INTRODUCTION

Poetics of the Prosaic

Just about two years before the December made famous by Virginia Woolf as the time of momentous change for “human character,”¹ her fellow Bloomsbury writer, Katherine Mansfield, wrote the following in her diary on December 21, 1908:

I should like to write a life much in the style of Walter Pater’s ‘Child in the House’. About a girl in Wellington; the singular charm and barrenness of that place, with climatic effects—wind, rain, spring, night, the sea, the cloud pageantry. And then to leave the place and go to Europe, to live there a dual existence—to go back and be utterly disillusioned, to find out the truth of all, to return to London, to live there an existence so full and strange that Life itself seemed to greet her, and, ill to the point of death, return to W. and die there. A story, no, it would be a sketch, hardly that, more a psychological study of the most erudite character. I should fill it with climatic disturbance, & also of the strange longing for the artificial. I should call it ‘Strife’, and the child I should call—Ah, I have it—I’d make her a half caste Māori & call her Maata. Bring into it Warbrick the guide.²

Mansfield wrote this from Beauchamp Lodge in Paddington, not far from the Grafton Galleries, where Roger Fry curated the first exhibition of “postimpressionist” painting that was to inspire Woolf’s famous comment. Inhabiting a moment just two years before that December, however, Mansfield proposed to write a work set half a globe to the south, in her native New Zealand, a place she had left just five months earlier, scarcely knowing, at the time of writing these lines, that she was never again to see her country of birth. In the Wellington of her childhood, she proposed to create a character taken from the indigenous tribes of the colony, with whom the British settlers had a history of violence. “Strife,” as far as we know, was never written; what we have instead is the abandoned draft of a novel titled Maata, based on her Māori school friend and lover from Wellington, Maata or Martha Grace Mahapuku. The etchings of strife in the diary entry, however, have hardly anything to do with the violent conflicts between the white settlers and the Māori that culminated in the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. The strife, instead, is quintessentially Mansfield: a psychological conflict between “the singular charm and barrenness” of Wellington and the “full and strange” life in Europe. It is a conflict that promises to account for at least some of the restless energy behind Maata’s movement between Wellington on one hand and England and continental Europe on the other, a movement that defines much of Mansfield’s own life as well.

Katherine Mansfield is one of those writers whose work and personal life are usually imagined in a clear mutual relationship. Claims about the way her stories echo, develop, or fulfill material contained in her notebooks, diaries, and letters—which have been resurrected relatively recently—are by now fairly standard. However, I want to place an importance on this diary entry that goes beyond its resonance with individual stories in her oeuvre, even beyond the story imagined but unwritten, and beyond the abandoned novel that comes closest to the aspiration contained in these lines. The tension between the “barrenness” and “fullness” of life etched in these lines, in fact, provides the narrative context for most of her work. This tension articulates itself through a minute preoccupation with the ordinary reality of everyday life, where the infertile banality of immediate existence is placed in a teasing relationship with the promise of the exciting fullness that life is capable of offering.

Capable, yes, but only at a distance. That fullness is not realizable here, “here” being a trope that is in equal measure spatial and cognitive. The fullness will always exist out there. This is the narrative already delivered in the yearning lines of the diary entry, in the diarist’s conception of charm and barrenness as aesthetic affects that are enabled by a longing for Europe or, more specifically, London, the metropolitan center of empire. It is a longing that will shape the trajectory of movement for the protagonist whose life originates in the colonial backwaters. London will not only promise but help the protagonist realize a fullness of life that will, in the end, overpower her in its intensity. The climatic cycles that shape life in suburban New Zealand also define the colonial periphery as a place of natural idyll that is too far removed from the epicenter of culture where momentous cultural events can “change” human nature, where charm itself is a kind of barrenness. Nothing happens here; life is empty, uneventful, on the margins of human history. Temporality here is mired purely in the rhythms of the natural environment, which is iterative, unregenerative, and, in the end, banalizing, next to the imagined and subsequently realized fullness of life at the center of imperial culture. Yet the life of the protagonist must be rooted in this barrenness, if only for the sake of a promise of fullness from a distance.

The oppressive banalization of everyday life on the margins of empire is an ineluctable experience of colonial modernity. If Mansfield’s 1908 diary entry historicizes a colonial yearning for the excitement and eventfulness of the metropolis that was to rise to a high point in the Woolfian imagination of December 1910, just as interesting is the diary of Virginia Woolf’s (at that time) future husband, Leonard, beginning November 10, 1908, a period during which he served as a bureaucrat in a distant outpost of empire. A single word, “Routine,” is repeated as the only entry “for four days straight … during his three-year appointment as assistant government agent of the Hambantota district in Ceylon.”3 The iterative banality of colonial life is infective; it is a malaise that ails the agents of imperial administration, too. However, while the boredom of imperial bureaucrats captures a significant experiential dimension of everyday life on the colonial periphery, it is radically different, in its affective structure and political meaning, from the way large groups of colonized people etch their self-image through a sense of the banality of their individual and collective lives against the magnetic epicenter of historical, social, and cultural phenomena represented in the metropolitan center of empire.

This book is an attempt to understand the most significant literary articulation of this hierarchical structure of colonial modernity. It is driven by the belief that modernity in the colony, which is well encapsulated in colonial and postcolonial Anglophone fiction, follows the disrupted and uneven globalization of European modernity, an ideal to which local modernities are held in a fractured and subordinated relation. The banalization of everyday life provides aesthetic form to this fracture. But this aesthetic also gets radically reinvented as a narrative impulse in Anglophone fiction produced in the colonies. This narrative impulse is the central subject of this book. Banality and its often-attendant emotion boredom need to be understood as key motifs for colonial and postcolonial literary criticism as they help to aestheticize the relation between the imperial metropolis and the colonial periphery.

As a form of negative aesthetic, banality has an oppositional relationship with literature. The oppositionality is structured by a failure to fulfill the usual promise of literature to engage and entertain its audience. But if the expected pleasures of the text remain rooted within its construction and production of readerly desire, banality emerges as a failing of a specific kind: the failure to produce the new, the original, and, by implication, the engaging. The structure of this failure remains more or less the same outside the domain of the literary text as it is within it. The dread of banality, therefore, is rooted in an inability to transcend the immediate conditions of life surrounding the experiencing subject. The banal is precisely what thwarts the spatial transcendence of the immediate and the temporal transcendence of the everyday. It is the absolute tyranny of the immanent and the inescapable, the denial of the possibility of the excess that is the core of aesthetic pleasure. Boredom is usually understood as the psychic affect that arises in response to the banalization of one’s existence, involving the lack of excitement, novelty, activity. As an aesthetic failure, banality exists in an antithetical relation to the intuitive function of literature; a valorization of the banal within narrative parameters can therefore only embody a contrarian aesthetic mode.

Precisely because of their antithetical relation to the traditional goal of literature to engage and entertain, the motifs of banality and boredom deserve to become central concerns for the project of literary criticism when they are articulated as aesthetic motifs in their own right. Sianne Ngai has significantly described marginal emotions like envy, irritation, boredom, anxiety, and paranoia as “noncathartic” affects4—in the sense that they resist the obvious cathartic impact of socially recognized and aesthetically canonized emotions like pity, fear, love, or anger. I would suggest that one of the most radical distinctions between classical and modern literature is the degree to which such “noncathartic” affects gain centrality in the literature of the modern or post-Enlightenment period. Banality and boredom, I argue, are among the most radically noncathartic of such affects that mark the conditions of this modernity. Moreover, they help to aestheticize the relation between the dominant and subordinated models of modernity, sharply illustrated in the affective politics of colonialism and its aftermath. As aesthetically oppositional tropes, banality and boredom enter the literature of modernism as markers of radical innovation, yet a full understanding of the genesis and afterlives of these motifs requires an analysis of the political relation between the colonial center and periphery that is deeply linked with yet distinct from the idiosyncratic aesthetic impulses of experimental modernism.

This book identifies the way the banality of everyday life and the boredom that often accompanies it paradoxically shape a narrative instinct along the margins of the global British Empire from late colonial modernism to the present day, as revealed in the fiction of four writers: James Joyce from Ireland, Katherine Mansfield from New Zealand, Zoë Wicomb from South Africa, and Amit Chaudhuri from India. This is a body of English-language fiction in which the banality of everyday life comes to define a globally mappable narrative impulse that has mostly been understood in a linear continuity with the formal innovations of metropolitan modernism. Instead, I propose a reading in which this impulse narrativizes a colonial problematic that significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of literary modernism. If narrative is triggered by the tremor, velocity, and eventually the excitement of the event, the temporal and affective lack embodied in the banal in these late colonial and postcolonial fictions comes to shape a narrative impulse that is aesthetically oppositional. It is this oppositionality that has primarily been interpreted in terms of literary modernism’s radical aesthetic. Rather than being driven predominantly by the subjective idiosyncrasy of formal experimentation, I suggest that the narrative energization of banality is just as significantly rooted in the social experience of colonial modernity.

Gathering momentum in the troubled late colonial decades of the global British Empire, literary modernism is a movement deeply embedded in the cultural, historical, and political tensions and anxieties between the metropolis and the periphery. If an ethnographic exploration of quotidian reality comes to shape English narrative realism since the late eighteenth century, the modernist fragmentation of the empirical archive of the everyday into the affective aesthetics of the banal is driven by desire and longing flowing from the colonial margins toward the heart of empire. As a subtly ideological marker of political marginalization, the aesthetics of banality represents the intimate, micropolitical consequences of colonialism, anticolonial resistance, and postcolonial identity formation, but at a distance from the public space where history is enacted as a grand spectacle of struggle and nation building. Banality and boredom make up evaluative and affective names for an introspective aesthetic whose apparent isolation from the tremors of public history is more symptomatic than conclusive.

This urgent confluence of modernist innovation and colonial anxiety in the hands of key literary modernists of late colonial origin is this book’s point of departure. Subsequently, the book explores the contested aesthetic and political legacies of this late colonial modernism as they spread beyond the Anglo-European canon and resonate with Anglophone cultures in the global South at various points of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial development. If the noncathartic motifs at the heart of this study gain literary centrality at a point of entanglement of an aesthetic modernity and a political crisis, these motifs also offer a significant way to read an archive of Anglophone fiction where this modernity as well as its crisis reaches its global expanse. However, the late colonial context of modernism is especially important as a point of departure of this affective relation, as this period sets off in earnest a process of cultural globalization wherein the planetary expansion of Anglophone literature becomes accelerated on a scale not seen before.5 Imagined as “an array of discrete yet interconnected localities,” as John Marx has argued, the late colonial and subsequently postcolonial production of English-language fiction is driven by a disruptive conflict with the imperial hierarchies of culture. In the historical backdrop of literary modernism, this conflict becomes invested with an immediacy unimaginable before.⁶

Katherine Mansfield, whose career charts an emotionally afflicted journey from the antipodean peripheries of empire to its cultural center in Bloomsbury, is an author whose work intricately reveals the manner in which the banal is aestheticized as an index of the relation between the empire and the colony. In her writing, the infertile banality of everyday life is a sensual, felt experience that points to the cultural politics of colonialism only by implication, through its imagination of a fuller life at the heart of empire. In the diary entry, her embodiment of this imagination in the figure of a half-caste Māori woman modeled on a character personally significant to her is, at the same time, an implicit indication of colonial desire, which is for the most part more effectively overshadowed in her stories. Rarely if ever does subjectivity belong to an indigenous figure in her work, which revolves, to a far greater degree, around settler colonial life. The banality of this settler life is a covert assertion of the removal of this life from the spectacle of public history that stages the dramatic conflicts of colonialism. The spectacular conflicts of colonial history, in such a life, are ironized in the private affliction of banality and boredom defining the sensibility that looks toward the imperial center.

Like Mansfield, other writers in this archive also deploy the motifs of banality and boredom as constituents of aesthetic experience, in which the interplay of desire, longing, and fulfillment signals the dynamics of colonial history, but at a subtle and idiosyncratic distance from the grand spectacle of historical events. Banality, for these writers, is a lack that indicates colonial disempowerment by implication, a lack that becomes a radical narrative drive in these fictions. Despite its being a negative value, the banal, in these texts, energizes a form of narrative aesthetic. As it seeks to explore this apparent paradox, this book asks a variety of related questions: How does the aesthetic celebration of banality relate to the empirical representation of the everyday? How significantly would this relationship mark the continuities and disjunctures between the realism of the early English novel, nineteenth-century naturalism, the stream-of-consciousness narration of early-twentieth-century modernism, and Anglophone narratives from decolonizing and decolonized cultures in the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century global South—narratives that, in turn, engage in a critical relationship with the literary institutions of Western modernity such as the novel and realism? Similarly, what are the differences between the functional detail that shapes setting and context in realism and the symbolic detail in modernism that invites the epiphany? Does the valorization of banality and boredom hinder affective engagement? If narrative is driven by the spectacle of the event, how does the banality of eventlessness enable a narrative impulse? Does banality stall narrative, or does it transform it? In the final measure, does such a narrative indicate an aesthetic failure or a radically innovative aesthetic? Similarly, if boredom signals an affective failure or a frustration of the need for engagement or excitement, how does such a failure turn into a subject of aesthetic representation?

Once again, Mansfield’s complex location between the metropolitan center of British modernism and the distant margin of empire provides some revealing insights behind the narrative energization of banality. These insights, moreover, have a unique resonance with the scope and objective of this book. The narrative centralization of banality and its affective counterpart, boredom, enables a complex interaction between the sociocultural consequences of colonialism and the experimental aesthetic of literary modernism. The radical life breathed into the banal, I suggest, defines an aesthetic unique to modernism that both extends and troubles the tenets of narrative realism of the nascent English novel that emerged in the culture of the late Enlightenment. To illustrate this claim and to understand how the fate of the banal stages an ambiguous conflict between the aesthetic principles of Enlightenment modernity and those of experimental modernism, I would like to turn to what is perhaps the most famous polemic in early-twentieth-century British fiction.

Desire from the Shores of Pleasure

In her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Virginia Woolf accuses Arnold Bennett of being a novelist of a drudging, bureaucratic mode. This essay is usually considered the clearest articulation of experimental modernism’s ideological difference from its close contemporary, the Edwardian fictional tradition, as represented by Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells. Writing of Bennett’s novel Hilda Lessways, Woolf objects to the plenitude of everyday details that she sees as used merely to create a context and produce the setting: “One line of insight would have done more than all those lines of description; but let them pass as the necessary drudgery of the novelist.”7 Hilda’s voice, the contours of her mind and character, Woolf feels, are forever pushed off the narrative’s horizon by an array of trivial things—the flour mill opposite Hilda’s window, the bricked path extending from the flour mill, the log of rents and freeholds and copyholds and fines—all of which, according to Woolf, merely indicate the tedium of unregenerative novelistic labor that keeps the author away from the spirit and soul of his characters. The Edwardian novelist, according to Woolf, is too often like a government bureaucrat nose deep in a sea of biographical and circumstantial details, most of which are incidental to the inner life of the characters: the Holy Grail for the modernist avant-garde. About H. G. Wells, her response assumes a similar tone of regret: “He is a materialist from sheer goodness of heart, taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials, and in the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realize, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings.”⁸ His commitment to producing a world replete with every possible everyday detail makes Wells, for Woolf, a “materialist,” while a writer like Joyce, in spite of the latter’s interest in all things scatological that initially earned her distaste, is, in the end, “spiritual.” Indulgence in the methods of Edwardian realism, to which she admits having felt “strongly tempted,” can, on the other hand, only produce stories that are “the most dreary, irrelevant, humbugging affairs in the world.”⁹ A refusal to celebrate “the crudity and coarseness of human beings” turns the Edwardians into soulless bureaucrats, taking upon themselves the details of rents, wages, calico, and copyhold estates at the expense of the “astonishing disorder” of the human sensibility.

Woolf here holds the Edwardians guilty of an excessive preoccupation with physical details, which stifles the fiction’s transcendence beyond the material. The Edwardian writers produce prose that is truly prosaic, in the sense Hegel implied in the phrase “the prose of the world,” all those quotidian circumstances and obstacles that limit individual expression and prevent aesthetic transcendence.¹⁰ The “quotidian” or the everyday, by preventing transcendence beyond the immediate, can only reproduce a world that is psychologically or aesthetically sterile. “The whole thing,” Hegel says, “appears only as a mass of individual details”;¹¹ the tyranny of external details obfuscates the uniqueness of subjective vision, which is the core of aesthetic beauty. While the quotidian can perform a range of functions and satisfy a variety of needs (including those of comfort, stability, and empathy), constriction into the realm of the quotidian, with no avenues of transcendence beyond it, transforms the quotidian into the banal. What was merely descriptive now becomes a value—or, as a negativity, an antivalue. Alternatively, cast into a temporal scheme, the predictable iterations of the everyday become banal.

The relationship of the quotidian with the banal has a curious parallel within the principles of narrative fiction. Quotidian details are often essential to flesh out the world of the novel and to produce the tangible immediacy without which realist narration, at least, cannot take shape. But when such quotidian details define the limits of this fictional world, preventing aesthetic, psychic, or symbolic transcendence, that world, as Woolf implies, becomes dreary, predictable, and banal. That is when the narrative becomes prosaic in the Hegelian sense. The evaluative and the generic implications of the term “prosaic” have coexisted simultaneously in literary history. In the context of Woolf’s polemic, however, the evaluative meaning of the term comes to the surface and coincides with the image of bureaucratic labor. Such labor provides socially and economically valuable knowledge but can only be a banalizing model for the art of narrative fiction—“the necessary drudgery of the novelist.” In the realm of the state and the economy, the methods and institutions of bureaucracy reinforce a nontranscendental organization of the everyday, and, in fact, the affinities between the bureaucratic systematization of factual information and the banality of realist fiction observed here by Woolf go considerably beyond the metaphor. The institution of bureaucracy, as Max Weber has reminded us, represents the logic of rationalism that marks the modern state and the institutions of capitalism.12 All the conditions for the successful functioning of Weberian bureaucracy—the “iron cage” of rationality, in Weber’s terms¹³—notably the methodical performance of specific duties, the structure of strict hierarchy, and the preservation of factual records, embody the spirit of rational capitalism that for Weber is the most important dynamic of transformation for European modernity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The worldview of narrative realism, especially within the early English novel, is also an epistemic legacy of this modernity. It seems clear that “rational capitalism,” as Weber has characterized it,¹⁴ and the epistemic mode of narrative realism are at least partially traceable to the same political and intellectual climate. In this light, Woolf’s allusion to bureaucratic labor in her criticism of what she sees as the drudging meticulousness of narrative realism reveals more than is first apparent.

The stream-of-consciousness method of fiction, in contrast, seeks a radical disruption of what we might call the mode of bureaucratic realism. This disruption reflects experimental literary modernism’s unease with the rationalist model of political and philosophical modernity ushered in by the European Enlightenment. As Woolf would put it, this disruption hinges on “the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary.”15 It is significant that she uses adjectives rather than nouns to articulate the difference between the Edwardian and the experimental-modernist modes of fiction, which share the physical atmosphere of the ordinary everyday but differ radically in the way they approach the material. The fragmentary details of quotidian city life, for instance, flood a characteristically Woolfian moment of jouissance on an ordinary June day, through the stream of consciousness that represents Clarissa Dalloway’s mind. Indeed, some of the finest moments of Woolf’s own fiction are constituted through the often aimless exploration of not only the general texture of everyday life but in fact through that of objects, moments, and situations that appear as the most banal and marginal elements of the social and aesthetic construction of the everyday. As Woolf identifies the banalization of the Edwardian narration of the everyday, she introduces a certain question of value—if only through its lack—as the point of departure of the modernist literary polemic. If the production of an ordinary, everyday world played a key role in the formation of the traditional realism essential to the rise of the novel, the physical and factual confinement within the details of this everyday world also came to appear as aesthetically oppressive to the modernist innovators in the early twentieth century.

How does high modernism respond to this problem? One could do worse than to say “epiphany,” probably the most concentrated instance of modernist elevation of the banal onto a plane of aesthetic transcendence, but a fuller answer is more complex than merely the successful epiphanization of everyday objects and situations in modernist fiction. Such an answer would take us back to the opening moment of this discussion—to the way Katherine Mansfield’s writings promise to transform the motif of banality into a narrative instinct. Lars Svendsen has provided a map of the affective entropy contained in boredom, an emotion that often follows or surrounds the aesthetic of banality. Quoting Roland Barthes’s suggestion that “Boredom is … desire seen from the shores of pleasure,” Svendsen argues that desire here implies “going beyond the ‘same’, that which is outside—transcendence.”¹⁶ Svendsen argues that “boredom is immanence in its purest form” and reaches the seemingly hopeless conclusion that boredom not only embodies immanence but the final and definite impossibility of transcendence of any kind. It is an accurate analysis within the cognitive framework of boredom as a malaise of the metropolitan West. However, if banality can be imagined as an aesthetic that is comparable to boredom as an affect, I would point out that the life of these motifs as the aesthetic and affective consequences of colonial modernity corresponds more accurately to the kind of desire that, for Barthes, constitutes boredom.

Modernity in the colony, I argue, is marked by a desire whose object can only be perceived from a distance. It is a desire whose very affective force depends on the spatial difference between the desiring and the desired. At this distance lies the final object of colonial desire, the metropolitan center of empire, a venue where events unfold and history happens with all its excitement. The banal, in the colonial and postcolonial fiction that gives it shape, is immanence forever haunted by the lure of transcendence but never fulfilled by it. As an aesthetic condition of colonial modernity, banality embodies a fractured relation to metropolitan modernity; at the same time, it remains perpetually animated by a desire to heal the fracture, to inhabit the transcendence that the center holds out as a promise. Through a play between desire and fulfillment, the imagined and the real, the immediate and the distant, the banal becomes a force that drives narrative. This narrative is shaped through the tension between the banality of everyday life and the promise of transcendence that is variously fulfilled, deferred, and frustrated in fiction produced by the colonial architects of literary modernism.

The narrative innovations of modernism draw a kind of conscious attention to banality as a value, and often, concurrently, to boredom as an affect. This involves a radical shift from the merely functional use of everyday details for the empirical production of setting and context, as seen in more traditional forms of realism. This is the ironic context of Woolf’s quarrel with Bennett, a context that remains unstated in her polemic. The radical modernist response to this problem is neither to abandon the everyday, nor to bring the dramatic and the spectacular to cause a rupture in its texture (as magic realism would do later in the century), but to invest fragments of this ordinary life with the libidinal energy of the banal haunted by the unfulfilled promise of transcendence. Through this narrative innovation, the banal, in a radical turn of cultural history, becomes an affirmative narrative force. Such is the paradox of narrative movement embodied in the empty, unfulfilled, and stifling lives of Mansfield’s settler colonial women in the New Zealand countryside or in the lives of Joyce’s “paralyzed” Dubliners; the banality of the immediate, for all of them, is energized by the possibility of a full and enriching life existing out of their reach but not their sensory imagination. Even the actual event of the epiphany, whether it is fulfilled or frustrated, is structured through desire for a transcendence of the banality of everyday life far from the metropolitan center. The unfulfilled or deflated epiphany that abounds in Joyce’s fiction at some level reflects the frustrated desire to move beyond the banality of the local that is teasingly touched by the lure of a magical transformation but is denied the reality of such a transformation.

The key question with which we are left might look like this: does the banal remain banal? Or does it get transformed, even fragmentarily, through the longing for fullness or transcendence? While there is a significant narrative shift from an objective description of the physical world to the idiosyncrasy of subjective consciousness in literary modernism, a number of contradictory impulses are also potentially at work within the shift itself. Liesl Olson, in her recent exploration of the modernist preoccupation with the ordinary, would have us pause longer over the complex relationship between the Edwardian representation of the ordinary everyday and that of Woolf, its archmodernist critic. According to Olson, critical attention to the “aesthetic of self-conscious interiority” in modernist literature has diverted us from its firm mooring in the ordinary materialism of the shared external world of the everyday,17 which such interiority never transcends or transforms fully. Not only does modernism share with Edwardian fiction a similar world of the ordinary, but it also foregrounds the manner in which this ordinary world resists aesthetic transcendence, which it does just as often as it celebrates such transcendence in heightened moments such as those of the epiphany. Olson’s example is, significantly, that of Woolf, who remains positioned in a perpetual ambivalence between the prosaic materialism of the external world—which is ordinary precisely because it belongs to a realm of common experience—and the poetic interiority of the unique, subjective sensibility, where the ordinary is transformed into the luminous index of inner lives.¹⁸ Not giving in fully to either impulse is the peculiar triumph of modernist fiction. Woolf’s disdain for Bennett’s methods in her essay is therefore partially deceptive, as in her own fiction she draws upon this world of banal, external materialism more than she actually admits in her polemic. “She transforms,” writes Olson, “but does not reject, the literary realism of the past.”¹⁹ Modernist fiction’s admittedly experimental preoccupation with the banal, therefore, can be scarcely understood without a consideration of the literary realism of past traditions.

For me, the relationship of the two is embedded in aesthetic modernism’s troubled relationship with the philosophical and political modernity of the Enlightenment, a modernity with which traditional realism is inextricably linked. The struggle between longing, fulfillment, and frustration that is at play in the movement between banality and transcendence is structured around the crisis of modernity as it is represented in the embattled aesthetics of literary modernism. Tensions and tremors in the global structure of the British Empire, on the other hand, provide a concrete historical venue for this crisis of modernity, a modernity that makes a disruptive attempt to replicate itself in the colonies. The paradoxical celebration of a negative value such as the banal, in the texts I read in this book, is an affective function of the political condition of their production. The aestheticization of banality in late colonial modernism is therefore underwritten by the core-periphery framework endemic to modernism, a framework shaped largely, though not exclusively, by colonialism. Such a framework, inevitably, has a temporal life as well; the motif of the banal, in that sense, approximates what Heather Love has called “backwardness,” following the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that the definition of modernity is contingent on the identification of the nonmodern.20 The banal, in these narratives, relates to the trope of backwardness, which Love locates at the critical intersection of modernity as a historical trope and modernism as an aesthetic movement. For Love, aesthetic modernism is marked by a tension between the instinct for novelty on one hand and forces variously structured around the negative and the backward—such as primitivism, decadence, decline, and melancholia—on the other. Temporality is key, as Love points out; for me, banality marks the disenchantment of temporality in the colony, the lacuna created by the perpetually deferred arrival of Western modernity, which promises to capture successfully the excitement of history and progress. Unlike Love, however, who reads “backwardness” in opposition to the instincts of innovation, I approach banality itself as the radical force at the core of the narrative instinct that drives these fictions. Just the way modernism has been understood to make provincialism a metropolitan concern—to bring, in John Marx’s words, “provincialism to the metropole”²¹—the most radical modernist fictions reinvent the disenchanted temporal and spatial experience of banality in the colonial periphery as an affirmative narrative force.

Indeed, the vitalization of negative tropes like banality and boredom are usually rooted in the radical politics of disenfranchisement. Patricia Meyer Spacks has convincingly argued that the boredom of middle- and upper-class women in the eighteenth century was the consequence of severe social constrictions that structured their lives. But it was this boredom that helped female authors from the period create narratives of “devious but intelligible social protest.”22 The aesthetic celebration of banality in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, in many ways, inherits the narratives of female boredom and anguish in early English fiction. Woolf, however, is not my subject in this book, except as the most insightful and polemical theorist of the banal in literary modernism; my focus here is on the narrativization of banality and boredom as a function of the political relation between the imperial metropolis and the colonial periphery, a subject on which Woolf’s work differs considerably from the fiction produced along the margins of empire. The creative articulation of banality and boredom in women’s consciousness, in Woolf’s work, however, remains related to the larger politics of disempowerment. My immediate interest in this book is the manner in which such disempowerment appears as a condition of colonial modernity and its affective interplay of desire, longing, and transcendence in fictions shaped by this condition.²³

Boredom, the close affective relation of the banal, has a complex status in literature and philosophy. It has often been thought of as an affliction that works as an incubator of extraordinary imagination, marking a singular sensibility, as indicated, for instance, in the well-known observations on boredom made by Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Søren Kierkegaard.24 The distinguished history of thought about boredom as a mark of a singular consciousness, combined with the perception of the emotion as an indolent luxury of the materially privileged, however, has obstructed the possibility of understanding boredom as an affective consequence of exclusion and disempowerment. Of considerable significance to my work is recent anthropological research that has chronicled boredom as the pervasive reality of lives on the distant margins of Western modernity, regions excluded by the structures of global capitalism.²⁵ Boredom, in such locations, is an affective consequence of a perceived non-modernity and the temporal disenchantment that follows the failed arrival of progress. However, it seems to me that within literary writing, experiences of banality and boredom are yet to be significantly understood as markers of marginality and exclusion. Literature is still significantly attached to the elevating singularity of boredom, as perhaps in some ways it should be. As a literary critic, I too remain committed to the demonstration of the negative or the noncathartic aesthetic of banality as an affirmative narrative force. However, I attempt to detach the related affect of boredom from its context of subjective singularity and material privilege, which has been the more dominant model in literary and philosophical criticism. What I hope is noticeable in this approach is how a set of motifs that are not only aesthetically but also politically negative can enable an affirmative narrative instinct. In the fictions I read, the hierarchy between the metropolis and the periphery that creates this disempowering nexus of aesthetics and politics is not only shaped by the late colonial context of modernism but also by the complex legacy of desire and ideology that follows the trajectories of decolonization and the development of postcolonial identity. It remains significant that it is the last phase that is also singled out by recent ethnographers of boredom in the global South as the most visible but theoretically intractable marker of the affective politics of marginality.

As aesthetic and affective indices of the uneven political relations that have marked Western modernity and its global expansion, banality and boredom simultaneously make up both the conscious self of modernist fiction and what Spacks has called its great “hidden Other.” The banal insistently negotiates between the aesthetic, the social, and the material. This is a connection that literary criticism has, perhaps not without reason, assumed to be natural. This study seeks to foreground the radical poetics of this historically “naturalized” negotiation along an archival trajectory through twentieth-century world literature in English that reflects the cultural aftermath of the British Empire. Before I turn to this body of fiction, therefore, I would like to examine in some detail the historical development of the aesthetic categories at the heart of this book, as they have evolved within the landscape of European modernity that has globalized itself through the colonial condition.

The Generic Modernity of the Banal

Our current consciousness of banality and boredom and, more crucially, the literary representation of this consciousness comes into being at a significant moment of politicophilosophical modernity in Europe, namely, the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, although it gathers maximum aesthetic momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under high modernism.26 The narrative of the appearance and celebration of the motifs of banality and boredom, I would like to argue, also offers an illustrative version of the larger relationship between the Enlightenment paradigm of modernity and the aesthetic movement of modernism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernity and modernism, as such, are two terms that I would distinguish carefully from each other.²⁷ Within the field of literary modernist studies, the fraught relationship between Enlightenment modernity and literary modernism has been the subject of significant debate, one usually centered on the question of whether that relationship is one of continuity or crisis. In other words, was modernism a continuation of the values of Enlightenment modernity, or did it signal a dramatic break from this modernity? The full range of this debate, which has been explored significantly by scholars of literary modernism, is outside the scope of this book.²⁸ What I’d like to emphasize here, however, is that literary modernism’s singular celebration of the banal encapsulates both the continuities and the discontinuities of modernism’s relation with Enlightenment modernity. Through its interest in everyday life, modernist fiction maintains certain continuities with post-Enlightenment notions of the aesthetic, most specifically in the shaping of the fictional world through the mode of narrative realism. But as Woolf’s impatience with Edwardian realism reveals most strikingly, the principles around which this quotidian world was organized—those of the rational, socially coherent values traceable to the novelistic realism that rises with Enlightenment modernity—were also to face a profound crisis in the wake of aesthetic modernism. While the constitutive texture of the fictional world sustained itself in the transition, the authorial approach to it changed drastically. The question of whether or not that change in turn radically transformed the fictional world itself remains part of a larger debate over whether the modernist preoccupation with chaos and disorder fully overturned the older narrative of Enlightenment modernity. But reaching a satisfactory conclusion to this larger discussion—which I suspect cannot be resolved definitively—is less important for our purposes than recognizing how the heightening of the banality of the everyday reveals the aesthetic significance of the philosophical relationship between modernity and modernism.

To begin to explore the close mutual relationship of these motifs within the narrative of modernity, it might be useful to step back and look into the etymological and cultural histories of the two words, “banality” and “boredom,” that have emerged as extreme evaluative and affective responses to the experience of the everyday. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word “banal” is in 1753, when it signified obligatory feudal service. Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary traces the word’s roots to the Serbo-Croatian ban, meaning “lord” or “ruler”; the American Heritage College Dictionary points to its origin in the French (and old French) word banal, which it annotates as “shared by tenants in a feudal jurisdiction.”²⁹ As an adjective, banal was used to designate things that belonged to feudal serfs (linking it again to ban, the Serbo-Croatian word for “lord”) or else, again, to compulsory feudal service.³⁰

Present-day annotations of the entry include “trite, feeble, commonplace,” while noting its original sense of “‘compulsory,’ hence common to all.” The sense of compulsion or necessity that casts its oblique shadow on the word “banal” and its attendant association with constriction and repetitive regularity, therefore, seem to originate in the communal obligations of the feudal system. Specifically, “banal” looks back to some of the common restrictions that bind the feudal community and define the latter’s bond to the feudal lord. This bond finds expression in the essential daily labor of its members, such as the production of food for consumption or obligatory services to the ruler, be they military or civil. Also immediately noticeable here is the double relevance of the word “common”—meaning both “shared by everybody” and “that which is ordinary, ubiquitous, or unoriginal.” The slippage of meaning between the two implications of the word “common” seems to hint at the larger transition of patterns in the history of the word “banal.” This history, one might say, not only charts a narrative of power and obligation constituting communal lives but also narrates a slow but perceptible transference of meaning over time, from the occupational lives of the politically and economically disenfranchised to a measure of value—or the lack of it. And this is precisely where, I would suggest, the semantic duality contained by the word—that which pertains to everybody and that which is unoriginal—indicates a significant relation between the political and the aesthetic. As it becomes clear from the evolving history of the English novel, the slippage between the two meanings indicates that the nascent genre’s preoccupation with ordinary life was linked to the gradually widening social base of its readership, thanks to the acceleration of printing technologies and an emerging middle class.

The earliest recorded use of the word “bore,” in the sense I’ve been using it here, is also in the eighteenth century, though the OED is unable to name a precise year. The etymological origins of the word, including the Old English word borian, all relate to the other meaning of the word, which pertains to mechanical movement, specifically to making or drilling a hole. The Random House Webster’s suggests that the word was first used to convey the sense of being “tiresome or dull” in 1768 and that this usage might possibly have come into vogue as a figurative extension of the slow, mechanical movement the verb originally implied. Should this claim have philological legitimacy—and it retains the metaphorical resonance even if it doesn’t—slowness, and thus a certain experience of the passage of time, are immediately established as the sociopsychological components of boredom. “The word bored,” Thomas Dumm argues along similar lines, “has no indisputable etymology that might move one beyond imagining the labor of drilling to explain how the idea of drilling a hole—to bore—could also describe the process of being dull and stupefied.”31 That in both cases these terms emerge against the backdrop of the culture of the late Enlightenment, which to a great degree shapes the modern Western conception of aesthetics, is significant as a philological point of departure for this project.

Nor is it accidental that the evolving histories of these two terms are characterized by etymological shifts between the domain of the sociopolitical and that of the affective. Corresponding contexts in literary history show that the rise of the novel as a genre, for instance, marks an intriguing overlap between the celebration of the quotidian and the foregrounding of common humanity in terms of character and narrative. This overlap, I argue, echoes the etymological shifts of the word “banal” between the realm of cultural value and that of the economic stratification of society. The double meaning in the related word “mundane,” implying both the ordinary and the secular, indicates these cultural symptoms of modernity as embedded in a secular vision. Locating an emergent earlier moment of modernity, in the late medieval fourteenth century, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri characterize European modernity as contingent on “the affirmation of the powers of this world, the discovery of the plane of immanence” that led to the denial of “divine and transcendent authority over worldly affairs.”32 This modernizing shift away from the plane of transcendence was arguably not only a secularizing move but also a move toward an ontological attachment to the plane of the quotidian. For Henri Lefebvre, too, the era of the emergence of the mundane was “the bourgeois eighteenth century,” when “the ‘mundane’ element burst forth into art and philosophy.”³³ Such a shift, reaching full momentum with the Enlightenment, found its natural aesthetic medium in the novel. Distinguishing itself from the older narrative of the romance, the nascent genre revealed a preoccupation with the “mundane” in the sense of “the ordinary” as much as in that of “the secular.” Franco Moretti’s description of this secular imaginary as constitutive of novelistic realism is illuminating: “It is a new, truly secular way of imagining the way of life: dispersed among countless minute events, precarious, mixed to the indifference of the world: but always tenaciously there.”³⁴ Though my project focuses primarily on Anglophone literature of the twentieth century, one of its underlying convictions is that the aesthetic of colonial banality remains entangled in a complex and sometimes contradictory relationship with the rise and development of the English novel within the context of the late Enlightenment. It is the eighteenth century that is marked by the rise of the novel and the emergence of narrative realism, the period that also saw the etymological—and perhaps also to a certain extent, conceptual—emergence of the motifs of banality and boredom in the sense we understand them today.³⁵

In the system of aesthetic value emergent in the culture of the Enlightenment, an evaluative link increasingly came to be drawn between the concept of “prose” as a certain way of looking at the world and as a certain kind of discourse. As pointed out by Michal Peled Ginsburg and Lorri G. Nandrea, foundational here is Hegel’s observation on “the world of prose and everyday” as one of contingency, where the individual is limited by circumstances and context: “As that which prevents individuals from teleologically realizing an implicit internal totality, ‘prose’ impedes transcendence. In contrast to ‘the look of independence and total life and freedom that lies at the root of the essence of beauty,’ moreover, ‘prose’ is a kind of ugliness.”³⁶ This connection between genre and value is embedded in the OED annotations on the word “prose,” which derives from the Latin prosus, meaning “straightforward, straight, direct.” Ginsburg and Nandrea refer to obvious links between the dictionary meaning of the word as “the ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure,” and its figurative definition of “plain, simple, matter-of-fact, and (hence) dull or commonplace expression, quality, spirit, etc.”³⁷ The generic and the evaluative meanings of the term “prose” are set up in a relationship of mutuality around semiotic structures of contingency, necessity, and nontranscendence. Such structures, I would suggest, anticipate the constricting networks of historical power that eventually produce banality as a radical narrative instinct in the twentieth century.

However, even though the ordinary begins to find its way into narrative awareness from the late eighteenth century onward, it is not until the development of modernism (first in continental Europe and then in the Anglophone world) that the motifs of banality and boredom come to be foregrounded as modes of a negative or noncathartic aesthetic that could be transformed into a narrative impulse. The notion that a psychic condition such as boredom could constitute a subject of aesthetic representation gained significant literary popularity only since the second half of the nineteenth century. Philosophies of the human condition such as existentialism had a role to play in this celebration of banality and boredom. For Elizabeth Goodstein, the nineteenth century is the crucial period where “the evolution of the discourse on boredom traces the constitution of a new rhetoric of experience—a modern idiom of self-understanding.” She points out that no recorded usage of the word “boredom,” according to the OED, is found before the mid-nineteenth century, when it appears in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and subsequently in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.38

To my mind, moreover, the echo of Robert Musil’s celebrated work in the title of Goodstein’s study, Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, points to the modern nature of the discourse around boredom and specifically to the significance of modernist culture to boredom’s aesthetic articulation. Pointing to the concurrence of the concept of boredom with the discourse of modern experience, Goodstein writes: “My overall claim is not that boredom as such is the key to theorizing modernity, but rather the problems of theorizing boredom are the problems of theorizing modern experience more generally.”39 The literary significance of this sociocultural claim about the conjunction of boredom and modernity comes out, probably more richly than elsewhere, in the novel Madame Bovary, published, significantly, the same year as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, a poetic work that pioneered boredom as an index of the modern experience. Traditionally, the innovative force of Madame Bovary has been identified in Flaubert’s experimental sense of narrative craft. But it is now clear to us that the novel’s centralization of the experience of (Emma’s) boredom—most notably, its “collapse of ‘adventure’ into everyday banality,” as Franco Moretti has put it, is just as important a component of its radical modernity.⁴⁰ More specifically, I argue that if the conceptualization and experience of banality and boredom are crucial components of the subjective experience symptomatic of modernity, they are experiences of lack, or “backwardness,” as Heather Love might put it, inseparably connected to the social distribution of power and resources. “The experience of boredom,” Thomas Dumm suggests, “may be connected to … feeling left out, existing on the margins of events that powerful people represent as central to what matters in the world.”⁴¹ Exclusion from agency or even awareness of events, however, rarely implies immunity from the consequences of such events, and the unwilling subjection to such consequences can just as well produce boredom as a mark of one’s inability to choose one’s own sociohistorical role. Dumm goes on to acknowledge that “boredom may be understood … as an expression of discomfort at not wanting to be a part of a larger narrative while being acutely aware that one is.”⁴² Colonial modernity is acutely caught up in such a narrative of unfreedom, with desire for its imperial counterpart entangled with an acute awareness of one’s material and ideological enslavement to it.

Spacks distinguishes carefully between ennui and boredom based on the grandeur and pride of the former’s aspirations as opposed to the humbler, more earthbound nature of the latter: “Ennui implies a judgment of the universe; boredom, a response to the immediate.”⁴³ With this distinction in mind, she reads nineteenth-century continental fiction and poetry, notably that by Baudelaire, primarily in terms of ennui rather than boredom. English translations of Baudelaire’s poetry have used both terms, as for instance in “Au Lecteur” (usually translated as “To the Reader”), probably the most direct and best-known example of what Baudelaire calls “l’Ennui” in his oeuvre. Such ennui, in Spacks’s analysis, magnifies the nobility of the experiencing subject, indicating “the sufferer’s awareness of society’s intractable corruption and of alienation as its consequence for the sensitive spirit.”⁴⁴ For Goodstein, on the other hand, the essential modernity of Baudelaire lies in the fact that he democratizes ennui: “In his verses, the ennui that had been the prerogative of the idle rich is represented as having passed to all of those whose lives lack meaning in a world where time has become everyone’s burden.”⁴⁵ The change of understanding of the emotion from one of more active agency to one of almost complete disempowerment is evident in Goodstein’s reading of the shift of the meaning as a vice at the beginning of Flowers of Evil to an unavoidable fate toward the end of the book, exemplified to perfection in the final “Spleen” poem.⁴⁶ Such a set of contradictory approaches reveals how authors like Flaubert and Baudelaire, as chroniclers of the historical transitions between ennui as an elevated, spiritual affliction and boredom as a more earthbound, widespread democratic emotion (though not necessarily designated by those names) become natural sites of debate about the evolution of the mental state as it is represented in literature. Both ennui and boredom share a resistance to affective catharsis, but the cultural history surrounding the two terms contains a clear trajectory of social movement in terms of class, privilege, and imaginative agency. In the end, ennui retains a philosophically and aesthetically elevated status within nineteenth-century European literature, predominantly representing the spiritual resistance enacted within the exceptional and often (though not always) aristocratic sensibility. Boredom, on the other hand, I’d agree with Spacks, is a more materially grounded, demotic affect that is also connected to the collective sensibilities of wider social groups, often those living within conditions of socioeconomic disenfranchisement. Boredom is, I further contend, also an aesthetic of deprivation that closely follows material domination and is not merely the complex, sometimes luxuriant assertion of imaginative agency by a subjective mind whose affliction, in the end, is a mark of its own exceptionality.⁴⁷

The affective focus of my project is also on boredom as a modern experience produced through socioeconomic conditions that are far removed from the glorified individualism and aristocracy of ennui. I focus on banality and boredom as they emerge from global positions of disempowerment, constriction, and the lack of access to resources—the abundance and inequitable distribution of which industrial capitalism makes blatant—rather than the transcendental ennui of a minority of privileged subjects. Boredom, in such a reading, is a symptom of an affective disempowerment where the phenomenon is not merely a function of the drudgery of lowly labor but also of the impoverishment of lives within the ideological and material reality of colonial domination. The acute sense of aesthetic constriction that produces banality and boredom in such lives is the necessary corollary of material, economic, and infrastructural inadequacies felt across the margins of the historical expanse of the British empire. Such inadequacies push their victims not only toward the intense theater of trauma but also toward the pervasiveness of banality and the iterative cycle of boredom.

It is worth noting, however, that throughout much of the twentieth century the most striking conceptions of the family of tropes that form a close descriptive backdrop to the motif of banality—from the empirical category of the “everyday” to the more value-laden concept of the “ordinary”—have been embedded in a network of various power relations. Cultural studies, for instance, has marked both the idea and the practice of the “everyday” as a crucial archive, in spite of the degree of theoretical intractability posed by its idea and the vast, diffuse range of reality embodied in its practice. For cultural theorists, the exhaustive concept of the “everyday” has included the spatial and temporal experience of ordinary life, detailed ethnographic representations of its reality, and the evaluative and affective tropes of banality and boredom. To a degree, therefore, my book explores literary terrains opened by the cultural-anthropological work of Michel De Certeau, Guy Debord, and Henri Lefebvre and, perhaps even more significantly, recent ethnographic analyses of boredom as an affective marker of exclusion from the most thriving narratives of modernity and capitalism in the present world.

Crucially for Lefebvre, the everyday emerges at the site where private sensibility is subordinated to the disciplines of institutional systems and their codes. This subordination produces a passivity on the part of the individual sensibility, and that passivity organizes the quotidian experiences of domestic and familial practices, leisure, and habit. In modern consumer society, the everyday is constituted around a number of autonomous subsystems, such as those of housing, fashion, food, and travel, as they are defined by such structures as the universalizing system of “architectural urbanism, the mechanisms of industrial food production,” or “the totalizing system constructed around the automobile.”48 Individual sensibility, personal choices, and decisions are petrified into an “organized passivity” in the face of the bureaucracies of labor and consumption imposed on both public and private lives. The production of the everyday thus necessarily involves the progressive disappearance of private agency, but this erosion of agency is far from uniform across all strata of society. The differential experience of agency and passivity in the embodiment of the everyday is a crucial point where some of my own arguments intersect with those of Lefebvre. “The generalized passivity,” he argues, “weighs more heavily on women, who are sentenced to everyday life, on the working class, on employees who are not technocrats, on youth—in short on the majority of people—yet never in the same way, at the same time, never all at once.”⁴⁹ The boredom generated in women’s lives from the constrictions of an oppressive, iterative everyday informs significant components of the texts that I read later on in this book. The culture and structures of officialdom or bureaucracy similarly emerge at crucial points in my project as generators of passivity, monotony, and boredom on both the public and private planes of experience. The “organized passivity” forced upon individuals by bureaucratic structures informs my reading of banality in the lives of Joyce’s paralyzed Dubliners as well as in the lives of the agents and consumers of bureaucracy in the global South during and after colonial rule.

What Lefebvre calls the “organized passivity” vis-à-vis the subsystems of consumerism in advanced capitalist societies of the West, however, has also been—ironically, perhaps, but surely not surprisingly—canonized as the principal criterion of happiness in such societies. The most significant political theorist who has continued an examination of this subject is Thomas Dumm, who has identified the United States as the ideal example of the society where the ordinary, in the form of the fulfillment of quotidian consumer desires, emerges as a significant venue of collective values. In A Politics of the Ordinary, he locates the American pursuit of happiness at a great distance from “dramas of conquest or war” to “private gratification of desire” on the most banal planes of life. “The ordinary,” he writes, “becomes the bland and stultifying ground of American values.”50

It is tempting to place Lefebvre and Dumm, both theorists of the ordinary or the everyday in advanced metropolitan societies, alongside each other. Dumm sees the everyday production and satisfaction of consumer desires as the canon of happiness in such a society, and a deep sense of irony, even sadness, necessarily accompanies this perception. While Lefebvre directly articulates a sense of the loss of individual agency and private sensibility in the face of such mechanisms of desire satisfaction, Dumm is more ambivalent about the constitution of the ordinary in such a society. In his reading, though the ordinary and the common are significantly marked by the mechanisms of consumption (the “post-Protestant ethic of consumption” is his intriguing name for it), they are by no means exhausted by the latter. The ordinary also stakes a significant claim on the “commonsensical principle of modern liberal democracy” within this very society. “A picture of ordinary people pursuing ordinary goods and leading ordinary lives constitutes an ideal vision of liberal-democratic societies.”⁵¹

It is clear that several of the scholars whose work has come to define the field of cultural studies have predominantly focused their attention on the production of the quotidian in the advanced capitalist societies of the metropolitan West. However, as anthropologists of the global South have shown, the idea and praxis of ordinary life are just as central to the postcolonial state and disciplinary interventions into it. Reflecting on ethnographic explorations of the postcolonial state, Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat write: “The constant recurrence of notions of stateness as a guarantee of order and ordinary life is thus not a barrier to critical engagement with the phenomenon of the state, but its most fundamental condition.”52 A global reading of the cultural politics of the quotidian thus also engages in a necessary conversation with anthropology, a discipline that has been closely linked to cultural studies.⁵³ Indeed, it is more or less agreed today that modern anthropology’s predominant archival focus on societies beyond the metropolitan West is partially traceable to the discipline’s development within the field of colonial power relations; this agreement has arisen not only because of pioneering works by Foucault and Said but also work by scholars closer to the field, such as James Buzard, Mary Louise Pratt, and James Clifford.⁵⁴ If an exploration of the literary representation of banality parallels cultural studies’ exploration of the everyday in metropolitan societies, it has a greater, albeit politically more complex relationship with twentieth-century anthropological discourse, which engages in an understanding of societies both within and beyond the metropolitan West through an immersion in the marginal fragments of life. The empirical chronicling of the everyday has always paved the ground for ethnographic knowledge production; however, it is only recently that anthropology has turned its attention to the affective trope of boredom as a constitutive feature of the everyday in spaces excluded or marginalized by the global narratives of modernity, capitalism, and progress, in locations as far flung as urban Ethiopia, aboriginal settlements in Australia, postsocialist Romania, and postcolonial Senegal.

Anthropology’s persistent engagement with the textures of everyday life ranges across a wide methodological space, from discursive analysis to sensory immersion. Very much like literary narratives, anthropological studies have often foregrounded the role of the sensuous in the apprehension and absorption of minutiae. Michael Taussig, for instance, working from the overlapping space between anthropology and cultural studies, enacts such a sense-driven absorption of the ordinary everyday, where knowledge “functions like peripheral vision, not studied contemplation, a knowledge that is imageric and sensate rather than ideational … knowledge that lies in the objects and spaces of observation as in the body and mind of the observer.” Armed with a sensuous, even distracted vision, postmodern cultural forms enact this anthropological exploration of ordinary life: “The ideal-type here would not be God but movies and advertising, and its field of expertise is the modern everyday.”⁵⁵ Such a vision of anthropological exploration shares with literary fiction not only the everyday as the subject but even the ethos through which to read it.

Beyond sharing an abiding preoccupation with the semantic implications of everyday life, what cultural anthropology has in common with my work is a stake in the historical scope of the fiction that I read. The period of high modernism was indeed a crucial one for anthropology, not least because of the major epistemic changes within it that brought the ordinary within its purview more than ever before. Central to these changes was a clear shift from the evolutionary-comparativist approach of James Frazer to the “functionalist” ethnography led by Bronislaw Malinowski, which foregrounded a fieldwork-driven, empirical study of quotidian life in a given culture, complete with the marginal, minute details that Malinowski called the “imponderabilia” of life.56

Just as importantly, the early decades of the twentieth century were also a seminal period for the beginning of a close mutual relationship between literature and anthropology, as becomes clear through the work of both Frazer and Malinowski. James Clifford, who analyzes this relation evocatively, puts the mutual relationship of literary-modernist and anthropological discourse in the troubled light of an emerging global modernity on the eve of the burgeoning disintegration of colonial empires.⁵⁷ Indeed, the concerns of anthropology have, throughout the twentieth century, been in constant negotiation with the cultural politics of decolonization and postcolonial identity formation.⁵⁸ My concern, as anthropology’s has more recently been, is how not only the everyday but also banality and boredom are produced as an index of the differential distribution of global power and resources. To this end, we need to explore how the space of colonial encounters, which Mary Louise Pratt has evocatively called the “contact zone,”⁵⁹ is rendered meaningful through a dialectic of the banal and the extraordinary, through which the apparently exotic in alien cultures is transformed into the quotidian component of studied lifeworlds, producing anthropological knowledge in the process.⁶⁰

The Banality of Empire

The four writers whose work makes up the literary archive at the heart of this book—James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Zoë Wicomb, and Amit Chaudhuri—come from four different corners of the world that has historically constituted the global British Empire. The fictions of all these writers variously aestheticize the banal as a motif of colonial modernity. In doing so, they mark a global tradition of narrative innovation that draws on crucial affective consequences of the late colonial and postcolonial social reality. Of these writers, Joyce and Mansfield, although they wrote from the political margins of the erstwhile British Empire, have attained canonical status within the tradition of British modernism. Wicomb and Chaudhuri also write from the colonial peripheries of the former British Empire. Wicomb’s career has extended from late apartheid-era South Africa to the postliberation present, while Chaudhuri has emerged as a novelist, poet, and critic in postindependence India, in the years leading up to the accelerated globalization of the twenty-first century. The significance of a similar family of themes in their work show these writers’ direct or implied links with traditions of British modernism on a global scale beyond the limits of metropolitan Western culture.

Modernist fiction, in moving from the ethnographic account of the everyday to the eclectic investment of symbolic meaning within a radically transformed banal, signals larger epistemic and political shifts associated with the advent of avant-garde modernism on the whole. In my reading, such shifts occur most notably through the uneven relationships between imperial and colonial modernities, relationships within which modernism needs to be located in order to be fully understood. Just as importantly, however, the preoccupation with the banal serves a more sharply polemical function in the works of the two postcolonial writers than it does in the work of their modernist counterparts, who were writing from a context of late colonialism. Wicomb and Chaudhuri are part of a significant tradition of fiction that has been marginalized by the dominant preoccupation with the more grand and spectacular narratives of colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonial development that, for instance, have been the subject of Anglophone national allegories from the global South. Wicomb and Chaudhuri, in other words, celebrate the banal at a time when narrative models are dominated by the spectacle. In doing so, they also delineate significant paradigms of fiction’s possible embeddedness in the inaction of the ordinary, in defiance of what Liesl Olson points out is narrative’s traditional commitment to extraordinary action that enables the praxis of the plot. Such a celebration extends the radical poetics of high modernism and its departure from traditional aesthetic paradigms that have defined the banal as the polar opposite of literary value and boredom as the affective sign of the failure to convey aesthetic pleasure. The oppositionality endemic to these texts, moreover, hinges on a radical aesthetic response not only to the affective consequences of colonial and postcolonial social reality but also to narratives shaped by such reality.

I read this global body of Anglophone literature not only in its immediate relation to literary modernism but also in relation to the larger, more dispersed legacy of political and philosophical modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment. Some of the most significant theorists of colonialism and postcoloniality have been persistent in their critical engagement with Enlightenment modernity and, on certain occasions, with the aesthetic modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They range from theorists of the black Atlantic to the subaltern historiographers from South Asia and Latin America.61 Their insights reveal a highly fraught relationship between European modernity and the colonial world. However, I read this archive of Anglophone fiction as existing in a greater continuity not only with the aesthetics of high modernism but also with some of the major cultural nodes of Enlightenment modernity, such as the rise of narrative realism and its preoccupation with the marginal details of quotidian life. Though this body of literature originates at various points on the periphery of the British Empire, I would make the more conservative claim that their embeddedness in metropolitan aesthetics is central to their very production. These texts variously trace a complex legacy to the narratives of modernism and modernity in the European context, doubtless partly because they are written in English and partly because they make up a body of prose fiction, a genre directly traceable to the tradition of literary modernity that follows the European Enlightenment. It goes without saying that this claim is specifically limited to this archive of literature; it is far from my intention to argue that the diverse range of Anglophone literatures in the world is overwhelmingly traceable to European cultural modernity. Moreover, this relationship varies widely within the body of fiction I read in this book—Joyce and Mansfield, as modernists canonized within the metropolitan canon, demonstrate a closer relationship with traditions of this modernity than that evident in Wicomb and Chaudhuri. More importantly, none of their relations with the literary discourse of European modernity is one of simple, uncritical inheritance. The colonial context of the global British Empire makes this relation one severely ridden with crisis and resistance, as postcolonial interlocutors of the canonized modernist Joyce, such as Andrew Gibson, Emer Nolan, and Enda Duffy, have ably demonstrated.⁶² Perhaps the most important thing to note at this point is that I read literary modernism itself as the indication of a serious crisis in the certitudes and principles of Enlightenment modernity. My reading of modernist fiction, therefore, takes as its point of departure a position similar to that of John Marx, who has argued that the radical experimentation of the modernist novel simultaneously hinged on a decline in the imperial confidence of Britain and the increasingly globalized importance of English as a literary language. “The decline of Britain,” according to Marx, accompanied “the rise of English.” Literary modernism thus not only signaled a crisis in Enlightenment modernity, but it also “joined hands with an interdisciplinary archive of scholarship and commentary to imagine a world of which England was no longer the centre but in which English language and literature were essential components of an abstract or virtual differentiated system that spanned the globe.”⁶³ It is this global system that is the larger context of my literary archive.

Marx’s argument about the literary globalization ushered in by modernist literature hinges on an undoing of “the Victorian fantasy of a planet divided into core and periphery, home and colony in favor of a new dream of a decentred network of places and peoples described, analyzed, and managed by a cosmopolitan cast of English-speaking experts.”⁶⁴ Despite my enthusiasm for the idea of the globalization of Anglophone literature, I remain hesitant about a complete dissolution of the core-periphery binary that Marx sees as endemic in modernism, even though I’m in strong sympathy with the way he reads the norms of metropolitan modernism as framed by “provincial concerns.”⁶⁵ Literary modernism, for all its radical innovations, in my view remains strongly linked to the cultural logic of the metropolitan and the peripheral, as has been argued by a host of modernist critics, notably Raymond Williams in The Politics of Modernism. This is made clear not only by the privileged cultural position of the metropolitan nations but also the heightened significance of select cities and even the artistic cultures of specific neighborhoods within them. The phenomenon of global Anglophone literature, emergent within the historical context of the British Empire, has to a great degree retained similar structures of metropolis and periphery, as Pascale Casanova has argued in the larger context of world literature. Such models of the relation between metropolitan and peripheral spaces help to illustrate banality as symptomatic of a political condition within this global archive of fiction. The embodiment of the banal as a narrative instinct ironizes the binary of the metropolis and the periphery. It is an irony that echoes modernism’s export of provincialism to the metropole that has been convincingly argued by Marx and other interlocutors of modernist metropolitanism.

Versions of the relationship between metropolitan and peripheral spaces have driven the biographical and imaginative movements of all four of these writers, leading them to spend most or much of their adult lives away from their places of birth and early years. Joyce carved out his literary vocation in different parts of continental Europe, which promised far greater cultural cosmopolitanism than the late colonial Ireland he left behind. Mansfield felt very much the same way about her native New Zealand, also emigrating to continental Europe and to England, where she was to gain an ambivalent status within the Bloomsbury circle. Zoë Wicomb left behind an apartheid-ridden South Africa to teach in Scotland, where she still lives, and the Indian-born Amit Chaudhuri has similarly carved out his reputation in the metropolitan centers of London and Oxford and has returned to live in India only after eighteen years in England. A culture of ceaseless travel, spatial disembodiment, temporary and permanent border crossings, alienation and homecomings have come to define the literature of the British Commonwealth following empire and decolonization, a field within which the erstwhile stable concept of “British literature” needs increasingly to be situated in order to be fully understood. A field irrevocably marked by a complex range of cosmopolitanisms, the literature of the global British Empire has over the course of the twentieth century come to constitute probably the most significant archive for what Pascale Casanova has called “the world republic of letters.”66 Writers who have emerged as ambassadors for this republic have demonstrated a wide range of relationships to the various physical and cultural spaces with which they have been associated. However, what is especially intriguing about the four writers in my archive is that though they move in person toward metropolitan spaces, their fiction is mostly preoccupied with the locations they leave behind. Dublin occupies almost all of Joyce’s oeuvre; Cape Town and Namaqualand and Calcutta and Bombay constitute, for the most part, the respective fictional contexts for Wicomb and Chaudhuri.⁶⁷ Cities and suburbs in England and continental Europe occupy a more prominent place in Mansfield’s fiction than they do in any of the other three, but most of her memorable later stories are set in the suburban New Zealand that she considered a cultural backwater. The banality of life in places left far behind, in all four of these writers, hinges on a complex interplay of memory, the aesthetics of an eclectic ethnography, and, probably most importantly, the sobering distance from their subjects gained by the fractured sensibility of the exiled writer.

It is almost as if all four had to detach themselves physically from the spatial context of their subjects for an immersion in what Emerson has called “the common,” “the familiar, the low” within the culture they left behind.68 The most important thrust of their cosmopolitanism rests, therefore, not on their depiction of the foreign or the metropolitan spaces toward which they variously gravitated: indeed, the usual equation of the local and the foreign is continually upset in their fiction. Rather, this cosmopolitanism is to be found in the constant negotiation of the alien and the homegrown in the liminal sensibility with which they describe the culture that they inherited by birth. Their ethnographic description of the ordinary as well as their anticathartic celebration of the banal in the colonial periphery emerges as a covert critique of the relation of the metropolitan and the peripheral as it has evolved within the global history of empire. The historical reality of this relation creates realms of possibility and fulfillment beyond the reach of the immediate, which invests the banality of local life with a subtle narrative energy. The intricate web of desire, pleasure, and consumption through which banality and boredom emerge as aesthetic motifs in this literature reveals a relation between the metropolis and the periphery that is both materially structured and ideologically inflected.

The depiction of banality and monotony through the troubled cosmopolitanism of the diasporic literary sensibility, however, is deeply ironic. Severe impediments to mobility generate an oppressive sense of boredom and banality for a vast number of subjects living in the impoverished peripheries of capitalism. In glaring contrast to the privilege of mobility that shapes the worldview of the cosmopolitan artist, these subjects live with no choice to move or travel beyond their immediate space, no freedom to lead a lifestyle of their own choosing. The embodiments of such constriction are widely varied, from Joyce’s paralyzed Dubliners, to Mansfield’s confined upper-middle-class women in settler society, to the poor creolized inhabitants of rural Namaqualand in Wicomb’s fiction. Severe constrictions on mobility and lifestyle practices produce the overarching aesthetic of banality and boredom, something which the biographical and imaginative movement of the cosmopolitan traveler and writer insistently seeks to escape.

An overwhelming sense of the banality of one’s life is a damning marker of economic and ideological subordination. Jamaica Kincaid provides a moving example of the afflictions of banality and boredom in peripheral locations in her polemical personal essay, A Small Place. At the heart of this affliction is the cultural and material politics of tourism. The question here is who can and who cannot travel. Those who cannot are unable to transcend the banality of their daily existence and can only hate the tourists who turn that very banality into their pleasure. Kincaid’s insight into this hatred is poetic:

For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives … so when the natives see you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.69

Banality and boredom are here rooted in the oppressive and inescapable materiality of the local—or as Lars Svendsen might call it, its oppressive immanence. And it is again movement that promises transcendence or liberation out of this claustrophobia of banality and boredom; if not the finality of migration, such movement must possess, at least, the recreational temporality of tourism. Being able to move contains the potential to thwart the pervasive banality of the local space that imprisons its dwellers through the misfortune of their birth. Not only does the boredom of these impoverished natives reveal their lack of mobility and economic agency, but in fact their boredom is the very affective force that defines the relation between the natives and the tourist as one of envy and hatred. The disempowerment of banality and boredom revolves around the structure of this relation rather than directly around the spatial polarity of the metropolis and the periphery. Banality and boredom here are not so much definitive characteristics of a particular place or the lives contained there—the privileged tourist, after all, derives pleasure from the very same place—as they are a reminder of the natives’ inability ever to escape from them.

The communal experience of the oppressive everyday in such peripheries is determined not only by the lack of resources and privilege but also by an awareness of the tilted allocation of the same across the globe, an awareness made acute by the cultural hegemonies that usually follow economic imperialism. Not only the empirical experience of the everyday but, more crucially, the feelings of excitement, lack, and monotony that structure such experience are shaped in the image of this center-periphery model by the ideological impact of cultural hierarchies that necessarily follow the economic pecking order. Antiguan beaches might be the objects of desire and excitement for the European or American traveler, but they are, for those travelers, still realistic, attainable objects. In contrast, the technological or cultural wonders, say, of Western metropolitan centers are infinitely more desirable to the native confined to a location in the global South, as she can rarely aspire to consume such pleasures as a tourist of leisure. The sociocultural superstructures of metropolitan power, ranging from the canons of “high” literature to today’s globally consumed popular subcultures, have in various ways worked to affirm this hierarchy of value within which the banal and the exciting have been produced as categories.

How does this aesthetic marker of exclusion and disempowerment energize narrative fiction in the twentieth century? This is the key question for this book, one that I feel is best asked within the global body of fiction that can be situated within the category formerly called British Commonwealth literature, a domain of culture that ranges from the canon to the periphery, not unlike the shared history of the former British Empire, which it acknowledges on a plane of cultural symbolism. All four writers discussed in this book, through their complex negotiations of biographical and imaginative movements between metropolitan and peripheral spaces, reveal levels of awareness of this global inequity of material and cultural power that range from the direct to the implicit. At the same time, distance from the spaces of their biographical origin—spaces that also come to define their principal subjects—enable in them a detachment from the most dominant political narratives through which the periphery often asserts itself against the metropolis. Anticolonial nationalism, in all these instances, is variously complicated by an investment in the banality of the everyday, which is located at a remove from the spectacular venues of mainstream struggle.

Beyond the common points of awareness shared by the diasporic literary sensibility, however, there remains an important difference between the divided sensibility of the early-twentieth-century modernist writer and the writer from the late-twentieth-century global South. The representation of the banality and monotony of life predominantly becomes, in the hands of the late colonial modernist, an index of the colonial power relation between the metropolis and the periphery. For the two late-twentieth-century writers discussed here—one from a culture poised on the cusp of liberation and the other from a developing postcolonial nation-state—the representation of the banal also resonates with a clearly articulated theoretical polemic that has begun to call for a departure from the ceaseless valorization of the mainstream narrative of spectacular struggle and development.70 If in the work of Joyce and Mansfield the constitution of the oppressive everyday is an effect of empire, in the work of Wicomb and Chaudhuri, the banal, while similarly linked to the sociopsychological consequences of imperialism, also significantly emerges as a locus of cultural resistance to the spectacular narratives of colonialism and its nationalist heirs. Their clear departure from the sensational struggles staged in the grand theater of the national public sphere and canonized in the headlines of mainstream historiography, such as wars, riots, genocide, and political upheavals, are a covert critique of the narrative preoccupation with the aesthetics and the politics of the spectacle. The relation of the description of the quotidian and the affective invocation of banality with the cultural politics of colonialism and postcoloniality, therefore, undergoes significant historical transformation over the course of the twentieth century. This book seeks to capture some of the most significant points of the fictional deployment of the contrarian aesthetics of banality within the cultural context of colonialism and postcoloniality, along a transnational body of texts where the literary enactment of such motifs meets with theoretical polemics over the politics of their representation.

Some additional explanation of my archival scope might be relevant, particularly the chronological leap that follows my discussion of the canonical modernist authors to a focus on the last decades of the twentieth century. Though considerably past the turbulent midcentury decades of decolonization in most parts of the world, the late twentieth century is an especially pertinent time to examine the epistemological and political implications of the banal in Anglophone postcolonial literature. Just as a sense of the power of the banal object or situation is found in Joyce’s theory of the epiphany or Woolf’s articulation of the stream-of-consciousness method, the last decades of the twentieth century set the stage for a curiously similar debate about the revelatory power of the quotidian and the marginal within the cultural politics of postcolonial fiction. It is in the context of these debates about the experiences of quotidian life as an important constitutive space for antiapartheid struggle that Kelwyn Sole foregrounds his argument that banality is an index of power and oppression.71 An exclusive focus on what Sole calls “the brutal displays of power and victimhood” tend to marginalize awareness of structured inadequacies within all aspects of the quotidian life of oppressed groups, including “basic needs such as clean water, sanitation, electricity, transport and housing” that mark out the disparity between the center and the periphery.⁷² It is within such quotidian inadequacies, as opposed to the spectacular dialectic of violent oppression and struggle in the colonial period, that Kincaid’s immobile natives are also stuck, trapped in envy for the visiting tourists who derive aesthetic pleasure from aspects of local lives that appear banal and iterative to the impoverished natives. Some distance, it seems, had to be achieved from the grand and spectacular moment of liberation, and the traumatic memory preceding that moment, to pave the way for a renewed fictional attention to the everyday.

The intense conflicts of decolonization had suspended, as it were, the possible fictionalization of an ordinary everyday, erecting instead the grand and dramatic narrative of power, domination, and struggle as the very condition of postcolonial writing during the decades immediately following independence. This narrative continued to dominate postcolonial writing, in most cases, to the last quarter of the twentieth century.⁷³ It is not in fact until the later years of the century that a handful of writers from locations in the global South begin to consciously question the postcolonial novelist’s aesthetic and ethical stake in the historically valorized narratives of colonialism and decolonization. In two of these contexts in particular, late apartheid-era South Africa and postindependence India, the consequence of this growing detachment has been a gradual discovery—or “rediscovery,” as the South African writer Njabulo Ndebele has called it—of the semantic potential of the mundane everyday at several removes from the dramatic conflicts in the public sphere.⁷⁴ The mundane and marginal fragments of indigenous life, consequently, have come to find champions not only in aesthetic practice but also in principle, against what is still the deafening noise of the national narrative of decolonization, independence, and development in the imaginative conceptions of the nascent nation. Forms of weariness with the narrative of the spectacle have led these writers not only to produce fiction that is remarkable in its removal from the obvious spheres of struggle and suffering, be they wars, riots, genocide, or other headline-grabbing political upheavals, but also to articulate vocally a theoretical polemic against the enslavement of the novelistic imagination to such spectacles. Taken together, this body of fiction charts a trajectory from the aesthetics of the banal to that of the ordinary that might be read as an affirmative movement from the condition of lack and unfulfilled desire structured by colonialism to a polemic about the representation of postcolonial reality that is of pointed relevance to the present.