Signifying With a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers (review)

Abstract

Marrouchi, Mustapha. 2002. Signifying With A Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers. Albany: State University of New York Press. $81.50 hc. x + 344 pp.Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman's charmingly insouciant acknowledgment might well stand as an epigraph to Mustapha Marrouchi's ambitious, frustrating, engaging new book, Signifying With A Vengeance. Marrouchi suggests that Signifying an attempt to arrive at a general theory of [postcolonial] (2002, 30). However, much of book seems actively opposed to production of such a theory. With three chapters devoted to individual theorists and three chapters devoted to individual fiction writers, there is little space for any synthetic overview. Following Michel Foucault, Marrouchi regards the literary text as part of a larger framework of texts, institutions, and practices (32); he seems disinclined to theorize as distinct from larger universe of discourse. He does frequently gesture toward newness of postcolonial, but in thematic terms which leave postcoloniality unspecified. Consider this provocation from book's opening:Goethe may have spoken first . . . of but its existence is quite recent; it was born with modernism, and now flourishes in an age of postmodernism. When writers become exiles or emigres, when they begin to write in their second or third languages, and above when experience of this displacement became subject of their work, then world literature was born, for better or worse. The postcolonial writer is probably purest example of this negative liberty -literally he or she writes repeatedly about actual and figurative centrifuges of modern life. . . . (Marrouchi 2002, 1)The last sentence races on to take in celebrity, hybridity, and Mikhail Bakhtin's double-voiced utterance, but this excerpt should suffice. Too many exceptions flock to mind to read these claims as historical and descriptive propositions they appear to be. (Isn't second language writing typical of Latin Middle Ages and many imperial courts through history? Is transplant Henry James literally homeless, and so more of a postcolonial writer than Cairo-dwelling Naguib Mahfouz?) Marrouchi frankly acknowledges that all signify on other texts (2002, 6). The slogan with a vengeance works more to motivate a particular critical style-dense, associative, contrapuntally layered, flecked with allusions (31), reading in a linear but in a jazzy, variational way (32)-than to formulate a general theory of postcolonial literature.Alternatively, one could argue that for Marrouchi style is theory; that as a sometimes Derridean, when he calls his book a prologue (2002, 31), he does not expect it to arrive at its goal but to defer such arrival indefinitely; and that he fully expects his readers to deconstruct his myth of a twentieth century origin of world literature, and in so doing to acquire a more multifaceted sense of postcolonial signifying than one could do within confines of a conventional theory in which claims are taken literally. I suspect that Marrouchi means just what he writes most of time, and is, like Whitman, willing to embrace contradictions, tensions, and rough edges in service of a capacious vision. For instance, there is a running tension in Signifying between Marrouchi's poststructuralist influences and a humanism that sees making aesthetic and moral judgments about authors and works of art as fundamental to literary criticism. …