Signifying With a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers (review)

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Walt Whitman's charmingly insouciant acknowledgment might well stand as an epigraph to Mustapha Marrouchi's ambitious, frustrating, engaging new book, Signifying With A Vengeance. Marrouchi suggests that Signifying "is an attempt to arrive at a general theory of [postcolonial] literature" (2002, 30). However, much of the book seems actively opposed to the production of such a theory. With three chapters devoted to individual theorists and three chapters devoted to individual fiction writers, there is little space for any synthetic overview. Following Michel Foucault, Marrouchi regards "the literary text as part of a larger framework of texts, institutions, and practices" (32); he seems disinclined to theorize "literature" as distinct from the larger universe of discourse. He does frequently gesture toward the newness of the postcolonial, but in thematic terms which leave postcoloniality unspecified. Consider this provocation from the book's opening:

Goethe may have spoken first . . . of "world literature," but its existence is quite recent; it was born with modernism, and now flourishes in an age of postmodernism. When writers become exiles or émigrés, when they begin to write in their second or third languages, and above all when the experience of this displacement became the subject of their work, then world literature was born, for better or worse. The postcolonial writer is probably the purest example of this negative liberty —literally homeless, he or she writes repeatedly about the actual and figurative centrifuges of modern life. . . . (Marrouchi 2002, 1)

The last sentence races on to take in celebrity, hybridity, and Mikhail Bakhtin's double-voiced utterance, but this excerpt should suffice. Too many exceptions flock to mind to read these claims as the historical and descriptive propositions they appear to be. (Isn't second language writing typical of the Latin Middle Ages and many imperial courts through history? Is transplant Henry James "literally homeless," and so more of a postcolonial writer than Cairo-dwelling Naguib Mahfouz?) Marrouchi frankly acknowledges that "all texts signify on other texts" (2002, 6). The slogan "signifying with a vengeance" works more to motivate a particular critical style—"dense, associative, contrapuntally layered, flecked with allusions" (31), reading texts "not in a linear but in a jazzy, variational way" (32)—than to formulate a general theory of postcolonial literature.

Alternatively, one could argue that for Marrouchi the style is the theory; that as a sometimes Derridean, when he calls his book a "prologue" (2002, 31), he does not expect it to arrive at its goal but to defer such arrival indefinitely; and that he fully expects his readers to deconstruct his myth of a twentieth century origin of world literature, and in so doing to acquire a more multifaceted sense of postcolonial signifying than one could do within the confines of a conventional theory in which claims are taken literally. I suspect that Marrouchi means just what he writes most of the time, and is, like Whitman, willing to embrace contradictions, tensions, and rough edges in the service of a capacious vision. For instance, there is a running tension in Signifying between Marrouchi's poststructuralist influences and a humanism that sees making aesthetic and moral judgments about authors and works of art as fundamental to literary criticism. His chapter on V.S. Naipaul relies heavily on the rhetoric of this older criticism. In defending Naipaul against his critics, Marrouchi appeals to Naipaul's personal experience and to the excellence of his style:

It is important not to blink at what he had to face and how it made him feel. Anger, fury, confusion, desire to escape: there is no wonder in it. We know too well the world we (postcolonials) came from. It is the world Naipaul rebuilt out of words and the extraordinary song of the words themselves . . . that have given us something entirely new. And...