Chapter 3 - Destitute Recollection: Joyce’s Indian Translocations

Summary

Academic scholarship on James Joyce’s work has shown over the past three decades a shift toward the local, and has highlighted the deep embeddedness of Joyce’s work in Ireland, especially Dublin. This may be viewed as a move away from earlier “universalist” or “globalizing” readings, where Joyce’s stature as a modernist, his formal experimentation, and his anticipation of later conceptions of literary textuality occupied centerstage. How do we think Joyce’s location in our present? What in Joyce can travel, in space and in time? This chapter focuses on the persistent preoccupation in Joyce’s work – notably Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – with recollection, especially with modes of remembrance that extend beyond individuals to encompass multiple levels of the past. It examines the afterlife of this concern in India by discussing Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (English, 1935), Devanoora Mahadeva’s Kusumabale (Kannada, 1988), and Anand’s Vyasanum Vighneswaranum (Malayalam, 1996). Through a consideration of forms of narration emerging from contexts where the relationship between instituted archives and literary citation is rendered difficult, the chapter delineates “destitute” modes of recollection foregrounded in strands of Indian modernism.