Only Reading: An Introduction

"It's only a book and I'm only reading it"; so protests Nyasha, an English-educated adolescent Shona girl to her concerned mother, who has found her daughter absorbed in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover at a mission school described in Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.¹ Set in Southern Rhodesia in the turbulent decade of the 1970s, when the war against white-minority rule that ended with the independence of Zimbabwe was at full flame, Dangarembga's novel became an almost instant postcolonial classic because of its graceful writing and its deft handling of (among other things) the problematics of alienation under colonial regimes of native education. Those problems are exemplified most intensely throughout the novel in fraught scenes of reading, in which the novel's two primary protagonists (Nyasha and her country cousin, Tambu) are engaged with the books of British Empire. Indeed, it is the alienation experienced while reading a book that triggers one of the most poignant nervous conditions of the novel's title, when Nyasha, whose critique of colonial education runs headlong into her simultaneous desire for the assimilationist advantages it offers, finally cracks, "beside herself with fury": "She rampaged, shredding her history book between her teeth ('Their history. Fucking liars. Their bloody lies.'), . . . 'They've trapped us.'"² These two scenes bookend the inevitable ambivalence (or nervous condition) that the two young women feel toward the cultural contradictions of colonialism and a missionary reading program that promises personal liberation at the expense of family, friends, and political freedom. As Nyasha knows well, it's never only a book.

It's also, of course, never only reading. K. Anthony Appiah, in "Cosmopolitan Reading"—an essay originally composed for the fifty-seventh annual meeting of The English Institute, part of which was later revised to serve as a late academic introduction to a recent British edition of Nervous Conditions—cites Dangarembga's book as his primary evidence of the cosmopolitan condition of the novel as a genre. The novel, he suggests, inevitably speaks in multiple voices to multiple audiences at once. And, for Appiah, the (nervous) cosmopolitan condition of Dangarembga's novel is both historical—"the very idea of the novel [in Africa] came from reading French and English novels in the course of a colonial (and latterly a postcolonial) education"—and moral, because it represents "an invitation to respond in imagination to narratively constructed events," even to events that would otherwise seem quite foreign to "a Western reader."³ In Appiah's assessment, cosmopolitan reading represents the obverse of colonial reading, with colonialism serving as something like an enabling condition (or violation, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak might have it) of cosmopolitanism. Underpinning Appiah's valorization of contemporary cosmopolitanism is a post-Enlightenment "Western" liberal faith in the moral and social virtues of reading: that through reading we "learn 'mutual toleration,' even the sympathy and concern for others."⁴ In some sense, Appiah is inverting the subaltern cosmopolitan force of the scene of Nyasha reading Lady Chatterly's Lover, in which it is a black adolescent girl from the colonial provinces responding imaginatively to a novelistic invitation from a white middle-aged man from the metropolitan center. Curled up with Lawrence "like a 'W'," as Patricia Crain describes the absorbed reading posture in her essay in this issue of ELH, Nyasha repeats, en abyme, a classic topos of the Bildungsroman, "in which we read of the Bildungsheld's [protagonist's] reading of other Bildungsromane," as I have noted elsewhere.⁵ In the colonial (or postcolonial) context, such scenes of reading are almost always ironized by the disparity between the world that books and colonial ideology promise and the one in which they participate in fact. Nonetheless, in the Bildungsroman tradition, reading not only represents the entry of the individual into the wider social order, it also marks the loss of childhood innocence, which is, of course, precisely what Nyasha's mother is concerned about. Liberalism's perennial "it's-only-a-book" defense ultimately cannot render Lawrence's novel inoffensive in Nyasha's mother's eyes, and it cannot keep...