This book examines the fundamental relationship between the sociopolitical and the literary aesthetic in colonial and postcolonial societies. Understanding affect as a crucial intermediary between the two, it demonstrates how dominant “structures of feeling” permeate the very fiber/texture of literary discourse thereby influencing it at the formal, generic, and stylistic registers. As such, it seeks to address a couple of major drawbacks that postcolonial criticism seems to be plagued by. First, it marks a clear departure from the traumatic outcomes of colonialism that invariably marginalize other feelings. The other lacuna that it endeavors to attend to is the overt deprioritization of formal and stylistic qualities of a narrative “in favour of thematic readings or ideological critique” (17). The project indeed comes across as an ambitious one given the author deals with two independent empires, three disparate centuries, and four different countries.
As one proceeds through the riveting pages of the book, however, one realizes the scholarly acumen and academic rigor that Scott brings to bear on his work. By identifying the pathological, disproportionate, and intersubjective quality of emotions in the six texts that he analyzes, the author attempts to arrive at a better understanding of the dialogue, exchange, and reciprocity that exists among diverse sociopolitical processes and the corresponding affective disorders that they engender. Beginning with Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley (1947), he points out that the disruptive forces of structural inequalities that were precipitated by colonial modernity in Cairo during the Second World War gave rise to a pronounced sense of anger and restlessness among the common masses. But, because the city was occupied by more than 140,000 Allied soldiers, this anger could not find any desirable cathartic outlets and was instead misdirected at more easily available alternatives such as spouses, employees, and associates. In such a scenario, the only semblance of order, meaning, and purpose that the people can confer upon their daily lives is through rumor, gossip, and hearsay. And yet, the melodramatic predilections of the narrative unpredictably mutate into the tragic with the death of Abbas, thus revealing the ultimate futility of such efforts. Scott borrows from Ato Quayson’s idea of the “systemic uncanny” to explain how anger readily exceeds the veritable limits of individual consciousness and acquires a more depersonalized quality.
Moving on to Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), the book highlights the centrality of affective restraint and attenuation that mirror the Nehruvian emphasis on temperance and moderation as the only effective response to the horrors of communal violence during the Partition of India in 1947. It perceptively draws attention to the way in which the novel consistently repudiates intense emotionality through a narrative that seems to endlessly procrastinate its conclusion. In the process, Seth manages to substantially contain the reader’s impatient search for sustained meaning and gratifying closure. The somewhat disappointing ending of the novel (where for instance Lata surprisingly chooses Haresh over the more enterprising Kabir) becomes grist to the same mill because any free play of strong affects would have defeated precisely the narratorial intention that simply privileges tolerance and self-control.
With Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899), Scott explores the essential paradox that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century Brazilian society during the Segundo Reinado. He astutely observes how the palpable asymmetry between archaic practices such as slavery and patronage on the one hand and the liberal ideologies and principles that were closely linked with European modernity on the other penetrates the very core of novelistic configuration so that although the references to slaves are brief and incidental, the socioeconomic privilege of the elites occupies center stage. More importantly, though, Scott underscores the way in which the idea of patronage that encouraged a strong sense of competitiveness and jealousy literally enters into Bento’s private life and assumes a displaced disposition. The delusional and misleading nature of his narrative thus marks his ultimate indifference to the ideological dichotomies that sustain his advantaged position in society.
The book once again returns to the Indian context by exploring the preponderance of boredom in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August: An Indian Story (1988). It emphasizes the dissolution of Nehruvian optimism and the inept, cumbersome, and perpetually dissatisfying bureaucratic procedures of the Indian Administrative Service that has profound affective implications for the principal protagonist. The overarching sense of routine, repetition, and delay that characterizes Agastya’s everyday life produces a strong sense of enervation that closely mirrors the indolence and clumsiness of governmental processes within the subcontinent. As a result, any concerted attempts to bring about a narrative closure proves to be decisively futile and creates a conspicuous “threat of interminability” (114).
Shifting the terrain of literary analysis to Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and the Sri Lankan civil war, which claimed approximately 100,000 lives, Scott traces the ubiquitous presence of fear in the novel that saturates every level of its narrative discourse. He incisively demonstrates how the decentred, disembodied, indefinite, and free-floating aspect of this dominant affect forces the discourse to develop a phobic reluctance to the very narrative that it is supposed to be uncovering, namely, the story of the crime that involves the death of Sailor (138). The noncathartic quality of this intense emotion does not therefore facilitate any easy closure or resolution that the reader is otherwise routinely interested in. On the contrary, the generic ruptures and dissonances repeatedly deprive the narrative of “the linearity, the hermeneutic closure, and the ‘localization of culpability’” (142) that one often associates with crime fiction.
Coming back, once again to an Indian novel, that is Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), the book analyzes the feeling of “stuplimity” (151) that involves a combination of the stupefying and the sublime. It argues how the spectacular and extraordinary crimes involving communal violence and terrorism coexist with their more mundane and quotidian counterparts such as minor robberies, customary corruption, and household squabbles. The banal and the inconsequential thus constitute a digressive narrative strategy that persistently frustrates the reader’s expectation for something significant within the plotline. It is only when Sartaj is able to reconcile the astonishing with the boring, the exceptional with the routine that even the banality of everyday life can bring about some sense of narrative closure. Scott’s interpretation is richly supported by a series of footnotes and secondary quotations that undoubtedly make it a pleasurable read. A little bit of an extra theoretical framework for the way in which he uses emotions, affect, and feelings interchangeably (perhaps in the introduction) could have lent greater depth and nuance to such equivalences and parallels that he works with throughout the book. Having said that, one must also simultaneously acknowledge the nuanced, compelling, and erudite arguments that he consistently goes on to make. The book is certainly a must-read for scholars of narratology, affect studies, and postcolonial criticism.
