Language of a Mad Hatter

Of all the literature that we have whole heartedly consumed this semester, I believe this particular piece emphasizes the language of colonization more perhaps than any other of the works we have digested. The books we have covered have all had a similar theme of hybridity in characterization, as most of our protagonists have found themselves caught between two worlds and struggling to grasp onto an identity. In Hatterr, we find a character in a similar situation but now the hybridity has manifested itself stylistically in our protagonist’s strange and curious diction. The faux-pidgin superfluous pseudo Victorian (yall like that, yeah I made that up) speech employed by our mad hatter is conceivably a direct representation of this hybridization. In societies where colonial oppression supplants indigenous culture and in the case of India, where the colonizer has set up English as a means to social mobility, it would seem acceptable that our perhaps not so educated protagonist would pick up these English words and idioms as a way to foray into the upper stratospheres of society. If Hatterr, like Gandhi, places emphasis on ‘experience’ , then this lay accumulation of seemingly exaggeratedly and false ‘educational’ speech would serve this con artist in a dual sense. Though the words are of an educated nature, his application and usage of this knowledge oft comes in a ‘real life’ setting. I place real life in quotations because obviously the fancifulness of his misadventures is meant as allegory and metaphor and not meant to be taken literally, but this book is not about a scholar who studied away in the hallowed halls of the Etons, or Shattuck St. Mary’s of our world, but the focus is rather on his accumulation of experiences and how they shape his world view around him. I like Hatterr, I think Desani does good by playing with the syntax and diction, and the cacophony of intellectual vomit pouring forth from H. Hatterrs mouth is quite amusing and correspondingly poignant given the trope of the piece.