A solution perhaps to the linguistic dilemma of former colonized writers

In “The Negro and Language,” Fanon reinforces the significance of language and argues that language “provides us with one of the elements in the coloured man’s comprehension of the dimension of the other” (17). The issue of language is equally important to Fanon as to Joyce. In Joyce’s texts, language is inevitably bound up with both identity and power, amongst other issues. Primarily through Stephen, Joyce grapples with the issue of language: when Stephen says that “the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine” (205), he duly recognizes the English language as belonging first and foremost to the dean, who is metonym for the British Empire. As such, English will always be for him a colonial language, an “acquired speech . . . so familiar and so foreign” (205). By taking on another language (220), Stephen sees his ancestors as betraying their Irish roots.

Through Stephen, Joyce examines and indeed, reinforces the dilemma of the formerly colonized writer writing from the periphery. While Joyce recognizes that English is a foreign tongue, one that is estranged from Irishness, he is writing in English. This dilemma is in fact not restricted to Joyce but also to Achebe, who has faced criticism from the African writer and critic, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who sees the use of English as "part of the neo-colonial structures that repress progressive ideas." Similar to Achebe who “Africanizes” his use of English by referring to African traditions and cultures, one way that Joyce negotiates this dilemma is to create a new form of English that is imbued with Irish references. He inserts Irish vocabulary like the “tundish” (205) and references specific to the Irish context, such as “Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book” which was “standard in primary and intermediate schools in Ireland” (280). Joyce also goes one step further than Achebe by creating a new English that is syntactically disjoined. Rather than English being fluid and transparent, Joyce’s English is fragmented and opaque as evinced both through his modernist form as well as the postmodernist technique of including other literary forms like the diary and other intertextual references.

Why Joyce is different...

While throughout the course, we have read texts that have been written by primarily by colonial authors, Joyce’s text is markedly differentiated from these because as an Irish (and formerly colonized) author, he writes from a marginal position. In contrast to Forster’s India, which can neither be properly classified nor categorized because it is a “muddle,” Joyce’s Ireland is one that escapes definition because of its ambivalent nature towards the British Empire. Here, it is apt to apply Jackson’s argument, that the relationship between the Irish and the British Empire is too complex in “its elusiveness, its contradictions, and its paradoxes” (123) to be glossed over. The Irish, as he points out, are both “agents and victims of the Empire” (152). The indefinable nature of the Irish experience and of Ireland is best illustrated, I feel, through Joyce’s use of language.

While Forster makes use of modernist symbols to render India unknowable, Joyce makes use of a modernist form of language that is fragmented to show the elusiveness and incomprehensibility of Ireland. Although Stephen makes use of the English language and recognizes it as a legacy of colonialism “so familiar and so foreign, will always be . . . an acquired speech” (205), Joyce, through Stephen, fragments language to reflect the ambivalent experience of being Irish and of Ireland’s relationship to the British Empire. Instead of language being presented in a linear fashion, language in Portrait is broken up in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s The Wasteland. Different narrative styles – songs (3), Stephen’s diary, poetry (266) and so on – are integrated into the text, impeding fluid flow of language.

Thus, through use of fragmented language – a typical characteristic of modernism -- Joyce seeks to show and reflect upon the displaced position and identity of the Irish people. By so doing, Joyce’s modernism is thus closely aligned with Irish nationalism.

Modernist experiences in Ceylon

Using Woolf’s “letter to Lytton” on May 21 1905, I am going to discuss how the experience of Woolf’s colonial encounter with the Indian “natives” is one of modernist alienation and disorientation. In this letter, Woolf draws our attention to the uncertainty and instability of events in the foreign space of the Jaffna Penisula using the metaphor of the cataclysm: “a hole had suddenly appeared in the midst of a field about 5 miles from Jaffna . . . every five or ten minutes, the crack widens and the earth topples over into the water, which heaves and swirls and eddies” (22). It is possible, I think, to see this violent geographical occurrence as a symbolic externalization of Woolf’s disturbed mind, disturbed because the colonial encounter and experience is one that is disorientating and confusing, to the extent that he can “neither read, nor think nor – in the old way he feel[s]” (22).

Certainly, Woolf’s disorientation here develops largely because of his alienation in “suddenly [uprooting] oneself into a strange land and a strange life” (3). The colonial encounter is seen as defamiliarizing and thus evoked as if it were an illusion, where “one feels as if one were acting in a play or living in a dream” (3). Indeed, the phantasgamoric element of the colonial encounter is continuously reinforced by Woolf: “there was something extraordinary real and at the same time unreal in the sights and sounds and smells – the whole impact of Colombo, the G.O.H., and Ceylon in those first hours and days, and this curious mixture of intense reality and unreality applied to all my seven years in Ceylon” (3). Ceylon, in other words, can be seen as the place where European anxieties are displaced and performed.

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.

Inability to Shoot the Symbol

Since numerous classmates have talked about Chatterjee, I am going to focus on something slightly more different: the elephant in Orwell’s text.

The elephant, in a typically modernist way, represents the unknowability of things. No one in the text is able to pin down the exact whereabouts of the elephant: “some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant” (3). Just as Forster’s India eludes understanding and comprehension, so too does Orwell’s elephant.

Certainly, it is difficult to pin Orwell’s elephant down because its “madness” leads to chaos and confusion. Orwell’s elephant leaves a trail of devastating destruction behind, destroying “someone’s bamboo hut, [killing] a cow, and [raiding] some fruit-stalls and [devouring] the stock,” as well as inflicting violences upon “the municipal rubbish van” (2). Orwell’s elephant, in other words, muddles up colonial order and organization, in a way that is similar to how Forster, through Fielding, perceives India as “a muddle” (63).

At the end of Orwell’s text, there is no one single unitary perspective on the elephant. As the narrator emphasizes, “among the Europeans, opinion was divided” (8): “the older men said [the narrator] was right [while] the younger man said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie” (8). Instead of having some one come up with a single justification for killing the elephant, the narrator tells us that “there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant” (8); the implication being that the elephant cannot be seen from one angle but is presented from multiple perspectives.

The elephant thus becomes a modernist symbol, very much like the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s text and the “Buddha” symbols in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories.

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Conrad's Modernism

Conrad’s later novels (in this instance, Lord Jim), I think, show distinct differences in terms of race, between the White Man (Jim) and the community of “natives” in the fictional Patusan. For example, the reader is informed of the differences between Jim and “Jim’s own servant”, Tamb’ Itam (206): while the former is described in terms of his whiteness – “white lord” – the latter has a “complexion [that] was very dark” (206). Racial binaries here are important to the text precisely because different qualities and characteristics are affiliated with different racial terms. By virtue of his ‘whiteness’, Jim as part of a ‘more superior’ race, can become “the virtual ruler of the land” (208). Jim, in other words, becomes like a symbolic White Rajah; he is a Romantic paternalistic figure that leads Patusan to civilization. Conrad is drawing upon traditional tropes of the White Man as the father figure in colonial discourses.


Despite drawing clear racial boundaries, these differences seem to be aestheticized in a modernist manner mainly through employment of multiple narrators and achronological narration. Through different narrators who present Jim’s story differently – Tamb’ Itam, Stein, Jewel etc – the reader is not given one, single, authorial portrait of Jim. Rather, the reader is presented with competing portraits of Jim; ultimately, what the reader is left with is a composite image of Jim. To add to this ‘modernist chaos’, Conrad confuses the time sequence of events, making it difficult for readers to follow the sequence of events that happened. In the Patusan section, as in the Patna section of the novel, there are movements back and forward in time: time goes back to the “seventeenth-century” (173) history of Patusan and time fast-forwards to the date where Marlow saw “the coast of Patusan . . . nearly two years afterwards” (185).

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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.

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Critical aesthetics

Fanon’s article, which centralizes on the issue of violence and how violence is both a purifying and a destructive force, is not only contained within the physical exertion of violence by the colonialists against the colonized, but can be applied to an aestheticizing of violence in Modernism itself. By ‘aestheticizing of violence’, I am referring to how modernists, by ‘forcing’ the colonized Other into a fixed and essentialized framework, reduces the heterogeneity and pluralism of the Other; I see this reduction as an act of violence – the colonialist has the power to represent the Other according to what he thinks/perceives/imagines the Other to be, even if it may be a simplified understanding or representation of the Other. In other words, as Said says, “Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient” (882).

Forster, I feel, is guilty of putting India and the ‘natives’ into an Orientalist framework, a framework that associates the Orient with all the qualities on the more inferior side of the binary. While the West is seen as efficient, logical and rational, India is seen as disorganized, illogical and spiritual. If we take as our example the first chapter of PI, we can see this in more detail. In this chapter, the description of India is one that is chaotic and messy: “houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life” (5). In contrast, the Civil Station is “sensibly planned…bungalows are disposed along roads that intersect at right angles” (6). Surely, right from the start of the novel, Forster has already neatly categorized India and the West into opposing sides of the binary.

Even if Forster decides for his novel the choice of India as his subject matter, versus other colonial novelists who might have rigidly only focused on the West, Forster colludes with colonial representations of the Orient as the exotic Other. Rather than being seen as rational and logical, the ‘natives’ are seen as doing “not one thing which the non-Hindu would feel dramatically correct.” India becomes a “muddle…a frustration of reason and form” (270). Indeed, the word ‘muddle’ is repeatedly used in describing India; the effect of this is not only to emphasize the distance between the Occident and the Orient but that there is no definite word to describe the ‘chaos’ of India. In fact, ‘muddle’ becomes the signifier for India, whether it is used to describe the ‘muddle’ at the Marabar Caves, whether Adela sees a snake or stick from the train or whether a ghost or an animal caused the car accident.

In the third part of the novel, although one can see Forster as a novelist who appreciates the religious festivities of India, I posit that this view is compromised by the fact that Forster seems to be an observer rather than active participant. In other words, Indian religious festivals are put on display for Forster’s Western readers to consume. “Seeing India…was only a form of ruling India” (291-292) as Aziz remarks. By observing the Indian religious festival, Forster is also putting India and its ‘native’ participants under surveillance, and by extension, if I may bring in Foucault, surveillance is a form of power. This power is one that the Western ethnocentric observer cum anthropologist has over the observed. And it is this power that allows him/her to enact violence onto his/her subject matter, by imposing a system of binary classification that can only reduce the subject matter. So it is for Forster.

All these examples show that Forster has assigned an Orientalist framework to India. By doing so, Forster enacts violence onto his subject matter – India. Ultimately, all the heterogeneities and pluralities of India are repressed and contained within a binaric classification. What is equally important here is that not only does Forster contain India within existing colonial dominant categories, he also greatly simplifies India by decontextualizing it and not taking into account the ‘native’ attempts at resistance. So, for example, although Gandhi is a major political leader in Indian nationalism, he is written out of PI. Forster as Western artist, thus has the power and knowledge to decide which aspect of India is to be focused on and which parts should be duly silenced. Ultimately, Forster is representing India in PI to his readers at home in Britain. As such, India cannot be anything else than exotic. Certainly, India cannot be represented in PI as an upcoming nationalist force. The essentialized and timeless view the Britons had of India does no justice to the actual political history of India. In fact, this erasure and forgetting of India’s nationalist history in PI, is a form of violence enacted onto Forster’s subject matter.

The politics and aesthetics of representation

I am interested in the ‘artistic’ representation of the Marabar Caves by Forster. While Gikandi finds that Picasso’s ‘western’ feel of representation is problematic because the masks are used as an object for the western artist instead of creating a free and equal ground for all cultures to interact with each other, I find that Forster’s representation of the Marabar Caves is equally problematic, less so for its symbolism of a metaphysical absence, a lack that matches Forster’s perception of a Godless universe –
“Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation” (116, italics mine) – than for its representation as an Indian mystery, one that is unknowable and eludes understanding. In other words, Forster’s representation of the Marabar Caves, to me, becomes an essentialism; all of India is reduced to the Marabar Caves in Forster’s novel, just as the entire worth of Africa is displaced onto the tribal masks that Picasso uses in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. India is therefore timeless because the Marabar Caves “are older than all spirit” (116).

The question here is whether Forster, as a modernist artist, is also a colonialist that imposes a western-orientated view of the east?

I feel that Forster’s representation of the Caves (and here, this is similar for colonial or western attitudes towards representation) is ultimately a troubling and disturbing one.
In Forster’s novel, Adela and Mrs Moore’s quests to “see the real India” (21) is marked primarily by their viewing of the Caves. Through these two characters then, Forster implicitly tells us that the ‘real India’ is the Marabar Caves, imposing a western ethnocentric view of India onto his readers. All that we read about or learn of the Caves applies to western perceptions of India as “dark,” exotic (“like nothing else in the world”), mysterious (“bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen”) and oppressive (“like an imprisoned spirit”) (116). The modernist representation of the Caves as that which cannot be pinned down (different characters have differing perceptions and experiences in the Caves, emphasizing the shift from an objective to a subjective reality as mentioned in Auerbach), was also a source of colonial anxiety for the western artist because they lacked knowledge about, and thus were fearful of encountering the Other (one is reminded here of Kurtz’s “the horror! the horror!”).

Forster’s representation of the Marabar Caves can be extended to his larger representation of India as a whole in his novel. Like Kipling’s Kim, Forster’s text indulges in exhibiting India as an oriental emporium, one in which the smells, sounds, festivities of India – “the pageant of birds in the early morning, brown bodies, white turbans, idols whose flesh was scarlet or blue” (42-43) – are displayed for the consumption of his western readers/audiences. In other words, Forster exoticizes India as the Other to the West even as India motivates him to write.

Finally, Forster’s representation of India is biased because in essentializing India, he decontextualizes his representation of India from its political contexts. Forster plays down the importance of Indian nationalism as a significant political force in the history of India. Particularly, I am reminded of Levine’s “Britain in India,” which among other things, talks about the disparate representations of the Indian Mutiny: “The political elements of rebellion were played down while violence against unarmed British citizens was accentuated” (79). So, the British represented the Mutiny as barbaric and uncivilized – all of which were reasons that augmented the justification for colonial rule and discipline in India. Subaltern studies, however, would view the Mutiny as the beginnings of early nationalist thought or actions.

So, yes I agree with Ashis Nandy that "All representations of India are ultimately autobiographical."