Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community by Kenneth Womack

Review by: Michael Greaney

The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 34, Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing (2004), pp. 269271
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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TES, 34, 2004

269

accounts of Africa by arguing that racism was rarely a major factor in descriptions
of China, which was usually presented as separate and different. This does not
mean, however, that travellers' observations were neutral; indeed, how could
they be? One theme that emerges repeatedly is that of the senility of the culture, a
perception that Confucianism had induced a state of cultural arrest. Secondly, there
was the question of hygiene. Beijing was described by a number of travellers as
the 'city of dreadful dirt', partly to express their startled experience of extremes
of wealth and poverty being mingled together. Clifford quietly but firmly resists
what has become something of an orthodoxy in the analysis of travel writing since
Edward Said's pivotal studies of orientalism, namely that Western travellersengaged in acts of imaginative colonization. Clifford argues to the contrary that in some
cases Western accounts presented China as the culture being visited by barbarians.
In this case, Chinese culture was read as the civilized Other. Alternatively,Western
accounts sometimes helped to correct such practices as the notorious foot-binding.
Another turning-point in Clifford's history comes with the First World War. From
theI920S onwards, travellerswere far less judgemental and far more cautious about
how much knowledge they were claiming of Chinese culture. This period coincided
with the opening up of China to tourism. Shanghai and Hong Kong became
regular stop-off points for liners and in the 193os air travel made even more access
possible for visitors. Clifford distinguishesbetween the vast Chinese hinterland and
the Treaty Ports, which were heavily westernized. AI930 shipping advertisement
exclaimed of Shanghai: 'It's as cosmopolitan as Vienna!' and in those ports
expatriate communities grew up within a context of cultural hybridity.Throughout
the I930S, probably under the impact of the civil war between Nationalists
and Communists, a new kind of book began to appear which pursued the 'whither
China' theme of imminent change. Arthur Snow's RedStarOverChinawas one such
study which included an early portrait of Mao Zedong. As the thirties progressed,
war came to occupy more and more of the travellers'concerns. Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden's Journeyto a War (I939) was typical of the period in its
subject. Or perhaps we should say in its attempted
subject, because their ignorance
of the language and therefore of the culture generally led Auden and Isherwood
to abandon their original plan of war reporting. Theirs was an extreme instance of
a general difficulty travellers registered of penetrating the extreme formalities and
decorum of Chinese culture. Some did manage this nevertheless, and even, like
Agnes Smedley, made their way through the Nationalist blockades to meet the
Chinese Communists. Clifford'sjudicious and informative study unfortunatelyjust
breaks off at a point where a new phase of Chinese-Western relations are developing with the beginning of the Cold War. The relative closure of China to Western
visitors and the stigmatization of such commentators as Agnes Smedley and Pearl
Buck in the USA must wait for a sequel study.
UNIVERSITY
OF LIVERPOOL

DAVID SEED

PostwarAcademicFiction: Satire, Ethics, Community.By

? KENNETHWOMACK.Basingstoke
and New York: Palgrave. 2002. viii + 207 pp. 40. ISBN:0-333-91882-7.

This study examines the satirical representationsof campus life in texts by Kingsley
Amis, Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, David Lodge, David Mamet, Ishmael Reed,

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270

Reviews

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Jane Smiley. The texts under discussion
-eight novels, one story collection (Oates's The HungryGhosts),one screenplay
(Mamet's Oleanna),and one work of 'nonfictional dramatization' (Gilbert and
Gubar's Masterpiece
Theatre) display, according to Kenneth Womack, a 'pejorative
poetics' in their response to academe. For Womack, the campus novel typically
functions as a satirical expose of the unscrupulous individualism that corrupts the
modern university's collective pursuit of wisdom, truth, and knowledge. From the
provincial redbrick of Amis's LuckyJim to the midwestern college of Smiley's Moo,
the ivory towers of modern fiction, governed by a cynical 'bottom-line mentality'
(p. I62) and an oppressive publish-or-perish ethos, have witnessed innumerable
cases of professional malpractice, sexual harassment, and intellectual fraud and
incompetence. The portrait of academe discerned by Womack in these texts is one
of a system in ethical disarray.
Ethics is also Womack's central methodological preoccupation. His book
announces itself as part of the 'humanist revival' (p. I7), a resurgence of interest
in notions of goodness, virtue, community, duty, and value after the 'nihilism' of
poststructuralism.Inspirationfor this approach is found in the writings of Wayne C.
Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum, and other critics who 'dare to engage in the interpretation of human values' (p. i ). Ethical criticism is enthusiasticallyinvoked throughout this book: each chapter opens with a renewed assertionof the special advantages
of Womack's favoured methodology, whilst the final paragraphhails the 'apotheosis
of ethics' (p. 162) in contemporary criticism. But it is difficult to see how a general
interest in matters of moral choice, and in tensions between self-interestand collective responsibility,adds up to a new 'interpretiveparadigm' (p. II). There is some
persuasive local theorizing here: Oleannaresponds interestingly to Levinasian ideas
about our 'obligations to the irreducibleface of the other' (p. Ioo), while Bakhtinian
notions of 'heteroglossia and carnival' (p. 145) enliven the discussion of Moo, but
the critical method tends towards plot summary and character analysis, with
the latter often conducted at a disarminglybasic level: the account of Lucky
jJim, for
re-lives
and
in
re-narrates
the
of
the
hero
momentexample,
experiences
by-moment fashion -'Dixon
hungers', 'Dixon confesses', 'Dixon opts', 'Dixon
masks', 'Dixon endures', 'Dixon wanes' in the course of 'Dixon's plight'. This
approach is sympathetic enough, but it is not quite a methodological breakthrough.
Nor does Womack's notion of 'pejorative poetics' ever come into its own as a
rigorous analytical category. Literary-critical nuance is often absent from the discussion: Nabokov rubs shoulderswith Kingsley Amis, Lodge with Mamet, but these
fascinatinglyincongruousjuxtapositions go unremarkedand unanalysed. The tradition of satirical writing on show here is tentatively identified as 'Swiftian' (p. I59),
but the vision of academe in Lodge and Smiley is surely more affectionate and
forgiving than that. 'Pejorative poetics' implies a concerted hostility, whereas one
might equally allege the existence of a suspiciouslycomfortable relationshipbetween
academe and the comic novel- a genre produced and consumed by intellectuals,
where the cosy in-jokes and self-referentialironies of academic discourse drown out
any rumour of the existence of a world beyond the seminar room.
PostwarAcademicFictionprovides a useful introductory overview, a careful and
sympathetic re-statementof the ethical and professionaldilemmas negotiated by the
fictional intelligentsia; but the questions it raises over the complex affiliations

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TES, 34, 2004

27I

between academic institutions and literary genres are worthy of a more searching
investigation.
LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

MICHAEL

GREANEY

PostcolonialImaginings:Fictions of a New World Order.By DAVID PUNTER.Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press. 2000. viii + 238 pp. ?I5.95. ISBN:0-7486-0856-7.

'In place of writing as production or as representation what we [...] have is a

"continuous show of writing", a writing "as if", or a writing "insteadof" a text that
can no longer be written because it has been defaced, effaced' (p. 81). It is in this
analysis of V. S. Naipaul's A HouseforMr Biswasthat the problem bedevilling David
Punter'stext is most clearly encapsulated. This problem turns on the question of the
relation of the textual to the real, for as the quotation above suggests, what is at
issue here is an argument, by now familiar through Edward Said's work, that a
West Indies (or an orient, for Said) formulated by others (the texts of colonialism) is
what forms a barrier between us and the reality of the West Indies. And though it
could be argued that Punter is here simply analysing Naipaul's elaboration of this
is dogged throughout by the problem of what to do
Imaginings
argument, Postcolonial
with the 'real'. For Punter's text, though it avers the impossibilityof accessing what
is supposed to be referred to by the 'text instead' (p.
I9), nevertheless relies on a
to 'beneath', 'behind'
recourse
has
which
model
of
literature,
continually
depth
(p. 89), 'below' (p. 63), 'beyond' (p. I02), a rhetoric that suggests a conception of the
text as somehow articulatingthat which it does not articulate('texts are composed of
silences', p. 105),where the analysis of a literary text's production of itself as a 'cover
story' (p. 177)for something else slides into the truth about postcolonial literature.
has with 'psychoThis may explain also the avowed problem Postcolonial
Imaginings
friable
as
is
unconscious'
of
the
the
where
(p. 104) on the
rejected
'concept
analysis'
another
under
reinstated
but
is
and
Western
cultural
of
its
specificity,
grounds
name, 'the crypt' (p. 63). Not only that, Punter'sparticularbrand of 'psychoanalysis'
reappears in that most problematic of forms, the 'psychoanalysis'of fictional characters and their fictional traumas (see pp. 132-33). Again, the problem of 'psychoanalysis' here would seem to turn on a reading in which the 'unconscious' appears
as the site of some un-analysable truth, and is therefore rejected by Punter to be
replaced by 'the crypt' which, though it is supposed to function as 'a most radical
decentring of consciousness' seems always in Punter's text to resolve itself from a
troubling of self-identity into the identity of 'the irredeemably other' (p. 63).
These are just two instances of the kind of contradictions and inconsistencies
that pervade Postcolonial
Imaginings.Another can be found in the call for humility
in the face of the postcolonial that is coupled with a magisterial assumption
of knowledge showing little evidence of self-reflexive critique of Punter's own
readings/productions of the themes of postcolonial literature.
Nevertheless, Punter's scepticism with respect to the neo-romanticism of Kristeva
and Deleuze and Guattari, and to the vaunted utopian possibilities of the worldwide web, together with his trenchant critique of the hegemony of World Bank
and IMF-driven economic theory are both refreshing and timely. Furthermore,
makes an interesting selection of texts that, as Punter expresses
Postcolonial
Imaginings

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