L it er a r y C r it ic is m a n d

C u l t u r a l T h e o r y
O u t s t a n d in g D is s e r t a t io n s

e d i t e d by
W i l l i a m E. C a i n
Wellesley College

A Ro u t l ed g e Se r ie s
O t h e r B o o k s in T h is Se r ie s :

T h e L ife W r i t i n g o f O th e r n e s s T h e M a k in g o f t h e V i c t o r i a n N o v e lis t
Woolf, Baldwin, Kingston , and Winterson Anxieties and Authorship in the Mass
L a u re n R u sk M arket
Bradley Deane
F r o m W ith in t h e F ra m e
Storytelling in African-American Fiction Out o f To uch
Bertram D. Ashe Skin Tropes and Identities in W oolf,
Ellison, Pynchon, and A cker
T h e S e lf W ire d Maureen F. Curtin
Technology and Subjectivity in
Contem porary Narrative W r it in g t f ie C it y
Lisa Yaszek Urban Visions and Literary M odernism
Desmond Flarding
T h e S p ace a n d P la c e o f M o d e rn is m
The Little M agazine in N ew York F ig u r e s o f F i n a n c e C a p ita lis m
Adam McKible Writing, Class, and Capital in Mid-
Victorian Narratives
T h e F ig u re o f C o n scio u sn e ss Borislav Knezevic
William Jam es, Henry Jam es, and
Edith W harton B a l a n c in g t h e B o o k s
Jill M . K re ss Faulkner, M orrison, and the E conom ies o f
Slavery
W 7o r d o f M o u t h Erik Dussere
F o o d and Fiction after Freud
Susanne Skubal B e y o n d t h e So u n d B a r r i e r
The Jazz Controversy in Twentieth-Century
T h e W a s t e F ix American Fiction
Seizures o f the Sacred from Upton Sinclair Kristen K. Fienson
to The Sopranos
William G. Little Se g r e g a t e d M i s c e g e n a t i o n
On the Treatment o f Racial Hybridity in
W il l T f ie C ir c l e B e U n b r o k e n ? the U.S. and Latin American Literary
Family and Sectionalism in the Virginia Traditions
N ovels o f Kennedy, Caruthers, and Tucker, Carlos Fiiraldo
1830-1845
John L. Hare D e a th , M e n , a n d M o d e rn ism
Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction
P o e t ic G e s t u r e from H ardy to W oolf
Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the M otions Ariela Freedman
o f Poetic Language
Kristine S. Santilli T h e S e l f in t h e C e l l
Narrating the Victorian Prisoner
B o r d e r M o d e rn is m Sean Grass
Intercultural Readings in American
Literary M odernism R e g e n e ra tin g th e N o v e l
Christopher Schedler Gender and Genre in W oolf, Forster,
Sinclair, and Law rence
T h e M e r c h a n t o f M o d e rn is m James J. Miracky
The E con om ic Jew in Anglo-American
Literature, 1864-1939
Gary Martin Levine
 Sa t ir e & t h e

Po s t c o l o n ia l N o v el
V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe,
Salman Rushdie

John Clement Ball

First Published 2003
by Routledge
Published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without written permission from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ball, John Clement, 1960-

Satire & the postcolonial novel : V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie / John
Clement Ball.
p. cm. — (Literary criticism and cultural theory)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-415-96593-4 (alk. paper)
1. Satire, English—History and criticism. 2. Commonwealth fiction (English)—History and
criticism. 3. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Naipaul, V. S.
(Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Achebe, Chinua—Criticism
and interpretation. 6. Rushdie, Salman—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Postcolonialism—
English-speaking countries. 8. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title: Satire and the postcolo­
nial novel. II. Title. III. Series.
PR888.S3B35 2003
823’.91409358—dc21
2003000220
ISBN: 978-0-415-96593-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-80349-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-95741-7 (eISBN)
To the memory of my aunt, Catharine Greenwood Ball, and for Lisa
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

Chapter One
Theories of Satire and Postcolonialism 9

Chapter Two
“The Old Enemy. And Also the New”:
V. S. Naipaul’s Multidirectional Satire 41

Chapter Three
“In All Fairness”:
Satire and Narrative in the Novels of Chinua Achebe 79

Chapter Four
“Pessoptimism”:
Satire and the Menippean Grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s Novels 115

Conclusion 165

Afterword (2002) 169

Notes 175

Works Cited 185

Index 203

vii
This page intentionally left blank
Preface and Acknowledgements

Satire is a prevalent but largely untheorized mode of representation in

postcolonial fiction. This book explores theoretical problems posed by
satiric postcolonial novels written in English and then examines the
generic, rhetorical, and political strategies of satire in texts by three of the
most widely read authors from former British colonies: V. S. Naipaul,
Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie.
The original version of this study was researched and written between
1992 and 1994 as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto. It
was successfully defended in December 1994, and the degree was con-
ferred in 1995. Following Routledge’s requirements, the dissertation has
been “lightly revised” for publication in the Literary Criticism and Cul-
tural Theory series. In addition to minor cuts and changes of wording
throughout, there are two substantive revisions. The first is the addition of
a brief afterword intended to update the theoretical framework (as out-
lined in the introduction and chapter one) by addressing the implications
of some key developments in postcolonial studies and satire theory be-
tween 1995 and 2002. The other substantive revision is to chapter four.
After completing my doctoral studies, I published two articles on Salman
Rushdie’s work that grew out of the research for this chapter; the further
thinking, writing, and editing that went into those publications is reflected
here. The first article, “Pessoptimism: Satire and the Menippean Grotesque
in Rushdie’s Midnight's Children,” was published in English Studies in
Canada 24.1 (1998): 61-81. The second, “Acid in the Nation’s Blood-
stream: Satire, Violence, and the Indian Body Politic in Salman Rushdie’s
The Moor's Last Sigh,” applies the chapter’s conceptual framework to a
novel published after the dissertation was completed; this article appeared
in The International Fiction Review 27 .1 -2 (2000): 3 7 -4 7 . I am grateful
to the editors of both journals for their permission to reprint material from
those articles in this book.

ix
JC Preface and Acknowledgem ents

Many other individuals and organizations have assisted this project at

various stages. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada awarded me a doctoral fellowship from 1991 to 1994, and the De-
partment of English at the University of Toronto supported my doctoral
studies in material and intangible ways from 1990 onwards. I am particu-
larly grateful for the friendly encouragement and excellent advice of my su-
pervisor, Jim Howard. My dissertation committee members, Ted
Chamberlin and Chelva Kanaganayakam, were unfailingly generous with
their time, providing thoughtful and inspiring comments on chapter drafts.
As an external examiner, Diana Brydon was also extremely supportive and
helpful.
Informally, the dissertation benefited from the ideas and support of nu-
merous graduate students and professors at the University of Toronto and
elsewhere: they include Alan Bewell, Russell Brown, Dan Coleman, Brian
Corman, Greig Henderson, Colman Hogan, Linda Hutcheon, Rosemary
Jolly, Ross Leckie, Nancy Lindheim, Mark McDayter, Uppinder Mehan,
Susie O ’Brien, Livinus Odozor, Katharine Patterson, Michel Pharand, Vic-
tor Ramraj, Richard Sanger, Michael Sidnell, Wanda Taylor, and Linda
Warley. Since then, my understanding of postcolonial fiction has grown
through exchanges with students and colleagues at the University of New
Brunswick and elsewhere; though they are too numerous to list here, I am
grateful to them all.
As a research assistant at the thesis-into-book stage, Jennifer Bronson
was conscientious and enthusiastic in helping me update theory and pre-
pare an index. At Routledge, I thank Damian Treffs, who solicited this
manuscript; William Cain, the Series Editor who accepted it; and Paul Fos-
ter Johnson, who as Damian’s successor shepherded it through the publica-
tion process.
Finally, I owe the greatest of debts to Lisa Alward, who got me started
on this project and who, together with our children Hilary, Jack, and Peter,
has cheerfully tolerated (and refrained from satirizing) my research-in-
duced states of compulsion and distraction.
Introduction

Satiric fictions occupy a prominent place among the texts from the former
British Empire that have come to be called the postcolonial literatures in
English. Many Commonwealth writers have written novels that are largely
or partly satiric; a longish list might include Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tha-
roor, Rajiva Wijesinha, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Sam Selvon,
Austin Clarke, Chinua Achebe, T. M. Aluko, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa
Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Hope, Mudrooroo, Patrick White,
Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Janet Frame, Margaret Atwood, and Mordecai
Richler. Back-cover blurbs regularly position postcolonial novels as “dev-
astating political satire” or “wickedly satiric,” as if the presence of satire,
like pornography, will help to sell more copies.1 Yet despite its prevalence
and popularity as a mode, satire has not yet been studied and theorized in a
comparative postcolonial context. Essays on particular authors or works
have been published, but there has not yet been the kind of investigation
undertaken here: one that employs the insights of postcolonial compara-
tive theories to interrogate Western formulations of satire and the satiric
with a view to outlining both their uses and limitations as models for post-
colonial texts.
In some ways, this absence of interaction between the discourses of
satire and the postcolonial is surprising, for they appear to share certain
foundational assumptions. Despite continuing debates and contradictions
among theorists about what satire is or does, it is commonly agreed to tar-
get “an object of attack” (Frye, Anatomy 224) which has either a general
or specific existence in the historical, material world of “social reality”
(Guilhamet 166) outside the satiric text itself. For Edward Rosenheim, in a
famous but controversial definition, satire is “an attack by means o f a
manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars” (323). Charles
Knight adds,

1
2 Satire tir the Postcolonial Novel

Satire’s distinction irom the genres it imitates lies in the unpleasant pres-
ence of such historical attack , and hence referentiality is central precisely
because the identity of the satiric referent, its independence, and the tran s-
form ation th at occurs when satire may be said to textualize it are m ajor
elements of the satiric message. (“ Satire” 35)

Critics who place notions of “attack” or “aggression” at the heart of satire

(e.g., Kernan, “Aggression” 117; Test, Satire 15-19) construct it as a mode
of oppositional writing whose referentiality is a function of its opposition.
Beyond the pages of every satiric fiction, they claim, is a targeted victim— a
person, institution, or practice—with at least some degree of historicality
and, depending on the theoretical model, of individuality, specificity, or
identifiability.
Two of the chief distinguishing features of postcolonial texts, as theo-
rized in the emergent discourse of postcolonialism, are oppositionality and
referentiality. These general terms encompass a range of concepts. Opposi-
tionality is variously articulated as resistance, subversion, counter-dis-
course, contestatory narrative, writing back, and critique. Referentiality,
which Stephen Slemon calls “a crucial strategy for survival in marginalized
social groups” (“Modernism’s” 5), is related to the concepts of agency, ma-
teriality, and historicality, through which specific local or national contexts
and subjects for writing are privileged. In this context, as in satire theory,
“referentiality” signifies not a mimetic or realist representation of the
world, but rather a localized cultural grounding responsible for the claims
of “difference” made by the postcolonial text (or the postcolonial critic ex-
amining the text).2 Postcolonial literary works, it is said, emerge out of a
concrete social reality and history of colonization and domination. The
postcolonial writer uses the colonizer’s language to oppose the hegemony
of imperial and neocolonial power and to construct herself in that lan-
guage as a subject where before she was an objectified and voiceless
“other.” Abdul JanMohamed puts these attributes succinctly when he de-
scribes Third World literature, a major component of the postcolonial’s
embrace, as “marked by two broad characteristics: its attempt to negate
the prior European negation of colonized cultures and its adoption and
creative modification of Western languages and artistic forms in conjunc-
tion with indigenous languages and forms” (103-04). According to theo-
rists of postcolonialism, the postcolonial writer challenges the hierarchical
binaries of Empire—center/margin, master/slave, self/other, civilized/sav-
age—to establish new centers of discourse, new subject positions, and new
loci of freedom and power. As a “space-clearing gesture” (Appiah 348), the
“post” in postcolonial need not be just a temporal designation. In Slemon’s
words,
Definitions of the ‘p ost-colon ial,’ of course, vary widely, but for me the
concept proves m ost useful not when it is used synonymously with a post-
independence historical period in once-colonized nations but rather when
Introduction 3

it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in cul-

ture, one which begins in the m om ent th at colonial pow er inscribes itself
onto the body and space of its O thers and which continues as an often o c -
culted tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international
relations. (“M odernism ’s ” 3)

In general, postcolonialism can be seen as a discourse of opposition to and

liberation from coercive European political structures, epistemologies, and
ideologies.
As such, “postcolonial” is not an unproblematic term— no more so than
any broad category (like “satire,” for instance) that assembles, defines, and
describes the common features of a large and diverse group of texts. Post-
colonialism has been criticized on a number of fronts by Arun Mukherjee,
Frank Schulze-Engler, Anne McClintock, and Ella Shohat, among others. It
is attacked as prematurely celebratory, fixated on past rather than present
power imbalances, inappropriately modeled on linear notions of time and
progress, and wedded to outmoded binaries that reinforce the colonial
domination they seek to undermine. “Postcolonial” is also said to be
overly homogenizing and disrespectful of local differences and specificities.
Moreover, according to some critiques, white settler cultures with their
ambiguous double status—oppressive dominators of aboriginal peoples
and dominated margin vis-à-vis the imperial center— should not be
grouped with the more directly and brutally oppressed peoples of Africa,
India, and the West Indies. These are all valid critiques of the terms “post-
colonial” and “postcolonialism,” though somewhat unfair, I would argue,
to the actual practice of postcolonial criticism in the hands of its finest
practitioners. Scholars such as Slemon, Bill Ashcroft, Diana Brydon, and
Helen Tiffin— leading advocates of postcolonial theory and practice— do
articulate many of the subtleties and distinctions that foes of postcolonial-
ism insist on. In their best work, they strike a balance sensitive to both the
commonalities and the differences displayed by diverse texts.
Nevertheless, it is important to articulate a couple of ways in which this
relatively new critical rubric, with its potentially enormous embrace, is or
should be restricted. The first restriction is proposed by Sylvia Soderlind,
who recommends limiting the postcolonial to “the literature produced in
former colonies that assumes a position of resistance to the metropolis”
(6). To this idea we might add that the engagement with imperial power
structures as present fact or past legacy may be direct or indirect, and
whether it is “found” in a text or “constructed” by the postcolonial critic
will be in some cases highly debatable. But implicit in Soderlind’s statement
is the cautionary recognition (not always made elsewhere) that many texts
from former colonies will have other primary concerns and may not resist
the metropolis at all. The postcolonial category should be reserved for
those that do. The second restriction on the field is one that Donna Bennett
sees as innate in the political bearing of postcolonial criticism. She writes
that “postcolonial approaches are more useful for identifying differences
4 Satire & the Postcolonial Novel

and tracing out the dynamics of power than for recognizing and valuing
similarities and accommodations, whether they be those of groups or of in-
dividuals” (196). Like Soderlind’s, this statement serves as a useful caveat
to the spirit of eager territorial expansion in which postcolonial models are
sometimes advanced; it reminds us that the rubric—however compelling
and broadly applicable it may seem—cannot serve by itself as an all-pur-
pose interpretive tool. In general, postcolonialism should be used selec-
tively, carefully, and non-hegemonically. It does not apply to all texts, and
those to which it does seem to apply are not fully accounted for by it. For
our purposes, however, Bennett’s remark helps clarify the apparent com-
patibility of postcolonial critical models (and the texts that fit the models)
with satire. Like the postcolonial text, the paradigmatic satiric text is also
obsessed with non-accommodating power dynamics and more interested in
differences than similarities.
If both satiric and postcolonial texts are innately oppositional and di-
rected referentially towards material conditions and agents, w7hat kinds of
specific connections between them can be made? Clearly the two theoreti-
cal constructs are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for each other.
Postcolonial oppositionality and resistance take many forms besides satire,
just as postcolonial literatures have no monopoly on satiric utterance,
which has flourished throughout the world in contemporary and historical
cultures. Both the complex but well-documented etymology of “satire,”
and its existence as literary practice and as theoretical abstraction from
practice, are predominantly Western.3 As practice, literary satire by most
accounts began in the classical era and descended through medieval and
Renaissance literatures, achieved prominence in the neoclassical era, ta-
pered off in the nineteenth century and, depending on who you read, in the
twentieth century either dwindled completely or came to dominate its liter-
ature.4 As a named and theorized entity (genre or mode), satire belongs et-
ymologically to Latin and Greek; as a discourse of literary history,
description, and classification it has in this century been the province of
Anglo-American, German, and Russian critics.
These roots in European cultural and critical traditions create potential
problems for satire as a model for analyzing postcolonial literatures. Euro-
pean-based intellectual systems and literary theories are regularly attacked
by postcolonial critics for running roughshod over the particularities and
differences of colonial and postcolonial reality. As Flenry Louis Gates
writes,
N o critical theory— be it M arxist, feminist, poststructuralist, . . . or w h at-
ever— escapes the specificity of value and ideology, no m atter how medi-
ated these may be. To attem pt to appropriate our own discourses by using
W estern critical theory uncritically is to substitute one mode of n eocolo-
nialism for another. (“ E d ito r’s” 15)
Introduction 5

A loud chorus of postcolonial writers and critics has critiqued the imposi-
tion of Western concepts, from liberal humanism to New Criticism to post-
modernism, onto postcolonial texts. Such practices are seen as assimilative,
coercive, and universalizing, and as ignoring crucial specificities of race,
tribe, class, culture, gender, ethnicity, religion, history, geographic locale,
and the material conditions of existence. The discourse of satire might also
therefore be vulnerable to dismissal as one more Euro-American will to
power over literary texts whose intents and modes of meaning are suffi-
ciently different from those of Western texts that they cannot benefit from
its intervention and may, in fact, be polluted, distorted, or even colonized
by analysis that follows principles derived from Western literatures. That
satire has not been so dismissed may be because as a theoretical discourse
it does not have the cohesiveness, the profile, or the perceived coercive
power of more controversial intellectual systems. It is hard to imagine Bill
Ashcroft’s description of poststructuralism as an “ominous intellectual or-
thodoxy” (“Intersecting” 24) being applied to satire criticism, a specialized
and diffuse body of genre theory. I raise the specter of possible objections
early, however, because the issues involved are central and serious, and to
ignore them would be irresponsible. Indeed, a central goal of this project is
to deny “satire” the status of transparent sign: to treat “satire”—a term in
common use among postcolonial writers and critics—with a certain suspi-
cion on the assumption that the unstated implication of such use—that
both writer and reader know and agree what “satire” means, and that as a
component of certain postcolonial texts it means more or less what it
means in other literary-critical discourses— may occlude the special quali-
ties of both satire and postcolonial literature.
The oppositionality and referentiality that are so central to both satire
and postcolonialism must not, therefore, be conflated. If satire is to earn its
place in postcolonial discourse as a productive designation of modes of
rhetoric and representation that appear to exist in postcolonial texts, the
terms of its discourse must be tested against postcolonial models. The pro-
liferation of theories and definitions must be investigated and reconfigured
on terms compatible with the strategies and sensitive to the varieties of
postcoloniality represented by a diverse group of texts produced in widely
differing conditions. Moreover, formulations of the satiric and the post-
colonial must be free to illuminate and critique each other. My first chapter
will be devoted to such an inquiry.
One claim made by most satire theories will be admitted from the start:
the perception of satire as “a borrower of forms” (Guilhamet 165). As
James Nichols says, “satire seems to have no distinctive forms of its own”
(49). For Michael Seidel, satire is “a mode rather than . . . a generically
fixed form,” and it can “alter potential in other systems of literary repre-
sentation” (Satiric xii). Historically, literary satire occurs in poetic, dra-
matic, narrative, and rhetorical forms; the concept of generic satire began
with the formal verse satires of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius, and contin-
6 Satire & the Posicolonial Novel

ued to be productively employed by writers and critics to categorize imita-

tions and variations on such poetic attacks in the Renaissance and Augus-
tan periods. But while genre status is claimed for satire by various critics
on the basis of its dominance as a mode in particular works of dramatic,
poetic, rhetorical, or fictional writing, arguments such as those made by
Peter Petro for designating selected contemporary novels as generic satire
are unproductive (9). The novel’s openness as a genre, alluded to by Henry
James in his “fluid pudding” and “baggy monster” epithets, and theorized
in this century by Mikhail Bakhtin and others, gives it plenty of room to
accommodate varying types and intensities of satiric writing.5 So while I
acknowledge the articulate and not unconvincing negotiations of generic
status for satire in recent work by Leon Guilhamet, John Snyder, and
Charles Knight, this study’s restriction to manifestations of the satiric in
contemporary novels will avoid the turf battles of competing genre claims.
It will remain content to let novels be novels and to analyze satire, however
dominant and transforming its effects on individual examples of the novel,
as a mode operating within the novel’s wide generic boundaries.
Using Ronald Paulson’s simple but useful distinction between “satire”
and “a satire” (Fictions 4), or tone and form, my topic will thus be satire
rather than satires—the mode not the genre. More precisely, this study will
be concerned with modes of satiric oppositionality in postcolonial novels.
It will proceed by opening up critical assumptions about satire and the
postcolonial to mutual inspection; it will then bring forward the questions,
issues, parameters, and provisional theories that emerge from that inspec-
tion onto the testing-ground of postcolonial novels. The texts I have cho-
sen for primary analysis are by three writers associated with different
national literatures: V. S. Naipaul of Trinidad, Chinua Achebe of Nigeria,
and Salman Rushdie of India. Besides being among the most prominent
and widely read authors from their respective regions, they deserve de-
tailed consideration on the basis of their substantial use of modal satire,
the importance of the mode to their interests and strategies, their overt
concern with Empire and its legacies, and the varieties they display—of ref-
erential and cultural contexts, of novel forms and writing styles, of politi-
cal positions, and of satiric utterance itself.
The aim of this project is not to construct an overarching theory of
satire in the postcolonial novel that can then be widely and authoritatively
applied. Satire, as critical commonplace has it, is protean. It is notoriously
resistant to unitary theories (Test, Satire x; Griffin 3). In writers as different
from each other as these three, satire is bound to operate in very diverse
ways. Indeed, as a parasitic mode that adapts to and transforms its generic
host— in these cases, the novel— satire may appear to be a completely dif-
ferent thing from one writer (or one text) to another. Satire thus needs to
be separately theorized for each body of work, even after the first chapter
has raised the general questions prompted by the idea of “postcolonial
satire.” In each author’s work, I find satire to have a different appearance
Introduction 7

and a different function, and to be most profitably investigated in tandem

with one or more different literary concepts. In the work of Naipaul, the
focus is on satire’s multidirectional targeting and its relation to irony and
allegory. In Achebe’s novels, satire is examined as a mode of critiquing
colonial discourse and as a problematic adjunct to the narrative impulse.
The final chapter considers the usefulness of Mikhail Bakhtin’s formula-
tions of negative satire, Menippean satire, and the grotesque body as inter-
pretive models for Rushdie’s texts.
The result, I hope, is a study that maximizes diversity and interest while
minimizing repetition and predictability. Despite the variables, however,
some thematic and methodological continuity should be apparent. The
politics of colonial and neocolonial, imperial and neoimperial power are
favourite topics of each author, and will emerge as favorite objects of
satiric representational strategies. As a result, this study is primarily about
the satiric representation of politics and the politics of satiric representa-
tion. My general method will be to examine each author within the context
of positions on colonialism, politics, culture, society, writing, and satire it-
self that emerge in his non-fiction and public statements—of which each
author has a substantial body. Each major novel in which satire plays a sig-
nificant role will then be examined for the contribution the satiric mode
makes to its overall form, style, themes, and rhetorical agenda.
The three authors come originally from colonies of invasion in the three
regions of the world where the British Empire made its most violent and
far-reaching interventions. In the West Indies, Africa, and the Indian sub-
continent, the imperial adventure disrupted and altered the greatest num-
bers of lives in the most profound and direct ways. It is arguably such
places, which have historically felt power differentials the most acutely
(and which continue to do so today), that are most likely to produce a vig-
orous culture of anger and opposition conducive to lively political satire. I
support the use of postcolonial theories in the criticism of literatures in
English from the white settler-invader populations of Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and South Africa, as long as such theories are appropriately
contextualized, qualified, and differentiated from their uses with the litera-
tures of the postcolonial “Third World.” I cite examples from both settler
and non-settler literatures in the theoretical arguments of chapter one. But
while subsequent chapters on such satirists as Richler, White, Frame, and
Hope could have extended the topic in fascinating directions, I have omit-
ted them and their settler-colony literatures from primary analysis for prac-
tical reasons. In the detailed discussions of Naipaul, Achebe, and Rushdie,
what I hope will become apparent is the variety, power, and complexity of
satire as a tool of postcolonial critique serving cultures that were among
those most profoundly affected by imperialism and its messy aftermath.
This page intentionally left blank
C H A P T ER O N E

Theories of Satire and

Postcolonialism

A remarkably enduring commonplace of satire theories is the notion that

satire, even at its most revolutionary, gazes nostalgically and conservatively
back upon a privileged golden age. Ronald Paulson (Fictions 18) put for-
ward this idea among the first wave of twentieth-century theorists working
to rescue satire from theoretical marginality, and it has been advanced
more recently by Frank Palmeri and Leon Guilhamet. Palmeri begins Satire
in Narrative with the following assertion: “Satirists discover in the past an
image of pristine integrity, in relation to which their contemporary situa-
tion signifies a falling off into ambiguity and doubleness” (1). For Guil-
hamet, satire “implies the existence in the past of an order prior to the
dislocation characteristic of the modern world” (16). He draws this impli-
cation from satire’s use of conventional genres (in however fragmentary a
manner), which allows satire, in its role of “mediator between the real and
the ideal,” to “find connections with the idealized traditions of antiquity”
(16). The golden age is actually for Guilhamet a “golden age of genre”
(164); genre represents institutional order, and the satirist prefers the or-
derly, known past to the chaotic present and the unknown future. The past
“has the sanctity of myth,” and “the object of satire is a present danger or
perversion of a hallowed norm” (165). If Guilhamet appears from these
quotations to be equivocating between attaching satire to sociohistorical
reality and using genre as a metaphorical substitute for that reality, he clar-
ifies his allegiance with the following:
It is not so much the historical past, perhaps, as the ideal perception of
pastness revealed in forms [i.e., genres] which attracts the great satirists.
In other w ords, the conception of epic, tragedy, or the m ajor nonmimetic
structures— history, philosophy, and oratory— can be idealized even be-
yond any imagined past. (1 6 6 )

This emphasis on generic rather than historical devolution provides an

example of how a potentially useful point of intersection between satire
10 Satire & the Postcolonial Novel

and postcolonial discourse can be theorized into mutual incompatibility. A

satiric postcolonial novel like Mudrooroo’s Dr. W ooreddy’s Prescription
fo r Enduring the Ending o f the World, for instance, might be read as privi-
leging an ideal past of harmony and peace in Tasmania’s aboriginal society,
one that was shattered by the violent interventions of white missionaries
and colonizers. In this reading, Mudrooroo’s satire primarily targets the
missionary Robinson as a metonym of the misguided do-goodism that
proved so destructive; Robinson may be ridiculous, but his power makes
him dangerous, and hence he is a satiric rather than simply comic figure.1
Any residual satire directed at Wooreddy and other quasi-collaborative fig-
ures would then be read as a “falling off” from authenticity and wholeness
into confusion and distorting behavior that would not exist but for Em-
pire; Wooreddy would therefore be a satirized victim, but of forces outside
his control. In this way, the novel could be read as paradigmatically post-
colonial, taking aim at the institutions, agents, and policies of imperialism
that form a kind of composite master-target behind all postcolonial satiric
gestures. In such an interpretation, a golden age like that portrayed in
Mudrooroo’s historical novel would be, at least for works from invaded
societies, the lost period of integration and order to which all satiric repre-
sentations explicitly or implicitly look back. Satiric opposition would thus
become closely allied with models of postcolonial resistance. The nostalgia
for a golden age and what Northrop Frye calls satire’s “struggle of two so-
cieties, one normal and the other absurd” (Anatomy 224) would become
related to the concrete history of colonization and what Bill Ashcroft calls
“the desire within post-colonial discourse to return to an original pre-colo-
nial relationship with the sense of a community which gave you birth”
(“Intersecting” 30). Such a model of postcolonial satire might be quite pro-
ductively tested.
But in Guilhamet’s formulation, real history disappears as the source of
satiric contrast and idealization. As a normative reality from which the sat-
irized present (or historical present in Dr. W ooreddy) marks an offensive
deviation, the material past is subsumed into genre—apparently a more
compelling source of ideals. Satire’s referentiality—what Linda Hutcheon
calls its “extramural” focus (Theory 43)—takes a back seat to a vision of
generic lineage. Postcolonial recuperative projects, to which the golden-age
model of satire could contribute, are diverted under Guilhamet’s model
from the realm of national-ethnic culture and collective history into a
purely textual process of genre shoring up fragments of its own grander
past. Not only is this obliteration of the satirist’s political urgency and real-
world groundedness at odds with postcolonial assumptions, but the loca-
tion of pastness in Western generic categories would also elide the oral and
scribal genres dominant in the varying pasts of invaded cultures.
Guilhamet’s perspective on the golden-age concept is certainly problem-
atic, but even in the more straightforward versions of Paulson and Palmeri
the idea will have trouble standing as a model for all postcolonial satire or
Theories o f Satire and Postcolonialism 11

as a distinctive feature of satiric rather than nonsatiric texts. The example

of Dr. W ooreddy suggests that if there is a golden age implied by postcolo-
nial satire it will be located before colonial intervention. Congruent with
the recuperative strategies claimed for some postcolonial texts by many
critics and authors, this seems a reasonable application of outside theory to
postcolonial contexts. But as a widely applicable model it cannot stand.
Texts from settler societies would be excluded; their history of cultural
rupture is of a very different kind than that of Caribbean, African, Indian,
or aboriginal communities. Settler societies’ relations to the imperial cen-
ter— and their experiences of marginalization, cultural dislocation, and
consequent striving for voice and collective self-understanding—were en-
tirely different than the oppression meted out by Empire in colonies of in-
vasion. The settler cultures of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and white
South Africa do not have collective precolonial social structures, lan-
guages, or cultural traditions to recuperate.
But even for cultures that Empire invaded, a model of satire that locates
the ideals on which satiric contrasts are founded in a pre-colonial past is
problematic in several other respects. Certain non-satiric works such as
Ngugi’s The River Between and V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men also ideal-
ize some version of that past as a time of order; others, like Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, though clearly preferring that past to the sub-
sequent disruption caused by Empire, nevertheless document the internal
divisions and structural weaknesses of the society that contributed to the
invaders’ early success. (Such a qualified idealism can also arguably be read
into the satiric Dr. W ooreddy. )2 The idealization of a precolonial golden
age would also ally satiric representations from invaded cultures with a
now largely discredited nativism. Moreover, the inhabitants of such a
golden age would also risk adhering to the European myth of the paradisi-
acal noble savage, which, as Selwyn Cudjoe points out, defined people by a
binary negation, “as having failed to attain or replicate the European mode
of life.” Savagism, he argues, “did not acknowledge the integrity of the na-
tive’s culture” (121). As an alternative to the purist impulses of nativism
and savagism, notions of hybridity, cultural syncretism, liminality, and
contamination have been asserted by numerous postcolonial writers and
intellectuals as good bases for constructing new identities, cultures, and lit-
erary forms. The nativist goal of retrieving a “pre-colonial purity” is
widely recognized as impractical because “post-colonial culture is inevita-
bly a hybridized phenomenon involving a dialectical relationship between
the ‘grafted’ European cultural systems and an indigenous ontology”
(Ashcroft, Em pire 195). Or, as Kwame Anthony Appiah more bluntly says,
“we are all already contaminated by each other” (354).3
The binary axis of the golden-age model also renders it inadequate to
deal with satire whose focus is contemporary, postindependence neocolo-
nialism. Novels like Salman Rushdie’s Sham e, Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross,
Achebe’s A Man o f the P eople, and Rajiva Wijesinha’s Days o f D espair sat-