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2 years ago
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Writing Politics/Writing and Politics
With Salman Rushdie's being knighted and Chinua Achebe's winning the Man Booker Prize within days of each other, the postcolonial novel in English/english is again in the news. The knighthood sure has political implications, and has been promptly politicised too. The postcolonial novel is often avowedly political (Achebe's remarks about his own writing in the report linked above bear testimony) but what makes literature vulnerable in its relationship with politics is that some texts are particularly susceptible to being used for political agenda quite unthought of or unwanted by the author. Another writer whose work has been put to political cross-purposes is J.M. Coetzee. Of course that brings up once again the vexed question of authorial intention, and its place in cognitive protocols of response. At a talk show organised by The Telegraph on 9 December, 2004, in Calcutta, that I was fortunate to be able to go to, Rushdie dwelt on this troubled aspect of writing, and it seems it is worthwhile to revisit Rushdie's remarks on that occasion now. Here is Rushdie's own transcript of his talk that appeared in The Telegraph on 20 December, 2004. The punctuation seems to have been messed up in the internet version, and from a brief glimpse I can decipher that the commas, apostrophes and quotation marks have all morphed into question marks. Questions abound, for sure.
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5 comments:
Great piece..
I personally feel that authorial intention should be replaced by myriad interpretations once the the work raeches its readers, intended or unintended. The pitfalls are many. Political affiliatins do not always sell a book. So much is lost from a piece when it is politicized unnecessarily. Having said that, I still feel that the real charm of a book lies in not how well it has been authored (which is albeit important) but how it is received, even if the target readers form a very tiny group.
As far as post colonial literature goes, it is the undertone of socio-political occurences present in most of the works that I like.
Read Maru by Bessie Head if you have not read.
Hmm. But authorial intention cannot be wished away so easily. That is also why a good deal of twentieth century western literary theory is preoccupied with it (particularly answering theories trying to wish it away), which I will not dare to summarize here. It is a much more nuanced question than any sense of it that my blog (hopefully) reflects. Said, for one, has an interesting take on it in "The World, the Text and the Critic." My point in stating that the politicising of literature brings up the old question was partly to stress that the question itself is here to stay. The exact context of my post is strictly the politicising of Rushdie (and Coetzee, like him) which would be clearer if you read Rushdie's transcript of his talk that I have linked.
In a poor way, the fact that I feel it necessary to reply to your comment, to redirect your attention to my intentions, testifies to the problem of authorial intention;)
I agree the question is here to stay...
You try to reassert your intention and I am trying to assert mine. I was sharing what i feel ought to be accepted..
How do preserve authorial intention anyways after it reaches book stores ?
Dharitri,
The short answer to your question is that "authorial intention" begins to be spoken about only after a book has reached the bookstores, and stressing its importance isn't trying to "preserve" it as you seem to think. Such "preservation" isn't too useful in this context anyway.
I hope you understand that throughout, I have used "authorial intention" as a very loaded term. Nobody is asking you not to have your own views about a book. But I hope you appreciate that when so much has been thought and written about "authorial intention," it is useful to know it first-hand before using the phrase, for otherwise, there is the risk of oversimplification and undue reduction. Since I do not think that a blog is the best place to exchange notes on such subjects, I drew your attention to Said's book, and I chose to refer to Said rather than anyone else because he would also interest you otherwise, given your interests in postcolonialism. Rushdie, in the transcript of the talk show that I linked, dwells on the issue at length, as I have pointed out in my post, and reading it bearing in mind the fatwa affair which follows him and his writing anywhere he goes, would help. Much of what Rushdie said on the business has been left out of the print version, obviously because the ghost of the fatwa still haunts him (you would recall there were fresh demands of a fatwa after the conferment of the knighthood), but still his point comes through. I thought Said and Rushdie could introduce you to the question better than me, and would be more convincing. I reiterate that Rushdie's case demonstrates just how mischievous and divisive, to say the least, a disregard for "authorial intention" can get, and, that that is all that I have tried to point out.
I am glad I dropped in - I totally missed the "news", being away from net for 3 weeks!
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