Self and the Other

Hello!

Like Chitra, I also preferred Auerbach’s reading to the other two, and I particularly enjoyed the way he teased out the various stylistic trends in Modernist writing - attention to consciousness, the seeming lack of authorial omniscience and the more fluid/fragmented treatment of time – all from a mere short passage from Woolf’s Lighthouse! However, I noticed something happening in my sub-consciousness as I was reading “The Brown Stocking” (I wonder if it happened with our classmates as well?). As Auerbach expanded on the different stylistic tools Woolf had adopted in order to explain the characteristics of Modernist writing, I found myself comparing each tool with pre-Modern writing, for instance, Victorian novels. In other words, in order to better grasp what Auerbach said Modernist writing was, I imagined Victorian writing as its direct opposite; as its Other.

This rang a bell for me later when I read Levine’s essay, especially where she says “the immense sense of difference and alienness experienced by Britons living abroad in other cultures is something many memoirs of imperial service mention” (107). She writes of how the colonizers look down upon the colonized as barbarians, savages, superstitious and uncivilized, as though they were “children in need of saving from their own ignorance and moral poverty” (120). The colonizers could define themselves as superior selves because they were not their native Others; they could congratulate themselves on being technologically, morally and intellectually more advanced when they compared themselves to their subjects’ lives. This theme of defining Self against the Other came up once again in Gikandi’s essay, where he highlights how, ironically, Picasso’s selfish and insensitive fascination for the Other, “fine African head…became a catalyst for modern art” (456).

For the Britons, separating themselves from their subjects in a selfish hierarchy might have been the only way they could register their sense of superiority and supremacy. Much has been written on how Modernism arose as a social reaction, perhaps deliberately separating itself from its preceding Other is what gives Modernist writing its unique stylistic characteristic. After Gikandi’s discussion of Picasso, this Self-Other dialectic really seems to pervade much; from the way people write, to art, and I suspect it reaches even to the way we order our own lives.

I like the way Auerbach reflected: “For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self. We are constantly endeavouring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, the present, and the future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live; with the result that our lives appear in our own conception as total entities” (549).