Towards a Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory: Literary Narratives, Traveling Tropes, and the Case of Virginia Woolf and the Tagores

In the foreword to his 1938 novel Kanthapura, about the growing participation of village women in the Gandhian movement, Raja Rao explains the experimental method of the tale as a combination of colonial hybridity and cultural difference in language, style, and narrative form:

The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a[n alien] language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own.… I use the word "alien," yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional make-up.…

After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly.… There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous "ats" and "ons" to bother us—we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling.

(v–vi)

The narrative poetics of Kanthapura are not Aristotelian, do not fall into a neat structure of beginning/middle/end, do not center on actions following principles of causality, and do not develop characters related to those actions in any ordinary way. Created by the cosmopolitan Indian writer, the old woman who narrates the tale does so out of a collective female/village consciousness, as a "we," not an "I." And yet there is a linear drift in the novel as the village women increasingly join the protests and assimilate the Gandhian cause into their own goddess-based, symbolic, and narrative practices. The text is recognizably a novel, recognizably a narrative—indeed, recognizably a fascinating experiment with the genre and its forms of telling.

What, then, is the task of narrative theory in the context of Rao's assertions and the blended forms of Kanthapura? Is it possible to develop a transnational narrative theory that can incorporate the many forms that literary narrative has taken across space and through time? Or should we reconceptualize the project of narrative theory? How would such a newly formulated transnational framework relate to the narratological project of identifying "universal" principles or components of literary narrative that transcend or undergird vast cultural differences? To explore these questions, I will reflect on universalism versus difference in narrative theory and then offer some strategies for transnationalizing the reading of literary narratives. By way of example, I propose the concept of "the implied story" embedded in tropes that travel transnationally and examine diverse nineteenth- and early twentieth-century instances of the trope that Virginia Woolf later made famous in A Room of One's Own—the trope of Judith Shakespeare, or the woman writer as gifted as the man. I focus particularly on the trope as it plays out in the life and early writings of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and his elder sister, Swarnakumari Devi, the first prominent woman writer in Bengal.

A Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory?

Has there been one? I think not and wonder why. The transnational turn has swept many subfields of literary studies, along with the tidal wave of globalizations across the disciplines and interdisciplines.¹ The national paradigm of literary studies is still firmly fixed in institutional and linguistic structures, but globalization in the humanities has conceptually speaking greatly dissolved that framework and transformed literary studies. There is, of course, an exponentially increasing study of non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial literary narratives as a reflection of the transnational turn in the academy. But with a few notable exceptions, this engagement with...