Anna Snaith: Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World

Summary

Katherine Mansfield's autobiographical and fictional writings frequently rage against the banality of settler colonial existence. Her yearning for the metropolis, with its associations of avant-garde culture and sexual possibilities, features prominently in biographical narratives. The geography of empire creates an index of desire for the colonial subject that inevitably locates fullness or transcendence elsewhere. In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire, Saikat Majumdar takes as his subject the political and aesthetic import of boredom or banality in the work of a range of postcolonial writers. This chimes with a turn in modernist studies towards the everyday. Majumdar, however, takes this interest in new directions, given the transnational purview of his approach. To read colonial experience and its literary representation as forever marked by traumatic, sensational and cataclysmic events is to overlook great swathes of the experience of colonial modernity, not to mention the way imperial power can be felt in the banal routine of bureaucratisation. Furthermore, Majumdar breaks apart the association of boredom (or its elevated cousin, ennui) from ‘its context of subjective singularity and material privilege’ (15). He reads it, instead, as an affective response to exclusion and marginality, which again runs counter to metropolitan narratives of colonial experience as exotic, hyperbolic and adventure-laden.

In a richly textured introduction, Majumdar sets out the philosophical, anthropological and aesthetic parameters of his monograph. He roots notions of the banal in Enlightenment modernity and the rise of the novel. While realism relies on a functional sense of the ordinary, for modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, the problem with the realism of Bennett or Galsworthy was not the inclusion of the everyday but its constraining or functional aspect. Modernist ‘newness’ arrives precisely in the transcendence achieved through the charged or heightened experience of everyday objects, sensations or moments. Colonial banality, then, is an oppositional aesthetic mode characterised by repetition and circularity, given that narrative is so often driven by the extraordinary or the event.

Prose of the World explores the work of four postcolonial writers: James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Zoë Wicomb and Amit Chaudhuri, all diasporic writers with a mobility often denied their characters.