Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire 9781498571968, 9781498571975

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Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Postcolonial Satire

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Postcolonial Satire Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire

Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Amy L. Friedman

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com

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6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-7196-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-7197-5 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

With gratitude to my incredible son, Jesse Friedman, for his support and enthusiasm for this project, and his suggestion that I work on making Postcolonial Satire Action Figures next.

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Contents

Acknowledgments 1

ix

2

Menippean Satire and Counter-realism in Indian Postcolonial Fictions G. V. Desani’s Postcolonial Menippean Satiric Subversions

3 4 5

Aubrey Menen and Menippean Wit Salman Rushdie’s Menippean Strategies of Language Irwin Allan Sealy’s Menippean Strategies of Form

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Conclusion: From Hatterr to Trotter and Beyond Bibliography Index About the Author

vii Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

1 49 83 109 143 177 191 205 209

Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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Acknowledgments

This book draws on research which would not have been possible without the significant backing and enduring patience provided by the English Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. It is now the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and somewhat unrecognizable in its blaze of illustrious eminences of celebrated reputations and glittering accomplishments. But back in my day it was a dim hallway of small-scale offices and even smaller-scale dreams, where every single department window faced the dim grey north. We elbowed past one other in the narrow corridor, labored long hours in the weak halflight of the flickering overhead lightbulbs, and fought over a handful of stubby pencils and one doddering manual typewriter in the main office. We worked hard but barely eked out a living, regularly stripping to our undershirts en masse to hew from gritty material the class plans that would bring glints of new angles of literary study finally into the light of day. David Margolies, Chris Baldick, Lucia Boldrini, Alan Downie, Josh Cohen, Helen Carr, Maria MacDonald, and the scarlet Tim Parnell will each lower their pint glass long enough to back me up on these recollections, before returning speedily to whatever ribald confab currently stands in for a “department meeting” at the Rosemary Branch Pub on the corner of St. Donatt’s Road and Lewisham Way in New Cross, South East London. And even if the Rosemary Branch is now a gastro-pub with “exposed brickwork” and is called The Fat Walrus, our plucky heritage endures. Mere progress can never erase the sheer summits of our inebriated wit, nor that nebulous but defiantly overinflated sense of purpose. My sole actual classmate when I arrived at Goldsmiths, Dr. Michelle Paull, has remained a beloved comrade in the intervening years, and there was never a finer colleague for the long haul. I salute her continued devotion to excellent pedagogy, curricular development, and the welfare of students and cats, even as departments, programs, and colleges continually shift and consolidate. One could have no better friend in academe than Dr. Paull. And one could have no finer friend in the trenches of life than Mary Jeremiah, lately of Kent, who fed me, refilled my glass, and filled my soul with the determination to carry on—it’s been an amazing and enduring friendship. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Peter Briggs of the Bryn Mawr College English Department, for his stalwart dedication to introducing ix

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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x

Acknowledgments

the marvels of literary satire to multiple generations of guileless undergraduates. The editors over at Lexington Press are rather spiffing in their helpfulness and unwavering support. I am grateful to acquisitions editors Jessica Thwaite and Holly Buchanan, to Ashleigh Cooke and Megan Conley, and also to former acquisitions editor Lindsey Falk, who has since moved to greener professional pastures which require far less time in stuffy airport departure lounges. Lexington set me up with the canniest anonymous reviewer ever, and I must salute this unsung individual for providing notes both astute and wise. Missing from my list of colleagues at Goldsmiths is my dissertation advisor, Dr. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Professor of Postcolonial Studies and English, who was a stalwart supporter and patient resource throughout my time in the department. Sadly, Bart left us far too early; kidney cancer struck and he died six days shy of his sixty-third birthday in December 2015, putting an end to a prodigious output of truly brilliant publications, whose signal attribute was effortless clarification of the most complex intellectual problems. Bart published a moving and elegantly written memoir in 2014, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets, in which he traced his travels and researches in India to explore recently revealed allegations that his father had participated in brutal acts while a member of the British colonial constabulary there in the 1940s. Bart was born during his father’s subsequent period of British colonial service in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and he had grown up knowing almost nothing of his father’s previous time in India. Bart had also been laying the groundwork for a new area of study, Postcolonial Life-Writing, which he continued to develop after his publication of Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation in 2009—a book Times Higher Education lauded as “a pioneering analysis.” Ever the effortless overachiever, Bart managed something else rather incredible during this time; his draft of The Setting Sun was also his dissertation for a second Ph.D, in LifeWriting, news of which he reported to me upon completion with immense pride and glee. “I got my second PhD last week,” Bart wrote, “Many are annoyed!” If you have not read Bart’s work yet, you should. The irony of discovering after Bart died the relevance of some of his more recent work to my current study is simultaneously crushing and confounding. I can only wish forlornly we could have discussed the political implications of genre more recently, and hope that my efforts here do justice to his material to which I have referred. Bart was a reliable source of both encouragement and challenge as I beetled away at my work for all those years. He disparaged any piece of writing I shared that vaunted jargon, opacity, or obfuscation. “Write,” Bart would always say, “for the man on the street.” “But Bart,” I’d reply in person, or via email, or just silently in my head, “You know, I don’t think the man on the street gives a damn about postcolonial satire.”

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Acknowledgments

xi

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“Write for him anyway,” Bart would answer, and then blithely return to completing almost instantaneously yet another manuscript, article, or review. Finally I’d like to thank my immediate family: my father Sidney, my late mother Sally, brothers Dan and Neal, sister-in-law Serena, family friend Matt O’Riley, and my wonderful son, Jesse. I’d also like to mention a few of my stalwart Bryn Mawr College sisters: Susan Messina, Vivion Vinson, Amanda Joseph, Claudia Ginanni, Irene Lambrou, Karin Schwartz, Kristin Manitzas Miles, Elisabeth McLaury Lewin, Margaret Hoag, Bryn Austin, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Kathy Roth-Douquet, Margaret Vaughn Elizondo, Heather McLaughlin, Kelly Kuwabara, Emily (Glick) Alston-Follansbee, Raka Ray, Susan K. Flinn, Eiblis Goldings, Marcy Epstein, Seemi Ghazi—each played a part in getting me here, and I am so grateful. And if you are out there, Man or Woman on the Street, apparently this book is for you.

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

ONE Menippean Satire and Counterrealism in Indian Postcolonial Fictions

…hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. —Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 1

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The authoritative, compelling image of the empire, which crept into and overtook so many procedures of intellectual mastery that are central in modern culture, finds its opposite in the renewable, almost sporty discontinuities of intellectual and secular impurities—mixed genres, unexpected combinations of tradition and novelty… —Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism 2 The original Latin word satura means “medley,” “hotch-potch,” and the best satirists have either known this or divined it. —Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire 3

MENIPPEAN SATIRE IN INDIA The Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata was feeling abject because his humorous writing was greatly underappreciated in the Roman Empire, circa 150 CE. But then he had a sudden dynamic vision of satire invading India under the triumphant banner of Dionysus, bringing a frenzy of forms and references and sharply cutting mockery. Lucian conjures this vivid battle of contrasts in his essay “Dionysus,” to argue against the reflex of dismissal of satiric writing. The satire scholar Robert C. Elliott describes Lucian’s vision in his influential assessment of satire’s roots in many global literary cultures, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960): 1

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2

Chapter 1

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Lucian tells an amusing parable of how Dionysus, Pan, Silenus, the satyrs, and the maenads invaded India. The Hindus with their massive armies, their elephants, their towers on top of the elephants, thought the invasion absurd. Scouts brought word that the enemy army consisted largely of young clodhoppers with tails and horns, given to dancing about naked, and crazy women who rushed around shouting “Evoe!”…. It was impossible not to laugh at them. But when the Indians were finally forced to do battle with the invaders and encountered the whirling, shrieking frenzy of Dionysus’ troops, their ponderous array of elephants broke and fled in terror. Lucian makes his point: “most people are in the same state of mind as the Hindus when they encounter literary novelties.…Thinking that what they hear from me will smack of Satyrs and of jokes, in short, of comedy…some of them do not come at all,…while others apparently come for something of that kind, and when they find steel instead of ivy, are even then slow to applaud, confused by the unexpectedness of the thing.” 4

The episode vibrantly conveys the skirmish between the forces of satire and a confounded readership. Elliott concludes with the comment that “These works [Northrop] Frye calls Menippean satires.” 5 An unexpected type of satirical incursion is also the focus of my study, which examines how the influence of the third-century BCE Syrian writer Menippus appears in postcolonial literary works by four Indiaaffiliated writers: G.V. Desani (1909–2000), Aubrey Menen (1912–1989), Salman Rushdie (1947– ), and Irwin Allan Sealy (1951– ). Each is more widely celebrated for demonstrating the counter-realist properties of magic realism in their writing. My aim is to explore aspects of this relationship between counter-realist postcolonial literature and Menippean satire; the overall spirit of this inquiry is captured by Helen Tiffin’s comment that the category of “the counter-discursive” extends to “the re/ placing of carnivalesque European genres like the picaresque in postcolonial contexts, where they are carried to a higher subversive power.” 6 I am making the argument that these works are part of a lineage of satire that embodies both significant attack and mixed modes of delivery, as these are the elements which can be traced to the influence of the ancient figure of Menippus, whose life and legacy are explored a bit later in this chapter. When critics discuss the modes in which postcolonial literature achieves its extensively celebrated transformations and subversions, the general trend has been to place the dominant manner of postcolonial writing within the counter-realist modes of magic realism, postrealism, or anti-realism. Often where critics have detected and denoted satirical elements, these are read as merely enhancing the political indictments of the text’s magic realism. The novels included here should be considered significant works of postcolonial satire, tackling as they do a broad spectrum of concerns, achieving widely-angled disparagement of, for example, both indigenous and imposed racisms in the writing of G. V.

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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Menippean Satire and Counter-realism in Indian Postcolonial Fictions

3

Desani, or century-spanning colonial and neo-colonial impulses in work by Irwin Allan Sealy. Salman Rushdie has aimed critique at entire national governments, while Aubrey Menen scourged the short-sighted operations of a small rural colonial outpost in a corner of Indian jungle. This project expands the remit of satire scholarship, employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism as powerful tools of reading and study; as Bill Ashcroft asserts of postcolonial criticism, “this was a new way of reading those literatures that emphasized their transformative power as well as their difference.” 7 My work considers postcolonial satire in the context of literatures of resistance, as a cultural and political act, and as a significant stage contributing to the development of postcolonial writing’s higher subversive powers. Any who might discount the focus of this investigation for its potential marginality of topic would be strongly rebuffed by even a partial list of notable practitioners of satire in postcolonial literature (though these are not in each case writers of Menippean satire). That list would include the Ethiopian Hama Tuma, the Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the South African Ann Harries, the Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Trinidadians Samuel Selvon and V. S. Naipaul, the Bajan George Lamming, and the Canadians Mordechai Richler and Margaret Atwood. To that cohort I am adding the four writers, Desani, Menen, Rushdie, and Sealy, who all share a connection to the Indian subcontinent, and whose works have not been considered together in this context of Menippean satire and resistance writing. 8 To look at satire’s currency in another way, it appears as a significant feature in several regional postcolonial literary histories spanning the colonial period to contemporary writing. Australian writing provides a particularly strong example of this; an historical survey of writers in Australia inevitably demonstrates the pairing of satire with each stage in the overall development of Australian writing, from an initial state of colonialism towards the open-ended questions and exchanges which characterize postcolonial literature’s concerns with globalization, hybrid forms, and the transgression of borders in the context of multiculturalism. One could begin with Australian writing from mid-nineteenthcentury colonial journals such as The Atlas (1844–1848) which contains meticulously crafted satiric parodies of the London-based journal Punch, continue to the 1890s satiric bush ballads of A. B. (“Banjo”) Paterson and others which impacted subsequent home-grown Australian poetry, move on to the influential mid-twentieth-century satiric verse of Alec Hope, and see a culmination in the late twentieth-century novels of Mudrooroo, Michael Wilding, and Peter Carey, who employ satire to revise and renew picaresque, surrealism, and fable respectively. As the literature of Australia has moved from realism and reportage into works which privilege non-realist presentation, satire has been a consistent feature, and it is

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4

Chapter 1

even particularly notable in the work of more recent writers such as Patrick White and David Foster, who attract a global audience. The writers considered here have contributed to a literary history which has been charted in its most general form as moving from realism to counter-realism in the development towards a literary production which is independent of imperial, colonial, or neo-colonial influences. This is admittedly a basic reading of a trajectory which has been identified and discussed by critics, and also recognized as somewhat artificially imposed. Nonetheless, there are distinctive arcs of development in regional postcolonial literatures which make it possible to identify trends towards new ideologies, identifications, modes, and degrees of political and cultural self-determination. There is critical agreement, for example, that Indian literature has transcended depictions of “the realism of life in Malgudi,” a reference to R. K. Narayan’s narratives set in his fictional Southern Indian town of Malgudi, spanning Swami and Friends (1935) to The World of Nagaraj (1990), and that Indian novels now are more likely to “explore and explode the boundaries that fragment human concern.” 9 One outcome of my study is the situating of a specific body of satirical work into a larger developmental trajectory, in a manner that clarifies how satire plays a significant role across an increasing swathe of media as a prosecutor of social wrongs and political injustices. As Brian Connery and Kirk Combe point out, there is a yet-unfulfilled prediction that “satire theory will be instrumental in continuing investigations of colonial and postcolonial literatures.” 10 Aijaz Ahmad may make a claim for the Indian exclusivity of “the characteristically Indian penchant for obsessive digressions and the telling of an interminable tale,” 11 but Menippean satire’s longstanding tendency towards catalogue and digression has been scrupulously documented. 12 Even Patricia Merivale’s observation that Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is an “encyclopedic book” which captures the “specific Indian urge to encapsulate the whole of reality” 13 can be directed towards a discussion of the Menippean, since Northrop Frye convincingly illustrates Menippean satire as “an encyclopeaedic farrago” full of “great catalogues” and marked by the writer’s “magpie instinct to collect facts.” 14 When Salman Rushdie characterizes the quintessentially postcolonial, polyvoiced language and multi-layered subjects of his novelistic worlds, he does so in similar terms, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet: “We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny,” evincing “argot…in which a sentence could begin in one language, swoop through a second and even a third and then swing back round to the first.” 15 Subsequent chapters develop in detail how realism in the postcolonial novels of Desani, Menen, Rushdie, and Sealy is disrupted by Menippean satire’s “wild fantasy…united with noble indignation.” 16 Where postcolonial critics have noted generally the fabulous, grotesque, and inexplicable of counter-realism, my readings point out

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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instead “the free play of intellectual fancy,” the combination of “stylization” and “ridicule” defined by Northrop Frye as Menippean elements, 17 and the “unruly” and “fantastic narrative” and “wild and parodic display of learning” described likewise by Dustin Griffin. 18 It is impossible to proceed without acknowledging a debt to the critical and theoretical work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, which views much of literary history as an on-going dialogue of genres, and which notably locates Menippean satires as “authentic predecessors of the novel,” thus establishing significant modern relevance for an antique form. 19 In his analyses Bakhtin was able to convey the aspects of Menippean satire which made it an apt influence, as he saw it, on later novelistic writing: “The menippea is characterized by extraordinary freedom of plot and philosophical invention.” 20 One begins to see that the “precursor genres” to the novel which Bakhtin identifies, specifically the menippea, and those to which he gives a lesser weight, the Socratic dialogue and the Greek satyr play, exhibit characteristics which resonate with more modern types of literature. These are genres which dynamically reject the stylistic unities which characterize the more-elite classical forms, such as epic and tragedy, via:

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a multi-toned narration, the mixing of high and low, serious and comic; they make wide use of inserted genres—letters, found manuscripts, retold dialogues, parodies on the high genres, paradoxically reinterpreted citations; in some of them we observe a mixing of prosaic and poetic speech, living dialects and jargons (and in the Roman stage, direct bilingualism as well) are introduced, and various authorial masks make their appearance. 21

In Bakhtin’s discussion, Menippean satire is ultimately elevated to a “carnivalised genre.” 22 Bakhtin’s summary of the classic form of Menippean satire has many powerful resonances with general descriptions of contemporary writing, but most significantly for my purposes here, his summary reverberates pointedly with critical discussions of postcolonial literature. Consider, for example, the postcolonial critic Elleke Boehmer’s description of the role of disruption in postcolonial writing at the level of narrative voice and structure: [p]ost-imperial narrative constantly negotiates between different registers, between high and low voices, and contrasting realities, past and future, First and Third World, elite and mass…the postcolonial writer flamboyantly crosses, fragments, and parodies different narrative styles and perspectives. Local contexts are reflected in the inclusion of pidgin English, untranslated words, obscure proverbs. The writer introduces a noise of voices that resist easy decoding. A similar effect is created where a work cites cultural information—jokes, fragments of oral epic…which cannot be deciphered without background knowledge. 23

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Chapter 1

Boehmer captures the tumult of information which can characterize much postcolonial writing, and also the potential intellectual gratifications of reading as decoding and interpretation. And Boehmer’s description also echoes strongly Menippean satire’s overall formal aspects, its mix of register, tone, format, versions of information, and its undeniable “impulse towards diversity.” 24 In making these assessments, I am using postcolonial in the sense of literature and its contingent criticism that have materialized out of locations affected by an imperializing force. I am proposing literature of South Asian origin as a category composed of postcolonial writing which shares a common set of issues, as articulated by Kwame Anthony Appiah with specific regard to African literatures. Appiah’s list covers the experiences of colonialism, issues of race and European-centered prejudices, the preservation of culture in the face of the transition to modernism, and the growth of literacy and a modern economy. 25 My exploration of Menippean satire leans on critical work which delineates satire’s methods of attack and ridicule, and on Menippean satire as a specific category which developed over time in different literary forms and traditions. I endorse Joel Relihan’s perspective that Menippean satire can be evaluated and discussed as a current form with ancient roots, based on “an evolutionary understanding of the genre.” 26 To this I add the recognition of genre as a cultural-political force. My work explores Menippean satire’s impact on genre in several contexts; the range of authors covered depicts both diffidence and embrace of the terms satire and satirist, and the concept of the Menippean is referenced in different ways by each author, which is appropriate for a literary form Eric McLuhan describes as hard to pin down definitively because it is “so macaronic and polymorphous.” 27 In proposing a line of connection and even progression in this cohort of writers, my aim is to avoid overly general or essential conclusions, while attempting to make a significant contribution to scholarship regarding two literary directions which I see as having a striking degree of overlap: the polyvocal, fragmented, parodic, paradoxically reinterpreting, reality-challenging, and multi-toned energies of both postcolonial narrative fiction and Menippean satire. My discussion of satire is separate from the category of comedy, although satire is often extremely funny. In the most basic terms, comedy seeks to prompt laughter and to unite its audience in that expression of laughter; comedy can sidestep satire’s target of attack or satire’s attitude of ridicule. A silly clown slipping on a banana peel and just managing to avoid a fall might be comic, but it is not satiric. Likewise, satire’s scurrility and sharpness can avoid overt humor, conveying a stinging message but without any obvious laughs. So the two are not the same thing, but satire and comedy share some qualities. Current theories of humor can shed some light on the workings of satire; Sarah Ilott addresses this cogently in her study of postcolonial comedy, explaining some of the ways

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Menippean Satire and Counter-realism in Indian Postcolonial Fictions

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the theories of superiority, incongruity, and relief help explain specific paradigms of satire. 28 The theory of superiority, Ilott expounds, sees “comedy as equating difference with inferiority and therefore laughing at difference,” and this translates into satire’s attitude of sometimes wielding authority over a target. 29 In postcolonial terms, this framework might illuminate issues of power imbalances and marginalization towards a subject. 30 Incongruity theory pivots on revelations of extra-normative behavior or outlandish performance, and as such leans towards comic examples which “undermine orthodoxies and upturn hierarchies.” 31 And relief theory follows the model of the release valve, the comic effect that enables individual or even shared laughter over a taboo, or at a recognized oppressor or experience of repression. 32 These strands of theory can help impose clarity on diverse types of ludic expressions and practices. 33 Their increasingly common inclusion in research projects is part of an overall expansion of critical work that considers humor, satire, and comedy in serious terms comprising social, psychological, and political impacts. 34 What one observes in the works of this study’s cohort of writers is the development of modern satire from an expectation of its singular literariness to an understanding of and even expectation of wider engagement in the world, what Anshuman A. Mondal emphasizes in his discussions of mockery, comedy, and satire as “forms of social practice; that is, as forms of socially symbolic action.” 35 This emphasis represents a stage beyond the apparently absorbing formalist and historicist deliberations on how to categorize the comedic-satiric genres, which have arguably dominated critical discussions on satire over some seventy years, because genre typologies admittedly do fascinate with their appeal to a sense of logic and order. 36 “The urge to classify is fundamental,” acknowledges Carolyn R. Miller in her consideration of genre and social action. 37 Mondal underscores that satiric mockery is a “performative” action because “it does not simply describe the world but seeks to act upon it in some way,” making satire “specifically political as well as moral in its concerns.” 38 Satire may prescribe an action, as corrective or even radical dare, but the writing of satire is too, according to Mondal, a “form of action.” 39 Further, argues Mondal, “[n]o matter how cynical the mockery, there is always some implicit desire to leave some mark upon someone or something, to achieve some effect.” 40 The works of Desani, Menen, Rushdie, and Sealy are located in this shifting of postcolonial satiric literature from critical expectations of contributing to the construction of an emerging literary discourse to an acknowledgment of social and political engagement.

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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Chapter 1

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AN INTRODUCTION TO MENIPPUS Menippus was a philosopher of Syrian origin who lived circa 250 BCE in Gadara, and who was identified with the Cynic order of thinkers. The Cynics were a loose and iconoclastic group who enacted what would today be deemed a minimalist, right-thinking, freely argumentative, nature-oriented bohemian lifestyle of notable indifference to possessions and, in some cases, personal hygiene. The ruins of Gadara now lie in northwest Jordan, very near the current borders with Syria and Israel; during the lifetime of Menippus, the town of Gadara would have been part of Roman Syria, though the region saw shifting governance by Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. Menippus is still known currently because he wrote parodic treatments in Greek of extant texts, attacking ideas, and mixing literary styles in a highly novel manner to incorporate forms and linguistic registers that veered wildly from refined to coarse. 41 We don’t know very much about his life, and none of his works has survived, but he nonetheless left a literary legacy significant enough to make him a touchstone for subsequent satiric writers. Some of the life of Menippus is described by the third-century CE Greek writer, Diogenes Laërtius, in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, a ten-book series of which Book Six on “The Cynics” presents Menippus. Much like Giorgio Vasari’s highly readable Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), which fills in some riveting dramatic arcs in the lives of many significant Italian Renaissance artists, the accuracy of Laërtius’s material about classical writers and thinkers of note can’t be wholly verified. Nonetheless, in presenting the origins and scope of work of “Menippus of Gadara,” Laërtius provides enough of a compelling snippet of biographical narrative to illustrate how the philosophical pull of the Cynics, with their “dog-like” reliance on intellectual instinct, might have been appealing to someone who apparently did not always exert much control over his own fate. (“Cynic” also shares an etymological root in Greek with canine, or dog. 42) As translated by C. D. Yonge, Laërtius describes the liberation and downfall of a writer of some skill: I. Menippus was also a Cynic, and a Phœnician by descent, a slave by birth, as Achaicus tells us in his Ethics…but that subsequently, in consequence of his importunities and miserly habits, he became rich, and obtained the rights of citizenship at Corinth. II. He never wrote anything serious; but his writings are full of ridiculous matter; and in some respects similar to those of Meleager, who was his contemporary. And Hermippus tells us that he was a man who lent money at daily interest, and that he was called a usurer; for he used to lend on nautical usury, and take security, so that he amassed a very great amount of riches.

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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III. But at last he fell into a snare, and lost all his money, and in a fit of despair he hung himself, and so he died. 43

It’s a brief but rather poignant biography: the self-emancipated former slave who achieved a literary reputation, and significant wealth and/or possessions, succumbs to tragic, anguished loss after being robbed. Laërtius concludes with “a playful epigram” about Menippus’s life: This man was a Syrian by birth, And a Cretan usurious hound, As the name he was known by sets forth, You’ve heard of him oft I’ll be bound; His name was Menippus—men entered his house, And stole all his goods without leaving a louse, When (from this the dog’s nature you plainly may tell) He hung himself up, and so went off to hell. 44

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In the translation of Laërtius by Robert Drew Hicks, Menippus and his work are characterized in this way: “There is no seriousness in him; but his books overflow with laughter.” 45 Something about the writing of Menippus also led to an “overflow” or surfeit of influence. Diogenes Laërtius refers to thirteen books written by “Menippus the Cynic,” listing Communing with the Dead, Wills, Invented Letters Attributed to the Gods, Against the Physicists and Mathematicians and Grammarians, On the Family of Epicurus, and The Epicureans’ Observances in Honor of the Twentieth Day, “and other works.” 46 All are now lost. Howard D. Weinbrot, however, has carefully catalogued many posthumous direct mentions of Menippus and his work, which establish a continued tradition of Menippean satiric writing. Weinbrot lists Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s placement of Menippus as one of the “jesters on the Frailty and Uncertainty of human life,” which references “mockers like Menippus.” 47 The original satiric texts must have had some genuine resonance, if only as measured in the degree of subsequent impact of these works on later notable writers such as Varro, Lucian of Samosata, and Petronius. Weinbrot distinguishes how Menippus did not embrace a “satirist’s ingratiating persona,” and that his writing itself is described as dominated by “harshness and mixed modes” 48 This angle positions Menippus in alignment with both of the etymological Greek and Latin origin strands of modern literary satire, the “harshness” of the ribald Greek goat-human satyrs, and the “mixed modes” of the Latin satura, a word meaning a platter of mixed foods. Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE), a later Roman writer of Latin and Greek, wrote the Saturae Menippeae (Menippean Satires, in 150 books), fragments of which survive, and which have been studied as direct evidence of Menippean influence. The unpublished PhD dissertation of Charles Marston Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires (1937), collects 1142 lines (591 fragments) of the original Latin and

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sometimes Greek, and translates them into English. Lee emphasizes of Varro, a writer on many subjects from prosody to agriculture, that “since he was a satirist he was interested in everything,” and notes that Varro imitated the work of Menippus of Gadara “with open acknowledgement.” 49 One can assemble from Lee’s study some sense of the elements of Varro’s satirical writing which might stem from those of Menippus; these comprise “oddity” and novelty of language, “variety” of tone and topic, “emotion,” “poetical” qualities, and “wisdom.” 50 As this is possibly the closest one can get to actual works by Menippus, some examples would seem apt here; though only snippets of longer works, they do convey a definite sense of snarky tone and attack. These are Varro’s original titles where they survive, and Lee’s translations from the Greek and Latin used by Varro. Varro mixes nostalgia and acerbity when he notes that “our grandfathers and ancestors, although their words smelled of garlic and onions, nevertheless were the best hearted souls” 51 The impact of a threat is described as something both fearful and physically comedic: “so that great Rome may tremble, and the great throats of her gluttons.” 52 In one fragment Varro addresses himself: “You are drunk, Marcus; for you begin to digress upon the Odyssey of Homer, although you promised to Seius that you were going to write on etiquette.” 53 Deft criticism of a fellow writer takes this form: “when Quintipor Clodius has written so many comedies without any muse, may I not ‘hew out of the rough’ one little book, as Ennius says?” 54 Human inconstancy is considered in “Tomorrow I Believe; Today I Don’t”: “and because of these things the ardent and fickle soul strives changeably to have, and then with disgust on account of an unsettled heart, to not have.” 55 There are frequent references to banquets and imbibing, as in the snippet on wine’s popularity, “There’s a Limit to the Pot, about Drunkenness” which considers that “no one drinks anything more pleasant than wine; they have found this for curing sickness, for making a fine hotbed of hilarity, for a bond to hold banquets together.” 56 These appear alongside musings on the ubiquity of drink: “do you not see that the gods themselves, if ever they wish to taste wine, have to sneak down to the shrines of men, and nevertheless then wine is given in a libation bowl even to Bacchus himself?” 57 Varro writes expositions in which one gets a sense of withering observations of the failings of others: “Empedocles says that men are born of the earth just as blight is.” 58 Intellectuals are targeted: “finally no sick man dreams anything so unspeakable that some philosopher may not corroborate it.” 59 Varro can also be charmingly self-deprecating: “The men of the forum decide that Public Opinion may restore my name to the number of the sane.” 60 Varro is pointed in his imagery: “and behold unexpectedly gray haired Truth, the foster daughter of Attic philosophy, joins us.” 61 And he is catty even when commenting on a suicide: “One night he stabbed himself with a common kitchen knife, for the embossed

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knives from Bithynia had not yet been imported.” 62 There is a distinctive comic voice cutting through as well: “And because that was the day on which my donations to clients would be given, I order it to be inscribed on the door, ‘Beware of the Dog.’” 63 There are direct references to Menippus in Varro’s writing, as in this mention of “The Tomb of Menippus”: “Menippus, that formerly noble Cynic [for “Cynic” Varro writes canis, or dog], here has departed from all mankind on this terrestrial ball.” 64 In “The Will, about Wills and Testaments” (Menippus also wrote a work called “Wills”) Varro declares, “the sons whom the Menippean sect has nourished, I give as tutors, to you who wish to develop the Roman state and Latium.” 65 Though but a brief mention, it is encouraging to have this ironic notion of a literary movement of hopeful writers following Menippus. Weinbrot cautions that most of the fragments of Varro’s Menippean Satires “are ambiguous, of course lack context and, except for an occasional lucky hit, offer little value for practicing satirists.” 66 These fragments certainly don’t give us much in terms of length but could still be argued to suggest some of the verbal cacophonies of Desani, occasionally the arch and wry tone of Aubrey Menen, the fantastic comic imagery of Rushdie, and the non-linear forms of Sealy. Varro, Weinbrot concludes, can be described as a somewhat cleaner and less impudent writer than Menippus, whose mix of forms and tones were taken up in a less passive way by Petronius in his Satyricon, Seneca in his Apocolocyntosis, and the Emperor Julian. 67 By the time Julian wrote Caesars (circa 362 CE), a set of dialogues amongst long-dead emperors, Menippean “conventions” were becoming apparent, notes Weinbrot: “a mingling of prose and verse, the serious and mirthful, gods and mortals, superterrestrial discourse and terrestrial concerns, handsome and ugly…and the guiding presence of a cynical voice.” 68 These binaries interestingly reflect somewhat the deconstructive tack on postcolonial writing that characterizes the influential critical assessment of postcolonial “writing back” established by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in their highly influential The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (1989): speaker-listener, metropolitan-primitive, center-margin, and so on. The classics scholar Margaret A. Rose registers that there never was a single “kind” of Menippean satire, “for Menippus parodied broadly the different ancient forms of learned discourse.” 69 The most “characteristic” innovation of the Menippean form, Rose asserts, was the noted, novel mixture of verse and prose in a single work. 70 That move alone defied contemporaneous notions of genre. Lucian of Samosata registers a measure of just how enduring the impact of Menippus’s work was. Some 400 years after his death, Menippus nonetheless shows up as a speaking figure in several of Lucian’s satirical works, including Dialogues of the Dead and the Icaromenippus. A character called “The Syrian,” who may be Lucian himself, appears in his comic

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dialogue titled “The Double Indictment,” which focuses on Menippean modes of writing (in current comic categories it would be termed a sketch). “The Syrian” is asked in court to defend his own writing from charges that he has defiled the character of the formerly lofty individual called “Dialogue.” Dialogue ruefully enumerates these complaints to the court.

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Dialogue: I was formerly dignified…he even dug up and thrust in upon me Menippus, a prehistoric dog, with a very loud bark, it seems, and sharp fangs, a really dreadful dog who bites unexpectedly because he grins when he bites. 71

Under Lucian’s Menippean influences, Dialogue as a literary form can no longer fit into any recognized category, having been un-defined and rendered some sort of extraordinary hybrid: “And, as if that were not preposterous enough, he has forbidden me either to walk on my feet or to rise on the wings of poesy: I am a ridiculous cross between prose and verse; a monster of incongruity; a literary Centaur.” 72 Thanks to continued appreciation for Menippus’s writing, via Lucian and many others, a wide and well-referenced literary tradition obtains. In one sense the roots of the Menippean mode rest in elements of the unsettling or even unseating of hegemonic discourses, and on satiric commentary from the perceived sidelines or margins which nonetheless attempts to inhabit, and subvert, mainstream forms. These are some of the dimensions of Menippean satire which can have resistance-literature implications in terms of content and context. Eric McLuhan articulates what can be identified as a resistance-orientation: the specific, ancient “Cynical drive to attack or arouse the reader for his own good provides the essence of Menippism that unites the works constituting this tradition.” 73 The chief structural characteristic of the original menippea reproduced in its inheritors is the unruly, seemingly incongruous mixture of contrasting literary forms, so that a single satire may contain dialogues, narratives, letters, lists, and lyrics, in an organized medley or an ostensibly haphazard mishmash. Eugene P. Kirk’s description of later Menippean-influenced satire lists “unconventional diction, Neologisms, portmanteau words, macaronics, preciosity, coarse vulgarity, catalogues, bombast, mixed languages, and protracted sentences…sometimes appearing all together in the same work.” 74 Theodore D. Kharpertian has summarized the effect of Menippean satire in its breaches of categories and its encapsulation of being an “open and flexible” genre: The reformative impulse of Menippean satire, its ancient and original goal of terrestrial fertility, is synonymous in fiction with perceptual fertility; its avowed enemy, perceptual habitude, is destabilized, thereby opening the possibility of regarding the object or objects of attack— indeed all experiential objects and states of affairs—anew. 75

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For comparison and clarity, one can consider Menippus in the context of the other central classical roots of literary satire, those stemming from the gentler approach of Horace (Roman, 65–8 BCE), and the more caustic pen of Juvenal (first–second century CE Rome). The work and influence of these two writers provide a sense of origin of modern types of satire based on tone and register of attack, still commonly delineated as milder Horatian satire and the more cutting Juvenalian. To convey a concise example, I began to ponder possible versions of “walked into a bar” jokes: “Horace, Juvenal, and Menippus walked into a bar.” The point of such jokes, wherein some incongruous group enters a bar, tends to be to play out the discordant differences amongst the cast ostensibly united in their beverage-seeking quest. 76 My examples, inspired by the symposium tradition in Menippean satire and aimed at discerning their divergences, come from each satirist’s treatment of drinking. Horace tends to make fun in a way which nonetheless invites the reader to enter in. In one of Horace’s Odes, Augustus Caesar has returned victorious, and Horace prompts younger celebrants to “seek out perfumes and garlands/and a jar that’s old as the Marsian War,/if any of them have managed to escape/Spartacus’s eyes.” 77 The “jar” holds a particularly fine old wine, if Spartacus, that old lush, hasn’t already drunk it. Horace’s tone is wry and affable, and a reader might laugh with him. In contrast, wine in Juvenal’s Satires sparks humiliating deflations for the undervalued guest at an eminent patron’s party: “Did I complain just now that you were given a different wine? Why, the water which your guests drink is inferior.” 78 Worse, your hosts wield vastly superior tableware to that which you are given, and they apparently anticipate that you are a lowly thief: “The cup in [host] Virro’s hands is richly crusted with amber and rough with beryl: to you no gold is entrusted; or if it is, a watcher is posted over it to count the gems and keep an eye on your sharp finger-nails.” 79 Juvenal is never afraid to embarrass his reader, or make him cringe with shame or recognition. And what of Menippus, ambling into the bar? Menippus might offer a satirical attack on those around him, show awareness of existing trends via the use of argot or current slang, and also throw in some form of mixed media, like the unexpected insertion of some written dialogue for a playscript in the middle of an academic monograph. MENIPPUS: Call this hipster dive a bar? Many of the young men herein say they are engaged in philosophy. And if one were to regard their ways of dressing and walking alone, well, they are tip-top philosophers. That is both an imagined Menippean outburst and a paraphrase from one of Lucian’s Dialogues wherein Menippus offers a sarcastic critique of would-be philosophers. 80

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Reverting quickly back to the familiar academic register, I will note that my discussions of Menippean satire often draw on critical material which focuses on writing from outside of postcolonial critical contexts. This underscores in a salutary way a need for more widespread attention to studies of satiric writing in non-Western traditions, for in a host of global writing cultures, satire is not alien, belated, borrowed, or latent. 81 However, satire has not been charted widely in examples outside of Western writing, although it should be. 82 Some of satire’s potential for radical critique and its provision of a significant foundation for a continued literary tradition is articulated by Robert Rawdon Wilson in an interview he gave about Menippean satire: “Menippean Satire is, despite its ribald proclivities and gross insults, highly intellectual…. Milowicki and I argue that, as a way of writing, Menippean is more than satire and much more than a Classical form.” 83

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THE MODERN MENIPPEAN There is agreement that Menippean satire “permits movement up and down the literary scale (high and low, oral and literary, verse and prose) and between genres and forms of speech.” 84 Its characteristic literary allusions may be set out as intertextual play or subversive, boundarydestroying attacks. As Garry Sherbert notes, in Menippean satire the philosophic center or norm may itself be subject to undercutting: the ostensibly sage narrator might display doubts, or through dense “metacommentary” undermine his or her own rationality or veracity. 85 The roots of the classical menippea in the symposium or feast have spawned a tradition of banquet-related themes in later works, combining motifs of physicality and ingestion. All of this delineates a counter-realist mode of writing which features both a vast thematic range engendering “a radical demystification from which nothing is exempt” 86 and boundary-challenging “polymorphic formal possibilities” as well. 87 David Musgrave, in his book-length study of the satiric Menippean grotesque from the Renaissance to the present era, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance (2014), considers that “there is no Menippean satire which is quintessentially Menippean: there is no paradigmatic Menippean satire and there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ Menippean satire. A form which is based on disjunction and impurity can have no final, refined form.” 88 Musgrave adds that in general, literary critics “recognise that the Menippean resistance to systematization is crucial to any understanding of the genre.” 89 Reflecting on the vast thematic and formal range of Menippean satire, Branham and Kinney remark that it is “so paradoxical and strange as to be suspect—like cold fusion.” 90 Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson discuss Troilus and Cressida in “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shake-

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speare” (2002), examining how the classical tradition of the Menippean satire was adapted in writing of the English Renaissance. Their study delves into the problems of defining “and even discussing” genre, pointing out that fixed definitions are intensely problematic, calling into consideration as they do the roles of authorial intention and readerly assumptions and expectations. 91 But Milowicki and Wilson achieve a useful model of explication nonetheless, examining textual evidence of Shakespeare’s awareness of the Menippean tradition, and scrutinizing convincingly the significant motifs and juxtapositions that would characterize an examined text as Menippean. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957) provides the most standard version of a definition of Menippean writing, and it certainly illuminates central characteristics of the Menippean, although his examples draw on a body of literature which demarcates the canon in fairly conservative terms. Also, while his adherence to an empirical model of investigation affords the benefits of a balanced and pragmatic approach, there is a tendency in his discussions to circumscribe paradigms more by what they are not, or do not do, in relation to his model’s other parallel definitions, than on what they manifestly do. Nonetheless, the manner in which Frye distills aspects of the Menippean has provided a useful basic representation from which to work. By examining each writer’s articulated and implicit relationship to the satiric and the Menippean, I have mapped out how they have adhered to and augmented the Menippean tradition, pointing ultimately to ways in which assumptions about novelistic form are challenged, and how this merges with the wider, on-going discussions of genre (and some extra-literary implications of genre) in a postcolonial context. Milowicki and Wilson’s Menippean reading of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida articulates the workings of the Menippean in a narrative text; their description foregrounds how Menippean satire achieves its mockeries by employing textual elements such as a fragmentary view, grotesqueries, seemingly antagonistic juxtapositions, hybridity, and varied textual sources, all in differing combinations: “a self-conscious, encyclopaedic array of discursive techniques, both motifs and conventions, any subset of which can be employed for exploratory or subversive purposes.” 92 These are many of the literary techniques and approaches which have been widely ascribed to, and construed as the underpinnings of, counter-realism in postcolonial writing. Milowicki and Wilson’s Menippean reading in the context of Shakespeare’s play pinpoints an encompassing of hybridity, linguistic and thematic diversity, erudition, grotesquery, and subversion which I wish to consider in the context of postcolonial literature. They explain that: As a literary mode…[Menippean satire] offers advantages to writers who may wish to cover many disparate themes and whose vision of the world sees many different levels of existence crossing and variously

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affecting each other. In its specifically satiric mode, Menippean discourse suggests the possibilities of mockery by showing, often in physical and bodily terms, the translation of one level of action or thought into another. It mocks and anatomizes the structure of an idea by playing its conceptual content through a very physical kaleidoscope. 93

Milowicki and Wilson conclude that by a text’s very “inclusiveness,” its presentation of a wide range of “ideas and possible positions,” the groundwork is established for “satiric mockery.” 94 In their argument, “inclusiveness [through hybridity] collapses boundaries,” and thus Menippean texts combine “elements of genre,” mix “disparate generic motifs,” and they “radically subvert conceptual boundaries.” 95 This framework elides with the challenges to boundary and border evinced thematically and formally by much postcolonial writing. From the literal examination of shifting geographical borders and resultant physical dislocations (in the fallout from Independence in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama, for example) to Homi Bhabha’s more abstract investigations of “a contingent, borderline experience,” an interstitial space which delineates “the margin of hybridity,” 96 postcolonial literatures have striven to focus attention on and often to subvert the very binaries and suppositions that maintain artificial borders and the subjectivities of boundaries. Despite the sense of destructiveness the Menippean version may imply, it is important to stress that the impulse of Menippean satire is not nihilistic; it retains the strong inclination to activate a version of morality that arguably operates in many satiric texts. Its power lies in its methods of interrogation. Menippean satire juxtaposes diverse texts and discourses which allows an alternative version to be “articulated,” but in its challenges to authoritative “versions,” not necessarily “authenticated.” 97 Menippean satire’s challenges to realism stem from its undermining of assumptions and norms, its tendency to question and unbalance, and its celebration of oppositionalities, whether embedded as conflicted characters within a text or inscribed as mocking resistance to generic categorization. As Milowicki and Wilson assert, Menippean satire is in “the modern sense, experimental,” a mode which tests “every possibility of literary creation,” examining problems of “form, of literary type and genre,” and even “assumptions about literature” by means of its fundamental, “sustained experiment with genre.” 98 I will return to their work in subsequent chapters because their emphasis so emphatically unites the elements of mélange and abuse. Thanks to critic and scholar Bill Ashcroft, we have an excellent study of a postcolonial writer who self-identified as Menippean, the Southern Rhodesian/Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera (1952–1987). Ashcroft contends that the work of Marechera “broke the iron grip of realism in the African novel.” 99 Marechera rejected explicitly the term “African writer” and selected the “Menippean” description he’d learned about in

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his own study of M. M. Bakhtin. 100 Ashcroft wonders if the rejection by Marechera of “African writer” is paired with a simultaneous or implicit privileging of being cast in company with Western or European canonical authors; this is worthwhile to note when reflecting on how individual writers and pieces of postcolonial writing figure into a larger schema of what Ashcroft calls “a literature in the process of identifying itself as neither Eurocentric nor simply anti-colonial.” 101 Marechera’s adoption of the Menippean tag serves to integrate him into a far wider range of extant writing, Ashcroft posits, sharing an excerpt from Marechera’s 1987 essay, “The African Writer’s Experience of European Literature”:

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Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin has offered a category of narrative whose unifying factor is a “carnival” attitude to the world. This category includes writers from different backgrounds. . . . The world of such novels…is complex, unstable, comic, satirical, fantastic, poetical and committed to the pursuit of truth. The hero can travel anywhere in this world and beyond. Fantasy and symbolism are combined with low-life naturalism. Odd vantage points offer changes of scale. Heaven and hell are close and may be visited. Madness, dreams and day-dreams, abnormal states of mind and all kinds of erratic inclinations are explored. Scandalous and eccentric behavior disrupts “the seemly course of human affairs” and provides a new view of “the integrity of the world.” Society is unpredictable; roles can quickly change. Current affairs are treated with a satirical, journalistic interest. Genres are mixed. Stories, speeches, dramatic sketches, poetry and parody exist side by side. This category of novel is called the menippean. It is no longer necessary to speak of the African novel or the European novel: there is only the menippean novel. 102

Ashcroft finds that this articulation of the Menippean melds perfectly with the words Marechera set on his pages: the “bizarre, chaotic, violent, allusive, ribald, prurient and scatological writing” of his short story collection The House of Hunger (1978), and his novels Black Sunlight (1980) and The Black Insider (published posthumously in 1990). 103 Ashcroft notes, and it is hard to disagree, that postcolonial theory has tended to focus on Bakhtin’s emphasis on hybridity and dialogism, instead of on carnival and Menippean satire. 104 Ashcroft reminds us that “for Bakhtin the term ‘novel’ itself refers to ‘whatever form of expression within a literary system reveals the limits of the system as inadequate, imposed or arbitrary.’” 105 Formal innovations and challenges to extant notions of genre, then, are part of an on-going and unpredictable process of cultural change. In Bill Ashcroft’s consideration of Marechera as Menippean, the Menippean may be “not so much subverting the novel form as realizing its dialogic potential”; and even a dystopian vision can assert its utopian better, for the “Menippean form enacts—while representing—the freedom that lies on [the] horizon.” 106 Ashcroft hews closely in his analysis of

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Marechera’s writing to Bakhtin’s articulation of Menippean satire as a genre which “provides the very critique on which the imagination of a better future can be built.” 107 In asserting the title of Menippean satirist, Marechera apparently also seizes the genre’s innate power to challenge readers with factual onslaught, disruptions to narratorial expectation, varying registers, linguistic play, obscurantism, in short, to demand implicitly intelligent reading of challenging discourse, and, in the critic Madhlozi Moyo’s terms, “for the reader to think about what he or she is reading, to consider the relationships between the forms that Marechera employs and the ideas that he interrogates.” 108 THE PROBLEMATICALLY WIDENING CATEGORY OF MENIPPEAN SATIRE

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The expression “Menippean satire” can apparently imply such a flexible structure that the term has been used to describe a surprisingly wide array of works which have in common the rupturing of formal narrative conventions. But while such works may essay overt challenges to realism via unexpected textual strategies, it is still important to remember that Menippean satire has its roots in a form which encompasses both textual polyphony/dialogism and satire. M. M. Bakhtin’s influential discussions of the development of the novel are arguably the main contributing factor to the current critical ubiquity of the term Menippean satire. Donald F. Theall comments that “Menippean satire had become a ‘hot’ topic among literary theorists in the 1970s and remained so into the 1980s,” fueled first by Bakhtin’s work (first published in English translation in 1965) and later by that of Julia Kristeva, who ascribed anti-authoritarian literary powers in her chapter, “Menippean Discourse: The Text as Social Activity” (1969). 109 In Bakhtin’s analysis the classical “serio-comic” forms—the Socratic dialogue; the Roman satires of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal; the Greek satyr play; and “finally the Menippean satire (as a genre)”—are important because each reflects a degree of material social reality and each is connected to the significant category of the carnivalesque, to manifestations of ritual social festivals and comic revelries. 110 These classical “serio-comic” forms are also described as a genre classification which recognizes the potential for textual engagement with ideology, and this is certainly a major contributing factor to Menippean satire’s appeal to modern critics, for it offers a discursive model for the eliding of content with form, and for the characterization of embedded literary oppositionalities. As a descriptive and contextualizing term it also can be construed as reflecting the way modern texts problematize referentiality and realism, through discordant narrative elements such as multiple voices. Gary S. Morson

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and Caryl Emerson focus on these dynamic narrative features in their discussion of how “Dostoevsky also breathed new life into Menippean satire by adapting other traditional features of the genre to polyphony.” 111 Their discussion is useful as it illustrates how the model of the Menippean satire has been, depending on point of view, either updated robustly as a continuing feature of literary practice, or appropriated in ways which privilege a discordant multivocality over its satiric roots. Nonetheless, because of its contemporary critical associations with transgressive, politically-engaged and/or intertextual writing, Menippean satire has grown to a category of overly wide application in contemporary assessments of literature. A very brief survey supports this. Using Bakhtin’s framework applied to the evolving novel, Eugene P. Kirk finds the menippea in Swift, Fielding, Cervantes, and Sterne. 112 Frank Palmeri confirms its presence in Twain, Borges, Nabokov, and Pynchon and notes its “renewed prominence and influence in the twentieth century.” 113 Julia Kristeva, discussing Menippean satire as a form of serious transgressive writing which continues the dialogic, intertextual novelistic progression identified by Bakhtin, locates the menippea in Kafka. 114 Elsewhere it is applied to the work of John Fowles, Richard Brome, Orson Wells’ radio adaptations, all of Thomas Pynchon’s novels, and T.S. Eliot. 115 Andrew B. Chrystall and Janet G. Sayers interpret the 1933 film King Kong “in the tradition of Menippean satire [to] reveal how the film satirizes the consumptive practices of its audiences directly.” 116 They locate the movie about the menacing giant ape in the Menippean realm of the fantastic journey, and in a cinematic critique of consumption and greed, but insist that the film “also symbolically kills its audience.” 117 A more successful study which applies an understanding of Menippean satire as an analytical tool is Aleksandar Takovski’s exploration of the 2014 government-led redevelopment of a large public square in Skopje, Macedonia. Apparently a great deal of public funding underwrote the sprawling installation of: “dozens of monuments,” “hundreds of statues,” “ships,” and “a carousel,” all “dominated by the twenty-five-meter statue of Alexander the Great dubbed ‘Warrior on horse.’” 118 Perhaps not unexpectedly, critics of the project railed at the imposition of expensive “aesthetic kitsch” wrought by a system plagued by embezzlement and corruption, and they resorted to flamboyant modes of satiric “digital activism” in protest. 119 Takovski explains: “[g]iven that the majority of the 76 memes [studied] criticize the aesthetic incongruity of the project by highlighting its hyper real, phantasmagorical nature, the choice of Menippean satire as a convenient aesthetic code for the expression comes not as a surprise.” 120 This is rooted in the fact that Menippean satire is “[t]he genre that combines the comic and the fantastic into a criticism of the official truth…. The truth tested here is the Government’s official discourse on the project’s aesthetic values and its financial benefit.” 121 Takovski’s study then steps briskly beyond the usefulness of the Menip-

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pean as a descriptor, to focus on the disparity between the high degree of “popular faith in humor as a means of criticism and change” and an enduring stasis regarding actual widespread civic engagement. 122

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Northrop Frye’s definition of Menippean satire in Anatomy of Criticism merges the continuum of “fantasy and morality” with a significant ridiculing attitude, and with an overall distinctive degree of erudition. 123 Frye’s focus on this definition of Menippean writing seems to have been his discussion’s main lasting impact. 124 His list of Menippean satires which display the characteristic “piling up” or “avalanche” 125 of focused intellect includes: Rousseau’s Emile, Voltaire’s Candide, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Butler’s Erewhon, and Huxley’s Brave New World. 126 F. Anne Payne, writing initially about Menippean aspects of Chaucer, eventually ascribes to the menippea features more in keeping with discussions of postmodernism, stating that it underscores mutability and social relativity, and “requires that we accept as necessary the presentation of simultaneous unresolved points of view.” 127 At this point, Menippean satire seems to be a catch-all category for literary works exhibiting dialogism, intertextuality, and erudite playfulness, even though such works may not bear any relationship to the initial subversions and discursive challenges one ascribes to the literary influences of Menippus. Thus there is an element in my work that essays a recuperation of Menippean satire while exploring its emergence in a segment of postcolonial literature. John Clement Ball inspires this direction when he casts Menippean satire as “an optimistic expression of becoming, renewal, and freedom,” 128 echoing Weinbrot’s assertion that in the context of “a threatening false orthodoxy,” the Menippean “form is unsettling virtually by fiat. It reminds us of the danger and difficulty around or within us.” 129 With regard to terminology in the face of such variety, I am staunch in my use of the phrase “Menippean satire,” with an equal emphasis on both the Menippean and the satiric. This runs counter to some of the trends in critical discussions of this literature. Northrop Frye distills a working definition of Menippean satire only to reject the term for “anatomy.” 130 John Clement Ball is persuasive in his rationale for discussing mainly the “menippean grotesque” in Rushdie’s work, since Ball delves largely into exaggerated depictions of the body which vex the way “normal” is referenced. 131 David Musgrave concludes that “Menippean satire is a radically heterogeneous form,” structurally, stylistically, and thematically. 132 Less persuasive is Peter Porter’s argument for the term “Menippeanism” over Menippean satire, which Porter supports via the view that “while formal flexibility and social criticism often coincide, neither is essential to the other.” 133 Instead of satire’s witty ridicule and attacks, Porter’s version exhibits a “narratorial or authorial posture of observation and collection,” 134 which neither negates nor corrects. What Porter

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proposes seems a mild and domesticated mode of critique that has been somewhat declawed. And even though their explications of the Menippean capture the imaginative verve and corrective drive of satiric writing, and I have drawn strongly upon this stance throughout this work, Milowicki and Wilson ultimately eschew satire for the phrase “Menippean discourse.” Their premise is that because the Menippean “suggests a vision indifferent to boundaries” the term “satire” is found to be too “delimiting,” and they prefer to reflect this in the designation of “Menippean discourse, some key part of which is satiric.” 135 Erik McLuhan prompts that “[i]n the end, these definitions not only divert attention from the fun and the satire, but more and more they have formed a system or philosophy of Menippism—the very kind of pedantry Menippus and his imitators routinely attacked.” 136 I choose to maintain the centrality of satire in the rubric of mélange and abuse, and this is because satire’s considerations of the moral can provide the tension that rescues the Menippean from the chaos of its efficient dissolutions.

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THE MOVEMENT AWAY FROM REALISM IN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE There is general critical consensus that from its initial appearance to more recently, Indian fiction written in English exhibits a change of emphasis from realism to experimental forms. Judith Plotz has charted the “largely realistic fiction of Indian nationality” which dominates Indian writing in the first three quarters of the twentieth century. 137 The compelling realist narratives of Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Kushwant Singh, Bhabani Bhattacharya, R. K. Narayan, Manohar Malgonkar, and Kamila Markandaya adhere to Kwame Anthony Appiah’s theorization of an initial stage of realist, naturalistic, directly referential writing which is followed by the advent of “post-realist” texts. 138 Chelva Kanaganayakam has mapped the evolution of such a counter-realist strand in Indian writing, specifically a tradition that departs, “in perception and portrayals of socio-cultural realities, from the mimetic tradition” of Raj Anand, Rao, Singh, Malgonkar, and Markandaya. 139 The overall challenges of experimental form comprise negotiating “the mode of narration” 140 and the limitations of an imposed colonial language to convey the complexities of modern Indian society. According to Prema Nandakumar, the progression of non-realist Indian fiction in English begins to answer back to an initial “reformative” realism which eyed social problems but eschewed any “stylistic and linguistic experimentation” in the arguably “alien” language of English. 141 The task ultimately is to achieve what Plotz deems “the necessary polyphony.” 142 The arrival of an expanding body of counter-realist literature, Appiah argues, reflects the broad emergence of indigenous postco-

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lonial culture, a culture evolving towards a fully decolonized state, and concurrent modes of expression. 143 Thus postcolonial literature of South Asia, and elsewhere, has developed into a complex body of writing, but the critical language describing it has paradoxically somewhat narrowed or even grown repetitive. JeanPierre Durix is one of a number of critics who have positioned magic realism as the dominant creative element in a large-scale rejection of realist writing within postcolonial literatures. 144 Indeed, the characteristics of magic realism are at times so identified with postcolonial writing as to be, in some quarters, yoked to the very definition of the postcolonial. Louis Menand is being only somewhat flippant when he maintains in a New Yorker essay on fiction that a paradigmatic postcolonial narrative text “should be a hybrid of postmodernist heteroglossia (multiple and high-low discursive registers, mixed genres, stories within stories) and pre-modernist narrative” with “the features of the world-literature prototype: a trauma-and-recovery story, with magic-realist elements.” 145 The most influential assessment currently is no doubt that of Homi Bhabha, who observed that “[m]agical realism…becomes the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world.” 146 But that term has approached a degree of alarming ubiquity; magic realism now applies to a global literature which mixes realistic and fantastic themes and subjects, the factual combined and jousting with the counterfactual in work by authors of striking diversity. Elizabeth Morgan notes the aptness of magic realism in general for the African novel, since “the mythic and magical will always be a part of African storytelling.” 147 Suzanne Baker posits that magic realism’s scope for appropriations of dominant language and discourses makes it an ideal mode for the assertion of the marginalized political agendas of Aboriginal writers of Australia. 148 Antonio Benítez-Rojo has articulated a contingent problem of the overuse of the category of magic realism, namely the way specific and significant narratives of violence and deprivation in postcolonial Caribbean writing become detached and generalized, “heard as homogenous and legitimate signifiers that constitute knowledge itself” rather than as significant and specific narratives of struggle. 149 Benítez-Rojo’s concern makes clear how far the contemporary critical reliance on magic realism to encapsulate strange and marvelous depictions has travelled from its roots in Jacques Stephen Aléxis’s powerful analysis of Haitian art, presented at the first Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956, which enunciated the far more particular aims “[t]o sing the beauties of the Haitian motherland, its greatness as well as its wretchedness…To reject all art which has no real and social content… To find the form of expression proper to its own people.” 150 A problem seems to rest in the more general explorations of forms of resistance and subversion in postcolonial contexts which cut across the

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lines of regional, local, and indigenous cultures. Stephen Slemon summarizes the specific nature of what critics must navigate with sensitivity:

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The critical use of the concept of magic realism can therefore signify resistance to monumental theories of literary practice—a way of suggesting there is something going on in certain forms of literary writing, and in the modalities of cultural experience that underlie those forms, that confounds the capacities of major genre systems to come to terms with them. At the same time, of course, the concept of magic realism itself threatens to become a monumentalizing category for literary practice and to offer to centralizing genre systems a single locus upon which the massive problem of difference in literary expression can be managed into recognizable meaning in one swift pass. 151

The central issue with magic realism that I am circling around is economically voiced by Ilan Stavans: “the term has achieved such ubiquity and elasticity as to become meaningless.” 152 For Laura Moss, magic realism “has been so widely employed that it has lost its cachet as an avant garde form.” 153 To add another level of complication here, some critics link the ancient menippea directly to contemporary magic realism. Rosemary Jackson emphasizes the carnivalesque roots of the menippea, specifically as discussed by Bakhtin, as one of the antecedents of modern fantasy, a direct precursor to the “contradictions” which “confront” reason in contemporary fantastic fictions 154; her study draws widely from examples of European literature. Jean-Pierre Durix expands upon Jackson’s analysis when he draws a direct line from the magic-realist modern to the satiric ancient, observing that “[m]agic realism has affinities with the old carnivalesque tradition and the menippea,” and he elaborates upon this link to describe how magic realism is a very flexible “form of cultural assertion” in postcolonial writing in the face of tyrannical dogma and discourse. 155 So while Bakhtin’s decisive analyses effectively resuscitated the menippea from critical and historical obscurity, the category of Menippean satire now seems arguably overdetermined, and also somewhat conflicted. Howard D. Weinbrot has argued, apparently in relative isolation until now, that in the wake of Frye and particularly of Bakhtin, “current theories of Menippean satire…allow too many texts at too many times to be Menippean,” and that the form is too broadly associated with ideas of philosophy expressed in dialogic voices or languages. 156 It is easy to see, however, why scholars of magic realism might see it as influenced by the elements of Menippean satire which veer so vividly from realistic depiction, but this nonetheless problematically divorces the main elements of the term. The blossoming of counter-realist measures in postcolonial fictions are hardly formulaic. John Thieme has characterized as magic realist a dy-

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namic, ever-increasing experimentation, describing a range of “complicity and subversion” which focuses attention on destabilization, dissidence, and the undermining of authority, in a style which is often colorful, flamboyant, and performative. 157 Elleke Boehmer considers that there might “be evidence of a common approach to mythmaking—say, to ‘redreaming’ the world through local myth, or weaving myths of the past for the postcolonial present—as in the many regional versions of postcolonial magic realism that exist, from Vikram Chandra in India through the Tanzanian-Canadian M. G. Vassanji to the South African Zakes Mda.” 158 There continue to be broad and creative shifts towards experimentation and syncretisms in postcolonial writing, in line with the “new and unexpected combinations” which Salman Rushdie and Edward Said describe and which also echo Gilbert Highet’s expression of satire’s embodiment of the syncretic impulse and its destabilizing energies. 159 Critical work on the connections between postcolonial writing and satire is starting to expand, as in Ball’s significant inquiries into the relationship of satire and politics in novels by V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie. The elements he finds most compelling are the “serious aspects,” the “targets” and “agendas” which require unpacking, investigations, decoding, and explanations, and which encourage a reader’s active engagement. 160 Although there have been notable forays into discussions of the counter-discursive (Tiffin 1987), work on satire and counter-realist postcolonial writing is more limited. Chelva Kanaganayakam makes an impressive case for reading work by R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose, and Suniti Namjoshi alongside Desani and Rushdie as part of a counter-realist tradition, although his specific emphasis is on subversive and destabilizing strategies, and he does not perceive much of the writing as satire. In keeping with his view that Rushdie’s chief impact has been to focus attention on “the demotic sensibility,” he denotes as “influence,” rather than any degree of satire or parody, the presence of a chapter in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) called “Midnight’s Parents.” 161 An element of Rushdie’s impact certainly has been to overthrow a sense of the imposed diction and restrained registers of English as an imported language. But the picture seems unfinished if one has not integrated the role of Menippean satire into Kanaganayakam’s assertion that Indian fiction is, post-Rushdie, a “fiction of fragmentation.” 162 GENRE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL It is helpful to start with the idea that genre is not fixed but dynamic and reflective of society and its arguments and priorities, and also its politics. Carolyn R. Miller has argued in “Genre as Social Action”

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that genre study is valuable because it emphasizes some social and historical aspects of rhetoric that other perspectives do not…a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish. 163

She continues that “[a]s a recurrent, significant action, a genre embodies an aspect of cultural rationality…genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community.” 164 For Miller, “the set of genres is an open class, with new members evolving, old ones decaying” in a continued process of cultural development and change. 165 Michael Sinding, pondering the challenges of constructing a convincing history of any specific genre, arrives at the conclusion that “[t]here are no strict defining features of the class; rather, certain prototypical members function as springboards for extension of the class according to certain prototypical themes.” 166 Writers then, spurred to be creative in contexts artistic, aesthetic, economic, and political, build on extant texts, extending, developing, and inevitably mutating received notions of genre. There can also be a thread of potent resistance to anointed prototypes within a generic class. Sinding addresses the significant task of outlining the generic limits of the novel, before asserting that:

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We can address even tougher cases. If there is a genre even more chaotic than the novel, it is Menippean satire…. But like the history of novels, the history of Menippean satire can be presented as a series of exemplars, earlier instances of which exert various kinds of shaping influence on later ones, to produce a set of variant forms that are linked by family resemblance. 167

Sinding affirms that this “classical form has been recreated, in changed forms, over the centuries,” addressing both its evolving nature and its longevity. 168 The most significant contribution to mapping a history of Menippean satire is by Eugene P. Kirk in his exhaustive compendium covering “the continuity of Menippean satire, from antiquity to the eighteenth century.” 169 Kirk makes a persuasive case for considering Menippean satire as an enduring body of related literature which “reveals a great deal about the role of an author’s cultural surround, in affecting what he chooses to emphasize in an ‘imitation’ of an earlier writer. In other words, a genre’s mutations are strongly shaped by non-literary events.” 170 Kirk construes this literature as embedded in culture in holistic ways, which invite informed readings attuned to contexts; his annotated catalogue of Menippean satires serves as a dialogic and historical resource which illustrates such influences among writers and their texts. Bart Moore-Gilbert’s work focuses on the authentic political impacts of genre, as he describes in his 2011 essay on the “political credentials” of postcolonial literary studies, “A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as Genre.” Moore-Gilbert

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demonstrates, in his study of postcolonial life-writing, how Frederic Jameson situates actual political ramifications of genre in his 1981 essay “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Uses of Genre Criticism”: “Jameson further insists that deviations from generic norms reveal ‘the historicity of structures’ by directing attention ‘to those determinate changes in the historical situation which block a full manifestation or replication of the structure [and its ‘value-system’] on the discursive level.’” 171 Forms which challenge, update, mutate, and undermine extant conceptions of genre, then, expose fissures in the political, cultural, and one supposes, economic systems devoted to the reproduction of cultural artifacts, and the structures, institutions, and markets which support them. Genre then, from the perspective of an engaged cultural analysis, may be construed as innately political, and Moore-Gilbert goes on to establish that “[f]orm…constitutes ‘the political unconscious’ of the text and it is the politically responsible critic’s role to read symptomatically for indices of its relation to social reality and the political forces which configure that reality.” 172 This is a more politically inclined articulation than Bakhtin’s already progressive stance that genre is a “stable yet constantly transforming tendency in literature’s development,” and that genre additionally is “reborn and renewed at every new stage.” 173 Bakhtin provides a basis for discussing genre’s significant contribution to history and to its continuities, and aids in understanding Jameson’s idea of the “historicity of structures,” even as one recognizes that culture evolves with fluidity and unpredictability. Bakhtin also asserts that:

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A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development. 174

David Musgrave has noted that the “manifestation of a genre and its development over time are representative of a deeper process” than the linear or sequential development which for some would constitute evidence of cultural progression, or the basis for simple taxonomies. 175 Indeed, as Musgrave records, Bakhtin emphasizes that genres are evidence of “ways of understanding the world” which “persist over centuries and across cultures, constituting a kind of transcultural memory.” 176 For Alastair Fowler genre is a straightforward “instrument not of classification or prescription, but of meaning,” a vantage which helps disenfranchise the critical pursuit of satire’s place in a constructed system of classification. 177 Miller adds that genre then “seeks to explicate the knowledge that practice creates” because “[a]s a recurrent, significant action, a genre embodies an aspect of cultural rationality.” 178 These ideas of political inflection, metrics of social dissolution and unity, and the deployment of transcultural modalities move genre theory in intriguing directions,

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beyond many prevalent discussions which maintain a focus on identifying characteristics. 179 Working from Bart Moore-Gilbert’s assertions then, satire functions particularly well as a genre, both cultural and performative, that reflects the need for change and which aims to prompt transformation. Grounded in historic and cultural specificities, satire underscores that the task of genre criticism is not “neutrally to describe” aspects of the form in question, but to understand it as constructing, in Moore-Gilbert’s terms, “a historically determinate conceptual or semic complex which can project itself in the form of a ‘value system.’” 180 And in this context, one can apprehend satire’s impact and efficacy as a vehicle for radical, change-oriented critique. In Howard D. Weinbrot’s designation, Menippean satire “is a genre for serious people who see serious trouble and want to do something about it—whether to awake a somnolent nation, define the native in contrast to the foreign, protest the victory of darkness, or correct a careless reader.” 181 Even in the seemingly neutral realm of genre theory and criticism, satire is provocative.

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RESISTANCE LITERATURE Satire demands readerly attention to historical and cultural specificities in order to decode meaning, follow a specific narrative thread, comprehend the target/s of attack, and be aware of just when and how a hit is carried out. This is a somewhat intense and directed contextual reading relationship. It moves on from what Massih Zekavat has referred to as “pay[ing] renewed attention to the actual reality of the world, rather than reducing it to mere textuality, in order to facilitate activism to encounter numerous contemporary challenges.” 182 Menippean satire adds the reading requirements of additional attention to satiric juxtapositions and incongruities, and varying kinds of textual hybridities. The sheer amount of information roiling the surface of a Menippean postcolonial satire points to the intense extra-textual connections being made. Satire in general has long been associated with oppositionality, and with the rhythms which manifest in the cultural conversations of attack and counter-attack. In “The Wages of Satire,” Harry Levin outlines a long Western literary tradition of the satirist as a moral arbiter, upholder of social norms and expectations, quick to rail at outliers and disrupters. But he also ponders if perhaps satire functions “to register alternative possibilities under regressive conditions.” 183 He acknowledges that strict regimes can “offer a standing incitement to satire,” because such harsh systems so often “have trouble living up to their own propaganda.” 184 Levin explores the scope of satire’s impacts from individual revenges to wider reforms “toward a sweeping overview of the human condition.” 185

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This is what John Clement Ball has articulated as the “time-honored question of whether satire intends to or ever actually does achieve change and improvement in the world. 186 Barbara Harlow’s ground-breaking study Resistance Literature (1986) addresses this important query regarding effect in terms of literatures of political protest. Harlow explores the deployment of literature and culture to effect radical change and “real-world” impacts, for people engaged in a struggle for liberation, and for freedom from oppressions and imposed cultural and political hegemonies. Harlow’s work establishes a framework for recognizing radical modes of critique which elide with messages of political and social change and actual agendas for action. In Postcolonial Poetics (2018) Elleke Boehmer has returned to Harlow’s field of work to re-examine “how postcolonial literary works might go about resistance now.” 187 Boehmer’s study addresses poetic practices and aesthetic methods, and looks at “how we read postcolonial literature today” and also “how the structures of that writing shape our reading.” 188 Boehmer, like Harlow, is concerned with “the objective of resistance writing to overcome oppression” and “how the approach based on pragmatic poetics…might integrate with an actual involvement in political struggle.” 189 Though each is working through a different approach and looking at different types of writing, Harlow and Boehmer both strive to put into a postcolonial critical context some way to measure or register effective literary resistance. Harlow’s work focuses powerfully on “combative, agenda-driven forms of writing.” 190 Boehmer’s augmentative step is the scrutiny of more “subtle, under-specified, and inferential” and juxtapositional literary practices, which may be no less resistant despite a lessovert insistence on ideology, or lack of foregrounding of over-identified themes of colonization. 191 Harlow and Boehmer’s work creates then an opportunity to consider how satire fits into this evolving critical context of postcolonial resistance-oriented literature. Harlow was inspired to focus on literature that articulated and even fomented active resistance, and her examples came from resistance poetry, resistance narratives, prison memoirs, and post-independence texts. Harlow’s study chronicles works that pivot on very overt, direct forms of attack on extant oppressions. Boehmer is prompted to reconsider aesthetic and reading practices by “the crucial question” of “how postcolonial texts go about confronting, interrogating, and re-imagining hierarchical and exclusionary structures, short of verbally attacking them.” 192 Postcolonial satire is predicated on attack, but one that demonstrates a significant degree of finesse with the colonizer’s language, a vaunted awareness of multiple literary traditions, and an intended meaning that is often connected to historical specificities (though often relatable beyond them). Postcolonial satire, as a performative act, is also attuned to discourses of power measurable on many scales, and explores power relationships in many contexts, like migrancy in Rushdie, or sociocultural marginality in

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Desani, Menen, and Sealy. “What is being performed” in these discourses, according to Anshuman A. Mondal,

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is power or, to be more precise, the positioning of oneself in a power relation. To give offence is to display one’s ability to do so; conversely, to take offence is to signal one’s subordinate position in that power relation, to display a vulnerability that marks oneself as a victim or object of power—to perform one’s powerlessness. 193

The mere launching of a satiric literary attack, then, can be a conclusively resistant act. Boehmer chronicles how, from an “early attention to difference and to opposition (if variously inflected across the field), a criticism emerged that tended at once to privilege cultural resistance and to elevate features such as multi-vocality and hybridity as modes of expressing it.” 194 Her explorations into a resistance-oriented postcolonial poetics consider how “the voice of the oppressed finds expression in the mutated, sometimes violently disrupted language of the oppressor,” and how postcolonial authors “contend with the legacies of these languages as vehicles of empire by subverting them from within.” 195 Edward Said has reflected similarly on the intentionally unifying aspects of engaging in struggle, commenting that “[t]he history of empire— punctuated by uprisings, seems incoherent unless one recognizes that sense of beleaguered imprisonment infused with a passion for community that grounds anti-imperial resistance in cultural effort.” 196 Both Harlow and Boehmer often return to the calculation that engagement in expressions of culture is an exponentially empowering act. Said also notes that “The concept of the national language is central, but without the practice of a national culture—from slogans to pamphlets and newspapers, from folktales and heroes to epic poetry, novels, and drama—the language is inert; national culture organizes and sustains communal memory.” 197 In this context, Menippean satire, which demonstrates and incorporates this kind of linguistic and textual cacophony, can—although this may seem counterintuitive—operate as a mode of restoring a sense of coherent narrative and history. Postcolonial Menippean satire’s enthusiastic onslaught of narrative and communicative components thus “form a counterpoint to Western powers’ monumental histories, official discourses, and panoptic quasi-scientific viewpoint,” to borrow again from Said. 198 According to Anshuman A. Mondal, the satiric/comedic mocking “genres do not just ‘prepare’ us for courses of action,” significantly, “they are forms of action.” 199 In other words, adds Mondal, “the purpose of satire is not to simply describe the world but to change it.” 200 The comments Edward Said has made about Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children in this context affirm the thematic arc I have found in the body of writing I chose to bring together in this study. Said notes “The conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West,

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to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories is of particular interest in Rushdie’s work, and in an earlier generation of resistance writing.” 201 Edward Said’s observations reflect some of what I discovered in my studies of a body of resistance-oriented postcolonial satire, and also help to identify this writing as a significant chapter in the evolution of postcolonial literature. These elements are also key to my choice of authors, because as an ensemble they powerfully engage outward with literary traditions, reconfiguring by rewriting and interrogating them. Although Desani, Menen, Rushdie, and Sealy all happen to be male writers, in my assessment they also represent a noteworthy degree of diversity of background, experience, and approach. They are also a band of writers bold enough to overturn established cultural frameworks. They write against Leon Guilhamet’s assertions that satire values a secure past and privileges the protection of the institutions which maintain the continuities of that past, or which even preserve “an ideal perception of pastness.” 202 Guilhamet also contends that “the object of satire is a present danger or perversion of a hallowed norm,” and that “the utopian vision that characterizes satire is almost invariably reactionary.” 203 Guilhamet arrives at this stance by concluding unambiguously that “no genre is more dependent on its tradition than is satire,” and one can see then how, in his scheme and with the largely Augustan material he examines (and which is invariably referenced as a universal metric in satire study), such an inclination towards this kind of unquestioning dependence would predicate satire’s tendency to “emerge along with a belief in the superiority of the past to the present and a fear of innovation as a threat to the institutions of the past.” 204 This is, in admittedly simplified terms, also an enunciation of the framework upon which support for the perpetuation of colonial institutions often rested. A COHORT OF SATIRIC WRITERS The authors included here can be considered as a cohort in a number of contexts. They are all South-Asian postcolonial writers of narrative fiction in English. As a group they represent some of the multiplicity of the Indian subcontinent: in their range of religious and cultural identities (Hindu and later Buddhist Desani, Christian-convert Menen, Rushdie at one point as culturally-identified Muslim); in origins both native-born (Sealy, Rushdie) and expatriate-born (Desani, Menen); in long-term residence in India (Sealy; Desani and Menen to a lesser degree) and in diaspora (Rushdie by default and later by choice, Menen by self-definition). Their work displays leanings Anglophile as well as national-allegiant, and towards complex articulations of self-identity. Each is also self-de-

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fined as askew from the mainstream by circumstance or by choice, affording access to a mix of outsider and insider insights (via Desani’s asceticism; Menen’s biculturalism and out homosexuality; Rushdie’s exuberant celebrations of hybridity and his later period of fatwa-mandated seclusion; Sealy’s staunch assertion of minority Anglo-Indian identity). Desani and Menen are near contemporaries, as are Rushdie and Sealy, and in each pair one author demonstrates dynamic reshaping of novelistic form (Desani and Sealy) while the other asserts as significant a challenge through significant manipulations of language (Menen and Rushdie). Although my argument does not require the writers in question to self-identify specifically as Menippean satirists, I have found some degree of awareness of the Menippean tradition exhibited in at least one work by each author. 205 Aubrey Menen is the most overt in identifying his works as satires by title and himself as a satirist. One might argue that the work of any self-identified satirist is connected in some way to its fundamental traditions, but Menen presents the linkage overtly when he illuminates his Menippean models directly in the course of his deflationary practices. In The Fig Tree, a novel satirizing both attitudes towards sexuality and the folly of national efforts to control human behavior, Menen refers to the much-used Menippean model of the symposium. Menen’s novel features several debates conducted over refreshments, and in the course of one such episode a character relates: I came across a book called PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM, or The BANQUET. The sub-title naturally attracted me, so I put it beside my bed. I thought it might be interesting to know what the Greeks ate. Well, I read it from time to time. I hadn’t got more than a quarter of the way through when I felt in my bones that something was very wrong. I know a good deal about banquets, and one thing I was sure of, Greeks or not, nobody ever talked as these characters talked over a table. So I turned to the introduction to find out something more about the book. Well, I was right. The thing wasn’t meant to be real. 206

It is typical of Menen that he would invoke irony by deflating a classical model while relying on it. Salman Rushdie also cites Menippean classical sources directly in several books: Chapter V of The Satanic Verses starts with a paraphrase from Lucius’s The Golden Ass, and in The Ground Beneath Her Feet the narrator likens his narrative to that of “Lucius Apuleius of Madaura,” yoking the Menippean and the postcolonial when he begs to be excused for a “(post)colonial clumsiness” which inflects “the oddness of my tale.” 207 G. V. Desani mentions his satiric treatment of Hatterr, 208 and also establishes a focus on liminal states through his depictions of Hatterr’s humiliations and deprivations, which echo strongly with those of Lucius Apuleius which unfold in The Golden Ass. Though not directly citing a Menippean source, Irwin Allan Sealy includes a

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chapter entitled “S for Satyr” in Red, in which the narrator ponders the role of culpability in art, touching on judgement, culture, and art that violates the precepts of “nature.” 209 The meditation pivots on depictions of satyrs in specific paintings, so there is some foregrounding of the Menippean mixture of realistic portrayals and fantastic figures in this context. Sealy’s satyrs are presented as combining fertility/creativity, celebration and menace, and the very borders of “civilization.” 210 His satyrs suggest something of the ridiculing character of what is known of the Greek satyr plays, although those plays stem from a very specific literary heritage. 211 Even though the disparate roots of the Latin “satire” and the Greek “satyr” have been acknowledged, later critical writing underscores that the satyr play has a role in the development of later satiric works; as M. M. Bakhtin records, the “satyr play was thus legitimized and made as canonical as the tragedies themselves.” 212 And then there is Rushdie’s 2017 novel, The Golden House, which is overtly about Menippean writers and literary structures and influences. Rushdie weaves subtle and explicit Menippean references in many of his texts but (as discussed in chapter 4 at length) The Golden House reads rather like a primer on Menippean satire. Other literary modes may be present in these authors’ works, but these examples begin to make a case for reading these texts as postcolonial Menippean satires.

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MIMETICISM AND SATIRE If one considers both counter-realism and Menippean satire as subversive modes, some overlaps begin to become apparent. The basic characteristics of counter-realism, for example, could be generally described as the combination of factual material (settings, situations, and characters) with counterfactual elements (supernatural, fantastic, or miraculous). By presenting the counterfactual material as factual, the text calls the objective and the factual into question. Menippean satire also mixes similar elements which undermine supposed objectivity and factual perspective. Each vaunts a degree of formal self-consciousness, and each has a specific, notable, and at times vexed, relationship with “reality” (I am recognizing the implied subjectivities of that term, in keeping with the observations of Jean-François Lyotard, et al.). Magic realism specifically seeks to upset the category of “the real” within the fiction in order to destabilize impressions of the world external to the text; its subversion rests in unsettling perceptions of this real world. Yet satires also aim at a similar disturbing effect; they are grounded to some degree in an attempt at objective portrayal, even as they subvert, distort, and critique, to draw out what is deemed worthy of attack in order to, again, unsettle perceptions of the real world. As Gilbert Highet frames this, the action is written out

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“partly with ferocious realism, partly with bitter and contemptuous distortion.” 213 Perhaps the more widely-referenced metaphor of the narrative as “the mirror held up,” employed by critics examining both magic realism and satire (including the Menippean mode), is most helpful in assessing this relationship. Stephen Slemon, establishing a concept of magic realism in a postcolonial context, explores Gabriel García Márquez’s motif of a “speaking mirror.” 214 Initially, this metaphor refers to the way a magic realist text may be read as reflecting actual speech and communicative modes in its realist narrative, so that the text “reflects” what Slemon identifies as “the social relations of a postcolonial culture.” 215 But, Slemon continues, the “speaking mirror” functions dually, so that it “does not only reflect in an outward direction toward postcolonial social relations. It also sustains an inward reflection into the work’s thematic content.” 216 This enables the magic realist text to distort temporal and historic fixities, so that it relates to the whole of postcolonial culture, to the entirety of a history of colonization, and to the “gaps, absences, and silences produced by the colonial encounter,” 217 which may be portrayed in fractured or fragmented language, dissociative or supernatural events, or incongruities and logically inexplicable events. Slemon’s definition places magic realism as a mode linked to, and circumscribed by, the recognition and development of postcolonial writing. Satire’s metaphor is also the mirror, stated most notably by Jonathan Swift in the preface to The Battel of the Books (1710): “Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover everybody’s Face but their Own.” 218 Leonard Feinberg has noted the striking prevalence of mirrors as a device for satirists. 219 Gilbert Highet explores the satirical reflection as specifically a “distorting” mirror, a slippery device which draws an audience in, for “[a] satirical picture of our world, which shows only human beings as its inhabitants, must pretend to be a photograph, and in fact be a caricature.” 220 This is in keeping with Northrop Frye’s anchoring of satire to an exterior “object of attack” 221 and Leon Guilhamet’s location of satire’s focus in “social reality.” 222 Yet Highet allows for satire’s relationship with a reflected “reality” to result in textual manipulations, exaggerations, and unpredictability, “In the world of satiric fiction, almost anything may happen at any moment. Satire sometimes looks at reality as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, deserving nothing but a bitter laugh.” 223 And this is actually rather key to my discussion, since it allows the central notion of referentiality, which is clearly a vital element in satire, to reflect postcolonialism’s emphasis on the emergence of a literature which has a basis both in a concrete social and material history, and a creative, constructed, often oppositional response to that history. Satire’s emphases, then, can add elements of destabilization, and can undermine the supposed neutrality and veracity in literary voices. Highet continues:

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Chapter 1 The central problem of satire is its relation to reality. Satire wishes to expose and criticize and shame human life, but it pretends to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth…it usually does this in one of two ways: either by showing an apparently factual but really ludicrous and debased picture of this world; or by showing a picture of another world, with which our world is contrasted. 224

Yet even when the particulars of satire’s realism, its historical specificities, are unintelligible to a readership for reasons of the passage of time, geographical distance, or linguistic opacity, Highet asserts the relevance of satire’s original and energetic attacks. He interprets a defect as an asset, stressing that “We can still enjoy the biting paradoxes…. We can still admire the deftly turned phrases…. We can laugh…we can…substitute other names…. It is in this way that good satire, although essentially topical, becomes general and permanent.” 225 In this context one may negotiate a balance between one of the pressing challenges for readers/consumers of the burgeoning category of postcolonial literature: the need to read postcolonial material in proximity to its specific, referential origins and influences, and the possibility of extracting meaning from the more variably-connected body of work which increasingly may be encountered in numerous contexts as popular or “world” literature. Satire is markedly part of the subversive, oppositional energy of this writing, an aspect which anchors a text in the specific and referential, and a feature which can aid its transcendence to the more accessible and possibly enduring.

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COUNTER-REALIST MENIPPEAN ELEMENTS The works addressed here share a history of prompting critics to reach for lists of genres to attempt to describe them, as they all assert formal innovations which problematize how the genre of the novel is perceived. Aubrey Menen is perhaps the most subtle in his witty prose fictions, but a Menippean parodic polyphony is nonetheless present in his sustained dialogues between Eastern and Western sources. These are sometimes literal dialogues, as in Shela: A Satire (1962), written as pages of a play script. Menen also introduces juxtaposed, parodied sources which cast his own racially-mixed heritage as actively conflicted. The protagonist in All About H. Hatterr, G. V. Desani’s sole novel-length work of prose fiction, enacts this conflict more vigorously, via cascades of juxtaposed sources throughout the text which impact and fragment novelistic form more directly. An East-West divergence arguably imbues the discourse in much of Salman Rushdie’s work, which emerges at the level of language usage in arrays of imaginative neologisms which have provided welcome material for scholars in the fields of both lexicology and stylistics. 226 A related instinct emerges in the novels of Irwin Allan Sealy, a body of

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work which tends to depict the ruptures within, and slights and injustices suffered by, the Anglo-Indian community, but the impact of Menippean content is most directly obvious in each novel’s radical engagement of experimental form. These authors all depict the characteristically Menippean elements of philosophical debates and extensive catalogues of information. Debates are artfully depicted in Menen’s work and dramatically enacted by characters in Desani’s. Disputes are represented at times by exploration of various art forms such as oral storytelling in Rushdie’s novels. Debates appear as radical challenges to formal expectations in Sealy, such as the complete disappearance of narratorial moderation, replaced with only stated argument and counter-argument at times in The Trotter-Nama and Red. The context for such debates is often a version of the symposium, with elaborate disquisitions and counter-arguments presented against the backdrop of versions of the banquet. These texts also feature the elaborate digressions and catalogues of information that Frye notes as “the organizing principle of the greatest Menippean satire in English before Swift [‘s Gulliver’s Travels], Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” 227 Sealy’s narrator in The Trotter-Nama catalogues the minutiae of Anglo-Indian life over several centuries, while Rushdie surveys expressions of subjective Indian experience in various different artistic media in most of his novels. Menen’s characters in The Prevalence of Witches offer lengthy, sophisticated dissections of the colonial drive for power, while the overload of information in Desani’s Hatterr veers well into the level of rant and tirade. They each offer a version of Frye’s “creative treatment of exhaustive erudition,” 228 always foregrounding language which exhibits Menippean satire’s exuberant celebrations and parodic wordplay. John C. Hawley has posited that postcolonial writers might “take the formal aspects from European art and find for them a new conceptual hybridized language” that incorporates and exhibits “the drive towards political freedom and cultural autonomy.” 229 In the postcolonial Menippean, carnival obtains, closure is resisted, and there are newer and more compelling expressions of the possibilities of independence and artistic expression. Subsequent chapters here will establish the degree to which these Indian subcontinent satirists negotiate the careful balance between “appropriation and resistance” which Om P. Juneja associates with the processes of modernizing, hybridizing literary forms, wherein a text can be both “an ape and a rebel.” 230 I will be examining in detail how Indiansubcontinent, postcolonial satirists reimagine the Menippean in postcolonial contexts, and how the term Menippean satire regains its specificity in this line of counter-realist fiction. There is also an arguable strand of progression and influence which links these satiric writers, and which helps to clarify the focus on this particular body of Indian subcontinent postcolonial writing. Desani and Menen hone in on transplanted and/or

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biracial individuals as generative of tropes of cultural hybridity. Rushdie translates this focus to entire migrant or displaced populations, examining impacts of hybrid inheritances, while Sealy tackles the presentation of a culturally underdetermined community, specifically the Anglo-Indian struggle to secure a “significant identity in the larger Indian context.” 231 My aim has been to draw unique novels into critical contact while retaining a sense of whatever made them so uniquely compelling to begin with. And I must concede that while the grounds for comparison between Menippean satire and counter-realist postcolonial writing are substantial they are not absolute. But by examining these selected authors as Menippean satirists my goal is to yield some new insights about the experimental and resistant nature of a substantial portion of postcolonial fiction. There is also an obvious need to wade carefully in applying a form so embedded in Western literary tradition into the context of the postcolonial, but in my investigations I have striven, if imperfectly, to examine how the Menippean is being actively used to reflect the disputes and dialogues that span conceptions of East and West. One can be guided by Edward Said’s observation that “Culture is never just a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures. This is the universal norm.” 232 Gilbert Highet mentions that Menippus earned the epithet “the joker about serious things,” and points out that the early satires by Menippus and Varro were “so rich in vulgarisms, archaisms, neologisms, and bold imagery…that they even make the straight verse satires of Horace and Juvenal look rather tame and monotonous.” 233 It is not violating this sense of Menippean spirit, nor Margaret A. Rose’s descriptions of Menippean practice, to apply these ideas to Menen’s innovative mixtures of parody and satire, Desani’s “ridicule or caricature of some sham-intellectual or theological fraud,” and the “outlandish fictions (i.e. fantastic voyages, dreams, visions, talking beasts) and extreme distortions of argument (often ‘paradoxes’)” of Sealy and Rushdie. 234 Respective chapters on Desani and Menen look at their use of intertextual juxtapositions which begin to shape this postcolonial emphasis on revision and renewal of novelistic language and form. Chapter 2 considers G. V. Desani’s sole full-length work, All About H. Hatterr, first published in 1948, as a Menippean satire which casts nearly every available satiric device as a Menippean strategy to depict the unresolved formal tensions between East and West. These Eastern and Western influences appear as intertextual references, in the depicted cultural conflicts of colonial India, and in the contradictory attentions of the mixed-race, eponymous, and picaresque hero. Chapter 3 examines a range of the prolific Aubrey Menen’s satirical novels, starting with his first, The Prevalence of Witches (1949)

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and including his memoirs, which cover many of the same questions he raises in his novels about the construction of identity. Rather than Desani’s avalanche of dramatic incursions which reshape and redefine form, Menen establishes Menippean satire through an emphasis on wit and refined erudition. Menen’s extremely clever and parodic juxtapositions of Eastern and Western sources impact upon the level of discourse and ultimately its shape and form. Chapter 4 focuses on how Salman Rushdie foregrounds the construction of Menippean elements through dialogic descriptions of various art forms within his novels, starting with Midnight’s Children (1981), and its interwoven references to cinema. Rushdie consistently embeds in each novel discussed here a central focus on another art form, and in the reading presented here, these art forms exist in a dialogic, juxtaposed, and often parodic relationship. Thus his inflection of this classic rhetorical device of comparison, ekphrasis, arguably has a bearing on the boundaries of the novel. His Menippean approach presents various modes of artistic and cultural expression as inter-related and connected, and as a result this Menippean attitude in his novels tends to undercut fallacies of uncorrupted or essential artistic or cultural traditions. The work of I. Allan Sealy, the subject of Chapter 5, comprises a series of novels, starting with The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle (1988), which incorporates a striking range of formal innovations. Sealy’s novels each have a subtitle which indicates a generic form, yet in true Menippean manner what emerges is a philosophical discourse on the aptness of such generic constraints, as in the ironic paradoxes of his vast “all”-encompassing historical chronicle, The Trotter-Nama, and the subjectivities which endlessly elude its narrative borders. Sealy uses Menippean strategies and structures to expand and reshape the novelistic genre to new levels and registers, while at the same time confronting how difficult it remains to create space for marginalized voices. NOTES 1. “In Good Faith,” © 1990 by Salman Rushdie; from Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 by Salman Rushdie. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 2. Chapter 4: “Freedom from Domination in the Future,” from Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said, copyright © 1993 by Edward W. Said. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 3. The Anatomy of Satire by Gilbert Highet. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press in the format “book” via Copyright Clearance Center. 4. Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 185–6. Lucian of Samosata’s dates are c. 120–180 CE. 5. Robert C. Elliott in The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, 186, refers to A. M. Harmon’s translation of Lucian (Lucian, London: Heinemann and NY: Macmillan,

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1913–1967, 8 Vols.; “Dionysus” appears in Vol. I, 49-55). I have used Lucian, “Dionysus,” H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, trans., The Works of Lucian of Samosata (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1905), Vol. III, 253–6. The Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata is not to be confused with either the Roman satirist, Lucius Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, or the character Lucian, who is the protagonist of Lucius’s The Golden Ass. To further complicate matters, Lucian of Samosata, the aforementioned Greek satirist, wrote a work called Lucius, or The Ass. I believe this is why classical scholars tend to refer to just “Apuleius” when discussing the author of The Golden Ass. Both were influenced by Menippus. 6. Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse,” Kunapipi 9, no. 3 (1987): 19. 7. Bill Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” in Reading Marechera, ed. Grant Hamilton (Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2013), 80. 8. Chelva Kanaganayakam links some of the counter-realist strands of Desani, Rushdie, and Sealy (2002), and Susheila Nasta explores the diasporic aspects of both Desani and Menen (2002). 9. P. K. Dutta, “Studies in Heterogeneity: A Reading of Two Recent Indo-Anglian Novels,” in Social Scientist 18, no. 3 (1990): 62. 10. Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe, eds. Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 11. 11. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 126. 12. See: Frye 1957, Highet 1962, Blanchard 1995, Sherbert 1996. 13. Patricia Merrivale, “Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Intertextual Strategies in Midnight’s Children and The Tin Drum,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1994), 85. 14. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 311. 15. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (NY: Picador, 1999), 56; 7. 16. Matthew Hodgart, Satire (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 55. 17. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 310; 309. 18. Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 9; 33. 19. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 22. 20. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 114. Bakhtin’s italics. 21. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 108. 22. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 127. 23. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 206. 24. Craig Howes, “Rhetorics of Attack: Bakhtin and the Aesthetics of Satire,” Genre 18 (1986): 234. 25. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press: 1992), 81. 26. Joel Relihan, “Five Menippean Papers,” academia.edu, July 20, 2016. 27. Eric McLuhan, Cynic Satire (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 52. An excellent starting place to understand genre, mode, and form in satire studies is Gilbert Highet’s foundational work, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962); Highet’s knowledge of the subject is encyclopedic, and his enthusiasm inspiring. Classics scholar Joel Relihan also offers much insight in Ancient Menippean Satire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 28. Sarah Ilott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (London: Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2015), 135–40. 29. Ilott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries, 135. 30. Ilott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries, 137. 31. Ilott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries, 137.

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32. Ilott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries, 138. 33. Mahmud Farjami explains that “[e]ach of these can be seen as identifying a basic branch of thought in humor studies and each effectively comprises a cluster of closely related theories about the mechanics and function of humor. From these, it is possible to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework” of comedy and humor (113) in Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017). 34. Robert Phiddian draws attention to what he terms “the relative atrophy of the theory of satire since 1970” (52) in “Satire and the limits of literary theories” (2013). Other fairly recent in-depth and worthwhile forays into literary satire theory and criticism include John Clement Ball, Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (New York: Routledge, 2003); David Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014); Paul Simpson, On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a stylistic model of satirical humour (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 2003). Satire study is advancing in media studies as well; see, for instance, Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson, eds. (NY: New York University Press, 2009). 35. Anshuman A. Mondal, “Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire,” in Comedy and the Politics of Representation, eds. Helen Davis and Sarah Ilott (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Studies in Comedy, 2018), 26. 36. This typology trend kicked off notably in the satire criticism heyday of the 1950s into the 1970s in which formalist debates entertainingly raged, which included Ian Jack’s Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660-1750 (1952), Ellen Leyburn’s Satiric Allegory (1956), Alvin B. Kernan’s The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (1958), James Sutherland’s English Satire (1958), Kenneth Hopkins’s Portraits in Satire (1958), David Worcester’s The Art of Satire (1960); the periodicals Satire Newsletter (1963-73), and Studies in Contemporary Satire (1974-96). The years 196971 alone saw four books with the title Satire: one each by Matthew Hodgart (1969), Gilbert Cannan (1969—reprint of earlier volume), Arthur Pollard (1970), and Ronald Paulson (1971). 37. Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984), 151. 38. Mondal, “Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire,” 26; 30. 39. Mondal, “Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire,” 27. 40. Mondal, “Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire,” 26. (Mondal’s italics.) 41. A recent essay on German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offers an intriguing modern contextual angle on the Cynics’ spirited and unabashed assaults on apathy. Author Thomas Meaney describes Sloterdijk’s surprisingly commercially successfully The Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) as a cry to “overcome social atomization” and modern pessimistic cynicism: “The antidote to cynicism, [Sloterdijk] suggested, was a re-immersion in the heritage of the Cynics of ancient Greece. He looked to the philosopher Diogenes, who rejected the social conventions that governed human behaviour and said that people should live instinctively, like dogs.… He celebrated the direct way that Diogenes made his points…and suggested that the answer to his generation’s malaise was to repurpose the spontaneous currents of the sixties counterculture.” (“Doktor Zeitgeist,” The New Yorker (26 February 2018): 30). 42. From the Greek κῠ́ων (kúōn) comes both canis (Latin) and canine (English). 43. Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. by C. D. Yonge (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd. 1915), n.p., gutenberg.org, 2018. 44. Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, n.p.

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45. Diogenes Laërtius, “Menippus,” Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book VI, trans. Robert Drew Hicks, Loeb Classical Library edition, Vols. 1 and 2, 1925. wikisource.org, October 2017, ll. 58–62. 46. This list of titles comes from Pamela Mensch’s translation of Laërtius (Oxford University Press, 2018), 308. Mensch confirms the slipperiness of some of Laërtius’s statements, pointing out that although Laertius writes that the books of Menippus were “full of laughter and very like those of his contemporary Meleager,” the latter wrote in another century (first century BCE) and so was not even a near contemporary (306n). Mensch’s translation of the “playful verse” goes: “Phoenician by birth, but a Cretan dog,/A hemerodaneistes [day lender/usurer] (for this was his nickname)/Perhaps you know Menippus./But then his house in Thebes was burgled/And he lost everything; nor did he understand the character of a dog: For he hanged himself” (306–7). 47. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.47, qtd. in Weinbrot, 27. 48. Howard D. Wienbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 28. 49. Charles Marston Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Pittsburgh, 1937), 5; 7. I wholly concur with Lee’s concluding assessment that “[i]t is a cause of regret that more attention has not been paid to the Menippeans, and that so much of their bulk has been lacerated by the corroding tooth of time” (14). 50. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 10. 51. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 23. 52. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 22. 53. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 23. 54. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 23. 55. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 25–6. 56. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 31. 57. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 31. 58. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 37. 59. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 32. 60. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 36. 61. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 35. 62. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 41. 63. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 35. 64. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 86. 65. Lee, Varro’s Menippean Satires, 90. 66. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 35. 67. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 39. 68. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 53. 69. Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85. 70. Joel C. Relihan, “On the Origin of ‘Menippean Satire’ as the Name of a Literary Genre,” in Classical Philology 79, no. 3 (July 1984), 228. Relihan has clarified via meticulous research that there was ostensibly “no generic use of the term ‘Menippean satire’ prior to 1581,” the publication year of a work by Lipsius called Menippean Satire— Dream, originally Satyra Menippea. Somnium. Relihan designates Lipsius “the first to assert the generic significance of ‘Menippean satire’” (228). 71. Lucian, “The Double Indictment”/“Bis accusatus sive tribunalia,” The Works of Lucian Vol. 3, trans. A. M. Harmon, The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 147. 72. Lucian, “The Double Indictment”/“Bis accusatus sive tribunalia,” trans. A. M. Harmon, 147. 73. Eric McLuhan, Cynic Satire, 58. 74. Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland, 1980), xi. 75. Theodore D. Kharpertian, A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990): 21; 41.

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Kharpertian observes that the genre of Menippean satire “has been the province heretofore of classical scholars or more recently of students of modern literature, neither of whom tends to read the other, so a synthesis of Ancients and Moderns is unlikely, given the current degree of specialization in literary studies” (30). 76. For the uninitiated, two examples: C, Eb, and G walk into a bar. The bartender says “Sorry, we don’t serve minors in here.” (These notes form a minor chord.) A nun, a priest, an Irishman, a Scotsman, a rabbi, and a blonde walk into a bar. The bartender looks at them and asks, “Is this some kind of joke?” 77. Horace, Odes, 3.14, trans. A. S. Kline, 2003, www.poetryintranslation.com/ PITBR/Latin/HoraceOdesBkIII.php. 78. Juvenal, Satire 5, “How Clients are Entertained,” trans. G. G. Ramsay, 1918, para. 6. http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ juvenal satires_05.htm#1 79. Juvenal, Satire 5. “How Clients are Entertained,” trans. G. G. Ramsay, para. 5. 80. Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead I, in Classics of Greek Literature, trans. Harry Wedeck (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2014), 293. From “In which Aeakus introduces Menippus to the ghosts of celebrated figures of antiquity,” in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead I. 81. See Christina Oesterheld, “Humor and Satire: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial,” The Annual of Urdu Studies 26 (2011): 64–86; she emphasizes, in this detailed study of several Urdu satiric works not well known outside of India and Pakistan, that “Urdu authors through the ages knew very well how to use all shades of humor to amuse their audiences, to point out human weaknesses and to attack the high and mighty” (64). 82. Three sources offer a start. One is T. W. Clark, ed., The Novel in India: Its Birth and Development (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1970); see within: T. W. Clark on “Bengali Prose Fiction up to Bankimcandra” for descriptions of Menippean-type works by Hutom Pyacar, 47; and R. S. McGregor on “The Rise of Standard Hindi and Early Hindi Prose Fiction” for similar efforts by Gopal Ram Gahmari, 167–9. The second source, Hasan Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), describes quite a few Persian satires which contain Menippean elements, although, like Clark and McGregor, the author does not identify them as such. Third is Mahmud Farjami, Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), which has survey chapters on classical to modern Persian satire, and political satire in Iran. “In classical Persian literature,” Farjami writes, “hajv (‘satire,’ or ‘lampoon’) and hazl (‘humor,’ or ‘not serious’) were in fact the dominant genres of humorous literature” (14). Farjami also shares that he is himself a persecuted satirist, having “worked as a political satirist since 2002 and been in exile from Iran since May 2010” (2). 83. Robert Rawdon Wilson, “On Disgust: A Menippean Interview,” The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 34, no. 2 (2007): 209. 84. R. Bracht Branham and Daniel Kinney, eds. and trans. Petronius: Satyricon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), xix. 85. Garry Sherbert, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 198. 86. Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” Poetics Today 23, no. 2 (2002): 304. 87. W. Scott Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 168. 88. David Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2014), 16. 89. David Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance, 18. 90. Branham and Kinney, Petronius: Satyricon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), xviii. 91. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” 291.

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92. As the individual texts discussed in this study bear out, in Menippean satire the exploratory is subversive, utilizing playful and/or deflationary questioning, as well as sometimes the literal quest. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” 293. 93. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” 307. 94. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” 307. 95. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” 308. 96. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 206. 97. Glenn D’Cruz, “My Two Left Feet: The Problem of Anglo-Indian Stereotypes in Post-Independence Indo-English Fiction,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38, no. 2 (2003): 118. 98. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” 319. 99. Bill Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” in Reading Marechera, ed. Grant Hamilton (Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2013), 77. 100. Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 78. 101. Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 79. 102. Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 101. 103. Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 81. 104. Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 82. 105. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1984), 276, qtd. in Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 82. 106. Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 89; 95. 107. Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 96. 108. Madhlozi Moyo, “Classical Allusion in Marechera’s Prose Works,” in Reading Marechera, ed. Grant Hamilton (Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2013), 152. 109. Donald F. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (NY: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), 192. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 82–9. 110. M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 21–22. 111. Gary S. Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 465. 112. Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (New York: Garland, 1980), ix. 113. Frank Palmeri, “Review: Satire: A Critical Introduction,” South Atlantic Review 60, no. 1 (1995): 173. 114. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” (1966), in The Kristeva Reader ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 50. 115. See, respectively: Byung-joo Park, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman: A Parody of Victorian Fiction,” The Journal of English Language and Literature 38, no. 2 (1992): 315–39; Hsiao-chen Chiang, “The Trope of an Upside Down World: Carnival and Menippean Satire in Richard Brome’s Antipodes,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 55–72; Werner von Koppenfels, “Of Ants and Aliens: Wells’ The War of the Worlds as Menippean Satire,” in Telling Stories: Studies in Honour of Ulrich Broich on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday, eds. Elmar Lehmann and Bernd Lenz (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1992), 147–162; Max Nänny, “The Waste Land and Michail Bakhtin’s Definition of the Menippea,” Anglistentag 1981: Vorträge, ed. Jörg Hasler (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1983), 206–218; Theodore D. Kharpertian, A Hand to Turn The Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990); and Max Nänny, “‘The Waste Land’: A Menippean Satire?” Poetry and

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Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge, eds. Roland Hagenbüchle and Laura Skandera (Regensburg: Pustet, 1986), 278–291. 116. Andrew B. Chrystall and Janet G. Sayers, “King Konsumer: Menippean Satire, Spectatorship, Sacrifice and Consumption,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 31, no.2 (2016): 266–76. 117. Chrystall and Sayers, “King Konsumer: Menippean satire, spectatorship, sacrifice and Consumption,” 274. 118. Aleksandar Takovski, “The Humor of Skopje 2014: Between Effects and Evaluations,” Humor 29, no. 3, (2016): 383. 119. Takovski, “The Humor of Skopje 2014: Between Effects and Evaluations,” 385. 120. Takovski, “The humor of Skopje 2014: Between effects and evaluations,” 387. 121. Takovski, “The Humor of Skopje 2014: Between Effects and Evaluations,” 395. 122. Takovski, “The Humor of Skopje 2014: Between Effects and Evaluations,” 408. 123. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 310. 124. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 310. 125. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 311. 126. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 308. 127. F. Anne Payne, Chaucer and Menippean Satire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 4. 128. John Clement Ball, Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (New York: Routledge, 2003), 120. 129. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 298. 130. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 310. 131. John Clement Ball, Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, chapter 4. 132. Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance, 22. 133. Peter Porter, Menippus at the Movies: A Theory of Menippeanism in Motion Pictures, PhD diss., (Wayne State University, 2003), ProQuest (3116531), 2. 134. Porter, Menippus at the Movies: A Theory of Menippeanism in Motion Pictures, 7. 135. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” 302. 136. Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 3. ProQuest Ebook Central. 137. Judith Plotz, “Rushdie’s Pickle and the New Indian Historical Novel: Sealy, Singh, Tharoor, and National Metaphor,” World Literature Written in English 35, no. 2 (1996), 33. 138. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford UK: Oxford University Press: 1992), 150. 139. Chelva Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurie, 2002), 80. 140. P. K. Dutta, “Studies in Heterogeneity: A Reading of Two Recent Indo-Anglian Novels,” Social Scientist 18, no. 3 (Mar. 1990): 62. 141. Prema Nandakumar, “The Fantasy Element in Indian Fiction in English,” Commonwealth Literature: Themes and Techniques, ed. P. K. Rajan, et al., (Delhi: Ajanta, 1993), 146. 142. Plotz, “Rushdie’s Pickle and the New Indian Historical Novel,” 33. 143. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 150. 144. Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998), 19. See also Bhabha (1994), Kanaganayakam (2002), and Thieme (2003). 145. Louis Menand, “All That Glitters: Literature’s Global Economy,” The New Yorker (26 Dec 2005 & 2 Jan 2006): 139. 146. Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990) 7. When I asked Prof. Bhabha if he still agreed with this statement, after his lecture “The Burdened Life: On Migration and the Humanities,” March 22, 2019 at NeMLA, Washing-

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ton DC, he replied: “Yes, but maybe now I would say ‘literary montage.’” Fascinating. Sounds possibly… Menippean. One awaits further developments. 147. Elizabeth Morgan, Aeroplane Mirrors: Personal and Political Reflexivity in PostColonial Women’s Novels (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 26. 148. Suzanne Baker, “Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Strategy: The Kadaitcha Sung,” SPAN: The Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 32 (1991): 56. 149. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1992), 212. 150. Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 269. 151. Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” Canadian Literature (1988) 116. Rpt. in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 408–9. 152. Ilan Stavans, “García Márquez’s ‘Total Novel,’” The Chronicle of Higher Education (15 June 2007): B9. 153. Laura Moss, “‘Forget those damnfool realists!’ Salman Rushdie’s Self-Parody as Magic Realist’s ‘Last Sigh,’” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 29, no. 4 (1998): 121. Critics have also attempted to downplay the dominance of magic realism in postcolonial writing by playing “up” the resistance aspects of realist writing. To this end, Laura Moss writes in defense of realism, holding that “non-realist writing is frequently privileged by postcolonial critics searching for a form to hold disruptive politics because of the assumption that its various forms are inherently conducive to political subversion due to their capacity for presenting multiplicity” (2000, n.p.). Moss notes that some critics seem to prefer works of an anti-realist mode because of the widespread perception that realism “perpetuates imperialist ideals,” reinforcing notions of superior metropolitan cultures and mandating the social and cultural codes of colonial hierarchies. Certainly Peter Hulme (1986), Timothy Brennan (1993), and Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin (1993) all fall into this category, linking the Eurocentered tradition of realist literature with the power to continue to perpetuate that European center as a cultural norm, and exploring anti-realist texts as more in line with possessing powers of resistance and opposition. 154. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 21 155. Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), 115–6. 156. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 296. Weinbrot points out that few have read the actual classical sources, either descriptions of the now-lost works by Menippus, or followers Bion, Varro, and Petronius, whose Menippean work in the main survives in fragments but which nonetheless constitutes collectively the roots of the early Menippean satire from which such influence and definitions are drawn. Weinbrot also debunks some of Bakhtin’s assertions that early modern writers were directly influenced by these classical sources, since the work was indeed so obscure and unobtainable. His updated definition would preserve the oppositional quality of Menippean satire, as well as its multivocality, while limiting some of its avenues for referentiality: “My notion of Menippean satire is of a kind of satire that uses at least two different languages, genres, tones, or cultural or historical periods to combat a false and threatening orthodoxy. It does so in either a harsher and severe or a softer and muted way…. This multiform genre is what in the Academics 1.2.8 Varro tells Atticus and Cicero is ‘multa admixta,’ a term Horace Rackham deftly translates as ‘copious Admixtures.’” (Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 2). The inclusion of Petronius in Weinbrot’s list would be contested by some; see Raymond Astbury, “Petronius, P. Oxy. 3010, and Menippean Satire,” Classical Philology 72, no. 1 (1977): 22–31. Astbury argues that Petronius’s distinct aim was comedy rather than satire, and that his Satyricon shares only a formal overlap with Menippean satire, namely the use of the prosimetric, or prose and verse, form. It is provocative

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though, in light of Bakhtin’s work, that Astbury identifies Petronius’s text as a “prosimetric novel” (30) my italics. Further dispute comes from Joel C. Relihan, who contends that the notion of a Menippean genre being recognized in any sense in antiquity is false: “That such a genre existed is evident from the lines of influence and tradition that can be traced in Varro, Seneca, Petronius, and others, but antiquity does not acknowledge the genre which modern literary acumen has uncovered and named on its own” (227). See Relihan, “On the Origin of ‘Menippean Satire’ as the Name of a Literary Genre,” Classical Philology 79, no. 3 (1984): 226–9. 157. John Thieme, Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary (London: Arnold, 2003), 170. 158. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 29–30. 159. With regard to terminology, this study uses “counter-realism” to sum up the effects variously expressed as anti-realist, post-realist, or magic realist, although I will sometimes be examining magic realism in the context of specific authors. Kwame Anthony Appiah is a useful source on the “post-realist” text, specifically an experimental, counter-realist, or magic realist category of writing which Appiah theorizes appears after an initial stage of realist writing emerges in a nascent, indigenous, postcolonial literary culture, as that culture evolves towards a fully decolonized state, and concurrent mode of expression (In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, 150). 160. John Clement Ball, Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (NY: Routledge, 2003), 166. 161. Chelva Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurie, 2002), 172. 162. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, 171. See also Rukun Advani, “Novelists in Residence,” Seminar 384 (1991): 15–18, for a further discussion of Rushdie as the watershed author of Indian postcolonialism. 163. Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151. 164. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” 165. 165. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” 153. 166. Michael Sinding, “After Definitions: Genre, Categories, and Cognitive Science” in Genre 35 (2002): 187. 167. Sinding, “After Definitions: Genre, Categories, and Cognitive Science,” 189. 168. Sinding, “After Definitions: Genre, Categories, and Cognitive Science,” 190. 169. Eugene P. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism (NY: Garland Publishing, Incorporated, 1980), ix. Kirk traces the continued influence and employment of Menippean satire’s tactics and “conventions” from antiquity through the late middle ages, into Byzantine culture, to the Italian and English Renaissance periods, and on into the Enlightenment and Puritan ages: “the prose-verse mixture, flagrant digression, rampant display of learned trivia, exaggeration of argument, inversions of ordinary worldly value…and outlandish vocabulary” (xv). He makes a serious case for the continuous history of the genre (citing Lucian, Petronius, Boethius, Erasmus, Rabelais, Burton, Swift, Voltaire, Sterne, and more, up to a 1661 Menippean satiric version of Oliver Cromwell’s funeral procession, penned by Abraham Cowley), while acknowledging points at which direct influence cannot be indisputably proven, such as when exactly such classical influences might have reached ancient and medieval Ireland to impact Celtic literature. 170. Kirk, Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism, ix. 171. Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Uses of Genre Criticism,” The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 145; 146. Qtd in Moore-Gilbert, “A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as Genre,” Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form, eds. Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 91; the square brackets are in Moore-Gilbert.

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172. Moore-Gilbert, “A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as Genre,” 91. 173. The second phrase is from Bakhtin in Pam Morris, ed., The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), 188. Qtd. in Ashcroft, “Menippean Marechera,” 89. 174. Mikael Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 106. 175. Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies: Menippean Satire since the Renaissance, 15. 176. Francis Dunn, “Rethinking Time: from Bakhtin to Antiphon,” Bakhtin and the Classics, ed., R. Bracht Branham (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 64; 65; qtd. in Musgrave, Grotesque Anatomies, 15. 177. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 22. 178. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” 155; 165. 179. See Conal Condran’s “Satire and Definition,” Humor 25, no. 4 (2012): 375–399, which the author explains was undertaken because “such a definition ought to be helpful for lawyers dealing with contentious cases of satire under new legal exemptions to Australian copyright law” (396). 180. Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Uses of Genre Criticism,” 107; 141; qtd. in Bart Moore-Gilbert, “A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as Genre,” 91. 181. Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2. 182. Massih Zekavat, Satire, Humor and the Construction of Identities (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 1. 183. Harry Levin, “The Wages of Satire” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1980), 1–14. 184. Levin, “The Wages of Satire,” 12. 185. Levin, “The Wages of Satire,” 13. 186. Ball, “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” 299. 187. Elleke Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings (Cham, Switzerland: Springer / Palgrave McMillan, 2018), 40. 188. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 1. 189. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 40. 190. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 40. 191. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 40. 192. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 40. 193. Mondal, “Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire,” 28. Mondal’s italics. 194. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 45. 195. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 30. 196. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (NY: Vintage Books, 1994), 214. 197. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 215. 198. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 215. 199. Mondal, “Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire,” 26–7. Mondal’s italics. 200. Mondal, “Taking Liberties? Free Speech, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Satire,” 28. 201. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 217. 202. Leon Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 166. 203. Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre, 165. 204. Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre, 17, 165. 205. Noting that satirists often eschew the term, Ball reminds us that “[s]atire makes people laugh and nod their heads and admire its creator; satire also makes people

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uncomfortable and suspicious and inclined to attack its creator” (Satire and the PostColonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, 167). V. S. Naipaul adamantly rejected the term “satirist” in an interview with Derek Walcott in 1965 (in Jussawalla, 8). 206. Aubren Menen, The Fig Tree (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 98. 207. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (NY: Picador, 1999), 388. 208. G. V. Desani, “Difficulties of Communicating an Oriental to a Western Audience,” in Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Hong Kong: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 404. 209. Irwin [I.] Allan Sealy, Red: An Alphabet (London: Picador, 2006), 256–7. 210. Sealy, Red: An Alphabet, 257. 211. Satire scholar Gilbert Highet illustrates how, though each has a distinct etymological root, “satyr” and “satire” intersect in some interpretations of their origins; he mentions that Petronius’s most known work is “called Satyricon liber, which means Book of Satyr-like Adventures; or Satiricon liber which…means Book of Satiric Things” (Anatomy of Satire, 264). It is now generally accepted that the work which clarified a division in origins for satire and the Latin term satura, and the Greek satyrs and satyr plays, is De satyrica Graecorum poesi & Romanorum satira, or Greek Satyrica Poetry and Roman Satire (1605) by the scholar Isaac Casaubon. There is no question that the satyr plays which still exist, complete or in fragments, are quite satiric. 212. M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 412. 213. Highet, Anatomy of Criticism, 123. 214. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. G. Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1971), 383. 215. Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” Canadian Literature 116, (1988): 9–24. Rpt. in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 411. 216. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” 411. 217. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” 411. 218. Swift’s passage continues: “which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the World, and that so very few are offended with it.” 219. Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire (Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press, 1967), 199. 220. Highet, Anatomy of Satire, 190. 221. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 224. 222. Leon Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 166. 223. Highet, Anatomy of Satire, 11. 224. Highet, Anatomy of Satire, 158–9. 225. Highet, Anatomy of Satire, 17–8. 226. See, for example, Sarala Krishnamurthy, “The Chutnification of English: An Examination of the Lexis of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” (Namibia: Namibia University of Science and Technology, 2010), ir.nust.na/handle/10628/230. 227. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 311. 228. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 311. 229. John C. Hawley, “Postcolonial Modernism: Shame and National Form,” What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, eds. Anna Bernard, Zaid Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray (NY: Routledge, 2016), 70. 230. Om P. Juneja, Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1995), 30. 231. Prema Nandakumar, “The Fantasy Element in Indian Fiction in English,” Commonwealth Literature: Themes and Techniques, ed. P. K. Rajan, et al., (Delhi: Ajanta, 1993): 151. For more discussion on lines of influence, see Kanaganayakam: “[i]n terms of

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form, it is Rushdie (who admits somewhat belatedly, the influence of Desani) and later Allan Sealy who write in a manner that establishes a line of continuity.… Even more than Rushdie’s work, Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama is a direct inheritor of the Desani mode and content” (Counterrealism, 56). He is referring to Rushdie’s acknowledgement in The New Yorker’s 1997 Summer Fiction Issue, which featured fictions of India, and which Rushdie edited: “My own writings, too, learned a trick or two from [Desani]” (“Damme” 58). Kanaganayakam’s critical interest is in the larger evolution of a counter-realist strand in Indian writing, and he clarifies that Rushdie, Desani, and Sealy are “in some ways experimental and subversive, and they belong to a tradition that departs, in perception and portrayals of socio-cultural realities, from the mimetic tradition” (Counterrealism 80). 232. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 217. 233. Highet, Anatomy of Satire, 36; 37. 234. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 85.

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TWO

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G. V. Desani’s Postcolonial Menippean Satiric Subversions

Govindas Vishnoodas Desani wrote his self-described “mosaic-organon of Life,” All About H. Hatterr (1948), while waiting out WWII in London, against a persistent backdrop of martial ordnance. It is not too much of a stretch to apply terms relative to explosions to sum up the text’s continuing impact on the critical imagination. This chapter examines how reading Desani’s challenging counter-realist text as Menippean satire accounts for much of its significant experimentation in form, themes, and diction. Menippean satire, for example, makes sense of D. M. Burjorjee’s very typical attempt to describe Desani’s text by listing the constituent genres, an attempt which foregrounds mainly the text’s elements of fragmentation and contestation of form: “it is an Everyman allegory, a symbolist novel of quest, a Bildungsroman…and above all, a philosophical dialogue.” 1 Desani inserts a title page that ascribes authorship to his title character, and which conveys thoroughly, in a most celebratory tone, the diversity of the text to come: The AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL OF H. HATTERR BEING ALSO A MOSAIC-ORGANON OF Life: viz., A MEDICO-PHILOSOPHICAL GRAMMAR AS TO THIS CONTRAST, THIS HUMAN HORSEPLAY, THIS DESIGN FOR DIAMOND-CUT-DIAMOND …H. HATTERR BY H. HATTERR

Echoes of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with its thwarted communications, implicit hierarchies, and unpredictability, are immediate and overt: 49 Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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“Take off your hat,” the King said to the Hatter. “It isn’t mine,” said the Hatter. “Stolen!” the King exclaimed.... 2

Opposition to imposed narratives asserts itself vibrantly in Desani’s text. Desani employs all of the devices which Gilbert Highet has identified as the broadest components of satire: “irony, paradox, antithesis, parody, colloquialism, anticlimax, topicality, obscenity, violence, vividness, exaggeration,” 3 as well as the additional key satiric tactics of burlesque, caricature, invective, and self-parody. Desani also manages to demonstrate all four features which George A. Test identified as the fundamental attitudes of satire: aggression, judgment, referentiality and play. 4 Massih Zekavat has emphasized that satire is “a discursive practice in the Foucaultian sense to which these four elements, in varying degrees, are essential.” 5 Examining Desani’s text as Menippean allows one to account for each of these elements, as well as for a studied topicality, a lexicon of originality, and formal innovations that overwhelm the ostensible isolation of Western and Eastern literary forms and influences. Finally, Menippean satire accounts for some of the method by which Hatterr may be read as a counter-realist text of substance which engages, if irresolutely at times, with central issues which emerge distinctively in later postcolonial discourses. G. V. Desani’s text is both a unique and important contribution to postcolonial literature. It is hard to describe All About H. Hatterr using conventional literary descriptions of its original time of publication (1948), or even those of its later editions; Desani reworked and expanded the text up to 1972, and even made a few amendments when it came out again in 1986. The biracial central character, H. Hatterr, has a series of picaresque adventures in colonial India as he seeks spiritual wisdom, cultural acceptance, and some measure of economic stability; there are also serious and comic meta-commentaries, disruptions, changes in register and tone, and jokey turns of phrase in many languages. The plot, in short, has Hatterr meeting a succession of eccentric characters in colonial India, including false gurus and out-and-out conmen. Desani was an autodidact who’d lived in Kenya and Sindh (then part of British colonial India, now a province of Pakistan) as a child with his Indian parents, and who left home in his teens in an act of self-determination to make a life in the UK. Through an extraordinary combination of intelligence, personality, wit, and drive, Desani managed to make social and professional connections with people of influence in British writing, publishing, and academia, which led to a successful international career as a journalist, and later as a lecturer. He composed the initial version of Hatterr during the London war-time blitz, and his odd and category-breaking novel was hugely well-received in post-WWII Britain. In addition to his journalism and lectures, he published the prose-poem Hali (1950), some short stories,

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and much later in life and up to his death in 2000, he’d entered into discussions regarding a third volume, his collected writing, to be called The Rissala. 6 Desani’s All About H. Hatterr presents challenges to critical analysis in terms of articulating its relationship to counter-realism as well as its relationship to realism. As counter-realism has held greater sway over interpretations and even expectations of postcolonial literature, critics have been quick to establish this as the sole basis for reading Hatterr. Naseem Khan’s 1993 essay states that “[i]ts anarchic humour, creative games with language and the reeling road it consciously plots between East and West sets it in a tradition that connects with magic realism.” 7 A few years later Khan situates the text’s East-West overlap more emphatically as “surreal” magic realism. 8 But even much earlier critical readings of Desani’s text focus on playful and novel elements which could be construed as magic realist. 9 In 1951 Delmore Schwartz identified the work as sharing Flann O’Brien’s indebtedness to Joyce, exhibiting the linguistic play and humor which subverts some of the darker tendencies of modernism, all the while stretching and reshaping the boundaries of realism. 10 In touting linguistic play, Schwartz points towards the aspect of experimental writing in which language creates its own reality. 11 Molly Ramanujan echoes this position, noting the work’s allegorical and moral rhythms, and overall stance of subversion: “[t]he verbal peculiarities of the narrator are part of the subversive and countersubversive intent of the book. The situation is not merely a reflection of the political under-tow of empire; it reflects the worldview of the twentieth century which is essentially postdualistic.” 12 Eric D. Smith essays a “recuperation” of Desani’s book from the critical trend of reading it as Joycean-influenced literary modernism, seeking to locate the text in a postcolonial context, and ruing that Desani “does frustratingly little to help us historicize his only novel.” 13 Nonetheless, Smith manages to establish some specific context for some of Desani’s scant, slant references to actual historical events. In the tale “The Sage, He Spake…” the sham guru called the Sage of the Wilderness takes all of Hatterr’s clothes, and Smith sees a potential echo of men actually “involved in the second-hand clothing business” and aligned with Gandhi’s 1920s “campaign of khadi,” the wearing of locally-made garments; Smith denotes this as textual representation of “a liberation from British capitalism through a systematic rejection of British-manufactured clothing.” 14 Smith’s assessment of Desani’s subjects exposes this and other “veiled” ideological resonances which argue for anchoring the text in specific material realities. 15 In Susheila Nasta’s reading, Desani maintains a “desire to widen the angle of the lens and to open up the essentially dualistic perspective of a Western modernity,” and this is key to where Nasta locates subversion in Desani’s text, as a vehicle for the articulation of counter-realism:

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Chapter 2 Desani’s purpose is less to analyse or argue than to dramatize, to illustrate the process by which Hatterr both remakes and is remade by language, creating a space which is not constrained by time or place so much as by the inherent mutability of language itself. 16

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Nasta considers that Desani’s text exhibits a prescient sense of awareness of how linguistic shifts problematize cultural perspective, and indeed any sense of veracity, and she emphasizes that this “shifting” focus on language as both striving for interaction yet conveying the innately untranslatable is exactly Desani’s point. 17 It is one which, Nasta notes, has subsequently become central to many analytical discussions of postcolonial texts, and it is also how Desani foregrounds a problematic relationship with referential representation. Andrew Goldstone registers an interesting counterargument based on the literary reception of Hatterr since its publication, specifically that “Desani refuses to be part of Betty Bloomsbohemia’s ‘struggle for newer forms of expression’” because Desani “implicitly recognizes that the broad category of the ‘new’ is actually regulated by a specific social formation—the metropolitan arbiters of advanced high culture.” 18 Goldstone argues additionally that too much emphasis on been placed on an interpretation of Hatterr as a way-station towards the establishment of what Goldstone sees as the problematic category of global literary modernism. Goldstone pushes to move the novel’s critical and readerly receptions over time into its overall assessment, as a way to allow literary study to include “the social processes by which literary texts acquire enduring value.” 19 Certainly satire’s emphasis on historicity does direct readerly attention powerfully outward from the text. Each of these approaches to interpreting the satiric subversions in Desani’s text, Susheila Nasta’s and Andrew Goldstone’s, manages in productive ways to “widen the angle of the lens.” HATTERR AND MENIPPEAN SATIRE Susheila Nasta’s reading of Desani’s tendency to “dramatize” offers a connection to the way Menippean satire draws attention to its parodic comparisons. Desani often describes the remaking of language in physical terms; language is enacted in gesture, and the spoken and written have physical correlations. After some detailed discussion of the function of erudition in Menippean satire, Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson mention in a footnote that “one should not ignore the extreme physicalness of Menippean discourse, its wealth of gesture and pantomime, the other end, as it were, of the spectrum of human communication.” 20 Desani makes a prominent reference to gesture in the page titled “Warning!” which begins his text; he immediately invokes elements of drama in drawing on performative acts and scripted dialogue:

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“Melodramatic gestures against public security are a common form of self-expression in the East. For instance, an Indian peasant, whose house has been burgled, will lay a tree across a railway line, hoping to derail a goods train, just to show his opinion of life. And the Magistrates are far more understanding…” Anglo-Indian writer Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, if you do not identify your composition a novel, how then do we itemise it? Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know. Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it a gesture. Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know. Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, there is no immediate demand for gestures. There is immediate demand for novels. Sir, we are literary agents not free agents.

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Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it a novel. Sir, itemise it accordingly. 21

There much more to read before the actual novel begins; Desani has quite a few framing devices and tactics of delay to deploy first. After the initial 1-page “Warning” is a 9-page introductory essay signed “Faithfully, G. V. Desani” entitled “All About…” [sic] and describing the (possible) origins of the text. Next is the title page with a long textual description and the title line “…H. Hatterr by H. Hatterr”; then there are “Contents”; this is followed by another 1-page “Warning!”; next is a 9-page “Mutual Introduction” in which H. Hatterr explains the background of the book; and finally one arrives at chapter 1, which in my McPherson & Company edition of 1986 begins on page 39. It’s a rather unexpected sequence to begin a novel. S. C. Harrex’s analysis of the novel highlights the notion of gesture as performance, of Hatterr as an extended exercise in theatricality, which suggests some of the more dramatic elements of magic realism: “Desani has virtually turned the novel into a performing art, just as his characters perpetually make performances of their own lives.” 22 This becomes central to what Chelva Kanaganayakam later discusses as Desani’s “artifice,” in that Desani has combined several modes to achieve an anti-realist text, drawing “the visual and the dramatic properties of drama” into the framework of a novel. 23 Kanaganayakam emphasizes that the “gestural” aspects of the text enable it to veer from linear narrative, and thus “causality along traditional lines of realism is not the objective of this novel” nor is the mode of the work “causality along empirical lines.” 24 But applying Milowicki and Wilson’s prompt to the text also promotes consideration of the ways Desani’s sham gurus physicalize their ridiculed attributes, and the way Hatterr’s trials are all enacted in some way on the body. Desani’s “Warning!” mixes reference with mockery, in keeping

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with the mixture of “medley and ridicule” which Margaret A. Rose associates with the spirit of classical Menippean satire. 25 The depicted gestures in the text, specifically some of Hatterr’s physical postures at various stages of humiliating episodes, echo Hadyn M. Williams’ account of the language of Hatterr as “rich, fantastic, and…by turns poetic and startlingly vulgar and cloacal.” 26 Episodes of debasement and shame visited upon aspirational, striving characters who are questing for insights and enlightenment in both Desani’s and Salman Rushdie’s work exemplify Robert Rawdon Wilson’s assertion that Menippean satire “is an excellent example of using physical disgust to mock, and to show contempt for concepts, and abstract intellectual positions.” 27 The references to gesture meld Eastern and Western formal sources, challenging their ostensible isolation, in the same way Hatterr resolves the disparate elements of his identity only in vaunting his confident assertion that “I am fifty-fifty of the species,” 28 subsequently “performing” in the role of sahib, and the role of native indigent. 29 Finally, Molly Ramanujan has mentioned the way classical Indian forms, in Desani’s supposedly instructive “Digest,” “Instruction,” and “Presumption,” which appear at the start of each chapter, followed by a section titled “Life Encounter” which prefaces each chapter’s main sequence of events, are wholly phoney and contain only “pseudoteaching[s],” 30 which perhaps we may consider a sort of empty textual gesture. The novel’s problematic relationship to realism has come into play for a number of critics. N. Radhakrishnan sees the “pure comedy” of All About H. Hatterr as limiting the novel’s relationship with the referential: “[t]he novelist is only criticising the sham of hypocrisy that shrouds many sanyasis. It must be noted that the novelist at no point criticises the real sanyasis.” 31 A. L. McLeod examines Desani’s political opinions to search for possible influences on Hatterr, but concludes that the work seems to be detached from political bias or naturalistic representation, and exists rather as an exercise in the comic absurd; in particular the lack of “verisimilitude” in the dialogue marks it as non-realist. 32 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar denotes it a “Joycean exercise in seeming incoherence,” 33 while Perry Westbrook echoes McLeod in citing Hatterr as “one of our century’s major contributions to the literature of the absurd.” 34 For Ron Blaber the text fails at realism because it is too destabilized a narrative, 35 while for Hadyn M. Williams the narrative lacks the substance to support any serious issues and the characters are all comic stereotypes: “What is Desani up to in this strange novel? Certainly his purpose is primarily to entertain. He avoids all political questions, has no moral to make and his picture of India is frankly surrealistic.” 36 In a later piece of criticism, Williams, though still stressing the comic foundations of the text, does concede a more complex focus. 37 Williams notes, for example, that Hatterr presents themes such as systematic racial inequality under colonialism. Nonetheless, Williams strives to emphasize that the text’s organizing

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principle is comedy, placing Desani’s work in the specific literary context of English comic novels. Dieter Riemenschneider calls Desani’s work “fantasy fiction” although he does so in the context of establishing such writing at the nexus of local and global concerns which could transcend “postcolonial binaries.” 38 Bruce King emphasizes a level of comedy which removes it from realism, noting particularly “Desani’s comic mangling of cultures and languages.” 39 There are also a few readings which oppose assessing the text as nonrealist. Ramanujan primarily places Hatterr in a Western literary and philosophical context which is issue-oriented and serious; her “precedents and parallels” for Desani are Forster, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Bellow, and modern writers of absurd tragedy. 40 Also going against the grain of the comedic and non-realist interpretation, Amitav Ghosh’s analysis places the text in specific opposition to magic realism, as a text which is primarily subversive in form rather than style or content, citing “the opaqueness of Hatterr” as an attempt to assert a claim on the novelistic form, wrenching it from its Western origins. 41 For Ghosh the novel is “a profoundly resourceful defence of certain non-Western spiritual and metaphysical ideas.” 42 M. K. Naik removes the text even further from a stance of subversion and anti-realism, reading it as a serious investigation of the psychology of colonialism which works solely in the vein of “realism and symbolism.” 43 My argument proceeds, then, from the position that reading Hatterr as Menippean satire restores a more coherent overview of the many levels on which Desani works in this text, and also addresses the challenge of elevating satire from being merely a contingent factor in this text. One can see the way Menippean satire offers a more adequate way to read Desani by examining some metaphors which have been applied to the text as a whole. Anthony Burgess describes Desani’s work “a sort of creative chaos that grumbles at the restraining banks.” 44 It’s a vivid image, albeit not such a useful or precise one, until one recalls how it is strikingly reminiscent of Howard D. Weinbrot’s pondering of a definition of Menippean satirical form and satirical practice. Weinbrot resorts to a metaphor from Samuel Johnson: “One needs to accept the oxymoron of rigorous fluidity or borderless borders. Samuel Johnson’s concept…of regular literary enclosures regularly burst by the unruly imagination offers a guide to such a practice.” 45 Suddenly, within this context of satire, the paradoxical model of incipient chaos and a counterpoint of order does not seem so alien or problematic. Prema Nandakumar’s description of Hatterr registers mainly perplexity at what to make of Desani’s multiplicity: “Here we have a strange compost of prose, poetry, parody, symbolism and satire. The hero is tragic, sane and clownish by turns with an occasional nod towards sheer poetry.” 46 Nonetheless, what Nandakumar highlights are the contrapuntal elements of Menippean satire, the

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“strange compost” which can encompass both hybridities and ambivalence. When critics do construe Desani within any paradigm of satire the text is immediately seen as more strongly issue-based. S. C. Harrex cites Hatterr as employing “comic satire” to “analyse” the “irrationality of life.” 47 He concludes that when the text registers “serious” issues they are broadly philosophical rather than specifically postcolonial. For Harrex the satiric elements joust with absurdist comedy and the author’s “bizarre imagination” as the text circles around “the question of the cultural relevance of the English literary tradition to modern India”; overall he concludes that the text is most concerned with experimentation with language, form, and “cultural themes based on the mixed-race, divided-self viewpoint.” 48 Most often, critics identify a single satiric thematic strand within the wide range of emphases in the text, with no attention paid to an overarching strategy of satiric methods and devices. Hadyn M. Williams focuses on the ridicule of Anglophilia through the character of Banerrji; Williams refers to the satire of “nationalistic platitudes,” and to Banerrji’s clichéd language (compared with Hatterr’s language of creativity). 49 Susheila Nasta notes Desani’s “satirizing of the ancient classics of traditional Indian religious doctrine.” 50 Ramanujan observes that Hatterr attacks the sacred in India as well as gurus of the Anglo-Saxon world. 51 Elsewhere Williams observes that Desani “makes great comic and satiric play out of the prejudice and racial misunderstanding.” 52 So while particular issues are recognized as being the focus of specific satirical treatment, there is a reluctance to view the text as one which navigates with any degree of unified strategy its plethora of issues ranging through colonialism, nationalism, identity politics, colonial literature, Anglophilia, and sham systems of belief. DESANI ON SATIRE IN HATTERR There is little published material to refer to in establishing Desani’s perspective on his own work. Desani published fairly modestly during his life, although at specific times he was extremely prolific as a lecturer. From 1936, when he returned to Britain as a reporter, and until the end of WWII, he was London-based as a lecturer and broadcaster for the Imperial Institute, the Ministry of Information, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and elsewhere. 53 Later, he was a philosophy lecturer at the University of Texas in Austin (1968–79), and upon his retirement in 1979, he taught for several summers at Boston University (1979–81). During the period between, from 1952 to 1966, Desani studied meditation and yoga in Hindu ashrams and Buddhist monasteries in India and Burma, often in seclusion. 54 The main commentary he did provide on his own work comes from an essay, entitled “Difficulties of Communicating an Oriental

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to a Western Audience,” initially presented as a talk in the late 1970s and published in 1978. It may be significant to his perspective that his period of dedicated spiritual study and seclusion had occurred in the intervening years since the book’s initial publication. Desani explains that in 1951 he first considered Hatterr as “a portrait of a man, the common vulgar species, found everywhere, both in the East and the West. His fears, desires, appetites, aspirations—not his experiences—are the same as those of any man, east, west, north, or south.” 55 The article contains Desani’s only reference to satire in Hatterr, and it implies the Juvenalian view of satire’s innate inevitability: Ask me, why should one write about H. Hatterr? Because, as man [sic], he is a legitimate topic in literature and his singularity is justification enough for his appearance. I happen also not to be an admirer of H. Hatterr although I am sympathetic to H. Hatterr. He is to me a comic character, and my treatment of him is bound to be satirical. 56

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Desani continues by way of an explanation to add: “I have tried, you see, per pro H. Hatterr, to minimise man somewhat.” 57 Desani emphasizes that the scene of Hatterr at the Ganges (in Chapter III) is one of “direct realisation of God” 58 and that the search for spiritual truth is universal, rather than either an occidental or oriental trait. In what is essentially an existentialist reading, he states that the major thematic bent of the novel is towards philosophical and spiritual issues. The emphasis on a central Everyman-type character and narrative of spiritual quest supports reading the text from the perspective of realism. However, he introduces a postcolonial context in raising the issue of imitative cultural expression, and this context lends support for opening the text to counter-realist readings, and establishes quite a lot of the content which is dealt with satirically throughout the book: My man H. Hatterr, moreover, hasn’t much to do with the problems of an Anglo-Indian individual, if any such problems exist, or with the alleged problems of an Indian in search for a theory or a way or a philosophy of life. Parrots imitate and what passes for an alleged sickness among some Anglo-Indians or Indians as a struggle to choose a way of life, the British way, or the Indian, is no sickness. This kind of searching is no conflict in the soul of the victim, but a desire to imitate, to be led, and so strive for status. Whether one would imitate the once successful British thoughtlessly, or the not so successful Indians, equally thoughtlessly, might be appearing to some as a sickness or spiritual struggle or search. 59

Desani embeds the questions, then, of assessing whether the quality of imitation is literal or satiric, and whether his text portrays a resolve for realistic, validating representation, or a wily need to challenge, subvert, and celebrate the sheer, audacious power of that subversion.

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A. L. McLeod locates themes in Hatterr which appear in earlier material from Desani’s infrequent pamphlets and rare published lecture texts; for example, the prospectus for Hatterr states that Desani was often critical of British government policy regarding India. But McLeod also says that there is “no evidence of where the author stood on the vital matters of Indian-British relations during the tumultuous pre-independence era.” 60 Nonetheless, excerpts McLeod cites from a speech given by Desani do indicate a stance of opposition to the impact of colonialism. Desani offers support for the notion of the interdependency of West and East, while underscoring specific philosophical divergences: West privileging experiential knowledge, East opposing this. In a phrase which echoes Salman Rushdie’s later comment on the “right” of diaspora artists to draw influences from their pre-colonial and pre-diaspora cultures, 61 Desani refers to Indian ideas and cultural concepts as “my property, my racial inheritance, my national right.” 62 However, his presentation of Indian culture is one of the prime areas of satire in his novel, and in castigating its sham gurus, its manifestations of Anglophilia, its questionable education systems, and some of its iconic sacred texts, he hits at the whole of India’s methods and assumptions of self-representation, attacking cultural patterns of corruption and pretext. Kanaganayakam notes that “[i]t is hardly surprising that a novel which self-consciously draws attention to its language should also explore the relation between language and reality. Since the novel constantly highlights the deceptiveness of reality, the language, too, becomes an instrument of deception.” 63 But the language of Hatterr also represents a singular achievement for Desani, in obtaining a level of fluency which enabled him to use language as a vehicle for protest and subversion. When Desani first reached London from Kenya in 1926 he was just 17, and spoke only the Sindi of his parents’ native region and some Kikuyu from his Kenyan ayah/nurse, having been born in Nairobi. 64 As a teen he’d returned to Kenya with his father’s brother to examine a family property, and managed to “scarper” and obtain a “British Empire passport,” fleeing his father’s insistent plans that he agree to marry a child bride in Karachi. 65 His autodidactic efforts in London to conquer the English language were nothing short of astounding, and his text’s fluency and multivocality stand in tribute to Desani’s drive; in Naseem Khan’s summary, Desani “reinvented English.” 66 Desani explains in a 1993 interview with Khan that he wrote Hatterr in the face of an increasing awareness of class differences both in England and in India. A “terrible tension” and fury at “hypocrisy and liars” fueled his engrossed library reading at that time and his numerous drafts of Hatterr: “By that time my range was such that I could speak with authority. I gave this spacious mind to this fellow Hatterr. He has all the disadvantages, like no parents. He is everyone.” 67 The paradoxical Hatterr is thus orphaned and singular, and yet universal, unique as a literary creation but also the product of an apparent multi-

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tude of literary influences. If one can summarize Desani’s somewhat shifting attitude towards this central character, or even alter ego, he veers from respect to sympathy to lack of admiration, which fits the “pattern” of the reluctant satirist who registers overall ambivalence towards his creation. There is tension even in the balance between individual formal satiric devices, which adds to the Menippean quality of variation in the text. The embedded textual mockery of the book’s author focuses attention on issues of authorship and suggests the dominance of the satirist over the text. However the thematic focus of the text vaunts context, with Hatterr’s repeated exclamation that “Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you!” 68 echoing Alvin B. Kernan’s distinction that “in Menippean satire the scene is stressed and absorbs the satirist, to some degree or altogether.” 69 Desani seems determined to accomplish that entire list of goals which Weinbrot has designated as central for Menippean satire: it “is a genre for serious people who see serious trouble and want to do something about it—whether to awake a somnolent nation, define the native in contrast to the foreign, protest the victory of darkness, or correct a careless reader.” 70 Desani’s range of satiric targets seem designed to vex both an Eastern and Western readership, to challenge stringent boundaries of identity and notions of “native,” perhaps to rout charlatans, and most centrally, to test his readership with an “avalanche” of intellect and a mélange of sources, formal models, and influences. One way to explain the discordant, multivocal elements of Desani’s work would be to focus solely on how as a whole the text problematizes categorization in Western literary terms. This would suggest a very forceful connection with postcolonial “resistance literature,” as discussed by Barbara Harlow, in this case as an example of resistance to the acculturation of (novelistic) literary form, raising paradigms of Western influence meeting non-Western revision. 71 But this explanation only privileges the text’s obvious elements of oppositionality, while ignoring its significant component of related referentiality, and the way these two work to create a satiric whole. Desani shows no sign of discomfort with the presentation of unresolved incongruities and inconsistencies, and indeed, he is celebratory about them. In the introduction Desani distances himself from “Ganesha,” rejecting the orthodox Indian authorial stance as scribe of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, but then he states that he is Hatterr’s scribe, an ironic refutation coupled with his addition that “though, by Ganesha, oft-times it’s prudent, aye, to lie.” 72 Hatterr’s rebellion vaunts the element of the extreme, when he decides to go “completely Indian to an extent few pure non-Indian blood sahib fellers have done.” 73 Yet the text ultimately celebrates hybridity over purity; in keeping with Salman Rushdie’s qualification, the text “rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure.” The final section, Yati Rambeli’s “Defense,” a section

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added to later editions from 1972 and titled, “With Iron Hand, I Defend You, Mr. H. Hatterr, Gentleman!,” comprises an 80-paragraph treatise in honor of Rambeli’s own Guru. It begins with its own title page, which includes the information that Rambeli was previously known as the lawyer, Beliram, whom we have met earlier in the narrative as Hatterr’s lawyer. The theme of the Defense is the hybridity of Indian-English literary discourse, although, paradoxically, Rambeli at one point irons out the core binary of Hatterr’s hybridity, commenting, almost dismissively, that he sees “The East or the West all being the same.” 74 Rambeli concludes with a reference to his own son and heir, named in hybrid fashion “Ch. Hamnet Yati Rambeli” [sic] in honor of Hamlet, whom Rambeli assumes to be “the male child of the bard, the great Shakespeare.” 75 Rambeli ends his treatise, and Desani his text, with an open-ended section which celebrates hybridity and the crossing and eliding of boundaries, while showcasing the ever-present possibility that literature will continue to mock traditions and create legacies in its own ways. The final words of Rambeli’s Defense simply run out, without a full-stop: “Lastly, I thank the ladies and gentlemen who will read this Critique. To them I say, in the words of the bard T. Moore, ‘Goodbye, my paper is nearly out, I have only room for, yours sincerely….’” 76 But this ending to the added-on chapter is not in fact the final word; five “PERSONAL FOOTNOTES” then succeed the italicized farewell statement. These are in the corkscrew logic of previous notes in Hatterr’s text, and serve only to restart the reading and unraveling anew, with yet another unforeseen framing gesture added to the narrative.

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THE FOCUS OF THE SATIRE IN HATTERR The text may be said to focus generally on identity politics in a colonial milieu, engaging with issues of nationalism and systems of belief. Desani traces many of the binaries which tend to characterize representations of colonial power structures: metropolitan-rural, center-margin, West-East, church-temple, master-servant, modern-parochial, Occidental-Oriental, familiar-exotic. It is also significant that he uses a narrator of mixed race but indeterminate ethnicity who himself constitutes the binary of AngloIndian, or perhaps European-Asian, since critics can’t decide how to define or view Hatterr, who is born to a “European” father and “Malaypeninsula-resident” mother. 77 To Blaber and Gilman he is the eternally hopeful picaro, 78 while Naik casts him as a victim in perpetuity. 79 But if Desani is consistent in one element of his unpredictable text, it is in his pattern of targeting both segments of these binaries, utilizing a destabilizing, multi-directional satiric attack. Through satire, Desani creates a paradigm for the postcolonial Indian subcontinent, bifurcated but searching for wholeness. This pursuit is mirrored in his central character, whose

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narrative problematizes establishing a stable postcolonial identity, recognizing the limitations of essentialist, or simply imposed, definitions. The narrative also explores and at times celebrates the self-constructed or syncretic self, and this arguably acts as a precursor towards later postcolonial literary models of celebratory hybridity, constructive migrant identity, and atypical modes of cultural self-definition. 80 However, to paraphrase Susheila Nasta, heralding subsequent “academic orthodoxies” regarding identity construction, and adumbrating later multivocal, hybrid texts, is not all that this text does. 81 Desani’s text is a multifaceted, postcolonial satire which issues its multi-directional attacks on deception and fraudulence, whether these arise in imperial or native cultures. As is to be anticipated in such a text, these targets are somewhat intermingled, and sometimes presented in unexpected combinations, as when issues of identity politics are linked to depictions of identity construction in colonial-era literature, or when Anglophilia overlaps with issues of nationalism. Colonialism is the most apparent of satiric objects in Desani’s text. In formal terms, the satire works consistently through allegories of colonialism. In philosophical terms, the colonial allegories all stress divisions, irreconcilabilities, and “contrast,” in the text’s shorthand for the Hindu model of eternal cycles of conflict—the “diamond-cut-diamond” or “big fish eat little fish” trope which appears on the title page and which is repeated throughout the text (and which links to Desani’s overall configuration of embedded multicultural textual satires, discussed below). Desani via Hatterr emphasizes the shifting ambivalence which allows him to both satirize and to disavow: “What do you expect of a damme writer of words, anyway? Truth? Hell, you will get contrast, and no mistake!” 82 Desani attacks a number of central imperial discourses: the narrative of empire as bringing modernization and progress; the narrative of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Education” (1835), in which the production of Anglicized “interpreters” would reinforce imperial rule; the narrative that individual identification with imperial culture (via education, for example) would promote its more widespread acceptance. Hatterr debunks each of these in turn, often through the character of his friend Banerrji, whose rampant and unquestioning Anglophilia satirizes the emptiness of imperial “progress,” and the futility of stamping a culture with an imposed, rigid system of education and notions of “knowledge.” But Banerrji also problematizes the imposition and absorption of culture. In his vast and uncritical love of British icons, Banerrji at times suggests Macaulay’s actual “mimic man”: “a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” 83 While at the same time, Banerrji’s staunch defense of his homeland and its cultural icons implies the resilience of Indian culture and consciousness, and a level of resistance or indifference to forces of

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hybridity. Hatterr’s comic encounters also depict the conflicts of colonial and indigenous influences. His adventures illustrate the split focus of his colonial-era “higher education,” 84 since, in an oblique echo of Kim, he has fled a colonial school and sought a succession of Hindu sages (Kim also appears later in the text). Hatterr’s ultimate understanding is a single lesson which he calls “the highest Hindu postulate”: “Abscond from charlatans and deceivers as thou wouldst from venomous snakes!” 85 In Menippean multi-directionality, the “charlatans” can be associated with both indigenous and imperial culture. Hatterr’s central adventures (identified as the “Life Encounters” in each of the seven chapters) may be read as a series of allegories of colonialism. Blaber and Gilman have mentioned the sense of colonial allegory in the geographical referents of the seven, city-based chapters, each mentioning a specific urban Sage in the initial “Instructions” section. 86 Hatterr encounters, in turn, “the illustrious grey-beards, the Sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in India), Madras, Bombay, and the right Honourable the Sage of Delhi, the wholly Worshipful of Mogalsarai-Varanasi, and his naked Holiness Number One, the Sage of All India himself!” 87 The repeated trope of each of the Instructions shows that “[w]ithin H. Hatterr’s story is etched a micro-narrative of colonialism, in the form of a dialogue between a supposed naïf and a supposed master.” 88 It is also key to note the parodic treatment of classic dialogous instructive texts. The first Chapter, entitled “The Sage, He Spake,” explores the disruption, threats, and violence instilled by a colonial regime and echoed in a colonized culture. Hatterr’s narrative mirrors these elements in his systemic exploitation by first the (colonial) Sahib Club and then by the (indigenous) Sage of the Wilderness. Hatterr expects morality of both the Sahibs and the Sage, yet each is exposed as corrupt. The Sahibs “blackball” him after his amorous washerwoman/dhobin publicly accuses him of owing her money. 89 The “Sage” stages a sham religious operation which divests seekers of their “worldly” possessions to stock a lucrative “second-hand goods and clothes” business. 90 Humiliated by both sides of his encounter, stripped first of his Club membership and then of his clothes, Hatterr could justifiably be attacking either adversary in his diatribe at the Sage: “I shall expose thee and thy crafty brother! Son of a merciless cheetah! Tyrant! Pathos-promoter! Unspeakable materialist! Shame…! Refund! I bid thee, refund! Be forthright, and refund!” 91 Hatterr concludes with an analogy of the desire for violent retribution which ensues when one is systematically exploited: I assess the world is made up of the two contrasting kinds: the Hitters (fellers who hit others without scruple or reserve), and the ruddy crabs, at the other end of the line. And, there are two sorts of contrasting ruddy crabs. The first sort, after being hit below the belt...turning Hitter, never allows the same to happen again. The second-class ruddy crab bears up, does not hit back, and having gotten a kick on the bottom,

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hangs about, cadging, complaining, quoting fate, tradition, scripture, invoking divine aid: just expecting compensation—sympathy, money, tit bits, anything ! 92

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Hatterr registers fury and aggravation at these systems which are neither what they seem nor what they advertise themselves to be. The Club should be “an assembly of…kindred spirits” he expresses in fury. 93 The Sage, instead of being “godly” is a “dirty chiselling Svengali.” 94 Hatterr’s frustration is palpable: “damme, I had an irresistible desire to hit the Sage on the head with a handy brick.” 95 These exploits leave Hatterr in an unfulfilled and ambivalent state, “bearing up,” driven toward actions “retributive! compensatory!” but ineluctably stalled in his victimhood. 96 The satire, though, is not stalled and exposes the potential for systematic corruption in both imperial and (colonized) indigenous culture. Chapter II, “…Versus the Impresario,” condemns economic exploitation under colonial rule, with the British imperial endeavor likened to a circus which manages to do all of the following simultaneously: eroticize its representatives (the ruddy-cheeked Rosie); slavishly maintain English provincial habits while outside England (nightly “roland-marj, quantities of stout, and kippers”); and blithely debase local culture (“Bill Smythe was at it again...amusing himself by teaching his parrot, Sid, the foulest stray bits of the Anglo-Hindustani”). 97 Hatterr is seduced by the robust English circus woman who wants him to work in her circus act, in which a lion eats a steak from a man’s chest. Molly Ramanujan has referred to Hatterr as “a twist to the tail of the departing British lion on the eve of Independence”; 98 here Hatterr encounters a real, menacing lion which is no less a symbol of Britain: She placed the meat on my chest and invited Charles to stomach it! That, briefly, was “The world-renowned Braganza Act in Bill Smythe’s celebrated London Lion Circus! The king of beasts eats from a living human plate!” 99

The celebrated circus act functions as a satiric allegory of the colonial reduction of individuals to objects of service. Hatterr is again stripped of his dignity and his clothes (which the Smythes exchange for a “lemoncoloured…half of a discarded bathing costume” for his lion cage debut) ostensibly in the aid of a system of values which ultimately objectifies and degrades him. 100 Chapters I and II contain the most focused critique of imposed colonial systems. In subsequent chapters, Hatterr faces additional humiliations as he is exploited, duped, beaten, and robbed by a series of fraudulent religious men, in successive episodes of failure to secure acceptance and a stable identity by “going Indian.” Against this narrative of Hatterr’s unsuccessful rejection of his own hybridity, one could locate a satiric allegory of colonial history and the urge towards nationalism in the actual order of the chapters and the themes contained in each: the colonial con-

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frontations and rejections of the first two Chapters; the transitional Ganges passage in Chapter III which gives Hatterr a Hindu spiritual context and an epiphanic insight which attempts to valorize a nationalistic context; the subsequent Life-Encounters which all deal with Indian characters and Hindu rituals; and the postcolonial historical context of Rambeli’s Defense, which mentions (albeit comically and satirically) Nehru and Gandhi. The structure of colonial allegory works with the hierarchy of colonial types which Naik, Blaber, and Gilman identify: Hatterr is the would-be native; Banerrji is the Shakespeare-quoting Anglophile; Beliram is deferential, exploitative and opportunistic; and the dog Jenkins is the cowering, disenfranchised subaltern. In Menippean fashion, these characters never develop or progress, and remain throughout an array of postcolonial stereotypes. Naik reads them through the filter of anti-realist “crazy surrealis[m]” and finds that “all three characters are only variants of the archetype of the colonial.” 101 But this flattens and reduces the text significantly, and one loses a sense of any nuance to these satiric creations. There is more depth and variation to the text if one interprets more modulated variations of counter-realist opposition to the exploitations of colonialism through satiric depictions. The text’s satire of nationalism is linked to its treatment of colonialinflected Anglophilia, which manifests primarily through the character of Hatterr’s sole friend, Banerrji. Banerrji’s typical greeting upon Hatterr’s return from an adventure, “I thank you! India thanks you!” is part of the continued mockery of the material emptiness of patriotic slogans. 102 But Banerrji tends to fuse a vision of a unified India with advancements which are the direct result of colonial influence: We are all human-brothers. One for all and all for one. Excuse me, I do not belong to the backward India. Arise, awake, advance! I already believe in the European sanitation and the water-closet. Mrs. Banerrji and I are also using forks and knives…. Mr. H. Hatterr, mankind is one. The culture of mankind is for all. India confirms same. 103

Williams refers to the satire of “nationalistic platitudes,” and to Banerrji’s desperately clichéd language. 104 Naik discusses how Banerrji is “hopelessly colonised” and aspires to ape “his master’s culture” but only manages to distort it. 105 But the repeated pattern of distortion is, significantly, satiric distortion, foregrounding hyperbole, topicality, colloquialism, and a great deal of irony. The satiric treatment of Banerrji’s nationalism thus intersects with the way he construes his constructed identity. Banerrji often selects heroic fragments but they are used in ironic and parodic ways. He anglicizes Indian cultural material and literary sources. On one visit to Hatterr he explains his particularly cheery garb which draws from India and England: “it is spring in India. Being poetically-inclined, I wear saffron-dyed clothes to honour the festive occasion. Also, as you perceive, I wear a

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twig of the basil in my country cap…It is vanity. It is, as the Bard says, Imogen speaking, Senseless linen!” 106 In a single conversation with a distraught Hatterr, he quotes Whitman, the Talmud, Greek myth, Kukkoka’s The Ratirahasya, or The secrets of love (a Sanskrit source on erotic love), and the Bible, but with little context: “Well might I exclaim with 2 Samuel XVIII, 33, Absalom, my son, my son!” 107 As Rambeli also does in the final chapter (with his references to “Sri Falstaff” and “Sri Prince Henry” 108), Banerrji also Indianizes English material, as when he mingles sources: “The Lotus-woman is A1 vintage. She has a face as pleasing as the Moon. She is lovely as a lily. She launches a thousand ships, as Mr. Marlowe says.” 109 He applies his range of sources to Hatterr’s dilemmas with native spiritual guides and gurus, such as Hatterr’s disastrous financial debt to Chety-Chety. Banerrji advises with celerity, but with questionable utility:

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The Bard has said, Who steals my purse, steals trash! Nevertheless, Mr. H. Hatterr, ahead of us is Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble! I am not a sob-sister, but first, excuse me, the situation reminds me of Hamlet. To be! But firstly, let us be calm, honest Iago. 110

The plethora of European literary references with which his speech is laden renders him ultimately a destabilizing force in the narrative. His fragmented verbal mimicry, coupled with his obsequious attitudes, satirizes and destabilizes the notion of the intact transmission of culture, and of cultural authority. His patent Anglophilia produces parody and exaggeration which undermines the high-minded concept of exportation of “culture” and “education” in the imperial mission. Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the ambivalence of colonial mimicry is useful here, with its emphasis on the “flawed” nature of imitation, and its tendency to “rupture” a discourse. 111 My tendency has always been to read this construal of mimicry in Bhabha as satirical mimicry, informed by discussions of mimicry in other disciplines which underscore a satirical element. An explanation of Batesian mimicry, for example, wherein species exhibit a resemblance that can exempt them from predation, relates that “Mimics may confuse predators by resembling both model and nonmimic at the same time,” a specific state of ambiguity that is actually termed by biologists “satiric mimicry.” 112 Researchers reporting on wasp behavior in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London use language that is perfectly in line with Bhabha’s influential analyses: “We term this satyric mimicry in reference to the ambiguity or paradox involved.” 113 Banerrji presents pieces of the original but not quite the original. If one follows Blaber and Gilman’s explanation of such speech, Banerrji’s “interpretation of literary sources” points “to the dialogised space that is colonialism.” 114 But it is clearly a satiric space as well, for Banerrji is blithely unaware of the import of his juxtapositions and his importations, and he

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does not register the fact that in his absorption of “Britishness” he has lost anything in the process. When Banerrji greets Hatterr upon the latter’s escape from the unbalanced Naga he demonstrates the satiric irony of his mixed hotch-potch combination of sources. When Hatterr rejects Banerrji’s offer (made in dialect) to touch his feet in supplication “as a devoted [Hindu] disciple and admirer,” Banerrji switches to English and instead buys him a meal and a beer and recites “the Christian Grace.” 115 What Banerrji lacks here is not faith or generosity, but any sense of cultural fixity. The wholesale quoting from English and other literary sources which characterizes Banerrji’s language first appears in the “Mutual Introduction” as a feature of Hatterr’s speech, and this embeds the text’s consistent and extended satiric interaction with texts. Harrex notes the constant parodies of Vedantic and Christian texts, and also how the book’s structural pattern of “Digest,” “Instruction,” “Presumption,” and “Life-Encounter” in each chapter parodies the classic Hindu treatise format, which is supposed to express a progression from “illusion through defeat to enlightenment.” 116 Yet Hatterr “derives a lesson at ironic odds with the prevailing moral code” 117 and instead ends each chapter perplexed and alienated, and reflecting the more satirical notes, which Highet mentions, of anticlimax, irony, paradox, and especially antithesis. There are obvious overall parodic textual relationships suggested, such as with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with its Mad Hatter, Voltaire’s picaresque Candide, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Naikar cites echoes of comic literary figures of “Falstaff, Ben Jonsonian Bobadil, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi, and the viduska or court-jester of Sanskrit Drama.” 118 Hadyn M. Williams has noted of Desani’s parody that: “[t]he mock-Upanishadic dialogues of Hatterr and Banerrji provide some of the richest comedy, in the contrast of pessimist and optimist, pragmatist and dreamer.” 119 In Section 1 of the “Mutual Introduction,” ostensibly authored by Hatterr, the writer addresses a Shakespearean-type watchman who protects the graves and reputations of the literary “Greats,” and their exchange foregrounds Hatterr’s ultimately overt mission to “disquiet” the literary pantheon. 120 Having presented the story of his past, Hatterr offers an apologia to the reader for his “folio,” the whole of which is written in the strung-together quotations and demotic language which are later found in Banerrji’s speech. It is important to note that Hatterr is at this stage of the narrative a former colonial who has reached the metropolitan center, London. But instead of Banerrji’s heroic fragments, Hatterr addresses the reader through anti-heroic quotations from Shakespeare, first as a dying man, then as a woman (although he alters the original’s “most poor woman” to “most poor man”). First he utters the death speech of John of Gaunt, in King Richard The Second, which begins in the original with the statement “Methinks I am a prophet new-inspired/And thus expiring do

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foretell of him/His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last.” 121 In typical paradoxical fashion, Desani suggests that Hatterr could be either the inspired prophet or just acting out a reckless impulse. Although Hatterr quotes from this speech’s famous catalogue of the qualities which constitute England’s greatness, the satiric undercutting lies in the speech’s (original, unquoted) closing: “That England, that was wont to conquer others,/ Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” 122 The reference underscores the notion of England’s decline as a colonial power and the degree of its complicity in its self-ruination. In the next quoted text, Katharine, Queen of England, in Henry VIII, pleads against the unfairness of her imminent divorce; she points out (in Shakespeare’s original) that she is “a stranger,/ Born out of your dominions.” 123 Both speeches, as used by Desani, underscore a sense of the moment of India’s division from the disintegrating Empire: a divorce, Britain’s wane, India’s isolation. The effect of the author’s plea to be read, filtered through this barrage of quotations representing literary “greatness,” raises the question of just what, and whom, one is reading. Partly through the fragmented nature of the quotations, and partly by the “outsider” author’s apparent facility with English literature, the author plays with a notion of destabilized literary authority, both as literary pastiche, and expressing satirically some postcolonial concerns. This is the same “author” who, in the preceding paragraph, stressed the inferiority of his autodidact credentials compared to those of the supposedly “educated” reader. Desani is deftly undermining canonical interpretations of Shakespeare’s texts while submitting that familiarity with the British literary canon, and with canonical literary interpretations of “great” works, represents colonial “education” and “knowledge.” While introducing the theme of the importance of education, Desani is satirizing assumptions about its fixity and homogeneity. He presents the struggle of the former colonial subject to find a voice, while subversively fragmenting and even undermining canonical texts and sources for “voice.” This thread of the satirical treatment of literary sources connects to the theme of identity construction. Partly this is due to the manner in which familiarity with literary sources reflects, and creates modes of expression for, Hatterr’s self-knowledge. But his self-comprehension always returns to his hybrid identity, as when a Sage says approvingly “Thou art persistent, O non-Indian,” or when Desani begins to sputter in fury and contemplates “giving him a bit of my fifty-fifty Oriental mind.” 124 The prevalence of the theme of fragmented or shattered identity in the literature of British India has been cited elsewhere; Bart Moore-Gilbert discusses the surprising “thematic frequency” of its extreme version of “psychic breakdown” in narratives of the colonial period, mentioning the examples of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Paul Scott’s The Day of the Scorpion. 125 But rather than the irretrievable psychic disintegration which points towards

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the mode of tragedy, identity questions in Desani’s work suggest the resolute optimism of the unchastened satiric persona. In Hatterr this optimism is linked to the doubled resourcefulness of the hybrid. Hatterr himself emphasizes the importance of the on-going process of self-discovery when he relates his own interpretation of Kim:

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This is romance for you! The Orient, damme! Once, in India, paying a call to a crooked lending-library… I happen to pick up R. Kipling’s autobiographical Kim. Therein, this self-appointed whiteman’s burden-bearing sherpa feller’s stated how, in the Orient, blokes hit the road and think nothing of walking a thousand miles in search of something. Could be! Dam’ true to Life, if anything is! I used to hate walks out East. But I enjoyed this one. The quest was upon me and I was braced to no end. 126

According to Christopher Porterfield, Desani “takes up where Kipling left off.” 127 For the hybrid individual in Hatterr, there is no original or essential identity to resume or to reach. He is always navigating what Harrex terms “the mixed-race, divided-self viewpoint.” 128 Desani’s text also echoes Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, in following a young male seeker who is not wholly Indian. Desani satirizes many of the viewpoints Gora presents sincerely, such as Gora’s aspirational belief in the wholeness of India: “We must fight against foreign customs, and foreign teaching; and we can only do that by holding firmly to our own customs and our own beliefs. Hold up before everyone the unbroken image of India, and men will come to believe in it.” 129 But Hatterr’s adventures and rebuffs foreground insecurity in his own beliefs, and the image which is ultimately held up through satire is hardly the unbroken India. The satiric textual parodies throughout Hatterr tend to reflect the themes of Menippean bifurcation and irresolution. Thus Hatterr’s singular, opportunistic grasp of literary sources is as significant as his overall highly individual, hybridized patterns of language. Both raise questions of the degree to which Desani’s depiction of a hybrid India is as much a satirically-inflected colonial fiction as it is a satiricallyinflected spiritual one. And this could be posed about the character of Hatterr as well, for whom identity politics play out in apparently irresolvable ways, but which nonetheless fit the model of the Sisyphean rhythm of satiric picaresque and the overall tendency of satire towards “militant disunity.” 130 Even the brief oasis of the Ganges passage (Chapter III) shows the striking antagonism of passive and aggressive forces in Hatterr’s search for identity, and the way the satirical treatment of other texts echoes these divergences and oppositions. Hatterr has a brief idyllic spiritual reverie

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at the Ganges, in which life seems equal to death and “[n]ot a thing is separated from another. Everything is in a universal embrace: a slumber of love!” 131 This musing is shattered by the order of “Always-Happy, Satan’s young alter ego” to “Strip!” as they prepare to launch an assault on a sleeping holy recluse/sanyasi with whom they have a quarrel. The momentary attainment of spiritual peace is set between episodes of comic humiliations and misunderstandings, culminating in a court-order which declares the still-living Hatterr the fatal victim of a tiger attack. In a brief span, Desani endures twice a false expiration, experiencing the paradox that “I was dying, and having, into the bargain, the most alive experience of my life.” 132 In this single chapter, the text presents satirical versions of (to return to D. M. Burjorjee’s catalogue of Hatterr’s array of formal parallels 133) an Everyman allegory, a quest narrative, a Bildungsroman, and a philosophical dialogue. Initially Hatterr decides to try being a holy beggar when he realizes he needs to hide from a debt collector. His allegory of spiritual gain falters when Always-Happy insists he must submit to castration; his quest leads to his penniless return home; he fails in his attempt to transcend his origins as “a half-heathen brother of man”; and his philosophical dialogue with Banerrji concludes with the refrain “Balderdash! Balderdash!” when Banerrji tries to point out the spiritual benefits of undergoing castration. 134 One could argue that this heterogeneous text, to apply the words of Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe, is governed by “satire’s own frequent formlessness” and brings to bear the characteristics of “entropy,” “irresolution,” “bifurcation,” and a sense of “chaos.” 135 These are central to satire but if misread might lead to the misapprehension that Hatterr is an unsuccessful attempt at another literary approach: absurd comedy, absurd tragedy, or anti-realism. Connery and Combe note that satire will tend to “inhabit the forms of other genres,” which lends clarity to the manner in which Hatterr is, in turn, a satirical version of the Everyman allegory, a symbolist novel of quest, a Bildungsroman, and a philosophical dialogue. 136 And thus it makes sense that the “entropic” conclusion of the book only adds to the list of satirized forms, as Rambeli, in the rambling final chapter, his “Defense” of Hatterr, satirizes the mode and discourse of literary criticism. Rambeli observes that “Life is full of opposite circumstances” and he seconds Hatterr’s “Statement-in-chief” about Life being Contrast, adding that the “literati” no doubt comprehend all of this. 137 DESANI’S SATIRICAL STYLES, MODES, AND TROPES It is difficult to think of a satiric tactic which Desani does not employ, and one might wish to borrow Burjorjee’s choice of the catalogue to account for them all: allegory, burlesque, exaggeration, caricature, invective, as well as irony, paradox, antithesis, parody, colloquialism, anticlimax, topi-

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cality, obscenity, and violence. Sometimes they are combined to effect simultaneous direct and indirect satire, as in the episode where Hatterr employs obscene invective “in the celebrated vernacular” towards the Sage of the Wilderness:

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“Son of a thug,” I said to the feller, giving him a bit of my fifty-fifty Oriental mind. “Monstrosity! Disgrace to mahatmas! Thy uncouth mother the defiled daughter of a vendor of the forbidden meat! Thy grandfather a wasp! Dog-sired!” 138

Invective is classical direct satire, but here Hatterr’s diatribe also edges into the satiric treatment of identity politics, using indirect satiric methods of irony and paradox. He is fifty-percent Oriental, but paradoxically, unsure if this will lessen or intensify his venomous attack. The episode escalates into aggression (“this culpable friar hovered towards me like a rogue elephant’s trunk, with the intent to pounce on me, and mete out violence”) but then switches abruptly to anticlimax when Hatterr retreats (“I acted quick, threw up the sponge.… I gave in”), citing the extreme and irritating hot weather and eschewing any more colloquial or physical antagonisms. 139 The ultimate irony is that this all contributes towards the Sage seeing Hatterr excitedly as a potential co-charlatan, and he invites Hatterr to join his lucrative but wholly fraudulent business. There is allegory in the satiric treatment of the overarching narrative of colonialism, as well as mini-allegories embedded in disparate episodes, which tend to pivot on the binary of independence/dependence. Desani employs burlesque in most of his characterizations, condemning through careful exaggerations and pointed mockery. The members of the Sahib Club, for example, all practice the stiffest of upper lips in the face of the dhobin’s extravagant protests: “Right through the curry-courses, not a feller could cough up a single word, except such sundry expressions of pain as, ‘The feller is a cad, sir!’ ‘Gad, the man wants a birching!’” 140 There is exaggeration in Banerrji’s platitudes, and in Hatterr’s initial profuse expressions when, joyously debarking at the port of Liverpool, England, he “had arrived!”: 141 I took off my tropical-lid, the sola-topi, in sincere salutation, and next, without a waterproof, in my white drill shorts, I knelt on the mid-beds of the old country, the soft depths of its textilopolis County Palatine, aye, Keeper, luv, the blessed wet earth of Liverpool, Lancs., in a thousand salaams! 142

Sri Y. Beliram, the grasping lawyer, in the course of the text becomes Yati Rambeli, extravagant holy man, and in the final chapter he volunteers his written “Defense” of Hatterr’s text. When the publishers do not respond as directed (“Owing to the terrible pace of Western life, dedicated to material pursuits, they were unable to do so”) Rambeli calls on them and the results suggest his presence has an exaggerated effect: “after my un-

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expected startling visit to their office, and causing some sensation with my ochre robe…they agreed to consider my contribution.” 143 In his effusive prose he represents the satiric device of a caricature of a literary scholar, frustratingly inexact and damning with parsimonious praise: “Mr H. Hatterr has faced all misfortune from these pukka muggers, trying hard to drive snails to Rome. There is no doubt to his sincerity.” 144 Hatterr’s shifting, polyglot, and fragmented language is another form of exaggeration by Desani, one which embeds elements of burlesque regarding how a reader might view “knowledge” in the face of Desani’s cavalcade of languages and references. The constant avalanche is bound to have an effect on any reading. Many critics have cited Hatterr’s closing apology to the reader in his lengthy “Mutual Introduction”: “I write rigmarole English, staining your goodly, godly tongue,” but none quotes the remaining word of the clause: “maybe.” 145 It is typical of burlesque’s method of subtly “letting the condemnation come home to roost,” sneakily implicating the reader in the “entropy” and the “chaos.” 146 The episode of Major Appadine-Sinclair in Chapter VI, “…Salute the ‘Kismet,’” presents another example of the overlap of satiric method and trope. Desani uses burlesque, exaggeration, caricature, invective, as well as irony and anticlimax. Before an audience gathered in his home, Hatterr is due to receive an honor he both desires and recognizes as undeserved, but he is disrupted by the return of his acid wife and her friend, the overbearing Major. Hatterr’s silent internal tirade at the Major viciously parodies and ridicules the typical bluster which Hatterr has encountered often, and which masks the racism of the upper-class colonial “lexicon.” But the fact of it being uttered silently robs the text of all climax. 147 Hatterr’s near-nudity at the moment of comedic apex adds elements of comic burlesque, and as the ceremony is abruptly disbanded before Hatterr can receive his tribute (more anticlimax), the ironic annoyance on the part of the wife and the Major appears to be both cynical and deeply prejudicial to Hatterr and his friends. Desani also employs a considerable degree of self-parody, in the form of repeated parodic and satiric authorial intrusions into the text. These add paradox and also undermine authority. They are direct satirical attacks on “the author” but they also hide in the indirection of caricature, degrading the author’s seriousness, while demonstrating irony in parading the author’s deftness with Menippean juxtapositions. Desani (as “G. V. D.”) appears as the anonymous “biographer” Hatterr refers to as “the no-scruples feller” who will mock him even “in death,” who replies in a signed footnote “Don’t be ridick!... G’wan, do some deed and die deserving an undeserved death! That’s manly, and good luck to us (me, you, and Socrates)!, G. V. D.” 148 Desani intrudes into the text most directly as an author who is overtly ridiculed by Hatterr, called “the Pharisee G. V. Desani,” and who is attacked as the promoter of devious intellectual obfuscation and deliberate

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dissembling. Hatterr at this stage confesses to being one of “the counterfeit chaps” profiting commercially from feigned religious belief, but he nonetheless reserves his most extreme castigation for Desani. Hatterr parodies Desani’s own paradoxical introductory statement, in which the author asserts a challenge to the philosophical dialectic of veracity and falsehood: “Mimic me truth successfully (that’s to say, lie to me and achieve belief) and I’d credit you, with Art, Skill, Imagination, and intimate Intelligence of Truth.” 149 Hatterr attacks Desani directly as a selfrighteous hypocrite, of a similar ilk to himself, but even worse for practicing pious deception in the guise of an author: The trump card of us Balaamite fellers is the mumbo-jumbo talk: the priestcraft of obscurantisms and subtlety: (...Wherefore, pious brethren, by confessing I lie, yoiks! I tell the truth, sort of topholy trumpeting-it, by the Pharisee G. V. Desani: see the feller’s tract All About..., publisher, the same publishing company)…. 150

Hatterr is taunting here, playing with irony’s jest of ideas, because while this “obscurantism” makes Desani a lowly dissembler, he also names himself as one of the “masters of perplexing parable-speech.” 151 This is a barbed form of communication, definitely not postmodern irony, nor Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern parodic reading of “ironic quotation.” 152 Hatterr explains that what he deploys is:

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a language deliberately designed to mystify the majority, tempt’em to start guessing, and interpreting our real drift, and allegory, what the hell we mean: pursue our meaning on their sthula (gross), the sukshama (subtle) and para (supreme) planes, and levels, and still miss the issue and dash their heads against the crazy-paved rock of confusion…. 153

The in-text satiric parodies of “Desani” by Hatterr also introduce satiric targets like the binaries of art versus commerce, and commerce versus exploitation. Hatterr likens an author’s manipulation of readers to a priest’s corruption of spiritual adherents, suggesting truly devious intentions presented as earnest ones; this takes on an additional level of irony in the context of Desani’s own subsequent serious spiritual quests, during the period when he revised Hatterr. 154 These intrusions all add to the active satire by blurring a sense of authorial distance, sabotaging a notion of stable authority, and arguably focusing a great deal of attention on the subjects of credibility and authorship. Desani’s extensive use of self-parody allows one to apply Alvin B. Kernan’s distinction that “in formal [direct] satire the satirist is stressed and dominates the scene,” but the particular manner of embedding this strand of author-centered satiric discourse also merges with writing in which “the scene is stressed and absorbs the satirist, to some degree or altogether,” which Kernan identifies as Menippean satire. 155

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CONCLUSION G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr may exhibit techniques which overlap with those of magic realist and anti-realist texts, but Menippean satire is nonetheless a more coherent way to read and apprehend this author’s work. One could argue that Desani’s text boldly co-mingles factual material such as settings and situations with counterfactual elements, but the counterfactual material is destabilized by satiric as well as ludic factors. The tools of satire are apparent; the sheer hyperbole of Hatterr is constructed in a flood of satiric devices, rather than those of magic realism. Even when the novelistic genre is interrupted by another genre, a classic trait of magic realism, the intruder is usually satirized in some way, rather than employed solely to call what has been established as factual into question. The incongruities of the text tend to be satirical paradoxes rather than the dissociative “gaps, absences, and silences produced by the colonial encounter” which magic realism approaches so well via fragmented language and supernatural events. 156 And the polyphony of themes and sources in Hatterr reflects Menippean satire’s formal drive towards diversity and exhibits the text’s refusal to grant hegemony to either its Eastern or Western roots. Desani’s contribution to postcolonial literature then is a Menippean satire of diverse themes and subjects, with the necessary polyphony and sense of multitude to depict modern Indian society as complicated, multivocal, and progressing in syncretic ways. The use of the Menippean genre encompasses competing energies and complexities by affording a panoramic range of sources and by injecting these energies into the very notion of carnival. The boldness of Desani’s text lies not in its juxtapositions of the natural and the unnatural, but rather in its high-spirited linguistic experimentation and multidirectional satire. And Desani illustrates how well the ancient form and spirit of satire can stretch in new and dynamic ways. The majority of critics who approach All About H. Hatterr end by citing Desani’s distinctly open-ended conclusion to the book, a closing which scampers from any sense of finality: Hatterr’s narrative ends with the exhortation “Carry on, boys, and continue like hell!” 157 This ending can be used to point out neatly the sense of irresolution and sustained conflict which permeates the narrative and also Hatterr’s sense of unabated quest. The later-added “Defense” by Rambeli finishes even more overtly ajar, with no final stop but instead its previously noted final ellipsis: “I have only room for, yours sincerely…” 158 These examples of a lack of finality certainly add force to the argument that Hatterr is best read as satire, for, as Frank Palmeri has commented, one of satire’s defining qualities is as a “provocative, exploratory form that resists closure,” 159 and Brian Connery and Kirk Combe stress consistently satire’s pull towards entropy and chaos. But the Menippean

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mode seems to obtain, providing the formal, thematic, and tonal means to navigate the milieu Desani establishes with the initial paragraph of the Introduction, entitled “All About…” in which he confides that “Life seemed so many clashes and contests, sorry! and, well, Invention helps.” 160 Desani’s assertion of satiric invention paves the way for subsequent postcolonial Menippean satires. The Menippean mode structures the on-going nature of Hatterr’s quest to establish truth, particularly with regard to the “competing political and religious creeds” discussed by Bart Moore-Gilbert. 161 Even the “Defense” anticipates more conflict, launching its parodic pre-emptory strikes against postulated literary critical responses, taking on the would-be pigeon-holers and delimiters of experimental, rule-breaking hybrid texts. Desani’s work fuses the elements which comprise the multa admixta or “copious admixtures” of the Menippean, 162 and the dynamic hybridity and originality of postcolonial literary fiction.

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NOTES 1. D. M. Burjorjee, “The Dialogue in G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr,” World Literature Written in English 13, no. 2 (1974): 216. Gerhard Stilz observes that Desani inhabits a “widely divergent mixture of discourses” spanning “autobiography, philosophical treatise, religious catechism, literary criticism, legal defense” and others, in “‘Truth? Hell, you will get contrast, and no mistake!’ Sanitizing the intercultural polylemma in G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948/72),” in Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik (Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenberg Verlag, 1998), 81. Some catalogues are of descriptive terms. Basavaraj S. Naikar lists “its thematic peculiarity and…its technical novelty and linguistic gallimaufry” (in “All About H. Hatterr: A Philosophical Comedy,” in Studies in Indian Fiction in English, ed. G. S. Balarama Gupta (Gulbarga, India: JIWE, 1987), 23). For S. C. Harrex it is a “cavalcade of wit and fantasy, of language-fission and mad Hatterr’s adventures” (in “The Novel as Gesture,” Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Hong Kong: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 74). Hadyn M. Williams calls it a “farce…an enthusiastic mélange of language, dialect, slang and mock-heroic metaphor” (“Kinds of Comedy in Indian Fiction in English: R. K. Narayan, R. Prawer Jhabvala, Govind Desani,” in Studies in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English, ed. N. Dwivedi (Allahabad, India: Kitab Mahal, 1987), 70). 2. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1939), Chapter XI, gutenberg.org. 3. Gilbert Highet, Anatomy of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 18. 4. George A. Test, Satire: Spirit and Art (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida Press, 1991), x. Also discussed in depth in John Clement Ball, Satire and the PostColonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, 178. 5. Massih Zekavat, Satire, Humor and the Construction of Identities (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 3. 6. Personal correspondence with McPherson & Company Publishers of Kingston, NY; Desani apparently used “Rissala” with McPherson to mean “mixture or combination.” At wordnik.com “rissala” is “In the British Indian army, a troop of native irregular cavalry.” There is a reference to “a dead Rissala,” a soldier found slain in colonial India, in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Lost Legion.” Risalah is also Arabic for “message.”

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Desani.org continues to post much additional information about Desani’s life, work, influence, and a longstanding effort to publish Desani’s collected works. 7. Naseem Khan, “All About Desani,” The Independent, 2 Aug 1993, 12. 8. Naseem Khan, “Liars, Hypocrites, Imperialists and Sages,” in Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, eds. Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 117. 9. Bouts and fits of feedback have followed publication of the numerous editions of the text, including an unexpected reprint of Hatterr in 1970 by Bodley Head; it was surprising as Desani had been in semi-seclusion studying yoga and meditation in India and Burma from 1952–66. Molly Ramanujan describes some of Desani’s specific devotions and exercises from this period; see G. V. Desani: Writer and Worldview, New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1984, 11; 15–6. See also Amardeep Singh, “More than ‘priestly mumbo-jumbo’: Religion and authorship in All About H. Hatterr,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46, no. 1 (2010): 89–100; via access to correspondence Singh shares additional details of Desani’s religious studies during this time. The book’s republication is part of its singular publication history, which deserves mention. It was first published as All About Mr. Hatterr by Aldor in 1948, and then reissued by Saturn Press (as All About H. Hatterr, dedicated “for Hindustaaniwalla Hatterr”) in 1950. A revised edition appeared in 1951, published by Farrar, Straus & Young in New York. The (unexpected) further revised edition was issued by The Bodley Head (London) and Farrar, Straus & Giroux (NY) in 1970. Additional revisions and a final added chapter, Rambeli’s “Defense,” appeared in the Lancer Books paperback edition (US) of 1972. In 1972 Penguin issued another revised edition, in paperback. Arnold-Heinemann published the paperback edition in New Delhi in 1985. McPherson & Company Publishers of Kingston, NY, from whose publishing history this information is compiled, issued the definitive edition in 1986 “with final revisions” by Desani comprising the plates of the Penguin version with the addition of the “Personal Footnotes” to Rambeli’s “Defense” (317–8). Since 2007 this edition of the book has been available from the New York Review Press in paperback. Hali, Desani’s somber prose-poem, also has a somewhat unique publication history. It was originally published in Britain in 1950 (Saturn Press), then revised for publication in The Illustrated Weekly of India (Bombay 1952), then revised again in another UK edition (1953). A dramatized version was produced at the Watergate Theatre (London, 1950), and broadcast versions for All India Radio (1950 and 1951). (A 1967 text edition was not authorized by the author.) The final version is the one published by McPherson in 1991, presented with short stories drawn from Desani’s contributions to the Times of India Illustrated Weekly from 1962–7. 10. Delmore Schwartz, “Review of All About H. Hatterr, by G. V. Desani,” Partisan Review 18, no. 5 (1951): 578. 11. Schwartz, “Review of All About H. Hatterr, 579. 12. Molly Ramanujan, G. V. Desani, Writer and Worldview (New Delhi: ArnoldHeinemann, 1984), 29. 13. Eric D. Smith, “‘Ambiguity at its best!’: Historicizing G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr,” ARIEL 40, no. 2–3 (2009): 112. 14. Smith, “‘Ambiguity at its best!’,” 117. 15. Smith, “‘Ambiguity at its best!’,” 112. 16. Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 54. 17. Nasta, Home Truths, 53–4. 18. Andrew Goldstone, “Hatterr Abroad: G. V. Desani on the Stage of World Literature,” Contemporary Literature 55, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 492. 19. Goldstone, “Hatterr Abroad,” 496. 20. Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” Poetics Today 23, no. 2 (2002): n. 318–9. 21. G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company Publishers, 1986), 12.

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22. S.C. Harrex, “The Novel as Gesture,” in Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Hong Kong: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 18. The “performance” aspects of the text have actually been explored a number of times in theater. The Ridiculusmus Theatre Co. of Derry, N. Ireland, adapted All About H. Hatterr for the stage in 1996, after a trip to India in January of that year, and numerous exchanges with Desani and his lawyer. The show, All About H. Hatterr, opened in April 1996 at the Battersea Arts Centre (ironically as part of their Irish Festival) and featured company founders David Woods and Jon Hough, along with Armen Gregory. Their production centers on both the performative and gestural aspects of the text. While imposing a degree of linear narrative on the chapters they used (originally chapters 1–3), the company also indulged in some of the showy, plotstopping, linguistic play of the text. Their program quoted Rustom Bharucha’s text on Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata: “We Indians are known for our circumlocutions…. Always the elaboration is more important than the thrust of the narrative.” Hatterr, the play, toured for 96 performances through 21 June 1998, when the final show took place at the Festival Club, Albert Hotel, Kirkwall, Orkney. But the actors were so drawn to the material for its themes and their possibilities of execution, for what David Woods called “the richness of [its] postcolonial English” and the theatrical potential of Hatterr’s “failure, indefatigability, vulnerability, and naughtiness,” that Desani’s book became the basis for a subsequent play, entitled Yes, Yes, Yes, which ran for 143 performances from August 1999 to June 2002. After a disagreement with Desani and his lawyer over permission to continue performances of the first play, Woods and Hough made another research visit to India (“a disastrous working trip…that still enlivened the end thing”) and developed the second play which “has Hatterr as an inspiration rather than source material,” and which employs AngloIndian characters attempting to explain the meaning of life. (David Woods, email to author, 6 Jan 2006.) Kanaganayakam references a later performance of a Hatterr-based play, entitled Damme This is the Oriental Scene for You (adapted from Desani’s book by the brother and sister team, Rehan and Saniya Ansari, Modest Productions, Toronto, performed 27 Jan.–13 Feb. 2000) which highlighted the text’s emphasis on artifice and counter-realism (in Chelva Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurie, 2002), 191 n. 1). This adaptation (which used only chapter 1) added a framing device to replicate the complex form of the original, which also shifts the emphasis more onto the main character’s unresolved racial hybridity. Rehan Ansari explains that “My play was a play within a play: H. Hatterr is performing a play in London about his adventures in India before an audience of ‘pucca’ sahibs. His point is to entertain and enlighten his gora audience with the idea that though he, Hatterr, is Indian, he is more English than the English. This is how the first act ends, with H. Hatterr making a case for why he should be humoured” (direct message to author 2 February 2018; orig. in Rehan Ansari, “As desi as Desani,” MidDay Mumbai (14 November 2002), blog post now removed; see production information at web.archive.org/web/20160201100602/http://saniyaansari.com/blog/?page_id=76). 23. Chelva Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurie, 2002), 52. 24. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism, 53. 25. Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 81. 26. Hadyn M. Williams, “Hatterr and Bazza: Post-Colonial Picaros,” in Australian and Indian Literature: Studies in Mutual Response, ed. David Kerr et al. (New Delhi: Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies, 1991), 209. 27. Robert Rawdon Wilson, “On Disgust: A Menippean Interview,” The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 34, no. 2 (2007): 208. 28. G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr: a novel (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 1986), 31. 29. There are unexplored critical areas in Desani’s text with regard to subaltern depictions, and the locus of parody and satire within these. The text’s relationship

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with Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, noted at the start of this quotation, suggests disenfranchisement in the symbol of the hat, which if not owned must be “stolen!” 30. Molly Ramanujan, G. V. Desani, Writer and Worldview (New Delhi: ArnoldHeinemann, 1984), 20. 31. N. Radhakrishnan, Indo-Anglian Fiction: Major Trends and Themes (Madras: Emerald Publishers, 1984), 127. 32. A. L. McLeod, “G. V. Desani,” in Writers of the Indian Diaspora, a Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, CT: Greenwich Press, 1993), 96; 98. 33. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi: Sterling, 1964), 68. 34. Perry Westbrook, “G. V. Desani,” in Contemporary Novelists, 4th ed., ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick (New York: St James’s Press, 1986), 236. 35. Ron Blaber, “The Contemporary Picaresque Novel: Desani and Oakley,” in Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire and Parody, ed. Pavel Petr, David Roberts, and Philip Thomson (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 179. 36. Hadyn M. Williams, Indo-Anglian Literature, 1800–1970, A Survey (New Delhi: Orient Longman 1976), 68–69. 37. Williams, “Hatterr and Bazza: Post-Colonial Picaros,” 206. 38. Dieter Riemenschneider, “Global fantasy–glocal imagination: The New Literatures in English and Their Fantastic ImagiNations,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41, no. 1 (2005): 16. 39. Bruce King, The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 141. 40. Ramanujan, G. V. Desani, Writer and Worldview (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1984), 68. 41. Amitav Ghosh, “Regarding G. V. Desani,” amitavghosh.com (blog), Dec. 2000, http://amitavghosh.com/blog/1. 42. Ghosh, “Regarding G. V. Desani,” 1. 43. M. K. Naik, “Colonial Experience in All About H. Hatterr,” Commonwealth Novel in English 1, no. 1 (1982): 37. 44. Anthony Burgess, Introduction to All About H. Hatterr by G. V. Desani (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1985), 10. 45. Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2. 46. Nandakumar, “The Fantasy Element in Indian Fiction,” 146. 47. Harrex, “The Novel as Gesture,” 81. 48. Harrex, “The Novel as Gesture,” 73; 74. 49. Hadyn Williams, “Kinds of Comedy in Indian Fiction in English: R. K. Narayan, R. Prawer Jhabvala, Govind Desani,” in Studies in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English, ed. A. N. Dwivedi (Allahabad, India: Kitab Mahal, 1987), 76. 50. Nasta, Home Truths, 54. 51. Ramanujan, G. V. Desani, Writer and Worldview, 70. 52. Williams, “Hatterr and Bazza,” 207. 53. A. L. McLeod in “G. V. Desani” (1993) lists the many institutions for which Desani lectured, as well as the various media outlets and agencies on whose behalf he worked as a reporter and correspondent (95). 54. Amardeep Singh looks at Desani’s evolving spiritual beliefs before and after writing Hatterr, in his essay which “draws on heretofore overlooked biographical materials, Desani’s own literary journalism, as well as the many revisions Desani made to the novel itself” (89). Singh finds in Hatterr evidence of Desani’s later deepening spiritual concerns. See Amardeep Singh, “More than ‘priestly mumbo-jumbo’: Religion and authorship in All About H. Hatterr,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46, No. 1, (February 2010): 89–100. 55. G. V. Desani, “Difficulties of Communicating an Oriental to a Western Audience,” in Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C. D. Narasimhaiah (Hong Kong: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 403.

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56. Desani, “Difficulties,” 404. 57. Desani, “Difficulties,” 404. 58. Desani, “Difficulties,” 403. 59. Desani, “Difficulties,” 403. 60. McLeod, “G. V. Desani,” 96. 61. Salman Rushdie, quoted in James Harrison, Salman Rushdie (New York: Twayne, 1992), 15. Rushdie’s reference to Hatterr emphasizes that “the migrations of the fifties and sixties” which brought Indians to England “happened,” placing Desani in a grouping of post-diaspora writers who have been influential in a discourse of postdiaspora cultural roots and impacts (15). Although his inclusion in this category is useful, Desani first arrived in Britain in 1926 and returned to India after WWII, so in strict temporal terms it can be argued that he doesn’t really “fit” the group of writers Rushdie is referencing; however, it is quite clear that Rushdie wishes to accord Desani a significant degree of influence. 62. Desani, quoted in McLeod, “G. V. Desani,” 97. 63. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism, 58. 64. From interviews Naseem Khan conducted with G. V. Desani, published as “Liars, Hypocrites, Imperialists and Sages” in Ferdinand Dennis and Naseem Khan, eds. Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), 118–131. 65. Naseem Khan, “All About Desani,” The Independent (2 Aug. 1993), 12. 66. Naseem Khan, “Liars, Hypocrites,” 117. 67. Khan, “All About Desani,” 12. 68. As in G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 41. 69. Alvin B. Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 70. 70. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 2. 71. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), xix. 72. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 20, 21. 73. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 33. Desani’s italics. 74. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 306. 75. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 316. 76. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 316. 77. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 31. What is Hatterr? He states in his introduction “One of my parents was a European, Christian-by-faith merchant merman (seaman). From which part of the Continent? Wish I could tell you. The other was an Oriental, a Malay Peninsula-resident lady, a steady, non-voyaging, non-Christian human (no mermaid). From which part of the Peninsula? Couldn’t tell you either” (31). But he claims subsequently, “I went completely Indian to an extent few pure non-Indian blood sahib fellers have done” (33; Desani’s italics). Kanaganayakam interprets him as specifically Anglo-Indian, and says that the novel “needs to be seen” in the context of the visually-syncretic, culturally disinherited body of Anglo-Indian experience (Counterrealism, 63–4). For Kanaganayakam this gives the text historical specificity, context, and “a particular valency” (Counterrealism, 64). Naik queries whether Hatterr’s “Malay Peninsula resident” mother could have been Indian. For Blaber he is not identifiable in historical (and therefore mimetic) terms. Williams (1976) insists Hatterr was Eurasian and not Indian. 78. Ronald Blaber and Marvin Gilman, Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian and Indian Fiction (Springwood, New South Wales: Butterfly Books, 1990), 25. 79. Naik, “Colonial Experience,” 49. 80. I am thinking of Salman Rushdie’s literary celebrations of migrant experiences, and of the attacks he has sometimes been subject to in his own much-hyphenated catalogues of self-definition. The gifted American/Canadian immigrant Indian author Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017) could also fit into this meditation.

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81. Nasta, Home Truths, 53–4. 82. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 275. 83. T. B. Macaulay, “Minute on Education,” in W. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition, Volume II (New York: Colombia University Press 1958), 49. 84. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 33. 85. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 252. 86. Blaber and Gilman, Roguery, 89. 87. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 33. 88. Blaber and Gilman, Roguery, 89. 89. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 46. 90. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 57. 91. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 58. 92. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 60. 93. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 60. 94. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 52; 60. 95. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 57. 96. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 61. 97. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 71–2. 98. Ramanujan, G. V. Desani, Writer and Worldview, 31. 99. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 79. 100. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 77. 101. Naik, “Colonial Experience,” 39. 102. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 272. 103. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 233. 104. Williams, Indo-Anglian Literature, 1800–1970, 76. 105. Naik, “Colonial Experience,” 44. 106. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 65. 107. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 44. 108. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 317. 109. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 42. Naik offers the most complete list of Banerrji’s sources, in addition to the Talmud, Bible and Greek myths: “Goethe, Victor Hugo, Bunyan, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Jeremy Taylor, Dryden, Pope, Halifax, Burns, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Jane Austen, Carlyle, Arnold, Tennyson, Hardy, Shaw, Conan-Doyle, and Walt Whitman; but his favourite author is, of course, Shakespeare” (“Colonial Experience,” 42–3). 110. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 112. 111. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86. 112. “Batesian Mimicry,” Wikipedia, 20 February 2019. To wit: “Batesian mimicry is a form of mimicry where a harmless species has evolved to imitate the warning signals of a harmful species directed at a predator of them both. It is named after the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates, after his work on butterflies in the rainforests of Brazil. 113. P. E. Howse and J. A. Allen, “Satyric Mimicry: The Evolution of Apparent Imperfection,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 257, Issue 1349 (22 August 1994): 111, http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1994.0102. We learn that “[a]s with Batesian mimicry, the effectiveness of the [satyric] defence will depend upon the relative frequency with which a predator encounters palatable mimics and noxious models in the population,” and also that “[b]ecause of their difficulty in resolving the ambiguity of a satyric mimic, predators will show a significant time delay in responding to such mimics compared with non-mimetic forms” (113–4). I hold the perhaps minority opinion that Homi Bhabha has studied in depth the literature on satiric mimicry in wasps. 114. Blaber and Gilman, Roguery, 89. 115. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 220. 116. Harrex, “The Novel as Gesture,” 76; 80. 117. Harrex, “The Novel as Gesture,” 80. 118. Naikar, “All About H. Hatterr: A Philosophical Comedy,” 34.

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119. Williams, Indo-Anglian, 68. 120. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 29. 121. William Shakespeare, King Richard The Second (The Alexander Text), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1978), II.i, ll. 31–33. 122. Shakespeare, King Richard The Second, II.i, ll. 65–66. 123. Shakespeare, Henry VIII, II. iv, ll. 15–16. 124. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 56; 58. 125. Bart Moore-Gilbert, ed., Writing India 1757–1990: The Literature of British India (Manchester and NY: Manchester University Press, 1996), 7. 126. G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 199. 127. Christopher Porterfield, “Towering Babel,” Review of All About H. Hatterr, Time (20 July 1970): 72. 128. Harrex, “The Novel as Gesture,” 74. 129. Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, trans. E. F. Todd (Madras: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1964), 16. 130. Connery and Combe, eds., Theorizing Satire, 6. 131. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 129. 132. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 132. 133. D. M. Burjorjee, “The Dialogue in G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr,” World Literature Written in English 13, no. 2 (1974): 216. 134. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 118; 149. 135. Connery and Combe, eds. Theorizing Satire, 5; 6. 136. Connery and Combe, eds. Theorizing Satire, 5. 137. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 293; 294. 138. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 58. 139. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 58–9. 140. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 45. 141. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 36. 142. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 36. 143. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 281. 144. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 285. 145. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 37. 146. David Worcester, The Art of Satire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 40. 147. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 248. 148. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 85. 149. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 13. 150. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 120. 151. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 120. 152. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms (University of Illinois Press, 1985), 43. 153. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 120. 154. One of the most fantastic details of Desani’s intriguing life must be the fact that by the time he reached late middle-age he had attracted his own spiritual followers, and in his middle seventies his disciples founded an ashram in Austin, Texas, where he held his teaching post in the philosophy department of the University of Texas. The ironies of the author of All About H. Hatterr attracting his own cult of spiritual followers are profound indeed. The publisher of the definitive versions of Desani’s works, Bruce McPherson, characterizes Desani as “a very complex man”: “For all of the antiguruism of Hatterr, he really did play the guru in person,” McPherson recalls of a visit to Desani in Austin. “He was also quite a mystic in many respects. When he came back to India after studying Mahayana Buddhism in Burma, he felt he had discovered, in the prophetic scriptures written on banana leaves [the slokas] a prefiguration of his own life. He had a trunk full of these papyri-like documents, and tended to speak to visitors at length about them” (Personal Interview, 5 January 2006). 155. Kernan, The Plot of Satire, 70.

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156. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” 411. 157. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 278. 158. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 316. 159. Palmeri, “Review: Satire: A Critical Introduction,” South Atlantic Review 60 no. 1 (1 January 1995): 173. 160. Desani, All About H. Hatterr (1986), 316. 161. Bart Moore-Gilbert, “‘I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim’: Kipling and Postcolonialism,” The Journal of Commonweath Literature 37, no. 2 (2002): 43. 162. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, 2.

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THREE

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Aubrey Menen and Menippean Wit

The Indian-Irish writer Aubrey Menen (1912–1989) authored a series of satiric fictions and two essay collections, from 1947 to 1970, which were each praised at the time of publication as exceedingly ironic and amusing. Few critics assessed his work as having much import beyond the level of droll but superficial social commentary, and fewer since have recognized his in-depth engagement with postcolonial issues. This chapter argues that Menen demonstrates a consistent satirical stance in a counter-realist manner, and that one may find in his work seeds of notable themes and perspectives which come to a more full-blown intensity in later postcolonial writing. In content his satires critique duplicitous principles of Empire and their enduring pejorative effects. A contemporary of G. V. Desani, his writing reflects the move towards counter-realism in postcolonial fiction, but these efforts may be characterized as more subtle, and inflected more by Menippean uses of language rather than Desani’s dramatic formal transformations in All About H. Hatterr. Menen employs Menippean mixtures of high and low verbal registers, historical settings, and versions of the symposium in which characters discuss and debate in deflationary terms. The most truly Menippean characteristic may be the tone of “learned mockery” exhibited by characters who appear in his texts; 1 in Menen’s work, postcoloniality is an epistemological state, and to be deficient in “learning” implies lacking comprehension of postcoloniality’s slant towards hybrid perspectives. His informed characters are knowing about issues both parochial and global, and witty with the asperity of the Bright Young Things of Evelyn Waugh, who was also Menen’s contemporary. 2 But where Waugh expresses many of the racial stereotypes that were, though inexcusable, characteristic of his class in its time, Menen tends to attack those who lack a balanced or encompassing view of social diversities. In terms of textual 83

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innovations, Menen’s incorporation of varied philosophical source material in his work, particularly in his essays, creates a fusion of Eastern and Western underpinnings, as well as a particularly dialogic and satiric quality. As the subsequent discussion illustrates, Menen, to apply some of Garry Sherbert’s discussion of eighteenth-century satires, wrote “highly intellectual” satires, “using learned wit to combat learned wit” with a high degree of self-consciousness. 3 To wit:

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The English were then masters of three-quarters of the earth, and in this three-quarters were both the Irish and the Indians. Had I been brought up as either of these I would have thought of the English as my equals but I would have been forced to treat them as my masters. As an Englishman I was able to treat both the Irish and the Indians as my inferiors so long as I was careful to speak of them to their faces as my equals. This formula was the basis of an astonishing organisation called the British empire and remained so until the formula was finally understood by the subject races, when the British Empire somewhat hurriedly became the Commonwealth. 4

This appears in Menen’s essay, “How I was Initiated into the Best Tribe,” in his memoir, Dead Man in the Silver Market (1953), and demonstrates well the author’s deftly wry tone, and his comfortable level of discussion of complicated cultural norms around identity and power. The UK edition of his memoir was published a year later with the subtitle An Autobiographical Essay on National Prides, and this subtitle is significant in that the book concludes that specific national virtues are illusory, and that we are far better employed in a focus on shared aspects of humanity. The entire book is an arch, careful, Menippean attack on the philosophy of nationalist identity, which Menen shows to be a fallacious concept via instances of colonial failings, all constructed in multi-media, multi-toned satiric examples, including dialogues, documents, and stories. Throughout his writings, Menen develops a series of significant postcolonial discourses using similar Menippean elements of diction, style, and structure. In pursuing questions of authorial identity, critics have tended to impose readings which reflect conflicted reactions to a writer who is both baldly autobiographical and, as one often sees with satirists, artfully indistinct. The factual elements of Menen’s background are perceived to be noteworthy both in their singularity and their contribution to the overall tenor of his work. Salvator Aubrey Clarence Menen’s parents were an Irish Roman Catholic mother and Indian Hindu father from the elite Nayar caste. He relates in his work that he grew up with a discordant sense of national identity which straddled being Indian in Great Britain and English in India. With a degree from the University of London, in the early 1930s he wrote drama reviews for The Bookman in London, directed thea-

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ter, and spent WWII editing propaganda film scripts for the Indian Government. From middle age, he chose an exilic residence as a foreign national in Italy. He discusses his homosexual identity in his memoirs with a frankness that is unusual for his time period, and he underscores it in the repeated dedications of his novels to his companion, “My Dear Philip Dallas.” 5 Most assessments of Menen’s work operate along some aspect of the linkage of his identity to literary content, pointing towards Menen’s perceived hybridities as his writing’s determining focus. By contrast, introducing the Menippean as a mode of assessing Menen’s texts allows critical recognition of a vision which foregrounds and manipulates divergent but interconnected themes and topics, which allows personal identity to be a significant but not sole factor, and which can contain multiple levels and expressions of existence, and resistance, simultaneously. Contemporaneous reviews often do identify Menen as a satirist, but they tend to focus on the singular disposition and attitude particular to this writer as the main prompt of satiric literary form. Menen was thoroughly at home with a more complex self-identity of satirist, as he explained in the “About the Author” section in his novel, SheLa: A Satire (1962):

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At fifty most satirists start to mellow. I don’t believe this has happened to me…. As a satirist my desire is to amuse, rather than reform. Many of the world’s tragedies have stemmed from people who have thought that human nature could be improved…. The message of at least one kind of satirist is that human nature is corrupt, but that this is not necessarily either a disastrous or a melancholy thing. 6

Critics rarely identify in any depth what Menen satirizes or how. In The Yale Review, Menen’s The Prevalence of Witches (1947) is “a merry and malicious satirical comedy about ethics and religion.” 7 John Woodburn, in The New Republic, notes Prevalence’s “adroit and exhilarating, not to say adrenaline, satirical writing.” 8 In Newsweek, The Fig Tree (1959) is celebrated as “a gay piece of blue-nose thumbing.” 9 Much of the critical material on Aubrey Menen follows exclusively the thread that his satire is rooted solely in his individual psychology. Bruce King’s comment on Menen is typical: “Perhaps because he experienced and embodied many incongruities he was a wry satirist in a mannered, elegant prose.” 10 Margaret Wimsatt emphasizes that Menen’s background affords him a specific acuity as a writer, with the description of him as “son of an Indian father and an Irish mother, who charmed so many people with his double insight into the Anglo-Indian world.” 11 Critics also identify Menen’s perspective as stemming from his position as an outsider. Wimsatt, for example, articulates that in his characteristic sardonic and barbed tone, Menen chose “a lonely freedom.” 12 A Time magazine review of Dead Man in the Silver Market from 1953 was entitled “Man Without A Country,”

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and depicts ruptures and oppositions in Menen’s writing as having an inevitability set in motion by the factors of his bi-cultural birth: [T]rouble fairly brims over when a man is born, as was Aubrey Menen, of an Irishwoman and a Hindu, is registered as a native Briton and educated like a true-born Englishman. Beset by so many distorting mirrors, such a man is bound to see the baffling jigsaw puzzle of his identity with either tears or laughter. 13

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Wimsatt even extends this critical puzzlement over defining Menen’s identity to an imagined perplexed readership, querying “What indeed was he? To the Western eye, his pictures seem to be of an Indian. To the teachers who trained him in the British public school system, he was an Englishman.” 14 The sole clarifying observation comes from Lalley, who eventually asserts that Menen himself actually governs this line of scrutiny: “This is Author Menen’s insistence that his hybrid self is a purely satirical and intellectual matter.” 15 In manipulating rather than subscribing to mimeticism, Menen at times presents a sense of identity which reflects Susheila Nasta’s discussion of “the triangular nature” of his identity components, allowing him a “conceptual vision” which, rather than merely reflecting cultural divisions, affords him the ability to “straddl[e] several worlds.” 16 Menen also uses satire to scrutinize and to achieve distance from aspects of his constructed identity, and he often returns to a level of satirical commentary which allows him to interrogate assumptions of essentialism, racial superiority, and patriotic nationalism as “absurd” (a favorite term of abuse). In Mohamed Elias’s 1985 monograph on the author, one begins to see some degree of conscious agenda on the part of Menen. Elias focuses on Menen’s denial that his noted rewriting of the Ramayana epic (The Ramayana, As Told by Aubrey Menen, 1954) exhibits “any interest in parodying the Aryan myths.” 17 When Elias questions Menen directly about the motivations for this work, Menen cites a literary one, a need to “rewrite the inconsistencies and lack of verisimilitude in the portrayal of Sita, which bedevil the orthodox version.” 18 Sita is the central female character in the epic. But Menen’s further statements in his interview with Elias point instead to a fairly clear-cut satirical, and politically-motivated, stance, as Elias explains that Menen is powerfully “indignant at the way the Sita image is being exploited to subject women to insidious forms of oppression in most parts of India.” 19 Menen’s indignation over perceived political and cultural injustices continues as a spur which powers more of his work, notably an episode in which Menen rejected as racist the efforts of Time-Life Books editors to expunge all descriptions of modernity from his manuscript for a Great Cities series volume on Bombay, in favor of lurid descriptions of slums. 20 The volume was never published. Elias states that:

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One can therefore understand the vehemence with which Menen rebelled against Time-Life Books for attempting to coerce him into writing things that pander to the market for racism. It is in this perspective that Menen’s revolt against Aryan myths appears in its proper hue as an attempt to do justice to the oppressed and the dispossessed. 21

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Some attention thus needs to be paid to the way Menen embeds serious topics in satirical works, balancing issues and indignation with both somber and lighthearted satire. Menen’s work delves into the issues of hybridity and identity politics which have become central to later postcolonial critical debates, and increasingly common to the literature which examines the enduring effects of Empire. Examining his work as Menippean satire brings these issues into clearer focus, as it tends to refocus attention away from issues of personal experience and psychology, and towards the mixed voices, influences, and registers of satire which reflect the complex contrasts of a contemporary, postcolonial society. Mary Jane Hurst, in an essay examining some of the reasons for Menen’s relative obscurity, focuses on a critical uncertainty over how to interpret manifestations of racial and cultural hybridity and how this overlaps with the puzzlement often set in motion by misapprehensions of satiric material. Hurst finds that these all contribute in tandem to the critical neglect of Menen’s body of work: “Menen undoubtedly chose humor or satire as his primary medium in order to distance himself from the pain of ‘otherness,’ and unfortunately for him, material that is funny may not be taken seriously.” 22 While this may oversimplify a sense of the personal psychology which may (or may not) underlie Menen’s writing, it does underscore the problems and resistances the presence of satire can set in motion. As singled out by Hurst, these characteristics of Menen’s work blend the resistances of satire with the inclinations of “postcoloniality”: “the move away from realist representation, the refusal of closure, the exposure of the politics of metaphor, the interrogation of forms, the rehabilitation of allegory, and the attack on binary structuration of concept and language.” 23 Menen does indeed exhibit each of these characteristics in his work. He moves away from realism and closure in Prevalence of Witches, arguably exposes the politics of metaphor in the context of world religions in SheLa, rehabilitates allegory in his rewritten Ramayana, and interrogates form in his mixed-form memoir of sexual and spiritual awakenings, The Space Within the Heart (1970). Each of his works contains some challenge to the divide of concept from language, often with a concurrent objectification of language through the elevation of wit and erudition. Garry Sherbert’s study of Menippean satire, though using much earlier European texts, is a valuable reference in its articulation that wit may emerge in both linguistic and narrative levels. 24

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Susheila Nasta is one of the few recent critics to write about Menen, and she examines the role of experimentation as it relates to the writer’s lack of visibility. She discusses how the marginalization of Menen and some of his contemporary Indian authors of English-language literature illustrates an unwillingness to register the on-going influence of such writers, and also points towards an inherent rigidity in established categories in literary studies. Nasta points out a perceived divide between the founding writers of Indo-Anglian literature, such as Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, and later postwar authors identified as “immigrant,” “expatriate,” or “diasporic”:

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This kind of critical labelling has served both the interests of some Indian critics, keen to preserve an uncomplicated nationalist narrative of resistance, as well as those metropolitan Western reviewers who were unable to read the innovative cross-cultural experimentations of such writers from outside the narrow confines of a Eurocentric gaze. 25

This dominant ambiguity over how to position and interpret writers such as Menen led to his being fairly unknown and thus unread; this would be amplified by the additional factors of his purposefully “triangulated” 26 (Irish-Indian-English) heritage and identity, his atypical frankness about his life as a homosexual man, and his exploitation of the textual manipulations, exaggerations, and unpredictability of satiric fictions. It is significant that Menen made artistic use of his perceived marginality. Nasta contends that Menen, along with contemporaries Krishna Menon and Mulk Raj Anand, had a sense of purpose about the specific position of the writer, and “were deeply committed to the need to question and to revision the West’s image of itself.” 27 Hurst identifies this stance as a part of Menen’s “semi-alienated perspective as both an insider and an outsider to the societies he describes,” noting that his work contains a “radical subtext” which offers “a challenge to both Eastern and Western institutions and ideologies.” 28 AUBREY MENEN AS A SATIRIST Menen’s autobiographical essays are the best source for his own attitudes towards his writing, as he addresses directly many of the issues and experiences which shaped his identity as a writer. Dead Man in the Silver Market (1953) features essays on identity, race, and culture, as the author narrates his visits to his “three countries,” England, Ireland, and India, to consider national characters and virtues. The Space Within the Heart (1970) is a book-length meditation on identity construction. Susheila Nasta has examined how some of these essays “present a sharp critique of the blinkered arrogance that feeds notions of cultural superiority, whether engendered by East or West.” 29 In the essay “How I was Initiated into the

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Best Tribe” (in Dead Man in the Silver Market), Menen revisits some of the painful racist incidents of his English upbringing. In “My Grandmother and the Dirty English” (also in Dead Man), Menen chronicles some of the prejudices and arrogance of his paternal, Nayar Indian heritage. Nasta examines how in these two essays Menen “ridicules” the hypocrisies and racism of English society, but then: “Menen provides a reverse mirror of the absurdities of this kind of blinkered vision.” 30 Menen’s tactics afford an opportunity to examine if his writing is more the “speaking mirror” of Gabriel García Márquez and magic realism, or the “distorting” mirror discussed by Gilbert Highet in relation to satire. Certainly in his essays and fiction Menen strives to reflect actual speech and communicative modes, reflecting the social relations, parochial inflections, and power dichotomies which Stephen Slemon places in the context of “a postcolonial culture.” 31 But there are also lengthy disquisitions and debates in each memoir and fictional text, as well as recollected incidents which privilege the author’s wit throughout the memoirs. There are indeed examples in Menen’s work of the significant “gaps, absences, and silences produced by the colonial encounter” as mentioned by Slemon, 32 but these are usually dealt with in a satiric way: a Chief who decides to simply “go deaf” to conclude an unwanted encounter with colonial authorities (The Prevalence of Witches); the Buddha’s tree glowing red with anger in Nirvana, after a stunning taunt from the Western Deity (SheLa: A Satire); Sita opting to keep her mouth shut in an updated Ramayana. And there is little sense of magic realism’s “inward reflection”; Menen is consistently chatty and instructive, providing a detailed, self-help section for the spiritual seeker at the end of Space Within the Heart, for example. Part of the satiric comedy of The Prevalence of Witches rests in the revelation of the duplicity of most of the characters: the Indian tribesmen, the Swami, and the colonial officers of Limbo all conspire separately to free the jailed man and rid the enclave of Winifred, the white wife of a colonial official. Winifred is the epitome of disruptive colonial assumptions of power, and she is ironically the most menacing individual in a territory feared for its local inhabitants’ willingness to ascribe events to the workings of the supernatural. And the mechanisms of “witchery,” which might have been mysterious or even supernatural in a magic-realist text, are laid quite bare in The Prevalence of Witches. The mystical personal journeys of Menen’s memoirs are made exterior, observation and experience mixing matter-of-factly with the author’s encounter with the sublime. So Menen’s mirror is arguably the “sort of Glass” wielded by Swift, deliberately caricaturing and exaggerating. 33 For although Menen’s texts tend to focus on issues which can be central to the workings of magic realism, his overall approach is always satirical, ironic, and mocking. The Prevalence of Witches, for example, centers on definitions of good and evil, precisely the material which tends to fuel the deceptive moral turns and

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pivots in magic-realist texts. But Menen is more invested in caricaturing the insufficiencies of those who would set themselves up as moral arbiters. As Nasta notes, Menen delves into “the perpetuation of superstitions and false ‘mysticisms’ as they are lived out in Limbo,” 34 but rather than portraying the reality or possibility of the supernatural, Menen instead mocks those who would countenance irrational beliefs, view any belief system as unquestionable, or who would deny the validity of the curious mind. His castigation covers native animists as well as imported clerics, and his plot is more centered on satiric exposé than an unrefined celebration of pluralism. SATIRICAL TOPICS

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Generally Menen’s deflationary techniques attack the bluster of colonial endeavor, the pomposity of authority, and the sense of an unassailably superior mission. An interrogation of identity politics runs throughout his work, a sustained critique of some of the absurd juxtapositions that constrain formations of identity. Many of Menen’s specific observations, and the entire premise of The Prevalence of Witches, arise from his colonial posting, at age 30, to an Indian jungle among the Dangi tribe to establish village schools and public health systems. When he departed, as he recounts in The Space Within the Heart, he felt that it was the Dangi who had educated him: “I saw as never before that what I was doing was false. The Dangis believed in their witches and here was I to put them right about the world, believing as I did—in what? . . . I was there to bring civilization to them. Had they ever dropped bombs on my parents?” 35 His satiric approach is to undermine the binaries of power and otherness that underscore colonial ideologies. His counter-realism here emerges from the attempt to replicate the sensations and atmosphere which accompany this experience of doubling in the face of a recognized absurdity. His earlier education, for example, brings him to the conclusion that “[t]he principle on which the English founded their liberty was that it was unthinkable that every Englishman should share it.” 36 He is prompted in his first memoir to conclude that “there was not one England but two” and left to ponder how this split then impacts him. 37 Like Desani, he is fixed on the paradoxical, exploring the illusory while revealing in Dead Man in the Silver Market that “all illusions are very dangerous.” 38 Even in work that is not overtly postcolonial in subject, Menen manages to undermine perceived colonial binaries. The Backward Bride: A Sicilian Scherzo (1950) concerns the comic honeymoon adventures of a traditional Sicilian village girl and her “progressive,” educated Italian husband, with

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a concluding triumph of her traditional values over his more progressive ones. Menen inserts a brief chapter close to the end of the book, entitled “The Wisdom of the East,” in which the young, pedantic husband, seeing a Muslim and a Hindu on a boat deck momentarily at prayers, is moved to champion briefly the intrinsic sagacity of the Orient.

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“Fool that I am to seek wisdom in the West!” he said. “I should have gone to India. I should have sat at the feet of sages and gurus and learned the secrets of the Infinite. One has but to look at the tranquillity that rests upon the faces of these two men, the resignation, the peaceableness, the utter contentment to know that truth is still to be found where mankind found it first—in the East.” He immediately resolved that the very next morning he would . . . make friends with the two men. 39

But Menen is writing in the exact year following Partition and has inserted a narrative that mirrors events unfolding in the newly established modern states of India and Pakistan. His satire presents both historical realities and an attack on some of the Orientalist notions and Western naiveté responsible for that history. Unbeknownst to the husband, the two men, upon completion of prayers, quibble “over the merits of eating or not eating cow’s flesh as a means to attaining Paradise.” 40 One (which one is not explained) dispatches the other by knife and rapidly dies of his own wounds; the bodies are disposed of at sea. An ideological dispute and lethal violence undermine the notion of peaceable tranquility, and although this episode inserts an arguably mimetic scene into the comic narrative, it serves to satirize the husband’s naïveté and the unquestioning acceptance of the paradigm that locates ineffable wisdom irrefutably in the Western academy or just as irrefutably in the Eastern temple. In this short episode Menen is able to draw “the contests” of the world into his overall narrative. But this is just a minor episode in The Backwards Bride, and Menen tackles postcolonial themes more broadly elsewhere. Menen’s SheLa: A Satire (1962) presents a specific exploration of issues of otherness, specifically the divisions spurred by misperceptions of identity, divisions which are variously presented as cultural, political, and spiritual. The book contains a plethora of satirical topics. Against a backdrop of postcolonial, Cold War global politics, the central premise is that two ostensibly legitimate Dalai Lamas have been found simultaneously. The scope of Menen’s mocking satire is vast, though achieved with a characteristic economy in short chapters and scenes. His juxtaposed “texts” in the book often represent various forms of modern communication, reflecting the apparatus of officialdom and satirizing its unwitting opacity and ironies. The opening and closing scenes are Menippean dialogues between the Buddha (who will be represented on earth ultimately by one of the sparring Dalai Lamas), the Archangel Michael, and the

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Devil, in which Menen lampoons the notion of sacred utterance by imposing a casual tone. The Buddha subtly manipulates his Christian visitor with a show of hospitality: “The Buddha took a bag of dates and a bottle from behind the tree, which now glowed a tranquil blue. ‘Have something to eat and drink.’” 41 A version of a symposium ensues, as Menen portrays conflicting spiritual views in a surprisingly satiric manner; dialogue between spiritual avatars seems to mirror the testy ebb and flow of earthly diplomatic negotiating forums like the United Nations (which features in subsequent chapters) rather than a realm of omniscient, enlightened authority. Sometimes the Buddha and the Devil appear to be surprisingly chummy, exchanging confidences. This undermining of who is “other” is a satirical theme throughout the comic narrative. The Devil, though a “he” in his conversations with the Buddha, discloses that “I incline rather to the feminine side,” making him more a figure of flickering ambiguities than fixed immoralities. 42 The Devil is also a model of the gender fluidity that reaches a crux when the two main characters take center stage, because there are two competing Lamas from two sparring political camps: a female lama, SheLa, short for “She Lama,” was chosen by the refugee Free Tibetans; her male counterpart, HeLa, was selected by the Soviets. 43 They debate the Gautama Buddha when he appears before each to gauge their respective qualifications. When the Lamas fall inevitably in love, or in teen lust at any rate, the Devil is delighted to note dryly the decline of elevated Buddhist “austerities.” 44 Confusion escalates over gender roles with SheLa’s admission that she hid her identity and wore boy’s clothing in order to study with the refugee Tibetan priests: “I’ve been both a boy and a girl. Most women spend their lives seeing nothing beyond the ends of their noses reflected in the dressing-table mirror. I can see all round the question.” 45 As the escalating Lama debate encompasses the globe, various female political leaders thwart traditionalist expectations, to the discomfit of their male counterparts: “It was well known that the East was rapidly adopting Western ways. It was also well known that Western ways often did not seem the same when they had been adopted.” 46 There is the suggestion that gender roles are both fluid and self-determined, and importantly, all equally productive of intellectual perspectives and insights. The notion of a merged East-West, female-male Lama disintegrates, but not before it briefly reflects an optimistic, unifying hybridity. Resolution is paradoxical and ironic, as when SheLa goes from being an Eastern commodity to one who trades in the exotic, eventually finding work in a New York City shop “just off Fifth Avenue, where she designs and sells Oriental trinkets.” 47

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From jostling sacred figures of major world religions, Menen moves in SheLa to the inadequacies and comic absurdities of nationalism, and its attendant officialdom, and the ridiculous mores of a pseudo-bureaucracy. The scope of SheLa is casually global, with scenes unpredictably skipping from the lamas, to the United Nations, to the Buddha, and to scenes of real and imagined national governments and their officials. There is a quality in the text that reflects a 1960s-era thrill at the level of collective global awareness that could represent “modernity,” wherein media like television and news publications merge the globe into a closer timeframe and view, and one could imagine the entire world actually engaged in a shared synchronous conversation about a major current event or looming scandal. One satiric target is the way that sanctioned communication between world leaders often rests upon the vicissitudes of translation. The encounter between the Russian Ambassador to the US and the American President reveals the degree to which they share a dependence on the successful “spin” of such a meeting in their home press and home offices; “official” communication is more about appearance than what is actually conveyed. A scene set in the United Patriotic Independent Fan Republic in West Africa introduces a critique of African self-determinism and satirizes a system that embeds expectations of corruption. President Mpongwe of Fan counsels M’bo, his new representative to the United Nations, where all nations will discuss the dual Dalai Lamas and their politically-conflicting axes of support.

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“What do you know about Tibetan Religious Affairs, M’bo?” “Absolutely nothing, sir.” “Excellent. Try to stay that way. It’s the great secret of being a successful neutral.” 48

Meanwhile the nascent country is struggling to survive: “Um,” said the President. “And just between you and me and the gatepost, if some colonialism doesn’t come our way pretty damn quick, I won’t be able to pay the army—and both of us will be out of a job.” 49 Fan’s national “higher policy,” it would seem, apparently welcomes conflicting binaries that destabilize logic and actual economy in the struggling country. In addition to the simultaneous welcome and rejection of colonial interferences, the President maintains cannibalistic “shock troops” to protect himself from his main Fan rival (a defense referred to as the dread “gastronomic shield”) while rejecting any mention of such measures in official statements, because this would undermine the performance of improved African “civilization.” Meanwhile in Fan the rogue Colonel O’Shaugnessy is allowed to roam the state shooting at Protestant ex-colonials for sport. The excesses then

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brim over more. The Devil reports to the Buddha that the Colonel “went on to shoot Mpongwe. Then he took over the Fan Republic and is now setting up a black Empire in Africa. M’bo is his Minister of State for African Unity. So many Irishmen are emigrating there that it is being called the first Irish empire.” 50 The Devil’s summary serves to demolish simultaneously certitudes of race, politics, and geography in the Fan Republic, as white Catholic colonials establish a titular black domain under a political banner that misapplies any conventional notion of “African unity.”

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Once again Menen destabilizes the basis for viewing “the other,” this time through a satiric conflation of extremely negative colonial roles. His context, though, is arguably one that is tainted with racist stereotyping, with his blithe but negative depiction of naïve, cannibalistic Africans unable to steer justly towards nationhood, and the drunken, out-of-control, murderous Catholic Irishman motivated purely by violent religious antipathy for Protestants. One must weigh carefully if Joan Acocella’s defense of Evelyn Waugh’s racist stereotyping obtains here in Menen’s work as well: “In [Waugh’s] Black Mischief the Europeans, the would-be bringers of civilization, are satirized much more wickedly—and much more pointedly, in moral terms—than the Africans.” 51 In Menen’s scheme, it may be arguable that there is equivalence in satiric attack established by a Menippean structure of juxtaposition, and that an ultimately dehumanizing colonial system is Menen’s most central target. In The Prevalence of Witches (1948), Menen plays with the celebration of primitivism and the mythological purities of nativism, within the setting of Limbo, a fictional aboriginal state in India during British colonial rule, in an unspoiled jungle of picturesque bamboo. This is possibly the most autobiographical of Menen’s novels, as it draws on his own past tenure as a colonial official in British India. As Frank Palmeri has noted, “satirists discover in the past an image of pristine integrity, in relation to which their contemporary situation signifies a falling off into ambiguity and doubleness.” 52 The apparent integrity of the past does go somewhat unchallenged as Menen suggests shifting or even fluid binaries of civilization and savagery, of order and disorder, in the colonial present: Once a year one Englishman visits Limbo, surrounded by clouds of insecticide through which can just be discovered the Union Jack. During this visit, Limbo is a part of the British Empire in India. When the Englishman has gone, various Chiefs of Limbo, sighing with relief, take off their trousers and go hunting again with their bows and arrows, [and] the mosquitoes come cautiously out to bury their dead. 53

The unnamed narrator’s ironic tone punctures some of the gravity of his colonial mission when he states, “I always wanted to possess a country of

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my own,” 54 and Menen maintains this mischievous stance towards colonial hegemony throughout. Limbo is also a microcosm for corruption on a larger scale, and this notion prompts a comparison of two belief and value systems, one colonial and one native, viewed as competing and, surprisingly to the novel’s colonial representatives, worthy of comparison. Mohamed Elias has emphasized that the novel’s plot highlights a sort of bridge to commonality of belief systems, borne out of humanistic sympathy; the main characters are “three westerners who sympathize with a tribesman in his superstition that witches were responsible for making him murder his wife’s lover.” 55 But there are also shades of Desani’s excoriation of religious frauds. Menen has noted elsewhere, pondering the sheer irony of a nation possessing a spiritual export, that “[a]ll countries have their religious absurdities, but India has had more than most—so many, in fact, that she has consistently exported them in the shape of swamis.” 56 There are also hints of nascent subaltern themes in the space the text gives to narratives from the natives’ religion, as when the tribal Headman explains their practice of witchcraft. As a prisoner, he is briefly in literal subjugation to imperial rule, but he quickly absorbs a lesson in the power of narrative in colonial discourse, specifically in how to structure a story to manipulate an audience:

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The story he had come to tell would have been quickly understood by his villagers, thick-skinned, rough and naked as they were. . . . He made up his mind to soften it. Not to tell lies (which he could not do, for the Limbodians do not tell lies as everyone knows), but to make it something that might have happened to these dressed and sensitive people, an act that one of their friends might well have done. 57

The Headman alters his story for the perceived weaknesses of his audience, subsequently enacting, to apply Barbara Fuchs’s phrase, “an active, aggressive imitation” 58 of his colonial captors when they repeatedly query his tale: “This time the question was so exactly that of a child that the headman smiled down at Catullus, waggled his finger and said: ‘You must not ask so many questions.’” 59 His simple gesture suggests the subversions both of satiric mockery and of the mirroring, “deliberate imitation” 60 which manages to vex several colonial binaries simultaneously with regard to active-passive, parent-child, speaker-listener, metropolitan-primitive. As one notes in Irwin Allan Sealy’s work as well, the position of the subaltern is memorably acknowledged but utterly unresolved. But the textual disruptions that are achieved via conflicting Menippean juxtapositions nonetheless work on a thematic level to deflect totalizing premises, so that what dominates the text are the ironies and absurdities of these apparently fixed binaries.

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Elias has noted Menen’s repeated emphasis that “the next step from religious perversion” is a rapid procession to the “social exploitation” of those deemed inferior, outcast or extraneous. 61 Faced with the expectation of imposing an imperial justice system, Menen’s colonial emissaries eventually wish to validate the beliefs of the aboriginal population. The central philosophical focus of Prevalence rests upon some of the points raised by Abdul R. JanMohamed’s investigations into the processes by which colonial discourse polarizes the cultures of the colonized and the colonizers into opposed categories. Catullus’s friend, Bay, another comically voluble Englishman, declares: “I am a Manichee….” “What do Manichees believe?” I asked him. “That there is an equal amount of good and an equal amount of evil in the world,” he answered, “and that the forces of one are as strong as the forces of the other.” 62

JanMohamed has drawn out some of the ways in which: [w]hile the surface of each colonialist text purports to represent specific encounters with specific varieties of the racial Other, the subtext valorizes the superiority of European cultures, of the collective process that has mediated that representation . . . instead of seeing the native as a bridge toward syncretic possibility, it uses him as a mirror that reflects the colonialist’s self-image. 63

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One can see this to a degree in various exchanges in Limbo between colonial officers and colonial subjects, but with hints of future possible cultural syncretisms, as when Catullus hosts a formal reception for the colonial officials, and the uninvited villagers play a surprising role. After dinner we moved out into the compound that surrounded the bungalow. It appeared to be an enormous, unlit ballroom, with a circle of black walls that in the daytime was the edge of the jungle, and a domed roof of translucent slate grey, pierced here and there, in the manner of ballrooms, with imitation stars. 64

The outside yard could be read as a pool of civility, edged by the unruliness and chaos of the jungle. However, one can see how Menen emphasizes instead the ironic gestural and performative aspects of this space and of this episode as an instance of enacted imperial hegemony. The ceremonial of the English dinner was none of our choosing. One observes it, in the jungle, to please the inhabitants, with whom it takes the place of the cinema. Or rather of the ballet, because they stand outside in the compound, invisible in the shadows, watching every move; and any omission of the classic steps in the performance will be widely discussed and generally disapproved. 65

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while at the same time restricting the level of exchange to an observed show, with the local people coming to watch the “performance” of colonial “culture.” A different possibility of cultural exchange is enacted when Catullus’s wife, Winifred, is exiled from India as a malign witch by instigation of the native population. In the context of postcolonial Manichean allegory, Winifred’s disdain for native beliefs marks her as an agent of evil, and the Limbodians observe her disregard for their culture with mounting horror. Catullus explains some of their grave charges against Winifred to the narrator: …she had pulled to pieces a garland so as to dissipate the good magic of a kindly gift; item the last: she had used for domestic purposes a jar dedicated to holding food for the tiger-god, and clearly marked on the outside with tigers to show what it was used for. The witch-doctor said he could hold the Limbodians back just so far, but he couldn’t say what they would do if provoked. 66

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Against Winifred’s expectation of colonial power as the enactment of unchallenged authority, Limbodian terms of social and cultural “good” overrule that power. The Headman’s success and Winifred’s abject departure underscore an insight by Kristin Carter-Sanborn about the subject position of the colonial. Carter-Sanborn points out that sometimes, empowered by making a significant intervention, the colonial “discriminated subject, incompletely contained by the power and paranoid knowledge invested in its constitution, participates in, confronts, and unsettles that very power.” 67 Menen’s characters reinforce the endurance and enduring value of cultural expression in the face of threats. Further exploration of some of these conflicts and ambiguities borne of power inequities becomes the central element of Menen’s retelling of the Vedic epic in The Ramayana “as told by Aubrey Menen” (1954; published as Ramayana Retold in England). In many ways this text provides a space for the author to construct an unexpected satiric persona in the overt placing of his own voice (“as told by”) in the creation of the text and revision of the narrative. Working on a more subtle level is his reformulation or updating of a narrative in ways that query the sacredness of a source. The central characters are all present, but Menen weaves into the story of Rama, Laxman, Sita, and Ravan a critique of widespread social and economic inequalities as entrenched in present-day Indian society. His introduction contains strong parallels with depictions of postcolonial literary projects, as Menen explains his drive to reclaim a miswritten past. 68 The most striking feature may be his explication of the role of the writer as an outlaw genius, as Menen draws parallels between his own motivations to reclaim the Ramayana narrative, and the loss of the voice of the original

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scribe, Valmiki, through successions of inadequate, or misguided, agenda-driven translations of the original work. Both well-intentioned and sloppy cultural appropriations have occurred via a history of translations, and Menen clearly identifies with the subject position of the sacred scribe. The entire enterprise may be said to be Menippean, as Menen’s rewriting adds a satiric tone of voice and also overtly juxtaposes the original and the new versions. Menen embeds a modern proto-feminist agenda as well, siding with Sita as the undoubted “heroine” and empathizing with other Hindu wives in the text. 69 Menen’s proto-feminist stance, which exposes oppressions of Hindu women, contributed to its notoriety upon publication and got the text banned for many years in India. 70 Sita, though, is described by Menen in the course of his rewriting only as “unremarkable” and “a simple soul.” 71 She is central to the plot but not the center of the narrative energy of his articulation of the tale. The principal figure is clearly Rama, who is presented as loving and devoted to Sita and towards his duty, but by contrast is provocatively introduced in a paragraph that fairly throbs with homoerotic detail.

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His skin was golden brown and gleamed with the movements of the muscles beneath. His torso, naked save for the strap that bore his quiver, was heavy-shouldered and greatly narrowed at the waist, in the manner most admired among Indians. The pleated cloth around his hips curved over buttocks that were something womanish, a sign in his race of high breeding. It fell halfway down his thighs, which were strong and spare. His feet were now shod with country sandals, made of the hide of a deer. He wore no ornaments, so that nothing beguiled the eye from the astonishing beauty of his face. 72

The most important relationships in this retold Ramayana are between men: the brothers Rama and Laxman, and Rama with the poet, Valmiki. The parting of the latter pair concludes the narrative, with Rama asserting his affection for the saintly scribe and positing the question, “[I]n your way of looking at the world is there anything you believe is real?” 73 Valmiki responds with a fitting summary for a satirical work: “Certainly, Rama. There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.” 74 The laughter that is the final “real” thing can be construed as satirical laughter, as the retelling of this foundational narrative ends with a paradoxical affirmation of the illusory quality of the world. For either a Western or Eastern reading audience there is irony in Menen’s satirical undercutting of the values the narrative is meant to enshrine, and as with most of his writing, one is left with a sense of its constructedness. The secret that has been finally revealed comprises the constituent elements of satire: human belief and folly registered in satire’s laughter.

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MENIPPEAN METHODS Menen makes use of many Menippean methods in his works to establish counter-realist elements in a satiric context. Milowicki and Wilson note that Menippean satire often refers to classical figures and uses them to mock heroic pretensions. 75 Menen often indicates his Menippean models in the course of his deflationary practices. In The Fig Tree, a novel satirizing priggish attitudes towards modern sexuality, Menen draws attention to his Menippean model overtly: “I came across a book called PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM, or The BANQUET. . .and one thing I was sure of, Greeks or not, nobody ever talked as these characters talked over a table.” 76 In Prevalence one might read “colonial” for the mocking of “heroic” pretensions and look to Catullus, a central character who is a loquacious version of the Roman poet by the same name. 77 The Roman Catullus is a symposium figure who mocks hollow rhetoric; he “ferrets out, highlights, and exaggerates as a fun-house mirror might, the ugliness in others” in the terms of Milowicki and Wilson. 78 The classic Catullus is consistently the instrument for metaphors that pinpoint the colonial mentality, and he is likewise the channel for discussions of bodies and consumption.

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Menen’s Catullus, the British Civil Service Administrator of Limbo and thus its highest local colonial official, is a vehicle for the critique of some of the ironies of empire’s authority. Menen has already established colonialism’s exercise of control via the written word. The narrator observes that: Nothing could be done properly in government unless one took notes, made a file, and passed it on for others to make notes: nothing was real, not even the man who stood now in front of the desk with sweat on his bare body, licking his lips, unless it was described in one of the dirty, crumpled bundles of paper that lay in confusion to the right and left of the desk like midden heaps. 79

Colonial “order” apparently creates its own reality, one which by mere description is absurd, and thus readily satirized. The business of empire is obscured in the exercise of busy-ness, and the text makes apparent the artificial constructedness of the imperial exercise. This is further borne out in the endless bureaucracy which binds and limits the narrator. But real power, Catullus voices, is established through control of language: I often wonder what sort of meanly wicked men made these treaties for England with their quibbles and tricks. We got an uncomfortably large slice of our Empire not by being good soldiers but by being quick at languages. First we sent the missionaries to make grammars and translations of the Bible, then we sent the Civil Servant to use the grammars

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Chapter 3 to write out treaties. The Americans got the Red Indians drunk on gin: we got our Indians fuddled with words. 80

But Menen also reveals rupture in the dominance of language. His Catullus is a comic model of prolixity who is possessed by language; his speech spews in a torrent of uncontrolled verbosity. His utterance overwhelms both him and his audience: “even at the age of fifty, as he was now, his conversation, though of surpassing interest, was still dictated, as it were, to an invisible stenographer who had set herself to break the world’s record in her profession.” 81 The narrator details the intercession necessary to render Catullus, a voice of empire, intelligible: “One listened to Catullus with both hands full of commas and full-stops, and one scattered them into the flood as it poured over you.” 82 It’s an image of comic intervention that also describes language as an unstoppable and uncontrollable force, and serves to cast Catullus as a version of a Menippean grotesque. Indeed, Catullus’s subject position as somehow a victim of language’s essential controlling power undermines his very agency.

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Other destabilizations emanate from manipulations of linguistic power. The unnamed narrator is the newly-installed Colonial Administration Education Officer of Limbo, who promises immediately to build schools for the native children, and he explains this goal to the aboriginal Chief. The Chief already has specific expectations of the proposed schools, though, which demonstrates his understanding of the relationship of language and power in Empire. The Chief asserts that he does not need to have his children educated in finance or the use of tools. The narrator is perplexed, and Catullus intervenes. “Then what do you want them taught?” Catullus shouted. The old man continued to grin for a while, nodding his head to show that he had heard and did not need the question repeated. “English,” he said, “to be able to deal with you.” 83

The Chief clearly comprehends this particular binary of colonial control, but his reply also indicates the potential for an aggressive mimesis that suggests the “deliberate performance of sameness that . . . threatens, or . . . modifies, the original.” 84 All it would take are the promised colonial schools as devices to achieve this: power delivered through language, only in a context aimed at undermining “both hierarchies and differences.” 85 It may be a bit of fantasy regarding the colonial subject’s manipulation and usurpation of imperial authority, but it is squarely a Menippean example of carnivalesque transgression. But Menen has one more sally to render regarding the power of language. At the conclusion of his conversation with the narrator and Catullus, the Chief calmly returns to the circle of his courtiers.

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The Chief turned his head from side to side, looking straight into each courtier’s face to see if they were laughing at his wit. Then, satisfied that he was properly appreciated, he went stone deaf again, and would hear nothing that was said to him. This way he brought the audience to an end, and when Catullus and I turned to go it was quite clear that we had been dismissed from his presence. 86

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The Chief’s final assault is to counter linguistic supremacy with the implicit power of silence. Menen achieves a shifting juxtaposition of high and low here which upsets certain assumptions about the locus of power and control. Elsewhere the Menippean destabilization occurs through textual juxtaposition. In SheLa: A Satire Menen inserts footnotes into the text which appear to establish a plausible historical context for his novel, a Menippean tactic in that it alters textual register. In one note Menen identifies the name of an individual mentioned in passing as an actual historical figure. As the character Mpongwe waxes nostalgic about his days at the London School of Economics, the footnote gives brief biographical information about a popular, and apparently credible, “Professor Harold J. Laski (1880-1948),” who instructed Mpongwe in political theory. 87 The other footnote gives explanatory background about the two main American political parties, and mentions President J. F. Kennedy, as background to a fictional “special election” in New Jersey which is distracting the attention of the fictional American President in Menen’s work when the global Dalai Lama “crisis” erupts. 88 In a work of exaggerations and mockery, with fictional accounts of the activities of identifiable, but generic, historical figures (the US President, the Foreign Minister of Communist China, etc.), the references to credible, verifiable history jar with Menen’s manufactured world, foregrounding the conflicting binary of artifice and history. It is a strategy that is implemented on a much larger scale in the satiric work of G. V. Desani; here it operates on the more minor but still effective level of introducing confusion about the intended register of the author’s assault on mimetic reality. The central narrative of the two Dalai Lamas serves to ground another Menippean textual disruption. We learn that the Buddha’s criterion for backing one of the Lamas hinges on which one supports his intense moral distaste for scientific research into unlocking the codes of DNA and RNA. In an Afterword to the book, Menen includes an entire N.Y. Times article with a distinctly alarmist tone regarding the state of current genetics research (dated 15 January 1962). The quoted scientists warn that research will shortly afford the means to manipulate lives, diseases, and minds. 89 Aside from the disjointedness of realism abruptly used to counter the fantastic, the serious article following Menen’s light-hearted narrative further establishes the Menippean mix of low and high. It highlights elements of philosophical debate embodied in individual charac-

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ters, the (more stylized) fictional scientists and political leaders lacking the humanity and vulnerabilities of the teen Lamas. And it allows fiction to resolve as ostensible debate, with issues of the moralities of medical research taking precedence over narrative closure. The Prevalence of Witches resolves with Limbo’s aboriginal-based order reasserted, but there is still a troubled sense around control of the Limbodian narrative. The removal of the imperious Winifred concludes satisfactorily the episodes of the dissected garland and the unappeased tigergod. But a final twist sets in motion again the conflict over language as the locus of local power. Towards the conclusion the character Bay plots to augment the extant Limbodian communal, oral historical narrative. I heard the Swami say to Bay, “Well, we’ve made history in Limbo.” “Contemporary history,” answered Bay in a dissatisfied voice. “Now what is needed is for us to give a past history to Limbo. . . . I have been making some notes…of the first and rather eccentric King of the Limbodians that I have invented.” 90

The text ends with the discourse still underway: “He went on talking,” the narrator relates to Catullus, “but he was too far away for me to hear what he said.” 91 The unsettled narrative’s refusal of closure embeds ambiguities about the ethos of imposing an originary narrative on an extant culture, about the fictionality of colonial accounts, and about the elusiveness of realist discourse. The conclusion asserts a Menippean sense of heuristic play about the way a narrative, even one intended as historical, may be constructed.

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THE WIT OF AUBREY MENEN As one will have gathered from the excerpts shared thus far, Menen’s work is indisputably clever. Wit enables Menen to exhibit elements of the construction and inevitability of a hybrid identity. Menen’s wit deflects expectations of idealism and realism which might counter the effectiveness of Menen’s epistemological concerns and revelations. Wit becomes the decisive method of discursive exposure and of self-exposure. Menen, for instance, allows his own recollected physical body to become the site of satirical discourse in an episode he recalls from school: “I was set to read aloud to the class the adventures of Kim, my colouring adding drama to the recital.” 92 Wit provides a method for navigating some of the ironies of racial and ethnic identifications and stereotypes. In “My Grandmother and the Dirty English,” his Nayar grandmother exhibits distaste for English domestic habits which she finds inferior to her own, specifically because “she felt she was borne of a superior race and she had all the marks of it [.…] she would laugh to herself, while my uncle

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translated; not an unkind laugh, but a pitying one, as she thought of the backwardness of the white man’s bathroom.” 93 In The Space Within the Heart Menen records a spiritual retreat undertaken in his barren Roman rooms, where he lives on sparse meals, meditates and reads for a month, surveying the elements which make up his sense of self. To probe his inner being is “like peeling an onion of all its layers.” 94 When he judges he has reached his center, what he terms “the Tranquil Eye,” he again marks his observations in terms of witty assessment which also affords a distance from his subject: The Tranquil Eye has seen an unforgettable sight. It has seen the whole of my life lying around it: and it was most comical. For it saw that my life had been the laborious construct of other people, some well-intentioned, some malign, some just interfering. It has been a life of emotion invented for me to feel. 95

The series of subjects Menen has to address to achieve the experience of actual disembodiment requires him to offer a catalogue that makes his physical self only more apparent and present. He recounts the experiences that have shaped his awareness of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, referencing both influential individuals and texts.

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I persuaded my English master to lend me more books on psychoanalysis which I devoured because I could identify myself so excitingly with some of the central characters. I did, at times, feel rather callow. I could not, for instance, remember being envious of my father’s penis. I could not recall ever having seen it. But my self-esteem was greatly restored when I discovered that, like as not, I would be a homosexual. This put me immediately in the company of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and less encouragingly, Oscar Wilde. 96

Menen seems determined in this text to embrace incongruity and the illfitting pieces of one’s past. He alludes to past lovers both male and female, to a humble young man who seeks his sexual counsel, and to his mother who made inappropriately amorous gestures towards him as a teen. In some cases he relays painful memories and then establishes a sense of detachment via withering, sardonic language. And he challenges readers to support his stance that sexual experimentation and fluidity are normal aspects of a human life: “other times, other customs, you may say, but if you do you will be missing a most striking corollary.” 97 CONCLUSION The work of Aubrey Menen is reliably witty; it is clever, arch and wry in tone, always entertaining, and by design very literary—it is intertextual, bold in topic, global in scope. His sharp insights into how culture is performed and history authored remain both relevant and instructive,

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and his singularly frank voice continues to reward attention and study. Critical consideration of his writing endorses that Menen’s is a voice for social and cultural justice, and for the marginal and ignored. Like G. V. Desani, Menen opted at times, despite significant external affirmation of the value of his literary work, to withdraw from literary and social interactions to develop in more focused, spiritual directions. The foregrounding in Menen’s writing of the satiric constructedness of his life, and the way he sees the intertextualities of his life’s narrative, ironically makes available the necessary prompt for Menen’s occasional choice of an elected isolation for himself: I have only to remember this, and I am the Tranquil Eye again, looking out like some objectively-minded goldfish from its bowl. But there is no goldfish and no bowl. . . . There is, let me hasten to add, no ethereal blue light. There is, indeed, some sort of feeling, and it is much deeper than “I think, therefore I am.” Sometimes I described it to myself as a sort of disembodied laughter, but in doing so I was merely a writer making a phrase about something which no phrase can describe. 98

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The Menippean motif of text and satire cast here as literariness and laughter may serve best to sum up the register of Menen’s work and its postcolonial contexts. Where Desani revamps form and stamps language with ferocious originality, Menen sets up erudite textual discussions of literary juxtapositions and influences. The constructed authorial identity which emerges from his highly narrated fictions and essays is predicated on wit as a mode of qualification and explication, and Menen’s work is profoundly Menippean for this. Aubrey Menen also deserves greater critical attention as a queer literary forerunner for his open stance as a homosexual writer, and his explorations of biracial identity as a continued challenge to the way societies privilege unified and fixed constructions of race. He modelled a willingness, both subversive and brash, to explore in his writing the elements which comprised his identity and what that meant beyond his own initial understanding. His most personal experiences were never off-limits as literary material, in an era which saw few writers emulate this path. And that element of wit, his ability to articulate the cleverest observations in the most stylish of manners, figures significantly; much of Menen’s subject matter was directed ultimately towards the construction of his singular satiric stance and voice. NOTES 1. Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” Poetics Today 23, no. 2 (2002): 293.

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2. There is at least an echo of Waugh’s world, where he and his same-named wife were known as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn, in the names of He-La and She-La in Menen’s SheLa: a satire. Waugh (1903–66) and Menen each became Catholic converts as adults. 3. Garry Sherbert, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 4. 4. Aubrey Menen, Dead Man in the Silver Market (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 8–9. 5. Menen dedicated The Stumbling Stone (1949), for example, as follows: “My Dear Philip Dallas, This is the story of Colley Burton’s Return which you asked for and which you helped me write, day by day, chapter by chapter, and in every part of it save this letter. Thank you. A.M.” 6. Aubrey Menen, SheLa: A Satire (New York: Random House, 1962), 173. 7. Orville Prescott, “Outstanding Novels,” The Yale Review 37, no. 2 (1948): 765. 8. John Woodburn, “Passports to India,” The New Republic (19 April 1948): 24. 9. “Sex—Now the Deluge,” review of The Fig Tree by Aubrey Menen, Newsweek (9 March 1951): 115. 10. Bruce King, The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 37. 11. Margaret Wimsatt, “Aubrey Menen’s Interior World,” review of The Space Within the Heart, The Yale Review 60 (1970): 138. 12. Wimsatt, “Aubrey Menen’s Interior World,” 142. 13. J. M. Lalley, “Man Without A Country,” Time (24 Aug. 1953): 83. 14. Wimsatt, “Aubrey Menen’s Interior World,” 139. 15. Lalley, “Man Without A Country,” 84. 16. Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 44. 17. Mohamed Elias, Aubrey Menen, Kerala Writers in English Series, Vol. 7 (Madras: Macmillan, 1985), 6. 18. Elias, Aubrey Menen, 6. 19. Elias, Aubrey Menen, 6. 20. Elias, Aubrey Menen, 2. This ensued after the publication by Time-Life of Menen’s successful volumes entitled London (1976) and Venice (1977). Menen was asked to submit a manuscript about a city of his own choice (2). 21. Elias, Aubrey Menen, 7. 22. Mary Jane Hurst, “Reintroducing Aubrey Menen: A Satiric Post-Colonial Author,” World Literature Written in English 33–34, nos. 1–2 (1993–4): 132. 23. Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism,” Kunapipi 9, no. 3 (1987), 172, quoted in Hurst, “Reintroducing Aubrey Menen,” 140. 24. Sherbert, Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit, 17–8. 25. Nasta, Home Truths, 22. 26. I am borrowing Susheila Nasta’s term here (Home Truths, 44). 27. Nasta, Home Truths, 29. 28. Hurst, “Reintroducing Aubrey Menen,” 129; 132–3. 29. Nasta, Home Truths, 45. 30. Nasta, Home Truths, 46. 31. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” Canadian Literature 116, (1988), 411. 32. Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” 411. 33. Highet, Anatomy of Satire, 190. 34. Nasta, Home Truths, 48. 35. Aubrey Menen, The Space Within the Heart (New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1970), 128. 36. Menen, Dead Man in the Silver Market, 35. 37. Menen, Dead Man in the Silver Market, 56. 38. Menen, Dead Man in the Silver Market, 100.

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39. Aubrey Menen, The Backward Bride: A Sicilian Scherzo (London: Chatto and Windus, 1950), 239. 40. Menen, The Backward Bride: A Sicilian Scherzo, 240. 41. Aubrey Menen, SheLa: A Satire (New York: Random House, 1962), 6. 42. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 16. 43. Life may follow art if current political predictions are correct; as the current Dalai Lama contemplates finding his successor amongst global Tibetans, the Chinese government has intimated that the next reincarnation will have to come from within China. There could actually be, in the immediate future, two official Dalai Lamas. 44. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 19. 45. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 69. 46. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 92. 47. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 159. 48. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 112. 49. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 112. 50. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 160. 51. Joan Acocella, “Waugh Stories,” The New Yorker (2 July 2007): 69. 52. Frank Palmeri, Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 1. 53. Menen, The Prevalence of Witches, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 9. All excerpts in this chapter from The Prevalence of Witches by Aubrey Menen are used by permission of Penguin, India. All rights reserved. 54. Menen, The Prevalence of Witches, 9. 55. Elias, Aubrey Menen, 4. 56. Aubrey Menen, “The Way The New India Thinks,” Atlantic Monthly 196 (1955): 45. 57. Menen, The Prevalence of Witches, 51–2. 58. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5. 59. Menen, Prevalence, 55. 60. Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 6. 61. Elias, Aubrey Menen, 8. 62. Menen, Prevalence, 78–9. 63. Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 60. 64. Menen, Prevalence, 71. 65. Menen, Prevalence, 69. 66. Menen, Prevalence, 249. 67. Kristin Carter-Sanborn, “‘We Murder Who We Were’: Jasmine and the Violence of Identity,” American Literature 66, no. 3 (1994): 581. 68. Menen, The Ramayana, As Told by Aubrey Menen (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), 5. 69. Menen, Ramayana, 69. 70. It was Menen’s approach to repositioning Sita in the narrative that earned the banning of the text in India by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1956. 71. Menen, Ramayana, 69–70. 72. Menen, Ramayana, 83. 73. Menen, Ramayana, 275. 74. Menen, Ramayana, 276. 75. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse,” 295. 76. Menen, The Fig Tree, 98. 77. Gaius Valerius Catullus (87–54? BCE) has a few notable similarities with Menen’s character, Catullus: at about age 30 the historical Catullus accompanied a friend who had an administrative position in Bithynia, Asia, and, suggestive of Menen’s satirical context, in death left behind “a host of stinging epigrammatic attacks on his personal enemies” (William Rose Benet, “Catullus, Gaius Valerius,” Benet’s Reader’s

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Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 168, General OneFile). He seems to have managed a lifestyle of Epicurean luxuries despite the demands of some governmental work. It is probably just coincidence, but Thornton Wilder’s novel about the historical Catullus, Ides of March, was published in 1948, the year after Prevalence. 78. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse,” 295. 79. Menen, Prevalence, 50. 80. Menen, Prevalence, 36. 81. Menen, Prevalence, 11. 82. Menen, Prevalence, 12. 83. Menen, Prevalence, 39. 84. Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 5. 85. Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire, 5. 86. Menen, Prevalence, 39–40. 87. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 108. 88. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 29. 89. Menen, SheLa: A Satire, 171. 90. Menen, Prevalence, 250. 91. Menen, Prevalence, 250. 92. Menen, Dead Man in the Silver Market, 15. 93. Menen, Dead Man In The Silver Market, 33. 94. Menen, The Space Within the Heart, 10–11. 95. Menen, The Space Within the Heart, 12. 96. Menen, The Space Within the Heart, 66. 97. Menen, The Space Within the Heart, 20. 98. Menen, The Space Within the Heart, 12.

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FOUR

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Salman Rushdie’s Menippean Strategies of Language

For the Menippeanly inclined reader, Salman Rushdie’s novels have always been crammed with clues pointing towards his fascination with the Menippean tradition. But the trend bursts through the narrative surface when a character in The Golden House (2017) relays that, in order to fathom other characters, he “studied Menippean satire.” 1 Such a statement is rather encouraging for my basic premise that the Menippean mode best describes and illuminates some of the counter-realist elements in Rushdie’s novels, from Shame and Midnight’s Children onward. As Eric McLuhan notes in Cynic Satire, “It is Menippean to allude to Menippean satire.” 2 The survey of work examined in this chapter shows Rushdie’s increasing tendency to make overt references to classical Menippean sources and figures in works which explore satiric literary subversions, a pattern which announces itself dramatically by the time he writes about Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus and satyr plays in The Golden House. Of his many novels which have been read as exemplars of contemporary counter-realist fiction, Rushdie nonetheless asserts in his essay collection, Imaginary Homelands: “There is a genuine need for political fiction, for books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world.” 3 Rushdie’s work also demonstrates the tradition enunciated by the Sufi poet Jalal-al-Din Rumi, in his lengthy work Masnavi about Sufi precepts, quoted in Hasan Javadi’s study, Satire in Persian Literature: “Hazl (satire) is education; take it seriously,/And do not be deceived by its outward form.” 4 Many critics have acknowledged Rushdie’s work as satirical, and some of his experiments with formal features of Menippean satire in individual works have been acknowledged, most extensively by John Clement Ball. 5 As Robert C. Elliot notes of the Menippean Petronius, “[he] manages brilliantly to 109

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capture the accent and intonation of the speaker himself. The rhythm of the speech, the syntax, the vocabulary—all bespeak the amiable vulgarian who is part of what he describes.” 6 I focus here on a wide range of Rushdie’s work, looking at how Menippean satire is often rooted in his novels’ language and diction, in what Anshuman A. Mondal has called “Rushdie’s mischievous inventiveness with language.” 7 A core element of this chapter is a focus on Rushdie’s central use of ekphrasis, the dramatic description of one medium of art using another, as in a poet describing a Grecian urn, or a novelist describing the creation and subject matter of a painting, the latter a frequent occurrence in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), for example. 8 This rhetorical device encompasses literary descriptions of the mental processes of artistic creation and even the description of wholly imaginary works of art as if they were real (sometimes called “notional ekphrasis”). In Rushdie’s inventive novelistic schema, and with his characteristic linguistic originality, he tends to focus on a specific art form (or two) with each novel. His depictions of artistic media as ekphrastic rhetorical elements have included cinema (in Midnight’s Children 1981), epic and folk narrative (in Shame 1983), religious literature and scripture 9 (in The Satanic Verses 1988), painting (in The Moor’s Last Sigh 1995), and popular music and photography (in The Ground Beneath Her Feet 1999). Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), framed as a children’s book, is a novel about the efficacies of intergenerational storytelling. The NYC-set novel Fury (2001) vaunts strong parallels and tributes to Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and embeds ekphrasis via the central character’s life as a puppet maker. 10 Rushdie’s often satiric and parodic pairings in literary narrative, via his descriptions and evocations employed to depict the cultural potential or the content of another art form, achieves some of the unsettling textual juxtapositions and dissonances characteristic of Menippean satire, its “mixed media,” and with it the consonant Menippean testing of boundaries, assumptions, and possibilities about artistic creation and even the role of the artist. In Rushdie’s novels, “different genres” quite literally “flow together…struggling in opposition to each other.” 11 The later novel, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), offers an ekphrastic presentation of the medium of oral storytelling recast in novelistic form, drawing on the Thousand and One Nights tradition. Two Years is connected to both the stories of Scheherazade told over the 1001 Arabian nights, and to the practice of telling and retelling those stories, as in Jorge Luis Borges’s essay, “The Thousand and One Nights,” which Borges originally presented as a lecture in 1980, and which iterates the futility of attempting to define East and West. Rushdie has been described as “creating” Borges as a “postcolonial precursor,” 12 and Two Years evokes a strong link to the ironic and counter-discursive prose of Borges and the oral delivery of his particular take on the 1001 nights; Borges stressed the cultural ubiquity of The Thousand and One

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Nights, “a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory.” 13 Both Borges and Rushdie, writing about the magical and transcendent qualities of storytelling, assert how layers of cultural influences undermine a concept of Western culture as somehow pure. Via the evolving tradition of retelling the 1001 stories, Borges says, “We see how marvelous the world is, and how inter-connected things are.” 14 Rushdie consistently employs ekphrasis in ways that augment satiric attack, via juxtapositions of artistic mediums that create space for consideration of both satire’s content and its methods across different media and genres. But this Menippean aspect of Rushdie’s counter-realism and experimentalism is not always registered as such. Instead Rushdie has sometimes been condemned for his inventive use of language, with erudite experiment misread as distracting intellectual play. James Bowman is one of the castigators, writing of The Moor’s Last Sigh that “it is hard not to come away with the sense that all this storytelling and linguistic invention is only for showing off and that Rushdie has written the book in order to demonstrate that he can write it.” 15 C. J. S. Wallia’s condemnation begins with The Satanic Verses and erupts again with The Ground Beneath Her Feet; in both texts Rushdie apparently “assails the reader with massive verbiage straining to be comic.” 16 Wallia objects particularly to “pontifical soliloquies on…art.” 17 Wallia’s main complaint appears to be satire’s tendency to undermine sensitive characterization through extravagant wit, for he narrows in on “the pervasive use of contrived, overly clever language and the lack of empathy-evoking characters” as “the besetting faults of much of Rushdie’s fiction.” 18 But a central emphasis on a variety of subject matter and on the targeting of ideas is precisely the elements which Northrop Frye, for example, cites as central to the Menippean model, where often one finds “characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and [which] presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent.” 19 In the political realm of postcolonial writing, satiric engagement through language (specifically the idea-laden, encyclopedic Menippean mode) is potentially going to introduce tensions of complicitous assumptions versus more-detached interpretation in a readership. The perceived implications of the authorial wielding of knowledge and information may transcend assumptions about novelistic elements such as “empathy,” and may also raise interesting questions about intended audience, exclusion and inclusion, and the political nature and biases of erudition. This chapter supports a reading of Rushdie in which Menippean juxtapositions assert redefined constituents of conceptual diversity, undercutting the assumptions that support generic and thus often cultural boundaries. Rushdie’s language and the worlds he shapes with it provide tools towards redefinition and positive modes of liberation and cultural inclusion, for otherwise, as Saladin Chamcha learns from the manticore

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in The Satanic Verses, the dominant narrative will continue to cast its rejects to the margins: “They describe us…They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.” 20 If this makes for “violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative,” as Frye sums up the impact of the Menippean mode, then so be it. 21 The brutality and anguish represented at times in Rushdie’s fiction, it may be argued, make clear the need for “violent dislocations.” John Clement Ball balances this in his observation that in Bakhtin’s Menippean satire “pluralism and festive carnival laughter represent signs of renewal, hope, and incipient democracy. Rushdie establishes such principles as working norms.” 22 Nonetheless, literature which is overtly political, historically oriented, and heavily structured by modes which feature exaggeration and extremes can be challenging to interpret; added to this is what Michael Wood lauds in Rushdie’s work as the counter-realist manner in which “Rushdie is demonstrating not the fictionality of fiction (or of reality) but the difficulty of telling where fiction begins and ends.” 23 As Rushdie’s narrator, Rai, muses on the most ancient roots of storytelling in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, these are “tales told not in plain language but adorned with every kind of extravagant embellishment and curlicue, flamboyant, filled with the love of pyrotechnics and display” and comprising “descriptions of contemporary morals and manners, punctuated by philosophical asides.” 24 But while an ancient bard may have “admit[ted] to the fictionality of his fiction,” Rai’s take is more problematic: “I continue to insist that what I tell you is true.” 25 The play with the boundaries of fictionality remains a central focus for Rushdie as he carefully mediates between method and intention: Quite often surrealism or whatever one would call it is used just as a piece of acrobatics, and then that’s all it is. And you think, “Oh shut the fuck up and tell me a story.” But the reason I do it is not fancy footwork. It’s because it seems to me to be a way of saying something that I hope is truthful. 26

Part of this perceived “fancy footwork” in his novels involves this integration of various other art forms into the narrative. The classical roots of ekphrasis dwell in artistic interests in ultimately augmenting one form via another; in describing other artworks and methods the artist aims to enlarge the scope of vision and comprehension, and also raises inevitable questions regarding how and what one sees and appreciates, and in what ways this is related to specific media. My proposition is that Rushdie reconstrues his subjects through these specific juxtapositions because he is able to introduce the perspective of the postcolonial artist assessing the roots, methods, and (sometimes vexing) implications of various art forms, their cultural and political connotations, and their impact on the boundaries of fictionality and representation.

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MAGIC REALISM IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S WORK

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In presenting readings of Salman Rushdie’s work in which counter-realism is attributed to a mode other than magic realism, one is rocking a fairly huge boat. Rushdie’s work is read widely as magic realist, and he is himself a significant icon in the world of magic realist art. 27 He is a perceived instigator of magic realist literature, uniting strands from Gabriel García Márquez and Günter Grass, acknowledging them magnanimously as sources of inspiration. He is sometimes credited with founding anti-realism in modern South Asian literature and, latterly, expanding it in postcolonial literature. There is an almost standard critical expectation that in each new novel, Rushdie will flaunt what critic Michiko Kakutani deems “his magician’s ability to fuse the mythic and the mundane, the surreal and the authentic, into a seamless whole.” 28 Giving credence to this line of expectation, Rushdie placed his own work (in 2005) firmly in the realm of “the non-realistic in literature—it comes down from Tristram Shandy, and through Rabelais, Cervantes, and Gogol. And this is a more questioning tradition, a tradition that does not take the world for granted. It says, we will make the world up in a certain way, in order to have a certain meaning.” 29 In a late 2017 interview, though, Rushdie places a caveat on his affiliation with magic realist writing; in conversation with Mark Lawson, Rushdie stresses: I just don’t like labels, I didn’t like Magic Realism as a label… I mean, I think Magic Realism as a label should be kept for those South Americans. That from the mid-50s to the mid-70s roughly speaking, it was a movement, they were talking to each other, they were like Picasso and Braque inventing Cubism. They were inventing a kind of writing which they felt suited their reality, and I think the term is best kept for that. But there are similar terms that have been used elsewhere in the world that describe the same thing really: French Surrealism, American Fabulism. It’s the same thing. And actually in the history of literature there has always been writing like this. 30

The specific politics of magic realism, the contingent critical discussions regarding its roots and its regionalism, and the aptness of its various perceived uses and/or appropriations, surface in the many extant discussions of Rushdie’s work. 31 No matter how his work is regarded, his writing is often placed somewhat automatically into the context of Western “high culture” which, according to Shailja Sharma, comprises “surrealism, magic realism, and European modernism.” 32 More than any other aspect of his work, it is the magic realist element that seems to split critics about how complicitous Rushdie is regarding the discourses and subjectivities he seeks to challenge and critique. When Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris declare that The Satanic Verses is “[t]he most controversial magical realist text of all,” 33 they are highlighting a conflict between

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the East-vs-West, post-fatwa controversies of the novel, and its original innovative and subversive content. 34 But their comment also encompasses the apparently unresolvable split between, to borrow from Andrew Teverson, the degree to which Rushdie is a reworker and reconstruer of Western imperial systems and approaches, or stuck with “postcolonialism as a political form that can only ever reply to, and revalidate, a colonialist center.” 35 Hence Stephanie Jones’s work to re-establish The Satanic Verses on its “organic local” levels of engagement, 36 although she does so strictly in terms of the clashes of cultures which Evelyn Fishburn identifies as definitive of magic realism. 37 An examination of Menippean satire opens a path towards an alternative model which moves beyond the expectations of resolution that these dissonances demand, stemming directly from Desani’s profoundly Menippean All About H. Hatterr: “What do you expect of a damme writer of words, anyway? Truth? Hell, you will get contrast, and no mistake!” 38 Ronald Blaber and Marvin Gilman’s observations on Desani in Roguery ring equally true of Rushdie:

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Whereas other writers are unable to use or contain the forces and potentialities of mixed-mode narratives…Desani achieves something rare in fiction. He maintains a dialogue between normative principles and structural openness to produce what might be termed a philosophical dialectic. Aware of the processes of production of new “language,” new ways of constructing the world, Desani shows a confidence to continue those processes, whereas other writers insist, for whatever reason, on arriving at a resolution. 39

Thus I am looking at the way Rushdie’s Menippean juxtapositions, and specifically ekphrastic textual representations of other art forms, initiate a reimagining of the limitations of representation that are bound up in demarcations between margin and center, and between ownership and appropriation. The implications of the counter-realist subversions which I am examining point to the possibility of disobedient, undermining, ribald, ridiculing, and imaginative re-readings which skew quoted texts (or in some cases, other art forms) by relocating them. In Ground, for example, Rushdie staffs a pirate radio ship off the coast of England with the postcolonial migrant and would-be pop singer–songwriter Ormus Cama, who is making the “journey from periphery to centre.” 40 Armed with only their music in their arsenal of political and cultural weaponry, “the pirates aim their sounds at Britain and the country surrenders.” 41 It’s a scene resonant with history, satirizing the threeminute “pop-ditty” as weaponry, but also nodding to postcoloniality and the workings of art to reshape culture and perspective in significant ways. Menippean satire is a means for a range of texts to be re-viewed through re-locations, and Rushdie emphasizes the postcolonial in how

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these new combinations reflect the conflicts of complex global relationships. 42 The focus of my reading is not on evaluating the relationship between Rushdie’s work and its “organic local” points of engagement via satire, 43 but it is useful to note how the specific modes of his writing come into focus when critical attention is paid to for whom Rushdie may be employing magic realism and/or satire. Shailja Sharma discerns a split in intended readership running throughout all of Rushdie’s work, based on the inclusion of these specific literary modes and techniques: “For his readers in the West, his dizzy stylistics, his use of myth, his pace of narration, and his magic realism are presumably more captivating. For his subcontinental readers, however, the text’s appeal lies not so much in the complex relationship between fantasy and history…but rather in its extended verbal and political satire.” 44 But to counter that stance regarding a divided audience for his work, Sadik J. Al-Azm finds instead a united, rather than divided, textual synthesis, marked mainly by a style of “brilliantly crafted surplus” which can comprise even “hostile” components in a model of “constitutive” relationality: “This is why we can safely say that The Satanic Verses remains the leading novel not written with an exclusively European and/or American and/or Arab and/or Indian and/or African readership in mind.” 45 In the terms of my discussion thus far, all of Rushdie’s techniques contribute to that sense of “surplus,” the overload characteristic of the Menippean as well as the magic realist “innovative artistic practices” Al-Azm describes that obscure the limits or boundaries of realism. 46 Nonetheless, the breadth of Rushdie’s Menippean textual dialogues arguably comprises a range of sources that will afford familiarity and accessibility for a large swathe of audience, since he consistently draws from sources that embody central Menippean/carnivalesque contrasts of high and low, popular and classical, liberal and conservative, local and global, and so on. An important step in this discussion is to begin to differentiate between the ways magic realism and Menippean satire function in Rushdie’s texts. Most of his novels contains magic realist elements, like the blue-and-white synagogue tiles that depict changing images from the lives of the characters in Moor, 47 or Ormus Cama’s interior voice which projects lyrics of famous pop songs before they have been released, the voice coming from his dead twin, eerily like the one who expired when Elvis Presley was born. 48 These elements, along with the more celebrated mythic animal transformations in The Satanic Verses and the psychic radio system of Midnight’s Children, exhibit magic realism’s emphasis on the potential veracity of the supernatural, folkloric, and mythic, but they do not foster attention on, or critique, the specific highlighted art forms themselves (the visual arts, music, myth/folktale, electronic media). They direct attention towards the magic and unexpected in often astounding paradigms.

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Laura Moss notably has predicted an imminent death for magic realism from overexposure and overuse, its conventions having “becom[e] predictable through repetition.” 49 Moss’s critical reading of intertextual parody by Rushdie, how Rushdie juxtaposes material from his own novels, is useful for the Menippean aspects which unintentionally surface in her comparisons. Moss finds that Rushdie’s “disintegrating patience” with the magic realist mode is answered by his tactics in a later work: “The Moor’s Last Sigh parodies both magic realism and its celebrated magic realist predecessor, Midnight’s Children, as it points to the inadequacies of the literary convention Rushdie himself helped to pioneer in an ‘english language’ context. The early novel is a primary intertext for the later one.” 50 Moss reads the intertextual relationship specifically in the context of parody as “a repetition with a critical difference,” corresponding directly to Linda Hutcheon’s definition of the term in her influential discussions of postmodernism. 51 But I would argue that Rushdie’s intertextual relationship with his own earlier work allows him to reference it in the manner of Menippean satire, tending towards a more carnivalesque type of juxtaposition. 52 What Moss is describing as a “self-conscious self-referentiality” 53 I would read as a firmly established Menippean approach of embedding other sources and kinds of discourse to aid in creating a fragmentary and distorted Menippean world. In the words of M. Keith Booker, discussing the intrinsic dualities to Rushdie’s fictions, “we are given an account of events, then that account is retracted, and we are given an alternative, contradictory account,” 54 and often the alternative version centers on satire rather than postmodern parody. Moss astutely points out an array of overlapping characters and motifs between the two books, and there are many more intertextual references. For instance, Moor reintroduces Saleem Sinai’s adopted son, Aadam Sinai/Adam Braganza, and supplies some details of the outcome for Saleem of Midnight, the Braganza Pickle firm, and its founders, the aged former ayah, Mary Pereira and her sister, Alice. Adam’s increasing malevolence in the Moor narrative deflates the hope surrounding him in Midnight where his first word is the magical incantation, “cadabba,” a toddler’s version of “abracadabra.” 55 But such “quoting” runs throughout Rushdie’s work; this is not the first time he has resuscitated characters or suggested dialogue between texts, as his work overall is powerfully metatextual. Rosa Diamond, of The Satanic Verses, elusive in her deep reveries of a colonial past and allusive to the thoughts of Gibreel, seems to suggest the mystifying “rose stone” of Grimus. Other examples come from subsequent works in which Rushdie’s magic realist techniques are by no means on the wane; as Booker claims convincingly, Rushdie’s continued presentation of duality, and unstable selves and histories, “suggests that the authority of all of our representations of the past may be somewhat questionable.” 56 But there is also an argument to be made that Rushdie’s Menippean satire continues unabated, expanding to include

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his own previous work to satiric effect in later efforts. For example, Aurora Zogoiby, who dies in Moor, turns up with her stinging tongue to ridicule a character at a party in Ground. 57 The details reveal the degree of carnivalesque complication. The party in Ground is hosted by the Parsee, Homi Catrack, of Midnight. William Methwold (Midnight and Ground) attends and mentions the sale of a villa to Catrack, an event which also takes place in Midnight. Aurora (Moor) memorably ridicules Ormus Cama’s father, Darius Cama, at the party. A separate example comes from Ground, when the mothers of Pimple Billimoria of Satanic and Nadia Wadia of Moor (named Tipple Billimoria and Fadia Wadia) appear as young, New York City starlets who infamously reject the amorous advances of Ormus Cama; with the added knowledge of their future voluptuous daughters, the sexual rejection of Cama becomes even more acidly humiliating in the narrative. 58 Rushdie’s pattern of juxtaposing his own earlier texts, sometimes discordantly, sometimes parodically, could be read as constituent of the literary project of “revisioning history” and presenting “alternative narrative perspectives” which Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi identify as a general approach of optimism and “renewal” in his work. 59 The nature of the intertextuality certainly undermines some traditional notions regarding the discrete nature of novelistic form, as it promotes a Menippean vision of the world in pieces taken from Rushdie’s own literary works. Beyond simply rewarding close readers of Rushdie’s texts with the pleasures of recognition and the promising possibilities of reconstruction, Menippean intertextuality creates satiric dissonance by problematizing the boundaries of a novel’s limits, its “world.” In Milowicki and Wilson’s terms, Rushdie is revealing a Menippean “pattern of mixture and mélange” which runs “throughout” his novels, ultimately “shifting history.” 60 Rushdie is also reinforcing Bakhtin’s assessment that “the menippea—and this includes also its oldest antique forms—to some extent always parodies itself…that is one of the generic characteristics…this element of self-parody is one of the reasons for the extraordinary vitality of the genre.” 61 One can also point to the re-emergence of the character Zeenat Vakil, a heroine of The Satanic Verses, as a significant character in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi find that Zeenat (Zeeny) Vakil presents a significant counter-note to the apocalyptic conclusion of The Satanic Verses, and they imaginatively project her into a made-up future Salman Rushdie novel: Perhaps a stronger ending might be found, stuff for another novel, in which maybe a Zeeny Vakil-like figure in the West might star, not as a chamcha, but as a multicultural pioneer, with other issues than repression and resentment, with movies and the media thematized not just as dreams and displacements and fantasy work, but as creative/positive political forces. 62

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And there she is in Moor, “a brilliant young art theorist and devotee of Aurora’s oeuvre,” hired to oversee the Zogoiby Bequest, to catalogue, preserve, and provide critical background to the body of Aurora’s work. 63 “Clever leftish Zeeny,” though admittedly not in the West, represents the critical voice of multiculturalism and the ability to contribute to global discourses, and Rushdie’s integration of painting into this discourse does point towards the creative and positive potential of art to articulate “political forces.” Zeeny comments in Moor on the growing Hindu fundamentalism threatening Bombay and elsewhere, in a statement which could function as one of Rushdie’s apparent precepts for what art needs to stand against: the fundamentalism dictated to the masses severely undermines the valid right of the individual to act and to absorb, in Moor threatening the “many headed beauty” and incipient “peace” of the Hindu system originally founded on models of multiplicity. 64 What is at stake is access to multiple available interpretations, meanings, and relative contexts. But Zeeny is also lampooned by Rushdie, apparently guilty of criminally opaque jargon, or how else to interpret Zeeny’s fictional “critical appreciation” of Aurora being given an obfuscatory title worthy of inclusion in the program of any upcoming convention of literary scholars: Imperso-Nation and Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogics of Electicism and Interrogations of Authenticity in A.Z. 65 The character Zeeny’s perspective is paradoxically both deflated and reinstated, as Rushdie satirizes the linguistic and other excesses of academia, as well as academia’s constant assumption of ideological hegemony in all manner of debates.

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SATIRE IN RUSHDIE: EXPLORING MENIPPEAN STRATEGIES I am hardly the first to read and consider Rushdie’s work as satire. Some previous critical assessments are overt and direct; Norman Rush simply describes the entire Satanic Verses as a satire. 66 John Clement Ball notes that the word “satire” appears “from jacket copy to critical articles and books” on Rushdie. 67 Some discussions of satire are in defense of Rushdie’s work; Sadik J. Al-Azm supports Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses as the pro-Islam work of a lone “serious dissident,” with the satire working in aid of his specific revisionism. 68 “No wonder, then,” Al-Azm comments, “if a Muslim’s exercise in satirical courage and laughter should pass mostly unsung for what it is.” 69 Al-Azm celebrates the spirit of Rushdie’s work overall as “fabulous satire of contemporary life meant to shock, bewilder and awaken, while at the same time formulating beneath its exaggerations, ironies, parodies, and criticisms very important truths about [his] age and society.” 70 Fischer and Abedi note that the “trilogy” of Midnight, Shame, and Satanic all “contain considerable satire about (mis)uses of Islam.” 71 For Shailja Sharma, satire is Rushdie’s way of re-

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vealing the “breadth” of his “familiarity” with the subcontinent, revealing “incestuous knowledges of cultural quirks.” 72 Satire has patently been acknowledged in Rushdie’s works, only there is little agreement regarding his use of it, and so it becomes a feature which is seen at times to unsettle readings of his texts, or even to unmoor expectations of Rushdie as a writer in a specific context of location, geography and time. Om P. Juneja credits Rushdie for his allegories of history which “open up the past to imaginative revision,” yet at the same time Juneja is critical of Rushdie’s satirical method, because:

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[b]y reducing a cultural concept like “shame” to a farce, Rushdie indulges in black humour and is in good company of modern-day satirists, but has lost his place among the historical novelists with ethical or mythical consciousness. His historical vision does not project an insider’s view as it is more satirical and less sympathetic. Since he cannot belong either to India or Pakistan, he remains a suspended human being. 73

However, one could situate the figure of the “suspended” Trishanku of the Hindu Ramayana, the royal figure who tries unsuccessfully to ascend to heaven with his corporal body, specifically in the context of Menippean texts. Such texts often pose juxtapositions that suggest the Trishanku story’s metaphor of the world as we experience it, and a heaven, or better version, which we seek—and which, as the story relays, the striving Trishanku was not quite able to enter. 74 In Shame we seem to encounter dual versions of history and geography which don’t quite overlap: “There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space.” 75 In Ground, we are told that JFK served two terms and that Watergate never happened, a reverberation of two versions of history, one familiar and one not; we are challenged to discern if one is actually an improvement on the other, and in which direction heaven may lie. 76 In this way the Menippean bard draws from multiple traditions or versions, and Frye reminds us that this theme of the utopian and its pursuit is common throughout Menippean writing. 77 Another way to consider this pattern of doubling is to return to Bakhtin’s discussions of carnival, in which the pattern of “crowning/decrowning” asserts the “dualistic” character of the carnival in general. 78 Bakhtin asserts that “[a]ll the images of the carnival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis…. Very characteristic for carnival thinking is paired images, chosen for their contrast (high/low, fat/ thin etc.) or for their similarity (doubles/twins)…[and] the utilization of things in reverse.” 79 In addition to the acknowledged focus on thematic and narrative dualities, 80 the implications of doubling in a Menippean context allow this “carnival thinking” to extend to additional elements in Rushdie’s work. There are the parodic pairings of Rushdie’s own texts

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with each other, with implications of reading Rushdie’s own works as intertextual. There are also playful suggestions of metafiction, which we can relate to the specifically Menippean tactic of “laying bare the device” of narrative. 81 By cleverly revealing authorial method through digression or interruption, the text becomes the medium whereby the writer is reflecting on writing itself. “[S]uppose this were a realistic novel!” the narrator muses in Shame, “How much real-life material might become compulsory!” 82 There is a persuasive echo here of Leela Gandhi’s assertion that postcolonial fiction produces not nation, but truth about the fictionality of nationhood. 83 And there is Rushdie’s ekphrastic strategy of pairing the writing of literature with creation through other artistic forms, a strategy which often achieves a Bakhtinian critique of genre when satire is involved. In this context of paired versions of artistic representations of the world which reflect a colligatory relationship of high and low, Rushdie launches Bakhtin’s “permanent corrective of laughter …a critique of the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and most importantly, too contradictory and heteroglot to be fitted into a high and straightforward genre.” 84 Rushdie’s “corrections” focus on ontological and epistemological questions which arise from juxtapositions of narrative fiction with visual representations of cinema, painting or photography, or with myths or popular music. Thus Aurora’s first mural, in Moor, on her bedroom walls and ceiling, full of spoof and fantasy and history and myth, is to her overwhelmed father “the great swarm of being itself.” 85 Pop music lyrics become revelatory because “Ameer was always convinced of the deep meanings hidden in [their] euphony and rhyme” in Ground. 86 And in Midnight’s Children, Saleem dreams of achieving the “chutnification of history” with his “pickled chapters,” lowly condiments mixed with ingredients from elaborate history, the truest hetero-glop, a jarred and jarring product. 87 Sometimes satire and its composition is actually the overt focus of Rushdie’s fictional work. The “minstrels singing vicious satires” in The Satanic Verses imply a sense of the satirical pervading the entire text. 88 The annual poetry contest is approaching, and contenders are at work in the market places, declaiming “while pilgrims throw coins at their feet.” 89 One “versifier” in particular, a most “precocious polemicist,” is asked about his taste for “vitriolic odes”: “A poet’s work,” he answers. “To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist, Baal. 90

Other references to the satiric are more subtle, but they nonetheless establish satire as a central strategy. Saladin’s description of London at one point echoes the voice of the first-century Roman satire-writer Juvenal

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listing emblems of urban ugliness and decay: “its gargoyles, the ghostly footfalls in its streets of Roman feet, the honks of its departing migrant geese.” 91 But Rushdie also invokes directly one of the classic bards of Menippean satire, Lucius Apuleius, in two of his works, The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. 92 Rushdie begins Chapter V of The Satanic Verses with a paraphrase from Lucius’s The Golden Ass and distinctly heralds an onslaught of Menippean juxtapositions and transformations to come. The character Muhammad Sufyan, one of three versions of Muhammad in the text, this one significantly “self-taught in classical texts of many cultures,” is awakened from deep sleep by Jumpy Joshi seeking refuge for an alarmingly caprine Saladin, and immediately Muhammad Sufyan paraphrases the text that enshrines Lucius’s Menippean motif of animal transformations: “Once I’m an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back into myself?” 93 The narrator then lauds Muhammad for responding:

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with the above impromptu quip, stolen, with commendable mental alacrity for one aroused from slumbers, from Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, Moroccan priest, AD 120-180 approx., colonial of an earlier Empire, a person who denied the accusation of having bewitched a rich widow yet confessed, somewhat perversely, that at an early stage in his career he had been transformed, by witchcraft, into (not an owl, but) an ass. 94

These words are the conclusion to the tour-de-force, 26-line sentence that begins this chapter, ending emphatically on the satire-evocative word, “ass.” The bedraggled, goat-transformed Saladin at this moment, rather significantly, resembles “the most limp and passive of—what? let us say: satyrs.” 95 His host delivers “further Apuleian sympathy”: “In the case of the ass, reverse metamorphosis required personal intervention of goddess Isis.” 96 But since “old times are for old fogies,” Muhammad offers instead the intervention of a bowl of hot chicken soup. 97 The icons of satire’s classic roots, the satyr and the golden ass, have been duly presented but in the logic of the text they need to be updated, relocated, modernized. To this motif of humans transformed to beasts in The Satanic Verses, noted by M. Keith Booker as a distinctly Menippean characteristic in that text, 98 one could add Sufiya turning to a monster in Shame, or horntempled, bow-legged, castrated, cucumber-nosed Saleem in the final chapters of Midnight. There is also Aurora Zogoiby in Moor, living in a house called Elephanta in a neighborhood called Elephanta, disparaged as “crazy as a monkey in a monkey-puzzle tree” by her husband, chauffeured by her monkey-god driver, Hanuman, to urban sites where she records the raw, despairing lives of workers in “subversive” sketches that are “a challenge to British authority”; these she signs with a tiny drawing of an “unblinking” lizard. 99 Booker comments that via such beast trans-

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formations “the very idea of a stable unified self is revealed by Rushdie to be a fiction.” 100 But in Rushdie’s view, the hybrid, even a monstrous one, as long as it is “a chimera with roots” can nonetheless “survive” even tragedy. 101 Across Rushdie’s work, Menippean satiric metamorphoses serve to emphasize dual and multiple selves, misreadings and mistaken identities, as well as the transformative powers of language and storytelling in these charged transformations. Rushdie returns to The Golden Ass subsequently to add perspectives about the perceived veracity and power of storytelling. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Vina and Ormus achieve dizzying musical fame as pop artists but suffer through their extended, postponed love affair. Their stage performances become a public venue for their increasingly troubled private lives. The narrator, Rai, notes this imbalance and shares an observation by Robert Graves that writers gradually apprehended how “the popular tale gave them a wider field for their descriptions of contemporary morals and manners, punctuated by philosophical asides, than any more respectable literary form.” 102 Rai’s musings frame his struggle to invest his own photography with a wider, more current vision. Somewhere in this layered meditation on art and life is also the author’s implicit emphasis on a dynamic, transforming narrative language that reflects conflicts in the nature of contemporary postcolonial storytelling. Rai articulates finally the problem: What hope can I, a mere journeyman shutterbug, a harvester of quotidian images from the abundance of what is, have of literary respectability? Like Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, a Moroccan colonial of Greek ancestry aspiring to the ranks of the Latin colossi of Rome, I should (belatedly) excuse my (post)colonial clumsiness and hope that you are not put off by the oddness of my tale. Just as Apuleius did not fully “Romanize” his language and style, thinking it better to find an idiolect that permitted him to express himself in the fashion of his Greek ancestors, so also I…. 103

The threads which Rai struggles to unite comprise the postcolonial, the Menippean, the ekphrastic, and the potentially transformative powers of created language. The main thrust of his narrative refocuses on Ormus as a musician who challenges boundaries of fact and fiction, and in doing so Rai also articulates Blaber and Gilman’s observations on Desani about creative “dialogue between normative principles and structural openness to produce what might be termed a philosophical dialectic.” 104 The “new language” Ormus/Rushdie produces is inflected by postcolonial multiplicities, and in general Rushdie’s narratives reflect the struggles of postcolonial artists to navigate the “philosophical dialectic” their stories create in a variety of art forms. Rushdie confirms his “confidence to continue those processes” 105 in defiance of neat resolutions, in Rai’s description of Ormus as “a man who saw, long before the rest of us, the artificial-

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ity of such a separation [of fact and fiction]; who witnessed the demolition of that iron curtain with his own eyes and courageously went forth to dance on its remains.” 106 LANGUAGE, EKPHRASIS, MENIPPEA Rushdie has characterized his use of language repeatedly as “playful,” describing it at one point as “typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.” 107 When questioned about his techniques, Rushdie clarifies a stage in its development: When I was writing Midnight’s Children, I was really trying to say that the way in which English is used in India has diverged significantly from standard English…. But even though this is the way everybody speaks in India, nobody had the confidence, when I started writing, to use it as a literary language. When they settled down to write, they would do it in a kind of classical Forsterian English that had nothing to do with the way they were speaking. 108

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The development of Rushdie’s language incorporates an ability to reflect hybridities. His language reflects P. K. Dutta’s observation that words are “positioned at the intersection of the different narratives of power, culture and history. What is produced, then, is a thick syncretism of diverse significations, though which [the text] creates itself.” 109 Rushdie’s language also exemplifies Gilles Deleuze’s remark that great writers carve out a non-pre-existent foreign language within [their] own language. They make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation…much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium. 110

In Moor and Ground, certainly, Rushdie is reflecting on the complex struggles of the postcolonial artist, and on more than one artistic medium. In Ground, he positions the writer as a creative visionary, “polymathic, a master of anatomy, philosophy, mythography, the laws of seeing and perception; an adept in the arcane of deep sight, able to penetrate the very essence of things.” 111 In ekphrastic fashion he incorporates the artistic visions and endeavors of his characters, so that in Ground, Rai sets out “to show that a camera can see beyond the surface, beyond the trappings of the actual, and penetrate to its bloody flesh and heart.” 112 In a similarly elevated vein, Ormus Cama’s pop music compositions make him a “sorcerer,” the “singer and songwriter as shaman and spokesman,” the “age’s unholy unfool,” “the secret originator, the prime innovator, of the music that courses in our blood…the music that speaks the secret language of all humanity, our common heritage, whatever mother tongue we

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speak.” 113 These goals pitch Ormus both back into origins and “ahead of his time” 114 and relate strongly to Rushdie’s on-going reformulation of the novel that also reaches back to the traditions of the classical age: “The novel is an exploration. It is not a lecture. The novel is a discovery.” 115 Aurora’s paintings (in Moor) span a complex artistic and philosophical dialectic. She has great success when she heeds Vasco Miranda’s urgings to “Forget those damnfool realists! The real is always hidden—isn’t it?— inside a miraculously burning bush! Life is fantastic! Paint that.” 116 But Aurora unleashes real power in her (apparently magic realist, “epic-fabulist”) work, and eventually she must recognize that “the ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and mélange which had been, for most of her creative life, the closest things she had found to a notion of the Good, were in fact capable of distortion, and contained a potential for darkness as well as for light.” 117 It is worth looking closely at Rushdie’s descriptions, as well as in the subversions which take place in depicted, “quoted” modes of artistic expression where conflicts continue to unfold. Fischer and Abedi have read into Satanic that “the novel is about immigrants and the struggle in their internal psychological discourses between influences that come from the movies and those that come from traditional religion.” 118 Certainly cinema provides iconic images and a paradigm of conflicted modes of vision in several of the novels. Drugged by her husband in Shame, Sufiya “lay on a carpet, like a girl in a fantasy who can only be awoken by the blue-blooded kiss of a prince” but eventually she rises up by herself in a frenzy of incipient violence. 119 Sufiya unites myths of Disney princesses with the horrors only hinted at in anodyne cartoon worlds; in her drugged oppression she is more mad Bertha of Jane Eyre than Sleeping Beauty or Snow White. “Few mythologies survive close examination,” Rushdie has noted. 120 Cinema interacts and clashes with belief system as Gibreel’s perspective merges with that of a camera in The Satanic Verses. Deep in observation, his point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments, spectator. When he’s a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he’s floating upon a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he’s swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a threehundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he’ll try a dolly shot, tacking along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk…. But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up the action like any movie fan, enjoys the fights infidelities moral crises, but there aren’t enough young girls for a real hit, man and where are the goddamn songs? 121

And when Hamza tells Mahound to ask Gibreel whether to admit the three goddesses (who are represented in the “satanic” verses) to the

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scripture of the Qur’an, Gibreel responds in full acknowledgement of the way his world is being mediated by cinema: “who asks the bloody audience of a ‘theological’ to solve the bloody plot?” 122 The vocabulary of the cinema makes this passage stilted: the “pee oh vee,” the spelled-out numbers of the “pan,” a “dolly shot.” The somewhat labored text heightens the contrast as one medium is elaborated in another, an unexpected jolt as we move between the visual and the textual, the serious and the ironic. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem narrates the 1919 massacre at Amritsar as if he is filming it: “No close-up is necessary,” he notes of the excruciating tensions before violence erupts. 123 In a way, history is transformed into visual art in his filmic description, and like Gibreel’s filmic observations, there is a mixture of narratorial irony, detached documentary, and jolting moral aberrations. There is also a degree of Menippean contrast that is worth noting in the relationship of The Satanic Verses to a long-standing tradition of satiric literatures in Islam. According to the scholar Hasan Javadi, “Persian literature abounds” with “religious satires,” especially where “coreligionists of the satirist become his targets,” attacked for “sanctimony and pretension,” and the “superstitions and hypocrisy” that undermine Islam as “a benign and tolerant” faith. 124 Fischer and Abedi point to a tradition of “Persian nationalist satirical accounts” that celebrate Salman Farsi as the ghost-writer of the Qu’ran for the illiterate Muhammad; it is not a leap to consider the overlapping roles of satirist Salman Rushdie and Rushdie’s version of Salman Farsi. 125 Also in Islamic tradition, as M. Keith Booker explains, there is the specific nature of the retraction Muhammad makes to withdraw the revealed-as-satanic verses: “Therefore he is forced to issue a palinode retracting those first satanic verses. But this retraction, like all palinodes, cannot fully erase the earlier verses, though it may place them ‘under erasure.’ In a sense, the retraction merely re-activates the carnivalesque energies of those earlier verses.” 126 This structure of repetition and reverberation would seem to augment the dialogic powers of Menippean satire, to expand its potential to promote older/marginalized sources speaking anew through modern/popular ones, and to juxtapose material in defiance of unitary notions of linear and thus “more truthful” narrative. It is apparently also the source of Aijaz Ahmad’s singular irritation with Rushdie’s “quality of linguistic quicksand…as if the truth of each utterance were conditioned by the existence of its opposite, and Rushdie seems forever to be taking back with one hand what he has given with the other.” 127 LINGUISTIC HYBRIDITY AND MENIPPEAN MULTIPLICITY I am reading the overwhelming volume of intertextuality in Rushdie as suggestive of his commitment to showcase “the existence of alternative

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dimensions within the same space.” 128 The contrasting and dialogic texts, sources, and art forms which clash in Menippean juxtaposition, jarred by degrees of disparity and parody, can be read as challenges to fixed notions of identity, history, and culture. “O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin,” marvels Saladin in The Satanic Verses. 129 With his “proper pride of the successful storyteller” Saleem explains in Midnight’s Children that “things—even people—have a way of leaking into each other…like flavours when you cook.” 130 Elsewhere Saleem reveals that “all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him and he is one person one minute and another the next.” 131 Much has been written regarding Rushdie’s stance on the positive energies of postcolonial hybridity and mélange; it seems appropriate to examine how the intertextual references that constitute part of his mixtures, and his adherence to challenging monoculturalism, are also inflected by Menippean satire. In Moor, for example, Rushdie uses the multiplicities of Menippean satire to project an (ideal perhaps) sense of Indian cultural plurality. Rushdie is both depicting and adding to the palimpsest that is India, even using this as a theme in Moor’s Last Sigh. The character Raman Fielding, the Hindu fundamentalist in Moor, 132 rails against the enduring imprint of Portuguese, Mogul, and British colonizers when he urges, “The true nation is what we must reclaim from beneath the layers of alien empires.” 133 Aurora Zagoiby, explaining the fantastic, layered “palimpsestart” through which she attempts to make her iconoclastic visions real, tells her son to “Call it Mooristan…. Places where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away…One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo-ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine.” 134 In a political nation and physical territory where history is materially layered (as in the destroyed Ayodhya Mosque set over the presumed site of the birthplace of Rama, described in The Moor’s Last Sigh 135) modes of multiplicity can appear to be accurate, even factual, methods of representation. As Rocio G. Davis remarks, “the creation of palimpsests, of cultural and generic constructs that constantly cancel each other out to reveal new versions of the same, permits entrance into an alternative universe where the boundaries between East and West, fiction and the reality, the true and the false, disintegrate.” 136 Rushdie presents the events at Ayodhya as the actions of either “fanatics,” or alternatively “devout liberators,” with the caveat to “delete according to taste,” 137 setting up two discordant versions which undermine each other, but which are both necessary. This is the same impulse that fuels the binary reality of Shame, where there “are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space…. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality.” 138 For Michael Wood, “[t]here is a speculative or satirical edge” to these “divergences; the country at an angle is a quizzical commentary on our own.” 139 Later the narra-

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tor in Shame elucidates a textual conflict in a way which makes explicit the postcolonial drive, articulated as the truth-seeking artist versus the impositions of empire:

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It is possible to see the subsequent history of Pakistan as a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through what-had-been-imposed. It is the true desire of every artist to impose his or her vision on the world; and Pakistan, the peeling, fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself, may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind…perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined, a picture full of irreconcilable elements. 140

In Rushdie’s case the artist’s arsenal to convey the shifting palimpsestic distortions of culture and narrative is composed of, and inflects, language, although even this, too, is compromised by empire: “Who commandeered the job of rewriting history?—The immigrants, the mohajirs. In what languages?—Urdu and English, both imported tongues, although one travelled less distance than the other.” 141 But in the cosmopolitan postcolonial world, a singular narrative in a native language might not garner the attention required to address global historical inaccuracies and injuries, and displaced ideologies. One artist’s language, however hybrid, may fall short of the intended “challenge to authority” Shailja Sharma discusses, the need for a language which can span “class, region, or community” to be widely representative, inclusive, and revisionist. 142 And so Rushdie’s Menippean satires are larded with diverse references which make them more representative and more dissonant, an intertextual overload as encyclopedic as Desani’s eruptions in Hatterr or Sealy’s digressions in The Trotter-Nama. As Om P. Juneja comments in Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness with regard to Midnight’s Children, Rushdie parodies The Arabian Nights, recent Indian scandals, Eliot, Joyce, and the Buddhist discourse, the Jatakas; 143 there is also Tristram Shandy, Kim, the Bombay talkie, John Wayne; 144 and also Lost Horizon and the myth of Shangra-la. 145 Shame, one notes, ridicules Benazir Bhutto as the resentful, embittered Arjumand “the Virgin Ironpants” Harappa. Moor parodically references American literature, European film, world mythologies, and the narrative of the Hindu god, Ganesha, who is the elephant-headed god of, among other things, scribes. 146 Ground is an ironic, rock-and-roll update of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, overlaid with the Indian myth of Kama and Rati. It would be extremely diverting to track down all the examples of multicultural intertextual references essayed by Rushdie, but what is clear with even this economical sample is that they contribute to what Rushdie sees as an “understand[ing] that the very essence of Indian culture is that we possess a mixed tradition, a mélange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal and contemporary Coca-Cola American.” 147 In the context of parodic intertext as Menippean counter-realist strategy, one may take a small

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but critical step away from Aijaz Ahmad’s arguments that Rushdie only seeks to exploit Western culture’s appropriations of Eastern culture, that he is “the elite artist” who “could now draw upon a whole range of cultural artefacts from around the globe.” 148 (One takes this step, though, fully acknowledging the powerful significance of Ahmad’s overall critique of metropolitan commodifications of the developing world.) Rushdie’s playful intertextuality gives voice to the modern and, to paraphrase Rai in Moor, the ancestral as well, always in a convincingly inclusive manner. In Ground Rushdie invokes a powerful model from the Italian Rinascimento, or Renaissance, which survives in his own commitment to openness, newness, and creativity: “By crossing boundaries, uniting many kinds of knowledge, technical and intellectual, high and low, the modern artist legitimizes the whole project of society.” 149 And as Kirsti Bohata has argued in her exploration of Welsh writing as postcolonial literature, in “postcolonial countries…language use is bound up with the politics of power.” 150 As global threats intensify, it makes sense that a postcolonial satirist would deploy the elements of satire most related to interrogations of narratives of power, in a new work.

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THE MOST MENIPPEAN OF ALL Salman Rushdie’s new work of 2017, his novel The Golden House, is not just a Menippean satire; it is a novel about Menippean satire. The Golden House addresses the aftermath of the horrific four-day terror wave that hit Mumbai in late November 2008, when armed men attacked multiple sites including a café, railway station, Jewish community center, hospital, and the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel; 164 people were murdered. That attack forms the spectral material and psychological backdrop as the narrative plays out, balancing mysterious personal backgrounds and epic national dramas, and Menippean satire. The narrator and other characters cite Menippean sources and refer to Menippean traditions directly. An initial indicator that the novel is Menippean rests in its visibly mixed-register, mixed-tone structure. Rushdie’s narrator, René Unterlinden, is an aspiring filmmaker, and this prompts entire sections of narrative written as film script, interior monologue, voice-over passage, a dramatic scene of legal interrogation, or bookended with camera directions, and concluding “Cut.” The text is littered with cinema references: comparisons, descriptions of famous movie plots, explanations of niche or little-known films. A character wonders if the black-suited and -hatted men following her in one scene are “reservoir dogs” or “blues brothers.” 151 In Rushdie’s particular deployment of ekphrasis, cinema is elevated to a higher epistemological power, as both guiding interpretive source and vast database of factual knowledge. Film

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in this novel is a fascinating art form and a perspective which can offer insightful, illuminating correlatives for events in life, as well as grounds for unending irony. “If life were a movie it would conclude with a wideangle shot of the Village,” René carps at life’s stubborn lack of receptivity to being directed, at one dramatic point. 152 The narrator references film persistently as a device and vocabulary for comprehending and describing a chaotic and unpredictable world.

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Life in the Gardens had always been somewhat reminiscent of Rear Window. Everyone looked out and across at everyone else, all of us brightly illuminated in our windows, which were like miniature movie screens within the larger screen, playing out our dramas for our neighbors’ pleasure; as if the actors in movies could watch other movies while those other movies also watched them. 153

There is also an ironic framing device as the narrator attempts to use the unfolding narrative as the basis for a documentary and then as a fictional film project, so that we are, rather confusingly, reading at various points a character’s fictionalized film narrative based on Rushdie’s fictional novel narrative. At one point René must differentiate between “in the movie” and “what I have to call real life,” 154 and yet all of this exists within a fictional text. There are many other overt Menippean aspects of this book. It attacks the “parrot[ed]” rhetoric of fundamentalist dogmas in a manner which foregrounds how empty such declarations are by cataloguing examples: “The immorality and decadence of. The evil hostility and degeneracy of. Needs to be confronted head-on by. The pure and pristine teachings of.” 155 Intertextual references to other artistic and performative genres emerge, as when we learn that the story’s three central brothers were once known in Bombay/Mumbai by the names of the three eldest Marx Brothers, the 1920s vaudeville and comedy film performers: they were Harpo, Groucho, and Chico. 156 A character briefly reappears from Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the former newspaper cartoonist turned dangerous Hindu-nationalist extremist, Raman Fielding. 157 There are some neologisms in the text, as in René’s naming of a type of conjured crisis which incessantly litters and clogs the workings of “the moral universe”: a “manufactroversy.” 158 This term is shared with some gravity, while René castigates specific elements we apprehend as coming from a recognizable, post-Brexit-vote, post-November-2016-USA-elections, postMumbai-attack, post-truth world. The central characters all arise in some manner from the actual literary traditions of Menippean satire, and this could not be more overt in Rushdie’s text. A central character is from Bombay, but has renamed himself Nero Golden, after the Roman Emperor, and moved to a Manhattan version of Nero’s Domus Aurea, or Golden House. The figure of Nero fits into

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the distinct Menippean lineage being evoked, as some classical scholars have identified in Petronius’s Menippean text, Satyricon, critiques of events recorded at Nero’s imperial court. The Golden House is where the narrator, René, meets the wealthy Nero and his three adult Marx Brother sons, also all now significantly renamed: the three sons “became Petronius, Lucius Apuleius and Dionysus.” 159 René is understandably intrigued by the unusual names, and must investigate: I decided to begin where they began, with their classical names. To get some clues to Petronius Golden I read The Satyricon and studied Menippean satire. “Criticize mental attitudes,” was one of my notes to myself. “Better than lampooning individuals.” I read the few extant satyr plays, Cyclops by Euripides, and the surviving fragments of The Net Fishers by Aeschylus and Sophocles’ The Trackers, as well as Tony Harrison’s modern “remake” of Sophocles, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. Did this ancient-world material help? Yes, in that it guided me toward the burlesque and the bawdy and away from the high-mindedness of tragedy. 160

René now ponders the significance of the Golden family as cultural source material, much as, to pick a random example, a scholar writing a book about literary satire would do, contemplating what to make of the significant Menippean references and discourses which underpin the unfolding narrative before her. René continues:

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So I was unclear not only about the story, and about the mystery at its heart, but also about the form. Would the surreal, the fantastic, play a part? At that moment, I was unsure. And the classical sources were as confusing as they were helpful. 161

From the names of the three brothers, René makes connections to satire’s origins in the traditions of Dionysus, the god of wine, theater, and revelry, to the satyr plays which invoke satire’s spirit, and to the ancient Roman satiric picaresque novel, The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius (which the son now named Apu, for “Apuleius,” admires as “a masterpiece”). 162 These three sons were all born in India, and Rushdie asserts a satirerelevant connection there as well: “Dionysus adventured far and wide in India, and indeed the mythical Mount Nysa where he had been born might have been located on the subcontinent.” 163 Later Dionysus’s girlfriend Riya “needs to inspect some South Asian artifacts that her Museum of Identity has been offered. Come, she had urged him, at least two of them concern the visit of Dionysus to India, so you’ll be interested.” 164 But in the murk of “questions of provenance,” the origins of these striking archaeological items—a painting of Dionysus with wild cats, and a carved marble bowl of a satyr procession—are too precarious to allow formal Museum acquisition. 165 They are insecure fragments of a little-known history, and perhaps also evidence of Menippean satire’s vision of a world in pieces. Riya rejects the artifacts. The

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narration reinforces that Menippean influence continues, even as a sense of veracity about sources may be shaken. René, trying to figure out this Golden family, also tries to fit together mystifying pieces of information: The satyr plays, to state the obvious, were Dionysiac, their origins probably lying in rustic homages to the god. Drink, sex, music, dance. So upon whom, in my story, should they shed most light? Petya “was” Petronius, but Dionysus was his brother…. And for Apu I went back to The Golden Ass, but, in my story, metamorphosis was to be a different brother’s fate…. I made, however, this valuable note. “A ‘golden story,’ in the time of Lucius Apuleius, was a figure of speech that denoted a tall tale, a wild conceit, something that was obviously untrue. A fairy tale. A lie.” 166

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What is indisputable is that counter-realist elements, “the surreal, the fantastic,” 167 so strongly present in earlier Rushdie novels, do not play a part in The Golden House. Seemingly inexplicable events are eventually logically explained in this novel. When Golden characters have seemingly mystical visions, we learn of the character’s contributing history of dependence on hallucinogenic drugs, for example. Characters do ponder what is verifiable in their individual lives, as when René stops to consider that: “death took a back seat at least while the festival was running, because real life, as we all well understood, was immortal, real life was the deathless stuff shining in the darkness up there on the silver screen” 168—in other words, we sometimes opt for the reel over the real. In The Golden House Menippean satire could not be more central. Salman Rushdie continues to model creating space for augmented cultural discussions in his work by featuring ekphrasis. Nicholas Stewart has described Rushdie’s references to cinema in Midnight as a magic realist “device binding Indian culture of the past to a contemporary multicultural interface” to signify the “composite nature of Indian culture and society.” 169 In this paradigm, Stewart continues, Rushdie achieves “a simultaneous undercurrent of doubt in his text that criticizes the adherence to magical, fantastic fictions” which reveal the decay in “a culture whose desire for fantasy marks the nature of its post-colonial identity.” 170 Thus the “magic” of cinema may be culturally and representationally insufficient. In contrast, one might argue that the Menippean elements, the diverse, parodic intertextual juxtapositions, conspire to undermine the problematic impulse of magic realism that there is something actually magical or other-worldly about Eastern sources and milieus. Rushdie’s use of Menippean strategies is, if anything, more consistent with his vision of multiplicity, hybridity, and polyphony, and the fallacy of “a pure, unalloyed tradition.” 171 His overloaded multi-lingual vocabulary conveys a sense of current global cultural complexities, and his ekphrastic references infuse his novels with elements that challenge and expand

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upon the confines of conventional genre. The sheer volume of satire upsets a reading which privileges comedy, tragedy, or history, though each can be convincingly present, and the unbridled authorial enthusiasm for artistic production in any number of media would seem to counter readings which foreground postmodernism’s more extreme acceptance of states of meaninglessness and dislocation. The constituent nature of Menippean satire that situates jolting comparisons, and therefore implies connections, also seems particularly apt for Rushdie’s overall affectionate presentation of the multifaceted culture that is both beloved and bothersome, the complex heritage which is both valued and problematic, the embattled objective and subjective view. Rushdie’s polyglot inheritance clearly has travelled through the voluble world of Desani’s Hatterr. This quotation demonstrates the esteem with which Rushdie values the “whole range of cultural artefacts” at his disposal. It comes from the section of The Moor’s Last Sigh where, in a convincing metaphor for “the writer,” the young Aurora is rebelliously opening windows. The entire household, as a result, is in riotous disarray come morning. “This low-class country, Jesus Christ,” Aires-uncle swore at breakfast in his best gaitered and hatterred manner. “Outside world isn’t dirtyfilthy enough, eh, eh? Then what frightful bumbolina, what dash-it-all bugger-boy let it in here again? Is this a decent residence, by Jove, or a shithouse excuse-my-French in the bazaar?” 172

In true Menippean manner, one can answer that, if it is Rushdie, it is probably, strategically, both.

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CONCLUSION Salman Rushdie’s significance as the writer of these postcolonial Menippean satires places him in the center of critical discussions of narrative and cultural autonomy, and the continuing ramifications of postcolonial history. His explorations of how hybridities are created and take shape in culture and identity continue to be a major influence on postcolonialinflected literary discourses which creatively warp strictly linear concepts of history and influence, and which undermine the embedded valorization of cultural hegemonies. Although denunciations of his work shaped him as a satiric resistance writer in both symbolic and material terms, he has always been a committed deployer of satire. In Rushdie’s texts, John Clement Ball notes, “satire is principled dissent against specific instances of terror, injustice, authoritarian coercion, and shameful behavior.” 173 Writing in the aftermath of the fatwa against him, Rushdie has put forth that: “We should all be free to take the grand narratives to task, to argue

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with them, satirize them, and insist that they change to reflect the changing times.” 174 Although historical events conspired to make Salman Rushdie’s own personal life the satirist’s embodiment of resistance, his entire corpus of work has always aimed to function in symbolic opposition towards abuses of power. Whether he has achieved this can be, and is, debated, 175 but it does point to the imperative of being satire-literate in our current global, political, digital, multi-media culture. A corresponding expansion of satire studies to promote such literacy will ensure the admittedly agreeable outcome of gainful employment for satire scholars in classrooms, but the main point here is that informed scrutiny of satire today is connected to vital debates regarding ethics, liberty of expression, the internet, religious pluralism, and the politics of media. One fairly recent episode illustrates how these debates are interwoven and current. When the UK government bore down in 2006 on amending its Public Order Act 1986, a law aimed at preventing expressions of religious and racial hatred, ensuing disputes ranged furiously over the ways racial animosity was not the same as religious hostility. Because religion is seen to be predicated on protestations of belief, opinion, and ultimately choice, a debate developed around how it differs from the more fixed aspects of race or ethnicity. It did not take long for satirists to weigh in on this issue, because what swiftly came into focus was that the future law’s adjudications would be over even putative intentions to express, in Anshuman A. Mondal’s words, “enquiry, criticism, and satire.” 176 Satire’s greatest asset, its power to provoke, suddenly was being scrutinized in the court of public opinion, because what comprises an insult, and what constitutes an incitement, are not always immediately evident, but the consequences could now be severe. And censorship remains satire’s greatest enemy. The British comedian Rowan Atkinson, famous for portraying Mr. Bean, and also various scheming anti-heroes in the satirical history series, Blackadder, weighed in. Atkinson argued that “[t]he clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.” 177 According to Atkinson, “satirists and writers who may choose to make comedy or criticism of religious belief, practices or leaders, just as they do with politics” were going to be put in the same problematic camp as “racist agitators.” 178 Nasar Meer, who agrees with the previous statement by Atkinson, then takes issue with the side-stepping of ways that attacks on religion can be synonymous with racism, objecting to Atkinson’s “assumption that it is satire and critique—as opposed to incitement to hatred—that would be prohibited by the proposed [legal] instruments.” 179 Mondal, who argues for the uptake of thoughtful accountability on the part of all satirists, observes that the “close association of comedy and satire, as forms of art that

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purportedly critique power and folly, was a significant feature of the discourse on the Bill, on both sides of the debate.” 180 Rushdie chronicles his own sojourn to the British Home Office with his friend Rowan Atkinson to register their objections to an earlier proposal to tighten blasphemy laws, which would have created immediate grounds for banning The Satanic Verses in the UK. 181 When Atkinson asked about the future of satire under the proposed legal change, he was dismayed to hear there would probably be a government department for approving scripts. 182 The bill that eventually passed as the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 requires evidence of intention to provoke or incite hatred, but excludes mere insult from legal action (and does not mandate a government department for script approval). The issues that swirled in this episode included satiric intention, satiric ethics, satiric attitude, and satiric purpose, which points to how significant and contentious satire continues to be. Satire plays a major part in the grand narratives being taken to task in culture and politics, as attempts continue to curtail the license to critique. As this chapter has explored, these are the very things that Salman Rushdie foregrounds in the majority of his work: the legitimacy of a wide range of human cultural expressions, the relationship of art forms to other art forms, our postcolonial inheritance of the distinctly unresolved condition of multiculturalism, and the incredible and weighty importance of satire’s longstanding history of inventive critique of all of this.

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NOTES 1. Salman Rushdie, The Golden House (New York: Random House, 2017), 42. 2. Eric McLuhan, Cynic Satire (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 45. 3. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 100. 4. Hasan Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 16. 5. John Clement Ball’s excellent chapter on Rushdie considers the extension by Rushdie of what Ball terms “the Menippean grotesque” in non-realist directions; in Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (New York: Routledge, 2003). See also M. D. Fletcher, ed., Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994, in which Ib Johansen identifies Grimus as Menippean satire in his essay “The Flight from the Enchanter: Reflections on Salman Rushdie’s Grimus,” 23–34; Philip Engblom notes Menippean features in The Satanic Verses in “A Multitude of Voices: Carnivalization and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman Rushdie,” in M. D. Fletcher, ed., Cross/cultures: Readings in the Post/ colonial Literatures in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 293–304. See also D. S. Michra, “Narrative Techniques of Salman Rushdie’s Shame,” Panjab University Research Bulletin (Arts) Chandigarh 18 no. 1 (April 1987): 37–44; Mishra identifies Shame as a Menippean discourse which comprises both comedy and tragedy. 6. Robert C. Elliot, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 196.

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7. Anshuman A. Mondal, Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech After Rushdie, (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 117. 8. I am indebted to Neil Ten Kortenaar’s illuminating examination of Rushdie’s description of a single painting by Sir John Everett Millais which appears in chapter 2 of Midnight’s Children. In Kortenaar’s example the textual experimentation with the subject of the painting “offers not so much a disobedient reading as a reading that makes nonsense of obedience” (258); see “Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger Back to the Empire,” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 2 (1997): 232–259. 9. In my discussion I am considering scripture as human-authored narrative and thus on some level “art,” admittedly sidestepping blithely and completely the potent question for some of the role of divine inspiration and origin. 10. Fury also richly rewards examination as an American-inflected postmodern text, with the added complication of its original publication date of September 11, 2001. See David Zucker, “Fury Meets and Greets Sabbath’s Theater: Salman Rushdie’s Homage to Philip Roth” in Philip Roth Studies 9, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 85–90. muse.jhu.edu/article/ 522068. Shalimar the Clown (2005) is also epically furious, set in fraught, murderous Kashmir, and not centered on ekphrasis, although the text is the basis for an opera produced in 2016. In “Terror, Globalization and the Individual in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown,” Florian Stadtler assesses the text “as an example of how the contemporary postcolonial novel debates terrorism, the neo-imperialist strategies of post–war US foreign policy and the Indian state’s military presence in Kashmir”; in Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 2 (1 June 2009): 191. 11. Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” Poetics Today 23, no. 2 (2002): 319. 12. Robin Fiddian, Postcolonial Borges: Argument and Artistry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), ix. 13. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Thousand and One Nights,” trans. Eliot Weinberger, in The Georgia Review 38, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 574. 14. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Thousand and One Nights,” 573. 15. James Bowman, “The Moor’s Last Sigh—book review,” National Review 25, no. 47 (31 Dec. 1995): 17. 16. C. J. S. Wallia, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” Review, IndiaStar Review of Books, indiastar.com, 1999: 1. Archived at web.archive.org/web/20091226020806/ www.indiastar.com/wallia20.html. 17. Wallia, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” 1. 18. Wallia, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” 2. 19. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 309. 20. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988), 168. 21. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 310. 22. John Clement Ball, Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (New York: Routledge, 2003), 124. 23. Michael Wood, “The Orpheus of MTV,” The New York Times (18 April 1999): Books 2. 24. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (New York: Picador, 1999), 387. 25. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 388. 26. Salon Staff, “Salman Rushdie: When life becomes a bad novel,” The Salon Interview, Salon (January 1, 1996): 5. https://www.salon.com/1996/01/27/interview_23/ 27. The related bibliography is huge. The debates start with Rushdie’s magic realism as assumed, and then center on its lines of inheritance and influence. See Neil ten Kortenaar’s excellent “Salman Rushdie’s Magic Realism and the Return of Inescapable Romance,” University of Toronto Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2002): 765–785; he finds Rushdie’s magic realism an apt reflection of conflicted postcolonial identities. Patricia Merivale places Midnight’s Children as the magic realist offspring of Günter Grass rather than Gabriel García Márquez, in “Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight’s Children, Magic Realism, and The Tin Drum,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman

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Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 329–345. And without its sizeable chunk of material devoted to Rushdie and his influence, the volume A Companion to Magical Realism would probably shrink to “A Pamphlet on Magical Realism” (Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, eds. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2005). 28. Michiko Kakutani, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet: Turning Rock ‘N’ Roll Into Quakes,” The New York Times (13 April 1999), Books 4. 29. Salman Rushdie in: “A Writer by Partition: Salman Rushdie interviewed by Michael Enright,” Queen’s Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2005): 560. Enright begins with the query: “Your friend Christopher Hitchens described you as Kashmiri by family, Muslim by birth, and Indian by partition. How does that inform your work? I don’t know what the triptych of schizophrenia is, but you have all of these parts at work in you.” 30. Salman Rushdie and Mark Lawson, The Guardian Books podcast, “Salman Rushdie on The Golden House, Trump and More,” 31 October 2017. theguardian.com/books. 31. One might start with Aijaz Ahmad’s discussion in “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: Postmodern Migrancy and the Representation of Women” wherein he registers disdain for Rushdie’s apparent participation in the commodification of cultures as centrally practiced by Western artists. In In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994), 123–158. 32. Shailja Sharma, “Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy,” TwentiethCentury Literature 47, no. 4 (2001): 596. See Edward Said’s description of Rushdie as someone who writes “both in and for the West” in Appignanesi and Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 165, and also Shailja Sharma’s appraisal that “Rushdie writes primarily for a metropolitan readership from a relatively secure position within the metropolitan intellectual Left” (588–9). For Sharma, Rushdie’s “raiding” of the global storehouse for cultural references and narratives for his work and his claim to cultural empowerment by doing so runs too close to the colonial “raiding” of native cultures (605). 33. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 9. 34. For an account of the events that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses, a good starting point is: The Rushdie File, eds. Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland (London: Fourth Estate, 1989). 35. Andrew Teverson, “Salman Rushdie’s Metaphorical Other Worlds,” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 2 (2003): 332. Om P. Juneja would fall into the first camp, as when he states that “[b]y dis/mantling the historical through the counterculture of imagination, Rushdie promotes polyphony and redefines the past” (Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness, 101). Vinay Dharwadker is a particularly forceful example of the latter. Dharwadker locates a “subversive hybridity” in Rushdie’s work which places his fiction in a larger political scheme, “into the combative postcolonialism” which “powerfully satirizes the colonial and neo-colonial West, seeking to overturn the existing (im)balance of power in order to enact a postcolonial revenge against the metropolis from its interstices and margins” (“The Formation of Indian-English Literature,” 259). 36. Stephanie Jones, “Of Numerology and Butterflies: Magical Realism in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, eds. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2005), 259. 37. Evelyn Fishburn, “Humour and Magical Realism in El reino de este mundo,” in A Companion to Magical Realism, Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, eds. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2005), 155. 38. G. V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr: A Novel (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 1986), 275. 39. Ronald Blaber and Marvin Gilman, Roguery: The Picaresque Tradition in Australian, Canadian, and Indian Fiction (Springwood, New South Wales: Butterfly Books, 1990), 94. 40. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 271.

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41. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 264. Rushdie names his pirate enterprise in this novel “Radio Freddie,” in tribute to the Parsi singer, Freddie Mercury, who fronted the quintessential British rock outfit, Queen. Mercury is partly the model for the protagonist, Ormus Cama. 42. An extension of this argument would be to “read” the fatwa as yet another text added to the Menippean succession of Rushdie’s work, disregarding for a moment the irreverent privileging of purely literary concerns inherent in that statement. The incredible satiric spirit in The Satanic Verses does at times seem further augmented by the ironic fact of numerous serious antagonistic critics of the text who refuse to countenance actually reading it. Rushdie adopts a very satiric approach himself when he is asked about the “story” of the fatwa, and has replied that “I think it’s a bad Salman Rushdie novel. And, believe me, it’s a very dreadful thing to be stuck in a bad novel” (Salon Interview, 2). 43. Several internet sites offer documents which discuss the specific historical events Rushdie’s novels refer to in “organic local” detail. See The Postcolonial Web (www.postcolonialweb.org) and Postcolonial Studies at Emory (www.english.emory.edu). 44. Shailja Sharma, “Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy,” 606. 45. Sadik J. Al-Azm, “The Satanic Verses Post-Festum: The Global, The Local, The Literary,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 20, no. 1 (2000): 50. 46. Al-Azm, “The Satanic Verses Post-Festum,” 51. 47. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (Toronto: Knopf, 1985), 76. 48. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 182. 49. Moss, “‘Forget those damnfool realists!’ Salman Rushdie’s Self-Parody as Magic Realist’s ‘Last Sigh.’” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 29, no. 4 (1998): 121. 50. Moss, “‘Forget those damnfool realists!’” 122. 51. Quoted in Moss, “‘Forget those damnfool realists!’” 122. 52. Laura Moss does concede at one point that “parody is eclipsed by Juvenalian [serious, topical] satire” in the section of Moor where Moraes becomes a hitman for his family’s enemies (“Forget,” 132). But that section is also packed with Menippean satire, in Moraes’s Jeeves-like adherence to his new master’s whims, and in his description of his new “surreal stratum, with a tin man, a toothsome scarecrow, and a cowardly frog for company” (Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 304). Frye reminds us that the “occupational approach to life” is distinctive in the Menippean and contributes to the way characters are depicted in terms of mental attitudes rather than personalities (Anatomy of Criticism, 309). 53. Laura Moss, “‘Forget those damnfool realists!’” 122. 54. M. Keith Booker, “Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie,” English Literary History 57, no. 4 (1990): 985. 55. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1982), 459. 56. M. Keith Booker, “Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie,” 983. 57. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 50. 58. Or it demonstrates that Ormus Cama could have been their putative father, were a slightly different plot line in effect, all under the aegis of the parent of all the characters, the author himself. Likewise, if William Methwold is Saleem Sinai’s real father as very obliquely hinted in Midnight, Methwold’s later union with Ormus Cama’s mother in Ground renders Saleem and Ormus bizarrely as (intertextual) halfbrothers. See Ground, 191. 59. Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World: Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses,” Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 2 (1990): 148, 149. http://www.jstor.org/stable/656453. In stronger terms there is Andrew Teverson’s statement that Rushdie’s satiric attitude emits both “scorn” for observed excesses and oversights, and a less reserved “refus[al] to be passive subjects in the face of power,

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and as such, it is a mechanism of human dignity and human resistance” (“Salman Rushdie and Aijaz Ahmad: Satire, Ideology and Shame,” 53). 60. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse,” 298. 61. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 141–2. 62. Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World,” 147–8. 63. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 329. 64. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 338. 65. This is obtuse jargon apparently condemned by Rushdie as babble. One notes that Dr. Zeenat Vakil ultimately perishes in the “fireball” that demolishes the gallery during the apocalyptic explosions that devastate Bombay at the novel’s conclusion (373). Although, upon consideration, the title of Zeeny’s work could stand as a parodic subtitle for Moor itself. 66. Norman Rush, “Doomed in Bombay,” Review, The New York Times (14 Jan. 1996): 1. 67. John Clement Ball, “Acid in the Nation’s Bloodstream: Satire, Violence, and the Indian Body Politic in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.” International Fiction Review 27, nos. 1 & 2 (2000): 1. Or there is the element of official rejection by which to judge a work a satire. In addition to the well-documented burnings of Satanic and its fatwa-led bannings, the Indian government banned import of The Moor’s Last Sigh after only 4000 copies had entered that country. 68. Sadik J. Al-Azm, “The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie,” Die Welt des Islams 31, no. 1 (1991): 2. 69. Al-Azm, “The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie,” 2. 70. Al-Azm, “The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie,” 4–5. 71. Fischer and Abedi. “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World,” 110. 72. Sharma, “Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy,” 600; 601. 73. Juneja, Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness, 103; 104. 74. My understanding of the Trishanku myth is deepened by Uma Parameswaran’s memorable poem by the same name, in Trishanku and Other Poems (Toronto: South Asian Review, 1988). 75. Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Picador, 1983), 29. 76. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 185. 77. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 311. 78. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 124. 79. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 126. 80. See Booker, “Beauty and the Beast,” 977. 81. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 175. 82. Rushdie, Shame, 69. 83. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 163. 84. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 55. 85. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 59. 86. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 125. 87. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 459. 88. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 97. 89. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 97. 90. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 97. 91. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 398. 92. See also Rushdie’s Lucius-esque short essay, “Travels with A Golden Ass,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 364-7. 93. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 243. 94. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 243. 95. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 244. Satyrs being major players at the Bacchanalian revels that are the source of satyr plays, in Comedy, and in all manner of subsequent

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ludic artistry. Without satyrs, Frye’s Seasonal Anatomy would be almost wholly Autumnal. 96. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 244. 97. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 244. 98. Booker, “Beauty and the Beast,” 980. 99. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 130; 131. 100. Booker, “Beauty and the Beast,” 983. 101. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 406. 102. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 387. 103. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 388. 104. Blaber and Gilman, Roguery, 94. 105. Blaber and Gilman, Roguery, 94. 106. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 388. 107. Rushdie, “The Salon Interview,” 1. 108. Rushdie, “The Salon Interview,” 1. 109. P. K. Dutta, “Studies in Heterogeneity: A Reading of Two Recent Indo-Anglian Novels,” Social Scientist 18, no. 3 (Mar. 1990): 64. 110. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Theoretical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 110; 109. 111. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 386. 112. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 80. 113. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 89. 114. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 89. 115. Rushdie, “A Writer by Partition,” 2. 116. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 174. 117. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 303. 118. Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World,” Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 2 (May 1990): 126. 119. Rushdie, Shame, 242. 120. Rushdie, Shame, 251. 121. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 108. 122. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 108. 123. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 35. 124. Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature, 71; 72; 80. 125. Fischer and Abedi, “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World,” 150. Anshuman A. Mondal also confirms that “Salman the Persian [Salman Farsi] is, by Rushdie’s own admission, an ironic, metafictional gesture towards the author” as stated in Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” Imaginary Homelands, 399 (noted in Mondal, Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech After Rushdie (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 107). 126. M. Keith Booker, “Beauty and the Beast,” 986. Although “palinode” comes specifically from the Greek tradition, Booker’s description is consistent with the way the character Muhammad’s concerns are portrayed in Rushdie’s text: that the verses will not be convincingly erased. 127. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 135. 128. Booker, “Beauty and the Beast,” 990. 129. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 519. 130. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 38 131. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 270. 132. As Jennifer Takhar points out, the character Raman Fielding seems inspired by the real life figure of the Hindu fundamentalist leader, Bal Thackeray (2). Fielding’s party, the Mumbai Axis, and his championing of the Hindu god, Rama, as the symbol of a pure Hindu history, all point to the “exact model” (2) of the Shiv Sena, the rightwing, race-conscious militant “army” of the right-wing Hindu BJP (somewhat analogous to the IRA and Sinn Fein during the heights of the Irish troubles). For more historical details, see Jennifer Takhar, “Raman Fielding/Bal Thackeray: Historical

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Rama-i-fication ‘Ram nam satya hai /The name Rama is truth,’” 23 July 2007, http:// www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/post/Pakistan/literature/Rushdie/takhar14.html. 133. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 299. 134. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 226. 135. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 363. 136. Rocío G. Davis, “Salman Rushdie’s East, West: Palimpsests of Fiction and Reality,” Passages 2, no. 1 (2000): 91. 137. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 363. 138. Rushdie, Shame, 29. 139. Michael Wood, “The Orpheus of MTV.” The New York Times (18 April 1999): Books 2. 140. Rushdie, Shame, 87. Rushdie’s italics. 141. Rushdie, Shame, 87. 142. Sharma, “Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy,” 605. 143. Juneja, Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness, 100. 144. Juneja, Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness, 147. 145. Juneja, Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness, 306. 146. Relating to, among other parodic references in Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh: Nathanial Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (296), Werner Herzog’s Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (241), the Wandjina of aboriginal Australia (433), and Aadam Sinai/Adam Braganza (359). 147. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 67. 148. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 129. 149. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 386. 150. Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English (Cardiff: University of Wales Press 2004), 128. 151. Rushdie, The Golden House: A Novel (NY: Random House, 2017), 236. 152. Rushdie, The Golden House, 375. 153. Rushdie, The Golden House, 310–11. 154. Rushdie, The Golden House, 361. 155. Rushdie, The Golden House, 333. 156. Rushdie, The Golden House, 335. 157. Rushdie, The Golden House, 332. 158. Rushdie, The Golden House, 359. 159. Rushdie, The Golden House, 41. 160. Rushdie, The Golden House, 42. Playwright Tony Harrison’s version of The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus was produced at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1990, and is adapted from Ichneutae (The Satiric Trackers), a satyr play by the 5th-century BCE Greek dramatist Sophocles, found in fragments of papyrus at the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus and published with the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in 1912. Ichneutae joined Euripides’ Cyclops, a complete surviving satyr play from fifth-century Athens, as the most complete examples of the genre. See Tony Harrison, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), reprinted 2004. 161. Rushdie, The Golden House, 42–3. 162. Rushdie, The Golden House, 60. 163. Rushdie, The Golden House, 66. 164. Rushdie, The Golden House, 101. 165. Rushdie, The Golden House, 101. 166. Rushdie, The Golden House, 43. 167. Rushdie, The Golden House, 42. 168. Rushdie, The Golden House, 277. 169. Nicholas Stewart, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonialist Device in Midnight’s Children,” originally in The Imperial Archive Project, ed. Leon Litvack (21 June 1999): 2; 3, https://web.archive.org/web/20061230072709/http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/india/rushdie.htm 170. Stewart, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonialist Device in Midnight’s Children,” 4.

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171. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 67. 172. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 9. 173. Ball, Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, 118. 174. Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House 2012), 360. Anshuman Mondal nonetheless uncovers some slippages in Rushdie’s published defense of the ostensible ethics of his Satanic textual attacks; see Anshuman Mondal, Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech After Rushdie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), chapter 4 “The Self-Transgressions of Salman Rushdie: Re-Reading The Satanic Verses,” 97–146. 175. Anshuman Mondal does so at length in Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie; he finds that Rushdie dissembles on a number of critical points around articulations of intentionality in The Satanic Voices. 176. Mondal, Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie, 191. 177. “Rowan Atkinson: We Must Be Allowed to Insult Each Other,” The Daily Telegraph, 18 Oct. 2012, telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9616750/Rowan-Atkinson-we-must-be-allowed-to-insult-each-other.html. 178. Qtd. in Nasar Meer, “The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities: Are Muslims in Britain an Ethnic, Racial or Religious Minority?” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 1 (2008): 76. (The quotation originally appeared in the now-defunct Liverpool Daily Post, in “Actor opposes new bill,” 7 December 2004.) 179. Nasar Meer, “The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities: Are Muslims in Britain an Ethnic, Racial or Religious Minority?” 76. 180. Anshuman Mondal, Islam and Controversy: The Politics of Free Speech after Rushdie, 198. 181. Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 521. 182. Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 521.

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FIVE

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Irwin Allan Sealy’s Menippean Strategies of Form

Irwin Allan Sealy writes bold Menippean satires which energetically juxtapose a vast array of influences and sources. His satires follow on from the work of Aubrey Menen and G. V. Desani in their thematic focus on philosophical debates, manifestations of the symposium, grotesque bodies, and the exposure of shams and frauds. He is both a contemporary and counterpart of Salman Rushdie in his imaginative contributions to the English-language literature of South Asia. But where Rushdie’s contribution is a creatively forceful use of Menippean satire via inventive language to reshape the lines of literary categorizations, Sealy uses Menippean satire’s vexing of formal and generic boundaries to reshape assumptions about literary form. “History books! We shall know what to do with them then,” remarks a character in The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle (1988), “Now a chronicle—there’s something.” 1 Sealy reshapes extant literary forms in novel ways that represent the forward movement of multicultural development. “[T]he Anglo-Indian remnant…. They fantasize about the past, “ says another character in The Trotter-Nama, “They improvise grand pedigrees. It’s like a Raj novel gone wrong.” 2 This chapter examines Sealy’s body of work as Menippean satire, emphasizing his range of experimental use of form. And while Sealy also foregrounds the artistic interests of his characters, he does so in ways that emphasize the creative energies of formal innovation, rather than in parodic juxtapositions that foreground rhetorical content. Sealy’s first work, The Trotter-Nama, fits directly into the category of postcolonial satire written with the broad pastiche intrinsic to the Menippean form. The 575-page narrative is a textual mélange, interrupted by lyrics, advertisements, recipes, newspaper headlines, letters, diary entries, exams, poetry, memoirs, dictionary entries, parliamentary edicts, 143

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mock panegyrics, spoof essays, biographies, and erudite cultural and historical disquisitions. The sheer range and preponderance of scholarly and pseudo-scholarly material challenges received notions of the novelistic genre; vastly “different kinds of writing have been juxtaposed to make a tenuous whole.” 3 In his subsequent works of fiction, Sealy continues to employ Menippean satire to restructure specific literary forms in experimental ways. The subsequent literary works, Hero: A Fable (1990), The Everest Hotel: A Calendar (1998), The Brainfever Bird: An Illusion (2001), Red: An Abecediary (2006), The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanack (2014), and Zelaldinus: A Masque (2017), incorporate additional elements of counter-realism, reshaping elements of genre in ways which at times dissolve their very boundaries. Hero’s tone and content are as raucously satiric as that of Trotter-Nama, while Everest and Brainfever are less abrasive. What Mishi Saran has described in Brainfever as “classic Sealy, with characters that flutter at the edge of reality and speak tangential views in unorthodox ways,” 4 an apparent suggestion of magic realism, could also be the Menippean characterization in which individuals appear trapped between subjective and objective views, where “characters variously occupy both sides of [an] opposition,” reflecting their “experience [of] a division of values or a conflict between ‘worlds’ that cannot be resolved rationally.” 5 With the publication of Red: An Abecedary, Sealy returns to more overt satire, and reshapes even more forcefully the very notion of the novel, with chapters focusing on themes and topics introduced by individual letters in the alphabet, the novel cast as 26-part primer. 6 With its mocking and transgressive tone, and entries in the form of narrative prose, lyric poetry, academic digressions, email messages, and occasionally an empty page, Red invokes the Menippean satiric form’s particular strengths of inclusiveness in bridging diverse cultural sources to build a novel whole. Shyamala A. Narayan has described The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: an almanack enthusiastically: “The book covers twelve months, in a diary format, so he has subtitled it ‘an almanac.’ It is an extraordinary work, a collage of narrative, essays, poetry, pictures, recipes and miscellaneous notes.” 7 (Elsewhere a reviewer referred to The Small Wild Goose Pagoda as “A House For Mr. Sealy.” 8) Zelaldinus is a novella in verse, with prose interludes, full of wry history-spanning juxtapositions and comic dialogues. Sealy’s work also tends to display Menippean satire’s “use of conspicuous, flagrant and self-conscious digression” 9 as a way of underscoring “themes of life’s and language’s discontinuity and ineffability.” 10 and these digressions also impact the physical structure and narrative progression of each novel. Sealy’s Menippean satire presents history as innately hybrid, sprung from mélange, juxtaposition, and fragmentary mixture. To adapt again from Milowicki and Wilson, Sealy “mocks and anatomizes” the very “idea” of a history by distorting its “conceptual con-

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tent” through the “very physical kaleidoscope” of his postcolonial Menippean texts. 11 SEALY’S MAGIC REALISM Despite consideration for the Man Booker Prize for Everest Hotel in 1998, most of the critical attention Sealy has received has been for his comic epic, The Trotter-Nama, the saga of the Anglo-Indian Trotters on their vast estate, San Souci, in Nakhlau (based on Lucknow), India. 12 The nama, or chronicle, spans seven generations. Critics have tendered the view that with its mixture of historical realism and dazzlingly embellished counterrealism, Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama fits into the trend of extravagant Indian writing marked by magic realism. 13 Indeed, The Trotter-Nama might even have precipitated it, had Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children not reached publication first. Sealy completed his final manuscript in 1984 while living in Lucknow, after publication of Rushdie’s book, and his pursuit of publication for the manuscript was lengthy. But in his earliest draft he had written a narrative with a “hero born at midnight at India’s Independence.” 14 As Sealy recounts the path of convergence with Rushdie’s novel, one gets a sense of an author both exerting control over his medium and overwhelmed at the tide of information his medium has to contain:

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Then Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children appeared and this bit of magic realism was one of many I had to change—and still some critics saw Rushdie’s “influence.” At first flush here is a case of two writers reading the same popular book (Freedom at Midnight) but a little deeper down you see two writers responding to the same historical moment. They have read the same book, but the book is India. India is doing the “thinking.” We do not write but are written. 15

With its position post–Midnight’s Children, even though Sealy was composing contemporaneously, critics have tended to view Sealy as strongly influenced by Rushdie’s styles and modes. So overall it is not surprising when Loretta Mijares reads The TrotterNama as a “revision of Midnight’s Children,” 16 or Glenn D’Cruz assesses Sealy in the context of Rushdie and finds these strong echoes: “In addition to the customary eclectic intertexts, linguistic exuberance and magical realism, Sealy’s sprawling chronicle of the Trotter family certainly displays a Rushdie-like predilection for problematizing the truth-claims of official historiography.” 17 But the Anglo-Indian Sealy presents in his novel a community often wholly excluded from official records and denied legal standing, so his apparent task is the truly ambitious one of creation and inscription, of undermining authority in a manner which somewhat exceeds the idea of problematizing. 18 Sealy’s Menippean interjection of “formal” texts into Trotter—“A note on the crocodile of Hindoo-

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stan,” “How the gypsonometer is made,” “A meditation on Indo-Greek sculpture”—lends a certain weight to the history he is articulating. The parodic structures and tones, the Menippean counter-narratives, then undermine the very notion of a centralized authority. Sealy incorporates a series of detailed excerpts from both historic and counterfeit AngloIndian sources; the fictional ones include “Extract from The Military Memoirs of General Mik Trotter,” “Extract from Gipsy General: the Life and Adventures of Michael Trotter, Irregular Soldier,” and “Extract from My Path to the Victoria Cross, by Thomas Henry Trotter.” In these excerpts fictional characters achieve glorified roles in the fraught history of British India. In the re-sited actual historical references, Sealy veils already marginalized Anglo-Indian individuals who inhabit history’s outskirts. Loretta Mijares has identified subtle textual references to the French businessman Claude Martin and the biracial military officer James Skinner from the eighteenth century; Parliamentary petitioner John Ricketts and poet Henry Derozio from the nineteenth century; and twentieth century authors Cedric Dover and Herbert Stark. 19 Readings of The Trotter-Nama which characterize it in the counterrealist manner of magic realism, post-realism, or anti-realism have also accounted for Sealy’s perceived stylistic choices by pointing to his sprawling subject matter: the sheer challenge of containing a vast narrative of seven generations of this voluble Anglo-Indian family. Judith Plotz admires The Trotter-Nama as “a form of performative nation building,” and notes that since that nation is India, the task demands a high degree of ornateness and elaboration. 20 To Plotz, The Trotter-Nama is an amalgam of irony, parody, and inventiveness which is “extravagant, exigent, and hybrid.” 21 The challenge for Sealy’s text then is to capture “an India that is simultaneously empty (because unshapeable), replete (because chaotic), and threatening (because uncontrolled, unfixed, multiple),” a nation of multiplicity which defies “unitary metaphors” and “single narratives.” 22 For Plotz the anti-realist elements are part of an imaginative projection towards an unknown, perhaps illusory future. But antirealist elements also encapsulate longstanding Indian literary traditions, as Prema Nandakumar points out, since “[t]he judicious mingling of realist fiction and fizzy fantasy by Indian authors is as old as the Panchtantra,” the fifth-century collection of fables in Sanskrit. 23 For Rukmini Bhaya Nair the text’s major imaginative counter-realist element is a referential intertextuality directed towards Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora. 24 These are texts, Nair states, “that insist on talking to each other, with or without the cooperation of their authors,” which prompts Nair to sum up Trotter as “rumbustious[ly] post-Kim.” 25 Nair locates the tension in Sealy’s text at the juncture of its playfulness and its serious interest in effecting “history,” for Sealy “uses every trick in the book of the nineties—bricolage, parody, pastiche, oodles of serious historical research—on his quest for the lost

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tribe of the ‘Anglo-Indians.’” 26 But the sincerity of need for actual historical recognition counters the play; Nair finds that “[h]ere The Trotter-Nama ceases to be a huge intertextual spoof and becomes a record of the collective anguish that must interest subalternist historiographers.” 27 Nair concludes that Sealy’s work “succeeds better than many fictions in rendering the blind spots, the lacunae in the colonial annals.” 28 Loretta M. Mijares echoes this focus on the culture of anguish, defining the narrative trajectory of the Trotter-Nama as specifically anti-realist because she sees it as opposing an extant “long-lived realist tradition of the tragic Eurasian.” 29 Sealy’s work is thus “the first major attempt to re-imagine the history of Anglo-Indians outside the conventions of tragic realism,” using elements of anti-realism to recast an adverse past. 30 Chelva Kanaganayakan seems to be the sole critic to see the colligatory relationship of Sealy’s methods and his aims, describing them in his study of counter-realism in ways which resonate with Menippean satire, although he does not use this term. Kanaganayakan identifies Sealy’s goal as establishing a “history of Anglo-Indians who are all too easily labelled, like the Burghers in Sri Lanka, as pseudo-British and dismissed as insignificant. That their story is equally valid and representative is confirmed by contemporary writing.” 31 Thus Sealy’s text displays a strategy of subversion, wherein “[c]onsciousness about the limitations of linearity coexists with the desire to record the history of those whose roles have been sidelined by political or cultural circumstance. Hence the experiment, the self-mockery, the constant punning, and wordplay.” 32 Kanaganayakam’s argument is that Sealy’s “narrative would sacrifice the seamlessness in favour of a ruggedness that insists on its provisionality.” 33 It is not a huge leap to point towards the unruly, boundary-unsettling, and self-conscious qualities of Menippean satire as an apt means for chronicling Anglo-Indian history itself, and played out in a mode of writing that strives to exhibit inclusiveness as it simultaneously tests and undermines. As Mijares has noted, “[i]n the parodic writing of the genealogy of the Trotters, The Trotter-Nama can rebuke literature and supplement and challenge history, and in so doing reveal the silences and injustices of both.” 34 Sealy himself has referenced the inherent resistanceorientation of The Trotter-Nama’s origins, sharing in an interview that: I set out…to get even! I needed to set the record straight. I knew it was going to be a novel about Anglo-Indians, and there were a lot of misconceptions about the community. A lot of things had been written which I felt to be false. I needed to wipe those traces away…. It’s a whole range of versions of this community which previously were ignored, or swept under the mat, and so were simply not visible, and my project was to make them visible. 35

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READING SEALY’S SATIRE Reading Sealy’s work as Menippean satire provides a wholly more adequate way to appreciate and access his texts. Sealy’s texts reverberate with Menippean characteristics, but these have remained largely unidentified. Judith Plotz’s careful observation regarding narratorial stance in The Trotter-Nama is actually a rather compelling (though unnamed) description of Menippean form: [i]n documenting the history of the archetypal Anglo-Indian family, the Trotters, Eugene draws on every kind of historical document and historical genre only to parody it: notes on natural history, notes on trade and manufacturing,…diaries, memoirs, extracts from radio programs, definitions of foreign terms for the English-speaking reader…. 36

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Sealy’s texts utilize the broadest range of Menippean motifs and structures. He exploits Menippean satire’s undermining of generic boundaries and he creates deliberate but artful hybrids via intertext, cross-cultural references, and the expansive vision of the encyclopedic. Once his formal strategies are identified, the subversiveness of his texts becomes more apparent. Sealy’s narrators in Trotter and Red bring a brightly modern sensibility to the text, in their zeal for technology, and the appreciation of modernist literature (Trotter) and modern art (Red). But Sealy is also spanning and unsettling differing traditions in the fragments he enshrines, and satirizing assumptions about inherent literary significance, the way advancement implies improvement, and the investment of cultural authority. There is a significant aside by Eugene Trotter in Trotter-Nama when Independence is approaching and the Anglo-Indian community is beginning to disperse overseas. He records that they unearth their “steel trunks” from storage with “a plangent booming.” 37 Then he makes an overt textual digression: In which I introduce literary echoes I wish to introduce literary echoes. For a long time I have wished to introduce literary echoes. I have yearned and yearned to introduce literary echoes, but have held back for fear of ridicule or misunderstanding. Now I have found courage, but I will do it quickly and limit myself to three. They follow. DA! DA! DA! —The Waste-Land

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BOUM BOU-OUM OU-BOUM —A Passage to India SUNYA ! -NYA ! -NYA ! —The Titar-Nama This is what I wished to do. Now it is done and my heart is eased. The echoes swell my chronicle and immensely increase its prestige. Praise Him. Praise Him. Praise Him. (CHRONICLE RESUMED) 38

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To the plangent reverberations of imminent diaspora Sealy pairs iconic texts pared to mere phonemes, and his narratorial voice shifts for this digression to a mock-modernist register. Sealy then proceeds to insert these distilled syllables throughout the remaining text, a chorus which reminds the reader that all “great” literature can be thus reduced to sounds and fragments which are, in contradiction, ostensibly meaningless, yet possibly also loaded with resonances. This direction of deflation is arguably rather counter to Rushdie’s florid expansionist take on language. In Eugene’s final scene, Reuben Trotter, who has treacherously sold off the family’s Sans Souci estate, is smote by a thunderbolt, to the sound effect of a T. S. Eliot-E. M. Forster-reminiscent “DA! – boum!” 39 In Reuben’s place there is now a bottomless hole, and the smooth sides make a “NYA NYA” sound if rapped upon. 40 Sealy’s hybrid texts have roots as much in the Western canon and its satiric traditions as in the varied multicultural literary traditions that form the foundations of modern Indian literature, even as his satiric juxtapositions model reductions and obliterations of influences. SEALY AND GENRE Sealy’s comments regarding his work affirm the notion that he works in pastiche and magic realism. Om P. Juneja has commented that Sealy is “participating in an ancient Indian tradition of re-writing the epics.” 41 Sealy affirms this perspective on returning to and re-writing epics, but in a more general sense, when he articulates his own view of the status of his novels as re-shapers of a wider range of literary models: “There are countless indigenous forms that can be revived and intelligently reworked. For my first novel—it needed to be a chronicle—I chanced on the nama form; for the second, Hero—it needed to be a masque—I turned to the less hallowed Indian form, the masala movie.” 42 Hence the pattern of subtitles: a fable, a calendar, a journey, an illusion, an almanack, and Red has at times been listed as An Alphabet as well as An Abecedary. The

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predilection for subtitles underscores Sealy’s tendency to reformulate genres as much as reference them. It points to the perceived inadequacies of generic categories, to a sense of genre expectations as something to regard playfully, in keeping with Milowicki and Wilson’s persuasive observation that to those of a poststructuralist inclination, “a genre is something invented, an artefact produced by routine reading habits.” 43 Sealy’s use of the Menippean as an overarching strategy means he subverts and parodies form in all of his narratives, in busy counter-realistic satirical play that admittedly can sometimes distract from underlying narratorial aims. The resultant overload is an apparent factor in Jose Borghino’s description of The Everest Hotel from a single review. Borghino’s attempt to catalogue the clashing structures of the novel echoes the variety of forms which critics once drew upon to list attributes of Desani’s Hatterr: “a gorgeous sprawling tangle of a book,” “a postcolonial social commentary,” “a melodrama of blighted love,” “a thriller,” “a political novel about the dangers of unbridled development.” 44 Sealy’s novel also veers between “two independent narrative strains” according to Ramlal Agarwal, each propelled by different classical Indian sources used to structure the book. 45 In his “Afterword” Sealy explains that he follows Kalidasa’s ancient Ritusamhara (The Garland of Seasons) for the division of his “calendar” by seasons, but uses “the old baramasih (twelvemonth) tradition of folksong, where the lamenting voice is always that of a woman” for his narrative of thwarted love. 46 For Agarwal the strains clash fiercely, leading to a confusing, overloaded text. But this noticeable degree of textual oppositionalities and conflicts return us to Menippean satire. Contrast is everywhere in the Hotel. The narrative pits garrulous individuals against the silent nuns and a mute child. Tibetan Catholics live with strict Hindus; there are able bodies and the grossly disabled; grandiose gestures overshadow genuine unsung heroics; the dead apparently visit the living. A character who refuses to die is writing a local version of The Book of The Dead. After a discursive passage comes a terse reading list. The Everest Hotel offers a version of the cultural hybridity of India in microcosm, and in the clash of cultures and represented texts satirizes the very notion of the unitary view. The resistance to category also points to discursive defiance of imposed genre classification, coincident with textual playfulness with form. If at times Sealy’s prose experiments demonstrate an edging towards the anarchic he tends to resolve this by defining new novelistic borders. Trotter-Nama, for instance, presents a huge challenge in terms of achieving closure, but Sealy manages it by Menippean strategies of reduction and slowing down symbolic time. (In Trotter-esque fashion, it will take a bit of chronicling to elucidate these strategies.) The text begins with a reference to Indian art: “A good miniature is a sugarplum,” Eugene confides to the stranger in the next airplane seat on his return flight to India;

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the stranger is travelling to a wedding. 47 We then learn in this monologue that Eugene is a forger of miniatures, and Eugene suggests giving his manuscript to the stranger to read. At the close of the central “Chronicle” section, Eugene is on an initial flight away from India, filching jam from a neighbor’s food tray (more sugarplums), and watching the “earth of India flatten and fall away into a miniature painting bordered with blue and indigo and dusted with gold.” 48 The ironic motif of (forged) miniatures in a massive mock-epic of 575 pages is hard to miss. 49 In the “Nama” epilogue, a monologue which concludes the entire text, Eugene encounters the stranger from the “Trotter” prologue again; the wedding guest has apparently missed the wedding, because he was raptly reading the Trotter manuscript, but he has now lost the document. Eugene is unruffled: So. Reading what? What bloody chronicle-fonicle? Trotter-Nama? Oh that. Liked it? So what you did with it? Lost it? Which storm—oh that. Ya we had it here too—worse even. So it’s all gone, hé? Never mind. Bit late inventing the paperweight, hé? Not that it matters now. 50

The silent stranger who has read the absorbing manuscript apparently stands in for the reader who has just completed Sealy’s vast novel. But Sealy embeds in the final monologue a paradoxically reinterpreting, reality-challenging revelation that the Trotter-Nama manuscript was an apparent sham, as artificial as Eugene’s counterfeit miniatures:

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Tell you the truth I made up the whole line—I mean joining up all those Trotters like that. Funny bloody story, more holes than a cheese in it. In fact, there’s a hole right in the middle. You remember the Middle Trotter? Well he wasn’t even an Anglo like I thought, I mean one of us. Some people said he was, so I used him, but afterwards I looked it up. British. So what to do? Change the whole bloody story? No thanks. All finished anyway. 51

Having blithely confirmed the slippery nature of racial and cultural identifications, Eugene invites the stranger for a drink and takes him on a tour of his favorite Lucknow locales before bringing him home for tea. We learn that Eugene rents rooms from a woman and her daughter who provide cakes for weddings. Eugene’s confession of fakery has thrown the veracity of the entire narrative into question, and to that uncertainty he adds a reference to his four current girlfriends, each of whom resembles exactly one of the Great Trotter’s four wives, the supposed core of the Anglo Trotter clan. But then a wedding begins; a band arrives, then a photographer, and the daughter is wearing a wedding veil. Eugene is unthinkingly under the impression that the absent groom is “a birdcatcher.” 52 But if one applies Geetha Gunapathy-Doré’s perceptive comment that “[i]f Joyce is remembered for his interior monologues, Sealy will be remembered for his narrative arabesque formed by a postmodern appropriation of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam’s figures of time (bird)

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and life (drink),” 53 then Eugene is the “birdcatcher,” snared now in matrimony, and narrative time is trapped, at least till the end of the novel. But future Anglo-Indian history will perhaps flow anew in the forthcoming issue of Eugene’s impending union. It is a scene of festivity and implied fertility (wedding), exuberant trickery (a faked narrative? an unwitting groom?), and inclusivity (reader as wedding guest), and therefore pure Carnival. “The inconclusive present begins to feel closer to the future than to the past” Bakhtin writes of Menippean attitudes towards closure, echoing the way textual mockeries have repositioned the text with regard to tradition and resolution. 54 Chelva Kanaganayakam is again the solitary critic, apparently, to outline how the topic and focus of Trotter may be read as a progression from that of Desani: “While Desani’s novel is about a representative individual, Sealy’s novel [Trotter] is about a whole community. But both are concerned with the predicament of Anglo-Indians, and Sealy’s ambitious work is as self-conscious, parodic, and digressive as Hatterr.” 55 Sealy has also acknowledged being aware of the tradition of Desani, specifically when he began the manuscript of Trotter in the late 1970s and sensed he needed to connect to tradition while forging his own, idiosyncratic path:

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At the time the only Indian models were the gray trinity of R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand—and the maverick G. V. Desani. I thought only The Serpent and the Rope worthy of consideration (I had not yet read The English Teacher) and Mr Hatterr’s zany discourses. The trouble was Rao was too solemn and Hatterr too mad. Not too mad for my liking; too mad for my purposes, the writing of a certain sort of serious history, an Anglo-Indian comic epic in prose. (And Hatterr was about as Anglo-Indian as my lungi.) 56

Although Sealy does not mention satire or the menippea, he registers that his writing takes on “indigenous forms that can be revived and intelligently reworked.” 57 The motivation Sealy explains for this attention to re-vision tends to sound a great deal like Highet’s mix and Rushdie’s newness. Sealy describes how: “One returns to old forms not for solace…but for the friction they generate in new circumstances. Out of that conflict comes something new, a kind of energy—and that is the extent of any country’s gift to the world civilization now rising.” 58 But Sealy is not aiming to write a piece of successful world literature; his stated aim in searching for apt form was so he could fit his work specifically into an evolving English-language literary culture in India; he “needed to discover a form that belonged here.” 59 Sealy’s satire sets in motion an expansive and complicated (pseudo) history, but it is not provisional; his choices about genre focus strategically on undermining assumptions about race, nationality, allegiances, and identity. Speaking about form in literary work generally, Sealy has commented that: “I like the idea of having to obey some rules while discarding others that may be

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only a kind of habit.” 60 His mold-breaking then stems from a primacy of story-telling and content, which, he explains, “disproves the notion that form is primary with me” as the sole starting point for a work. 61 “We’re accustomed to imposing a false coherence on the phenomena of the world in the name of art,” Sealy has maintained. “The classical approach is precisely that: you elide certain details and come up with a version that represents life according to a sedate consensus. I live and work outside that consensus.” 62 By examining some of the approaches of Menippean satire it becomes evident that Sealy embeds a postcolonial focus through Menippean means in a manner which sidesteps any artificial “coherence.” SATIRICAL TOPICS IN SEALY’S WORK

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Sealy uses specific thematic conventions of Menippean satire to address these broad issues of race, nationality, allegiances, and identity. This section will examine how these topics emerge in Trotter-Nama, in recognition of the magnitude of the work and the paucity of critical readings it has received in this context. Sealy uses Menippean motifs of food and feast, and the grotesque and mutilated body, to establish debate on colonialism and postcolonial identity politics. The Trotter-Nama could be read as a modern Anglo-Indian Symposium, so dominant is the mixture of ingestion and discourse throughout. The chronicler of the Trotter clan is Eugene Aloysius Trotter, Seventh Trotter, and his initials follow his frequent addenda and footnotes to the text: E.A.T. He is both authoritative and unstable, driven by a need to record and an urge to embellish and indulge. The chronicle contains over a dozen commanding interruptions for food-related material: on mangoes; on curry powder; on the making of ice cream; a “thesis” on the dessert gulab jamuns (made with flour, ghi, sugar syrup, and rosewater); instructions for proper ghi. But foods hold sway over both text and individual characters. An Anglo-Indian character grows fat while cooking both European and Indian sweets compulsively, because “the milk and honey of two continents flowed in her veins.” 63 Justin Aloysius Trotter is the Great and First Trotter, born Trottoire to a French Catholic father and Egyptian Coptic mother, and founder of the Anglo-Indian clan through his four wives. He is described as becoming more Indian as, once settled in Sans Souci, he ingests a wider range of Indian dishes, which Sealy presents, characteristically, as a vast inventory: as his appetite for curries deepened, his tastes widened to take in mint chutneys, cauliflower pickles, cucumber salads, green mango achars, tomato kasaundis, lotus-root, tamarind, pepper-water, pastes, purees,

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While the Great Trotter absorbs culture through food, the narrator of Eugene’s manuscript imbibes constantly, assisted by his Cup-Bearer, who comments bluntly and condescendingly on the work-in-progress. The “Narrator and Cup-Bearer” device grounds the text immediately in both Western and Eastern traditions. The duo calls up the myth of Hebe, devoted cupbearer to the Grecian Gods, and also the loyal retinue of the Biblical King Solomon which helped to dazzle the Queen of Sheba. Sealy’s trenchant servant is a bit closer to the version which sometimes arises in the Persian poetry of Rumi, 65 where the cupbearer is, at times of intoxication, the trusted confidant: The cupbearer brought me the bill. I said: Here, take the turban from my head. No, no, take my whole head, but right now Help me sober up just a little. 66

Sealy skewers this particular master-servant convention and any incipient spirituality it may represent in Persian tradition with caustic verbal repartee between his two players.

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Excuse me, Narrator. But could we have a little less speculation and a little more story? Impertinent Cup-Bearer! Could I have a little more patience? And a little more of that Mexican blend [liqueur]. In a little while you shall have more story than you could wish for. I take it on faith, Narrator. 67

In the course of the entire chronicle, the Narrator imbibes his way through Japanese rice wine, mead from Germany, cloudberry liqueur from Quebec, “water-white” maraschino from Dalmatia, sweet Lichi cordial, an Irish coffee, eau-de-vie of raisins, fermented wormwood, and Rooh-Afza headache remedy, ending with the remaining bottle, the dark, satisfying Mexican Kahlua. 68 He drinks in the entire world and evokes again Khayyam’s metaphorical relationship of “drink” to “life.” The inebriated narrator may be increasingly less reliable, or more willing to delve into untoward details of his subjects; his servant always defers in the interests of hearing more of the story. Eugene Trotter is another character introduced in the context of his gargantuan appetites. Eugene initially appears ordering a second meal aboard a flight for the empty seat between him and his audience/fellow traveler, the wedding guest heading to India. Eugene politely introduces himself to his airline seat-mate as “Lenten Trotter…corpu-lent, flatu-lent, indo-lent,” apparently driven by keen hungers, at all times both garrulous and insatiable. 69 The text is formally encyclopedic with regard to food, managing a feast of references in its character sketches, footnotes, asides, and quoted

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and juxtaposed texts. Various versions of an actual symposium also appear, the most full-blown taking place on Christmas day amongst the three middle-most generations of Trotters: Thomas Henry, Middle Trotter; his daughter, Victoria; her husband, Theobald Horatius Montagu; their son, Peter Augustine, Fifth Trotter; and their seven other children. The entire section, “Table Talk,” is written as dialogue from unidentified sources, a clash of voices at table, a verbal cacophony and microcosm of the mélange of British-Indian tradition as the family says grace and eats biryani. 70 “We’re not English,” someone asserts. “What are we?” someone else at the table fires back. 71 Sealy arguably deals with this question throughout the text and certainly in his exaggerations to do with the body. Rebellious bodies in the Trotter-Nama swell and shrink, turn color and transform. Instead of the trope of magic realism wherein grotesquery challenges nature by suggesting that the supernatural is palpable, Sealy’s tactics are wholly Menippean. He tests truths and assumptions about physical differences and racial boundaries by “the translation of the conceptual into bodily terms” 72 reinforcing Sherbert’s emphatic conclusion that the most distinguishing element of Menippean satire is “its mixture of satire and philosophy.” 73 Rather than reifying the supernatural, Sealy follows the path Northrop Frye describes of satire’s demystification and demolition of the means of oppression, an attack on “the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions.” 74 Sealy’s bodily exaggerations and monstrosities center on the oppressive nature of racial assumptions and the politics of colonial, postcolonial, and neo-colonial identity. The grotesqueries and transformations start at the indigo baths which produce huge income for the estate. They also generate a motif of transferring satire to the body, physicalizing the supposedly immutable imprints of race, caste, and identity. The defiant son of Justin Aloysius Trotter, the Great and First Trotter, Mik (Kim spelled backwards), has been frolicking at night times in the indigo vats with the 12 daughters of the Greek sculptor who has been ornamenting the estate. To the consternation of Justin, Mik’s blue coloring won’t wash off. Already a prankster and attractive to women, he is rapidly becoming more Krishna-like as he darkens from sapphire to midnight. “Do something,” Justin pleads with Mik’s Tibetan tutor, “If he grows any darker he will be invisible.” 75 In the face of Justin’s increasing tyranny, Mik runs away, shepherded by his Tibetan mentor (shades of Kim’s lama), while Justin tortures from his official floor-polisher-and-night-watchman the secret ingredient which has made the dye so permanent: “I piss in the tanks,” the distraught man confesses, and immediately “every able-bodied male in Sans Souci” is awarded the same extra daily task, which ensures the future profitability of Trotter’s renowned and amazingly enduring indigo dye. 76 Distracted by income, it is only later that Justin remembers his missing son, but then

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the problem and embarrassment of how to advertise a lost blue boy prevents him from action. 77 Mik’s discoloration serves as a metaphor for the uncategorizable status of the mixed-race individual in India at that time (roughly the 1760s to 1790s at this stage of Sealy’s narrative), and subsequently. Mik/Kim will later demonstrate military valor and also the key attributes that would render him a spy nonpareil in the service of the British: linguistic versatility; an extraordinary photographic memory for details, blueprints, and layouts; an aptitude for “covert activities”; and “the irrefrangible necessity of a khaki skin for British military espionage in India,” the indigo tint having faded by his young adulthood. 78 But after training at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, South East London, Mik’s prospects are shattered by an edict issued by the Directors of the East India Company in 1791 that bars any “son of a Native Indian” from “employment in the Civil, Military or Marine services of the Company.” 79 The Company relents in his case and Mik ships to India, but a subsequent edict from the Governor-General of Calcutta blocks him again. A command No person the son of an European [sic] by a Native mother shall serve in the Company’s army as an officer. Such persons may be admitted as fifers, drummers, or farriers. THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL IN COUNCIL Calcutta, at Fort William April the 21st, 1795

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(CHRONICLE RESUMED) Unable to drum or fife, and with only a foggy notion of the farrier’s art, Mik submitted to the latest whim of fate with a curl of the lip. He saluted the commandant, turned in his uniform, and took a tonga to the city. 80

The Kipling-esque question of “And what is Mik?” hangs in the air. Once in the city he discovers a wave of likewise discharged but highly trained, mixed-race soldiers, who en masse secure work serving the independent Indian princes, a twist on the mercenary work of his father for the colonial powers. 81 Eventually he will face his father on the opposing side when the Marathas battle their neighbors in Hyderabad, and then begin “sporadic attacks” on the East India Company’s lands in Madras; the British will call in the aging military star, Justin Trotter, as part of their own reinforcements. 82 The Governor-General of Calcutta issues another edict, this time one that encapsulates the irony of Mik’s situation of race-based oppression: any Anglo-Indian former (summarily discharged) officer will be deemed a traitor if found fighting for the opposing side. 83 Such injustices, borne out in references to historical documents, are compounded in Sealy’s later account of WWI, when ‘[a]ll over India [Trotter] relatives

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were enlisting in thousands…. Eight out of ten Anglo-Indian men of fighting age…marched with jerky steps…onto the troop ships.” 84 Only when they are casualties is their identity status in any way clarified, and it is potentially a bitter transformation: “in the moment of their death [they] were transformed into Britons. Their records and posthumous awards stated, concisely, ‘Born in India.’” 85 The mix of references and inversions of Kim establish an experimental counter-discourse. Sealy establishes a sense of homage to Kipling’s established literary influence in the realm of subsequent writing on postcolonialism and race, 86 while continuing his pattern of satirical demolitions. It is Sealy’s underlying sense of outrage that obtains. The Trotters’ inchoate status reverberates from the earlier slur chalked on the door of the dark-skinned FonsecaTrotter: the word “UNFAIR.” 87 A “devotee” of Alexander Pope, we are told, Fonseca insists that the punning, unkind graffito be left alone. 88 Uncanny physical events continue to occur in the text, mainly around the births and deaths that mark the boundaries of the Anglo-Indian community. Phillippa, the wife of Thomas Henry, Middle Trotter, swells the population of Anglo-Indians, giving birth to a succession of twins with bizarre regularity, at least nine sets according to the Family Tree. Each is named Victor, one fair and one dark in each pair, and “[o]nce she even fell pregnant while Thomas Henry was away, simply by thinking of England.” 89 After Justin dies (and disappears) falling from a balloon ride over Sans Souci, his third wife, Elise, Jarman Begam (she is his German wife) marries Yakub Khan, Justin’s ambitious staff baker, creator of sweet breads and ruthless plans. Khan is later found dead engulfed in a seething swarm of bees, while Elise simultaneously disappears in the kitchens, leaving behind a “long narrow puddle of water that…refused to evaporate,” with her soaking black burqa atop it. 90 The husband’s remains are swathed in black, while the wife’s remains (freed from purdah) stubbornly refuse to disappear. In The Trotter-Nama events and descriptions undermine a sense of continuous or unified identity for the Anglo-Indian community, even as Eugene strives to present it as a whole and integrated history. The repeated theme of near self-castrations is a pointed example of an abruptly breached expectation of continuity and wholeness for the community. First Justin Trotter attempts self-mutilation at age 14, when his stepmother’s singing lessons and encouragement inspire him to do this “strange thing. In a desperate bid to join a travelling company of Florentine castrati, he severely wounds but does not permanently damage himself. Humiliated by his failure, he waits only for the wound to heal before enlisting in the French force bound for Quebec.” 91 Subsequently the teen Eugene, also a hopeful singer, listens to the advice of his 41-year-old lover, Soma, an Alexander-Trotter from the line of the Jarman Begum and Yakub Khan: “‘There is a way of keeping your soprano if you really want to. But you’ll have to choose between your voice and me.’ She whispered

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the medieval Italian remedy in his ear. Eugene already knew, and had chosen: he loved his voice. He would do what had to be done.” 92 But nerves and the obfuscating dark prohibit his success, and he awakens in hospital. Before leaving, Soma bent and whispered affectionately in his ear: ‘It’s not all—you know—gone, the doctor said. And anyway, you could afford—’ The nurse drew the curtain. Left alone, Eugene tried his voice, but it was neither one thing nor the other, and he saw that he would always linger in between. 93

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There is an obvious connection to the near-castration scene in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and also to some of the themes which Catherine Pesso-Miquel has examined in the context of Tristram and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, wherein effeminacy and bastardy are read as metaphors for hybrid identity. 94 In the context of Sealy’s text, the metaphor examines the role of narrative completeness, as the characters choose to attempt self-mutilation, loss of virility, and potency in order to maintain voice, the means to convey artistic material and message. They would opt for the specific hybridity that is the castrated male if it leaves their means of creation, rather than procreation, intact. For Justin, the episode launches his career towards his future as the founder of a hybrid dynasty in India. In Eugene’s case, the attempt merely serves to enforce his hybrid state. He is subject to the variable nature of race-based identity in the context of colonial and independent India. As an Anglo-Indian he is a focus of mistrust and racism by both Indians and British. Abroad, his status is also in question, if his mother’s experience in England is anything to go by: A few days after she arrived in England, [his mother, Queenie] had found herself turning brown. In fact, the whole process had started in the aeroplane when she went to powder her nose about half-way between Delhi and London. Now she was dark enough that one Sunday when she thought she’d worship in another suburb the verger said kindly, meaning to clarify, “This is an Anglican church.” In short, Queenie was ready to come back home again. She suspected the process would start all over again in reverse until she once again stuck out in India, but what was one to do? There was no ideal solution short of becoming an air-hostess, and it was too late for that. Even they didn’t remain forever suspended in the air over Constantinople. 95

If food and bodies represent cultural intake and communal boundaries, they merge in the way the actual intake of hybrid foodstuffs literally molds the building of Sans Souci (literally “care-free”). The Trotter estate grows under the guidance of Justin, the Great Trotter, who is given the land west of Nakhlau as reward for military service to the Nawab. As Sans Souci took shape around him, Justin grew in to his château, filling out with gusto, his every surface advancing symbiotically with

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his house, a dome appearing there, a belly here; there a turret, here a fold; here a palpitating buttock, there a gibbous barbican. 96

The physical home of the Trotters apparently emerges from Justin’s absorption and consumption of his milieu. Using just the hand-drawn maps at the start of Sealy’s text, one may pinpoint its exact location today according to a contemporary map of Lucknow, in India’s northeast. Sans Souci is situated at La Martinière, a vast estate built by General Claude Martin (1735–1800) of the East India Company’s army in the late eighteenth century. A Frenchman like Justin Trotter (1719–1799), he arrived in India in the 1750s as a soldier and later amassed a fortune serving the local Nawab, settling down with numerous wives and mistresses although he begot no heirs. An historical rumor has it that the estate was originally named Constantia after a girl Martin left behind in France, but the Martin crest also reads “Labore et Constantia”(“Toil and Fidelity”), surely a Trotteresque logo. Martin may have built it to remember a lost love, but it was also his own intended resting place. “La Martinière was a tomb that became a palace,” a Lucknow historian has commented, 97 while Sealy’s Sans Souci is a palace where eventually the bodies of many generations of Trotters reside, some in formal and marked sites, and some unknown. La Martinière is also the model for Rudyard Kipling’s St. Xavier’s school in Kim, the boys’ school where the young Kim spends some unenthusiastic time, a feature that arguably becomes significant in terms of the ways Sealy’s work rewrites that iconic text. 98

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MENIPPEAN STRATEGIES TO CHALLENGE FORM It is already established that Sealy exploits the Menippean strategies of parodic textual juxtapositions and bold metafiction. 99 In another context these might be seen as purely postmodern strategies, the very clever stripping away of artifice, but each has a postcolonial inflection in Sealy’s work, and each is connected to how he undermines notions of form. Menippean strategies constitute Sealy’s experiments with form across all of his fictional work, starting with the forceful dismantling that sometimes permeates his methods. Sealy’s texts are wondrously rich with parodic juxtapositions, digressions, quotations, and diverse forms which inevitably destabilize readerly expectations of genre, because each text so little resembles that which came before. In Hero, a story of dramatic manipulations which are eventually carried out on a national stage, he includes diagrams of interwoven character relationships for his cast, 100 suggesting also that each is represented by an animal, as in an avatar or in an earthy, satiric beast-narrative. In Trotter, Sealy fashions his overtly parodic rewriting of Kim, inverting some of Kipling’s more famous events and motifs as he inverts the

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eponymous hero’s name. 101 In Rukhmini Bhaya Nair’s absorbing and original scheme, Tagore’s optimistic and nationalistic Gora shoves aside the iconic Kim as Gora “moves, python-like, to ingest that novel,” Kim. 102 Nair continues: “What makes Gora an intriguing novel is the sophisticated textual strategy it uses both to reduce the potency of and to draw on the Kim stereotype,” of the parentless/nationless Irish urchin who somehow comes to embody Indian culture. 103 In the succession Nair maps, Sealy takes both Kipling and Tagore harshly to task for writing contemptuously of Anglo-Indians:

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Trotternama [sic] simply will not allow Kim its blissful ignorance; it rips up the colonizer’s history as if it were the paper it is written on, interleaving Mik’s story with “other” historical records that reveal the Raj’s shabby treatment of the Anglo-Indians. 104

Nair’s description aptly sums up the ferocious tenor which Sealy’s Menippean juxtapositions sometimes achieve. In Brainfever, the spying tailors are apparently mendacious because they are unscrupulous “satyrs.” 105 In Trotter-Nama, characters who read Pope and Swift seem to use a satiric perspective as armor against insults and attacks. 106 In Red he considers the incredible mutinous power of ironically toying with the idea of art as just “a soothing sedative for the brain.” 107 But just as Sealy’s formal structures “rip up” conventional notions of genre, there is a level of violence mirrored in the murders and atrocities he records: the murder of Hero, the murder of a Brainfever protagonist when Russian neo-Nazis mistake an Anglo-Indian for a Romany, Mik’s wrenching loss of an arm in Trotter-Nama, the death in Everest of the young political activist who blows up a dam, the torture of the thief by police in Red. Since Sealy tends to establish each of his narrators, to a degree, as an alter-ego, one could argue that his formal choices afford an iconoclastic perspective that allows him to modulate between what Elias Canetti construes as “a psychologically complex authorial voice and the self-regarding anger of a pure satirist.” 108 Sealy also makes intertextual references to his own writing which seek to solidify his body of work. Rushdie reintroduces characters from previous novels in ways which achieve a sort of extra-validation of characters, as they are made even more multi-dimensional, more socially connected, more related to events in a hybrid, polyglot world. Rushdie’s characters make populations seem generally more fluid and intermingling. But Sealy references his previous works in ways which seek to validate them in terms of their genuineness, their authenticity. His references are also sometimes structured in digressive or interrupting formats; he will halt a narrative to reference a previous work. Eugene Trotter, historian manqué, appears as E. T. in a footnote in Red as the author of a scholarly essay on the history of an obscure cult. 109 Sealy references the essay again, this time identifying the author, Eugene Trotter. 110 Eugene Trotter also shows

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up in Hero as an apparently competent portrait painter for Hero and his film-star wife. 111 Rather than just appearing as a character in Sealy’s subsequent work, Eugene Trotter, and by extension the Trotter-Nama, is instead a credible source for it, and Eugene is a figure of authority, expertise, and apparent ubiquity. Later in Red, a pizza delivery boy says his name is Trotter, and after the murder of Zach Wilding’s girlfriend, Mrs. Wilding muses that her son should have married “that young Trotter girl” who was “a picture.” 112 Embedded in Red, the Trotter history and community created by Sealy takes on a new degree of legitimacy. But there is a satiric edge to all of these references, for Eugene Trotter’s supposedly authoritative text in Red, “The Annals of the Black Codpiece Society,” is mock scholarship in a fictional text, and the Trotter girl is indeed a “picture,” a character described in a fiction about the vicissitudes of the art world. Sealy even cites Trotter within Trotter, for on page 85 of The Trotter-Nama is a reference to page 85 of The Trotter-Nama. A boatmaster, watching a dark stain of spilled indigo follow a boat, “laugh[s] out loud” and observes that “The crop must have been a good one if they have enough nil to throw away.” 113 A detailed definition of nil follows: “n. Indigo; the colour blue; the colour between blue and violet…16th c. Hind. nila, blue; f. Sansk. nili, indigo.” 114 The definition concludes with a list of five sentences and sources which illuminate the use of the word “nil” through history. The final entry reads: “1799 ‘The crop must have been a good one if they have enough nil to throw away.’ Boatmaster to himself, Trotter-Nama, p. 85.” 115 Sealy’s vocabulary of parodic self-references here veers to an exaggerated level in the drive to establish some degree of credibility, authority, and authenticity, and to mock simultaneously those same impulses. For a moment on page 85 of The Trotter-Nama we are reading about page 85 of The Trotter-Nama. Sealy is no less forceful in his imposition of formal experimentations driven by specific narrative content. Where Rushdie utilizes ekphrasis to introduce divergent discourses on ways of seeing and relating which are specific to other art forms, Sealy incorporates the other art forms directly into his work. So, as we have noted, Trotter has all the cacophonous digressions, letters, recipes, conflicting narratorial voices, and ephemera that would logically make up a history, of a nation or of a community. Brainfever Bird features disorienting passages recounting the surreal dreams of the characters, including the heroine, Maya, whose name means “illusion.” Red is a series of alphabetical dictionary entries; the narrative compounds rather than builds in a conventional linear structure. Hero, the tale of a “Bombay Talkie” film actor who becomes a political figure, 116 is structured as an actual film script, with chapters entitled “Fight,” “Flashback,” “Joke,” “Chase,” “Cliffhanger,” “Cliffhanger II.” The narrative literally begins and ends with a “Song” and a “Dance.”

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The narrator, Zero, inserts camera directions so the text resembles an actual script. Here Zero drives the popular Hero, now Prime Minister, to make an Independence Day address at Delhi’s Red Fort, and gives accompanying directions on how this pivotal scene will be filmed: STAR camera will pan the fortress wall from north to south from a point in Chandni Chowk, the medieval market opposite. The colours flow in the soft grey light; red sandstone, monsoon green grass, milky sky, in bands which approximate the colours of the national flag. Under a harsh sun they would appear bleached, drained of their natural vitality; today every hue, in nature and on man, leaps out at the spectator. 117

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The ersatz camera directions emphasize the author as director of the features of the narrative, but at the same time, the script-format introduces an unseemly degree of theatrical manipulation into the principles of democratic politics. The metafictional text also suggests manipulations of the reader, as Hero’s narrator, Zero, informs us he is writing a script called Hero. In Red there is more parodic metafiction, as the narrator, N., is writing an extraordinary novel called Red; his ex-wife, O., berates him for not writing “a normal novel for a change?” 118 Hero begins with a section entitled “Entrance” which plays on the shifting border between audience as active and passive spectator: We are sitting in the Rex Café and Stores in a time warp, you with your book, I with my pen. When I look across the table you are there; if you look up from your book, I am here. We salute one another. There is one cup of tea on the table: yours, mine, the skin already forming on it…. Very shortly we will pay the bill (allow me) and go next door, just up the street really, to the Byculla Talkies. Your book is entitled Hero, the very word I, on the other side of the time warp, have just written with my pen…. Other links will bind us. But you can break the spell by putting down the book, by going away. I will pay the bill. Since you’re still here with me, I will tell you that the film we are about to see, or you are about to see…is also called Hero. 119

Zero becomes Hero’s amanuensis and scriptwriter, a modern-day servant as Hero’s star waxes in the film and political worlds. But Zero guns down Hero on the final page of the text, a destabilizing narrative step that makes Zero an unknown assassin, and there are several puns to be unearthed here on “shooting” a script, and what is “reel.” Zero’s nickname conferred by Hero is “DOG,” and Zero boasts on the final page that “I shall sign the script DOG, which you can read forwards or backwards or any way you like, the Zero is always in the middle.” 120 The text offers an amalgam of author/screenwriter/director who is most centrally a trickster figure. As Hero moves seamlessly from his filmic world of fantasy to the equally scripted one of politics and history, the trickster/author reveals the degree of manipulations and orchestrations that control and taint

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both culture and nation. As Zero divulges, he views his deceptions as culturally sanctioned:

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I cannot betray my caste. My caste. The caste of Bluffers. Bahuroopiya, of a thousand faces. It is our duty to deceive. Not the thuggee way, not that sort of deceiver…. We’re honest fakes, and in this country that’s saying something. When all is said and done we tell the truth. And you cherish it more for having been hustled through a lie. But now I’m getting moral and that’s bad; we’re never moral. Zero Trickster. 121

There are similarities in the work of Sealy and Rushdie, and they are overt enough for critics to repeatedly classify Sealy as “in the mold of Rushdie” and having to “slough off” a reputation for imitation. 122 But Sealy really seems to maintain a unique focus on form, even when he shares, for example, Rushdie’s tendency to write about artists. Even though Hero examines the lives of actors, Brainfever Bird features a puppeteer, Red has a composer and several painters, and the Everest Hotel features a nun who paints botanical illustrations, these arts are used to provide the forms with which to create Menippean juxtapositions. Individual art forms are not as individually significant, as they apparently are for Rushdie; for Sealy, at times, they stand in more for the idea of creation and creativity. Sealy even inserts the diagram of “seeing a painting” in Red, which simply emphasizes the centrality of critical apprehension; it could refer to any painting, rather than those by Matisse which are central to the narrative. 123 So film provides Hero with a shooting script and a way to circumscribe “artifice.” Maya’s puppets in Brainfever are satiriccaricature versions of individuals in the narrative, and Menippean extensions of ideas under attack, as when a puppet general is remade to suggest a current politician, or dishonest characters are punished via their avatars in a puppet show. The botanist’s notes in Everest give the text an overall sense of being a notebook of (arguably shifting) impressions, some more complete than others, even as the text mirrors the seasonal calendar of its sub-title. And Red’s Anglo-Indian composer, Zach, brings odd sound poems and the awkward structures of modern music to some of the entries of the Abecedary, which in Sealy’s highly original approach, focuses attention on the unwieldy or unexpected impacts of experimental art. The more recent Zelaldinus: A Masque tells, in mostly poetry, the story of a novelist named Irv, who visits the spectacular Fatehpur Sikri, site of the palace compound of Jalaluddin (Zelaldinus) Akbar, where Irv has a series of conversations with the ghost of this long-dead King. There is more to it; the fragmented narrative indicates that masques would have been presented at Sikri by Akbar’s harem of hundreds of women, and so this work is similarly “such a pageant, glittering and fantastical, where

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past and present, nobles and commoners, history and fiction rub shoulders. The emperor himself, a man of limitless enthusiasms, is both chief participant and magus.” 124 The Times of India endorsed the book as a “mishmash too extravagant to ignore” with its “narrative technique blur[ring] the distinction between poetry and prose.” 125 Irv must win over the illiterate King’s trust when he reveals himself to be a writer of fiction. The King is a tough audience. In the poem called “schoolmen,” Akbar’s stance of suspicion of scholars presents a serious challenge: some day I’ll show you, irv, he says to me, the schoolmen at their labours… grown men writing term papers, magicians turning books into books. myself I’d sooner fence with tapers. 126

Akbar is apparently aware of the brain-drain of Indian scholars abroad, and rails at this state of affairs, with one singular exclusion: what keeps them there? damned if I know. this one goes from chat show to chautauqua to chair, that one foists on all who care his tortured photo. not one of them (well, maybe one) has paid his way— that fatwa fellow. The rest doing a hitch hike on the gravy train (injun end) while beavering away

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at their bleeding c.v. for holy miriam’s sake, what keeps them there! The footlight basking? the thrill of being close to the mike? 127

The “fatwa fellow” Rushdie has apparently earned his right to reside abroad, as the ghost reflects on Indian artists absent from the subcontinent. The Indian author Amitabha Bagchi, reviewing Sealy’s “The Small Wild Goose Pagoda,” notes admiringly of Sealy that [s]omewhere in the reading the thought occurs unbidden that one of the essential qualities of this book is its Indianness. Among his contemporaries Sealy remains the one who continues to evolve, trying to invent a “home-grown tradition of experimentation”—a project abandoned by those Indian English writers of his generation who “relocate(d) to New York, acquire(d) house style” and found themselves “assigned a brown beat.” In these post-national times he stays true to the national project. 128

Sealy’s acknowledgement of Rushdie’s fatwa ordeal in this way would seem to extirpate any remnant of unease regarding their perceived overlaps in literary focus. After all, it is the eternal ghost of the Mughal EmFriedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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peror Akbar (who reigned 1556–1605), who has apparently heard of Rushdie; an esteemed emperor, celebrated for singular accomplishments, is aware of Rushdie’s trials. Shireen Moosvi has researched some of the historical Zelaldinus’s impressive array of skills:

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Father Monserrate, who saw him in 1581, tells us: ‘‘Zelaldinus [Akbar] is so devoted to building that he sometimes quarries stone himself, along with the other workmen. Nor does he shrink from watching and even himself practising, for the sake of amusement, the craft of an ordinary artisan.’’ In his account based on Jesuit letters from the Mughal court, Father Pierre du Jarric has this description of Akbar: ‘‘At one time he would be deeply immersed in state affairs, or giving audience to his subjects, and the next moment he would be seen shearing camels, hewing stones, cutting wood, or hammering iron, and doing all with as much diligence as though engaged in his own particular vocation.’’ In many ways, such as his attitude towards women’s rights and slavery, not to speak of his hostility to religious bigotry, Akbar remained unique. 129

Sealy’s regard for this particular historical figure and for his appreciation for artisan efforts may also have roots in Sealy’s own more recent expansion of his creative work beyond writing. The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanack tells the story of Sealy’s actual time spent constructing a pagoda in his yard, after seeing the celebrated Giant Wild Goose Pagoda of southern Xi’an, Shaanxi province, on a visit to China. The original Buddhist structure is multi-tiered and incredibly striking. Sealy dedicates the book to his own “433 square yards” at home in Dehradun, in northern India. For this project he has taken up brickwork and construction, and the book contains lists, diary entries, engineering notes, philosophy, travel notes, dialogues with his hired workers, history, and Sealy’s own ink sketches. At one point Sealy ponders how to describe this book, listing how it could be: Analects [like the sayings of Confucious], a Farmer’s almanack, Workbook, Handbook, Chapbook, a Meditation which can contain both “recipes and reflections on a septic tank,” and with a nod to the Menippean, an Anatomy. 130 The book cover informs readers that in addition to his novels, Sealy (aged 63 at the time of the book’s publication) is currently “apprenticed to a bricklayer.” There is a fair case to be made that Sealy’s later work conveys a deep recognition of the material efforts and energies of artisans, that they are more than symbols standing in for a general idea of creation and creativity. There are some additional manners of overlap in narratives from different novels, which direct us to Sealy’s postcolonial strategies of intertextuality. The overlaps suggest the solidity and veracity of the texts, particularly via the sustained presence of Anglo-Indians, rather than referencing any larger, clashing sense of frenzied global polyphony. In other words, Sealy’s characters don’t turn up at flashy parties in cosmopolitan

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locations in his other novels. But they provide dialogic connections in a Bakhtinian sense, suggestive of the repetitions of oral narrative traditions, or the power of local histories constructed of the mundane or diurnal, which are no less significant for being parochial. And these intertextual overlaps and resonances in Sealy’s texts, though Menippean in being obviously constructed, arguably exhibit none of the characteristics of magic realism. Everest and Brainfever each begins with a stolen suitcase which is eventually retrieved. The wily Jed in Everest mentions a local framer named Zero (Hero). Brainfever’s central section, set in Delhi, is called Red City, and the color permeates in a manner which presages the lush descriptions of hue in Red. Brainfever and Everest both conclude with a single mother making a new life with a baby daughter called Masha. But the most powerful echo runs between Everest and Red, which both take place in a fictional version of Sealy’s actual home at the Himalayan foothills, Dehradun, called Drummondganj in Everest, and Dariya Dun in Red. Both texts center on an artsy, flamboyant, red-haired Caucasian woman (called Inge in Everest; and Aline in Red), who seduces and records (photographs; paints) her Indian lover, and in each book she is murdered. And each murder is investigated by the same “morose” policeman, Inspector Bisht, who sifts through the clues and inconclusively arrives at a semi-plausible version of the case. But we learn from the narration that Inge bled to death from a knife wound after drinking and ingesting blood-thinning drugs. Aline is also poisoned, when hallucinogenic mushrooms are added to her food by her lover’s jealous local girlfriend. Both women have drug-induced visions before Inge exsanguinates, and Aline strolls off her roof. The narrative repetition is fairly overt, but suggests no overt parodic intentions on the part of the author; if anything each reads as a cautionary warning to flame-haired, Orientalist female tourists seeking the spiritual uplift of India. There is, though, the uneasy sense of the subjectivity and narrative subversion of ostensibly objective “investigations.” Each time the actual crime rests on emotional motivations and punishment for secret exploitations, for Inge has been doing witchy animal sacrifice rites with her lover in the cemetery, and Aline is slumming, secretly cheating on her composer with a lowly and amoral thief. For all their artistic airs they each refuse to “see” or register race or caste in an Indian social or cultural context. These disturbing episodes arguably ridicule the women’s naiveté and superficiality, and reflect the vein of counter-realism Kanaganayakam is describing when he comments on recent Indian writers whose approach “is not about surfaces, but about ruptures and fissures.” 131 Sealy’s intertexts align more, then, with the idea of narrative repeated and replayed, rather than updated. Although he recognizes an inherent paradox, Bakhtin writes that “the objective memory of the very genre…preserve[s] the peculiar features of the ancient Menippea.” 132 The repetition of motifs and events can be read as examples of Sealy’s mix of

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iconoclastic fragmented narrative and self-referentiality. 133 Sealy’s tack also illustrates what Laura O’Connor describes as the way Menippean satire capitalizes on “the topicality of the immediate and unfinalizable present” as “a starting point,” 134 and it is not unexpected that a Menippean satirist might return to a narrative to rework its ground with varying degrees of mockery and abrasion. When Sealy’s narrators admit to fictionalizing (in Trotter, Hero, Red), we are firmly in the territory of postmodernism’s knowing acknowledgments of duplicity. But Sealy is also recognizing the provisionalities of postcolonial discourses, the constructedness of his inevitably hybrid narratives, and the degree to which he is working with and around material handed to him by the incongruities which obtain in the wake of empire. Accommodation must be made, because: “In fact, there’s a hole right in the middle.” 135 Sealy’s satires may set in motion expansive and complicated pseudo-histories, but they also foreground the need for, as Kanaganayakam notes, methods which create distance and the means to “fictionalize the past.” 136 Sealy is also illustrating the way in which “self-parody in satiric rhetoric…prevents even the process of writing itself from becoming an oversimplified convention or ideal.” 137 In the discord and sheer formal array of his narratives, Sealy undermines the very idea of a relatable history, and reinforces the overarching Menippean conflict of subjectivity versus objectivity. In Trotter-Nama this philosophical debate is explicitly mapped over subjective chronicle and its corollary, the miniature—versus objective history, with its emblem, the photograph. Sealy articulates a metaphor in this novel for the soul-destroying colonial methodologies which gave rise to the wholly negative stereotype of the Anglo-Indian population as “Cranny, n. Originally Indo-Portuguese clerk using English; secretary; miserable scribe; mere copyist;…slavish hack; nook; member of caste neither here nor there.” 138 The metaphor rests in the type of writing Thomas Henry, Middle Trotter (the “hole in the middle”) takes to as a child: the mindless copying of prose. With Thomas Henry it was never anything but ink, and black ink. At St. Aloysius’s School he filled notebooks with transcription from any source that came to hand, starting anywhere and ending anywhere. He did not seem to care what he copied (once he copied his own work without knowing it), so long as it was prose and continued evenly and regularly to the end of the page. If he could have written a single continuous line on a ribbon which stretched to infinity he would have done so, for such was the nature of prose. 139

The conflict of chronicle (created) versus history (vertically and imperially imposed) is repeated in Sealy’s narrative, a friction which intensifies. At one point the Narrator administers a mock-catechism to the CupBearer; it is during the period of Thomas Henry’s son-in-law, Theobald

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Montagu/Trotter, who takes up the writing of “speculative” local history and also the use of the camera. 140 “Snake in the grass!” the Narrator has earlier berated him, before moving in with his worst epithet: “Historian!” (383). Later the Narrator asks, “‘who first brought Care to Sans Souci?’ The Cup-Bearer replies, ‘The Devil did.’” 141 The catechismic queries continue: His principal name? The ANTI-TROTTER. His other names? Theobald Horatius Montagu…. What was the state of Sans Souci before he came? A state of bliss. And after? A state of desolation… Its smell? Rank. Its sound? Ashen…. Its shape? Scroll-shaped. Its taste? Ashes in the mouth, ashes in the belly. This foul substance is called what? This foul substance is called History. And its opposite? Is the Chronicle. Which may be illustrated? Profusely. Is colourful? In the extreme. Has flavour? Honey in the mouth, honey in the belly…. Its sound? Ethereal. Specifically? Soprano…. Not castrato? Not quite. Its shape? Spherical. Its supreme exponent? You. Does it usher in a new age? It ushers in an age of promise. Which is the end of what lie? It is the end of Historie. [sic] 142

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The “desolation” is spread by the “[d]ry, literal, joyless, prowling shutterbugs” with their cameras, who stand in opposition to the “character” and the “particularity” of the miniature, a friction expounded in an “Interpolation” in which Eugene asks “Who killed the miniature?” and answers, “the camera.” 143 “When does an art form come into its own” and “find its true voice?” queries Eugene, “When it learns to distill from the general.” 144 He finds that apex in the miniature portrait. But the camera evolves into the wedding portrait business, and eventually it will mature into the film industry, with its records of “crowds” and far “pavilions.” 145 The wait continues, according to Eugene, for “the stubborn Object” to be “absorb[ed] into the purest Subjectivity,” but even this perspective is debated, since it arises in an essay published by the character Montagu which that author later disavows. 146 The tensions between objective and subjective grasps of “reality” manifest again in the brief narrative in Trotter of Jivan. He is the unfortunate son of the fallen Budhiya, and she is an untouchable from a servant family on the estate. At the illegitimate birth she is demoted in caste according to religious laws. Jivan disappears from the narrative altogether for a while, but eventually he is discovered still working on the estate but literally invisible. As sweeper-and-emptier of chamber pots, he is “a man of so degraded a caste that the very untouchables lorded it over him.” 147 Montagu eventually discerns him using a camera, after his wife, Victoria, complains of ghostly episodes of chamberpots floating mid-air and along corridors. 148 Setting a tripod in the hall, Montagu captures the image Victoria indicates, although he observes nothing. To his amazement, the photograph reveals the white blur of a chamberpot, and behind it, “through the smudge of ghostly waving lines there shone a face which for the first time in its life was made visible.” 149 Jivan had “been until now, an unseeable.” 150 The episode arguably overlaps with the bodily transformations and inexplicable enhancements of magic realism, but Sealy has embedded a thorny philosophical debate on the relative values of narrative versus purely representational genres, in addition to the attention paid to the silence and invisibility of the subaltern. After developing the image, Montagu is prompted to campaign to publicize the “evils of caste,” and apparently feels he has the camera to thank for his awakened sense of social consciousness, as he ponders “how could he not see what was under his very nose?” 151 But he is still a recorder of images, and in every sense a lowly copyist. And for Jivan, nothing changes; he remains invisible and thus there is no text or dialogue available that could articulate him in any Menippean context within the Nama. But the Menippean satire of Sealy’s formally innovative text does manage to contain this unfortunate narrative, adding it to the overload of information, perspective, and influence that overwhelms mere “history” while recasting and revivifying the genre of narrative fiction.

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CONCLUSION In conclusion, though it is hard to conclude in the face of Sealy’s characteristic torrents, Sealy’s use of the Menippean to experiment with form gives substance to the debates he embeds and the arguments he pursues. Menippean satire allows Sealy to recraft narrative models to mount significant historiographic challenges throughout all of his work. Counter-realist texts obviously problematize the authentication of material presented as factual, and satire can undermine notions of fixed reality as well. Part of the playfulness of the Menippean form also extends to its ready subversions of authorial intentionality, which John Clement Ball addresses by arguing for “a critical practice that tries to compensate for satire’s willful blindnesses by bridging gaps and reading broader frames of reference” into texts. 152 The work of the critical reader, then, becomes the effort to provide “contextualizing knowledge” that allows both the specificities of an historically or geographically placed critique, and the expansive cross-cultural associations that allow the corrective nature of satire’s impulses to apply to disparate locations, cultures, and structures. 153 This complements the insights of Loretta M. Mijares, writing specifically about Allan Sealy’s Trotter-Nama and its subversive stance towards factual material that “works not so much to question the authority of historiography as to demand the archival work of verification, creating a past more known than previously.” 154 Mijares describes following the injunction of Sealy’s narrator to look up an actual historical text, ostensibly quoted verbatim in Trotter-Nama; when Mijares does so it is with astonishment that she “learns that Eugene has not in fact changed a single word.” 155 The historical text, an 1853 Parliamentary record of a discussion of the alleged physical inferiorities of the Anglo-Indian “race,” seems in its extremes to be overt and outrageous parody, yet is in fact a faithful excerpt. 156 The result of her research is that, in her newly verified reading, “[t]he juxtaposition of the narrator’s own coyly straightforward style and the embarrassing documentary record blurs the lines between history’s prose and fiction’s parody.” 157 Yet, she notes, not many readers would be aware of these historical facts. 158 Mijares delineates that in a postmodern context, history, often parodied, is presented as unknowable and unreliable, while Sealy’s text in its “postcoloniality…is demonstrating that there is in fact a history, albeit textualized, that is available but ignored. In this context, parody becomes a strategy for historical survival: the unreliability introduced by parody transforms the careful reader of The Trotter-Nama into an historian.” 159 Menippean satire can integrate historic specificities that move a readership towards the recouping of lost or ignored material and away from readings which merely relativize the hybrid into endless pluralities.

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NOTES 1. Irwin Allan Sealy, The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 261. 2. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle, 559–60. 3. Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” Poetics Today 23, no. 2 (2002): 299. 4. Mishi Saran, “Love and Puppets in Delhi,” Far Eastern Economic Review 166, no. 26 (3 July 2003): 53. 5. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse,” 315. 6. I have listed the full titles for Sealy’s works, as they are listed in Red. The TrotterNama, Hero, and The Everest Hotel were originally published with their compound titles. The Brainfever Bird was not, but in the list of works in Red it has been changed (the phrase An Illusion has been added). Sealy also published a nonfiction work, originally From Yukon to Yucatán: A Western Journey (1994), also published as From Yukon to Yucatán: A Journey of Discovery in the Footsteps of America’s First Travellers. From Trotter to Brainfever Sealy published as I. Allan Sealy and with Red he appears as Irwin Allan Sealy, (in large-embossed, dark-red lettering on the back panel of the blazing red cover). I have shortened titles for the sake of economy of space in subsequent references. 7. Shyamala A. Narayan, “India,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50, no. 4 (2015): 505. 8. See “A House For Mr. Sealy,” Mail Today (New Delhi, India), 25 May 2014, Business Insights: Global. 9. Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 106. 10. Eugene P. Kirk, qtd. in Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern, 106. 11. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse,” 307. 12. Or in Sealy’s words: “which the vulgar and rough-tongued call Lakhnau, or One Hundred Thousand Boats” (Trotter 24). Trotter-Nama won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 1989. 13. See in particular: Mijares, “‘The Fetishism of the Original’: Anglo-Indian History and Literature in I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama,” and Ganapathy-Doré, “Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama: A Postcolonial Synchronicle.” 14. Sealy, “Writing A Novel,” Indian Review of Books 3, no. 1 (1993): 30. Rushdie includes a villa called Sans Souci in the already-published Midnight’s Children; it is one of the four built by William Methwold, and the Ibrahims move into it when Methwold decamps at Partition (97; Methwold’s tale concludes in The Ground Beneath Her Feet). Saleem Sinai’s parents take an apartment in the nearby Escorial Villa. Rushdie (perhaps) pays back the intertextuality in Ground (1999), when his narrator muses on Indian names and fixes on ‘Sodawaterbatliopenerwala’ (10, sic), while Sealy had already introduced in Trotter-Nama (1988) a taxidermist whose work is displayed at Sans Souci and he is named Sodawaterbottleopenerwallah (418). Sealy may have beaten Rushdie again to the punch in one notable example, quoting in Trotter-Nama the same popular song verse from the film Sri 440 that is much-noted in The Satanic Verses (also 1988): “My shoes they are Japani/These pants are Englishtani/My red hat is Russi/But my heart is Hindustani” (Trotter 496). Rushdie’s Gibreel translates it fully to English (Satanic, 5). In Rushdie’s version, Chamcha counters the vulgar film song with a pious eighteenth-century sermon, a Menippean paradigm of the textual contrasts to come. In Sealy the song is sung by hopeful Hindus and Muslims united on a peace march in the early days of Partition, but the lyric “Hindustani” prompts violence among some Muslims in the march, and a full-scale murderous riot erupts (Trotter, 497). In Sealy, the song satirizes how communal knowledge (“Every Indian knew the song”) both unites and disrupts, defining but isolating and alienating communities (Trotter, 496). 15. Sealy, “Writing A Novel,” 30. 16. Loretta Mijares, “‘The Fetishism of the Original’: Anglo-Indian History and Literature in I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama.” South Asian Review 24, no. 2 (2003): 8.

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17. Glenn D’Cruz, “My Two Left Feet: The Problem of Anglo-Indian Stereotypes in Post-Independence Indo-English Fiction,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 38, no. 2 (2003): 114. The use of “customary” brings to mind Louis Menand’s dry comment (mentioned in chapter 1) on magic realism seeming rote or predictable in world literature. 18. See Loretta Mijares’s excellent essay on the history, and some literary-critical implications, of pejorative terms for perceived mixed-race-status individuals in India; “‘You are an Anglo-Indian?’: Eurasians and Hybridity and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Vol. 38(2): 125–145, 2003. 19. Loretta Mijares, “‘The fetishism of the original,’” 10. 20. Judith Plotz, “Rushdie’s Pickle and the New Indian Historical Novel: Sealy, Singh, Tharoor, and National Metaphor,” World Literature Written in English 35, no. 2 (1996): 29. 21. Judith Plotz, “Rushdie’s Pickle and the New Indian Historical Novel,” 29. 22. Judith Plotz, “Rushdie’s Pickle and the New Indian Historical Novel,” 32. 23. Prema Nandakumar, “The Fantasy Element in Indian Fiction in English,” in Commonwealth Literature: Themes and Techniques, eds. P. K. Rajan, et al. (Delhi: Ajanta, 1993), 145. 24. Rukmini Bhaya Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion: Postcoloniality and Literary History,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 162. 25. Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion,” 162; 160. 26. Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion,” 179. 27. Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion,” 180. 28. Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion,” 181. 29. Loretta M. Mijares, “‘The Fetishism of the Original,’” 7. 30. Loretta M. Mijares, “‘The Fetishism of the Original,’” 7. 31. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, 185. 32. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, 185. 33. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, 185. 34. Mijares, “‘The Fetishism of the Original,’”19. 35. Arvindar Singh, “In Conversation: Irwin Allan Sealy and Arvindar Singh,” India International Centre Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2013): 93. 36. Judith Plotz, “Rushdie’s Pickle and the New Indian Historical Novel,” 43–4. 37. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 484. 38. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 484. The Titar-Nama is not included in Eugene’s list of extant namas, which are listed elsewhere in Trotter-Nama: The Akhbar-Nama in tribute to the great Mughal, the Shah-Nama in praise of Persian Kings, the Babar-Nama of the first Mughal, the Sikandar-Nama of Alexander the Great, the Ni’mat-Nama of medieval recipes, and “the Tota-Nama, the Book of the Parrot, a Hindu epic told by a talking bird that goes on and on” (Trotter-Nama, 7). The term, “Sunya,” comes from the Vedic numbering system’s concept of zero; see A. K. Bag and S. R. Sarma, eds., The Concept of Sunya (New Delhi: Aryan Books, 2003). Geetha Ganapathy-Doré notes Sealy’s parody of these specific examples, particularly “Ferdowzi’s Shah Nama and Abu Fazl’s Akbar Nama,” as well as of the entire “Persian Genre of the Nama,” in The Postcolonial Novel in English (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 129. 39. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 562. 40. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 562. 41. Om P. Juneja, Post Colonial Novel: Narratives of Colonial Consciousness (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1995), 18. 42. Sealy, “Writing A Novel,” 29. 43. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse,” 298. 44. José Borghino, “Welcome to the Gathering at the Hotel Eccentric,” Courier Mail (Queensland), (October 31, 1998): 9.

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45. Ramlal Agarwal, “The Everest Hotel,” World Literature Today 73, no. 4 (1999): 738. 46. Sealy, The Everest Hotel: A Calendar (New Delhi: India Ink, 1998), 333. 47. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama, 3. This is in the Prologue, entitled “Trotter” (1–10). The actual “Chronicle of the Trotters,” apparently Eugene’s manuscript, unfolds in the second section, called “Trotter-Nama” (11–563). Eugene returns in the Epilogue, called just “Nama” (563–575). 48. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama, 559. 49. There is a miniature on the cover of Trotter-Nama that manages to incorporate the entire narrative: Sans Souci, all the main characters, couriers, servants, indigo vats, mango trees, river, and town. The origin of the book’s “Jacket Painting,” printed on the book jacket, is presented as similar to the ones the text gives for Eugene’s forgeries: it is “Fall of the Great Trotter by an unknown artist of the Kirani School, circa 1800. Coll. I. Allan Sealy.” “Kirani” is a version of “cranny,” the pejorative word for AngloIndians, which Sealy parodies throughout the text. He identifies himself as the artist of the miniature in a statement in the introductory chapter of Hero (14). 50. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama, 565. 51. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama, 572. 52. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama, 574. 53. Gunapathy-Doré, “Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama: A Postcolonial Synchronicle,” 75. 54. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 26. 55. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, 192. 56. Sealy, “Writing A Novel,” 29. 57. Sealy, “Writing A Novel,” 29. 58. Sealy, “Writing A Novel,” 29–30. 59. Sealy, “Writing A Novel,” 29. 60. “Zelaldinus opens a modern window on Akbar,” Interview with Irwin Allan Sealy, The Punch (May 31, 2017): 1. http://thepunchmagazine.com/the-byword/interviews. 61. “Zelaldinus opens a modern window,” 1. 62. “Zelaldinus opens a modern window,” 2. 63. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama, 314. 64. Sealy, The Trotter-Nama, 127. 65. Ibrahim Gamard, Rumi scholar and translator: “the cupbearer [saqî], literally ‘water-carrier’ or ‘water server,’ is a frequent term in Persian literature. It means the dispenser of pure water, or wine, which are symbols of spiritual blessings in sufi poetry.” Masnavi, www.dar-al-masnavi.org/about-dar-al-masnavi.html. 66. Jalal al-Din Rumi, Masnavi, “Man agar mastam agar hoshyaram,” D 1679, “Ghazals and Ruba’is,” trans. from the Persian by Iraj Anvar and Anne Twitty. 2007. http:// www.archipelago.org/vol10-34/rumi.htm. 67. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 35. 68. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 39; 184; 190; 227; 241; 308; 479; 490; 501; 547. 69. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 3. Eugene’s punning comment on the “indo-lent” is “I’m half Anglo, you know” (3). 70. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 422–27. 71. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 424. 72. Milowicki and Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse,” 320. 73. Sherbert, “Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit,” 32. 74. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 233. 75. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 154. 76. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 155. 77. In his dark blueness Mik conjures Krishna, sprung from the black hair of Vishnu and often represented in sacred images as blue or blue-black. Like Krishna, the god of fire, the young Mik plays with pyrotechnics and manages to blow up a building at Sans Souci. Later he aids the Tibetan in his “Little Game” (Trotter-Nama, 172) of the

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non-lethal fires which torch various urban public offices of the East India Company all over India, and he is given the status of Fireworker when he completes his cadet course at the Military Academy. Krishna-like, he also has no difficulty summoning shepherd girls (like the sculptor’s daughters) for nighttime adventures. 78. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 201. 79. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 201. 80. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 202. 81. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 203. 82. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 220. 83. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 223. 84. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 431. 85. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 432. 86. See Bart Moore-Gilbert’s “‘I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim’: Kipling and Postcolonialism,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.2 (2002), 39–58. Moore-Gilbert elucidates how Sealy’s treatment of Kim enacts appreciation of Kipling while subverting key elements of this iconic text. 87. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 210. 88. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 210. 89. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 360. 90. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 289. 91. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 114. 92. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 512. 93. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 512. 94. See Catherine Pesso-Miquel, “Clock-ridden Births: Creative Bastardy in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” in Postmodern Studies 36: Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film, eds. Christian Gutleben and Susana Onega (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 17–52. 95. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 554. 96. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 127. 97. Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie. La Martinière. Taj Magazine, June 2001. http:www.tasleemlucknow.com/laMartinière boys.htm. For images of La Martinière through the ages, reproduced from numerous forms, see http://www.columbia.edu/ itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/1700_1799/claudemartin/claudemartin.html. The collected images include an engraving from the European Magazine, London, c. 1790; a 1794 engraving of Martin where the resemblance to Sealy’s descriptions of Justin Trotter is pronounced; a watercolor of the house by Indian painter Seeta Ram, 1814–15; an albumen print by Samuel Bourne from the 1860s; and a photograph taken in the late nineteenth century. 98. As per Martin’s wishes, the estate became a boys’ school after his death, today known as La Martinière College, a private secondary school. By leaving instructions to have himself (a Christian) interred beneath the house, Martin insured that the local Nawab, as a Muslim, would not try to obtain ownership of the property. When the will was disbursed in 1840 three boys’ schools were established, in Lucknow, Calcutta, and at Martin’s birthplace in Lyon. Each is today called La Martinière. The 1950 MGM film version of Kim, starring Errol Flynn, with Dean Stockwell as Kim, was partly filmed at La Martinière, Lucknow. Not insignificantly, Allan Sealy is himself an alumnus of La Martinière, Lucknow. 99. I am relying heavily on William Gass’s definition of metafiction, as specifically writing about writing itself, especially concerned with how meaning occurs or fails, and wherein parody extends to interpolations on the very act of writing. See William Gass, “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” Fiction and the Figures of Life (NY: Knopf, 1970), 25. 100. Sealy, Hero: A Fable (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 1990), 15–16. 101. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 170. 102. Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion,” 173. 103. Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion,” 173.

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104. Nair, “The Pedigree of the White Stallion,” 180. 105. Irwin Allan Sealy, The Brainfever Bird: An Illusion (London: Picador, 2003), 277. 106. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 164; 210; 284. 107. Irwin Allan Sealy, Red: An Alphabet (London: Picador, 2006), 184. 108. Elias Canetti, qtd. in Michael Andre Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Resentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 52. 109. Sealy, Red, 9. 110. Sealy, Red, 200. 111. Sealy, Red, 200. 112. Sealy, Red, 213; 303. 113. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 85. 114. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 85. 115. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 85. 116. The book, Hero, is rather clearly based on the life of M.G. Ramachandran, the film actor known for his heroic roles, who became chief minister of Tamil Nadu and died in 1987. Fischer and Abedi state that “Rushdie models Gibreel [of The Satanic Verses] on the Indian movie stars M.G.R[amachandran], Rama Rao, Raj Kapoor, and Amitabh Bachchan” (122). It would appear that once again, as with the narrator born at the stroke of midnight on India’s Independence, Sealy’s literary concept is coincident with and scooped by Rushdie. Sealy, who uses Ramachandran even more centrally than Rushdie, includes factual information from the year 1986 regarding the chronology of Sealy’s own earlier two publications in the first chapter of Hero. He blurs the role of narrator and author, but the “facts” coincide with the genuine history of his books: the seven-year wait by 1986 to see Trotter-Nama published, which will take another two years to be released. So the planned “filmi-political novel” (14) Sealy was working on in 1986 would overlap Rushdie’s work on The Satanic Verses (1988), which is also arguably a filmi-political novel. Again Rushdie trumped Sealy’s publication date, as Hero did not come out until 1990. For excellent insights into the influences of Ramachandran’s unusual career path, see Sara Ann Dickey, Going to the Pictures in Madurai: Social, Psychological and Political Aspects of Cinema in Urban Working Class South India. PhD dissertation, Anthropology, University of California at San Diego, 1988. 117. Sealy, Hero, 203. Sealy’s italics. 118. Sealy, Red, 320. 119. Sealy, Hero, 11–12. 120. Sealy, Hero, 248. 121. Sealy, Hero, 41. 122. Tarun Tejpal, “The New Masters: Indian Writers Were Once in Awe of London: Today They Set the Pace in English Literature,” Asiaweek, 1 Aug. 1997: 1. 123. Sealy, Red, 6. 124. Sealy, Zelaldinus: A Masque (New Delhi: Aleph/Almost Island, 2017), 1. 125. “‘Zelaldinus: A Masque’—Akbar and the ghost of his present.” Micro Review, June 20, 2017. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/reviews/akbar-andthe-ghost-of-his-present-zelaldinus-a-masque-review/articleshow/58292865.cms. 126. Sealy, Zelaldinus, 49. 127. Sealy, Zelaldinus, 52. 128. Amitabha Bagchi, “The Small Wild Goose Pagoda,” Review, Mint, New Delhi (19 July 2014): 1. Livemint.com. 129. Shireen Moosvi, “The World of Labour in Mughal India,” IRSH 56—Special Issue (2011): 256. doi:10.1017/S0020859011000526r2011. Moosvi is referencing the record of the Jesuit Father Anthony Monserrate, who reported from the Emperor Akbar’s court to Rome in the 1570s. See: Anthony Monserrate, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, SJ, on his Journey to the Court of Akbar, trans. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee (Cuttack, 1922): 201. Sealy refers to Father Monserrate’s records in his Masque as well. 130. Sealy, The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanack (New Delhi: Aleph, 2014), 240. 131. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, 186.

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132. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 121. 133. See Loretta Marie Mijares, Constructing Hybridity: Eurasians/Anglo-Indians in British and Indian Fiction. PhD diss., New York University (2002): 74–6. ProQuest (3048844). 134. Laura O’Connor, “Neighborly Hostility and Literary Creoles: The Example of Hugh MacDiarmid,” in Postmodern Culture 15, no. 2 (2005): 16. 135. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 572. 136. Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction, 185. 137. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 234. 138. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 55. 139. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 313. 140. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 412. 141. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 375. 142. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 375–6. Sealy’s italics. 143. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 393–4. 144. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 394. 145. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 394. 146. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 394; 414. 147. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 392. 148. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 391. 149. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 392. 150. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 392. 151. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 393. 152. Ball, Satire, 40. 153. Ball, Satire, 40; 38. 154. Mijares, Constructing Hybridity, 14. 155. Mijares, Constructing Hybridity, 14. 156. Sealy, Trotter-Nama, 308. 157. Mijares, Constructing Hybridity, 14. 158. Mijares, Constructing Hybridity, 14. 159. Mijares, Constructing Hybridity, 12.

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Conclusion From Hatterr to Trotter and Beyond

In October 2017 Salman Rushdie discussed his then most recent novel, The Golden House, with the journalist Mark Lawson for The Guardian newspaper’s Books Podcast:

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There was a moment some years ago when I was doing an event at Columbia University with Edward Said; we were having a conversation. And in the Q and A, a gentleman from the audience, who I think was a member of the faculty at Columbia, English faculty, stood up, in a state of some agitation, and he said “Mr. Rushdie, we have always thought of you as postcolonial, but what I am asking is: Are you still with us?” [Laughter from Rushdie and audience.] It was the heat in the question, you know. And I said, I am sorry, Sir, but we’ve only just met. I don’t know if I am with you or not. 1

My discussion has covered a significant body of postcolonial Menippean satire in this critical expedition in the postcolonial period from Hatterr to Trotter. It is hoped that the provision of specificity regarding each author and text has balanced out concerns about generalizations, and that the spirit of motivated, open critical enquiry obtains throughout. I have stressed Desani’s near-heroic use of numerous Menippean strategies to resist closure and finality, maintaining both Hatterr’s noble on-going philosophical quest, and the formal tensions between Eastern and Western influences. In Menen’s work I have focused on how clever juxtapositions of Eastern and Western sources impact the level of discourse. Rather than Desani’s avalanche of dramatic incursions which reshape and redefine form, Menen establishes Menippean satire through emphasis on wit and refined erudition, even as he allows Menippean-inflected discourses to unfold in surprising physical, sexual, and cultural contexts. My focus on Rushdie has been to foreground his construction of Menippean elements through dialogic descriptions of various art forms within his novels; Rushdie’s employment of ekphrasis arguably has a bearing on the boundaries of the novel, and his Menippean approach tends to undercut fallacies of uncorrupted or essential artistic or cultural traditions. With the work of Irwin Allan Sealy, one confronts innovative Menippean satiric forms and a number of ironic paradoxes, the most central being that of the “all”-encompassing historical chronicle and the subjectivities 177

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which endlessly elude its narrative borders. Sealy uses Menippean strategies and structures to expand and reshape the novelistic genre to new levels and registers, while at the same time confronting how difficult it remains to create space or voice for the subaltern, the marginal, the disenfranchised, and the hybrid. In the Menippean fragmentations and reformations of all of these texts, each of these authors foregrounds an undeniable drive toward the untested and the new. The material presented here additionally makes a powerful case for the significant imaginative and constituent role comprised by satire in the way these postcolonial texts challenge, destabilize, re-vision, and correct. Stemming from all of the research shared here, I have argued for wider critical investment in postcolonial satire, and for the importance of increased satire literacy. This project traces a specific era of postcolonial satiric developments. The work of these four authors, G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy, comprises a chapter in the evolution of postcolonial satire, a temporal and textual interval when it could be argued that postcolonial satire’s dominant characteristic of counter-realist representation aligned strongly with the features of Menippean satire, and that reading these works as satire enables tapping into salient discourses on resistance, opposition, and subversion. Based on the substantial body of work discussed here, one can point towards a distinct trend or pattern, and assessing this alignment critically makes apparent ways to appreciate the multi-leveled, multi-toned, multi-faceted satiric critiques put forward in these works. One can also see ways in which they have had influence, stamping on subsequent postcolonial writing of the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere a multi-directional imprint of satire’s estimable credentials, connections, and potentials. My concluding discussion now shifts direction to approach satire in more general terms, to trace some of the challenging arguments which will shape postcolonial satire, and satire scholarship more broadly. Satire remains a pivotal and impactful literary and cultural art form and seems set to remain in the critical spotlight of on-going debates about cultural autonomy, power, free speech, and the politics of art. Summing up the emphases of a recent project called The Power of Satire (2015) that produced scholarly papers, a conference, and an anthology, lead researchers Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw evoke the potentialities of a satire that “plays with cultural forms and identities, it travels between media and through periods of time, it provokes critical reflection on authorities, tackles values, dogmas and taboos, and disturbs power relations.” 2 Their project’s conclusions indicate some of the pathways forward for future investigations: that satire can perform necessary sociocultural and political interference, that satire should be seen as a sociocultural mode of performance that can contest cultural boundaries, and that there also needs to be a research focus on satire’s potentially divisive impacts on societies in an expanding multi-media global culture. 3 Their

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usurpation of the title of one of the foundational texts of satire study, Robert C. Elliott’s The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (1960), is an act which makes an impressive claim for rerouting the progress of an earlier critical narrative. The question always arises, in the context of discussions of resistance literature and art, whether it actually has an extra-literary effect, in societal or political terms. Measurable outcomes both positive and negative are always critically important, but difficult to assert in a field more qualitatively than quantitatively determinate. 4 Iranian scholar Mahmud Farjami embeds a focus on such material impacts in his project to understand and record the elements which motivate both Iranian political satirists experiencing an oppressive regime and those in the Iranian diasporic community living where their work is no longer under censorship or threat. Farjami finds that satire can be a source of psychological redemption for the satirist in an oppressed society. He underscores that “relief from anger and aggression, often caused by observing incongruences and gaps between the ideal and the real, is the main motivation behind the production of political satire in Iran.” 5 He also uncovers linkage from resistance writing and art to action, in his finding that “[t]his relief usually drives the satirist to engage in social action in the form of punishing the cause of corruption and oppression by challenging the hegemony of the dominant power.” 6 His study merges dominant strands of contemporary humor theory with investigations into the extra-textual activities and perspectives of satiric writers and artists. 7 Evidence of the potential divisive impact of satire has been borne out in what John Clement Ball has designated the “real-world events that… demonstrate, in some compelling new ways, the risks and perils of satire’s unstable power in our heterogeneous societies.” 8 Certainly Salman Rushdie’s work forever updated our sense of the contemporary contentious impacts satire can have, although there is a long historical tradition of punitive measures dealt to satirists for their art. 9 The responses stirred by the publication of The Satanic Verses, and not its author’s intentions, were the determining factors of what subsequently became the Rushdie Affair. Ball summed up those events: That most infamous of satiric novels, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988)—written in and mostly about London in the 1980s but more notoriously taking a satiric brush to Islamic history and matters of faith—demonstrated satire’s power to provoke violence a quarter century ago when it prompted bannings, bombings, book burnings, stabbings, the murder of its Japanese translator, and the declaration of a fatwa, or death sentence, on Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini that forced the author into hiding from 1989 to 1998. 10

Salman Rushdie did not write his satiric novel to incite on-going debate about the parameters of satire and free expression, but that is indeed

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what happened. Deliberations about the very nature of satire continue, spurred by the Verses aftermath, which Rushdie chronicled in Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012), naming that book after the pseudonym he used while in hiding. In that book about attacks on himself and his work, he ponders the irony that “for many years, The Satanic Verses was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. There was something surreally comical about this metamorphosis of a novel about angelic and satanic metamorphoses into a devil-version of itself.” 11 Tense outcomes of satire in our modern literary, digital, graphic, and post-textual discourses have not abated at all. After the printing of twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten on Sept. 30, 2005, a publishing event set up by the editor in a spirit of intended multiculturalism, there were protests, boycotts, violent unrest, international diplomatic disturbances involving over a dozen countries, and political uproar on multiple continents. The paper’s culture editor, Flemming Rose, emphasized in the accompanying editorial that the images were intentionally set in a context of “contemporary democracy and freedom of speech, where one must be ready to put up with insults, mockery and ridicule…. [though] it does not mean that religious feelings should be made fun of at any price.” 12 Citing satire as a national cultural institution, Rose stressed in a subsequent article that "The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat [all] religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers.” 13 Extant satire traditions can feature in the cultural processes that characterize integration and assimilation of new social groups, but that seems separate from the issue of how fair an incorporating gesture the cartoons actually were. In April 2010 an American cartoonist, Molly Norris, launched a satiric and anti-censorship effort on social media inviting people to a virtual “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” and over a hundred thousand people signed up for the event, with a similar number on a page protesting it. The event did not go well. The subsequent outcry provoked the governments of Pakistan and India to temporarily block Facebook and sent Norris, at the urging of the FBI, into hiding, where she apparently remains. And on 7 January 2015 two armed men stormed the Paris office of the satirical French weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, a proud participant in the longstanding French practice of publishing extremely outrageous material, which had included cartoon images of the Islamic prophet. (Simone Chambers has recorded that “Everyone agrees, including Charlie Hebdo, that its form of satire is offensive, rude, and scurrilous.” 14) The gunmen, who announced affiliation with an Islamic terrorist organization, killed a dozen staff members and injured 11. In the fraught weeks following the massacre, in marches and on social media, hundreds of

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thousands of people declared “Je Suis Charlie/ I Am Charlie” in solidarity with the satirists. Debates about free speech, and the relationship of satire and violence, were kindled in academic and mainstream journals, in classrooms and government chambers, and they continue today. In the aftermath, John Clement Ball, in an essay contemplating “Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” designated satire “representational violence”: “Sometimes its mocking and critical ways make satire so explosive that the symbolic violence of its distortions motivates actual violence on the part of those who feel targeted (or offended).” 15 Grant Julin, trying to mediate how satire could proceed in a conflicted, multicultural world, called political satire “weaponised humour.” 16 Julin adds that it is “a double-edged sword. On one edge is its ethical core—a moral concern and seriousness that seeks political reform of some perceived wrong or injustice…. Political satire’s less benevolent edge is its cut—a methodology that wounds by weakening its target through linguistic and artistic barbs.” 17 That these events pivot on satiric representations of Islam highlights economically a current global state of contention around cultural and mimetic boundaries, and also an aspect of continuing postcolonial-inflected discourse around apprehensions of The Other. The critic Srinivas Aravamudan had earlier viewed the possible effects of Rushdie’s contentious text, in this specific framework, as perilous:

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Defending satire of a longstanding historical and cultural “other” of the West, such as Islam, can very easily, if the satire is appropriated by the West as a decontextualized “critique,” serve the apotropaic function of insulting and frightening the adversary, ultimately doing the ideological work of cultural imperialism. Such a defense illegitimately asserts the superiority of a Western viewing position over that which is attacked. 18

The involvement of satire in these transcultural confrontations also points to its singular embeddedness in contemporary discourses on power and the nature of resistance. “Culture,” after all, Elleke Boehmer reminds us, “is an instrument of power.” 19 The distinction between the appropriateness of smearing the powerful versus attacking the powerless remains for many an unclear margin. Grant Julin wonders if, post–Charlie Hebdo, satire has sacrificed its perceived “moral edge as a ‘punching up’ of the powerless against a corrupt, unjust, and authoritarian power structure.” 20 The concern echoes remarks the satiric cartoonist Garry Trudeau made post-Charlie in a speech on “free-speech fanaticism, and the problem with ‘punching downward’”: “Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.” 21 He continues, “What free-speech absolutists

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have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must.” 22 Trudeau’s remarks, reprinted in The Atlantic under the heading, “The Abuse of Satire,” were interpreted by many as placing blame for the attack on the errant magazine staff: “Freedom” he concluded, “should always be discussed within the context of responsibility.” 23 Simone Chambers‘s exploration of the Charlie Hebdo aftermath hinges on the centrality of maintaining a rational sense of civility predicated on averting future conflicts: “Incivility cannot be invested in words or images independent of context. The question is the power of the words to harm” and to then inflict longstanding social and political damages. 24 Chambers further notes that “offence and insult have different civility registers” which center on degrees of appearing warranted versus “gratuitous.” 25 Grant Julin also registers concern that the violence-inciting political cartoons foregrounded, in Bakhtinian terms, the virulent monologous attack and a destructive, “punching-down” drive, and that this should be countered by a more responsible approach. 26 Tariq Modood resists any uncritical celebration of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, blogging that “[t]here is a world of difference between satire against the powerful (‘speaking truth to power’) and against the powerless, where it becomes not just a form of bullying but risks becoming racist.” 27 And Ball asks: “When satire punches down, is it in danger of reinforcing prejudices against subaltern groups and, however unwittingly, shoring up powerful, status quo hierarchies?” 28 In these discussions of satire we find a highly loaded version of what Homi Bhabha problematizes in the context of postcolonial discourses, specifically how “[t]he study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of ‘otherness.’” 29 Tzvetan Todorov had earlier recognized the profound relativities and instabilities of the designation of an “other.” 30 Mahmud Farjami notes that it was influential postcolonial theorist and critic Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak who “coined the term ‘othering’ to refer to the process through which the imperial discourse creates its others, hence produces its subjects….it simultaneously constructs the identities of both colonial and colonized subjects.” 31 If satire participates in this process, then it also potentially enacts this specific discursive reciprocity, and indeed Ball has noted with a degree of warning that “[s]atire, with its objectifying, disparaging gaze and its deliberate misrepresentations, is a form of othering.” 32 Sarah Ilott has commented in the context of humor theory that any form of “comedy based on superiority inadvertently exposes the imagined power of the Othered group and reveals underlying social fears.” 33 In the current cultural climate these “fears” can reflect an array of projected anxieties regarding migrancy, terrorism, and versions of extreme cultural alienation. Satire scholars will need to contend with these ugly possibilities raised by satire that can be disseminated rapidly via contemporary media and

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exert its cultural clout in ways perceived to be malfeasant, weaponized, and divisive. This requires a scholarly awareness of the ways causing offense exacerbates cultural and political vulnerabilities, as well as historical misrepresentations. In “Satire and Dignity,” Giselinde Kuipers has explored the dichotomy of the loss of dignity following a perceived public decline in power, versus the way access to social and political power is needed to respond to satiric attacks in a dignified manner. 34 Postcolonial critical work such as that of Elleke Boehmer leads in considering how cultural institutions and hegemonies can be “resisted and thwarted” at many different cultural and practical levels, while at the same time widening the acknowledged registers of artistic practices in ways which add balance and representation to modes of expression and to cultural frames of reference. 35 An angle that should not be overlooked is the double negative of resistance rendered against instances of resistance writing, as a marker of impact or effect. Mahmud Farjami notes in his research on political satire as an index of press freedoms that “political satire is often one of the first targets in press crackdowns and other attempts to limit political freedom owing to its critical examination of power and authority. As such, political satire can be regarded as an index of the freedom of speech,” in the specific case of his work, in Iran. 36 Quantitative analysis of institutional and formal pushback directed towards satire, though certainly measurable, stands as a rather dire and depressing metric for measuring the success or efficacy of satiric literatures of resistance. One can add to this catalogue of concerns for satire study the inherent difficulty of interpretation, such as the straddling of a conservative tendency to label and castigate behaviors deemed morally unacceptable, and a liberal appeal to radical inclusion in the face of conflicts. There is always the possibility for a reading which admires clever delivery while reproaching utterly the content, or vice-versa. How any individual piece of satire is understood is unpredictable and contingent. As Ball notes, “the satirist’s intentions can be important to the act of interpreting a satiric work.” 37 A ferociously chastised satirist may have had honorable aims, and even be aligned with significant and progressive shifts in cultural perceptions. In Edward Said’s articulation of literary resistance, he describes Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a “work based on the liberating imagination of independence itself.” 38 In Said’s framework, “resistance…is an alternative way of conceiving human history.” 39 JeanPierre Durix has explored how imperialism’s brutal legacy was the deprivation for colonized peoples not only of territories and wealth, but also of history and imagination. 40 In this context, satirical work can be construed as resistant and liberational, particularly in the Menippean manner which forces epistemological reconsideration via its unanticipated methods and its drive to counter-realism. One can also ink in “longevity” to satire’s

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function as a literature of resistance, based on the stalwart resolution of so many fired-up writers to use one’s words to do battle. Rushdie has continued to emphasize and to celebrate satire’s role in this liberatory vein. In the memoir Joseph Anton he writes of his own experience, using third-person narrative, of resisting the fatwa: “he needed, now, to be clear on what he was fighting for. Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner. Also skepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee.” 41 Despite enduring extended hardship in this period, Rushdie describes being able to project an ideal cultural milieu, and it is notably one which can be read as offering a genuine welcome to the practices of the Menippean Cynic: “Liberty lay in the argument itself, not in the resolution of that argument; in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent…. All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected.” 42 When Rushdie was awarded the Kurt Tucholsky Prize in 1992, an honor given to threatened or exiled writers and named after a persecuted German satirist who published in the years before WWII, he welcomed the chance to convey what he saw as the core issues at stake in the attempt to shut down his work and his voice. In Joseph Anton, he describes himself making this address to the Swedish Academy:

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At the heart of the dispute over The Satanic Verses, he said, behind all the accusations and abuse, was a question of profound importance: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told?… As a creative artist he knew that the only answer to the question was: Everyone and anyone. 43

Rushdie has consistently maintained the stance, recorded by Andrew Teverson, “that free narration is a form of free speech and thus is good for society,” and accordingly, satire is a component of this value-based system of communication and even community-building. 44 Teverson additionally endorses that we read Rushdie's repeated “allegories of storytelling less in terms of a naive plea for free speech and more in terms of the relationship [Rushdie] advocates among cultures.” 45 Certainly the overall trajectory of Rushdie’s work indicates indelibly the importance of satire as a marker of freedom of expression. There is still a strong critical pull, though, which emerges regularly in scholarly publishing in humor and genre studies, to impose fixed categories on satire in general, and when Menippean satire emerges in these discussions, to establish comprehensive rules, rhetorics, and rubrics for the Menippean. What may be both the most compelling and the most

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perplexing aspect about this enduring critical practice is its compulsive reliance on the ancient model of Sisyphus, the one who was condemned to repeat an exceedingly strenuous endeavor which inevitably returned him to its starting point. In “Satire and Definition” Conal Condren considers a wide range of historically contextualized critical assessments of satire including the Menippean, before concluding that “Satire, then, much like the humor with which it has for so long been associated, is unsuitable for an essentialist definition.” 46 The extreme challenge of pinning down the parameters of what exactly satire is, Condren resolves, conveys more about the limits of definitions than about conclusive ways to sum up satire as an act, genre, or attitude. 47 Erik McLuhan has sought to clarify the category of Menippean satire by establishing the mechanism of its specific rhetoric. His description of the goals of Menippean satirists is apt: “Their constant aim is to restore balance to perception: they combat delusion and illusion and pretentiousness and intellectual boneheadedness of every stripe.” 48 Likewise McLuhan offers a germane summation of the spirit of the Cynic Menippean satirist: “They will swipe any technique, resort to any extreme, to jolt the target (the man-in-the-street reader) into wakefulness, to restore a sense of proportion, and to limber up the senses.” 49 But his notion of a specific rhetoric seems restrictive, emphasizing as it does that “Menippean satire is a device for producing a specific kind of effect on the reader… an active form, not a passive one: any work that produces the effect of a Menippean satire is a Menippean satire.” 50 This focus on a satire’s assumed effect on the reader leaves little room for the modern critical pluralism which endeavors to assert the value of a rich diversity of discourses and voices. As John Clement Ball notes, with specific regard to how satire might be interpreted: “Our globalizing, ever-more wired world of intermingled peoples, cultures, and ideas makes an assumption of shared norms even more suspect today.” 51 McLuhan does, though, render a very useful observation that “Menippism springs entirely from a need to stay alive, a refusal to be swallowed or subsumed; it steadily prods one into remaining awake and keeping a sense of proportion and of human scale.” 52 This restoration of “balance to perception” aligns productively with Elleke Boehmer’s recent work which explores the new territory of postcolonial poetics, a concept that rests in the impact on readers of a tier of subtle but serious textual juxtapositions and contrasts. Boehmer’s work both notes, and then consciously veers from, the tendencies of previous postcolonial criticism to celebrate and to rather blithely “elevate features such as multi-vocality and hybridity” to such a degree that critics “almost inevitably impose overarching critical paradigms upon the writing.” 53 Boehmer instead concentrates her work in postcolonial poetics on interstitial moments, silences, and textual ruptures, working from recognition that “[c]ultural hegemony, like other forms of hegemony…might also be resisted and thwarted

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at different cultural—conceptual, linguistic, textual, rhythmic— levels.” 54 Boehmer’s work confronts a certain degree of critical noise that has built up, and this is what I regard as aligned with McLuhan’s focus on a satire that, though it definitely brings its notes of discord and its clash of voices, also endeavors to remind readers about “proportion” and “human scale.” The model established by Elleke Boehmer in her exploration of a new framework for discussing postcolonial poetics, and the questions she raises, each have relevance for construing how studies of postcolonial satire might proceed. Boehmer foregrounds in her work a reading-practice-based approach, which resonates with the value satire critics have placed on reading deeply for context, history, and epistemological connections. She widens the range of included generic forms of writing and cultural expression, and considers ramifications of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century in the context of topics including “cultural reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.” 55 Boehmer is not so much revisiting a postcolonial subject as expanding the critical consideration of “literature as an instrument of social change.” 56 There is a significant amount of intriguing scholarly work which explores the role of satire in different contexts by establishing a socialcommentary continuum of optimistic to pessimistic, or constructive to destructive—which can provide a sense of comparative measurement or placement for multiple works. John Clement Ball does this in his work on Salman Rushdie, cataloging several of Salman Rushdie’s novels as exhibiting negative or positive satiric stances. Ball denotes the satire in Shame, for example, as predominantly negative, because of the textual dominance of its rage. 57 Dannagal G. Young has staged this satiric continuum from a sociopolitical angle, looking at the alliance of satire and irony with liberal American political outlooks, contrasted with the more constituent response of outrage in conservative camps. 58 As satire studies broaden and increasingly engage across disciplines and media, we are concurrently challenged as scholars to update our attentions to this field. There is very promising work in satire studies which explicitly takes to task, with some urgency, a degree of critical stasis which ignores the increasing heterogeneity of literary studies and the widening impacts of postcolonial perspectives. This approach is unapologetic in its critique of Western cultural hegemonies, and of the dismal constraints of canonicity. In their anthology, The Power of Satire, editors Drees and de Leeuw make the explicit demand “that present-day satire research should no longer stick to an exclusive western scope.” 59 Their innovative vision of satire criticism and theory veers from the dominance of a Eurocentric canon dominated by those Augustans, towards satire in a multitude of formats, genres, and geographical contexts. For Drees and de Leeuw, the “power of satire” as it should be considered today lies in its cultural “flexibility” and the persistence of its trans-media reinventions. 60 Robert Phiddian has endorsed the development of satire

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theory “that crosses disciplinary boundaries to allow an understanding of the wider social and cultural effects of satire,” 61 while Arwa Mahdawi opines that in our current “world of misinformation and ideological echo chambers…we desperately need a conversation about what constitutes satire in today’s media landscape.” 62 My own work has aimed to add some variety and new perspectives to the discussion of satiric postcolonial literature and to expand extant scholarship in ways that open some interesting new avenues for future consideration. I want to return to Howard D. Weinbrot’s statement that Menippean satire “is a genre for serious people who see serious trouble and want to do something about it.” 63 The inference here is that satiric writers can be engaged, impassioned, ardent, and, I will add, that they can exhibit concern and perhaps even care too much. The critic J. A. Bryant published a volume in 1972 subtitled Ben Jonson and His Imperfect World, with a most perplexing main title: The Compassionate Satirist. Against the backdrop of all that has been discussed here, that seems an apparent oxymoron. But upon contemplation, it is not necessarily wholly contradictory. J. A. Bryant’s Jonson is not in any way an Horatian old softie, but rather a satirist who demonstrates acute awareness of the difficult equation of optimism to cynicism, of tolerance for human fallibility, of sentience for the need to indict the crime and not the person, of the insight that the satiric spectrum runs from bitterness to benevolence, of reassurance in humankind’s decency, and finally, of the deep connection of the writer to society. 64 In many ways, the satiric authors considered here fit the description of the overly engaged writer, one who resorts to literature’s strongest curative mode to comment and direct attention to perceived imbalances, corruptions, and human deficiencies. That their selected mode of resistance is via a literary art form may narrow the potential audience, but it diminishes neither the significance of their message nor their corrective drive to remedy and rise above. But then I may also be eliding entirely too much the writer and the work. Farjami insists that “[i]t is neither necessary to believe all satirists to be sincere, nor to accept their stated values nor their treatment of others. What matters is the type of claim they are making.” 65 Satire remains at its core a medium and a message, a dynamic commentary, and a performative and demonstrative act, all of which continue to differentiate it from other cultural practices and justify continued scholarly attention. What we are left with is the surety that this conversation will continue into the future. Satire’s potency as political, social, and cultural critique, its longstanding presence in many literary and cultural traditions, as well as its ability to transcend the fixities of genre in ways which continually and creatively thwart formalist efforts at stable classifications, will ensure this. Accessing and communicating culture in transformative ways will continue to be central to both satire and postcoloniality, as new ideas, voices, and practices joust for critical attention and response. We will

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admire satire’s endurance as a “sustained experiment” in its many literary and visual forms. 66 We will continue to consider satire’s sometimes vexed relationship with comedy, and to assess the extra-literary cultural impacts of Menippean satire’s juxtapositions and mixed-media expressions. We will avoid the labyrinth of taxonomy. We will endorse the study of satire as a mode of textual and performative action that will always be best assessed by what it does, and not necessarily what it is. And in future discussions of postcolonial satire we will continue to marvel at the sheer richness of postcolonial culture, and at the considerable subversive strengths of satire.

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NOTES 1. Salman Rushdie and Mark Lawson, “Salman Rushdie on The Golden House, Trump and more,” October 31, 2017, in The Guardian Books podcast, produced by Susannah Tresilian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2017/oct/31/salman-rushdie-on-his-novel-the-golden-house-trump-and-more-books-podcast. 2. Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw, The Power of Satire (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015), 5. 3. Drees and de Leeuw, The Power of Satire, 5; 2; 1. 4. For a wide-ranging discussion of the community-stabilizing and communitybuilding impacts of some hybrid performative forms of dissenting satire, specifically parodic news shows, satirical documentaries, and ironic activism, see Amber Day, Satire + Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate (Indianapolis, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2011). 5. Mahmud Farjami, Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 174. 6. Farjami, Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era, 174. 7. See also Jessica Milner Davis, ed. Satire and Politics: The Interplay of Heritage and Tradition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2107): Australasian humor scholars in social science, politics, media, literary history, art, and performance examine the nexus of satire and politics in contemporary British, American, and Australian satirical media, with a focus on political life, voter intention, and a trans-disciplinary critical approach to humor. 8. John Clement Ball, “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” Genre, Vol. 50, no. 3 (December 2017): 300. 9. I have taught a course on satirists who have faced grim and dire consequences for their writing, covering: Juvenal, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, Yaqub Sanu, Garry Trudeau, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Hama Tuma. This is in no way an exhaustive historical list but it comprises a very workable and interesting syllabus. 10. Ball, “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” 297. 11. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), 115. 12. Flemming Rose, “Muhammeds ansigt,” Jyllands-Posten, 29 September 2005. The editorial was called “Muhammed’s face” to refer to the injunction in Islam on producing images of the Prophet. 13. Flemming Rose, “Why I Published Those Cartoons,” The Washington Post, 19 February 2006, washingtonpost.com. 14. Simone Chambers, “Free Speech and Civility in Pluralist Societies,” in After the Paris Attacks: Responses in Canada, Europe, and Around the Globe, eds., Stephen J. Toope and Edward Iacobucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2015), 14.

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15. Ball, “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” 297. 16. Grant Julin, ”Satire in a Multi-Cultural World: A Bakhtinian Analysis,” Comedy Studies 9, no. 2 (2018): 150. 17. Julin, ”Satire in a Multi-Cultural World: A Bakhtinian Analysis,” 150. 18. Srinivas Aravamudan, “‘Being God’s Postman is No Fun, Yaar’: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,” Diacritics 19, no. 2 (1989): 5. 19. Elleke Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings (Cham, Switzerland: Springer / Palgrave McMillan, 2018), 44. 20. Julin, ”Satire in a Multi-Cultural World: A Bakhtinian Analysis,” 150. 21. Garry Trudeau, “The Abuse of Satire,” The Atlantic, 11 April 2015. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive. 22. Trudeau, “The Abuse of Satire.” 23. Trudeau, “The Abuse of Satire.” 24. Chambers, “Free Speech and Civility in Pluralist Societies,” 18. 25. Chambers, “Free Speech and Civility in Pluralist Societies,” 18. 26. Julin, ”Satire in a Multi-Cultural World: A Bakhtinian Analysis,” 150. 27. Tariq Modood, “In remembering the Charlie Hebdo attack we must not forget the responsibility that goes with free speech,” Daily Archives, January 12, 2015, blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2015/01/12. 28. Ball, “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” 300. 29. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 17. 30. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (NY: Harper & Row, 1983). 31. Spivak qtd. in Mahmud Farjami, Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2017), 156. 32. Ball, “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” 297. 33. Sarah Ilott, New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (London: Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2015), 135. 34. Giselinde Kuipers, “Satire and Dignity,” in The Power of Satire, eds. Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015), 19. 35. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings, 45. 36. Mahmud Farjami, “Political Satire as an Index of Press Freedom, A Review of Political Satire in the Iranian Press during the 2000s,” Iranian Studies 47, no. 2 (2014): 239. 37. Ball “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” 300. 38. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 216. 39. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 216. 40. Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998), 188. 41. Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 285. 42. Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 210. 43. Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 360. 44. Andrew S. Teverson, “Fairy Tale Politics: Free Speech and Multiculturalism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 4 (2001): 450. 45. Sabina Sawhney and Simona Sawhney, “Reading Rushdie after September 11, 2001 (Introduction),” Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 4 (2001): 438. Their comment refers to Andrew Teverson’s essay. 46. Conal Condren, “Satire and Definition,” Humor 25, no. 4 (2012): 396. 47. Condren, “Satire and Definition,” 396. 48. Eric McLuhan, Cynic Satire (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), xv. 49. McLuhan, Cynic Satire, xv–xvi. That “man in the street” reference is for my late colleague, Prof. Bart Moore-Gilbert, with his dependable opinion that that is my intended audience. I also learned that Horace observed of the audiences of the bawdy,

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satiric satyr plays, in Ars Poetica (c. 19 BCE), that “some take offense—knights, freeborn, and men of substance—nor do they greet with kindly feelings or reward with a crown [coin] everything which the buyers of roasted beans and chestnuts approve” (see: Sonja Madeleine Tanner, Plato’s Laughter: Socrates as Satyr and Comical Hero (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), 188, n. 68). The bean-buyers who appreciated the messages and the value of satirical writing and performance were apparently the ordinary folk, the common punters, in fact, the classical-era people on the street! Bart Moore-Gilbert for the win. 50. McLuhan, Cynic Satire, xv. 51. Ball “Capital Offenses: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo,” 299. 52. McLuhan, Cynic Satire, 4. 53. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 45. 54. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 45. 55. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 1. 56. Boehmer, Postcolonial Poetics, 2. 57. John Clement Ball, Satire and the Post-Colonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (NY: Routledge, 2003), 137. 58. See Dannagal G. Young, Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the U.S. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2019). Also Dannagal G. Young, et al., “Psychology, Political Ideology, and Humor Appreciation: Why is Satire so Liberal?” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 8, no. 2 (2019): 134–147. 59. Drees and de Leeuw, The Power of Satire, 5. 60. Drees and de Leeuw, The Power of Satire, 274. 61. Robert Phiddian, “Satire and the Limits of Literary Theories,” Classical Quarterly 55, no. 3 (October 2013): 54. 62. Arwa Mahdawi, “What counts as satire in the Trump era? Not pointless Photoshop parodies.” The Guardian, 23 Jan 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/23/what-counts-as-satire-in-the-trump-era-not-pointless-photoshop-parodies?CMP=share_btn_link. 63. Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2. 64. J. A Bryant, Jr., The Compassionate Satirist: Ben Jonson and His Imperfect World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 3; 23; 51; 176; 5; 2. 65. Farjami, Iranian Political Satirists: Experience and Motivation in the Contemporary Era, 4. 66. Edward J. Milowicki and Robert Rawdon Wilson, “A Measure for Menippean Discourse: The Example of Shakespeare,” Poetics Today 23, no. 2 (2002): 319.

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Index

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African, 3, 6, 16, 17, 22, 23, 93, 93–94, 115 Ahmad, Aijaz, 4, 123, 125, 136n31 Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, 49, 66, 76n29 All About H. Hatterr theatrical performances: All About H. Hatterr, Ridiculusmus Theatre Co., 1996, 76n22; Damme This is the Oriental Scene for You, Modest Productions, 2000, 76n22; Yes, Yes, Yes, Ridiculusmus Theatre Co., 19992002 76n22 Anand, Mulk Raj, 21, 88, 152 anatomy, 20 Anglophilia, 56, 58, 60, 64, 65 anti-realism, 2, 55, 68, 113, 146 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 6, 21, 45n159 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 181 Ashcroft, Bill, 2, 11, 16, 17 Atkinson, Rowan, 131, 134, 141n177 Augustan, 30, 39n36, 186 Australian, 3, 46n179, 188n7, 203 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 5, 16–17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 32, 44n156, 111, 117, 119, 151, 165–166 Ball, John Clement, 20, 27, 46n205, 111, 118, 132, 134n5, 170, 179, 181, 183, 185 bar jokes, 13, 41n76 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 22 Bhabha, Homi K., 16, 22, 43n146, 65, 79n113, 182 Bhattacharya, Bhabani, 21 bicultural, 30 Blaber, Ronald, 54, 60, 62, 63, 65, 78n77, 113, 122

Boehmer, Elleke, 5, 6, 23, 28–29, 182, 185–186 Booker, M. Keith, 116, 121, 125, 139n126, 145 Burjorjee, D.M., 49, 68, 69 burlesque, 50, 69, 70, 70–71, 130 Caribbean, 22 carnival, 17, 35, 73, 111, 119, 151 carnivalesque, 2, 18, 23, 100, 115, 116, 125 Carroll, Lewis, 49, 66. See also Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Chambers, Simone, 180, 181 Charlie Hebdo, 180–181 cinema, 110, 124, 128, 131 Combe, Kirk, 4, 68, 73 Connery, Brian A., 4, 68, 73 cynic, 8, 9, 11, 39n41, 109, 184, 185, 189n49 de Leeuw, Sonja, 178, 186 Desai, Anita, 24 Desani, G. V. [Govindas Vishnoodas]: and ashrams, 56, 80n154; early years, 50; All About H. Hatterr, critical reception of, 51; Hali, 50, 75n9; on H. Hatterr, 57; on satire, 57 Drees, Marijke Meijer, 178, 186 Dryden, John, 79n109 Durix, Jean-Pierre, 22, 23, 183 dystopian, 17 ekphrasis, 110, 112, 114, 120, 123, 131, 161, 177 Elliott, Robert C., 1, 2, 178 empire, x, 1, 11, 29, 51, 58, 61, 66, 83, 84, 87, 93, 94, 99, 100, 126, 167 erudition, 15, 20, 35, 36, 52, 87, 111, 177 exile, 41n82, 84, 97, 184 205

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Index

experimental, 16, 21, 35, 47n231, 51, 73, 143, 156, 163

Kristeva, Julia, 19 Kuipers, Giselinde, 182

Farjami, Mahmud, 39n33, 41n82, 179, 182, 183, 187 Fatwa, 113, 132, 137n42, 164 Frye, Northrop, 2, 4, 14, 20, 23, 33, 35, 111, 119, 137n52, 138n95, 155

Laërtius, Diogenes, 8, 9, 40n46 Lawson, Mark, 113, 177 Lucian of Samosata, 1–2, 9, 11–12, 13, 31, 37n5, 41n80 Lucius Apuleius, 31, 37n5, 109, 120–121, 122, 129, 130, 131, 138n62

Ghosh, Amitav, 55 Griffin, Dustin, 4 grotesque, 14, 143, 153 Guilhamet, Leon, 30 Harlow, Barbara, 28, 59 Harrex, S. C. [Syd], 53, 56, 66, 68, 74n1, 76n22 Hawley, John C., 35 homosexuality, 30, 84, 88, 103, 104 Horace, 13, 18, 36, 187, 189n49 humor theory, 6; incongruity, 6; relief, 6, 179; superiority, 6, 30, 181, 182 hyperbole, 64, 73

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Ilott, Sarah, 6, 182 intertextual, 14, 19, 20, 36, 103, 116, 117, 119, 125, 127, 129, 131, 137n58, 146, 160, 171n14 Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, 54 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 96 Javadi, Hasan, 41n82, 109, 125 Julin, Grant, 180, 181 Juneja, Om P., 35, 119, 127, 136n35, 149 Juvenal, 13, 18, 36, 57, 120, 137n52, 188n9 Jyllands-Posten (The Danish Cartoons), 180 Kanaganayakam, Chelva, 21, 38n8, 47n231, 53, 58, 76n22, 78n77, 152, 165 Khan, Naseem, 51, 58, 78n64 Kipling, Rudyard, 67, 74n6, 156, 159–160, 174n86; Kim, 61, 67, 102, 127, 146, 155–156, 156, 159–160, 174n86, 174n98 Kirk, Eugene P., 12, 19, 25, 45n169 Krishna, 155, 173n77

Macedonia, 19 Malgonkar, Manohar, 21 manufactroversy, 129 Marechera, Dambudzo, 16–17 Markandaya, Kamila, 21 Márquez, Gabriel García, 33, 88, 113, 135n27 Marx Brothers, 129; Chico, 129; Groucho, 129; Harpo, 129 McLuhan, Eric, 6, 12, 20, 185 memoir, 28, 36, 84, 87, 89, 90, 143, 148, 179, 184 Menand, Louis, 22, 172n17 Menen, Salvator Aubrey Clarence: as anti-racist writer, 86–87; as homosexual, 84, 88, 103, 104; The Backward Bride: A Sicilian Scherzo, 90; critical reception of, 85–86; Dead Man in the Silver Market, 84, 85, 88, 90; early years, 84; The Fig Tree, 31, 85, 99; on self as satirist, 85; The Prevalence of Witches, 35, 36, 85, 87, 89–90, 94, 96, 99, 102; The Ramayana, 86, 97, 98; SheLa: A Satire, 34, 85, 87, 88, 91–93, 101; The Space Within the Heart, 87, 88, 90, 102 Menippea, 5, 12, 14, 19, 23 Menippus, 2, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 20, 36, 40n46, 41n80 Merivale, Patricia, 4, 135n27 Mijares, Loretta Marie, 145, 146, 147, 170, 172n18 Miller, Carolyn R., 7, 24–25, 26 Milowicki, Edward J., 14–16, 52, 54, 99, 117, 148, 149 mimesis, 100 modernism, 6, 51, 52, 113 Modood, Tariq, 181

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

Index Moore-Gilbert, Bart, x–xi, 25, 27, 67, 73, 174n86, 189n49 Moss, Laura, 23, 44n153, 116, 137n52 myth, 127, 138n74, 154

Parnell, Tim, ix, 199 Persian literature, 41n82, 109, 125, 139n125, 151, 154, 173n65 Petronius, 9, 11, 44n156, 45n169, 47n209, 109, 129, 131 Phiddian, Robert, 39n34, 186 picaresque, 2, 3, 36, 50, 66, 68, 130 Picaro, 61 Pope, Alexander, 79n109, 156, 160 postcolonial life writing, x, 25 postcolonial poetics, 28, 29, 45n171, 185, 198, 199 postmodernism, 20, 116, 131, 167 post-realism, 146 The Power of Satire (Marijke Meijer Drees and Sonja de Leeuw), 178 The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Robert C. Elliott), 1

rhetoric, 25, 99, 129, 184 ridicule, 4, 6, 20, 36, 54, 56, 71, 89, 116, 127, 133, 148, 180, 181 Ridiculusmus Theatre Company, 76n22 Riemenschneider, Dieter, 54–55 Rose, Flemming, 180, 188n12 Rose, Margaret A., 11, 36, 53 Rumi, 109, 154, 173n65 Rushdie Affair, 179 Rushdie, Salman: Fury, 110, 135n10; The Golden House: A Novel, 32, 109, 128, 129–131, 177; on The Golden House as overtly Menippean, 128–131; The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 4, 31, 110, 111, 116, 122, 127, 137n41, 137n58, 171n14; Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 110; Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, 1, 109, 139n125; Midnight’s Children , 4, 16, 29, 37, 109–110, 115–116, 119, 123, 124, 125, 135n27, 145, 171n14; The Moor’s Last Sigh, 110–111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129, 132, 137n52, 138n65, 138n67, 140n146; receives the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, 184; The Satanic Verses, 31, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124–125, 125, 134, 137n42, 138n67, 141n174, 148, 175n116, 179, 184; Shalimar the Clown, 135n10; Shame, 109, 110, 119, 126, 134n5; Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel, 110

race, 6, 34, 56, 60, 84, 88, 93, 98, 102, 104, 133, 139n132, 153, 155–156, 156, 158, 165, 170, 172n18 racism, 2, 71, 87, 89, 133, 158 Rama, 98, 139n132 Ramanujan, Molly, 51, 53, 55, 56, 63, 75n9 Ramayana, 86, 97, 98 Rao, Raja, 21, 88, 152 realist writing, 21, 23, 33, 44n153, 45n159, 87, 102, 146 Relihan, Joel, 6, 38n27, 40n70, 44n156, 53

Said, Edward, 1, 23, 29, 36, 136n32, 177, 183 satire literacy, 133 satura, 4, 9, 47n211 satyr, 2, 5, 9, 18, 31, 33, 47n211, 109, 121, 130, 130–131, 138n95, 140n160, 189n49 Satyricon, 11, 44n156, 47n211, 129–130 Schwartz, Delmore, 51 Sealy, Irwin Allan: and pagoda construction, 165; apprenticed to bricklayer, 165; The Brainfever Bird: An Illusion, 144, 160, 161, 163, 165,

Naik, M. K., 55, 60, 63, 64 Namjoshi, Suniti, 24 Nandakumar, Prema, 21, 55, 146 Narayan, R. K., 4, 21, 24 Nasta, Susheila, 51, 52, 56, 60, 86, 88, 88–89 neo-colonial, 2, 4, 136n35, 155 Oriental, 52, 53, 56, 60, 67, 68, 70, 91, 165 Othered, 182

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Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

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Index

171n6; The Everest Hotel: A Calendar , 144, 145, 150, 160, 163, 165, 171n6; Hero: A Fable, 161, 162, 163, 173n49, 175n116; Red: An Alphabet, 144, 148, 149, 160–161, 162, 163, 165, 171n6, 172n42; The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanack, 144, 164, 165; The Trotter-Nama: A Chronicle, 145–158; writing of Trotter-Nama, 145; Zelaldinus: A Masque, 144, 163, 164 serio-comic, 18 Singh, Kushwant, 21 Sita, 86, 88, 97–98 Slemon, Stephen, 22, 33, 88 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 182 Swift, Jonathan, 19, 33, 35, 45n169, 47n218, 89, 160 symposium, 13, 14, 31, 35, 83, 99, 143, 153, 154

Thieme, John, 23–24 Tiffin, Helen, 2, 11, 24, 44n153 Trudeau, Garry, 181

Tagore, Rabindranath, 68, 146, 159 Takovski, Aleksandar, 19 Test, George A., 50 Teverson, Andrew, 113, 137n59, 184

Young, Dannagal G., 186

utopian, 17, 119 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 9–11, 36, 44n156 Wallia, C.J.S., 111 Weinbrot, Howard D., 9, 11, 20, 23, 27, 44n156, 55, 59, 187 Williams, Hadyn M., 54–55, 56, 64, 66, 74n1, 78n77 Wilson, Robert Rawdon, 14, 14–16, 52, 54, 99, 117, 148, 149 Wimsatt, Margaret, 85, 86 wine, 10, 13, 130, 154, 173n65 wit, 36, 74n1, 83, 87, 89, 102, 104, 177

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Zekavat, Massih , 27, 50

Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.

About the Author

Copyright © 2019. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Amy L. Friedman is currently associate professor in English, first-year writing, and liberal studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she has taught for a decade. Her Temple courses include British, American, and global literature surveys; honors seminars on the Beat Generation and satire; and a first-year writing course with an environmental justice syllabus. Friedman has published widely on women writers of the Beat Generation, including Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, and Rochelle Owens, since 1996. She has been studying satire even longer, as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College and graduate student at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where she earned a PhD. Her next satire projects: computational satire humanities, and making postcolonial satire action figures with her son.

209 Friedman, Amy L.. Postcolonial Satire : Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Lexington Books, 2019.