That Which Fanon Cannot Speak, Joyce Must Not Remain Silent

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.

A Portrait and Its Discontents: The Dissonance of Voice

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. .

The Heterotopic Imagination: Remembrance of Woolf's Past

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.

Sovereignties in Question: The Instance of Metissage In the Colonial (Un)Consciousness

Stoler's emphasis on the term “internal frontier” (516) shows its curious logic: a frontier, if it is to make coherent sense, exists in the liminal space between incommensurable entities. Even as it tries to demarcate purity and homogeneity, it can never function without its outside. Stoler’s focus on the issue of metissage becomes interesting because it interrogates the logic of colonial identity as needing to anxiously manufacture and redefine its sense of exclusivity. The powerful liminal presence of members of a community who disrupt the boundaries between colonizer and colonized suggest how this separation comes to be produced and maintained by a colonial apparatus militating against ideological collapse.

The threat of this collapse bespeaks a fear of European devolution, assuaged through modernity’s focus on the increasing rationalization of societal and governmental processes that order people into discrete categories of control. Systems of subordination that shore up cultural identities and mores are thereby naturalized, justified, and rendered as epistemologically transparent. Max Weber's gloomy pronouncements on this kind of instrumental rationality that traps people in its iron cage, and Adorno and Horkheimer's indictments on the value of “reason” in this system that ultimately led to the Holocaust can be seen as powerful attempts to challenge this rationale.

Perhaps it is bourgeois society's use of language, and its role as enabling the objectivity and standardization of the administrator and scientist that needs to be questioned. Literature must then inhabit a zone of textual metissage to effect this critique: literary language, as a self-reflexive phenomenon that both points to an author's and readers’ positionality on events, and enables the critique and subversion of that stance in favour of a certain interpretive uncertainty that cannot and must not become absolute, provides such an alternative. This is perhaps the moral impetus of reading and writing.

Acts of Literature: The Margins of Flory's Inscription

What struck me as I was reading Orwell’s novel was the conspicuous amount of literary references and allusions that filters through Flory. He maps Paris through literary names like Baudelaire, Maupassant and Proust, implying that the best a culture and society has to offer is distilled through aesthetics. Orwell suggests however, that this focus can prove to be distorting, and shows this through the story of Elizabeth’s past, where all she encounters is squalor and “beastliness” (92) with none of “those interminable conversations with bearded artists” (91) that Flory thinks her life is surrounded by. Orwell ironizes Flory through his blissful unawareness of the stultification of European art that degenerates into sham artistic pursuits, and cannot provide an answer for societal and familial alienation and estrangement.

Flory’s coding of a society through aesthetic lenses also leads him to dichotomize European art and all its attendant societal glories, and Eastern art which reflects “a civilization stretching back and back, practically the same, into times when we were dressed in woad” (105). Flory unconsciously articulates prevalent discourses about Asiatic society that needed colonialism as a spur to progress. Flory however wants it both ways: the landscape is also exoticized as an unsullied paradise which he wants to share with Elizabeth. The fantasy of an originary site of innocence relies on this objectification of space that must remain untouched. Flory’s psychic split manifests itself as a textual doubling of Elizabeth and Ma Hla May: however much he aspires after a model of European femininity, she is made desirable only against a native Other that precedes her. Orwell suggests that a framing of experience through literature only sets up false binaries between what must be preserved (at the cost of its artificiality) and what can only serve as a backdrop.

Theatre of the (Colonial) Absurd: The Performance Of: Shooting An Elephant

Orwell's colonial tale emphasizes the theatrical aspects of European subjectivity vis-à-vis the colonized, internally and externally. The modernist focus on the alienation of the self within the colonial subject gets inflected through the consciousness of the narrator who "was hated by large numbers of people” (280) in Burma. The narrator's psyche gets interestingly caught in a split between sympathy for the colonized and rage against their acts of retaliation against the colonial system. It is a curious tangle, however, that is locked in a circle and self-perpetuates: the motivating factor for sympathy is precisely the dehumanizing colonial regime that fuels such acts of counter-aggression in the first place. Both positions obviate any genuine relation to the colonized independent of what Chatterjee calls “colonial difference”: the narrator's compassion remains faceless and abstract, without transcending the ideological paradigms of imperialism that also inscribes the native person as a “damn Coringhee coolie” (287) whose life is worth less than that of a piece of machinery.

Colonial difference is theatricalized externally in Orwell's story as the white man, through his superior technological arsenal, brings control and order through a show of force. This staging however, proves to be disempowering. Orwell shows how the European and the native relate to each other through images and constructions of the other that are completely inauthentic; therein lies the dilemma. The white man must constantly perform his role: what actually distinguishes his subjectivity belongs not to him, but is negotiated through a process of mediation with the colonized. The narrative distance gained in Orwell's tale betokens this fracturing of consciousness that is necessary for the colonial enterprise. The interplay of modernism and colonialism manifests in the alienated subject's psyche as a performance of dissonance, which he then carries into the sphere of physical action.

Here Reads Everybody: Jimmegans Text

Conrad’s display of Modernist techniques of story-telling comes out in strong focus in Lord Jim: the very act of telling or narrating itself becomes foregrounded as process. Action here becomes mediated through narration: Jim’s story must be filtered through Marlow, who wrests the tale away from the monologic third-person narrator of the first four chapters, to a digressive, deliberately Bakhtinian poly-vocal site of story-telling that include the voices of people like the French Lieutenant, Egstrom and Stein. By cutting across different languages and discourses, the confluence of these social and linguistic texts in Marlow’s narrative sets up the Habermasian notion of the public sphere of discourse that is invested and interpellated through its reading of Jim’s story in a certain way. Thus, what the inquiry wants is (in a Dickensian motif) “facts” (24) of Jim’s case; and what the crowd wants to see at Jim’s inquiry is nothing less than a display or illumination of profundity that never comes.
This then interrogates the way in which Conrad’s narration is a self-conscious engagement in how we read and construct social and personal narratives. Jim’s own phenomenological view of events are such that the issues involved are “beyond the competency of a court of inquiry” (93); indeed, Jim’s own identity remains as “prodigiously inexplicable” (98) to himself as to anyone reading Marlow’s text. We are also never allowed to forget that for all its seeming incongruity with the social, Jim reads himself as if he were reading a text: he is “a hero in a book” (8). Jim’s tragedy can be read in the light of Nietzsche’s claim that we need to sustain fictions about ourselves if we are indeed to live: Jim’s own self-fashioning in Patusan points to a need (his and ours) to read, and thus own, a story that can truly be his.

Post-Lecture Thoughts

Just had a few thoughts about class today:

Samantha raised the point that in order for Conrad to destabilize a certain (European) perception of the cannibals, he nevertheless had to appeal to and represent precisely the notion of cannibal that he wants to write against. This is an example of what the philosopher Jacques Derrida finds paradigmatic of language: the experience of the aporia, where it must be structurally necessary for concepts to engage in a critique and destruction of themselves, by opening up possibilities of contestation and interdeterminacies that nevertheless remain intrinsic to the very notion of the "purity" of the concept itself. The charge of Conrad "ventriloquising" African subjects can also be read in this light: in order not to ventriloquise, he must still ventriloquise: language must remain forever open and inadequate to itself, even though it tries to close down this "something undecided" about it.

Deconstruction then goes beyond a simple "destabilizing" quality of the binaries that the group presented about in class. To see the real significance of this breaking down of binaries is to see that our binaries are not and never originary; it is to see that it is on the basis of an originary indeterminacy that these binaries are even allowed to appear in the first place. They are effects of an interminable "play" that allows meanings to disseminate, come into being and contest each other. This then opens up possibilities for readings to challenge what we (or English civilization) have always taken as natural: if everything was set in stone, there would never be anything left for us to do to change what had been given to us.

Of Gramm(odern)tology: Achebe's Conrad

Chinua Achebe’s polemic claim that Conrad’s novel is a blatantly racist text hinges upon the claim that the African continent and its inhabitants merely form the dialectical backdrop that sustains the psychodrama of the disintegration of the European mind and morals; and that Africans are not provided with a language and an identity from within the text that affirms them as human beings. However, Achebe’s claim that Conrad fails “to hint… at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge” (7) Marlow, and hence the assumption that the language of the novel is unproblematically objective seems flawed when Conrad constantly points out how any act of narration, mired as it is in an interminable solipsism, cannot “convey… any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning” (50).

Indeed, in as much as Achebe draws out the historical specificity of Conrad’s ideological blind-spots, he neglects to further reflect on the consequences of the historically contingent nature of the language of the text itself. By constructing a notion of a Conrad who has control over his text, Achebe fails to see the alternative of an author-function (qua Foucault) whose ability to enunciate is predicated upon the various discourses that European artistic representation makes available. In this account, to write and represent is to be historical: meaning is no longer in the hands of what the author intends (as Achebe seems to want to say when he compares Marlow to Conrad himself). Achebe’s own discourse then, provides an avenue with which Conrad’s discourse can be challenged: the only way is to constantly read the text and read (and re-read) it well, to read for its assumptions and the places where these discourses can be subverted. The loss of certainty that Marlow speaks gives Conrad's text its life.

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Heart of Violence: Binaries Under Fanon's Eyes

Fanon’s intense, indeed vitriolic text “On Violence” predicates itself upon the setting up of dualistic binaries that come into antagonistic conflict: he envisages colonial society upon a Hobbesian atmosphere of perpetual war and violence between the colonizer and the colonized; and a Hegelian master-slave dialectic where the colonizer’s entire “validity” (2) is derived from the economic and social superiority that he has qua the colonized, and where the violent and intense counter-resistance that the colonized offer can only make sense against the antithetical backdrop the colonial machinery affords. Indeed, Fanon states that colonial reality is a compartmentalized one, drawn around boundaries and binaries that cut across social, economic, political and cultural lines and modes of identification. However, these boundaries, while serving the purpose of classifying and ordering reality also sediment forms of oppression and violence that Fanon cries out against: in this world, “the colonized subject is always presumed guilty” (16), and he is always “dehumanized” (7) as such.

I feel however, that just as Fanon’s text illustrates how violence, in its myriad forms, is enacted upon the body and reality of the colonized subject, Fanon’s own analysis does its own violence upon the people whom he is writing about: he seems to want to reduce all levels of colonial reality and indigenous forms of expression into a violent response towards colonial repression. Thus, he codes the “ecstasy of dance” (19) in terms of the “supercharged libido” and the “stifled aggressiveness” (20) that suggests repressed violence that only make sense within the context of the Manichean struggle against the colonizer. Using this overtly Freudian terminology, Fanon reduces and thematizes all of the colonized into vectors of unconscious forces that one day will overwhelm the establishment with an unprecedented show of force. Is there not something chilling in Fanon’s frequent references to the positive value of the violence of the oppressed as “praxis” (21), and as the only means through which colonial authority can be destroyed, without essentially speaking a different language from that of the oppressors, and thus essentially replicating and repeating the ideological structures that have been foisted upon them?

Fanon’s text also, in its translatability, enacts the ambiguity of the above position: in its readability, it partakes of European discourse through translation no matter how much its own themes give voice to resistance against colonial hegemonic values. I suggest that a better alternative can be provided by the critical resources afforded by deconstruction, where the notion of established binaries itself carry from within the seeds of its own dismantling. Reading this into Forster’s novel, we see how the institution of the court, as an apparatus of the English and thus a means of entrenching these fixed binaries that Fanon talks about, must inherently have a degree of instability and undecidability if it is to function as an institution: Aziz’s acquittal is an example of this. The indianization of Mrs. Moore’s name into “Esmiss Esmoor” (250) becomes an illustration of how the dominant language can turn into its Other as such. Can we then appropriate Fanon’s notion of violence by thinking of modernism as doing violence to established modes of aesthetic representation and language; where language now enacts its own failures in totalizing a form of reality that is objectively stable and (in Fanon) hierarchal, as in the radical linguistic experimentation of something like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake?

A Passage to Multiplicity: Forster and (Colonial) Reality:

Forster’s novel was indeed an intruiging and lovely read for me; the arrest of Dr. Aziz and his subsequent trial reminded me greatly of Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird: similar issues of racial prejudice and social and ethnic tensions are probed in these two novels. What was intriguing for me in the novel was Forster’s positioning of “India” as the centre of a social and cultural nexus foregrounding the condition of multiplicity that very often proves refractory to any classification and codification. Forster reminds us early on that the entity “India” is in all actuality “a hundred Indias” (12); and later on, Aziz reminds Adela that “[n]othing embraces the whole of India, nothing, nothing” (160). Levine’s chapter on British rule in India also reminds us that India “was not a single country or entity… [and there] was no single Indian language or religion” (61). As against the colonizer’s need to categorize India for the sake of efficient administration and to impose a hegemonic language and value-system on the natives, (with all its, following Foucault, concomitant issues of power and subordination), Forster’s novel shows up the hypocrisy of this very discourse of the colonial administrators by demonstrating their shocking lack of empathy towards the natives, borne out through their artificial generalization of the “native condition” that obviate the need for genuine understanding and indeed, responsibility for the colonized.

Indeed, what Forster’s novel depicts is nothing less than a whole assembly of, to use Louis Althusser’s term, ideological state apparatuses (i.e. colonial administration, railways, the court, the school) that seek to clamp down and impose a form on the multiplicity of India that seeks to resist this violence as such. Levine’s chapter thus delineates several colonial implementations that get subverted simple because they “failed to take into account” (72) the deep divisions and multiplicities that pervade “Indian” society and identity/identities. Forster’s description of the untouchable who pulls the punkah in the courthouse thus achieves significance: the facticity of the almost naked body of the Indian proves “to society how little its categories impress” (241) nature that refuses to be codified. Franco Moretti, in his book Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998) makes the intriguing claim that metaphorical language increases in the European novel’s description of the “unknown”, or the Other because they “simultaneously express the unknown” (47) through an unexpected semantic association and also “contain it” (47) through codifying otherness in familiar linguistic territory. Read in this light, Mrs. Moore’s experience in the Marabar Caves where even “poetry” (165) as the most intensely metaphorical of Western literary genre is reduced to utter incoherence betokens this ultimate failure of European language to thematize and give shape to an Indian reality that nonetheless forcefully intrudes into the colonial consciousness.