The Event of Postcolonial Shame (review)

In The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Timothy Bewes proposes a new reading of the postcolonial novel that focuses on its relation to shame. Shame, for Bewes, is neither a subjective emotion nor an ethical response, but rather arises from the tension between the aesthetic and ethical claims of the modern novel. It is thus inseparable from form.

Bewes draws on an impressive range of philosophers and literary critics in order to build his own theoretical framework: Theodor Adorno, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Frantz Fanon, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Georg Lukács, and Jean-Paul Sartre provide the key inspiration for Bewes' argument, while many others are acknowledged as important influences. Following Lukács, Bewes sees the novel as defined by incommensurability between form and content, between ethical aims and aesthetic strategies. The experience of incommensurability is crucial to the development of shame, which Bewes characterises as "an event of incommensurability" in itself (60). The shamefulness of the postcolonial situation arises from the conjunction of the "obligation to write" about colonialism, and "the impossibility of doing so innocently" (42). Bewes, here, takes his cue from Adorno's comment on the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz.

If Bewes engages with a wide variety of critical thinkers in order to formulate his theories, he applies them to an equally broad range of writers. Among the diverse literary works he discusses are fictional and semi-fictional texts by Caryl Phillips, V. S. Naipaul, Joseph Conrad, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Zoë Wicomb, and J. M. Coetzee. In his conclusion, he also provides brief analyses of Michel Leiris' ethnographic expedition journal L'Afrique fantôme (1934) and of Louis Malle's film L'Inde fantôme (1968). Of these, I found Bewes' reading of Phillips particularly insightful. Bewes argues that existing criticism of Phillips' oeuvre neglects the materiality of the literary text and ignores the central question of Phillips' relation to realism (63). In this, critics also let themselves be misled by Phillips' own comments on his novels, which suggest that he needs to hear his characters before he can write them. For Bewes, by contrast, Phillips' novels convey the impossibility of speaking. Regarded as realist or representative, Phillips' characters, and, indeed, his novels, must be regarded as failures, for they exist solely as ventriloquized clichés. Together with the virtual absence of authorial narration, the derivative and imitative voices of Phillips' characters, however, can be seen to express the inarticulacy engendered by the shameful clash of ethics and aesthetics.

Naipaul's work is analysed with respect to its rage at the belatedness of the colonial subject and as an example of late style in the vein of Adorno. Bewes reads The Enigma of Arrival as "a materialization of the negative dialectic of form itself" (99), but is somewhat less convincing in this chapter, perhaps because he regards Naipaul's project as a partial failure himself. Much more illuminating is the next chapter, which juxtaposes various pre- and post-revolutionary writers. Conrad is presented as writing in a post-revolutionary mode in a pre-revolutionary period in Under Western Eyes (1911), while Ngũgĩ and Wicomb are probed for their potential to engage with the idea of freedom outside the logic of its realisation. Ngũgĩ's A Grain of Wheat (1967) demonstrates how the colonial system is pervaded by shame because all its structures are shaming. There is only one character in the novel exempt from shame, Bewes suggests, and he relates this to the tension between the forms of the epic and the novel that the text dramatises. Bewes also relates this to Ngũgĩ's own dissatisfaction with the European novel (and the English language), which eventually led to his more explicit engagement with the Gĩkũyũ oral tradition. Wicomb, by contrast, addresses the gap between the pre- and the post-revolutionary consciousness by embedding two diametrically opposed relations to language in her novel David's Story (2002). While the narrator of the novel wants to uphold language, its protagonist wants...