Language: The Colonized and the Colonizer

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

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

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

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

Literary References in Woolf

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

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

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

Flory's 'Glory' and Unsympathetic Characters in Burmese Days

I found the name of Flory quite interesting considering the character. The images conjured in me on first sight were that of 'glory' and 'flourish', which are certainly not attributes that the man himself usually conjures.  The only times when he is covered in 'glory' is under what one may consider false pretexts - when he chased away the tame buffalo, during the shooting trip, and later when he aided in dispersing the riot.  Every time, the 'glory' is ripped away, sooner or later (for example when Flory fell off the pony).  Flory as 'false glory', a slippage from the lette F to G; and the fact that it is a vaguely feminine-sounding name (especially when his dog's name Flo brings attention to that) - he ends up as a false hero, right to the end of the novel (which I'll not spoil here :p).

In fact, none of the characters come of the novel well; for example, Verasami's blind faith in the British Raj, Elizabeth's anti-intellectual snobbery, the Anglo-Indians' general racism (particularily Ellis's), U Po Kyin's slippery ruthlessness, even his wife's passivity.  Orwell, in fact, seems to go out of his way to make the characters unlikable, with few if any redeeming qualities.  By provoking dislike for the characters, Orwell invites us to condemn the sorts of attitudes and worldviews that drive them.

-- Yingzhao

A Panopticon in Reverse

The way in which the narrator in "Shooting An Elephant" is compelled by the colonial native gaze to act out the role expected of him suggests to me a sort of Panopticonism at work: under the public gaze, one is compelled to stay within the confines of prescribed behaviour.  The narrator shoots the elephant merely 'to avoid looking a fool'; he is his own 'policeman', unwilling to let himself buck the colonial narrative.  As the narrator notes, 'when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys'; by constructing the structures of power, the structure itself becomes a constraint on the colonizer's freedom of action.  In this way, the colonial entreprise turns into a faracial performance, one that can only end when the 'white man' abandons the entreprise, and thus leaves the Panopticon that he constructed.

-Yingzhao

Multiple Narratives

The way in which Lord Jim is narrated is rather fragmented, even with Marlow as the principle narrator of the story.  There is the omniscient narrator who introduces the story, for one, and within Marlow's own storytelling there are several narrators too with their own viewpoints and stories to tell, not least Jim himself.  Beyond that, Marlow's narrative is split up further by the letter to the unknown sympathetic listener; the perspective in the letter is arguably different from that offered in Marlow's earlier speech, since it happens later in time, taking into account the events that happened since then.

All the narrators have their own viewpoints, though Marlow acts as the mediating and interpretive agent through which they expound their tales.  But Marlow is also mediated by the omniscient narrator of the novel, who in turn can be said to be mediated by Conrad himself.  Yet we trust all of them to be telling the truth - at least, their version of the truth, for Conrad makes plain the biases in each of the voices. Even the omniscient narrator takes sides in the novel, notably when he paints an unsympathetic picture of Jim in the introduction.

But since the viewpoints clash with each other, the end result is that we never get an authoritative picture of Jim, the main subject of the discourses.  Differing perspectives, pawing away at the truth, but not quite getting there; this is one of the hallmarks of modernist technique.  Looking back at Passage to India, we find different perspectives on the caves and on India itself that never resolves into a neat whole; Lord Jim, though written earlier, takes this a step further, on the midway point between PtI and something like To The Lighthouse with its streams of consciousnesses.

- Yingzhao (296 words)

The Limitations of Culture

The introduction to my edition describes Heart of Darkness as ‘the creation of a writer who was neither a passive product of his own culture nor fully able to transcend the assumptions of that culture’, and I believe that this is really the best way to approach the novella.  Indeed, the impact of the novella in the years immediately following the novella’s publication was that of an anti-imperialist tract, among other things; it was only when Achebe’s essay was published that a greater controversy started to make itself heard.  Achebe’s concerns are certainly valid, and he has clearly thought about the issues regarding HoD in great depth; however, it is clear that his issue isn’t just with the novella, but with the entire condescending Western mindset that he feels is implicit in it.  Conrad has failed to completely ‘transcend the assumptions of [his] culture’.  And yet he was certainly not a ‘passive product’ of Western culture; one of his short stories, ‘Amy Forster’, can be read as a damming indictment on the unreasoning prejudices of his own adopted people (the British), and as mentioned, HoD paints European imperialism in a none-too-flattering light (though it curiously omits the British; that, however, is another discussion entirely).  Achebe made HoD a scapegoat in his quest to shock his Western audience into seeing the flaws in their own viewpoints, and to judge by what has come since, he has in large part succeeded.  But I feel that it is unfair to then simply dismiss HoD as ‘not great literature’, for, as other posters have noted, there is much more to the novella than a man who is held back by his cultural assumptions.

-Yingzhao (279 words)

Impulses of Modernism and Imperialism

I can't help but wonder if modernism itself can't also be seen as part of, or rather an outgrowth of, the same impulses that gave birth to imperialism, given that others have already noted, with the aid of Fanon's polemic article, the violence inherent in both systems/ideologies. The impulses being those of modernity; a willful questioning of and destabilizing of the status quo in the case of modernism, and out-and-out economic exploitation in the case of imperialism. In fact, on could say that modernism is in large part a result of the fruits of imperialism (one thinks back to Gikandi's article on Picasso and his relation with African art), and by playing on those motifs, modernism does violence to the representations of the colonized.

Folks complain of their posts getting longer; mine keep getting shorter. Way to buck the trend, me?

- Yingzhao

A Passage to India: My Scattered Thoughts

A Passage to India resists a definate interpretation, as other posters before me have already noted. Despite the omniscent narrator, there are a multiplicy of interpretations possible, even at the level of basic plot (namely, what exactly happened in the caves?). All the characters in the novel strain to attain their own interpretation of India, but as the narrator notes, there is "no one India". In this sense, the novel fits the modernist mould of the instability of meaning, and the search for meaning that goes on anyway. But the search for the 'real' India is not the primary focus of the novel; rather, it ultimately hinges upon the relationship between Fielding and Aziz, which up to the end is everchanging, unpinnable, and destined never to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

As for the book's relation to imperialism, it has been cited in several places as one of the reasons the British pulled out of India with a sense of 'having washed their hands of a disagreeable affair'. Is it an anti-imperialistic book, then? Certainly, the Anglo-Indians are portrayed in a negative light, again as other posters have already noted. And yet there is more than a trace of Orientalism evident in Forster's portrayal of the various Indian characters. Even Aziz, the most 'rational' of the Indians portrayed, does not escape the stereotype of the irrational, mysterious Oriental... but the Anglo-Indians are behaving just as irrationally. In fact, it turns out that none of the characters are quite rational in their thoughts. After the shock of the First World War, perhaps it is starting to sink in that the colonizers are not as superior to the colonized as they first believed... and from here, one can speculate that modernism as a literary movement sprang at least in part from just such a realization and interaction. Seen in that light, Modernism and Imperialism are more tied together than one might had thought.

My thoughts are rather disjointed this week, so apologies if this comes off as just so much rambling.

-- Yingzhao