Abstract
I have just made a series of connections between Derek Walcott’s aesthetic concerns, his established authorial tendencies, and the multiple social and political locations within which his career has developed. The case studies in Part II work in a similar way. My attention to writers’ biographies and their relationships to the literary marketplace is at odds with the notion, common throughout much of the twentieth century, and even now possessing some nostalgic power, that successful literature should register the absence of the author as its most apparent creator. As R. Jackson Wilson points out, through multiple influences from fin de siècle art for art’s sake ideology to New Critical formalism, from semiotics to poststructuralism, the ‘true artist’ has often been thought to operate as though ‘the cost of his success was a kind of self-denial, a successful withholding of the self from the work.’2
‘I feel as if I have been concealed behind a false self, as if a shadow has become substance while I have been relegated to the shadows.’1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Some of Huggan’s ideas about exoticism also appear in his earlier work on tourism; cf. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 107. cf.
Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism,’ in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 156.
Goffman characterizes ‘front regions’ as ‘where a particular performance is or may be in progress,’ whereas ‘back regions’ are ‘where action occurs that is related to the performance but inconsistent with the appearance fostered by the performance’ (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959], 134). The spatial distinction between the kitchen and the seating area in a restaurant is perhaps the most straightforward example. Goffman’s broad interest is ‘impression management’ as a general aspect of everyday social interaction, and he does not distinguish the tourism industry from other service sector businesses. However it is interesting that his identification of the metaphorically theatrical or performative aspects of business practice anticipated the formation of an intentionally theatrical ‘experience economy’ that tourism is often taken to embody. Many businesses now create consumer spaces like stages, with employees engaged in performing elaborate acts designed to make consumers believe in their own participation, including staged access to the once hidden ‘back regions.’ So, for example, a restaurant seating area might be positioned such that diners can see what goes on in a kitchen, typically a cleaned-up stage version of the actual kitchen where most of the food is prepared and cooked. On tourism as the experience economy’s apotheosis, see Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience (New York: Putnam, 2000), for whom it is ‘much more like staged commercial entertainment than cultural visitation’ (149); and
John Urry, Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995), who argues that the history of tourism proves that capitalism existed in ‘disorganized’ forms — dependent largely on the consumption of images rather than on the production of concrete items — long before the postmodern era. Urry interprets the late capitalist economy as one in which ‘tourism’s specificity dissolves,’ as it finally epitomizes the entire way ‘contemporary social and cultural experience’ is organized (148). I return to the subject of tourism’s exemplarity below.
cf. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), who notes that during the industry’s development the tourist was often defined by his inability to access what is ‘authentic,’ something then ‘represented as a fugitive essence, hounded into hiding by encroaching modernity’ (10).
Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 105.
Ulf Hannerz, ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,’ in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990), 237–41.
James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: the Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 9.
Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 82.
In fact it is likely that the category of the global market reader is so abstract that it can only be deployed rhetorically, producing results that will be distant from the empirical validity so crucial to most book history methodology. A few empirical studies of reading practices of relevance to the postcolonial field do exist. Given that a key ‘other’ to academic readers is audiences for popular culture, it is not surprising that these have been subject to the most sustained attention, or that studies of their habits are considered part of a general field now called ‘the ethnography of reading.’ See, for example, Radhika Parameswaran, ‘Western Romance Fiction as English-Language Media in Postcolonial India,’ Journal of Communication 49 (1999), 84–105;
Jyoti Puri, ‘Reading Romance Novels in Postcolonial India,’ Gender & Society 11 (1997), 434–52; and
Wendy Griswold, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). These studies aim at an understanding of discrete and carefully delimited ‘cultures’ of reading. Janice Radway’s classic study of romance reading is paradigmatic (Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2nd edn. [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press], 1991). In it the practices of a group of small-town middle class women are surveyed, contextualized, and finally explained. Readers’ responses to survey questions are not simply reported; rather they are also interpreted for an academic audience, in a way that shows what these non-academic readers do not understand about their own experiences. In this case, the claim is that their repetitive reading of mass-market romance responds to their need for a nurturing emotional sustenance denied them as subjugated members of a fundamentally patriarchal culture. Radway’s involvement in the culture of romance reading is always that of an insider-outsider. She spends time with her subjects and gains their confidence, but she is not herself a romance reader. She also adheres to the feminism that the surveyed readers intuit only in part, and imperfectly.
Derek Walcott, ‘What the Twilight Says: An Overture,’ in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 7–8. Further page references appear in the body of the text.
See Ian Gregory Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 199, for a critique of Walcott’s positioning of the peasant or the fisherman as the ‘new Adam.’
Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). cf.
Timothy Brennan, ‘Cosmopolitans and Celebrities,’ Race and Class 31 (1989), 1–19.
Paul Breslin, Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 21.
Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 281.
Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 318.
In fact it is a major trope for many key cosmopolitan writers, perhaps most notably V.S. Naipaul, who has claimed to feel like an exotic alien ‘to those among whom he was born,’ but also to a reading audience ‘that is not composed of members of his own culture’ (Roger Célestin, From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 177). If a writer constantly states his alienation from all available affiliations, can he be said to have an ‘own culture’ at all? For Célestin, Naipaul renounces what is ‘primitive’ and constantly deexoti-cizes the so-called Third World because it is the presumed integrity of some ‘primitive’ culture that keeps him from fully ascending to the status of the ‘romantic writer’ figure he most admires (199). He cannot detach no matter how much he might desire to. Naipaul embraces ‘the West’ because it offers him the chance to be free of responsibility. At ‘home’ he cannot escape concern because he cannot escape ‘an affiliation that cannot accommodate a denial of the historical predicament of that area of the planet’ (212). cf.
Rob Nixon, London calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
John Thieme, Derek Walcott (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 199.
John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990), 100–2.
Copyright information
© 2007 Sarah Brouillette
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brouillette, S. (2007). Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace. In: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288171_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288171_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35372-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28817-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)