Eng Lit Departments in our colleges and universities appear to have been long infected by a virus which has various strains known by names such as post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism and cultural relativism. Though these deadly strains of the deadly virus have infected other departments in colleges and universities, Eng Lit faculty and students are found to be easily vulnerable to them. The closer the proximity of Eng Lit Dept to Anthropology Department, the greater the risk of the faculties of those closeted in the former getting damaged irreparably.
A few days ago I got a chance to see a professor apparently hit by the bug. Worse, he was allowed to spread it to the Eng Lit faculty and students in a local university. This Professor is a senior guy from another university. He was on the campus to deliver a lecture on "Why tell stories?" in commemoration of a late Professor of English. A story is not true, he said and added with an emphasis that we all love stories. The Professor addressing a small audience of teachers and students was behaving properly and showed no sign of the infection. "All the time there are stories around us....Identity is a story, self is a story. Your identity card is a piece of fiction," he was telling the audience. It all sounded very interesting.
The Professor started pushing his Theory of Fiction to envelop communities. "Community also uses language," he said adding that communities should communicate more [their stories]. I could not see the point the Professor was trying to hammer home. But it started getting clearer when he suddenly unearthed colonialism. 'Colonialism is still there,' he stated emphatically. Colonialism would not end once the exploitation of materials and resources ceased to happen, he continued. Economic exploitation, he pointed out, was just a part of colonialism. Colonialism, he argued, had deprived us of our right to tell our stories. "Every person has a right to tell stories,' he said. Bingo! That's statement. That's exactly what Salman Rushdie said in his memoir 'Joseph Anton'. And remember the attempts to deny him his right to tell his stories. Was the Professor indirectly hitting at THAT colonialism that deprived the author of The Satanic Verses of his right to tell his stories? Wasn't the Khomeini fatwa an attempt to colonise our minds, police our thoughts and leave us brain-dead by means of coercion and intimidation? I thought the Professor would mention Rushdie's book before he said what he said during his speech: "Stories are the best prophylactic defence against hatred." But the name of the reputed author who was the victim in our time of the most vicious and nakedly violent attempt to gag a story-teller did not come out of the Professor's lips. He mentioned Tony Morrison, Hanif Khureishi, who had been in the forefront of the protest against the fatwa, and Walter Benjamin, who wrote the essay 'The Storyteller'.
My disappointment was eclipsed by the way the Professor was unravelling his Theory of Fiction. "FIR registered by the police following an incident of crime is a story, nation is a story, my CV is a story, a lie is a story. The stories are mirrors where you can see a little bit of yourself. The stories are things that make you imagine things."
So far so good. I thought he made his point and did it well. Then came the rabbit out of his hat (just imaginary, not real). "Unless we have stories we cannot understand what multi-culturalism is." To make it clearer he said: "Until we hear other people's stories, there is no multi-cultural society." He was suggesting that multi-culturalism stood for multiple voices. I thought: You add 'multi' before everything and it looks nice, progressive and sexy. (A close friend of mine, who is a sharp-eyed journalist, told me he had once asked some local leaders of an Islamist organisation at a press conference, when they were lecturing the assembled journalists about the virtues of multiple voices in a multi-cultural society, if they could accept the idea of multiple gods since they were of the view that 'multi' is something to be cherished in matters cultural and social. My friend did not tell me how the Islamists responded to that question.)
The stories were soothing, the stories order and structure the world, the Professor said and I nodded. That reminded me of what the famous sceptic Michael Shermer said: "Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not." But the Professor's linkage of multi-culturalism and stories already unnerved me. He was, I thought, thinking about Rushdie who represented the individual's right to tell his or her story; he was also thinking about Khomeini who represented a culture's right to tell its story which is one of the stories in a Multi-cultural Paradise where the Khomeini story of silencing a storyteller would co-exist with the Rushdie story of free expression, except that the pro-free expression Rushdie team should go hiding for years while pro-fatwa team would roam free to pin its story on to the corpses of hapless tellers of different stories, to tell them that the world needed just One Story and One Book.
I heaved a sigh of relief after the Professor concluded his speech to be followed by a Q & A session. I couldn't help myself suppress a question to know whether his Everything-is-a-story theory really covered everything. I shaped a question in my mind. I wanted to ask him if everything is a story and if it was colonialism's job to deprive individuals and communities and cultures of their right to tell their stories, was it possible to assume that colonialism itself was a story ('A story is not true'). But when I stood up to ask the question, the question I shaped in my mind got unshaped and I found myself asking this question: "Sir, you have said that everything is a story, that is, fiction. In that case, are there no facts to be known in this world? It is the endeavour of science to break the spell cast by stories of different sorts. Is science itself a story? Are theory of gravity and theory of relativity, for example, pieces of fiction?"
I did not understand exactly what the Professor said in reply to my question. My understanding was that he evaded my direct question and resorted to babbling for the next two or three minutes. My notepad showed just two sentences that I managed to comprehend and write it down: "Stories only have a provisional value" and "Belief in something, it works." I don't know how to decipher these two sentences to arrive at what exactly the Professor meant. He could be saying that stories were different from facts and that stories (religion, superstition, lies) would work as long as you have faith in it. The Professor was certainly against breaking the spell cast by the stories. (If you really want to break the spell, read Daniel Dennett's book 'Breaking the Spell'). If stories were soothing, they should be safeguarded against attempts by science to know facts that sometimes cut through fiction.
I stood up again after a round of questions from others in the audience. "A multi-cultural society is a society where there are different cultures with different stories. Are all these stories equal? Should we assume that all the cultures are equal? Should we not differentiate between a culture that subjugates its women and another culture that upholds gender equality?"
This time I really failed to make head or tail out of what the learned Professor said to answer my question. My notepad contained the word 'Anthropology' written legibly by myself. I thought that most Anthropologists were ardent advocates of cultural relativism.
The virus of post-modernism, post-colonialism or cultural relativism could have originated from the Departments of Anthropology. But it definitely wrought havoc on the English Departments in our part of the post-colonial world where anthropologists and English Professors inspired by culture studies tended to believe that everything was perfect and pristine before the Western colonialism stepped its foot in the lands where our ancestors had lived a life of happiness and fulfilment. Perhaps, as the Professor suggested, we are condemned to live in the world of eternal fiction.
