Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature by Elizabeth S. Anker (review)

Fictions of Dignity is a distinctive contribution to the growing body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between human rights and novels. Anker identifies two particular problems with human rights discourse - one to do with embodiment, the other with language - and argues that fiction can act as a corrective and a counter to these difficulties.

The first chapter argues that only victims of rights abuse appear in the discourse as bodily vulnerable creatures. Meanwhile, the subject who possesses human rights is defined through concepts such as dignity and bodily integrity, which present a whole, nonporous and ‘strangely bloodless’ body as the ideal projected consequence of rights protection (p3). In this way, to have human rights is understood as an overcoming or a transcendence of the woundable human body, and the various registers of embodied existence are neglected. The second difficulty identified by the opening chapter has to do with language. If the emancipatory vocabulary of human rights has been contaminated by political opportunism, forced to serve neo-imperialist agendas and employed to defend gross abuses, can its terms and categories be rehabilitated and used in ethical ways?

Anker’s contention is that the problem of language and the problem of the body are linked and both can be addressed, and human rights themselves thus reimagined, through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In a convincing chapter on his thought Anker shows that for Merleau-Ponty, bodily experience shapes the self in multiple and dynamic ways and that there is a level of experience which flows from embodiment and precedes social or linguistic meanings. For this reason, it is always possible that language - even a corrupted language like human rights - can be refreshed through phenomenological perception. Art has an important place in this analysis; as Anker glosses Merleau-Ponty, certain types of art are ‘uniquely poised to replicate the contours of phenomenological revelation’ (p74).

It is in these terms that Anker goes on to read her four novels – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy -in successive chapters. As she acknowledges, these texts are central to the postcolonial canon and have been written about elsewhere at considerable length. However, Anker aims to ask new questions of them, and, by extension, of the postcolonial methodologies which have interpreted them, specifically through ‘tracking how aesthetic experience can map the unfolding of an embodied consciousness’ (p74).

Merleau-Ponty’s ideas provide a useful and substantial theoretical framework for Anker’s critique of human rights. However, in her analyses of all four novels, Anker is primarily concerned with the ways the texts pose a challenge to liberal conceptions of the self. Although she does discuss what she considers to be particular instantiations of rights discourse (the Indian Constitution, for example, or South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission) in relation to the novels, in places the argument would have benefitted from a clearer sense of the historical and theoretical specificity of human rights ideas about the self, as distinct from those of the broader liberal tradition.