12 - Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry

Summary

In his book The Postcolonial Unconscious, Neil Lazarus writes that postcolonial scholars today

ought … to redress a long-standing imbalance in postcolonial literary studies by focusing anew on realist writing. The point is that, inasmuch as the dominant aesthetic dispositions in postcolonial literary studies have from the outset reflected those in post-structuralist theory generally, the categorical disparagement of realism in the latter field has tended to receive a dutiful – if wholly unjustified and unjustifiable – echo in the former… There is no good reason for scholars in postcolonial studies to hang on to this dogma today.(82)

It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that postcolonial studies – as an academic field based mainly in literary departments – has generally demonstrated a lack of interest in the formal complexities of literary realism. To many postcolonial critics, realism as a literary form fits poorly with the field's dogmas and values – the established theoretical concepts that characterize the orthodox postcolonial text analysis. The theoretical vocabulary – mainly derived from poststructuralist theory, as Lazarus points out – has on the one hand been crucial in terms of the formation of postcolonial studies as an academic field; on the other hand, the at times exaggerated use of concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, catachresis, the in-between, and so on means that many postcolonial literary readings have tended to say more about postcolonial studies as an academic institution and as a theoretical orientation than about the texts themselves. Often, postcolonial critics have focused on anti-realist literary forms – that is, forms seen as corresponding to the institutionalized postcolonial vocabulary – whereas literary forms belonging to the so-called realist tradition have typically been read along a thematic register or labeled inherently Eurocentric, essentialist, and homogenizing. Realism as a literary form constitutes, in other words, a kind of blind spot in postcolonial studies, despite the fact that a considerable amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition.