Modernism and Empire

i'm so getting this book from the library =P

2008-11-17T21:42:00.000-08:00

Doesn't this sound like a great text for the next incarnation of this module? lol

(Plot summary of Forster's "The Life to Come", by Robert Selig, in "'God si love:' On an unpublished Forster Letter and the Ironic Use of Myth in A Passage to India.")

A Christian missionary in the wilderness so impresses a native chief by the doctrine that "God is love" that at night the chief returns to the missionary and submits to a homosexual advance. Under the innocent impression that Christian worship is, in fact, homosexual love, the chief then converts his entire tribe to homosexuality. But, as the years pass, the now-remorseful missionary rebuffs the chief's attempts to repeat their sexual encounter. At last, as the chief is dying, the missionary declares that their homosexual love was actually a perversion of the true Christian religion but that they may achieve, in heaven after death, a spiritual love for one another. The chief responds by killing his former lover and then himself in the expectation of renewed homosexual love in heaven.

for a fuller plot summary (xtianity in the story comes tagged with modernity and progress apparently) check out this site.

The Process of Whitening

2008-11-12T19:57:00.000-08:00

When I went for a seminar on multiculturalism and met a well-known (but alas name slips me now) professor in UCB she said that middle class minority or colonised cultures tend toward a process of "whitening" in which they, like Fanon says need to get kid of the "soul [in which] an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality" (Fanon, 18). While I found it intriging, taking on the behavior, attitudes and language of the coloniser to assimiliate the ranks of the colonised, my critical instinct was that this is similar to other systems of power/social relations.

Think of, for example, feminism and Marxism, in which being female and being poor (non-capitalist) puts one in the surbodinate position in relation to those in power. To be respected, the female must prove their capability to be equal that of the man while the proletariat must gather their forces to usurp the capitalists. Almost inevitably, they end up taking on elements of the "enemy" forces in a parodic way - the female becomes hyper-masculine while the proletariat end up perpetuating capitalist notions (Orwell's "Animal Farm", current Chinese Communist Party in China). What Fanon does is to give a postcolonial/racial slant to the notions of power and the disenfranchised, but it is something I think, which is more universal than simply want it means to be colonised; it extends into questions of what it means to be in a position of powerlessness.

p.s. sorry my hall internet was spoilt yesterday. urgh.

Associations

2008-11-12T19:30:00.001-08:00

Reading Stephen’s translation from infant consciousness into the consciousness of a budding artist, I am reminded of a Taoist anecdote:

Before enlightenment, the mountain and the river are just mountains and river.
During enlightenment, the mountain and the river are more than just mountains and rivers.
After enlightenment, the mountain and the river are only just mountains and rivers.

And when Stephen exclaims the following epiphany:

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning. (268, 269)

I am reminded of what E. M. Cioran writes of in A Short History of Decay (trans. Richard Howard), in which a relation between thought and prostitution is uttered as follows: “Everything I know I learn in the School of Whores!” should be the exclamation of the thinker who accepts everything and rejects everything, when, following their example, he has specialized in the weary smile, when men are to him merely clients, and the world’s sidewalks the marketplace where he sells his bitterness, as his companions sell their bodies.

Remarkable therapy

2008-11-12T16:09:00.000-08:00

If "speaking pidgin-nigger closes off the black man; it perpetuates a state of conflict in which the white man injects the black with extremely dangerous foreign bodies", and the newcomer who expresses himself expressly in French does so to emphasize the "rupture" that has occurred, it seems to me that all they're doing is valorizing the fragmentation of multiple subject-positions (the racially marked subject has broken off from the "effigy of him", an "essence", an "appearance"). This is as naturally reactionary as a raced subject's experiences that tell him that to celebrate the fragmented is to celebrate, or at least, remember, his own dismemberment (or perceived ejection, a break: he has "no culture, no civilization", no "long historical past"). The use of the oppressor's language here ("Our enemy is the teacher") can be modulated into the absurdity of privileging precisely those that have denied subject-status and agency to the marginalized and the oppressed. I think this is why the "old mother" cannot, or even refuses to understand this new incarnation ("a new type of man"!) of her son, she sees his new accent and slang as appropriate extremely dangerous foreign bodies. But things are never as simple as black or white (heh). In the end, I see language almost as a proselytizing agency determined to usurp the requisite inscription and repetition of Negro moral authority (because the Negro always has to say "Me work hard, me never lie, me never steal" ).

This willing internalization of oppression (or a reconstruction of self through the white Other) preludes Fanon's "disalienation of the black man". And still we have "a great black poet" instead of merely 'a great poet'. The power of language! That there is always this other, this contingency!

Last-minute Tundish...

2008-11-12T16:06:00.000-08:00

Fanon makes clear the immense role language plays in constructing the identities of the colonizer and colonized and states, “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” (38) The French that the Antilles Negro speaks seems self-empowerment, but is also complicity with a culture that deems him inferior. In Portrait Stephen refuses to learn Irish: “this race and this country and this life produced me…I shall express myself as I am.” (220) By Fanon’s formulation, Stephen’s attempts to forge an Irish identity through his colonizer’s language is paradoxical, self-defeating – by using English, he is already “tak[ing] on [an English] world.”

However, I find it a problematic conclusion - Stephen’s discussion of the tundish with the Dean reads on one level like Fanon’s examples of European enforcement of black inferiority by talking down in pidgin Creole, with Stephen’s morose reflection that “the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205) when the Dean takes the word as a lowly Irish construction. As it turns out, it is “English and good old blunt English too,” (204) while “funnel,” conversely, is of French origin, a remnant of the time England itself was ‘colonised’, or conquered, by the Normans. The Dean’s identity as an Englishman and Stephen’s identity as an Irishman, however, define the identity of the respective words in their conversation – the French word appears more English than the English word that appears Irish, and Stephen’s revelation arguably does not make the Dean any less English nor he any the more.

This perhaps demonstrates that the identities of the colonizer and colonized also play an immense role in constructing their languages, and redeems somewhat Stephen’s decision to refashion English for an Irish identity – as well as Fanon’s contradictory usage of French for his theses.

The line/language of beauty

2008-11-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Reading Fanon and Joyce in tandem this week brought up a particular issue that surfaces in the other texts we have studied: the importance of beauty in language, and the relation of the colonised (as a "tourist" of sorts of the coloniser's language) to beauty.

In a rather unfair exchange (among many others), the coloniser aestheticises the Other as a means of adding beauty to the English language and as a means of creating beauty. I'm thinking of Said and Gikandi here - the selective use of material or pseudo-spiritual aspects of the East/Other to make art. There's a hint of this in Joyce as well, when yellow ivy makes Stephen think of ivory: "one of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run: India mittit ebur" (157). India sends ivory: the coloniser's language is the medium that makes aspects of the East - the romanticised image of India, the material of ivory - beautiful. The coloniser is thus placed in the powerful position of the artist.

However, I call this exchange unfair because the colonised is barred from reciprocating. The privilege of the artist does not extend to the colonised, and this is very evident in Fanon's description of the French talking down to the native, even if the native is fluent in French: language to the native must be fragmented and thus made unbeautiful (for the native, language can only serve as a means of communication and the coloniser's assertion of power). The native is thus barred from the realm of the aesthetic and kept from creating beauty in language, because the notion of beauty, as with language, comes with an accompanying world of cultural knowledge and tradition (as Fanon and Joyce describe). The coloniser-artist feels more and more threatened the closer the native comes to this hallowed world. For the colonised, however, the problem lies in how to access beauty without resorting to this cultural world of the coloniser; Stephen, for instance, cannot enunciate an aesthetics of beauty without thinking through the borrowed lens of Aquinas. The colonised can thus try to reclaim this coloniser's cultural notions of beauty for his own, or he can rewrite his own standards of beauty.

I argue that the latter is what Joyce does in Portrait. By placing Irish Stephen in the role of artist, he reclaims agency for the colonised to act as a creator of beauty, as Joyce himself does through his modernist play with language. Rejecting the hermetic line of beauty, as it were, of the omniscient authorial voice, he revels in fragmentation, showing how fragmented language can be beautiful - contrary to the French in Fanon. Joyce, therefore, enacts a reversal of the talking-down and deaestheticization of language that goes on in Fanon; this is, arguably, an excellent example of how the colonised artist can reclaim beauty for himself.

Lucky Thirteenth Week Post

2008-11-12T09:24:00.000-08:00

So this is the last post! Like Kelly, I have to say I really liked this reading as I identified with it and like many of you I kept thinking about my exchange programme to the UK and how the Brits and Europeans reacted to me as an English-speaking Asian. What struck me while reading Fanon was the point he makes on the White’s perception of the black man:

“To make him talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible” (35).

And it made me question why Whites would be so concerned about the fluent, intellectual Black in this day and age? Could it be a fear of retribution? That the empire could strike back and the Black could become the coloniser? While the age of colonialism is over,I think a colonial mentality is still alive and kicking in the Whites’ mindset. Why else this fear of the once-colonised’s/seen-as-inferior’s acquisition of the coloniser's language? As already mentioned by some of you, “A man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language…mastery of language affords remarkable power” (18). Through the colonised race’s command of the coloniser’s language, the coloniser’s sense of superiority premised on differences is therefore undermined.

As a side note, thinking about this led me to think about Singapore’s anxieties years back when we heard the mainland Chinese were learning English and were speaking it better than us! I remember my Lao Shis telling us that we'd better learn our Mandarin "hao hao", because the Chinese are learning English faster and better than we are and soon it'll be us going to China to find jobs! I didn't listen and therefore find myself in English Literature :-)Before the rise of China around the earlier part of this decade, we tended to think of Singapore as superior to China (correct me if I'm wrong, I for one did), which we saw as a backward country where all our products were imported from (sound familiar?). Then, suddenly around the period 00'-02'we started hearing our politicians, notably LKY making speeches about "the rising dragon" and their shock on finding China more developed and modern than we were. And boy were we scared! Being fluent in English and being more cultured(!)in the ways of the West was, and I think still is, one of the last vestiges of power that we felt we could wield against them and then even in that they started to threaten us. To some extent, I think just maybe we can see where the Whites mentioned above are coming from...

Yet, I also find it significant that we tend to pride ourselves on our ability to converse fluently in English and in being well-versed in Western culture. We define our modernity as being a society that is largely English-educated, and English-speaking. In maintaining the language of our colonisers as our first language, how much of our identity becomes defined by the West? And therefore, how much of ourselves remains stuck in the shadow of Western colonialism, now in the form of dominantly Western capitalism, if the West is the standard against which we measure ourselves? Like the case of the Negro, can the Singaporean be seen as having "no culture, no civilisation, no long historical past?" (34). Oh dear, I think we need a Dedalus!

Thoughts on Fanon's article

2008-11-12T07:53:00.001-08:00

In this week's post, I'll respond to this quotation from Fanon's article.

"To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is."

The main point here is that the mastery of the language of the dominant culture enables one to assume a culture. For some reason, I immediately thought of Obama. He's now the first African-American president of the US, and by extension also the most powerful person in the whole world yada yada ... but at the same time, is Obama "black" or "white" ??? Yes, he has a black body, but in many ways, he's also white. He's not only really well-educated (all the great schools!), speaks well, speaks the language of the educated white Americans etc; or perhaps we can consider him as black in a way that is acceptable to many whites. In many ways, Obama's success at being able to "take on a world" can be attributed to his being able to "gain greater mastery of the cultural tool" of the Americans. In comparison however, if we were to come across a black drunkard in an alley, we would immediately classify him as a black. But of course, this black drunkard speaks the same English as Obama, so I think the question then to ask is if they're speaking the same language?

Whilst writing this blogpost, I suddenly thought of a show that I use to be quite crazy over. "mind your language"-- in which Mr Brown teaches a class of foreigners English and all the cultural stereotypes start showing themselves. It's hilarious, okay, maybe also racist. But at the same time it shows how we can all be speaking the same English, but actually speaking a different language.

I look suitably asian

2008-11-12T06:59:00.000-08:00

Since everyone’s having so much fun with language, like Kelly I’d also like to relate a personal anecdote that some of you might have heard before. I was in a certain university in the US last summer, where a friend and I decided to enrol in a course of American film and lit. During the first lesson, the lecture handed out a (disturbingly long) reading list, peered down at our distraught faces and said with great kindness, “I won’t mind if you two can’t read English as well as the rest of the class”.

!!!!!!!!
(Of course my friend and I looked convincingly Asian and therefore, non-white, and therefore subjected to a mild form of the sort of experience that Fanon writes about).

Moving on, I’d like to examine Fanon’s quote on pg 18: “A man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language…mastery of language affords remarkable power”. This reads very much like the kind of argument that the local government put forth when they first embarked on English education back in…errr…very long ago. In the colonial framework, language was one more divide along which the coloniser/ colonised could be dichotomised in order to perpetuate colonial difference, not only through the difference in articulation, but the corresponding intellectual ability it implied. To address a native “exactly like an adult with a child” is not only to dismiss him as inferior, but to forever exclude him from “the world expressed and implied by that language” – the colonial world of reason, rationality, progress, intelligence, technology, etc etc.

Prof Lim in my Asian American Lit class once referred to the language as ‘cultural currency’ – meaning that the English language, specifically has a very real value in a global culture that is increasingly becoming an English one. To speak today of a global culture, and global Englishes, for that matter, seems to me to imply a rupture in the entanglement of language and culture. We can probably all agree intuitively with the idea that English has cannibalised ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ cultures through its sheer pervasiveness (my Chinese sucks) but I would like to question how viable this view is today. If English has been claimed by all culture and ethnicities and whatnot, I don’t believe it can still be seen as the carrier of a single (colonial) culture. The difference, I feel, between Fanon’s experience and ours (Singapore’s) today is the sense of confidence we (or at least) I can bring to my use of English.

(Seeing as it is the last post, I have been rather liberal with wordcount, which is 418. Please excuse :)

Language: The Colonized and the Colonizer

2008-11-12T06:46:00.000-08:00

It is ironic that Fanon uses the language of the colonizer (French in his case) to present the case about language as an instrument of imperial ideological domination. Like Joyce, and like many post-colonial intellectuals and writers from Acebe to Edward Said, he faces the paradox of needing to present the state, the case of his people and culture in a language that does not belong to him. In Joyce's case, he fights that paradox by, among other things, calling into question the Englishman's own command of language. The word 'tundish' comes to mind; in Portrait the professor thinks that it is an Irish word, when in truth it is as English a word as words can be (Heaney in his notes mentions that 'tundish' is in fact a mid-Elizabethian word). The slave knows the master's language better than the master. Ellis from Burmese Days would not have stood for this; "We shall have to sack [the native butler] if he gets to talk English too well," he says.

And yet English can itself be termed a 'colonized' language. It has roots in both Germanic languages and Latin, with a liberal helping from latter-day French and German, not to mention Hindi, Mandarain, Chinese, Malay, and a whole host of other languages. English is probably unique in this among imperial languages. Is it truely 'colonized', or does the very act of borrowing transforms the word into another instrument of ideological domination? 'Anime' in its native Japanese context refers to any animated work, including 3D modelling; in English it has come to mean cell-shaded animation from Japan or done in 'the Japanese style'. Is this an ideological stereotyping, or is this a simple case of borrowing from another culture? Is the act of 'borrowing' in language ever free of power implications? These are questions that I have yet to come up with answers for.

Language and its reception

2008-11-12T06:39:00.000-08:00

"To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is. Rather more than a year ago in Lyon, I remember, in a lecture I had drawn a parallel between the Negro and European poetry, and a French acquaintance told me enthusiastically, 'At the bottom you are a white man.' The fact that I had been able to investigate so interesting a problem through the white man's language gave me honorary citizenship" (38).

According to Fanon, speaking a language means you take on that specific world, and this act of taking on is interesting. When speaking a particular language, how much mastery can we have of its cultural or symbolic value when the language is being mediated through a different Self with a different, sometimes opposing cultural value? If a negro were to have complete mastery over the English language, how much power or 'whiteness' does he indeed possess when this language he speaks is juxtaposed by the visual image of what he is or who he is in relation to what he speaks?

So this leads us to yet another question.. In what lies the power or symbolic capital of a language we speak? Is its worth and value in the actual speaking of it by a person, or in its RECEPTION by another person?

I do not have an answer. But i do think that we can draw a distinction between when a language is merely spoken and when it is recieved and understood.

That Which Fanon Cannot Speak, Joyce Must Not Remain Silent

2008-11-12T06:35:00.000-08:00

Fanon’s writing interrogates the importance of the politics of language in a colonial context. Language is never a naïve, transparent tool or mode of communication that can be translated across cultures without remainder; indeed since the writings of someone like Wittgenstein, we have come to see that our understanding of the world and others is fundamentally mediated through the language we speak. Fanon urges us towards recognizing the power differential inherent in such an utterly intersubjective phenomenon such as language use. It is a well known pithy that a standard language (of the colonizer) is a dialect backed up by an army, and the mechanics of the interpellative gaze of the imperialist fixes the “dialect” of the colonized in a subordinate, hopelessly objectified position that closes off genuine dialogue. This damns all writing from the colonized from the start: all attempts to assert an authentic form of colonized consciousness through their own language further traps them in “the arsenal of complexes” of “the colonial environment” (30) that infantilize or exoticizes them.

In such a system, the only way out is through acculturation to the master culture; to be otherwise is indeed to be pathological. Stephen must mediate between these two positions in his literary endeavours, between the language of high European realism of the nineteenth century, and a nascent modernist form that must capture and create the conscience of his race and country. The voice of the colonized cannot assert and speak in a cultural, historical and social vacuum, and it can be recognized as language only in its basic difference from the colonizer’s. Fanon shows us how native bodies can be regulated and disciplined in the mould of the master; Stephen’s adamant stance of non-servitude is the assertion of his irreducible alterity that denies inferiority and resists subjugation.

Black Skin, White Masks - gods, frauds

2008-11-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

According to Fanon, "[t]he colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes white as he renounces his blackness, his jungle" (18). But the colonized is only "elevated" amongst his people - "In France one says, "He talks like a book." In Martinique, "He talks like a white man"" (21). This is evident in the conversation between Ellis and the butler in Burmese Days, Chapter 2:

'How much ice have we got left?'
''Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.'
'Don't talk like that, damn you--"I find it very difficult!" Have you swallowed a dictionary? "Please, master, can't keeping ice cool"--that's how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can't stick servants who talk English. D'you hear, butler?'
'Yes, master,' said the butler, and retired.

There seems to be no win-win situation between the colonized and the colonizer - if he speaks the language of the colonizers he's a fraud, if he doesn't, he's a savage.

One question though..

At the end of Fanon's paper is the excerpt by Michel Leiris.. Is he talking about the French language when he says "resort to a mode of speech that they virtually never use now except as something learned" (40)? or is he referring to French-Creole?

Anyway just some other random thoughts/things:

I found this rather interesting, something I yahoo-ed..

But our histories, for once generous, gave us a second language. At first, it was not shared by everyone. It was for a long time the language of the oppressors - founders. We did conquer it, this French language. If Creole is our legitimate language, we gradually (or at once) were given and captured, legitimated and adopted the French language (the language of the Creole white class). Creoleness left its indelible mark on the French language, as did other cultural entities elsewhere. We made the French language ours. [. . . ] Our literature must bear witness of this conquest. [. . . ] Creole literature written in French, therefore, soon invest and rehabilitate the aesthetics of our language. Such is how it will be able to abandon the unnatural use of French which we had often adopted in writing.

From Eloge de la Créolité -- Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, 1990 (1989)

(The three authors represent a new wave of French Antillean intellectuals; this book is their poetic manifesto, their aesthetic genealogy, their statement of Creole identity. Translated by M. B. Taleb-Khyar, it first appeared in English in the journal Callaloo.)

Source: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/ELOGED~1.HTM

And another thing: Me and my friend were having a random conversation about Gong Li and her Singaporean citizenship, and when talking about what if a famous Singaporean was to become the citizen of another country, what would happen? Would there be outbursts like those in China? My friend said that it was unlikely cause we're apathetic. Are we?

Mastery of language - whose power

2008-11-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

Sorry, just got to share this. Just to add to Kelly’s experience, I was in Sweden (many years ago) at some international camp and someone asked us (we were all female!) if we lived in trees in Singapore and if the women stayed at home to cook!?! (No he was not trying to be funny. He thought Singapore was in China!) Talk about ignorance right?

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power” (Fanon 18). Let us rephrase that “Mastery of the colonial language affords remarkable power”. The colonial language continues to be a powerful medium and this is evident in the sheer number of English books we find in bookstores around the world. Fanon states that the one “who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is” (Fanon 38) but we see in Stephen that the more he acquires the colonial language, the more aware he becomes of his alienation from it:

The language in which we are speaking is his before mine. How different are the words . . . on his lips and on mine . . . His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired language. (Portrait 205)

The question is how does one reconcile the use, or need for the English language with preserving cultural identity? I think Yeats and Joyce have done that. They have appropriated the English language and blended it with their own culture to create an “Irishness” that people will study for a long long time (English Literature students at least). They are examples of how a colonized people can ‘fly by those nets’ (Portrait 220).

And we have arrived at the end....

2008-11-12T05:59:00.000-08:00

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argues that ‘[t]o speak a language is to take on a world, a culture’ (38). In doing so, we lose a sense of our own national identity and culture, and there is a certain fear in there being a lost in the continuation of this culture. We certainly see this conflict embodied between Stephen and Davin: Stephen represents the higher culture of Irish that has been ‘assimilated’ into English culture (in other words, the privileged one. Think LKY and the like) and is an example of the anxieties surrounding a potential loss in identity that Fanon highlights in his article; Davin represents the peasant, the Irish that is fiercely trying to hold on to his Irish identity –‘Whatsoever of thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password’ (196).

Perhaps we can understand this conflict better by looking at our own Singaporean context. In absorbing the English language as our first language, we have created a common language that helps to unify everyone together, making it possible for people of different races, cultures and backgrounds to communicate with one another. But at the same time, we have lost, or at the risk of losing, the very cultures that our very forefathers had brought along with them when they came to Singapore. One of my Malaysian friends asked me today why is it that in Singapore, we have the option of dual sound for Japanese and Korean dramas but not for Hong Kong dramas or dramas in dialects? My answer was that the government wanted to unify the Chinese together by pushing for Mandarin as the Chinese’ Mother Tongue, and not the dialects. Yet, there still exists a worry that in doing so, we are losing the unique culture that each dialect group brings with them. We are like Stephen and Davin: being easily assimilated into the Western culture to the extent that when I went to England people reacted with surprise that 1. I dress the way they dress. 2. I talk the way they talk. 3. My major is English Literature; at the same time, we are struggling to hold on to our Asian values, to our own traditional cultures and negotiating a Singaporean culture at the same time.

Since this is the last blog post of the week, I’d like to say that at the end of this module, I have looked deeper into my own sense of self and my own notion of a national identity. I question what is it that I have lost by growing up in Singapore, by being introduced to English at an early language and loving (and thus consuming) English and English culture more than say Mandarin and Chinese culture. Looking back, I wished I had put in more effort in Chinese and learnt more about my own culture; at the same time, I also wonder what life would have been like if I had grown up in Malaysia (being a Malaysian at first) as opposed to in Singapore. What language would I be speaking and would I be comfortable with? What culture will I be in? What mask will I be wearing? Perhaps, I should like Stephen, attempt ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ just to make sense of things. Just kidding.

Of Dupes and Duping Dupes

2008-11-12T05:22:00.000-08:00

As an Irishman, Stephen’s position is much more fluid than the simplistic compartmentalization of “duped” and “duping dupes” as described by Fanon. There is no tension between the renouncement of being black to becoming whiter and the rejection of white influence and sticking to being black. The issue of being a colonized European also seems to exempt him from the Prospero complex as documented in Fanon’s work.

In Joyce’s work as well as Fanon’s, one aspect of colonization is consistent in both cases -- that of language’s effect on culture. As Fanon writes, “to speak means . . . to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (17 - 18). Such a empowerment in education that allows the colonized to gain power to either fight his colonizers (which unfortunately is still mired by his use of the coloniser’s language) or renounce his origins of the colonized (yet still problematic because he will never be a fully evolved human in being a pure white).

With this power attained by education to be wielded in either directions of the duping paradigm as laid out by Fanon, we find that Stephen is an anomaly. Such powers that Fanon describes as both constructive and destructive (Fanon 29), are turned inward in Stephen’s case. His self-flagellation to achieve some epiphany to transcend his conflicted self of Irish/English is perhaps due to his being different from the Russian/German and the Negro (Fanon 34). Unlike the rest of the Europeans, he has no other language or stature outside the metropole, precisely because it is his motherland where he, like the Negro, will have to derive value from. Yet unlike the Negro, he has a culture, a civilization and a “long historical past” (34), by virtue of Ireland being a part of Europe before being Unionised. I believe that it is this uber liminality that causes the anomaly of inward, self-violence by the weapon inherited from the coloniser.

self-subjugation

2008-11-12T05:18:00.001-08:00

In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Stephen diagnoses Ireland as being subjugated not only by the Catholic Church and the English colonisers, but also by the Irish people themselves. As Seamus Deane notes in his Introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, “The double empire of London and Rome weighed so heavily on the Irish because they had grown to love their enslavement and to fear freedom and its responsibilities” (Introduction xxxv). The colonised Irish people are definitely then shown to be culpable in their own subjugation.

This reminded me a lot of "Burmese Days", where the natives too are represented as being inept and complicit in their own subjugation. While the Irish fear responsibilities as Deane says, the natives in "Burmese Days" are shown to be inept and incapable of taking up any responsibilities. This is evident when the camp that Flory presides over becomes a scene of complete disarray during his absence—“The whole camp was at sixes and sevens…Nearly thirty coolies were missing, the sick elephant was worse than ever, and a vast pile of teak logs which should have been sent off ten days earlier were still waiting because the engine would not work” (Chapter XVIII, page 207). Through this example the natives are definitely shown to be so inept that they seem better off under the dominion of a white master.

The natives are also shown to be complicit in their own subjugation through their pandering to the white master, as evident in the character of Dr Veraswami,who constantly deprecates the East and plays up the might of the British colonisers and the empire despite being kept in a servile position by this very colonial enterprise.

By portraying the colonised as being complicit too in their own subjugation, I think these two novels work to show how colonialism is not always a black and white affair where the colonisers are the ones subjugating and the colonised the ones suffering. They definitely paint colonialism to be a more complex affair where both the coloniser AND the colonised have a part to play in the conquering of the native country.

Speaking a language

2008-11-12T05:18:00.000-08:00

Fanon writes about how speaking a language means above all to assume a culture. It is true that language interpellates the speaker into certain modes of thought. But it is not a complete adoption of any one particular culture. Speaking a language also involves a self-reflexive process of negotiation between several cultures, an intersecting of different language-consciousnesses, and a continuous testing of boundaries i.e. what does a word, like “suck”, signify etc. Stephen’s walk across the city highlights the merging of cultures and consciousnesses – “he passed the sloblands of Fairview…think of the cloistral silver-veined prose of Newman…the dark humor of Guido Cavalcanti…went by Baird’s stonecutting works…the spirit of Ibsen…the songs by Ben Jonson…the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas…the dainty songs of the Elizabethans”. I guess the point is that when one speaks of language, there always seem to be some kind of essentializing quality of language; as though speaking English equals to English culture and speaking Gaelic equals to Irish culture [as Davin asks Stephen, “Are you Irish at all? … Why don’t you learn Irish?”]. In fact, speaking a language also points to a multitude of worlds, between past and present, between different cultures and ideological belief-systems, intersecting and co-existing in consciousness.

(it's a very Bakhtin approach which i wonder if it makes any sense in relation to Fanon, or the issue of speaking a colonial language)

A solution perhaps to the linguistic dilemma of former colonized writers

2008-11-12T05:05:00.000-08:00

In “The Negro and Language,” Fanon reinforces the significance of language and argues that language “provides us with one of the elements in the coloured man’s comprehension of the dimension of the other” (17). The issue of language is equally important to Fanon as to Joyce. In Joyce’s texts, language is inevitably bound up with both identity and power, amongst other issues. Primarily through Stephen, Joyce grapples with the issue of language: when Stephen says that “the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205), he duly recognizes the English language as belonging first and foremost to the dean, who is metonym for the British Empire. As such, English will always be for him a colonial language, an “acquired speech . . . so familiar and so foreign” (205). By taking on another language (220), Stephen sees his ancestors as betraying their Irish roots.

Through Stephen, Joyce examines and indeed, reinforces the dilemma of the formerly colonized writer writing from the periphery. While Joyce recognizes that English is a foreign tongue, one that is estranged from Irishness, he is writing in English. This dilemma is in fact not restricted to Joyce but also to Achebe, who has faced criticism from the African writer and critic, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who sees the use of English as "part of the neo-colonial structures that repress progressive ideas." Similar to Achebe who “Africanizes” his use of English by referring to African traditions and cultures, one way that Joyce negotiates this dilemma is to create a new form of English that is imbued with Irish references. He inserts Irish vocabulary like the “tundish” (205) and references specific to the Irish context, such as “Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book” which was “standard in primary and intermediate schools in Ireland” (280). Joyce also goes one step further than Achebe by creating a new English that is syntactically disjoined. Rather than English being fluid and transparent, Joyce’s English is fragmented and opaque as evinced both through his modernist form as well as the postmodernist technique of including other literary forms like the diary and other intertextual references.

proof of existence

2008-11-12T03:44:00.000-08:00

one part of fanon's essay that really leapt out at me was when he was relating how he gives european foreigners to france directions and realises that there is a difference in the perception of europeans and Negros because of the Negro's cultural lack:

When it comes to the case of the Negro, nothing of the kind. He has no culture, no civilization, no 'long historical past.' This may be the reason for the strivings of contemporary Negroes: to prove the existence of a black civilization to the white world at all costs. (34)

and u know, that really struck me with a sense of pathos. why should a race of people have to fight so hard, just to prove it exists? shouldn't its physicality, its national identity and land speak for itself? and yet isn't that what everyone does, in social settings and conversations, one speaks to remind others of one's presence--otherwise, one is just not there. and that's why fanon's argument of language as being something more powerful perhaps than physical manifestations of identity, being something that "assumes a culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (17-8) really speaks to me. one speaks, really, to assert one's identity. and correspondingly, the way one speaks or what one speaks shapes one's identity (and social perceptions of that identity) as well.

and has anyone noticed the ridiculous proliferation of the irish presence in postcolonial lit? (or is it just me - maybe i'm biased, having hated seamus heaney in jc...i'm just not a fan of seeing rape of the land and one's identity in rolling hills, earth and digging spades) fanon's assertions really hit home with why there is so much irish literature preoccupied with deconstructing and fixing the irish identity within the context of the confusing, destabilised political climate imposed by the british. the irish are overcompensating for the hegemonising of their identity by the british empire--they have to speak out - and volumes at that - to make themselves heard, to constantly assert and reinforce their identity and place in the world.

i wrote about colonial linguistic violence in one of my very first blog entries for the class. it's really striking how that superficial understanding has come much further--colonialism is not just about usurping someone else's language, someone else's education systems, how children are raised, etc. it's about taking away someone's identity--the very proof of their existence.

selling out

2008-11-12T02:37:00.000-08:00

We see a lot of reference to being evicted from houses (“...the landlord will put us out” sans “boro”), leaving houses (189), or selling off houses (“...his father’s property was going to be sold by auction”). If a house can be read as a metaphor for a person’s culture, then the significance of Stephen experiencing the loss his homes may mirror the cultural genocide that Ireland experienced under British rule. Also, since eviction and auctioning both have a kind of monetary relevance, we might argue how the text negotiates the idea of ‘selling out’, particularly in the case of the Irish with respect to their own national culture and language.

This notion of selling out is evoked in Fanon’s reading where he talks about the “new man” who has deliberately suppressed his native culture and embraced the culture of the new mother country. (“...he answers only in French, and often he no longer understands Creole.”) Fanon calls this “the death and burial of its local cultural originality”, and Stephen later says heatedly, “My ancestors threw off their language and took another...they allowed a handful of foreigner to subject them.”

Coming back to the idea of selling out, I think that both texts seek to redress the painful reality of how a unique culture can be lost or eroded because its people lack something like moral courage or nationalistic pride. Stephen attempts to do so in his eventual decision not to abandon Ireland but to take it on himself to “forge...the uncreated conscience of [his] race”, and Fanon, through his criticism of an oppressive White culture which values the humanity of a person only after that person “renounces his blackness, his jungle”. And I think both are successful partly because I found both texts’ justified in their arguments (and do despise the cultural bigotry of colonizers), and partly because of the great deal of influence they still retain to this day..

I Enjoyed their Dumbstruck Faces when I Invariably Replied, 'English is the first language in Singapore'.

2008-11-11T21:45:00.000-08:00

I liked Fanon's essay very much! I'll first relate a personal anecdote, and from there, question the place of the overseas-Singaporean in relation to Fanon's essay.

Fanon refers to statements like 'How long have you been in France? You speak French so well' as 'exasperating' (Fanon), and I agree most emphatically. When I was in the U.S., I got the exact comment (just replace 'France/French' with 'America/English') or variations of it all the time. I could not decide which was more pathetic- their pompous assumption that Asians cannot possibly speak 'English so well' without 'be[ing] in [America]', or just their plain ignorance.

On a related but more serious note, Fanon talks about how 'the Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter- that is, he will come closer to being a real human being- in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language', and that this may be applied to the 'broad[er]' context of 'every colonized man' (Fanon). My question is, however, what happens when the person in question is a Singaporean who grew up speaking English, and then goes to Britain for further studies? The case is slightly different here, as the first language in both Singapore and Britain is English- hence not requiring a fundamental shift in 'the entire body of values by which [he] perceive[s himself] and [his] place in the world' (Ngugi wa Thiong'o), that might be required of the 'Negro of the Antilles' (Fanon). A caveat- I do realize that the 'kinds' of English spoken in Singapore and in Britain are rather disparate- but not as drastically so as that of a different language entirely. Where is this Singaporean placed in the context of Fanon's argument?

Joyce’s Epigraph, title and Modernist interpretive freedom

2008-11-11T21:01:00.000-08:00

The epigraph that frames the novel comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it can be translated as “he turned his mind to unknown arts” It refers to the story of how Daedelus, the fabulous artificer reacted by fashioning wax wings when told by King Minos of Crete that he and his son would not be allowed to leave the island. Since Icarus flew to close to the sun and fell to his death, the epigraph seems to mirror the rising and falling trajectory that through the various chapters in the book. As Lucas pointed out last week, the narrative movement of each chapter ends on a high note, only to be brought down low by the depressing image or scene that introduces the next chapter. However, apart from framing the rising-falling trajectory, the epigraph seems also to be an open invitation to interpretive freedom. The image of imaginative exploration seems to invite all readers to open their minds to new ways of seeing. The provisionality of the novel’s title as evident in how it is “a” portrait and not THE definitive portrait of an artist as a young man also provides a sense of the modernist openness and subjectivity. Since the portrait by its very nature reflects both the perceive as well as the subject, it seems that Joyce is calling upon his readers to actively participate in this process of meaning-making, where those who approach the text seeking definitive meaning or a prescriptive reading will not succeed. This openness and interpretive flexibility of the text which demands active readerly meaning making is evident in Chapter one, when young Stephen cowers under the table and learns about fear and punishment. The phrase “pull out his eyes Apologize” is repeated in a singsong manner, and the reader has to decide if this represents the voice of authority hammering home the lesson, or the consciousness of an already rebellious Stephen throwing back the threat in a mocking tone.

"Your English Very Good!"

2008-11-11T18:08:00.000-08:00

Fanon writes, “this self-division [behavioral differences of the Negro] is a direct result of colonialist subjugation”.

The relationship between power and language is evident in this article. The perpetuation of a dominant language and the “desire” to master the dominant language suggests the desire to be on equal footing with a “master”. The idea of a dominant language suggests to us a form of neo-colonialism.

“The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter… in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language”. We don’t have to look so far to understand where Fanon is coming from. Our local education system instills the importance of the English language right from the start- fail English and you fail to communicate, you are left behind (quite literally for some- being “retained” and repeating certain levels of their education). Mastering English becomes not a source of becoming "whiter" over here but rather, becoming a “model” citizen and becoming part of a dominant culture/community that is imagined, preferred and perpetuated by certain political entities.

A rule of difference is hence coded in language. Within our current globalized context, the impression of many is that one needs to speak English in order to assume a better position to the First-World countries. MNCs, trade and business relations are vastly communicated in English [or if need be, an English translator in the negotiations]. One could argue that even the Tiger Economies of Asia fall back to communicating through the “common” medium of English.

However, a recent observation of language and power and its relationship to the economies can be seen in the increased attention given to the Chinese Language and Arabic Language when places like China and Dubai are becoming increasingly important economic entities. But I think we're still far away from Mandarin or Arabic usurping the English language. The point for my ramble here is that language of the dominant economic power/s is that which people strive to assume in order to be on an "equal" position.

To speak English is thought to be understood and to be part of the global culture. The irony is this: the global culture we so fondly talk about in transnational texts, the idea of an increasingly shared culture, a breaking down of barriers and being a citizen of the world isn’t all that “globalized”. Many things are still coded in the English language and by extension, “First World” ideals and values. [Sidenote: Maybe this is why the French and Japanese are so averse to the English language]

I’m not against the use of English as a common language [after all, I am an English Literature student]. But if “to speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”… just whose culture and civilization are we assuming?

Last Post!!! :)))

2008-11-11T09:15:00.000-08:00

I just have to say this— doesn’t the bit in Fanon’s article about Charles Andre-Julien introducing Aime Cesaire as “a Negro poet with a university degree” and “a great black poet” remind you of Obama?! “The first black president…” and such? His race foregrounded his presidential post/campaign only because he belongs to a group that was once (or still?) discriminated for its race/skin color in America.

Anyway, going back to Fanon’s article, I liked how Fanon wanted to “help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment”, to not be a “slave of their archetypes”. I think this idea is to some extent, I hope I’m not stretching it here, being developed in Portrait, though the ‘their’ is not limited to the complexes borne out of colonialism or only referring to colonizers’ expectations of the colonized individual. Fanon showed that language means power, that it means adopting a culture and Portrait shows that language also means discourse, a system of beliefs. After all, the novel is about what everyone, belonging to different systems, expects from Stephen right? So can we say that the nationalist discourse (Parnell,etc) in specific, since this is actually directly borne out of colonialism, also sets up expectations (on the nationalist’s behalf) of Stephen and actually a colonizer would anticipate that the colonized Catholic Irish man would naturally support Parnell. Or am I reading Fanon all wrong? Eeps.

Anyhow, I think it is significant that in the end, Stephen chooses to reject all the (conflicting) discourses he is exposed to; he instead fashions an identity for himself that lies outside and beyond the reach of these systems. Stephen hears a sermon and tries to speak/act the religious discourse/way. He fails because it goes against his natural tendency to appreciate beauty. The epiphany is then an understanding about his own self, about the kind of language he is meant to use which involves describing his experience of seeing and living. The language of an artist’s.

"Was that poetry?"

2008-11-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

"The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry?"

I don't think we are ever going to get away from the issue of language and Stephen in Portrait. Stephen's unrequited love for Emma Clery is complicated by her involvement with Fr. Moran in the Irish language revival movement. And language gives way to cultural formation and expression; it is the gateway to ideas, feelings and philosophies, to a people's way of life. Language is necessarily political; it interpellates its subjects and speakers into a particular modality of thought, over and against alternative philosophies and ideologies. And for Stephen, the threat of the resurgence of Gaelic is intertwined with his untenable desire for Emma. In a very real sense, he loses Emma to language.

Language and words are, however, Stephen's arsenal. His quiver full of arrows, if you will. The aforementioned penultimate apprehension of her transmutes Emma into poetry by his lustful thoughts. His ironic decorporealization and retextualization of Emma is a "brute-like" violence of the mind enabled by language. Here, Emma is at once an idealized vision of Irish femininity that remains untenable to Stephen. Having experienced the carnal encounter with a woman's flesh, followed by the orgasmic epiphany of his vision of the female muse, Stephen is finally able to repudiate his affinity for this vision of Irish femininity based on Clery's apparent affinity for the wrong language, the wrong religion, the wrong man. Stephen above all must unshackle himself from all those issues before taking flight. Constantly trumping his own indigenous language would result in self-disenfranchisement, and Stephen's intense devotion to his own individual soul underlies this desire to come into his own, above all things else.

Waiterrrl, hor woarh ji buie jiu (Bing me a beeya)

2008-11-10T04:26:00.000-08:00

Fanon's very first paragraph left an indelible impression on me:

"The Black man has two dimensions. one with his fellows, the other with the white man. A negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question ..." (17)

In the texts that we have studied, I argue that this phenomenon is not just limited to the Black man, but almost everyone in the colonies. I find this split in identity or consciousness intriguing, mostly in part that it is a very modernist aesthetic, something of schizophrenia. This pattern of fragmentation and splitting of identities, or double-standards, can be traced to administrations of colonial rule. How colonialism is ruled on difference, but it is also very ambiguous because the government in the colony is mediated to a degree to suit the cultural context, marking its difference of metropole rule. I think it can be said that colonial rule is schizophrenic in itself.

As compared to his previous essay, I quite sympathize with Fanon this time round. His lamentation that the Black man seeks to emulate European culture and rejects his indigenous culture is poignant. This psychological brainwashing that European culture and language as the benchmark and symbol of progress/modernity is a form of cultural genocide of Black man culture.

I feel for this on a personal level perhaps because I have never mastered Teochew (think LKY bilingual policy), which severely handicaps my communication with my grandmother. We can communicate only through a series of guesswork, gestures, and awkward smiles. It is this irreparable loss of being able to communicate in Teochew, to connect to a lost past, to understand the nuances of my dialect (for want of a better word) group that struck me personally.

Lingua [Franca] Siapa?

2008-11-10T02:12:00.000-08:00

The exploration of language as it affects/ is affected by the colonizer and the colonized is one that is perhaps most interesting when we consider Joyce. While language is obviously a carrier of culture, the adoption of language in terms of colonial dynamics is perhaps most aptly captured in Fanon’s idea that “the Negro wants to speak French because it is the key that can open doors” (Fanon 38).

The language of the colonizer, indeed that that is foreign to the native language( British English to Irish in Joyce’s novel), is deemed as superior and the underlying need to survive in the colony ( or in the face of the empire) sees the native “ incarcerating a new type of man”(Fanon 36). Here we see the ideas of language as opportunity, language as professed through power and therefore language as a form of power to be partaken of.The link between identity and language is further confounded when we contemplate Fanon’s idea that “every dialect is a way of thinking”( Fanon 25) and that the native adoption of a “language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation” ( Fanon 25). The complexity lies in the way the native tries to forge a new identity by acquiring the power of the new language, but at the same time renounces his own identity. What Fanon suggests is that the Negro/Native has “no culture, no civilization” (Fanon 34) to fall back on and so his native language is bankrupt of value in the opinion of the Western world( the colonizers)

What remains to be asked then, is who’s language is it really, this language of the colony? It takes on words of the native language/dialects, but is forcibly structured to that of the colonizers. Meaning in some cases remain constant, but take on different forms: Joyce’s novel sees Stephen wonder about how even in the existence of “different names for God in all the different languages in the world … still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God” (CH 1). Lingua Franca becomes Lingua Siapa, in the imposition of foreign on the local(in the eyes of the colonized) and of the local on the alien( in the eyes of the colonizer).

If we take into account Stephen’s role as an artist and his struggle to forge an identity in a changing Ireland through language we are left to contemplate the implication of language on expression and identity.The power behind the imposition, accessibility and usability language then complicates itself in the forging of a new (colonial) identity.

Language, Art, Ethics

2008-11-06T02:09:00.001-08:00

- Early blog post: but the epiphany is in the later bit so it's hopefully ok.

- sorry there were some errors; have tried to clean them up.

=

I liked Lucas' close reading of the epiphany scene, and how he correlated it with the eileen scene to show how the repeating motifs create, among other things, a sense of the continuity of Stephen's consciousness throughout the text. One thing that struck me was the descriptions of Eileen and the unnamed girl: while Eileen seems 'corporeal' to us, the girl appears mainly as a 'corpus', a body of text.

Lucas pointed out the repetition of "Ivory" in the two passages, a reference to the litany of the Virgin Mary. I suggest that Stephen's language and conceptualisations don't adhere to Eileen: she mocks the litany (and thereby Stephen's idealisation of her), her actions and comments on pockets are non sequitur, she runs off "all of a sudden";

Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold.

even the syntax participates: the full stops seperate the tropes of religious imagery from her being.

In contrast the muse is transformed entirely by the "magic" of his language, she has no name; her body metamorphoses into that of a bird. each clause is a simile of Stephen's making, we see her only as he sees her. She has no agency of her own, only able to "suffer" his male gaze, transformed into an inactive aesthetic object.

This, i suggest, contributes to the sense of "disillusionment" in the novel: there is no union within the epiphany, it is, in fact an act of violence that objectifies and reifies the girl. Perhaps the same thing happens to Dublin: the transformation of city into intertextual tropes, while 'validating' or 'canonising' the Irish city, is nonetheless a kind of disembodiment, a kind of loss. In other words, a problem in the ethics of representation.

Here comes The Dedalus!

2008-11-05T15:46:00.000-08:00

There is something remarkably Modernist about Stephen Dedalus' fascination with language and the inner world of emotions; it is this very quality that has us in thrall from the very beginning of the novel (at least it is for me), and his exploration of the associative qualities of language and prose that attempt to draw out the fluid quality of individual consciousness is also accompanied by an increasingly desperate sense of alienation. He rejects the nationalist cry ("Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or mystic after") because it is an uncritical patriotism; it is above all, a communal movement and as such, demands conformity for success (Parnell's clandestine affair with Kitty O'Shea dooms him). Stephen prizes his individualism: "You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets" and this, I think, transcends the English/Irish binary opposition to come up with an aestheticist sensibility, one that is as self-assertive as a "portrait" and intellectual, almost demiurgic. His father taught him whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Stephen learns a more important lesson in his "reality of experience": never to peach on yourself.

The reality of language

2008-11-05T15:44:00.000-08:00

Ireland's position as a site of divided identity, as Jackson suggests, lies partly in "the failure of the British to define Ireland either in fully metropolitan or colonial terms" (150). Definitions, and language as the key means of definition, are thus invariably tied to the shaping of identity and one's reality.

This is something that struck me very much about Joyce (and perhaps it is true of modernism in general as well): words are as much political as they are aesthetic. Like Orwell, Joyce seems to espouse a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the language you use defines your reality, which in turn defines and restricts your language. Stephen's formative years are matched and reflected by the literal formation of language and its semantic possibilities. As a boy, meanings are multiple and malleable, reflecting the tabula rasa state of his mind: "What did that mean, to kiss?" (11-12); "God was God's name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too" (13). Meanings, however, become restricted by social conventions, as shown by the coding in colours and language that Stephen learns. The lexical item "green rose" must be rejected because "you could not have a green rose" (9). Green (and maroon) become associated with the political reality of Ireland - green for Parnell, maroon for Davitt. In this way the rejection of the "green rose" becomes more subversively diabolical: you can have red or white roses, York and Lancaster, but to map Irish green to a British symbol is denied by linguistic and "realistic" (insofar as the real is shaped by language and society) conventions.

The effect of language on the state of of being colonised is thus highly complex: if a person is brought up in the capacity of a colonised man, how does one separate what this reality imposes on him as opposed to the reality that is his and that he can shape? How does Ireland (or India, or other colonies) define its reality when it is caught in a linguistic and real-world "halfway house" (to quote Jackson)? Language is slippery; so is reality and identity. Joyce emphasises this with his use of language, which slips and slides, fractures and builds, to create a sense of the "real": Stephen's burgeoning consciousness, matched and mapped by the reader's own consciousness in the reading experience. And yet, in line with Joyce's own identity as Irish (reflected and shaped by this characteristic of his language), shadowing it all is a constant questioning of the "real" that he builds and its relation with the "master language" of English: "How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit...my soul frets in the shadow of his language." (167)

the ironic tone of the novel

2008-11-05T13:31:00.000-08:00

I would like to suggest that novel invites us to take an ironic view of Stephen's artistic ambitions. This can be seen from the title of the novel- "The portrait of an artist as a young man." The word "portrait" suggests that the novel is a self-conscious attempt at framing the artist as a young man. If this is so, the novel then highlights the artist and his inexperience, thereby setting up Stephen's ambitions and his perspectives as flawed and perhaps even foolish. This invites the reader to stand at a critical distance from Stephen, and to evaluate his ambitions. Therefore, when Stephen triumphantly proclaims that his art will be the means of liberation for the Irish people;

"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"

is the title of the novel then hinting at the impossibility of this success?

Stephen D(a)edalus: Loner or Liberator?

2008-11-05T08:45:00.000-08:00

Yet, for all his lonely self-assertion, Stephen recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration. (vii)

With the obvious allusion to the overreaching Greek hero Daedalus, our young protagonist comes to us as not quite straightforward a hero-to-be. Contrary to his claim that as a liberator of his race he wanted to “forge…the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (pg), Stephen hardly exhibits traits of a liberator. A voluntary social loner instead, he is deeply alienated from his family, friends, and in a larger sense, the Irish community. Yet despite his attempt to assert his individual identity, Stephen finds himself deeply embedded within the “nets” of “nationality, language, [and] religion” (220). For example, he excels in English, writing poetry and essays well, yet recognizes that English is the language of the British colonizers:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine…I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (205)

As for religion, at beginning of Part III, Stephen keeps going back to visit the prostitutes, “prowl[ing] in quest of that call” (109), yet he has a sense that this is sinful: “He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment” (110). When Father Arnall gives his sermon, Stephen is greatly affected, unlike the other boys, driving deeper his loner status at the same time inscribing him deeper into this “net” of Irish nationality.

I guess ultimately my post this week comes as a set of questions: (1) can we really take Stephen to be the liberator of his race, and (2) can Stephen’s grappling with these “nets” be allegorical of a nation trying to break free from its British/Roman past, if after all, Stephen’s struggles are also very much personal ones? If so, (3) how fit is the character of Stephen for this hero/liberator role, if he is so deeply embedded in these very “nets” that he is trying to fly free from?

Leakage

2008-11-05T07:15:00.000-08:00

I find it interesting how colonialism has switched from a racial problem, to a religious one. At least one thing stays the same, that colonialism is essentially a rule of difference. In Ireland, the Empire’s involvement made use of religious difference, between Protestants and Catholics. To elaborate further, this rule of difference is ironically an effort by the British Empire to work with local allies. As Jackson states, “[t]he cultivation of these allies might be linked to the policies of division and rule which were often the hallmark of the British colonial presence” (130). In addition, “[t]he British, in Ireland and elsehwerre, were always keen to exploit division, and to transfer their affections and support from one local community to another, depending on their calculation of advantage” (131).

Jackson’s commentary on colonialism in Ireland is refreshing, because it states some of the positive side effects of colonialism. He is careful not to appear as endorsing or valorizing British colonialism in Ireland, but it made me curious about the ‘leakages’ or side effects that colonialism had not intended.

These ‘leakages’ can, I think, be related back to the modernist techniques. The idea of resisting totality, of ‘leakages’, is perhaps another way of highlighting plurality of meanings, the futile efforts in containing and establishing control for something inevitably eludes and escapes. In a strange way, I see Stephen’s rejection of everything, as a form of ‘leakage’, to resist taking any sides and to abandon all forms of binding structures.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning (268, 269)

A Portrait and Its Discontents: The Dissonance of Voice

2008-11-05T07:13:00.000-08:00

From the first few extraordinary chapters of Joyce’s novel, we are alerted to the importance of voice and discourse to the novel: Stephen hears the voices of his father, and his playmates at school questioning him about his identity. Indeed, working within the paradigm of the bildungsroman, Joyce indicates the dialectic of self and society, and inner and outer life that the hero must reconcile or merge as the end-point of his development into maturity and full sensibility. Joyce even has his protagonist list in “the flyleaf of the geography” (12) his place in relation to Clongowes, Ireland, and Europe. Indeed, the narrative at this point evinces a comic inclusiveness where Stephen’s consciousness registers the accents of his parents, Dante, and Uncle Charles, with no thought as how best to structure and frame the ideological dispute between the strident Fenian militancy of Mr. Casey and the conservative Catholicism of Dante that breeds, as Jackson points out, “division within families” (136).

Stephen must come to reject what he terms “the din of all these hollowsounding voices” (88) flooding his consciousness that seek to claim him for their own. Joyce ironically subverts the bildungsroman tradition by pointing out that the resolution of Stephen's identity plunges him into radical isolation and distance from societal institutions from without that threaten absolute disempowerment. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, says Stephen in Ulysses, and thus he records the deep failure of the complete awakening of any authentic Irish historical imagining from the shackles of a colonial system that demand narcotic conformity to the dominant history and culture it disseminates. An absolute space of interiority then becomes not only the privileged mode of representation of the self and its struggles, but an absolute mandate of incommensurability that ensures its authenticity. .

Pieces of Empire

2008-11-05T07:06:00.000-08:00

Jackson's article highlights several issues that contribute to the contradictory/tense relationship between the British Empire and Ireland. One such issue is that of differential treatment of the Irish Catholics. What is interesting for me, I guess, is that here differential treatment and biasness is based on religion rather than race/colour seeing, that both the Irish and British are after all caucasians.

How much 'stronger' (for lack of a better word) is religion a driving force to discriminate and rule over in comparison to race as a dividing category? Does Portrait give us readers anything to back up this statement?

And just a sidepoint - I think the fragmented nature of the text reflects the fragmented colonial state which is in part a product of the various government structures (which complicate colonial ruling - it becomes a mess as Jackson puts it in the article).

In addition, in relation to this module... the texts have so far discussed the different colonial situations in various parts of the world - Burma, India, Ireland.. this I suppose, grants us a better insight into colonialism/imperialism. The spectrum of voices and perspectives is modernist in its multiplicity which rebels against the fixed certain-tude (is there even such a word?) of texts narrated by a third person.

the sermons remind me of my secondary school days

2008-11-05T07:01:00.003-08:00

Joyce's passages of fire and brimstone, and Stephen's classification of himself as a sinner, besides providing me a road map of my post-mortal future, remind me strangely of what Foucault says of homosexuality:

Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

[History of Sexuality]

which is not to suggest that Daedalus was homosexual, but rather that his outward acts of fornication now informs his identity, his soul: he's now a species of sinner going to hell.

I'll admit to not being a fan of joyce (prefer nabokov for my dose of literary genius), and, fried out as i am, may have missed stuff, but: given how closely catholicism is tied into the irish identity, i wonder if stephen's sexual sins, by making him a bad catholic, also make him a bad irishman. taken this way, perhaps we could say that it is, in a sense, colonialism that informs stephen's guilt over his promiscuity since the fervent catholicism (in education and religion) is related to the history of Ireland as a colony.

it seems a stretch, but then again, we do witness this phenomena in our own time and space: for instance in the debate over things like keeping 377 of the penal code, and the peculiar arguments of certain ministers whose european religion motivates a desire to keep english law.

A Portrait

2008-11-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

The tension between identity and language is interesting. Davin asks Stephen “Are you Irish at all” (219) because he spoke against the Irish reformers. What does it mean to be Irish, or British (or Singaporean for that matter since we do not even have a language of our own). There is a lot of emphasis on language in Portrait, Davin believed that speaking Irish would make Stephen more ‘Irish’ but I get the sense that language does not and cannot define our identity. The same thing that is called a “funnel” or “tundish” doesn’t change what it is; it merely changes the perspective in which we recognize it. If it is not language, what defines our nationality? This is quite a stretch but Stephen needed to find new perspective/find his identity or redefine ‘Irishness’ by leaving Ireland and in Passage, Ronny became more ‘British’ in India (British imperialist cliquishness) which was accentuated by his initial admiration for Adele’s individuality (Passage 44) until it led to her being ostracized by the colonists’ community.

“Irish families simultaneously upheld and subverted the Empire” (Jackson 137) – this split in loyalty exists not only in Ireland but within the empire itself. We’ve seen it in Flory and Veraswamy in Burmese Days, Fielding and Aziz in Passage, and Stephen and Davin in Portrait, there is no absolute consensus within their own community on colonialism. So far, we’ve been associating the two camps colonizer/colonized in terms of racial binaries - white/non-white but in Portrait, we’re reminded that Europeans (Irish) too were colonized by the British. In previous texts, colonialism is intrinsically linked to race, at the same time, it isn’t really just race. Nationality is defined by the language we speak, the views we share yet we don’t share the same views. The inability to categorize and define empire seems to be complicate by modernism’s multi-perspective, polyphonic voices that are allotted to individuals?

'History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.'

2008-11-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

The above quote is from Joyce's Ulysses, and appears in the Introduction to the Penguin edition of Portrait (pg. xxxix). It is especially appropriate when considering the relation between Portrait and the Irish historical condition - that of a victim of imperialism, both Roman (in the form of Catholism) and British. At the end of each stage of the novel, Stephen seems to be on the verge of a revelation, of a grand renewal or beginning; yet within the first few pages of the next stage the revelation is proven false; the cake is a lie. There is a parallel here with Parnell, who features so prominently in the first part of the novel, for the liberation that he worked for never came, even though it seemed so close. Stephen/Joyce seeks to escape the vicious cycle of history, in order to find his own - and by extension Ireland's - place in the sun. It is a looking forward, rather than the looking back of the Irish Revival.

james' modernist ambivalence

2008-11-05T05:02:00.000-08:00

james' modernist anxieties come through in his portrayal of dedalus as a character with a confused self identity, a pastiche of different parts constituting a somewhat schizophrenic personality. like forster's characters (adela and mrs. moore), but to much a greater extent, dedalus undergoes an existential crisis of self a few times in the novel: "nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echoe of the infuriated cries within him...he could scarcely recognise as his his own thoughts, and repeated dlowly to himself: I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus..." (94 of my el cheapo "enriched classics" copy) When he tries to remember his childhood, he failed to recall any of its vivid moments and instead "recalled only names: Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes." (ibid) the reduction of his childhood memories to names reflects the deeply political background and politically confused identity of the Irish persona.

jackson's assertions that Ireland was a "half-way house between Britain and the Empire," and to Ireland the Empire was "a source both of constraint and liberation" depicts the colonised's dilemma as less one of racial subjugation and discrimination, as we saw with the other texts, but one of religion, politics and that of being used but at the same time helped or rewarded in some way. (i'm sure people doing irish poetry can shed more light on this!) jackson goes on further to describe the contradictions of Irish Home Rulers "being proud of Irish feats within the British Army, but contemptuous of the Army itself." dedalus' confusion about his self identity to the point of remembering names and not memories of his childhood hence reflects the experience of growing up in such a schizophrenic and politically contradictive environment. while such existential crises aren't uncommon in modernist texts written from the colonial side, including Woolf's and Forster's, i think that james depicts the unique political situation of the irish colonised as being caught in a difficult liminal space of being white and European, and yet exploited in similar ways as the "inferior" races of the East--and hence, ambivalent about one's political and historical identity but in a very different way perhaps, from that of the typical 'native'.

Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic

2008-11-05T04:09:00.000-08:00

Adding on to what Sarah has said about language and colonial discourse, I completely agree with the idea that Stephen's familiarity with English proves the success of the ISA (ideological state apparatus) of education in assimilating the Irish into the coloniser's dominant culture and language. However, this is not solely a one-way street and cross-culturization, for lack of a better word, takes place.

Stephen compares the different way the British dean of studies and he relate to the English language:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (Portrait 189)

Here, he claims the dean to have a superior relationship to the English language which is "his". Later, Stephen realizes he has acquiesced to the difference between the coloniser and the colonised on the basis that he was both British and a dean: this does not mean he is right.

That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other! (Portrait 251)

Joyce problematizes the scene here and suggests that the coloniser himself is impacted by cultural assimilation, the dean easily labels a word he is not familiar with the Irish "other". To suggest that the dean has come "to learn [his own language] from us" is humourous but is also a perverse version of the master (English)- slave (Irish) dialectic. Often one thinks of the way the coloniser has affected the colonised, but fails to think of this exchange as mutual.

Through this process of cultural assimilation, neither the English nor Irish culture is, according to Said, "single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic". (Quote from an online article). Both are subject to the other culture, relying on the other to sustain a power relation modeled on the Hegelian model.

language as a mark of difference

2008-11-05T02:30:00.000-08:00

Language, figures in many of the books on our course, as a sign of the coloniser’s domination over the colonised. For example, in “Burmese Days”, Veraswami is depicted as constantly speaking with an extra ‘s’ behind many of his words, almost as if the text is drawing attention to the difference in the way he speaks, a difference that perhaps marks him as being different from the colonial masters who are native speakers of the language. The text also highlights this inferiority in language in Ma Hla May who is depicted as saying during her denouncement of Flory in the church, “”Yes, that’s the one I mean—Flory Flory!” (She pronounced it Porley) (284).

This is also evident in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” where language exists as a sign of the English colonisation of Ireland. For example, the Dean thinks that “tundish” is an Irish word despite it belonging to the English vocabulary, and in this instance, Stephen appears to know the English language better than the Dean. However, despite this, Stephen is always mindful of the fact that he is ultimately still using the language of the colonisers, as evident when he says, “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine… His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (205). Hence language here too, will always be a mark of Stephen’s inferiority because the language is ultimately not his, but the coloniser’s, and the fact that he has mastered it so well only goes to show his degree of colonisation by them!

Modernism and Empire and, Identity

2008-11-05T02:16:00.000-08:00

This is the first time I’m reading anything by Joyce and well, it was an experience. Anyway, I felt that it was a novel about influences and I really saw modernism and empire come together in this novel because Stephen is trying to find/shape his personal identity as a person (I always thought modernism has much to do issues of identity because of its style of using stream of consciousness, multiple viewpoints). I thought it was adorable but also meaningful and astute when Joyce wrote from a child’s perspective and Stephen sees himself as belonging to “Ireland…Europe…The world…The universe”. The discipline of geography itself appears redundant because countries only stay put on the map. In reality, people move, migrate, cross boundaries, invade territories. In this process of moving then, identities lose their clear-cut definition. A white man in England would be just that; in India however, he would have a different identity, perhaps as a pukka sahib. So what escapes the colonized child’s attention is that Ireland does not just belong to Europe; it belongs to the Empire. His own identity is as such, because of the Empire, is fragmented even before he starts to shape it.

When reading the Christmas dinner bit in Portrait, the part about how “the British imperial rule in nineteenth-century Ireland generated a political culture where families might be divided through their Irish or imperial allegiance” from Jackson’s article was brought to mind for me. In this scene, it is not about ‘Us. v. Them’ or even Protestant v. Catholic. Joyce shows another type of division in which “Irish allegiance” gets problematized. It appears at one level to be a debate about whether religion should enter politics or whether the latter should remain secular. But I felt (since Stephen is sitting at the adult table for Christmas for the first time and watching this scene unfold) that this debate would only further complicate the construction of self-identity for the protagonist. Mr. Casey, Mr. Dedalus and Dante are all Catholics and they are all for the liberation of Ireland (since Dante whacked a man who had “taken his hat off when the band played God save the Queen” with her umbrella) but yet, what a heated argument! Who is the ideal patriot? Who is the ideal Catholic? Empire thus enters to prevent someone from ever resolving such issues of identity and like Jackson says, an individual or family ends up housing within itself contradictions or ambiguities.

Fragmented Interiority of Empire and Self-Destructive Tendencies

2008-11-05T01:47:00.001-08:00

Jackson’s survey of the Union’s internal composition of divisive and volatile nationalisms, with its negotiations of tensions of state oppression and movement towards social advancement to and from the Empire and Ireland, forms the backdrop of Stephen’s modernist anxieties in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For Stephen, the volatile anxieties of his nationalism in such a milieu can only be transcended in a certain pathway. The Hegelian dialectic of power relations that stratifies the colonies to the Empire, then possibly reflected in the internal colonization of Ireland, and its anxiety of living within such a paradigm (as Stephen experiences) can only be shaken off with a modernist transcendence - art.

This aim to achieve transcendence from the political and economic power relation between Ireland and the Empire is one of self-destructivity and violence within the Self. We see that Stephen, in his escape from the haunting of his double-crossing countrymen, seeks multiple forms of “self-flagellation” to either expunge his internal conflicts or to heighten his consciousness to a transcendent level. Stephen’s obsession in the death of the Irish martyr Parnell, and the scenario of how his Irish compatriots had sold him out to his death, reflects what Jackson summarises as the “volatile, and unpredictable political culture” of Ireland (Jackson 152).

On the cultural perspective, Stephen’s achieving an epiphany after sleeping with a prostitute, subsequently subverted by his extreme devoutness followed by another epiphany and then once again subverted by his disillusionment and the leaving of the Order show a constant debunking of possible pathways of transcending the milieu of ambiguity of Ireland and the Irish Self. Stephen’s journey show that to escape the slightest “British experience of Empire” (152) as detailed in Jackson’s chapter, the artist must then exile himself from the machine of the Empire totally, and how that is not possible even in a self-destructive mode.

Who was right then?

2008-11-05T01:46:00.000-08:00

The links between politics and religion were brought across quite strongly in Portrait (which I felt weren't discussed enough by Jackson). At the Christmas dinner, the party talks about the death of Parnell who is an Irish Protestant and a nationalist politics leader. The conversation then turns to the idea of the Catholic Church meddling in state politics: Dedalus says “Nobody is saying a word against them…so long as they don’t meddle in politics; Dante retorts that the “bishops and priests in Ireland have spoken…and they must be obeyed” (35). The intermingling of politics and religion gets mixed up in individual relations, not only between grown-ups, but also between children, who must already learn to take sides. Dante discourages Stephen from playing with Eileen because Eileen was a protestant, and “when [Dante] was young she knew children that used to play with protestants and the protestants used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin” (39).

The argument over religion and politics becomes somewhat cyclical [if the priests didn’t interfere with politics, it will be fine; but the priests are important and if people didn’t disagree with them, it will be fine etc.] Stephen sums it up with, “Who was right then?” (40) When Stephen thinks about God, he remembers that “Dieu was the French for God” and “though there were different names for God in all different languages in the world…still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God” (17). Everyone is right in some way or another, but the internal division that stems from politics, religion, and the effects of colonialism [how alliances with the British and the imposition of certain policies further fueled these divisions], passed on through generations, makes it impossible for any cohesive resolution.

Why Joyce is different...

2008-11-05T01:26:00.001-08:00

While throughout the course, we have read texts that have been written by primarily by colonial authors, Joyce’s text is markedly differentiated from these because as an Irish (and formerly colonized) author, he writes from a marginal position. In contrast to Forster’s India, which can neither be properly classified nor categorized because it is a “muddle,” Joyce’s Ireland is one that escapes definition because of its ambivalent nature towards the British Empire. Here, it is apt to apply Jackson’s argument, that the relationship between the Irish and the British Empire is too complex in “its elusiveness, its contradictions, and its paradoxes” (123) to be glossed over. The Irish, as he points out, are both “agents and victims of the Empire” (152). The indefinable nature of the Irish experience and of Ireland is best illustrated, I feel, through Joyce’s use of language.

While Forster makes use of modernist symbols to render India unknowable, Joyce makes use of a modernist form of language that is fragmented to show the elusiveness and incomprehensibility of Ireland. Although Stephen makes use of the English language and recognizes it as a legacy of colonialism “so familiar and so foreign, will always be . . . an acquired speech” (205), Joyce, through Stephen, fragments language to reflect the ambivalent experience of being Irish and of Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire. Instead of language being presented in a linear fashion, language in Portrait is broken up in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s The Wasteland. Different narrative styles – songs (3), Stephen’s diary, poetry (266) and so on – are integrated into the text, impeding fluid flow of language.

Thus, through use of fragmented language – a typical characteristic of modernism -- Joyce seeks to show and reflect upon the displaced position and identity of the Irish people. By so doing, Joyce’s modernism is thus closely aligned with Irish nationalism.

Finally, a text from the colonized

2008-11-05T01:26:00.000-08:00

It is interesting how we are now reading a text where the colonized are Whites, the colony is Britain’s first and the author is the colonized. With the other texts, we have been debating about the White man as colonizer from reading what the author (who incidentally is writing from a position of the colonizer that gets to travel and visit other colonies) and we have recognized certain problems with these readings. While certain parts of the other texts could be argued to be shedding light on the plight of the colonized, the texts are also concerned with protecting their own standing as one that still privileges the colonizer. Furthermore, the texts are also more interested in highlighting the conflicts the White man, as part of the colonizing mission, caught in this cycle of imperialism faces than presenting detailed images of the hardships the colonized undergo. Hence, Portrait as a text written from the perspective of the colonized provides an interesting argument against the other texts that we have been reading thus far.

I have to admit, I don’t like Stephen. He’s a little too wishy-washy for me. However, it is quite refreshing to see how he negotiates the conflicts he feels towards the British Empire, his religion, himself and to Ireland. As a character who might be representing James Joyce himself, Stephen’s decision that he has to be an artist in order to deal with these conflicts is fascinating: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (276). What possibilities do art hold as a tool for finding oneself as an individual, and as establishing oneself as part of a community? How does art figure into nationalism and the idea of a nation?

Personally, I think art, in particular the written form, allows the artist to use language to retaliate, to create a space onto which they are able to project their own vision of Ireland. Art is a potential tool for revolution, and hence it is important to both the colonizers and the colonized. While one wants to use it to protect his vested interests, the other uses it to band their own people together in the realization of a nation.

Words, Words, Words...

2008-11-04T22:45:00.000-08:00

“Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: through them he had glimpses of the real world about him.” (64)

As most of us know, Portrait is essentially a bildungroman that traces the growth of Stephen. In the chapters on Stephen’s formative years, the subjective reality of an individual is most prevalent in the language used by Joyce; short phrases, disjuncture in syntax and “nonsensical” words. As readers, we are essentially placed into the shoes of the characters and catch a glimpse of the world- but the world according to Stephen. As readers, we’re lead to grasp for meanings and make sense of the writing just as Stephen makes sense of the world. How Stephen starts viewing the world and making sense of the world is shown to be influenced by external forces just as much as it is an interior subjectivity that we as readers are privy to.

Reading this text (or any other particular text for that matter) requires a conditioning of sorts. The repetition of words, phrases and events serve to condition readers to a particular style/ way of reading. Past the first chapter then (or maybe earlier for some of you), one is sufficiently acquainted with the style [“learning by heart”] to look beyond mere stylistics- we start decoding: picking out the significance of the particular style or the relation to its historical context amongst other things. We start getting glimpses of the world of the character, the text and the author.

The significance of the relationship between reading [which is personal experience] and ideology/epistemology [external force] is apparent here. Whatever we deem to be deeply personal or subjective is ultimately the product of something larger than ourselves. Supplementing what we’ve discussed in past seminars: the individual can never be separated from the community, our body belongs to the state and the text cannot be separated from its context.

Paradox: the empire as both an agent of liberation and oppression

2008-11-04T21:48:00.000-08:00

Jackson argues that Ireland under the British Empire epitomized its contradictions, where for the Irish the empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression, and it paradoxically provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration. The Irish’s attitude towards the British Empire was often an ambivalent one: Although they were major participants in Empire, they also formed a significant source of subversion.

This ambivalence is evident the characterization of Stephen. On the one hand, Stephen resents colonial rule, and diagnoses Ireland as suffering multiple levels of imperial subjection under British colonial rule and the Catholic Church. Stephen sees the empire as alien and menacing, lamenting that “when the soul of a man is born into this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight”, where he shall attempt “to fly by the nets” of “nationality, language and religion” that entrap him. He asserts that he is the “servant of two masters, an English (British colonizers), an Italian (the Roman Catholic Church), and a third who wants me there for odd jobs.(the contemporary Irish Nationalist movements that he perceive as being ineffective because they do not break free from this condition of subjection.)” When Stephen states in Ulysses that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, he is referring to Ireland’s long history of colonization by England, the ineffectiveness of the Irish resistance and the fact that the Irish had grown to love their enslavement, and cooperated with their oppressors to reinforce their subjection. Thus, although Stephen sees the true Irish self as one that has not yet been awakened, and is confident that his art will be the means of liberation, the text ironises this belief as being naïve because his mind is too supersaturated with the English language (such that he knows the word “tundish” and the English dean of studies does not) and the Catholic religion. This ironising is apparent in the scene where Stephen experiences an epiphany of his artistic vocation. Although he identifies with his namesake Daedalus, the text uses irony and distance to suggest that Stephen can be the over-striving Icarus who falls because his ideals are over ambitious and unrealistic, causing him to fly too near to the sun and drown as a result.

However, Joyce's modernist text is then again highly ambiguous because it does not completely undermine Stephen's bid to be an artist, and resists a definitive meaning and closure because it suggests that although the Catholic religion entraps Stephen, it could also paradoxically provides him with the creative ability as an artist to be a "priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life."

The Künstlerroman and the Irish Condition

2008-11-04T20:38:00.001-08:00

Just for fun. This is Norman Rockwell's Triple Self Portrait. My dad showed it to me way back in sec. school and it's lingered in my memory.

In discussing the artist figure of Stephen Dedalus, I will be intruding somewhat into Part 4 and 5. Like my more post-modern, cheeky Norman Rockwell painting, there are various layers in the representation of Dedalus. On a macro level, Joyce creates a tableu of an older artist representing himself as a young man. On a micro level, an older more mature artist Stephen “paints a portrait” of himself as a “young man” growing up as a Irish colonised subject. On an even more micro level, in the narrative itself, the representation of Stephen’s mental world shows us young Stephen’s process of negotiating and working out his selfhood/identity by attempting to paint a “self-portrait” of himself as seen in on page 98. “I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus…The memory of his childhood…he recalled only names: Dante, Parnell etc etc.” Or by drawing a parallel between his position, embarking on his artistic career, with that of his mythical namesake, Daedalus, who in the Grecian myth, frees himself from prison with wings he fashioned.

Through Stephen’s negotiation of his identity as a self and therefore as an artist, Joyce evokes the problem of the Irish Condition, one that is similarly attempting to assert an Irish identity to free itself from the English coloniser. However, the dilemma of what the pure, un-colonised Irish identity is when English-ness has permeated and influenced the Irish identity arises. Where can the colonised subject go to liberate itself from the coloniser when its identity has very much been shaped by its colonial past, the coloniser’s language and culture. To support this, I point to Part 4’s trivial “tundish/funnel” incident with the English professor where Stephen realises his colonised position has been imbedded in him through language. “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205).

For Stephen, the true Irish self has not been awakened or liberated, but he hopes it will be liberated with his art. “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (276). However, the question of whether he will succeed is left open by Joyce. Will he be an idealistic youth like Icarus who flies too near the sun and dies, or Daedalus? Is he like the artist in Rockwell’s painting, over-idealising himself? Is it even ever possible to totally liberate the colonised subject from his coloniser? By saying he will “fly by those nets” (220, emphasis mine) of “nationality, language and religion, will he really transcend those nets? Or will he perpetually be flying “by” in the sense of using/being caught in those nets?

The individual and the Community

2008-11-04T17:54:00.001-08:00

The introduction to the Penguin edition of Portrait reads, “Stephen recognizes himself to be a member of a community; it is in relation to the collective, the race, that he formulates his individual aspiration. Similarly, it is in relation to his community that he learns the techniques of individuation, although it is by a process of inversion that he achieves his ambition to be self-born”.

I found this so apt and suited to some of the things we have discussed in class this whole semester- this whole idea of the individual and the community. I think starting form Passage, to Burmese Days, we have looked at how their authors tend to zoom out of a discourse of the community and focus on the individual impulse, hence complicating colonial discourse, which is usually understood on the larger, communal level, and this zooming in on the individual, we have labeled as being a very modernist technique.

Joyce however, complicates this very separation of the individual and community, where we realize that it does not really make sense to focus on an individual alone because the individual gains himself and shapes himself based on or in response to his community. Hence, Stephen’s individuality and interiority cannot be seen as being separate and excluded from the larger world he lives in for it is the community that allows him this individuation. Therefore, if we were to go back and revisit characters like Flory, Ronny and Aziz, perhaps we could now read them as not merely characters whose interiority we gain access to due to the modernist mode of representation, but as characters whose interiority is only possible because of both how their community shapes them, as well as our own community that allows us to read them.

293 words

And I thought soul-buying was the Devil's trade...

2008-11-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

With Portrait, our course has finally come full circle - we started out debating what our texts of Empire had to do with Modernism, and we will doubtlessly now debate what this text of Modernism has to do with Empire. (Kidding…sort of…) I'll have to admit to looking out for references to Empire throughout the first three chapters, eyeing each instance Stephen considers the boundaries of his world with suspicion… Of course, overlooking for now the complicated relation Ireland has to the British Empire, the only obvious references I've seen in them are the ex-students "now…in the burning tropics," (117) and "saint Francis Xavier…the apostle of the Indies," (115) and the latter is something that struck me.

"He went from country to country in the east, from Africa to India, from India to Japan, baptising the people. He is said to have baptised as many as ten thousand idolaters in one month…He wished then to go to China to win still more souls for God…" (115)

Perhaps I'd spent too much time last week staring at the commodification of women in Stoler's article, but the impression this description of the "great soldier of God" (115) gives me is that of a commodification of the African and Asian natives on the part of the Church. From this extract, it occurs to me that the missionaries who ventured to the colonies were seeking as much of a profit as the colonists (whose overriding economic agenda has been impressed on us week after week) - albeit a profit for their immortal souls. Natives are not looked upon as persons in their own right, but merely as potential converts for a "soul in devotion pressing like fingers the keyboard of a great cash register." (160) Of course it's a lot easier to grab such great bargains, converts by the swathe, in regions where Christianity is newly introduced than back home - a "true conqueror" saint Francis Xavier indeed was, as shrewd a businessman as any in the EIC…

[So sorry for posting so late last week, Dr. Koh! I'm posting a little earlier this week in penance...]

Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

2008-11-04T09:38:00.000-08:00

Are you weary of reading Joyce today,
Lost in the deep dark soul of night?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

His words for students hath raised hell
Five parts, unequal and not alike
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Christmas ruined, long live Parnell
Or is Britain put to the fight?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

The low ringing of the church bell
Resonates; makes Stephen contrite
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

Strange sex with a mademoiselle
Then repentance, before taking flight.
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

And yet you have held on so well
Sluggish eyes, brain without respite!
Are you weary of reading Joyce today?
Light will be shed come this Thursday.

'It pained him...that he did not know where the universe ended.'

2008-11-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

In the beginning of Joyce's "Portrait", Stephen attempts to place himself within the larger structures that surround him. Beginning with himself, he traces his belonging to his country, nation, and eventually, the universe' (27). While he believes that 'after the universe' comes 'nothing', he is troubled by whether there is 'anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began' (28). This failure to 'know where the universe end[s]' not only 'pain[s]' him, but makes him 'fe[el] small and weak' (28). Here, Stephen's uneasiness is three-fold:

1) The 'nothing place' (28) is something Stephen doesn't understand;

2) It is therefore regarded as something other to him, and is hence excluded from the list of places he belongs to;

3) He thus attempts to keep it at a distance from him by imagining that something exists to demarcate it as a different space altogether. This, however, fails, as he is unable to answer whether there is a 'wall' or a 'thin thin line' separating the universe' and 'the nothing place' (28).

These result in Stephen's anxiety, as his attempts to compartmentalize the world into neat categories of understanding go awry. This seems to parallel the uneasiness that the colonial powers felt when ruling their colonies. Replace Stephen's 'nothing place' with 'the native', and 'the universe' with 'the white world', and you have the colonizer's anxiety. In this new case, safety comes from the neat categories of the colonizer and the colonized- recall Chatterjee's argument that colonialism was based on ruling through difference and exclusionary tactics. Similarly, this safety is threatened with the blurring of boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized- recall Stoler's argument about metissage and metisse children, Ellis' outrage at a servant's improving English and the mere thought of a native as a member of the club, and other instances where transgressions of boundaries spell trouble.

[[Just a thought- in relation to our class' title, the modernist writer's attempt to be unafraid of the unknown is intriguing. Instead of 'feel[ing] very tired to think [of such big things]' (28), modernist writers embrace the unknown and the dissolution of neat boundaries, as these allow for new possibilities to be opened up. In doing so, they (attempt to) transcend the limitations of what the Empire was fearful of.]]

The Apathetic Empire

2008-11-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

We have gone from India to Africa, Africa to Burma, and Burma to Ireland. Textually speaking, I’d say that we as readers have conducted a little imperialist mission of our own—if those texts are microcosms of countries, our analyses and deconstructions of them then make us something like conquerors and colonizers. And indeed, we occupy a position of considerable power: able to argue a text in any way we choose, justifying just about anything by twisting and turning evidence into our favour. The only ethical thing to do then is to be responsible in our interpretations, rather than dressing them up because they sound good. Now, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, it is precisely for this reason that I confess I’ve gathered a pretty nasty impression of the British Empire.

Jackson talks repeatedly about how the “strategies of British government in Ireland resembled their colonial counterparts in many ways.” While there is nothing wrong with having a consistent foreign policy, there is something decidedly reprehensible about maintaining it despite the negative effects it was known to have on the subjected colony, e.g. the viceroyalty infrastructure—“resentments, intrigue and snobbery which it generated, were broadly familiar…throughout the Empire”; or implicit social stratification which arose either from “British dependence upon, and exploitation of, local allies…local elites”, or the conferring of “imperial honours and titles”.

In fact, it gets uglier when we find out that the British were “keen to exploit division”, routinely “transfer[ring] their affections and support from one local community to another”—the effects of which we can see in the resentful relations among the Irish in Portrait (“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”). The lack of British urgency in sending aid during the Irish potato famine is also a mark of imperial incompetence and apathy towards the people under their rule. The religious liberation that the Empire touted to bring was really a paltry front for what was just “imperial economic vampire[ism]”, and it is no wonder that Portrait’s Dedalus articulates the need to free himself from the these colonial “nets”, thus expressing a desire for freedom/liberation which his mythological name itself invokes.

Power, (re)Structure, Everyone and One.

2008-11-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

(warning I have taken painkillers for my back : a muscle relaxant im convinced they give horses)

The first thing that hit me about Joyce’s writing, was well, Joyce’s writing. His ‘unconventional ‘ use of punctuation especially when it comes to speech suggests that the dialogue that is shown becomes merely a reflection in the mind of the listener, rather than a product of the speaker per se. Its all very modernist, but this week im struggling to find the link(s) between the text and the reading.

Stephen’s struggle in school with Father Dolan seen in his situation over the broken glasses and hand-caning suggests the obvious issues with authority. In the novel we see tensions that arise between state and church when it comes to notions of authority. The culture that Stephen must rise against seems to be embedded in a tangle of power struggles. In much the same way as the colonies we have seen in previous texts on the course , Ireland becomes “ a half-way house between Britain and the Empire”(Jackson 136).

Struggling between formulating an identity of its own and being an extension of imperial impulses, Jackson notes Ireland struggled between a government style that was “colonial and metropolitan” (Jackson 126). The notion of “Cultural nationalism” and “political consciousness”( Jackson 136) that arises because of British imperialism comes from that “interrelationship of Irish Society with the British Empire” (Jackson 139). This seems to be something mirrored in other texts that we have done like Foster’s A Passage to India and Orwell’s Burmese Days where the locals start to become more aware of politics and how it affected lives.

Joyce’s novel revolves around Church, Self, Establishment and Power- four themes that are all, like Ireland ‘sand Britain’s fate: interrelated. In this sense perhaps we can draw links between Jackson, Joyce, Modernism and Colonialism by noting how power structures are altered on both a macro level; country(govt/ religion),society as well as micro level; individual.

Colonial Fiction...

2008-10-29T18:11:00.000-07:00

Something that strikes me incredibly about Growing is the “theatrical unreality” (23) of colonial life that Woolf draws our attention to early on. Notably, he says “I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story. (46) We have been in this module studying fictional constructions of colonial portrayal, only to be told that real colonials were very much like fictional constructions. While Woolf’s account then reflects favourably on the Orwellian and Forsterian characters we have debated the realism of; it also more ominously brings to mind the lesson Conrad makes for us of “Lord Jim,” who, consuming adventure fiction, died a deluded romantic hero. Here, we see Woolf’s suspicion that real life colonials have consumed Kipling’s colonial fiction and thus fashion their conduct in a textbook portrayal of what they believe through popular fiction their colonial lives should be like.

Of course, through Stoler’s examination of the myth and realities of colonial living, we are made intensely aware of the fictionality and constructedness of the supremacy of the Empire and European identity, which makes the real colonial’s strict adherence to fictional prescriptions of conduct hardly any more unreasonable than a strict adherence to manuals bearing mythical beliefs of the make-up of Europeans and the colonised. In such a light, anti-imperialist texts, or at least texts such as Growing that highlight the unnaturalness of such conduct become important in opposition to Empire-supporting narratives such as The White Man’s Burden.

Stoler and Concubinage

2008-10-29T16:55:00.000-07:00

Pardon me for this late entry! here are my thoughts on Stoler's article...

Stoler argues that the colonizer-colonized categories and labels were layed out by "forms of sexual control" and "defined the domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves"(42). Hence, she says that inperial authority is structured in highly gendered terms, and this sexuality and gender to a large extent gave the colonial system its order and manner.

I find this interesting because it assumes that the women were of a subordinate position, when i would instead propose that women in fact had an upper hand in a system like this, whether they realised it or not. They were being instrumental in shifting the colonial system of meaning from self-interest and moral superiority, making clear the weak links in narratives of colonial legitimization.

When stoler says, "most of these women remained servants... but some combined their service with varied degrees of independence and authorit"(49), the point here is that women had a way out, or rather, a way to manipulate their position and manipulate their men to their benefit, and we do see an example of this in May in Burmese Days.

So while Stoler seems to talk aboout "reinforced hierarchies" due to concubinage, i think the more important issue is how these hierarchies are problematised. There is a definite shift from the twice colonized subaltern woman(by patriarchy and by the colonizer) to the subaltern woman with agency and upon whom the colonizing sommunity was deeply dependent on.

The Furry Death

2008-10-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Leonard Woolf, I personally do not find your subject of animals irritating in the least: no, indeed, I rather wish you'd had gone on. And on. And on. Or at least explained what exactly Bambi does when he acquires a nicotine addiction. i find myself horribly intrigued by Charles, "obviously a pukka English dog", as opposed to the pariah "yellow" dogs; I wonder what breed he was to have been so saliently genuine or superior, that he would, possessed by an "imperialist Anglo-Indian spirit" recognize a "native" cat. Caliber in this instance is proved by violence, the "rapidity" of murder that gleans "considerable prestige", which also gets translated into "canine society"- very reminiscent of colonial reaction and the modernist theme of anxiety about new uncertainties.
Growing actually made me think of a line: "For we are surrounded by mirrors, walled in by contradictory images of ourselves" when Woolf ponders on the rightness of sitting on a horse "arrogantly". This contradictory nature is also keenly observed in the anecdote he provided of his encounter of the graves of Adam and Eve. Charles is here the "dog of an infidel". The infidel here is also the savior, being trailed by "smiles and shaking of heads and lifting of hands".
Running an empire is, too, much like taming an elephant, using co-opted natives like "tame elephants" to assuage resistance, it's a "precarious position".

Who watched the newest episode of South Park (Pandemic) and tried grafting Stoler's ideas onto it? So if you obviously are a Peruvian pan flute band and yet... at the same time you're obviously not, you may very well be key in overthrowing Peru or saving the world from giant guinea pigs. Or it could just be why Craig says the kids at school dislike you. Heh heh heh.

modernist by last name

2008-10-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

I think my favourite question to ask is whether or not a text is modernist. So…is Growing modernist? I don’t think so but I shall suggest modernist elements other than those already talked about. I feel that the modernist impulse in Woolf has less to do with consciouness (as in the other Woolf) and instead more with narrative and representation.

I thought a very strong modernist gesture lay in the way Woolf would constantly take little sidetrips out of the narrative and tell us little anecdotes about various people. For instance, he relates Dutton’s naivety in sexual matters by way of an “example”, which comes in the form of a little story within a story. This serves to fragment the narrative in a sense, such that while narrative continuity is maintained, the notion of a single, overarching and totalitarian narrative is reduced. The same example is also similar to what Auerbach – remember him?! – describes as “excurses, whose relations in time to the occurrence which frames them seem to be entirely different” (537). Of course, the only occurrence that takes place here is the act of narration; nonetheless, these ‘excurses’ break up the temporal continuity of the narrative into two discontinuous narrative sequences.

These anecdotes also give the text an impressionistic quality – we learn about characters like Dutton through the impressions that Woolf gives us, rather than straightforward description. The most obvious – and funniest example I can think of is his encounter with Mrs Dutton:

“…perhaps owing to the overpowering smell of clean linen, it gave me the feeling of unmitigated chastity…”

Such suggestiveness even though he never really tells the readers what it is that makes her so miserable! However, my point is that impressionism makes the reader acutely aware of the mediating presence of the author/narrator, along with the realisation that the evocative images we are given are subjective impressions of a non-omniscient, non-objective narrator.

(299 words, excluding quote)

Dogone days...

2008-10-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

I think it was the way Woolf framed it but I was exasperated that even the dog possessed “the imperialist Anglo-Indian spirit” such that it knew its superiority over native dogs. It seemed rather odd Woolf’s claim that he was curiously unaware of his status as an imperialist. Surely the climate in the colonies was sufficiently different from London and the power the sahibs possess over the natives must have been apparent. The tennis club, in the same way as the European club in Burmese Days, was as a symbol of white superiority and exclusivity. Perhaps he was unconsciously justifying his role by feigning ignorance?

Stoler noted that “what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic” (Stoler 57). Here, I am reminded of the sensation stirred by Adela’s alleged sexual assault by Aziz in Passage to India, and the absence and silence of women in Growing. The few women we encounter are that of miserable wives of colonial administrators as they enter into the prison of marriage. Mrs Dutton transits from a relatively independent missionary to the confines of a sterile marriage. Mrs Price bears her suffering in silence “except for the unhappiness terribly stamped on her face”.

Comparing the role of Ma Kin and the European wives, Mrs Price and Mrs Dutton, all three women do not have autonomy and suffer their roles in silence. The men do not take them seriously nor value their opinions let alone care about their happiness in the marriage. How different are they? Perhaps the only endorsement available to European wives is to take on the role of the male imperialist dog (like Elizabeth’s high-handed treatment of domestic staff after marriage in Burmese Days).

Putting a face to imperialism/colonialism

2008-10-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

I have no clue how Leonard Woolf looks like, but somehow, strangely, I feel that he has managed to put a human face to imperialism/colonialism. But why? Has it to do with this 'frank' feeling I get while reading the text? Or is it because he was (so he claims) "a very innocent, unconscious imperialist" (25)?

Unlike the other texts, I find that Woolf's autobiography provides a new perspective into imperialism/colonialism. While it addresses the negative aspects of modernity on the empire - changing the natural landscape (48), erasure of culture (49), the hum drum of the machinery (53), it also points out the positive aspects - efficiency of a regulated system (110), etc... The text recognises the tension of "holding the balance" (110), perhaps it is its awareness of the "difficulties and the frictions" (111) of imperialism that somehow neutralizes this text.

Is it just me, or is this text very comforting? Odd word, but I do not find myself cringing or horrified as I was with the other texts.. maybe it is the lack of abuse and military might.

Literary References in Woolf

2008-10-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

Woolf makes several explicit literary references over the course of "Jaffna"; He directly casts Mrs Lewis as an archtypal character from a Jane Austen novel, likens the native Sinnatamby, as well as the white people around him, to characters from a Kipling novel - he goes so far as to say that 'I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story'. Later on, he likens the 'profound melancholy and fatalism' lying beneath the surface of the natives to something that 'permeates the scenery and characters of a Hardy novel'. The effect of this is to highlight the unreality and performity of the situation that Woolf finds himself in, such that he seems to be living in the pages of a work of fiction. It makes his point that the Anglo-Indians are displaced people out of their natural habitat - echoes of Passage to India here.

The Heterotopic Imagination: Remembrance of Woolf's Past

2008-10-29T06:07:00.000-07:00

I’d like to focus on the interesting premises and assumptions on which the literary form of autobiography is based. As an enterprise that ostensibly and reliably accounts for a person’s life, the form provokes the ever pertinent question of how any kind of writing or narrating can purport to represent a stage of life in its entirety and objectivity. Woolf zeroes in on this when he admits that “[d]airies and letters almost always give an exaggerated, one-sided picture of the writer’s state of mind… Even to ourselves we habitually exaggerate the splendours and miseries of our life”. Woolf's constant referring to letters that he writes to Lytton show up the fact that he relates to himself as text that is self-consciously fashioned and produced. He also sees other people as characters coming out from other colonial literary texts like Kipling's.

While never reaching the comic and absurd extremes like Tristram Shandy does in his quest to hold a mirror to his own life, Woolf shows us that writing is indeed a form of disciplining the self. Like Proust’s narrator, Woolf reaches into his past and finds meaning and significance in the events that have happened and that thus can become aesthetically representable. In fact, Woolf’s writing makes explicit what is inherent in all writing: by separating the “I” that writes in 1960 about events that have happened in 1905, autobiography as a form posits that textual meaning can only arise as a result of this deferral in time, and displacement of space. The retrospective coding of colonial place as something sacrificed to modernity achieves its resonance at the juncture of its topographical reality that inheres, and its necessary deferral into a form of textual “exotic” and unreality. The event of writing (of the self) happens through this distance achieved.

Thoughts on Stoler

2008-10-29T05:35:00.000-07:00

Stoler's article argues that "categories of 'colonizer' and 'colonized' were secured through forms of sexual control," these forms of sexual control and the “rationality” behind them are furthermore dynamic, and change overtime for the purpose of maintaining imperial power. Stoler supports her argument by giving examples of how concubinage is viewed differently over time.

Despite these shifting views of concubinage, what remains static for me is not just simply that the binaries of 'colonizer' and 'colonized' are maintained, but that concubinage is never discouraged (not until the early 20th century- when way to many mixed kids started popping out) and sex remains a common denominator in these shifting views. This is interesting because these sexual exchanges seem to be a consequence of [???- not sure] the economic exchange and trade that colonialism is about.

Economic exchange and sexual exchanges are perhaps one and the same thing. (think commodification of bodies). As a result, everything is reduced and thought of in terms of money. Someone said last week that money effaces race, perhaps its not the erasure of race in the sense of being able to transcend the social class that is associated with your race, but rather, the unmarking and effacement of your individual cultural past, and also the act of re-inscribing you with a new kind of marking/worth- in terms of dollars and cents, in order that the native might remain dependent. The institutionalization of these hybrid children as a form of containing hybridity is then just another "thing”/mechanism that arises from this capitalist system, just as it is also the capitalist machine that in the very first place gives rise to these shifting forms of sexual control that “secure” these binaries.

I hope I make sense, got a bit confuse myself while typing. ☺

colonial identity = masculine identity

2008-10-29T05:27:00.000-07:00

the colonial anxieties of emasculation continue in leonard woolf, as we see from his description of dutton and miss beeching: "He seemed to have shrunk and she to have swollen...I sometimes think this must be the ideal life for a male--and, after performing his male functions, is killed by her or just dies. Not that I thought that Mrs. Dutton would kill and eat Dutton; but she seemed somehow or other to have absorbed what little life and virility he possessed." (72) this proves again how the colonial identity is tied inextricably to the masculine identity and its anxieties of challenge from any frontier of the suppressed and disempowered--whether female, native or other. while interpretations of colonialism and imperialism as an outlet for excess male sexual energy or as a sublimation of sexuality (hyam) might seem a little exaggerated, stoler's claim that "imperial authority and racial distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms" (42) is certainly legitimised by the overwhelming literary (and historical--as she has introduced in 'carnal knowledge') evidence brought to bear on the idea that the colonial identity is fundamentally tied to masculine identity and is, as such, gendered.

It is significant that while marriage and sex are sites wherein the male is able to exert his sexual dominance, they are paradoxically then also the sites of his possible failure and sexual ineptitude. Mrs. Dutton's swelling and appropriation of her husband's virility reflect masculine anxieties about marriage and sex as potential sites of impotence. furthermore, the idea that the masculine identity is tied to performing some kind of sexual function, after which he is rendered useless and ineffectual reduces the masculine identity as tied to a simple physical function--a shallow act lacking actual substance. Likewise, the colonial mask is a "facade" for woolf, and as we have discussed with orwell's elephant, colonialism is very much the assertion and upholding of the image of the potent, virile male with whom must lie all military, racial and sexual power. Stoler's gendered analysis then is very useful for dissecting the colonial identity as fundamentally tied to masculine identity.

The Sun, the Sand, and the Sea....

2008-10-29T04:57:00.000-07:00

Landscape becomes the site of physical and metaphorical change in Woolf’s “Growing”. The change also suggest a disjuncture between the metropole and the colony- not merely physically but psychologically as well.

It starts with the “warm welcome” of the harsh tropics for the “innocent, unconscious imperialist” like himself: "the Colombo sun, which in the late morning hits one as if a burning hand were smacking one's face, the whole of my past life in London and Cambridge seemed suddenly to have vanished, to have faded away into unreality".

The new reality for him is this, the tropics. The climatic change becomes the first indicator of change- of the reality of his situation.

"The strange sense of complete break with the past, the physical sense or awareness of the final forgetting of the Thames, Tilbury, London, Cambridge, St. Paul's, and Brighton, which came upon me". The old memories and places have paved the way for these new sites of memory. The places and buildings become the second indicator of this new reality.

And finally, the fear of colonial administrators back in the metropole: "But I lived in it for many years... and it got into my heart and my bones… I lived inside it to some extent... so that something of its rhythm and tempo, like that of the lagoons and the jungle, crept permanently into my heart and my bones".

This is perhaps a final metamorphosis for the individual living in the colonies, perhaps? As indicated in the highlighted words- there’s a disjuncture from the past, a conjoining with the new. But of course, this does not necessarily mean that he no longer is an “English gentleman”. If so, the suggestion would be that memories and places maketh the [English] man.

Stoler and the sleeping dictionary

2008-10-29T04:29:00.000-07:00

When Stoler describes how British Imperialism rationalized concubinage by arguing that “local women could supply as useful guides to the language an other mysteries of local societies”, where they were credited for providing services that kept European men alive in their initial precarious acclimatization to harsh native climates and alien cultures, I was reminded of the Hollywood movie The Sleeping Dictionary, which starred Jessica Alba playing a native woman named Selima from Sarawak who becomes the concubine of a dashing white colonial officer John Truscott (Hugh Dancy) for the purposes of inducting him into the mysteries of the local language and culture. Apart from the gross historical inaccuracies of the film, it is interesting how the movie removes culpability from the British Imperial enterprise by representing concubinage not as a colonial practice sanctioned by the colonialism’s reluctance to export European women to the colonies, but as a native custom initiated by the Sarawak people, and merely tolerated by the British officials. In fact, the representation of the native custom of concubinage seems almost an imposition on the reluctant Truscott, who is represented as the gentlemanly and passive victim who initially struggles to comprehend why he has to abide by the savage native custom of concubinage. The native woman Selima is represented as the sexually aggressive and inexplicably exotic Other who becomes affronted when the gentlemanly and civilized British official rejects her advances because he is bound by his code of honor. Thus, concubinage is sentimentalized and romanticized in the movie because it is for the sake of being a good and responsible governor of the local natives that Truscott yields to concubinage. Stoler’s point that concubinage paradoxically reinforced the hierarchies on which colonial societies were based, while making these distinctions more problematic at the same time is also evident in the film when concubinage, which was supposed to be an “emotionally unfettered convenience” becomes a union that is “sustained and emotionally significant.” This is realized in the film when Truscott and Selima falls into a forbidden love and produces a mixed Eurasian child. This enrages both the communities of the colonizers and the colonized, because the metis child threatened to destabilise the binaristic categories of colonial difference that sustained the division between the white colonizer and the native colonized.

Growing Skewed

2008-10-29T04:12:00.000-07:00

I find myself having a perplexed attitude towards 'Growing'. On one hand, I think it is subjective to the point of being unrealistic, and on the other, it seems jarringly honest.

Let’s take the honest bits first: he includes extracts of letters, many of which appear uncensored. There is crudeness in his letters (““f*** your wife” I added and enraged him”), as well as a kind of sadism regarding the incident of his owl and rat (“All night long he chases a rat round the dog kennel…he never catches him and as I never feed the rat, they are both slowly dying of starvation”). Also, he admits to sleeping with a “young Burgher girl”, an act that I am sure would not have reflected well of him then.

But I begin to challenge Woolf’s candidness when I see things like “No one, the man included, seemed to be much concerned by this” as a response to Woolf's mismanaged dog peeing on a Sinhalese man, or even that (according to him), “the Arabs were vastly amused” to be “hit…[by]a walking stick” to clear a path for himself. I see it as just another form of White validation of ‘native’ abuse—simply through a ‘but they don’t mind’ attitude. Woolf’s descriptions of events also seem exaggerated/almost ideological (the way the native crows began “eating the vomit as it came out” of Charles’s mouth, or the fact that tiny Charles defeated 3 “large” native dogs, each double his size mind you). I also find his depictions of women in the text fairly extreme, almost like caricatures—we see the phrases “true to type”, “true to the type”, “the kind of wife”, “the…freckled type”—who are flatly/spectrally depicted—“she was a Jane Austen character”, “an inveterate matchmaker”, “went out of her way to say the most outrageous things at the most awkward moments”, “two angels performing a miracle”. Perhaps, the politics of mis/ representation are in play here.

Is Woolf really so different from all the other Dead White Men?

2008-10-29T03:54:00.000-07:00

I, like some others it seems, was looking forward to Woolf being an entirely non-racist writer. However, I was initially disappointed by page 54 when he describes the people of Jaffna and Haambantota kachcheris as

nearer than we are to primitive man and there are many nasty things about primitive man...They live so close to the jungle that they retain some thing of the litheness and beauty of jungle animals...They do not conceal their individuality any more than their beggars conceal their appalling sores and ulcers and monstrous malformations.

Lest someone say I quote out of context, here Woolf compares the native favourably against the white man who "live..behind our lace curtains in the image...of the rubber stamp and the machine" (Woolf, 54). He celebrates the natives "animal" qualities as opposed to the functional, non-instinctual lives of the Europeans who also have the "desires and passions of the primitive man" (Woolf, 53), but are too inhibited by the superego (Woolf, 54).

Arguably, comparing natives to beautiful jungle animals may not be that insulting in a technical sense. However, I fail to see how it is in any way flattering that their "individuality" is compared to a beggar totally honest about displaying his "appalling sores and ulcers and monstrous malformations", images all associated with disease. Woolf also falls into the thought which associates the land with certain qualities which then "infect" the peoples - people who live near the jungle behave like jungle animals. What I'm saying is this: even as Woolf claims to celebrate the native, his language seems to undercut the content - i don't know if this a subconscious racism or a product of the cultural framework and language norms in which the imperialist functions.

(Not at) Home Away from Home: Out of Country, Out of Character

2008-10-29T03:31:00.000-07:00

Woolf's “Jaffna”, like “Shooting an Elephant”, is centred on and driven by a main protagonist, typically an average-rank official: an insider to the Empire, yet one who looks in from the outside. Like the elephant-shooting official, who is forced to operate as an automaton within the imperialist system, of which flaws and motives he recognises, so also Woolf saw imperialism from the outside in and “gradually became fully aware of its nature and problems”. While such self-awareness might be praised, it in fact detaches characters (and authors?) from responsibility for the ills of empire while they yet remain in it.

Interestingly, the authors we’ve been reading tend to pad their characters’ actions by contrasting home and being “out there” (Heart of Darkness 17). Woolf tellingly opens the “Jaffna” section by disclaiming that

If one lives where one was born and bred, the continuity of one’s existence gives it…accepted reality. But if…one suddenly uproots oneself into a strange land and a strange life, one feels as if one were acting…or…in a dream.

Also, the characters in Heart of Darkness and Burmese Days are so unnerved by being in foreign lands that they just can’t function in character, conveniently accounting for their exploitative and cruel acts.

From the realm of the caves, Forster’s words echo thus: “We’re not pleasant in India, and we don’t intend to be pleasant. We’ve something more important to do” (Passage 45). Contrary to Fielding’s quip that “You can make India in England apparently, just as you can make England in India” (67), the impulse to detach characters and their motives from their actions with the "out-of-country, out-of-character” mentality prove otherwise – you can’t make England anywhere else than England – and betray the nagging need to account for the vast number of crimes committed in the name of colonialism.

(300 words)

Modernist experiences in Ceylon

2008-10-29T03:21:00.000-07:00

Using Woolf’s “letter to Lytton” on May 21 1905, I am going to discuss how the experience of Woolf’s colonial encounter with the Indian “natives” is one of modernist alienation and disorientation. In this letter, Woolf draws our attention to the uncertainty and instability of events in the foreign space of the Jaffna Penisula using the metaphor of the cataclysm: “a hole had suddenly appeared in the midst of a field about 5 miles from Jaffna . . . every five or ten minutes, the crack widens and the earth topples over into the water, which heaves and swirls and eddies” (22). It is possible, I think, to see this violent geographical occurrence as a symbolic externalization of Woolf’s disturbed mind, disturbed because the colonial encounter and experience is one that is disorientating and confusing, to the extent that he can “neither read, nor think nor – in the old way he feel[s]” (22).

Certainly, Woolf’s disorientation here develops largely because of his alienation in “suddenly [uprooting] oneself into a strange land and a strange life” (3). The colonial encounter is seen as defamiliarizing and thus evoked as if it were an illusion, where “one feels as if one were acting in a play or living in a dream” (3). Indeed, the phantasgamoric element of the colonial encounter is continuously reinforced by Woolf: “there was something extraordinary real and at the same time unreal in the sights and sounds and smells – the whole impact of Colombo, the G.O.H., and Ceylon in those first hours and days, and this curious mixture of intense reality and unreality applied to all my seven years in Ceylon” (3). Ceylon, in other words, can be seen as the place where European anxieties are displaced and performed.

Being Always Subject to "Imperial Power"

2008-10-29T03:19:00.000-07:00

In the section where she talks about 'Racist but Moral Women, Innocent but Immoral Men', Stoler notes that even if

'European women were positioned as the bearers of a redefined colonial morality[,] to suggest that they fashioned this racism out of whole cloth is to miss the political chronology in which new intensities of racist practice arose... ...Significantly, what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with a realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic' (Stoler 57).

This particularly struck me as it summed up nicely the feeling of futility one may feel in being part of the colonial enterprise. Recall the policeman in "Shooting an Elephant", and his painful awareness of his status as a representative of white prestige and thus the need to 'avoid looking a fool' (Orwell, "Shooting"). Recall also, Flory in "Burmese Days", where it is initially 'unthinkable' (Orwell, "Burmese Days") that he should stick up for Dr. Veeraswami, and ends up signing the document that Ellis writes. Both characters admit to the reality that 'when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys' (Orwell, "Shooting").

While Stoler's quote makes reference to women, it is clear that all entities under the colonial regime (women, men, animals; you name it) must follow their prescribed place in society, even if this place is irrational, immoral, or redundant. This is not to say that the status quo is static-on the contrary, it is ever-changing (Stoler gives the example of how concubinage is viewed differently over time). However, most noteworthy is the fact that this change only occurs when it is in keeping with the larger, current goals of the empire. Until then, one may agitate for change to little or no effect- such is 'imperial power' (Stoler's title).

(286 words excluding block quote)

Writing the white self by censoring sex

2008-10-29T02:50:00.000-07:00

I found Stoler’s observation that the later stages of colonialism were accompanied by the increasing need to build a “cordon sanitaire” (77) around whiteness and white prestige very interesting. This seems to be paralleled in the tension I find in Orwell and Woolf, which arises, I feel, between the growing awareness of empire’s complexity on one hand and the anxiety of self – the need to inscribe one’s identity within protective whiteness – on the other.

This tension is reflected in the Orwell and Woolf texts, which claim to be autobiographical but which are carefully – whether consciously or not – crafted to project a certain image of the self. What struck me in particular about Woolf was how he constantly drew on symbols of whiteness to shape his discourse. The people and events he writes about are compared to (and therefore understood through) fictional discourses from Austen, Kipling, Forster, Don Quixote; his autobiographical account is based not just on personal recollections but on letters exchanged with Lytton Strachey in England. One has to be in dialogue and contact with Englishness/whiteness in order to express the self. And in order to project a self that is acceptable to standards of whiteness (as Woolf himself performs to the Club and to the natives), Woolf and Orwell’s accounts of the self also undergo some form of self-censorship. As noted in other posts, women are curiously absent in texts by both authors; attempts at portraying (white) women are sanitized and desexualized – a symptom of the prescribed moral and sexual roles that Stoler identifies.

Arguably, sexuality in colonialism is essential but veiled (by symbolism or other forms of discourse and power relations) because sex is disarming in its physicality and visceral nature. This is somewhat similar to Woolf’s epiphany that when faced with simple, sensory contact with his beloved animals, “they make nonsense of all philosophies and religions” (101) [though Woolf seems to have a disturbing tendency to place more importance on his pets than on the natives!]. Hence, the power of sexuality and sex to challenge imposed boundaries (physically manifested in the metis children of mixed blood) explains why they were gradually censored from the discourse of whiteness.

On The Duttons

2008-10-29T02:26:00.000-07:00

“I can still see their minute figures [i.e. Miss Beeching and Dutton], standing there in the gigantic, flat, dusty plain of Jaffna peninsula, looking helpless, ridiculous, pathetic against the flaming sunset. And I realized that largely owing to me Dutton would marry Miss Beeching – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Miss Beeching would marry Dutton […] I was depressed that Sunday bicycling back to Jaffna.” (69-70)

Woolf disapproves of the union between Dutton and Miss Beeching. He seems to be demoralized by the thought that the former has been “caught”. He goes on to elaborate this thought with a metaphor:

“[The Duttons] reminded me of those pairs of insects – some are spiders or worms – in which a very small male is attached to a very large female – fitting ignominiously and neatly into her gigantic body – I sometimes think that this must be the ideal life for a male – and, after performing his male functions, is killed and eaten by her or just dies.” (72, emphasis mine)

Woolf’s attitude towards the Dutton’s union seems to based itself on a certain intimation of an unsavoriness in Miss Beeching’s character; he distrusts her, perhaps even imbue her presence in the continent with a deplorable agenda. Woolf writes that, together with Miss Case, Miss Beeching arrives in the tropics for the purpose of missionary work (69). And, as it turns out, “some months later Miss Beeching did marry Dutton.” (70) I am intrigued by why Woolf would feel so strongly against the union between Dutton and Miss Beeching. Is he reacting upon an assumption that the two missionaries entered Jaffna only on the pretext of missionary work, whereas their real agenda is to participate in the “marriage market”? Stoler’s exposition of the restrictions on European women in the colonies may be relevant here: if unions between European man and native women were encouraged institutionally as these were considered “less costly” or economically more viable a method of providing “sexual access” to the European men within the colonial enterprise – native women who entered into concubinage “could be dismissed without reason, notice, or severance pay. They might [even] be exchanged among Europeans and ‘passed on’ when men left for leave or retirement in Europe.” (49) – and if the restrictions on salary increases of male European colonial employees continues to be upheld – as a method of discouraging immigration of European women and marriages between them and the European men in the colonies – would not, then, the pretext of missionary work presents itself as an attractive justification for the entry of European women into the colonies?

Or is Woolf more concerned if Dutton is capable enough a man (an English man?) to enter into so solemn a project as marriage is? In relation to the second possibility, Woolf writes that Dutton is “mentally […] certainly a eunuch,” that “his attitude towards [love and women] was a cross between that of a sentimental and innocent schoolgirl and that of Don Quixote.” Thus, Woolf appears to think of Dutton as naïve and romantic, and perhaps more crucially, unmanly. What then constitutes Woolf idea of (an ideal?) manhood? To answer that, one may refer to the emphasis in the second quote.

More will be touched upon during presentation.

the act of colonialism

2008-10-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

Woolf seems to paint colonialism as something akin to a farcical act and I got a first hint of this when he says that it was the act of pretending to be grand “in a strange Asiatic country’ that “gave the touch of unreality and theatricality” to the lives of the White ruling caste. In London, they were what they were, they were not acting. But in Ceylon, they “were all always…playing a part, acting upon a stage”; the backcloth of which was imperialism” (24).

This notion of theatricality and acting is continued when Woolf describes how he attained a good impression in Jaffna. He says, “My reputation as …a Sahib…was therefore established within three hours of my arrival, for a civil servant, wearing bright green flannel collars and accompanied by a dog who within the space of ten minutes killed a cat and a large snake, commanded respect”. Here, the comical and almost ludicrous manner by which Woolf gained this immediate respect as a White master undermines his own prestige because it is almost as if White respectability depended not on true substance, but on whether one possessed the right costumes and props to pull off the White master’s act of prestige.

This idea of acting is also evident in how the civil servants met every evening for a game of tennis, which had become something like “a ritual, almost a sacrament”, before adjourning for social conversation—“the ritual of British conversation which inevitably followed British exercise”. All these social rituals seem to me like outward shows of sophistication and civility, mere acts of the white man’s supposed prestige and superiority over the natives. All these definitely reduce colonialism to a very empty and substance-less shell for me—a very staged-up act that is ultimately hollow at the core.

Restoring my faith...

2008-10-29T00:37:00.000-07:00

I felt that Woolf was a much more honest writer than Orwell was, and he presented the dilemmas colonial masters faced in a much clearer light. Woolf highlighted the performative aspects colonialists had to play but at the same time, demonstrated to the reader his attempts at negotiating between the performativeness and truthfulness.

I think part of the reason why I felt that Growing was more real than the other works we have read on the course is because he does not adopt this high and mighty imperialist attitude towards the colonized. There were several instances where we see him as who he is, another human being in an alien land. When he wrote about the death of an Arab man, the description was simple and sad:

The four men “waded back slowly; the feet of the dead man stuck out, toes pointing up, very stark over the shoulders of the men in front. The body laid on the sand. The bearded face of the dead man looked very calm, very dignified in the faint light (95).

Woolf did not dehumanize the Arab man, did not try to impose strict binaries but rather his description of the man as ‘dignified’ touched me. Just when I had lost all faith in colonial masters as humans and saw them as just greedy and self-absorbed men, I’m glad Woolf came along to restore some faith in them. And I thought it was hilarious how he said he was ‘infuriated when I saw a rather unpleasant looking white man introduced into my room by the peon without my permission’ (129). Where he said ‘[t]he longer I was in Ceylon, the more prejudiced I became against “white men”’ (129), for me, it’s the more empire writings I read, ‘the more prejudiced I become against “white men”’ (129).

Sexuality in Exigency

2008-10-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

We see in Woolf’s Jaffna account the figures that obviously reflect the Stoler’s description of European women in the colonies. A “Jane Austen character”, Woolf describes Mrs. Lewis as a archetypal female of the Victorian Social Realist novel (42). Likewise, it is due to such characters that Stoler describes to have “contructed the major cleavages on which colonial stratification would rest” (56), “as bearers of a redefined colonial morality” (57). Her attempted matchmaking of Woolf with Mary can also be seen as the microcosmic replication of the colonial state’s directive that European men in the colonies would need to be married to a European woman to keep them in check.

Yet, the absence of the wife figure in Woolf’s account in Jaffna provokes suspicion. It might be presumptious to say it, but perhaps like most European men in the colonies, he indulges in prostitutes to relieve sexual tensions/pressures of living in the colonies (68), and the marriages of his generation in Jaffna are described to be bleak and sad (70), for Dutton and Miss Beeching’s marriage is described to be falling apart (74). Where then, is the European wife, or the native concubine that Stoler prescribes for men in the colonies?

Woolf’s platonic lying together on the sand with Gwen, juxtaposed with the lax (immoral?) upbringing of the two girls by their widowed mother (102), shows him to be deviating from Stoler’s chapter description of European men in the colonies as “innocent but immoral men”, needing “racist but moral women” (56). But what Woolf’s silence on his sexuality in the Jaffna account means the abovementioned or is simply glossing over the norms of colonial sexual politics, his encounters of colonial representations of sexualty largely subscribe to the economical and political exigencies.

show me the women

2008-10-28T21:07:00.000-07:00

There is hardly any mention of women, much less notable and interesting woman personalities in Leonard Woolf’s Growing. I think this is very much explained by Stoler’s article on how colonial policies discourage the immigration of European women into the colonies, limiting marriages only to high ranking officials and keeping salaries of European recruits “artificially low” to prevent them from starting a family (48). I think that it is the scarcity of European women, rather than Leonard Woolf’s deliberate omission that explains the lack of female personalities in his autobiography.

Leonard Woolf did pay special attention to the Lewis and Price couple. Mrs Lewis was “[l]arge, plump, floridly good-looking”, “a Jane Austen character complete in face, form, speech, mind – a Mrs Jennings” (42). She is “an inveterate matchmaker” equipped with “artless and embarrassing manoeuvres” (43). Mr John Penry Lewis was a “[l]arge, slow, fat, shy man” who was “extremely lazy and not fond of responsibility”, “took little interest in administration” (41). Mrs Price “was the exact opposite of Mrs Lewis. She was a real Victorian lady” (114). She is “rather silent and extremely nervous”, with an “impenetrable reserve” (114). Ferdinando Hamlyn Price was “[t]all, thin, athletic looking, baldish, with a long hatchet-face” and was “congenitally and incorrigibly lazy” (105).

There are a few observations to be made. Both Mrs Lewis and Mrs Price have “delicate sensibilities” and need for “elevated standards of living” (55). Mrs Price whose “life with Price and Ceylon ... terrified her” (114), Mrs Lewis and her gramaphone (88). Marriages are confined to high ranking colonial officials (i.e. G.A). Married men are lazy and seldom dealt with colonial administration, preferring to delegate the jobs to young and single subordinates (i.e. Leonard Woolf).

Contrary to Stoler’s article, I do not see European women and marriage as having that much of an impact on colonial rule. Then again, perhaps that is what Stoler is concerned with, the overlooking and omission in assessing the influence of European women with regards to colonial policies.

"... the silence, the emptiness, the melancholia ..."

2008-10-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

No one (at this point in the class, at least) can miss the significance of the opening of Chapter 2: "There was something extraordinarily real and at the same time unreal in the sights and sounds and smells ... and this curious mixture of intense reality and unreality applied to all my seven years in Ceylon" (21). Once again, like Conrad, Woolf probes the nature of reality, and by extension the nature of consciousness and of experience itself and the very faculties with which we apprehend/comprehend the world. The fact that the Woolf prefaces his own arrival in Sri Lanka in such uncertain terms underscores his own anxiety at being displaced from not only his home, but from the familiar structures of knowledge production and meaning making. In being pushed to the very fringes of the Empire Woolf finds it almost necessary to undertake the ontological questioning that is at the heart of his memoirs. This line of questioning undercuts the solipsism that is so intrinsic to the "I" of the autobiography, and the centre cannot hold. Much of the chapter is a reorientation, in every sense of the word, in a foreign country, but just as Woolf is getting comfortable in Jaffna, his brief posting to Mannar unsettles him once again, besieging him with sleepless nights.

Thus, modernism was not just a fictional strategy; it also allowed for the interrogation of autobiographical self, and for the crystallization of the anxieties of the colonizer, as Woolf came to see colonial superfluity and futility in Sri Lanka. One is left to consider (as does Leonard himself, undoubtedly) what might have happened if he did marry Gwen, and it in is this subtle yet palpable ponderation of the autonomy of the individual against the social script that Woolf does not simply address a growing disaffection towards the colonial enterprise, but mounts a redress of the self and society, and how the latter impinges on the former.

European women in native lands

2008-10-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

Stoler’s essay talks about the role of women in colonialism, and how sexual politics can be seen in relation to racial policies. Although the presence of European women in native lands enforced the boundaries and social spaces drawn between the white community and the natives, this reinforcement of racial differences was a continuation from previous tensions in the interactions between colonizers and colonized. European women are however chided for several things: racism, jealousy of Euro-Asian unions, and if they are assaulted by natives, they are often blamed for provoking their desires.

Similarly, the women in the novels read in this course have been portrayed as naïve, racist and unable to adapt to native cultures. Have we been reading them wrongly? That we fault these women for perhaps not being more open-minded and less racist, when in fact, they had a gendered-specific role to play in the colonial lands. As Stoler argues, “what European women had to say had little resonance and little effect until their objections coincided with a realignment in both racial and class politics in which they were strategic” (57). Do we perhaps take on the position of a White male colonizer with certain expectations of how European women were to behave, in ways which are also “strategic” to our own understandings of colonialism?

If colonialism is predicated on colonial difference, then European women could either be perceived as the bearers of these differences or they could transgress their roles. Either way, they must be read in ways aligned with particular ideologies and value systems. As much as European women, like the natives, are policed by the white male colonizers, they are policed by readers too.

Performativity; Power and a little Gender

2008-10-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

The idea of theatricality or performativity is seen again in Woolf’s Growing. His open admittance that “in Ceylon [they] were always, subconsciously or consciously, playing a part, acting upon a stage.(Woolf24-25)” suggests that the role of the colonized is one that is not so much assumed as it is acted out. The underlying notion of having expectations to meet in the eyes of colonial standards by the establishment suggest that the relationship between colonizer and colonized was not only set up by expectation (and recognition) of a master-slave(power-powerless) dynamic, but also perpetuated by it. Stoler’s idea of “who counted as “European” and by what measure”(43) then becomes something that is vague in terms of actual personality traits, but becomes a much more vague label recognized by virtue of the way the colonizers and colonized act. This can be seen in Woolf’s autobiography where his dog defecates someone’s clean white clothes and no one takes notice and also when the Charles, his dog is sick all over the native owned place in Jaffna and no one took notice. The fact that the white man (and the whiteman’s dog) can behave in such a manner without consequence signals the obvious power positions.

While Stoler’s article of Gender suggest that sexual images illustrate the iconography of rule(45), what remained curious to me is Woolf’s illustration of women(white or non) in the excerpts, from the nonchalant way he says he “spent the night”(I forget the page) with a local woman to his merciless, descriptions of Miss Beeching with the “face rather like that of a good looking male Red Indian”( Woolf 26)and Mrs Lewis as “large, plump and flordly good-looking”(I forget which page), he seems to embody that colonial ideal of European “hypermasculinity”(cant find the page in Stoler) in his power of gender over the figures of Others; women and perhaps the most “othered’ the native women (who supposedly are “useful guides”(Stoler 49)

Growing Up Woolf

2008-10-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

It looks like I'm the first to post this week. I found the chapter, "Jaffna" a bit of a drag to read towards the end. Am I the only one? It starts out interesting enough, but as the memoir progresses Woolf starts transitioning abruptly from one incident to another, leaving me a bit disorientated(and bored, all those acronyms do NOT help),and I was wishing I was reading Roald Dahl's Going Solo instead, indicative of the state of nostalgia I'm currently wallowing in. (aka: I miss my childhood!) But to be fair, this Woolf's not that bad. Okay now on to my post proper:

In "Jaffna", Woolf writes retrospectively about working experience as a civil servant in Ceylon, working hard and efficiently for indolent G.As, doing their jobs for them, improving office effiency etc etc. He recounts his life in the imperialist White society, talking about the White civil servants he met. Interpersed between his accounts are extracts from his correspondence with his Bloomsbury friend, Lytton Strachey.I found most interesting his resemblance to Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, in his "growing" awareness of himself as a "ruler of subject peoples" (111) and the doubts that came along with it, where at the beginning he had been a "very innocent, unconscious imperialist" (25). Like Orwell, he becomes conscious of the dilemma that faces the white imperialist as a "cog" in the imperial machinery through day-to-day incidents with natives. Woolf, in the horse-whip incident, doubts the White imperialist's right to rule in thinking that his "sitting on a horse arrogantly in the main street of their town was as good as a slap in the face" (114). It is ironic that Woolf had disregarded traffic laws in stopping his horse to be this nit-picky, exacting civil servant, pointing out how the natives had encroached on the highway with their property. Woolf becomes aware of this irony which highlights inequities in treatment that White imperialists assume, in order to perpetuate their rule. Similar to Orwell's Shooting, Woolf becomes aware of the White imperialist as "acting" on the "stage, scenery, backcloth" that was imperialism. What Woolf seems to be projecting is the implication of being an individual within a larger organisation or machinery. In Woolf's bid to be a good civil servant, an "effective cog" so to speak, he assumes a stance that compromises fair, un-rascist treatment of the natives, thus perpetuating their dominance.
(295)

From Looking to Voyeurism

2008-10-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

Just have to post this: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=KzRX8i_2gkU

Enjoy. =)

a friend by any other name is a foe

2008-10-22T14:31:00.000-07:00

My post will be about the "fraudulent recognition" of Flory as a friend. First off, other than the good doctor it's pretty much safe to say that Flory doesn't have any other friends (the "louts" at the Club he's so fond of denigrating won't be hard-pressed to call him one either, him and his "Bolshie" ideas). Strangely enough though the term "friend" is peppered liberally throughout the narrative, there are very few instances of Flory calling Veraswami that very name; he calls him "doctor" instead. This effectively puts distance between an Englishman and a Burmese and lends ballast to the disquieting sentiment that it is "a disagreeable thing when one's close friend is not one's social equal". This close friendship is one-sided; Flory is an exploiter in the same vein as the bigoted Ellis is but worse since he professes to be the doctor's friend and claims that that friendship "was not worth" the ugly rows that would break out were he to support the doctor's election to the club in the next breath. He only throws in his cloth together with Veraswami when he himself is in a position of power later on and therefore, untouchable. Veraswami's fanatic loyalty to the English is translated into his friendship with Flory, one that isn't reciprocated. Flory's suicide damns Veraswami to "pagodas, pariahs, pigs, priests and prostitutes" and yet still Veraswami makes the necessary arrangements in the wake of his messy death, in both his official capacity as doctor and personal as friend, lying to preserve Flory's legacy, a legacy nobody else cares for anyway. He's as much removed from shok de as you can get.
The asymmetric essences embodied by the colonizer and colonized here are that of Flory's renunciation of his only ally and Veraswami's dogged decency.

Flory and the Angel in the House...

2008-10-22T12:10:00.000-07:00

I was especially interested in Stoler's depiction of the colonies as "laboratories of modernity," with those within it "subjects" that "reworked" the coloniser's "experiments" and the "possibility that their choices expressed a domestic subversion, a rejection of the terms of the civilising mission." (551) In conjunction with this, I was thinking about the development of modernism in postwar Britain, and the trend of sexual experimentation, with unorthodox relationships such as homosexuality and extramarital affairs being encouraged (or at least, so we seem encouraged to think through biographies of various modernist writers), and such experimentation being a part of the reaction modernism had against the Victorian values of family life.

As far as reaction towards Victorian values goes, Flory could be in ways construed as a modernist (or modern) hero, turning against the traditional English ranks to socialise with the natives, and abandoning the façade of Victorian morality to admit to its lie - "the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them." (33) When Passage's Collector sadly notes "after all, it's our women who make everything more difficult out here," it might well apply to poor old Flory, for it is Elizabeth's arrival that erects in him the Victorian vision of "the angel in the house" and its family trappings - a vision that, as discussed above, was fading even in England, as Elizabeth attests to: "'You should have a piano,' he said despairingly. 'I don't play the piano.'" With a Victorian idealisation of women as his downfall, Flory goes from modernist hero to Victorian loser, a failed subject in that "laboratory of modernity." In contrast, Stoler's "cultura[l] hybrids" would instead be true modernist heroes, their "lifestyles" (551) perhaps closer to the "domestic subversion" that the very modernists in Britain were grasping towards.

Capitalism in Burmese Days.

2008-10-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

"We seem to have no authority over the natives nowadays, with all these dreadful Reforms, and the insolence they learn from the newspapers. In some ways, they are getting almost as bad as the lower class at home."

Here, Mrs Lackersteen complains about the increasing difficulty of controlling her servants. But at the same time, by comparing the 'lower class' in English society to the 'natives,' this quotation also highlights the stark parallels between the social structure in English society and the colonial enterprise in India.

"Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in wheels of despotism ... you opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs' code."

Here again, the narrative describes the capitalist regime of English society in Hindu terms (ie: Pukka sahibs' code). This again highlights the parallels between the situation in England and in Burma. Therefore, I think it is perhaps arguable that "Burmese Days" is also a critique of the capitalist discourse and not just imperialism per se. Perhaps it is even arguable that Burma is merely a tool used by Orwell to unveil the evils of capitalism in England. By highlighting the similarities, I think the novel also exposes the nature of these systems, suggesting that institutional power doesn't rely on any individual (whether the pukka sahib in Burma or the bourgeois in England), and ultimately results in the alienation of the individual as exemplified by Flory.

Appearances versus Reality

2008-10-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

The case study of the Icard/Lucien relationship (Stoler, 522-524) reveals the West's insistence on "empirical" modes of understanding in relation to racism, how one can deduce "invisible protean essences" from their "visual representations" (Stoler, 522)

"a boy who had virtuallly none of the exterior qualities (skin tone, language, or cultural literacy) and therefore could have none of the interior attributes of being French". (524, Stoler)

This quote , that the physical is merely a logical result of the emotional/intellectual/spiritual life of the individual is similar to the empirical approach that Wallace takes in "The Malay Archipelago". Obviously, this is very flawed.

Race then becomes complicated for the mixed-blood subject because it is less easy to judge them base on similarities in appearance or the use of European names. In fact, "physiological attributes only signal the non-visual and the more salient distinctions of exclusion on which racism rests" (521, Stoler). Racism is not merely about physical difference, in fact it is the physical difference that highlights or is a result of more fundamental differences on which racism rests.

In relation to Burmese Days then, it would seem Orwell critiques this. Despite Flory's familiarity with European high culture he is still ugly because of his birthmark, still Othered by the European community. On the other hand, Elizabeth's ignorance of Western culture and her dubious morality does not translate into poor looks. I don't know if there is a discrepancy I am merely looking for due to the Stoler reading, but it does point to fundamental flaws in the way one approaches the whole "appearances are a natural result of the emotional/cultural/intellectual reality of the individual" idea that the West seemed to have adopted at that point in time.

got hypermasculine meh?

2008-10-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

According to Stoler, the “demasculinization of colonised men and the hypermasculinity of European males are understood as key elements in the assertion of white supremacy”. In Burmese Days, Orwell contrasts this masculine ideal against the realities of Flory and Co. as a means of challenging both the racial and gendered implications of this ideal.

While this hypermasculine ideal is very much embodied by the polo-playing, feral, virile, Verrall, the same cannot be said for Flory and Co., who spend their available time indulging in gin and tonics rather than games of tennis. Furthermore, the white colonisers are shown to be inadequate in comparison with the local males. There is, for instance, the token symbol of physical strength and purity:

“The Burman who paddled Elizabeth was sixty years old, half naked, leaf brown, with a body as perfect as that of a young man” (160)

Masculinity is expressed most clearly in their sexual exploits (I’m thinking of that skanky scene involving Mr Lankersteen and THREE Burmese girls, and similar) which are numerous and commonplace, and which involve the domination of local women such as Ma Hla May. However, doubly asymmetrical power relationships between colonizer/colonized and male/female makes it difficult for me to read such sexual relations as an embodiment of white masculine power – You don’t need to be particularly power to dominate over an already subjugated and subservient class of people. Furthermore, the presence of Elizabeth, with her love physical sport such as shooting and horse-riding, serves further to undermine the gendered stereotypes.

The issue of virility also arises: Concubinage revolves around sexual, but sterile (infertile?) unions and Flory for instance is described as being in a state of perpetual bachelorhood.

“Flory, because a bachelor, was a boy still whereas Ko S’la had married, begotten five children, married again and become one of the obscure matyrs of bigamy” (51)

The idea of fecundity (or lack thereof) is thus another, more subtle way in which the ideal of white masculinity is critiqued and found to be wanting.

Milieu, infection and colonial health

2008-10-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

Stoler quotes Paul Rainbow’s argument that “the concern about milieu permeating French colonial thinking on education, health, labor, and sex in the late nineteenth century can only be understood in terms of the scientific episteme on which it relied” (535). This stood out for me for two reasons: the notion of milieu that Stoler discusses several times in the reading, and the “episteme”/metaphor of infection that permeates colonial discourse.

On one level, the colony is presented as a source of infection for the metropolitan centre in terms of physical health. Contemporary medical accounts warned of health dangers to Europeans who “stayed in the tropics too long” (Stoler 536); this is reflected in Burmese Days with Flory’s illness that “finished” his youth (68) and the creepy doctor who measured Marlow’s cranium in Heart of Darkness. Infection also carries to another level of heritage and blood, hence the anxiety over metis (literally mixed blood) that Stoler examines.

Besides carrying uncomfortable overtones of feudalism (where the right to rule is carried in the blood/endowed by superior divine force), this literal, quasi-empirical way of looking at the effect of the colony on the colonizer is problematic for me because of how it subsequently becomes a metaphor and epistemological mode that shapes the discourse and perception of colonizer and colonized alike. Imperialism becomes, in every sense of the word, a malaise that plagues colonial relations and thought: notice how for Flory “what poisoned everything…was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived” (Orwell 68). The framework of infection shapes the milieu in which colonialism functions and the colonizer’s response: preventing infection by purifying the milieu/environment, as Flory does by replacing the source of infection (May) with the totem of the pure white woman. This is partly why the portrayal of both women in Orwell’s text (barring the complications of authorial irony) disturbs me on an instinctive level.

Stoler and Orwell

2008-10-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

Stoler’s article about colonial categories and people who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened imperial divides (514) can be applied to “Burmese Days” particularly through the characters of Francis, Samuel and Flory. Francis and Samuel being “sons of white fathers and native mothers” are what Stoler calls the progeny of “métissage”, people straddling the boundary between white and native man. Their fate as outsiders to the white society despite their “drop of white blood” (126) is sealed, because, as Stoler says, even with a rhetoric affirming that education and upbringing were transformative processes, Europeanness of métis children could never be assured to colonial officials. What more then for Francis and Samuel who are described as being “brought up in the bazaar”, having “had no education”, and having no proper upbringing (126)—in the white man’s eyes, not only their mixed parentage, but also their lack of any transformative processes would have effectively stained whatever white blood they biologically possessed. This is perhaps why the two men “excited a peculiar dislike in” Elizabeth and why she even terms them “awfully degenerate types” (126)—precisely because these Eurasians were seen as “threat to white prestige, an embodiment of European degeneration” (515).

Flory is another example of a transgressor of boundaries because instead of adhering to Manichean categories in his associations, he has a friendship with Veraswami and even a sexual relation with Ma Hla May. Elizabeth’s disgust towards Flory’s sexual relation once again represents the colonial society’s concern that European men living with native women would be “contaminated” by these native associations (533). This is particularly evident when Flory’s “ugliness” only became apparent to Elizabeth after she witnessed Ma Hla May’s denouncement of Flory and realised that he had “been the lover of that grey-faced maniacal creature” (286), almost as if May had infected Flory with her ugliness through her association with him.

'Burmese Days' and 'Passage to India'; A Caricature

2008-10-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

As people have already pointed out, there are many similarities between Burmese Days and A Passage to India. The former book was published a decade after the latter, so it is not inconceivable that Orwell read PtI and was influenced by it. In both cases, a picture of the Anglo-Indians is being painted, and there is a friendship between the eccentric Englishman and the Indian doctor, which leads the Englishman to stand up on his friend's behalf. These similaries, however, serve to highlight the contrasts. Aziz and Veraswami are almost polar opposites of each other in their attitutes to the British Empire. Adela and Elizabeth arrive with opposite expectations of India/Burma. Flory is much more insecure than Fielding... the list goes on. Where Forster painted a more realist portrait of the Anglo-Indians and their world, Orwell paints a caricature, despite him terming Burmeses Days a 'naturalistic novel' in his article 'Why I Write'. By doing this, Orwell is perhaps stripping his novel down to its basic agenda - as an expose of the folly of imperialism, much as PtI was oft cited as a reason why the British should leave India.

Liminal Eurasians in Burmese Days

2008-10-22T08:39:00.000-07:00

Stoler’s essay about the metissage phenomenon of interracial unions and how Indo-Chinese in various Dutch colonies occupied a liminal position in colonial society due to their hybrid identity manifests itself in Burmese Days, specifically in the condition of the two Eurasian men Francis and Samuel. Their liminality is evident in how they are despised by not only the European community, but also alienated from the native Burmese community because their “political, economic and social bids” were in contradistinction to the demands of the native population, not in alliance with them. On the one hand, Europeans such as Elizabeth perpetuate pseudo-scientific racist myths about the allegedly inherently degenerate natures of Eurasians, asserting that “half-castes always inherit what’s worst in both races”, and thus exclude them socially by not wanting to associate or “touch them with a stick”, while using such myths to rationalize and justify the political exclusionary, discriminatory practices implemented against them, such as “cutting them off from entering third-grade Government services.” On the other hand, Francis and Samuel’s relationship with the natives, although much friendlier because the natives allow the Eurasians to cadge and work for them, is also a tension-fraught one because the Eurasian men basically capitalize or exploit the colonial notions of racial difference as a means of survival. They perform “European-ness” by complaining of “prickly heat” and wearing “huge topis” that remind the natives that they’ve got European skulls susceptible to sunstroke even though they may not suffer from these conditions that plague white men, because it is precisely the “drop of white blood” that assures their survival, recommending them as superior beings worthy in the eyes of the natives who grudgingly allow them to living amongst them. Their liminality which is caused by the exclusion from a proper European education and abandonment by their English clergymen fathers is also expressed in how their attempts to showcase their mastery of the English language falls short because of the excessively overt use of highly conventionalized/ritualised forms of civilised English expressions such as “Good evening to you” and “most honored to make your acquaintance” which are interspersed with grammatically, structurally or syntactically unsound or awkward phrases such as “Myself I suffer torments each night” that are associated with the perceived stereotype of how a native Burmese who is unable to master the English language speaks.

Crossing boundaries

2008-10-22T08:06:00.001-07:00

The “purity of the community… the essence of the community [as] an intangible “moral attitude”, a multiplicity of invisible lines” (Stoler 516) that cannot be crossed is seen in Flory, May and Dr Veraswami. Flory crosses the racial lines of imperialism by befriending and aligning his sympathies with the colonized. However, with Elizabeth’s arrival, the invisible lines that divide colonizers and colonized are unveiled as he realizes that he “longed all these years for somebody to talk to!” His acute loneliness stems from straddling between his colonist lineage and disapproved friendships with the locals. In May and Dr. Veraswami, there is a reversal of racism as they believe the colonists as superior to their own race and actively seeks to cross into the domains of the colonists’ community. May thought that becoming the wife of a white man would give her prestige and earn respect while Dr Veraswami believed his own race as inferior to the colonists.

Both Colonizers and colonized are trapped within the nets of imperialism. Dr. Veraswami and May can never cross into the other community while Flory can never assimilate into the Burmese because of the burden of his colonist status:

But we can't help it… a demon inside us driving us to talk. We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and somehow never can. It's the price we pay for coming to this country.

The disgrace and fear of contamination of the white race by metissage cost Flory his life. Most of all, all who transgressed from and into the boundaries of ‘pure communities’ suffer humiliation, poverty and death while those who remained within their side of the picket fences (Elizabeth, Macgregor, Ellis etc) continue to perpetuate racial demarcation. In the end, both colonizers and colonized cannot escape their ‘birthmarks’.

It was not what he had done that horrified her…It was, finally, the birthmark that had damned him.

Victimization of Women

2008-10-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

Stoler asserts that European women were controlled and 'policied' "by reaffirming the vulnerability of white women and the sexual threat posed by native men" (60). This positioning of women as weak, vulnerable and fragile has been and still is repeated across various instances of war.

In A Passage to India, we have the incredulous belief that "the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer" (222), thus placing the European woman as vulnerable to the sexual appetite of native men.

Part of Hilary Clinton's speech at the First Ladies' Conference on Domestic Violence, 17 Nov 1998: "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat".
http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/generalspeeches/1998/19981117.html

In an article titled, "The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace-building", Rafeeuddin Ahmed, Chef de Cabinet to UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim says: "In retrospect, I realize how much of my perception about women in war was influenced by the media. The incessant images of desperation and victimization tell only part of the story. The other part, the strength, courage and resilience, is rarely captured".
http://www.es.amnesty.org/uploads/tx_useraitypdb/women_war_peace.pdf

Women are constantly positioned and depicted as victims. However, I feel that Elizabeth of Burmese Days is somewhat a robust character. She appears to be a rather 'strong' character in the sense that she does not burst into tears (chapter 23 when Verall leaves at the train station, rather than bawling "she would betray nothing"), instead she is rather aggressive and assertive.

Therefore, what I mean to say is that Orwell doesn't really depict the vulnerability of European women (as per the character Elizabeth). But what is interesting is the vulnerability of European men to the sexual threat posed by native women is instead presented to us readers.

P.S. The darn page has an error and so I wasn't able to italize or underline anything properly. Dang it.

exclusion and inclusion

2008-10-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

I find this whole issue of inclusion and exclusion very interesting. As Stoler notes, in most scenarios, “class, gender, and cultural markers deny and designate exclusionary practices at the same time”(521) and that none of these categories “is privileged at any moment”(521). Stoler goes on to elaborate the complexities involved with these categories and how they carried slightly different meanings in different situations.
However, what about the idea of self- exclusion or inclusion? Is inclusion and exclusion to a particular group only defined and sanctioned by the ones in authority, or can it be discussed from a more personal, individualistic level? For instance, in Burmese Days, we see Flory othering his own people, constantly referring to his white people as “Them”, with an obvious dislike towards them. On the other hand, we see Dr. Veraswami getting agitated when Flory criticizes his own white club members. Hence, while Flory excludes himself form the white community, in his attitude towards them, the Doctor includes and associates himself with the white community, like mimic man. Perhaps then it is this sense of inclusion and exclusion that is far more strong and important, for it defeats any categories set out by the larger authority. Yet, the question really is, even while an individual can include or exclude himself from HIS group or community in thought, can he ever be freed from his larger community that defines him? Can he ever be free form its expectations and demands of him? Orwell leaves this open- he criticizes neither the Doctor nor Flory, which seems to suggest that both are right in wanting what they want, and both are also perhaps stuck in a sort of liminal, inevitable position, somewhere in between inclusion and exclusion- which perhaps is the colonial experience for both the colonizer and colonized.

(300 words)

Look How Far We've Come...

2008-10-22T06:49:00.000-07:00

Upon reading Stoler's article about the colonial authorities sanctioning of sexual liasons and by extension, the body, it reminded me of how things hasn't changed that much.

Stoler relates the issue of metissage to this control over sexuality (of both Whites and Natives) when colonial authorities linked "domestic arrangements to the public order, family to the state, sex to subversion, and psychological essence to racial type" (516). Anyone who has taken Singapore Studies modules [Or even National Education classes] or Sociological modules would already know how family is seen as the basic unit of nation.

The emphasis on the private/intimate lives of the individual basically implies that the body [more importantly, the female body] belongs to the State. Anyone remembers the reiteration of the "National Service"/ "civic duty" of women at a recent politician's speech? To paraphrase everything: "Go on, have kids because our population is decreasing and our country needs you." Of course, we have government policies (in the form of "baby bonuses) that encourage this. Within the colonial period of course, the sexual liasons of the European men were also contained and monitored within direct/indirect policies (for instance, policies that intially allowed concubinage, and policies that allowed for the entry of European women into colonies).

The body tied so closely to the nation state reflects the biopolitics/body politics prevalent during the colonial period and carried through till today.

This brings to mind the viability of biopolitics/ body politics then and now. Within the article, we get a sense that these sanctioning of “sexual deviancy” is met with opposition (rightfully so, since it merely recodes race). But the fact that such control over the body still remains till this day suggests a few things to me. Firstly, that this is a good form of governance. Secondly, the seeming impossibility to “own” your own body for even with the progress of time, we have yet to deviate from biopolitics/ body politics. From the moment of birth everyone is tagged, institutionalized and run within the cog of the machine. Instead of running within the colonial machine, of course, we’re stuck is the machine of the nation-state. How depressssing.

The Aesthetics of Colonial Concubinage

2008-10-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Much discussion has focused on the sexual relations between Flory and Ma Hla May (during this post, referred to as May) but less has been said about the modernist aestheticization of May’s concubinage.

When we first meet May, Orwell, through the narrator, casts May in an Orientalist light: she is dressed in traditional Burmese wear of the longyi, her petite frame, “typical” of representations of Asian females, is emphasized (“perhaps five feet tall”), and her “narrow eyes” are accentuated (here, we are reminded of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese eyes in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse). The narrator also takes great pain to describe to us the intricate details of May’s Orientalist clothes and her general appearance: she was “dressed in a longyi of pale blue embroidered Chinese satin, and a starched white muslim ingyi on which several gold lockets hung” (52).

If May is presented in an Orientalist fashion, the sexual subjugation that May is subject to under Flory’s concubinage is turned into a modernist aesthetic. As Flory’s “native” concubine, May is compared to a stylicized doll that is subject to Flory’s whims and moods: “she was like a doll, with her oval, still face the colour of new copper . . . an outlandish doll and yet a grotesquely beautiful one” (52). Rather than dwelling on May’s “abject status [as] slave” (Stoler 49) and the victimization that she undergoes as Flory’s concubine, Orwell, through the narrator, sees May as an aesthetic sculpture. The implication of the simile -- May’s “tiny, straight, slender body was as contourless as a bas-relief carved upon a tree” (52, italics mine) -- is that the “native” woman, May, is reduced to an artistic object in the Western artist’s imagination. In other words, colonial concubinage is hijacked from its colonial history and turned into modernist aesthetic.

When May is banished by Flory, her aesthetic value depreciates, to the extent that she takes on a ghastly appearance, with her “greasy” hair and her “face grey with powder . . . [looking] like a screaming hag of the bazaar” (273). Ultimately, May is condemned to be an aesthetic commodity, circulated and exchanged within the modernist (and colonialist) economy.

White Identity at Peril

2008-10-22T05:52:00.000-07:00

A classic illustration of white supremacy in Burmese Days found me rather vexed when I got to the part where Maxwell had just been murdered. As the Club men began plotting their revenge, the native’s life is portrayed as cheaper than a white man’s, like in exchange rates: “two corpses against their one – best we can do” (219), as if life can be valued in the first place. The natives understand the double-standards of the colonial rule they are under: aware that the four boys, wrongly accused for attacking Ellis, were not likely to be given fair trial, they decide to take things into their own hands and stage a revolt at the Club. Stoler highlights a similar double-standard regarding inter-marriages, showing how European men who marry native women are merely seen as indulging in sexual excess, while the native women are always assumed to be either prostitutes or concubines.

These double-standards, instead of solidifying white supremacy, actually cast light on the frail justifications for white supremacy and the fragility of the “essence” (Stoler 516) of European-ness. For example, such métis’ (persons of mixed parentage) “ambiguous positioning and identifications” (516) were regarded as potentially disloyal threats to the colonial state. Further, that they can be classified as Europeans by association with their fathers does well to upset the “purity of the [colonial] community” (516), and race is no longer the stable or adequate marker of colonial difference. Fears then emerged that a European man might lose his “identity and would become degenerate and décivilisé” (534), and this leads me to conclude that the imposition of white supremacy by colonial rulers on colonised subjects was symptomatic of white identity at peril: colonisers were beginning to realise the fluidity of their white “essence”, which undermined the justification for colonialism – race as colonial difference.

(300 words)

historicising texts

2008-10-22T04:05:00.000-07:00

i think the stoler article helps to pull us back as subjective readers and interpreters to historicise texts within the economic and social realities that were actually occurring at the time--historical facts which we (or at least i) tend to overlook in lieu of textual evidence such as characterisation, metaphors, etc. for instance, instead of reading ma hla may as a devious temptress who manipulates and blackmails flory for her own capitalistic gains - an agent of her own capitalist agenda - as we did last class, we now can see her contextualised within the prevalence of concubinage, which "was tolerated precisely because "poor whites" were not." (Stoler 54) not only is she divested of her agency in such a context, she's tolerated because concubinage perpetuates "white prestige" as european women are perceived as too expensive to upkeep, and therefore native women become the convenient outlets of sexual release who are, naturally, divested of any legal rights. Stoler is quick to point out that "Colonized women could sometimes parlay their positions into personal profit and small rewards, but these were individual negotiations with no social, legal, or cumulative claims." (57) placed within such a machine, may becomes that cog lacking agency which in so far as she is able to act (eg. putting on the mask and taking it off after her performance as was discussed) deludes herself and flory into perceiving she is dangerous in any way, when it is the other way around and white men like flory are "protected" (or at least perceived to be paternalistically) by the white colonial regime. while this might seem like pointing the finger at exploitative white men again, the article qualifies this and asserts that to some extent they, like women both native and colonised, are all colonial subjects in their own right, subsumed within the mechanics of colonial exploitation.