Otherness has become one o f the central categories in the culture, literature, philosophy o f W estern modernity. “Other” helps to define the norm, acting as a negative point o f reference, giving birth to various exclusion strategies and stereotypic images, which have been by now quite thoroughly described. Development of postm odern theories of otherness in the last decades had led to re
grouping of the m ajor oppositions of self/other, native/alien, putting the “other”, the “different” in the center, giving him /her the voice, which is clearly seen in the active developm ent of various cultural critical theories and mini-discourses, and at the same time, powerlessly stating again and again the absolute enigmatic nature of otherness. Postcolonial theory, as one of the oldest and widest in its grasp on the world map of otherness discourses, as well as actively developing lately trans-cultural, hemispheric, continental, transatlantic and other studies with neo-universal, global, and com parative bents, have tried to get rid o f the “radical alterity”, accentuating trans-cultural interactions and their cognitive results, refraining from regarding the “world literature” in the usual segments o f separate national traditions and languages, as they had been interpreted before, realized in the popular concept o f post
colonial dissolving of national culture as a stable construct and language as teleology. Homi Bhabha puts in the basis of his com parative theorizing various global, in his view, cultural, political, psychological influences, concepts and themes, which allows him to bring together, e.g. such aesthetically completely
different writers as Nadine G ordim er and Toni M orrison (Bhabha 1994: 13-18). This understanding of “world literature” claim s to bring back globality and universalism into the sphere o f literary criticism , but in fact, is potentially based itself on exclusion. The process of finding more and more “others” is principally end
less — we shall always be able to find voices, that no one has heard as yet. Form ulated in respect o f a certain area, postcolonial categories cannot work for all other cultural regions and need be necessarily verified for each particular milieu, which brings us back to the problem atics of radical/non-radical nature of
“differance” . Thus, the very catchy m etaphor o f “un-hom e-le-ness”
(ib. 10, 12), offered by Bhabha (and borrow ed from Freud through Lacan), as a specific lack o f preferable point of cultural reference, a curious indiscriminacy between “s e lf ’ and “other”, requires closer definition each time when it is applied to a concrete literary phenomenon and region, first of all, in the direction o f adding the personal, individual dim ension, and also — rejecting the supre
macy of the oppositional and insurgent discourses. D efining this specific am bivalent state of constant balancing, Salm an Rushdie calls it “straddling of the two cultures, that som etim es turns out to be falling between two stools” (Rushdie 1991: 15) and points out the “at once plural and partial nature” (ib.) of the un-homed identities. The concept of “un-hom e-le-ness” signalizes the efforts of postcolonial theorists to change the predom inantly political discourse to the cultural-ontological-psychological, and in certain cases — aesthetic as well.
Today such a large cultural area,that never really cam e into the zone of postcolonial theorists’ interests is the post-Soviet region — too exotic and largely unavailable in its varied cultural/
linguistic/ literary representations to the rest of the world. Gayatri Spivak, e.g. characteristically uses the word “post-Soviet” in her recent A C ritique o f P o stcolon ial Reason. Tow ard a H istory o f the Vanishing P resent (1999) only in tem poral, not a cultural-spatial sense, interpreting it invariably as a m entally insuperable border of division. Her term “post-Soviet” does not strive to define what is inside this area, but rather is m eant to exclude this m aterial from that general, blurred idea of the world trans-national cultural globality that the scholar offers as an alternative to postcolonial
“Being Elsewhere” 65 theory. The um brella term “post-Soviet literature” also causes doubts, because it again describes only the tem poral condition and is m arked with some left-over patronizing effect o f the old Soviet term s like “literature of the peoples o f the U SSR ” . D isciplinary divisions in Russia have rem ained the same today, and the m ajority o f scholars still continue to transm it the cultural-colo- nizing ideologies o f the Soviet times, e.g. autom atically repro
ducing the Stalinist models o f m ulticulturalism : “Soviet in its contents, national in its form ” . Postcolonial and cultural critical problem atics, even in relation to “native” m aterial, rem ain in Russia un-popular exotics, which is connected also with a more substantial problem atics o f re-conceptualizing the unstable concept o f national identity and ideology that Russia faces today and still is not able to even start solving, in contrast with, e.g. the Caribbean region which has made successful efforts to make up a viable trans-national, trans-cultural, trans-ethnic and even trans-religious Caribbean identity. The political leftist discourse, fashionable in the last decades in the W estern cultural-critical environm ent will not become popular in the post-Soviet region — for quite some time. At the same time, the old Soviet and even older Russian com plexes o f im perial superiority (W estern-m odeled, based on the myth o f the European nature of Russian culture, civilizing “other”, inferior nations) are still alive and unquestioned in the minds of many “intellectuals” .
Post-Soviet m aterial is not easy to classify within the usual, prim arily British postcolonial schemes due to the versatile, many- sided developm ent o f cultural colonialist strategies in this area, connected with specific historical/cultural peculiarities and stra
tegies o f colonization in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, corresponding to the curious double model (the Russian Imperial and the Soviet colonialist ideologies are m utually super
im posed), and once again dem onstrating the im possibility o f the absolutely universal theory of otherness.
In the post-Soviet cultural space literary sub-traditions can be generally described as still going through the boom o f authenticity, characteristic o f the postcolonial world literature in the 1960 — 1970s. The first to destroy this scheme have been the cross- cultural authors, who fall in-between the old Soviet assim ilative
9
model and the national-ethnic authenticity one. A m ong them I would m ention Andrei Voloss, the author o f the “A nti-B ooker”
prize-w inning (1998) novel K hurram abad, a Ukrainian post
m odern w riter Yuri Andrukhovich, who wrote a novelette R e
creation s (1991), a “ form er” Bakinian A fanasy M am edov, the author o f somewhat im pressionistic Proustian sketches L ove an d M ake M istakes (2000). This in-between fiction, available to the Russian-reading public mainly through literary journals, still rem ains on the periphery o f the attention o f w ider audiences, and not only in the ex-em pire itself but in the ex-”colonies” as well, being inconvenient both to the politically engaged culturally extrem ist readers and to the Russian public, who is not yet able to get rid o f imperial illusions and acquire the post-im perial tolerance that Britain has been lately so fam ous for.
The global polem ics on “differance” coincides with the general turn from aesthetics to culture, the peak o f which in the hum anities came at about a decade ago. Negation o f disciplinarity has led to rendering o f literature and art m ainly within the presum ably dem ocratic “cultural critical” frame, and consequently to a com plete neglect and de-valuing o f aesthetics, stigm atized as “elitist and outdated” . Perhaps the time has com e to som ew hat shift back from “boundless” culture to aesthetics, certainly interpreted not in any norm ative way, for if we try to analyze the works of trans- cultural authors, we will have to keep in m ind that literature is
“self-validating”, and any author should be judged by his books, not his passport or the political party he belongs to, not by the degree of his authenticity (Rushdie 1991: 67). M any international or “un-hom ed” writers dem onstrate the essentializing nature of
“authenticity”, connecting it with the concealed, m odernized form of (self)exotization that E. Said described back in 1978 as
“orientalism ” . Am ong them there are such hybrids — “traitors”
from the point o f view o f authenticity adherents — as Salman Rushdie and a British poet of Guyanese origin David Dabydeen, an Am erican writer o f Chinese descent M axine Hong Kingston, a
“ Check French” M ilan Kundera, and many others who are clinging to a tem perate, hesitant, post-essentialist relativism in the vein of Bhabha and Said, and at the same time, create fearlessly innovative and fruitful in-between aesthetic models.
“Being Elsewhere” 67 A critical approach free from the artificially narrow discourses o f pow er and suppression, based on the rehabilitated aesthetics of a non-norm ative nature, largely fused with psychological-onto
logical characteristics, w ould be the m ost unprejudiced one, lacking the initially condescending or, to the contrary, aggressively self-proclaim ing bent. Such a goal is hard to achieve, as it requires the scholar to be deft as a rope-walker and as double-faced as a Janus, able to apply the errant, m igrant way o f reading and inter
preting the texts, struggling in the “cultural hotchpotch”, a post
national m elange that Rushdie so colorfully describes in relation to Bombay (ib. 394).
It is im portant that practically none o f the international writers wants to be called a postcolonial author, preferring instead such less value-based and politically-engaged categories as in-betw een
ness, un-home-le-ness, ethic-aesthetic hybridity, cultural “m e
lange”, as a positive m eaning-generating synthesis, rejecting the essentialist, insulting hyphenated definitions, visibly dem on
strating the painful split in their double selves (Indo-Anglian, British-G uyanese, Franco-M aghrebian, etc.). These new defini
tions are invariably marked with em otional-m etaphorical over
tones, as most postm odern “term s” are. The most widely spread of them is the unbelievably elastic “hybridity”, actively discussed not only by Bhabha (Bhabha: 38, 127, 207-208, 242), but by a num ber o f Latin-Am erican “border theorists” (J. D. Saldivar, H. Calderon), and by the writers themselves. Rushdie in his collection o f essays, deftly called Im aginary H om elands, baptized him self and sim ilar writers, m arked with an insuperable sense o f loss and exile, a
“world com m unity of displaced authors” (15). This becom es not only a form al acknowledgem ent o f their immigrant status, but also a confirm ation of profound spiritual exile, metaphysical outsider- ness, under which, according to Rushdie, Günter Grass, James Joyce, Isaac Bashevis Singer, M ilan K undera and M axine Hong Kingston could easily sign (ib.). These cosm opolitan people “root them selves in ideas, rather than places, in memories as much as m aterial things” (ib. 124), they suspect reality and define them selves in spite o f definitions imposed by others.
A term inological m etaphor, offered by Rushdie to define this new “world literature”, sounds seemingly even more offensive
than “hybridity” — “m ongrel” literature (ib. 67, 69, 70, 394), but nevertheless correctly describes the essence o f this specific con tem porary state of mixing, transform ation, hybridizing, denying the sterile absolutism o f pure blood and culture. It is im portant to note the elem ent of illegitim acy o f these writings, that Rushdie insists on, its existence around, in spite of, beyond the generally accepted spatial-tem poral and ethic-aesthetic coordinates, at the junctures of which the new meanings are being constantly created.
M. Bakhtin in his studies of historical poetics (e.g. in E pic an d N o vel) pointed out polyglossia (or heteroglossia) and the poly
valent nature of the new forms that are bom at the m argins of official, dom inant, “high” literature, e.g. the novel, as a genre at first explicitly illegitim ate and gravitating tow ards border, m ar
ginal characters and topoi. At the end of the 20th century this Bakhtinian rule acts differently, for deliberate m arginality in all m anifestations has becom e today a certain surrogate norm. M.
Foucault transform s B akhtin’s “polyglossia” into a largely cultural concept of “heterotopia”, though the essence rem ains the same, and Rushdie, echoing both Bakhtin and Foucault, speaks o f certain areas of cross-pollination — trans-cultural and trans-lingual (ib.
69), pointing out that this im possible m ixture o f various traditions can be not only “am biguous and shifting, but also highly fertile territory for a writer to occupy” (ib. 15).
B akhtin’s fam ous exam ple o f the interaction o f Latin (non
native for many territories) and “barbarian”, low languages, out of an illegitim ate union o f which such genre forms as novel came to exist, today is echoed in the sim ilar “barbarization” o f English that turned an international lingua fr a n c a, which is not interpreted by the m odem generation o f writers, connected originally with form er British colonies, as the conquering tongue, and is no longer rejected indiscrim inately, but rather re-m ade, re-interpreted,
“dom esticated”, treated as only one o f languages, no longer dom inant, if we speak o f objectively m ulticultural, m ultilingual areas, such as India. Rushdie, e.g. points out the non-m arked nature o f English for the generation o f “m idnight children”, bom at the end o f colonial tim es and called so after his novel o f the same name had been published, or we can use the exam ple of Spanglish and “C alo” in M exican-A m erican fiction. Finally, a
“Being Elsewhere” 69 good exam ple w ould be the Caribbean tradition with its Creole English-es, bom out o f an impossible cultural/linguistic m ixture of various ingredients. If before they existed m ainly in oral, folklore form s, and later — in the so called “dram atic m onologues”, now they m ore and more often come into the spheres o f written (as opposed to oral) and prosaic literature. A Jam aican w riter M ichelle C liff juxtaposes fluent, rational, logical and unm istakably W estern discourse o f her dissertation on Italian Renaissance and the jagged, nonlinear, alm ost shorthand prose about herself as a subject, where the Royal English is fighting with colorful patois and Creole pigeons of her childhood, giving birth to tem poral and spatial mixtures, genre and stylistic hybrids, am bivalent characters (C liff 1988: 57). David Dabydeen experim ents in equipping his own poems, written in Creole dialects, with unique self-translations, in a way mocking the would-be scholarly com m entary to an “other- ed” text, making the impossible cultural translation, which centers between and beyond the W estern rational analysis and emotional thickness and violence of the true words, spoken by the “m ute” or the “un-bom ” . That is why even in D abydeen’s dram atic m ono
logues, follow ing form ally the Caribbean poetic tradition, there is always present a certain additional perspective, problem atizing the act o f cultural translation or linkage as such, alienating the genre of the dram atic m onologue itself, assigning it not to a living person (a slave, a coolie), but to a drowned and half-decom posed slave’s head, recollecting its past and dream ing o f its future (“Turner”).
Although theorists have generally agreed today on the negation o f the partly rom antic understanding o f language, as a universal means o f expressing the national character and holistic identity, this statem ent needs further concretizing in the direction of cultural-linguistic translation and linguistic hybridizing proble
matics. It is especially skilful in the case of truly postm odern authors, who have a Nabokovian, Joycean freedom o f word/world- creation, who possess a sensitive ear, as Salman Rushdie does.
Typical exam ples o f his m ultilingual word-hybrids, which usually are toponym s and characters’ names, include “Aurora Bomba- yalis”, the alm ost Joysean “Uper the gur gur the annexe the bay dhayana the mung the dal o f the laltain”, “Lam bajan Chandi- w aja” — “ Long John Silver-Fellow”, endless toponymic hybrid
variations, concocted according to the principle o f the palim psest, that acts as a leitm otif in many Rushdie’s books.
Rushdie, echoing Latin-Am erican-centered theories o f cultural translation as paraphrase, as bridging, that e.g. culturally extrem ist Chicana G loria Anzaldua is so famous for, offers a characteristic explanation of the linguistic-discursive side o f cross-culturalism in literature, carrying the act of translation inside the very w riter’s identity: “The W ord “translation” comes etym ologically from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that som ething always gets lost in the translation. I cling obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained” (Rushdie 1991: 17).
The problem o f the language choice is connected with the gravitation to this or that cultural model — assim ilative, chrono
logically the earliest, archaic, that Latin-A m erican scholars usually connect with the imagery of insurgent “C alibans” , and finally, the hybrid model, under which the m astering and skilful use of an
“international” language, what used to be the colonizer’s tongue, gets to be connected with the process of liberation from both W estern and authentic discourses. Such a hybrid model, marked with cosm opolitan, postm odern elem ents, allows the writers not only to enlarge their audience, but also to actively deconstruct the form er dom inant language from within, corresponding to the model of the double, split consciousness, a specific state of inner exile, giving a “stereoscopic” vision that has certain advantages in com parison with the holistic, unified positioning o f both the archaic and assim ilative modes.
A num ber o f authors, mainly traditionalists or cultural extre
mists (e.g. the Kenyan writer Ngugi W a T hiong’o, who turned to Gikuyu instead o f English) think that the necessity o f carrying out the de-colonizing struggle, using the very language-colonizer — narrows the authors’ potential. Thence comes their often dem on
strative refusal to use “dom inant” English, returning to the native tongues instead. The dem onstrative archaization o f cultural/
linguistic models, however, does not always equal the rejection of the aesthetic and poetic(ologic) models o f the W estern discourse.
The same refers to the rejection of the Russian language that is predictably at its peak today in the whole post-Soviet area, where
“Being Elsewhere” 71 the attitude towards the colonizer’s tongue (Russian) has not yet been changed into a detached, objectified, and playfully creative one.
No m atter what language the international writers choose, the result usually is B akhtin’s “heteroglossia” , the trans-cultural Levi- Straussian bricolage, and the emphasis shifts from the skillful im itation o f imperial English, French, Spanish, Russian to the countless ways o f its decomposition from within, a dem onstration o f its rotten nature, as a part of the dying “body” o f Empire, final
ly, efforts to give it a new potential by illegitim ate “cross-pol- lination” and “hybridizing”, subverting the dom inant language — beyond recognition.
All that, however, does not mean that cultural models should be com pletely ignored when we analyze cross-cultural fictions, for there is a close relationship between aesthetics and cultural para
digms. At the basis of the contem porary artistic models of in- betw een-ness there almost always lie real m ulticultural geographic areas that due to a num ber o f specific historical conditions, have been able to exist for a long time in a state o f syncretism, orga
nically com bining various, often contradictory, elements. Such features are typical e.g. for India, or for the complex Caribbean culture. The idea o f the culture-rhizome, having a mass o f roots and lacking one main trunk, acting as a chaosm os o f thousands of interconnected threads but not “structured” in any generally
nically com bining various, often contradictory, elements. Such features are typical e.g. for India, or for the complex Caribbean culture. The idea o f the culture-rhizome, having a mass o f roots and lacking one main trunk, acting as a chaosm os o f thousands of interconnected threads but not “structured” in any generally