Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire by Saikat Majumdar (review)

Saikat Majumdar’s Prose of the World is an erudite, wide-ranging, and innovative study of Anglophone world literature that opens up an array of fundamental theoretical and methodological questions in literary studies. Majumdar links together two early-twentieth-century modernist writers, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, with late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century postcolonial writers, Zoë Wicomb and Amit Chaudhuri, through their portrayals of banality, boredom, and the everyday in order to make larger claims about narrative, historiography, and empire.¹ Working across the fields of modernist studies and postcolonial studies, Majumdar effectively demonstrates the value of transnational and comparative literary criticism that, nevertheless, is attentive to the specific local and national contexts that shape writers, their works, and their reception. My use of the word “national” here is slightly ironic; Prose of the World intelligently reveals the material force that nations and nation-states bring to bear upon writing and criticism even though the nation, as a category, is the book’s perpetual antagonist.

As the introduction shows, Prose of the World is firmly grounded in the rich scholarship on boredom and the everyday in modernist studies, arguing that “banality” and the failure of epiphany and transcendence are, paradoxically, the source of literary modernism’s tremendous energy. But banality, for Majumdar, is not just an idiosyncratic theme: it is produced by the fractures and contradictions of (capitalist) modernity—whose tensions are especially manifested in the work of writers shaped by colonial spaces (Joyce in Ireland, Mansfield in New Zealand). Banality registers the infinite displacement of desire for modernity and progress, the gap between the periphery and the center; it functions as the “index of the differential distribution of global power and resources” and is thus a radical critique of the status quo (27). The banal and the everyday stand in opposition to the spectacular, the eventful, and the dramatic—elements that are thought to be central to narrative and history but, in fact, do the work of modernity by suppressing the individual, the fragmentary, the contingent, the rebellious.

Majumdar then creatively applies and extends the examination of banality in literary modernism to discussions about subalternity in postcolonial theory and historiography, where “subaltern” represents not only a marginalized identity (peasants, the poor, women) but that which is absent from the grand narratives of both imperialism and nationalism. Prose in the World finds the literary counterpart to Joyce and Mansfield in writers like Wicomb (South Africa) and Chaudhuri (India)—although, in the latter case, the writer represents not the driving force of Anglophone postcolonial literature but a minoritarian trend that focuses on the ordinary and the uneventful against “the deafening noise of the national narrative of decolonization, independence, and development” (36). Prose of the World, in this manner, is very aware of the unevenness in its comparison of the modernist and postcolonial articulations of banality, pointing to the presence of this transnational thread but avoiding a rigid determinism in which the banal experience of modernity necessarily produces an aesthetics of banality.

The four central chapters of Prose of the World move chronologically from modernist to postcolonial, with each one taking up an individual author and providing a more nuanced sense of the shifts within the author’s career and her or his relation to the colonial periphery. Furthermore, each author’s work is read in relation to concepts and ideas in a variety of disciplines (including ethnography, history, and literary criticism) such that the theoretical compatibility of the literary work with other sets of ideas gets highlighted. Literature can now be read as one among many ways to investigate the problem of relating the ordinary to the extraordinary in understanding how modern life works. The effect of this organization and methodology, as the book moves from Joyce and Mansfield to Wicomb and Chaudhuri, is to introduce us to growing, multifaceted, and eclectic archives of theories and meditations on modernity that develop alongside...