Language, Art, Ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the sermons remind me of my secondary school days

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

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

[History of Sexuality]

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

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

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

White narrative, black words

Some thoughts on Orwell and Kelly's question.

Stoler suggests that racism is not primarily a visual ideology: rather the visual differences of race serve to signal the non-visual, "more salient" distinctions of exclusion "on which racism rests". The visual can point to skin colour or other physical attributes; it can also refer to a difference that is constructed: the different architectures of the colonial club/local buildings, the colonial grotto, clothing.

Physical Difference always exists (not even the King of Pop gets away from that), it is the abstract differences that become value laden, that maintains and further seperates this distance. Turning back to Hegel, we could say that after the moment of recognition, before the physical struggle that determines master/slave, is the ideological struggle.

Anyway, turning to Orwell's writing and its apparent misogyny and racism: these words, these sentiments, seem parallel to the physical attributes that distance the text from us, in our '(more) enlightened', pomo-poco-politically correct age. If we think of our identities as 'white' bodies of discourse, then Orwell/Conrad's text (not Orwell/Conrad) might seem 'blacky' racist, or better to say 'brown': "white canonical goodness" intertwined with "black racist sentiment". All very chocolatey and no doubt I am crazy from overwork.

But the point being that, if the text displays some kind of "metissage", how do we approach the text? To "whiten" it would probably be to consider the misogyny/racism ironic, a mask of blackness to highlight the whiteness within. If one feels the content cannot be treated ironically, then it is destined to remain blackly offensive.

So anyway, my response to Kelly's question on how to handle racism in Orwell's text is, partially, the horribly waffly sounding "make of it what you will". The caveat is: having the power to make of it what you will, be gentle, for literary texts in some ways are "Other" to us, just as the native is "Other" to the European: going in directions which need not necessarily converge. Attempting to "Colonise" the text, peculiarly, reproduces the imperialist ideology in a literary kind of way.

MindYour Language

''Bout twenty pounds, master. Will only last today, I think. I find it very difficult to keep ice cool now.'

'Don't talk like that, damn you--"I find it very difficult!" Have you swallowed a dictionary? "Please, master, can't keeping ice cool"--that's how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can't stick servants who talk English. D'you hear, butler?'

Ellis' sentiment jumped out at me because it seems to share some qualities with our current contemporary debates on English/Singlish in Singapore: A particular mode of language use becomes the defining characteristic of a certain class or category. So the colonised should speak with a kind of broken mangled English; the ah beng with a particular kind of chinesey singlish (i've always felt that singlish varies depending on the race of the person speaking and which asian grammar s/he incorporates).

Chatterjee already points out language as a site of colonial difference (cf The Nil Durpan affair). In a slight variation, we can say that even within one language, English, the mode of usage itself is a site of difference. Perhaps this has its descendants in the realm of English Language teaching, with the strange aura attached to "native speakers".

As the little episode above shows, language use seems less rigidly fixed by our physical boundaries; one thinks of 'impressions' as a kind of stand up comedy staple. Yet it is interesting to see how closely we associate language with these other markers of difference: for Ellis, to hear a grammatically correct sentence spoken by a native servant is revolting in itself.

Difference exists, it is the set of values (e.g. British Superiority) written into that difference that is problematic. But when we become attached to the values, then the difference cannot ever be allowed to mutate in character, or worse, to vanish: it becomes as if an attack on those values. Which is what happens in the passage above, and perhaps why the rest of the chapter degenerates into a load of nostalgia for the old Raj where the values of British Superiority were unchallenged.

historical context

In considering imperialist texts that arguably display a certain measure of racism (Conrad leaps to mind...), one way to "forgive" the faults of the writers is to invoke "historical context": Conrad may have objectified his Africans (and some might say, his South East Asians), but perhaps there wasn't any other way for him to act, given the historical circumstances of the time.

I tend to have some problems with this line of reasoning, although I don't think its invalid: it helps explain, at least in my own case, a certain resistance to hard-core postmodernity that deconstructs all meanings and binaries. But on the other hand, it seems to gloss over questions such as individual responsibility and the relationship of the individual with received ideologies. At its least sophisticated, it seems to imply that individuals cannot act outside a certain historical framework at all, or worse, that we 21st century individuals are somehow free (or at least 'more free') than our nasty, racist predecessors.

I find Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" helpful in trying to understand this concept: the narrative comes an officer in British Burma, from within the "historical context" of imperialism rather than from its margins, or from a different temporal vantage point. Seen from the inside, one speaks less of ideologies than experience: what turns the officer against British imperialism is the "dirty work" he witnesses, the prisoners and the tortured; at the same time what turns him against the Burmese is the physical and verbal insults.

Such a text is helpful, i think, in reminding us that we (and our predecessors) have more than mere "historical context": we do possess the ability to consider our relationship with given ideologies, and, if unable to transcend them, at least problematise or resist them.

surface effect

I like the idea of high resolution/low resolution as brought up in class, but I do agree with the person (sorry I wasn't sure who!) that there are certain moments where the Africans are brought up in high resolution: the Africans paddling the canoe (who give a link to reality), the sick Africans near the river, the 'noble' cannibals on the boat, and the strange African woman.

(Of course, I have to admit that I'm not sure of the extent of Prof. Lim's analogy, so I'm taking the idea of 'resolution' as referring to one's sensation when reading descriptions)

I guess what that means is that its not enough to describe in high resolution or low resolution, but rather to evoke depth: without that, they are still objects, though perhaps aesthetically crafted ones. The African woman seems a partcularly striking example: a long description, but ultimately she remains opaque.

Perhaps this is why Conrad seems impressionistic: the narrative contains fragments in high resolution, seemingly solid, but merely glossing over an elusive, ambiguous reality. Conrad's narrators often provide very evocative, detailed descriptions, yet are always aware that they are merely 'scratching the surface of reality', so to speak.

This concern with surface and depth also occurs in Lord Jim: during Jim's trial, he considers "that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appaling face of things. This "serried circle of facts" would seem to bring out a "truth", but it effectually only brings out a high-res image. What is suggested as essential is Jim's own testimony, what he thought he saw: not the objective truth, (that Jim absconded), but the subjective reasons for it - a trick of the eyes.

more than racism

Early on, Max noted that the "essentializing of Africa and Africans in HOD renders them into mere inanimate objects". Achebe suggests that this tendency in HoD is at least partly due to Conrad's own "irrational hate" and "bloody" racism, since "even after due allowances have been made for all the influenes of contemporary prejudice on his sensibility, there remains... a residue of antipathy".

This is to suggest that what irks Achebe is not that Conrad was a racist, his objectification of Africans seems out of proportion to "normal" standards of racism: it obsessively repudiates and belittles the claim to kinship between European/African. I'd like to complicate this notion by suggesting that Conrad actually tacitly accepts the claim, but the implications are grave since Colonialism is justified by the difference between the European and Native. This logic reveals itself in the Master/Slave dialectic: the moment of struggle is followed by a period of continual violence that entrenches the difference between the two beings (C.f Levine and fanon).

By removing this difference, colonialism is revealed as merely a system of greed, at its heart a desire to possess the other as an object. One senses this in what appears to be Kurtz's boundless rapacity.

I suspect there’s a sense of being implicated in a wrong that nonetheless seems to have preceded you, and promises to outlast you: faced with this, what remains except an intolerable guilt and shame?

Perhaps this is why Conrad leaves them only as an indistinct and threatening shadow at the edge of the narrative rather than being more explicit. Kinship is only affirmed in an extreme moment, that of mortality and death, and in a sense that recognition is a kind of death, in that one loses one's bearings, loses one's basis for understanding the self.

Violence and Representation

My post is related to Yisa's suggestion that the artist must do violence to representation for "a kind of healing can occur, within the individuals who approach art either from the standpoint of the artist or from that of the audience."

In class the notion of "violence" in nationalistic poetry was brought up: the birth of the new nation state is forged through a poetry which "does violence" to existing language: in this way, the colonisers language is now re-arranged to speak of the native's experience, or the native's language breaks out of its traditional form/content and addresses issues of modernity and the nation. The old laws in the state of representation are broken; new laws are formed, and the state of poetry is symbolic of the nation state.

In this sense, violence is not only destructive, but also productive; nonetheless what it produces does not transcend violence, merely re-arrange it. Fanon's act of writing/narrating "On Violence" comes to mind, it is a violent gesture turning the colonisers Hegelian dialectic and the language back against them.

I suggest that Forster's "A Passage to India" also does violence to representation, but in a different way: through a process of “erasure”, which problematises any mode of representation’s hold on reality. In the novel, events which are described off-handedly become significant (Mohammad Latif’s bribing of Antony), events that seem central are then made to seem trivial (Mrs Moore’s epiphany in the caves), actions that reconcile also further division (Aziz’s collar stud).

What does this violence produce? I suggest it opens the possibility for a state of interpersonal relationships that is immediate and somehow beyond language (or at least, the rhetoric of coloniser/colonised). One glimpses this inexpressible state in Aziz's affection for Mrs Moore/Ralph/Fielding, who resorts to a mere platitude: "You are an Oriental".

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?

Fanon's "On Violence"

One thing remarkable about Fanon's chapter "On Violence" is the intense violence of the writing itself. Unlike "A Passage to India" or Levine's study of colonialism which show how both colonised and coloniser are multifaceted entities resisting a single interpretation or representation, Fanon has no qualms about illustrating (reductively) three essential 'camps': the coloniser, the colonised, and the 'colonised intellectual'. The first two camps are both characterised by the use of violence; the last group calls for non-violence in a selfish attempt to preserve the position they have gained under the colonial enterprise.

Fanon seems to suggest, in my reading, that the colonial enterprise is fundamentally doomed because the violence needed to sustain it - through 'petrifying' the colonised in a dream-like state of submission - eventually leads to the colonised taking up this experience of violence as a unifying factor that focuses their own violence into an overthrow of the colonist.

Yet the colonist can speak nothing apart from this "language of pure violence": all his ideals and claims to civilisation are merely ideologies enforced by "the barracks and the police stations".

An implication of this is that the violence perpetuated by the colonist appears necessary for the colonised to cohere: Fanon's interpretation of nationalist activities seems to characterise them as alternative outlets for violence and thus more a distraction from the 'proper work' of overthrowing the colonists. Forster's description of Aziz as a nationalist intent on finding a "real India" seems to support Fanon's theory: poetry and ethics are a hinderance towards the real work of de-colonialisation, as they distract from the "true nature" of the colonised who are essentially united by an experience of colonial violence.

But this premise seems to lead into a problem towards the end essay where he speaks of the situation after decolonisation: the colonised country now becomes "economically dependent" because its infrastructure has been formed only with a view of exporting raw materials. Fanon recognises this, but the only solution he seems to offer is for the capitalist countries to "pay up" and to stop being "irresponsible".

If these countries are truly as one dimensional as Fanon suggests, with no other attitudes towards the colonised other than violent exploitation, why should they bother with reparation? Yet, if one admits that perhaps there was some sincerity to the colonists ideals, and that colonisation is more complex than the mere use of violence, then the violent process of decolonisation that Fanon has previously described seems less necessary than he sets it out to be. Either way, Fanon provides a compelling but incomplete, it seems to me, critique of the phenomena of colonialism.

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.

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