Postcolonial Relocations

736 CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM matriarchal and community-oriented alternatives. Andrea Dimino gives us an interestingargumentabout Morrison's and Faulkner'5 different senseof themselves as artists and cultural spokespersons ('Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: Remapping Culture'), which clearly privileges Morrison's peculiarconflation ofart with politics. Dimino spoils the argument. though, by being so obviously selective in her citations, as a seemingly insignificant example suggests: against a Faulkner utterance expressing disdain for critics she pits Morrison's claim in an interview with Dick Cavett that she reads all her reviews 'twice.' Never mind that Morrison may have been self-mockingly favouring her interviewer with a brief glimpse of the all too human attention-craver behind the austere artist, or that her more usual remarks about critics are as caustic as any of Faulkner's. She quotes some of Faulkner's less endearing public statements about America's racial predicament in the 19505, statements which reveal a man whose political will was sadly incommensurate with his undeniable imaginative power. But some of Morrison's public pronouncements - on the Clarence Thomas hearings or the O.J. Simpson trial, for example - may in time not look very wise either, if they do not already strike some readers as having a knee-jerk quality unworthy of her novelistic imagination. This brings us to one of the ironies inherent in Morrison'S current stature. We pretend to be in a 'postmodern' era suspicious of meta-narratives, suspicious of heroic authors, and suspicious of art and literature as privileged modes of discourse. Such suspicion has enabled us to arrive at a richer, yet more sober assessment ofWilliam Faulkner's achievement. At the same time, Toni Morrison has entered the oracular space once occupied by Faulkner. She has done so precisely because she has supplanted one compelling meta-narrative about American history with another (albeit as self-reflexively as Faulkner was about the tenuous nature of narrative), and preciselybecauseofher remarkable dexterity with literary language. Morrison seems these days to be a living refutation of the death of the author announced decades ago by Barthes and Foucault. We are in fact hard pressed to renounce those modernist notions of heroic authorship that have shaped twentiethcentury Anglo-American literary criticism. For better or for worse, literary studyand the pleasures and challenges of 'literature' - remain predicated upon masterpieces and authoritative utterances, even ifwe have borne witness to obvious changes in the contents and complexion of those texts. Postcolonial Relocations CHELVA KANAGANAYAKAM Rosemary Marangoly George. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction Cambridge: CClmbridge University Press 1996. 265. $49.95 The lines that conclude Al1en Curnow's poem about New Zealand, 'The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch' - 'Not I, some child, POSTCOLONIAL RELOCATIONS 737 born in a marvellous year, / Will learn the trick of standing upright here' - are at once an acknowledgment of the poet's own sense of alienation and his convidion that future generations, less concerned with England as the centre, would be able to claim Aotearoa as 'home.' The poem raises interesting questions about the location of home, about the process by which occupation, migration, settlement, or attachment transforms the distance of 'house' into the comfort of 'home.' And this is also the concern of Rosem~ry Marangoly George, who claims that her book 'is an attempt to think affectionately and critically about the politics of home.' George's attempt, however, moves beyond the literature of diaspora and exile in that it seeks to analyse all works that invoke home as a constitutive aspect of the human experience they seek to portray. As she points out, 'all literary texts that unsentimentally interrogate the seductive pleasures of "feeling at home" in homes, genders, a specific race or class, in communities and nations, could be read as "immigrant fictions."' Such a framework allows for the study of a wide range of texts, and if the author's capncity to encapsulate this diversity within a coherent argument accounts for the work's strength, it also suggests why at times the reader is confused by the maze of detail and the absence of adequate signposting. George's study includes, among others, nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian authors such...