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  • The Art of Tuning: A Politics of Exile in Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner and Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music
  • Cameron Fae Bushnell (bio)

Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner (2002) and Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music (1999) have received negligible critical attention, despite abundant notice in the popular press. Mason’s novel has largely escaped negative assessments in reviews; it has been described as “an excellent early-21st-century reproduction of a late-Victorian novel” (Barrett) and a “remarkable debut novel” (Kakutani), its prose “as vivid, memorable and curryrich as the colors of a Burmese bazaar” (Shafer). Admired as a descendant of such Western literary classics as Homer’s Odyssey (Siegel), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Charles, Siegel, Wintle), and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (Wintle), it fits easily into a literary genealogy of travel adventures. In contrast, the press has roundly derided Seth’s novel, calling its love story plot a “soap opera” (Gleick) and expressing frustration with its subject matter (Western classical music), setting (London), and characters (English). Especially when compared to Salman Rushdie’s contemporaneous Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), another novel about music, Seth’s work is seen as offtarget; it “does not fit into current expectations of the postcolonial,” as Bruce King notes about Seth’s 1994 novel, A Suitable Boy.1 [End Page 332]

King’s insight points to a problem of categorization resulting from a seeming disjunction between Mason’s and Seth’s national origins and their subject matter; it is one reason, I suggest, for the neglect of these novels. Literary critics may doubt the capability of a young American novelist such as Daniel Mason to write credibly about late 1880s Burma during the period of tribal resistance to British imperial occupation. Scholars may agree with the popular press that Calcutta-born Seth has neglected the crucial role of native informant in choosing not to write about Indian domestic situations or about India’s national struggle to detach itself from the British Empire. I argue that we can read both novels as projects of postcoloniality if we read their representations of music as posing a politics of exile. Mason’s novel depicts exile as physical dislocation, but more significantly, both novels stage exile as separation from a set of cultural standards that is operative in Western classical music and central to the protagonist. Both authors insist on the right to write from within the imperium in order to interrogate its assumed power structures.2 Ultimately, both novels depict—ironically, through representations of sound and music—the necessity of cultivating “deafness” to dominant cultural ideologies in order to hear contesting voices and to mount resistant practices.

In challenging dominant cultural structures through representations of music, The Piano Tuner and An Equal Music expand the category of literary postcoloniality. Both works mount a critique of imperial power, not within the expected colonizer/colonized binary, but rather within the fissures of Western cultural practice. We might usefully bring Edward Said’s strategy of contrapuntal reading to bear in interpreting the Mason and Seth novels. Employing musical counterpoint as a metatextual model for reading multivocally, and thus politically, Said crafts a contrapuntal methodology in order to trace all voices in a literary work, including those that are “off-stage” or absent. I suggest that we consider [End Page 333] musical tuning similarly: when thematized or used as a narrative structuring device, tuning invokes particular disciplinary standards for protagonists (and readers), while simultaneously suggesting nonstandard modes of performance that might become the bases for cultivating strategic thinking that eludes dominant ideals.

These novels chart the overriding influence of Western tuning standards on their protagonists. Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner, set in London and Burma in 1886, details an encounter between competing aesthetic senses. Protagonist Edgar Drake is a London piano tuner chosen by the British military to travel to Burma to tune a grand piano sent out previously under unusual circumstances. Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, having single-handedly established relations with local Shan tribes to the benefit of British colonization efforts, requests and is granted an Erard grand piano. Edgar (whose name orthographically underscores his identification with the Erard, a French-crafted...

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