Joyce’s Epigraph, title and Modernist interpretive freedom

The epigraph that frames the novel comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and it can be translated as “he turned his mind to unknown arts” It refers to the story of how Daedelus, the fabulous artificer reacted by fashioning wax wings when told by King Minos of Crete that he and his son would not be allowed to leave the island. Since Icarus flew to close to the sun and fell to his death, the epigraph seems to mirror the rising and falling trajectory that through the various chapters in the book. As Lucas pointed out last week, the narrative movement of each chapter ends on a high note, only to be brought down low by the depressing image or scene that introduces the next chapter. However, apart from framing the rising-falling trajectory, the epigraph seems also to be an open invitation to interpretive freedom. The image of imaginative exploration seems to invite all readers to open their minds to new ways of seeing. The provisionality of the novel’s title as evident in how it is “a” portrait and not THE definitive portrait of an artist as a young man also provides a sense of the modernist openness and subjectivity. Since the portrait by its very nature reflects both the perceive as well as the subject, it seems that Joyce is calling upon his readers to actively participate in this process of meaning-making, where those who approach the text seeking definitive meaning or a prescriptive reading will not succeed. This openness and interpretive flexibility of the text which demands active readerly meaning making is evident in Chapter one, when young Stephen cowers under the table and learns about fear and punishment. The phrase “pull out his eyes Apologize” is repeated in a singsong manner, and the reader has to decide if this represents the voice of authority hammering home the lesson, or the consciousness of an already rebellious Stephen throwing back the threat in a mocking tone.

Paradox: the empire as both an agent of liberation and oppression

Jackson argues that Ireland under the British Empire epitomized its contradictions, where for the Irish the empire was both an agent of liberation and of oppression, and it paradoxically provided both the path to social advancement and the shackles of incarceration. The Irish’s attitude towards the British Empire was often an ambivalent one: Although they were major participants in Empire, they also formed a significant source of subversion.

This ambivalence is evident the characterization of Stephen. On the one hand, Stephen resents colonial rule, and diagnoses Ireland as suffering multiple levels of imperial subjection under British colonial rule and the Catholic Church. Stephen sees the empire as alien and menacing, lamenting that “when the soul of a man is born into this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight”, where he shall attempt “to fly by the nets” of “nationality, language and religion” that entrap him. He asserts that he is the “servant of two masters, an English (British colonizers), an Italian (the Roman Catholic Church), and a third who wants me there for odd jobs.(the contemporary Irish Nationalist movements that he perceive as being ineffective because they do not break free from this condition of subjection.)” When Stephen states in Ulysses that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, he is referring to Ireland’s long history of colonization by England, the ineffectiveness of the Irish resistance and the fact that the Irish had grown to love their enslavement, and cooperated with their oppressors to reinforce their subjection. Thus, although Stephen sees the true Irish self as one that has not yet been awakened, and is confident that his art will be the means of liberation, the text ironises this belief as being naïve because his mind is too supersaturated with the English language (such that he knows the word “tundish” and the English dean of studies does not) and the Catholic religion. This ironising is apparent in the scene where Stephen experiences an epiphany of his artistic vocation. Although he identifies with his namesake Daedalus, the text uses irony and distance to suggest that Stephen can be the over-striving Icarus who falls because his ideals are over ambitious and unrealistic, causing him to fly too near to the sun and drown as a result.

However, Joyce's modernist text is then again highly ambiguous because it does not completely undermine Stephen's bid to be an artist, and resists a definitive meaning and closure because it suggests that although the Catholic religion entraps Stephen, it could also paradoxically provides him with the creative ability as an artist to be a "priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life."

Stoler and the sleeping dictionary

When Stoler describes how British Imperialism rationalized concubinage by arguing that “local women could supply as useful guides to the language an other mysteries of local societies”, where they were credited for providing services that kept European men alive in their initial precarious acclimatization to harsh native climates and alien cultures, I was reminded of the Hollywood movie The Sleeping Dictionary, which starred Jessica Alba playing a native woman named Selima from Sarawak who becomes the concubine of a dashing white colonial officer John Truscott (Hugh Dancy) for the purposes of inducting him into the mysteries of the local language and culture. Apart from the gross historical inaccuracies of the film, it is interesting how the movie removes culpability from the British Imperial enterprise by representing concubinage not as a colonial practice sanctioned by the colonialism’s reluctance to export European women to the colonies, but as a native custom initiated by the Sarawak people, and merely tolerated by the British officials. In fact, the representation of the native custom of concubinage seems almost an imposition on the reluctant Truscott, who is represented as the gentlemanly and passive victim who initially struggles to comprehend why he has to abide by the savage native custom of concubinage. The native woman Selima is represented as the sexually aggressive and inexplicably exotic Other who becomes affronted when the gentlemanly and civilized British official rejects her advances because he is bound by his code of honor. Thus, concubinage is sentimentalized and romanticized in the movie because it is for the sake of being a good and responsible governor of the local natives that Truscott yields to concubinage. Stoler’s point that concubinage paradoxically reinforced the hierarchies on which colonial societies were based, while making these distinctions more problematic at the same time is also evident in the film when concubinage, which was supposed to be an “emotionally unfettered convenience” becomes a union that is “sustained and emotionally significant.” This is realized in the film when Truscott and Selima falls into a forbidden love and produces a mixed Eurasian child. This enrages both the communities of the colonizers and the colonized, because the metis child threatened to destabilise the binaristic categories of colonial difference that sustained the division between the white colonizer and the native colonized.

Liminal Eurasians in Burmese Days

Stoler’s essay about the metissage phenomenon of interracial unions and how Indo-Chinese in various Dutch colonies occupied a liminal position in colonial society due to their hybrid identity manifests itself in Burmese Days, specifically in the condition of the two Eurasian men Francis and Samuel. Their liminality is evident in how they are despised by not only the European community, but also alienated from the native Burmese community because their “political, economic and social bids” were in contradistinction to the demands of the native population, not in alliance with them. On the one hand, Europeans such as Elizabeth perpetuate pseudo-scientific racist myths about the allegedly inherently degenerate natures of Eurasians, asserting that “half-castes always inherit what’s worst in both races”, and thus exclude them socially by not wanting to associate or “touch them with a stick”, while using such myths to rationalize and justify the political exclusionary, discriminatory practices implemented against them, such as “cutting them off from entering third-grade Government services.” On the other hand, Francis and Samuel’s relationship with the natives, although much friendlier because the natives allow the Eurasians to cadge and work for them, is also a tension-fraught one because the Eurasian men basically capitalize or exploit the colonial notions of racial difference as a means of survival. They perform “European-ness” by complaining of “prickly heat” and wearing “huge topis” that remind the natives that they’ve got European skulls susceptible to sunstroke even though they may not suffer from these conditions that plague white men, because it is precisely the “drop of white blood” that assures their survival, recommending them as superior beings worthy in the eyes of the natives who grudgingly allow them to living amongst them. Their liminality which is caused by the exclusion from a proper European education and abandonment by their English clergymen fathers is also expressed in how their attempts to showcase their mastery of the English language falls short because of the excessively overt use of highly conventionalized/ritualised forms of civilised English expressions such as “Good evening to you” and “most honored to make your acquaintance” which are interspersed with grammatically, structurally or syntactically unsound or awkward phrases such as “Myself I suffer torments each night” that are associated with the perceived stereotype of how a native Burmese who is unable to master the English language speaks.

Misogyny in Burmese Days

Burmese days seems to have an misogynistic male bias because it has a tendency to gloss over rape and events of sexual exploitation in a matter-of-fact manner. Rape seems to be “naturalized” and described as simply a banal, mundane, commonplace by-product of the tyrannical patriarchal imperialist regime. Rape is an event that is stripped of its symbolic meanings (brutal male violation of female individual freedom, psychological trauma) when the text either describes it as an insignificant, unremarkable event that demands no further explication or represses the event as a non-event altogether. For instance, after U Po Kyin’s callous dismissal of the young village girl with a baby (that requests to see him, claiming the baby to be his) because he did not “recognize her” since he engages in too much rape that all the girls become faceless, the third person narrator does not represent the subjectivity or individuality or point of view of the girl who was raped by U Po Kyin. She remains unidentified, unnamed, unknown--the voiceless subaltern who cannot speak. This event is then dismissed and silenced by the misogynistic text as one of the many mundane events in U Po Kyin’s life that demands no further elaboration. Thus, the text is inflicting metaphorical textual violence on the female victims of sexual exploitation; an exploitation sanctioned by the patriarchal gender politics of Imperialism, which is an androcentric male enterprise. The narrator is also disturbingly misogynistic in how he depicts Mr. Lackersteen’s sexual exploitation of the Burmese prostitutes in a comic, light-hearted and amused manner, when he jokes that “Mr. Lackersteen managed to enjoy quite a number of good times (of quickie sex with Burmese prostitutes), although they were hurried ones.” The text’s use of the subject of sexual violence as a joke to highlight the comic relations between a henpecked husband and a domineering wife is misogynistic because it trivializes and obscures the grave consequences of sexual violence and exploitation sanctioned by the patriarchal colonial regime.

Irony in Shooting an Elephant

Orwell’s story is refreshingly ironic in its critique of British colonialism. Instead of cataloguing the cruel injustices meted by the British colonizer on the colonized in a run-of-the-mill fashion, it critiques colonialism by revealing how colonialism ironically inhibits the freedom of the colonizer. The first-person narrator experiences this revelation when he was assigned to resolve the case of the momentarily deranged elephant. Knowing that the madness was temporary, the narrator was reluctant to shoot despite possessing the “legal right” and “sufficient pretext” to do so due to the animal’s tragic killing of an Indian coolie. When the narrator assesses his visceral/emotional response towards killing, he comes to the conclusion that he does not in the “least want to shoot [the elephant].” Personifying and humanizing the elephant as grazing with a “preoccupied grandmotherly air”, he rationalizes about the moral grounds for killing and finds it wanting, knowing “with perfect certainty that [he] ought not to shoot” as “the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow.” The act possesses to him, the gravity of “murder.” Nonetheless, his sovereignty to act according to his own free will and values are inhibited by the oppressive premises of colonialism, which imposes the “conventionalized figure of the sahib” that the “natives expect” the narrator to conform to. Since the justification of colonialism is contingent upon the British colonizer’s self-imposed myth of the courageous, strong and “resolute” sahib who “knows his own mind”, and “do definite things”, the narrator does not want to “look like a cowardly and indecisive fool” in front of the natives. To “feebly” do nothing would be a laughable spectacle inviting mockery and cries of hypocrisy from the natives as it undermines the model image of the sahib that affirms British authority. Thus, the colonizer is ironically trapped and disempowered by his own myth. He realizes that “the moment the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys.” The colonizer’s superiority is an illusion. Although “seemingly the leading actor of the piece”, he is in reality only an absurd puppet” ironically subjugated by the very mechanisms that enables his oppression of the natives.

Linguistic confusion symptomatic of the failure of the British colonial enterprise

I was intrigued by how Conrad’s treatment of language in Lord Jim reveals its critique of the British colonial enterprise. When Jim leaves for Patusan on board a ship, he meets a half-caste captain whose English is expressed as a verbally confused mishmash/incoherent jumble. The captain’s “flowing English” is described as seemingly “derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic.” The “crazy” or foolish quality of the captain’s speech stems from how unintelligibility and inarticulacy result when he attempts to pepper his language with stock phrases and clichés that he mimes/apes/mimics from the rhetoric of the British colonial civilizing mission of the “white-man’s burden.” This mental colonization of the captain by the hypocritical values and rhetoric of British colonialism results in an inappropriately inflated and highfalutin exaggerated-ness in his speech that becomes comic because the phrases are wrested out of their originally idealistic, moralistic and allegedly “noble” context and jarringly used to describe everyday, mundane administrative and official realities with which it is incompatible. The text clearly mocks the confused and inapt employment of language:

Had Mr. Stein desired him to “ascend”, he would have “reverentially”—(I think he wanted to say respectfully—but devil only knows)—“reverentially made objects for the safety of properties.” If disregarded, he would have presented “resignation to quit.” Twelve months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius “propitiated many offertories” to Mr. Roger Allang and the “principal populations”, on “conditions which made the trade “a snare and ashes in the mouth”[…]

To me, this verbal confusion can be read as symptomatic of the social and political disorder that has resulted from British colonialism and the chaos that has ensued from the failures of its white mission in Patusan.

(291 words)

Marlow's attitudes towards the "savages"

I found Marlow’s attitudes towards the African natives fascinating. Using derogatory terms like “niggers” and “savages”, he ostensibly perpetuates racial prejudices of British colonists. However, he criticizes European imperialism as a corrupting force that imposes its own materialist values of economic greed onto the natives, displacing them from the restraining values of their own cultures, compelling them to serve alien imperialist materialist aims. Imperialism causes the savage’s fall from innocence”; it is a debilitating force that destroys the cultural integrity of African societies. Although Marlow does not go so far as to call the African “a noble savage” (a primitivist concept: prelapsarian condition of essentialised humanity unencumbered by the corrupting forces of civilization), he does describe the “pure, uncomplicated savagery” of the Africans” as a positive relief from the horrors that Kurtz (who presents himself to the natives as a “supernatural deity”) has unleashed in the Congo out of material lust for ivory. Although he is initially condescending in calling the Africans “prehistoric” due to their lack of cultural, technological and intellectual sophistication, he recognizes that the values of European civilization may not necessarily be superior. His recognition that Africans possess a “humanity” just like his is evident in how he comes to the revelation that the African drums may possess “as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.” He perceives Africans less tainted by European values in a positive light, calling the twenty cannibals on his steamer crew “men one could work with”, admiring their morality in not eating the whites on board. On the other hand, he is contemptuous towards mentally colonized Africans who ape European values, calling one of the obsequious Africans “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs.”

296 words

Convergences in Fanon’s and Forster’s anti-colonial sentiments

Although both Forster and Fanon were thinkers from distinctive cultural backgrounds and drastically different socio-historical contexts, their anti-colonialist sentiments with regard to the relations between the colonizers and the colonized seem to converge.

(Forster was writing from an empowered position of a British colonial in the 1920s, a time when the British hold over India (although challenged) was still flourishing. On the other hand, Fanon (as a mixed “native” with African roots, from the French colony of Martinique) wrote his polemic in the 1960s as a disempowered colonized subject reacting to the turbulent process of global de-colonization and the then on-going violent Algerian struggle for national independence from French colonial rule.)

Fanon’s understanding of the inherently violent nature of relations between the colonizer and the colonized can be compared with Forster’s exploration of the possibility of a friendship between the British colonizers and the Indian colonized in A Passage to India.

Fanon argues that the relationship between the colonist and colonized is defined by violence, emphasizing the necessarily violent nature of decolonization, where the national liberation of the colonized from the Manichean colonial world cannot be achieved through a “rational confrontation of viewpoints” or any forms of “compromise”, but only through a total revolution driven by “absolute violence.” Fanon’s aggressive call to arms is evident when he proclaims that “the work of the colonized is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist. […] For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.” The violence expressed by the colonized in retaliation towards the colonist is warranted because colonization is a military enterprise in which “direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny and contained by rifle butts and napalm.” In retaliation to the regime of colonial violence which destroyed the pre-existing social fabric of the colonized country, the eradication of the colonial world has to be “unconditional, absolute, total and seamless.” Nothing short of an absolute and revolutionary demolition of the colonial superstructure will do.

Fanon’s call for the complete destruction of colonialism is echoed in Forster’s novel, which suggests that an English-Indian friendship is only possible when the process of decolonization is complete and India is liberated from the clutches of British colonial rule. The mutual violence that characterizes the relationship between the colonist and the colonized is evident in Forster’s novel. The colonial administrator Ronny emphasizes the need to employ force in the governance of India, asserting that India is not a drawing room and the English are not in India to be pleasant, because “[the English] have something more important to do.” I interpreted “something more important” to mean the “holding of this wretched country by force.” Fanon’s point about the metaphorical violence that the colonist inflicts upon the colonized through the dehumanization of the colonized subject is also evident in how Ronny regards the colonized as what Fanon terms the “hysterical masses, blank faces and shapeless bodies”-- objectified faceless masses without any individuality. This is most evident in the scene in which he “dropped in” on the tea party that Aziz and Professor Godbole invite Miss Quested and Mrs Moore to. Although both Aziz and Godbole address Ronny deferentially, Ronny systematically ignores them because the natives are to be neither seen nor heard. As the narrator wryly puts it, the relationship that Ronny has with the Indians “is an official one.” As private individuals, he always “forgets them.” Forster’s novel also highlights how the physical and metaphorical violence directed by the British provokes a similarly violent reaction from the Indians. Aziz’s bitter call for the complete demolition of the colonial enterprise is militaristic:

“Down with the English anyhow. […] if it is fifty five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea”

Similarly, Forster’s novel also demonstrates Fanon’s point about the irrational and violent retaliation from the colonized. Fanon argues that “the colonized is dominated but not domesticated. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and jumps on him. The muscles of the colonized are always tensed and ready to change his role from the hunted game to that of the hunter.” This is evident in how Aziz and the Indian community became “aggressive” after Aziz’s victory in the courtroom. The Indians plotted to “develop an offensive on the British”, and “tried to do so by discovering new grievances and wrongs, many of which had no existence. The narrator attributes this spurt of irrational violence as a natural corollary of the “usual disillusion that attends warfare” (between the colonizers and the colonized).

Forster’s novel also concurs with Fanon’s argument that it is not possible for an Englishman and an Indian to be friends in the context of British colonialism, due to the fundamental assumptions of racial inequality that the colonial enterprise is premised on. Although the initial friendship between Fielding and Aziz seems to epitomize Forster’s utopian vision of liberal humanism (they are apparently able to transcend racial prejudices and treat each other with respect and good will), Forster soon reveals their friendship to be unsustainable in the face of the harsh realities and inequalities endemic to colonialism. The friendship falls apart after Aziz is accused of attempting to rape Adela, and their estrangement is exacerbated by the external social circumstances and cultural prejudices perpetuated by the binaristic Manichean worldview that governs colonialism. Although there is mutual admiration and respect, their own respective communities pull them apart through mutual stereotyping. The end of the novel illustrates Fanon’s argument that a true friendship can only be established on grounds of egalitarianism and a thorough demolition of the inequity of colonialism. Although Aziz and Fielding desire friendship, the horses that they were riding took divergent paths, while the gloomy landscape of India symbolically rejects the possibility of a friendship before decolonization.

A passage to India

The text’s treatment of the character of Ronny seems ambivalent. On the one hand, it satirizes his character as being an unthinking colonial administrator who simply apes the prevailing racial prejudices of the time. This is evident in his status as an Anglo Indian who exhibits stereotypical bigotry towards the colonized. However, the text also seems to avoid falling into the trap of reducing Ronny into the stereotype of the overbearing and evil colonial master by sympathetically attributing his prejudiced racial attitudes to be a detrimental result of colonial social conditioning and the overwhelming political pressures exerted on him in his role as a colonial administrator. (My argument is limited to the representation of Ronny, because it seems to me that Forster’s text does fall back into essentializing Indians in some parts of the novel).

As a stereotypical Anglo-Indian, Ronny possesses an arrogant sense of British superiority and perpetuates a series of received “second-hand”, reductive and stereotypical generalizations about Indians that ignore their heterogeneity, complexity and humanity. The text mocks the way in which Ronny imitates the views of previous colonial administrators that he looks up to, simply by virtue of their length of service in India, which he perceives as a factor that lends authority and wisdom to their colonial capacity to subjugate an inferior race. Ronny’s mindless conformity and his uncritical acceptance of received wisdom about British superiority is parodied in the passage where he argues with his (initially) kind and inclusive mother Mrs. Moore about what she perceives as his “improper treatment of natives”. Although Ronny projects a false “macho” bravado in expressing his convictions about the innately depraved natures of Indians, the text reveals that he is nothing but a mere parrot who quotes verbatim second-hand opinions, phrases and arguments (that he is not even sure about) from older colonial officials. Ronny seems to be a naïve and unquestioning servant of the British Empire, who accepts received knowledge unquestioning without challenging the moral validity of the colonial enterprise and the racial assumptions that it is premised upon. He buys into the whole colonizing rhetoric/grand narrative of “justice and keeping peace” and believes fervently that British rule is essential for the “good” of India. He is condescending when he stresses the childlike qualities of Indians, citing their innate irresponsibility, volatility, and propensities of violence (amongst other inferior flaws) that in his opinion, justifies the need for British rule. For instance, Ronny believes that both the Muslim and Hindu Indians are innately belligerent, and cites their nature to engage in violent religious antagonism as a justification for British rule. The constant rivalry between the two religious groups “proved that the British was necessary to India; there would certainly have been bloodshed without them. His voice grew complacent again; he was here not to be pleasant but to keep the peace.” Ronny also engages in cultural essentialism when he stereotypes Indians as possessing “inattention to detail, a fundamental slackness that reveals the race.” However, the text reveals his assumption to be flawed because Dr. Aziz had only exhibited such slackness in his attire as a result of his self-sacrificial act of kindness in salvaging Fielding’s wardrobe predicament at the expense of his own convenience and tidiness.

However, the text does not present Ronny in a completely unsympathetic light. It does not discount Ronny’s humanity by presenting to us a Ronny “before the fall”, as his mother reminisces about a pre-lapsarian time when Ronny possessed a “young man’s humanitarianism.” He used to possess a greater sense of cultural sensitivity towards music and the arts (he played the viola and had better taste in plays), and he used to possess unique opinions and morally sound judgments that were untainted, un-circumscribed or unconstrained by social pressures or “convention”. Thus, the text argues that Ronny’s bigotry arises neither from inherent evil, ill-breeding or a deliberate malicious intent to give offence, but rather due to the dehumanizing power of his position that has since corrupted him. Ronny’s racial worldview is stressed by the text to be the overwhelmingly normative attitude that colonial administrators were inculcated and pressured to conform to. In his confrontation with his mother (who demands he treats Indians with more humanity and respect), he rails against the political backlash he would face from his own Anglo-Indian community if he “behaved pleasantly” to the Indians. It is in his own beneficial self-interest and self-preservation if he conformed rather than rebelled against the status quo. The allure of social status and political power has corrupted him, as evident in how he pronounces his “predicament” in a “self-satisfied lilt”:

“Oh, look here, he broke out, rather pathetically, what do you and Adela want me to do? Go against my class, against all the people I respect and admire out here? Lose such power as I have for doing good in this country because my behavior isn’t pleasant? You neither of you understand what work is. […] I am not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental literary man. I’m just a servant of the government […]”