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TELLl NG TWICE-TOLD TALES

ALL OVER AGAIN

LITERARY AND HISTORICAL SUBVERSION

IN BHARAT! MUKHERJEE'$ THE HOLDER

OF THE WORLD

PALLAVI RASTOGI

It is difficult jf not impossible, to map the works ofBharati Mukherjee onto any schema ofli'ferary ontology. Although her fiction, not to mention much of her nonfiction, seems to follow in almost organic progression, it eludes a broader taxonomy of classification simply, yet not only. because the author herself is so resistant to the making and maintaining of categories. While most ofMukherjee's fiction reveals an aversion to ethnic categorization, her

1993 novel The Holder of the World also deconstructs the categories of liter- ature, history, and literary history. In this essay I argue that Mukherjee desta- bilizes literary and historical categories through the trope of subversion and in the process also questions the homogenizing impulses of mainstream American culture.

My analysis of The Holder of the World engages with Mukherjee aiti.cism in general and takes issue with the divisive polarities-either effusively lauda- tory or sharply critical-thathaye shaped academic discourse on her writing. Mukherjee has often been criticized for her less than nuanced celebration of the diasporic state: novel after novel confirms Mukherjee as an enthusiastic proponent of 1he United States' wonderful ability to synthesize its diverse pop- ulation into a harmonious-as.well as simultaneously multi.cultural-whole. My project here is not to recuperate Bharati Mukherjee as a writer but to

. focus on how a single novel in her oeuvre stands out as an embodiment of the vast possibilities of cultural exchange. Instead of advocating absorption into a greater American identity, The Holder of the World presents a nonas- similationist approach to cliasporic contact. Keeping in mind some of the

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again 2.69

problems that regularly surface in Mukherjee's :writing, I argue that 1ne Holder of the World marks a shift in the assimilationist stance advocated in such earlier novels as Jasmine, The Tiger's Daughter, and Wife and instead searches for a dialectic ofinterculturalnegotiation 1hrough which mainstream American society is dramatically altered as much as it alters its own immi- grant population.

The Holder of the. World has often been described as a rewriting of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, although its aspirations are much more ambitious: Mukherjee seeks to establish a connection between the United States and India that goes back more than four hun- dred years. I read Mukherjee's novel as providmg a prehistory of The Scarlet Letter r~ther than a revision of its themes. Mukherjee transports Hannah Easton, the woman who would become Hawthorne's Hester, to seventeenth.- century India, where she discards her Puritan repressions and enters into a lusty affair with an Indian king. The affair ends, thanks to the plunder- ing ~pages of the Mugb:alemperor Aurangzeb. Hannah returns to Salem carrying a child, appropriately named Pearl Singh.

At one of its many levels, then, the novel is a whimsically unpredictable retelling of the antecedents of The Scarlet Letter, as Mukherjee claims that Hawthorne dehoerately kept hidden the real origins of Hester Prynne, Puritan adulteress. Tue novel moves across complex chronological and cultural zones: Puritan ·New England, medieval India:, the contemporary United States, and modern India. These fluid nanative spaces allow Mukherjee to reveal the connections made possible by leaps of the imagination and, at a more per- sonal level, to link herself and her writing across cultures, eras, and ideolo- gies. The novefs message of cultural symbiosis is transmitted powerfully through the trope of literary and historical subversion.

Mukherjee subverts Western literary lineage both structurally and the- matically: in the first.instance, by crafting a nonlinear narrative that com- pletely overturns canonical Western notions of cohesiveness and order; in the second instance! by excavating the historical origins of Hawthorne's story. Mukherjee develops new thematic modes in her writing with the publica· ti.on of this novel, concerned as it is with ideas of cultural and geographical exchange rather than with the themes of dislocation, alienation, and necw essary assimilation that recur in such novels as The Tiger's Daughter, Wife, and Jasmine. If jmmigrantwriting can actually be celebratory, this situation gestures toward a new problematic, to which I will return later in this essay.

In Bharati Mukheljee, Fakrul Alam relates that Mukherjee began writing the novel after she came across ·

10 Pallavi Rastogi

a seventeenth-centln"y miniature painting in a I989 pre-auction viewing in New York. According to Mukherjee, what she saw in the painting. "a blonde-Caucasian woman in omate Mughal court dress[,] holding a lotus

bloom[,] was the original sti.mulus for the novel.n (This] led Mukherjee to look at the recorded history of colonial New England, the East India com- pany and Mughal India. Evidently, Mukherjee found in the process enough evidence to produce a book that sugg~sts that th.ere could have been connec- tions made between America and India in earlier centuries-connections

that can inspiie connections between atltures in our time [130 ].

The Holder of the World is a literary meditation on thls p~ting. Mukherjee uses the many cultures in and around the painting to emphasize the Indian presence not only in the present but also in the past and the future of the United States. The painting-and, later, the novel-metonymically suggest the eternalness of this presence in American life. After all, itdepict:s ''a blonde- Caucasian woman in ornate Mughal court dress." That the auction is in New York City, considered by many to be the hub of the world, emphasizes the current reality of this presence in the contemporary United States.

The novel's longing for links between cultures, what Mukherjee calls "a hunger for connectednessn (Holder u), can be discredited as an impulse toward assimilation. Nevertheless, Mukherjee's articulation, in The Holder of the World, of the process through which an intertemporal link between cultures is established can be translated as a yearning for cultural cross- pollination. Beigh Masters, the novel's contemporary white woman narra- tor, is an asset collector searching for the Emperor's Tear, which, according to legend, is the most pristine diamond in the world. Beig]is quest for this diamond leads her to discover Hannah Easton, a Puritan woman known as the Salem Bibi, who was transported across history and cultures to become

the mistress of an Indian king, later to return to Salem and become Haw- thorne's Hester Prynne, as described earlier. But Beiglis search for the pris- tine diamond is also a metaphor for a deeper search: the search for connections not only between Hannah and herself but also between the American and the Indian. By fusing Indian themes within the originally Euro-American fonn of the novel Mukherjee attempts to negotiate the chasm

of cultural division. Mukherjee further complicates our ideas of "Indian :themes" and "Euro-American forms," however, by freely mixing into her narrative such creative modalities as oral narrative, previously considered "Oriental," and such all-American ther,nes as the making of the American nation and the nature of American national identity.

1· ' 1

I

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again 2.'JI

To subvert cultural hegemony, The Holder of the World conceives of an elab- orate analogy of similarity via difference. Hannah Easton and Beigh Masters are separated by chronology and culture, but their similarities are marked through an assertion of connection across chronology and atlture. It is thus necessary for Mukherjee to set the novel across many "time zones" so that sh~ can constantly emphasize the connections between historical periods and cultures and the peoples in those periods and atltures. That Bei.gh can actu.· ally "transcend time" (Iyer 34) and so make time hybrid seems to be a state- ment on the porousness of time and culture, concepts usually considered linear and unitary. It is significant that Beigh can travel through time only by means of the scientific know-how ofher Indian lover. Such forceful erup- tions in the narrative reaffirm the presence of the Indian in the American, for it is people like Venn (a work-absorbed scientist at MIT) who make the United States the technologically advanced nation that it is. Venn, then, is a tribute to the scientific contributions of the Indian American community to the United States. This is important in the context of the assertion of simi- larity via difference. Just as Mukherjee, th.tough the presence of Venn, cele- brates the con~butions of Indians to the contemporary United States, she will also acknowledge, through the tropological presence of Pearl Singh.- so separated from Venn by time and culture-the importance of Indians in the making of the American past, therefore putting forward the provocative thesis that Indians have always been contributory figures in the United States. · In an interview with Beverley Byers-Pevitts, Mukherjee says, "I wanted

virtual reality because many of the new immigrants are involved in that kind • of technology, and I wanted people to experience history rather than have pallets ofhistory, tombs ofhistory, limp data laid on them" (197). This notion ofhistory-as a constantly modified experiential instance of the lived life-- excavates the forgotten voices of the marginalized in the malting of the United States. Even though Mukherjee recuperates history from the margins, her rewriting ofhistory, using the discursive patterns of the dominant culture- byidentifying her texts as American and refusing a hyphenated designation- has earned Mukherjee her share of detractors who see this as subservience to the insistent call ofhegemony. Commenting on a remark by Jasmine in the eponymous novel, Walter Gobel says:

In murdering the past, however, there is the danger ofblackeningthe image of the mother country, in dreaming witlun a hegemonic atlture the danger of affirming its ideology-here specifically: of freedom, possibility, adapt- ability and continued renewal [n6].

2.72. Pallavi Rastogi

Indisputably, Th~ Holder of the World is a dream.y meditation within and through the images of the dominant cultu:re. The novel clearly identifies itself as an American text. and for that political destination to be attained, the "mother country" is not necessarily ~'blackened" so much as its.descrip- tion is secured by an uncomfortably orientalist:8.avor. Here is Beigh desaib- iri.g a painting called The Apoca1:ypse:

Beautiful Salem Bibi stands on the cannon-breached rampart of a Hindu fort. Under a sky on fire, villages smolder on puzple hillocks. Banners of green crescent moons fl.utter from a thousand tents beyond the forest, where tethered horses graze among the bloated carcasses of fallen mounts. Leop- ards and tigers prowl the outer ring ofhigh grass; the scene is rich in aow- and-buzzard. hyena-and-jackal, in every way the opposite of fertile Marblehead [ Holder rJ; emphasis added].

An uncharitable reading of Mukherjee ·would mark this as a limitation in her creative range.1 More baldly put Mukherjee's array of representation is limited to the two extremities of stock Western imagery, either through the lens of extreme chaos, as in The Tiger's Daughter, or through excessive orientalism, as in The Holder of the World. While it is tempting to fling finger- wagging accusations of "orien:tali.sni' again.st Mukherjee, we should al.so con- sider why she creates these polarities. The Holder of the World is written to confirm the mutual hybridization of cultures ostensibly unconnected and disparate. In claiming that the India of The Apocalypse is "in every way the opposite of fertile Marblehead," Mukherjee also makes the far bolder claim in the course of the novel that "arid India" and "fertile Marblehead" are not really all that different. 2

It takes an undergraduate thesis to bring to Beigh "a belief that with sufficient passion and intelligence we can deconstruct the bani.ers of time and geography. Maybe that led, circuitously, to Venn. And to the Salem Bibi and the tangled lines of India and New England" {Holder II). The use of the word "tangled"-evoking, among other images, a shared colonial history- is significant. Mukherjee creates this reflection of East and West by a stra~~ egy of reverse orientalism. Here, Beigh is viewing a Mughal painting by an Indian artist who imagines the Salem Bibi at her point of origin:

In the fust of the series, she stands ankle-deep in a cove, a gold-haired, pale-bodied child-woman against a backdrop of New England evoked with wiJd, sensual·coior. The cove is covered with cold-weather, color-changing

V

.l 'j

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again 273

maples and oaks whose leaves shimmer in a monsoon's juicy green luxzm. ance. ... Crouched behind her in the tiny 1:rlangle of gravelly shore visible between her muscled legs, black-robed women with haggard faces tug loose edible tufts of samphire and sea-grasses. I was right-they were fascinated by us. The artist cannot contain the wonders, fish and bird life burst over the border [Holder 15-16; emphas~ added].

Clearly it is New England that is being exoticized and orientalized here by its association with fecundity, ripeness, and excess. Beig}fs authorial com- ment is even more significant "I was right-they were fascinated by us.n Here the Indian painter fixes his gaze on the Occidental and reproduces the moment of contact in a flamboyantly orientalist gesture. While reverse orientalism as a strategy may be problematic, it nevertheless underlines the similarities that different cultures may share. It also subverts the tired depic- _tion of the Western world as stable, rational, and controlled. The question that the novel wants us to ask is: How does the Mughal pamter, who has never crossed the borders of India, know how to paint New England?

This conundrum is reasserted through a suggestion of parallax in the young Hannalis art. Hannah is not only a beautiful seamstress-she is, after all, reproduced as Hawthorne's Hester-but also a creative artist. One particu- lar piece of tapestry becomes, in the young Hannalis hands, a "pure visionn:

· A twelve-year-old Puritan who had never been out of Massachusetts imag· ined an ocean, palm trees, thatched cottages, and blaclc-sld.nned men cast- ing nests and colorfully garbed bare-breasted women mending them; native barks, and .on the horizon, high-masted schooners. Colonial gen- tlemen in breeches and ruffled lace, buckle~ hats and long black coa1s pac- ing the shore. In the distance, through bright-green foliage, a ghostly white building-it could even be the Taj Mahal rising [Holder 44,].

\

Hannah can visualize the Other and give it imaginative life through her needlework. Orientalist rhetoric sought to define the Other as the binary opposite of the Western norm, but here the Mughal painter and Hannah share similar modes of visual perception. This returns us to the dominant theme in the novel: the interconnectivity of India and the United States, which plays itself out on the body of the Indo-American text. Hannalfs tap- estry, the Mughal paintings, the novel itself, stand as eloquent testimony to the redemptive nature of art in substantiating the endurance of a presence that refuses to be effaced by centuries of white Western dominance.

74 Paf/avi Rastogi

The process of "un-Othering" also challenges the ideas of home, origin, and nationality. While Mukherjee affirms her American identity, she also acknowledges a debt of gratitude to her origins. In representing the "new American' and uin examining the new identity, she says she wants to explore the consciousness of those who are not of one ethnic group or another, but of many different ethnidtie~ (Byers-Pevitts I89). Whatever Mukhetjee's intent may be, the effect of the novel promises us something else: the .. new" hybrid American straddling multiple ethnicities was always present, even in the America traditionally thought of as the mostmonoetbnic, as in Puritan New England, where the name "'Puritan' itself conveys the idea of a certain self-contained purity.

In this novel, Hannah, the white Puritan woman, is allegorized as the figure of immigrant difference. After J adav Singh, her Indian lover, is killed in battle, Hannah returns to Salem as a figure of radical otherness, bring- ing back with her a child from an interracial union, thus quietly yet fumly lodging the Indian within the American. Nalini Iyer marks this as a moment of historical rewriting:

Black Pearl [as the residents of Salem call the child] is Indo-American; her very existence signifies the merging of cultures. Hawthome's Pearl is white, and in creating Black Pearl, The Holder of the World forcibly inserts immi-

grant culture and history into the American canon [42].

It is Pearl rather than Mother-of:Pearl who becomes an agent of cultural change. Half-American, half-Indian> she nev.ertheless is entitled to an American identity, as her uadulteress" mother is not. It is significant that Pearl is born in a liminal space in "r70I somewhere in the South Atlantic on the long voyage home" (Holder 284) and links the Indian and the American by hervery lim.inality. Black Pearl is the representative of the new hybrid American who gives to race and hybridity the importance denied them by a society relentlessly masquerading as white and pure. But, as the novel claims, this new hybrid American is really not "new" at all but can be traced back as an active agentm the origma:ry myth of nation building: "Pearl Singh ... saw in her old age the birth of this country, an event she had spent a life-time advocating and suffering for" (Holder 284). Thus Mukherjee asserts both the presence and the agency given to the Indian American in the cre~ ation of canonical American history and the making of the American nation. But the American identity and the American nation to which Pearl Singh stakes a clajm. is never-and was never,-a white Christi.an identity or nation.

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again 275

Instead, the idea of Americanness is :fractured into bits and pieces, with no one, not even Puritan Americans. able to lay claim to it in any holistic way. The figure of Pearl Singh as second-generation diasporic brings to light the international mooring of the homogeneous cultural terrain of Puritan Salem. Mukherjee thus destabilizes the impenetrable borders of the American nation-state, pushes open the boundaries of American citiz~- ship, and subverts the teleology of American history.

The imagination then enables this rewriting of quintessential Americana, for it is textual action that reconfigures the linearity of a hegemonic mythol- ogy. Falaul Alam comments:

The Holder of the World is written to show [that] what makes a historical novel come alive is the writer's imagination. ... Mukherjee is[,] in fact, emphasizing the role the creative imagination plays in transforming what would otherwise be seen as silence or slow time into events and characters full of life {x3x].

The imagination becomes the agent of subversion tbxough which Mukherjee makes a giant leap for "immigrantkindn into the historical antecedents of the United States. By writing Indian history into an American life narra- tive, Mukherjee firmly establishes the reality of this presence in American life and ·letters. Moreover, as the novel progresses, Beigh leams to ques- tion her research methodologies and supplement them with a rare imagi- native transcendence. While Venn is seeking to synthesize time into a giant reality, where each moment of history can be made easily available by the mere push of a button, Beigh learns to "trust the psychological integrity" of that which is being researched (Holder 232).3 'Ihe object-in particular, the objectified-has an integrity of its own that is often erased by the process of time. The writer/researcher/reader brings back to life, through acts of the imagination, that which has been previously silenced or pushed to the margins of history: here, the presence of India and Indians in the malting of the ~ly United States. .

The Holder of the World, however, does much more than reproduce the American past in a hybrid image. While the process of rewriting is s.igni:ficant, Mukherjee also turns a few quotidian concepts upside down and inside out. Th.is process of turning the structuring schematics of everyday life topsy- turvyis common in Mukhetjee's fiction. Gobel, commenting on Mukherjee's short story "The World According to Hsu. n says, "The concept ofbeing home is transferred here into a shared homelessness with a heteroglot commu-

2.76 Pallavi Rastogi

nity situated on an island of the m.md" (u6). These ideas insinuate them- selves into The Holder of the World, but what is most significant in the later work is Mukb.etjee's rewriting of her earlier ideas ofhybridity and belong- ing. In her earlier writing, she indicates that it was hybridity that engen- dered cultural angst within immigrants, both in their homelands and in the places to which they had migrated. 4 In The Holder of the World., Mukherjee does away with the exclusivity (only immigrants are hybrid) implied by the category "mmrigrant." Hybridity is a sustained process that emerges from intercultural contact and alters all it encompasses. Beigh thus becomes hybrid, in spite of being a white woman, not only through her love affair with Venn but also through her meditation on and ~interchange with the Salem Bibi and with contemporary and medieval India. While it is true that Mukherjee advocates a certain kind of universal hybridity, her position is much.more complex than the cheap cop-out that such a reading would imply. Mukherjee does not so much .carve out an assimilationist space for immi- grants as explode the concept of hegemony by assigning the qualities of hybridity to all: here, specifically through subverting notions of race, eth- nicity, citizenship, history, nation building, and, on a more abstract lev~, those of time and space. Thus Hannah Easton and Beigh Masters become allegorized as immigrants because each belongs to a world other than that of her present physical reality. The mmrigrant, too, lives in these myriad regions, belonging and yet not belonging to this multiplicity. The novel is an expression ofMukherjee'sironic sympathy for those who straddle many realities, many worlds. "Home," then, becomes a loaded tenn unable to attach itself to any fixed point for anyone who inhabits the world of this novel. Gobel's "shared homelessnessn is not confined to those who belong to ethnically marginal communities.

Mukherjee's relationship with "home,n in the literal sense of the word, is also somewhat vexed. Maya Manju Sharma sees Mukhetjee as displaced · even within India {20). Here, it is important to affirm the heterogeneity of the polyglot community that is India. Given the frightening trend toward right-wing Hindu nationalism today, it is easy to see why anyone might feel ill at ease in a country where everyone, at some level, is in a minority. Mukherjee's Bengali-speaking background places her at a distant periphery in a nation controlled linguistically by the Hindi-speaking north. For Mukherjee, then, consciously accepting the identity ofmmrigrant means positioning herself away from the secondary status accorded to her com- munity in India and finding in the United States a space she can call home. Thus to commit herself to the idea of America is ·

Telling Twice-Told Tales All 011er Again 277

not necessarily to pledge allegiance to the forces of racism and imperial- ism worldwide .•.. [InJ accepting the roie of immigrant, she has not redefined herself as an American. Rather she bas consented to be part of that long procession of peoples who have over the years redefined America [Sharma 20].

Shanna, interestingly, gives Mukherjee the very same agency in the mak- ing of the United States that Mukherjee gives to Black Pearl In The Holder of the World, Mukherjee reminds us that the United States itself is a nation of immigrants, tbatitwas always already a hybrid space. By giving American- as-apple-pie characters like Beigh access to hybridity, the novel demonstrates the vitality of cultural exchange, which alters both dominant and periph- eral cultures in significant ways. Moreover, as the historical subversion enacted by the novel daringly suggests, the United States has fundamen- tallyimpure antecedents, which have made all future generations multiethnic rather than merely monoethnic.

Mukherjee also excavates the experience of women-silent and expressive-across time and culture: indigenous Indian or immigrant women, the Yale-educated white woman or the illiterate Puritan turned mis- tress of Hindu Rajah. Here, the feminine principle not only is given space in w~ch to articulate and be articulated but also creates that space itself: the novel, Hannal:is embroidery, ·Pearrs advocacy of an American nation, and Beigh's research also stand in for and double as the presence of the female immigrant. This is not to say that there is a universal female or immigrant experience that Mukherjee articulates, or that Mukherjee conflates femininity and the immigrant experience. If there is any.conclusion thatthis novel points to, it is that feminine and immigrant space are not as different from the dominant culture as they are made out to be. Over time, the feminme and immigrant populations have asserted themselves, fracturing in the process the will to power of the hegemonic masculine white order. The dontinant culture is also not an unyielding monolith; rather, it is a pliant entity sus- ceptible to being changed as much~ it seeks to change. In interacting with. the Other, the dominant culture is also fractured, a consequence of inter- cultural contact that then makes us question the veracity of such categories as "dominant' and "peripheral.11 Mukhetjee's novel attests to this universal multiplicity assigned to both center and periphery. It is significant that the novel's opening words are "I live in three time zones, not Eastern, Central and Pacific. I mean the past, the present and the future" (Holder 5; empha- sis added). This announcement instantly undercuts, as a structuring pres-

.78 Pallavi Rastogi

ence in the novel, the paramount importance of the United States and its methods ofliving life, and it establishes the importance o{multiplicity and of the innate ability to see into, indeed be in1 many worlds. Succumbing to the drive toward hybrid.ity and cultural exchange has to be a participatory exerdse1 not only for the Indian immigrant but also for white women (and white men). the so-called original Americans.

Now, to link the ideas ofhybridity, enunciated above, to this essay's orga- nizing trope of subversion, I will return to the structuring modality of the novel, a modality through which Mukherjee makes the great Western lit- erary tradition into a hothouse hybrid. That this novel is very preoccupied with the literary canon is indisputable. While the novel is thematically atten- tive to the prehistory ofHawthome's The Scarlet Letter, the structure is adapted from one particular ode of J obn Keats: his "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The four parts of the novel are opened by epigraphs that form an orderly yet ran- domly selected sequence in Keats's poem. The £rst section of the novel is heralded by lines from the first stanza of Keats's ode. I want to draw atten- tion to the second line of that epigraph: "Thou foster-child of Silence ang. slow Time." At one level, Mukherjee uses Keats to insert herself into the tradition that she has been denied by canonical literature. At another level, she makes the contents of the verse relate yet not relate to her text. Iyer likens the use of Keats's ode to Han.nilis needlework-"they are both static and dynamic :in their tale-telling" (3 6)-but she does not further her explo- ration ofMukherjee's very deliberate use of Keats's ode. In "Ode on a <;;recian Um," Keats acknowledges the presence of ancient Greece. both in his own creative fashioning and in that of the English literary tradition in general. By using couplets from this poem to open the four parts of her novel, Mukherjee makes an analogythat acknowledges the debt owed by American literature to the Indian presence. Mukherjee's novel is classified as an American novel, but the narrative tension can come into being only if the importance of India is conceded in the making of the United States. The connection that Mukherjee challenges us to make is on a broader, more macroscopic level: the United States must acknowledge its debt to the Indian presence in its midst. Moreover, itis to her own benefit that Mukherjee uses the standard implication, in the Western traditi.o~ of opening each chap- ter with an epigraph from another1 canonized writer. In literary tradition, this method of using epigraphs establishes the connectivity of the literary method: the later writer places himself or herself in the tradition of the ear- lier writer, thus subtly seeking his or her own canonization.5 While Mule-

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again 279

herjee's writings reflect a similar anxiety of influence, her use of Keats's poetry also leads to an intricate literary subversion, which she achieves by making the text mean things other than what the epigraph leads us to sup- pose. Here, then, Mukherjee deploys the method of the dommanttradition- use of the epigraph in the tradition of Western literature-but also that tradition's subversion, making sure that the meanmg of the epigraph is not always true to the epigraph itsel£ Thus, in the first epigraph, the ufoster- child of silencen is not only Hannah, whose life history has not yet been unearthed, but also the Indian presence in American history. The other three epigraphs make similar subversive sense. Mukherjee's implied com- ment is that medieval/modem India and Indians play a role in American consciousness similar to that played by classical Greece in the English con- sciousness. Thus one cannot deny, or perhaps even determine, the impact of the "Other" in our collective and individual making. This explains why Mukherjee needs to have a white narrator who, in seeking to 1:211earth her origins, discovers the interconnectivity of people, time, and places. As the movement of Keats's ode makes the poem itself into the Grecian um, so too does Mukherjee's novel fashion itself-the Inda-American creative text- as the "holder of the world. n •

Mukhetjee's reworking of the origins of The Scarlet Letteris also a signi- ficant emissary in the hybridizing of the Western literary canon. On the one hand; Nalini Iyer claims that Mukherjee fashions for herself a canonical American literary identity and "is refusing a hyphenated existence as an Indo.American writern (42). On the other hand, Fakrul Alam says that Mulc- herjee, in writing this novel, "attempts to place herself in the American tra- dition of prose narrative while affi.nning her origins h;l the Indian artistic traditions" (x). This statement would imply a contradiction ofiyer's earlier thesis: that Mukherjee is refusing the hyphen, which attaches itself to any writer different from the nonn. I would argue, however, that Mukherjee does insert herself into American prose conventions and does emphasize h~ immigrant status while asserting her obligation to Indian cultural mores, but she also alleges her similarity to the norm via her difference. In other words, in the United States, the hyphen is the norm. We are all doomed or privileged to bear the hyphen, and itis this difference, this hyphen, that makes one "trulyn American. The hyphen, then, becomes the scarlet letter, the red badge that marks us all. Mukherjee may explicitly deny herself the hyphen, but the novel resolutely attaches a hyphen to all it encounters.

Furthermore, Iyer's reading-which claims that Mukherjee, by insert- ing herself into the .American canon, insists on an accommodation of the

i8o PallavJ Rastogi

migrant voice into that canon-neglects to take into accounttha4 with this rewriting of Hawthorne. Mukherjee also questions the whole -notion of canons, their viability, and their historical veradty: "Who can blame Nathaniel Hawthorne for shying away from the real story of the brave Salem mother and her illegitimate daughter?" Beigh asks, tongu-e firmly in cheek (Holder284). By proving Hawthorne's accountto be potentially false or erroneous, Mukherjee asks us not to trust received.information but to breathe life into "false facts," with the necessary privileging of the imag- ination. The novel is only an infinitesimal tampering with Hawthorne. which never really rewrites the narrative action of The Scarlet Letter; yet, in playing around with the historical antecedents 0£.the novel, Mukherjee claims that it is she, not Hawthorne. who has access to the "real" story of Hester Prynne.

All this is not to say that there is npt a deep unease about "whiteness" and the "white male tradition' in thu(novel. Perhaps no other Mukherjee novel has ever been so self.consciously written into a masculine conven- tion. The novel continuously references Hawthorne: the lecherous Indian factor is called Prynne; Hannalis best friend is called Hester; Hannah her- self is called Precious as Pearl and her daughter, Hawthorne's Pearl. is called Black Pearl This referencing of The Scarlet Letter works in a complex way, at two levels. At one level is the anxiety of Hawthorne's influence, which fi11s this novel with palpable disquiet. Hawthorne never really leaves the novel, and the fact that Mukherjee is compelled to keep creating Hawthomian char- acters in her text is an indication of this anxiety. At the other leveL however, this playing around ~th Hawthorne is also of vital importance to Mukher- jee's central pw:pose in the novel, which is to establish the interconnec- tivity of time, place. and people. Again, the name Prynne, which we usuall} associate with Hester Prynne in Puritan New England, is "translated" intc a male factor in India. In Mukhetjee's novel, the name Hester is given firs1 to Hannalts best friend and then to Hannah's Indian handmaiden, Bhagmati A reproduction ofhistory makes it possible to move identities around and among people and places and thereby to question the original ass~ of identities. In each of us there is already something of the Other, per, haps of many others. By making canons, we freeze people and places intc

inflexible artifacts. This is why Mukherjee's use of Keats's ode, which wist fully looks back at a culture now long gone yet frozen in time, becomes SC subversive.

The anxiety of Hawthome's influence also functions as a com.mentar) on the marked absence of a significant white male presence in the novel

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again 2.8:

Instead, the novel is crowded with minor white male characters and con- stant references, thematic and structural, to major white male literary writ- ers: Keats, Hawthorne, and Thomas Pynchon, to name only three. 6 What is the novel trying to say through these silences, gaps, and omissions? Do they generate a problematic in a novel that dnws so heavily on the white male tradition yet negates the white mans presence in the actuality of the novel? Does Mukherjee's marking of the absence of the white man for~ close the white man from this hybridization, this hyphenation that Mukherjee celebrates with such vitality and exuberance? The novel brings to the sur- face the heterogeneity behlnd the linear teleology of criticism and histori- ography, thereby implicating the white masculine method ofhermeneuti.cs in the silencing of those without power. But the novel implicitly bestows its white male constituency with access to hybridity by arguing that the American nation was always aheady a diverse entity whose claims to hybrid- ity were hidden but never erased by the imperatives of hegemony.

I will nowretum to the idea of a possible problematic inherent in the descrip- tion of Mukherjee as a writer who celebrates the immigrant experience. Because I have pointedly designated The Holder of the World as a novel that enshrines individual agency and deconstructs categories, it is important that I also consider Mukherjee's place not only within the broader category of Indo-American fiction but also, and more specifically, in the context of the label that she (who hates all labels) has given herself that of uimmigrant writer." Mukherjee has consciously rejected the term "expatriate" and instead has adopted the identity of the immigrant, an immigrant of the Ellis Island variety (Iyer 29-3I; Sharma 18-19 ). The terms '~expatriate" and "immi- grant'' convey two very different images: the former implies a political and cultural rejection of the point of origin, whereas origin is clearly marked in the cultural affiliations associated with the latter. Mukherjee is se1£.con- sciously an immigrant writer who, in The Holder of the World, at least, delib- erately commemorates the immigrant experience, in the process challenging standard replications of migration and diaspora as being characterized by debilitating doom and gloom. While some critics, such as Jasbir Jain ( quoted in Sharma, "The Inner World ofBharati Mukherjee" IO), see immi- grant status as always tied to a negative depiction of the home country, others, such as Walter Gobel, see it as a possible negation of one's individual iden- tity: "P~rhaps you can have your identity and lose it while exploring and re- negotiating a border territory" (u8). Gobel refers to the Indian identity as the superfluous identity, the :implication being that Mukherjee discards that

i82 Pal/avi Rastogi

which marks her as Indian. Nowhere in The Holder of the World does this appear to happen, however. In fact. the novel tacitly acknowledges that iden- tity is complex, variable, and created out of a number of interconnected worlds. While this is explicit in ~ Holder of the World, even in ¥ukherjee's other novels identity formation seems to be a key structuring thematic. Mukherjee, replying to the considerable criticism leveled at her for her sup- posedly assimilationist stance., says:

The complexion of America has already changed. Let's admit it, let's deal with it instead of pretending that the White A:oglo ~odel still holds for every.:. body. Each of us, mainstream or minority, is having to .change. It's a two- way metamorphosis [quoted in Nelson, Writers of the Indian Diaspora241].

Although this statement predates The Holder of the World., its resonances m the novel are startling. More than anything, The Holder of the World is an effort to make the "mainstream" an amalgam of 4'minorstreams;' forcing us to think of what these concepts imply, if indeed they imply anything at all.

By placing Hannah Easton's Eastern sojourn (the aural resonance of the nam.e is all too apt) at the center of her narrative, Mukherjee emphasizes the presence of India in the making of the United States, a making that is literary, atltuxal, and historical The Holdt:r of the World argues that the United States needs to acko.owledge its debt of gratitude to those who have shaped it and will continue to shape it. In order for this acknowledgment to be made, first the forgotten voices of these communities need to be excavatecL and then American history and culture need to be reconfigured, with the endur- ing impact of these groups kept in mind. As the novel's subtext seems to indicate, American history would have been vastly dffferentifHannah Easton had not gone to India and then returned to the West carrying the East in her belly.

BI B LIO C RAP HY

Alam, Falaul. Bharati Mukh~ee. New York: Twayne, 1996. Byers-Pevitts, Beverley. "An Interview with Bharati.Mukherjee." Speaking of the Shon

Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Ed. Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohx- berger, and Maurice Lee. Jackson: University ofMississippi Press, 1997. x89-98.

Gobel, Walter. "Bharati Mukherjee: Expatriation, Americanality, and literary Fonn.» Fusion of Cultures? Ed. Peter 0. Stummer and Christopher Balme. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, :i:996. m-18.

I . i

I

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again 283

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. r850. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 1995.

Iyer, Nalini. "American/Inman: Metaphors of the Self in Bhara1i Mukhetjee's The Holder of the World.n Aritl: A Review of International English.Literature:27-4 (1996): :29-44.

Mukherjee, Bharati. The Holder of the World. New York Knopf, 1993. --. Jasmine. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, I989. --. The Tigu's Daughter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972 . --. W!fe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. . Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York Garland,

1993. --, ed. Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-bibliographiail Critical Source Book.

Westport Greenwood, 1993. Rajan, Gita. "Bharaii Mukherjee. n Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-bibliographi-

cal Critical Source Book. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport Greenwood, 1993. 235-42.

--. "Fissuring Time, Suturing Space: Reading Bhaxati l\:fukherjee's The Holder of the World. n Generations: .A&ademic fQninists in Dialogue. Ed. Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. :288-308.

Shanna, Maya Manju. "The Inner World of Bharati Mukherjee: From Expatriate to Immigrant" Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. New York: Garland, 1993.3-22.

NOTES

1. Jasbir Jain (quoted in Shanna, "The Inner World ofBharati Mukherjee" 10) observes that. in The Tiger's Daughter and Wffe, "the attempt to understand India is clouded by the desire to interpret for foreigners, to judge India by their standards and value systems.n

2. Interestingly, we do notknowto which "fertile Marbleheadn Mukherjee is refer- ring. On the one hand, it could be the Marblehead of Beigl:{s world, which houses the painting titled The Apocafypse. On the other hand, it could refei to the Marblehead of Hannah Easton. This ambiguity is meant to further Mukherjee's point about the interconnectivity of cultures.

3. "I have come to trust the psychological integrity of oral narratives," says Beigh (Holder232). For Beigh, this trust of psychological integrity is not limited to the oral, although it becomes significant in the context of immersing India in America, since India's narrative fiction is so steeped in the oral/aural.

4. For ex"ample, consider Jasmine, Wije, and The Tiger's Daughter. 5. Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (179I) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874) are exam-

ples that come to mind.

l

. J

~ Pallavi Rastogi

G. luanotb.ertongue-m-cheekieference, Beigh comments, "IfThomas Pyncb.9n, peibaps one of the descendants ofher failed suitor, had not alreadywrltten V., I would call her a V" (Holder 60}. In that this novel is about rewriting a male text and gen- erating a debate about who has authority over history and interpretation, this com- ment becomes ironically signfficant.

.....

;..

PALLAVI RASTOGI is assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University, where she teaches colonial, po51:colonial, and diasporic litera- ture. Her research mterests center on South Asian diaspora studies. She has published essays on landscape in V. S. Naipaul's travel narratives and on the memoirs and letters of Cornelia S orabji, India's £rst woman lawyer. · ·

THE SCOTT AND LAURIE OKI SERIES

IN ASIAN AMERICAN STU Di ES

From a Three-Cornered World: New and Selected Poems by James Masao Mitsui

Imprisoned Apart: The World War II Correspondence of an lssei Couple, by Louis Rset

Storied Lives:Japanese American Students and World War II by Gary Okihlro

Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories, by Russell Charles Leong

Poper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography, by Kip Fulbeck

Born in SeOffle: The Campaign for Japanese American Redress, by Robert Sadamu Shimabukuro

Co'!finement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War JI Japanese American Relocation S;tes, by Jeffery F. Burton, Mary M. Farrell, Florence B. Lord, and Richard W. Lord

Judgment without Trial:Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, by Tetsuden Kashlma

Shopping at Giant Foods: Chinese American Supermarkets in Northern California, by Alfred Yee

Altered Lives, Enduring Community:Japonese Americans Remember Their World War I I lnco~eration, by Stephen S. Fugita and Marilyn Fernandez

Eat Everything Before You Die: A Chinaman in the Counterculture, by Jeffery Paul Chan

Form and Traneformation in Asian American Literature, edited by Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi

FORM AND in Asian American Literature

Edited by

ZHOU XIAOJJNG AND SAMINA NAJMI

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

Seattle and London

This book is published with the assistance ofa grant from the SCOTT AND LAURIE OKI ENDOWED FUND for the publication of Asian American Studies, established through the generosity of Scott and l.aurie Oki.

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The editors gratefully acknowledge per- missions to reprint the following: Chen, Tina Y, "Impersonation and Other Disappearing Acts in Native Speaker by Chang-rae lee," an earlier version of "Recasting the Spy, Rewritjng the Story: The Politics of Genre in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee," which appeared in Mod,. em Fiction Studies 48.3 (2002), 637-50, 654-67. © Purdue Research Foundation. Reprinted with pennission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Excerpts from .I<intlko Hahn, ·Cntising Barthes" and "The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Han.em" in The Unbeamble Heart, re- printed with pennission of the author.

Excerpts from Essex Hemphill, "Black Machismo," Cordon Negro." "The Tomb of Sorrow," "The Edge, n and "Heavy Breath- ing" in Ctrmwnies, reprinted with permis- sion of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Tm:tothy llu, "The Sized ofit," "Whj.te Moths," and '"Reading Whitman in a Toilet Stall" from Burnt Offerings. Copyright © 1995 by Timpthy Liu. Reprinted with the pemtlssion of Copper Canyon Press. Excerpts from John Yau, "Between the For- est and Its 'frees," Edificio Sayonara, and Forbidden Entries, reprinted with pennis- sion of the author.

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FOR OUR CHILDREN-

AS YOU LEARN TO SPAN THE CONTINENTS,

AND IN DOING SO, TRANSFORM THEM.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Critical -;rheories and Method- ologies in Asian American literary Studies 3 ZHOU XJAOJINCi

Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna: Establishing Ethnographic Authority 30 DOM I N I KA FER EN S

The Seduction of Origins: Sui Sin Far and the Race for 'fradition 48 DAVID SHIH

Political Resistance, Cultural Appropriation, and the Performance of Manhood in Yung Wm.g's My Lift in China and America 77 FLOYD CHEUNCi

Reading Ethnography: The Cold War Social Science of Jade SnowWong's Fifth Chinese Daughter and Brown v. Board of Education IOI CH RISTO PH ER DOUG LAS

Abraham Verghese Doctors Autobiography

m His Own Country I25 RAJ IN I SRI KAN TH

Cambodian American Autobiography: Testimonial Discourse I44 TERI SHAFFER YAMADA

Two Hat Softeners ":in the 'frade Confessiorf: John Yau and Kimiko Hahn x68 ZHOU XIAOJ I NCi

Beyond the Length of an Average Penis: Read:ing across Traditions :in the Poetry of Timothy Liu 190 RICHARD SERRANO

Decolonizing the Bildungsroman: Narratives of War and Womanhood :in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman 209 SAMINA NAJMI

Short Story Cycle and Hawai'i Bildungs- roman: Writing Self, Place, and Family :in Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the

Bully Burgers 23x ROdO G. DAVIS

Recasting the Spy, Rewriting the Story: The Politics of Geme in Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee 249 TINA Y. CHE~

Telling Twice-Told Tales All Over Again: Literary and Historical Subversion in Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World 268

PAL.LAVI RASTOGI

Note~ on Contributors 285

Index 289