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.