The Nation at War with Itself: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance
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One of the consequences of the dominance of a poststructuralist-oriented vocabulary within Postcolonial Studies is that the field has had relatively little to say about literary realism, despite the fact that a considerable amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition. I discuss some of the reasons behind this theoretical impasse, including Benedict Anderson’s canonical critique of literary realism, which he aligns with the homogenizing force of the national imaginary. The argument I pursue in this article—following Jonathan Culler’s critique—is that the novelistic dynamic Anderson identifies should be seen as less specifically related to the discourse of the national per se, and more connected to a certain basic dynamic pertaining to the idea of a political community, one that conditions but also precedes the possibility of a national discourse. I bring these ideas to a discussion of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance from 1995, in which the Schmittian distinction between friends and enemies plays a crucial role in terms of the novel’s portrayal of the historical event of the Emergency. I argue that the novel explores the ways in which biopolitics accompanies the national, ideological-interpellative narrative, and that the text’s realism should be seen as a symptom of a divided world (in which everyone, potentially, is an enemy), a nation at war with itself. Mistry’s text provides the framework within which we may understand the workings of the permanent state of emergency.
Abstract
One of the consequences of the dominance of a poststructuralist-oriented vocabulary within Postcolonial Studies is that the field has had relatively little to say about literary realism, despite the fact that a considerable amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition. I discuss some of the reasons behind this theoretical impasse, including Benedict Anderson’s canonical critique of literary realism, which he aligns with the homogenizing force of the national imaginary. The argument I pursue in this article—following Jonathan Culler’s critique—is that the novelistic dynamic Anderson identifies should be seen as less specifically related to the discourse of the national per se, and more connected to a certain basic dynamic pertaining to the idea of a political community, one that conditions but also precedes the possibility of a national discourse. I bring these ideas to a discussion of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance from 1995, in which the Schmittian distinction between friends and enemies plays a crucial role in terms of the novel’s portrayal of the historical event of the Emergency. I argue that the novel explores the ways in which biopolitics accompanies the national, ideological-interpellative narrative, and that the text’s realism should be seen as a symptom of a divided world (in which everyone, potentially, is an enemy), a nation at war with itself. Mistry’s text provides the framework within which we may understand the workings of the permanent state of emergency.
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