June 27, 2004

On the "Multicultural" Novel

Last week, Slate ran a conversation between Jim Lewis and Jeffrey Eugenides, on the "uses and abuses of literary modernism." (The e-mail exchange was part of the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.) What drew my attention to the conversation was Eugenides' contention that "the new 'multicultural' novel isn't new at all." I was interested in how specifically Eugenides was going to define 'multicultural novel' and how he was going to suggest that it wasn't new. Jim Lewis, on the other hand, seemed to think that it is indeed new. Eugenides starts out with this

The majority of so-called multicultural novels are nothing but new wine poured into old bottles. What's the great subject of the novel? Marriage, of course. In the West, we've lost that subject. Marriages aren't arranged anymore. Divorce is no longer unthinkable. You can't have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.
What the multicultural novel has going for it is the marriage plot. They can still use it! The societies under examination are conservative, religious, still bound by custom and tradition. And so�voil�you can be an Indian novelist or a Jordanian novelist and still avail yourself of the greatest subject the novel has ever had. Arranged marriages, dowries, social stigma at divorce�it's all back again, in perfect working order.
This doesn't mean that these novels can't be enjoyable. I don't blame them for using the marriage plot. But using it in the way they do has consequences. Though these books are coming out now, they're already at least a hundred years old. Plus, the 19th-century subject matter begins to infect the prose. It makes the characterization creaky. There are cobwebs between the sentences. Entire paragraphs smell like mothballs. The multicultural novel is not alone in this. Most novels smell like that. My old teacher, the great Gilbert Sorrentino, used to put it like this. Of all the books coming out, he'd say. "These books don't exist. I mean, they exist. But they don't EXIST!"

I'm actually astounded by the analogy Eugenides uses and by the idea that because one subject has been dealt with in 19th century England, it can't be dealt with again (and maybe better). Even the "They" in "they can still use it" draws a sharp line between "us" and "them" with the "us" clearly coming out ahead. The 'us" here has gone off to the forest, examined and catalogued a few trees, and declared that the forest was now uninteresting to anyone else but to "others." In his response, Jim Lewis didn't directly answer some of these positions, but Eugenides comes back to them in his last missive. He is quick to defend himself of any charges that he is against multiculturalism itself ("of which [he] heartily approves.") And, having indeed received questions about his use of "multicultural novel" Eugenides sets outs to define his terms

[L]et me define what I mean by the term "multicultural novel." I do NOT mean fiction written in foreign languages. I do not mean Urdu literature or Japanese literature or Nepalese literature. By multicultural I refer to novels written in, say, English, and originally published in the United States or the United Kingdom that deal primarily with characters who are not living in the United States or the United Kingdom, or novels that examine the lives of an ethnic group hermetically insulated from the�and here comes another so-called�dominant culture. I do not mean White Teeth. I do mean Waiting by Ha Jin. I mean writing in a 19th-century manner about characters living in the 20th or 21st, and calling this new because the names of the characters are Hassan or Chen rather than Emma or Mr. Darcy.
You can spot a multicultural novel of this sort very easily. It is written in English but sounds as though it were translated.

I have to take a break here because this is so insanely myopic that I need a breather. Perhaps one should ask Eugenides where he thinks the works of Ahdaf Soueif, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and others whose books were published in the U.K. and U.S., and who deal with characters set in the rest of the world, fit in his view. Does Eugenides seriously want us to believe that what they have written is not new? Yes, most of them have dealt with marriage at one point or another (I mean, seriously, who hasn't?) but have they brought nothing else to the table? How about the way structure was used in Roy's books? The language in Soueif's work? The insistence of Achebe on the purpose of the novel, or indeed, of any work of art? And have none of these contributed to the novel as an art form? Now, at this point, one might ask oneself where Eugenides got the idea that he could neatly put everyone in their boxes. Here's his expertise.

I know what I'm talking about here because the early parts of Middlesex threatened to be just the kind of multicultural novel I so despise. I was writing about Greeks in Asia Minor in 1922, writing about them in English, putting English dialogue in their mouths, and it gave me an ulcer. The way I settled this problem to my satisfaction (save that there's never satisfaction in writing novels) was to interlace this old-fashioned story with a contemporary American one, to try to keep the language peppy and colloquial rather than sonorous and antique, to use lots of postmodern tricks making it clear I was worried about this kind of storytelling, and, especially, by trying to be funny. Still, part of my distaste for the so-called multicultural novel comes from my own near-trafficking in it. I escaped and lived to tell the tale. Beware all who enter here.

Well, thanks for the warning, but, we're going there anyway.

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