"Was that poetry?"

"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.

Are you weary of reading Joyce today?

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.

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

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.

" ... to halve his loneliness ... " (Chap IV)

For Stoler, sex functions not simply as a metaphor for colonial relations (a point of contention in last week's class), but is inherently fundamental to the colonial enterprise, affecting its policies and the practical outworkings of its power relations. Undergirding her entire piece is how intimacy with the colonial other ironically fostered and accentuated racial subjectivities, and this is echoed in Burmese Days. From the start of the novel, in Chap IV, Flory and May are never fully comfortable with in their "relationship". Their physical intimacy belies their disgust not simply for each other, but for themselves as individuals; neither is fully comfortable in his/her own skin. In joint nakedness, both are ashamed of their own physicality - Flory with his birthmark, and May with her breasts. It would then be logical to conjecture that their arrangement is purely economic, given that Flory has bought her from her parents. But I would suggest otherwise, for an alternative answer may be found later in the chapter, where Flory goes for a dip in the pool in the forest. There, surrounded by nature, while watching "a single green pigeon", Flory finds an immanent expression of his inner loneliness. It is in this evocation of the deep malaise of the soul - the desire to know and to fully know another - that Orwell. through the portrayal of sex in the colonies, approaches the modernist apprehension of an individual crisis of subjectivities, of an individual striving against the prevailing discourse.

"Lenin, A.J. Cook, and the dirty little poets in the Montparnasse Cafes" (Chap XVII)

Burmese Days is strikingly, and overtly, strewn with references to European, and specifically, British popular culture of Orwell's time. It opens with the epigraph from Shakespeare, but most of the novel proceeds to refer to a fair amount of British popular colloquial writing. Elizabeth's favourite author is Michael Arlen (Chap. VII) who, while not strictly considered lowbrow, did not gain the critical import of Charles Dickens, for instance, whom Orwell gestures towards. Mr Francis, an Eurasian, is said to speak "like Mr Chollop in Martin Chuzzlewit" (Chap X), though at this point it is not clear whether this emerges from Elizabeth's inner thoughts or is a narratorial comment. I am inclined towards the former, for Elizabeth's own disdain for the "highbrow" then might be read ironically - "all these Highbrow ideas — Socialism and all that. ‘Highbrow’ was a bitter word in her vocabulary." Verrall also shares her distaste for the "highbrow" - he "had not read a book since he was eighteen, and that indeed he 'loathed' books; 'except, of course, Jorrocks and all that' " , Jorrocks being a "vulgar ... cockney grocer" (Wikipedia) featured in a comic paper.

Perhaps Orwell is harshly caricaturing British citizens stationed in the colonies, striving to flaunt his own cosmopolitan status against their impoverished enculturation in this debut novel of his, and might be at the same time grappling with his own bohemian bourgeois status as an emerging writer (hence "dirty little poets"). Hence, in studding the novel with such references both to colloquial written culture and to what might be considered "high art", Orwell might be leveraging on the latter to distance himself from the former, aspiring towards something more than just a mere journalistic account of Burmese racial politics.

And so when Orwell borrows the lines of the traditional lyric "O Western wind, when wilt thou blow, that the small rain down can rain" (Chap. XXI), he is perhaps not only longing for the rain to quell the heat, but for the Western aesthetics to sweep through what he saw to be the intellectually stultifying colonial outpost of the Far East. These references betray Orwell's own anxiety of losing touch with the bastion of high culture while in colonial Burma, but they also foster an ambivalent relation towards the Empire - Orwell is embittered with the colonial enterprise, and yet at the same time implicitly beckons for the proliferation of its high culture. A colonialism of a different kind?

I could go on about how this ambivalence is extended to Orwell's relation to the romantic tradition ... but I'll leave that for next week.

White Mask, No Face

Orwell's semi-autobiographical piece achieves through its ironized narcissism not simply a condemnation of the praxis of imperialism, but a realization of his own disempowered subjectivity as a colonial subject of the Empire. In the binarized Manichean Burma, Orwell's dispossessed civil servant-police officer finds that it is his own subjectivity impinged upon not only by the Burmese, but by the colonial strictures of his own originating culture.

This ironic hegemony, which closes back on itself, arises sharply in Orwell's delineation of the half-hour it takes for the elephant to die. The elephant is trapped between life and death, in a liminal hell-on-earth, its existence held in temporary abeyance. Orwell's narrator in killing the elephant to save "face" and uphold the image of colonial superiority, can no longer give the elephant life to reverse his dreadful act, but is also unable to fully and completely kill it, and it is in that painful long interval between life and death where we see the artifice of the colonial identify, and yet, more disturbingly, how this artifice forces a capitulation of his own subjective humanity - "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." In being scrutinized by both the gaze of the colonized and the interiorized colonial gaze (yes, think surveillance and 1984), Orwell's narrator sharply encounters this irony of colonial hegemony, where he is disempowered by an ideology meant to empower him. He is no longer a person, but simply a colonial representative wearing the mask of the white man.

Thus what Orwell grapples with in this short piece is not just the realization that racial identities and power structures are merely performative given the white and yellow masks of colonialism (worn both by colonizers and colonized, and not by their own volition), but ultimately with the loss of self in a dehumanizing colonial landscape as a result of necessarily having to uphold such appellated identities.

eagleton and culture

some timely distractions from essay writing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/21/1

"one of us"

Conrad, at the end of his note at the end of the novel, calls Jim "one of us". Marlow himself repeats this phrase throughout his recountings. The immediate reading of this would be to see Jim as a kind of everyman, whose moral dilemmas are somehow universal, and are ours as well. Yet it must be noted that by being "one of us", Jim is not "one of them". He is not one of the prilgrims sleeping below deck on the Patna, nor is he one of the indigenous Malays at Patusan. Jim's socio-cultural affinities are not hence not as universal as we might expect; he is more of an every-European that an everyman.

Conrad does not claim to offer any point of view other than an European one, and we can perhaps blame Conrad for being racist (again) or Orientalist. But Conrad consciously delineates the cultural and linguistic difference between Jim (and Brown) and the Malays. He is, as is Jim and Marlow, sharply aware of the dialectics of Us and Them, of Self and Other. For as much as we try to dissolve the binaries that keep man and man at bay, we will never be able to fully enter the mind of another. Yet in the brief moments of human connection, like when Marlow and Jim make eye contact in the courtroom, where truly universal issues like justice and honour arise, is there "truth disclosed in a moment of illusion", and then might Jim truly become "one of us" - not simply a character, but human in shape and form.

Racist Conrad. So what?

Achebe is right in highlighting certain aspects of Conrad's work that appear to be racially derogatory, but to call him "a thoroughgoing racist" obscures aspects of the work that aim to resist received conceptions of the colonial enterprise. Conrad never set out to subvert racial stereotypes, but to expose what many Europeans back home never knew about Africa and the violence inflicted upon its people, To achieve this polemic, humanizing the colonized is not a pre-requisite; Conrad only needed to dehumanize the colonizer. It is his depiction of the ironic reversal of the civilized becoming savage, of the divergence between reality and interpretation, which infuses the work with its timeless power. I think the racist strand within HD does not render Conrad's work complicit with colonialism. Rather, it underscores the pervasiveness of colonial discourse in his day; how Conrad, for all his progressiveness, was still unable to fully transcend the thinking of his time.

Another irony: Achebe's essay is now perennially read alongside Conrad's work, but this is possible primarily because of Achebe’s professorship at a top liberal American college. Franz Fanon himself was educated in Lyon, in the homeland of his colonizers. Perhaps this highlights the ambivalent and contradictory relationship between the colonized bourgeosis public intellectual and structures of knowledge production belonging to the colonizer, and how the former leverages upon the latter in a kind of neocolonial bootstrapping that only reinforces Western authority, like an extension of Gramscian hegemony.

"mankind and flowers": a passage to violence

(this is a fairly ambitious post, please bear with me)

Aziz's interest in religious poetry appears to be a throwaway characteristic of the bourgeois intellectual. Yet this emphasis on aesthetic experience is one of the central intertwined strands of the novel, along with friendship, religion and nationalism. There is a moment early on in the novel where Aziz while ill, with Haq, Hamidullah and Syed Mohammed gathered around bed, recites lines from Urdu poet Ghalib. The narrator notes the effect, that "[l]ess explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved" (IX). Note the shift in the use of pronouns: it appears Forster identifies with and also wishes his readers to simultaneously grasp with him how Urdu poetry, in the scope of its aesthetic effects, is appreciable by all humans who should have universally felt that existential loneliness, that dismal solipsism that besets each human being. And furthermore, how does Muslim poetry stand as a call to a rival Hindu deity?

I think, unlike Fanon who felt African colonial subjects could be united on "the grounds of nation and sometimes race" (10), Forster might be suggesting art as a means for resisting heterogeneity; aesthetic experience as coterminous with religious experience, a transcendental means of galvanizing mankind towards something greater than ourselves. But art and its effects are never as straightforward as we might like it to be, else all of India, nay, all of the world, would have been united by poetry recitals. Later on in the same passage in IX, Aziz notes that sometimes poetry "only increased his local desires" for women. At the heart of this aesthetic experience is the desire to fully know, and to be fully known by, another person. Yet Forster, throughout his novel, seems to be underscoring the difficultly of this, with the cryptic echo, the ninety-nine names of God, the breakdown of Adele's and Ronny's romance, and the failure of Aziz's and Fielding's friendship. Poetry, given its elliptical nature, expresses itself in terms of an omission, a kind of meaningful void that at first appears meaningless (like the Marabar Caves). Wallace Stevens said that "the nobility of poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without", and I think Forster, in leveraging upon Urdu religious poetry to expose the longings and desires of the soul, consciously resists that violent call to arms that is central to Fanon's essay, and batters the inner self in search of redressal from all the schisms and divisions that keep man and man apart.

Discussions

Interesting threads generated by Xinwei and Lucas' posts: let's keep these in mind and try to follow up with them in class. Closely related to the themes of this class: how can you understand Modernism in terms of a certain aesthetics of violence? Indeed, what does this term mean?

vogue india

tangetially related, and fanon's essay might bring other things into relief.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/business/worldbusiness/01vogue.html

Forstering Modernism

The question of how Forster is a modernist is not easily answered, not in the least within the confines of this blog post. But my sense is that while Forster is not a modernist in style and technique, in his thematic concerns and outlook he might be considered one. Allow me to explain.

Largely speaking, there is not a great deal of formal divergence of the kind we previously saw in Woolf with her use of free indirect discourse. Forster does not fracture time in the representation of the inner psychologies of his characters; there are flashbacks and excursions and echoes(!) of the past, but there is always a singular authorial voice that coheres the individual experiences of each of his characters. However, given the symbolic import of the Caves, of the echoes that resonate within the minds of Adele, Aziz, Fielding and Moore and of the religious imagery throughout the book one could make a argument aiming to strengthen Forster's relationship to modernism, for symbolism as a literary stylistic allows for the creation and expansion of an externalized objective significance within an interiorized subjective conciousness, which is what Woolf achieves in her fragmentary stream-of-conciousness.

Back from the verbosity of it all - I would think that one would find a greater justification for Forster as modernist and A Passage To India as a modernist text if we examine its thematic concerns. I put it to you that Forster depicts in this novel various individuals grappling with their own individuality and autonomy over and against the prevailing socio-cultural onslaught of a modernity shaped by the imperial enterprise. We see Adela struggling with the expectations of becoming a betrothed wife to an Anglo-Indian, Fielding dealing with a mid-life crisis of sorts as well as his own ambivalent relation to the Empire and India, and Aziz having to bear the weight of expectation of the British and Indians in addition to his incarceration, and so on in other characters as well. It is this emphasis of the individuals at odds with a received socio-cultural heritage which perhaps marks Forster and this novel as modernist. At the end of Chapter XXVI, Fielding considers that "we exist not in ourselves, but in terms of each other's minds" (234), evincing a kind of reverse solipsism, where the individual can never fully reckon himself or herself. This dismal internal void, which the Caves are metonymic for, underscores perhaps Forster's engagement with "modernist mode", and also points to modernism's relation with the Empire and the Orient, how this literary movement looked upon the colonized Other and reflected on the horror, the horror of its inner void.

Yet I would call Forster, at best, a marginal modernist, for while the emotional, spiritual and epistemological crisis that beseiges the characters in A Passage To India is what typifies much of modernist literature, much of the novel unfolds conventionally, in accordance with the norms of earlier nineteenth-century literature, where authorial authority and social critique are hallmarks of such texts. One should also bear in mind the connotations borne by "modernism" as a taxonomic classifier. Must any great work of the twentieth century necessarily be called modernist? Is the term, as a generic marker, normative and does it bestow some inherent prestige among its canonical works, that we may lay open such assumptions to contestation?

(I would have like to have touched on Aziz's concern with poetry and the emphasis on aesthetic experience, and the connections with the mythic, but I've run out of space. In class, perhaps?)

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