Kröller, Eva-Marie

English

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BOOK REVIEWS 133 and critique the dominant ideologies. Her valorization of the U.S. as a locus for positive change in novels like Jasmine problematizes her position as a postcolonial intellectual, for she fails to see the threat of American neocolonialism. There are several other articles in this collection that are worth mentioning. Samir Dayal examines the pervasiveness of violence in Mukherjee's work, arguing that the ambivalent functionality of vio-lence in Jasmine reveals "the contradictions of postcolonial subject-formation" (65). Janet M. Powers offers an interesting deconstructive reading of Mukherjee's fiction. Using Roland Barthes's system of struc-tural analysis of narrative, Powers highlights the sociopolitical com-mentary generated in Mukherjee's novels of the Indian immigrant experience in the United States. Pushpa N. Parekh looks at the narra-tive voice and gender roles in Jasmine, focussing on how these tech-niques are used in delineating the "serving" process of the immigrant women. Gurleen Grewal investigates the many inconsistencies that plague Jasmine. She makes a convincing case of the utter improbability of Jasmine's adventures and changes of identities in the United States, showing Mukherjee's insensitivity to the real struggles of immigrant women. Mitali R. Pad examines the culture conflict that Mukherjee's Indian immigrants experience in her short stories. Carole Stone makes a comparative analysis of the short fiction of Bernard Malamud and Mukherjee. Maya Manju Sharma traces the development of Muk-herjee as an artist, with focus on her early work. Pramila Venkates-waran examines Mukherjee as an autobiographer, arguing that Days and Nights in Calcutta marks the turning point in her artistic development. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives is a useful collection of essays with plenty of material that the reader will find interesting and chal-lenging or, at the very least, controversial. SHAMSUL ISLAM Bruce Greenfield. Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790-1855. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. pp. x, 249. Discovery narratives, so Bruce Greenfield in Narrating Discovery, are part of colonial discourse, for "reporting on an exploratory journey . .. meant casting individual activity in terms that would be recognized and valued in European and colonial power centres" (10). These in-troductory remarks are apropos; they are also somewhat alarming, be-cause a reader versed in recent travel criticism may fear that this is yet another predictable and jargon-ridden tract without due attention to the texts. Such a reader will be pleasantly surprised: Narrating Discovery is one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking books in the field to have come along in recent years; in its unassuming way, it is equally respectful towards its material and its reader without ever relinquish-ing its own intellectual integrity. 134 BOOK REVIEWS The cover illustration captures the spirit of the book better than its title: what first appears to be a black-and-white reproduction of a Ro-mantic painting turns out to be a contemporary photograph, and the figure reclining against a backdrop of fog-shrouded mountains is not a languorous worshipper of nature but a wan-looking modern-dav hiker: indeed, the book is much concerned with the conflicts that many "discoverers" have had to negotiate between preconception and reality. Nor were the conflicts necessarily motivated by romanticism; Greenfield spends much space on discussing narratives in which ro-manticism was patently not an issue. Among these is Samuel Heame's Journey to the Northern Ocean, and here, too, the subtitle is somewhat confusing: Greenfield begins with narrators who are traditionally con-sidered part of Canadian exploration literature (Heame, MacKenzie, Henry). He may, of course, argue that these, too, are part of the (North) American picture, but since he sets out to trace a develop-ment beginning with Hearne et al., continuing with Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike and John Charles Fremont, and culminating in Irving, Poe, and Thoreau, he is clearly after a (U.S.) American literary ances-try. Given the efforts in Canadian-American comparative studies to in-sist on differences as well as similarities in the two lineages, it would have been worthwhile to learn of Greenfield's views on the matter. Narrating Discovery outlines a development that begins with a dominantly "collective errand as embodied in commercial and govern-mental institutions" (21), as difficult as it often was to sustain the impersonal voice of such narratives, and moves towards romantic individualism by "radically shifting the authority for the traveler's un-dertaking for sponsoring institutions to the traveler's personal experi-ences" (174). Greenfield is careful to insist that such individualism may be a form of colonialism even more pernicious than the original, for in order to inscribe that "particular destiny" (182), romanticists found it necessary to postulate a virgin land devoid of aboriginal inhabitants and traditions. The thesis of the book may be simple enough, but it still provides unusual historical and generic perspec-tives for Irving, Thoreau, and Poe, placing them in the middle of a de-velopment rather than at its beginning. The approach of the book—by author rather than theme—makes for some redundancy. At the same time, it makes for a persuasive cu-mulative argument that leaves the specificity of each text intact. Like his colleagues in travel criticism, Ian MacLaren and Mary Louise Pratt, Greenfield is particularly strong in rhetorical analysis. Researchers in-terested in this approach will find excellent work on classic tropes such as the explorer as Adamic man or the half-breed guide as liminal fig-ure. Greenfield might have made more of the special resonance that his comments on living's The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus ac-quired in 1992, the book's year of publication: Columbus's depiction as Christian martyr and the narratological complications of a text de-BOOK REVIEWS 135 voted to propagandising his mission make interesting footnotes to the many assessments, that year, of Columbus's arrival in America. In a quotation from Irving's The Adventure of Captain Bonneville, Greenfield also offers a poignant extension of Pratt's analysis of the bird's-eye view as imperialist perspective; here, the spectator usurps Native tradi-tions to legitimize his undertaking: For a time the Indian fable seemed realized: he had attained that height from which the Blackfoot warrior, after death, first catches a view of the land of souls, and beholds the happy hunting grounds spread out below him, brightening with the abodes of the free and generous spirits. The captain stood for a long while gazing upon this scene, lost in a crowd of vague and indefinite ideas and sensations. ( 159) Narrating Discovery is a fine book, reminding one that much ground-work for the analysis of imperialist discourse has been accomplished in American Studies, a perhaps paradoxical situation not always suffi-ciently acknowledged in postcolonial criticism. EVA-MARIE KRÖLLER Brian McHale. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992. pp. xii, 342. $49.95; $16.95 Pb-As Brian McHale points out in his introduction, Constructing Postmoder-nism seeks to overcome the substantialist reading of postmodernist fiction that (some have thought) he advances in his first book, Post-modernist Fiction (1987). In that work, although claiming constructivist biases, McHale outlines a rather formed view of modernist and post-modernist fiction. Modernist fiction is preoccupied with questions re-lated to knowing: "What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know h, and with what degree of certainty?; . . . What are the limits of the knowable? And so on" (Postmodernist Fiction 9). Whereas modernist fiction is marked by this epistemological dominant, postmod-ernist fiction is concerned with ontological issues related both to the nature of fiction itself—as seen in the proliferation of parodie meta-fictional texts—and to the nature of the worlds constituted by narra-tors and characters. In Constructing Postmodernism, McHale is sufficiently circumspect to realize that he has fallen into a self-"constructed" trap of sorts, though certainly he is not alone in this among students of postmodern litera-ture and philosophy. This particular problem was captured long ago in a Greek paradox, the one involving a Cretan who claims that all Cretans are liars. Though explicitly endorsing the relativism and contingency that is at the heart of postmodemity—see, for example, McHale's admission of constructivist biases in both of his books— postmodern scholars ultimately betray themselves by speaking authori-tatively, definitively, uncontingently, about matters postmodern. 

Bruce Greenfield. Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature

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Bruce Greenfield. Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature

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