Prose of the World

At the heart of the genre of prose fiction exists a set of fundamental questions about time and narrative. If narrative is inextricably bound up with the category of time, what is—and what should be—the relative importance of the ordinary everyday and that of the major event? Is narrative essentially event bound? Is it embedded in what Franco Moretti calls a Hegelian “teleological rhetoric,” wherein “the meaning of events lies in their finality” and where “events acquire meaning when they lead to one ending, and one only”?¹ Does the crux of narratives, as Moretti puts the question, rest on events, with the final event defining the grand teleological climax that gives meaning to everything that comes before? Should we make a distinction between the narrative politics pertaining to the ordinary and that attending to the special event? What about the banal? If banality is to be understood as the aesthetic of ideological inadequacy, can it not also be defined as the absence of the event and, by implication, of history?²

The same set of questions, repeatedly asked in this exchange, goes to the very heart of narrative as a fundamental category that defines fiction and history alike. Modernist fiction, with its radical reconceptualization of temporality, has been especially invested in this question, as Liesl Olson points out, for instance, in the difficulty faced by Virginia Woolf in the narration of the nonevent, or “the dullness of habitual experience”,3 as opposed to the pointed contours of trauma that stand out more easily in memory and are similarly more easily narratable. But while the sharpness of traumatic experience threatens to take over narrative, one of the great challenges of modernist fiction has been to find a narrative aesthetic of the ordinary and the nonevent, a concern it has intriguingly shared with the methods of historical narration in the twentieth century. The ordinary, therefore, has posed a challenge to both fiction and history, inasmuch as they are both rooted in the category of the narrative. The banal, however, is therefore more than the mere lack of event—it marks a cultural lacuna that, in the final instance, embodies a perceived exclusion from historical progress. Time, in this lacuna, is cyclical and iterative, produced in the sensibility of the marginal subject empty of historical as well as aesthetic significance.

Thomas Dumm suggests that we should maintain a distinction between a reading of the ordinary and a reading of the event. “Because both the normalization of life and the emergence of events entail the control and deployment of representations that originates in the space of the ordinary, we must learn to distinguish a politics of the ordinary from the politics that attends events and norms.”4 Making this distinction, however, is far less simple than it looks on the surface. Dumm’s attempt to provide a politics of the ordinary alerts us to the fact that even if a distinction between “a politics of the ordinary from the politics that attends events and norms” is worth making, it is perhaps even more important not to lose sight of the fact that the construction of ordinary life is itself a political act. The social construction of the everyday by Dumm, and by Henri Lefebvre before him, hinges on the very disciplinary and normative function of the political. Yet, as Nadia Seremetakis reminds us, the politics of the ordinary are almost always overshadowed by the more dramatic politics of the event: “The sensory structure of everyday life is experienced as naturalized, almost cosmic time over and against which eruptive, ‘sensational events’ such as elections, performances, accidents, disasters, are profiled,” with the latter as “almost pre-selected as narrated history.”⁵ When narrative, be it historical or fictional, is seduced into this easy but flawed distinction, the consequence is the recognized polarity between the everyday and the eruptive, the banal and the dramatic: “The polarity between the sensational and the mundane is also the dichotomy between sensational and the sensory in which the latter is left unmarked, unvoiced and unattended to, as a banal element of the everyday. The division distinguishes the anonymous flow of the everyday from that which is culturally, politically and biographically set aside as notable and discursive.”⁶

At the heart of this false binary is also a misconstruction of the political, which now inheres exclusively in the sensational, which is understood to make its mark against the supposed apolitical neutrality of the banalized everyday.⁷ But while this banalized everyday is imagined as neutral and continuous, what is forgotten is the fact that organic time is itself shaped through a political process.

This debate over the relative importance of the ordinary and the event begins with a provocative statement about the discursive production of history made by Fernand Braudel in his monumental history of the Mediterranean world. Here, Braudel describes the history of sensational events and warns against its seductive appeal: “A history of brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations, by definition ultra-sensitive; the least tremor sets all the antennae quivering. But as such it is the most dangerous of all, the richest in human interest, and also the most dangerous.” Contrasted to this is Braudel’s celebrated history of the longue durée: “there can be distinguished another history, this time with slow but perceptible rhythms.”⁸ This is the kind of history that, as Seremetakis argues in her reading of Braudel, helps to divert attention away from the sensation of the event and becomes “an analytical tool and empirical description of historical experience in everyday life.”⁹

Braudel would have the historian cultivate a certain suspicion of, and intellectual distance from, the event that appears to puncture the gentler, submerged rhythms of time. These rhythms, over a longer period, reveal themselves to be a more reliable index of historical development than the brief, sporadically erupting event possibly can be. “Events are the ephemera of history,” he offers his caveat well beyond the middle of his monumental history; “they pass across the stage like fireworks, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.” The history that takes as its point of departure “the spectacular and often misleading pageant” of events, moreover, “tends to recognize only ‘important’ events, building its hypothesis only on foundations which are solid or assumed to be so.”10 Such history, however, overinvests itself in moments, which, no matter how spectacular or disruptive they might have appeared to their contemporaries or even subsequent historians relying on available documentary evidence, in the long run turn out to be misleading signposts. They fail to reveal the larger and far more significant patterns that underlie history, which are rarely contained within the framework of events, notwithstanding the aesthetics of spectacle often embodied within that framework.

Seremetakis’s participation in the debate about the importance of the event is shaped by her interest in what she calls “modern sensory experience.” She sees Braudel’s suspicion of an event-driven history as rooted in an allegiance to the textures of everyday life. I hesitate, however, to attribute Braudel’s suspicion of the event to a corresponding commitment to the ordinary everyday. The everyday, it would seem, is an ideal alternative space next to the kind of eruptive spectacle Braudel understands the event to be. But I would be careful to maintain a distinction between Braudel’s model of longue durée and the kind of interest in the ordinary everyday that I myself share with Seremetakis. Braudel, as Paul Ricoeur indicates in his description of the new historical trends, rather emphasizes “a social time whose major categories—conjuncture, structure, trend, cycle, growth, crisis, etc.—are borrowed from economics, demography and sociology.”¹¹ Even though a sensual immersion in the quotidian may very well intersect with the longer, gentler patterns of this social history, there is little in Braudel’s writing that suggests that the historian actually imagined them as mutually interdependent.

The debate over the relative importance of the ordinary and the event defines the fundamental category of narrative. The narrative theorist Paul Ricoeur’s engagement in this argument initiated by Braudel is driven by his belief that a crucial component at the heart of narrative—be it fictional or historical—is time. Any form of human experience, private or public, he reminds us, can only unfold along a temporal scheme. “The world unfolded by every narrative work,” he writes at the very beginning of his two-volume Time and Narrative, “is always a temporal world.” And then, later: “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode; narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” His awareness of time as the central dimension that bridges history and aesthetic narrative leads Ricoeur to observe the historiographic shift from “political history toward social history.”¹² If political history frames “the realm where events go off like explosions,” the history of deep-lying trends is championed by the historians of the French Annales school, most notably Braudel, to whose preface to The Mediterranean Ricoeur refers carefully.

Ricoeur’s intervention in the work of the Annales historians on the relation of history and event has influenced what is perhaps the most engaging debate about the epistemological status of the ordinary in the twentieth century. In his response to this debate about whether narrative can or cannot extricate itself from the event, Stanley Cavell refers to an earlier paper by Ricoeur (developed in Time and Narrative) and critiques Ricoeur’s claim that narrative history cannot make a clean break with the unfolding of events.13 “My contention here,” Ricoeur is quoted in this paper as having said, “is that history cannot be radically eventless because it cannot break its ties with the kind of discourse which is the original ‘place’ of the notion of the event, i.e. narrative discourse.”¹⁴ This is the crucial point where Cavell objects to Ricoeur’s argument. Narrative, according to Cavell, need not necessarily remain tied to the notion of the event. Essential to this disagreement is a dispute over the definition of an event. Cavell chooses to depart from the three criteria of an event that he reads Ricoeur as articulating: “that it is of something past, something done by or done to human beings, and something unrepeatable.”¹⁵ Clearly, such a definition of an event is rather exhaustive and consequently makes the possible extrication of narrative from the event difficult, if not altogether impossible. Cavell instead defines events as necessarily possessing a certain importance that leads to them being institutionalized, to some degree or the other, in the public sphere: “Obvious examples are the things high schools in my days used to call current events, the things newspapers call news, the things that appear on calendars of events.”¹⁶ Cavell’s definition of the event here, it seems to me, is closer to Braudel’s than to Ricoeur’s—both emphasize, among other things, the event’s obvious and immediate importance to its contemporaries, as news headlines tend to be. Ricoeur’s reading of Braudel has already begun to set up a distinction between that which seeks out the dramatic and that which does not: “Braudel’s opposition is evidently to a concept of event, one of whose negative features is that it theatricalises human existence.”¹⁷ By contrast, Cavell is drawn toward Braudel’s interest in the collective, larger structures of history: “toward the long-term, endlessly repeated conditions of human life amounted to history’s turning away from attention to the story of individual human beings in favor of attention to more or less anonymous collectivities.”¹⁸

Cavell finally arrives at his own argument about narratives embedded in the ordinary and the marginal via Emerson’s and Thoreau’s commitment to the ordinary as an insight into immediate sensual experience. Crucial here is Emerson’s idea of adjacency, of being in a state of unmediated proximity to the world and the laws of nature as opposed to the grand achievements of human culture and civilization canonized in history. “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low,” Cavell quotes Emerson as declaring. “Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and the future worlds.”19 The historical narrative that is extricable from the event, accordingly, would not be the “eventless” but rather “the uneventful, seeking, so to speak, what is not out of the ordinary.”²⁰ Moreover, the distinction between the history of events and that of the uneventful ordinary is not to be overstated. The ordinary, as Thomas Dumm points out in his reading of Cavell, is not just the small and the unnoticed that is opposed to the event: “the uneventfulness of the ordinary is the inevitable ground from which we may come to a better appreciation of events.”²¹ An unmediated engagement with the local and the ordinary, as opposed to a narrative fixation of dramatic or “important” events, therefore, not only enables a better understanding of history but also a more nuanced appreciation of the events themselves.

The polemic about the potential of the ordinary in the conversation about fiction in late-twentieth-century Anglophone cultural politics, I would suggest, is a crucial illustration of the relationship between ordinariness and narrative in the field of literary practice. In this context, the celebration of the ordinary is not only indicative of a radical aesthetic but, more importantly, a polemical departure from the national narratives about domination and resistance, which are configured as “events” in the sense Cavell and Braudel define them. Ndebele’s project of rediscovering the ordinary not only seeks fiction’s liberation from the spectacle of events in the national public sphere, but it also suggests the minute textures of the mundane everyday as the means through which fiction can actualize such a liberation. Added to the dichotomy of the ordinary and the event are two further sets of concerns—the national and the local, and the public and the private. The plea here is to move away from a telescopic view of history as it is shaped by a public consensus, usually in a national space, and toward the local and the immediate as it might be experienced in the immediacy of private sensibilities, often embedded in the quirks of regional cultures that do not add up to this national narrative. Such an immersion in the sensually evoked contours of the local and the immediate recalls Cavell’s reading of Emerson, as the latter asks for an engagement with “the common, the low, the near” as opposed to the great and the remote.²²

If some of the most significant genres of mid- and late-twentieth-century Anglophone fiction from the global South, such as protest literature and the national allegory, have shown an entwinement with history, it is the history of events—as variously pointed out by Braudel and Cavell—with which they have been preoccupied. Most of such events, moreover, have been what Seremetakis calls “sensational events”—elections, performances, disasters, wars, riots, and similar eruptions that the contemporary public sphere institutionalizes as “important.” The consequence has been a necessary turning away from the ordinary, “endlessly repeated conditions of human life” that constitute a distinctive, if alternative, space for the political. The ordinary is subsequently used only as a passive backdrop against which such major events shape the course of historical narratives and define the ethos of fictional ones, often through a contingent formal investment in the fantastic, the theatrical, and the magical realist. Fiction and history have come closer together than ever in the national allegory, illustrating, in the process, Ricoeur’s belief that narrative has to remain exclusively embedded in the temporal unfolding of events. The definition of the “event,” moreover, remains predictable in such narratives—it is a canon of public-historic importance with which liberation movements and the postcolonial nation-state pedagogically interpellate its citizens. If, for Cavell, such events are what high-school education canonizes as current events, Amit Chaudhuri has argued that the postcolonial novel in India “rehearses a national narrative that every middle-class Indian child has learnt in school and which every member of the Indian ruling class is defined by: the narrative about colonialism and independence, and the idea of India as a recognizable totality”; that in fact the historiography offered in the Anglophone novelistic national allegory is likely to make some readers “feel that they have gone back to their Indian Certificate of Secondary Education textbook.”23

Within the cultural politics of the Anglophone fiction from the global South, these arguments constitute a timely and powerful polemic. The more obvious historical burden that appeared to be placed on the postcolonial novel following the spectacular force and intensity of anticolonial movements, the resplendent moment of liberation, and the excitement of postcolonial development makes the fictional articulation of the mundane everyday a morally daunting project. Gestures of attention to the textures of ordinary life signify a large measure of courage for the writer of postcolonial fiction at a time when the novelist’s mission still seems inextricably entwined to the still-unfinished business of decolonization and nation building in its full public glare. Ndebele’s call for a “Rediscovery of the Ordinary” is, in fact, an undisguised plea for a politicomoral ambiguity in the face of what was arguably the most traumatic and troubling phase of his nation’s history. A rediscovery of the marginal narratives of the banal, the quotidian, and the humdrum, often located far away from the din of mainstream History, is, at a moment like this, an act of intense political ambivalence for the postcolonial writer, who is always confronted with the kind of ethical urgency that draws him (usually a “him”) farther and farther away from the quotidian materiality of local idiosyncrasies, which are usually hidden in the crevices of the private sphere. Such a rediscovery is, in that sense, politically irresponsible, in the face of the normative definition of the political that emerges in the theater of mainstream political struggle and the imaginary of postliberation progress. This capacity for moral idiosyncrasy not only resonates with Cavell’s view of the ordinary as an alternative space for the historical, but it also recalls experimental modernism’s radical introspection within the frames of the ordinary everyday at a time when the public sphere, within respective national contexts as well as worldwide, was being ripped apart by the seismic tremors of global war, warring political ideologies, the radical polarity of unforeseen economic prosperity and depression, and the gradual disintegration of colonial empires all around the globe. In my archive of fiction, I have chosen such moments from the early and the late twentieth century as the crucial occasions for the aesthetic celebration of banality in Anglophone fiction in the global British Empire.

There is a distinguished tradition of intellectuals of radical working-class movements who have warned against the fetishization of the spectacular moment and grand victories, asking instead for a focus on the preoccupations of quotidian life. While Guy Debord has explicitly stated that “the revolutionary proletariat … will have to renounce everything that transcends everyday life,”24 Jacques Rancière has wondered about the implication of the revolutionary working class simply asking for a different everyday life as opposed to the more politically defined claims for better working conditions or for a share in factories.²⁵ Henri Lefebvre, reading the subservience of the everyday to capitalism, has argued for the centrality of the everyday in the revolution: “A revolution cannot just change the political personnel or institutions; it must change la vie quotidienne, which has already been literally colonized by capitalism.”²⁶ More recently, Sonali Perera has urged moving beyond the mythologized spectacular moments of the revolution toward the smaller, quotidian struggles of the everyday, which continue after the revolution has taken place.²⁷ Such a movement, according to her, offers us the kind of understanding of nonmetropolitan working-class literature that is long overdue, dominated as it has been by a single-minded preoccupation with the resplendent moment of revolution celebrated in mainstream history.

Discourses of the minority experience—especially those connected to forms of imperialism—have been associated with overt trauma and dramatic spectacles of oppression for too long, as Ndebele had reminded his fellow citizens during the disturbing years of apartheid. Even from the perspective of liberation struggles, a limited version of art’s relevance to politics has often hinged on the degree to which art has directly participated in the dramatic arena of such struggle. “The operative word here,” Ndebele writes in his essay “Redefining Relevance,” “is ‘dramatic.’” And consequently, “what is dramatic is often defined according to the imperatives of real politik. According to this definition, the dramatic can easily be determined: strike action, demonstrations; alternatively, the brutality of the oppressive system in a variety of ways.”28 Much of this association, I repeat, is fully justified, as such oppressions worldwide, and the chain of tragic events they have historically unleashed, indeed have had dimensions of the spectacle. One only has to think of acts of colonial genocide, extermination of indigenous groups in settler colonies worldwide, and religious and communal violence in the global South for some of the most obvious examples. But just as the historical recording of such spectacles of oppression has not prevented theorists of working-class struggles from looking into the theoretically intractable moments of the ordinary everyday far from the sound and fury of the public sphere, literary readers should also not hesitate to consider the mundane and the marginal as a pertinent index of subaltern consciousness.

Not doing so would be to run the risk of missing out significant facets of these realities and of equating the entirety of such experiences with a handful of oft-repeated—albeit important—stories that gain cultural centrality both with the indigenous bourgeoisie and in the metropolitan centers of the West. I, for instance, grew up in a large city in postcolonial India. My personal experience of the most oppressive legacies of colonialism and the obstacles to postcolonial development had little to do with spectacles of riots, terrorism, genocides, all of which had wreaked havoc at other times and in other places. It had much more to do with the mind-numbing boredom inspired by functional and dysfunctional bureaucracies alike, a thousand trivial details of institutions not working the way they might have been expected to work, even within local parameters. What was much more real for me was not the spectacle of power but the banality of it. Underlying such power was not brutality but apathy, what Michael Herzfeld has aptly called “indifference,” whose “real danger” is “not that it grows out of the barrel of a gun, but that it too easily becomes habitual.”²⁹ The banality of power was the affective consequence of a certain public mindset of indifference, which, as Herzfeld has so eloquently put it, “is the opium of the state drudge.”³⁰ This banality was made up of bureaucratic formalities that made little or no sense; the “predictability of routine” of the failure of public and private institutions; the long empty evenings of daily, repeated power cuts; the long, slow trips in crowded buses that made up the experience of the everyday.³¹ I know these failures unleashed far more traumatic consequences elsewhere, and I share all the outrage and anger at such consequences, but it still remains hard to deny that one of the main consequences of these failures—of governmentality as much as of market logic—is inaction; of “unpleasantly extended time,” to use Goodstein’s words for the German sense of boredom; of the kind of banalizing emptiness that frustrates the private citizen of the postcolonial state caught in a fractured relation to neoliberal capitalism.