regardless of race, language or religion

Much has already been said about how the modernist aesthetic re-enacts a form of violence upon narrative and textual means of representation and understanding. I’d just like to point out a further relationship between violence and aesthetic systems that struck me while reading Fanon (and thinking about Auerbach). Fanon writes that colonized masses “intuitively believe that their liberation must…and can only be achieved by force” (33).

Inhabiting as they do a pervasive structure in which colonial dominance (in economic, cultural and political fields, as described by Fanon) prevent the subject from confronting the coloniser as an equal, the outright rejection of such structure seems to be the only means available for levelling the playing field. In PI for example, Aziz knows the result of his trial has already been foretold; his legal, social and cultural standing are more than enough to ‘prove’ his guilt. On the other hand, physical violence, in all its bloody reality, represents not only a rupturing of these oppressive structures, but also allows the battle between coloniser/colonised to be fought in a kind of primordial state of pure physicality, a kind of lacanian Real where social constructions and the (false) inequalities that they bring are abolished. An oblique reference to this can be seen in Adela’s observatin of the punkah, whose “strength and beauty…[and] physical perfection” is likened to a go’ d in contrast to the “cultivated, self conscious and conscientious” Assistant magistrate opposite him (205). Physical violence, in other words, provides the interface where men can meet as equals and reverse the stifling hierarchies that colonialism spawns. ( I was actually thinking of Pahlanuik’s Fight Club, which might help demystify what I think has been a rather convoluted paragraph)

The idea of equality drew my thoughts back to Auerbach, who also described the aesthetics of modernism as possessing an equalising impulse. I posted earlier that I disagreed with Auerbach regarding modernism’s ability to represent an unprejudiced and universal sort of “common humanity. But it strikes me now that the modernist aesthetic, like violence, attempts to locate a space that is free from imposed systems and representational biases. Thus, modernism too promotes a sort of equality: Not only reexternal differences in individuals disregarded in favour of ‘common’ interior processes, but also, ordinary and nondescript people are seen as being equally worthy of representation. My grammar goes awry – a sign of sleepiness – and shall just end by saying that equality provides a common thread by which violence and modernist aesthetics can relate to one another

Boumshead Revisited

Last week, I was highly ambivalent about A Passage to India, in part because of Forster's sweeping generalisations of both the white administration and the natives despite that "there is no such person in existence as the general Indian." (XXX, 232) Reading Fanon this week, it dawns upon me that perhaps if I apply his fundamental tenet, that "the colonial world is a Manichaean world," (6) to Passage, I might be able to alleviate my "echo," as it were. Fanon's colonial world is a "compartmentalised world, this world divided in two," (Fanon, 5) and it is this world that Forster writes of, a world of binaries for which generalisations thus must hold. For the natives, "he too generalised from his disappointments - it is difficult for members of a subject race to do otherwise;" (II, 6) for the colonisers (and this is already a kinder view), "all unfortunate natives are criminals at heart, for the simple reason that they live south of latitude 30." (XVIII, 143) Mrs Moore's "Christian tenderness had gone" (XXI, 172) in the face of "boum, it amounts to the same," (XXIII, 180) but as she leaves India, "'I have not seen the right places,' she thought," the "untouched places," (181) and "longed to stop" at even Bombay, "the huge city which the West has built and abandoned with a gesture of despair" (182) - India's final words to her are "'So you thought an echo was India; you took the Marabar caves as final? They laughed, 'What have we in common with them, or they with Asirgarh? Good-bye!'" (182) Perhaps India is right, there are "a hundred Indias," (I, 8) India is itself irreducible; then perhaps Fanon is too right, it is colonialism that reduces it to "a world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified." (15) Then, too, Forster is right: his generalisations are by definition truth in a Manichaean world, and the Westerners of whom I complained defy his stereotypes merely "new-comer[s]" not yet "fatigued" by that "hostile" Indian soil (II, 11) - thus it is that the Western "Oriental" Mrs Moore must go mad, Adela must depart, and even Fielding must eventually cease to be "the renegade" (XXIV, 192) and "thro[w] in his lot with Anglo-India by marrying a countrywoman." (XXXVII, 279) The Manichaean world that colonialism creates is what makes it so that Fielding and Aziz "must inevitably part," and it is only when colonialism and the Manichaean binaries of coloniser and colonised are "driv[en]…into the sea" (282) that "[Fielding] and [Aziz] shall be friends." (282) Problem solved! Except not, for "my echo has come back again badly." (XXIV, 184)

My ambivalence has spread to Fanon. In "On Violence" he too generalises - rather, if it is said Forster generalises, Fanon fairly dictates. His writings are as Manichaean as the colonialised world he speaks of - in his unyielding insistence upon the definitive thoughts and actions of 'the colonised', 'the intellectuals', 'the coloniser', 'the European nations', slowly but surely it becomes impossible to stave off uncomfortable comparisons to the blundering, insula, Western anthropological studies that Gikandi and Levine had raised, and indeed, McBryde's very own "Oriental Pathology, his favourite theme." (XXIII, 189) To compare thus nevertheless appals me - it seems to align Fanon with the very colonisers he raged against, to make of him an early-Aziz who at once seeks to "shake the dust of Anglo-India off his feet" (II, 10) and yet "felt important and competent" to have the English as "his guests." (XIII, 113) Somewhere, Fanon is spinning in his grave; I hastily attempt to rectify my trespass and grant the benefit of the doubt: of course, the world of which he speaks is a colonised one, Manichaean due to the colonialism, like Forster's, and of course his writings would too be thus Manichaean, how could it be otherwise in such a world? Treacherously I cannot help but continue to think perhaps to re-enact this Manichaeanism in his text makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy, as compartmentalising as the colonisers, as imperative as to which is the right - the only - way…Fanon still spins - enough. I cannot bear to accuse him of complicity, perhaps it would suffice to conjecture that the tone, the structure of his writing bears testament to his theory - colonialism stains the colonised; we are still brimming with anger, slowly smashing the barriers and statues of this psuedo-petrified world. This is my decision now, but perhaps by the end of this course, it'll be Fanon instead that I'm smashing. But now, yes, now I cannot bear it, and neither can I bear to smash Forster - which brings me to my next thought "On Violence." Forster's colonised India bears much resemblance to Fanon's Manichaean world, and yet the most important aspect of Fanon's colonialised world appears to be largely, as I mentioned in my last blog posting, elided in Passage - that of violence. Next to Fanon's 'manifesto,' the lack of outright violence in Passage seems ever more underscored. Fanon is of the colonised, Forster of the coloniser - even this alone would suggest that after all is said and done, Forster still writes through Western eyes, that he elides the political currents, the Indian violence, because - what? Any number of reasons, he did not think them significant enough, he did not want to give the Indians too much credit, it all boils down to the idea that he has "reduced" India in spite of his words. But as I said, I cannot bear to smash Forster now, and instead I will propound: I have not read much Forster but of what I have, I can barely imagine him writing directly of war. Maybe it's just not his "thing." Instead of colonialism, I see his elision of violence as more of modernism. Instead of reduction, I prefer to think of it as perhaps a kind of metonymy. There is, I think, much to thrash out and dispute if one were to read Forster through Auerbach, but nevertheless, to simplistically lift wholesale: "it is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light." (552) Rather than the bloodiness of the riots, Forster pins the crux of the novel and its Manichaean colonial tensions on perhaps such a (once again, relatively) random moment: an event that may or may not have happened, a trial that dissolves and an urge to violence that diffuses. "The Marabar caves had been a terrible strain on the local administration; they altered a good many lives and wrecked several careers, but they did not break up a continent or even dislocate a district." (XXV, 206) This, perhaps, more than the blood and thunder, is what (hopefully) displays to one that "the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled," (Auerbach, 552) so, perhaps, one day the coloniser and the colonised "shall be friends." Aziz's conclusion, after all, shows that Forster is not unaware of the need on the native's part for the violence of which Fanon speaks: "if it's fifty five-hundred years we shall get rid of you; yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea." (XXXVII, 282)

These blog posts are getting way too long for my rapidly disintegrating study schedule - the next one will (have to) be shorter, but I just have to finish off with (another) clarification. What I meant by stating in class that the novel takes pains to establish that the characters are "not-gay" was really, being the sort of person who can't bear to smash Forster, simply that, for a novelist who seemed to have taken pains to conceal his own orientation from the public audience all his life, I can't help but feel like we're rebuffing his pains in possibly concluding that Fielding and Aziz were friends largely because they're 'gay for each other' (you gotta admit that was taking over the entire discussion for a bit…). Not that I'm not saying it can't be a factor, especially considering the highly homosocial if not homoerotically charged conclusion with its "myriads of kisses," (279) just that I feel it mightn't have been supposed to be a factor so obviously and easily considered by the audience Forster intended, who weren't supposed to know about his homosexuality. Just a little consideration of the possible intention of the author - which, I know, I know, is an outdated concept…

Toes

The quote “[t]he man who doesn’t toe the line is lost … If you leave the line, you have a gap in the line” struck me as particularly meaningful when thinking about issues related to modernism and empire (160).

The statement was made by McBryde as a word of caution to Fielding for being on the side of the Indians. In McBryde’s opinion, Fielding’s disregard for conforming to the standards and rules established by the Anglo-Indian community in Chandrapore will result in his expulsion, hence “lost”. The second part of the quote is McBryde’s obvious hinting at Fielding’s obligation and duty to his own kind.

In the colonial enterprise where everyone is obliged to “toe the line”, there is certainly “no room for – well – personal views” (160). Everything is based on the collective, which in a sense erases unique individual identities. The “wife of a small railway clerk” who was “generally snubbed”, becomes a symbol of “all that was worth fighting and dying for” with her “abundant figure and corn-gold hair” (170). The body is idealized and transformed into a symbol that makes it “all worth fighting and dying for”. All sense of the individual is erased from the body. Leaving the “line” results in a “gap”, a space that can be exploited and used against the collective. The anxiety that the hegemony of colonial rule will be threatened is a significant concern for the colonists. This is certainly a direct opposite of modernism, which celebrates the individual and rejects any rigid categorizing. And it is in this polarity (Empire / Modernism), that I find interesting, albeit in a nebulous way for now.

If we view “the line” as (Victorian?) literary tradition, modernist writers are certainly the culprits that do not “toe the line”. In leaving “the line”, they created “a gap in the line”, which I see it as an opening up of a space for multiple perspectives and voices. To allow for “a close approach to objective reality by means of numerous subjective reality by means of numerous subjective impressions received by various individuals” (Auerbach). Yet, there is also a sense of “los[s]”, with no omniscient meaning to be derived and no conclusions to be arrived at.

Linking the two points I have tried to make, I see the employing of the modernist technique as a possible/adequate way of addressing the issues of colonialism. Rather than taking sides (imperialist vs anti-imperialist), it opens up a gap to engage readers in formulating their own viewpoints and opinions. The ambivalence in A Passage to India has been astutely commented on by Jean, which I think is the main point of the novel. It is a “passage”, rather than Destination India.

Modernists and Milkmaidens

In my reading of A Passage to India, the Milkmaiden’s song (end of chapter seven) seems like an allegory for the desire to know and/or represent Reality completely. Novelists strive to call Reality into presence through language; similarly the Milkmaiden pleads for Krishna’s presence: although he is in her heart and on her mind, so to speak, but is nonetheless physically absent

Adittionally, this allegory possibly illustrates the shift in mimetic techniques from the Victorian to the Modernist as described by Auerbach. The novelist “in earlier times” who employs language with “objective assurance” conceptualises a “unipersonal subjectivism”: he admits a single objective version of reality, one Krishna, so to speak.

The modernist, on the other hand, senses the inability to know/represent Reality in this way, and works with a random portion of the whole experience of reality: the Milkmaiden does not care which of the hundred manifestations she wants, each of the part will reflect the whole. Here I think of what Auerbach describes as a “transfer of confidence”: “that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed. (547)” Through the selection of small, intimate, “random” moments, deemed as “common” to all men (552), the modernists strive to present reality within their works, just as the milkmaid makes her humbler appeal for Krishna’s presence.

Despite her new appeal, Krishna still doesn’t come. This points to where Auerbach and Forster seem to diverge, in my reading.

While Forster’s narrative technique differs from the modernists, he nonetheless seems concerned with the impossibility of grasping reality—here, India—in totality, and presents to us a myriad of perspectives from parties and persons seeking the “real India”. Random seeming events—for example, the bribing away of Antony, the servant from Goa—return from a different perspective: instead of demonstrating Aziz’s attempt at hospitality, it is perceived as proof of malicious intent. Yet through all these, the ‘real India’ is explicity described as eluding everybody, from the satirised Anglo-Indians, to the sympathetic Mrs Moore, and even to Aziz when he, as a Nationalist, seeks a definition of India to forge a new nation-state.

The end of Auerbach’s essay appears optimistic: with a world that is “inextricably mingled”, difference decreases (there are no longer any “exotic peoples”). By assuming a commonality in human consciousness, the random occurrences common to every man then should illustrate at least a human version of “reality”. But within Forster’s novel, the differing perspectives seem to create more fragmentation than synthesis: it is as if the very consciousness of each party was not merely different, but tending in different directions. It is as if the ninety-nine names of God were contradictory, yet all name God; or that the hundred manifestations of Krishna were so radically different, that the milkmaiden would find some irreconcilable with her desire.

My random thoughts...

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

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

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

Modernism's Mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Andrea

auerbach to the future

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

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

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

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


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

looking at the brown stocking

Hello :)

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

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

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

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

Modest modernism: Auerbach and Levine

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

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

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

Temporal Structure of a Modernist Scene

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

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

-- Charlene

The Brown Stocking and Empire

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

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

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

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

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

-lynnette

Conrad, Auerbach, Levine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thow Xin Wei

Response: Gikandi, Levine and Auerbach

Uh, I haven't seen a precedent, so I hope I'm doing this right. Here's a response to the three readings this week, focusing primarily on the Gikandi. It ran a bit longer than I'd expected - apologies! I'll definitely work on trimming future responses... My first read-through of "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference" left me sceptical of how far Gikandi had fulfilled the Picasso-centric goals of his piece as laid out in the early passages with his rather general conclusions of "perspective and spectatorship." (476) However, looking at it again, I wonder more appreciatively whether the article does not in its execution mirror the challenge of "displac[ing] Picasso…from [his] ritualised place" (476) he is keen for studies of modernism to take up. After all, the tight focus on Picasso the article begins with gives way to wider considerations of modernism, and allows, particularly, the African 'other's' perspective to dominate such considerations near the close, diluting and eventually edging out the Picasso factor - and thus view from traditional Modernist studies - to finally leave at least this reader with the stronger impression of the African take on the development of modernism. Of course, I say this, but all in all I still can't be sure whether that was Gikandi's intention, or if he simply meandered as was my original impression…

Something else that struck me from the article was an observation that I felt was a disturbing echo of another in Levine's "Ruling an empire," a chapter I thought was a straightforward read, if somewhat heavy on the disdain the author felt for the Empire's belittling of its colonial subjects - certainly it is a justified disdain and the obvious and contemporarily 'proper' way to view colonial rule, but it fairly drips from every other sentence engaging the colonial view of its subjects, a feature of the narration I found distracting in an excerpt with so much factual information. In any case, Levine notes that, in spite of the missionaries' criticism of "imperial policy and practice," they were "nonetheless a part of imperial conquest" (120) - "it was not imperialism as a philosophy that missionaries criticised." (121) Upon reading this, I was immediately put in mind of Gikandi's statement that "even when artists such as Picasso questioned colonial practices, they seemed to reproduce the colonialist model of African societies; they questioned the practice but not the theory of colonialism." (476) As Levine points out, literary portrayal from even the Victorian era of such missionaries has largely been "unflattering," (121) so their duplicity is hardly a surprise; however, to realise that 'revolutionary' artists often respected in literary studies were guilty of the same duplicity that seems self-evident in the case of missionaries does chill me. The insularity that shaped the Western view of the 'other' that is often accepted as fact, that both Levine and Gikandi point out as a flaw of commonly accepted knowledge is thus made real to me with startling clarity, and I realise I still have a way to go in my personal "displacement and deritualisation," as Gikandi would have it. (476) Reflecting thus on my thoughts after reading Auerbach's "The Brown Stocking," this realisation is underlined. Other than a brief raised eyebrow at the effusiveness of "Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking!" (552) I had found very little quarrel with the chapter, thinking it fascinating and enlightening about a topic I still know precious little about. Only after Gikandi and Levine did I think to ponder more on the brief mention of "exotic peoples" (552) and the lack thereof contributing to the development of the modernist technique. Now that I think about it, Auerbach's conclusion thus seems incredibly simplified. I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but at least, thanks to Gikandi's challenge, I'm coming into awareness of the possibility that something may be made of it.

Tan Hui Jun, Jean [HT074193A]