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