The line/language of beauty

Reading Fanon and Joyce in tandem this week brought up a particular issue that surfaces in the other texts we have studied: the importance of beauty in language, and the relation of the colonised (as a "tourist" of sorts of the coloniser's language) to beauty.

In a rather unfair exchange (among many others), the coloniser aestheticises the Other as a means of adding beauty to the English language and as a means of creating beauty. I'm thinking of Said and Gikandi here - the selective use of material or pseudo-spiritual aspects of the East/Other to make art. There's a hint of this in Joyce as well, when yellow ivy makes Stephen think of ivory: "one of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run: India mittit ebur" (157). India sends ivory: the coloniser's language is the medium that makes aspects of the East - the romanticised image of India, the material of ivory - beautiful. The coloniser is thus placed in the powerful position of the artist.

However, I call this exchange unfair because the colonised is barred from reciprocating. The privilege of the artist does not extend to the colonised, and this is very evident in Fanon's description of the French talking down to the native, even if the native is fluent in French: language to the native must be fragmented and thus made unbeautiful (for the native, language can only serve as a means of communication and the coloniser's assertion of power). The native is thus barred from the realm of the aesthetic and kept from creating beauty in language, because the notion of beauty, as with language, comes with an accompanying world of cultural knowledge and tradition (as Fanon and Joyce describe). The coloniser-artist feels more and more threatened the closer the native comes to this hallowed world. For the colonised, however, the problem lies in how to access beauty without resorting to this cultural world of the coloniser; Stephen, for instance, cannot enunciate an aesthetics of beauty without thinking through the borrowed lens of Aquinas. The colonised can thus try to reclaim this coloniser's cultural notions of beauty for his own, or he can rewrite his own standards of beauty.

I argue that the latter is what Joyce does in Portrait. By placing Irish Stephen in the role of artist, he reclaims agency for the colonised to act as a creator of beauty, as Joyce himself does through his modernist play with language. Rejecting the hermetic line of beauty, as it were, of the omniscient authorial voice, he revels in fragmentation, showing how fragmented language can be beautiful - contrary to the French in Fanon. Joyce, therefore, enacts a reversal of the talking-down and deaestheticization of language that goes on in Fanon; this is, arguably, an excellent example of how the colonised artist can reclaim beauty for himself.

The Aesthetics of Colonial Concubinage

Much discussion has focused on the sexual relations between Flory and Ma Hla May (during this post, referred to as May) but less has been said about the modernist aestheticization of May’s concubinage.

When we first meet May, Orwell, through the narrator, casts May in an Orientalist light: she is dressed in traditional Burmese wear of the longyi, her petite frame, “typical” of representations of Asian females, is emphasized (“perhaps five feet tall”), and her “narrow eyes” are accentuated (here, we are reminded of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese eyes in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse). The narrator also takes great pain to describe to us the intricate details of May’s Orientalist clothes and her general appearance: she was “dressed in a longyi of pale blue embroidered Chinese satin, and a starched white muslim ingyi on which several gold lockets hung” (52).

If May is presented in an Orientalist fashion, the sexual subjugation that May is subject to under Flory’s concubinage is turned into a modernist aesthetic. As Flory’s “native” concubine, May is compared to a stylicized doll that is subject to Flory’s whims and moods: “she was like a doll, with her oval, still face the colour of new copper . . . an outlandish doll and yet a grotesquely beautiful one” (52). Rather than dwelling on May’s “abject status [as] slave” (Stoler 49) and the victimization that she undergoes as Flory’s concubine, Orwell, through the narrator, sees May as an aesthetic sculpture. The implication of the simile -- May’s “tiny, straight, slender body was as contourless as a bas-relief carved upon a tree” (52, italics mine) -- is that the “native” woman, May, is reduced to an artistic object in the Western artist’s imagination. In other words, colonial concubinage is hijacked from its colonial history and turned into modernist aesthetic.

When May is banished by Flory, her aesthetic value depreciates, to the extent that she takes on a ghastly appearance, with her “greasy” hair and her “face grey with powder . . . [looking] like a screaming hag of the bazaar” (273). Ultimately, May is condemned to be an aesthetic commodity, circulated and exchanged within the modernist (and colonialist) economy.

Aestheticizing Performance and Performing Art

I am interested in the modernist aestheticization of the Burmese pwe in Orwell’s Burmese Days. As “a kind of Burmese play; a cross between a historical drama and a revue” (101), the pwe embodies “nativeness”. We are told that the skirts of the pwe’s best dancer “curved outwards above her hips . . . according to the ancient Burmese fashion” (103); the significance being that the pwe is a form of homage to Burmese heritage and tradition. Although the pwe is a material embodiment of “Burmese-ness,” it is presented as a modernist aesthetic. If the subjugation of Blacks is aestheticized – in that while in service to the Whites, they are dressed in stylistic clothes – in the music box that Jean Genet saw, then the subjugation of the Burmese “natives” can similarly be said to be aestheticized. This aestheticization takes place not only because the dancer is reduced to inanimate objects, but more importantly, because her movements are compared to aesthetic commodities: she has the movement like “one of those jointed wooded figures on an old-fashioned roundabout. The way her neck and elbows rotated was precisely like a jointed doll” (104, italics mine). Burmese subjugation, in other words, is stylicized and incorporated into literary texts in a manner that we do not question, precisely because it has been naturalized.

After establishing how Burmese subservience is aestheticized in the text, it is necessary to discuss the reaction towards this ‘aesthetification’. The European reaction to the pwe is that of both attraction and revolt: Flory tells us that it is “grotesque, it’s even ugly . . . yet when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see behind it!” (105). In this respect, the conflicted response to the pwe is similar to the European response towards U Po Kyin right from the start of the novel: he was a man “shapely and even beautiful in his grossness” (1). The response to both the pwe and U Po Kyin remind us of the narrator’s response towards the dead “native” in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant; in the latter case, likewise, the narrator is both fascinated and repulsed by the dead Indian coolie.

300 words is a very good idea: reframing binaristic language into modernist fragmentations

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (HOD) is structured around the Manichean framework that Fanon talks about in his article: the binary between the colonizer and the colonized. This is exactly Achebe’s grouse with Conrad’s text. In terms of language in HOD, Conrad makes clear the inevitable and embedded distance that separates the colonizer from the colonized. There are numerous examples of this: I take as my main example the difference between Kurtz, the Pride of Empire and the “six black men” (18). While Kurtz is “a prodigy…an emissary of pity, and science, and progress” (30), in other words, the symbolic embodiment of the values that are advocated by Empire, the “six black men” are criminals who have deviated from these values. The anxieties of deviance and degeneration that grip the British Empire result in the exertion of physical control over them: “each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain” (18).

Although the difference between White pride and Black savagery (“unhappy savages”) is made clear, Conrad, it would seem to me, reframes this difference into a framework of modernist aesthetics. While Conrad’s use of language is clearly structured around binaries, language itself becomes fragmented, incoherent and shrouded in mystery, in a typical modernist manner. These six men “were called criminals” yet they were like “an insoluble mystery from over the sea” (18). There are many examples of how language breaks down in the text despite it being structured around binaries: phrases are repeated – “but what’s the good?” (82), Marlow tells a lie at the end of the novel even if he says that he “hate[s], detest[s]s, and can’t bear a lie” (32), and Kurtz can only repeat “the horror! The horror!” in a manner that is wholly inadequate to his experience.

(296 words)

A Charming Music Box

To spur on further thoughts on this week's reading: the following words have been taken from Jean Genet on what triggered him to write "Les Negres", or "The Blacks" -- perhaps one of the most difficult yet profound works on the philosophical structures of racism in twentieth century literature. As you may know, Genet was a twentieth century French writer who is most famous perhaps for his works including "Our Lady of the Flowers," "The Thief's Journal," and for his political (also described as existentialist and Absurdist) plays ranging from "The Balcony" to "The Maids."


Genet on what made him think of writing "Les Negres":

"The point of departure, the trigger, was given to me by a music box in which the mechanical figures were four Blacks dressed in livery bowing before a little princess in white porcelain. This charming bibelot is from the eighteenth century. In our day, without irony, would one imagine a response to it: four white valets bowing to a Black princess? Nothing has changed. What then goes on in the soul of these obscure characters that our civilization has accepted into its imagery, but always under the lightly foolish appearance of a caratydid holding up a coffee table, of a train bearer or a costumed servant bearing a coffee pot? They are made of fabric, but they do not have a soul. If they had one, they would dream of eating the princess.

When we see the Blacks, do we see something other than the precise and sombre phantoms born of our own desire? But what do these phantoms think of us then? What games do they play?"

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?)