selling out

We see a lot of reference to being evicted from houses (“...the landlord will put us out” sans “boro”), leaving houses (189), or selling off houses (“...his father’s property was going to be sold by auction”). If a house can be read as a metaphor for a person’s culture, then the significance of Stephen experiencing the loss his homes may mirror the cultural genocide that Ireland experienced under British rule. Also, since eviction and auctioning both have a kind of monetary relevance, we might argue how the text negotiates the idea of ‘selling out’, particularly in the case of the Irish with respect to their own national culture and language.

This notion of selling out is evoked in Fanon’s reading where he talks about the “new man” who has deliberately suppressed his native culture and embraced the culture of the new mother country. (“...he answers only in French, and often he no longer understands Creole.”) Fanon calls this “the death and burial of its local cultural originality”, and Stephen later says heatedly, “My ancestors threw off their language and took another...they allowed a handful of foreigner to subject them.”

Coming back to the idea of selling out, I think that both texts seek to redress the painful reality of how a unique culture can be lost or eroded because its people lack something like moral courage or nationalistic pride. Stephen attempts to do so in his eventual decision not to abandon Ireland but to take it on himself to “forge...the uncreated conscience of [his] race”, and Fanon, through his criticism of an oppressive White culture which values the humanity of a person only after that person “renounces his blackness, his jungle”. And I think both are successful partly because I found both texts’ justified in their arguments (and do despise the cultural bigotry of colonizers), and partly because of the great deal of influence they still retain to this day..

The Apathetic Empire

We have gone from India to Africa, Africa to Burma, and Burma to Ireland. Textually speaking, I’d say that we as readers have conducted a little imperialist mission of our own—if those texts are microcosms of countries, our analyses and deconstructions of them then make us something like conquerors and colonizers. And indeed, we occupy a position of considerable power: able to argue a text in any way we choose, justifying just about anything by twisting and turning evidence into our favour. The only ethical thing to do then is to be responsible in our interpretations, rather than dressing them up because they sound good. Now, at the risk of sounding prejudiced, it is precisely for this reason that I confess I’ve gathered a pretty nasty impression of the British Empire.

Jackson talks repeatedly about how the “strategies of British government in Ireland resembled their colonial counterparts in many ways.” While there is nothing wrong with having a consistent foreign policy, there is something decidedly reprehensible about maintaining it despite the negative effects it was known to have on the subjected colony, e.g. the viceroyalty infrastructure—“resentments, intrigue and snobbery which it generated, were broadly familiar…throughout the Empire”; or implicit social stratification which arose either from “British dependence upon, and exploitation of, local allies…local elites”, or the conferring of “imperial honours and titles”.

In fact, it gets uglier when we find out that the British were “keen to exploit division”, routinely “transfer[ring] their affections and support from one local community to another”—the effects of which we can see in the resentful relations among the Irish in Portrait (“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”). The lack of British urgency in sending aid during the Irish potato famine is also a mark of imperial incompetence and apathy towards the people under their rule. The religious liberation that the Empire touted to bring was really a paltry front for what was just “imperial economic vampire[ism]”, and it is no wonder that Portrait’s Dedalus articulates the need to free himself from the these colonial “nets”, thus expressing a desire for freedom/liberation which his mythological name itself invokes.

Growing Skewed

I find myself having a perplexed attitude towards 'Growing'. On one hand, I think it is subjective to the point of being unrealistic, and on the other, it seems jarringly honest.

Let’s take the honest bits first: he includes extracts of letters, many of which appear uncensored. There is crudeness in his letters (““f*** your wife” I added and enraged him”), as well as a kind of sadism regarding the incident of his owl and rat (“All night long he chases a rat round the dog kennel…he never catches him and as I never feed the rat, they are both slowly dying of starvation”). Also, he admits to sleeping with a “young Burgher girl”, an act that I am sure would not have reflected well of him then.

But I begin to challenge Woolf’s candidness when I see things like “No one, the man included, seemed to be much concerned by this” as a response to Woolf's mismanaged dog peeing on a Sinhalese man, or even that (according to him), “the Arabs were vastly amused” to be “hit…[by]a walking stick” to clear a path for himself. I see it as just another form of White validation of ‘native’ abuse—simply through a ‘but they don’t mind’ attitude. Woolf’s descriptions of events also seem exaggerated/almost ideological (the way the native crows began “eating the vomit as it came out” of Charles’s mouth, or the fact that tiny Charles defeated 3 “large” native dogs, each double his size mind you). I also find his depictions of women in the text fairly extreme, almost like caricatures—we see the phrases “true to type”, “true to the type”, “the kind of wife”, “the…freckled type”—who are flatly/spectrally depicted—“she was a Jane Austen character”, “an inveterate matchmaker”, “went out of her way to say the most outrageous things at the most awkward moments”, “two angels performing a miracle”. Perhaps, the politics of mis/ representation are in play here.

Blasphemous Burmese days!

Native spiritualism is something that we readers of colonial texts have come to expect. We see elements of it in Passage, in HD, in Lord Jim. So no surprises to see it in Burmese days--Burmese beaters conduct a sacrificial rite prior to the hunt, Ma Kin is deeply concerned about acquiring merit. What does interest me is what seems to be a not-so-subtle subversion of the usual native worship of native gods to a textual worship of White culture.
For starters, the terms “most holy god” and “the holy one” pop up routinely when the Burmese servants address White men. The European Club is referred to first as “the spiritual citadel”, and later as “that holy of holies”. The murder of a White man (Maxwell) is “a sacrilege”. Really, it is almost impossible to miss the religious (pun intended of course) spiritualization of Whiteness.
In the event that we did, however, the text certainly seems to take further steps to reiterate the point—mainly by eroding the position of prescribed native and European religion. U Po Kyin’s methods of acquiring merit turn Buddhism into something like a commercial enterprise where money is everything—purchasing a pagoda/salvation is akin to purchasing just another commodity. The pre-hunt sacrificial rite I mentioned earlier is attended to by Burmese with “serious, bored faces, like men in church”, implying with that single quote the spiritual apathy in both the ‘natives’ and the White Christians. In fact, the church service that takes place later in the book is described as “the great social event of their lives.” So. The sacred space of religion has become nothing more than a mating or match-making ground. Where is the reverence for the divine? It appears to be lost. Subsumed, I suppose, by the worship of Whiteness, or that “most holy god”.

White Accessories

What does it take to be white? Let’s view the checklist: you must first have the skin colour and bone structure to match (by contrast the ‘native’ is “dark” or “bronze” and has a flat nose, not forgetting the reminders that they have “eyes like those of a dog”), next you need the attitude of a racist, and you also ought to know how to shoot or play polo. A rough checklist may be derived from Elizabeth’s likes and dislikes—they serve as a marker for what is socially desirable in a proper White man. My point in dwelling on this issue of White criteria has to do with the fact that the theme or the up-keep of appearances seems very central to the performance of Whiteness.
Flory looks the part of the White man (and thus pleases Elizabeth) when he talks about dogs and shooting, attends club activities and dresses in “silk shirts” or “shooting boots”; Ellis through his belief in “ruling [“damn black swine”] in the only way they understand”, i.e. aggressively; and Elizabeth by responding with an expression of horror and disgust at everything native (rejecting Chinese tea, Burmese dance, even innocently non-toilet trained native babies). I’d argue that even her “tortoise-shell spectacles” symbolically enhances her performance of White superiority and “self-possess[ion]”, especially because it is described as “more expressive, indeed, than eyes”—eyes, being the windows to a soul, should express the heart of a person, but those spectacles express the look of a confidence befitting a White woman. The only time I recall Elizabeth not wearing them is when she is trying to seduce Verrall. Similarly, the Eurasians wear “huge topis to remind you that they’ve got European skulls”, and make claims of suffering “prickly heat”. If Whiteness is a culture, then these are its signposts.

Shooting a man shooting an elephant

‘Shooting an elephant’ sounds very much like shooting a film called, ‘An Elephant’. At one point, the narrator is even described to have “la[in] down on the road to get a better aim”, a position which you can imagine some photographer out in Africa getting into. Conveniently, the rifle is depicted like it is a long range camera—“a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights”. The point I am perhaps trying to raise here is the idea of theatrics, of the spectacle, of performance. And the elephant certainly looks like it is on display, while the narrator clearly is as well.
I would go so far as to draw a parallel between both the elephant and the narrator—in the same way that the elephant is this huge being, the narrator is an agent of this other huge entity called the British Empire. (It helps that elephants are grey, because that’s the colour of institutions in my mind’s eye: stony grey walls, and high pillars which kind of look like the elephant’s four thick legs too eh?) Both elephant and empire are running amok, or going haywire—“the dirty work of Empire”—and both are literally and figuratively going down—“the British Empire is dying”. Indeed, in the same way the crowds rose against the elephant, they will rise against the flailing empire.
The difference between the two is that unlike the narrator, the elephant doesn’t have anything to prove. Like someone put it, an elephant is an elephant is an elephant. The white man, on the other hand, is on display because he is trying to prove his whiteness. The camera, or the stage, then turns on him here because the one being shot/filmed is really the white man. And the crowds are watching.

[295 words]

crumbling conrad

Last week we talked about collapsing binaries in HOD. This week, I found it almost impossible to ignore the (and this is of course completely subjective) deeply ingrained theme of failed establishments. Before the dust of one crumbling framework can settle, another one pops up (or rather, down).

Crash 1: Take the repeated allusion to ships for instance—how many of them are damaged, derelict, sinking? If a ship can indeed be said to represent human conquest of the sea/unknown, then we can read these ships as floating and failing institutions of sorts.

Crash 2: The maritime industry is also a failed establishment: firstly because officers onboard the Patna are described as debased, alcoholics, violent, morally questionable (leaving pilgrims to drown is just mean, bordering on blasphemous), and secondly because even the team of inquirers set up as a watchdog system to oversee the former can be read as itself flawed and indicative of internal contradictions—Captain Brierly defects to be on Jim’s side, arranging for him to run away.

Crash 3: Language as a stable institution pretty much also crumbles in the text. Words like “water” or “cur” generate much misunderstanding and violence, characters seem unable to find the words to say (terms like “magnificent vagueness” and “glorious indefiniteness” cue this), and French is left untranslated (something which should trigger ideas about authenticity and the limited capacity of language as a conveyor of meaning).

Crash 4: Patusan, arguably, is de-established place, a backwater. Even its political structure crumbles since the people want to overthrow the rajah, and later on Jim (since men try to assassinate him).

Why all the anti-establishmentarianism? Perhaps a modernist desire to resist absolutism or reflect the increasingly fragmented and unstable quality of a world that is going to the dogs is in play here.

(298words)

home sweet home

I don’t often like to dwell on the grotesque, but I did spend some time wondering about the significance of Kurtz’s house. Now, I can see how mounting “heads on stakes” could be a perverted form of native commodification—akin to hunting antelope and displaying their antlers on the wall. What stimulates my interest is why Kurtz would want to make those faces face in. We see how even Marlow says, “They would have been…impressive…if their faces had not been turned to the house.”

Could Conrad be trying to stir us into thinking about the colonizer reveling in the gaze of the colonized, desiring the native to look upon and emulate/mimic the colonizer? In that sense we can see the one head which is facing out (and which was “smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber”) to be rejecting that prescribed position of subjection. That head then becomes a symbol for the “dream” of decolonization and liberation.

Or, we could read the heads on stakes as a subversive form of Foucault’s theory of surveillance. Kurtz’s house then becomes something like a panopticon. Since Kurtz wants to be watched, the natives who were punished by Kurtz and thus beheaded now become his symbolic surveillances. Instead of the normal panopticon where one guard watches many inmates, we have a situation where many inmates are forced to watch or admire one guard. This form of native humiliation is magnified when we are told that “the chiefs [of the people] came every day to see him [and] would crawl…” The rest is left to the imagination but it is easy to see how compelling the native to gaze upon its own humiliation is potentially disempowering.

[286words]

space and empire

It really tickles me that a few weeks ago we were all going on about Levine’s satirical tone, when the whole time the real deal was just sitting there, in Fanon’s work. Talk about writing to slam. I’ve read segments of this article before but the absolutist and highly convinced tone still catches me every time. Many things stand out in this article, some of them written in a fairly amusing way—for instance the examples of colonial vocabulary which the article raises: “quintessence of evil”, “absolute evil”, “innate depravity”—reminding us of how the colonized are (unreasonably) cast in the role of barbarians to justify colonial rule. Indeed, Fanon’s “If we leave, all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages” mirrors Ronny’s “We’re out here to do justice and keep the peace”, and both narratives suggest that both speakers are misguided, either through Fanon’s over-the-top tone which cues us to roll our eyes at the statement, or Mrs Moore’s gentle chiding that Ronny is wrong.

Anyhow, I’ve gotten distracted. My intended posting was really about the concept of space. I like the fact that, simply put, an Empire is really all about space. The more space you take up, the less space there is left for your competitors, the more powerful you are because the pie can only be split so many ways. Also, having a large empire also means having a large mass of troops at your disposal if one ever felt like waging a war. In economic terms, that also means you have more natural resources. If the wealth of a person is measured by the size of the house he/she lives in, then the strength and authority of an empire is measured by the amount of space it spills, spreads, sprawls across. Look at the British club and enclave in Passage, and see how they vary from the native’s parties and living conditions. Fielding’s house is neat as a pin, but Aziz’s is cluttered and little more than a squalor. Fanon sums this binary up by saying that “the colonist’s sector is clean and smooth, without a pothole, without a stone” while the colonized sector is “a world with no space”. No space! Without space, one does not have power, and having a cluttered space only implies that one lacks the ability to consolidate or organize that power.

The negotiation of space is also what first set the colonizer and the colonized apart—not just because they hail from separate spaces, not just because one came to invade the other’s space, but because after the former invaded and settled in the latter’s country he segregated his side from the Other side. Just as the Islamic tradition segregates the men from the women via purdah, the colonizer separated himself from the colonized with cultural inventions. We can read this as alluding in some way to the colonizer as being the masculine presence (free to roam the public sphere) and the colonized as the feminine one (held behind purdah)—perpetuating the ideology that the East is effeminate and the West has to masculinise it through a colonial mentoring of sorts.. Or we could choose to see it from a more ironical perspective—mainly that while purdah’s segregation is meant to protect women from men, colonial segregation is meant to protect the colonizer from the colonized. Note how this reading also suggests a highly insecure empire, where the colonizer is always in mortal fear of being overthrown, of decolonization. And the way Fanon goes about describing (excessively so) the process and potential of decolonization, the colonizer does seem to have reason to fear.

Gender and empire

I think that there is always going to be something to say about gender whenever one discusses empire and imperialism. For instance, I’ve always known that India was the crown jewel of the British Empire, “a symbol of Britain’s overseas power” for other colonial cultures to see, but after reading chapter 17 to 20 of Passage, I came to see it as a site of British anxieties as well, particularly in their attitudes towards the white European woman. All the hullabaloo made after Adela was ‘assaulted’, particularly the lack of rationality used in dealing with the situation (the extinguishing of the “lamp of reason” in place of “emotion”, the use of the phrase “women and children” with growing hysteria etc), suggest to me that the British were conscious of their women as signifiers of a greater domestic culture.
This is how my logic follows: children are the future of the nation --> women care for the children --> British customs and values are transmitted from a mother to a child --> women are therefore seen as guardians of British domestic culture and the future of that heritage --> the protection of women is thus paramount to maintain this great culture. Since the native has, to a majority of the British, become a site of corruption and debauchery (indeed, there are many snide throwaway remarks made about Mohammedans and their 4 wives), the white European female must then be kept away from the vile beasts lest they be infected by native impurity. The heavy emphasis placed on white female virtue objectifies the female because she has become more of a national emblem than a fellow human being. We see how the treatment of Adela reveals this—“their kindness was incredible, but it was her position, not her character, that moved them.” This symbolic position is made more demeaning because it is a symbol which confers importance to the bearer only for a little while—“The wife of a small railway official...with her abundant figure and masses of corngold hair, she symbolized all that is worth fighting and dying for; more permanent a symbol, perhaps, than poor Adela...”
I wonder if the vehicle status of colonial women does not then mirror the status of the colonized women in some sense. Levine mentions the traditional practice of sati or “suttee” as she terms it, where the wife of a deceased Hindu was compelled to die upon his funeral pyre “in recognition of his centrality to her existence”. Not seen as an individual of her own right, she is but a signifier of the male-centred system, a blank slate on which Patriarchy inscribes whatever it wishes.
Different culture, same condition.

Modest modernism: Auerbach and Levine

I’m afraid that there was not much I gathered from the Gikandi reading. At best, the title and some phrases managed to spark some ideas that I hoped were relevant to the demands of this module. However, I am not sure that these ideas were what Gikandi was in fact driving at. For instance, when he talks of Picasso’s ability to separate the “fine African head” from the human being (which was, to be honest, for me the most engaging bit of the reading), I started to think of Picasso as a metaphor for the general European mindset that dehumanized and objectified the racial Other in imperial times. Is it not possible that an almost ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude would have created the same dismissive and alienating environment for the object of scrutiny as did the colonial and hierarchical approach towards the Other? Picasso, in the act of remarking on Williams’s “fine African head” could also be read as fragmenting Williams into parts (head and body at least), much like how European colonizers of the nineteenth century fractured, and carved their little flags into different parts of, Africa—indeed, the latter is something Conrad depicts rather vividly in Heart of Darkness when Marlow declares that Africa was “marked with all the colours of a rainbow”.

Sticking to readings I am fairly less likely to have misinterpreted, the Auerbach article (I think) put the framework of modernism across succinctly. Its very title, “The Brown Stocking”, mirrors the privileging of “minor, unimpressive, random events” that its content follows through on. Just compare the title of each article we were supposed to have read this week and you will find that Auerbach’s is the most humble—so humble it is deceptively more like a children’s story than a literary critique. This perhaps encapsulates what I believe is Auerbach’s main point: that it is precisely the “simple and trivial...[which] are at the same time essential and significant.” Life exists in the small moments as it does in the grand ones. The demolishment of absolutes in place of ambiguous subjectivity is also another feature of this very modest aesthetic movement—I like the fact that these authors (like Woolf) refrain from offering anything more than a “doubtful” humble opinion. Perhaps, this ‘humility’ can be seen as a natural progression from a realisation that the absolute, hard-handed and self-superior attitudes that were adopted under the regime of British empire were obsolete. The impulse to impose binaristic categorizations on the racial Other by the colonizers illustrate the kind of power imbalance and authoritative position that Woolf and other modernists want to avoid.

While Levine does not so much talk about modernism as she does empire, she does give us an overview of the kind of history that made the fertile aesthetic period of modernism possible, allowing me to make a valiant attempt at linking the two. I find the idea of hypocrisy very pronounced whenever I look at the British empire. Notions like the white man’s burden, the moralizing mission, the missionary mission for that matter, or the civilizing mission all reveal (on hindsight of course) the duality of the motivations behind the colonial conquests. Levine also tells us that colonialism was “clearly more a pragmatic than a moral stance, less concerned with Britain’s duties than with its political and economic success”. Furthermore, I gather that the tendency to regard the colonized as (in Levin’s words) “lesser peoples” and themselves as “the finest and noblest expression of humanity” speaks more of British self-importance and pride than it does of compassion and goodwill. Perhaps then modernist writers resist definition and embrace ambivalence in recognition of the ultimate inability to pin down an enduring sense of the way things are. If a person’s every intention or motivation is nuanced, then foregrounding one nuance of that motivation wholly over another is akin to creating an inaccurate representation of that motivation, and in being incomplete, it becomes dishonest. It is no wonder then that Auerbach lists a “haziness, vague indefinability of meaning” to be a quality of modernist texts. The multiple layers of Mrs Ramsey’s consciousness suggest a plurality of thought but never highlights one thought as being more significant than another. Some of her thoughts gain significance because the reader accrues to it more attention and wonder than others—for instance, the mystery of her past and why she looks sad—even while that point is not something the narrative accentuates in any particular manner. The fact that we get no answers reinforces the narrative’s desire to remain ambivalent and impartial by not pandering to the reader’s added interest in that single moment.