvious implication is that this is a work in which Stein ventriloquizes Binh as she did Alice B. Toklas in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and the possibility is floated that this stolen manuscript is in fact the book that we have been reading as we read Monique Truong’s novel.
- 102.
Naipaul, Half a Life (London: Picador, 2002), p.93.
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Vlitos, P. (2018). Introduction: Ways of Reading a Meal. In: Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96442-3_1
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