Death of a Discipline by Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty;

Author:Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000, Literary Criticism/General, LIT006000, Literary Criticism/Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

I will close by looking at a moment in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, a novella on which I have written more extensively elsewhere.

Devi’s novel is not a self-conscious response to Conrad. I choose to read it thus because it is the story of a journey into the heart(land) of the other.

Puran Sahay is a middle-class Hindu Indian journalist who is staged as limited in many ways. This is the man who travels to aboriginal country. As in Salih’s novel, there are postcolonial government functionaries and nongovernmental employees at work here, just as in Heart of Darkness the sorry structure of Belgian imperialism is at work in the Congo. Puran enters the other’s space “responsibly,” as did Mustafa Sa’eed and, indeed, Kurtz.

Am I, unwittingly, creating a taxonomy here? Perhaps I am. Kurtz is shown as succumbing to the horror of touching humanity in the raw: “Exterminate all the brutes!” (HD 84). Mustafa Sa’eed is shown as unable to survive an individual phallogocentric project to undo the difference between the colonizer and the colonized. In the process, Salih excavates colonized space to show its heterogeneity. In Mahasweta’s story, Puran is accepted by the Aboriginals, and it is they who play subject.

If Salih postpones sexual difference and the consequent possibility of collectivity maximally, Mahasweta does so minimally. Puran is shown to be incapable of sustaining a relationship with a particular woman from his own (middle) class, limned respectfully as an agent of affect and intellect. All the good government officials have active or activist wives who are elsewhere. The aboriginal women are shown to be as impervious to government family planning posters as are the Bedouin to women’s specificity. In the absence of any infrastructural effort at education and of a structure of welfare, children are sold, with devastating affective consequences. The harshness of the necessity to distance aboriginal sexuality is reflected in a cruel metaphor: “The infants rest their faces like ticks on the chests of the skeleton mothers” (PT 128).

We are, then, in an effortfully established rather than effortlessly generalized male scene. I have done harm to the novella by quickly summarizing many delicate rhetorical moves. I add to that by giving you the answer before considering the staging of the failure of response. Puran’s arrival is coincident with the coming of the rains. The area had been suffering from a drought that had led to devastation that the government was having difficulty technically designating as “famine.”42 Those so-called “difficulties” are part of the story. Puran is included into the Aboriginals’ mythic and collective self-representation as the bringer of rain.

Now in the case of Maryse Condé’s representation of multilingual subaltern Africa, and in the case of the rhetoricity of the structure of interpretation, I have spoken of “literary competence.” In the case of how the below crosses to the above, I have spoken of “restricted permeability.” As we proceed to rearrange institutionally, in the name of a new Comparative Literature, what can only happen perhaps in an unnameable future, we can include a rigorous awareness of a restricted permeability within a notion of literary competence.

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