Mood, Health, and the Global Anglophone Novel

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A maximal definition of the Global Anglophone Novel would, as we know, include all novels written in English, regardless of origin.1 The cost of inclusivity is definitional crisis: such a broad category demands new parameters if critics are to engage meaningfully with its constituents. In what follows, I want to suggest that one such parameter, Global Health, when presented axiomatically and non-exhaustively, might intersect with concerns about the hegemony of the Global Anglophone. Global Health, like the Global Anglophone, seeks to understand its object, health, as "enmeshed in a complex system of individual behaviours, family and community relationships, environmental surroundings, economic limitations, and structural injustices." 2 Global Health concerns have always framed moods in Global Anglophone novels, but it is only recently that critics have begun to think about what the resources of World, Global or Postcolonial Literary Studies (however one might define these fraught and overlapping epistemes) and Global Public Health might reciprocally offer one another, to "help us better understand how discourse on health is transmitted across cultures."3 This notional understanding does suggest an approach or attitude we might adopt when reading and responding to the Global Anglophone, thought maximally, but it is not unproblematic. For this contribution to the broader debate on form and the Global Anglophone, I want to discuss a tension that emerges when Health and Anglophone literature intersect in the Global, and how this contributes to the creation of moods or atmospheres of health in Global Anglophone Novels.

Specifically, I want to focus on what Alvan A. Ikoku calls "the limited universal" of Global and Public Health discourse as a stepping stone to addressing mood as a formal literary device. Responding to a corpus of malaria literature from colonial Kenya, Ikoku takes "the limited universal" to be a narrative voice that attenuates its "universal" epidemiological claims by directly addressing a select, white readership: "a voice often used epidemiologically, to express concern over an encroaching disease, but a voice also used literarily, to imaginatively locate home within a foreign and malarious space." 4 Ikoku uses exemplary postcolonial analyses of the colonial gaze in Karen Blixen's Out of Africa (1937) to establish a paradigm for the limited universal. Blixen's memoir recalls her place in the colonial history of the British in Kenya. It begins: "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet." 5  In his review of the critical responses to the work, this passage in particular, Ikoku observes that while its colonial gaze is often discussed with great nuance, its clinical gaze is, by and large, ignored. Ikoku thus proposes to read Out of Africa

with an awareness of its founding in a specified provision of land and environs: a set of geographic and ecological privileges that not only sustained a farmer's existence, but produced a farming life for which a literary memoir could later be dedicated, a period of labor retold as a primarily aesthetic account of the past, even as the conditions for remembrance were not fully imaginable outside the rhetoric of colonial health. It is therefore important for us to understand Out of Africa as an instance of literary form constituted by and constitutive of modern medical discourse on Kenya. 6

Colonial public health practices enable Blixen to live on her farm, and, eventually, to write a memoir of the experience, which, in turn, contains a latent acknowledgement of these practices. Nowhere is this more apparent, Ikoku notes, than the air, implicitly positioned in opposition to the mala aria ('bad air') then still thought to be the breeding place of malaria-carrying mosquitos. Blixen writes: "The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. . . . Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be." 7 Ikoku responds: "[Blixen] reassembles the very location of her farm via recourse to topographical idiom [...] that describes not just an aesthetically framed site for plantation labor, but a colonial structure that situated her home in the "high air" of the Ngong Hills—at a distance from the mala aria of surrounding regions known to be epidemic if not endemic for the disease." 8 Ikoku's argument gestures to a formal problem embedded in Global Health discourses, imagined as an objective form of understanding, unmediated by prejudice, structural inequality and epistemic injustice. I want to argue that Global Anglophone Novels address this problem, more or less reflexively, as a matter of mood or atmosphere.

To draw this out further, I turn to Arundhati Roy's reflexive response to Global Health in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). The architect and sometime central consciousness, S. Tilottama Ipe, hears of three men crushed to death by a runaway truck.9 The men were sleeping next to a highway where they were taking refuge against dengue fever, the diesel fumes from passing cars acting as a mosquito repellent. Tilo imagines the men, stone-workers, as they settle for the night, talking and smoking beedies. She enumerates the things they might have died from "if they hadn't died of truck": "a) Dengue fever; b) The heat; c) Beedie smoke; or d) Stone-dust." "Or maybe not", she continues, "Maybe they would have risen to become: a) Millionaires; b) Supermodels; or c) Bureau chiefs. Did it matter that they were mashed into the grass they slept on? To whom did it matter? Did those to whom it mattered matter?"10 Tilo's enumerations close down the options through which the men might potentially express their lives differently. The freak accident of their death "of truck" is set against a context where death by more epidemiologically grounded causes—fever, heat, smoke or stone-dust—is far from accidental. Works like Roy's Ministry invoke epidemiological risk to create an atmosphere, wherein the accidental death "of truck" flattens out against conditions of generalized risk for the impoverished and the precarious. The moment's irony relies on a tension between the accidental and the inevitable. The distinction only matters if the men, themselves and those to whom they matter, matter. But the abrupt, eventual nature of the accident is precisely what brings into focus the more longitudinal epidemiological risks the men face.  The irony that the three men are killed "by truck" rests upon, rather than refuting, the latent respiratory conditions they face. In this, they form part of a risk pattern that transects the divide between the Global North and Global South. Tilo's mother dies of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), some years—and three pages—before the three stone-workers. COPD, in the developed world, is commonly, but not exclusively, caused by smoking. Parallels between the episodes anticipate the dangers of Beedie smoke or exhaust fumes or stone-dust, in other words, atmospheric causes of respiratory impairment that affect the lungs whether the persons matter or not. The truck, then, simply forestalls other, more lengthy, chronic illnesses. As if to hammer home the actuarial logics of relative risk forced upon the victims of global capitalism, the stone-workers choose where to sleep alongside the highway by "calibrating the optimum density of exhaust fumes and dividing it by the acceptable density of mosquitoes. Precise algebra; not easily found in text books." 11 Roy's "precise algebra" parodies Ikoku's "limited universal," by having her literary voice draw on the language of Global Health.12 The resulting irony emerges from juxtaposing "universal" health claims with the concrete concerns of social and environmental justice.

The workers in Roy's Ministry, also trying to avoid mosquito borne illness, create a very different home to Karen Blixen's in a very different kind of mosquito-free air. So, if the concern with mala aria might bring together heterogeneous texts like Blixen's and Roy's in new configurations of the Global Anglophone, the contingency of their different contexts also puts the "limited universalism" of health discourses under some scrutiny. But Roy's work is clearly more concerned with how one incorporates the disavowed self-interest of beneficiaries of the bad-air world-system. Thinking about stone-dust, Tilo wonders "how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated [...] two lung-shaped slabs of stone remained behind, unburned." 13 Tilo wishes to un-know those "certain specific things" that she knows but wishes she didn't. Roy, on the other hand, wants her readers to know these things, which is why she describes, in graphic detail, what happens to silicotic lungs. She also recognizes the readers' reluctance to know these things, and their desire to "un-know" them, after the fact. So, even as she focuses on the conditions of the lungs, she merely alludes to the occupational cause as the men settle for the night, "their eyelashes and lungs pale with stone-dust from cutting stone and laying floors in the multi-storey shopping centres and housing estates." 14 The connection between the lungs, "pale with stone-dust", and a larger system of capital, "multi-storey shopping centres", of which Tilo, and Roy's readers, are beneficiaries, remains latent.15  Roy's "floors" remain present but indeterminate in the passage, leaving it to the reader to discern links between her immediate concern for the workers and the text's mood of late capitalist expendability. The Global Anglophone uses the universal claims of Global Health to create moods or atmospheres, while showing these claims to be limited, contextual and contingent. If Global Health research demonstrates how the indifferent environments of the novel are animated by health concerns, it is the reciprocal responsibility of the Global Anglophone to address the limited universalism of such concerns, a limitation structured as much on the desire of beneficiaries to "un-know" their consequences as on the "precise algebra" these consequences demand of their victims.

Arthur Rose is a Vice Chancellor's Fellow in English at the University of Bristol. His publications include Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee, Theories of History (coedited with Michael J. Kelly) and Reading Breath in Literature (coedited with Heine, Tsentourou, Garratt and Saunders).

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