On India

An attempt at an idea-starter:

One of the most thoughtful writers I've ever had the pleasure of reading, Ashis Nandy, once wrote: "All representations of India are ultimately autobiographical."

What do you make of this line? Can places which are faraway and "different" ever get represented without implicating yourself? What does this mean for you, then, when you travel -- or even when you encounter a person from somewhere unfamiliar to you? How does this translate into your reading of books like Passage to India?

And, of course, you could take this idea in any of the directions we raised in class so far...

AK

Just an online article on E. M. Forster

E.M. Forster, Middle Manager

If anybody is interested, an article about E. M. Forster as a personality and writer.

Still, like all notable English novelists, he was a tricky bugger. He made a faith of personal sincerity and a career of disingenuousness. He was an Edwardian among Modernists, and yet—in matters of pacifism, class, education, and race—a progressive among conservatives. Suburban and parochial, his vistas stretched far into the East. A passionate defender of "Love, the beloved republic," he nevertheless persisted in keeping his own loves secret, long after the laws that had prohibited honesty were gone. Between the bold and the tame, the brave and the cowardly, the engaged and the complacent, Forster walked the middling line.

(Western) art and its relation to modernism pose a problematic situation in that, on one hand, “art has come to function as the defining point of cultural achievement and civilization…clearly distinct from the danger and defilement represented by the Other…”; on the other hand, modernism challenges this thesis because it would seem to “posit the Other not as a threat but as a source of new energies” (Gikandi 458). At the same time, modernism creates a kind of surveillance, “routine maintenance”, on the type of art that can be allowed, and on the overall effects of the Other. The African can only be allowed as “the citadel of modernism”, if the object has been separated from the body. This idea of cleansing and purifying the Other seems to defy the very purpose of artists seeking the unknown for new sources, to awaken consciousness within people.

In addition, I would agree with Gikandi that it was merely the idea of primitivism that appealed to Picasso, for an idea can be interpreted and rationalized. But the African bodies and cultures posed a far greater danger, not only because they could “contaminate”, (Levine mentions how Britons were afraid to ‘go native’, and would send their children back to Britain to root out local culture), but also because they were “incomprehensible” (as Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness) – the Other could not be adequately represented and defined. Furthermore, the Other could possibly reflect a darker and unknown side of the colonizer, and this could threaten his very state of being.

In that sense, the relation between modernism and the Other, wavers between trying to represent consciousness and a deep-seated anxiety of the Other, between the African as an object of art divorced from its culture and the African as a living body. Even the very notion of “representing consciousness” is questionable. It’s as if modernism tries to delve into the Other, yet unable to do so, gives its audience its own version of the African. Yet, how can it still be called modern, if rather then test new grounds and find new ways of representing consciouness, there remains a need to survey and cleanse the Other, one key source of reference? Can Picasso’s art still be considered “modern”? And what is “modernism”? – if the term (1) seems to be indicate a rather Eurocentric view, which effectively eliminates the Other; (2) seems to suppress what it tries to express (that of "consciousness").

My random thoughts...

While Auerbach acknowledges that “it is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth”, Auerbach states that we are moving towards “an economic and cultural leveling process”. Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems to me that Auerbach is visioning a unified weltanschauung through “unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people.” I find this an interesting thought yet at the same time, problematic. If we refer to Levine’s ‘Ruling An Empire’, converts were given Christian names and had to give up their identities and local customs in order to assimilate into the colonizer’s culture and language was an integral tool used by missionaries to ‘educate’ and promote western values. If we consider that the language of a people reflects the weltanschauung of that people in the form of their linguistic structures and nuances, the fact that we are reading these texts in the English language which is not the native language of most colonized countries, poses a problem. We all perceive things differently, even in the everyday trivialities (eg. the multifarious views of Mrs Ramsay through the eyes of different people), how much more so in different cultures with vastly different languages? Therefore, is “cultural leveling” really possible? Is Auerbach’s visioning of “unification and simplification” perhaps too simplistic and optimistic?

From what I gather in Gikandi’s article, the ethnic Other serves as a “source of new energies” and understanding the Other goes as far as it benefits Western civilization. There never was the intention of the West assimilating with the ‘savage’. Levine’s article reminds us of the reality of violence associated with imperialism especially helpful while reading Heart Of Darkness. However, what is the connection between Modernism and Empire? Are we brushing aside the violence that came with the African artifacts when the art is taken without the remembrance and understanding of its culture? The representation of reality it seems to me, is still rather one-sided where the Other is selectively brought to the fore when it is convenient in the case of Picasso’s African influences without interest in the people.

Sorry this is really sketchy as they are just random thought processes.

Modernism's Mirror

I'd like to use the following quote from the Auerbach reading as a springboard for the rest of this post:

"The writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished; almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae." (534)

The motif of reflection/mirroring seems particularly pertinent to the issues raised by Auerbach and Gikandi: firstly in how mirroring as a means of constructing the self appears to be a trait (or product?) of modernism. I say this based not only on Woolf’s technique of using the random external event to reflect the inner self (538) and Gikandi’s argument of how Picasso uses the African art object to isolate the “pure” forms of Western art; Auerbach’s own method of explication - reflecting the stylistics of modernist fiction off (an)other text – bears this out as well. Of course, one can give a pat explanation for this trait: the destabilizing of the central, unitary self that accompanied the modernist movement (as Auerbach says several times) means that identity can only be asserted in relation (or reflection) to another, or an external circumstance. However, I would argue that this method of mirroring comes with its own problematic set of double standards, as it were.

It seems to me that we can read Gikandi’s argument as providing the underside to what is generally considered innovative and pathbreaking about modernism. One such feature: the external and mundane serving as a mirror/catalyst for the richer inner world. Here’s what Auerbach has to say about it:

“in Virginia Woolf’s case the exterior events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events…” (538)

Besides the striking choice of the word “hegemony” - with its connotations of power relations - here, I can’t help but see a parallel between this and Gikandi’s argument. The external, or the African/Other (bearing in mind the common technique of relegating the Other to the margin), is not considered in and of itself but in how it sheds light on the internal/central self.

At the same time, both Woolf and Auerbach both employ the technique of extrapolation: using something small (a brown stocking, a short extract from To the Lighthouse, a madeleine..sorry Proust) to derive larger conclusions. Yet how is this different from what Gikandi accuses Picasso and other Primitivists of doing – fetishizing and using a part of African culture (like the mask) as sufficient representation of the whole?

I guess it’s hard to think of such questions without bringing in value judgments – Auerbach was right when he said that this was “indicative…of certain tendencies and needs on the part of both authors and public” (546). Yet my question is: is it possible to conceive of the self without a mirror? We are used to thinking in dichotomies, I think - even the module title seems to be setting up a sort of self-other divide…but how else can we think of one without the other?

- Andrea

Us, the Other and the In Between.

In retrospect, I think i actually enjoyed perusing the readings more than I'd thought I would. They made me reflect on the "new imperialism" that began in the 1880s and that stamped its legacy on the Third World.
What I found of especial interest in Levine's "Ruling an Empire" is the anxiety over the perceived possible corruption of the Britons by the native, 'lesser' cultures which would inevitably undermine British rule. "Pocahontas" jumped into my mind at that point and refused to budge. In my study of history in secondary school and junior college I guess I'd conveniently glossed over the fact that assimilation at the height of Britain's imperial power was very much a "one-way street". It is easy to get blindsided by the colonized people's struggles. After all, jingoism was the rallying cry of the day, one that united nationalism, anti-Semitism and imperialism. I for one have always found myself focusing on the harsh sentiment voiced by Jews of the time; the harshest thing one man can tell another is that your "blood, your soul, your sensibility has no place in our community, you are and will remain different, ignoble, alien." There is variance, but there are also parallels in the colonists' cases and that fascinates me; they couldn't and didn't remain inviolate and to expect them to remain perfectly aloft was ludicrous and doomed from the onset. They had to strive for it though, because they had effectively garlanded themselves and stepped on to the pedestals of their own volition; to temper their personas would mean undermining their power and authority over the less civilized. Even Picasso was irritated by the influences the Negroes had on him even as he loved the "magical influence" of the primitive and tribal. After all, there can be a certain kind of nobility in savagery, as Levine touches on in the case of the Amerindians, or rather, I would venture to say, romanticism. Therefore, I would think that one of the concerns of this module is the margins of identity as well as the modes of identification. Because decolonization was a process rather than a simple appearance, these identification imperatives are vastly dynamic and more, even a type of recolonization.
Levine also piqued my interest further with mention of Bronte's St John Rivers, who is a favorite character of mine. She mentions the trend among converts in "adapting Christianity to a variety of colonial customs and traditions, an un-expected and, to the missionaries, mostly unwelcome outgrowth of their efforts." This confluence of identities has shaped the world as we know it today and even in contemporaneous social times, the distinction between race and religion is ambiguous. For example, there are cultural aspects of being Malay that aren't exactly endorsed by Islam and history is not so much a palimpset as a continually shifting entity.
I really like what Yuen Mei highlighted in her post. Orientalism is, for the most part, still superficial or at least, vaguely specular. And I do agree that the intimacy of savagery and the artistic sensibility is crucial in the aesthetic of modernism, as evinced by our current furious blogging. The fallout, and its multiplicities, are for us to ponder on.

Nur Khairunnisa Ismail

Picasso the Colonist

I have dubbed Picasso a colonist for three reasons (and I am sure there are more):
- Superiority (Narcissistically self supposed or otherwise)
- Objectification of the Other
- And the manipulation of the Other

Comparing Levine’s article to that of Gikandi’s I have found several similarities between the British colonial figure and Pablo Picasso. Firstly, the British saw themselves as “kinder”, “persevering, unflinching … patriotic … [and] love order and justice” (Levine 104). They saw themselves as superior in comparison to the colonized (105), and believed that the “modern world belonged ‘to the Anglo-Saxon race alone’” (104). Similarly, the notion of superiority in relation to Picasso emerges with the “routine maintenance” of modernism – the need to “separate the African’s art from his or her body … [so that] it could be cleansed of its danger” (Gikandi 456). This fear of contamination gives us the ‘clean’ white body of Picasso and the ‘filthy’ black body of the African. This idea of contamination is also reiterated by Levine’s article whereby assimilation was a “one-way street”; if any assimilation was to take place it would be the “colonized people who were expected to conform” (107).

*Interlude*
~ Expectations ~

There was nothing special about meeting Picasso. It was a meeting like many others, except that meeting Picasso was a big disappointment. It was a disappointment for stupid little things: I didn’t like how he looked; I didn’t like how he behaved (455).

And I can’t blame Aubrey Williams for feeling disappointed. I know I would be if my heroine turned out to be an “ordinary past-middle-aged” (455) woman. But what is interesting here is not so much that Picasso is “ordinary”, but that we have here an alternative – the Other’s expectation of the “master” (455). What exactly did Williams expect? A larger than life eccentric being? Did Williams place Picasso on a pedestal? Can we then blame the British for thinking they are far more superior than their colonies (Levine 114)?

*Interlude Over*

Secondly, both the British colonial figure and Picasso objectify the Other. “For many colonists the lands and the peoples of the Empire were also specimens to be listed, categorized and labeled” (Levine 114). Similarly, Picasso objectifies the African body as per his meeting with Williams – all that appeals to Picasso is Williams’s “fine African head” (Gikandi 455). The Africans and the colonized no longer serve as human beings, but mere bodies for calculation and models for art. In addition, Picasso chose “as models masks that seemed to be closer to a familiar European grammar about form and symmetry” (471), even here he selects and differentiates between what should be classified as aesthically suitable for his art.

Finally, both the colonial figure and Picasso manipulate the Other. Behind the “White Man’s Burden” farce, the growing colonies of the British fuelled their economy; it provided them with resources; and gloat points over the French and Dutch in their scramble for power and control (and pride) in Southeast Asia. Similarly, I would say Picasso colonizes African art and body and then “use[s] them to his own head” (Gikandi 468).

Question: Is the white (often male) author/writer/poet a colonizer as well in his/her endeavor to talk/discuss/document the exotic/subaltern/Other?

Angel

auerbach to the future

"There is [in modernist works] a hatred of culture and civilization, brought out by means of the subtlest stylistic devices which [its own] culture and civilization have developed, and often a radical urge to destroy" (Auerbach 551).

Towards the end of his analysis of the modernist literary technique (with detailed reference to Woolf and to a lesser degree Proust), Auerbach attempts to situate the development of such stylistics within the larger reach of contemporaneous history, but with nary a reference to colonialism or imperialism except in the setence I have quoted above. (I think of Iraq, Tibet and South Ossetia.) The violence which Auerbach accords to modernist writers is analogous to that enacted upon the colonised Other by the colonising European Selves. Except for one thing. Modernist writers inflict the violence upon its originating culture and its own perception of reality, not on other Third World backwaters.

Modernism therefore allows for the problematization of the relation to the Other by problematizing the Self. The multiplicity of voices in Woolf's 'To The Lighthouse' emphasizes alterity and difference, not homogenity - which is the goal of colonialism - as Levine has pointed out in her piece. To further synthesize Auerbach and Levine, the Empire, with all its perceived attendant threats of contamination and adulteration, served as a source of deep-seated discomfort and allowed modernist writers to deploy such fears towards the fragmentation of the identity of continental Europe as a economic force, as a cultural cradle and as a beacon for mankind.

Gikandi, who in his article points out the ironies in how modernism has itself become institutionalised when its practitioners conciously sought to work against the prevailing aesthetics that reinforced the white man's superiority, also underscores this inherent link between modernism and colonialism. The fracturing of European colonial identity is enabled by the modernist technique, characterised by the extract of Woolf’s work, which gestures towards the gap between what it can explicitly articulate and what it must finally say. This disjunctive ultimately and finally allows for a critique of the colonial enterprise.


(p.s. Am I the only one who noticed that pages 542-543 are missing from Auerbach's essay?)
Lucas Ho

looking at the brown stocking

Hello :)

I only have like two things to say about the essay by Auerbach: its idea of ‘multiple consciousness’ and its conclusion.

I guess Auerbach, in raising the question of ‘multiple consciousness’ (549) and how ‘(t)he tremendous tempo of the changes proved the more confusing because they could not be surveyed as a whole’ (549), indirectly provokes the reader to establish a connection between the Empire and impressionism in Woolf’s or general modernist writing. To me when I read this part of the essay I think of how the narrator’s omniscient knowledge before modernism is symbolic of the monarch/central governor figure which used to represent absolute authority, and as colonialism takes place, this absolute authority figure is confronted with different cultures and other authority figures in the colonies belonging to both Great Britain and other colonial powers. Take the example of Africa, the continent gets ‘crowded’ when various European powers become neighbours (think the continent being fully occupied on the map, as ‘marked with all the colours of a rainbow’, to quote Marlow in Heart of Darkness). This forces change in the form of governance in colonies because the colonial powers are now aware of and thus influenced by each other. Due to this ‘crowdedness’, one is forced to recognise and acknowledge his own view as subjective. This also relates to the structuralist idea of only seeing the world in fragments and not in entirety. This is when the empire ties in nicely with modernism—the recognition of an authentic response to a much-changed world is subjective. To the Lighthouse, according to the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia (:P), is Woolf’s attempt to examine the human experience of time, the indefinability of character, and external circumstances as they impinge on consciousness. The idea of consciousness being influenced by the experience and thus relative to time and space is to me intriguing because this unique experience in a particular point in time also lapses into another experience. It gives me the idea of experience as a spiral event motivated by random occurrences and association.

What the conclusion presents, as I see it, is a utopian vision of neo-colonialism which makes integration of differences, negotiation of exoticism and localising the exotic possible. This utopian idea of post-colonial unification alludes to a middle way in which everyone can identify because it is founded and sustained by the random occurrences in life. Cultural differences are made to seem insignificant in this middle way because it is the universality of humanity that sponsors this neo-colonialism. However, I find this vision limiting because the idea of ‘there are no longer even exotic peoples’ suggests unification of cultures, which then suggests homogeneous experience… which seems problematic because of, to put it simplistically, the asymmetrical economic development of the world and how the Third World is unlikely to catch up with the First world as demonstrated by the dependency theory.

Okay since this is a blog/forum, I should take it as an ideal environment for learning…and so it’s alright if I don’t make sense right? Heh, feel free to respond :)

The Fear of Contamination- Reading Levine and Gikandi

In reading the articles by Levine and Gikandi, the common concerns of fear of “contamination” and “anxiety of influence” struck me as interesting and worth looking into in these two articles. Levine, in her essay, delves into the attitudes of the colonisers towards the cultures of the colonised, that “It was colonized peoples who were expected to conform to British behaviors and values: movement in the other direction was considered contamination, not assimilation” (107) Interestingly, in Gikandi’s essay which was published as recently as 2003, Gikandi expresses his displeasure at modernism’s shedding of the “contaminants of the Other” (456) as it enshrines itself, canonises itself as part of Western culture. A thought that entered my mind as I read this was that, if Gikandi is right, then while the age of Western colonisation ended decades ago, the ethnocentrism of the West has persisted given its insistence on claiming modernism as purely a Western aesthetic, denying the role that their empires played that “made modernism possible” (456). Interestingly then, we, the once-colonised have not truly been released from the shackles of colonisation, as “colonialism of the mind” persists to this day with the West still insisting on and establishing its hegemony in the world of English literature.

Therefore, perhaps in our decision to take on this module and examining the canonised texts, we begin to acknowledge the role played by the colonised Other in the formation of the Modernist movement, that Gikandi claims has been dreadfully under-rated and perhaps begin to right the wrong that has been done in the process?

Sorry if this is short and rather sketchy, I’m experiencing a bad case of writer’s block this week, been thinking for hours. I'll post something much much better next week.

-Leong Hui Ran

thoughts on Gikandi's article

Reading Gikandi’s article made me think of a painting we had studied in another module, “Slaves Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying” by Turner (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/turner/slave_ship.jpg.html). With reference to this title, the subject of the painting is supposed to be of the slaves drowning in the seas. However, against the grandeur of the sea that Turner had painted, the plight of the drowning African slaves appears almost insignificant. Hence, in the pretext of drawing attention to slavery, Turner appears to foreground and emphasise something else. This has even prompted Ruskin, an English critic to say that the painting depicted “the noblest sea that Turner ever painted… the noblest certainly ever painted by man’. While valorising an English painter’s achievements, Ruskin however only relegates the subject of the painting, the drowning of African slaves, to a brief footnote in his essay, similar to how the slaves occupy an insignificant and almost unnoticeable space in the painting. Here even though it may not have been Turner’s intention to slight the issue of slavery in his painting, Ruskin’s comment shows how the Other could be depicted in an image by his colonial master merely to promote the success and achievement of this very master even at the expense of erasing the history of the slave, the Other. Perhaps, this is where aesthetics converges with politics.

I think this is similar to what is said in Gikandi’s article that “the relation between the modern and the savage was defined by a dialectic of love and loathing, identity and difference” (458) and that the African body and artwork were things that “the modernists wanted to deconstruct and yet secure as the insignia of white, European, cultural achievement” (459).

Hence, in response to one of the questions posed under our course descriptions, “How does the “non-European” world then figure into Modernist texts and images”, I think (based on the Turner painting and the article by Gikandi) that the “non-European” world can be figured in Modernist images to further delineate the slave-master binary and to further define and identify the modern European masters with notions of power and dominance. Despite putting the Other at the forefront and claiming it as a subject, the modern European masters have merely sealed their positions as the one with the power to depict and represent.

I hope I haven’t made too far-fetched a link with Turner’s painting!

-Sarah

Religion, Politics and Empire (thoughts on the Levine reading)

The British motivations for imperialist expansionism are mostly explored in political, economic and social categories. While the lines are often blurred between the three major aspects, what is perhaps more important is the legitimacy behind each claim. Levine’s article brings up several interesting points about the dynamism of British imperialist desires and operations over time, but what is striking in the article is the uneasy relationship between religion, politics and empire.

Supposed regard of “British law and governance as the finest and noblest expression of humanity”(104) meant British imperialists set their sights on expansionism in a spirit of organizing the world through their systems. The undeniable link between British civilization and religion meant that the idea of a “civilizing mission” had both political and social implications.

This appears problematic on two levels;
(i) The assumption of the inferiority of everyone who was not British became a cornerstone on which they built their empire(s).
(ii) This line of argument meant the provision of a morally affirming justification to invade and occupy foreign lands, begs the reader and/or observer to question the extent of truth behind the motivation of the civilizing mission

The inconsistency in theory and practice manifested through ‘disorderly white communities in the outback making “claims of empire as a civilizing mission fragile” (108). This disenchantment of the civilizing mission, that ‘duty of imperialism to take civilization to lesser peoples’ (105) degenerated at times into “devastation wreaked on local populations”(109). What perplexes the situation further, is that while the ‘Evangelicals fervently believed in the civilizing propensities of Christianization” (114),which should have fit perfectly with the ‘noble’ British imperial desires, they were suspect of impeding imperialist operations (and the way of life) with their “anti-slavery protests”(119) and open criticism “of colonial practice” (119). This then seems like the civilizing mission argument, in reality, amounted to little more than a flimsy, convenient label of social and political aspirations to conquer resource rich parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The relation between politics and empire then becomes slightly more complex. While there was undeniable political agenda in imperialist desires to control land, population and resource, the very politics in expressing and representing the desires for, aspirations to and motivations of the expansion of the British Empire involved the emphasis of social aspirations deemed moral (and noble) over economic ones. While there was no doubt intent and an initial effort to ‘civilize’ through missionary posts, education and setting up of infrastructure, one might also use Levine’s article as a platform to explore the effectiveness of their efforts and the possibility that the civilizing mission was meant to aid the ease of imperial operations for the British to continue their economic exploits in their colonies.

Modernism and the Colonized Other

After going through all the readings, and briefly going through what has already been posted, I'm struck by just how far Modernism as an aesthetic movement seems to be affected by the Other, especially the colonized Other.

Gikandi's analysis of Picasso's relation to African art as well as classicism reminds me of that archtypal Modernist work, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Intertextual references to classical works abound here, as well as an explicit reference to Sanskrit and ancient Indian work in the final section of the poem. Does Eliot gloss over his debt to the Indian 'Other', as Gikandi alleges Picasso did? In a piece of writing, and especially with a borrowing from another language, such would be difficult, and in the later footnote to The Waste Land Eliot does acknowledge his borrowings from Sanskrit. But then again, at that time Sanskrit was seen as the root of the 'Indo-European' class of languages - in other words, his borrowings from its literature can be framed as simply a borrowing from a previously overlooked branch of European civilisation, notwithstanding the entire sweep of Indian history and culture which was to come after. Either way, Eliot's use of his classical and Sanskrit sources (among others) serve a similar function to Picasso's use of classicism and nativism. Referring back to Gikandi's essay, early on he paraphrases (458) Eliot as saying that "one could no longer understand culture without knowing 'something about the medicine man and his works'"; Gikandi points out, however, that the primitive serves only as a conduit to understand 'civilization', and not an endpoint in itself. We look at the Other in order to gain a better picture of the Self, but we ultimately keep out distance from the Other. Such it is with Eliot, and such it is, as Gikandi subsequently shows, with Picasso. One wonders whether the learning of Sanskrit and its assorted works was accompanied by the same sort of violence that brought the African masks to Europe where they could capture Picasso's attention.

Levine's essay on the British Empire provides a more than adequate backdrop to this ambivalent relationship between the European (or in this case British) self and the (in this case colonized) Other. We find that the British were concerned with keeping the 'purity' of their race and culture - no wonder then that Modernist art seems loath to acknowledge its debt to its African Other. Levine also notes that 'the needs of the colonized remained ... subservient to those of Britain' (116); in a similar fashion modernists like Picasso and Eliot used the Other in their works only as it suited them. Here modernity enters the picture, as elements of the Industrial Revolution spread throughout the colonies as a purported 'neutral' elements, but with of course a Western origin. As Levine notes, in the 'celebration of a technology-driven western model of development' (117), the implied political message of Western superiority over other cultures was obvious.

Auerbach's essay analysing the extract from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse was not as interesting as the others, to me, but it did draw attention to one of the hallmarks of modernist writing: that of the multiple streams of consciousness. In particular, Auerbach notes how these streams are brought to bear in order to decipher a single enigma - the person of Mrs Ramsay - over the course of a single 'inconsequential' moment in time. And Auerbach concludes that 'there are no longer even exotic peoples' (552) with the use of enough 'random moments' like those that Woolf employs. The 'random moment' is 'comparatively independant of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair'; it purports to be neutral, free of ideology. This levelling that Auerbach asserts will take place as a result sits in odds with Levine's and Gikandi's essays, and I myself am not convinced that such would result. To me, the 'haziness, vague indefinability of meaning' (551) seems a better representation of the extract chosen, and of the modernist works studied here in general; an attempt to query our Selves with unfamilar instruments, to tease out the hidden meanings within. The (colonized) Other is simply one of those instruments, and the multiple streams of consciousness another.

- Yingzhao

The Schemata that is My Stigmata

Chapter 7 of Levine’s interpretation of the historical topic of British Imperialism Ruling an empire details Britain’s exercise of power over the colonies. The “imperial supremacy” (103) is perpetuated through colonial employment, British education and Christian evangelization. We can derive from the evidence in Levine’s work how the shifts from the capitalism of Industrial Revolution Europe to the Modern period in the early 20th century affect the colonization processes, from a largely economical, profit-driven enterprise to the export of cultural capital. The shifts in literature and art are noted by Levine:
By the late 1800s, satire as well as the realism of the nineteenth-century novel yielded in popularity to colonial romancing. By the late nineteenth century, the empire became for fiction writers, for poets, for artists, a place of adventure and secrecy, of bravery and individualism (121).
To Levine, this emerging aesthetic movement is seen as a “literary and visual form of pro-imperial propanganda coincided with political efforts to drum up imperial support and interest in the British population at large (121). Perhaps this Eurocentric preoccupation with the exotic seen in the colonies can also be examined with Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, where the best illustration in Levine’s Ruling an empire would be the fear of the dissolving barriers between the binary oppositions of Orient and Occident shown in the control of marriages between the colonizers and the colonized. The maintaining of the colonized in their category of a “lesser culture”(107) allows the colonizers to retain the mandate they had given to themselves in a moral purpose to spread imperial influence to alleviate the colonized from “alleged savagery and lack of civilization”(107).

Largely in agreement with Levine’s interpretation of the British Empire’s hegemony, Said’s Orientalism then applies in Gikandi’s Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference. While Gikandi launches into an argument showing us how to rethink the “aesthetic of modernism” and the “schemata – and stigmata – of difference that both maintains and haunts it”, Yisa’s summary in his earlier post aptly provides the words to my feelings of Gikandi’s work, that “the primitive Other, even in the course of the Modernist reevaluation of traditions and long-held beliefs and ideologies, is valued (even valorized) solely as that whose use and purpose is servitude to the Eurocentric progress of civilization”(After Gikandi). The dismembering of Williams by Picasso at their introduction to each other sounded off the alarm for the objectification of the Other, and as much as I tried to prove to myself otherwise in the remainder of the article, the further details of Picasso’s use of the African forms in his art continues exacting violence in the representation of the exotic. Gikandi claims that Picasso’s “division of bodies from artistic models” allowed the African to be “cleansed of its danger and thus be allowed into what Aaran has aptly called ‘the citadel of modernism’”(456). The forced assimilation of the form is colonization in subliminality, and if we were to take Gikandi’s point for its value, no amount of masking and abstraction techniques will mitigate Picasso’s work from his “stereotypical notions of the black’s [EXCESSIVE] sexuality”(460).

Reading Auerbach’s chapter The Brown Stocking in Mimesis, the explanation of the stream of consciousness narrative style in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse brings helpful food for thought regarding the earlier mentioned points on Orientalism and the political and economical backgrounds of colonialism and imperial racism. The widely understood necessity of our tendencies to view everything in binary oppositions is reflected in the Modernist style of the “stream of consciousness” narrative. The consciousness of the Modernist individual is presented to be existing (proverbial “I think, therefore I am”, which Descartes never actually said, but maybe implied…), by Mrs Ramsay’s thought and feelings that are springboarded by the “objects of her creative imagination”(534). It is poignant, therefore, for us to think about Auerbach’s creative imagination by the object, which in this case, is Woolf’s word in Mrs. Ramsay’s world – “The Brown Stocking”. My agitation in the process of writing about the empire in Modernism in the previous paragraphs is placated, as, or so I think, Woolf’s and Auerbach’s aim to catharsise the anxieties of the Modernist reader.

There is, for sure, a schemata, and stigmata, of difference.

my bad for busting 2 paragraphs,

Weiquan

Thoughts on Auerbach's The Brown Stocking.

I wasn't really able to understand some of the readings, and to be honest, I must admit that I got quite lost in them. But the one thing that stood out for me was Auerbach's close-reading of To the Lighthouse. It is very different from the other kinds of critical essays that one would usually find on any other literary work. Auerbach painstakingly analyzed almost every single line! The intention must have been to acutely highlight the many unconscious and silent 'slips' in Mrs Ramsey's thought process and also the inconspicuous weaving from "exterior action" to "interior thought." These are the techniques frequently used in modernism, which according to Auerbach, "puts emphasis on the random occurrence, to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself" (552). Just as "exterior events lose their hegemony" (538), do the overarching narratives of the British Empire also 'lose their hegemony' and the strata of society as a result, becomes "inextricably mingled" (552), such that "there are no longer even exotic people" (552). In other words, I think Auerbach is trying to say that modernist techniques show that the world is far from manichean, and that these techniques promote randomness, hence finding common ground and shedding light on how similar we all are. This by implication helps to coalesce the binaries of self/other, civilized/exotic.

Auerbach's essay is also interesting because the book that it is part of is titled Mimesis- The representation of Reality In Western Literature. The word representation stood out to me because I instantly recalled something I learned in another module- that it can stand for two different meanings. To represent something is to stand for something (as in to portray or to exhibit) and also to stand in for someone. Therefore, when one represents, one is not only portraying or exhibiting something, but also making a representation for someone, meaning on the behalf of that person. As a result, I can't help but wonder which 'representation' of the 20th century Auerbach is doing or both???? Moreover, Auerbach claims somewhere in his essay (I remember reading it somewhere, but I can't find it anymore) that he has chosen this extract from To The Lighthouse randomly (i truely hope I'm not imagining this!), even adding that "he who represents the course of human life, or a sequence of events extending over a prolonged period of time, and represents it from beginning to end, must prune and isolate arbitarily" (548-549).

It is here that I'm confused because when Auerbach claims (as per his title) that he is trying to compile a representation of reality in western literature- more specifically modernism (in this case, and in this chapter), I'm really wondering if he not (through this 'random' process of compiling and selecting) also ironically positing the sort of "unification and simplification" (553) that he warns off at the end?

opps. I just realize I didn't really talk about the Empire part? But I'm thinking it works in the same way? I'm not sure. Just as Auerbach's Mimesis might be a simplification of the vastness of western literature (or in this case modernism), the idea that modernity corresponds to the end of the authoritative empire and the beginning of a global market is also an over-simplification?

Stream of Consciousness

Hello all! I've picked out two rather distinctive (seemingly disjunct) points from the essays, and if you think (I hope not!) my discussion is rather flippant, unthinking and incoherent, just treat it as if it were a stream of consciousness. :)

What caught my attention in Levine's essay was her conclusion: that "shifts such as these are useful reminders of the way in which empire had different meanings in different eras..." (122). It made me think: if Singapore were part of an empire in this (post)modern age, what meaning would it undertake? My thoughts did not concretize till I read Auerbach's "The Brown Stocking"; since in that reading, there was a large focus on "multipersonal subjectivism", perception and impression, for e.g. "what people think about [Mrs Ramsay] and the impression she makes" (133) in the modern(ist) era.

Therefore, I came up with the conclusion (or rather, hypothetical thinking) that if a form of government today, or 'the empire in this present era' wants to remain in power, it should not fail to realize that there is an increasing need to sustain their power through ideology and the indoctrination of certain values. This is because violence alone (has never and) will no longer suffice, as we have seen from the Levine article -- how policing in the 19th century has begun to make "colonial resentment [...] strong" (117).

Therefore, if you take a random example, say the Singapore society or any society for that matter, it really does not matter much if the government makes blunders as long as the citizens perceive that they are safe, secure and happy. (Sorry! I can't back this up with an example here lest I offend some people in the community!) It is really easy to blur the division between reality and the representation of material happiness, which I would argue comes in the (objective) form of (the possession of) money especially if certain ideologies are at work. This blurring, I would argue, works in favour of the government, especially when facing a crisis.

So maybe I would like to pose a question to all of you: what do you think is the significance of ideology if an empire exists today?

In celebration of the random, my random ramblings...

The Auerbach reading stands out for me even now, after doing the three readings because, one, the way in which Auerbach went about presenting his case was compelling and two, he made so many salient points just by examining that one short extract by Virginia Woolf. One such point was that the representation of reality in modern texts, with its shifting consciousness, non-linear narrative, celebration of the random moments were “the first forewarnings of the approaching unification and simplification” It would be a nice way to counter the hopelessness that pervades the extract, if not generally most modern texts, wouldn’t it? What I got most vividly through Levine’s and Gikandi’s articles was the strong dichotomies that were put in place during imperialist periods- colonizer vs. colonized, self vs. other, white vs. black. Levine pointed out how imperialism was reflected in politics, economics and basically every sphere of life, including literature. So when Auerbach traced throughout the centuries the stylistic shift that resulted in shifting and multiple consciousness, though the device is hardly considered new now, and suggested that it means that “the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled” such that “there are no longer exotic people”, I think Auerbach without completely focusing on imperialism, pointed out how Modernism and Empire come hand in hand. Levine mentioned how up until the late 19^th century, novels still reflected the Anglo-Saxon mind, their beliefs and concerns so the random moments, the centrality given to the banal and the mundane in Woolf’s extract/ modern texts was the first lesson for me as how to great the shift was.

Similarly, the one point that stood out for me in Levine’s article which was basically how entangled and yet, distanced the colonizers and the colonized were with each other. Levine reminded us how no matter what they did, the Whites always ended up giving themselves a pat on the back. They either prided themselves of being the only capable of saving the non-White, non-Briton ‘savages’, their White Man’s Burden in short, or they congratulated themselves on being brave enough to venture into these uncivilized parts of the world. Yet, they fretted about living in close proximity with their colonized subjects, as if by proximity, they could catch their ‘savageness’, their ‘otherness’. In fact, Levine mentioned how “the distance between colonist and colonials was both spatial and social in most cases”. This actually, while reading, brought me back to Auerbach’s point that modern texts play with space and time and aim to step beyond that one single immediate reality and I was wondering whether this was the reason why the modern movement felt the need to move beyond that one single reality---was it their way of overcoming boundaries? So that it was no longer the reality as Whites or colonizers had known it or had created all that while? I don’t know, I might be stretching it at this point but just a thought.

One last insert, a personal pondering, before I end. Levine mentioned how missionaries gave new Christian names to their colonized converts and I thought how the identity of the colonized must have been very distorted because of imperialism. So they are taught Christian and Western values but yet, they were never fully assimilated. In Wilkie Collin's Moonstone, the Indian character in the novel, in one scene, despite possessing the Western attire and mannerisms and speaking perfect English, only aroused suspicion and fear in the other character's, Mr Bruff's, mind. In postcolonial lit, one thing I recall was how the colonized individual who had appropriated Western manners was received by his own kinsmen- with utter distaste. So it will be interesting to see how modern texts deal with this sense of fragmented sense of self.

- Shiva

Modest modernism: Auerbach and Levine

I’m afraid that there was not much I gathered from the Gikandi reading. At best, the title and some phrases managed to spark some ideas that I hoped were relevant to the demands of this module. However, I am not sure that these ideas were what Gikandi was in fact driving at. For instance, when he talks of Picasso’s ability to separate the “fine African head” from the human being (which was, to be honest, for me the most engaging bit of the reading), I started to think of Picasso as a metaphor for the general European mindset that dehumanized and objectified the racial Other in imperial times. Is it not possible that an almost ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude would have created the same dismissive and alienating environment for the object of scrutiny as did the colonial and hierarchical approach towards the Other? Picasso, in the act of remarking on Williams’s “fine African head” could also be read as fragmenting Williams into parts (head and body at least), much like how European colonizers of the nineteenth century fractured, and carved their little flags into different parts of, Africa—indeed, the latter is something Conrad depicts rather vividly in Heart of Darkness when Marlow declares that Africa was “marked with all the colours of a rainbow”.

Sticking to readings I am fairly less likely to have misinterpreted, the Auerbach article (I think) put the framework of modernism across succinctly. Its very title, “The Brown Stocking”, mirrors the privileging of “minor, unimpressive, random events” that its content follows through on. Just compare the title of each article we were supposed to have read this week and you will find that Auerbach’s is the most humble—so humble it is deceptively more like a children’s story than a literary critique. This perhaps encapsulates what I believe is Auerbach’s main point: that it is precisely the “simple and trivial...[which] are at the same time essential and significant.” Life exists in the small moments as it does in the grand ones. The demolishment of absolutes in place of ambiguous subjectivity is also another feature of this very modest aesthetic movement—I like the fact that these authors (like Woolf) refrain from offering anything more than a “doubtful” humble opinion. Perhaps, this ‘humility’ can be seen as a natural progression from a realisation that the absolute, hard-handed and self-superior attitudes that were adopted under the regime of British empire were obsolete. The impulse to impose binaristic categorizations on the racial Other by the colonizers illustrate the kind of power imbalance and authoritative position that Woolf and other modernists want to avoid.

While Levine does not so much talk about modernism as she does empire, she does give us an overview of the kind of history that made the fertile aesthetic period of modernism possible, allowing me to make a valiant attempt at linking the two. I find the idea of hypocrisy very pronounced whenever I look at the British empire. Notions like the white man’s burden, the moralizing mission, the missionary mission for that matter, or the civilizing mission all reveal (on hindsight of course) the duality of the motivations behind the colonial conquests. Levine also tells us that colonialism was “clearly more a pragmatic than a moral stance, less concerned with Britain’s duties than with its political and economic success”. Furthermore, I gather that the tendency to regard the colonized as (in Levin’s words) “lesser peoples” and themselves as “the finest and noblest expression of humanity” speaks more of British self-importance and pride than it does of compassion and goodwill. Perhaps then modernist writers resist definition and embrace ambivalence in recognition of the ultimate inability to pin down an enduring sense of the way things are. If a person’s every intention or motivation is nuanced, then foregrounding one nuance of that motivation wholly over another is akin to creating an inaccurate representation of that motivation, and in being incomplete, it becomes dishonest. It is no wonder then that Auerbach lists a “haziness, vague indefinability of meaning” to be a quality of modernist texts. The multiple layers of Mrs Ramsey’s consciousness suggest a plurality of thought but never highlights one thought as being more significant than another. Some of her thoughts gain significance because the reader accrues to it more attention and wonder than others—for instance, the mystery of her past and why she looks sad—even while that point is not something the narrative accentuates in any particular manner. The fact that we get no answers reinforces the narrative’s desire to remain ambivalent and impartial by not pandering to the reader’s added interest in that single moment.

Modernism AND Empire

Not forgetting the context of the module, that Modernism and Empire are linked, I read "Brown Stocking" with regard to the multiplicity of perspectives that the Other, not the woman but the empire, can offer. Modernist techniques, Auerbach claims, allows the writer to approach the empire "from many sides as closely as human possibilities of perception and expression can succeed in doing" (536).

Lynette wrote

"how then can modernist explorations of thought be equally representative of all ways of life?"

I approached this question in the following way: If one substitutes the subjects of the essay from a) Mrs. Ramsay, the trip to the light house and Lily Briscoe's work with b) the British Empire (and I do not know if this is oversimplifying the essay for my purposes), it is possible to argue that the latter, like the former can only be partially known. The complexity of the empire will inevitably "remain unexpressed, enigmatic, only dimly to be conjectured" (551). Through an interest in the daily life, minute details and thought processes, the modernist techniques underline the innate commonalities in mankind such that "there are no longer even exotic peoples" (552). In this sense, I think what Auerbach claims is that modernist techniques may be said to be able to present the exotic empire not as a mere exterior Other, but an extension of the common interior of humanity.

- Christine

Temporal Structure of a Modernist Scene

Auerbach in "The Brown Stocking" addresses Woolf's modernist treatment of the stocking scene in To the Lighthouse, noting in it first of all, the treatment of its temporal structure. Auerbach asserts that there are two temporal "continuities" or lines of thought which occur simultaneously--the exterior measuring of the stocking and Mrs. Ramsay's interior monologue and reminiscing, prompted by her exterior actions. As he puts it, "This entire insignificant occurrence is constantly interspersed with other elements which, although they do not interrupt its progress, take up far more time in the narration than the whole scene can possibly have lasted." (529) He notes that the "time and narration takes is not devoted to the occurrence itself...but to interludes." (537) Indeed, the scene is spaced out not by the exterior action of measuring the stocking, but is planned around the existence of these very interludes of Mrs. Ramsay's. The interludes then catalyse and forward the dramatic action and significance of the scene (if it can be called dramatic) and the mundane is structured around them instead of the opposite. Rather than action framing thoughts, thought frames and controls the action. (We see this when Mrs. Ramsay becomes irritated at a recollection of a Swiss girl praising the scenery of her hometown where her father was dying, and snaps at James.) Or rather, thought and action work symbiotically, as is more like real life.

This technique clearly foregrounds the existence of the consciousness and its interior monologues against the physicality of everyday actions, taking into consideration the amount of time and space dedicated to Mrs. Ramsay's thoughts as opposed to her actions. The opening quote Auerbach includes before his essays (I wonder if anyone else noticed this?) is the opening line to Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": "Had we but world enough and time..." The poem's speaker (for those who haven't done EN3??? Romanticism!) tries to seduce his lover by convincing her that if a suspension of time were possible, he would spend every moment of eternity worshipping her, but since it is not, he ends with the 'carpe diem' call-to-action of her reciprocating his affections while they are still youthful. This speaks clearly to me of a parallel "freezing of time" in the literary text except with Woolf, it is not impossible but a daily occurrence wherein "the road taken by consciousness is sometimes traversed far more quickly than language is able to render it" (ibid). With exterior time "frozen" while interior time runs its course in the scene, Woolf manages to both divide and link the scene with two different threads of thought/action. To go a little further with this, time has become one of the inconquerable governing concepts which modernists seek to break down and subvert. I suppose this likens modernists with colonialists, by virtue of the fact that both seek to conquer what previously seemed inconquerable.

-- Charlene

After Gikandi

The main thrust of Gikandi’s arguments can perhaps be summarized as such: the primitive Other, even in the course of the Modernist reevaluation of traditions and long-held beliefs and ideologies, is valued (even valorized) solely as that whose use and purpose is servitude to the Eurocentric progress of civilization. Hence the disinterest that Gikandi claims of Picasso, one of the leading painters of the Modernist movement, in lived African culture as opposed to the African culture gleamed and examined as from behind the glass wall of an alienist’s profession or that of a specimen collector’s laboratory. Gikandi implodes the unhappy encounter between Picasso and Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams, and finds in it an implication that could perhaps scandalize the entire movement of modernism:

The practitioners of modernism had themselves started the process of containment, that they needed the primitive in order to carry out their representational revolution, but that once this task had been accomplished, the Other needed to be evacuated from the scene of the modern so that it could enter the institutions of high art. (457)

For Gikandi, it would seem, what matters is not whether Picasso’s art is impelled by a methodology; what matters is the degree of soundness that constitutes the basis for that methodology and its praxis. Gikandi writes of Picasso’s early paintings, that:

the African’s body, in its disproportional form and primitive sexuality, would allow Picasso to kill two birds with one stone, both classicism(which favored idealized bodies) and modern culture (which was coy about male sexuality). Consequently, in this early phase of his career, Picasso adopted African forms as a way of thinking through the limitations of the forms of representation favored by the art academy, namely a sense of order, proportionality, and idealization. The African body formed the embodiment of disorder. (462)

Thus, the irony behind that which can be gathered of Modernist movement’s underlying philosophy, through the use (by Gikandi) of Picasso as exempler of the quintessential Modernist, is that while the civilized, and invariably European, world becomes disenchanted with its ancient values and customs, and hungers for new modes of apprehending existence, its method of achieving progress should remain - whether it be outrightly admitted or not - so shamefully barbaric, or primitive.

(Other) Modernism(s): Auberbach and Gikandi Reading the Movement

Erich Auerbach’s famous last chapter, “The Brown Stocking” in Mimesis, his magisterial survey of Western realism, points to several key elements in Woolfian aesthetics, and indeed, Modernist aesthetics as a whole. W.B. Yeats had already sounded the profound epistemological and ideological uncertainty that was to pervade the mood of so much Modernist artistic works in his poem “The Second Coming” when he notes that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”; likewise T.S. Eliot in his High Modernist poem “The Waste Land” speaks of the “fragments” that although are irredeemably shattered and incommensurable, form his only bulwark against coming dissolution and annihilation. Auerbach thus speaks of the marked disappearance of the traditional “author, with his knowledge of an objective truth” (535-6) and his “position as the final and governing authority” (536), towards a literary stylistic in Woolf’s text that attempts to “approach [reality] from many sides as closely as human possibilities of perception and expression can succeed in doing” (536). Herein lies the important realization (for the Modernists) that reality had become too complex to accurately render from any one objective and omniscient viewpoint. Adumbrating post-modernity’s disillusionment of any grand narrative, modernist aesthetics tended, as Auerbach points out, towards an “increasing predilection for ruthlessly subjectivistic perspectives” (551). The emphasis then falls on the random, mundane and quotidian event in “the momentary present” (541) and what it releases in the individual consciousness that is presented in process, or as a stream. Indeed, it is probably of no small significance that the philosophical movement that we know as phenomenology emerged during the Modernist period, the former attempting to philosophically give shape as to how consciousness meaningfully intends, or gives shape to its experiences. This peculiar interiority, verging at times on solipsism in modernist writing, thus attempted to give voice to what Woolf elsewhere terms as “the dark places of psychology”.

It is however, precisely the reading of the primitive as representing these “dark places of psychology” in relation to a “pure” modernist aesthetic and ideology that is contested in Gikandi’s article. By simultaneously acknowledging, yet relegating the formative place of the African, or the cultural Other, to “the subliminal and subconscious or unconscious” (469), a process of violence is inflicted, whereby the Other is abjected and “purif[ied]” (471) as part of modernism’s “economy” (471). Modernist ideology and rhetoric then interpellates reading and criticism through a perpetuation of itself in a stable and symmetrical representational dichotomy of Self-Other without directly confronting and “understanding the Other” (458) as an entity that is precisely irreducible to the “simple opposite” of the Western Self. Gikandi reads this movement in terms of Harold Bloom’s much celebrated notion of the “anxiety of influence” (458) that relegates and discards the embodied and historical African subject in favour of an aesthetic sublimation towards artistic forms and conventions that serves modernism’s project as such. Picasso’s tenuous relationship with his African artistic models must then, as Gikandi suggests, be re-negotiated through “seeing the modern artist’s from the Other’s angle of vision” (475). Such a critique must undoubtedly be self-reflexive, as Gikandi’s text itself shows: by using modernist vocabulary such as “epiphanic” (455) and concepts such as the “unconscious” (469) to advance his points, he gestures towards a critical paradigm that exceeds these terms of reference, in its encounter with artistic and cultural alterity.

Ian

Self and the Other

Hello!

Like Chitra, I also preferred Auerbach’s reading to the other two, and I particularly enjoyed the way he teased out the various stylistic trends in Modernist writing - attention to consciousness, the seeming lack of authorial omniscience and the more fluid/fragmented treatment of time – all from a mere short passage from Woolf’s Lighthouse! However, I noticed something happening in my sub-consciousness as I was reading “The Brown Stocking” (I wonder if it happened with our classmates as well?). As Auerbach expanded on the different stylistic tools Woolf had adopted in order to explain the characteristics of Modernist writing, I found myself comparing each tool with pre-Modern writing, for instance, Victorian novels. In other words, in order to better grasp what Auerbach said Modernist writing was, I imagined Victorian writing as its direct opposite; as its Other.

This rang a bell for me later when I read Levine’s essay, especially where she says “the immense sense of difference and alienness experienced by Britons living abroad in other cultures is something many memoirs of imperial service mention” (107). She writes of how the colonizers look down upon the colonized as barbarians, savages, superstitious and uncivilized, as though they were “children in need of saving from their own ignorance and moral poverty” (120). The colonizers could define themselves as superior selves because they were not their native Others; they could congratulate themselves on being technologically, morally and intellectually more advanced when they compared themselves to their subjects’ lives. This theme of defining Self against the Other came up once again in Gikandi’s essay, where he highlights how, ironically, Picasso’s selfish and insensitive fascination for the Other, “fine African head…became a catalyst for modern art” (456).

For the Britons, separating themselves from their subjects in a selfish hierarchy might have been the only way they could register their sense of superiority and supremacy. Much has been written on how Modernism arose as a social reaction, perhaps deliberately separating itself from its preceding Other is what gives Modernist writing its unique stylistic characteristic. After Gikandi’s discussion of Picasso, this Self-Other dialectic really seems to pervade much; from the way people write, to art, and I suspect it reaches even to the way we order our own lives.

I like the way Auerbach reflected: “For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self. We are constantly endeavouring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, the present, and the future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live; with the result that our lives appear in our own conception as total entities” (549).

Ramblings on language, culture and the Other

With reference to what Kelly wrote,

If we take this to be true, the forced imposition of the English language over Irish is indeed a violence done to Ireland. This means the eventual 'carr[ying over of English] culture', and therefore English 'values', into Ireland- a quiet and insidious technique that enables the empire to expand and survive.

I think forcing the Irish to adopt the English language is definitely a form of violence done to the Irish. Languages certainly reflect our own cultures and values, and have the power to reveal where we come from. By adopting the English language, colonies risk losing touch not only with their mother tongues, but also their very own cultures and what has traditionally set them apart. The power the British held was English – in forcing us to learn the language, we will certainly start identifying with the English culture and their value systems and before we know it, exchanged our culture for theirs. How many countries today aspire to be as modernized as the English or the Americans? Singapore is a good example: how many of us speak Malay, our national language, or are proficient in our mother tongue? In an argument with my aunt, she commented that Singaporeans have lost their roots because most of us speak English, identify English as our national language and are more Western than Eastern. More recently, I was ‘scolded’ by a PRC because I wasn’t proficient enough in Mandarin. To him, since I am a Chinese, I should be speaking Mandarin more fluently than English. At a deeper level, to him, I have become more westernized and identify less with my ‘roots’.

Looking at what Levine wrote in “Ruling an Empire” then, ‘It was colonized peoples who were expected to conform to British behaviors and values: movement in the other direction was considered contamination, not assimilation’ (107); given how Singapore has turned out today, the fears of the British were certainly not unfounded. If the colonial masters were to adopt our cultures and our languages instead, they would eventually lose what made them British and essentially, their right to have power over us. While Picasso was interested in African subjects for his work, he had to be careful that he would not be assimilated into African culture in the process. While Europe was, and still is, fascinated with the mysterious Orient, they are only just fascinated. After all, Gikandi stated

Savagery and the artistic sensibility would intimately be connected in the aesthetic of modernism; however, it did not follow that the moderns were willing to give up civilization to become one with the savage’ (458).

In dealing with the Other, the White man’s own vested interests still had to be protected. But it kind of makes me wonder what if the colonial masters had allowed themselves to become part of the culture of the colonized? How different will the world be now? Would modernism be different from what we are studying now? In a way, I’m excited to see how the world is changing with China coming up, and the amount of people in the West actually picking up Mandarin just to keep up with the times. How much more dilution of cultures in the world will take place?

On another note, I don’t know if what I’ve just typed has any relation to what we’re doing on this course at all. My apologies if I’ve gone off-tangent, or am not making any sense at all. Ha ha.

-Lee Yuen Mei

The Brown Stocking and Empire

Initially, Auerbach’s The Brown Stocking seemed to be purely about modernism, with little or no connection to issues of empire. However, the essay ends with the claim that “in this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation” that is modernism, “we cannot see but to what an extent…the difference between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened” (552). This conclusion illuminated for me a common thread running through all three readings: the invisibility of the Other and the West’s perpetual refusal to perceive Others as unique individuals

Auerbach claims that modernism’s exploitation of interior thought foregrounds the “elementary things which our lives have in common” and erases superficial differences that divide. Because of this, “the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled; there are no longer even exotic peoples”.

To me the description of modernist writing as unprejudiced and precise begs question. Modernism arises from the traditions of Western culture and is an aesthetic movement practiced by an elite class of artists; how then can modernist explorations of thought be equally representative of all ways of life? The claim of its lack of bias, then, already points to Auerbach’s privileging of the position from which writers people like Virginia Woolf write, and it remains a bias that is invisible to him.

What then, of the claim that “there are no longer even exotic peoples”? To me, the term exotic resonates with Rubin’s description of Africa as “something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous”(Gikandi 468) ­– in other words, something unknown; and unknowable. The understanding of their innermost processes that comes with the modernist enterprise then causes the loss of this quality of exoticism because the exotic Other is now knowable; he can be understood in terms of the fundamental elements he shares with the Western writer and his representations.

Gikandi writes that Picasso had little interest in Africans as human beings and producers of culture, only as subjects of his art . Similarly, Levine describes the British as expecting the colonized people to conform to their standards of behaviour and value systems. Auerbach’s claim for the modernist enterprise, again, rests upon the assumption that the “exotics” can be understood and represented adequately in terms of the Western artist. That which outside the writer’s experience and the limits of his writing are, it seems, disregarded. The sense of the invisibility of the Other thus persists throughout modernism notwithstanding Auerbach’s claims of a movement towards unification.

-lynnette

Anxiety and Marriage

It seems that the notion of “Art for Art’s sake” cannot be applied to Picasso’s “Black period” or his modernist paintings. For in this instance, art is not a liminal space, removed from the historical context of the artist. One can argue that the idea of colonial/ white superiority can be found within the history of modernism where “the Other is considered to be part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive”. Gikandi goes on to elaborate in his essay why there seems to be this anxiety to “minimize the constitutive role of Africa in the making of modernism” (458).

This anxiety is seems to be deep-rooted to colonial anxiety of the Other. Levine’s “Ruling an Empire” states that the imperial government sought to “limit marriage between local women and colonizing men in an effort to keep colonizer and colonized separate… It was colonized peoples who were expected to conform to British behaviors and values: movement in the other direction was considered contamination, not assimilation” (107). The dialectic of purity and contamination moves beyond the social landscape and into the realm of art, with the contention of the “influence” of African art on modernism. There is even contention over the use of the word “influence”, and the redefinition of African influence with the words “affinities” (by Rubin) or “connotations” (By Bois) avoids “contaminating” modernism by reducing the “influences” to mere traces. Hence, preventing a union between the Other and the Self.

According to Gikandi, modernism’s overt admiration for the Other seems to imply that the Other is a “source of new energies” (458). I would like to suggest that another possibility for the apparent anxiety could possibly be the fear of the “end” or “used-upness” of Western art, if the West had to source for new inspirations from the East- where does that leave them? Interestingly enough, African art seems to be positioned as both the “creator” and “destroyer” of modernism in the West.

Nadia Arianna

Conrad, Auerbach, Levine

Colonial rule seems, at first, most obviously divided by nationality: France, Germany and Britain each have different 'styles' of colonialism. Marlow, in Heart of Darkness makes a remark to this effect when he considers the map of Africa with its different colours demarcating nationally different - German, French, English - colonialisms.

Levine's article reminds us that even within a particular nationality of colonisers, there are still marked divisions along class boundaries (110), and also significant differences in ideals: for example, moralists saw colonialism as bringing civilisation to the natives , while the pragmatists saw colonialism as a means to eliminate the 'waste' of resources by the non-productive native (104-106).

This is helpful in reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Marlow's ideals seem more pragmatic; Kurtz (and the white women in the novel) seem to have more morally driven ideals. This does not necessarily set them apart: Levine suggests that both stances are united by the perceived lack of civilisation in native society (106). As the narrative progresses towards the physical and psychological 'heart of darkness', these ideals are stripped away: the deeper one investigates the nature of colonialism, one no longer finds moral progress, productivity and civilisation; only an endless and meaningless (absurd?) desire to consume.

Auerbach's essay is a fascinating piece of close reading that explores the techniques in modernist writing. Among other things it suggests that the modernists had "confidence that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed". But the "random-ness" is never fully random, nor the "totality" the sum total of experience: at the very least there is still an artist/author who holds a certain version of truth and who selects and orders the experiences in the narrative.

Heart of Darkness seems to strive towards such a "total" view of the colonial phenomenon: Marlow's and Kurtz, two random figures in the larger colonial epoch, seem to stand in for the differring ideals of "all Europe" which disguise an essential "horror". But even then, as Max points out, the colonial phenomenon is only told through the consciousness of the white man (and is it possible at all to speak of the native experience through the same narrative techniques? Auerbach, by suggesting that there are no longer even exotic peoples [552] implies so).

Actually something interesting I noticed while reading Heart of Darkness and Auerbach: while Auerbach suggests that a kind of "unprejudiced" representation that erases differences between people is possible through examining the random moment, for Conrad, this seems to happen only at a "supreme moment": the claim to kinship between Marlow and his "late helmsman" occurs only at the moment of the latter's death - in my reading, a reminder to Marlow of his own mortality since its possible that the helmsman actually shielded (even if unintentionally) Marlow from the spear.

Thow Xin Wei

My thoughts on Auerbach's The Brown Stocking

I find this reading the most interesting of the three, especially the point that Auerbach makes about the fusing of interior and exterior occurances such that to understand the "real" Mrs Ramsay for example, we need this multitude of various parrallel and co-existing thoughts and consciousness of others around her. What intrigues me further is the idea that we not only have these multiple, interjecting or intersecting, shifting streams of consciousness, but we also have varied narrative voices speaking to us in the course of the novel. We have the voice that ceases to be authoratative, not possessing any objective information on the characters, and as doubtful and as hesitant as we readers may be, and whose "narration of objective facts has completely vanished"(534). Auerbach associates this voice to that which is highly lyrical, "poetic and non-real"(532). Then this voice at some instances is altered where we hear the objective speaker, where more earthly matters are spoken about.

After reading this, it ocurred to me that perhaps Woolf employed this technique very consciously so as to break down the notion of the authoratative, objective narrative voice. Gikandi speaks of the White-Other binary in Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference, where he says there is no desire or "incentive" to know the Other if not for the fact that it leads to the understanding of the civilised white self. This White self in any text could be seen as the author, or the narrative voice, while the characters dependent upon this voiceso that theymay be heard form the Other group. And in presenting a narrative voice that is so extremely volatile, shifting and doubtful, and perhaps even almost afraid to define and pin down her own characters, Woolf manages to restore some depth that seems unknowable even to the author, to her characters and thus to The Other. And as Auerbach suggests, this could be Woolf's "attitude toward the reality of the world he represents"(535)- the need to establish an equally unobjective(for the lack of a better word) authoratarian voice.

Some thoughts

In his article, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Gikandi argues that we need to rethink “the aesthetic of modernism” (457); in Picasso’s case, we need to rethink the ambivalent relationship between the artist and his African ‘objects’: on the one hand, these ‘objects’ provided the aesthetic influence(s) needed for Picasso to escape the conventions in Western art (those that emphasized order and symmetry). Yet on the other hand, while using these ‘objects’, Picasso denies the significances that they played in “the shaping of modernism” (457). So while these African ‘objects’ provided the framework that maintain modernism’s aesthetics, they are stigmatized as different, and thus disavowed from the very art that they were essential in shaping.

This “anxiety of influence” (458) within the sphere of modern art that Gikandi discusses, uncannily reminds me of the colonial anxieties that Levine talks about in her article. In both cases, anxiety is fuelled by difference: in Gikandi’s case, there is a binary opposition between the “modern and the savage...defined by a dialectic of love and loathing, identity and difference” (458, italics mine), while in Levine’s case, the binary opposition is established between the colonizer and colonized (107). In this respect, modernism is deeply complicit with colonialism because among other reasons, both were motivated primarily by the ideological impulse of “imperial supremacy” (Levine 103), which catalyzed hierarchical oppositions between the colonizers and the natives, with the term that occupies the more privileged position in the binary associated with the former. Just as the colonized were doomed as “lacking intelligence, social organization, and…civilization” (Levine 106), so too were the Africans in modern art commodified as objects, never to be fully appreciated as whole subjects.

When we turn to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (HOD), we see that the same anxiety is reproduced, exemplified strongly in the shock and horror of the White men who “remained open-mouthed a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at ‘ready’ in their hands” (49). Similar to the colonial and modern anxiety that Levine and Gikandi talk about in their articles, Conrad’s text registers the anxiety of the Self towards the Other. Again, it is the difference between the White men and the natives that is a cause for anxiety. We see the replicas of the same binary reproduced: major characters have names and speak in the text while the natives, existing mainly as flat and minor characters, are unidentified individually (they are only known as “six black men” (18), “the black fellows of our crew” (49) and “black shadows of disease and starvation” (20)) and are largely voiceless. In terms of narration, the narrative perspective is told from a white man’s point of view (Marlow). While Marlow has “a voice…and for good or evil [his] is the speech that cannot be silenced” (44), the natives seem to be doomed not to utterance but to silence; the implication of this is that we never get to hear the views of the ‘colonized’. The issue of difference returns continually to haunt the text. Marlow learns that despite the ideals of rationality, restraint and civilization that the White men were supposed to exemplify, it is the natives that possessed more self-restraint, more “inborn strength to fight hunger” (51). In contrast, the White men believed that “[a]nything – anything [could] be done in this country” (40).

Even as modernist artists felt it essential to question conventional and traditional modes of representation, like Conrad did in using multiple modes of narration (Marlow’s narration as opposed to the frame narration) in a similar manner to the multiple perspectives and collages embedded in Picasso’s Cubism, and even if such artists “questioned colonial practices” (Gikandi 476), such as Conrad did through Marlow and Picasso did through his use of African ‘objects’, they still “reproduce[d] the colonialist model” (Gikandi 476). Both Conrad and Picasso replicated the colonial model through establishing binaries in their texts/paintings that served to maintain the distance between the White men and native men.

Romona Loh

Some thoughts on Woolf after reading “The Brown Stocking” by Auerbach..

In “Modern Fiction”, Woolf writes against authors of realist Victorian novels, arguing that Bennett and Galsworthy were “materialists” who wrote of “unimportant things.” She criticized Victorian empirical realism which was preoccupied with verisimilitude in its representation of physical and material reality. Verisimilitude is a realist literary technique (evident in Defoe) frequently employed by Victorian novelists to create a sense of material corporeality by incorporating a whole host of specific details about a physical environment that gives the illusion of an objective reality. This Victorian realism was based on the belief in the individual apprehension of external reality or truth through the senses. This sense of assured knowledge of an orderly world and the coherent, rational, stable and knowable self can perhaps account for the presence of the authoritative omniscient narrator who looks on from an ahistorical and transcendental position. He sees all and knows all, presenting eternal truths about settings and characters authoritatively to readers, who are lulled into believing that they are witnessing an ostensibly “natural” unfolding of historical events. However, with the widespread social- political turmoil during the first 4 decades of the 20th century, there was a breakdown in traditional certainties which resulted in an epistemological crisis and a climate of radical skepticism and uncertainty. The scientific evolutionary theories of Darwin and the anti-religious theories of Marx challenged Christianity, scientific explanations became “harder for the layman to understand”, while the debacle of World War one exploded traditional values such as “patriotism and loyalty to authority.” The idea of a coherent, rational and unified self was also challenged by Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the repressed desires of the id and various psychological complexes. Thus, in response to the sense that the “world of the 1910 was more complex than the orderly world that had been presented to the reader in Victorian literature”, Woolf repudiated Victorian realism which emphasized exterior materialism, calling for a new focus not with the “body but with the spirit.” In her works, exterior events become subordinate to the representation of interior subjective mental consciousnesses of characters. Woolf also challenged the contrived nature of linear plotting and formulaic chronological narrative sequences in Victorian novels, arguing that “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” If “a writer could write what he chose, not what he must (based on literary convention), there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style.” Woolf called for a new form of realist fiction, which aimed at providing a mimetic psychological representation of “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” Not only does she stress the complexity of diverse thoughts, feelings and impressions that the mind experiences, she also emphasizes the literary representation of an unbroken and arbitrary flow of these thoughts, feelings, random associations, shifting and contradictory observations, memories and subconscious intuitions in a quotidian setting. Unlike Victorian novels, where the presentation of individual thoughts was calculated to motivate or anticipate external (predictable/contrived) events within the narrative scheme, exterior events in Woolf’s fiction take the backseat, serving mainly to release inner processes. In Woolf, the vitality of the inner life is contrasted with the poverty of the external life.

Auerbach also mentions the demise of the omniscient narrator in To the Lighthouse, where narrative shifts between the interior consciousnesses of multiple unidentified narrative voices occur. These diverse voices conjecture about the possible ambiguous meanings of events, or speculate about the histories, behavior and motivations of characters without certainty. This defies the traditional Godlike representations in Victorian literature that presumed human behavior and motivations to be knowable through rationalistic deductions and logical reasoning. This reminds me of Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is not a modernist text, but a postmodernist metafictional text that parodies the conventions of Victorian realism in a more hyperbolic and self-conscious manner than the modernist Woolf. The narrator postures to be an omniscient third person narrator at the outset, only to playfully subvert the realist convention of omniscient authorial intrusion. Unlike Victorian novels that employ narrator intrusions for reinforcing the illusion of realism by establishing continuity between “real” life and the fictional world, Fowles employs it to disrupt realism. The narrator erupts into the text and self-reflexively proclaims himself as the inventor of the story he is narrating. He alerts the reader to the text’s status as constructed fiction by stating that “the story I have told is all my imagination”, where the “characters I create never existed outside my own mind.” The suspension of disbelief is further disrupted when the narrator enters into a self-conscious discourse about the processes involved in the text’s creation, anticipating and subverting the reader’s expectations of conventional realist Victorian narrative strategies:

“Who is (the character) Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? I do not know. […] If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ mind and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and the voice of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God”

By claiming ignorance about the true nature of the character Sarah, the narrator deflates the authority of omniscience that he has assumed for the past 12 chapters. The reader is made aware that previous insights into Sarah’s nature are not absolute truths, or even incomplete truths, but fabrications that resulted from the narrator’s imitation of Victorian convention. Thus, realism and epistemological certainty are exposed to be historically-specific and ideologically-established Victorian literary conventions. In refusing to explain the true motivations behind Sarah’s behavior, the narrator introduces epistemological uncertainty and thwarts the reader’s expectations of coherent meaning and “absolute truth.” This subverts the Victorian belief in the authority of realist novels as unproblematic reflections of reality that can transmit transcendental moral truths to be held up for emulation by the reader. Thus, the epistemological uncertainty of modernism seems to have carried over to the postmodern era, albeit in a more radical and self-conscious incarnation.

Gikandi and Auerbach

Harlow

Gikandi’s Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference got me thinking about Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. The article stated that “the primitive was a conduit to understanding “civilized” man, art and poetry, not an endpoint in itself; there was no incentive to understand the Other unless it would lead to an understanding of Western civilization either in its “childhood” or moments of crisis” (458). I find this statement useful towards the reading of HOD. The story centers on imperialism and the white (“civilized”) man’s anxiety towards his interaction/similarity with the natives (the Other). Any mentioning of Africa and the Other happens at the periphery so as to fulfill the ultimate task of understanding the white man, who occupies the centre. Interestingly in HOD, the natives only appear at the margins of the river while the white men are located centrally in the river. The hired natives on the boat are positioned around Marlow, never occupying the central position/authority as he does. The article also mentioned that Picasso values Williams “merely as an object or subject of art, not as an artist, not as a body, not even as a human subject” (456). In this sense, perhaps the essentializing of Africa and Africans in HOD renders them into mere inanimate objects (no individuality)? The depiction of Africans as units of labour literally objectifies them to fulfill Conrad’s artistic expression of the slavery issue?

Auerbach’s “The Brown Stocking” was an interesting read. The explanation on how Virginia Woolf weaves the exterior occurrences and inner thought processes seamlessly through themes and images is enlightening. However, I find myself asking if there is any significance in this reading with regards to issues of the Empire, perhaps it only applies to the Modernism aspect of this module?

Cheng Wenzhang (Max)

'Ruling and Empire' and Brian Friel's "Translations"

Hi all,

This post focuses on Philippa Levine's chapter, 'Ruling and Empire'. About halfway into the chapter, having discussed how violence was a 'key feature of ruling a colony' (Levine 113), Levine goes on to say:

'Yet there was far more to the success of the Empire than the gun and the sword, or even the navy frigate. The age of empire was also an age of collecting and classifying, an age in which the very boundaries of knowledge seemed almost limitless, and the Empire played a substantial role in the intellectual confidence that bolstered these typically Western views ... For many colonists the lands and the peoples of the Empire were also specimens to be listed, categorized and labeled' (Levine 113-4).

When I read this passage, a play I had read and watched over the Summer jumped out at me- Brian Friel's "Translations" (I just got back from Ireland where I read two courses, Irish Lit and Theatre, over Summer School). First performed in 1980, the play is set in 1833, in a Gaelic-speaking town of Ireland. It examines the effect of the 19th century British Ordnance Survey of Ireland, which meant the mapping and re-naming of the whole of Ireland- towns, roads, and landmarks- from Gaelic to English.

The passage above reminded me of the play because:

1. The forced shift from Gaelic to English is portrayed in Friel's play as being equally (or arguably, even more) successful in ruling/expanding an empire than 'the gun and the sword, or even the navy frigate' (Levine 113), and
2. Friel's play enacts the reality of 19th century British imperialism, where 'for many colonists the lands and the peoples of the Empire were also specimens to be listed, categorized and labeled' (Levine 113-4).

*edit*

The play is interesting to consider in light of Levine's chapter as it discusses a form of non-physical violence imposed upon Ireland. In his book, Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O states:

'Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world [...] Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.'

If we take this to be true, the forced imposition of the English language over Irish is indeed a violence done to Ireland. This means the eventual 'carr[ying over of English] culture', and therefore English 'values', into Ireland- a quiet and insidious technique that enables the empire to expand and survive.

*end of edit*

 

The play is reminiscent of a lot more of the reading material in various other ways, and if anyone's interested (or thinks they can tackle even more reading), Friel's play, along with other major Irish plays written during the formation of Ireland's National Theatre Movement, can be found in Harrington's Modern Irish Drama.

Thanks, and let me know if you have any thoughts!

- Kelly Tay