In Making Words Matter, Ambreen Hai argues that “literary agency,” or the way in which literature influences the social world, “is a central concern for colonial and postcolonial writers with very different agendas” and that this concern is “inseparable from imaginings of the body” (p. 312). Of the book's eight chapters, which include a theoretical introduction and an epilogue, the most substantial—and successful—ones focus on the novelists Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, and Salman Rushdie. Of these three writers, Forster's focus on the body is the most direct and least “metaphorical”; he sees it as “the fundamental condition for artistic truth.” Kipling and Rushdie use the body more as a metaphor, even though they, too, are concerned with truth-telling—as a challenge to censorship and imperial interests (Kipling) and as a way of “remak[ing] communities” through the imaginative labor that is the ultimate “material, cultural work of postcolonial fictions” (Rushdie; p. 313).
Those looking for a good summary of the book's central argument will be better served by the opening pages of the epilogue than by the long discussion in the introductory chapter. The literary-critical readings that form the core of the book are superb, and both literary scholars and those from disciplines in the social sciences will find the analyses elegant and rigorous. In the opinion of this reviewer, chapters 3 and 4 contain the best analyses of Forster available in print. They reveal the strengths of a serious and sophisticated literary critic who provides a close reading of Forster's important novel A Passage to India, and—by examining Forster's letters and the revisions of the novel's manuscripts—also shows how a set of social, sexual, and ethico-political concerns gradually take shape in the author's consciousness. This is easily the best description I have read of the complicated and self-conscious ways in which Forster came to develop a critique of colonial culture and heteronormative values.
Readings such as the one Hai provides show that such a critique cannot be understood—or even discerned clearly—unless we grapple with Forster's evolving language, his revisions of his metaphors, and his changing angles of vision. Readers from all disciplines will find these readings illuminating, and will see in these chapters on an anticolonial English novelist exactly how good close readings of literature can develop our understanding of sociocultural themes and concerns. Chapter 3, “Forster's Crisis,” is a pleasure to read; it has the hallmarks of good historical and biographical writing—lucidly analytical, but with a strong story line.
The chapters on Forster are flanked by two each on Kipling and Rushdie. Readers who are familiar with Kipling's imperialist ideology will be especially interested in the self-conscious, even “meta-fictive,” dimension of Kipling's stories and his novel Kim. Kipling's narratives about India, Hai says, contain a commentary on their own “complicated position of complicity and resistance, [their] own uncertainties, dangers, and subversiveness” (p. 32).
The chapters on Rushdie, which are more analytically compelling than the two on Kipling, focus directly on the textual presence of “bodies, body parts, and bodily effluvia” in the novel Midnight's Children, showing how they are linked to Rushdie's “efforts to construct a new idiom to render the agency of his postcolonial narratives” (p. 212). These are among the most thorough and patient analyses of Rushdie that I have read, and Rushdie has, of course, generated a great deal of critical writing. Hai's readings of Rushdie are not startlingly original, but they are the most comprehensive; they reveal exactly how Rushdie's novel works, pulling together strands that are easy to see in isolation but often much more difficult to analyze as thematically overlapping and interrelated.
I have focused primarily on the textual analyses in Making Words Matter because they contain superb examples of literary criticism and would be useful for readers from a range of disciplines, including the social sciences. But it is worth pointing out that the introductory chapter is weak, summarizing a variety of theoretical concepts without going deeper into the issues raised. The eclectic approach fails to explain some rather extravagant claims, such as the following: “the human body … is at once the site of autonomy, instrumentality, and subjection” (p. 6). The claim about the body as the site of autonomy is repeated but never elaborated or defended, and there is no recognition that autonomy has traditionally been defined as an “inner” achievement, a condition of the mind, of our capacity to reason, deliberate, and imagine—even in the face of physical deprivation or pain. The poststructuralist thinkers whom Hai draws on may consider such a claim to be based on old-fashioned idealism, but that point needs to be argued rather than simply assumed to be true. Autonomy may well be primarily a “physical” or “bodily” condition, but that claim is far from self-evident, and even the most ardent poststructuralist critic needs at least to argue and defend it. Fortunately, however, the achievements of the book's core chapters do not depend on the underdemonstrated claims of the introduction, and readers would do well not to rely on that chapter for an exposition of the book's main ideas.
