Lifting the Sentence: A Poetics of Postcolonial Fiction by Robert Fraser (review)

Abstract

944 Reviews Silver's Virginal Woolflcon argues, the construct 'Virginia Woolf itself,have become signifiers at large. Silver's concern is with the 'versioning' (p. 13) of Woolf by various, often competing , interests. From 1962, when Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was staged, Woolf has evolved from writer to icon, 'a point [that] cannot be overstated ' (p. 9). Silver demonstrates, from a new historicist perspective, how Woolf's apparently powerful iconic circulation has not been freefrom effortsto police her significance through that same circulatory process. When her face appears on T-shirts, mugs, and shoulder-bags, she becomes demotic and ceases to be scary. When her head is grafted upon Marilyn Monroe's body (p. 236), the intellectual woman is demoted to monstrosity. One way or another, these inscriptions of Woolf seek to reduce her. Silver counterpoints these pessimistic observations by a materialist move, noting how the hybrid nature of that last example locates a monstrous Woolf in 'the realm of the nonbinary' (p. 265). For, spliced onto Monroe's flesh, the cerebral Woolf may be read as sexual, non-sexual, or both. To that extent, Woolf's deconstructive icon queers the framing of her attempted representations. It was Woolf's acknowledged beauty, after all, that granted her well-known portraits entry to that same celebrity realm inhabited by Monroe (p. 137). Nevertheless, 'Albee had made Virginia Woolf [. . .] a household term' (p. 116), and this unfortunate familiarity has ingrained a 'recurring motif of fear' (p. 31) that continues to ripple outward: the Richard Dimbleby Lecture broadcast by BBCi on 22 November 2000 was entitled 'Who's Afraid of Modern Art?' Woolf's iconicity is haunted by this notional fear, though material instances may seek to play with and at times neutralize it. Silver's book is an important diagnosis of this cultural pathology. Her analyses illustrate just what Woolf is doing (as icon) in Hanif Kureishi's 1987 movie Sammy andRosie Get Laid, and how she is represented (as character) in Brian Gilbert's 1994 film Tom & Viv. Taking stock like this is both troubling and empowering. Yet one is grateful for a study that is timely, wide-ranging, well informed, and bound to be frequently cited. University of Dundee JimStewart Liftingthe Sentence: A Poeticsof PostcolonialFiction. By Robert Fraser. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2000. xii +252 pp. ?13.99. Until its problematic last chapter, Robert Fraser's cheerful exploration of postcolonial fiction makes a welcome and productive intervention in postcolonial literary studies. In contrast to many readings of postcolonial novels, Fraser chooses not to work with the niceties and orthodoxies ofpostcolonial theory and instead bases his criticism upon more conventional modes of literary analysis, with particular reference to aspects of style and form. Much of the book's success depends upon Fraser's extensive knowledge of postcolonial literature and its various national and cultural contexts, and it is particularly valuable in returning attention to earlier generations of writers whose work seems of lesser consequence to recent postcolonial critique: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Ayi Kwei Armah, Wole Soyinka, R. K. Narayan. Newer voices also receive expert attention?most notably Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey?and in a refreshing manceuvre the work of writers from Francophone countries is occasionally considered in translation. It is important that Fraser remarks early in the book that he is certainly not making a survey of the field. The disclaimer enables him happily to organize postcolonial fic? tion into six distinct phases of 'emergence' while acknowledging the crudity of such mapping and claiming no universality forhis model. These phases move fromthe 'precolonial narratives' of colonized cultures to 'colonial and imperial narratives' written MLR, 97.4, 2002 945 during occupation, 'narratives of resistance', 'nation-buildingnarratives', 'narratives of internal dissent' produced in the immediate wake of postcolonial political independence , and 'transcultural narratives' which emphasize fluidity and post-national sensibilities. It is, clearly, a model based firmlyon the political and historical experiences of 'new Commonwealth' countries in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, and unsurprisingly the majority of Fraser's textual examples come from these regions . Fraser's mapping usefully contextualizes the novels discussed, especially those dealing with representations of the nation, and...