Painting a Picture,well kind of.

(just a reminder, my page numbers are from some SUPER OLD edition )

Painting a picture:
A Passage to India for all its delving into religion, landscape, colloquialism and a myriad of description of clothes and culture still remains as a book of the West. In this sense, we see some resonance in Fanon’s idea that “the colonizer fabricates the colonial subject”(Fanon, 2). This seems to occur both within the book, where the British have a clear, set view of the Indians; “there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race” (CH8:80) as well as beyond the book, i.e. Forster as a British writing about India. This idea perhaps goes beyond just the question of Western exoticization of the East, or even of a possible skewered and/or inaccurate description, but leads us to ask the following:
(i) whether or not
(ii)and to what extent
we should question
(I)the validity of representing (II)and the right to represent
something/someplace/someone(s) that is not of the self in modernist fiction that ambitions to incorporate a certain mimesis.

Could the fact that Forster’s novel is a fiction be a certain cover under which to blur the lines between expression of feelings toward the whole colonialism/imperialism/empire building notion and a certain escapism on his part to express the other-worldliness of the East in that “licentious Oriental imagination”(CH31:267)?

In the later parts of the novel we see Aziz shedding a certain layer of his insecurity when he becomes a little more outspoken( possibly smarting from his ordeal) when he says “ ‘Discussion of the past is useless.’he said, with sudden sharpness in his tone”(CH30:262-263). This departure from Fanon’s suggestion that “the colonized subject is constantly on his guard and made to feel inferior” (16) suggest that in the later parts of the novel we see a very different India in terms of its inhabitants, both British and Indian. They perhaps, do not move any closer together nor any further apart, but grow increasingly different in their own realms. What I found very apt about Fanon’s “On Violence” was the description of “Atmospheric violence: this violence rippling under the skin”(Fanon 31) as reflecting Post-trial Chandrapole. While there is uneasiness, it is not overbearing and everyone moves on in their own roles; Adela leaves, Fielding retreats from his ‘middle ground’ between British and Indian to mingle more with English women and eventually marries, Ronny returns to his job. There is certain wariness and a general lack of goodwill to each other except for due course in civility and propriety, which rings a bell with Levine’s point on the British ‘law and government’ being ‘the noblest expression of humanity’(Levine 104).

I guess what I’ve been wondering about this week is the idea behind the idea of a place being about its people, in this case about India being about both the British and the Indians( and how they act/are portrayed/received). It struck me that when Fielding was asked about seeing the “Real India”, he said “ try seeing Indians” ( CH3: 27). Do people make a place, and does it only encompass the natives? Or is the idea that we are supposed to take away remain that of how and who treats the natives is what really matters?

*help me out, im abit confused!

The contaminated, India and history

In light of the Gikandi and Levine readings that we did last week-- about how the colonized could be Westernized but the colonizers, in adopting the culture of the colonized, are seen as contaminated – doesn’t it seem particularly applicable to Passage to India and in particular, Fielding?

Consider the British’s reaction towards him: there is this distance between Fielding and his own people because he isn’t like them. In choosing to keep company with the Indians, the English, in particular the women shun him. ‘He had found it convenient and pleasant to associate with Indians and he must pay the price’ (VII 53). Fielding is an example of one whom the colonizers see as ‘contaminated’; in desiring to indulge in his relationships with Indians, he has become a misfit, one who neither fits-in with the British nor with the Indians. But Fielding isn’t the only one. How about Mrs. Moore, and Ronny’s reaction to her friendship with Aziz? Certainly it is frowned upon, as is Miss Derek because, as Ronny puts it, ‘[…] how a decent girl like Miss Derek can take service under natives puzzles me…’ (VIII 83). It makes one think about the kind of danger these ‘contaminated’ pose to English culture: what fear do the British have? They desire to keep and retain what they can of home in an alien land, yet they can’t avoid not coming into contact with the Indians. The only thing the British can do is to take precautions and ensure that their culture doesn’t become interchanged. Forster wrote that the British in India were like the exiled – I think for them to ensure that they don’t become further exiled, they have to preserve what they can of their own culture and essentially, their own identity.

I also find it particularly interesting how Adela keeps insisting on seeing the ‘real’ India. Many classmates have already asked in their posts, ‘what IS the real India?’ I don’t think we’ll ever know. The British, by colonizing India, has already changed what India was. For Adela to see the real India, she has to first see through the British, to see beyond the anglicized Indians, and even then what she sees may not be an accurate representation of what India is. Her surname itself is worth analyzing: Quested, as in questing for what India is, and yet the past tense of the name suggests that she has already decided what ‘real’ India should be before even reaching India (I hope I’m not pushing it too far). Why else will she keep rejecting the India that she’s shown and keeps insisting to see something else, something that comes closer to what she perceives the ‘real’ India to be? Then again, Forster also presents the idea of perceptions, how we always perceive things and tend to be biased towards our own perceptions. Aziz has his own romanticized image of India, so does Fielding, so does Ronny and every other character in the novel. Who is right and who is wrong? Or are they all correct? It’s like saying, “let us show you the real Singapore!” but what is the real Singapore? Adela is essentially a tourist in another country. She has been conditioned by her own country’s value systems and beliefs and has adopted her own views on India. Her perception is, in other words, already coloured. People tend to see what they want to see, and for Adela, Ronny, Mrs. Moore, Aziz etc., we’re presented with what they want to see their environment as. It’s like us being tourists to another country – we each have our own notions of what we want to see in that country, and what the ‘real’ country is about.

In a way, I think history is also like this. History is after all, ‘His Story’, and as stories go, they tend to be told by someone. And since it is told by someone, the story tends to have biasness that reveals the storyteller’s own conditioning and beliefs. Like how Levine could be said to be biased in her “Ruling an Empire”, I think all historians are biased, even if they strive not to come across as one. History is a story that is told from the point-of-view of someone who believes in his or her version of the history – much like how Adela believes in her own idea of the ‘real’ India.

-Yuen Mei-

Reading this Passage aloud....

One of the things that caught my attention while reading the text was the multitude of voices- Hindus, Moslems, British women, British men, Government officials, Colonial teachers and the list goes on. You’d think that with a multiplicity of voices (and hence perspectives), one would get a real sense of “India”. Levine states that “India was not a single country or entity… There was no single Indian language or religion”. (61) One can argue then, to gain a grasp of India, one had to look at it from all sides.

The text denies me the satisfaction of understanding "India", partly because of Forster’s underlying authorial voice, which dictates how the story pans out. Even as one reads the satirical representation of the British in India, through the eyes of the locals (who incidentally don’t agree on whether they can truly be friends with the British), one cannot refute the fact that Forster writes the passages for us. It is one author’s voice that pervades the text, writing the words that Dr Aziz or Fielding utters on these pages.

An act of ventriloquism, if you will.

Which begs the question- can a text ever be written to truly represent a people? On whose authority do we rely on to get a representation of a people? As shown in the text, even the locals cannot be relied upon to give us a clue into the people- Ralph Moore “was not so much a visitor as a guide” as compared to Dr Aziz.

One attempt at mediating this issue is through a narrator or author who does not purport to fully understand each character in his text. It is precisely the characters eluding the reader’s grasp that stops the text from becoming a ventriloquist performance for readers. Ironically, it is this elusive nature that allows the readers a foothold on gaining an understanding of India.

Is there a resolution to the issues of representation? No, not yet.

Gender and empire

I think that there is always going to be something to say about gender whenever one discusses empire and imperialism. For instance, I’ve always known that India was the crown jewel of the British Empire, “a symbol of Britain’s overseas power” for other colonial cultures to see, but after reading chapter 17 to 20 of Passage, I came to see it as a site of British anxieties as well, particularly in their attitudes towards the white European woman. All the hullabaloo made after Adela was ‘assaulted’, particularly the lack of rationality used in dealing with the situation (the extinguishing of the “lamp of reason” in place of “emotion”, the use of the phrase “women and children” with growing hysteria etc), suggest to me that the British were conscious of their women as signifiers of a greater domestic culture.
This is how my logic follows: children are the future of the nation --> women care for the children --> British customs and values are transmitted from a mother to a child --> women are therefore seen as guardians of British domestic culture and the future of that heritage --> the protection of women is thus paramount to maintain this great culture. Since the native has, to a majority of the British, become a site of corruption and debauchery (indeed, there are many snide throwaway remarks made about Mohammedans and their 4 wives), the white European female must then be kept away from the vile beasts lest they be infected by native impurity. The heavy emphasis placed on white female virtue objectifies the female because she has become more of a national emblem than a fellow human being. We see how the treatment of Adela reveals this—“their kindness was incredible, but it was her position, not her character, that moved them.” This symbolic position is made more demeaning because it is a symbol which confers importance to the bearer only for a little while—“The wife of a small railway official...with her abundant figure and masses of corngold hair, she symbolized all that is worth fighting and dying for; more permanent a symbol, perhaps, than poor Adela...”
I wonder if the vehicle status of colonial women does not then mirror the status of the colonized women in some sense. Levine mentions the traditional practice of sati or “suttee” as she terms it, where the wife of a deceased Hindu was compelled to die upon his funeral pyre “in recognition of his centrality to her existence”. Not seen as an individual of her own right, she is but a signifier of the male-centred system, a blank slate on which Patriarchy inscribes whatever it wishes.
Different culture, same condition.

Fractured Identity and the Road to Partition

Levine's Britain in India reflects the historical fact that the Indian population in British India was as diverse as the Princely States on the Indian subcontinent before the East India Company annexed them and ruled them with a one-size-fits-all governance. In Forster's Passage to India, the diversity of cultures between Indian Hindus, Indian Muslims, Indian Sikhs and more are simplistically categorised as "Indians" by the British, especially the British women accompanying their husbands to colonial postings in British India. Not being in touch with the administration of the settlements, the women's aversion to contact with the Indians (Forster 39) show the rift of understanding between the colonised and the colonisers. With such insentivities and the trial of Aziz for the attempted rape of Adela as a catalyst, the riot in the subsequent acquital of Aziz brings to the foreground the previously simmering undercurrents of interracial tensions. These tensions do not merely exist in the plane between the British and the Indians, but with the the Indian population, the Indian Hindus and the Indian Muslims. The majority-Muslim mob that riots outside the courtroom and the hospital show the fragmented Indian culture. Suspicions between the ethnic groups within the Indian population can be seen when the mob confronts Dr Panna Lal, an Indian Hindu doctor, outside the hospital and demands the release of Nureddin (238).

The interracial tensions are true historical facts and are very much alive in the present day. While the setting for Passage to India maybe fictitious, there are two links to the present geography of India. Chandrapore's nearest similarity in name, Chandragarth in the northwestern edge of India, is located close to the border clashes with Pakistan in the present day, and the state of Bihar where Forster is said to have based his narrative on, suffers prejudice from the people of more centralised Indian states. In the historical and geographical sense, Forster chronicles the history of British India's development up to 1924, the publication date of the book. What Levine describes in Britain in India supports the larger facts of government policies and history in Forster's narrative, and Forster's zooming-in on the everyday life of the community in Chandrapore gives the history more human and emotional description.

But Forster's narrative foreshadows many issues arising from the British India diaspora that the colonial offices in London would never have predicted. The insensitive handling of racial issues and the subsequent Partition of Punjab to Pakistan and India caused intercommunal violence and a huge displacement of Hindus and Muslims uprooted to cross the borders. There were many other displacement of the Indian population under the British's haste in drawing the boundaries for post-independence Pakistan and India. Such violence, in the tensions against the British in the mutinies and among ethnic groups in the civil wars, show the fragmented loyalties of the Indian population. There will be too many compartments if we were to categorise the identities of the "Indian" (which, in Passage to India, is shown impossible). From the basic ethnic groups, the Indian subcontinent has too many of them, as the Subaltern had got mixed up with in his entreaty to send in the Army (191). And then from these, throw in the categories of religion and the loyalties to British/Mogul Emperor descendancy/Hindu Prince descendancy. We get a seemingly infinite number of permutations that render India a complex web of identities from before Forster's writing to beyond our lives. The issue here is how the Modernist anxieties of the individual is equal in both the British and the Indian. Of course I would like to point out that at the outset the Indian has more to worry about since the flux to the cities (advanced to modernity by the British) would include more diverse racial and cultural differences than the British moving into any European city.

Forster's work, in my opinion, addresses all of us living in the postcolonial era, all the way back from 1924. Like Aziz and his compatriots, and any other historical being in this milieu of the Commonwealth, are our identities also manufactured by the British Empire to be this complex and subjective?

The "real India"

Adela’s quest for the “real India” is interesting because it brings us to the question: what is India? Is there a real India? As Levine states, India is not a single country but a collection of states differing in languages, religions, and customs. The notion of “India” then exists only as an ideological construct, as a result of the British rule. Colonialism brings centralization to India, but also seeks to contain the overwhelming-ness of India i.e. by having a central rule, India can be posited in a non-threatening space, and even of familiarity (resembling the environment left behind in Britain); in addition, the land is affixed to a point, a name, “India”. There is the mistaken (though convenient) perception that one Indian represents all Indians, as Ronny remarks, “Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pins to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar-stud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to details; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race.” (71) Or the idea that one Indian represents the whole of India, as seen in Adela’s behavior towards Aziz. It’s also funny to note how the British women ask Adela if she wants to meet one or two Indians, to get a sense of what India is like, as though the Indians belonged to a circus show, or as though one or two Indians could possibly represent India.

It’s hard to talk about India without merely scratching the surface or simply digressing! But the point I would like to make is that India seems to be of such complex nature, that the only way for the British colonizers to talk about India (and rule India), was to generalize, based on some assumptions, and to give India some sort of singular quality, not “a hundred Indias – whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one” (13). However, this construction of India also crushes the possibility of seeing India as a multilayered country of different cultures and meaning, and even suggests the need to "cleanse" India. This notion of one India ironically conveyed in the way Aziz describes the city: “The roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India. He felt caught in their meshes.” (14)

Yet, doesn't the Marabar Caves, left untouched by the British, pose a threat to any attempt to contain India into a single entity? Hmmm...

The Unbearable Triteness of Boum and Other Problems

A Passage to India fills me with ambivalence - similar to my ambivalence over Kipling's Kim, and it is notable that twenty years separate them and my ambivalence does not wane (though admittedly twenty years is but a short span in history, literary or otherwise). Indeed, Forster is sympathetic towards the natives, indeed the white administration is portrayed far worse than the locals, but indeed it is nevertheless still a white man's sympathy. If there is a 'hero' in this polyphonic text, it is Fielding. Generalisations (on the part of the seemingly objective narrator, laying aside the generalisations made by characters whose viewpoints are incorporated into the narration) about India and Indians are made sweepingly even as Aziz points out "there is no such person in existence as the general Indian' (XXX, 232) - when Fielding reali[ses] "the profundity of the gulf that divided him from them. They always do something disappointing," his point is constantly being proven by the irrationalities and cruelties of every Indian character, no matter how likeable. In contrast, the generalisations too made about Westerners in India are often disproved by Fielding and to an extent Adela, the only characters in the book who always follow the path of truth without prompting. The capper is Ralph Moore, who descends during an Indian holy festival and directs the native Aziz to the uncanny image of the Rajah, prompting Aziz to "[feel] that his companion was not so much a visitor as a guide" (XXXVI, 274) - even if Aziz had declared him an "Oriental" (XXXVI, 272), it is still a white man who performs this ultimate messianic act. It struck me as a hypocrisy of sorts, the hypocrisy - conscious or otherwise? - of an English intellectual who can quite rightly lambaste the white administration but can too seem not to think it presumptuous to declare "there is something hostile in [Indian] soil" (11) and just about conclude with a white messiah. Dr. Koh's Ashis Nandy quote actually helped to quell my ire here; "all representations of India are ultimately autobiographical," and I tried to remind myself so too is Forster's. Even if his Indians indeed "always do something disappointing" and "there is something hostile in that soil," "a hundred Indias…whisp[er] outside beneath the indifferent moon" and the thought that "India seem[s] one"(I, 8) is merely illusion, whether for his Indians or him.

And yet, still ambivalence, for though "a hundred Indias…whisper" - "boum, it amounts to the same." (XXIII, 180) What am I to think of Mrs Moore's existentialist crisis? In Part III, we perhaps come to see that "boum" is hardly a problem for India as it is for Mrs Moore and Adela, for "it amounts to the same" is celebrated: "they loved all men, the whole universe…to melt into the universal warmth." (XXXIII, 249) Could it be a sign of the irreconcilability of the Eastern and Western mind, that the Caves, as the sky, say "no, not there" (XXXVII, 282) in "boum," so that Mrs Moore in her proclaimed Orientalness can "know" (XXIX, 228) but as inevitably a Westerner cannot cope with? The Western mind that "hope[s]" Shri Krishna will "[come] in some other song" where the Indian mind cannot "[understand the] question [of whether he comes in some other song]" and accepts that "he neglects to come," (VII, 66) that "God is not born yet - that will occur at midnight - but He has also been born centuries ago, nor can He ever be born." (XXXIII, 247) But then, if "Boum, it amounts to the same," what of the fact that the "hundred Indias" are not the same, and Sri Krishna is of the Hindu and Aziz is Moslem? Do Forster's contradictions have a point, or is he too struggling with India and "boum?" So for now, more ambivalence. I look forward to discussion, and while there are several other issues that seized my interest greatly, I'll save them for next week's blog post, just in case. One last point, to raise my dear Levine (whom, I have too noticed, seems oddly significantly less polemic in "Britain in India" than in "Ruling an Empire"), "Britain in India" illustrates that the India of which Forster writes was subject to a great many tensions, and often violent action. In Passage, I see little of chronicled widespread movement, and instead a strong focus on a singular and relatively trivial matter, that even when the community is moved to action, it is an easily subdued affair. Even the violence during Mohurram is all but elided, and defused with comedy. "It amounts to the same," Auerbach's (relatively) "random moment," (552) or something else altogether (such as lingering colonial sentiment, which I hesitate to suggest)? I cannot presume Forster's intentions, but I struggle to judge if I consider it a feature or a flaw.

And a clarification on Levine (er, outside of my two legitimate passages): contrary to what I fear might be popular opinion, I don't have a problem with her content in "Ruling an Empire" - there is not a lot she says that I don't agree with to one extent or another. What I have a problem with is that either 1. she takes it for granted that I would agree with everything she says, or 2. she is desperate to convince me that I should agree with everything she says. If it is 1, I take offence that she presumes me, the audience, so presumptously (as Dr. Koh conjectured in class), if it is 2, I am aghast at how blatantly she goes about her convincing, that I can see so clearly that what is intended to be read as fact is a desperately argued argument. It's just sloppy. Of course every "objective" historical article is really a subjective persuasive argument, but I consider it the hallmark of a successful(ly masquerading) historian to be able to couch the latter as the former. But you may also consider me a history prude, and it is only one person's opinion.

Levine, Forster and Ashis Nandy

Having done one reading by Levine last week and concurrently reading “A Passage to India” had an effect on how I read the Levine reading this week, for many things struck me at different points in the reading. For one, I felt like there was a noticeable change in Levine’s tone in this reading. In class last week, we were debating whether Levine was too pronounced in her disdain for the Brits. I did notice that disdain and it didn’t bother me then but, the lack of it in this reading, that overt disdain was surprising for me. However, the essay was nonetheless still enlightening for me because I have always read about how the British treated their colonial subjects generally but not what specifically India meant to them, for them. Without explicitly stating it so, Levine pointed out for me how the Brits’ decisions regarding India were manipulative, strategic, unscrupulous and hypocritical. Perhaps what bothered the person who blogged about Levine’s overt disdain last week, was how even when Levine mentioned the good plans that the Brits carried out, she quickly undercut it by mentioning the flaws within those plans—not giving them credit where they deserve it? The thought alone no more counts?

Whatever her intent was in always swiftly undercutting the Brits’ “good plans”, the article on the whole made one very important point or posed this one question for me--- did the Brits know their Indians? This was what connected Levine’s article for me to Forster’s novel. The reforms that the Brits undertook, though not completely useless or failures, demonstrate that the Brits were selective about who made up their India when it came to culture- the Brahmins. Looking out for “good” culture, the Brahmins who naturally practiced a different lifestyle from other Indians who had those “typically Indian behaviours or ideas”, would indeed appeal to the Brits’ elitist senses. So they actually did know their Indians, just that it was a particular class. Just like Adela who “in her ignorance, she regarded him(Aziz) as ‘India’, and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate, and that no one is India”. Just like Ronny who adopted what the Callendars and Turtons preached about the Indians because they “had been not one year in the country but twenty and whose instincts were superhuman”.

This is where I am compelled to agree that Ashis Nandy was spot-on when she(he?) wrote those wise words that “All representations of India are ultimately autobiographical”. Levine highlighted how the wives of the Brits by coming to India resulted in certain areas of India “resembling more and more the environment left behind in Britain”, a.k.a home. Mr Fielding in a similar train of thought muses how the increasing influx of their women, “made life on the home pattern yearly more possible”. This importing of their culture while refusing the Indians’ own, this keen desire to recreate a mini-Britain on Indian soil, this wanting to feel at home yet averting away from all that is Indian and remaining in their Clubs amongst their tennis and tea would indeed result in a certain representation of India that exudes dissatisfaction- because that will be their experience. Another person, another set of expectations, another type of experience. I think representation of anything becomes autobiographical. Yupyup.

- Shiva

In Difference

In Difference
(I’m using an old Penguin Modern Classic edition, so page numbers here are of little aid! Sorry!)

The values of the Enlightenment; Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are clearly echoes in A Passage to India. Both the British and the Indians struggle with the construction of and adaptation to the meaning of these ideals , reflected in the many layers of differences that are exemplified in the book.

Within the community:

Within British society in Chandrapole we see restrictions on the very liberty to choose where and how to live in the way the playing of the’ Anthem of the Army of Occupation…reminded every member of the club that he or she was British and in exile.’(p26-27) [CH3] The struggle for equality within British society in Chandrapole is also seen in the difference in status of women vs men and even amongst families ( Turtons ,Lesleys, Callenders). The idea of brotherhood is perhaps one that is taken as a source of psychological comfort and strength to them; that idea of being British, that ‘India isn’t home’ (p34) [Ch3]

In much the same way, the rise of education among the privileged (wealthy) and the rise of urbanity that allowed for that ‘increasingly mobile’ (Levine p70)indigenous population saw a class of Indian professionals ( Aziz, Das, Panna Lal, Mahmoud Ali, Hamidullah) that were motivated by western enlightenment but never quite manage to attain its values. Equality within the Indian caste system throughout the novel remains an unsaid impossibility with separations between the Mohammedians and Hindus as well as between the servants/drivers and the professionals. Fraternity is perhaps seen through the wave of national fervour in support of Aziz that we see in the courtroom and in the uproar created after Adela’s revelation (one that is perhaps as much to herself as to the courtroom).

Other ideas of difference:

Affluence and access to resources is not only what separates the British from the Indians but perhaps a certain sense of unease with the departure from their former way(s) of life. The British, in their exile, or in company of their spouses in exile are displaced to not just a foreign land but a foreign way of life to which they must adapt even while clinging on to comforts of home( Whiskey, plays like ‘Cousin Kate’ and card games). The Indians being put under colonial rule are subjected to the authority of the British, even while (some are) being educated and given a chance to rise up in society through interaction with the very same foreign (intruders?) presence. For the Indians , they adjust to the unease of accession to new authority as opposed to the ‘collection of states’ ruled ‘by local dynasties’ (Levine p.61). In a slightly more vexing way, the new class of Indian professionals faced a rising social status, but a n existence in a limbo between Indian and British, never quite belonging to either side or necessarily wanting to.

Just scratching the surface(s) here, hope I didn’t muck it up!

Us, the Other and the In Between.

In retrospect, I think i actually enjoyed perusing the readings more than I'd thought I would. They made me reflect on the "new imperialism" that began in the 1880s and that stamped its legacy on the Third World.
What I found of especial interest in Levine's "Ruling an Empire" is the anxiety over the perceived possible corruption of the Britons by the native, 'lesser' cultures which would inevitably undermine British rule. "Pocahontas" jumped into my mind at that point and refused to budge. In my study of history in secondary school and junior college I guess I'd conveniently glossed over the fact that assimilation at the height of Britain's imperial power was very much a "one-way street". It is easy to get blindsided by the colonized people's struggles. After all, jingoism was the rallying cry of the day, one that united nationalism, anti-Semitism and imperialism. I for one have always found myself focusing on the harsh sentiment voiced by Jews of the time; the harshest thing one man can tell another is that your "blood, your soul, your sensibility has no place in our community, you are and will remain different, ignoble, alien." There is variance, but there are also parallels in the colonists' cases and that fascinates me; they couldn't and didn't remain inviolate and to expect them to remain perfectly aloft was ludicrous and doomed from the onset. They had to strive for it though, because they had effectively garlanded themselves and stepped on to the pedestals of their own volition; to temper their personas would mean undermining their power and authority over the less civilized. Even Picasso was irritated by the influences the Negroes had on him even as he loved the "magical influence" of the primitive and tribal. After all, there can be a certain kind of nobility in savagery, as Levine touches on in the case of the Amerindians, or rather, I would venture to say, romanticism. Therefore, I would think that one of the concerns of this module is the margins of identity as well as the modes of identification. Because decolonization was a process rather than a simple appearance, these identification imperatives are vastly dynamic and more, even a type of recolonization.
Levine also piqued my interest further with mention of Bronte's St John Rivers, who is a favorite character of mine. She mentions the trend among converts in "adapting Christianity to a variety of colonial customs and traditions, an un-expected and, to the missionaries, mostly unwelcome outgrowth of their efforts." This confluence of identities has shaped the world as we know it today and even in contemporaneous social times, the distinction between race and religion is ambiguous. For example, there are cultural aspects of being Malay that aren't exactly endorsed by Islam and history is not so much a palimpset as a continually shifting entity.
I really like what Yuen Mei highlighted in her post. Orientalism is, for the most part, still superficial or at least, vaguely specular. And I do agree that the intimacy of savagery and the artistic sensibility is crucial in the aesthetic of modernism, as evinced by our current furious blogging. The fallout, and its multiplicities, are for us to ponder on.

Nur Khairunnisa Ismail

The Fear of Contamination- Reading Levine and Gikandi

In reading the articles by Levine and Gikandi, the common concerns of fear of “contamination” and “anxiety of influence” struck me as interesting and worth looking into in these two articles. Levine, in her essay, delves into the attitudes of the colonisers towards the cultures of the colonised, that “It was colonized peoples who were expected to conform to British behaviors and values: movement in the other direction was considered contamination, not assimilation” (107) Interestingly, in Gikandi’s essay which was published as recently as 2003, Gikandi expresses his displeasure at modernism’s shedding of the “contaminants of the Other” (456) as it enshrines itself, canonises itself as part of Western culture. A thought that entered my mind as I read this was that, if Gikandi is right, then while the age of Western colonisation ended decades ago, the ethnocentrism of the West has persisted given its insistence on claiming modernism as purely a Western aesthetic, denying the role that their empires played that “made modernism possible” (456). Interestingly then, we, the once-colonised have not truly been released from the shackles of colonisation, as “colonialism of the mind” persists to this day with the West still insisting on and establishing its hegemony in the world of English literature.

Therefore, perhaps in our decision to take on this module and examining the canonised texts, we begin to acknowledge the role played by the colonised Other in the formation of the Modernist movement, that Gikandi claims has been dreadfully under-rated and perhaps begin to right the wrong that has been done in the process?

Sorry if this is short and rather sketchy, I’m experiencing a bad case of writer’s block this week, been thinking for hours. I'll post something much much better next week.

-Leong Hui Ran

Modest modernism: Auerbach and Levine

I’m afraid that there was not much I gathered from the Gikandi reading. At best, the title and some phrases managed to spark some ideas that I hoped were relevant to the demands of this module. However, I am not sure that these ideas were what Gikandi was in fact driving at. For instance, when he talks of Picasso’s ability to separate the “fine African head” from the human being (which was, to be honest, for me the most engaging bit of the reading), I started to think of Picasso as a metaphor for the general European mindset that dehumanized and objectified the racial Other in imperial times. Is it not possible that an almost ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude would have created the same dismissive and alienating environment for the object of scrutiny as did the colonial and hierarchical approach towards the Other? Picasso, in the act of remarking on Williams’s “fine African head” could also be read as fragmenting Williams into parts (head and body at least), much like how European colonizers of the nineteenth century fractured, and carved their little flags into different parts of, Africa—indeed, the latter is something Conrad depicts rather vividly in Heart of Darkness when Marlow declares that Africa was “marked with all the colours of a rainbow”.

Sticking to readings I am fairly less likely to have misinterpreted, the Auerbach article (I think) put the framework of modernism across succinctly. Its very title, “The Brown Stocking”, mirrors the privileging of “minor, unimpressive, random events” that its content follows through on. Just compare the title of each article we were supposed to have read this week and you will find that Auerbach’s is the most humble—so humble it is deceptively more like a children’s story than a literary critique. This perhaps encapsulates what I believe is Auerbach’s main point: that it is precisely the “simple and trivial...[which] are at the same time essential and significant.” Life exists in the small moments as it does in the grand ones. The demolishment of absolutes in place of ambiguous subjectivity is also another feature of this very modest aesthetic movement—I like the fact that these authors (like Woolf) refrain from offering anything more than a “doubtful” humble opinion. Perhaps, this ‘humility’ can be seen as a natural progression from a realisation that the absolute, hard-handed and self-superior attitudes that were adopted under the regime of British empire were obsolete. The impulse to impose binaristic categorizations on the racial Other by the colonizers illustrate the kind of power imbalance and authoritative position that Woolf and other modernists want to avoid.

While Levine does not so much talk about modernism as she does empire, she does give us an overview of the kind of history that made the fertile aesthetic period of modernism possible, allowing me to make a valiant attempt at linking the two. I find the idea of hypocrisy very pronounced whenever I look at the British empire. Notions like the white man’s burden, the moralizing mission, the missionary mission for that matter, or the civilizing mission all reveal (on hindsight of course) the duality of the motivations behind the colonial conquests. Levine also tells us that colonialism was “clearly more a pragmatic than a moral stance, less concerned with Britain’s duties than with its political and economic success”. Furthermore, I gather that the tendency to regard the colonized as (in Levin’s words) “lesser peoples” and themselves as “the finest and noblest expression of humanity” speaks more of British self-importance and pride than it does of compassion and goodwill. Perhaps then modernist writers resist definition and embrace ambivalence in recognition of the ultimate inability to pin down an enduring sense of the way things are. If a person’s every intention or motivation is nuanced, then foregrounding one nuance of that motivation wholly over another is akin to creating an inaccurate representation of that motivation, and in being incomplete, it becomes dishonest. It is no wonder then that Auerbach lists a “haziness, vague indefinability of meaning” to be a quality of modernist texts. The multiple layers of Mrs Ramsey’s consciousness suggest a plurality of thought but never highlights one thought as being more significant than another. Some of her thoughts gain significance because the reader accrues to it more attention and wonder than others—for instance, the mystery of her past and why she looks sad—even while that point is not something the narrative accentuates in any particular manner. The fact that we get no answers reinforces the narrative’s desire to remain ambivalent and impartial by not pandering to the reader’s added interest in that single moment.

Conrad, Auerbach, Levine

Colonial rule seems, at first, most obviously divided by nationality: France, Germany and Britain each have different 'styles' of colonialism. Marlow, in Heart of Darkness makes a remark to this effect when he considers the map of Africa with its different colours demarcating nationally different - German, French, English - colonialisms.

Levine's article reminds us that even within a particular nationality of colonisers, there are still marked divisions along class boundaries (110), and also significant differences in ideals: for example, moralists saw colonialism as bringing civilisation to the natives , while the pragmatists saw colonialism as a means to eliminate the 'waste' of resources by the non-productive native (104-106).

This is helpful in reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Marlow's ideals seem more pragmatic; Kurtz (and the white women in the novel) seem to have more morally driven ideals. This does not necessarily set them apart: Levine suggests that both stances are united by the perceived lack of civilisation in native society (106). As the narrative progresses towards the physical and psychological 'heart of darkness', these ideals are stripped away: the deeper one investigates the nature of colonialism, one no longer finds moral progress, productivity and civilisation; only an endless and meaningless (absurd?) desire to consume.

Auerbach's essay is a fascinating piece of close reading that explores the techniques in modernist writing. Among other things it suggests that the modernists had "confidence that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed". But the "random-ness" is never fully random, nor the "totality" the sum total of experience: at the very least there is still an artist/author who holds a certain version of truth and who selects and orders the experiences in the narrative.

Heart of Darkness seems to strive towards such a "total" view of the colonial phenomenon: Marlow's and Kurtz, two random figures in the larger colonial epoch, seem to stand in for the differring ideals of "all Europe" which disguise an essential "horror". But even then, as Max points out, the colonial phenomenon is only told through the consciousness of the white man (and is it possible at all to speak of the native experience through the same narrative techniques? Auerbach, by suggesting that there are no longer even exotic peoples [552] implies so).

Actually something interesting I noticed while reading Heart of Darkness and Auerbach: while Auerbach suggests that a kind of "unprejudiced" representation that erases differences between people is possible through examining the random moment, for Conrad, this seems to happen only at a "supreme moment": the claim to kinship between Marlow and his "late helmsman" occurs only at the moment of the latter's death - in my reading, a reminder to Marlow of his own mortality since its possible that the helmsman actually shielded (even if unintentionally) Marlow from the spear.

Thow Xin Wei

'Ruling and Empire' and Brian Friel's "Translations"

Hi all,

This post focuses on Philippa Levine's chapter, 'Ruling and Empire'. About halfway into the chapter, having discussed how violence was a 'key feature of ruling a colony' (Levine 113), Levine goes on to say:

'Yet there was far more to the success of the Empire than the gun and the sword, or even the navy frigate. The age of empire was also an age of collecting and classifying, an age in which the very boundaries of knowledge seemed almost limitless, and the Empire played a substantial role in the intellectual confidence that bolstered these typically Western views ... For many colonists the lands and the peoples of the Empire were also specimens to be listed, categorized and labeled' (Levine 113-4).

When I read this passage, a play I had read and watched over the Summer jumped out at me- Brian Friel's "Translations" (I just got back from Ireland where I read two courses, Irish Lit and Theatre, over Summer School). First performed in 1980, the play is set in 1833, in a Gaelic-speaking town of Ireland. It examines the effect of the 19th century British Ordnance Survey of Ireland, which meant the mapping and re-naming of the whole of Ireland- towns, roads, and landmarks- from Gaelic to English.

The passage above reminded me of the play because:

1. The forced shift from Gaelic to English is portrayed in Friel's play as being equally (or arguably, even more) successful in ruling/expanding an empire than 'the gun and the sword, or even the navy frigate' (Levine 113), and
2. Friel's play enacts the reality of 19th century British imperialism, where 'for many colonists the lands and the peoples of the Empire were also specimens to be listed, categorized and labeled' (Levine 113-4).

*edit*

The play is interesting to consider in light of Levine's chapter as it discusses a form of non-physical violence imposed upon Ireland. In his book, Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O states:

'Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world [...] Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world.'

If we take this to be true, the forced imposition of the English language over Irish is indeed a violence done to Ireland. This means the eventual 'carr[ying over of English] culture', and therefore English 'values', into Ireland- a quiet and insidious technique that enables the empire to expand and survive.

*end of edit*

 

The play is reminiscent of a lot more of the reading material in various other ways, and if anyone's interested (or thinks they can tackle even more reading), Friel's play, along with other major Irish plays written during the formation of Ireland's National Theatre Movement, can be found in Harrington's Modern Irish Drama.

Thanks, and let me know if you have any thoughts!

- Kelly Tay

Response: Gikandi, Levine and Auerbach

Uh, I haven't seen a precedent, so I hope I'm doing this right. Here's a response to the three readings this week, focusing primarily on the Gikandi. It ran a bit longer than I'd expected - apologies! I'll definitely work on trimming future responses... My first read-through of "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference" left me sceptical of how far Gikandi had fulfilled the Picasso-centric goals of his piece as laid out in the early passages with his rather general conclusions of "perspective and spectatorship." (476) However, looking at it again, I wonder more appreciatively whether the article does not in its execution mirror the challenge of "displac[ing] Picasso…from [his] ritualised place" (476) he is keen for studies of modernism to take up. After all, the tight focus on Picasso the article begins with gives way to wider considerations of modernism, and allows, particularly, the African 'other's' perspective to dominate such considerations near the close, diluting and eventually edging out the Picasso factor - and thus view from traditional Modernist studies - to finally leave at least this reader with the stronger impression of the African take on the development of modernism. Of course, I say this, but all in all I still can't be sure whether that was Gikandi's intention, or if he simply meandered as was my original impression…

Something else that struck me from the article was an observation that I felt was a disturbing echo of another in Levine's "Ruling an empire," a chapter I thought was a straightforward read, if somewhat heavy on the disdain the author felt for the Empire's belittling of its colonial subjects - certainly it is a justified disdain and the obvious and contemporarily 'proper' way to view colonial rule, but it fairly drips from every other sentence engaging the colonial view of its subjects, a feature of the narration I found distracting in an excerpt with so much factual information. In any case, Levine notes that, in spite of the missionaries' criticism of "imperial policy and practice," they were "nonetheless a part of imperial conquest" (120) - "it was not imperialism as a philosophy that missionaries criticised." (121) Upon reading this, I was immediately put in mind of Gikandi's statement that "even when artists such as Picasso questioned colonial practices, they seemed to reproduce the colonialist model of African societies; they questioned the practice but not the theory of colonialism." (476) As Levine points out, literary portrayal from even the Victorian era of such missionaries has largely been "unflattering," (121) so their duplicity is hardly a surprise; however, to realise that 'revolutionary' artists often respected in literary studies were guilty of the same duplicity that seems self-evident in the case of missionaries does chill me. The insularity that shaped the Western view of the 'other' that is often accepted as fact, that both Levine and Gikandi point out as a flaw of commonly accepted knowledge is thus made real to me with startling clarity, and I realise I still have a way to go in my personal "displacement and deritualisation," as Gikandi would have it. (476) Reflecting thus on my thoughts after reading Auerbach's "The Brown Stocking," this realisation is underlined. Other than a brief raised eyebrow at the effusiveness of "Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking!" (552) I had found very little quarrel with the chapter, thinking it fascinating and enlightening about a topic I still know precious little about. Only after Gikandi and Levine did I think to ponder more on the brief mention of "exotic peoples" (552) and the lack thereof contributing to the development of the modernist technique. Now that I think about it, Auerbach's conclusion thus seems incredibly simplified. I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but at least, thanks to Gikandi's challenge, I'm coming into awareness of the possibility that something may be made of it.

Tan Hui Jun, Jean [HT074193A]