I HAVE JUST FINISHED TEACHING A CLASS ON O.S. CRIME FICTION. A few weeks ago we read Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and then we watched the film john Huston made on the novel, with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. The film curiously makes no reference to one of the most famous passages in the book, which is when Sam Spade tells the devious but lovable Ms O'Shaugnessy the story of the man called Hitcraft. Flitcraft is the fellow who, in the middle of "a clean orderly sane responsible affair" (64) of a life, has a freaky near-death experience that makes him confront his own mortality, and decide that, given the fact that we live in a universe that embodies death as its real, a universe of blind chance and freak events, a universe of unreason, the more attuned to reasonable life we seem to be, the more out of step with life we really are. The more in step with life the out of step; the more reasonable our life, the more unreasonable it is Poor Flitcraft abandons everything, his life, his loyalties, his family, his job, his money, moves to another city, and starts a new life, only to find himself a few years later having essentially reproduced his previous life. How much of current thought in postcolonial studies mimics Flitcraft's impossible attempt to escape his own shadow? Flitcraft's attempt to decolonize his life, to rid it of everything that men at one point to be clean, orderly, sane, and responsible, ends n failure, because he restitutes a subjectivity that cannot but fall into the apparent cleanliness, orderliness, sanity, and responsibility that can only produce themselves as such at the cost of a fundamental omission: the omission of the real, as the essential out-of-stepness of history itself. There can be no restitution. The thought of infinite restitution is merely delusional, when not sheer ideology. It is perhaps time to give up what Dipesh Chakrabarty a few years ago called "good history" (92-98). If infinite colonization cannot in any case be avoided, as Flitcraft rather comically discovers, should we not at least refuse to be colonized by the pretense of its opposite? Have we forgotten what we must mean when we say "decolonization"? The failure to think of the limits of decolonization is colonization itself.
