Since everyone’s having so much fun with language, like Kelly I’d also like to relate a personal anecdote that some of you might have heard before. I was in a certain university in the US last summer, where a friend and I decided to enrol in a course of American film and lit. During the first lesson, the lecture handed out a (disturbingly long) reading list, peered down at our distraught faces and said with great kindness, “I won’t mind if you two can’t read English as well as the rest of the class”.
!!!!!!!!
(Of course my friend and I looked convincingly Asian and therefore, non-white, and therefore subjected to a mild form of the sort of experience that Fanon writes about).
Moving on, I’d like to examine Fanon’s quote on pg 18: “A man who has language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language…mastery of language affords remarkable power”. This reads very much like the kind of argument that the local government put forth when they first embarked on English education back in…errr…very long ago. In the colonial framework, language was one more divide along which the coloniser/ colonised could be dichotomised in order to perpetuate colonial difference, not only through the difference in articulation, but the corresponding intellectual ability it implied. To address a native “exactly like an adult with a child” is not only to dismiss him as inferior, but to forever exclude him from “the world expressed and implied by that language” – the colonial world of reason, rationality, progress, intelligence, technology, etc etc.
Prof Lim in my Asian American Lit class once referred to the language as ‘cultural currency’ – meaning that the English language, specifically has a very real value in a global culture that is increasingly becoming an English one. To speak today of a global culture, and global Englishes, for that matter, seems to me to imply a rupture in the entanglement of language and culture. We can probably all agree intuitively with the idea that English has cannibalised ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ cultures through its sheer pervasiveness (my Chinese sucks) but I would like to question how viable this view is today. If English has been claimed by all culture and ethnicities and whatnot, I don’t believe it can still be seen as the carrier of a single (colonial) culture. The difference, I feel, between Fanon’s experience and ours (Singapore’s) today is the sense of confidence we (or at least) I can bring to my use of English.
(Seeing as it is the last post, I have been rather liberal with wordcount, which is 418. Please excuse :)
Showing posts with label lynnette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lynnette. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
modernist by last name
I think my favourite question to ask is whether or not a text is modernist. So…is Growing modernist? I don’t think so but I shall suggest modernist elements other than those already talked about. I feel that the modernist impulse in Woolf has less to do with consciouness (as in the other Woolf) and instead more with narrative and representation.
I thought a very strong modernist gesture lay in the way Woolf would constantly take little sidetrips out of the narrative and tell us little anecdotes about various people. For instance, he relates Dutton’s naivety in sexual matters by way of an “example”, which comes in the form of a little story within a story. This serves to fragment the narrative in a sense, such that while narrative continuity is maintained, the notion of a single, overarching and totalitarian narrative is reduced. The same example is also similar to what Auerbach – remember him?! – describes as “excurses, whose relations in time to the occurrence which frames them seem to be entirely different” (537). Of course, the only occurrence that takes place here is the act of narration; nonetheless, these ‘excurses’ break up the temporal continuity of the narrative into two discontinuous narrative sequences.
These anecdotes also give the text an impressionistic quality – we learn about characters like Dutton through the impressions that Woolf gives us, rather than straightforward description. The most obvious – and funniest example I can think of is his encounter with Mrs Dutton:
“…perhaps owing to the overpowering smell of clean linen, it gave me the feeling of unmitigated chastity…”
Such suggestiveness even though he never really tells the readers what it is that makes her so miserable! However, my point is that impressionism makes the reader acutely aware of the mediating presence of the author/narrator, along with the realisation that the evocative images we are given are subjective impressions of a non-omniscient, non-objective narrator.
(299 words, excluding quote)
I thought a very strong modernist gesture lay in the way Woolf would constantly take little sidetrips out of the narrative and tell us little anecdotes about various people. For instance, he relates Dutton’s naivety in sexual matters by way of an “example”, which comes in the form of a little story within a story. This serves to fragment the narrative in a sense, such that while narrative continuity is maintained, the notion of a single, overarching and totalitarian narrative is reduced. The same example is also similar to what Auerbach – remember him?! – describes as “excurses, whose relations in time to the occurrence which frames them seem to be entirely different” (537). Of course, the only occurrence that takes place here is the act of narration; nonetheless, these ‘excurses’ break up the temporal continuity of the narrative into two discontinuous narrative sequences.
These anecdotes also give the text an impressionistic quality – we learn about characters like Dutton through the impressions that Woolf gives us, rather than straightforward description. The most obvious – and funniest example I can think of is his encounter with Mrs Dutton:
“…perhaps owing to the overpowering smell of clean linen, it gave me the feeling of unmitigated chastity…”
Such suggestiveness even though he never really tells the readers what it is that makes her so miserable! However, my point is that impressionism makes the reader acutely aware of the mediating presence of the author/narrator, along with the realisation that the evocative images we are given are subjective impressions of a non-omniscient, non-objective narrator.
(299 words, excluding quote)
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
got hypermasculine meh?
According to Stoler, the “demasculinization of colonised men and the hypermasculinity of European males are understood as key elements in the assertion of white supremacy”. In Burmese Days, Orwell contrasts this masculine ideal against the realities of Flory and Co. as a means of challenging both the racial and gendered implications of this ideal.
While this hypermasculine ideal is very much embodied by the polo-playing, feral, virile, Verrall, the same cannot be said for Flory and Co., who spend their available time indulging in gin and tonics rather than games of tennis. Furthermore, the white colonisers are shown to be inadequate in comparison with the local males. There is, for instance, the token symbol of physical strength and purity:
“The Burman who paddled Elizabeth was sixty years old, half naked, leaf brown, with a body as perfect as that of a young man” (160)
Masculinity is expressed most clearly in their sexual exploits (I’m thinking of that skanky scene involving Mr Lankersteen and THREE Burmese girls, and similar) which are numerous and commonplace, and which involve the domination of local women such as Ma Hla May. However, doubly asymmetrical power relationships between colonizer/colonized and male/female makes it difficult for me to read such sexual relations as an embodiment of white masculine power – You don’t need to be particularly power to dominate over an already subjugated and subservient class of people. Furthermore, the presence of Elizabeth, with her love physical sport such as shooting and horse-riding, serves further to undermine the gendered stereotypes.
The issue of virility also arises: Concubinage revolves around sexual, but sterile (infertile?) unions and Flory for instance is described as being in a state of perpetual bachelorhood.
“Flory, because a bachelor, was a boy still whereas Ko S’la had married, begotten five children, married again and become one of the obscure matyrs of bigamy” (51)
The idea of fecundity (or lack thereof) is thus another, more subtle way in which the ideal of white masculinity is critiqued and found to be wanting.
While this hypermasculine ideal is very much embodied by the polo-playing, feral, virile, Verrall, the same cannot be said for Flory and Co., who spend their available time indulging in gin and tonics rather than games of tennis. Furthermore, the white colonisers are shown to be inadequate in comparison with the local males. There is, for instance, the token symbol of physical strength and purity:
“The Burman who paddled Elizabeth was sixty years old, half naked, leaf brown, with a body as perfect as that of a young man” (160)
Masculinity is expressed most clearly in their sexual exploits (I’m thinking of that skanky scene involving Mr Lankersteen and THREE Burmese girls, and similar) which are numerous and commonplace, and which involve the domination of local women such as Ma Hla May. However, doubly asymmetrical power relationships between colonizer/colonized and male/female makes it difficult for me to read such sexual relations as an embodiment of white masculine power – You don’t need to be particularly power to dominate over an already subjugated and subservient class of people. Furthermore, the presence of Elizabeth, with her love physical sport such as shooting and horse-riding, serves further to undermine the gendered stereotypes.
The issue of virility also arises: Concubinage revolves around sexual, but sterile (infertile?) unions and Flory for instance is described as being in a state of perpetual bachelorhood.
“Flory, because a bachelor, was a boy still whereas Ko S’la had married, begotten five children, married again and become one of the obscure matyrs of bigamy” (51)
The idea of fecundity (or lack thereof) is thus another, more subtle way in which the ideal of white masculinity is critiqued and found to be wanting.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
such unsexiness
What stood out the most for in Burmese Days was the very different treatment of sexuality and desire in the novel. Someone mentioned earlier that all characters in the novel were cast in a negative light, and I’ll add that all but one are decidedly physically unattractive. We’re already familiar enough with the subversion of white male superiority, hence Flory’s giant birthmark, the yellowing Mrs Lankersteen and a whole host of lazy, drunk colonials. However, unlike previous novels read on the course, the native Other is never exoticised or aestheticized into an object of desire. Even at her best Ma Hla May is “an outlandish doll and yet a grotesquely beautiful one” (52); the clearest visual picture we get of the Burmese man is U Po – “fat, symmetrically, like fruit swelling”. Unlike Kurtz’s African mistress or the hunky punka-wallah of Passage to India, the native is no longer represented as possessing the virility, health and other attributes that the Empire is shown to have lost.
If the native is read as representative of the ‘East’ that is colonised, the novel suggest an attenuation of the colonial daydream of the East as Exotic Other. Colonies are no longer ideal sites constructed in opposition to the West, upon which the desires of the West can be projected. Neither does the East exist as an Other: when seen through the eyes of Orwell it takes on the same mundane, greyish hue as do the withering colonials. Even Elizabeth, the central object of desire, becomes by the end of the novel “the position for which Nature had designed her for from the first, that of a burra memsahib” (287). Desire is recycled endlessly into banality; the loss of desire suggests a dissipation of virility that heralds Empire’s impeding decline.
If the native is read as representative of the ‘East’ that is colonised, the novel suggest an attenuation of the colonial daydream of the East as Exotic Other. Colonies are no longer ideal sites constructed in opposition to the West, upon which the desires of the West can be projected. Neither does the East exist as an Other: when seen through the eyes of Orwell it takes on the same mundane, greyish hue as do the withering colonials. Even Elizabeth, the central object of desire, becomes by the end of the novel “the position for which Nature had designed her for from the first, that of a burra memsahib” (287). Desire is recycled endlessly into banality; the loss of desire suggests a dissipation of virility that heralds Empire’s impeding decline.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
everyone wants an elephant
I would just like to add on to Christine’s point about the elephant not being a modernist symbol, because I didn’t see it as one either.
While there is a certain sense of ‘unknowability’ suggested by the failure to obtain any definite information about the elephant, it nonetheless remains that the elephant IS eventually located, isolated and killed. There is a consensus that is arrived upon with regard to the elephant: While the elephant starts off as being both an enigmatic and disruptive force, the end of its violent spree coincides with a ‘conquering’ of the enigma as the elephant is no longer presented as being beyond comprehension and knowledge.
The capitalist-imperial mind DOES succeed in inscribing the elephant within its own utilitarian terms. As the narrator describes it in terms of dollar worth: “Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds possibly”. Interestingly, the Burmese perspective also reduces the elephant to a simple object of value – the nutritional value that its meat provides.
This convergence of multiple perspectives into a single one is visualised in how all the Burmese people converge into a single body with a collective gaze directed upon the elephant as a thing to be killed and a source of food. Even the narrator is implicated within this gaze, as he states “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it”. Interesting to me, however, is that it is neither the white man nor the native who succeeds in gaining mastery over the elephant, but a sort of shared will, with the desire of the Burmese coinciding with the ability of the armed, white man.
While there is a certain sense of ‘unknowability’ suggested by the failure to obtain any definite information about the elephant, it nonetheless remains that the elephant IS eventually located, isolated and killed. There is a consensus that is arrived upon with regard to the elephant: While the elephant starts off as being both an enigmatic and disruptive force, the end of its violent spree coincides with a ‘conquering’ of the enigma as the elephant is no longer presented as being beyond comprehension and knowledge.
The capitalist-imperial mind DOES succeed in inscribing the elephant within its own utilitarian terms. As the narrator describes it in terms of dollar worth: “Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds possibly”. Interestingly, the Burmese perspective also reduces the elephant to a simple object of value – the nutritional value that its meat provides.
This convergence of multiple perspectives into a single one is visualised in how all the Burmese people converge into a single body with a collective gaze directed upon the elephant as a thing to be killed and a source of food. Even the narrator is implicated within this gaze, as he states “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it”. Interesting to me, however, is that it is neither the white man nor the native who succeeds in gaining mastery over the elephant, but a sort of shared will, with the desire of the Burmese coinciding with the ability of the armed, white man.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
creeping twenty feet underground: the politics of representation
Jim’s willingness to stand trial after abandoning the Patna, and his habit of running away from areas where the story of his role in the Patna might circulate, work together to comment on the politics of representation.
After his ‘abandonment’ of the Patna and the consequent loss of his seaman’s certificate, Jim slides away from public view, hopping from shore to shore in order to avoid re-encountering traces of his unhappy past. Instead he locates himself in places where knowledge of his disgrace has not yet circulated. In the words of Michael Valdez Moses, Jim seeks the places “where narration lags behind the event” (64). When Jim’s story is narrated by others, he becomes defined by his representation within that narrative. Jim does not want to be defined by the shameful narrative of his past, seeking instead a clean slate where he can “rewrite” his story.
Ashamed as he is of his actions following the non-sinking of the Patna, Jim does not shirk from the public or from legislative judgment. “Do you not think you or anyone could have made me if I…I am – I am not afraid to tell?” asks Jim (112). This ‘telling’ constitutes an act of agency – when he speaks for himself Jim can at least try to bring out the nuances of his subjective experience on the ship, an agency that is denied him when his story is related by a third party.
To me, Jim’s escapist tendencies derive not so much from a desire to forget/deny his actions on the Patna, but rather, the desire to tell his own story in his own words, to define himself in his own narrative. This desire is not dissimilar to post-colonial writers and such who “write back” against colonial inscriptions.
(293 words, excluding reference)
* Quote from Moses taken from:
Moses, Valdez Michael. "Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics. from Modernism and Colonialism. Ed.Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. London: Duke University Press, 2007.
After his ‘abandonment’ of the Patna and the consequent loss of his seaman’s certificate, Jim slides away from public view, hopping from shore to shore in order to avoid re-encountering traces of his unhappy past. Instead he locates himself in places where knowledge of his disgrace has not yet circulated. In the words of Michael Valdez Moses, Jim seeks the places “where narration lags behind the event” (64). When Jim’s story is narrated by others, he becomes defined by his representation within that narrative. Jim does not want to be defined by the shameful narrative of his past, seeking instead a clean slate where he can “rewrite” his story.
Ashamed as he is of his actions following the non-sinking of the Patna, Jim does not shirk from the public or from legislative judgment. “Do you not think you or anyone could have made me if I…I am – I am not afraid to tell?” asks Jim (112). This ‘telling’ constitutes an act of agency – when he speaks for himself Jim can at least try to bring out the nuances of his subjective experience on the ship, an agency that is denied him when his story is related by a third party.
To me, Jim’s escapist tendencies derive not so much from a desire to forget/deny his actions on the Patna, but rather, the desire to tell his own story in his own words, to define himself in his own narrative. This desire is not dissimilar to post-colonial writers and such who “write back” against colonial inscriptions.
(293 words, excluding reference)
* Quote from Moses taken from:
Moses, Valdez Michael. "Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics. from Modernism and Colonialism. Ed.Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
politics, politics
Achebe criticises Conrad for racism and the dehumanisation of the African people in his writing, stating at one point that HoD calls “the very humanity of black people” into question. While this blog is peppered with evidence in support of this statement, I’m quite uncomfortable with how literature is reduced to a battlefield on which Achebe wages his political war on the West.
An essay by Arif Dirlik from my long ago post-colonial class problematizes the reading of history and literature as “alternative forms of politics”, in particular referring to the “displacement of political questions to the realm of culture”. In the essay, these issues are discussed with regard to Asian-American writers and the expectation that they ‘represent’ or ‘give voice to’ the minority group to which they belong. Dirlik argues against these expectations, stating that literary representation should not be used as a tool to replace the political representation that minority groups lack in civil society.
In the same way, Achebe has a bone to pick with HoD that clearly isn’t just about literature. The figurative violence inflicted upon African bodies in HoD (and much of Western art) is symptomatic of the exploitation and literal violence done to these bodies under colonialism (Fanon says it all!). Heart of Darkness certainly represents a historical moment that is deeply prejudiced against
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
regardless of race, language or religion
Much has already been said about how the modernist aesthetic re-enacts a form of violence upon narrative and textual means of representation and understanding. I’d just like to point out a further relationship between violence and aesthetic systems that struck me while reading Fanon (and thinking about Auerbach). Fanon writes that colonized masses “intuitively believe that their liberation must…and can only be achieved by force” (33).
Inhabiting as they do a pervasive structure in which colonial dominance (in economic, cultural and political fields, as described by Fanon) prevent the subject from confronting the coloniser as an equal, the outright rejection of such structure seems to be the only means available for levelling the playing field. In PI for example, Aziz knows the result of his trial has already been foretold; his legal, social and cultural standing are more than enough to ‘prove’ his guilt. On the other hand, physical violence, in all its bloody reality, represents not only a rupturing of these oppressive structures, but also allows the battle between coloniser/colonised to be fought in a kind of primordial state of pure physicality, a kind of lacanian Real where social constructions and the (false) inequalities that they bring are abolished. An oblique reference to this can be seen in Adela’s observatin of the punkah, whose “strength and beauty…[and] physical perfection” is likened to a go’ d in contrast to the “cultivated, self conscious and conscientious” Assistant magistrate opposite him (205). Physical violence, in other words, provides the interface where men can meet as equals and reverse the stifling hierarchies that colonialism spawns. ( I was actually thinking of Pahlanuik’s Fight Club, which might help demystify what I think has been a rather convoluted paragraph)
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
friezes and spirits
“She and Ronny would look minto the club like this every evening, then drive home to dress; they would see the Lesleys and the Callandars and the Turtons and the Burtons, and invite them and be invited by them, while the true India slid by unnoticed. Colour would remain…—and movement would remain…But the force that lies behind colour and movement would escape her even more effectually than it did now. She would see India always as a frieze, never as a spirit”
I would like to use this quote, taken from pg 43 of the Penguin edition, as the focus of my post. Throughout the novel I found Adela an intriguing character, and her repeated desires to look beyond the unseeing stereotypes perceived by other Anglo-Indians (as named in the quote) seemed, at first, an attempt to more positively represent the relationship between Empire and its Indian subjects.
However, I find myself questioning now if Adela’s attitude towards India is a counterpoint to the prevailing one expressed by such men as Ronny (“We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly”), or if they are merely two sides of the same coin. For all her desire to see the “real’ India and her apparent interest in meeting Indian people, she assents to Fielding’s observation that “The first time I saw you, you were wanting to see India, not Indians” (245). Her desire to see the “spirit” behind the “frieze” of colour of movement too can be read in colonial, essentialising; while the frieze suggests a superficial and static apprehension of one’s surroundings, the desire for an essential and transcendental ’’spirit’ takes one away from direct experience and subsumes it beneath the search for a general and totalising essence.
Thus, while Ronny and his compatriots have essentialised India into an absence that is to be ‘avoided’ as far as possible and is spoken about only in utilitarian, or otherwise derogatory terms, Adela seeks an exoticism in India marked by its difference from the Empire and, and finds it best answered by the cold beauty of a moonrise reflected in the mirror (She isn’t really happy most other times, not even when she gets taken around ‘real’ Indian caves by the ‘real’ Indians Azia and co). For all her interest in native customs and fair treatment of Indians and so forth, Adela, it seems, cannot help but perpetuate the imperial gaze that she wants to hard to avoid.
What, then, is one to do if both interest and disinterest in the reality of India can be equally read as colonialist and oppressive? What sort of attitude is there left for a foreigner – an Anglo India – to take? To me, Forster’s novel complicates the easy binary of self and exotic other, perhaps by suggesting an impossibility of perceiving the world otherwise.
Lynnette
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Brown Stocking and Empire
Initially, Auerbach’s The Brown Stocking seemed to be purely about modernism, with little or no connection to issues of empire. However, the essay ends with the claim that “in this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation” that is modernism, “we cannot see but to what an extent…the difference between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened” (552). This conclusion illuminated for me a common thread running through all three readings: the invisibility of the Other and the West’s perpetual refusal to perceive Others as unique individuals
Auerbach claims that modernism’s exploitation of interior thought foregrounds the “elementary things which our lives have in common” and erases superficial differences that divide. Because of this, “the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled; there are no longer even exotic peoples”.
To me the description of modernist writing as unprejudiced and precise begs question. Modernism arises from the traditions of Western culture and is an aesthetic movement practiced by an elite class of artists; how then can modernist explorations of thought be equally representative of all ways of life? The claim of its lack of bias, then, already points to Auerbach’s privileging of the position from which writers people like Virginia Woolf write, and it remains a bias that is invisible to him.
What then, of the claim that “there are no longer even exotic peoples”? To me, the term exotic resonates with Rubin’s description of Africa as “something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous”(Gikandi 468) – in other words, something unknown; and unknowable. The understanding of their innermost processes that comes with the modernist enterprise then causes the loss of this quality of exoticism because the exotic Other is now knowable; he can be understood in terms of the fundamental elements he shares with the Western writer and his representations.
Gikandi writes that Picasso had little interest in Africans as human beings and producers of culture, only as subjects of his art . Similarly, Levine describes the British as expecting the colonized people to conform to their standards of behaviour and value systems. Auerbach’s claim for the modernist enterprise, again, rests upon the assumption that the “exotics” can be understood and represented adequately in terms of the Western artist. That which outside the writer’s experience and the limits of his writing are, it seems, disregarded. The sense of the invisibility of the Other thus persists throughout modernism notwithstanding Auerbach’s claims of a movement towards unification.
-lynnette
Auerbach claims that modernism’s exploitation of interior thought foregrounds the “elementary things which our lives have in common” and erases superficial differences that divide. Because of this, “the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled; there are no longer even exotic peoples”.
To me the description of modernist writing as unprejudiced and precise begs question. Modernism arises from the traditions of Western culture and is an aesthetic movement practiced by an elite class of artists; how then can modernist explorations of thought be equally representative of all ways of life? The claim of its lack of bias, then, already points to Auerbach’s privileging of the position from which writers people like Virginia Woolf write, and it remains a bias that is invisible to him.
What then, of the claim that “there are no longer even exotic peoples”? To me, the term exotic resonates with Rubin’s description of Africa as “something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous”(Gikandi 468) – in other words, something unknown; and unknowable. The understanding of their innermost processes that comes with the modernist enterprise then causes the loss of this quality of exoticism because the exotic Other is now knowable; he can be understood in terms of the fundamental elements he shares with the Western writer and his representations.
Gikandi writes that Picasso had little interest in Africans as human beings and producers of culture, only as subjects of his art . Similarly, Levine describes the British as expecting the colonized people to conform to their standards of behaviour and value systems. Auerbach’s claim for the modernist enterprise, again, rests upon the assumption that the “exotics” can be understood and represented adequately in terms of the Western artist. That which outside the writer’s experience and the limits of his writing are, it seems, disregarded. The sense of the invisibility of the Other thus persists throughout modernism notwithstanding Auerbach’s claims of a movement towards unification.
-lynnette
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