In celebration of the random, my random ramblings...

The Auerbach reading stands out for me even now, after doing the three readings because, one, the way in which Auerbach went about presenting his case was compelling and two, he made so many salient points just by examining that one short extract by Virginia Woolf. One such point was that the representation of reality in modern texts, with its shifting consciousness, non-linear narrative, celebration of the random moments were “the first forewarnings of the approaching unification and simplification” It would be a nice way to counter the hopelessness that pervades the extract, if not generally most modern texts, wouldn’t it? What I got most vividly through Levine’s and Gikandi’s articles was the strong dichotomies that were put in place during imperialist periods- colonizer vs. colonized, self vs. other, white vs. black. Levine pointed out how imperialism was reflected in politics, economics and basically every sphere of life, including literature. So when Auerbach traced throughout the centuries the stylistic shift that resulted in shifting and multiple consciousness, though the device is hardly considered new now, and suggested that it means that “the strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled” such that “there are no longer exotic people”, I think Auerbach without completely focusing on imperialism, pointed out how Modernism and Empire come hand in hand. Levine mentioned how up until the late 19^th century, novels still reflected the Anglo-Saxon mind, their beliefs and concerns so the random moments, the centrality given to the banal and the mundane in Woolf’s extract/ modern texts was the first lesson for me as how to great the shift was.

Similarly, the one point that stood out for me in Levine’s article which was basically how entangled and yet, distanced the colonizers and the colonized were with each other. Levine reminded us how no matter what they did, the Whites always ended up giving themselves a pat on the back. They either prided themselves of being the only capable of saving the non-White, non-Briton ‘savages’, their White Man’s Burden in short, or they congratulated themselves on being brave enough to venture into these uncivilized parts of the world. Yet, they fretted about living in close proximity with their colonized subjects, as if by proximity, they could catch their ‘savageness’, their ‘otherness’. In fact, Levine mentioned how “the distance between colonist and colonials was both spatial and social in most cases”. This actually, while reading, brought me back to Auerbach’s point that modern texts play with space and time and aim to step beyond that one single immediate reality and I was wondering whether this was the reason why the modern movement felt the need to move beyond that one single reality---was it their way of overcoming boundaries? So that it was no longer the reality as Whites or colonizers had known it or had created all that while? I don’t know, I might be stretching it at this point but just a thought.

One last insert, a personal pondering, before I end. Levine mentioned how missionaries gave new Christian names to their colonized converts and I thought how the identity of the colonized must have been very distorted because of imperialism. So they are taught Christian and Western values but yet, they were never fully assimilated. In Wilkie Collin's Moonstone, the Indian character in the novel, in one scene, despite possessing the Western attire and mannerisms and speaking perfect English, only aroused suspicion and fear in the other character's, Mr Bruff's, mind. In postcolonial lit, one thing I recall was how the colonized individual who had appropriated Western manners was received by his own kinsmen- with utter distaste. So it will be interesting to see how modern texts deal with this sense of fragmented sense of self.

- Shiva