An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie

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Author: Robert P. Marzec

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An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature

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An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie

by Robert P. Marzec

AN ECOLOGICAL AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDY OF LITERATURE

© Robert P. Marzec, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7640–6 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7640–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marzec, Robert P. An ecological and postcolonial study of literature : from Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie / by Robert P. Marzec. p. cm. ISBN 1–4039–7640–6 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—History and criticism. 2. Inclosures in literature. 3. Land tenure in literature. 4. Land use in literature. 5. Imperialism in literature. 6. Ontology in literature. I. Title. PR830.I593M37 2007 820.9⬘358—dc22

2006050996

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

C on t e n t s

Acknowledgments

vii

Chapter One Enclosures, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe Syndrome: Notes toward an Ontology of Land

1

I. Introduction: The Robinson Crusoe Syndrome and the Enclosure Movement

1

II. Enclosures and Inhabitancy

8

III. Robinson Crusoe and the Tour

13

IV. Conclusion—Global Enclosures

22

Chapter Two The Territorialization of Land

27

I. Imperialism and the Territorialization of Land: The Native Ground of Heidegger’s “Earth”

30

II. Imperialism and the Deterritorialization of Land: Deleuze and Guattari’s “Stockpiling”

37

III. Sticks of Mead: A Genealogy of Enclosures, the Open-Field System, and the Commons

42

IV. Daniel Defoe and Arthur Young: The Panoptic “General View”

51

V. The Material Mechanism That Holds It All Together: Adam Naming the Land

65

VI. Native Earth: The “Tenacious Cement”

71

vi / contents

Chapter Three Problematizing Enclosure in Eighteenth-Century English Literature I. Introduction: The Landscape of Enclosure II. Enclosure in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews

77 77 86

III. Anchoring a Disciplinarity of the Land in Humphrey Clinker

100

Chapter Four Inhabiting Land in the Age of Empire: Twentieth-Century Literature

113

I. The Return of Native Earth: Thomas Hardy

113

II. Inhabiting the Land in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

123

III. A Land at War with the Human: Forster’s Narratology of the Speculative in Howards End and A Passage to India

135

IV. Nation and Nonnarration: Salman Rushdie’s Inhabiting of a Postcolonial Land

153

V. Postscript: The Appeal of the Land and the Lost Ontology of Inhabitancy

168

Notes

175

Index

198

Acknowledgments

I owe a great deal of intellectual and emotional debt to many people who supported me in the long development of this book. There are too many to name, but special thanks and gratitude must go to Constance Coiner, Lennard J. Davis, Kelvin Santiago-Valles, and Susan Strehle—all of whom read this book at various stages of its development and provided significant and indispensable comments. The book would not be the same without their engagement and commitment to the overall project. I will never be able to express my enormous gratitude completely to William V. Spanos, who, more than anyone else, has had a profound effect on this project, and on my intellectual development as a critical thinker and scholar. He read through many versions of the manuscript, and offered unparalleled insights that have strengthened the entire book in countless ways. Part of the research for this book was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A shorter version of chapter one was first published in boundary 2, summer, 2002. I thank Paul Bové and Duke University Press for permission to reprint it here. I thank my colleagues in the English Department at the State University of New York, specifically Jan McVicker, for providing an always-encouraging environment in which to work. James E. Hess of the Heritage Map Museum was very kind to give permission to reproduce the map of Atlanta for the cover. Amanda Zepeda graciously reworked the map at the last minute in order to produce an image that matched more closely the concept of my book. My editor Farideh Koohi-Kamali and editorial assistant Julia Cohen were both extremely helpful throughout the entire publication process, and I deeply appreciate as well the excellent copyediting of Elizabeth Sabo and Maran Elancheran. I must acknowledge my immense debt to Christine Battista, who never once stopped encouraging me during the long transformation of this project into book form. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Carol and George Marzec. Without their support, encouragement, and love through the years this book would never have seen the light of day.


C h ap t e r O n e Enclosures, Colonization, and the R O B I N S O N C R U S O E Syndrome: Notes toward an Ontology of Land

We would do well to . . . look first at that period of crisis following upon England’s wide-scale land enclosure at the end of the eighteenth century. The old organic rural communities were dissolved and new ones forged under the impulse of parliamentary activity, industrialization, and demographic dislocation, but there also occurred a new process of relocating England . . . within a much larger circle of the world map. —Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism The advantages resulting from enclosures are not to be looked upon as merely beneficial to the individual, they are of the most extensive national advantage. The improvements in agriculture, that source of all our power, must be trifling without them. —Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour Through the North of England (1770) As we made nearer and nearer to the Shore, the Land look’d more frightful than the Sea. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

I. Introduction: The Robinson Crusoe Syndrome and the Enclosure Movement Two historical developments parallel the coming to presence of the English novel: the rise of the British Empire, and the land-reformation phenomenon known as the Enclosure Movement. Connections of the novel to the former have been made many a time in the past two decades. Yet the massive nationwide and eventually worldwide restructuring of humanity’s relation to the land—a restructuring that now gravely impacts the earth’s ecosystems—has oddly been passed over by contemporary literary and

2 / ecological and postcolonial study

cultural theorists, and it continues to this day to be subject for debate almost exclusively within the disciplines of economic history and agriculture. The enclosure movement, which can be traced back as far as the dissolution of the monasteries, began to flourish at a time in history when the Dutch, the French, and the English were vying for sovereign control of the Indian subcontinent and the trade routes to the Far East. The movement was at its height when the English government was concentrating on the transformation of the East India Company from a merchant organization into a political apparatus for overseas domination. It continued throughout the nineteenth century, adapting English citizens to new procedures of existence; while at the same time colonial subjects in Africa, India, and elsewhere came also to be governed by new sociopolitical schemas of land enclosure. Agricultural campaigns of the later twentieth century such as the “green movement” in India reveal the destructive ecological impact that the discourse of enclosure has upon the land. In the twenty-first century sphere of a global world order, enclosures of a different kind continue: most notably the passage of transnational corporations into third world countries, with the politicoeconomic organizations of the IMF and the World Bank setting the terms of development for these countries.1 The elision of these connections is more than idiosyncratic: it indicates that we have come to accept the essence of “land,” and its various formations, as self-evident. We must therefore reawaken an ontological understanding of land. * * * When Robinson Crusoe first sees the island that will eventually become his homeland for twenty-seven years, he is so filled with anxiety that he codes the land as “more frightful than the Sea.”2 Fearful of unknown space, he spends his first night not inhabiting the land on its own terms, but metaphysically3 above it in a tree (RC 36). Uncontrollably thrown into the space of uncultivated land, he is unable to immediately establish a frame of reference, which triggers a response of dread: the land appears as an example of the Lacanian Real,4 a nonsymbolizable, meaningless presence that bewilders Crusoe’s sensibility, and by extension the sociosymbolic order of the British Empire that he carries on his back. He broods over the potential for “God to spread a table in the Wilderness” (RC 69, 107), and gradually eases his dread by spending decades setting up a series of enclosures that slowly cover the landscape. It is not only Crusoe who fears uncultivated land and achieves order by enclosing it; Defoe himself was a great believer in the power of enclosures to establish a radically new mode of enlightened (imperial) existence that transformed the land into an object to be mastered by humankind. In his

notes toward an ontology of land / 3

A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain Defoe surveys the domain of England’s immediate landscape, cataloguing in some six hundred pages every quarter of English soil. Throughout he advocates the scientific and market-driven normalization of the land, valorizing enclosures as “islands of improvement in a sea of open-field.”5 In Robinson Crusoe, this same enclosing of the land authorizes Crusoe to spread God’s table, and allows him to climb down from the tree (yet “remain” there in a metaphysical sense) to occupy the space of the other. Only from within the pale of enclosures does Crusoe establish a relation to the land, a relation that is at the same time paradoxically not of the land, for the land must become English (enclosed) land before he can connect to it in any substantial fashion. After God’s table is spread, Crusoe says that he no longer “afflict[s] [his] self with Fruitless Wishes of being there,” for the island has come to radiate with the “Dispositions of Providence,” which “quiet his Mind,” and “order every Thing for the best” (79–80, emphasis added). Crusoe tames the undifferentiated earth of the island by endowing the land with the positive and moral “seed” of “Providence.” In order to cope with an entirely other form of land than that to which he is accustomed, he introduces an ideological apparatus to overcode the earth. In this fashion, he can “quiet” his mind, relieve his anxiety, and resist the nightmare of actually “being there” on the island: the terror of inhabiting an other space as other. This “being in the tree,” a resistance to “being there” until the land is enclosed and transformed, is the structure of what I call the “Crusoe syndrome.” Defoe’s handling of the land in his Tour and Robinson Crusoe indicates, I claim, a more global “structure of feeling” coming into existence during this pre-imperial historical occasion. It is a structure that stands as a formal diagram for future colonial developments: before England began to colonize “open,” “wild,” and “uncultivated” land and subjects abroad, it created an apparatus for colonizing its open land and subjects at home—an apparatus that could be transplanted to distant territories. Enabling the British subject to establish a sovereign sense of identity, enclosures precipitate and prepare the way for England’s relocation in the expanding circle of the colonial world map. It was in the enclosure act that the ideology of imperialism became a material reality, with enclosures creating a new problematic that formed a nexus between the growing colonial cultural order, the domestication of foreign lands and peoples, monopoly capital, and the novel. English novels from the eighteenth to the twentieth century contain a surprising number of significant references to enclosures and to the chaotic nature of unenclosed “savage Common lands.” These references do not simply reflect a historical phenomenon; they indicate the extent to which the English novel itself is inscribed in the midst of a new imperial formation of land. Throughout Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example, Jones receives


repeated warnings and punishments for transgressing enclosed borders.6 Before the truth of Jones’ blood relation to Allworthy is discovered, Jones cannot claim a legal and moral connection to the land. He lives as a “vagabond” without any right to English soil, and consequently, any legitimized form of identity. Escaping his label as a vagabond to eventually become a legal landowner is synecdochic of a narrative imperative that buttresses the classical novel form: the novel’s hero reaches his or her maturation by domesticating itinerant (i.e., “false”) tendencies. By connecting identity maturation to gaining a legal and moral right to the land, Fielding replicates Defoe’s narrative, and the development of Crusoe from an identity-less wayward traveler to a land-owning governor. This relation between identity and the land appears repeatedly in the form of an anxiety that overwhelms the imperial subject, an impatience marked by a certain nonfoundational nomadic movement which must eventually be tamed and managed by being inserted into a colonial system of utility. Robinson Crusoe, in the early stages of his identity formation, feels compelled time and again to escape from national borders by going to sea, even at the risk of his own death. What becomes transparent is a nonsubjective ontological flow of desire, an irreducible and founding concomitant of the act of constituting an imperial subjectivity. The colonialist opposition between a self who is governed by an unruly nomadic impulse, and one who has domesticated this impulse by becoming an agriculturalist (settler), is a structural imperative of Western teleological narratives of identity formation: the movement of nomadic desire must come under control through the commodification of that desire in a colonialist apparatus. The specific form of that commodification is the enclosure act: the grounding of a previously open subjectivity in a fabricated (colonized) land. Symptoms of this fear of uncolonized desire/land surface in other novels. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela states at one point that she would go so far as to suffer the terrors of being stranded on some “wild Common” rather than stay in confinement with Mr. B. Yet when a chance to escape arises, she recoils from crossing this anarchic territory. In Tobias Smollet’s Humphry Clinker, Matthew Bramble travels extensively through England, assiduously tallying the financial success and the “civility” of those who have cultivated enclosures. The novel draws to a conclusion with Bramble focalizing the character of Charles Dennison, a self-made rural businessman who has achieved the ideal symbiosis of subjectivity and land in the form of the enclosure act. Having studied “current theories of agriculture,” Dennison embarks on a process of building a small empire by buying “uninhabitable” land that comprises “fields lying [in] waste.”7 At the end of the novel, Bramble proudly proclaims that everything within his field of vision has reached the point of being regulated to his satisfaction: the fields have been


“improved,” the economy of the farms are being “superintended,” and the general cultivation of enclosed country life gradually finds the characters “perfectly at ease in both . . . mind and body.” In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the unenclosed Commons appear as a region of delinquency, an influence leading to a lack of mental discipline, to a “loitering” and wild mind.8 Shelley refers to the Common specifically to summon images of wildness for her contemporary readers. The connection is not an arbitrary one. E.P. Thompson has shown that signifiers such as “wild,” “barbarian,” and “wicked” came to be part of one’s daily vocabulary when referencing those who lived on the Commons.9 George Eliot deploys a similar metaphorics of enclosure in her novels. In Adam Bede the wealthy landowner Arthur Donnithorne dreams of applying the enclosing techniques of the famous agriculturalist Arthur Young. In this manner he can discipline himself and tame the “wild country,” and also discipline his farmers to “a better management of the land,” whereby he may “overlook” them from atop his horse.10 While Shelley’s and Eliot’s novels invoke the unenclosed land as a trope of preternatural excess, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights pushes this trope even further. Here the unenclosed land appears in the central references to the moors and their relationship to an uncontrollable passion. The wild moors are essentially connected to the wildness of Heathcliff, and to Hindley’s son Hareton as well, who becomes in part “unvirtuous” by living among the “rankness” of the “wilderness of weeds.”11 In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Robert Moore triumphs as the hero at the end of the novel, in part because of his promise to reterritorialize the landscape by securing an act to enclose the open space of Nunnely Common. By enclosing he can “save” the working-class citizens of his country, providing jobs for the “houseless, the starving, the unemployed . . . from far and near.” With an act of enclosure, the tensions of the novel disappear; everything finds its “proper” place at the conclusion: Moore doubles the value of his mill property, expands his manufacture and holdings, turns “wild ravines” into “smooth descents,” remakes the “rough pebbled track” into an “even, firm, broad, black, sooty road,” and parcels out the entire parish between himself and his brother.12 These domestic references acquire a fuller imperial character when one begins to consider the appearance of enclosures and unenclosed spaces in works such as Heart of Darkness, Kim, Howards End, and A Passage to India. Edward W. Said has commented on what he refers to as the “contrapuntal” nature of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.13 On one hand, the novel is arguably critical of the British imperial project: the narrator Marlowe clearly finds the treatment of the indigenous Africans by the Europeans to be barbarous. Yet, as Said points out, Marlowe never gives voice to the African, and in this sense tacitly assumes that the indigenous population does not warrant inclusion in the Western critique of empire. In terms of my argument here, we can push


this idea of choosing not to communicate with the local population one step further: Marlowe also chooses not to acknowledge the land of Africa, precisely because it is unenclosed and therefore too disorganized for his mind to comprehend. As the deconstructionist critic J. Hillis Miller has remarked, the issue of comprehension (and by extension, the inability of Marlowe (and Conrad) to find an adequate means of representation) lies at the heart of the text. But what has been overlooked is the extent to which unenclosed land serves as the key vehicle for foregrounding this impossibility of representation. Marlowe describes the land as “featureless,” “empty,” and a “wilderness” that contributes to Kurt’s madness.14 Unenclosed land at the edge of empire is discarded as aesthetically and mentally unthinkable. As a result, the novel takes on an oppressive force characteristic of Western narratives that recoil from anything outside their domestic system of representation: the aesthetic and the political potential of the land of the other is simply eliminated. In a strikingly similar manner Rudyard Kipling addresses the problem of representation in his novel Kim. In Kim the land appears as if it were a giant Common: India is represented as “grey” and “formless,” its people a “roaring whirl.”15 Kipling is undoubtedly less ontologically anxious than Conrad when it comes to the problem of representation. Unlike Heart of Darkness, the focus of the novel here is the imperial education of Kim. Obstacles to representation are to be expected but quickly overcome for the Westerner traveling East. Kim is taught to pin the landscape down and visually map its contours for the “great game” of empire. Kim learns to transform the wayward (non)identity of his childhood, simultaneously cultivating the full potential of his ability to cross-dress between Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and English cultures by classifying these identities alongside his classification of Indian land. He thereby gives form to the “formlessness” of the land and its people. In this sense, Kim’s education restages Crusoe’s self-education; both form their identities by forming a secure land. More importantly, even though the one is accepting of empire and the other critical, both Kim and Heart of Darkness repeat Crusoe’s need to metaphysically remain in the tree: Kipling seeks to overcome and master the land through representation, Conrad considers the land too primeval for representation. They each fail to consider the possibility of expressing the land on its own terms. The relationship between enclosed and unenclosed spaces are more consciously thematized and nuanced in the novels of E.M. Forster. In works such as Howards End and A Passage to India, Forster critiques the imperial control of land. Consider the placement of the famous house from Howards End, which Forster situates purposely at the edge of an old Common. Henry Wilcox—a powerful English landlord whose wealth stems from his colonial possessions in Africa—speaks at a crucial moment in the novel about the nature of English land. He expresses the view of his entrepreneurial


contemporaries: that a privatized, enclosed piece of land is a more efficient and cost-effective means of capital accumulation (and personal, moral development) than the Common-field system of land cultivation (which is based “inefficiently” on sustenance rather than accumulation for international export). Wilcox points out with dissatisfaction and regret that the house stands at the edge of a former Common, that “unfortunately” it once had been a small farm.16 To Henry Wilcox the Common and small farms are signs of poor management, areas of the countryside symptomatic of inherently unsound economic methods. A threat to the English will to power, the Common does not offer clear, measurable borders: it needs extensive “thinning” and “draining” to be brought under “control.”17 In A Passage to India, Forster foregrounds the tensions surrounding the English control of Indian land, making the land itself an entity in the novel that “refuses” to be fully understood and mastered by British colonists.18 Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence also offer a critical view of enclosed spaces, a view indicative of a shift in the sensibilities of late nineteenth, early twentieth-century novelists. Thomas Hardy, for example, writes with great veneration of the “unenclosed wild” of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, celebrating the heath as an “untamable,” “obscure, obsolete . . . county” that is “all unstable” and stands as the “enemy” of “civilization”—a space on the English landscape that wards off ways of knowing, mapping, and the insertion of a technological apparatus.19 But for Hardy, warding off “civilization” and technology means that the heath has the potential for sheltering its own inhabitants from acts of appropriation, making the inhabitants “impossible to discover” as they “change shape and position endlessly.”20 In a similar fashion D.H. Lawrence invokes the image of unenclosed land half a century later in The Rainbow when examining the disparaging effects of coal mining on the land and its inhabitants. At the conclusion of the novel, the main character Ursula turns to “the shelter of the common,” embracing “the unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered” in order that she may “create a new knowledge of Eternity in the flux of Time.”21 Even though Hardy and Lawrence do not focalize this “sheltering” and temporal character of unenclosed land in relation to the British imperial project of colonization, they are nevertheless attune in different ways to a resistant dynamic of the land that is founding and irreducible, a dynamic that may be said to parallel most closely Martin Heidegger’s thematization of an “Earth” that “shelters [its inhabitants from the ‘World’] without violation.”22 I merely suggest in this first chapter that this dynamic of a “resistant essence that shelters” lies at the heart of human/land relations, and that a particular adversarial form of characterizing the land (as a volatile entity that needs to be subordinated by the West) has come to rule imperial consciousness and novelistic representation in the modern era. Contrarily,


land that resists and shelters its inhabitants wards off a colonial apparatus. The imperial encounter with land thus emerges as a syndrome, and land itself comes to be represented in the sociosymbolic order of empire as a hostile being needing to be enclosed, “cured,” and “cultivated.” The references to land and enclosures that I have briefly invoked are not solely a matter for literary study, as if this recurrent trope in literary texts could be neatly disciplined apart from the context from which it was born, or discarded as having no impact on our current global setting. Critics such as Raymond Williams have explored the impact of enclosures in terms of their connection to literature and the widening gap in class relations: the “country” and the industrialized “city.” But even Williams fails to fully consider the polyvalent presence of enclosures beyond their immediate British occasion. What needs to be disclosed is the transdisciplinary complicity of enclosures to ontological, cultural, sociopolitical, and environmental discourses of imperial representation and identity formation.23 The novels I mentioned—founding canonical narratives of Western cultural memory— express again and again an anxiety about land, both home and abroad. As Edward W. Said argues, there is an irreducible relation between narrative representation and the imperial development of social space. What has been tellingly overlooked, however, even by those postcolonialists heavily influenced by Said’s work, is what I would argue to be a crucial moment in his analysis of imperialism and social space: that is, the allusion in Culture and Imperialism to the need to think the influence of parliamentary acts of enclosure.24 Given the powerful role England has played in the development of a colonial (and now global) world order, it is all the more surprising that postcolonial theorists across the board consider as negligible the generalized fear of the land surfacing in texts from the late seventeenth century to the present. What has been astoundingly overlooked, in other words, is the onerous presence, at the heart of the planet’s strongest colonial order, of a significant ontological dread. When one considers the great effort it requires to overlook the immense volume of these corresponding depictions of the land, one begins to see that the refusal to comment on their presence indicates the extent to which an ideologically informed awareness still defines and prepares the way for land relations in our current historical occasion. At stake, fundamentally, is how this awareness has neglected, denied, and made invisible real historical alternatives to land relations handed down by the modern nation-state. This book is about retrieving the lost history of these alternatives. II. Enclosures and Inhabitancy An enclosure is the turning of open, communal land into private property. It involves the surrounding of that land with barriers designed to close off


the free passage of people and animals: large, open fields formerly devoid of physical territorial boundaries are brought into a system in which land is “held in severalty” (by individuals) through the erection of stone walls, fences, ditches, and hedges that separate one person’s land from one’s neighbors.25 “Holding land” suggests here a logic of one neighbor standing against another. It imposes on the surface of the land a positivist ideology. It creates a system of registration: the enclosure act involves the meticulous measurement of a piece of land for the first time by state land surveyors, enabling portions of the land to become legally registered as separate, private—and thus “positive”— properties. To agricultural theorists, political scholars, and novelists such as Arthur Young, Jeremy Bentham, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding, enclosures were seen as a great advancement in farm and land management. They enabled farmers to increase the productivity of their laborers. The movement was hailed by the entrepreneurial class as one of the greatest advances in land development, increasing the production of grain yields on the farms of some of England’s counties from ratios of 3:1 and 5:1 to 20:1.26 In several cases, the phenomenon proved attractive to great landlords and small village farmers alike. In fact, not all enclosure acts were the result of wealthy entrepreneurs; a number of enclosures were carried out by agreement between farmers, and in some cases entire villages. However, many vehemently opposed the movement, for it meant the erasure of a way of life founded upon the free access to land. Groups of people suddenly finding themselves dispossessed formed together to tear down newly planted rows of hedges. Enclosure riots were common throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, making the transition to a presumably more advanced form of existence anything but smooth. Despite this resistance, from the turn of the seventeenth century to the time of the Restoration, the idea that the enclosure system was an “advancement” (it produced higher yields, it “improved” the land) gradually convinced parliament to favor enclosure as the answer to the agricultural and economic problems of the country. Ultimately, enclosure signaled the end of production for immediate short-term use—for sustenance—and the beginning of production-for-profit, for long-term storage, with “a cash economy . . . replacing the old subsistence agriculture.”27 In addition to being turned into private property, land becomes subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a new discursive system of registration: copies of enclosure acts (many of which include detailed maps) are disseminated to the enclosure commissioners, the Public Records Office, various County Record Offices, and parish registries. Imbricated in a sheet of language, land is pulled into a discursive state archive that functions at the same time as a system of supervision. One sign of this discursive


development is the growing importance being given to geographical metaphors around the time of the great waves of parliamentary acts of enclosure in the eighteenth century: the Linnaean “classificatory table,” the foreign “territory,” the enclosed “field,” the designed “landscape.” These terms reveal the rise of a discourse of enclosure, and the extent to which this discourse saturates a developing geographical awareness: scientifically, politically, aesthetically, and mentally. Michel Foucault discusses how terms such as these reflect a new “administration of knowledge,” disseminating effects of power along spatial lines.28 Yet even in the work of Foucault, we see no conscious awareness of how this new administration relates to the growing discourse of landscape mastery. It is worth examining this terminology in more detail than normally given. “Territory,” for instance, names a juridicopolitical dispersion of power: a mapped area controlled by a lord, a military commander, an imperial surveyor, a governor, or a nation. “Field” denotes an economico-juridical dispersion: the landlord who encloses a space of land, turning it into his “field” in order to expand his sovereignty and his income (the stock of grain or sheep). “Landscape” indicates a politicoaesthetic dispersion: the comportment of land to an artist’s image of organic beauty. It is during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that an entire constellation of terms such as these became generalized. They reveal the development of a master narrative of enclosure that is both symbolic and corporeal—a terminology that begins to determine in advance the possibilities for thinking spatial relations. This narrative comes to set the terms of interpretation, to govern the “truth” of the land, and to administer that truth. Land comes to “hold within” its essence a hidden element, that, if not vigilantly contained by this discursive administration, would lead to the national subject’s monstrous transmutation into the foreign other. During the expansion of New England, for example, signs of a dread of unenclosed land abound. The lack of clearly demarcated Indian property rights confounded British settlers, who could not think the itinerant character of Indian communities whose settlements broke up and reassembled upon a different territory as ecological needs required. In 1653, around the time when the logic of enclosing had hardened to become an epistemological imperative, the historian Edward Johnson saw it as a sign of providence in America that English settlers had transformed a “remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness” into “a second England for fertilness.”29 Once parliamentary acts of enclosure had become an accepted way of life, the Commons came to be seen by state officials and the public alike as first useless, then dangerous: they began to signify a lack within the nation’s topography. Annexed to the periphery, away from the center of “proper” culture, the Commons, and the people living on them (gypsies, vagabonds, migrant laborers, displaced farmers), were given an inferior status paralleling


the “uncivilized” and “wild” indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, Africa, India, and the East Indies. The connection of unenclosed land in England to the “savage” land of the colonies is not merely metaphorical. During the era of parliamentary enclosures—when a statewide apparatus evolved capable of fully realizing in a material fashion the imperial will-to-power over the land—masses of laborers in the imperial polis came to be affiliated with peripheral natives: “Like the ‘wild men’ of the New World, the ‘dangerous classes’ of the Old World define the limitations of the general notion of ‘humanity’ which informed . . . European . . . expansion.”30 From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, parallels were drawn between an “immoral” British underclass, Irish peasants, and “primitive” Africans.31 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century these denigrating metaphors begin to appear globally, as in the case of the monopolization of land in Puerto Rico by major U.S. corporations. As rural England had, Puerto Rico underwent the conversion of a subsistence agricultural economy to a wage labor system. Kelvin Santiago-Valles quotes the enlightenment rhetoric of the late-nineteenth-century colonialist Robert T. Hill: “For Hill, these anthropomorphic ‘impoverished soils and deforested mountains of Porto Rico [sic]’ literally ‘cri[ed] aloud for agricultural experiments to apply the magic wand of chemistry, drainage, and irrigation,’ so that they could be ‘rescue[d] . . . from the waste and ruin of four centuries,’ thereby ‘rehabilitat[ing] the island into an agricultural and scenic paradise.’ ”32 Similar colonial-capitalist enclosures of land occurred in Jamaica, Barbados, and throughout a number of African territories.33 What needs to be thematized, however, and for current work in postcolonial and ecological studies in particular, is the integral relation between the enclosing of the land of the colonizer and the cultivation of the land of the colonized. This relation between enclosing and cultivation is an essential component of imperial expansion—of a widespread imperial culturalization. As William V. Spanos explores in America’s Shadow, the word “culture” itself contains an essential relation to “cultivation.” Both are “cognates of colonize (from the Latin colonus: ‘tiller,’ ‘cultivator,’ ‘planter,’ ‘settler’) and colere (‘cultivate,’ ‘plant’: colonies, for example, were called ‘plantations’ by the English settlers in the New World).”34 Moreover, our current term for “agriculture” has its origins in the Roman (imperial) word agricola (farmer), which derives from the Greek agrios (wild, monstrous, savage). As Spanos argues, the Roman aggressiveness toward their peripheral others informed their partiality for this inimical term over “the more original and originative Greek words” for how one relates to the land: “georgia (gea⫹ourgos: earth-working) and georgos (one who works the earth).”35 A similar originative “working of the earth” existed in England before the period of enclosing. Enclosure for the preenclosure laborer meant the eradication of


centuries-old use-rights. These “use-rights” were part of the custom and referred to the freedom of access to the Common for purposes of pasturing livestock and maintaining the needs of one’s daily existence.36 The discourse of enclosure gradually annulled these use-rights. It led to the eviction of farm workers living in cottages, and the annexing of small farm owners to larger farms as laborers. Instead of being an “earth-worker,” the agricultural laborer became a subject in a landlord’s empire, and the earth he tilled a wildness to be properly cultivated.37 As more land was enclosed more men were legally considered to be “masterless” because they could not prove they were tied to a specific owner’s land. In 1572, parliament passed the Vagrancy Act, which ordered punishment for anyone who could not prove a legal association with a specific farm. Between 1553 and 1701, in Sussex, Norfolk, Devon, Hertfordshire, Warwickshire, and elsewhere, “houses of correction” were “built for the sole purpose of solving the problem of vagrant, masterless men.”38 This resulted in an increase in arrests of “unenclosed” people. In defense, these landless, “trespassing” laborers referred to themselves as “inhabitants” as a way of laying claim to their centuries-old rights to the land. The term inhabitant signaled justified cause for being present on an enclosed area of land formerly open. In 1603, however, the legal proceeding known as “Gateward’s Case” challenged the notion of inhabitancy. Gateward’s Case was a dispute between Stephen Gateward and an enclosing landlord named Robert Smith. Gateward had been “championing the cause of poorer villagers in the vicinity of Stixwould, Lincolnshire,” when he was brought before the court for vagrancy. Supporting the custom of use-rights, Gateward argued that he had a legal right to cross the newly enclosed property on the basis of being an “inhabitant of the land from time immemorial”—the typical defense strategy.39 But, due to the changing worldview that enclosures pointed to progress, the court decided that the word “inhabitant” was so vague as to be meaningless. The court ruled that only a landowner, a laborer working for a landowner, or a tenant—an individual carrying proof of renting space from a landowner—could legally invoke rights of use. Unconditioned use-rights were no longer a legal reason for being on the land, for the land was now tied to the signature of a specific individual. This judicial transformation of the self from “inhabitant” to “tenant” or “landlord” marks a foundational displacement. Etymologically, the word names a logic quite different from the commodification of subjectivity within the economy of tenancy, or the status of sovereignty accorded to landlords. Inhabiting stems from the word habiting [from the French habiter], that is “to have dealings with,” “cohabit,” “dwell,” “inhabit.” But it is also part of the realm of being itself: [Latin Habere], meaning “to have,”


“to be constituted,” “to be.”40 In the word “inhabitant,” the self and the land are not thought of as unrelated entities. Rather, they can only be thought from out of their relation to one another: the inhabitant is that person who is constituted by dwelling and having dealings with a particular place and cohabiting with a particular people. The word itself names relation, and grounds that relation in the land, in a logic markedly different from the later eighteenth-century idea of individualism, or the twentiethcentury notion of a transcendent subjectivity. Arguing that one is “the best, the most successful inhabitant,” immediately resonates as odd, whereas within the problematic of individualism, “the most successful individual” is determinant. Individuality posits selfhood as being grounded within the self, thereby creating the opposition of an enclosure or barrier holding together the essence of an “inner” self standing against another self. Inhabitancy names a relation to exteriority, and as such opens a way of thinking subjectivity as standing upon a structure that gives it support and meaning: land supports humankind. Thought in this manner, the ontology of inhabitancy is utterly anti-Cartesian. Within the logic of enclosure, however, instead of the human subject being “set up” by the land, the human subject sets up the land, territorializes it with its positive presence, places an individual name upon the land to establish it as private property. Land is deprived of its foundational offering, and that foundation subsequently is placed within the self. With this shift, all questions concerning the structures that inform and construct the self disappear. No longer an inhabitant borne along by the land, the self becomes a sovereign subject, a being enframed by an enclosure that subjects the land, challenging it to produce higher yields for national standards: point for point the logical economy of Robinson Crusoe. Enclosure, therefore, overcodes the land, placing on the land a gridwork of oppositions, not only inside versus outside, but by extension, individual against individual, ethnicity against ethnicity, nation against nation.41 III. Robinson Crusoe and the Tour Throughout Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe spends a good deal of his time as a castaway attempting to restructure the apparently chaotic nature of the tropical island he comes to call home, in order that he may unearth some significance in a land uncharted and indeterminably distant from the known, and thus meaningful, land of the England. Crusoe refers repeatedly to the land as a site of instability, a being that stands in opposition to the necessary establishment of his “true” self. Defoe’s interest in cultivation concerns more than the domination of land; it is part and parcel of British and Western identity formation. At the opening of Robinson Crusoe, young


Crusoe faces the problem of how to acquire the proper “design” of his subjectivity. He is plagued by thoughts and desires that are contradictorily nomadic in nature and cannot be enclosed: “[M]y Head began to be fill’d very early with rambling Thoughts” (4). These desires constantly push him beyond the boundaries of his home, prompting him against his “better judgement” to transgress the parameters of his native England: “a meer wandring Inclination I had for leaving my Father’s House and my native Country” (4). Crusoe is confounded by the fact that this force refuses to be connected to anything meaningful. His passion here signifies more than the “rising action” of the novel form; it cannot be ignored as an aesthetic complication that Defoe will eventually resolve by bringing together all his character’s “wild disparities” in a firm resolution. This novel’s form itself is part of the very logic of the Crusoe syndrome we have been interrogating. The novel achieves its resolution, and the hero his “true identity” by formulating individuation through the erasure of inhabitation. He “sets himself up” on the island by refusing to inhabit it, planting enclosures in order to colonize a “savage” land that paradoxically contains the same unruly forces that give Crusoe his excessive drive to constantly explore new territory. The two processes—of individuation and the constant expansion of physical enclosures upon uncultivated space—cannot be separated. It is in this taming of an excessive (nomadic) drive that we find the connection between imperial identity formation, the land, and capitalism. The ability to enclose will become the saving grace, that which will mark the difference between a civilized zeal and a savage rambling. The relation between enclosures, individualization, and the early stages of monopoly capital can be attested to by Crusoe’s technological relation to land (a relation, as we have seen, that is also fundamental to the plot of Tom Jones, Humphry Clinker, Shirley, Kim, and many other British novels). Crusoe’s inability to moderate his passions leads him on a number of voyages, and after coming close to being “swallow’d up by the Sea” (9), he finds himself beginning to tame these passions by becoming a “landed gentleman” in Brazil. His relationship to the land, however, is predetermined. Before he settles the land, he approaches it in advance by projecting upon the land an anticipatory sketch that informs his encounter with the Brazilian earth: “[I] purchased as much Uncur’d Land, as my Money would reach, and form’d a plan for my Plantation and Settlement” (27). In his mind he formulates land as a preenclosed idea. The land is bound in advance to a gridwork, an eidos of land that hovers spatially above the Brazilian territory, and temporally before it. Once the land is enclosed and adapted to this gridwork, it can then be inserted into a system of utility: “We began to increase, and our Land began to come into Order; so that the third Year we planted some Tobacco, and made each of us a large Piece of


Ground ready for planting Canes in the Year to come” (27). The land now becomes visible as land, as coming recognizably into existence because of having been set up by a sovereign subject: “we made . . . a large Piece of Ground ready.” Crusoe’s establishment of a colonial plantation in Brazil sets the stage for a much greater challenge to his self-sovereignty: the colonization in isolation of an entire desert island of “Uncur’d,” raw materiality. When he arrives on the island, the land affronts his sensibilities as a thing “not easy to describe or conceive.” Defoe gives detailed descriptions of how Crusoe opposes this threat to stability by building enclosures around first himself and then his animals—turning “moorish,” uncultivated land into productive and “providential” soil.42 Even though he succeeds in taming Brazilian fields, he finds he cannot keep his rambling designs enclosed, and soon sets off as a negotiator for a company of merchants wishing to make money in the slave trade. At sea again, his ship encounters a hurricane that lasts for nearly two weeks. Curiously, Crusoe can offer us a highly detailed chart of their course throughout the entire duration of the storm.43 It is not until they reach land that Crusoe experiences any signs of losing his sense of measurement and the ability to map his location: “we knew nothing where we were, or upon what Land it was we were driven” (33). The land poses even more of a threat than the hurricane at sea that throws his ship off course. Stranded on the island, he faces this “dreadful Deliverance” (36). The fear of being on unenclosed ground leads him to embark on a year-long project of building a dwelling that he refers to as his “Wall”: “I have already describ’d my Habitation . . . but I might now rather call it a Wall” (50). His displacement of “Habitation” for “Wall” suggests the new structure of feeling informed by the discourses of enclosure and individualism. He then begins the physical process of enclosing the island. He encloses his arable fields (RC 84–85). He builds enclosures for cattle and goats (RC 111). And he constructs two “plantations”: his original dwelling, and a new “Country Seat” on the other side of the island—each fully developed with enclosures of their own (RC 110–111). Such obsessive acts of fortification mark the importation of an enclosing apparatus that seeks to appropriate land while never inhabiting it. That apparatus gives land meaning, “improves” it, turns it to utility, and stands against it in order to establish a sovereign address for the self. More than just a physical transformation, enclosing commands the full range of being. (1) There is the enclosure of time: Crusoe begins to “order [his] times of Work,” his “time of Sleep,” and “time of Diversion” (RC 53), in order to positively fulfill time and show that he is never idle: “[T]his Time I spent in putting all my Things in Order”; “All this Time I work’d”; “During this Time, I made my Rounds” (RC 56, 57, 78; emphasis added).


Subsidized by the larger ontology of enclosure, the field of temporality— like the soil of the land—is subjected to efficient cultivation and the demand for a higher yield. (2) There is the enclosure of his domestic space, with the obsessive compartmentalization of goods inside his cave. (3) There is the enclosure of consciousness: his sense of security depends upon his sense of being a self-made individual unfettered from exterior influences. He fashions a mechanical device to sharpen his tools, without having “seen such a thing in England” (RC 61). He invents a kiln for his pottery from having “had no Notion of Kiln” (RC 88). He constructs himself as a fully original thinker: a Cartesian act of enclosure at the depth of consciousness. (4) There is enclosure on the register of religion. After the famous incident of throwing out the husks of corn, which “magically” grow (through the grace of God) into food-bearing corn stalks, Crusoe begins an extended search for a metaphysical cause that would redeem the island and its land. He searches the land, scrutinizing every inch of its space for the signs of Providence: “I went all over . . . the Island . . . peering in every Corner, and under every Rock” (RC 58). His search for a “secret Power” that “guides and governs . . . all” leads him to wonder if such a power can exist in the wilderness of an isolated island: “Can God spread a Table in the Wilderness?” (RC 68, 69). Subsequently, he becomes entirely governed by the need to institute a plan of cultivation, so that he may realize his divine “deliverance” from his island prison and from his wild actions in the opening of the novel that led him to be stranded outside the pale of civilization: “my Deliverance lay much upon my mind” (RC, 70). This “deliverance” names not only his deliverance from the wilderness of the island, but signifies in addition the deliverance of the island to its “true” providential (metaphysical) foundation. It is at the point of this providential turn in the narrative that he decides to claim the island for England: “I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in Inheritance, as compleatly as any Lord of Mannor in England ” (RC 73).44 These polyvalent enclosure acts, and the search for Providence, in turn lead to the onset of a new economy, one that marks the shift from a communal and native relation, to the domination of the land as a space of production. The word for this new economy is “stockpiling”–a theoretical term of Deleuze and Guattari’s, and one that I develop more fully in subsequent chapters. Here, however, we can provisionally remark upon Defoe’s imbrication in this economy by noticing the way in which a stock enables Crusoe to spread the “Providential Table.” Crusoe remarks with pleasure upon the land’s high yields and his increased inventory (RC 90). This increase in stock in turn leads to an increase in the size of his holdings: “as my Flock encreased, I could add more Ground to my Enclosure” (RC 107). The engrossment of land, and the stockpiling of its yields enables Crusoe to


achieve his great goal of transforming the island’s inefficient “wilderness”— its status as an open wasteland—into the much sought-after providential table: “What a Table was here spread for me in a Wilderness, where I saw nothing at first but to perish for Hunger” (RC 107). The famous scene of Crusoe’s discovering of the footprint throws into high relief the ontological dread concealed by these acts of enclosure, and their essential relation to identity formation. The footprint causes a sudden and overwhelming rise in anxiety for Crusoe. His terror of the print calls into question his entire order of stability. One by one the different registers of stability collapse: “my Fear banish’d all my . . . Confidence in God” (RC 113). When the threat of an unknown force arrives, his attention turns toward the yield he has drawn from a disciplined (colonized) land: he refers to the potential threat to his stock of “grain” and “booty” repeatedly after the discovery of the footprint (RC 113). Presented with an aporia that cannot readily be incorporated into the sociosymbolic order of his providential table, Crusoe decides immediately to destroy his enclosures. This drastic decision to erase their presence reveals more than a practical concern: it powerfully symbolizes that the land’s being has been transformed into individualized, private property. Enclosures, and the stock they produce, have come to serve as an outward extension of his inner, autonomous self. Cultivated land, in other words, cannot be allowed to slip into the hands of someone whose identity is not stamped in its soil. The “land” is not some furtive reality that Crusoe as a distinct subject comes to discover and claim, though this is precisely how he attempts to characterize it. It is not an object that preexists Defoe’s presence: the island that he has enclosed is an object produced in the operation of his own transformation into a self-reliant individual. They both arise out of a single problematic, which is why he contemplates releasing the land to its former “wild” state, so that it will not be occupied by a foreign force. If that occupation were to occur, Crusoe’s subjectivity would be captured as well, for the disciplining of the land is part and parcel of the disciplining of his identity. This opens the way to an understanding of identity and land as an inseparable relation, for the structure of one’s relation to the land determines the structure of one’s identity. It is crucial at this point in our analysis to remember that the footprint serves merely as the prelude to Friday’s entrance into the narrative. The print is the mark of an absent body: a material aporia that remains imperceptible in the “overview” of Crusoe’s visionary field. If it maintains its status as imperceptible, he will never be able to eradicate it from his enclosed field of knowledge production. The print consequently must take on a symbolic meaning by being “filled.” Friday arrives as the answer to this aporia. Tellingly, at Crusoe’s most distressed moment of anxiety, when considering the potential presence of unenclosed “others,” he loses consciousness and


dreams of the appearance of Friday. Crusoe dreams that he “saves” a “Savage” from cannibals who come to the island; that he takes this savage into his enclosure; that he is “call’d by Providence” to train him to become a “Servant”; and that, after accomplishing this feat, he may “venture to the main Land” (RC 144–146). After his dream of Friday’s entrance into the narrative, Friday himself appears—in exact accordance to the events of the dream. The dream is thus the installment of a narrative in which Crusoe may solve the potential threat of alterity. Before he even appears in the text, Friday is reified as the object to cure Crusoe’s fear. His meeting with the other is enclosed and patterned in advance to preclude uncontrollable contingencies. Through the subtraction of Friday’s “otherness” (a subtraction tantamount to obliterating everything that Friday is outside of Crusoe’s order) Crusoe restitches the fabric of his discursive field, torn by the footprint. The depth of this restitching extends all the way to the national level, for Friday submits not only his identity to Crusoe, but his entire culture: “the Foundation of [Friday’s] Desire to go to (enlighten) his own Country, was laid in his ardent Affection to the People, and his Hopes of my doing them good” (RC 164). Friday “wishes” to have Crusoe enclose his people as well. In this sense, Crusoe never actually encounters Friday, in the same metaphysical fashion that he never encounters the land of the island in its unenclosed state, but stands in a disinterested position beyond the land and its people. Throughout their relation, Crusoe encounters only his own immured subjectivity in the character of Friday. The potential for alterity and newness that Friday might bring to Crusoe’s world is never inhabited. The stockpiling economy of enclosing (the necessity for continual expansion), and the structure of a (non)relation to the other it enforces, is fundamental to the logic of enclosure, and crucial to the expansion of British national identity in the colonial world map. After Friday’s enclosure—which “opens the way” for the enclosure of the native population, and which parallels the predetermined enclosure of Brazilian land—the narrative quickly progresses to the accumulation of other inhabitants and individuals: Crusoe “saves” Friday’s father, a Spanish sailor, and then the sailor’s compatriots. At this point Crusoe reflects upon his situation: “My island was now peopled, and I thought my self very rich in Subjects. . . . First of all the whole Country was my own meer property; so that I had an undoubted Right of Domination. 2dly, My People were perfectly subjected: I was absolute Lord and Lawgiver” (RC 174). More interesting, however, is how Crusoe certifies that they understand the rules and regulations of the island’s maintenance by “letting them into the Story of [his] living there, and put them into the Way of making it easy to them: Accordingly I gave them the whole History of the Place, and of my coming into it; shew’d them my Fortifications, the Way I made my Bread, planted my Corn, cured my


Grapes” (RC 199). Tellingly, it is at this point that Crusoe may now reveal his enclosures to outsiders—because these “outsiders” have become little more than a prosthetic extension to his identity, and therefore are no longer from the outside proper. It must be emphasized that this pressure to enclose an antagonistic land is more than a literary theme, for the same economy of “improving” uncultivated, nonprovidential land governs Defoe’s Tour. The Tour, which has been cited extensively by many economic and agricultural historians as a primary document, and has even been granted the status of an honorary blue book, deploys a discourse of enclosure from beginning to end.45 To notice when Defoe is making specific references to enclosures, one must be attune to the contemporary metaphors of enclosure, such as “improvement,” “drainage,” and “taken in”–metaphors buried in the discourse of that historical occasion. The informing presence of this discourse’s relation to archival registration and a new administration of knowledge can be felt in its encyclopedic noting of the markets and industries of cities; its tracing of the movements of “notable” personages and the location of their country estates; its cataloguing of old Roman roads; its naturalizing of the necessity for all towns to be connected to one another and to London; and in its extensive detailing of the manufacturing interests and economy of every area. The concern for the spreading of a providential table in particular is unrelenting in Defoe’s Tour. The metropolis of London functions throughout his expeditions as a machine for producing improvement and morality: a central node, from which radiates a series of “circuits” that economically and discursively enclose the land (T 47). The countryside receives its metaphysical justification from London: London’s “surplus” of “excellent conversation” and a “pleasanter sociability” gradually disciplines the surrounding villages: “This increase causes those villages to be much pleasanter and more sociable than formerly . . . without the mixture of assemblées, gaming houses, and public foundations of vice and debauchery” (T 49). The land of the country comes to be predetermined by the aggrandizing, providential measure of London. The metropolis functions as an engine for increasing the national yield: “the present increase of wealth in the city of London, spreads itself into the country, and plants families and fortunes”; “N.B. . . . this whole kingdom, as well as the people, as the land, and even the sea, in every part of it, are employed to furnish . . . the best of every thing, to supply the city of London” (T 57, 54). Defoe works unrelentingly to overlay the breadth of the landscape of England with this panoptic gaze of London. Even an undeveloped plot of land that has yet to reflect the presence of London carries the potential and has its telos in becoming enclosed in the near future within London’s circuitry and the demand for a high yield.46


This concern for a “high yield” is not a minor matter for Defoe. As with Robinson Crusoe, the Tour is equally buttressed by an economy of stockpiling. Defoe scans the land for places producing a “high yield.” At a fishing village near Barking Defoe notes that the smallest fish are sold in the country, while “the best and the largest” are sent “away upon horses, which go night and day to London market” (T 53). When he comes to Colchester he remarks upon its great production of oysters, which are sent up to London (T 53). The discourse of enclosure, and its fundamental relation to stockpiling, provides the means not only for London to expand its circuitry, but for generally isolated areas of the countryside to meld into a larger, national apparatus.47 More than any other moment in Defoe’s Tour, the following passage reveals the importance and widespread reach of enclosures: their relation to Providence, to the state, and to the “organic” link between beauty, nature, capital, and the sovereign individual. Here, enclosure stands out on the landscape as a new political aesthetic, a “grand parterre” that organizes land and empire, marking with unmatched force England’s superiority over other lands: [H]aving two foreign gentlemen in my company, [we] passed over this heath. . . . [T]hey were surprised at the beauty of this prospect . . . turning their eyes every way in a kind of wonder, one of them said to the other, that England was not like other countries, but it was all a planted garden. They had there on the right hand, the town of St Albans in their view; and all the spaces between, and further beyond it, looked indeed like a garden. The enclosed cornfields made one grand parterre, the thick planted hedge rows, like a wilderness or labyrinth, divided in espaliers; the villages interspersed, looked like so many several noble seats of gentlemen at a distance. In a word, it was all nature, and yet looked all like art; on the left hand we see the westend of London, Westminster-Abbey, and the Parliament-House. . . . At the farther end of this heath . . . the Earl of Essex has a good old seat . . . a little further, is the town of Hempstead, noted for an extraordinary cornmarket, and at Ashridge . . . is an ancient mansion house of the Duke of Bridgewater. (T 343–344, emphasis added)

Defoe has taken two “foreign” gentlemen to a rather miraculous heath— miraculous in that it affords them a prospect of such breadth and detail that one would think Defoe had telescopic vision. He constructs the view in a concerted manner, so as to include all the various sites of improvement catalogued throughout his tours: the town with its enclosed fields; the villages “interspersed” among these enclosed fields that form a circuitry with the town; the great centralizing “city of circuits” where we see clearly the omnipotent presence of God and the state made manifest in Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament; all of which leads to the corn market: the


source that generates wealth for the pulsing circuitry or commercial gridwork of England. Finally, the market is book-ended by the goal of all this activity: the individual’s “seat” in the city, and his estate in the country—both the fruits of enclosing and improving. The city seat and the country house serve as examples of how an enclosure act creates “free-willed” subjects. The entire collection of these sites serves to enframe an idealized picture of England as a Garden of Eden, and as an organic whole. But even more interesting in this passage is that enclosures themselves function as segments of a unifying machinery that stands between the wilderness of untamed nature and the civilizing artistry of the individual’s domination of that wildness: the purposefully placed hedge rows reflect both the “wilderness” and the complexity of a connective “labyrinth.” They form a “parterre” that reflects how nature has been redesigned along more efficient lines. They divide the landscape as if part of an immense “espalier”—a framework designed to train the wildness of an uncivilized land. London may be the central node within this network—the tower of a panoptic apparatus; but it is enclosures that function as the machinery for constructing a national gridwork of control: they are the capillary cells of the panopticon, disciplining the land from the ground up. Defoe’s fortifying of English soil parallels the fictional Robinson Crusoe’s erection of enclosures and other fortifications on a tropical island. In each world, enclosures serve as an example to the future of Western humanity of how land should be governed, down to the last detail. Crusoe returns years later after other adventures to check on the progress of his island colony. He reflects with satisfaction on the “improvements” that the Spanish have accomplished, on how they have been successful in taking a number of the “Carribeans” as prisoners, so that they could begin to “people” the land. Afterward, Crusoe takes one last voyage to his original plantation in Brazil, bringing supplies to his “subjects.” He includes among these “supplies” “seven Women” for his native tenants as “Wives to such as would take them” (RC 220). He promises women as well to his English farmers, but on the condition that they “apply themselves to planting” (RC 220). These examples signify the monomaniacal character of Crusoe’s self-aggrandizement, the necessary continual expansion of acts of enclosure and colonization, and the internal logic of imperialism’s growing need for fully “problematized,” positivist acts of mastery and possession.48 At the end of Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe bequeaths the reterritorialized island to the Spanish (an indication that England has inherited the mantle of empire, and learned, unlike Spain, to couple the productive cultivation of the land with the benign cultivation of people); in his Tour Defoe educates his foreign companions on the proper manner for reterritorializing one’s backyard. Both are legacies for future generations of civilizing Europeans. Both serve


as guidebooks for future travelers on how to enclose and cultivate territories on the “inner” and “outer” edges of the British imperial order: to redeem, in other words, the ontological dread of “being there.” IV. Conclusion—Global Enclosures The pervasive lack of recognition of these enclosure movement affiliations I have laid out indicates that we have unsuspectingly come under the grip of a highly persuasive but nonetheless ideologically manufactured view of land. This view, as I have attempted to show in this brief and introductory genealogy, is imperial through and through. Only by retrieving, as I have argued, an ontological understanding of land can we reveal these connections. Awakening such an understanding has become increasingly difficult, for the dominance of global technology is founded on the “necessity” for people and information to metaphysically transcend geographical barriers: the supplementation once again of Defoe’s idealized prospect view of an immense espalier of English enclosures that turn uncultivated land into a utility for the market—only now on a global level. Legitimated by the logic that an increased technologization of the planet enables cultures to break down territorial land barriers and reduce differences for the installation of a “common ground,” arguments in favor of these and other supposedly neutral innovations abound. Only with the establishment of such a metaphysical ground, this logic continues, can an egalitarian and democratic community be made manifest. The idea of a singular, uncommodified territory of land stands on the stage of modernity as an outlaw. Land—its material heterogeneity, its geographical and geopolitical variations, its embedded historical relation to tribes, clans, ethnicities, cultures, religions, and nations—has become, in the conceptualized “world picture” of a global order, a phenomenon to be erased.49 An examination of the character of this prized common ground of modernity, and the constructed idea of territoriality conditioned by its structural logic, can help to sharpen the polyvalent influence of enclosure’s economy. As I have been arguing, the metaphysical rationale informing these common currencies has its origin in the formation of imperial orders from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Edward W. Said succinctly phrases imperialism’s bearing upon land in his Culture and Imperialism: “[W]e must attempt . . . [to] set . . . art in the global, earthly context. Territory and possessions are at stake, geography and power. Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to have more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous populations.”50 Indigenous inhabitancy is coded as the very


force that disables the polity of a transcendental epistemology; it signifies a fall away from the great platform of a common humanity. The commonground logic must consequently bypass, or continually push away, the limit of difference by postponing the arrival of that limit. This results in the deterritorialization of specific territorial differences in order to establish a community of “agreement.” A Marxist analysis of the flow of capital can help to clarify the fantastic economy of agreement being marketed here. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the alleged benign civility of capitalism unconceals the continuing influence of enclosures: instead of denying difference altogether in order to establish a homogenized world order, capital allows difference to have a certain degree of access to representation on the platform of humanity, though positioned at a secondary level to the primary universal of the humanist sovereign individual, and the free market that enables individuality.51 This is what makes humanism–and capitalism–liberal. With money as capital’s general equivalent, its abstract “axiomatic,” capital can be grafted upon any territory, and upon any difference generated within a particular territory. In this sense, it can deterritorialize what was once intrinsic or peculiar to a territory, placing it within the universal flow of the global economy. This is the logic of the enclosure act: the privatization of land ostensibly marks the land with the different signatures of individual owners, but what supersedes and enables this individual parceling is the deterritorialization of land so that it can become first and foremost a commodity that increases the universal (providential) flow of capital—giving also unchecked legal support and priority to the entrepreneurial “free-willed” citizen of empire: both the land and the imperial subject (the individual) are distinguished by the measure of their “high yield.” The twentieth and twenty-first centuries are marked by this widespread deterritorialization, which arose out of the gradual transfer of a colonizing apparatus overseen by the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the numerous hands of transnational corporations in the late twentieth century. Hence, it should come as no surprise that positioning oneself above the land before it has been properly enclosed has evolved into something of a master methodology in the current neocolonial occasion of a global world order, an order, I claim, that has inherited Defoe’s model for land relation. In the “global village,” land can be inhabited only after being subjected to the rationale of purifying enclosures, made manifest in the ever-rising demand for partitions and policed borders. The Crusoe syndrome—with its will to transcendence—afflicts even the international peacekeeping organizations that seek to “resolve” these increasingly violent conflicts over territoriality. This can be witnessed directly in the 1999 NATO campaign to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.


That the answer to the need for a “humanitarian response” should come in the form of a seventy-seven day bombing campaign reveals the extent to which global organizations such as NATO and the United Nations remain entrenched in a logic of responsibility that implements “peace” by rising to a disinterested position transcending the land. More precisely, NATO reenacts the (onto)logical metaphysics of the Crusoe Syndrome by taking on the position of the imperial subject who stands over and against the object of its inquiry by “remaining in the tree” and refusing to inhabit the land: the “peacekeeper” stands absolutely distant, maintaining, as Judith Butler remarks in her analysis of the Gulf War, the “aerial, global view.”52 During the event of war, enclosing land stands as the solution to the problem of how to install “peace” in “uncultivated” regions of the planet.53 In the global world order of the late twentieth century, enclosing “uncultivated” land from a position of transcendence continues at an increased pace. Consider the passage of first world transnational corporations into third world “Common” lands, where the politicoeconomic organizations of the IMF and the World Bank set the terms of “development” and “structural adjustment”: code words from a discourse that centralizes the production of high yields, an economy of “surplus extraction” that ultimately has the opposite effect of leaving the land barren–an outcome that Defoe would not have foreseen.54 The connection being suggested here between transnational corporations and the old empires is by no means tenuous. This logic of the “high yield” has its origins precisely in the enclosure movement: enclosures were justified (and continue to be justified by many agricultural historians) on the grounds that they tripled and quadrupled yields. As the first nation to enclose its fields on a widespread level, England soon far excelled its European competitors, developing a cash crop nexus that set the standard for national productivity, which in turn helped produce an unshakable national identity. In the contemporary occasion of “humane” first world interventions the same standards of “efficiency” and production apply: only when a third world land has spread and enclosed the table of providential production in its “wilderness” can it hope to engage in an exchange with other, more cultivated global players. Twentieth-century advancements in the science of agriculture add a new component to this cultivation of high yields, one which ends in the destruction of third world land—an outcome that early English enclosure advocates would not have foreseen. By exploring the enclosure movement and the ontology of enclosure, this book takes seriously Said’s call to place art—specifically the English novel—within a global and earthly context. The tensions between these two, the global and the earthly, and the manner in which they are played out in the novel (a cultural artifact essential to the formation of imperial


and current neo-imperial attitudes toward the land), is my central focus here. I employ the terms global and earthly in a more distinct fashion than indicated by Said in the passage above. By “global” I mean the complex of contemporary transnational forces of capital and culture governed by an endeavor to homogenize and reduce difference and distance, an evolving network first laid down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the development of the Dutch, French, and specifically British Empires. By “earthly” I mean a heterogeneous dynamic of varying indigenous territorialities that stand in opposition to the larger forces of globalization, a dynamic that does not inevitably demonize difference, but rather points toward the possibility of creating a nonfoundational, uncommon politics of communal resistance. “Earthly,” then, names an attempt to do more here than simply conclude that the land is a social construction—the current intention and method of the institution of postcolonialism. If we are to take up the question of land in a genuinely fundamental fashion, it will also be necessary to consider the possibility of a nonderivative thought of materiality—of an errant, trespassing force working at the limit of discursivity’s horizon. In the next chapter, I explore this “earthly” potential in detail. This book, ultimately, seeks to address a question that has come to be of such paramount importance in the twentieth century, that we might consider it to be the ontological problem in this historical occasion: What is it about the character of land that has led it to be invoked as the cause of such anxiety and dread? What is the essence of this being? How has the English novel informed our understanding of, and added to, this essence? Why has land all but exclusively come to presence either as a homogenized and barricaded territory founded upon a positivist logic of ethnicity and nationality, or as an equally homogenized yet deterritorialized space founded upon a global logic of commodity-capital? One has only to think of the lengthening roster of twentieth century land disputes in such locations as Kosovo, Sarajevo, South Africa, Ireland, Palestine, Prague, and elsewhere, not to mention the massive deterritorializations of frontier land in the United States and USSR, to see cultural anxieties still being played out at the site of land. To consider such examples as indications of the natural consequence of population expansion, or as part of the process of some benevolent order of scientific advancement, is to subscribe to the belief that the orders currently holding sway are unchallengeable; it is to harden even further Pope’s profoundly imperial postulate “Whatever is is right.” The disciplines of postcolonial and ecological studies register only a glimmering of an ontological engagement with the land—with, in a phrase, the essential nexus of identity formation, culture, and colonization. In this respect it is crucial to seriously examine the recent rise of “global studies” as a distinct discipline, a discipline that many feel to be more germane to the


current historical situation than postcolonial studies. Bruce Robbins in particular has made the compelling argument for a move beyond the culture wars in order to work toward an “internationalist ethic.”55 He is especially critical of those who argue for a wholesale rejection of the “view from above,” contending instead that in an “imperfect world” urgent collective action must unavoidably engage this view (as in the moments of aerial intervention during World War II and Bosnia). He finds even more spurious the counterargument that heralds the differential force of the local as a viable force for warding off global homogeneity.56 When guarding against these comfortable essentializations of the local or the global, Robbins’ admonitions need remembering. What his (representative) analysis lacks, however, is any consideration of the genealogical development of the view from above—which only solidifies all the more the manner in which the problematic of enclosure predetermines the very conditions of our approach to the question of collective action and an internationalist ethics. The specific manner in which land is experienced (as “frightful”) and incorporated (enclosed), sets in motion a relation to the land that has informed the logical economy of colonization from Daniel Defoe to NATO to the war in Iraq. The task is to unearth and explore the concealed schizophrenic nexus dwelling at the heart of the great Western imperial polis of modernity: the paradox of a simultaneous English grasp for and disavowal of land. This deterritorializing dynamic of accumulation-erasure was a founding and formative element of the British Empire. What demands attention is not merely the extent to which a metaphorics of enclosure informs the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, but the matter of how the discourse of enclosure that informs the British novel transforms the very being of land in order to establish widespread relations of domination. What must be unearthed is this gradual appropriation of an essentially resistant force to the textual, administrative, economic, and political apparatus of imperialism: a totalizing change in spatial awareness and human relations. Without an extended and transdisciplinary discourse of critique of the land—its colonial and neocolonial history and ontology— we run the risk of reifying even further the imperial enclosures of individual, ethnic, national, religious, and global essentialism. Only through such a critique may we open a more originary and nonfoundational approach to the possible ways a heterogeneous citizenry can inhabit the earth.

Chapter Two The Territorialization of Land

It is . . . more essential to say that the earth shelters the dead. The Iliad, XXIII, 244 speaks of being ensconced in Hades. Here the earth itself and the subterranean come into relation with sheltering and concealing. . . . For the Greeks, death is not a “biological” process, any more than birth is. Birth and death take their essence from the realm of disclosiveness and concealment. Even the earth receives its essence from this same realm. The earth is the in-between, namely between the concealment of the subterranean and the luminosity, the disclosiveness, of the supraterranean (the span of heaven). For the Romans, on the contrary, the earth tellus, terra, is the dry, the land as distinct from the sea; this distinction differentiates that upon which construction, settlement, and installation are possible from those places where they are impossible. Terra becomes territorium, land of settlement as realm of command. In the Roman terra can be heard an imperial accent. —Martin Heidegger, Parmenides The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. . . . [A] tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. —Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology” We have begun another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country. . . . Why would we not attempt a campaign against our domestic foe, I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the Kingdom? . . . Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement. —John Sinclair, speaking during the Napoleonic Wars


In chapter one, I briefly explored a number of allusions to enclosures in the English novel from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the midtwentieth century. These manifold references are not to be taken at face value as passively reflective of historical developments. Rather, their preponderance points to a larger dramatic shift in the ontology of land in England: a shift from that of a communal relation based on a nonsovereign selfhood of “inhabitancy,” to an individual-oriented territorialization of the land founded on an economy of “standing-above” the land. These references to enclosure have a far-reaching relevance; they are part of a developing fourfold nexus that reflects the emergence of a new discourse of imperialism: the novel (as an artifact soon to become the means of cultural representation), the self (soon to become the “free-willed” subject of capital), the land (a materiality slowly becoming the object of domination), and the expansion of the British Empire (the spread of land domination abroad through acts of colonization and commodification). In this chapter I amplify this nexus by looking in some detail at a number of primary and secondary historical sources of enclosure in anticipation of turning to specific novels in the remaining chapters. Living within the discourse and practice of enclosure for more than two centuries will have had a heady effect on the way one thinks about the land, and on the kinds of representations deployed in attempts to define/ construct it. Recognizing this ontological barrier and acknowledging how it limits understanding of the land is pivotal, for it underscores how a shift in consciousness is necessary if one is to retrieve the lost history of inhabitancy. This makes this retrieval an ethical project as well, for it involves the opening of new possibilities for finding freedom from the domination of agendas that have little to do with the health of the environment and the heterogeneous interests of different geographical communities. Part of my intention in this book is to develop what postcolonial critiques of colonialism typically overlook—alternative forms of existence to the ideologies of imperialism and Western thought. Since the first great wave of parliamentary enclosures—and in some instances before that—it has become increasingly difficult to develop a nonmetaphysical relation to the land, one that would speak to what I have been calling the land’s “earthly” context. The fundamental difference in meaning between the communal “inhabitant” and the enclosing individual concerns a thinking of the self either as constructed through relations of exteriority (“inhabiting” a context), or as an entity that exists on its own (having a preexisting “inside” that stands over and against an “outside” context). The latter, as post–humanist theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Spivak have persuasively demonstrated in the past thirty years, is, in essence, also a social construct, one fabricated in such a way as to conceal its ideological underpinnings. But what interests

the territorialization of land / 29

me here is the following: whether one locates the origin of this notion of selfhood as sovereign entity in the industrial era of precapitalism, or in the work of Descartes, or as having its beginnings as far back as Plato, the main point is that in our era this construction finds its meaning in an annulment of earthly relation. To be more specific, with the rise of the individual, earthly relation goes “underground.” In order not to fall into the same trap of thinking the land as a positive entity (as a phenomenon having an “inner substantiality” that remains unchanged regardless of historical, economic, or national shifts in context), it will be necessary to find ways to characterize the meaning of the land from the concrete specificity of earthly relation. I begin by addressing specifically the land’s “earthly materiality” and how it relates to the logic of imperialism, turning first to an ontological analysis of this problem with reference to Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari, before dealing with the historical sources. The trajectory of this chapter needs one additional point of qualification. In order to bridge the gap between postcolonial and ecological studies I establish connections between three disciplines in this study—literature, philosophy, agrarian history—concentrating in this chapter on the latter two in particular. Because of the naturalized separation of philosophy and agriculture, an extended philosophical analysis of acts of enclosure and Common-field systems of agriculture may seem strange. A great deal of criticism over the past thirty or so years has gone far to interrogate the institutionally controlled barriers that stand at the limits of disciplinary thought, and to open literature to the world of postcolonial (among other) studies. Yet, in discussing the rise of empire and the connections between imperialism and the cultural artifice of the novel, little consideration has been given to the massive socioeconomic movement of land reformation, which was at its height when the English novel came into existence and the foundations of modern imperialism were being laid. (The single work to take up this question in any detail is Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City; but even Williams does not explore the disciplinary narratives of meaning constructed by agricultural theorists and historians. His engaging analysis overdetermines the discipline of literature.) From its inception the novel mirrors what could justly be called an obsession with the land—and the colonial order’s changing relation to land in general. Yet literary studies still desperately lack a thoroughgoing consideration of this connection. In his consummate statement on the status of the humanities post September 11, 2001, Said alludes to the importance of the land when criticizing the rigid schema imposed on literature by critics as diverse as Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and Northrop Frye: “the power of institutions like the monarchy, the treasury, the colonial companies, and land-settlement agencies were not given notice at all, neither in Shakespeare


nor in Jane Austen nor in Ben Johnson nor most impressively in all the great writing by and about Ireland, from Spenser to Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, and Shaw, whose core concerns are precisely the definition and ownership of the land itself.”1 This schema largely continues to this day, despite the advances made by fields such as global studies and postcolonialism. For this reason, any contemporary scholarly analysis needs to reflect upon the ontology of land. Because the discipline of agricultural studies has dominated our thinking about the land, it is important to consider its scholarly activity at length when taking up questions about the relation between land, the novel, and fields such as postcolonial and environmental studies. In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Said justifies the weight he gives to the novel in critiquing the apparatus of imperialism by considering it to be a cultural form that was “immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes.” He argues that stories—the act of weaving a narrative in general— are “at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world.”2 I would make the same claim for treatises, social tracts, farmers’ pamphlets, and official government documentation pertaining to the movement of land enclosure, which many would agree to be the English experience from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries in the reshaping of the attitudes of a nation, which at one point came to dominate more than half of the globe. For this reason an extended analysis of the work done by agricultural historians is crucial in any twenty-first-century critical engagement that attempts to find viable alternatives to the imperial command of the land that has held dominion for a majority of modern history. I. Imperialism and the Territorialization of Land: The Native Ground of Heidegger’s “Earth” Colonial encounters with native lands are generally marked by relations of hegemony, whereby the colonial authority attempts to control the territory of the other from an assumed metaphysical position of superiority. Rather than beginning with analysis of these structures of domination and mastery, I start by exploring structures of open relation to which we are unaccustomed. Martin Heidegger makes frequent references in a number of his works to an alternative encounter with the land. These references, however, have been largely ignored by contemporary theorists—due no doubt, in part, to the way in which Heidegger himself overdetermines the ontological at the expense of other sites of inquiry (such as agriculture and geopolitics).3 An entire slew of formulaic considerations of these references that condemn them as merely fascist meditations on “blood and soil” does not help either. These pat readings continue to disable the prospect for new land relations that his investigation offers. Moreover, his engagement with the


issue of land appears sporadically throughout his work, never appearing in a fully developed essay of its own. If there is any legitimacy to his claim that agriculture has come under the “grip of another setting-in-order,” it is worth developing the full potential of these references. Heidegger’s explication of the Greek conception of land in the passage from Parmenides quoted in the epigraph of this chapter serves as a good starting point, for he approaches the essence of land here—in this case “earth”—in a nonmetaphysical way: the “earth itself . . . comes into relation [i.e., ‘comes into being’] with sheltering and concealing.”4 The terminology of “sheltering” and “concealing” has to do with the main subject of Parmenides : the Greek conception of truth as aletheia. Heidegger translates this word as “unconcealment,” “uncovering,” “disclosure,” and “unforgetting.” His invocation of what might be called a poststructuralist conception of truth is complicated and would take us too far afield from the context of my engaging the question of the land. A brief discussion of aletheia, however, will indicate the significance of his thinking this question in a nonmetaphysical way, and underscore how the discourse of enclosure impacts the sociopolitical status of truth itself. Truth as aletheia directly opposes the traditional Western understanding of truth, which has its origins in the Roman, and not the Greek, conception of truth: veritas. The latter characterizes truth as an indisputable answer to a question or as an incontestable, scientifically verified solution to a problem: truth understood as “correctness.” Held to be a solution, truth consequently serves as an end point: the conclusion of a search process appearing in the form of a correct answer to a question. As I have shown in chapter one, in its attempts to win over the hearts and minds of British agricultural laborers, the rhetoric of the discourse of enclosure echoes this logic of having reached a verifiable “end point”: enclosures are a more “efficient” and “rational” relation to the land. They bring land into the domain of the scientifically objective. They are the answer to the question of how to deal with the ontological dread of undisciplined land. And they are presented, most significantly, as the correct use of land. This primacy of the conclusion itself—which is given the stamp of certifiable correctness because it “is” the “truth”—lends to truth a certain neutrality. The very structure of the Roman truth as correctness argues the case that truth itself is self-evident: it lies beyond all forms of adulterating historical influence, free from the biases of subjective points of view and ideologically informed agendas. Heidegger shows, however, that this version of truth conceals a hierarchical structure of power. As an indisputable answer, truth puts in play an economy of unquestioned adequation: it finds its telos in a comportment to some commonly accepted form of definitude and factual accuracy. As William V. Spanos has argued, the widespread


dominance of the Roman veritas is indissolubly related to the Roman imperial project, which operates to a large extent precisely because it must have recourse to an idea of truth as correctness in order to impose hierarchical relations of domination on the “savage” lands it seeks to colonize.5 Unlike veritas, which involves the subjective assumption of a set of cultural solutions that have come to be considered foundational and binding, aletheia names an interrogation of the manner in which these answers have come to be accepted as persuasive and true. Being “unconcealed” means being attuned to the ways in which a culture is informed by an ideological ground plan that determines certain assumptions to be “true” and others “false.” In other words, if we are attuned to the ways in which a particular truth comes into being, to the way in which it is “unconcealed,” we discover the logical imperatives or directives that support this truth. In this way, “unconcealment” implies a coming into power of a particular truth that now holds the field. Far from requiring an adequation to an absolute, aletheia keeps open a relation to truth as an entity brought into existence to serve the rationale of the distinct mode of thinking that produces it. The dynamic of the Greek understanding of earth obviously is of a similar dynamic to that of aletheia. In the passage from Parmenides quoted in my epigraph, the “earth” stands as the middle ground between the “subterranean” (the concealed: in this case what is not available, or what lies beyond the limit of human control), and the “supraterranean” (the “luminosity” of absolute “disclosiveness”). Earth—the land—is the “in-between” where nonbeing and being belong irreducibly together. The earth, in other words, is the site at which meaning is set underway—and set underway in an agonistic, differential fashion. The earth is the ground upon which birth and death are played out, not only the birth and death of human beings, but the birth and death of any phenomenon: cultural formations, institutions, historical shifts, material metamorphoses, and the coming and going of ideas and modes of thinking. Because of its ambivalent character, the earth cannot be thought as a solid foundation that preexists all structural formations. Directly opposed to this, the middle site of the earth never places stability above instability, or an idea of some correct form above chaos. The tension between stability and instability is, in fact, fundamental and inseparable: the chaos of instability opposes the hegemony of stability, guarding against one form of stability, standardization, or conformity from gaining ontological, political and social dominance. Thought from this standpoint the “materiality” of the earth is nonpositive, because it opposes the classical notion of a positive, immobile ground. In this sense it carries— with its deconstructive element of instability—an extra-ideological potential capable of destabilizing the ideological forms of the reality that hold sway. However, it would be a mistake to characterize Heidegger’s


explication of the earth as merely a proleptic version of Derrida’s constitution of meaning as a play of presence and absence. As I show more clearly, concealment also involves a structure of protection, one that allows local differences to maintain their distinctive existence in the face of colonial orders. Heidegger explicates his metaphor of the earth more fully in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” “The Origin of the Work of Art” has been one of the most widely read of Heidegger’s essays. Fredric Jameson sums up what has unfortunately come to be the predominant reading of that essay: “Heidegger’s central analysis . . . is organized around the idea that the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World, or what I would prefer to translate as the meaningless materiality of the body and nature and the meaning endowment of history and the social” (7). The problem with this reading is that it entirely overlooks an important dynamic quality that Heidegger gives to the earth. As such, Jameson’s all-too-neat characterization of the earth as “meaningless materiality” and world as “meaning endowed” ignores the possibility of thinking beyond ideological apparatuses of power, a thinking that would contest a centralizing order of power without simply replacing it with another. Jameson’s dismissal of an earthly “active refusal” reproduces the same dead-end conclusion reached in so many arguments made from the position of social constructivism. This position of social constructivism offers only two possibilities for thinking materiality: either materiality is meaningful in that it has been formed to serve a social function (a plantation as opposed to an uncultivated field), or it is unformed and raw, and hence meaningless. By concluding that a system of power is a construct that endows materiality with meaning, and that the subjects caught within this system of power are also constructs, one only ends by allowing both the system and its subjects to abrogate all responsibility for finding an alternative. Arguing that “everything is a social construct” is no less ideological than attempting to step out of ideology entirely.6 Moreover, it places the social above the material, for the material must constantly depend upon the social for its meaning. Even more consequential, the critical gesture of denouncing everything as an ideological construct has the effect of turning ideology into an omnipresent and omnipotent god. Despite the brilliance of his explication of postmodernism’s intimate connection to capitalism, in his reductive characterization of Heidegger’s earth Jameson merely ends by performing the very “postmodern logic of pastiche” that he wishes to elude. The assertion that “everything is ideologically constructed” is, I would argue, the major obstacle that prevents postmodernism from enacting any substantial destruction of the (now global) forces of territorial hegemony. The stumbling block to overcome is, as Slavoj Zizek has articulated in his work, this


“inherent impossibility of isolating a reality whose consistency is not maintained by ideological mechanisms.”7 Heidegger’s thematization of the earth offers such an extra-ideological potential. His point in thinking the materiality of land in the metaphor of the “earth” is precisely to free the substance of the land from the ideological assault made upon it by the commanding human individual. Determined by the discourse of enclosure, the human individual approaches the land as raw matter that lies useless until formed by his or her entrepreneurial hand. The cultivation of the land has come under the grip, as Heidegger phrases it in “The Question concerning Technology,” of a challenging economy of ordering: “ The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field.”8 Only when the commanding subject/commanded object dichotomy is lifted, only when this master/slave binary of the former and the formed (Crusoe’s “we made us a large piece of ground”) is overcome, can the earth be thought from a measure other than ideologically derived. The fact that land is preapproached continually from the end point of a particular use-value reveals, I would argue, the extent to which the discourse of enclosure governs the meaning of the land. In a later passage from “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger develops the idea of earth in relation to the Greek word phusis. The passage discusses the space that comes into being at the site of an ancient temple, and how this temple and its space is supported by the earth—irreducibly related to it from a local, not an imperial, standpoint: Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, through itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. What this word says is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent. The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on the earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground.9


The point to be drawn from this passage is that Heidegger, in critiquing the classical definition of Art, advances an ethical understanding of cultural production from the standpoint of inhabitation. It is, plainly, an anticapitalist idea of justice. We see here the structure of an open relation to the land that makes possible the performative subjectivity of the “inhabitant.” Inhabitation is the essence of “earth”: “on which and in which man bases his dwelling.” What is crucial is that this conception of support does not stem from an outside source that would want to lay claim to those things arising from the earth in order to command them: this is not about private property. Rather, the earth offers the “gift” of a nonviolent support: “Earth . . . shelters everything that arises without violation.” And what is not being violated here are the singular (nonrepeatable) relations of the local that give it its distinctiveness. In addition, this action of “sheltering”—which also suggests “protection”— is not universal, but geographically specific: “earth . . . only . . . emerges as native ground.” “Emerging” names the action of a nonderivative coming into existence. In relation, things merge and therefore come into existence. In its sheltering, the earth itself withdraws from being captured by an outside force. This action of “withdrawing” is the particular aspect of “concealing” at play in the dynamic of aletheia. Earlier in the essay, Heidegger makes it clear that the earth announces and tenaciously maintains this quality of withdrawal: in the thing being sheltered by the earth “vibrates the silent call of the earth . . . its unexplained self-refusal” (PLT 34). As such, the earth cannot be given over to any one institutionalized mode of use or production. An ideological framework imposed from outside—such as an apparatus of national enclosure—would overcode and annul the heterogeneous, “native” dynamics of the earth, recoding its active self-refusal as a negative facet to be overcome: the lack of standardization, for instance, often referred to in discussions about the open-field system that “impedes” the “efficiency” of national yields, and the export system. Earth as phusis, however, places value in the act of withdrawal from commanding triumphalist discourses of exploitation. What I have been calling the “materiality” of the earth, which has been up until this point a loaded and ambiguous term, can now be sharpened. The earth’s materiality “appears” not as an inert corporeality, nor even as a meaningless substance that has yet to be given signification (through language and discourse, as in the institutionalized version of postmodernism). Rather, it exists as an active intensity of singular relations, an event of resistance that cannot be explained by a grand truth (veritas) discourse. The intensive “work” of the earth is in fact this warding off of a final and total explanation. This “call” of the earth does not suggest a speech act (which would stem from, and be incorporated into, a discourse), but can only be thought


of as an invitation to the historical and locational specificity of its appearance, to its “native ground.” Furthermore, these terms—“historical,” “locational,” “specificity”—are not meant to suggest that the native ground can be found on a chart, as if capable of being labeled once and for all on a colonial explorer’s map. Rather, they are to be thought of as active elements, not stationary sites. For nowhere in this entire passage do we see anything along the lines of a formal positivism able to be traced on a map. All is activity, the intensive movement of constantly shifting relation. The “raging” of the storm does not stem from the storm itself, but from its relation to the building holding its ground, which “first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence.” The “steadfastness” and “repose” of this building does not exist positively as an innate quality, but is brought out and “brings out” the “raging” of the sea. Even empty space does not preexist relation, for it is only through its relation to the “towering” building that the “invisible space of the air” becomes “visible.” The thought of materiality, and of objects’ singular relation to the land from which they arise, is highly nomadic. Thus, the founding Roman conception of land as territorium, and the manner in which British imperialism is informed by this conception, bears no mark of this earthly potential to ward off. That a land would hold itself back in some fashion directly opposes the economy of colonization, which functions well or poorly based upon its strength in capturing the land of the other. If the aspect of withholding manifests itself at all in the movement of colonization, it is only as a negative annoyance needing to be overcome: the “uncultivated” jungle, the lack of straight roads for proper transportation, the “swirling masses” of “indistinguishable” native populations, the innumerable varieties of dialect that present a “hurdle” to the formation of a national tongue, and so on. In opposition to land appearing as native ground, land as territorium expresses potential only in the extent to which it can give itself over to the mastering colonizer. The aim is to grip the land firmly, for purposes of settlement and installation. To return to the passage from Parmenides, in “those places where [settlement proves to be] impossible,” the area in question has yet to become a territorium: an orderable and commandable territory. When land becomes territorialized, it becomes a spatialized realm, part of a larger landscape given over to an imperial authority. Under this logic, places on the earth that show signs of a withdrawal from the potential for installation are coded as meaningless, and therefore cannot be properly called “land” in the imperial sense. The engagement with the land as an in-between space giving birth and temporarily giving support to new forms of meaning and cultural materiality makes little sense once land has been enclosed. As thought through the logic of enclosure, land is ideologically recoded so as to be thoroughly a product of imperialism. Land as territorium consequently signifies a process of ideologically overcoding the


land with an agenda that has little to do with local concerns. Land thought from Heidegger’s earth, however, would seem to offer not another ideology to place over the Roman territorium, but an extra-ideological potential for warding off discursive regimes of domination. We are still faced, though, with the problem of how this ideological shift actually occurs, how the open-relational context of native ground becomes submissive and succumbs to a relation of domination. Two theorists who address this problem are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. II. Imperialism and the Deterritorialization of Land: Deleuze and Guattari’s “Stockpiling” In the chapter entitled “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture” from A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari consider more materially the question concerning the shift from what I have been calling, after Heidegger, “native land” to land as imperial “capture” of land as territorium. Although as with Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari fail to consider the role of the enclosure movement in their interrogation of the rise of apparatuses of capture, their work is of interest here because of its considerable thematization of precapitalist formations of the land. Their analysis approaches the rise of capitalized land by exploring the difference between two distinct methods of land formation: so-called “primitive” societies, and “advanced” state-governed societies. They begin by dismissing the traditional, evolutionary postulate that argues that itinerant, primitive social orders are “primitive” because they lack the appropriate degree of economic development in order to “evolve” properly into a modern, clearly bordered state order. The evolutionist maintains that “nomadic” and “tribal” orders simply “ ‘don’t understand’ so complex an apparatus” as the modern state.10 Referring to the work of Pierre Clastres and Karl Marx, Deleuze and Guattari reverse the logical economy of evolution and ask instead if it is not actually a concern of the primitive order to ward off the formation of a state apparatus, to employ mechanisms that keep centralizing organs of power “distinct from the social body from organizing” (ATP 357). They mark as essential to the state the establishment of an economy of conservation and comparison. Two mechanisms bring about this twofold universal economy: the creation of a centralized “stock” (a conservation mechanism) and the installment of “ground rent” for purposes of founding a statewide, corollary measure (a mechanism of universal comparison). The institution of a stock marks the onset of capital accumulation, and the installment of a ground rent overlays the heterogeneity of the land with an abstract, common reference that lies above the particulars of the land, thereby capturing the land under a single measure.


Stepping back from this naturalized economy of capital exchange, Deleuze and Guattari ask: “Is it possible to conceive of an ‘exchange’ between separate primitive groups, independent of any reference to such notions as stock, labor, and commodity?” (437). They find an answer in the following example of exchange: Take two abstract groups, one of which (A) gives seeds and receives axes, while the other (B) does the opposite. What is the collective evaluation of the objects based on? It is based on the idea of the last objects received, or rather receivable, on each side. By “last” or “marginal” we must understand not the most recent, nor the final, but rather the penultimate, the next to the last, in other words, the last one before the apparent exchange loses its appeal for the exchangers, or forces them to modify their respective assemblages, to enter another assemblage. . . . [T]he farmer-gatherer group A, which receives axes, has an “idea” of the number of axes that would force it to change assemblages; and the manufacturing group B, of the quantity of seeds that would force it to change assemblage. . . . The last as the object of a collective evaluation determines the value of the entire series. It marks the exact point at which the assemblage must reproduce itself, begin a new operation period or a new cycle, lodge itself on another territory, and beyond which the assemblage could not continue as such. This is indeed a next-to-the-last, a penultimate, since it comes before the ultimate. The ultimate is when the assemblage must change its nature: B would have to plant the excess seeds. A would have to increase the rhythm of its own plantings and remain on the same land. (ATP 438, emphasis added)

The question of exchange here touches the precise relation one has to the land, and the manner in which the land will appear as an entity—either as an entity that withholds its presence to a certain extent (in that it refuses a universal measure), or as a territory that can be appropriated from afar. The critical moment comes at the point one defines the limit marking the differences between groups and the land they occupy. As with Heidegger’s antimapping term “locational,” Deleuze and Guattari’s “last” operates more as a verb than a noun designating a positive point capable of being mapped in an accountant’s ledger. Moreover, the movement of exchange itself is nonphenomenal: “Exchange is only an appearance: each partner or group assesses the value of the last receivable object (limit-object), and the apparent equivalence derives from that. The equalization results from the two heterogeneous series. . . . There is neither exchange value nor use value but rather an evaluation of the last by both parties (a calculation of the risk involved in crossing the limit), an anticipation-evaluation” (ATP 439). The meaning of the last can only be found—as with Heidegger’s “earth”—in relation (“collective evaluation”), and in the active intensity of “warding off.” What is warded off is the installation of an order on a territorium: the last marks the point at which the groups would have to lodge themselves on


a specific piece of land: “B would have to plant the excess seeds. A would have to increase the rhythm of its own plantings and remain on the same land.” The last also is the active marginal moment that counters the installation of a stock: it works against the accumulation of “excess seeds.” The last gains its collective measure in its ability to anticipate the capitalist state apparatus lurking on the horizon and prevent it from forming. Recoding “the last” for purposes of appropriation and accumulation is therefore requisite for the shift from native land to territorium. Deleuze and Guattari sharpen the ambiguousness of this idea of the last by differentiating this marginal moment as either a “limit” or a “threshold.” The “limit” names the penultimate point that ensures the continuance of a heterogeneous exchange assemblage; the “threshold” names the ultimate point at which exchange “evolves” into the territorium economy of stockpiling: [T]he limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change. . . . We previously defined primitive societies by the existence of anticipation-prevention mechanisms. Now we can see more clearly how these mechanisms are constituted and distributed: it is the evaluation of the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage). The threshold comes “after” the limit, “after” the last receivable objects: it marks the moment when the apparent exchange is no longer of interest. We believe that it is precisely at this moment that stockpiling begins; beforehand, there may be exchange granaries, granaries specifically for exchange purposes, but there is no stock in the strict sense. . . . Stockpiling begins only once exchange has lost its interest, its desirability for both parties. . . . The stock seems to us to have a necessary correlate: either the coexistence of simultaneously exploited territories, or a succession of exploitations on one and the same territory. It is at this point that the territories form a Land, are superseded by a Land. (440)

The evaluation of the last as limit maintains the economy of exchange that functions as an itinerant mechanism holding back from the shift to a homogenous assemblage. It is an “itinerant” mechanism because it does not work according to a structure of accumulation, a structure that would function through an internal positive measure devised to work against outside forces: such as a group that would seek to standardize its artisans and traders, then expand upon other groups, and eventually nations. The mark of accumulation—the stockpile—operates according to a principle of homeostasis. The stockpiling assemblage “fills itself up,” so to speak, locating its identity within itself by calculating the amount its system is capable of storing. It sets in motion a pathway of production-accumulation that leads to an economy of efficiency: increase productivity, work faster, minimize


capital outlay, make more return on investments. Whereas the itinerant mechanism of heterogeneous exchange defines its identity in its relation to exterior forces, forces that do not exploit and enclose production on an internal measure. In opposition, the internal measure acts to mark a territory, one needing to define-defend itself by increasing efficiency in order to take on a hierarchical coding as a “greater” entity: it becomes a territorium, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, a land (in the sense of property). To invoke the terminology from my argument in chapter one, the itinerant exchange model works by inhabiting a context of relations, while stockpiling founds individuality, and all the forms of private property relations that follow in the individual’s wake. Deleuze and Guattari further develop the relation between “stockpiling” and “land,” clarifying that the stock-threshold model is an imperial apparatus because it must “overcode” singular, local relations with its transcendent economy in order to simultaneously exploit different territories. Here a difference in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology must be marked from that of Heidegger’s. Heidegger uses the term territorium and phrases like “setting up a territory” to denote actions of an imperial order. In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, the terms “territory” and “territorialization” (and their correlative term “coding”) do not always refer to an act of colonization. In Anti-Oedipus, “coding” (and later in A Thousand Plateaus, “territorializing”) refers to precapitalist social machines that define themselves according to highly complex, differentially coded flows of desire that reflect a “collective investment” among groups. Itinerant groups, in other words, are not so pluralistically fluid as to be without an identity. They are coded (they are known for harvesting seeds or for making axes), and they preserve a territory (they sustain a relation to the earth), but the territory they occupy does not become sedentary, and does not begin to impose its measure on other territories. The itinerant territory is always native, never global. In this sense “territory” is more closely related to Heidegger’s “earth.” Capitalism, on the other hand, operates by “decoding” flows, substituting for singular codes (“preserved territories,” “native earth”) the decoded flow of “abstract quantities in the form of money.”11 To “decode a flow” or “deterritorialize” the specifics of territorial exchange means to enforce a universal criterion that would govern all forms of relation—transcending the differences between various territories, and conceiving of these differences as secondary. It is tantamount to “overcoding” the otherness of territories with a single global identity, lifting coded, native, territorial groups off the local earth to become part of an all-inclusive, sedentary state apparatus that annuls the specifics of the earth and inhabitancy: “States [are] . . . the product of an effective deterritorialization that substitutes abstract signs for the signs of the earth.”12


It would seem, then, that the nation-state and its economy of capital is founded upon a structural paradox. Because of its accumulative assemblage (the production and subsequent defense of a stock), and the need to increase its potential to accumulate by constantly expanding upon new territory (the increase of the stock by the grafting of a single identity upon new territories through deterritorialization), the capitalist state requires that its assemblage be both sedentary and expanding outward at the same time. Its stock must be lodged in an ideal space that remains immobile—a center, a metropolis (everything encountered must submit itself for measure, or “reflection” and “global comparison” against this identity stock); and it must develop by engaging all new encounters by expanding upon them and exploiting or “capturing” their potential. It would seem also that this turning of differential territories into a monopolistic state “land” must begin with the land itself in the form of “ground rent”: Ground rent, in its abstract model, appears precisely when a comparison is drawn between different simultaneously exploited territories, or between the successive exploitation of the same territory. The worst land (or the poorest exploitation) bears no rent, but it makes it so that the other soils do bear rent, “produce” in a comparative way. A stock is what permits the yields to be compared. . . . Ground rent homogenizes, equalizes different conditions of productivity by linking the excess of the highest conditions of productivity over the lowest to a landowner. . . . This is the very model of an apparatus of capture, inseparable from a process of relative deterritorialization. The land as the object of agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed among people according to a common quantitative criterion. . . . The land has two potentialities of deterritorialization: (1) its differences in quality are comparable to one another . . . (2) the set of exploited lands is appropriable . . . from the standpoint of a monopoly that fixes the landowner or -owners. . . . Land as compared and appropriated extracts from the territories a center of convergence located outside them; the land is an idea of the town. (ATP 441)

There are two implications in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of Marx’s ground rent here: (1) that “land” is predetermined, or preaccomplished by something other than itself (as an “idea of the town,” or in the case of Crusoe’s island, as an enclosed, little England), and (2) that it is as an ancillary entity necessary for establishing the measure of surplus profit (the “least productive” land is retroactive to the “most productive” land). Here is precisely the problem with Jameson’s characterization of Heidegger’s “earth” as “raw materiality.” It is also precisely the problem inherent in ecological theory (which essentializes land in terms of “spirit of place”) and postcolonial theory (which can only say of land and nature that it is constructed). That is to say none of these approaches considers land in terms of the kind of


relation articulated here by Deleuze and Guattari. If we see these implications in terms of colonial activity, we begin to realize that the “land of the other”—because of its “raw,” “untamed,” and “inefficient” status—serves from the beginning to enable the imperial order to establish the surplus that forms the basis of its stockpile: the land of the other is “subtracted” from the land at home, and makes the land at home “productive.” In this sense, production itself has no “content” in any positive sense; it only acquires meaning at this moment of subtraction. Nor is what is subtracted a positive substance; it is instead the open-relational context of the earth, the itinerant exchange-limit that wards off monopolization. Colonization begins with the subtraction of that which wards it off. And what wards it off is neither empty raw materiality nor spirit of place but the relation of the always specific and local exchange-limit. This negation is colonization’s origin, which its discourse of “efficiency” and “correctness” occludes. Colonization is inaugurated from the ground up, and it does not so much find its origin in the demonization of its others (although this certainly occurs), nor in the marking of the other as a difference in relation to the colonial same. Rather, it is the subtraction of the relational singularity of the other—the inhabitancy of the other—that is the necessary precondition of the colonial apparatus. As we see, this process of subtraction occurred first “at home,” with the subtraction of the Commons and open fields from enclosed lands, then continued abroad with the subtraction of “exotic land.” The expressions “openrelational context of the earth” and “process of subtraction” are no doubt limited in their efficacy without any connection to the sociopolitical. What follows concretely situates this ontological analysis of the land. III. Sticks of Mead: A Genealogy of Enclosures, the Open-Field System, and the Commons With the discussed ontological analysis of capitalism and the earth in mind, we can now critically examine a number of major works by agricultural and economic historians dealing with enclosures and the Common-field system, paying specific attention to the ways in which these scholars have discursively woven this history and its symbolic significance. The history of the Commons and the enclosure movement is long and complicated, and this study is not meant to serve as a complete account. However, it is necessary to establish at the beginning of this section—if only in a cursory fashion— a sense of the dramatic changes in agricultural development that parallel both the emergence of an Enlightenment discursive regime of power founded upon the disciplinary categorization of knowledge, and the development of the British Empire. Because of this disciplinary regime, and the peculiar symbolic significance it gave to the land, a look at the history of


enclosures cannot be a neutral retelling, but must attend as well to how these factors necessarily influenced the scholars who recorded this history. In this manner, I hope to retrieve a portion of the lost history of preenclosure forms of existence. The view handed down by traditional history—that the Commons were a breading ground for idleness, that the open-field system was impractical, that it was the handmaiden of a repressive feudal social structure, and that because of this structure all human existence sprang from two planes, aristocracy and serfdom—masks the intricacies of what was in reality a sophisticated structure of social relations. Indeed the question of the origins of the Commons and the open-field system is the subject of some dispute among twentieth century historians. A great deal of evidence indicates that this communally organized social system of agriculture predated the feudal system by at least five centuries.13 The idea that there was always some form of manorial system whereby portions of land were granted by the king to individual lords, who then legally “owned” the land, has come under scrutiny. Common rights, “use-rights” (the liberty to have access without question to land that was considered “open” to everyone for grazing, gathering fuel and supplies, erecting cottages, etc.) stemmed from a much older system of collective cultivation of the land that was prevalent not only in England, but throughout most of Europe. Under this system—often referred to as the “Saxon system”—there was no sense of individuals possessing the land as we understand the word today: as highly guarded, private property. If the dynamics of ownership could be said to be in play at all, the land would be “owned” in common by the village communities, or by the “King.”14 But, as we see, it would be utterly anachronistic to deploy this capitalist idea of ownership in referring to a system in which the land was not thought in contemporary terms of property. Consider the intricacies faithfully adhered to in many communal villages. Typically, the portion of the land under cultivation (“arable” land) in the open-field system was divided into three, four, and sometimes five large fields, with one of the fields left fallow to regenerate each season.15 The first field might be entirely devoted to winter corn, the second to spring corn, the third to roots or clover, and the last left unsown. Near these fields lay what is referred to properly as the Common: the pasture on which all the villagers kept their animals. After the harvest, the tilled fields would be thrown open as well, creating an even larger Common pasture. The arable fields were further divided into long “strips,” and farmers were assigned specific strips from each of the fields to plow. These assigned strips were not connected, but scattered across a wide area. Scattered strips meant that a farmer most likely had holdings in at least three different places, in three different fields. But these strips of land were not considered to be a farmer’s


possession. The fields, or meadows, were commonly thought to be too valuable ever to become private property. In this way the meadows were subject to a precise mechanism of periodical reterritorialization: the strips were redistributed on an annual rotation, giving to the land the power to actively refuse the installation of a human apparatus of domination. It is, to recall Heidegger, a concerted effort to “set in order” a relation to the land based on a logic of “taking care of” and “maintaining,” rather than on an exploitative “challenging” of land as if it were in some way the servant of man. One cannot emphasize the full implications of this last point enough. It would be limiting, for instance, to think of this strip system from the basis of human sovereignty, as if it were a means of carving up the land for human use. We would merely be understanding half the potential of this relation to the land if we were to stop short by considering it solely as an egalitarian distribution among men. To do so is to approach the land from the standpoint of being first and foremost a commodity for human consumption. The mechanism described not only makes equal the relation between one farmer and another, but the relation between the farmers and the land itself. In some villages, a companion mechanism augmented strip farming in order to ensure as best as possible a nonexploitative connection between humanity and the land. As most farmers could not write, they identified themselves through the use of a “mark” signifying their identity. These marks they carved onto what were called “mead” sticks (to indicate their relation to the “mead-ow”). The mead sticks, in turn, were collected and placed in a sack. To divide the quality of the fields equally, lots were drawn to apportion the strips, beginning with the most favored meadow strip down to the least. A particular strip was called out, and the mead stick pulled from the sack indicated the farmer who would receive that strip of land for that year. In this fashion, the open-field relationship to the land further warded off the possibility of monopolization by any single member of the village.16 Only the area of the land considered suitable for the production of crops was cultivated, the remainder was open to all for the crazing of cattle. At the end of the harvest, the arable land was also thrown open and released to the same privileges as the Commons. These village communities were economically self-dependent, with some under the loose authority of a lord after the advent of feudalism; but even then many were not associated with a manor at all. Here we have the very model of an exchange-limit system that operates without being based upon a stock or an idea of commodity relations. The use of the mead stick demonstrates a real awareness of the risk involved when a community organizes itself on the earth. It is an operation that calculates and prevents the switch from the open-field network (the tenuous balance between farmers and the land) to the stock-threshold assemblage


(when the balance shifts to a logic of accumulation for the purposes of producing a high yield, bringing into existence a new system of meaning, with an entirely new frame of reference to stocks, labor value, and commodities). The attention paid to the placement of farmers in this exchange-limit network should once again not be understood from the perspective of the farmers alone. Remarking how the land is distributed among the farmers limits us to looking out from only one side of the equation. What is anticipated and prevented is not only one farmer’s exploitation of another, but also the subordination of the earth to the human subject. In this sense, it would be more accurate to say that the movement of this system is first triggered by a solemn regard for how the land allows itself to be released to the human subject. Thinking of the land from the standpoint of how it releases itself to the farmers, rather than from how the farmers control the land and its distribution, gives us a sense of how very different this existence is from the ontological order of the present. Unlike Crusoe’s encounter with the land, in which he needs to relieve his dread by first bringing in from the outside an apparatus to overlay the land, thereby changing the very character of the earth, these farmers show an immediate relation to the land from the perspective of being there. By mentioning these and other examples of preenclosure structures, I by no means wish to present them as indications of some golden era of an England free from forces of hegemony, royal or otherwise. This deflection of monopolized control was no utopia; it depended on a number of factors, one example being whether a village was connected to a manor and a lord of the manor who would oversee village operations. The feudal system, and the variety of forms in which that system manifested itself, was not without its own problems, with its rigidly imposed hierarchies, constraints of serfdom, imperial religious codes of morality, and the lack of ability to change one’s status socially. What we can find of interest in the examples, however, is the potential for discovering alternatives to the demands that an ideology of enclosure has been placing upon England and other Western landscapes since the early modern era. The introduction of the feudal system began to change slightly the old Saxon order. Feudalism predates the enclosure movement, but it differs from the Saxon order in that it began to territorialize the land along more militarized lines.17 Much of England at this time was parceled out into territories commanded by military chiefs. These chiefs gradually began to exercise rights of property over the open space of the village communities, turning these communities into boundaried “manors.” The villagers became the manorial lord’s dependants, subject to rendering military service to him when called. Under this system there was still no private ownership of the land in the modern sense. If ownership existed in any


form, it was only as a quasi-possessive force, with the manor lord granting land “tenures” to the inhabitants. The villagers maintained their right to turn out cattle on the manorial wasteland, and continued to cultivate the fields collectively. Being “manorialized,” however, they began to give a certain amount of the produce cultivated to the lord of the manor. Later, as the number of military and produce requirements eroded, an early form of land tax evolved called “quit rents.” Persons paying these rents are said to be the forefathers of what came to be called “freeholders.” Freeholders were at the top of what eventually became a manorial social hierarchy that also included, in descending order, copyholders, leaseholders, villeins, and serfs. Within this graded system many farmers were not granted the land tenure that was an inherent part of the Saxon system. These farmers fall into roughly two social groups. The first came to be known as “villeins” of the manor; they held certain rights to the land and to their cottages, but could be evicted by the lord at any time.18 Below them were the “serfs” who had no land holdings, working as “bondsmen” of the lord. Still, even the serfs had some access to Common rights, and to sites on the land still open and free from enclosing barricades. This change to feudalism had begun before the Norman conquest, but afterward more of the land was partitioned out to lords to be held on the primary grounds of military service to the king. Even though the land under feudalism became the property of a manorial lord, there still remained a number of village communities yet to be territorialized by a military chief; and many of the villages coming under the control of a lord continued a collective social order as before. It was this new manorial order, though, that led to the beginnings of the land-enclosure movement. Manorial lords began to claim Common lands as their private property; they began to disregard the rights of the villagers, turning the Commons into private hunting grounds. The Statute of Merton of 1235 marks the date at which the enclosing of the land became a legal reality. The statute was passed by parliament, which was at that time made up solely of lords who were Barons. This enabled the lords to enclose without petition or appeal to the freeholders and villeins. Thus began the first kind of enclosure, promulgated by large landowners making parks for deer and other game, then by landlords investing in the raising of sheep for the emerging textile market, and eventually by landlords aspiring to monopolize other forms of production for export to major towns, cities, and other nations. Throughout the centuries from 1235 to 1603 many disputes arose over enclosures and the erasure of collective access to open land. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, parliament frequently sided with farmers. Enclosure acts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a matter mostly of large landowners pushing farmers off communally farmed open


fields in order to make way for sheep. These landlords raised sheep for the early textile market, a precursor to the more expansive markets of the industrial revolution. The enclosing of the land for sheep occurred primarily in the midlands and were the works of individuals, not of parliament. Many of the lands enclosed by these entrepreneurial landlords were in fact ordered by the courts to be thrown open again, for enclosure during this time was generally considered by the Crown, parliament, and the populace to be a threat. Enclosure led to heavy migration and depopulation of many villages.19 The heavy migration also resulted in an influx of people to new settlements and already overcrowded Common fields.20 Enclosure “commissioners” were given instructions to move into the countryside to gather evidence on how enclosures had led to the heavy depopulation of the portions of the countryside and the desertion of a number of villages. The commissioners had orders to gather the names of those responsible by drawing up a list of those who kept over 2,400 sheep, those who kept more than two farms, and those who had pushed farmers off their Commons.21 Enclosing landlords began to take advantage of newly developing national, and eventually international, markets. The dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century further attenuated the old medieval system of tithes, opening the way for a new system of land taxation, and essentially handing church-owned land over to the “real estate” market of large landowners seeking to increase their holdings: “By the end of the sixteenth century there were twelve times as many propertyless people as there had been a hundred years earlier.”22 The transition to this new ground plan was anything but smooth. These and subsequent centuries saw a number of “enclosure riots,” where groups of anywhere from a dozen to several hundred formed to tear down the hedges and stone walls erected after an act of enclosure. Riots broke out across England, among them the famous Ket’s rebellion of 1549, which again centered on the seizing of Common rights by large landholders in Norfolk.23 Even though this Tudor period of government passed two agrarian statutes to help the homeless cottager find land in the countryside, parliament responded to these enclosure riots with a series of legislative acts designed to disable villagers and farmers from forming in groups of more than three, which included laws of vagrancy whereby a person could be whipped, beaten, deported, hanged, or burned at the stake for trespassing on enclosed land.24 By 1590, popular protests of enclosures in the form of hedge leveling had created such widespread fear that parliament raised the charge of “revolt” given to these enclosure protests to the level of “treason against the King.” The effect of this was to make all protests that extended beyond the decreasing boundaries of the village community a treasonable act.25 It was little more than a decade later in 1603 that Gateward’s Case


ultimately gave the most serious blow to any legal recourse left to an inhabitant wishing to oppose the colonization of land by landed individuals. The new ontology of enclosure thus created and firmly installed a new nationwide binary opposition between the enclosed and the unenclosed. As discussed in chapter one, acts of enclosure led to the creation of “masterless men”—dispossessed farmers and laborers who were in the eyes of officials, for all practical purposes, a new (sub)species of humanity. Alongside the Vagrancy Act of 1572, and the numerous “houses of correction” built between the years 1553 and 1701, laws against vagabondage passed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made violence against itinerant people not only legal, but a moral imperative.26 With this division of humanity into two categories comes a new symbolic network that fashions a highly intolerant view of the itinerant and the multiple. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have shown, it was during this era that the multiple came to be associated with the monstrous “many-headed hydra”—the symbol of the multitudes of dispossessed commoners, laborers, sailors, and slaves that either needed to be contained by the nation-state, or carted beyond its boundaries. The consequences of these political changes were dramatic. Ancient Common rights enjoyed by inhabitants not considered judicially to be “tenants” (freeholders or copyholders) of a particular manor could no longer claim free access when confronted with a newly enclosed plot of land. The post-Restoration government began to openly sanction acts of enclosure, accepting them as a way to cultivate the land more productively.27 Even the open-field systems came to be more rigidly structured: “[F]rom the sixteenth century onwards manorial documents contain more and more explicit rules and regulations about the workings of the system, until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they are at their most emphatic and lucid. On the eve of Parliamentary enclosure some maps of Common fields villages present a more orderly pattern of strips, furlongs, and fields than anything available earlier.”28 In the mid-seventeenth century the last antienclosure bill was presented in the House of Commons and rejected.29 The legalities of enclosure acts came under the control of parliament in the reign of Queen Anne at the turn of the eighteenth century. These new “parliamentary acts of enclosure” were massive, and dominated the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries— with the bulk of them occurring between 1750 and 1830. By the eighteenth century, enclosures were regarded increasingly as a revolutionary scientific development, generally thought to be more efficient and cost-productive. Enclosure allowed for other “improvements” to occur, such as fertilizing, draining, and regulated rotation.30 An efficiency-driven relationship to the land began to hold sway. The “efficiency” of enclosure ostensibly meant that fewer farmers were required to work the land, “freeing”


them to move to developing factory towns. The Common and unfortified open-field system was considered to be a disabling manner of existing on the land, for it did not readily lend itself to stockpiling and market fluctuations. The old open-field village communities displayed “warped” patterns of settlement—nucleated villages generally in fielden communities, small hamlets, and scattered homesteads in woodland communities—that did not lend themselves to market ties: “The open-field village was . . . essentially a selfcontained social and economic organization originally based upon production for subsistence, not for market.”31 An act of enclosing a portion of the land with these unconnected communities guaranteed that the community would thereafter be tied to a growing gridwork of commercial enterprise. Thus we see Defoe’s cherished “espalier” brought into existence: the new circuitry of market-driven connections that reach out across the land, coupled with the new imperial mastery of uncultivated land. This circuitry appears habitually from the eighteenth century on and is part and parcel of the Enlightenment episteme of a general spatialization of the realms of production. It brings into existence the new coupling of land and empire. The statewide campaign to eradicate itinerant groups, and the monstrous multitude in general, was gradual but ruthless. The demand for a connecting gridwork that reflected the general need to spatialize (to ideologically construct, in other words, “true space” as enclosed space) targeted particular sites known for harboring the “dangerous” multitude. The creation of a new circulatory apparatus meant that all old forms of circulation needed to be examined and modified. The wide flanks of major carriageways, for instance, were places that itinerant peoples set up semipermanent housing. This was a commonly accepted use of this space before the ground plan of enclosure came to dominate the countryside. At these roadway sites, many sold produce outside of any connection to an officially sanctioned town market. These areas came to be recoded as black market sites. An act of enclosure would have resulted in the erasure of these sites, for many acts not only modified the unenclosed land in question, but included in their documentation the extensive reterritorialization of the roadways in the surrounding area. The fencing of a particular plot of land also brought with it the fencing in of open, roadside spaces. After 1790, the flanks of all new roads were uniformly narrowed to discourage “vagabonds,” “gypsies,” and “wastrels.”32 The formerly isolated, nucleated local village became part of an emerging international market. This meant that the distance separating these nucleated villages—which dominated England’s topography before enclosures— was becoming connected also to the creation of a new colonial world map. The “waste” lands—now considered to be uncivilized areas—had largely been eliminated from the lowland areas.33 This eradication of the lowland


wastelands occurred during the wars with France, and the conquest of these wastes became synonymous with the conquest of France itself. It was at this time, in 1803, that Sir John Sinclair equated the eradication of foreign invaders to the eradication of the Commons: “We have begun another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country. . . . Why would we not attempt a campaign against our domestic foe, I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the Kingdom? . . . Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.”34 The control of “waste” at home reflected the desire for national domination of land abroad.35 Earlier in 1659, Adam Speed in his Adam Out of Eden argued that there was plenty of uncolonized, open land still left in England, and that there was no need to go to Jamaica to find more land to colonize.36 The greatest waves of parliamentary acts of enclosure were coterminous with the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars37: 38 percent of these acts occurred between the years 1755 and 1780 and 43 percent between 1790 and the mid-1830s.38 Numerous “surveys” of the land were published, such as Edward Hasted’s twelve-volume The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, compiled between the 1750s and the 1790s. Hasted’s survey is a scrutiny of “licit” and “illicit” sections of the land: “[East Kent] is a remarkable, beautiful and pleasant [area], being for the most part an open champaign country, interspersed at places with small inclosures and coppices of wood, with towns, frequent villages and their churches, and many seats [gentry and bourgeois mansions], with their parks and plantations, throughout it. The face of the whole of it is lively, and has a peculiar grace and gaiety.”39 Opposed to this graceful topography stands the unenclosed land of Stelling Minnis, yet to be colonized by the middle class: “There are numbers of houses and cottages built promiscuously on and about the Minnis [i.e., Common waste and Downs], the inhabitants of which are as wild, and in as rough a state as the country they dwell in.”40 Many advocates of enclosures during this time raised the stakes of an enclosure act to the level of national security. Securing an act of enclosure meant that one secured a sizeable portion of the land’s topography against potential invaders, for an enclosure brought with it the fortifications of erected hedges, fences, stone walls, and trenches. Invasion arose as a growing concern, for this was a decisive time for the British Empire in terms of the expansion of its dominion, specifically in relation to the lengthy and substantial transformation of the East India Company from a merchant apparatus to an institution of political sovereignty.41 Preparing to make its assault against the unenclosed multitudes of far-flung lands, England


hardened its campaign to eradicate the unenclosed multitude within its domestic borders. IV. Daniel Defoe and Arthur Young: The Panoptic “General View” Documentation surrounding the subject of enclosure is substantial, and the continuing concern for a proper spatialization of land in our own time shows that an ontological dread of unenclosed land can by no means be dismissed as a phenomenon of the past. Although the debates for and against enclosure have been active from the time of the first enclosures, with many books, pamphlets, treatises, and agricultural manuals appearing steadily from the sixteenth century onward, the two most influential periods in terms of published material are the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The twentieth century in particular is the period that began to concentrate with “scientific” precision on questions of national agriculture and the enclosure movement. The century itself can be divided into two energetic periods, with a number of foundational texts written just before World War I, and a great deal of work being published consistently since World War II—making the study of agriculture a discipline in its own right. That most of the texts published in the first period appeared during the era of national anxiety leading up to World War I—which was also a time when England was facing heavy criticism against its imperial presence abroad— cannot be disregarded as a matter of coincidence. Nor can the vast production of texts since World War II be considered coincidental, this later period being a time of spreading anticolonial activity—with nation after nation gaining its independence from England and France. When the logical imperatives informing the possession of land abroad were beginning to unravel, concern arose for developing a precise and positive meaning for the soil within England’s national borders. While the old justifications for “enlightening” the peripheral possessions of various territories in the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and elsewhere came to be challenged, attempts were made in the imperial polis to discover the truth (in the sense of veritas) of England’s land. If such a positive source of true land could be found at home—and made symbolically to represent the foundation of empire— then this phenomenalist meaning could be extended to land reformation elsewhere, hence justifying the imperial project on a global scale. The positive presence of true land in the polis could serve as the source of adequation for all other land masses, and applied morally to the chaotic, irrational land of the other.42 What we see unfolding in the historical documentation is an England increasingly establishing its identity in terms of a disciplinary relation to the


land, with that relation manifesting itself especially on an agricultural register: the adoption of new methods for farming; the breeding of better livestock; the constant invention of better-shaped plows; the increase in crop rotation from two-field to five-field systems to produce a higher yield. The titles alone of many of the books and articles published from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries give an indication of the new development of this disciplinarity, which valorized greater efficiency and a precise knowledge of the land itself: The English Improver Improved (1652); Observations on the Present State of Waste Lands of Great Britain (1773); Enclosures, A Cause of Improved Agriculture, and of both Private and National Wealth (1787); Elements of Practical Agriculture (1838); and many others. The eighteenth century in particular saw dozens of volumes spotlighting particular counties, such as General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hereford, with Observations on the Means for Its Improvement. These agricultural “general views” covered every county. It must be remembered also that most of the authors of agricultural “improvement” texts from the seventeenth century onward were gentry who wished to see their estates grow.43 This is a history written by the dominant culture, in other words, in direct reaction against the land’s inhabitants—the multitudes of dispossessed farmers and laborers who performed much of the agricultural work that went into the making of the British nation and Empire. Their view of the land, like Hegel’s view of history, is the view from above. In their attempt to convince the public of the rationality of their campaign by constant reference to a moral principle of efficiency, they reveal the extent to which their view is informed by the metaphysical logic of individualism and mastery, as opposed to the inhabitants’ view from the standpoint of “being there.” Thus, the large-scale dissemination of these “general views” is the inauguration of panoptic land: the installment of a general economy of land administered from above, by a centralizing agricultural and political authority. Panoptic land—like the creation of a system of disciplinary surveillance that creates “docile bodies,” as diagnosed by Michel Foucault—is a land broken down, individuated, and rearranged in order that it become more obedient and useful. The age of parliamentary enclosure discovers the land as object and target of power. The land becomes subject to an overseeing panoptic principle of efficiency—the impulse of which we saw at the turn of the eighteenth century in Defoe’s survey from atop the hill. The disciplining “general view” seeks to increase the force of the land in agricultural and economic terms of utility. At the same time this disciplinarity implements heavy restraints on the land by diminishing “errant” forces (less productive Common land, “wasteful” itinerant movement between fields under the former “strip” farming methodology, the multitude of commoners and vagrants seen as a threat by the nation-state)


to maintain political obedience. By bringing together an increase of production with a simultaneous decrease of so-called errant movement, panoptic land couples an “increased aptitude” with an “increased domination.”44 In the eighteenth century, England led the world in grain yields, 50 percent above any other European country.45 The Encyclopaedia Britannica boasted that “Britain alone exceeds all modern nations in husbandry.”46 The scientific justification of increased yields, buttressed by the encyclopedic confirmation and dissemination of the “knowledge” of this increase, further strengthens panoptic land by establishing it empirically as the panoptic measure of Western husbandry: English land becomes the agent in a panoptic disposition of the growing international land “evolution” of the “agricultural revolution.” In addition to the enclosure of the open fields, England’s agricultural revolution involved the amalgamation into large farms of small peasant holdings (referred to legally as “engrossment”). This created a landless class of wage laborers: farm hands and itinerant craftsman, some of whom eventually became factory workers after the beginning of the industrial revolution. Those that could not produce yields sufficient to the standards of the new panoptic measure were incorporated in the panoptic structure of factory production. Panoptic land, however, has less to do with the search for methods of “scientific advancement” and “historical progression”—even though these are the terms ceaselessly invoked in historical analyses of the enclosure movement—than with the installment of a new oligarchical strategy of social control and political domination. The creation of a three-tiered class structure bears out this assumption. Wage laborers, unlike their village laborer predecessors, became subject to market fluctuations—experiencing a drop of 50 percent in real wages between the years 1500 and 1640. And unlike village laborers, wage laborers could not rely on the produce from Common land as an alternative means of support.47 This phenomenon, which was commonly referred to as the “disappearance of the small farmer,” was at its most concentrated at the height of England’s imperial order in the Victorian era: “By the nineteenth century, the landlord’s mansion was lavish, the farmer’s house modest, the labourer’s cottage a hovel.”48 In order to unleash the land from the derivative methodologies that currently construct its being, we need to do away with the entire tradition that accepts the historical progression of land reformation as self-evident and apolitical. The very terms invoked to justify this view, such as “efficiency” and “yields,” are irreducibly related to a space of privileged invisibility (invisible in the sense that the author of “general views” is presumed to be unbiased, disinterested, and therefore free from any ideological motivation) inaugurated by a panoptic apparatus of production that operates by hiding its relation to power and imperial control.


In 1956, an official “Advisory Committee” of scholars from a dozen of England’s leading universities was formed for the purpose of initiating an extensive series of works designed to address the history of the English landscape in terms of its agricultural evolution. The series was titled The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Ten years later the first in the Agrarian History series was published: volume IV, which covered the years between 1500 and 1640. The same year W.E. Tate published his seminal text The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movement, which offered an alternative view of how enclosures erased what Tate represented as a more egalitarian mode of existence in the communal form of the English village community. Since then, the amount of scholarly publication on the subject of the land and agrarian history has increased exponentially. Two contestatory views toward the efficacy of enclosures have prevailed from out of the discursive foundation laid by these twentieth century scholarly works: the first arguing that enclosure destroyed England’s golden age of village life, the second that it was the revolution that enabled England to advance far ahead of her competitors. The general consensus, however, even amongst critics of enclosure, is that the enclosure movement was responsible for “greater productivity.” The critical Victorian scholar Toynbee wrote: “the destruction of the Common-field system of cultivation; the enclosure, on a large scale, of Commons and waste lands; and the consolidation of small farms into large . . . brought, without doubt, distinct improvement from an agricultural point of view. [Enclosure] meant the substitution of scientific for unscientific culture.”49 His view of enclosure as a “scientific improvement” continues to this day, with contemporary historians such as Clay Wilson, who argued in 1984 that enclosure was necessary if any form of advancement was to have occurred: “the land must be freed from communal restrictions that h[o]ld back the numbers of livestock and technical improvements. The purpose of enclosure was to do precisely this. . . . Yields may have been nearly doubled.”50 Such talk of “freeing the land” clearly continues to be persuasive. Yet, from outside the ideology of enclosure, from the position of inhabitancy, we would no doubt find such a definition of freedom to be peculiar, if not egregiously deceitful. It is time to wrest the phrase “high yield” from its standing within the discourse of scientific improvement, and to see it instead as code for the eradication of the resistant potential of the earth, as the shift from the communal exchange-limit system to the imperial stockpiling economy that erases an inhabitant’s unconditional right to a free and open land. It is difficult to do this, for most of the major fortunes in postRestoration England and the eighteenth century were made from such investments in enclosing, engrossing, and “improving” the land.51 And most of the fictional versions of the men who made these fortunes, men


with whom we are to identify—such as Samual Richardson’s Mr. B., Henry Fielding’s noble Squire Allworthy, and the rational, moral center of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas Bertram—were patterned on these enclosing landlords. It is also not solely a matter of the domestic colonization of dispossessed commoners; many of these estate empires, like Squire Allworthy’s, were built with funds acquired from the commoners of distant colonial possessions. English planters in the British West Indies, for instance, gained a substantial number of farm holdings abroad by 1713, enabling them, like the old manorial barons, to buy large portions of land back in England.52 Wilson’s characteristic representation of “freedom” reveals the stakes involved in the attempt to formulate the meaning of England’s relationship to its land. The question of a particular kind of freedom underlies the entire metaphorical economy of terms deployed to describe the land since the eighteenth century: productivity, growth, efficiency, scientific advancement, consolidation, and improvement. “Freeing the land” becomes England’s contorted responsibility to its land in the colonial era. In such evolutionaryinformed works as Wilson’s the character of this freedom is accepted and never fundamentally questioned. If, however, we shift our stance to look from below, from the logic of inhabitancy, we can extract the word freedom from its containment within the discourse of enclosure. “Freeing the land” constitutes a recoding of the land according to a technical ground plan. This new essential relation to the technological has been largely ignored in enclosure research. This becomes especially apparent when one reads through the illustrious seven-volume Agrarian History of England and Wales, which traces the history of the land in England from “prehistory” to 1939. In volume IV, the authors teleologically remark upon the first attempts of the culture to immerse the land in technical production, the “science” of which they treat as an inchoate novelty at this early stage in the “development” of agriculture. By the time the Agrarian History reaches the turn of the twentieth century, however, discussion of the land is thoroughly absorbed by questions of a technical nature: “Higher yields of corn crops were limited by the capacity of the straw to stand under an extra weight of grain; farmers on fertile soils used fertilizers and manure cautiously in order to avoid laid crops in wet seasons, and the extra cost of harvesting them. One of the objectives of plant breeders at this time was the production of varieties with stronger straw; by 1910, R.H.Biffen . . . had bred Little Joss wheat, which combined a resilient straw with considerable resistance to yellow rust.”53 In 1838, the Royal Agricultural Society was founded in order “to promote the application of science and technology to the practice of farming.”54 The society awarded prizes to essays most ingenious in finding new and improved farming techniques. The logic of this


technologization of the land continues to go unchallenged, as made evident in the conclusion to volume VI of the Agrarian History. This volume analyzes the years between 1750 and1850 (those most crucial in terms of the amount of enclosures, and the movement itself ), and ends with the following resolution concerning enclosure: “[D]espite the time-lag that technical shortcomings imposed on the reaping of its full advantages, it cannot be doubted that for a substantial proportion of farm acreage enclosure provided the essential modern framework within which more scientific and machine-based cultivation could eventually succeed.”55 The jurisdiction of this technical attitude in terms of “improvement” is ubiquitous. The argument is always that the introduction of a technical worldview enabled Great Britain to begin improving farming techniques, which meant increasing the degree to which the land could produce. Increase in productivity meant an increase in the stockpile of the nation’s resources. Calculating the measure of “meaning” and “superiority” was hence directly proportionate to calculating the level of the stockpile. We see this view espoused in G.E. Mingay’s The Agricultural Revolution (1989): The old pull of the London market, which had long affected farmers in the home counties and East Anglia, as well as specialist producers farther afield, was supplemented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the new influence of expanding ports and centres of commerce and industry in the midlands and north. At the same time, farming necessarily became more closely influenced by market fluctuating, trends in imports, and movements in prices. In the long term the gradual shift towards higher consumption of meat and dairy produce influenced the expansion of livestock production and dairying, while the growth of large urban markets also encouraged more specialist production of market-garden produce.56

In the formation of land as territorium, the London market serves as the land’s center of convergence; the land, to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis, becomes an idea of the town, predetermined by shifting market relations of supply and demand.57 We see how “freeing the land” results in a tighter control of the land, one that expresses the shift from a setting-in-order that takes care of and maintains to an ordering that challenges the land’s “potential” to cope with market fluctuation. Concealed in the new “specialist production” lies the idea that farming has started to become an industry for the production of commodities, rather than agriculture based on subsistence. The move from subsistence to commodification signals the shift from an exchange-limit relation to a stock-threshold organization. The land becomes subject to a quota, to an expected level of “output.” James Caird, a respected authority on agriculture in the nineteenth century, argued for what was referred to as “farming high,” that is, farming as intensely as


possible to produce the greatest yields.58 The new philosophy was to produce as much as possible. After the seventeenth century the land is dominated by this inexorable mandate, and the extent to which the land could produce guaranteed in turn its positive meaning. A new land comes to presence in the developing gridwork of commercial enterprise: the panoptic land of capitalism that establishes the possibility for the industrial revolution. A counterpart to the dread of uncultivated or unchallenged land now appears: the dread of distance. In seeking to expand itself, the new panoptic gridwork also has its goal in the reduction of distance: the bringing together of what the “specialist produces farther afield.” This creation of connections across distances sets in play a new economy of reality, concentrated on the “pull of the London market,” which acts as the distribution center of panoptic land. This centralization of difference in the polis seen from the perspective of scientific advancement is taken as the freeing of the land to its “true” potential. Yet what this point of view passes over is a concealed tension in the land that I want to mention here briefly before addressing it fully at the end of the chapter and in relation to the works of E.M. Forster in the last chapter. The growing demand to lay down a connective gridwork on the land, with the new anxiety that open spaces escape its totalizing net, suggests that the land contains within its essence the devious element of distance, a dynamic in operation of a kind of “holding back” that the new technical worldview desperately needs to overcome. Under the technical worldview, this withholding aspect of land’s being must be coded as negative, and then overcome if the land is to be properly “freed.” Freedom, under the economy of market relations, means increasing the possibility of consumption for the “great mass of consumers.” The land becomes an entity to be devoured. It is now entirely handed over to the “mechanized food industry.”59 And as with the erasure of the inhabitant in favor of the enclosing individual, the land becomes a reified entity solely existing to be at the service of the national subject, the subject that gives the land meaning through the increasing of its productive potential in a connective gridwork that attempts to contain distant sites of “openness” that carry in them the dangerous potential of an uncertain and unsupervised alterity. Although there are numerous writers in the eighteenth century who wrote on the subject of enclosure and the land, the period might be said to be framed by two authors in particular: Daniel Defoe and Arthur Young. Defoe’s Tour through the Entire Island of England, published in 1721, provides the historian with meticulous detail concerning the early eighteenth-century English landscape. As we have seen, Defoe, like Robinson Crusoe, espoused total enclosure of the land. He remarks favorably? throughout his tour on those areas of England governed efficiently and producing great yields. The Tour was published in four volumes, from 1724 to 1726. It is divided


into thirteen routes or “Letters.”60 It is among the first of those works from the period of the late Restoration and early eighteenth century that may be said to be the beginning of the modern travel narrative and tourism in general. Although there exist a few narratives written earlier than this period—such as William Harrison’s Description of Britain (1577), William Camden’s famous Britannia (1586), and Robert Blithe’s The English Improver (1649)—the 1690s onward saw a number of “journeys through England” reach the market. Camden’s Britannia was reissued in 1695; John Stow’s Survey of London came out in 1693; a collaborate work called Magna Britannia appeared in many volumes from 1720 to 1731; John Macky’s A Journey through England appeared in three volumes from 1714 to 1723; and Celia Fiennes made a number of journeys at the end of the seventeenth century (although her Journeys remained in manuscript until 1888). As a “great novelist,” however, Defoe is considered to have written a travel narrative containing more literary merit than the others. As an early eighteenth-century traveler/historian, Defoe is concerned with dispossessed commoners only insofar as they pose a threat to the expansion of the enclosure movement. Nevertheless, their muffled yet spectral presence when they do appear in his text is important to note if we are to retrieve their history from the official guardians of the state. In his sixth tour (“The West and Wales”) Defoe devotes a short paragraph to a dispute between an enclosing landlord and the poor inhabitants affected by the enclosure: At Tring . . . is a most delicious house, built á la moderne, as the French call it, by the late Mr Guy, who was for many years Secretary of the Treasury, and continued it till near his death. . . . There was an eminent context here between Mr Guy, and the poor of the parish, about his enclosing part of the Common to make him a park; Mr Guy presuming upon his power, set up his pales, and took in a large parcel of open land, called Wiggington-Common; the cottagers and farmers opposed it, by their complaints a great while; but finding he went on with his work, and resolved to do it, they rose upon him, pulled down his banks, and forced up his pales, and carried away the wood, or set it on a heap and burnt it; and this they did several times, till he was obliged to desist. After some time he began again, offering to treat with the people, and to give them any equivalent for it. But that not being satisfactory, they mobbed him again. How they accommodated it at last, I know not: I mention this as an instance of the popular claim in England; which we call right of commonage, which the poor take to be as much their property, as a rich man’s land his own. (T 349)

Reading this passage, one would think initially that Defoe had no opinion on enclosures, or that, as a disinterested historian of the English landscape, he was trying to remain neutral. His readers, however, would be familiar


with the text of Robinson Crusoe, and the way Crusoe benefits from enclosures. And it is only six pages before this mention of the commoners that we read about the view from the hill. A reading of the Tour does not have to be extensive to show that Defoe’s imperial eye tends to favor the new breed of individuals who make up the wealthy entrepreneurial class. His politics does not fall on the side of communal property. The language at the end of this passage suggests Defoe’s awareness of the growing conflict between the sovereign individual and the crowd. Mr. Guy is portrayed as the one to compromise by “offering to treat the people,” only to be “mobbed again” for his efforts. “Mob” is a term that appears frequently throughout works of literature in the eighteenth century to represent the inhabitants—an indication of the extent to which the very idea of inhabitancy is erased. That its frequency remains largely unquestioned is indicative of the extent to which it too has been buried, like the term “yield,” within the discourse of an eighteenth-century cultural logic of panoptic disciplinarity. The community of cottagers and farmers exist in the text as a vague multitude of unnamed commoners, as a potentially dangerous mass. Far from being neutral, the passage is written (as is the entire work) for a particular audience. This representation of the commoners serves as a cautious marker for the enterprising gentleman who, if he is to cultivate his land from a privileged position of “disinterested” efficiency, will have to concern himself with territorial disputes. And the lesson to be learned is the following: when disputing with commoners over land rights, an immediate solution may not prove “satisfactory” to the mob. The passage thus raises the vital question of who has claim to land. For Defoe, it is decidedly those individuals who, informed by a puritan work ethic, find the means to improve production and the capital stock of the nation. The trajectory of Defoe’s first letter (a tour through East Anglia) is very revealing of the way he constructs the meaning of the English landscape. It is representative of his letters in general. He opens the letter with a reference to the metropolis of London, the point of departure of his travels. As discussed briefly in chapter one, the metropolis serves as the starting point and central circuit for a discursive construction and colonization of land throughout the countryside. Defoe marvels at the increase of economic and social activity in London, valorizing it for its ability to raise the social status of the citizenry living in peripheral villages: “This increase causes those villages to be much pleasanter and more sociable than formerly” (T 49). London’s “surplus” of “excellent conversation” and a “pleasanter sociability” gradually influences and ultimately moralizes the surrounding villages (T 49). The metropolis of London “circuitry” operates as an expanding apparatus of capture by bringing the surrounding landscape within its new commercial and middle-class activity. Even an undeveloped plot of land


that has yet to reflect the presence of London carries the potential and even has its telos in becoming enclosed in the near future within London’s circuitry.61 Defoe’s Tour indeed proves that the land has become the “idea of the town,” to recall Deleuze and Gauttari. Enclosure became the means not only for London to expand its circuitry, but for generally isolated areas of the countryside to meld into a larger, national apparatus. Before the civil war period, there was relatively little communication and no cohesion between the countries surrounding even London.62 Areas of the country—villages, hamlets, small communities— were sharply localized. They were still referred to as pays, indicating their distinctiveness and distance from one another, as if they were separate countries. It was not until the period of enclosure, along with the building of railways, that a significant homogenization of these regions occurred.63 Defoe’s narrative consistently overdetermines the utility of an area. In the parish of Barking he notes that once the lands surrounding the parish were “taken in” (i.e., enclosed) they were much “improved” and began to produce tithes above 600£ per annum (T 50). He then shifts his attention to another side of the county just beyond the parish and notes: “this side of the county is rather rich in land, than in inhabitants,” hinting that such a rich section of the land lies ready and even calls for more development. Defoe’s suggestive remarks concerning land development are a constant theme in the tours, and this is made more evident when traveling to the east of the above-mentioned area he judges what he considers to be an unappealing expanse of land being occupied by a smaller number of farmers: “the country is justly said to be both unhealthy and unpleasant. However the lands are rich . . . and it is very good farming in the marshes, because the landlords let good penny-worths, for it being a place where every body cannot live, those that venture it, will have encouragement, and indeed it is but reasonable they should” (T 51). This could very well be the description of a group of colonial adventurers having decided to establish a settlement at the edge of the new world “wilderness,” or a collection of agents working for the East India Company setting up a camp outside of eighteenth-century Bombay. In this passage Defoe comments upon the steadfastness of the farmers for “seeing it through” in such unpleasant surroundings. Unlike Joseph Conrad—who spent a good deal of his life at sea—Defoe was not a circumnavigator of the globe. Even though he was the author of texts such as the History of Pirates, New Voyage Round the World, and even a narrative about an expedition to the moon called The Consolinator, his physical travels were confined within the island of Great Britain. In reading his tours, however, we see that traveling beyond the limits of English soil was unnecessary when it came to finding material for his need to fabricate “savage” territories for his fiction. In his mind, the many “unhealthy” sites


of marshes, Commons, open fields, fens, and moors were in themselves as “uncivilized” as any South Sea island. Londoners in general regarded the northern sections of England and much of Wales to be primitive. Early Scottish enclosures were considered to be “islands of improvement in a sea of open-field.”64 In his tours, Defoe earmarks certain areas of the country, such as the marshland called the “Three Hundreds,” for their potential to cause illness in the constitutions of London gentlemen (T 53). England was thus, in Defoe’s mind, still plagued in the early eighteenth century by the dis-ease of uncultivated, unenclosed land. And as an itemized list of spaces within the territorium upon which construction, settlement, and installation are possible from those places where they are impossible, his Tour stands as a colonial document in the fullest sense of the term. At the other end of the eighteenth century stands the political agriculturalist Arthur Young, the single-most prolific author to write on the subject of enclosure. There was no one else in the late eighteenth century who pushed more strongly for the enclosure movement. In 1767, he began the first in a series of tours of England, later publishing a number of volumes of these tours, which were to be widely read not only in England, but throughout Europe.65 From 1758–1817 he published more than two dozen books and countless articles on religion, politics, economics, national defense, and the constitution of the British Empire. From 1784 to1815, he edited a monthly periodical that contained many articles that he wrote concerning trade, foreign and domestic commercial policy, the local and state administration of enclosures, and the need to increase the flow of paper currency. Political authorities found his works to be important reference materials. His published tours through France (1787–1789), for example, served as “useful information” to British authorities who were interested in the French and their relation to the land during the Napoleonic Wars.66 In 1793, Young was appointed secretary to the Board of Agriculture. This was the same year that the Board was established, and the position gave Young more substantial political power to influence and promote the development of the land for an industrially growing England that would soon take its central place in the colonial world map. In fact, Young’s influence in the administration of the colonies was in some cases very direct. Working with the Court of Directors of the East India company, he arranged in 1798 to have a number of his books and pamphlets on husbandry sent to the East Indies on board company ships to be sold at the Bengal settlement and elsewhere.67 Ten sets of the Annuls of Agriculture were shipped over, four of which were sent directly to Baron Robert Clive in Mumbai, and the other six to the Marquis Wellesley.


He was heavily critical of mercantilism, and lobbied to have the East India company become a state-administered organization, and not a merchant concern.68 His answer to the problem of mercantilism in India and elsewhere was to institutionalize agriculture, which he considered to be the first indication of civilization, and the first art to be performed by humans: “For agriculture, in a word, as it is the most useful, so it appears to have been the first employment of man. Xenophon, in his Book of Oeconomics, bestows due encomiums on a Persian king, who examined with his own eyes the state of agriculture throughout his dominions. . . . And the famed author concludes another passage with remarking, that a truly great prince ought to hold the arts of war and agriculture in the highest esteem; for by such means he will be enabled to cultivate his territories effectually, and protect them when cultivated.”69 Cultivating the land is the first and most determining step in colonizing a territory. Young’s connection to the East India Company was only one among many. He held active memberships in over a dozen political organizations, including the Philosophical and Literary Society of Manchester, the Economical Society of Berne, the Imperial Economical Society, and the Patriotic Society at Milan.70 He was instrumental in convincing the parliament to pass massive acts of enclosure.71 He also kept company with some of the most notable social reformers of his day, among them Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. It could be said that Young’s view of an entirely enclosed England reiterates Defoe’s panoptic apparatus of Circuits. Elizabeth Hung, a Young scholar writing in the early twentieth century, notes that Young believed that it was important to show that a fundamental connection existed between the nation and how its inhabitants engaged the land: “Arthur Young was a nationalist. He saw England’s power built upon the solid foundation of her soil—its cultivation.”72 The essential connection Young draws between agriculture and the British Empire can be clearly seen in a number of his statements, such as the following from his Northern Tour: “But when we speak of the good of the state, it is necessary to be understood with some degree of precision. . . . There is an aggregate interest, which must also be attended to, which consists of two kinds, first the support of internal government and national works; and secondly, the power of the nation relative to her neighbours; that is, the possession of such a degree of power as may secure her independency in any wars which ambition or accident may kindle. . . . These aggregate interests . . . are but other names for the public revenue; it is that which sets in motion the whole machine of government. . . . Both public and private wealth can arrive only from three sources, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce. . . . Agriculture much exceeds both the others; it is even the foundation of their principal branches.”73 The agriculture Young has in mind is based on


enclosure. He argues in virtually all his works: “Inclosures raise rents; high rents make men industrious. . . . Everything must be turned to good advantage when high rents are paid; the farmer knows that everything must be profitable; and that [enclosures] renders them so.”74 Moreover, for Young, “Inclosures are the first foundation of a flourishing agriculture.”75 Young was also very concerned over the struggle for independence in the American colonies, insisting that an increase in production and cultivation were the ways to maintain control: “We should not conclude, because the vast territory of North America, at present, is in a great measure in a state of barbarity, that arts, sciences and empire cannot one day flourish there. All her barbarity will wear off in time, and those regions, which now are boundless forests, wastes, and wilds, will one day be peopled with flourishing cities, and adorned with beautiful cultivation; and possessing in all their brilliancy the arts, the sciences, and all the consequences of luxury and empire.”76 Young could very well be speaking of his homeland England; the language of “wastes,” “forests,” and “wilds” is the same terminology he and enclosure theorists of agriculture in general apply to sections of the English landscape in his other works.77 His approach in encouraging the English government and its citizens in particular (since this statement comes from a set of husbandry letters written for farmers and laborers) is to portray uncultivated segments of the land not as worthless, but as carrying great promise for future development. Land not taken in hand is teleologically coded so that it will always appear in (discursive) reality as either a potential or as the threat of a pure, chaotic savagery—but never as a phenomenon that may function according to a different logic. In other words, if this enclosing economy of reality is to work properly, it must precode or preaccomplish what has not yet been taken in by its machinery. The land must never have a value or a meaning other than the current value and meaning given by market relations. This teleological “preaccomplishment” of uncultivated land makes certain that a void never appears in the economy of the social order in power, for such a void would call into question the legitimacy of that order. This coding of the land beforehand as having its telos in the social order’s current system of utility marks the first step in a nationalist approach to the land. A significant step in nationalizing the land is to guard against alternative nations from forming—especially since many of the lands coming into possession lie at a great distance from England. This makes the unhindered control of land a matter of imperialism, in addition to being a matter of national interest. Young’s answer to the problem of keeping distant land in England’s dominion is not to use force, but to make this metropolis of colonial authority aware of the need to continue its close surveillance and control of cultivation and manufacturing abroad.78


The way to ensure this control of agriculture and the land of the colonies is to constantly produce more efficient means of refining the raw materials that the land offers, but to keep the means of refining located within the borders of the homeland, and the harvesting of raw materials at a distance. Young encourages the development of manufacturing machinery—“water machines,” “hand engines,” and “jennies” for spinning yarn—which employs British citizenry and increases the flow of production because machines are faster.79 But he locates the value of the colony to be in its ability to furnish raw material: “upwards of two-thirds of the whole cotton consumed is purchased from foreigners. . . . And this circumstance has incontestably proved, that nothing is wanted but a fine raw material, to fix in Great Britain, for ever, a decided pre-eminence in the manufacture of muslins.”80 In this way the periphery of empire becomes part of the imperial order, but only on a subordinated register; the colonies are cultivated (and in this sense partially “civilized”), but cultivated in such a way as to ensure that they remain “unrefined.” They become part of the imperial order of truth (veritas), but they still keep, in the hierarchy of truth, a certain degree of their innate “falseness.” They are kept standing, as Heidegger phrases it in the Parmenides, but not standing high (P 44): “I have before examined the importance of keeping the inhabitants of colonies absolutely without manufactures; because, as the most essential independency consists in the possession of agriculture and manufactures, and as most, if not all colonies, must possess the first, it is therefore highly requisite to keep them from the latter. . . . A people circumstanced as the North Americans would be, if such a system was fully and completely executed, could not possibly even think of withdrawing themselves from the dominion of Britain.”81 One can easily recognize the extent to which Young’s advice continues to inform the current twenty-first–century divide between the “developed” Northern and Western and the “underdeveloped” Southern and Eastern sections of the planet.82 Like Crusoe—who felt that his enclosure of the island was the true way to make manifest the presence of “divine Providence” that was always there but furtively waiting under the soil until it was handled properly—Young felt that his constant and detailed attention to the land could be reliable only if it flowed “from a Christian resignation to the Divine Will.”83 This religious attenuation he applied not only to himself but to anyone who was to work the land “properly.” In Young’s mind, the landlord, the laborer, and the farmer should all be connected through a Christian worship of the divine.84 In this tripartite relationship he brings together the bulk of English citizenry underneath the structure of a metaphysical ideal. Without this moral center to connect the three classes of citizens, who are to oversee the land in their different capacities, the structure begins to fall apart. Without


the proper “religious instruction” the “Common people” turn “idle,” “depraved,” and “licentious” (437). Finally, Young felt that a system of cultivation of the land based on enclosure was not only a matter of good economic production and marketing, and not only a religious right, but ultimately the manifestation of an organic truth: “And as I embraced agriculture not as an amusement, but a business, and with a fortune that would not allow me to be indifferent about profit, especially in every thing carried on in large, I sought after Truth, and tried a number of experiments merely to discover her; totally indifferent on which side I found her, and solicitous only to be convinced of the most profitable methods, in order to pursue them as worthy objects of my attention.”85 This “truth” of enclosure Young foresaw as taking dominion over the entire landscape of England in the form of large farms overseen by a select group of landlords: “Population in the British dominions cannot increase, without an increase of the quantity of food; but suppose the quantity is increased by means of a better culture, arising from a division of the country into larger farms.”86 He suggested that any landlord successful in enclosing a large portion of the land should receive a knighthood as reward.87 With Arthur Young, the land becomes the prison work house for the population, and today’s large farm agribusinesses have made his policies a widespread reality. V. The Material Mechanism That Holds It All Together: Adam Naming the Land What the history I have summarized tells us, therefore, is that the enclosure movement stimulated a transformation in the essence of the land on a number of registers: materially, with the erection of property barriers; economically, with the transformation of land into private property and the connection of yield to market structures; militarily, with the view of enclosures as the deployment of fortifications for purposes of national defense; scientifically, as a more efficient technical apparatus. But this tight control of the land, and the equally secure threading together of all these registers of meaning, could not have occurred without the help of a mechanism that would ensure the regulated relation between these sites. Such a mechanism would also have to ensure that one could oversee these relations in a precise manner, through recourse to a presumably objective mode of calculation. The danger was always that the former “openness” of a preenclosed landscape would slip through to disrupt the efficiency of the newly “freed” land (the positivistic freedom of increased productivity). And the disorganized nature of openness threatened to impede the accuracy of the new technical methodology.


Reflecting this anxiety over a means of controlling the land, agricultural and economic historians frequently allude to a frustrating lack of evidence in the pre-Restoration and preparliamentary enclosure period.88 Scholarly essays often open by addressing the problem of gaining access to information about the land: “Considerable difficulties confront the historian. . . . There are no comprehensive surveys of landownership” in the period before the Restoration and early eighteenth century.89 More specifically, they cite the shortcoming of the preenclosure period to be its lack of a functional “economic mechanism.”90 In his essay for volume four of the Agrarian History, Alan Everitt observes: “Closely connected with the increasing scale of transactions was the inadequacy of Tudor business methods in implementing them. For although by 1640 an elaborate code of custom had come to govern private bargaining, it was inadequate to contain its wayward tendencies. It was cumbersome, inflexible, and inexact. . . . A more carefully thought out system of regulations was called for; but it was not forthcoming.”91 Everitt’s construction of what he notices to be a lack in the open-field economy belies his mode of inquiry, which handles this lack as a failure—subsequently characterizing the open-field system as incapable of developing because it does not “understand” its own mechanical limitation. Blinded by his postenclosure problematic, Everitt does not entertain the possibility that this refusal of an economic mechanism to “come forth” may be purposeful. He reads it only as a sign of the system’s backwardness. Everitt’s (and other modern historians’) discussions of this “backwardness” gives us a clue to what can be said to be present after enclosure acts. It turns out that the judicial act of enclosure itself contained within it the much sought-after mechanism of control necessary for ensuring the ongoing relations between the various registers. The historian W.E. Tate points toward the creation of this mechanism in his examination of the “enclosure award”—the legal document that finalized on paper the transformation from an open to a closed system: The first purpose of the awards was to achieve and to record the change from the ancient methods of husbandry to the modern system of individual land ownership and cultivation. The awards, however, do much more than this. They are a valuable source of field- and other minor place-names. They record incidentally the courses of ancient highways and watercourses. The existence of footpaths and rights of way is evidenced by them. So are the courses and breadths of the main land drains. The liability to maintain these, and the ownership of fences and hedges are often recorded in these same invaluable documents. Titheable lands are often distinguished in them from lands non-titheable. (In many places the tithe award is less useful a source of information about tithe than is the enclosure award, since throughout whole counties more tithe was commuted under enclosure acts than under tithe acts.) They record allotments of lands for public purposes, and the endowments

the territorialization of land / 67 of ancient village schools and other charitable foundations. They contain much information as to the nature and distribution of land ownership and holding in rural England one to two centuries ago. They serve as ultimate evidence of title to no inconsiderable proportion of the countryside, from the rector’s glebe and the lord of the manor’s home farm, to the parish council’s “allotments” staked out on the site of the old parish gravel-pit.92

What we see here is that the act of enclosure introduced an extensive and meticulously detailed system of registry to the landscape of England. This registry marks the development of a new rigor in Adamic naming of the land that records at a capillary level minor place names, fields, footpaths, and the precise measure of land drains. The award overlays the landscape with a gridwork and a level of certainty previously unachievable. The award becomes the very ground of research for those attempting to construct the meaning of the land: the historian, antiquary, economist, administrator, social reformer, and so on. In some cases, the award document served as the founding charter of the modern village.93 Moreover, with each new act, multiple copies of the award were drawn up so that everyone from the enclosing landlord and the government “enclosure commissioners” down to the general public could have access to its information. Copies were sent to London for the commissioners and surveyors, to the public records office, to the ministry of agriculture, to the squire at the manor house, to the county records offices, and kept in parish registries for the parish council and the village community. Enclosure, then, does not only name the physical act of hedging in a plot of land and the recoding of that land along the enlightenment ideology of individualism. Enclosure—with its extreme attention to the need for written documentation and the creation of a massive archive—signals the beginning of the modern bureaucracy. The “enclosure award” document itself serves as the nexus for a vast network of increased discursive activity, with its detailed attention to the measurements of village environs, its extensive surveys of farmland, pastures, woods, and wastes; its use as an official touchstone for judicial disputes over borders and inheritance; its revered accuracy in delimiting “objectively” the territorialization of land under a specific name. As an officially sanctioned source of information, the material award inaugurates a new discourse of truth. This truth functions according to the logic of adequation, of veritas. The material award begins to serve as a scientifically verifiable solution to the problem of the meaning of land. Research binds itself to the “facts” found in the award, which become the ground for future discursive construction. The award consequently serves as an end point: the conclusion of a search process appearing in the form of an answer to a question, as with the teleological economy. The statistical reliability and subsequent interpretation of the award certainly is disputed by


many scholars, but these disputes are for the most part confined to questions of an ontic nature. They do not approach the award as an ontological entity. Moreover, for the award to achieve such a status of bureaucratic authority it must present itself as having achieved a certain level of certifiable “correctness.” The enclosure award is the coupled ontological and material site at which a new discursive reality is set underway. The award covers the land with a sheet of language. The land that is represented in the language of the award, however, is not the middle ground of Heidegger’s “earth.” The award presents itself instead as a solid foundation, a center that preexists subsequent structural formations. This can be attested to by recalling the rhetoric of enclosure that, as we have seen, pervades the many discussions concerning enclosure in the primary documents from the seventeenth to the twentieth century—from Defoe to Young, Thirsk to Yelling: enclosure always prioritizes metaphysical stability above relational stability; the state above the local; bordered settlements above itinerancy, transcendence above immanence. Consequently, the enclosure award—and by extension the act of enclosure itself—conceals the land, and the potential for approaching it as a differential middle ground constituted by immanent relations. In the wake of enclosure, cultural formations, historical shifts, and material transformations become entrenched as natural and thus all the harder to call into question. From 1750 onward there was greater and greater incentive to “keep account” of the land, especially with enclosure’s logical economy of increased commercialization and the need to attend to market movements.94 Enclosure led to a stricter surveillance of the land and the movement of people in general. Nomadic “drovers” who needed wayside pastures to stop temporarily to set up stands were coming under increasing scrutiny because of their “unofficial” status as traders: “The tighter administration of highways, the growth of enclosure, the development of toll bridges, and similar signs of the greater commercialism of inland trade and farming also made wayside pastures harder to find. By [the eighteenth century] rent payments for overnight halts were regular elements in the accounts of drovers.”95 Itinerant drovers were considered during this period of surveillance to be traveling illegally; even certain routes themselves were considered to be illegal. Over the course of two centuries, the award became the core of a new socioeconomic apparatus that gradually covered the land. Volume Six of the Agrarian History remarks upon the increasing richness of material, which describes the many regions of England in great detail.96 In addition, a considerable amount of mapping occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in part from the Royal Agricultural Society’s activities in giving


prizes for essays devising better agricultural techniques for specific farming regions.97 There was also a demand for the increased precision of measurement in the areas detailed by these prize essays; enclosure’s fundamental connection to measuring helped to turn what had consequently come to be considered “fuzzy” areas into sharply defined parcels.98 Coupled with the ideology of “improvement” this rage for mapping reflected an improvement in “rationality” as well, and indicated that national subjects were now relating to the land on a rational level.99 The scientific eye to detail, the desire to map, and the need to keep account were further buttressed by the land becoming soil: “The most striking difference between regional divisions in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century and those prevailing at the end of the eighteenth century is that the former are associated with traditional ways of farming, while the latter correspond closely with characteristics of soil.”100 The interest in soil ushers in a new attentiveness to seeds, chemicals, and “enhanced growth.” The precise scientific analysis of the soil becomes the basis of its cultivation. Scientific farming techniques, which have their basis in the desire to increase stock, replace the collective liminal economy of communal exchange. As opposed to local, differential village practices, areas become defined according to the grade of the soil, which can be classified in tables: The earlier divisions were broad, ill-defined and encompassed a great variety of local practices. What held them together was a strong sense of identity with a region, a common dialect, shared customs, vernacular styles of building, clothing, and decoration, peculiar implements, and indigenous manners of performing everyday tasks. The distinctive attributes of a region resided in the behaviour of its inhabitants. On the ground itself, the boundaries between one region and its neighbours were unstable and ephemeral. Later regional divisions, by contrast, were territorially more homogenous . . . and characterized by their uniformity of farming enterprises rather than by their folk ways.101

Maps of “soil regions” replace maps of farming communities. “Stratigraphical boundaries” reveal the new relevance of geography to farming.102 The mapping itself even reflects an overt sense of gaining mastery over the land. As farms dating from the late eighteenth century in the midlands were named after victories over the French and the acquisition of colonies overseas, now maps manifest a victory over the soil.103 This new concentration on the soil brings us to the logical conclusion of the ontology of enclosure. We see finally how this challenging the land has nothing to do with a genuine relationship between humanity and the land, with an affiliation based upon a solemn regard for how the land allows itself to be released. Neither, paradoxically, does it have anything to do with the agency of human beings, with whether the current state of relations


between people are just. With the turning of land into soil all questions concerning the welfare of human beings and the land disappear, and are replaced by a scientific discourse so attenuated that mastery itself stands as the sole consideration. As the core of this new bureaucratic apparatus of rationality, the enclosure award does not simply “take stock” of what already exists on the land, as if the land contained an inherent materiality that the award simply measures and stores as information. The award itself, and the discursivity it puts into play, is not a secondary, transparent designator operating in tandem with a more primary, essential phenomenon that we would call “the land.” The award is itself stitched onto the land. It becomes the ontological ground by which the land acquires meaning. The materiality of the land and the discursivity of the award cannot be separated: the surveyor was to proceed with his “true and exact plan and admeasurement of the lands. . . . These plans were to be verified by him on oath. He was to set down . . . the provisions made for highways, bridle roads, footpaths, any arrangements as to land drainage and a carefully worked out apportionment of the obligation of making, and future maintenance, of the boundary hedges and fences.”104 This concentration on precise measurement is only one component in the extensive process of seeing an enclosure award through to its conclusion. The typical enclosure process—from the initial stages of survey to the final award—took generally three years to be completed.105 The earliest awards were written on parchment rolls, and averaged thirty to forty skins of parchment. They present in detail the entire history of an enclosure act’s long arbitration, detailing “the proceedings of the commissioners from the beginning, when they took their qualification oaths, to the end, when they executed, signed, and sealed the award . . . [including] their numerous decisions and arbitraments.”106 Enclosure commissioners, along with the official land surveyors, were so in demand from the mid-eighteenth century onward (when thousands of acts were being passed each year), that they became something of a minor social class: “the enclosure movement provided much employment for surveyors but also created a class of professional enclosure commissioners who were respected in their spheres of influence . . . some . . . [becoming] nationally famous.”107 The cost of obtaining an enclosure was rather expensive, and a commissioner could make a substantial living off his fees.108 In many cases, farmers were heavily burdened by the expenses of enclosing their lands—which included the fees of the surveyors, the costs of erecting hedges and draining fields, in addition to legal fees—that most small farmers sold out in advance of an enclosure to avoid the expense.109 One might ask, at this point, if the formation of the enclosure award actually signals any substantial change in the meaning of the land, and


question if the older medieval “tithe” did not operate also along similar “discursive” and “accumulatory” lines. The form of taxation associated with the medieval tithe does indicate an essential connection to the land, but its connection has the character of what could more accurately be considered as “distant restraint”; it is not concerned with producing a knowledge about the land, nor with domesticating the land through the certainty of measurement and the demarcation of soil types. It is only concerned with the accumulation of funds, and cares less about how those funds are collected. The tithe “allows” the differences across the land to maintain a high degree of heterogeneity: open fields, undelimited pastures, wooded communities, village orders, indistinct parish boundaries, cottage settlements, large farms, and small farms alike. The collection of tithes does not depend upon a knowledge of the land, or that the land refashion itself in order to be “plugged in” to the rationality of enclosure, for enclosure demands that the land begin to display a meaning that is constant and universal. With enclosure, every quarter of the land must submit itself to the surveillance and statistical analysis of the bureau of the commissioners. Enclosure depends upon this homogenizing surveillance of the land: “Nothing is more unprofitable than a farm in tillage in the hands of servants where the master’s eye is not daily upon them.”110 It was not so much the rise of print culture and the mass distribution of newspapers that became the mechanism for the creation of an “imaginary homeland,” as Benedict Anderson posits111; it was the enclosure award that served as the apparatus for the reformation of land as a universal, national idea. VI. Native Earth: The “Tenacious Cement” As seen throughout this chapter, this evolutionist, agrarian fundamentalist argument is based on the assumption that the open-field system is “not advanced enough” to be able to understand complicated economic mechanisms. There is indeed a certain form of constraint to open-field agricultural, but it is precisely in this constriction that this system shows us its power of resistance and sheltering. W.G. Hoskins gives us a different sense of the open-field system. He gives us a glimpse of the lost history of inhabitancy, a form of existence that granted another economy, another justice, another way of life. Consider the logic of his argument in favor of the open-field system: It is . . . almost impossible to convey to modern minds the full significance of common lands for the old peasant or thrift economy, which made use of all the resources of the neighbourhood, and was very largely self-sufficient. . . . It was this economy, which lived almost entirely off its own resources, that enabled the peasantry of all classes from the yeoman down to the cottager

72 / ecological and postcolonial study and labourer not only to stand up to the catastrophic rise in prices of the later sixteenth century but even, for many of them (labourers included), to improve their position; and it was this same economy which enabled the village to withstand for so long the disintegrating effect of parliamentary enclosure and not to collapse at the first blow. The tenacious cement that bound it together, compounded of local resources, of traditional knowledge of those resources, and skill in making use of them, of living in a place which had meaning and significance for its inhabitants, or work that still, for the great majority, completely satisfied their creative impulses, of governing themselves through their fellows—such a cement was not likely to give way at one blow, however formidable.112

What precisely is this “tenacious cement” that enabled the communal village to resist enclosure for so long? Is there any evidence of a “collective evaluation of the threshold” that would transform the exchange-limit dynamic of the open field to the stock-threshold assemblage of enclosure? Far from being “less advanced,” inhabitants maintaining an open-field economy show evidence of an awareness of the need for complex economic mechanisms to ward off the arrival of enclosures. An indication of this awareness of an other order lying on the horizon appears in Joan Thirsk’s description of the Northumberland community: In many pastoral districts where the commons were still plentiful, it was customary for whole communities to agree upon a change of land use from time to time. Alternatively, a man was permitted by custom to enclose and cultivate a piece of land from the common at any time, so long as the community was compensated by an equivalent piece of formerly enclosed land. In these ways a rough balance was always maintained between plough and pasture.113

The village in this example implies a knowledge of a threshold that should not be breached; it has an idea of the consequences of stockpiling, and consequently of how a system of enclosure would change the entire structure of the community. But how is this awareness acquired? Even though the villagers would most likely be aware of the enclosing activities of landlords in other areas, it would seem that enclosure must exist in some form or another from the beginning, otherwise there would be no way to mark the limit at which a communal exchange begins to form. But this vague “form” of enclosure is not the actual phenomenon itself. It hangs on the horizon as an idea necessarily entertained—“something real but nonactual,” to invoke Deleuze and Guattari.114 If there is no idea of enclosure, then there can be no communal economy either, for the collective effort of the community is defined by its constant passage to the penultimate limit, which is defined by the nonactualized idea of the ultimate threshold. The communal agreement on the frequent change of land use cited by Thirsk, and the complicated


annual reterritorialization of the land in the form of mead sticks, as we have seen elsewhere, is what wards off a monopolizing enclosure of the land. This warding off, though, cannot occur without an idea of enclosure, which sets in play the economy of a constant passage to the penultimate, heterogeneous limit. Inhabitants agree that the capitalist competition of individuals is what they do not want. Thirsk’s discussion of the balance maintained between enclosure and the open-field points to the shift between an exchange-limit and a stockthreshold system: And so long as the traditional system of husbandry was observed, the balance was not too rudely shaken even though the commons continued to undergo piecemeal enclosure. The rapid spread of enclosure in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, was accompanied by some radical changes in the traditional husbandry of the different regions. Enclosure liberated men from restrictions and communal regulations. They used this liberty to alter their system of husbandry. In some places the old equilibrium of plough and pasture abruptly disappeared. In the fifteenth century the conversion of arable to pasture was so usual after enclosure in parts of England that in the sixteenth it was popularly regarded as the inevitable consequence.115

Preenclosure existence is plainly a history lost to Thirsk. In her characterization of the conversion from the open-field system to one of enclosure, Thirsk undoubtably presents us with the “facts” of this change, but she does not consider her own postenclosure perspective, which is to consider communal regulations to be “restrictions” that keep men from being “liberated.” Limiting the complex coding of the village structure in such a way hinders Thirsk from seeing this structure as formulated precisely to hold back the very onset of a “liberation” that would set in place the logic of individualism. Her perspective narrows the vibrant aptitude of a structure—a tenacious cement—that must work constantly to maintain a practice of liberation entirely other than the form of liberation available to us today. “Liberation” defined as the freedom from open-field restrictions designates a license to begin stockpiling, and thus sets oneself off from the rest of the community, creating a self that stands in opposition to others. That this new form of liberation came to be seen as the “inevitable consequence” of scientific progression reveals the extent to which its inducement gradually covered the old form of cooperative liberation, making the latter appear to be the total opposite of freedom. “Use-rights” function along similar nonstockpiling lines. Grazing, gathering fuel, and collecting wood are more than added extras, as many historians have noted; these activities form the primary means for an inhabitant’s livelihood. From the standpoint of a postcommunal perspective, the


value of Common right has little meaning because it cannot be calculated as can a regular wage: it has no “exchange value.” Nor can the Common itself be assessed with regard to an ideal “amount” it can offer, to a level that it can produce. Such a method of measurement applies to an enclosed field designed to meet certain quotas. As J.M. Neeson has shown recently: “Common pastures were useful only if they were not overstocked, and the animals fed on them prospered only if their grazing was well regulated.”116 As a countermeasure to overstocking, villages agreed upon a practice of limiting the amount of animals each village could put out to pasture on the Commons. This restriction was referred to as “stinting” and was central to the preservation of Common land.117 Neeson shows the extent to which the value of the Commons has been “written out” through the course of the eighteenth century, so much so that contemporary enclosure historians have overlooked the possibility of an alternative logic of value.118 The inhabitant does not “own” this native ground, but the inhabitant must always be “sheltered” or protected by native ground in order to maintain its identity. The “freedom” of individuality, on the other hand, does not necessarily mean that the individual will receive such protection. The growing class of laborers from the seventeenth century on were landless and migratory—moving from village to town to city to find stable work. In addition to the individual who is lifted off the ground and stands over against it in a subject/object formation, enclosure lifts people off the ground in a second sense; it produces a landless laboring class.119 Enclosure, in fact, was directly connected to an increase in vagrancy in the late seventeenth century, with an army of 30,000 already roaming the English countryside.120 By the mid-eighteenth century less than 0.2 percent of the owners controlled 43 percent of the land.121 Unlike the inhabitant, the landless laborer was increasingly dependant on the landlord for work,122 making—like the centralizing power of the town—the individual laborer the idea of the landlord. This new form of subjectivity as the dependent laborer contrasts markedly with former village laborers, who seldom went beyond the borders of their local town, and sold what they harvested weekly at the nearest market.123 The difference between the old local laborer, and the dependant laborer is the difference between an inhabitant and a subtracted individual, where the worker becomes the slightly false or “inferior” self, and the landlord the superior or “true” individual. The difference is between masters and servants,124 for those on the margins of this new social hierarchy became known as “masterless men” subject to vagrancy laws that come into existence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. In response to the increase of people being uprooted, these laws legislated that all able-bodied persons lacking independent means must have a master; if not, they were legally “masterless,”


and hence vagabonds. The difference between masters and servants is therefore a difference between native ground and owned land—between a sheltering earth and an imperial territorium. We are dealing here—in all of these references to the presence of “local variation” and the absence of a “trend towards standardization”—with what we saw to be in operation in Heidegger’s earth. The open-field system may not have been the best of all possible worlds, with its social hierarchies, and exposure to danger in times of bad harvests. Yet it does offer food for thought in the world of enclosure that governs humanity’s consciousness. In the open-field system, land offers the potential “gift” of a nonviolent sheltering: “Earth . . . shelters everything that arises without violation.” The exchange-limit economy of sufficiency is a human comportment to the land based not on colonization, but on a relation that enables it to continue its withdraw from capture by an outside, national force. The one who inhabits this land does not approach it as if it were untamed, raw open matter waiting to be formed by an entrepreneurial hand. The meaning of the land lies not in the conception that it is an inert corporeality waiting to be given signification and rationality through enclosure. It exists as an active intensity, as that which refuses the imposition of a metaphysical center that overcodes its native measure with a universal order. Treating the other and her land as wild, savage, primitive, and exotic is only a derivative sign that something else has already occurred; it only hides a more originary, founding act of violence. It is the subtraction of the tenacious cement, of the active refusal offered by open, native land that marks the beginning of the violence of colonization and empire.


Chapter Three Problematizing Enclosure in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Our people have a strange itch to colonize America, when the uncultivated parts of our own island might be settled to greater advantage. —Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker

I. Introduction: The Landscape of Enclosure The previous chapter focused on a retrieval of different potentials for thinking the land in relation to the monumentalized historical discourse of enclosure acts. This history regards these acts as generated variously by the vicissitudes of a growing population, the advancements of technology, the ascendency of the free-willed individual, natural agricultural evolution, increased efficiency, and so on. Against this homogenizing positivist view, which at the same time both names and enables a colonialist approach to the land, Deleuze and Guattari, and on a different register Heidegger, attempt to release the land to think the measure of our relation to it from its varying geographical occasions. Instead of coding so-called primitive agricultural village communities as incapable of understanding the economic complexities of an “advanced” and enclosed commercial market, these “open field” communities enact a relation to the land that is just as complex—even more so because of their awareness of the constant threat of a “closed-field” economy lurking on the horizon. The communal, “openrelational” cultivation of the land was gradually concealed by acts of enclosure, which not only imposed a phenomenal gridwork across the physical land, but gave rise to a panoptic cultural ground plan of enclosure that came to inform the ontological register of reality as well. The purpose of this chapter is to trace how this gradual concealment played itself out in the literature of the period most decisive in the history of enclosure: the eighteenth century.


The easy manner in which literary theorists have accepted agricultural acts of enclosure is indicative of a deeper and more widespread disciplinary accommodation to an ontology of enclosure that unconsciously informs our access to works of literature—works epistemically conditioned by England’s changing relation to the land not only in the eighteenth century, but throughout the colonial era: the cultivation of “savage” land in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the indissoluble connection between the development of an English estate and the colonial appropriation of distant land in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the decisive property relations of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the critique of techno-imperial accumulation of land in E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and the parody of the British constitution of Indian land in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. That critics in general ignored for so long the presence of imperialist ideologies in literature suggests the degree to which the ontology of enclosure has disabled the exploration of issues of geography that are crucial to the themes of many literary texts. Edward Said makes this clear in disclosing the presence of an imperial geography in a seemingly provincial and apolitical work such as Mansfield Park, in which he thematizes Mansfield Park’s vital, yet overlooked, affiliation to the colonial possession of Antigua, without which the estate of Mansfield would not exist. In revealing these connections, Said demystifies the hidden but fundamental relation between British “civility” and the colonization that makes it possible. That these acts of colonization should remain hidden and unobserved by scholars for decades is astounding. Equally astounding, however, is the still obscured connection between enclosures and colonization. For, as we have seen in the previous chapter, it is the ontology of enclosure that generates this relation between civility and colonization. Mansfield Park’s owner, Sir Thomas Bertram, is an enclosing landlord; in addition to having enclosed a space of land on English soil, he has enclosed a distant geographical location as well. Antigua serves as the “uncultivated” and “empty” site that enables Bertram to establish, through the exportation of capitalist production, an empire in the English countryside. This integral relation of the land of the colonizer and the cultivation of the land of the colonized is an essential component of imperial expansion in general, and has been documented by a number of historians, sociologists, and economists. The postcolonial sociologist Kelvin Santiago-Valles writes: “During the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a handful of Western European, North American, and Asian interests started expanding and transforming their colonial and neocolonial systems by way of the exportation of capitalist production. Countries including Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Japan, and the United States moved in this direction because, among other reasons, of the industrial growth and the rise of monopoly capital taking place on their own soil.”1 Limited geography and heavy

problematizing enclosure / 79

industrialization in the colonizer’s home led, Santiago-Valles argues, “to the increasing need for new sources of cheap labor, new markets, and new sources of cheap raw materials” overseas.2 The imperial expansion of monopoly capital on distant soil frequently involved a massive transformation in the use of land in these territories. These land reformation projects are indications of the transplantation of the ontological economy of enclosure to foreign soil. Santiago-Valles describes this transformation in the specific context of the United States colonization of Puerto Rico: One of the major alterations that took place in the new Caribbean possession of the United States was the recomposition of the principle uses given to farmland. For example, between 1899 and 1919 the total area planted in sugarcane more than tripled. The available data also indicates that this particular farmland, as a proportion of all cropland, more than doubled. Tobacco cropland experienced an extremely dramatic growth during these first twenty years. There was a more than sixfold jump in absolute area and an almost fourfold increase in proportional area. . . . This transformation of agricultural production—together with the emergent controlling interests in banking, commercial, manufacturing, and utility sectors in Puerto Rico— was orchestrated by a tight network of monopoly corporations headed by the National City Bank and the Morgan Guaranty Trust.3

This “cultivation” of Puerto Rican land closely parallels the increase in “land productivity” that occurred on English soil during the two great waves of parliamentary acts of enclosure. As discussed in the previous chapter, Arthur Young’s concern that England keep a firm hold on the American colonies’ administration of land cultivation during its formative stages in the eighteenth century suggests that an ontology of enclosure fundamentally informed the colonies’ “improvement” of American land. Moreover, the logical economy of imperial land “engrossment” effectuated by monopolizing landlords in England reappears in the American imperial context with the monopolization of noncapitalist land relations in Puerto Rico by major U.S. corporations. As in the case of England, Puerto Rico underwent the conversion of a subsistence agricultural economy to a wage labor system that meant “depopulating the landscape of ‘native’ direct producers, repopulating parts of the land with U.S. capital, and relocating as many of these direct producers within a cheap, wage-labor market.”4 The characterization of unenclosed, noncapitalist land in England as “waste” and in need of “improvement” appears, as mentioned in Chapter One, in the Puerto Rican context as well, where the “impoverished” land is “rehabilitated” and turned into a “scenic paradise.”5 The transplantation of this ontology of enclosure is by no means exclusive to the context of Puerto Rico. In his analysis of colonial-capitalist


coffee plantations in Jamaica, James Delle reveals how the British “used space as a tool of exploitation.”6 Influenced by spatial theorists such as Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre, Delle develops a concept of space as an active force and a material tool deployed by the British in order to manipulate the land of Jamaica and bring Jamaican agriculture under the sway of commodity capital. He shows how the transformation of the agricultural landscape of Jamaica—the colonization by the British Empire of the Blue Mountain region with the cultivation of coffee plantations—was essentially related to the introduction of slave-labor, then wage labor, relations.7 Land became a “built environment,” constructed by the colonizers, who physically embedded it with the use and exchange values of a capital economy for “production, exchange, and consumption.”8 As we saw in the conversion of English land and citizenry, this transformation is twofold: first, the land in Jamaica was enclosed in the shift from subsistence agriculture to commodity capital; second, the inhabitants were enclosed in a hierarchical and oligarchical relation of imperial landlord to disciplined wage laborer. Similar colonial-capitalist transformations of the land occurred in Barbados, Mozambique, and throughout Africa. Gary Puckrein traces the development of Barbados into a “little England,” with the rise of a British “plantocracy” coming to own most of the land and the political reins of power: “Even in the most liberal of times a person had to be a white male of at least sixteen years of age and possessing ten acres of freehold in order to vote.”9 Walter Rodney, in his work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, reveals the extent to which family and kinship land throughout Africa came to be restructured according to the demands of capital development. In the specific cases of Senegal, Niger, Chad, and Southern Africa, the aggressive cultivation of land led to soil impoverishment and the general destruction of land and exploitation of cheap labor: “On the reserves of Southern Africa, far too many Africans were crowded onto inadequate land, and were forced to engage in intensive farming, using techniques that were suitable only to shifting cultivation. In practice, that was a form of technical retrogression, because the land yielded less and less and became destroyed in the process.”10 Each of these works, like Said’s, demystifies the obscured relationship between the rise of empire and the exploitation of land and labor. In overdetermining an economic focus and the ontic manifestations of capital, however, each inadvertently throw into darkness the larger question of the changing ontology of land. Part of what I have been arguing is that this fundamental ontology of enclosure—which history eventually hands down as self-evident—has prepared the way for theorists across the disciplines to overlook the indissoluble relation between human beings and the land, and for future generations of novelists such as Rudyard Kipling to write


disparagingly of broad open field spaces in the “foreign” geographical location of India. This ontology even has the effect of influencing authors who have been heavily critical of empire, such as Joseph Conrad, whose Marlowe can only describe the open fields of the African jungles in Heart of Darkness as “an empty land,” and whose individualist Axel Heyst in Victory literally cannot step beyond the enclosure of his outpost of empire into the uncultivated area of the island forest in the Malay Archipelago: “In front of Heyst the forest, already full of the deepest shades, stood like a wall.”11 Making such connections involves another part of my argument. These examples point to a blind spot in contemporary criticism: the failure of theorists to consider the presence of the enclosure/imperialism connection in earlier works of literature. A symptom of this is the lack of attention paid to the presence of imperialism in the eighteenth century. Some, such as Sara Suleri, have explored the influence of late eighteenth-century figures such as Warren Hastings and Thomas Burke. But to a large extent, connections to Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and so on, remain unexplored. The presence of imperialism and colonization is less openly apparent in English literature from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century than it is in the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, and Lawrence do not take up imperialism as a major theme, as do Conrad, Forster, and Kipling. The period, however, was a crucial one for laying the foundations of British rule at home and abroad, and the essential logic of imperialism is in fact present in these early novels. According to economics historian J.R. Wordie, some 24 percent of England’s land was enclosed in the seventeenth century, and 13 percent in the eighteenth century.12 How could this massive transformation in land relations not be connected to acts of colonization, or seen as having any affect on literature? It would seem that the presence of an imperial ontology is overlooked inasmuch as it appears not in the form of controlling land abroad (although that motif occurs in a few novels, such as Robinson Crusoe), but that it manifests itself in an emergent ideology of how the English relate to their land at home. And because the connection between the ontology of land and the logic of imperialism remains obscure, allusions to the land are considered to have nothing to do with colonization. Even though the connection between the enclosure of land at home and the enclosure of land abroad is not conspicuous at this earlier stage in the historical development of the British Empire, one can uncover a number of seemingly marginal references that furnish an indication of this emergent relation. Indeed, the presence of distant lands as sources of potential exploration and wealth was very much part of the literature of the Restoration. In Annus Mirabilis, for instance, Dryden wrote of London’s rising from its ashes to become an imperial city through winds of international trade along


the spice route. It must be remembered as well that the Restoration was also the first notable period of imperial expansion. After the East India Company was founded officially with Queen Elizabeth’s granting of its charter in 1600, the first major settlement of Chennai (then Madras) was established in 1639. It was then that the growth in settlements in India began to occur, with Charles II granting more than seven additional charters between the years 1661 and 1686, among them Mumbai (1668) and Kolkata (then Calcutta) (1686). Even though the East India Company would not become a state-run organization until 1773 (with an act of parliament that centralized the administration of all the provinces in the hands of the governor general and mandated that all civil and military affairs be subject to regular review by a British cabinet), the years between the Restoration and mid-eighteenth century laid the foundations for British rule and centralization of India. The Dutch had ousted the English from Sumatra, Java, and the other islands of the Eastern Archipelago in 1622, and continued to maintain their hold on sections of India, but the war of 1665–1667 eventually eliminated Dutch presence in India. Then in the mid-eighteenth century, the struggle with France (1745–1761) ended all French domination of India, making the British East India Company master of the field, and giving it the ability to monopolize the far Eastern trade from India to China. It cannot be emphasized enough how this emergent ontology is not merely a matter of historical curiosity—for economists, historians, literary critics, and others. As I have tried to show in the preceding chapters, enclosures are part of a newly developing ground plan that affects the full range of existence. Their emergence, for instance, parallels the widespread shift in thought itself—a shift that signifies “enlightenment.” Alternatively called the “Augustan Era” and the “Age of Reason,” the moment in history that underwent the greatest number of enclosure acts also was influenced heavily by the metaphysics of Newtonian science. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1686) encouraged the application of scientific and mathematical principles to the observation of previously unexplained natural phenomena.13 His work was devoted to solidifying the union of empirical observation to a mathematical methodology. The pursuit of “freedom” in an increasingly mathematical age—which brought with it a craving to measure space—went hand in hand with the turning of space into property. In his Second Treatise, John Locke argued for the creation of a unified commonwealth, believing “the great and chief end” of peoples’ alliance under a single government to be “the preservation of their property.”14 The constellation of these and other developments normalized the maturation of the enclosure movement and augmented its larger ontological ramifications. The effect that agricultural enclosure acts had was to


overcode the geographical surface of England and its colonies in order to formulate a land free of aporias and governed by a single—or what we now might term “agricentric”—principle of presence grounded in meticulous measurement and precise mathematical calculation. Open fields were erased in favor of a normalizing panoptic representation of the land, making the land conform to the larger imperial design. Thus England could dispose of its internal contradictions not only through logocentric acts of discursive homogenization, but also through the very material site of farming. Another very revealing way in which the ontology of enclosure prepared the way for future investigations into the nature of land is made manifest in the particular manner in which the discipline of literature developed an explicit methodology for discussing the land, but without broaching the question of the essence of land and the importance of the enclosure movement. This methodology could be referred to as “landscape criticism,” with literary investigations of land being almost exclusively the purview of “landscape” critics. Canonical works such as John Barrell’s The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, John Dixon Hunt’s The Figure in the Landscape, Edward Mallin’s English Landscaping and Literature, Jeffrey Spencer’s Heroic Nature, and James Turner’s The Politics of Landscape, to name a few, focalize literature’s ties to the land—but only in relatively apolitical terms. These works analyze, for instance, the evolving interests in gardening, the influence of Italian pictorial representations of rural scenes on eighteenth-century poetry, or the curiosity with the hermitage and hermits of poets intent on “discovering themselves” in the solitude of nature.15 In general, the approach of these theorists is to read the landscape—and the variety of ways that painters, gardeners, and landscapers (such as the eighteenthcentury’s “Capability Brown”) came to systematize the land—as little more than a wellspring from which the creative poet, playwright, or novelist can supplement their ingenuity, variety, and individuality. Among these works, the only one to mention the enclosure movement (though without thematizing its widespread influence) is John Barrell’s Idea of Landscape. One of Barrell’s insights is to notice that the words we have at our disposal to think the land (his term is “landscape”) force us to think of it in terms of formal patterns: “The words ‘landscape,’ ‘scene,’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘prospect’ . . . demanded, in short, that the land be thought of as itself composed into the formal patterns which previously a landscapepainter would have been thought of as himself imposing it.”16 This insight remains undeveloped by Barrell, but we begin to see that the very language made available to thought by landscaping theory sets in play the ideological process of organizing and coding the land before the possibility ever arises of thinking the land from its own occasion. Furthermore, the terms “landscape,” “scene,” “prospect” (the impact of which Barrell symptomatically


downplays in the above sentence) arise out of a hierarchical economy of domination. The framing being enacted by the novelist, gardener, painter, or the magistrate working at an outpost of empire involves an act of mastering—a will to power wielded from above in the act of conceptualizing (taming) the open/heterogeneous space below. In this sense, the act of mastering marks a “disinterested” subjective presence as well, one that stands as a supposedly unbiased “center-elsewhere” looking down upon the free play of the land below. The truth handed down in landscape painting and literature, then, is once again the truth of veritas: the imposition of a regime of correctness across what might be thought of as a sociocultural landscape: “To display a cultivated taste in landscape was a valuable social accomplishment. . . . [V]ariations in taste . . . are regarded by some novelists as legitimate indications of differences in character.”17 Barrell tentatively posits a change in the organizing impulse of poets in relation to their landscapes, seeing in particular the poems of James Thomson indicative of a transitional period.18 Barrell finds evidence for this transition in the writings of the landscape painter and gardener William Kent, who—active a few decades after Thomson—maintained that his organization of the land was in no way an opinionated act, but an improvement upon the order that arises naturally out of a landscape. The idea that structural improvements were a “natural act” can be seen equally in the philosophy of the landscaper “Capability Brown,” who acquired his name from suggesting whether certain tracts of land expressed “great capabilities” for enhancement. In the movement from Thomson to Kent to Brown, the current of thinking about organizing the land gradually erases the immediacy of the artist. The presence of a subject taking deliberate action to organize a territory comes to disappear almost entirely: structuring the land is no longer an activity imposed by an outside influence, but an expression of the organic in nature, the providential table, waiting to be realized by the artist. Two things are accomplished with this “erasure” of external or artificial persuasion: the imperial act of a subject’s overt domination of the land moves into hiding, and becomes more difficult to expose; but at the same time the subject gains in strength, for the artist who “correctly” discharges the latent structure of organization already present but concealed in the land is all the more admired for his “artistic talent.” The most talented artist is he who depicts this new law of nature to the best of his abilities. “Individuality” paradoxically names the drama of a competition focused on the desire to master one’s skill at producing the work that best enacts nature’s inherent harmony. This has the dual effect of establishing the human subject’s “unity” with nature’s hidden “essence.” No doubt this pursuit of nature’s symmetrical essence fueled the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ passion for an Edenic restoration.


Jeffrey Spencer’s Heroic Nature catalogues examples of a growing investment in poets to picture the countryside of England as the Garden of Eden. Spencer maintains that the craving for a former time of “simplicity”—a simplicity found in the rural landscape—is the response to the period’s growing urban complexity.19 This acceptance of rural simplicity in turn affects widespread cultural views of the land. Hence, the belief in an inherent symmetry in nature in its rural setting—which is made manifest by the skilled artist/cultivator who expresses his genius through the improving acts of erecting and thus revealing nature’s hidden symmetrical enclosures— comes to be accepted as the self-evident definition of “rural simplicity.” But this very definition of “simplicity” as “harmonious and natural structure” has very little to do with the character of rural landscape before the enclosure movement. In fact it is equally part and parcel of the “complexity” of commercial expansion at urban centers (enclosure as a commercial process of binding the village to the town, and then to the local, and eventually international, market). The mystification of the land as “rural simplicity” indicative of a “golden age” is in reality the invention of the enclosure-produced city. Thus the ascendency of the following assumption held by so many, and expressed most emblematically by Jeffrey Spencer: “The imagery of ideal landscape changes very little from age to age.”20 This belief finds its origin in the new structural field governed by the ground plan of enclosure. It is this structural ground plan—supported by landscape theorists, among others—that has hindered modern conceptualizations of the land. The influence of this structure tends to be totalizing, for it governs the procedures by which investigations into the nature of land proceed, and defines beforehand the questions that the investigator can introduce. This structure, in other words, is what Althusser has called a “problematic.”21 In terms of the “visions” theorists have perennially had of the being of land, I would argue that it is not by accident that the subdiscipline of literary studies that focalizes the land is a discipline of “landscaping” and not of the land. Ever since the eighteenth century, land has become “landscape.” This problematic is not limited to the aesthetic site of landscaping theory, as if that aesthetic existed in a void; it is thoroughly political. Just as the period of years marking the breaking-away of colonies from imperial rule after World War II saw a major increase in “scientific” activity around the issue of England’s land and the enclosure movement (discussed in chapter two), literary scholars also became active at this time in developing the field of “landscape” study. Their research has opened up the possibility of thinking the land, and generated a great deal of insight. But at the same time, this “opening” has come to define what objects are “worth” seeing—what, to invoke the language of Althusser, becomes “visible” and what remains “invisible.” It has imposed, in other words, a visionary field, and it is this


institutionalized field of vision that both “gives” and “withholds” our access to the land. The great landscaper “Capability” Brown rises from the vision of this field, his very rhetoric expressive of a new affiliation between the architecture of the land and the architecture of the word: “THERE, (pointing a finger), I make a comma, and point to another spot where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon.” More than any other “improver,” his statements reveal the profound extent to which the land has been covered by a sheet of language. The problem is first to examine in detail this problematic of enclosure and its manifestation in literature of the eighteenth century, and then to find alternative entryways into a less-derivative thinking of the land’s being. This chapter tracks the maturation of that problematic, and explores how it initiates a politics of stability and instability. II. Enclosure in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews The novels of Henry Fielding were written in the midst of the national upheaval of England’s land reformation: the first great wave of parliamentary acts of enclosure. Thousands of enclosure acts were being passed in the years surrounding the publications of Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. Fielding himself was no stranger to rural farm life, nor to the judicial administration of the land and politics in general. He spent his boyhood on his family’s farm in East Stour, Dorsetshire from 1709 to1719; he was active in the opposition to Walpole, editing the oppositional journal The Champion; in 1748 (a year before the publication of Tom Jones) he was commissioned as justice of the peace for the district of Westminster in London; and soon after he became the magistrate of all of Middlesex. He was also something of a policing agent, devising a successful plan in 1753 for suppressing crime and the activity of “gangsters” in London.22 As I noted in the previous chapter, the justice of the peace had become by Fielding’s time a powerful position, one that could oversee entire village communities. Fielding’s judicial and political interests, and his experience in agriculture, cause his texts to be of considerable importance in the literary and cultural construction of the land in the eighteenth century. We have seen Defoe’s enclosure of land as a process fundamental to the establishment of Crusoe’s imperial identity. Let us now consider the lengthy description of Allworthy’s estate in Tom Jones: The Gothic style of building could produce nothing nobler than Mr. Allworthy’s house. There was an air of grandeur in it that struck you with awe, and rivaled the beauties of the best Grecian architecture; and it was as commodious within as venerable without.

problematizing enclosure / 87 It stood on the south-east side of a hill; but nearer the bottom than the top of it, so as to be sheltered from the north-east by a grove of old oaks, which rose above it in a gradual ascent of near half a mile, and yet high enough to enjoy a most charming prospect of the valley beneath. In the midst of the grove was a fine lawn, sloping down towards the house, near the summit of which rose a plentiful spring gushing out of a rock covered with firs and forming a constant cascade of about thirty foot, not carried down a regular flight of steps, but tumbling in a natural fall over the broken and mossy stones till it came to the bottom of the rock, then running off in a pebbly channel that with many lesser falls winded along till it fell into a lake at the foot of the hill, about a quarter of a mile below the house on the south side, and which was seen from every room in the front. Out of this lake, which filled the center of a beautiful plain, embellished with groups of beeches and elms and fed with sheep, issued a river that, for several miles, was seen to meander through an amazing variety of meadows and woods till it emptied itself into the sea; with a large arm of which, and an island beyond it, the prospect was closed. On the right of this valley opened another of less extent, adorned with several villages and terminated by one of the towers of an old ruined abbey, grown over with ivy, and part of the front, which remained still entire. The left-hand scene presented the view of a very fine park, composed of very unequal ground and agreeably varied with all the diversity that hills, lawns, wood, and water, laid out with admirable taste, but owing less to art than to Nature, could give. Beyond this the country gradually rose into a ridge of wild mountains, the tops of which were above the clouds. It was now the middle of May, and the morning was remarkably serene, when Mr. Allworthy walked forth on the terrace, where the dawn opened every minute that lovely prospect we have before described to his eye. And now, having sent forth streams of light, which ascended the blue firmament before him as harbingers preceding his pomp, in the full blaze of his majesty rose the sun; than which one object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented: a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures.23

Without an informed awareness of the polyvalency of enclosure acts, it is difficult to immediately see connections to a problematic of enclosure and colonization in this passage. The scene is meant to appeal to our aesthetic sensibility, and stand as an ideal of beauty generated by an author writing about his country in a fashion unique to the literature of the day. No doubt the scene serves as a mark of the author’s individual talent too for constructing an inspiring backdrop for his work to unfold and his characters to develop. The complexity of the landscape, the attention to detail, the way in which the description of the land melds with the character of Allworthy, and how that depiction of the land will move outward later to function as a major part of the novel’s plot, all reveal Fielding as a talented author.


Yet, upholding Fielding’s literary skill for study and emulation does not necessarily mean that it is devoid of historical meaning. Fielding’s ideal of the English country estate house, and the land that surrounds it, is not the product of an isolated imagination. We can admire his skill as a writer while being attentive at the same time to the constellation of political, economic, social, and philosophical registers that are each affiliated with the idealized register of the aesthetic. It should not be taken for granted, for instance, that his estate should inherently be accepted as ideal in the first place. Owning a house of this size, one that commands such an expanse of land, would have been considered profligate and overly extravagant within a social system governed by an exchange-limit dynamic. It would have been the very thing that a Common field village community would have wanted to avoid: the stockpiling of resources within the hands of a single person. This alternative perspective, however, goes unnoticed not only in the landscape situated within the pages of the novel, but also in the literary landscaping theory of the period. Allworthy’s is among the largest country estate in all of English literature. We are in fact told that his is “one of the largest estates in the county” (TJ 29). The indication is that he has been “blessed by Fortune” with this estate because of his “sound constitution,” “solid understanding,” and “benevolent heart” (TJ 29). The “nobility” and “solidity” of the house’s structural dominion over the landscape form an outward extension of Allworthy’s solid understanding and benevolence in a fashion similar to Crusoe’s island “estate.” His presence is writ large on the land, which extends from the hills backgrounding the house to the tamed valley below, from the sublime mountains that rise into the clouds, to the villages that were once affiliated with an old monastery but now come under the supervision of Allworthy’s estate house. The abbey serves as a reminder of the dissolution of the monastries, and the rise of the secular gentry to power. As noted in the previous chapter, the great landowner frequently stood as the central economic node connecting several villages, regulating their flow of production through enclosing and engrossing the land. The structure of Allworthy’s house complements Allworthy’s subject position as the legal regulator of this flow of production. The building is “noble,” a reflection in architecture of his own “inner” nobility. Its location affords Allworthy an idealized “prospect” of the land below. His house in fact sits as the hub of a wheel not only in terms of a highly structured, hierarchically arranged landscape with his house overlooking all others, but juridically and morally as well. From his view Allworthy panoptically surveys the villages below: the house’s structural design enables him to survey the perfectly formed land from every window. He is positioned in the seat of judgment as the magistrate and as the moral center of the novel.


The entire scene, however, is represented as “naturally” derived, not constructed. This is to show that the landscape surrounding Allworthy has organically come to reveal his “worthy” presence, that the earth here has come to be in the way it is meant to be because of his presence, implying again the presence of a Providential table in the wilderness. The park on the “left-hand scene” is composed of “unequal ground” that is “agreeably varied with all the diversity of hills, lawns, wood, and water.” This “diversity” is “laid out with admirable taste,” but this laying out was not accomplished by Allworthy, nor any artist, but by Nature itself: “owing less to art than to Nature.” On the summit of the lawn that slopes down toward the house rises a cascading spring, but we are urged to see that this spring is not contrived: the spring forms a “constant cascade of about thirty foot, not carried down a regular flight of steps, but tumbling in a natural fall over the broken and mossy stones.” The organic flow of this spring reaches beyond the immediate land itself, to meld with the sea in the distance, and a nearby island. Operating as a quasi-wellspring of Allworthy’s presence, the river extends to capture the island—coupling moving matter with the less corporeal extension of his entitled gaze. Allworthy, and the organic English land, form a reciprocal relationship. Together they constitute the standard of measure for the island we see in the distance—and by extension, those more remote islands of potential colonial possession lying farther than England’s immediate field of vision. The prospect is “closed” on this side of Allworthy’s panoptic view with the encapsulation of the island lying in the distance beyond the sea. At the other end, the visionary field extends to the sublimity of the heavens, to the “ridge of wild mountains” that rise above the clouds. Onto this remarkable landscape Allworthy steps out, standing on the terrace that affords him an absolute view. Allworthy’s “view” is important, for it is not anyone’s view; it is a view meant only for a man of Allworthy’s stature: the scene is “described to his eye.” The field of vision is reciprocal, with the “dawn” opening to Allworthy “every minute that lovely prospect.” The light of the dawn sends “streams of light, which ascend . . . [from] the blue firmament before him as harbingers preceding his pomp.” The entire scene comes to a close by being tethered to the telos of Allworthy’s reason for being, which is to “render” his “benevolent” self by “doing . . . good to his fellow creatures.” The firmaments of light further suggest that he has been endowed by God to embark on this project of benevolent intervention. Fielding’s description of Allworthy is obviously grounded in the logic of sovereign individualism, in the idea that he possesses a positive “core” that automatically enables him to establish himself as a great estate owner, and equally as the judicial authority for the county; for he is also a magistrate— a justice of the peace—who oversees disputes in the villages and farmlands.


One could easily deconstruct the sovereignty with which Fielding encloses Allworthy at his entrance in chapter two by his discussion of “Human Nature” in chapter one (TJ 28). Human nature, Fielding tells us, is the subject of his novel. More specifically, the novel deals with the search for “true nature,” because human nature itself comes in such a “prodigious variety” that any single author would never be able to treat all its different kinds. A lesser author thus runs the risk of focusing on a type of nature “too common and vulgar” (TJ 28). To solve this problem, and to show his superior wisdom, Fielding turns (not surprisingly) to Pope’s Essay on Man, which recommends that one must shape nature in order to cultivate “true wit”: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” (TJ 28). The answer to the question of what constitutes true nature, Fielding concludes, lies in the author’s “skill in well dressing it up” (TJ 28–29). He develops the idea of “dressing” nature by connecting the acts of writing and reading to the act of eating: Fielding metaphorically describes the first chapter as a “bill of fare” to the novel, which is to be experienced by the reader as a “feast” (TJ 27). Again, the metaphorical development of the act of writing and the search for a more “valid” form of human nature stands as a sign of Fielding’s talent as an author. Yet his creative metaphor, like all metaphors, arises out of a context larger than his individual mind. Preparing a refined form of human nature leads him to a discussion of how one prepares food for a refined palate: “Where then lies the difference between the food of the nobleman and the porter, if both are at dinner on the same ox or calf, but in the seasoning, the dressing, the garnishing, and the setting forth? Hence, the one provokes and incites the most languid appetite, and the other turns and palls that which is the sharpest and keenest” (TJ 28). The metaphor, in other words, reflects a point of view that stems from a class-related construction of meaning, and not from some indisputable standard of appetite. Setting up the nobleman’s palate for veneration results in the derision of the working class’s sensibilities. By extension, the same hierarchical condescension is in operation in the construction of “truer” human nature. Allworthy’s “solid understanding” and “benevolent heart” reveal themselves to be not inherent attributes of his character, but exterior “dressings” that put in play an economy of meaning based upon a hierarchical logic that stamps one class “superior” and the other “inferior.” The initial depiction of Allworthy in the following chapter as a gentleman inherently “blessed” by “both Nature and Fortune” with the gifts of a benevolent heart and the “inheritance of one of the largest estates in the county” begins to unravel in light of the opening chapter’s reliance upon a hierarchically constructed method of making meaning. The novel de-structures its own conviction in a reliable core supposedly underpinning true human nature.


This deconstructive reading attends to the philosophical side of meaning-production in the novel, but it has its limitations in that it can only expose the logic of an ontological register of reality at the site of class. Such a reading tends to reify itself at this level, ignoring the connections to the expansive historical structure of the enclosure movement and its relation to the rise of an imperial nation. What must be kept in play is how each of these accomplished historical formations fuel one another and territorialize the possibilities for patterning and engaging reality across the board. When it is time to concentrate on one of the village communities set within Allworthy’s visionary field, his delineation is strikingly different from the extensive sketch and beauty of his estate environs. After Allworthy discovers the infant Jones in his bed, he sends his housekeeper Mrs. Wilkins down to the village to locate the mother. The villagers tellingly appear in the text in the form of a coagulation of fearful “inhabitants” who run “trembling into their houses” at the sight of Wilkins. It is interesting to note that Fielding specifically refers to these villagers as inhabitants; the term still is employed during this transitional stage between inhabitation and individualism to indicate the class of farmers, craftsmen, and laborers who remain part of the historical continuum of the open field system, as opposed to great landowners who have been individualized, such as Allworthy. In addition to being innately fearful, the inhabitants of the village are also portrayed as being a mass of suspicious beings. During the scene in which Wilkins forces Jenny Jones to confess that she is the mother of Tom, a crowd gathers to taunt Jones: “the bystanders . . . were now grown very numerous. Many of them cried out that they thought what [Jenny Jones’s] silk gown would end in; others spoke sarcastically of her learning. Not a single female was present but found some means of expressing her abhorrence of poor Jenny” (TJ 41). The scene reveals that in addition to Fielding’s metaphorical enclosure of the village as a mass of resentful and panicky people, his depiction of them is heavily gendered as well. Not only is the crowd made up entirely of women, but Allworthy noticeably sends a woman to interrogate the village inhabitants. The actual maintenance of the villages themselves turns out to be women’s work, as if the female housekeepers of large, enclosing landowners stood as mothers overseeing the villagers below as their children. Once this awareness of gender is foregrounded, we begin to see that not a single man appears in this initial encounter with the village community. When Mrs. Wilkins first steps into the village, she immediately seeks out the house of the village’s “elderly matron” for information. They in turn begin to “scrutinize the characters of the several young girls who lived in any of those houses” (TJ 39). The only mention of a male figure comes in the form of Jenny Jones’s schoolmaster, but he is simply mentioned in passing to show


that she has been educated (the task of a man), and does not appear in the scene itself. After Mrs. Wilkins returns to Allworthy with her report, he summons Jenny Jones in order that she may “receive [her] wholesome admonition and reproof ” (TJ 42). The chapter thus tells us the following: that women appear as gossiping panoptic guards, and as foot soldiers sent to scout or “evidence” of misconduct; and that men appear in the chapter as educators and judges of proper conduct (the exterior “dressing” that signifies inner true virtue). In addition, the inhabitants for the most part appear in the novel unnamed. The tradition of symbolizing women as “the weaker sex” comes to serve as “proof ” at this moment in history that inhabitancy is the weaker form of identity. This is further buttressed by gendering individuals as male and rational. This gendering of the village as female is not an isolated incident; the symbolization continues throughout the novel. For instance, when it is discovered that Allworthy is not going to send Jones to prison, Fielding writes: “it was universally apprehended that the House of Correction would have been her fate, though some of the young women cried out it was good enough for her . . . yet there were many others who began to pity her condition; but when it was known in what manner Mr. Allworthy had behaved, the tide turned against her” (TJ 48). Phrases such as “universally apprehended” are frequently invoked when speaking of the discourse of the village, but when specifics are given it is always women who do the speaking. Despite Allworthy’s “inherent” benevolence, his judgments can be harsh. When it is “discovered” that the schoolmaster Partridge is the father of Tom Jones, Allworthy summons the schoolmaster to appear before him at Paradise Hall. When Partridge refuses to confess his guilt, Allworthy punishes him by depriving him of his annuity, which amounts to the better part of the schoolmaster’s income. The act thus sentences him to live below the poverty level (TJ 84). Likewise, Allworthy’s answer to the “problem” of Jenny Jones is to have her “convey[ed] . . . from the scene of [her] shame” (TJ 44). He arranges for her to be sent a “day’s journey” from his estate—far enough to be out of the range of any contact with her former community. A similar fate awaits the gamekeeper, who is dismissed from Allworthy’s service once it is found out that he was with Tom Jones when Jones shoots a partridge that had flown into the air over the next enclosed property. Fielding’s conviction that the large, enclosed country estate represents a national ideal stems from a tradition of valorizing the country house that one can also find active in poets such as Jonson and Pope, and in earlier novelists such as Defoe, Richardson, and Eliza Haywood. This tradition has been examined by eighteenth-century scholars such as Carole Fabricant and Mark Girouard who have criticized English poets’ and novelists’ frequent invocation of the country house ideal, exposing its status to be somewhat


mythical. As Girouard argues, “although poets like Jonson, Marvell or Pope and moralists like Addison constantly urged landowners to live on their estates, and praised and glamorized the lives of those who did, from the sixteenth century onwards the upper classes were spending more and more time in London—or the area round London in which the court rotated.”24 And as Carole Fabricant argues in her provocative book Swift’s Landscape, Jonathan Swift was the one satirist who wrote considerably to subvert the country estate ideal, seeing first hand the effects of English absentee landlordism and rack renting in Ireland.25 Swift, moreover, noted the “spirit of perverted individualism . . . prevail[ing] everywhere,” and expressed his concern for individual landlords’ exploitation of their tenants “through images of class warfare.”26 Despite Fabricant’s exemplary critique of English country estate ideology, her work does not connect this ideal to acts of enclosure, and the larger problematic of enclosure developing into a fundamental structure of reality during this period. Even Swift himself may not have extended his critique to enclosures, as the following passage from the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels suggests: During our Journey, [Lord Munodi] made me observe the several Methods used by Farmers in managing their Lands; which to me were wholly unaccountable: For except in some very few Places, I could not discover one Ear of Corn, or Blade of Grass. But, in three Hours traveling, the Scene was wholly altered; we came into a most beautiful Country; Farmers Houses at small Distances, neatly built, the Field enclosed, containing Vineyards, Corn-grounds and Meadows. Neither do I remember to have seen a more delightful Prospect.27

Though it is difficult to identify Gulliver’s feelings toward this prospect with Swift’s own, the context of the passage would indicate Swift’s faith in enclosure. It is at this point in the third voyage when Swift satirizes— through his invented “Academy of Lagado”—the abstract concepts and visionary schemes projected forth by the Royal Society. The Academy of Lagado invents such projects as “extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers” and “contriv[ing] a new Method for building Houses, by beginning at the Roof, and working downwards” (GT 152–53). The Academy, in turn, has begun to influence the countryside adjoining the metropolis of Balnibarbi, “contriving new Rules and Methods of Agriculture and Building, and new Instruments and Tools for all Trades and Manufactures” (GT 151). Their inventive methods, however, have all backfired, leaving “the whole Country [lying] in waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloaths” (GT 151). In contrast, Gulliver’s guide Lord Munodi has enclosed the lands of his estate, which affords Gulliver his “delightful Prospect.”


According to Gulliver, Munodi has built a house of a “noble Structure,” and designed it “according to the best Rules of ancient Architecture” (GT 150). The land surrounding the house is equally patterned: “The Fountains, Gardens, Walks, Avenues, and Groves were all disposed with exact Judgment and Taste” (GT 150). Set within the more extensive and clearer critique of the Academy’s failed schemes of land improvement, Gulliver’s praise of Lord Munodi’s enclosed estate stands as the favored method of cultivating the land. This lack of critique in Swift’s work suggests the extent to which enclosures appeared as progressive to even the most politically critical writers of the era. Regardless of its cast of characters that span from the gentry to the proletariat, Tom Jones is not a novel about farmers, laborers, or village community members in general; it is a novel about the individual, and how certain individuals outwardly express the right kind of human nature. These individuals will be the ones who inherit the land. With so much concentration by literary scholars on the “individuality” of the main characters of novels, it has become practically impossible to lift the veil of this enclosure-informed notion of identity. Martin C. Battestin’s 1961 introduction to Joseph Andrews is a case in point. If we reconsider his introduction in the light of the shift from inhabitancy to individualism lying behind the literature of the eighteenth century, the work becomes particularly revealing of how pervasive and concealed a problematic of enclosure continues to be within the discipline of literary studies. For this reason it would be fruitful to examine Battestin’s introduction in some detail. Battestin’s reading of Fielding’s Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews recognizes these novels’ representation of a rural existence, arguing, for instance, that in the former novel, the characters of Joseph and Fanny together “offer . . . a strain of the pure pastoral in the rank and ruined garden of England.”28 Like many theorists, he therefore notices the land as a major force in literature. But he fails to think the character of that presence. Instead, his prospecting eyes lock on Fielding’s adherence to the latitudinarian school of humanism in his attempt to find the “central meaning” of the novel. It is at this point that Battestin’s essay leaves the land behind in order to concentrate on the Restoration’s moral revival of the quarrel between St. Augustine and Pelagius, in which the former maintained that humans were essentially depraved and could be redeemed only through the grace of God, and the latter professed humanity’s possession of an “innate goodness” that only needed “correct” exercise of the will and the appropriate deeds of “righteousness” in order to earn salvation. Swift’s yahoos are the most famous eighteenth-century example of humanity’s essential “lack of goodness.” Against this, Battestin argues, Fielding develops characters such as Mr. Allworthy—who is described in terms of his innate benevolence.


Battestin points out that this latitudinarianism provided one of the “primary sources of the strain of sentimentalism and benevolence [running] through so much of the literature of the eighteenth century.”29 Even so, he never delves into the structural conditions in place that would give support to this argument and its great influence on the literature of the period. Because of this, Battestin accepts the debate instinctively. This leads him to conclude that the meaning of the novel lies in a transcendent concern for the “moral development of society.” The novel then becomes in his eyes a vehicle for weeding out what inhibits a social order’s development. Battestin then tells us what the goal of this “weeding out” has been, which is at the same time what makes Fielding’s novels so great: they “further the development of the individual.”30 Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones thus become primers for a training in individuality: a subject hones “his ability to control and discipline his appetites.”31 Throughout, Battestin never considers the possibility that this mode of identity may be something other than a natural occurrence, and reflective of a larger historical and agricultural ground plan relatively new to the continuum of history. His disinterested inquiry assumes without question that the trend of individualism is totally devoid of any ideological underpinnings. This ideology is made clear when we begin to pay attention to the ideal space in which Battestin sees Fielding placing the individual: For Fielding, following a venerable tradition that reaches back to Juvenal and Virgil, town and country were always morally antithetical, types, respectively, of vice and virtue. In [ Joseph Andrews] he most clearly defines and objectifies this polarity of values in the contrasting lives of Mr. Wilson, but it informs the main narrative as well. Joseph Andrews withstands the solicitations of his Mrs. Potiphar and preserves his chastity even in the hostile environment of Mayfair; but exposure to the vanities of the town immediately begins to corrupt his manners: he dresses his hair after the latest fashion, leads the rioting of the footmen at the playhouses, and—most dangerous sign of all— is lax in his attendance and behavior at church. . . . Fortified by Adams’ good counsel and good example, however, Joseph resists temptation and recognizes the thorough degeneracy of the Great City, where the highest precept of morality goes unobserved: “London is a bad place,” he writes to Pamela, “and there is so little good fellowship, that the next-door neighbours don’t know one another.” The antidote, of course, is depicted in the account of Mr. Wilson’s solution: a rural life of retirement, simplicity, industry, and mutual love—Fielding’s adaptation of a familiar classical ideal. . . . Fielding’s preference for the country was not the product of any foolish idealism about the absence of vice in a rural setting.32

Battestin’s reading here amounts to an erasure of the historically specific context of the eighteenth-century agriculturally oriented social structure.


While he adumbrates Fielding’s promotion of the country over the city, which in turn would initially appear to contradict Defoe’s embrasure of the city (the “circuitry” of London), he fails to acknowledge the distinctive capitalist character being championed in this “classical ideal.” The very fact that Battestin refers to this rural life as “classical” discloses his assumption that the lure of the countryside represents a transcendence of the social and economic conflicts of history. The space of the country serves to sublimate the need for an “antidote” to the antagonistic world of growing commercialism of the eighteenth century. In other words, Battestin unknowingly falls prey to the very mystification of “rural simplicity” that the enclosure movement itself paradoxically produces in order that it may maintain its power over previous forms of socioeconomic existence. Since rural simplicity never existed in the first place, it was and is the manufactured utopia of “nowhere,” and representing this as the “classical ideal” constitutes an act of concealing and ultimately erasing the real socioeconomic systems of exchange-limit and inhabitancy that formerly constituted existence in the actual world. That the country should stand as a sublimating antidote is nothing novel, yet its invocation is by no means free from the structural imperatives of the day that enable the construction of English social reality. “Simplicity,” “industry,” and “mutual love” are clearly not universals in Fielding’s fiction. These terms apply to the class of enclosing landlords who are “industrious” in that they push the land to produce for purposes of stockpiling. The “mutual love” clearly does not apply to everyone, especially the “footmen” of a lower social class who are intractable and given to rioting—a reference here specific to city spaces, but that would also apply to manifold riots by farmers and laborers over the privatization of land—acts of resistance that as a justice of the peace Fielding would no doubt have condemned as well.33 Battestin’s need to defend Fielding’s endorsement of the rural land (“not the product of foolish idealism”) because it is “absent of vice” belies his own adherence to a bourgeois social standing; for what he considers to be “vice” obscures the potential to see that this vice was in fact an act of social resistance on the part of laborers denied access to the land by their very status in the new social structure of a privatized and monopolized landscape. Battestin thus “overlooks” his own indissoluble relation to the land as a critic who is fully informed by a problematic that objectifies land in the idealized, apolitical form of landscaping. Furthermore, Battestin’s blindness to the ideological intent in Fielding’s use of the countryside contributes to the continuing development of a national consensus concerning the idyllic nature of rural land. This development began in the eighteenth century and continues its influence even in Battestin’s own moment in history in 1961—a time when England’s (and France’s) peripheral colonies were in the midst of attempting to break free


from imperial domination. What I would argue is that these invocations of the countryside—Defoe’s at the turn of the century, Fielding’s in midcentury, Smollett’s in the latter half (as we see), and Battestin’s in the early 1960s—are not accidental or natural occurrences. Battestin’s argument that the “symbolic polarity” of “city-country, vanity-virtue . . . governs the action and meaning of the novel” is symptomatic of larger cultural ontological transformations taking place in England: individual/entrepreneurial enclosures in the early eighteenth century by large landlords in the time of Defoe; the increasing interest by parliament in enclosure during Fielding’s time when possessions abroad were undergoing the shift from a mercantilistic to a government concern; the first great wave of parliamentary enclosure acts and the cessation of the United States during Smollett’s lifetime. The common assumption of each of these authors is the paradox of a nonideological belief that country land positively embodies the search for the perfect organic relation between human beings and the land. The latitudinarian concept of “innate goodness” is fully realized, and only fully realized, in the movement from the “vanity of London toward marriage in the country with the virtuous Fanny Goodwill.”34 Fielding’s symbolization of the country as female appears again; for the principal marriage here is not to the individual Fanny, but to the rural land. This “moral vision” of Joseph Andrews—and Tom Jones as well (Jones’ inheritance of the Allworthy country empire)—is, Battestin maintains, what empowers the novel to “achieve that highest pitch of great art” in that Fielding’s simplification of his heroes and their land illuminates “a world abundant for all time.”35 It would seem, then, that in addition to Fielding’s belief in the essential goodness of humanity (though a goodness that needs to be cultivated “properly”), he believes in an essential goodness in the rural land as well. But this land must also be cultivated properly—through the “improving” (policing) acts of enclosure and privatization. That this belief in an organic relation to an inherently moral land is thoroughly ideological becomes apparent when we begin to examine the type of land that Fielding valorizes in Joseph Andrews. The characters are continually in danger of becoming lost on the open road, unenclosed fields, and the downs (78, 115, 200, 202). The downs are a site of potential rape (117). The return of Lady Booby to her country estate shows that Fielding is highly aware of the power that a landlord has come to hold, and of what a landlord’s absence can do to a village community: She entered the parish amidst the ringing of bells, and the acclamations of the poor, who were rejoiced to see their patroness returned after so long an absence, during which time all her rents had been drafted to London, without a shilling being spent among them, which tended not a little to their utter

98 / ecological and postcolonial study impoverishing; for, if the court would be severely missed in such a city as London, how much more must the absence of a person of great fortune be felt in a little country village, for whose inhabitants such a family finds a constant employment and supply. ( JA 236)

Fielding’s many discussions of the proper use of the land by these inhabitants of the country reflect his concern for ensuring the “constant employ” of a puritan work ethic. This is seen most overtly in the character of Peter Pounce, who opposes Parson Adams’ antilatitudinarian notions of charity to the poor, in favor of educating everyone to work the land with more industry: “ ‘the distresses of mankind are mostly imaginary. . . . How can any man complain of hunger . . . in a country where such excellent salads are to be gathered in almost every field?’ ” Fielding’s famous insistence in Joseph Andrews that his novels deal with universals, that they “describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species,” also informs his supposedly disinterested, transcendental description of a symbolic ideal land. If his characters are to succeed in discovering a “truthful” connection between the individual and the land, then the land must be made to rise above its own differential geography as well. This annulment of the specifics of geography comes on the heels of the narrator’s prefatory remarks in the first chapter of book three of Joseph Andrews, which argues that the proper subject of novel writing is not the “topography” and “chorography” that one finds in the books with titles such as “the History of England, the History of France, of Spain, etc.” Such texts, Fielding argues, “describe countries and cities, which, with the assistance of maps, they do pretty justly,” their authors getting caught in “topographical contradictions” ( JA 157). Instead, Fielding praises the more “biographical” approach to writing literature in that it is more “certain that truth is to be found only in the works of those who celebrate the lives of great men” ( JA 157). The topographers, oddly, cannot be relied upon for “factual” information because of their different points of view, but “with us biographers the case is different; the facts we deliver may be relied on, though we often mistake the age and country wherein they happened” ( JA 157). Again, the discourse is universalist, the attempt to inaugurate a new style of writing that reflects organic truths that transcend history and culture—which was what Fielding felt himself to be doing as one of the first “great English novelists.” In opposition to the “narrowly focused” topographer, Fielding’s humanist biographer would direct his attention to “the actions and characters of [great] men” ( JA 157). Texts such as the Arabian Nights, the history of Marianne, and Le Paison Parvenu, the narrator argues, contain the “mistakes” of too much concentration on the specificities of their separate countries’ land. This has the


unwanted effect, the narrator of Joseph Andrews argues, of carrying the work “beyond the sight of the reader” and creating characters that—because they cannot be connected to any particular universal landscape—are merely “heroes of their own creation” generated by a “chaotic brain” ( JA 158). This search for a writing that concentrates on universals indicates not only that the supposed universal idea itself is none other than an idea that has come to be considered persuasive within a particular culture (and thus appears from within that culture to be “universal”). More importantly, it also camouflages its inherent relation of domination, for this perspective assumes that anything that differs from the universal will be “out of the sight of the reader.” In other words, that which contradicts the cultural accepted/constructed “universal” will not be understood, and hence is ultimately useless: to return to the former class [the biographers], who are contented to copy nature, instead of forming originals from the confused heap of matter in their own brains: is not such a book as that which records the achievements of the renowned Don Quixote more worthy of the name of history than even Marianna’s? for, whereas the latter is confined to a particular period of time, and to a particular nation, the former is the history of the world in general, at least that part which is polished by laws, arts, and sciences; and of that from the time it was first polished to this day; nay, and forwards as long as it shall so remain. ( JA 159)

Achieving a form of cultural writing that presents the reader with universal characters—the “species” of humanity, as opposed to any specific inhabitant— requires at the same time that one rise above geography, that one conceal the heterogeneities of any particular land in favor of a homogenized “line of sight.” This calculated search for the “more general and noble purposes,” says Fielding, ending his introductory chapter to book three, is the job of the satirist (JA 159). As major and persuasive cultural artifacts, Fielding’s novels kindle the eighteenth-century desire for a universally coded and controlled landscape, a desire that is not only contained within the borders of the British Isles, but extends to England’s colonial enclosure of its possessions on an increasingly homogenized world map. All of this discussion of latitudinarianism versus Augustanism arises out of the sociosymbolic order of an emergent humanism, specifically the individualism of the eighteenth century. Descartes may have abstractly reified subjectivity in the form of an isolated, internalized selfhood a full century earlier, but the eighteenth century is the field upon which the self becomes actualized in the logic of this inherent individuality at a material level with the turning of land into a phenomenon to be possessed and held privately.


III. Anchoring a Disciplinarity of the Land in Humphrey Clinker When we turn to Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, a novel published in the midst of heavy parliamentary enclosure activity in 1771, we see a marked difference in how the land is constructed. Humphrey Clinker is a travel novel, a prolonged tour of England, Scotland, and Wales. The tour begins in Wales at a great estate (Brambleton Hall), traverses the midlands of England to London, moves from London through the northern counties, turns east to Scarborough, follows the North Sea coast before heading to Edinburgh and Glasgow, then ends by moving south to Manchester and back to Wales. The “expedition” is thus considerably extensive, crossing the paths of at least half of Defoe’s tours. Smollett, in fact, makes reference to Defoe’s Tour in both Humphrey Clinker and his extensive eight-volume The Present State of All Nations (1768–1769)—even going so far as to echo some of Defoe’s condescending remarks upon the Welsh.36 The journey is told in the epistolary style, with letters being written by five characters: the main character Matthew Bramble, his sister Tabitha Bramble, Tabitha’s maid Winifred Jenkins, Matthew’s nephew Jeremy Melford, and niece Lydia Melford. Since the novel is highly episodic, there is no immediately discernable central plot governing the unfolding of events. In his recent introduction to the new annotated edition of the novel, Thomas Preston argues that if the novel can be said to have a principal theme that holds together each of its various episodes, it is to be found in “the gradual discovery by each of the major characters that happiness or felicity, as Matt Bramble calls it, will not be found in luxury and affectation (two of Matt’s favorite denunciatory terms) but in order, moderation, and active concern for the mental, physical, and moral health of oneself and others.”37 The first major letter of Matthew Bramble takes as its subject the dangers of an unenclosed, unimproved section of the land called Clifton-Downs, which he portrays as being subject to mysteriously sudden downpours of rain that release a “daemon of vapours” (HC 13). In Clifton- Downs, Bramble finds the air to be “intolerably colder” than anywhere else, and the inhabitants to be “low-spirited,” “emaciated creatures,” who are in the “last stage[s] of consumption” (HC 15). This condemnation of Common lands is something of a leitmotif in the novel. We see Bramble frequently finding fault with Common lands, as in the case of Harrigate Common, described later in the novel: “Harrigate is a wild common, bare and bleak, without tree or shrub, or the least signs of cultivation” (HC 159). His viewpoint receives support from the character of Jerry Milford, who writes of the highway robbers they must fend off while crossing Harrigate.


Bramble’s description in this first letter connects the space of the Commons to the space of death; it is a space to be avoided at all costs. Bramble’s appraisal of Harrigate—which he believes to be devoid of any useful management or logical rationale—leads him to think extensively about land. After a lengthy examination of the many threats Commons pose, the letter shifts abruptly to a consideration of how Bramble oversees his own land. He expresses concern for his tenants and their financial standing, indicating to his reader that he is a “generous,” “good-hearted” gentleman, who will always look out for the good of others. However, the nature of his generosity derives from the sanctioned economic structure that supports the sovereignty of a landlord and positions him as overseer of an extensive piece of property. This same economic structure judicially legitimizes the people who live on this property as “tenants,” and not inhabitants. Bramble exemplifies the landlord of this structure of dependency. He makes certain that all of the farmers and laborers on his property rent their space of living from him; they are therefore his tenants, and as his tenants they take shape within a technology of social purification by possession. Any itinerant day laborers he might possibly employ consequently would not be considered as tenants, and would either have to be legally connected elsewhere to another landlord’s property, or make their living as cottagers on some unenclosed area such as a forest, or the kind of Common field so denounced in the body of the letter. The significant stakes of tenancy become even clearer when Bramble turns to review the incident of a man named Higgins, who has been caught illegally trespassing on his property as a poacher: “As for Higgins, the fellow is a notorious poacher, to be sure; and an impudent rascal to set his snares in my own paddock; but, I suppose, he thought he had some right (especially in my absence) to partake of what nature seems to have intended for common use—you may threaten him in my name, as much as you please, and if he repeats the offence, let me know it before you have recourse to justice” (HC 16). It is interesting that Bramble suggests here that his position as an encloser of the land may be going against “nature,” challenging the right of everyone to have access to the land. This inadvertant admission of an “unnatural” relation to the land is indicative of his position in the historical development of the enclosure movement. The movement was still heavily contested in the mid-eighteenth century, despite the legal precedence of Gateward’s Case. Even so, Bramble does not develop this momentary break in the sociosymbolic order of enclosure, and he never mentions in any of his other letters that there might be a potential antagonism between his engagement with the land and commonuserights. The aporetic thought thus passes unproblematized, and his pronouncement of Higgins’ illegality stands. The question of who has rights


to the land remains thoroughly based upon the order of the day. This is made sharply apparent in the sentence that immediately follows, which gives authority to his correspondent Dr. Lewis to hunt on his land: “I know you [Dr. Lewis] are a great sportsman, and oblige many of your friends: I need not tell you to make use of my grounds” (HC 16). Unlike Higgins, Dr. Lewis is given full access to the land. Higgins’ “intuitive” attempt to continue the old Common system of enacting an inhabitant’s use-rights is denied; but Lewis’ desire to hunt game as a gentleman is never in danger of being compromised. Bramble’s tendency to classify people in terms of their legal status—as “tenant,” “poacher,” and “sportsman”—also operates in his manner of reasoning. In his next letter to Dr. Lewis, he writes: “a man must not presume to use his reason, unless he has studied the categories, and can chop logic by mode and figure—Between friends, I think, every man of tolerable parts ought, at any time of day, to be both physician and lawyer, as far as his own constitution and property are concerned” (HC 24–25). Cultivating reason appears as part of a larger architecture that branches outward to the individual’s “constitution” and “property.” This mode of reasoning by “categorical chopping” manifests itself spatially in Bramble’s acts of surveillance of the many towns and countrysides he encounters in his lengthy expedition. His description of London berates the city’s layout for having “no unity of design” (HC 88). Its expansion into the surrounding countryside has led it to “become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support” (HC 86). At first, it appears as if Bramble is concerned with providing for a more egalitarian social system, based on a distribution of smaller farms: “What wonder that our villages are depopulated, and our farms in want of day-labourers? The abolition of small farms, is but one cause of the decrease in population” (HC 86). However, his distress over the reduction in small farms has more to do with the manner in which small farmers are becoming specialized laborers for the new commercial economy. This is a cause for trepidation in Bramble’s mind; for he discovers that some of these farmers have been able to cash in on new methods of achieving success by taking on one of the many subject positions arising during the period of market expansion: The gayest places of public entertainment are filled with fashionable figures; which, upon inquiry, will be found to be journeymen taylors, serving-men, and abigails, disguised like their betters. In short, there is no distinction or subordination left—The different departments of life are jumbled together—The hod-carrier, the low mechanic, the tapster, the publican, the shop-keeper, the pettifogger, the citizen, and the courtier, all tread upon the kibes of one another . . . rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, justling, mixing,

problematizing enclosure / 103 bouncing, cracking, and crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption—All is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain. . . . In a word, the whole nation seems to be running out of their wits. (HC 87–88)

Bramble has similar criticisms of the Circus at Bath, which he argues to be “inconveniently” placed at “so great a distance from all the markets, baths, and places of public entertainment” (HC 35), indicating that he, like Gulliver in his appraisal of Lord Munodi’s nobly structured estate, would prefer a scheme of city planning formulated to enable the fullest realization of a commercial economy. Bramble’s investment in rigidly structured, well-proportioned space— coupled with the degree to which he exemplifies this concern in so many of his letters—exposes his monomaniacal pursuit for order and control. The following description of Bath serves as a prime example: [O]ne sees new houses starting up in every out-let and every corner of Bath; contrived without judgement, executed without solidity, and stuck together, with so little regard to plan and propriety, that the different lines of the new rows and buildings interfere with, and intersect one another in every different angle of conjunction. They look like the wreck of streets and squares disjointed by an earthquake, which hath broken the ground into a variety of holes and hillocks; or, as if some Gothic devil had stuffed them altogether in a bag, and left them to stand higgledy piggledy, just as chance directed. What sort of monster Bath will become in a few years, with those growing excrescences, may be easily conceived. . . . All these absurdities arise from the tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept away all, even the very dregs of the people. (HC 36)

Bramble’s fear of an expanding Bath, and of English plantations, does not contradict his ideological belief in an inherent and stable foundation underpinning the landscape of England. It is not so much that Bramble disapproves of this expansion, as that the new breed of successful individuals are not being trained in what he considers to be the proper conduct for a British citizen of means. This is made clear in his suggestion for proper training for a marginal character he admires and refers to as “Martin the adventurer,” whom he advises to seek his fortune in the East Indies (HC 182). Bramble’s advice discloses a belief in the colonial project. It particularly suggests his disciplinary approach to the question of how to inculcate a sovereign entrepreneurship in a tumultuous citizenry by dispatching men of the right “breed” to the colonies. In Smollett’s novel, landscaping theory appears overtly as a culturally accepted mode of production. Matthew Bramble begins to formulate his interpretations of the land by making reference to the preromantic landscape


painter John Taylor.38 He praises Taylor as the “best landscape-painter now living,” complimenting him for his ability to express a “richness of foliage” and a “warmth in colouring which delights the view” (HC 73). But the aspect that most amazes him is the painter’s ability to represent an extraordinary degree of depth: “he is so happy in his perspective, and marking his distances at sea, by a progressive series of ships, vessels, capes, and promontories, that I could not help thinking, I had a distant view of thirty leagues upon the back-ground of the picture. If there is any taste for ingenuity left in a degenerate age, fast sinking into barbarism, this artist, I apprehend, will make a capital figure, as soon his works are known” (HC 73). This distant perspective—a variant of the prospect view—contrasts sharply with his turbulent view of a disorganized Bath. In Bath, Bramble’s view abides within the midst of the movement of the city. This contextual “being-inthe-midst” reflects the differential engagement that Heidegger maps in the relation between world and earth, and in truth as aletheia. Heidegger’s term for this is “care,” the horizonal immersion of being-in-the-world, as opposed to the more vertical (metaphysical) position in which the seeing subject stands above and beyond the object, event, or people being overlooked and investigated.39 Taylor’s painting is an analogy of the way that Bramble perceives the world. Through the painting, Bramble can achieve his individualist desire to step out of the dislocating movement of Bath to a position of control and domination. His embrasure of the painting in opposition to the streets of Bath designates the movement from the openrelational context of inhabitation to the enclosed, standing-against economy of individualization. Bramble stands over and against the painting, which stands as the proper picture of the British imperial world. He stands in a position of unquestioned authority, mastering the way in which the land, and the ships being sent out to the colonies, are framed. His disinterested controlling gaze affords him an unobstructed view of the reach of this imperial apparatus, which his “interested” (immersed) view from within the horizon of Bath prohibited. The structure of the painting matches Bramble’s descriptions of favored spaces of the land: “the country [or northern England], when viewed from the top of Gateshead Fell, which extends to Newcastle, exhibits the highest scene of cultivation that ever I beheld . . . the country lying on both sides of the river, above the town, yields a delightful prospect of agriculture and plantation” (HC 196). Bramble’s obsession with this metaphysical view from above is further attested to in the manner in which he concludes his lengthy denunciation of London’s lack of a “unifying design.” He vows to his correspondent Dr. Lewis that after exploring the “depths of [London’s] chaos” for the “benefit and amusement of [his] pupils,” he will return “with a double relish to [the] solitude and mountains” of his home estate (HC 89). As such,


Bramble affiliates himself with the growing roster of those who give us the view from above. In addition to Bramble’s metaphysical act of enclosing the land through painting and his corrective descriptions of Bath and London, he extends his craving to “chop logic” to the disciplinary field of scholarly research— specifically in the area of archival documentation at the British Museum. Visiting the museum’s library, he remarks upon the lack of boundaries in the intermingling space of the amassed documents: “It would . . . be a great improvement . . . if . . . all the books of character . . . [were] classed in centuries, according to the dates of their publication, and catalogues printed of them and the manuscripts, for the information of those that want to consult, or compile from such authorities. I could wish, for the honour of the nation, that there was a complete apparatus for a course of mathematics, mechanics, and experimental philosophy; and a good salary settled upon an able professor, who should give regular lectures on these subjects” (HC 100). This moment in the novel is uncanny in its similarity to the moment in Robinson Crusoe when Crusoe agonizes over the organization of the goods in his cave. Bramble’s compartmentalization of knowledge into discrete categories reflects the disciplinary tradition of the Enlightenment that Foucault interrogates in such works as The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish. Bramble’s imperial enclosure of the land discloses itself to be continuous with the larger ontological enclosure of being in general. This is made evident in the creation of supposedly fully separate and unrelated sites of knowledge production in the museum’s library—a site symbolic for importance as a major repository of culture for the British Empire. In the tradition of the Enlightenment, the lack of a “disinterested” view marks a failure on the part of the artist who cannot achieve the “proper balance” in a painting; the novelist who lacks the ability to structurally “unify” the events and characters within the novel; the historian who falters by paying too much attention to “minor” events rather than concentrating on history’s “peak” moments and “great leaders”; the scholar who cannot do “honour to the nation” by finding the most efficient means to classify knowledge. The successful artist, historian, writer, and scholar, on the other hand, is the one who can “rise above” the immediate action of the place in question to reach a positivist space beyond, where it is believed that one can achieve an unbiased, “truthful” perspective of the events unfolding below. From this prospectival vantage point, the subject can “intuitively see” the organic structure lying underneath the apparent discontinuities. Each of these performances of disinterestedness have in common the act of distancing oneself from the land, whether that “land” manifests itself in the form of a painting, a novel, historical events, or an archive. The many “prospect views” appearing during this century signify the extent to which this


imperial act of distancing oneself from the land had gained a foothold in the cultural logic of the age. The ubiquitous desire for these prospect views— which are found not only in poems and novels, but in more “scientific” works like Arthur Young’s agricultural manuals—is the concrete manifestation of the more silent gridwork of the enclosure movement’s problematic. After his excursion into the chaos of London, and his polyvalent enactments of disinterestedness, Bramble retreats to the “solitude” of country life. It is here, at the beginning of book two, that we see him facilitating his “recuperation” by devising “improvements” for his land, and engaging in a regulated cultivation of the soil (HC 118). Here his identity as an enclosed individual begins to function in full force: Shall I state the differences between my town grievances, and my country comforts? At Brambleton-hall, I have elbow room within doors, and breathe a clear, elastic, salutary air—I enjoy refreshing sleep. . . . I indulge with cyder, which my own orchard affords; or with claret of the best growth, imported for my own use, by a correspondent on whose integrity I can depend; my bread is sweet and nourishing, made from my own wheat, ground in my own mill, and baked in my own oven; my table is, in a great measure, furnished from my own ground, my five-year old mutton, fed on the fragrant herbage of the mountains . . . my game fresh from the moors; my trout and salmon struggling from the stream . . . the produce of the natural soil, prepared by modern cultivation. . . . Without doors I superintend my farm, and execute plans of improvement, the effects of which I enjoy with unspeakable delight—Nor do I take less pleasure in seeing my tenants thrive under my auspices, and the poor live comfort’ably by the employment which I provide. (HC 118)

The entire rhetoric of his relation to the world is saturated with his privatized selfhood. This form of identity goes hand in hand with the logic of possession. He manifests his identity in the vast number of objects he collects and labels as his own, and in the “benevolent” (disinterested) power he exercises over his tenants (who are also his possessions). Writing from within the walls of his estate in Britain, he sounds no different from Robinson Crusoe writing in his journal from within the walls of his estate in the distant tropics. When Bramble reaches the northern-most border of England in Northumberland, he notes that the Scottish people have progressed somewhat in the improvements of their land over the English by enacting enclosures (HC 201). Once he enters Scotland, though, he finds other areas that have yet to “catch up”: the “agriculture in this country is not yet brought to that perfection which it has attained in England. Inclosures would not only keep the grounds warm, and the several fields distinct, but would also protect the crop from the high winds, which are so frequent in this part of


the island” (HC 208). His references to the need for acts of enclosure increase in the second half of the novel, and in the third volume in particular, as Smollett prepares to bring the movement of the novel (the “expedition” for the ideal mode of existence) to a firm and culturally meaningful resolution. The metaphor of “soil” begins symptomatically to appear alongside these later references to enclosure, indicating Smollett’s indissoluble relation to the ontological transformation of “land” into “soil,” which marks, as I argued in chapter two, the “rehabilitation” of the earth into an efficiencygoverned materiality: “The soil of this district produces scarce any other grain but oats and barley; perhaps it is poorly cultivated, and almost altogether uninclosed” (HC 237). Such metaphorical shifts are extremely subtle, but by that very fact indicative of the pervasion of enclosure. The novel comes to a close with the introduction of the character of Charles Dennison, who is the one character in the novel who achieves the perfect symbiosis of subjectivity and the land. And he accomplishes this precisely through the logic of enclosure. He stands as the ideal entrepreneur, able to struggle with any and all hardship to eventually triumph through the stolidity of his individuality. In the wake of a failed profession, a ruined estate, and a marriage “for love” and not for financial gain, Dennison retires to the “simplicity” of country life (HC 308). There he studies the “theory of agriculture” and embarks upon a process of buying “uninhabitable” farm land that comprises “fields lying [in]waste” (HC 310–311). His initial act involves an investment of two hundred pounds in enclosure, from which he rapidly generates an income “more than double the [investment] sum.” With the immediate increase in earnings, he gradually encloses all of “his” farms (no mention is made of the community of farmers inhabiting the land before his arrival), all of which results in the raising of an estate that yields him more than twelve hundred pounds a year (HC 314). Because of his spontaneous success as a self-made man, others begin to seek him out to become his pupils so that they might learn his victorious “practice of husbandry” and thereby acquire the proper skills of attaining sovereign command of the land (HC 329). The novel draws to a conclusion with this ideal organic coupling of the individual to the land. Bramble’s closing letters proudly proclaim that everything within his field of vision has finally reached the point of being regulated to his satisfaction (HC 335). The fields have been “improved,” the economy of the farms are being “superintended,” and the general cultivation of the country life gradually finds the characters “perfectly at ease in both . . . mind and body” (HC 335). Bramble’s initial fear of his niece Lydia’s engagement (on the grounds that she has debased herself by becoming entangled with a “wretched stroller”), which acts as the only substantial tension of the novel’s plot, are entirely expunged when Bramble discovers that her fiancé is none other than Dennison’s son.


Matthew Bramble’s—and by extension, Smollet’s—concern for order and moderation turns out to be excessive, and this craving outwardly manifests itself in his many descriptions of the landscape. They set in play an opposition between country and city. He levels satiric critiques against the city in general, condemning the structure of the metropolis for its lack of order, poor sanitation, population density, and chastising its citizens for affectations of luxury. As Preston shows in his introduction, Matthew Bramble is not opposed to progress in his urban satire, for he has high praise for the commercial development of towns like Leith and Glasgow. This celebration of economic development is coupled with a romantic view of the countryside, which Preston argues, represents “traditional values.” Yet Preston, not unlike Battestin in his discussion of Fielding’s novels, fails to clearly identify what these “values” may be. The closest he comes to clarifying them is in his analysis of the concluding sections of the novel—sections that include the important introduction of the two families of Matthew Bramble’s old acquaintance, the Baynards and the Dennisons. These two families personify the binary polarity of the novel’s satire: its denunciation of an untempered “squalor of wealth,” and its praise of rural enterprise and the development of an industrious agricultural commercial economy. It is this development of an efficiency-oriented agriculture that Matthew Bramble values above all else. In Bramble’s eyes, the luxury of the Baynard’s household reflects the “vices” of city life found in his earlier visits to Bath and London. In contrast, he finds the Dennisons to be the ideal family, coupling rural tranquility with an assiduity for economic development. Preston writes, “the Dennisons have achieved economic and financial security by adopting the rural economy of farming and cultivating their small estate. In typical eighteenth-century fashion, Smollett uses the imagery of gardening and estate planning to carry the burden of moral assessment.”40 Preston then concludes that the Dennisons’ cultivation of the land represents the ideal “harmonious spiritual and physical life.”41 Nowhere, however, does Preston point out that the Dennisons have achieved their economic equilibrium because of the land-enclosure movement. Nor does he question his own reliance upon the theories of landscape gardening. His analysis of the novel, as with many analyses of Humphrey Clinker and eighteenth-century novels in general, gives the impression that the Dennisons’ relationship to the land expresses an unquestionable structure of harmony. With Preston’s reading, the novel begins to take on a reified value, one that gives it its universal appeal and justification as a cultural canonical artifact. The novel’s universal relevance as an art form that founds a presumably harmonious relation to the land is accepted and valorized as an unbiased solution to problems of national interest. As Preston rightly points out, the


Dennisons’ estate espouses the kind of “traditional values” that have the potential for “bridg[ing] the chasm between England and Scotland.”42 But what this kind of criticism fails to see is that this “harmonious” solution to the question of how a nation should cultivate its land, and the land to come under its national dominion in the future, is part and parcel of the hegemony of enclosure and individualism. Consider, for example, how Preston concludes his examination of the “ideal cultivation” of the country: “The virtues that the Dennisons have cultivated in the country suggest to the main characters that happiness develops from within, a creation of the individual, and is sustained through active social intercourse. Matt [Bramble] discovers that each individual, if he strives, can imitate the Dennisons, who have reached that pitch of ‘rural felicity’ toward which Matt himself had been aspiring.”43 The answer for Preston (as with Battestin before him) lies in the development of the individual, the very order of subjectivity born out of the shift from a stewardship of the land to its colonization. It is clear here that Preston’s deployment of the signifier “individual” represents more than a disinterested use of a common term, for when it comes time to give the reader specifics about the essence of Dennison’s success, this quintessence of Dennison’s individuality is none other than the stockpiling landlord: “Dennison moved to the country with no more than [£300] . . . in his pocket, and over a period of twenty-two years improved the yield on his country farm into an annual income of £1,200.”44 It is then the moral task of the satirist to reveal “the evil of the world” by demonstrating the “viciousness” of the world of the Baynards’ excessiveness.45 Preston’s conclusion, then, that Matthew Bramble’s “symbolic search for happiness” comes in the form of this individual cultivation of the land that enables Bramble to “transcend the world of his satire,” silently inaugurates an ideological view that camouflages the violence inherent in his own “harmonious” reasoning: “All individuals, including the satirist, must proceed from the recognition made possible by the revelation, and if they strive they may emulate the Dennisons rather than the Baynards.”46 Preston’s analysis of Smollett’s intent, I would argue, is paradoxically right on target. Smollett himself writes in his preface to Roderick Random of the vital responsibility of the satirist to universally “improve” the world.47 What we have seen throughout our analysis, though, is that the universal appeal to the individual (the sovereign subject who achieves success and discovers happiness by conquering the land through the improvement of its yield and the establishment of a high annual income), is a peculiar definition of happiness that is neither universal, nor natural. Moreover, this definition of happiness in the form of land improvement is strikingly similar to the logic of improvement-by-domination carried out in colonial plantations.


It is nothing new to question the rise of the individual in the history of the development of capitalism and the rise of bourgeois culture. But what is not acknowledged is that this construction of subjectivity has its origin in a relation to the land peculiar to the modern era. Prospect views, landscaping theories, the development of tighter landlord-tenant relations, the policing of boundaries, the creation of strategies for dealing with coagulating multiplicities in growing cities, the simultaneous concern for properly educating and ascertaining the names of the nouveaux riches—all these betoken an anchorage of the human subject in an imperial apparatus that overcodes the land in the name of domination. These symptoms are not the ostentatious signs of sovereignty, but the institution of a new form of subjectivity thought to be based on the erasure of power being wielded over others through the act of endowing everyone with free will—which is coupled with the mystified belief that freeing the individual results in the “freeing of land to its true potential.” Endowing the human subject with “free will,” however, names an act of hegemony against the land, not a freeing of the land. This particular mode of freedom being generated is not a higher position of neutrality, as was presumed to exist, for instance, in the sublation of contradictory desires in the ideal “third space” of marriage in Pamela. The “peace” of the free-willed individual designates a static temporal victory by one side exerting a concealed power over another. This exertion of power makes it an issue of class struggle (landlords against tenants; commercially “successful” individuals against struggling laborers; and always individualized land against inhabited, native land). The argument for this mode of freedom is a derivative creation of the problematic of enclosure that we have been interrogating. It assumes that the individual, like the supposed existence of a moral and organic form of land, is a universal essence that has always existed, one that has been allowed to come into its own only now that we have reached the end of history. What is not problematized, and what cannot be problematized in history after enclosure is that this individuality is a reciprocal fabrication of the very enclosure movement it seeks to inaugurate. Bramble’s representation of the landscape of England in Humphrey Clinker indicates how the problematic of enclosure has led to the concealment of the land’s antagonistic “in-between” essence, which in turn is symptomatic of the economy of power necessarily inaugurated by the logic of imperialism. In the previous chapter, I traced the difference between aletheia and veritas as thought by Heidegger in his Parmenides, and the connection between these differing versions of truth to the essential singularity of relation in his term “earth.” This essential and productive antagonism in play on the land slowly withdraws through the course of the eighteenth century as the British Parliament and other English sociopolitical


institutions begin to focus on formulating the groundwork for more decisive imperial actions. The success and promoted national “heroism” of Robert Clive, the trial of Warren Hastings, and the transformation of the mercantilistic East India Company into a political, cultural, religious, and educational apparatus of control all occur in the definitive last half of the eighteenth century. It is in the “great literature” of the period, however, that we can more substantially see the coming into dominance of the truth (veritas) of enclosure, and the prioritizing of a discourse of order—both of which are considered to be not only a moral manifestation of a self-contained subjectivity that has achieved the proper relation between subject and object (between the self and the land), but a prioritization also considered to be an organic truth underlying all of being. This belief in an ordered foundation as an organic truth establishes itself as a national metanarrative, appearing and reappearing consistently throughout the literature of the mid- to late eighteenth century. The antagonism of life and death played out on the earth will remain to a large degree silent until it is brought back into view by novelists such as Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence. For all their inventiveness and creative diversity, canonical novels of the eighteenth century—as cultural artifacts instrumental in forming public opinion—function as conduct manuals when it comes to the land-enclosure movement and the development of a nationwide imperial comportment to the being of land. Sometimes unwittingly, other times consciously, their singular insights and individualistic wisdoms coincide in a contentious affiliation with the problematic of enclosure: the unfurling sheet of language and materiality creating a rurally simplistic landscape over a more volatile, native earth.


Chapter Four Inhabiting Land in the Age of Empire: Twentieth-Century Literature

Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation. —Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism

I. The Return of Native Earth: Thomas Hardy For his sixth novel The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy drew his own “Sketch Map” (figure 1) of Egdon Heath—the open land on which and in which the story takes place. The map sits laconically alongside the famous opening description of the heath. The heath itself is an eccentric space of land so crucial to the novel’s plot and to the development of its characters that it would be an extreme injustice to refer to it as “backdrop” to the story. For a comparable reason, it would be an injustice to discard the map as a mere “representation” of the more important description of the heath located within the novel proper. It is worth pausing, consequently, to consider the map itself before turning to the novel. The map was included in the first edition of 1878, but did not appear in subsequent editions. This is not surprising. The map itself gives no “prospect” (in the full sense of an enclosing field of vision that reduces the singularities of the land) that would help to clarify the disorienting nature of the heath as described in the novel. It is true that the map situates the viewer in a bird’s-eye perspective, but all that view tells us is that the land below is a haphazard disjunction of winding roads, dotted paths, hilly ridges, serpentine rivers, and a field of wild furze, grown to such an extent that it has come to signify little more than a palimpsest of the ancient Roman road hidden beneath. The map’s place-names help at times to situate the reader, but this act of “situation” is only in relation to other sites

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Figure 1 Thomas Hardy’s “Sketch Map” for The Return of the Native

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within the peculiar context of the heath itself. These place-names offer no information for the scientific imperial cartographer seeking means for charting their locations as positive reference points existing in a larger, more meaningful landscape that may lie beyond the fuzzy limits of the heath’s (and the novel’s) imperceptible borders. The map manifests a liminal space, one offering no movement beyond its own, internal circulation. We might gain some access to the noncartographic logic of the above-mentioned “situationality” by employing the itinerant name of “liminal circulation,” or “liminal flow.” The idea is that the map does not take as its goal the need to “represent” the heath, in the sense of facilitating its incorporation into a more global sociosymbolic field. Further, the map does not signify a synecdochal structure indicative of a larger, more meaningful order. It is not even signification in the traditional sense of the term—an act of naming that enables a mastery, and takeover by a dominant discourse. Such a takeover would pull us back into the problematic of enclosure. On the contrary, the sketch map does not colonize the heath for the reader who wants to be relieved of the burden of disorientation experienced on the heath’s native earth. Instead, the map wards off the creation of a stock of utilizable meaning concerning the heath; it functions instead as an entity laterally connected to the assemblage of enunciations surrounding the heath made by Hardy in the novel itself. In imperialism’s economy of geographical takeovers, enclosing enacts a dualistic program of capture: an overlay and a tracing. The geographer of empire overlays the singular territory of the other with the premade gridwork of commercial, political, and social circulation: Find the towns that will eventually serve as centers of distribution; develop an eye for pathways promising the quickest means of travel from one point to the next; establish defendable boundaries while at the same time opening the “primitive,” nucleated village to the global empire of the cash-nexus. It is in this sense that imperial mapping can more accurately be referred to as a tracing, that is, it merely reflects/traces the imperial vision, for the land being surveyed for colonial possession is attributed to the needs of the polis.1 The land is wedded to the imperial order, traced or reproduced according to the guidelines of the high command. The tracing of an imperial cartography involves a method assuming a strong principle of unity. Tracing enforces a “common ground,” which is merely a political euphemism for mimicry, whereby the colonized land “learns” to mimic and adhere to the ruling order. The imperial map maker always brings the territory of the “unknown” back to the same, reproducing a Western cultural consciousness closed in on itself. Instead, Hardy’s sketch map of the heath is the performance of what we might call a nonrepresentational mapping of the earth. If “mapping”— demarcating boundaries, territorial possessions, geographical details—is a


crucial component of the imperial project, then one needs to qualify this reference to Hardy’s drawing as a map. It can only be said to be a “map” if we think of that term in a truly different fashion—not as an object representing an organic landscape (a tracing of an assumed inherent order), nor as a subjective presentation of an imperial agenda (an overlaying of a metaphysical design), but as an event presentation that appeals to a singular population, rather than a national citizenry. It relies upon no principle of unity that would serve as a public pivot in the dual process of overlaying and tracing. Opposed to the need to ascribe map making to rigid rules of expertise, Hardy’s sketch map is unattributable, flowing from the novel and functioning with it rather than signifying the “meaning” of Egdon Heath. The map wards off the “deterritorialization” of the heath. It is necessary at this point to pause for a moment to consider the importance of these terms, and the precise way they denote whether or not a land is being exploited—especially the concept of deterritorialization. A term of Deleuze and Guattari’s, “deterritorialization” is now in widespread use, but also commonly used inaccurately. The term is understood exclusively to signify a liberatory movement away from the demands of a centralizing polity, standing as something of an equivalent for “deconstruction.” But deterritorialization does not always refer to the breakdown of some sovereign territory; it can also be the most powerful tool available to an empire and the movement of its capital. Capitalism, for Deleuze and Guattari, operates not by allowing distinct territories and their alternative economies to continue existing in their distinctiveness, apart from a global empire. Rather, capitalism deterritorializes the singularity of territories, opening up a territory’s local earth so that it may be inserted into a larger global apparatus of exploitation. It erases the dynamic of sheltering—the protection afforded by an inhabitant’s native ground. This is why one can say that a village is deterritorialized by the enclosure movement. The liminal or nucleated flow is broken, its exchange-limit transgressed, and a new flow opened to mesh with the threshold of outside, statewide distribution. We should be suspicious of the “opening” of this threshold, especially if we come to think of it as a sign that the village is advancing beyond its insular, “back woods” character. If anything, the idea of an “opening” is misleading. The enclosure of the village has brought about the demarcation of rigid, not liminal boundaries. These rigidly enclosed boundaries are thought to give the village its “freedom”—its capacity to “grow.” It may be true that the village obtains a clearer “identity” in terms of its acreage, but that identity becomes part of, and attributed to, the demands of a global order. “Opening” the village has meant a reduction of its differential essence. Its native land has begun to be veiled by national land.


Countless critics have remarked upon the land of Hardy’s novels, in terms of his assiduous attention to the “Wessex landscape.” However, the term “landscape” reflects anything but a neutral meaning. Critics writing about the land, nature, and the earth in respect to Hardy, invariably wield the term out of custom. There are times when attention is paid to the emergence of a resistant force in Hardy’s preoccupation with the land, but these moments tend to remain undeveloped. Very little is said about parliamentary acts of enclosure, and even less about the immense project of imperialism concurrent to these acts. Against the backdrop of an evaporating “ideal” countryside, many of Hardy’s readers treat his rural land nostalgically, memorializing his half “real” half “fictionalized” setting of Wessex. Works such as The Landscape of Thomas Hardy by Donald Maxwell diligently scan the novels’ lengthy descriptions of the countryside, gathering evidence in order to capture its “essence” in a series of paintings. Maxwell feels that the novels naturally lend themselves to these acts of portraiture: “The story [of The Return of the Native] begins with a chapter of pure landscape painting that sets the scene into which, Chapter 2, come figures of men.”2 The land is considered to be an important and very meaningful device for “setting the scene.” It is thus reified from the outset as object to be given over for “men”—who are equally part of a larger “overview” in that they are “figures” of a mastering artist’s panoramic, aesthetic view. Hermann Lea’s Highways and Byways of Hardy’s Wessex similarly focuses on apprehending some degree of the “quintessence” of Hardy’s environment by creating an album of photographs meant to reflect “the real places which served as bases for the descriptions of scenery and backgrounds given us in the novels and poems.”3 These works in and of themselves are highly engaging compendiums to the novels, and no doubt were not intended to be more than this. The are, however, symptomatic of a more encompassing romantic worldview in place that has its basis in the desire to enframe the land as if it were a picture for humanity’s enjoyment. This landscaping aesthetic operates silently, in even the most intuitive sociopolitical analyses. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Marxists began to concentrate on Hardy as the chronicler of a rural society threatened by capitalist intrusion.4 Through the work of Arnold Kettle, Tess came to be seen as a novel about the destruction of the English peasantry, rather than a story about a “pure woman.”5 Merryn Williams, for example, argues that Hardy’s novels “are the first to transform the life of rural England into a great and imperishable art.”6 Williams’s reading of Hardy is heavily critical of those (such as Maxwell and Lea) who, in wishing to see a return to a more romantic countryside, coopt him to serve the agenda of the reactionary camp. Instead, she emphasizes Hardy’s awareness of the sociopolitical realities of indigent agricultural laborers who face the daily exigencies of


diminishing resources, the threat of eviction, and the potential for their cottages to be pulled down. However, even Williams’ considerable work of lifting the veil of nostalgic romanticism from Hardy’s Wessex continues to downplay the dynamic of his engagement with the land: “It is dreadfully easy to see the vast ‘elemental’ heath as a pseudo-romantic backcloth for human passions. . . . [T]his is to some extent Hardy’s own fault; the quality of his opening description of the heath and the rather theatrical figure of Eustacia . . . incline us to visualize Egdon as a metaphysical entity, a dark and wild tract of land unrelated to any forms of human or animal life.”7 Williams reads the heath as a “sterile” plot of land, one that contrasts with the “productive agricultural life in the neighboring valleys.”8 The heath then stands as a symbol of the “terrible and destructive force” of nature, and the point of the novel lies in the need for nature to be “controlled by human effort.”9 The lighting of the bonfire on the heath on November 5 by the inhabitants has importance not as a pagan ritual, but because “it exemplifies human energy and the refusal to be dominated by a forbidding environment.”10 Williams’ reading is provocative in that it rightly attempts to give voice to the struggles of the agricultural laboring class. Yet the focus of this struggle is directed against the land, and not against the problematic of enclosure, and the resulting class relations of power in place that have led to the distinctive mode of existence of Hardy’s laborers. As we have seen, the agricultural laborers are a product of the enclosure movement that shifted the political formulation of the land from a class of inhabitants to a class of landowners, which turns the bulk of the population into struggling small land holders, tenants, or itinerant laborers. The characters of the novel—the inhabitants of the heath—may not be functioning overtly within an enclosed landscape. There is no clear mention that any of them are themselves enclosers; and there is no presence in the novel of a large, enclosing landlord, such as Tom Jones’ Mr. Allworthy. Nonetheless, it is the hidden ontological logic that interests us here, and not the full-blown thing itself. The view that Williams presents—that the laborers are strong because they can overcome a desolate land—telecasts the same structural logic as those who enclose the land: that the land is a materiality that humans must master. In Williams’ reading, land is reduced to a phenomenon having its telos in the exaltation of the human. Under the logic of this argument, the “wild” heath becomes an aporia in the English landscape needing to be colonized. Against her better judgment, Williams’s argument unwittingly enlists Hardy’s novel to the service of the metanarrative of the imperial civilizing process. This unthematized “will-to-power” logic of the human subject that relates to the land by mastering it as an object—which continues as a cultural given to this day—is so insidious that we can easily be convinced


that the agricultural laborer actually gains power in this symbolic act of overcoming the land.11 Acts of dominating the land, however, only carry meaning in the manufactured architecture of individuality. By shifting the focus of the laborers’ struggle to the land as being their enemy, the struggle for a better existence becomes a totally apolitical struggle: it is not a matter of someone imposing unequal relations of political power, but of coming to terms with one’s valorous taming of the land. As a result, Hardy comes to the service of the state by “supporting” the same colonizing economy that Crusoe employs in his providential mastery of the island. With these considerations in mind, let us turn now to Hardy’s discursive “mapping” of the heath: A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor. The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread. In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. . . . The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced half-way. . . . Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something . . . one last crisis—the final overthrow.12

If the history of enclosures is about the setting up of boundaries to stop the flow of transgressive multitudes, and the history of imperialism the implementation of enclosures on a global register, then the history of movement in all its forms would constitute a resistance to the dominant narratives of the nation-state. From the first sentence of The Return of the Native we are


confronted by a land in motion, not a statically composed landscape: “it embrowned itself moment by moment.” The “flow” of the heath is of a different temporality from that of the “astronomical hour” of the sky and the surrounding world. The title to this opening chapter would suggest the heath to be existing outside of time: “A Face on Which Time Makes But Little Impression.” Yet the curious manner in which the land of the heath “retards” the dawn, “saddens” the moon, “anticipates” stormy weather, makes inadequate this assumption that the heath exists metaphysically outside of the differences disseminated by temporal movement. The singular retardation and intensification generated on the heath gesture toward not an absence of time, but name a warding-off of “worldly” and “heavenly” temporality. On the heath one lives in a “division of time” other than the standardized time of the external world. The separation of the heath from these two regimes of temporality is also a separation from these worlds’ regimes of matter. The singular materiality of the heath is of another order than that of a formalized matter based on a principle of presence, for the provenance of this other matter is cause for “shaking and dread.” This dread expresses a fundamental instability in opposition to the accepted stabilities of the world and of heaven. In terms of how the problematic informs the subject’s “vision,” the space of this nomadic land, with its “rounds” and “hollows” rising into the evening, does not give access to the clinical, enframing eye. One has to inhabit the heath, to “be there” “at such a time.” Sight, the most detached sense, the sense of prey and of capture, is displaced in favor of a more intimate relationality: “It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen.” The clinical clear light of day whitewashes the heath’s “true tale.” Instead of being watched by the observing, panoptic eye, the heath itself watches and in its watching waits with “intent.” The heath, in other words, is everything that Crusoe would want to erase. Instead of a principle of presence the heath calls for proximity. Proximity is not a relation between a subject and another subject, or between a subject and an object, but names a confrontation with one’s limits and the movement of those limits in reaction to the specifics of the particular exteriority being inhabited. This nomadic liminality is experienced rather than perceived (perception being an act of a sovereign subject). It is in this sense “imperceptible,” and as such offers an alternative to the deterritorializing movement of capital and the nation-state. Given this radical engagement with a liminal economy of proximity, what, then, is Hardy talking about when he makes reference to a “last crisis” and a “final overthrow”? Is he invoking some Hegelian conceptualization of the “end of history” in which multiple and antagonistic forces come to be reconciled in a peaceful common ground? It appears as if many of his critics think so: “Hardy’s careful combination of metaphor and organic


image has opened up a new dimension of physical reality for twentieth-century fiction: the microscopic world of man’s origins, the teeming locale of the evolutionary roots of human existence”; “The new relationship in Hardy’s novels between landscape and character involves a new quality of microscopic vision and a new sensuous grasp of space. . . . This sense of oneness between man and his physical environment brings about a revival of the plot and physical pilgrimage built upon a ‘spirit of place’ ”; forming this “oneness” is the “naturist” technique of Hardy; “The naturist novel returns always to Eden, where there is no knowledge, only wisdom”; Hardy transplants a Darwinian meaning to the soil, “a utopia founded upon a donée, a given truth already present ontologically in nature.”13 Given the nonrepresentational character of the heath, it is hard to accept its intent to be a prelapsarian flight from history, temporality, and the contingencies of other, equally demanding registers of reality. I would suggest that instead of signifying humanity’s organic unity with the land, Hardy’s heath more closely matches Heidegger’s resistant earth—a form of living energy ( phusis) brought into being entirely through relation, a withdrawal from being taken over by an imperial order of signification. What is Heidegger’s thought of relation if not the nonfoundational principle of proximity that characterizes Hardy’s sketch map? It is in “contrast” that the heath “wears an appearance.” The “frowning storms” “intensify” the heath’s “opacity.” If there exists any clue to the question of the “last crisis” it is to be found in the heath’s own form of an exasperating signification of self-refusal: “Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity” (RN 3). These partially self-negating descriptive terms work to qualify their own signifying power and expressive intent. Alongside this negation Hardy offers the term “sublimity,” a transgression of “renowned beauty” of “the accepted kind” (RN 3). Sublimity here refers not to a movement to a higher space, but an act of resistance to the “exclusive reign” of “orthodox beauty”: “it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter” (RN 3). If the text offers anything to the reader to be overthrown as the “last crisis,” it is the dominating reign of transcendental idea of beauty. The connection to phusis is further attested to by Hardy’s description of a peculiar intensity that builds as the heath’s being circulates in proximity: Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend. Then it became a home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original

122 / ecological and postcolonial study of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by scenes like this. (RN 4)

This “intensity” generated by the heath is likened to the kind of “flight” experienced outside the subjectively controlled order of consciousness. These unconscious flights reenter the mind in the proximity of the heath, which acts as an exterior stimulus for unclasping the rationalizing sovereignty of consciousness. As with Heidegger’s earth, the intensity that invokes this flight from consciousness is not a positive essence, but a force that also arises out of the activity of relation. “Winter darkness,” “tempests,” and “mists” bring out the heath’s intensity—much like the building sheltered by the earth in “The Origin of the Work of Art” brings out the raging of the storm by “first making the storm itself manifest in its violence.” In proximity to the “storm” and the “wind” the heath comes into an active intensity. In “reciprocity” it is “aroused” into being. Its being does not preexist relation. The active intensity brought about through relation in the above passage contradicts the passage that immediately follows, where it appears that Hardy comes dangerously close to compromising the nonexploitative character of the heath: It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities. (RN 4)

The suggestion of an “accordance” with man’s “nature” indicates a reliance upon a logic of harmony. The mention of “tragical possibilities” suggests that readers will undergo a redemptive catharsis. Yet even amongst these traditional conceptions, the heath refuses to be “tamed” and maintains in its “mysterious . . . monotony” a withdrawal from the mastering logic of comprehension. This withdrawal, coupled with the language found in the passage immediately following, contradicts the humanist rhetoric of tragedy. The land returns to its “obscurity” and “obsoleteness” (RN 4). There is even mention made of the land’s ancient “use-rights”—the “Turbaria Bruaria”: “the right of cutting turf ” (RN 4), which is still to be “found in old charters” relating to the district. The language Hardy uses to describe the heath straddles the metaphysical and the nonmetaphysical. Just when we think the heath can never be taken in by metaphysics, the intensive movement of proximity slips away in


favor of a traditional, almost prelapsarian perspective: To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, . . . and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow . . . themselves almost crystallized to natural products by long continuance—even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change. (RN 5)

Still, even in this passage’s heavily loaded language, the sense is of a land rich in history, not of a landscape expressing, as Alcorn would have it, an Edenic “Wisdom.” The heath is not like the formless sea, for the sea is an entity that has no temporal measure, no history in its “pure fluidity.” Just as no “pure nomad” exists, neither is Egdon Heath representative of a vague, pluralistic “absolute flow.” The flow of pluralism—of a deterritorializing capitalism—is what Hardy’s land refuses. The heath does not give “ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.” In opposition to the constant deterritorialization of nationalized and internationalized flows of the “irrepressible New,” the heath is “inviolate,” sheltering an ancient history in “permanence.” Permanence here gains its meaning not in the customary sense of “universal” and “absolute,” but once again in an oppositional relation to the free-floating sea of pluralism. As such permanence marks more accurately a proximity-event of resistance, rather than an organic principle of unity. The permanence of the heath is an insistence of the singular native territory, a territoriality defined by its liminal circulatory flow that has not been deterritorialized by a larger, global order. Maintaining its identity as a liminal territory, the active intensity of Hardy’s land refuses the logic of colonization. II. Inhabiting the Land in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow II. a. The Landscaping Critics Lawrence’s concern with the rise of industrialism has received substantial attention. But as with Hardy’s “industrial” critics, hardly any attention has been paid to the land-enclosure movement or to Britain’s imperial relations


to lands overseas in these analyses of Lawrence. The analyses attempt to throw into relief the major relations of power deconstructed in his novels, but they fail to draw connections to the novel’s larger global historical occasion. Marko Modiano, for instance, retrieves from Lawrence’s posthumously published papers clear statements concerning Lawrence’s thinking about the industrialization of English soil. At times, in these unpublished letters and notes, Lawrence sounds almost Heideggerian: “The industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.”14 However, as with Preston’s reading of Humphrey Clinker and Battestin’s reading of Tom Jones, Modiano sacrifices a more originary consideration of pre-industrial agriculture to concentrate on what he considers to be the “tragedy” of the individual at the end of The Rainbow. As with Preston and Battestin, this focus on the individual is related to a disabling assumption about the ontological meaning of land. Modiano writes, “The advent of industrialization coincided with a new epistemology, one associated with scientific and mechanical approaches to problem solving. In general terms one can say that pre-industrial society looked toward nature and religion for solutions to life’s dilemmas, while industrial society turned toward science. . . . Agrarian life had allowed man to cultivate relations not so much with things as with ‘nature,’ and to experience the family legacy as an integral part of this natural life. . . . Man, [according to Lawrence in Women in Love] through mechanization, had become separated from ‘the very stuff of being.’ In time Lawrence came to idolize and idealize the past, i.e., primitive societies and pre-industrial England.”15 Once more the essence of “nature” and agrarian existence passes entirely unthematized in an analysis that ironically depends so heavily upon the classical opposition between “nature” and “culture,” between “primitive” and “scientific.” From this unacknowledged, fundamental separation flows an entire analysis that can only function if it remains enclosed upon itself by marginalizing the dynamic of inhabitancy. Lawrence’s solicitation of a nonessentialist ontology—“the very stuff of being”—is, for all intents and purposes, discarded by Modiano as a quasi-religious statement. In this way Modiano totally bypasses the many references to enclosures and open fields at the end of The Rainbow to conclude that the character of Ursula is “intrinsically tragic,” having been unable to “succeed” in her “efforts to attain contact with other human beings.”16 Ursula’s profound inhabitation of the land is thus entirely overlooked, even in the recognition of the industrialism in which she is situated: “Her courageous journey, however . . . takes her no further than one of the dirty industrial towns which Lawrence so adamantly hated and there she is left, the tragic heroine, to dwell in the novel’s last offering of hope for a better future. . . . Her tragedy completes the cycle of movement from the agricultural world of the countryside to the industrial


community of the town.”17 As we see shortly, Modiano is only partially attuned here to the land that opens up at the end of The Rainbow.18 By far the richest work—and the work to engage most fully Lawrence’s relation to an “organic materiality”—is Anne Fernihough’s D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology. Part of Fernihough’s valuable insight is the following: critics have been misled in reading Lawrence as if he subscribed to a mimetic model of language, a model that works under the assumption that language and the material world are “disjunct,” and that language “suppresses its own rhetorical status, aspiring to transparency and thereby appropriating the world as its own.”19 To this suppression inherent in the mimetic ideology, we need to add an indispensable component: language’s material power of hegemony, which goes into hiding when it comes to be thought of as transparent. In other words, what needs to be emphasized is the ability of a signifier to impose a will to power in its act of constructing meaning and in its interpellation of materiality. Fernihough’s analysis is philosophically very sharp. To explode the mimetic relation between signifier and signified, she retrieves a more originary understanding of art that is active in Lawrence’s writings. Drawing striking comparisons between Lawrence and Heidegger, she reveals the extent to which Lawrence was committed to a project of deaestheticization in conjunction with his critique of industrialism. She shows how Lawrence consistently worked to lift the classical dichotomy of a subject/object mode of relating to the world. Instead, she suggests, he placed an emphasis on matter, what Lawrence called at one point in his analysis of Cezanne’s art, the “substance of thereness.”20 Arguing against the many critics who read Lawrence’s “organicist aesthetic” as mysticism or idealism, Fernihough attends to Lawrence’s own decree that “matter actually exists.”21 Her retrieval of Lawrence’s ontological critique of art liberates him from the shroud of mysticism sewn by the landscape critics. The single aspect of Fernihough’s exemplary reading that I would criticize, though, is that it is too ontological. In the end, the term “materiality”—meant to be a performance of political resistance to the discipline of aesthetic inquiry— tends to become itself static in her work. It remains reified within an exclusively philosophical mode of investigation. Consequently we need to release materiality to the equally crucial registers of history, economics, agriculture, and imperialism. The discussed works on Lawrence (and on Hardy as well) seek to establish a more egalitarian relation to the earth. But the conclusions drawn from these liberal humanist approaches (except Fernihough’s) to the question of finding a “truer” relation to one’s territory all fail to break free from the economy of agricentrism, which can be seen at play in the very terms deployed by these critics in the struggle to gain freedom: “middle ground,”


“unity,” “organic essence,” “landscape,” “order,” “balance,” “equilibrium,” and so on. Alcorn’s claim summarizes the logical economy of this struggle: “Lawrence’s polarities, like Forster’s, are preparations for bridge-building: the ‘arch’ of The Rainbow, the ‘equilibrium’ of Women in Love, the ‘duet’ of Aaron’s Rod are moments of connection, instants in which dualities are transcended or obliterated.”22 On a fundamental level, the goal in these humanist modes of inquiry is no different from Defoe’s own agricentrism, which appears in Crusoe’s belief in an organic “providential” logos abiding in the land. The anxiety is still the same: the land presents the individual with an infinite degree of movement, variety, difference, and instability, and we can either dig deep enough to ultimately discover this providential logos of unity lurking underneath it all, or we can locate this logos in the human subject whose life project then becomes the search for a means to triumph over the land by mastering its chaotic movement. In the end, the search for a “truer” relation based on an organically inherent equilibrium occludes the resistant character of the land, and passes by the possibility of thinking humanity’s proximity to the land from the dynamic of an exchange-limit structure. Because it has its goal in the annulment of the land’s act of resistant withdrawal, organicism merely initiates another project of stockpiling. We must recognize the complicity between (1) the origins of industrial, agricultural, and land hegemony and colonization, and (2) the organicist and landscaping modes of inquiry. II. b. Lawrence’s Poetics of Inhabitation The final chapter of Lawrence’s The Rainbow focuses solely on the character of Ursula, last in the long Brangwen genealogy of “blood-earth” issuance. She has moved far from the original Marsh Farm homestead, a habitation sustaining generations of Brangwens before its enclosure at the opening of the novel due to the demands of a newly constructed colliery canal and railway. These demands bring so considerable a degree of commercial activity to the land native to the homestead that they in turn give birth to a new industrial town. The artificial changes to the land press upon the Brangwens, who ambivalently alight upon these new commercial possibilities by practically becoming tradesmen, while feeling displaced at the same time as “strangers in their own land”—the raw changes in the earth having “shut them off ” from their former association to the earth.23 Tumbling through her own acutely ambivalent relation to the historical continuum into which she is thrown at birth, Ursula undertakes and engages in a more radical confrontation with the land in the final chapter. In this chapter, named after the title of the novel, Ursula inhabits the land in and around the industrial town of Beldover. The ontological pressures that limit Ursula’s


possibilities for action in the future come to a head in the chapter. Ursula’s rage in the face of uncompromising constraints makes the ending of the novel an odd admixture of pessimism and hope. For the inhabitant attempting to insist on an agency undetermined by a metanarrative, both imperial and phallocentric, the land has come actively to presence as a zone of contestation. Critics have said a great deal about the image of the rainbow as a “bridge builder” and a “symbol of unification,” interpreting it according to a vaguely New Critical logic of reconciliation. The rainbow is thus understood to be a vehicle that resolves contestations under its all-embracing arch. In opposition to this search for signs of rhetorical tidiness at the end of Lawrence’s novel, I want to focus on what could be called the chapter’s poetics of land inhabitation. To arrive at this point, we must map the movement of Ursula’s passage through various territories and apparatuses of capture that have brought her to this particular habitation. Initial statements in the novel concerning Ursula tell us that she is a child born into a Cartesian universe, the very image of an isolated self, fully enclosed: “She was always herself, the world outside was accidental” (R 203). She is described as if something innate causes her to retreat from a world considered to be outside and fully separated from her immured identity: “She asserted her self only. There was now nothing in the world but her own self ” (R 208). In part this is a reaction to her own, highly egocentric father, whom Lawrence describes as “perfectly self-contained. He was himself, the absolute, the rest of the world was the object that should contribute to his being” (R 211). As Ursula moves into adulthood, she comes to be aware of herself as a more ambivalently coded “separate entity” existing “in the midst of an unseparated obscurity” (R 263). This “obscurity” is further defined as “the nothingness and undifferentiated mass” of an “undiscovered life” (R 263). Traditionally this would be the point at which the naturists, or the landscaping theorists, would step in, their problematic instinct telling them to annex the terms “obscurity,” “nothingness,” “undifferentiated mass,” to the realm of mysticism. This condemnation of Lawrence’s presumably “fuzzy” attempt to think beyond the “concrete” reality of a scientifically governed worldview is informed by the assumption that only in enclosed (colonized) spaces can we find clarity. We must not condemn Lawrence’s “undifferentiated mass” as being any less precise because it has not been subjected to a traditional understanding of precision. In fact, its refusal to come within the corrective lens of a spatial problematic indicates even more precision—the precision of another nature, justice, and “responsibility,” to use Lawrence’s own word. Ursula’s “torment” of “inheriting” the responsibility of this “obscurity” suggests a less moralized and a more ethical (nonfoundational)


relation to the limits of her own continuously developing being. Unlike her father (aptly named “Will”), who finds comfort in the harmonizing arch of a fully stabilized Lincoln Cathedral (R 187–189), Ursula’s ontological act of inhabitancy couples the stability of her already determined self with the instability of “undiscovered life.” We find more evidence to support this displacement of morality with a nonfoundational ethics in her resolve to dismiss the Christian world of “absolute truth and living mystery” that confronts her every Sunday, in favor of a “week-day world” in which she can more tangibly “live by action” (R 263). At the early stages of her life Ursula is unable to find a productive way to “live by action.” It is her “first love,” Anton Skrebensky, who begins to unclose her insulated subjectivity. At this key moment, Lawrence brings the being of the land back into the novel. In unfolding outward, Ursula thinks of herself as being intimately connected to the land, but in a peculiar manner: “[Anton] brought her a strong sense of the outer world. It was as if she were set on a hill and could feel, vaguely, the whole world lying spread before her” (R 269). The disposition of this first unfolding of Ursula’s sequestered self cannot be ignored. It carries decided overtones of the individualist mode of identity construction, with the self standing above the land so as to occupy it from a prospect position of authority. Her desire at this point is to unfold without limits, to deterritorialize the land in the face of her first genuine encounter with another being: “[T]hey became one movement . . . dancing on the slippery grass. It would be endless, this movement, it would continue for ever” (R 295). As the delirium of the dance increases for Ursula, she imagines herself expanding even further, opening to a “communion with the moon” (R 296). The unfolding to the ecstatic point of oblivion goes far beyond the immediate presence of Skrebensky himself. He is left behind as she expands beyond all confines and contingencies. This cosmic transgression of limits abruptly comes to a stifling close for her as Anton’s voice brings her back to the immediate physicality of the dance. Instantly, she comes to think of his presence, and the presence of the people around her as a burden, as if they were “magnetic stones” holding her down (R 296). The presence of Skrebensky now has a totally opposite effect on her from her first encounter with him: “[H]e must weave himself round her, enclose her, enclose her in a net of shadow, of darkness, so she would be like a bright creature gleaming in a net of shadows, caught” (R 297). Skrebensky as a figure to aid in the breaking of constraints is superseded by a Skrebensky personifying a traditional male mode of domination in heterosexual relations. After this Ursula notices the drastic changes in the land around her, reflecting Lawrence’s own misgivings in the face of the substantially growing coal mining industry in the English countryside. Ursula’s uncle,


Tom Brangwen, moves to a developing industrial town called Wiggiston. Lawrence gives some of the history of the town’s growth: “It had been a hamlet of eleven houses on the edge of healthy, half-agricultural country. Then the great seam of coal had been opened. In a year Wiggiston appeared, a great mass of pinkish rows of thin, unreal dwellings of five rooms each” (R 320). The people living in Wiggiston are described as halfdead, as “spectres” moving along “blank streets” in a “barren cohesion” of “homogeneous sterility” that suggests “death rather than life” (R 320). The town is totally colonized by the coal mines, and owes its formation to the development of a commercial empire. Moving through the narrow streets, she feels “as if a hard, horny shell enclosed them all” with “human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery” (R 321, 324). As Ursula struggles to create a place for herself in the continuous variation of the world, Lawrence turns more and more to the metaphor of “enclosure.” His use of this metaphor, as we come to see, does not indicate some literary extraction from an abstract and isolated aesthetic domain; it arises specifically out of the character of the English land. The word comes to signify a mode of identity that, I would argue, Lawrence finds to be at odds with the earth. After Ursula has raked herself through the coals of teaching elementary education, she celebrates her triumph over this severely disciplinary system. But she ultimately decides that this structure of habitation is too limiting. Her work as a grade school teacher is a way for her to overcome her initial fears of not being able to succeed in “The Man’s World” (the title of the chapter in which these scenes occur). At the end of the chapter Lawrence uses the character of Maggie Shofield as a foil for illuminating Ursula’s reluctance to be enclosed in the limited subject position of a schoolmistress: “It was during this winter that Ursula suffered and enjoyed most keenly Maggie’s fundamental sadness of enclosure. Maggie enjoyed and suffered Ursula’s struggles against the confines of her life. And then the two girls began to drift apart, as Ursula broke from that form of life wherein Maggie must remain enclosed” (R 382). The inhabitation at a highly specific site (the schoolhouse), which counters her former cosmic experience of a subjectivity unclosed to the point of delirium (with Skrebensky), proves to be little more than an experiment in domestication. In the most radical chapter of the novel, the land emerges in a nonderivative, antagonistic relation of the open and the enclosed. It is not only that Ursula passes between literal land enclosures and open fields in the space outside of Beldover called “Willey Green,” but that her passage through this milieu resonates across the zones of identity, gender, the commodity-fetish structure of marriage relations, commercial land construction, and imperial economies of land domination. Lawrence moves beyond the figural to set


his character within an active-intensive “groundwork” that signifies more than a mere backdrop, more than a mere landscape. The manner in which the chapter unfolds gives a sense of the depth of this resonance: Ursula went on towards Willey Green . . . Making on towards the wood, she saw the pale gleam of Willey Water through the cloud below, she walked the open space where hawthorn trees streamed like hair on the wind and round bushes were presences showing through the atmosphere. It was very splendid, free and chaotic . . . She turned under the shelter of the common, seeing the great veils of rain swinging with slow, floating waves across the landscape. . . . She must beat her way back through all this fluctuation, back to stability and security. [S]he moved swiftly along, watching her footing . . . with no thought, contained in motion. . . . [S]he went through the wash of hollow space . . . Suddenly she knew there was something else. Some horses were looming in the rain. . . . [T]hey were going to be near . . . She knew the heaviness on her heart. It was the weight of the horses. But she would circumvent them. She would bear the weight steadily, and so escape. . . . She knew without looking that the horses were moving nearer. . . . She was aware of their breasts gripped, clenched narrow in a hold that never relaxed . . . pressing to burst the grip upon their breasts . . . running against the walls of time, and never bursting free . . . They were behind her. The way was open before her, to the gate in the high hedge in the near distance, so she could pass into the smaller, cultivated field, and so out to the high-road and the ordered world of man . . . On her left, two hundred yards down the slope, the thick hedge ran parallel. At one point there was an oak-tree. She might climb into the boughs of that oak-tree, and so round and drop on the other side of the hedge. . . . (R 450–453, emphasis added)

One immediately notices the hackneyed binary opposition of “open/ Common space” equated with “chaos,” and its tacit counterpart of “organization/enclosure” to “order.” Yet the open space of Willey Green discharges a grant of freedom to Ursula. Since the Newtonian “revolution” in cosmic spatial theory there has been perhaps no more persistent an opposition than this one between “chaos” and “order.” It is a revolution that meant much to eighteenth-century novelists and poets. And it is a revolution equally fundamental to the logic of colonization (e.g., the land of the other is consistently understood as chaotic; the natives practice cannibalism; they are irrational beings; they have no stable culture because they lack a written history; etc.). This leashing of chaos to the worn definitions of “utter confusion” and “disorder” has made it difficult for us to come to this nonconcept by any other means. Moreover, it has had the paradoxical effect of mastering the very thing incapable of being mastered: chaos is named as “disorder.” The name of disorder is a signifying marker of power, having the


effect of “felling” chaos to the level of the falsum. Thereafter, chaos is allowed to exist, but as a phenomenon having now a utility in that its suppression buttresses the order of stability. Ursula’s gaining a fragment of freedom through this inhabitation of chaos, however, gestures toward an ontological relevance entirely other than that of this classical epistemology. Jacques Derrida articulates a certain ontological relevance to be found in chaos: All that a deconstructive point of view tries to show, is that since convention, institutions and consensus are stabilizations (sometimes stabilizations of great duration, sometimes micro-stabilizations), this means that they are stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Thus, it becomes necessary to stabilize precisely because stability is not natural. . . . Now, this chaos and instability, which is fundamental, founding and irreducible, is at once naturally the worst against which we struggle with laws, rules, conventions, politics and provisional hegemony, but at the same time it is a chance, a chance to change, to destabilize. If there were continual stability, there would be no need for politics, and it is to the extent that stability is not natural . . . that politics exists and ethics is possible. Chaos is at once a risk and a chance, and it is here that the possible and the impossible cross each other.24

Derrida’s characterization of chaos as both a threat and a chance for freedom can be thought in relation to Ursula’s encounter with the open land at the end of The Rainbow. It is not so much that Ursula travels beyond the limits of classical thinking concerning the force of chaos; she travels elsewhere, enacting a different integration with an unenclosed space of continuous variation and heterogeneity. Once we release chaos from the truth-economy of veritas and falsum, we begin to encounter a richness of matter in chaos that remains concealed by the orders of stability longing to give form to all materiality. The chaotic space of the Common gives Ursula “shelter.” This space of the Common is not meaningless, as if some empty void. It has heft: she must “beat her way” through its movement. Her relation to this movement is not subjective. Nowhere in this passage to the land’s limit do we see a subject in a domesticating comportment to an object. The Common field is not an object given over to Ursula in a will-to-power correlation of knowledgeconstruction: “she moved swiftly along . . . with no thought.” Neither is this a confrontation with a problematic field of inquiry having duped a subject presumed to know through an act of interpellation. Instead, her being has unfolded so as to become lodged in the undirected movement of the field’s openness: “She moved swiftly along . . . contained in motion . . . [flowing] through the wash of hollow space.” To suggest that she is somehow “hemmed in” by an obligatory directionality is to miss the potential of movement here. It would be clearer to speak of her “containment in motion” as an act of


becoming, of becoming motion, or becoming open field, rather than voyaging between two politically implemented “states.” This unfettering act of becoming motion is not something she takes lightly, which is why she failed before in her first cosmic “expansion” in the presence of Skrebensky. There she fully held on to her subjectivity, consciously thinking that expansion with reference to traditional, “mystical” symbols that denote a sense of “being at one” with the universe: the “ecstasy” of the heterosexual dance with Skrebensky; the paganist “communion with the moon”; her leap to the prospect view where she can oversee “the whole world lying spread before her.” Lawrence in fact tells us openly that all of these images stem from the “reflections of her own desire.” Instead of seeing the Common as a phenomenon placed at her service and spread before her—as does Allworthy when he surveys his estate—she is the one to be spread back against the Common’s nomadic flow. This flow weighs “heavily on her heart.” Her subjectivity unfolds further as this weight begins to flow out of the heavy rhythm of the horses to form an attachment to her heart. At this stage, the movement of the Common comes to signify more than simply the facile, liberalist dream of a pluralistic world set in continual flux. Movement unveils itself to be a risk, as well as a freedom. The horses evince this quandary of time’s pressure: they are situated within the movement of time, are part of its flow. The movement of time and the nomadic flow of reality give to Ursula a perilous endowment: the pharmakon of freedom’s insecurity. Against this turbulent shelter she feels an impulse to pull back from the freedom of its “fluctuation” to return to the realm of “stability and security.” She enters the “cultivated” field that marks the edge of civilization, eventually fleeing the horses by climbing over the oak tree that grows near a hedge that marks the threshold of an enclosure. Her return to “stability and security” carries its own, correspondingly oppressive weight, for the only form of security history makes available for her is the domesticating, propertymarriage nexus offered by Skrebensky. We begin to see that the chaos of the Common is not the only poison cure she faces. The security of the enclosed field is also a double-edged sword: security brings with it domestication: “She was very ill for a fortnight, delirious, shaken and racked. . . . [T]he corrosion of [Skrebensky] burned in her . . . Why must she be bound, aching and cramped with the bondage, to Skrebensky and Skrebensky’s world? Anton’s world: it became in her feverish brain a compression which enclosed her. . . . ” (R 455). Her realization of security’s poison does not stop with the restricting possibility of a marriage with Skrebensky. It carries over to the cultivated field of literary perception enclosed by the problematic of the early twentieth-century world at large: “[S]he repeated: ‘ . . . I have no allocated place in the world or things. I do not belong to Beldover


nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled and entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it, like a nut from its shell which is an unreality’ ” (R 456). Lawrence develops this image: And again, to her feverish brain, came the vivid reality of acorns in February lying on the floor of a wood with their shells burst and discarded and the kernel issued naked, to put itself forth. She was the naked, clear kernel thrusting forth the clear, powerful shoot, and the world was a bygone winter, discarded . . . whilst the kernel was free and naked and striving to take new root, to create a new knowledge of Eternity in the flux of Time. This grew and grew upon her. When she opened her eyes in the afternoon and saw the window of her room and the faint, smokey landscape beyond, this was all husk and shell lying by . . . she was enclosed still, but loosely enclosed. There was a space between her and the shell. It was burst, there was a rift in it. [S]he looked ahead, into the undiscovered land before her. . . . It was the unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered upon whose shore she had landed, alone, after crossing the void, the darkness which washed the New World and the Old. . . . Anton belonged to the past. (R 456–457, emphasis added)

This is the moment of truth for Ursula. The specific modality of this truth is the contestatory movement of aletheia. The traditional image of the nut and its kernel sending out a “powerful shoot” is set against the plane of eternity, but a nomadic eternity, an eternity thought from the nonpositive dynamic of a temporal flux. The reference to eternity here harks back to Ursula’s initial immersion in Christian notions of beauty and freedom: that is, “eternity” and the “everlasting.” The return of eternity to the text at this crucial stage should not be taken as a teleological sign. Lawrence purposefully does not discard the thought of transcendence in relation to Ursula’s attempt to gain agency as she faces the prisonhouse of history. Thinking transcendence does not mean automatically embracing metaphysics. Acts of transgression come to pass precisely in a quasi-transcendent movement across the fabricated limits of reality. Such a movement names a passage to the divine, where the divine becomes a term designating the nonpositive space of the open. It is in this sense that the “kernel” of Ursula has come to undergo an aletheiac experience. It signifies a deconstructive critique of the realm of historical reality that has come to be constituted and accepted without question. The image of the kernel is itself nonpositive, in that it exerts its presence as a “rift” and not as an object to be possessed. It is the Lacanian Real that Crusoe desperately attempted to erase by enclosing the island. This rift brings to bear her aletheiac antagonism between the perceptible and the imperceptible, the Common and the enclosure, stability and


chaos, freedom and security—specifically, the unconcealed of the problematic of history that has come to pass, and the concealed of a nomadic materiality that resists the problematic of colonization. This aletheiac experience is not simply Lawrence taking literary license and withdrawing from the specificities of a harsh, industrial reality. He sets this ontological exploration alongside the occasion of England’s substantial commercial enclosure of the land: She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already enclosed in a coffin . . . she saw the hard, cutting edges of new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph, the triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines. . . . [A] dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land. . . . Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint vast rainbow. . . . And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination. . . . She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. (R 458–459)

Not only does the novel never let us forget the real and monumental pressure of industrialism, but Ursula’s coming to think of herself as a rift in the imperial assemblage of reality expands beyond her own sovereign identity with its selfish concerns. This rift, that names the emergence of a nonmasterable materiality that exists as a concealed region of continuous variation, arises as well on the earth as a possibility for the citizenry of England at large, who are covered in the shell of the coal mines. We see, finally, that the rainbow itself—supposedly a pure symbol of “harmony” and “bridgebuilding”—ascends out of a poison cure antagonism. It will come to existence not as some final arrival of universal security; it will not be the deliverer of a common ground. The “new germination”—the possibility of freedom for the formerly agricultural inhabitants who have “evolved” to become the mastering individuals of their own fate in the coal mines of empire—must also endure the dreadful freedom of the open field. The “answer” unfolding in the last chapter is not to be found in the search for a harmonious resolution, in the symmetry of the “rainbow” in which we would find Ursula attaining peace with what has been a consistently “confused” and “tortured” identity. It is the taking of a risk, and an emerging of a fresh pathway that can come only about in an act of a transgression of boundaries, in a movement to the limit of all available pathways.


Regardless of the extent to which both Hardy and Lawrence de-structure the problematic of the imperial enclosure of English land, the efficacy of their act of resistance has its limitations. There is something disturbingly absent in their anti-imperial and ecological engagements. Neither offer their readers a view of what lies outside the confines of their immediate environment. I have in mind the distant colonial possessions that constitute the second crucial and indissolubly related component in the deterritorializing expansion of imperial geography. This occlusion cannot be dismissed on the ground that both authors were more concerned with subjects closer to home. Inhabiting a native land does not necessarily mean that the inhabitant has absolutely no connections beyond its immediate confines. Knowledge of overseas acts of colonization were part of a British citizen’s daily life. It is important to note that this absence of any consideration of British cultivation of the land in its colonies reveals how the land of the other was in a manner unassailable and inaccessible to the novelists wishing to explode their own internal acts of enclosure. This unassailable character of peripheral land constitutes the last hurdle of the enclosing problematic—the disciplinary limit that disables the inhabitant from establishing connections across more than the most immediate and obvious registers of being. Such connections are found in the novels of E.M. Forster. III. A Land at War with the Human: Forster’s Narratology of the Speculative in Howards End and A Passage to India III. a. Jameson versus Suleri Many have written about earth imagery and the importance of rural landscape in Forster’s novels. Unfortunately, most of these investigations are of a piece with the landscaping criticism circumscribing the novels of Hardy and Lawrence.25 However, two recent essays by Fredric Jameson and Sara Suleri bring up (though too briefly) the question of the land in terms of imperial geography and spatiality. Jameson’s essay has to do with what he calls a “spatial disjunction” determinative of the colonial system, in which the experience and life in the colony remains “unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power.” Any attempt on the part of the metropolitan subject to enlarge his or her knowledge of the colonial system as a whole on the basis of the internal existential experience found in the first world can never grasp the “radical otherness of colonial life.” The metropolitan experience thus no longer has its meaning solely within itself, for this experience is based on a system located beyond the metropolis itself.26 Jameson’s argument is analogous


to what I argued to be the limitations of Hardy’s and Lawrence’s engagement with their native land. Thus Jameson chastises the modernist aesthetic for its continual attempts to “solve” this formal contradiction by establishing some satisfying form of absolute totality. Following this logic, Jameson claims that Forster’s Howards End is imperialist and modernist, and for two crucial reasons. (1) Forster cannot project his narrative onto the radically different space of the other, of the colonized. As such this essential, oppressed component of the imperial project is denied its voice. (2) Forster draws the (unwittingly imperial) conclusion that because he has “deconstructed” the metropolis, he has also deconstructed the entire apparatus of imperialism, its totality. This obsession with the need to create a totality stands as one of the major markers of a modernist aesthetic. This modernist act of creating a totalization based entirely on the view from the first world is an imposition of violence because it is a compensation for what it cannot know. One might ask, what about A Passage to India? Of that novel, Jameson has this to say in a gruff footnote: “About A Passage . . . what needs to be said here is (a) that Forster’s luck lay in the fact that one of the many Indian languages is the one called Indian English, which he was able to learn like a foreign language; and (b) that the novel is restricted to British and Muslim characters (Islam being, as Lévi-Strauss instructs us in Tristes Tropiques, the last and most advanced of the great Western monotheisms), the Hindus specifically designated as that Other are inaccessible to Western representation.”27 I take up this hasty jettisoning of A Passage shortly, but here say that Jameson’s important insight concerning the hidden geography of colonization paradoxically blocks him from engaging the nonrepresentational element I see to be at work in Forster’s novels. The argument concerning the exclusion of the Hindu culture from A Passage has some validity, but it is also short-sighted. Even though the concentration lies upon the Muslim Dr. Aziz and his community and the Western liberalism of Fielding, the resistant force active in the novel comes from another location. The nomadic, resistant component of the text is to be found in the nonrepresentational enunciations of the land, and in the Hindu character Professor Godbole. To return to the question of a first world totality, Jameson argues that this imperial act of creating a totality arises specifically during the historical period of Western Modernism. But is this totalizing gesture to fill in all the gaps not what characterized the imperial project even in its earliest stages, during the eighteenth century? Recall the description of Allworthy’s estate in Tom Jones, in which his field of vision extends in all directions, and to the island in the distance. The totalizing gesture equally informs Crusoe’s motivation to fetishize Friday, to “visualize” Friday in such a way as to have his being preaccomplished before he can physically enter the narrative. It is also


what engenders in Robinson Crusoe an undivulged hostility that the colonist levies on the otherness of the land. Thus this same absence of a genuine engagement with the colonial radical otherness in Howards End is what leads Jameson to ultimately condemn Forster: “[Forster’s] representation [of the British imperial project] is incomplete, and thereby epistemologically distorted and misleading: for we are only able to see that face, the ‘Imperial type,’ turn inward, toward the internal metropolitan reality . . . which is its content.”28 There is no denying that Forster does not even attempt to engage the colonial constituent in Howards End. Yet, I would argue that Jameson’s failure to consider the nomadic warding-off of the land so prominent in Forster results in the most odd kind of positivism yet. For if Jameson does not think his provocative idea of an “otherness” from the standpoint of an ontological withdrawal, he runs the risk of constituting that space according to an economy of toleration. What I would find valuable—and decisive— is an analysis of Forster that attenuates itself to this economy of resistance. Moreover, because Howards End is limited to the metropolis, it is important to think the resistant possibilities of that novel alongside A Passage to India. Howards End, for all its supposed liberal humanism, contains an essential undermining of the limited geographical field of vision assembled by the metropolis. It is Sara Suleri’s essay on Foster that partially opens the door to this engagement. Suleri’s essay primarily explores the complex issue of “friendship” in A Passage. What interests us here is the essay’s unexpected turn in its closing pages to discuss the issue of geography: A Passage to India opens and ends with evocations of geography. The geographic, however, does not suggest a “natural” landscape that lies beyond the parameters of a colonial economy: it no more represents a “real” India than do either its inhabitants or its religious and cultural mythologies. Instead, Forster turns to visualize landscape as though to an act of cultural description that is relentlessly antiexotic in its intent.29

This thematization of a landscape neither “natural” nor “real” tells us immediately that Suleri’s use of the term “landscape” has little to do with the problematic informing the work of landscaping theorists. More interestingly, Suleri makes a case for an anti-exoticism that reveals a more nuanced act of anti-imperial cartography: “In place of the exotic, the ordinary is privileged, so that the narrative need express no desire for either overt possession or a concomitant repulsion.”30 Furthermore, at the Marabar caves themselves, the “realm of the imperial extraordinary” is “rendered coterminous with empty space.”31 It is then through this “emptiness of geography” that the colonizer and the colonized come to be unwitting participants in


coming to terms with the question of historical location: “Such geography denies both connection and chronology, in that it forces cultural description into a recognition of its own vacuity.”32 This vacuity, Suleri argues, is the “secret” of the caves. Suleri’s notion of a “productive emptiness” takes us far toward a way of resisting the imperial act of cartographical tracing whereby the metropolis overcodes the land of the colony. I would want to add to her acute reading, however, a more concerted questioning of this idea of “emptiness.” Recall what Deleuze and Guattari found to be disabling in the Lacanian notion of emptiness, or “lack”: “Lack (manqué) is created, planned, and organized in and through social production.”33 It is this notion of emptiness, in other words, that is crucial in sustaining the capitalist flow of production. Third world markets are coded as “undeveloped,” and thus “lacking” the proper development that can be given to them by transnational corporations; they are “empty” because they are not capitalist, or not capitalist enough. Because capitalism’s economy deterritorializes by organizing and “filling” a market’s “empty” spaces, Deleuze and Guattari think the prediscursive from the standpoint of a “materiality-in-motion,” of “exchange-limits” rather than from an essential lack. Capitalism’s appropriation of lack is also why Heidegger’s notion of a “resistant earth” serves as a more productive means to thinking a nonfoundational ontology. It seems to me that the notion of emptiness can only hold so much deconstructive power if one is waving the banner of discursivity. It should be clear by now that my critique of discursive projects such as those of the postmodern social constructionists has absolutely nothing to do with a denial of discursivity. Rather it has everything to do with the precise manner in which discursivity has been institutionalized, how it now largely acts only as a methodology.34 It is against the institutionalized methodology that has enclosed Forster’s radical engagement of land that we can turn to Howards End and A Passage to India. III. b. Forster’s Withholding Call: Crusoe’s Progeny and the Lost Sense of Space In almost every one of Forster’s novels, and as early as his short stories, a material and resistant land lies at the limit of discursive constructions of identity, nationalism, imperialism, industrial development, and the expansion of commodity capital. Forster’s fiction is replete with metaphors of “the earth” and the “space” of the earth “opening” in a proleptic Heideggerian fashion to stand in opposition to early twentieth-century industrialism and the Edwardian age’s technologization of the countryside. His early short story entitled “The Machine Stops” is a quasi-futuristic tale of a planet overtaken by a vast network called “The Machine” is an extensive apparatus that


lies elevated above the earth. In “The Machine,” people live in isolation from one another in rooms that supply them with biological, intellectual, and cultural stimulation. In this mechanized civilization, there is no need for human contact. Conversations, lectures, “public” gatherings are carried on by remote communication. The ground below is thought to be too volatile and toxic to support life. The machine is considered a divine apparatus, taking charge of humanity’s needs, serving even as the ontological ground or “spirit of the age.”35 In the story, the character of Vashti, who is seen by others as a deviant, secretly escapes from the machine and reaches the ground beneath. Vashti’s reasons for resisting the machine are curious. He argues that in the machine people “have lost the sense of space” (“MS” 167). Because everything lies within arm’s length in the partitioned living quarters supplied by the machine, it has annulled the effect of distance that was an integral and formative element of existence when people lived on the ground. “Space” was previously marked by distance—by areas out of reach. It was this unavoidable factor of the “out of reach” that gave meaning and distinctiveness to the very idea of territoriality: there exist territories beyond one’s knowledge and control. The distance between territories is also what makes it possible to think inhabitation, to think what it means to be there, as opposed to existing in a different territory. In such a fashion is the logic of space made possible. But in “The Machine,” and in the current world order, “all space [is] accounted for” (“MS” 168). Distance, and the potential for inhabitation, is lost in the new technological world. The population of the planet has come under the sway of the ultimate apparatus of enclosure. Such a critical attitude against the accounting of all space suggests that Jameson has overlooked a crucial aspect of Forster’s philosophical outlook. These metaphors of the technologization of the surface of the earth appear repeatedly in Forster’s latter novel Howards End. The character of Margaret is haunted by a fast-paced “sense of flux” brought about by the new motorcars and “hurrying men who know so much and connect so little” (HE 213). At moments, when the calculated speed of men and motorcars slip away, Margaret encounters a dynamic of territoriality, of what Forster calls “space,” that does not operate according to the logical economy of enclosure: [S]he recaptured the sense of space which the motor had tried to rob from her. She remembered again that ten square miles are not ten times as wonderful as one square mile, that a thousand square miles are not practically the same as heaven. The phantom of bigness, which London encourages, was laid for ever when she paced from the hall at Howards End to its kitchen. (HE 210)


The “sense of space” names, in this passage, a nonaccumulative, nontechnological relation to the land. The space of Howards End has the capacity to ward off London’s distension. Furthermore, Forster connects this destruction of the sense of space to the British imperial project. Margaret connects her thoughts about the engrossment and commodification of English space to the expansion of that imperial project: “Now she thought of the map of Africa; of empires” (HE 210). Through Margaret, Forster resituates the enclosure of English space within the larger, expanding, colonial world map. Visiting Henry Wilcox at the Rubber Company, Margaret takes notice of the chamber leading to his office, where two maps of Africa hang on either side of the room. The first depicts a “helping of West Africa” above the fireplace, the other the entire continent, “looking like a whale marked out for blubber” (HE 215). The ideological covering of the English landscape—with its logic of increased expansion whereby the polis of London gradually overtakes the countryside—extends to the ideological codification of Africa, to the giving of meaning to the African continent by Western map makers who “fill up” a space assumed to be “empty.” Forster also interrogates these ideological processes of covering—the filling up of the “empty” space of the land–in his novel The Longest Journey. Throughout the novel, the characters are unable to move beyond the modern organizations and commodifications of the land. The main character Rickie, however, gradually pulls away from his investments in civilizing modes of intellectual production, and at the end of the novel a “sense of space” unfolds for him that is similar to Margaret’s encounter with a nontechnological earth. Here, Forster refers to it as “the power of the earth.” This power acts as a resistant force that denies enclosure’s logical economy of systematization and the turning of space and time into a global imperial utility: He saw that the little incident had been a quiet challenge to the civilization that he had known. “Organize.” “Systematize.” “Fill up every moment.” “Induce esprit de corps.” He reviewed the watchwords of the last two years, and found that they ignored personal contest, personal truces, personal love. . . . The power of the earth grows stronger. Streams do divide. Distances do still exist. It is easier to know the men in your valley than those who live in the next, across a waste of down. It is easier to know men well. The country is not paradise, and can show the vices that grieve a good man.36

When these “watchwords”—enactments of an ideological positivism—reveal themselves as having the effect of closing-off, of enclosing, what comes to presence in their place is the “power of the earth,” which refuses systematic organization and the imposition of an esprit de corps that would impose a commonality across the landscape: “Streams do divide. Distances do still exist.” In this instance, the enigmatic earthly power appears as a fundamental


rift that separates one zone of land from the next. It introduces the thought of a locality, or more specifically, the thought of the singular local as having an extra-ideological power because of its tendency to actively resist contemporary movements to globalize the space of the world, movements that have the effect of annulling distance and difference. We can further illuminate Forster’s thematization of space by examining his critique of enclosure. By attending to the ways in which the character of Henry Wilcox in Howards End devalues the Common-field system, we come to realize what his devaluation exposes: Forster’s search for an opposition to this market-driven relationship to the land. Directly in the middle of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, we find what appears to be little more than a marginal reference to the old Common-field system. As mentioned briefly in chapter one, at a pivotal moment in the novel the two main characters, Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox, take a tour of what could be called the central character of the novel—the house, and the terrain of the countryside surrounding the house, called “Howards End”—when they pause to observe the lay of the land from an upper-story window. Henry’s speech at this moment bears some consideration, for it sets the stage for the famous passage in which the narrator describes the house and the tree at Howards End as achieving that great, transcendent moment of “connecting” that serves as the guiding principle of Howards End, and Forster’s fiction in general. In the following passage, Henry espouses the view that privatized, enclosed land is far superior to the Common-field system: Henry [took] her over his property, and had explained to her the use and dimensions of the various rooms. He had sketched the history of the little estate. “It is so unlucky,” ran the monologue, “that money wasn’t put into it about fifty years ago. Then it had four—five—times the land—thirty acres at least. One could have made something out of it then—a small park, or at all events shrubberies, and rebuilt the house further away from the road. What’s the good of taking it in hand now? Nothing but meadow left. . . . Mismanagement did it—besides, the days for small farms are over. It doesn’t pay—except with intensive cultivation. Small holdings, back to the land— ah! philanthropic bunkum. Take it as a rule that nothing pays on a small scale. Most of the land you see (they were standing at an upper window, the only one which faced west) belongs to the people at the Park—they made their pile over copper—good chaps. Avery’s Farm, Sishe’s—what they call the Common, where you see that ruined oak—one after the other fell in, and so did this. . . . When I had more control I did what I could: sold off the two and a half animals, and the mangy pony, and the superannuated tools; pulled down the outhouses; drained; thinned out . . . and inside the house I turned the old kitchen into hall, and made a kitchen behind where the dairy was. . . . But one could still tell it’s been an old farm. And yet it isn’t the place that would fetch one of your artistic crew.”37


Henry’s narrative dissembles the essence of land in this passage. Being part and parcel of an official enclosure history, Henry does not speak on behalf of the commoners, though this same history gives him the authority to speak of them. Because of this we cannot treat his speech in terms of what he finds problematic; rather, we must examine the fleeting presence of what he finds to be unproblematic. In giving his skeletal history of the “little estate,” Henry invokes the metaphor of “the land” in at least two distinct ways: the phrase “back to the land” and the activity of “having” or “stockpiling” land in the phrase “it had four-five-times the land.” The tendency is to perceive these remarks as simply the invocations of everyday speech. Because of this they have tended to be overlooked. Henry’s comments, however, point to an unthematized ontology of land. His terminology is part and parcel of the metaphorics of enclosure that came to govern spatial representation in the eighteenth century. Coupled with Margaret’s unspoken thoughts, Henry’s comments give us glimpses of a now-vanished collective of small farmers who once attempted to maintain a nonmercantile relationship to the land at Howards End. The terrain of Howards End is “mismanaged” in Henry’s eyes not only from the fact that it was an area of England’s home domain comprising small farms, but because those small farmers struggled to continue the old practice of sharing the Common, even though they eventually gave in to the onslaught of enclosure: “ ‘Avery’s farm, Sishe’s—what they call the Common, where you see that ruined oak—one after the other fell in.’ ” Henry indicates his distance from and disdain for the Common-field system of production by distinguishing a Common from a useful piece of land by scanning the landscape for impoverishment: “the ruined oak.” In addition, he makes it clear to Margaret that the term itself is not part of his vocabulary: “what they call the Common.” The people who currently own the land surrounding the house are, to Henry, a respectable breed: industrialists—“good chaps” who have made money by mining copper. But the previous small farmers had first to “fall in,” the military metaphor here gesturing toward Henry’s valorization of a well-disciplined entrepreneurship. Henry’s description of his extensive changes to the property parallel precisely the specific “improvements” administered upon Common lands undergoing enclosure. Small houses, cottages, shacks were frequently pulled down; trees and shrubbery were cut back; and wetland areas of the landscape needing to be expanded for reasons of grazing or crop expansion were drained so that every inch of an enclosed area would be capable of producing a higher yield for the market place.38 Seeing this deliberate positioning of Henry we gain a sense of Forster’s attunement to the Crusoe syndrome. In the character of Henry Wilcox thrives the two century-long lineage of Crusoe’s progeny. With Wilcox we are still caught in the tree, panoptically overlooking the land and standing


against it. In contrast to the improving entrepreneur, small farmers would have pastured their “two and a half animals” (code for a small farm, or a cottager maintaining a small plot of land) collectively on the Common meadow. They would have subscribed to a different philosophy from that of enclosure, in Henry’s words a philosophy of “back to the land.” Such attempts to ward off productivity as defined by market relations is a sign of misplaced obstinacy in Henry’s eyes and only postpones the inevitable: the “falling in.” Throughout the two centuries leading to the historical period of Howards End more and more land came to be engrossed under the control of large landlords who had turned to enclosure as the ultimate method of capitalizing upon, and increasing the size of their holdings.39 In Henry’s estimation, the landowners of the area, to successfully grasp the means of “proper management,” were exactly those who turned the land into copper mines. The reference to copper is significant, for it shows that Henry, being a good man of business, has his finger on the pulse of the stock market. Copper came to be a valuable commodity in the late nineteenth century, used in the making of ships, roofing, pipe, and, in the beginning of the twentieth century, electrical wires.40 As chief director of the Imperial West African Rubber Company, with a fortune extending to eight estates across the geography of England, Henry firmly stands as an imperial authority and colonizer of lands—at home as well as abroad. Henry appears on the scene with this knowledge to help the “two women”—his former wife Ruth, and ostensibly Ruth’s mother. Ruth and her mother are the only remaining Howards, but they can no longer maintain the Howard lineage and their inheritance–because they are women, but also because they have not yet begun to bring the land to its fullest “potential.” Taking the land “in hand” means instituting methods of occupation, possession, measurement, and continual accumulation. Forster’s reference to Henry’s concern for the “use and dimensions” of rooms indicates a mode of perceiving an area of space in terms of its measurability and use-value: of advancing from the “back to the land” philosophy to the technological approach of “having land.” When a piece of land begins to exhibit continually increasing, measurable patterns it begins to take on meaning as a resource for capital. Howards End no longer offers this possibility; it can no longer be “taken in hand” because there is “nothing but meadow left.” Thus the land at Howards End cannot be called “properly” English, for it offers nothing to the imperial gentleman. In other words, for Henry, land is a source of danger if not handled properly. Land is a being that requires a constant vigilance, it calls for a predetermined plan of spatialization in order that one maintain a safe distance from land’s differential, resistant essence. With the erection of physical boundaries land becomes, for the human subject, a marker of a positive


sovereignty. A new subjectivity emerges in the nexus of this new relationship to the land, and the status of that subjectivity gains decisive meaning through the calculatory logic attested to by the need for precise measurement: Henry’s power as a sovereign being manifests itself in the dimensions and maintenance of boundaries, and grows in proportion to the number of his estates. The size of his estate holdings, in turn, grows in proportion to the amount of money generated from his holdings in Africa. Each of these factors—the accounting of all space, the logic of measurement, the endowment of land with positive meaning—coalesce around the phenomenon of enclosure. The return of an irreducible instability in the literature of Forster marks the reemergence of inhabitancy and a nonexploitative ontology of land. Dealing with this reemergence while existing within the more dominant ontology of enclosure requires a change in the way we produce knowledge, and in the way we think about space. This means coming to terms with an idea of territoriality that is neither positive nor fully empty, an idea based neither on essential blood ties to the land nor the lack that invites global capital. It also requires a rethinking of representation itself. One of Forster’s characters in particular exemplifies this return of a lost inhabitancy, and the connection between inhabitancy and representation: Ruth Wilcox, the matriarch of Howards End. Ruth Wilcox has been described by many landscapers as embodying an almost primordial connection to the earth. Indeed, her entrance into the narrative is marked immediately by her relation to the earth: “She approached . . . trailing noiselessly over the lawn, . . . a whisp of hay in her hands. She seemed not to belong to the young people and their motor, but to the house, and to the tree that overshadowed it.”41 This initial introduction is emblematic of Forster’s delineation of Ruth Wilcox, and it is easy to see why critics have fallen prey to an archetypal exegesis of her character. However, what tends to be overlooked is the narrator’s openly acknowledged inability to fully represent this character. This inability to represent points to an ontological fracture at the heart of the novel’s narrative, one that also marks the text of A Passage to India. This fracture in representation is the narratological equivalent of the refusal to account for and fill up the entire realm of space. Our evidence for this can be found in the novel’s consequential engagement with the dimensions and limits of representation—exhibited most vividly in the speech acts of Ruth Wilcox. Ruth bears an ambivalent relation to the very act of speech. For her husband Henry, and for her sons, speech acts are transparent, and language itself a technological instrument: “Yes or no, man; plain question, plain answer,” demands Charles Wilcox from his brother Paul. But Ruth interrupts this demand by responding differently: “one doesn’t ask plain questions. There aren’t such things” (HE 22). In this


scene the narrator accentuates Ruth’s refusal to use a representational method of speaking. Her tactic is a complex engagement that turns this refusal into action: “she did not ask questions. Still less did she pretend that nothing had happened, as a competent society hostess would have done” (HE 23). The narrator’s own tentative approach to Ruth can tell us a lot about her character: “All [discussion of Ruth Wilcox] is speculation: Mrs. Wilcox has left few clear indications behind her” (HE 67). Far from filling in the totality of existence, Forster’s rhetoric here shows not the self-satisfied certainty of sovereign representation but a narratology of the speculative.42 Throughout the novel the narrator does not describe Ruth Wilcox; she is in some founding sense unavailable to him. The tags at the opening of many sentences discussing her clue us in: “Perhaps the elder lady”; “Perhaps it was she” (HE 66). This is no poetic diversion on Forster’s part. His usurpation of narrative control gives reverence to the distinctness of Ruth Wilcox’s character. Consider the conversation between Ruth and Margaret over another confusion: “Oh, Mrs. Wilcox, I have made the baddest blunder. I am more ashamed and sorry than I can say.” Mrs. Wilcox bowed gravely. She was offended, and did not pretend to the contrary. . . . “I have been too absurd all through, I am very much ashamed.” [says Margaret] Mrs. Wilcox did not answer. . . . “It wasn’t that your son still—” “Oh no;” [Mrs. Wilcox interrupted] “he often—my Paul is very young, you see.” “Then what was it?” [Mrs. Wilcox] repeated: “An instinct which may be wrong.” “In other words, they belong to types that can fall in love, but couldn’t live together. That’s dreadfully probable. I’m afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.” “These are indeed ‘other words.’ ” said Mrs. Wilcox. . . . “But it’s all right now?” [asks Margaret] “I think so.” “You only think? You aren’t sure? I do love these little muddles tidied up.” “Oh yes, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Wilcox, moving with uneasiness beneath the clothes. “I always sound uncertain over things. It is my way of speaking.” (HE 70–71, emphasis added)

We learn several things in this early key moment. Among them is that Margaret’s overwhelming desire in this encounter is to “straighten everything out.” She has trouble grasping the subtleties of Ruth’s enunciations, and leaps to an attempt at translation in order to master the communication between


the two. Ruth, however, performs something entirely different in this passage. She enacts a form of speaking that does not work according to any logic of assertion. Of her speech act it can only be said that she exerts a certain withdraw. This “withdraw” places a certain pressure on cultural orders of discursive representation: “with each word she spoke, the outlines of known things grew dim” (HE 81). To put it more succinctly, Margaret (the early Margaret of the novel) puts full faith in representation, in language—whereas Ruth denies the regime of representation its mania for fixation. This brief consideration of Ruth Wilcox may have seemed a digression from our topic, but attending to Ruth’s narratology of the speculative also gives us access to a nonrepresentational encounter with the land/habitation of the house at Howards End. It is Ruth’s embrasure of the speculative in relation to the unseen that Margaret comes to adopt in the wake of Ruth’s death. We are told that the death of Ruth comes to help Margaret “in her work,” offering “hope . . . on this side of the grave” (HE 107). Ruth’s specter haunts Margaret, Henry Wilcox, and the narrative at large for the remainder of the novel. She brings the instability of “the unseen” to the stability of Henry’s world. When it is discovered that she has left Howards End to Margaret, Henry’s patronizing thoughts of his wife’s “even goodness” take a more overtly defensive turn: “the unseen had impacted on the seen, and all that [the Wilcoxes] could say was ‘Treachery.’ Mrs. Wilcox had been treacherous to the family, to the laws of property, to her own written word” (HE 103). This question concerning the use of language in relation to the land is equally paramount and is situated against the backdrop of colonialism in A Passage to India. One of the first indications of this occurs early in the novel over a conversation about the Marabar caves. Mrs. Moore, Adela Quested, Dr. Aziz, and Mr. Fielding have gathered together with Professor Godbole, who we are told is something of an “authority” on the caves. But when they ask Godbole about the caves, his “answers” are not what they expect: “Do describe them, Professor Godbole.” “It will be a great honour.” He drew up his chair. . . . After an impressive pause he said: “There is an entrance in the rock which you enter, and through the entrance is the cave.” “Something like the caves at Elephanta?” “Oh no, not at all; at Elephanta there are sculptures of Siva and Parvati. There are no sculptures at Marabar.” “They are immensely holy, no doubt,” said Aziz, to help on the narrative. “Oh no, oh no.” “Still, they are ornamented in some way.” “Oh no.” “Well, why are they famous? We all talk of the famous Marabar Caves. Perhaps that is our empty brag.” “No, I should not quite say that.”43


As the conversation unfolds, each of the characters attempts to nail down the correct description of the caves. They each attempt to name the precise nature of the caves, to unearth their meaning. Godbole, however, is carrying on a different kind of communicatory act, which the others do not hear. The caves appear in a tendential emergence that cannot be traced. They are not an object to be given over to mastery, but an opening that the characters cannot assail. And they cannot assail it for the very reason that they all take the approach of “discovery.” It is, in fact, exactly the imperial logic of discovery that the novel travesties in this passage. The conversation begins to exert a pressure on the characters’ need to know, their need to explore, and stake a claim for understanding. It is this same kind of withholding of positive knowledge that we see performed as well in the character of Ruth Wilcox, who, when she is coerced by Margaret into giving a precise answer, moves “with uneasiness beneath the clothes.” It is thus in the colonial character of Professor Godbole that we see Forster enact what in Howards End was a speculative narratology that focalized the deconstruction of the metropolitan site. Coupled with his nondescription of the caves Godbole’s Hindu song in the “Mosque” section of the novel is crucial to understanding the conclusion of the novel, which contains a subtle but significant reference to the song. Godbole explains the song as follows: “I will explain in detail. It was a religious song. I placed myself in the position of a milkmaiden. I say to Shri Krishna, ‘Come! come to me only.’ The god refuses to come. I grew humble and say: ‘Do not come to me only. Multiply yourself into a hundred Krishnas, and let one go to each of my hundred companions, but one O Lord of the Universe, come to me.’ He refuses to come. This is repeated several times. . . .” “But He comes in some other song, I hope?” said Mrs. Moore gently. “Oh no, he refuses to come,” repeated Godbole, perhaps not understanding her question. “I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come.” (PI 85)

In this passage we are confronted with an unfolding of thought contradictory to the ontology of imperialism. The song enacts the movement of an encounter with an other that allows the other to maintain alterity in the face of a subject wanting-to-know. Godbole’s call enacts an address to the other in which the other refuses to come to presence. In opposition to the will-topower of the imperial subject, Godbole’s song enacts an antimetaphysical call to the divine. Because he “knows” the divine will never come, the divine thus “appears” only in the contentless form of a speculation. What makes it “divine” is its ex-centric, quasi-transcendent action of refusal. In Howards End Margaret Schlegel begins to show signs of developing a similar resistant comportment to the discursive world of stability so that she


can encounter the unseen.44 Her thoughts suggest a desire to find a flow of existence that lies outside of conventionalism and custom: “I want activity without civilization” (HE 116). Eventually, each character in Howards End encounters the force of the unseen, but with different reactions. The Wilcox formulation of the unseen, their naming it under the signifier of “treachery” (they equate the “unseen” to a negative “emptiness”) surfaces as the major ontological problem of the novel. As Forster indicates through his connections of the Wilcox emptiness to their acts of colonization in Africa, this emptiness lies at the heart of an imperial ontology, and the manner in which that imperialism turns the earth into a territorium: “Nature is turning out Wilcoxes . . . so that they may inherit the earth” (HE 194). But Forster is very careful to show—and here lies my disagreement with Jameson’s reading of the novel as narration that, because it has deconstructed empire at home, assumes it has deconstructed the colony as well and thus spoken to or “filled in” the complete realm of being—that the signifier “emptiness” is itself an imperial term signifying the attempted mastery of the unseen. The personified narrator of the text repeatedly draws attention to the differences between naming and speculation, between “emptiness” and “the unseen,” in other words, between the imperial naming/turning of the unseen into emptiness and the nonpresence of the unseen as a deconstructive force. The more that Margaret comes to engage the unseen in a manner parallel to Ruth Wilcox, the more the narrator pulls back from giving us precise and “correct” descriptions of Margaret’s character. We see this in the following passage, which contains a number of complex statements about the unseen, and the possibility of a relation to its essentially unassailable essence: All vistas close in the unseen—no one doubts it—but Helen closed them rather too quickly for [Margaret’s] taste. At every turn of speech one was confronted with reality and the absolute. Perhaps Margaret grew too old for metaphysics, perhaps Henry was weaning her from them, but she felt that there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that so readily shreds the visible. The businessman who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. “Yes, I see dear; it’s about halfway between,” Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm. (HE 203)

As before with Ruth, the narrator begins his mode of speculation with the word “perhaps.” Moreover, Margaret’s connection to the unseen does not prioritize the instability of an ontological “nothingness” over the stability of an ontic “reality.” The two instead find their meaning in the transgressive passage to the limit of “either realm.” By delimiting the structure of a relation to the unseen in excess of the transcendental idea of “halfway,” Forster


draws out this encounter without recourse to the stale idea of the need for a “common ground.” Margaret’s excursion into “either realm” comes to manifest itself in less abstract terms once she arrives at the site of Howards End. There, the seen and the unseen, stability and instability come to appearance on the land. Henry takes Margaret to see the house. When he realizes he has forgotten the keys to Howards End, he drops her by the side of the road to return for them. Forster writes: “Then the car turned away, and it was as if a curtain had risen. For the second time that day she saw the appearance of the earth” (HE 208). The presence of the earth expands its significance: “She was struck by the fertility of the soil” (HE 208). The opening of a “sense of space” reverberates back to her memory of her father’s critical contemplation of empire, when she criticizes, as we saw earlier, the “phantom of bigness.” The “space” that appears to Margaret at Howards End is an exertion of a resistant pressure, a concerted withdrawal inherent in the movement of the encounter with an (anti-imperial) ontological foundation. This “pressure” exerts a force on the visible—the imperial world at home and abroad. The sense of space at Howards End makes Margaret recall the British imperial construction of space in the maps she encounters when visiting Henry at his “Imperial and West African Rubber Company.” The map of West Africa depicts what I have been referring to as an imperial act of “tracing,” its geographical meaning having little to do with the native earth of the continent itself. It reflects, to use Forster’s own terms, a “cosmopolitanism” that blocks us off from receiving “help from the earth” (HE 273). It makes a “spectacle” of the land’s “meadows and mountains” (HE 273). It is an imperialist mode of deterritorializing the heterogeneities of the land. We see Forster’s criticism of this mode becoming more aggressive as the novel surges to its climax: “[T]he Imperial. Healthy, ever in motion, it hopes to inherit the earth. It breeds as quickly as the yeoman, and as soundly; strong is the temptation to acclaim it as a super-yeoman, who carries his country’s virtue overseas. But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled the earth that he inherits will be gray” (HE 338339). The reference to the yeoman, and the connection of the yeoman to the colonizing “cultivator” of the land overseas gives a clear indication that Forster also disavows a view of England’s agricultural heritage as the Edenic, enclosed garden held so dear by Smollett’s Bramble, Fielding’s Allworthy, and Defoe’s Crusoe. In the particular quality of cosmopolitanism and “motion” articulated here Forster touches on the economy of capital. It is this motion that has created, as he says elsewhere in the novel, a “civilization of luggage”—a flow of people who do not inhabit the land, but travel on the lines of


“cosmopolitanism,” the sequestered, technologizing motion of “motorcars,” the detached sense created in the “anger” of “telegrams” that impose the instrumentality of “efficient speed” on language. Cosmopolitanism names the type of citizenry we find in “The Machine.” In the closing pages of the novel Margaret contemplates the disposition of this capitalistic motion of imperialism (which, Forster warns us, is gathering strength): “ ‘This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest on the earth.’ ” (HE 355). Margaret’s view is one of hope, and the novel ends on a positive note—with Helen and her child (the hybrid offspring of two distinct classes and nations) running from out of the field. In A Passage to India Forster deconstructs imperial representation from the beginning, as Sara Suleri reveals. But, as I argued before, Suleri overlooks the indissoluble relationship between this deconstruction of representation and the resistant force of the land. This resistant force marks its movement as fundamentally different from the deterritorializing capitalist economy of movement that seeks to fill the totality of space. Indeed, we are immediately hit with the refusal of this economy at the opening of A Passage, which lays out the setting of the novel, the city of Chandrapore offers “nothing extraordinary,” and is “scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely” (PI 3). The Ganges, the city’s river front, is “not holy”; the city gives no prospect, no “panorama”; the temples are “ineffective”; and Chandrapore itself “was never large or beautiful” (PI 3–4). The opening undermines our commonplace assumptions about landscape representation and sets the stage for an unfolding of negating signifiers that continue throughout the work. Forster cultivates this more thematically at the opening of the second section of the novel with the “description” of the Marabar Caves. All attempts to associate the caves with a way of knowing are denied: “Nothing, nothing attaches to them” (PI 137). More significantly the caves are not in existence for human systems of meaning making: “their reputation—for they have one—does not depend upon human speech” (PI 137). They are devoid of any signifiable content: “Nothing is inside them, they were sealed up before the creation of pestilence or treasure; if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good and evil” (PI 138). They lie beyond the limits of the field of vision of all problematics: “they bear no relation to anything dreamt of seen” (PI 136). They are a “geology” that “looks further than religion,” older “than anything in the world,” expressing an “irreducible antiquity” (PI 135–136). In Brontë, Defoe, Eliot, Fielding, Kipling, Richardson, Smollet, and the landscaping theorists, we have seen many different representations of the land. These representations alter depending on the changing specifics of history,


but they are ultimately supplementations of one logocentric order for another—from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth. In A Passage to India, however, we encounter a release of a different, nonrepresentational form of engagement with the land. The novel stands thus as a denial of traditional descriptions of metropolitan and overseas lands, in addition to its denial of colonial landscapes being represented as “exotic.” The emphasis here is that Forster’s anti-exotic descriptions of colonial land exposes the illusions of the (imperial) landscaping mode of representation. From the beginning, this imperial problematic has had its reason for being in the assumption that land can be made to order—whether that ordering involves overt colonial possession, or the engrossment of arable fields during British parliamentary acts of enclosure. In the process, the resistant essence of land—appearing in Common fields, wastes, unclaimed forests, and so on—came to be seen initially as resistant, but was quickly recoded as lack, as a dangerous emptiness needing to be filled with the positivism of first, “efficient cultivation,” then commercialism, and finally colonialism. But it is precisely the formerly veiled essence of resistance that comes to presence once again in the novels of Forster. What needs to be thematized is the difference—and it is major— between Forster’s engagement with land in Howards End and A Passage. In the former, the appearance of the land offers the possibility of a new existence for the characters. In A Passage, however, the only character that achieves such possibility is Professor Godbole. Even Mrs. Moore, somewhat of a parallel to Ruth Wilcox, fails to achieve this connection. Tellingly, the land of A Passage does not give any hope for “connecting,” as it does in Howards End. The answer to this fundamental disparity in the novels can be gained by paying attention to the difference in the tenor of the later novel’s narrator. Placing the two novels side by side one realizes that unlike Howards End, the narrator of A Passage displays little faith in his own characters. This statement is somewhat kind, for he makes it clear at times that he does not care for them much at all. One might see the liberal humanist character of Fielding as the “hero” of the novel, and as representative of Forster’s own views. But this stance can be held only by ignoring the many condemning statements the narrator levels at Fielding: “[Fielding] regretted taking sides. To slink through India unlabeled was his aim” (PI 193). We are told that Fielding lacks the ability to think the ontological potential of the caves’ leveling echo: “This reflection about an echo lay at the verge of Fielding’s mind. He could never develop it. It belonged to the universe that he had missed or rejected” (PI 307). If we were to place such a statement in Howards End, we would think the character in question to be Henry Wilcox. Furthermore, in his conflict with Aziz, which essentially puts an


end to the friendship, Fielding attempts to heal the rift by sending Aziz a letter. But the letter is filled with “generalizations and comparisons,” as if he were seeking recourse in a “scientific manual” (PI 312). The letter does not speak to the intimate situation of their friendship and “repels” Aziz, who “replies coldly” that he will be leaving before being able to see Fielding (PI 312). Most damning of all is Fielding’s statement “I travel light” (PI 303)— a remark that Margaret Schlegel would no doubt have much to say about. The remark’s obvious disinterestedness aside, it is more the kind of statement one would expect from Charles or Paul Wilcox, the great carvers of empire. Even Mrs. Moore does not reach the level of intimacy with the narrator of A Passage that the narrator of Howards End enjoys with Ruth Wilcox. Mrs. Moore is described as being little more than pugnacious in the wake of her encounter with the caves: “she didn’t want to write to her children, she didn’t want to communicate with anyone. . . . She lost all interest” (PI 166). All of this suggests that some fundamental shift has taken place in the movement between the novels. The narrator’s misanthropy builds, and it comes ultimately to “climax” in the novel’s pessimistic ending: [Aziz] shouted: “India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!” . . . India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenthcentury sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Beglium perhaps! Fielding mocked again. And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: “Down with the English anyhow. That’s certain. . . . [I]f it’s fifty-five hundred years, we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then”—he rode against him furiously—“and then,” he concluded, half kissing him, “you and I shall be friends.” “Why can’t we be friends now?” said the other, holding him affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace . . . they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.” (PI 361–362)

The phenomenon of “only connect” does not occur in A Passage as it does in Howards End. The narrator openly scorns the actions of his characters, and he seems completely frustrated with both Aziz and Fielding. On the Eastern side of the border, Aziz’s solution of creating another nation is rebuked as at best an anachronism, and at worst part of the problem. The answer of nationalizing only resolidifies the problematic of imperialism. On the Western side, Fielding continues his “mocking,” which has been his


only mode of interaction with Aziz in the closing chapters of the novel, and shows his character to be continually short-sighted and judgmental. The novel ultimately gives its characters no passage, but this does not make it a “failure.” The pessimism at the novel’s conclusion gestures toward something more historically vital. The characters in the novel—characters born into the history of enclosure and colonization—have no passage to a crosscultural connection. They are not ready for it. The articulation of the native earth “sending up rocks” reveals the presence of a land angry at its own (non)inhabitants. The land “does not want it”—it does not want nationalism, organicism, exoticism, imperialism, nor individualism. The pessimism hints at the presence of a land at war with the human. It suggests that humanity—especially Western European humanity—is not ready at this stage of its historical development to inhabit the earth. Forster’s A Passage speaks to its optimistic predecessor, sardonic in reaction to the earlier novel’s all-to-easy critique of empire in the metropolis. Forster wrote Howards End before he had been to India. When he traveled there a few years later, he did not spend his time on the subcontinent as a tourist. He worked as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas.45 His inhabitation of India led to a different form of engagement with the question of imperialism. In opposition to the “assailable” metropolis of Howards End, the stakes in the colony are higher. A Passage thus offers no utopian form of resolution. To think of its ending only as cynicism would be to miss what it offers. The “no, not yet” harks back to the nonrepresentative and a-technological call articulated by Godbole: “Come, come, come.” The refusal of “not yet” signifies the inability of the characters to inhabit the land. The call stages a gesture outward to the unseen. It enacts a nonmastering passage to the other that can only come in the form of a speculative plea. It names an entirely different unfolding of thought in relation to the vital question of cross-cultural connection and to the irreducible multiplicities of cultural lands inhabiting the earth. Connection does occur, but only in the pressure of a founding and irreducible separation, only in the narratology of the speculative “come” and the resistant “not yet.”

IV. Nation and Nonnarration: Salman Rushdie’s Inhabiting of a Postcolonial Land Bharat Mata Ki Jai—Victory to Mother India! . . . India was all this. . . . The mountains and the rivers of India, and the forests and the broad fields, which gave us food, were all dear to us, but what counted ultimately were the people of India, people . . . who were spread out all over this vast land. Bharat Mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions of people and victory to her meant victory to these people. You are parts of this Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in

154 / ecological and postcolonial study a manner yourselves, Bharat Mata, and as this idea slowly soaked into their brains, their eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery. —Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India Motherness—excuse me if I underline the point—is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet. Ladies-O, gents-O: I’m talking major mother country. —Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

In previous chapters I argued that the enclosure movement depends upon a calculative use of language that exploits the land. The enclosure movement introduces a new form of bureaucracy, unfolding a “sheet of language” across the land, for without a working administrative system of registry no enclosure act could be passed. Postcolonialism ironically faces a similar language problem, for the “linguistic turn” informing postcolonial theory ironically bars access to the materiality of land. Such forays are labeled “romantic” or “essentialist.” This also bars access to what is more originative than the rule of “social construction”: an extra-discursive resistance that is the very nonpositive “ground” from which all discursive constructions spring. To open the question of an extra-discursive potential I turn to an exploration of Salman Rushdie’s postcolonial engagement with inhabitancy and nationality. Explorations into the discursive construction of nationality tend to reach their analytical limits in a self-entangling encounter with the axiom that discursivity is unavoidable. The logic of a discursive methodology terminates with the declaration that essentialist beliefs are no more than ideological constructions, that one’s sense of belonging to a nation stems from an interpellation by a sociosymbolic order that wishes to homogenize the diversity of the land in order to fabricate a national identity. In this sense, postcolonial critiques inevitably fall victim to their own inability to step beyond representative structures of signification. In the wake of Edward Said’s foundation-shifting and liberatory Orientalism, much critical work engaging the question of postcolonial agency has tended to bypass the very conditions that make discursivity. The insights of structural linguistics, semiology, and institutionalized Foucauldian discourses of power have gone far to de-structure the positivism of metaphysical imperatives.46 Yet the overwhelming tendency has been to prioritize linguistic construction to such an extent that it reaches the level of a divine precondition. Discursivity, because it is everywhere, acquires the categorical status of the very metaphysical omniscience it wishes to call into question. This agent-less stumbling block has led to a widespread privation running through many analyses that have been authorized by this wisdom of postmodernity, for if


the postcolonial law of discursive nationality were not nondiscursive at some point, it is difficult to see how historical change would be possible.47 What has been overlooked, then, is the potential of an extra-ideological opening, the possibility of an encounter with everything that Salman Rushdie attempts to engage in his writing. To read Rushdie is to experience a constant encounter with what has to be foreclosed in order that a discursive field of national reality remain constant and convincing—the land. Narratives such as Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and The Ground Beneath Her Feet offer a contentious and powerful refusal to what Fredric Jameson has called “the prison-house of language.” In these texts, Rushdie engages “the way things are,” not only from the Foucauldian perspective of “the way that things have discursively come to be,” but from the locus of a nondiscursive instability that precedes the very act of discursive construction. Ideas and motifs such as “the many-headed monster,” “incompatability,” “humanized,” and “earthquakes” indicate the presence of an energizing freedom from stabilizing forces.48 These and other terms point to a dynamic that critics have failed to see in Rushdie’s works: the irreducibility of an anarchic momentum that first makes necessary the introduction of stabilizing powers. Rushdie’s texts interrogate the fundamental relation between the essentially unstable and chaotic and the stabilizing institutional forces of self-hood, convention, and national consensus. The anarchic momentum is thus the fundamental “affliction” against which the nation struggles, vis-à-vis a regulatory political apparatus based upon a discourse of enclosure. The passages quoted in my epigraph each speak of the importance of the nation. In The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru paints a mythical and romantic picture of Indian nationality in the wake of 1947 independence.49 Let us come to this text first from the standpoint of a discursive analysis. Nehru’s Bharat Mata, the trope of “Mother India,” operates as an abstract symbol of a unified political entity. He constructs, in the nurturing image of motherhood, an all-embracing image that seeks to conquer geographical divisions. The nation-state imaginary elides the singularity of regionalism for the sake of a centralized nationalism. As the postcolonial critic Jyotsna Singh has pointed out, “Countering the peasants’ experiential understanding of geography, Nehru . . . struggles to define the concept of a nation to which they all belonged.”50 Interrogating this concept of the nation, Singh characteristically invokes the ways in which these and similar formations of the nation-state rely upon the belief in an essentialism that turns out in the end to be a discursive construction. Quoting Benedict Anderson’s insight that the nation is an “imagined community,”51 Singh concentrates on the ways in which a nation’s body of literature—its fictions—are essentially related to the constitution of nationality: “Drawing


on this relation between the nation and fiction, one can explore India’s coming into being as a system of cultural significations within a complex and fragmented discursive field of the ‘nation’ ” (CN 160). Moreover, Singh professes that the praxis of unconcealing subjectivity and nationality to be a fictional construct is a “critical commonplace in the post-Foucauldian era” (CN 160), suggesting that alone to be reason enough to engage in this type of poststructural inquiry. Singh’s espousal of a fundamental connection between nationality and fictionality—or as a frequently cited collection of essays now central to the discipline of postcolonial studies has phrased it, the nexus of “nation and narration”—goes far to unravel the ways in which cultures constitute meaning.52 Edward W. Said makes a similar argument in Culture and Imperialism: “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”53 Said focalizes the important role that narrative plays in the development of an empire and the generation of one culture’s imperial attitude toward another. He places central importance on the novel itself as the vehicle having the most constitutive impact.54 To question these claims is to enter dangerous territory. I am not suggesting, however, that the relationship between cultural narratives and acts of colonization does not need urgent attention, especially the kind of sustained critique enacted by Said and others. What I am suggesting is that the institutionalized discursive critique founders at this moment in the maze and malaise of “circumstantial influences.” This critical maneuver has the character of a highly disabling abrogation: responsibility for the possible task of social transformation dissolves in the interstices of an unlocatable generality the discursively constructed “culture at large.” As a result, much of the postcolonial work of critical inquiry has left behind its innovative edge and become dogmatic. This dogmatism continues even at the moment when inquiry concentrates on differential alternatives to the discourse of national homogeneity. A case in point: Singh provides a provocative exploration of the ways in which the nation and works of fiction operate either to solidify (Nehru’s philosophy) or to offer a “fragmented discursive field” (what Singh sees to be Rushdie’s approach). With Rushdie, Singh points to the way in which the narrator Saleem of Midnight’s Children highlights fragmentation, to how he “maps the social formation of the Indian subcontinent in multiple stories, presenting the narrator’s choice of story as one of several possibilities” (CN 167). What the novel then tenders is a more egalitarian “world of jumbled genealogies” (CN 167) that enforces in the end no superior point of order, but places “metamorphosis and flux” against an aggrandizing essentialism. We are left then, in Singh’s investigation, with a liberalist


celebration of hybridity as the new, nonmastering national narrative. This conclusion is ethically appealing, but dissatisfying nonetheless. Singh’s text is representative of a general trend in postcolonial studies: that is, to reveal the extent to which identity is a zone of contest for various representational orders. One could also consider the impressive work of Teresa Hubel’s Whose India? Hubel explores the ways in which India has been systematically appropriated by an imperialist agenda that operates ubiquitously on a number of registers: cultural, spiritual, political, social, and so on. Her approach to the question of appropriation, of ownership, is to employ, not surprisingly, the discursive methodology that dominates the procedures of research in the current postcolonial academy: Who owns India? . . . India is more than a geographical entity. If it were not more, how could Salman Rushdie describe it as a “new myth—a collective fiction”. . . . India’s reality extends beyond its geographical presence. It has also an imaginative dimension. The . . . potential for appropriating India increases when it is recognized as a property of the imagination. . . . Depending on one’s focus, India is a cultural, spiritual, political, social, or emotional construct, and as such it belongs to whichever individuals or groups are able to constitute its formation in discourse and, additionally, assert their right to claim it. . . . Rudyard Kipling and Jawaharlal Nehru, for instance, stake their claim to the ownership of India by the very act of writing about it. This study assumes that writing can possess exactly this kind of power, the power to establish ownership, and that some writing works to this end.55

What we need to think, in so much as this kind of manifestation can be thought, is precisely India’s “geographical presence.” If we are to free ourselves from the prison house of discursivity and reopen Foster’s “sense of space,” we need to engage everything that Hubel shuts down in her analysis. I wholly agree with Hubel when she states that “the potential for appropriating India increases when it is recognized as a property of the imagination.” And I would even emphatically agree with her argument that India “belongs” to those who have the power to “constitute its formation in discourse” and thereby make it possible to “claim” India. However, the question that needs to be asked—the question in fact that the discursive method cannot ask—is what exactly is being claimed here? The answer would appear to be tautological: fictions claiming more fictions. As Rushdie himself so sharply reminds us, we should never forget the power of fictions: “fictions . . . are dangerous. In fiction’s grip, we may mortgage our homes, sell out children, to have whatever it is we crave.”56 But neither should we forget an opening to an alternative to fictions, to the possibility, as Rushdie also reminds us, of a “letting go” of the fictional. As the passage from his


short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” continues, “Alternatively, in that miasmal ocean [of fiction], we may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We let them go.”57 What has arrested the discipline of postcolonial studies for some time now is this impossibility of letting fictions go. One critic who begins to open this question of “letting go” is Homi Bhabha. In his engagement with Rushdie, Bhabha argues that the idea of a national community needs articulation as a “cultural temporality of contingency and indeterminacy at the heart of the discourse of civil society.”58 Bhabha’s favored tropes—“intermediacy,” “in-between,” “interstitial,” and “hybridity”—point to the complexities circumscribing subjects and the national structures in which they live: “What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out,’ remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference—be it class, gender, or race. Such assignations of social differences—where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between—find their agency in a form of the ‘future’ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is . . . an interstitial future, that emerges in-between the claims of the past and the needs of the present.”59 Again, Bhabha’s differential subject names a praxis grounded in a realization of external contingencies. Unlike Singh and Said, however, Bhabha introduces another component to the question of discursive construction. This appears in the unfolding of a futural “opening out.” The opening out is, for Bhabha, what makes it possible for an identity to be “performative.” Performative in this case signifies the potential for subjects to acquire some say in the matter of their construction, to act while not being entirely colonized by the discursive claims of an identity or culture. Bhabha, in other words, introduces temporality into the equation of discursive ideological construction; with the arrival of the future comes the gift of difference. Still, Bhabha’s “hybridity” offers little more than Singh’s constantly shifting “world of jumbled genealogies.” These trendy jumbled approaches to the structure of identity beg the question of what happens when the “opening” of the future “stitches” itself—to deploy Bhabha’s language—to the already colonized past (or present). Does this not end with yet another unavoidable act of ideological appropriation? In chapter two I approached this question ontologically by thematizing Heidegger’s discussion of the “earth” and Deleuze and Guatarri’s discussion of the “exchange-limit.” In opposition to these engagements with singularity and inhabitancy, acts of enclosure and acts of colonization function through the separation of inhabitants from the land. By exploring this manifestation called “the land” my point was to


show that the land operates as a materiality not entirely colonized by an ideological apparatus. The land, in other words, is never solely a “discursive construct.” The land does not name the rigid insistence of a totalizing contingency, but expresses equally a nonformed materiality that wards off appropriation. We can sharpen the relevance of this foundational shift by recalling the twofold etymology of the term inhabitant: French habiter and the Latin habere. As a form of subjectivity that is constituted by dwelling and having dealings with a particular place and cohabiting with particular peoples, inhabitancy names the very relation to space that Forster’s Vashti attempted to revive. Inhabitancy points to an awareness of what discursively and nondiscursively (in the act of resisting discursive hegemony) grounds a self, and by extension a culture: the inhabitant is defined in the specificity of the earth that emerges only as local ground—the very idea of territoriality minimized by the nation-state. The inhabitant is “borne along” by the land, driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord. Understood in this context, we begin to see that inhabitancy is what Nehru needs to erase in order to create a homogenous image capable of enclosing an entire subcontinent. At the moment when enclosure sets in, self-hood ceases to be a relationship between an inhabitant and the land, and turns into a thing set up by imperial man, who creates a nation through acts of enclosure and colonization. Colonization, therefore, names the act of separating people from the differential land upon which they live. This is perhaps most easily seen in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, in which Kim must learn to map the “whirling mass” of the Indian land by overcoding the land with a mechanical ideological vision in order to give it “meaning.”60 But this act of “separating people from the land” has also been internalized in some cases by those who have been a persuasive force in resisting colonial orders, as seen in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru. When Nehru in The Discovery of India addresses the question of India’s “nationality” in the wake of independence, he seeks recourse to an accommodating ideal that he sees to be necessary in order that the people of India may come together as a nation: “You are parts of this Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourselves, Bharat Mata.” Nehru’s project—at least in this speech and at this point in his career—is to lift the people of India off the land, to make them subjects of an ideological “Mother India,” and to ignore the experiential differences of the land itself, the oppositions of distance and diversity. For Nehru to make of India a nation, he needs to erase the differential ways in which people inhabit the land. This act of erasing identity as thought from inhabitancy also involves the annulment of the possibility of an engagement with the nondiscursive.


Revealing Nehru’s Mother India to be a discursive formation thus also reveals that formation to be an arbitrary stabilization. This then begs the question of precisely what he feels the need to stabilize. We come to realize that “community,” in Nehru’s philosophy, names the erasure of geographical separations and experiential differences. The image of the mother nation, its eidos, lies not in the way in which the people inhabit the land and its specific cartographic characteristics, but in how people need to paradoxically rise above the land in order that they may establish a common ground. The “vastness” of the land becomes as a tacit threat. The land, in its diverse “forests and broad fields” gives its people sustenance, but the ontological encounter with the land must cease at this stage for Nehru. To achieve his goal of unity, he needs to leave the land behind to focus on “the people of India,” and how they might coalesce at the conquering metaphor of “victory.” He invokes the people only as a vehicle that gives him the power to formulate a coherent identity: people as subjects of India, not as inhabitants. Nehru’s struggle to establish a meaningful India results in a massive forgetting of the land—precisely because it has the character of an unstable intensity that, if not concealed, would forestall the arrival of the nation. I use the phrase “unstable intensity” here to suggest the “appearance” of the land to be something other than a material positivism, something other than a phenomenological “cause” that would reify it merely as another metaphysical entity standing in opposition to the entity of the nation. In this sense, the land is formally empty, which is why its appearance can be said to be nondiscursive. However, this formal emptiness does not mean that the land is nothing. Land, as we begin to see in Nehru, and even in Hubel, names something along the lines of an active, emphatic denial. To put it alternatively, land is always that which overflows what has discursively come to be. We have seen the denial of the land at its most intense in the conflict at the end of Forster’s A Passage to India. In opposition to Nehru’s Bharat Mata stands Forster’s bilious polemic against nationality. In Forster’s work we sense how more than anything these characters are overwhelmed by the manner in which they inhabit the land. The earth separates, “sends up rocks,” creates geographical divisions. The earth “speaks” this separation in a “hundred voices.” Forster makes manifest Nehru’s most feared nightmare—the land that “does not want” nationality, or in this case, internationality, which shows that Forster is profoundly attuned to the hidden and antagonistic aspect of the land. Forster, writing thirty years before Nehru, anticipates the latter’s gesture of the need to struggle against the earth in order to fashion a consensual community. As I have shown earlier, Forster’s novels deal with—in his own


words from The Longest Journey and Howards End—“the appearance of the earth.” In these works the appearance of the earth signals the chance for people to “connect.” However, as I have suggested when the stakes of connection are raised in the shift from English nationality to the matter of the warring national interests burdening East and West, the earth oddly comes to presence as an unproductive destabilizing force. What one can claim on behalf of Forster is his awareness of the seemingly insurmountable difficulties facing the question of internationality. The earth pronounces its “not yet” in reaction to having been historically marked so thoroughly with the self-righteous imperial assumptions threading the connections between East and West. What makes Rushdie’s engagement with nationality different from Nehru’s and Forster’s is not so much his constant use of self-conscious narrators who are aware of the ways in which they have been constructed and fictionalized sociopolitically (which has received the most attention from postcolonial critics). Rather, Rushdie’s constant parodic foregrounding of nationality and other discursive constructions makes them appear as onerous peculiarities: “I’m talking major mother country.”61 In reading Rushdie, we realize that his narrators do more than accept the workings of ideological imperatives. They find it incredibly odd that ideology exists at all. This foregrounding of incredulousness provokes a general unsettling in our relation to nationality as a phenomenal occurrence. It also marks the first stage in a denial of a authority of discourse. One develops a sense of this at the opening of Midnight’s Children: I was born in the city of Bombay . . . at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence. . . . I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. . . . Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. . . . I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something. . . . And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame. (MC 3–4)

What can a discursive method say of Saleem’s narration? The vision of such a method reveals immediately how Saleem is constructed and admits these


constructions to the reader: “indissolubly chained to those of my country.” It notices that Saleem’s birth coincides with the birth of India’s independence from Britain. It describes how his connection to this history is “indissoluble,” how he can never step out of this contingency, for to do so would be to admit subscription to a positivist belief, to the liberal humanist ideal of acting as a free and sovereign individual. Moreover, one can plainly see the impossibility of thinking Saleem as an autonomous individual, for he is already from the start a jumbled genealogy of “multitudes” “jostling” and “shoving” at his very “inner core.” Or, as Saleem himself puts it much later in the novel: “To know me, you have to know the world.” But is discursivity—this consuming multitude of external social forces perforating his being—the only address of the narrator of Midnight’s Children? Might we point to a nondiscursive or extra-discursive site from which he may act with concerted agency? Is Saleem, in the final analysis— because he is so thoroughly constructed by the religious, metaphysical prophecies (soothsayers), historical facticity (newspapers), and political imperatives—truly left without a say in the matter of his own empowerment? If this be the case, then we are left with the sterile result that the logos of agency, and thus the locus of responsibility, can only be located in the finally unlocatable externality of an amorphous sociohistorical contingency. Relativism shows its insidious nature here, along with the equally insidious opposite side of relativity’s double-edged sword, the naivete of stepping out of ideology, which only leads to our enslavement to it.62 Such a self-defeating gesture, however, gives infinite power only to that contingency, making of it an insurmountable, transcendent principle. An odd phenomenon has therefore begun to manifest itself in the current moment of ideology’s history. Ideology—or the apparatuses of discursive, social construction—has always worked by hiding the fact that it exists. This was Foucault’s lesson (and one that still needs to be remembered), that a discourse operates and gains its strength when we do not know we are invoking it. It was this ability of ideology to hide itself that made it historically necessary to embark upon the long project of discursive discovery. However, the power of ideology has apparently shifted in our current historical occasion. We begin to see that ideological discursive constructions are at their most powerful not when they remain hidden, but when they are foregrounded, in such admissions as “this is ideological through and through”—the very admissions marking critical postcolonial engagements. Admitting subjectivity to be ideological carries the assumption that this admission also denies ideology its power. In this denial, ideology is at its most cunning, for it presumably gives up the reins of power in a twofold movement—first by admitting its presence, and second in getting the subject to freely admit his or her constitutive collusion that gives power


back only to a force that had already been revealed to be the custodian of authority. It is as if a radical coalition spent a lengthy amount of time revealing a certain political regime to be corrupt, then ended by shrugging their shoulders and relinquishing responsibility back to that system. This ontological anxiety—the fact that ideology exists—runs through each of Rushdie’s narratives, whether it be announced in the discourse of national independence as in Midnight’s Children, or the discourse of religion and race relations as explored in The Satanic Verses, or the discourse of Mother India and capitalism as in The Moor’s Last Sigh. That Bharat Mata exists in the first place, that it is rather than is not seems to be what Rushdie’s “Motherness is a big idea in India” submits in response to Nehru’s acceptance and deployment of nationality. Rushdie’s presentation of nationality’s absurd existence reveals not only that Nehru fails to think nationality as an ideological construct, but that he also fails to think why the nation should exist in the first place: the nation’s need to cover the affliction of an essentially anarchic land. Let us look more closely at Midnight’s Children. Acknowledging his “indissoluble” connection to the “consuming multitudes” of India, Pakistan, and the remaining presence of British nationalism, the narrator Saleem points to the urgent need to take up a project of resistance: “Now, however, time . . . is running out. . . . I must work fast . . . if I am to end up meaning— yes, meaning—something.” Saleem’s “Now, however” signals the coming of a next step, of that which follows in the wake of acknowledging discourse’s presence. And his cry of “yes, meaning” stands as an admonishment to the critique that ends prematurely with the agent-less revealing of the presence of ideology. His narrative will explore what lies outside the chaining narratives of nationality. He will be “guided” by a “holey, mutilated” “bedsheet”—a reference to the hole that opens after his grandfather Aadam Aziz relinquishes his belief in God, and by extension, the holes that open in metaphysical, “soothsaying” prophecies and political “ratification.” These breaks in national discursivity, these “holey mutilations” of nonnarration will be his “open-sesame,” his chance at meaning beyond what has already been constituted by narrative acts. It is when the construction of national identity reaches the point at which the consequences are most brutal—for the individual and the masses—that the presence of the local, nondiscursive earth (the very kind of meaningless and dangerous unenclosed land that literally brought Crusoe to his knees, as we saw earlier) makes a curious but significant appearance in the novel. The key moment occurs during the total transformation of Saleem’s originally deviant and anarchic sister “the Brass Monkey” into the national heroine known as “Jamila Singer.” Formerly the most intractable and resistant of characters, Saleem’s sister becomes, under the discourse of nationalistic


purity, the “voice of the nation.” To oppose this transformation, and the codeterminant division and transformation of northern Kashmir into part of the new nation of Pakistan, Saleem reveals in full parody the absurdity of this constructed meaning by developing a “science of nasal ethics” from his interaction with the singularities of the earth in the streets of Karachi. Rushdie describes Jamila’s transformation as follows: And when Jamila Singer’s fame had reached the point at which she could no longer avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the rumour that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car-crash; it was Major Latif who devised her famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar, the curtain or veil, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed in public . . . at its very centre, the Major had cut a hole. Diameter: three inches. . . . That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet. . . . As she became public property, [she was] subjected to the exaggerations and simplifications of a self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom, so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the childworld of her Monkey years. (375)

Furthermore, Jamila Singer’s voice becomes for the nation, “a sword for purity,” a “weapon” whereby the guardians of the nation may “cleanse men’s souls” (MC 376). Saleem’s sister, in becoming a “national heroine,” “dedicate[s] herself to patriotism” (MC 376, 377). In opposition to Jamila’s jingoism, Rushdie places Saleem’s travestying sense of smell: “What I could smell, Jamila could sing. . . . My nose, her voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart. While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the uglier smells which invaded it . . . so that while she rose into the clouds, I fell into the gutter” (MC 377). To take recourse in the term I have been using to mark the appearance of the extra-ideological, while Jamila sings national discursivity, while she patriotically lifts the people of Pakistan off the land so that the metaphysical idea of the “land of the pure” may soak into everyone’s ears, Saleem plunges to the earth to “inhabit” literally and figuratively the ground of India at its most gutter-al. The emergence of the vulgar in relation to the building of a national consensus with all ears harking up to Jamila Singer signifies more than a Bakhtinian coupling of “the high” and “the low”— more than a “de-grading” of hierarchies. What emerges, I suggest, is the


land as a strange, trivial, and ultimately useless effluvium that defies the institutional processes of meaning making. Saleem writes, “jerking my narrator’s eyes away from the described past. . . . I became even more determined to drown the past in the thick, bubbling scent-stew of the present . . . O dizzying days before categorization! Formlessly, before I began to shape them, the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of animal faeces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body odours of young men in lose pajamas holding hand in Sadar evenings” (MC 378). The unfolding of Saleem’s olfactory engagement with the land and its inhabitants marks of an excessively intimate inhabitancy on Saleem’s part and marks simultaneously a movement away from the discursive obligations of being a narrator. In the act of “jerking” his “narrator’s eyes away,” he abrogates the patriotic duty of discursively rendering the “described past”—the narration that gave rise to the nation. He “drowns” this narration in the “bubbling scent-stew” that is the nomadic movement of the fluid land and its people, and thus takes the first step in challenging the normative role of the novel as an artifact for buttressing an ideologically constructed, colonized culture. This stage of our analysis takes us to the point at which Bhabha locates agency in the postcolonial narrative. Rushdie, however, is more precise about the materiality of what remains in Bhabha a generalized “interstitial” opening. It is at this point that Rushdie stages the possibility of a step beyond relinquishing power to pure contingency by showing the absurdity and arbitrariness involved in the very process of imposing form upon the singular and heterogeneous “stink of the earth” through his science of nasal ethics: Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by colour—boiling underwear and the printer’s ink of the Daily Jang shared a quality of blueness, while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor-cars and graveyards I jointly classified as grey . . . there was, too, classification-by-weight: flyweight smells (paper), bantam odours (soap-fresh bodies, grass), welterweights (perspiration, queen-of-the-night); shahi-korma and bicycle-oil were light-heavyweight in my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung were among the heavyweight stinks of the earth. And I had a geometric system also: the roundness of joy and the angularity of ambition; I had elliptical smells, and also ovals and squares . . . a lexicographer of the nose. . . . O wondrous voyages before the birth of philosophy! . . . Because soon I understood that my work must, if it was to have any value, acquire a moral dimension; that the only important divisions were the infinitely subtle gradations of good and evil smells. Having realized the crucial nature of morality, having sniffed out that smells could be sacred or profane, I invented in the isolation of my scooter-trips, the science of nasal ethics. (MC 379–380)

In travestying the very act of constructing meaning, and setting that travesty alongside Jamila’s song of nationality, Rushdie delivers the nation to its


uncanny strangeness. Saleem is more than a character embedded in the strife of the nation; he is more than a “socially constructed” narrator. He is a narrator who marks, through the parodic transformation of the gutters of the earth into a discourse of high moral seriousness, the desire to refuse the capturing act of national narration. This is more than saying that the narrator is socially constructed. It signals a warding-off, a withholding from ideological construction, and a travestying of discursivity. But more significantly, Saleem, who is unlike any other narrator in literary history, offers us the most profound example of inhabitancy. He has the ability to enter the minds and bodies of every one of the millions of people living in India. This quasi-transcendence of his own subjectivity does not merely signify an act of voyeurism; these travels into the bodies of others manifest an act of becoming other: “At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire . . . at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage . . . [then] I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk” (MC 198). Saleem is not a disinterested observer in these encounters; he literally inhabits the full beings of others. More than a mirror of India, Saleem is the multitude of India: “I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside of me” (MC 4). Moreover, Saleem tells his readers that they should come to see that this radical version of subjectivity marks not only his subjectivity, but all of humanity as well: “How many things people notions we bring with us into the world, how many possibilities and also restrictions of possibility. . . . To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (MC 120–121). Unfortunately the restrictions of possibility far outweigh the potentials, for the lesson that Saleem also teaches us in Midnight’s Children is that the multitudes of the modern era have not learned how to embrace this emancipatory life of relational inhabitancy. The multitude has not learned how to initiate its own potential—because each subject of the multitude has also been utterly colonized by the various forms of enclosure (identity politics, national patriotism and jingoism, religious fundamentalism, the rivalry of capitalist individualism, etc.) that have come to dominate existence. At the conclusion of the novel the multitudes have become a “many-headed monster,” a “dense crowd . . . without boundaries, growing [and filling] the world, . . . [making] progress impossible” (MC 532). In the end, Saleem is cut off from his own identity of radical inhabitancy; he no longer obtains strength and possibility in the multitude: “I am alone in the vastness of numbers, the numbers marching one two three” (MC 532). The multitude becomes a colonized crowd, marching toward destruction, “pushing shoving


crushing,” eventually “trampling [Saleem] underfoot,” and obliterating his potential and the potential of the midnight’s children, who end by being “sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, . . . unable to live or die in peace” (MC 533). The conclusion of Midnight’s Children thus stands as a warning, an illustration of the hopeless direction towards which the multitude is headed in the contemporary historical occasion. The appearance of the earth as a resistant force in Rushdie’s works receives its fullest development in his great transnational novel The Ground beneath Her Feet. At a significant moment Rushdie addresses how the politics of nationality and the unequal distribution of global resources have reached disastrous proportions: In the West the earthquakes have stopped and the construction teams have moved in. Banks and insurance companies are building their new palaces over the faults, as if to assert the primacy of their authority, even over the misbehaving earth itself. The scars left by the quakes are being transformed into regeneration zones, gardens, office blocks, cineplexes, airports, malls . . . In the South, however, the devastation continues. It’s as if the earth were discriminating against its most disadvantaged children. In India where houses are built of mud and dreams, where the structures of life are fragile, their foundations weakened by corruption, poverty, fanaticism and neglect, the damage is immense. . . . The fact is that the ground in America is not shaking, but some patch or other of Indian soil . . . is hit by subterranean tremors almost every day. To many third-world observers it seems self-evident that earth-quakes are the new hegemonic geopolitics, the tool by which the superpower quakemakers intend to shake and break the emergent economies of the South, the Southeast, the Rim. The boastful triumphalism of the West during the revolutionary upheavals of 1989–90 has come back to haunt it. Now all earth tremors are perceived as Euro-American weapons, what were once classified by insurance brokers as acts of god are now close to being treated by entire states as acts of war, and the altruism with which ordinary Western citizens contribute to disaster relief funds, and even the indefatigable efforts of the international aid agencies, look like post-facto attempts at salving the guilty consciences of the powerful after the damage has been done. Indian, Pakistan, Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq and China all announce the allocation of gigantic “plate wars” budgets. A new kind of weapons scramble has begun. . . . Self respect and national pride are invoked and people declare themselves ready to let their children starve in order to acquire the ability to shake the world. (The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 553–554)

An enclosing, imperial relation to the land has become a global phenomenon, a geo-politics of domination that damages the land of the planet’s South and East continents. Here Rushdie reveals the extent to


which the anxiety over unenclosed land informs and governs an entire series of functional discursive sites, sites that continue to produce innumerable degrees of suffering: the economics of the “free market,” the ideology of liberal democracy, the growing strength of the military and its arms trade, the uses and abuses of agriculture, and the generalized disinterestedness that has a hold of thinking and the imagination—a disinterestedness that could only have gained such a practical hold on the human mind in the wake of the deeply backgrounded history of humanity’s separation from, and subsequent standing-over-and-against, the land. In its engagements with the earth Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet restages Forster’s A Passage to India on the global stage of the twentyfirst century. In the roughly three quarters of a century that separates the two narratives, the manipulation of the earth has extended far beyond the damages and violence inflicted on one geopolitical space by another. In Rushdie’s novel the colonization of the “misbehaving earth” has reached epic proportions, affecting entire regions of the planet. The fabric of national discursivity has reached the point of destroying the land and peoples of entire continents. Here again it is important to emphasize that the land comes to presence not in the form of a positive phenomenon, not as some “raw materiality” that only expounds the fact that it has yet to take on meaningful form, but as an event of separation, as an intensity marked by the act of refusing. What this active intensity discloses are the dangers inherent in the process of constructing a homogenized image of nationality that seeks to transcend geographical borders. This nondiscursive, or prediscursive anarchic momentum is what I admit to have been left behind in the postcolonial study of literature. Indissolubly chained to this linguistic methodology, institutionalized postcolonial studies cannot think the event of nonnarration that Rushdie offers the nation.

V. Postscript: The Appeal of the Land and the Lost Ontology of Inhabitancy In the transformation of the East India Company from a loose mercantile organization into full-fledged government apparatus, one of the first actions to be taken by colonial authorities was the formation of a land-revenue department called the “Committee of Lands.”63 Initially formed to collect revenues from the Indian territories ceded to the British, the committee’s administrative power quickly expanded, taking over not only the registration of land but also the control of salt, the flow of opium, the general management of customs productions, and eventually the entire field of judicial


administration in the colony for purposes of tighter political control. This paralleled a number of earlier developments in England: the meticulous measurement of land, the creation of a mechanism for centralizing economic production, the increase in judicial power of the justices of the peace, and the general deployment of an discursive apparatus that made possible the political administration of domestic land down to the smallest detail. At the time India was coded as having “no stable government,” as existing in a corrupt “feudal state” that disabled it from advancing into the modern age.64 The reference to the feudal era is not merely metaphoric: it reflects England’s triumphant colonization of its own Common lands, thus inciting the same call to arms in its confrontation with the subcontinent. Buttressed by the ontology of enclosure promoted consciously and unconsciously in many major novels and their critics, we can now see these traditionally separated investments for what they are: signs of a sea change in human/ land relations that set the stage for global geopolitics in the modern era. This change also affects the manner in which humans relate to one another, made manifest conspicuously in the many national and cultural conflicts of the modern era, but present as well within a nation’s own heterogeneous multitude.65 Such triumphs over land occurred throughout the long history of colonization, and in this book I have attempted to unearth the gradual rise of a discourse of enclosure to reveal the profound impact this discourse has had on humanity and the lands humans inhabit—from the time of the first individual acts of enclosure in the English countryside to the full-scale colonization of entire continents. The discourse of enclosure has utterly transformed humanity’s relation to the land. It has brought about a shift in consciousness that impacts the very basis of human subjectivity and human relationships. In turn this discourse has generated a ubiquitous and crippling ontological anxiety between humankind and the land. Land comes to “hold within” its essence a “chaotic” element, that, if not vigilantly contained by this discursive administration, would lead to the national subject’s monstrous transmutation into the foreign other: Crusoe is seen as a success, Kurtz a failure. As I argued in chapters one and two, the real brutalities committed against those dispossessed of their land throughout the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (which continues today) attest to the rise of this dread of unenclosed peoples. Here is real evidence to suggest that the transformation of human subjects into “bare life” and unenclosed land into a “state of exception” has been occurring long before Giorgio Agamben suggests.66 This history of enclosure, unfortunately, is mere prologue to the current historical occasion. Though literal “Acts of Enclosure” were for the most part already a thing of the past in the twentieth century, the enclosure


movement continues in full force in our neocolonial era. It informs current international relations, generating policies that now affect existence on a planetary scale. As the philosopher-environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin argues, [F]or five-hundred years, we have been enclosing [the] Commons . . . every land mass on this planet short of Antarctica, . . . turning land . . . into [a] commodity . . . that can be bartered and sold and negotiated in the market place. . . . [W]e enclosed the great ocean commons into sea quarters. And now we have a law of the sea treaty which allows each country to have sovereign use of 200 miles out from the coastal waters: thirty-eight percent of the ocean and ninety percent of everything worth anything. . . . [Next we enclosed] the atmosphere. Air quarters, air plane traffic. Now you can buy and sell and lease what used to be the home of the gods. . . . We went after the gene pool . . . And now you can patten the microbe, you can patten the animals, you can patten the plants. You can literally enclose the biological commons of the earth.67

The enclosure problematic is even more ubiquitous than Rifkin imagines. The hierarchies of power, exploitation, and profit created by nations, religions, and the multinational and transnational corporations of today’s world weave even tighter the logical economy of enclosure. The thought of democracy itself has come to be almost completely colonized by enclosure’s logic of turning land into pieces of private property. The “stability” of liberal democracy is equated rarely with anything other than free market capitalism—with, in other words, individual property relations and the demand for “high yields.” The movement of the free market invariably repeats the same engrossing-landlord/dispossessed-tenant relation that we saw occurring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Robin Broad, John Cavanaugh, and Walden Bello write, “There is evidence that the deep popular discontent we witnessed in parts of Asia exists throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia, where privatized adjustment has been practiced for more than a decade. Free-market economics, people there are discovering, invariably concentrates power in the land of the few wealthy exporters, landlords and natural-resource exploiters. As a result, this privatized development path ends up being profoundly undemocratic.”68 Capital investments in the so-called third world countries—the Common fields that the North and the West seek to enclose—are controlled largely by organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These powerful orders arise out of the very economy of enclosure that many third world communities are struggling to resist. The investment “packages” that first world countries float to the third world concentrate on a country’s gross national product as the measure of its development. But achieving an “efficient” national


productivity often means the elimination of trade barriers, stricter money policies, currency devaluation, cutbacks in social subsidies, and the breach of a country’s exchange-limit structure for purposes of foreign investment.69 In addition, this emphasis on the GNP—which encloses the land by annexing its meaning to the measure of a cash-nexus—more often than not results in the exploitation of collective agricultural communities, which leads to irreversible changes in a land’s ecology: “timber exports promote soil erosion on denuded mountains and dry up critical watersheds; cash-crop exports typically depend on polluting pesticides and fertilizers; large fishing boats often destroy the coral reefs in which fish breed and live; tailings from mines pollute rivers and bays.” 70 With this exploitation of a land’s natural resource base, the methodology of constituting an “efficient land” has replaced the sustainability of an inhabitant’s stewardship of the land.71 The enclosure of the earth within the metaphysical signifier of the GNP further alienates native inhabitants from the land, treating the land in the process as a passive object to be colonized and capitalized. Ecosystems around the planet are thus increasingly threatened by the enclosure of open areas for purposes of various “land development” projects. Transnational pharmaceutical corporations (the fastest growing business industry) enclose the biological and agricultural Commons by privatizing and patenting the information produced in these domains. This enclosure and privatization of knowledge production is further strengthened on the judicial register with the rise of “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPRs). Information on productive methods of fertilization in third world communities, for instance, can be “discovered” and developed by first world biochemical companies, then sold back to the territory from which the method originated. Because of IPRs, the inhabitants of these agricultural communities have begun to find themselves in the peculiar position of having to pay for their own knowledge, knowledge that evolved cumulatively and collectively through the course of many generations. The development and deployment of “terminator seeds” in third world agricultural communities, which has resulted in a decline in calorie intake in Mexico, Argentina, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and elsewhere, further attenuates the life situations of those living in these twenty-first-century Common spaces.72 Likewise the discourse of enclosure continues to govern the politics of identity construction at the national level, establishing a dangerous groundwork for international relations. Today feelings of national belonging go hand in hand with discussions of “freedom.” We have only to examine the historical rise of the nation to uncover the long list of brutalities committed on the grounds of national superiority and national pride to begin to wonder about the character of freedom being espoused here. If a different


principle of freedom is to be enacted, we must guard against this particular structure of freedom that has a hold on modern humanity and its conceptions of identity. As the previous chapters have hopefully disclosed, current popular forms of identity based on individualism stem from a particular idea of freedom, one that is indissolubly connected to an act of hegemony against the land. Another more thoughtful and critical way to view this modern structure of freedom is to explore the alternative forms of freedom that have been erased from human consciousness. Such an alternative can be found in the structure of inhabitancy. It is time that oppositional critics fully consider the four centuries–long war that imperial forces have been waging against the earth and its inhabitants. With the erasure of inhabitancy comes the creation of a free-floating human subjectivity, capable of being displaced or made landless at any time at the whim of a large landowner, a large corporation, or simply the unforeseeable twists of the global economic market. As the late Edward W. Said wrote at the end of his important work Culture and Imperialism, “[S]urely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history” (332). This aggravated status of dispossessed peoples is symptomatic of the destructive ontology and historical legacy of the enclosures. If these facts of the current historical occasion are not addressed in a fashion that avoids the calamitous economy of the old enclosing systems of cultural thought and political policy, the planet’s multitudes will only continue to be crippled by this logic that forces people to stand against one another. The lesson of the multitude at the end of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children needs remembering—even more so today than when it was first published a quarter of a century ago. Our age thus faces—and will increasingly come to be defined—by a new tension: between empire on the one hand (and its grounding in an ontology of enclosure and grasp for the “high yield”), and the counterontology of inhabitancy on the other—between enclosed orders and the individuals who form them, and the multitudes of unhomed peoples denied their fundamental right to inhabitancy. This tension will come to mark more and more the struggle of our global historical occasion—not only in the actions of enclosing orders imposing their policies on a fluid, heterogeneous world, but also as more and more people work to resist the destructive reality wrought by these enclosing powers. We can already see this resistance happening in communities around the globe, specifically in the many nonstate alternative social movements inaugurated by the planet’s innumerable dispossessed inhabitants: movements such as the Communal Property Association of South Africa (which struggles to establish a relation to the land directly opposed to the discourse of enclosure); the Landless Workers


Movement of Brazil (which functions by occupying land enclosed by wealthy landowners and private corporations that have their history in the colonization of Brazil from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries); the Communal Irrigation Management System of the Swiss Alps; the Middle Atlas Central Area Agricultural Development Project in Morocco; Via Campesina; and more.73 The works of literature I analyzed in this book can, and should be, connected to these movements occurring throughout the world, for such movements indicate that the counterontology of inhabitancy can be a real political viability. Communities of this kind think of the land in terms of an exchange-limit structure: a collective agreement arrived at between individual inhabitants and across singular communities. What they enact is another economy, another geopolitics, another justice: a cooperative evaluation of the limit that must not be crossed if any land and any land’s inhabitants are to avoid the brutalities of exploitation—be that exploitation economic, ecological, political, or cultural. To think this alternative is to think beyond not only the tiresome but continuing loud calls to national superiority, but beyond the seductive call of liberal transnational global capitalism as well. With such connections might we rethink the current status of literary humanism and the potential of humanism in general to serve as a humane force for social justice in a globalized world that gives greater priority to socioeconomic mobility and technological innovation than to the needs and values of communities that are used and abused by the continuing forces of enclosing empires, past and present. What needs to be thought, in other words, are the ways in which a polity can enact not a discourse of mastery but an ethical engagement that stems from a speculative address to a singular population, an address, like Godbole’s appeal, to an inhabitancy whose presence and whose land will always withdraw from exploitation. In such a way might we revive the lost ontology of inhabitancy.


Notes

Chapter One Enclosures, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe Syndrome: Notes toward an Ontology of Land 1. Robin Broad, John Cavanagh, and Walden Bello, “Sustainable Development in the 1990s,” in Paradigms Lost, ed. Chester Hartman and Pedro Vilanova (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 88. 2. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), 34. Hereafter cited as RC. 3. In Martin Heidegger’s sense of the term, which he derives from the Greek metata-physica: “above,” “beyond,” or “outside” “things as they are.” Metaphysics is a logic arguing that one can stand over and against the temporal or anarchic flow of existence, that one can maintain a neutral position outside shifting contextual relations. Heidegger states “Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings which aims to recover them as such as a whole for our grasp.” Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 109. 4. My use of Lacan’s “the Real” derives from Slavoj Zizek’s development of the term. The Real is that which escapes governing by the sociosymbolic order, that is, ideology. It names what Zizek refers to as an “extra-ideological” event that disrupts the coordinates of the order of reality holding dominion; the Real is the “inherent point of failure of symbolization.” See Slavoj Zizek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (New York: Verso, 2000), 121. 5. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 11. Hereafter cited as T. 6. The plot of the novel itself is based, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, “on the desire to link by marriage the two largest estates in Somersetshire.” See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 61. 7. O.M. Brack, Jr. ed., The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 310–311. 8. The explorer Robert Walton is on his way to the prototypical unenclosed land of the North Pole, when he pauses to contemplate the rationale of his voyage: “But it is still greater evil to me that I am self-educated: for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common and read nothing but our Uncle Thomas’ books of voyages. . . . I greatly need . . . to regulate my mind.” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 18–19.

176 / notes 9. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1980), 242. 10. George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin, 1980), 173–175, 214–215. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights offers an even more obvious case of excess: the moor’s thematic connection to an uncontrollable passion and the wildness of Heathcliff, and Hindley’s son Hareton as well, who becomes in part “unvirtuous” by living among the “rankness” of the “wilderness of weeds.” Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Boston: Bedford Books, 1992), 176, 189. 11. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 176. See also pages 166, 170, 171, 174, 177, 188–190, 201–202, 203–208, 222,224. 12. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 644–646. 13. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 24. 14. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), 29, 34, 83. 15. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 202. 16. E.M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 214. 17. Ibid., 214–215. 18. In addition to the novel’s opening and ending descriptions of an antagonistic land, I have in mind particularly the scenes leading up to and including the exploration of the Marabar caves, and the “reputation” of the caves, which “does not depend on human speech,” E.M. Foster, A Passage to India ( New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1984), 4–5, 79–80, 137, 361–362. 19. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 2, 12. 20. Ibid., 12. 21. D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 450. 22. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, ed., Glenn Gray, trans. J. Albert Hofstadter. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 42. 23. There is ample material across the disciplines on the subject of the land that needs consideration. Yet no work has sufficiently—even briefly—explored the connections between these various fields of study. Martin Heidegger refers to the technological transformation of the agricultural industry from stewardship to capitalist “stockpiling”: The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently that it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. . . . But . . . the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order which sets upon nature. . . . This settingupon . . . expedites . . . directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. Coal . . . is stockpiled. (“The Question concerning Technology,” in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row, 1977], 14–15) At key moments in his analysis of space, Henri Lefebvre points toward the need to think the extensive relay that I have in mind: Property relationships (especially the ownership of the earth, or land) . . . [are] closely bound up with the forces of production which impose a form on the earth or land. . . . [Thus] a unity transpires between

notes / 177

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

levels which analysis often keeps separate from one another: the forces of production and their component elements (nature, labour, technology, knowledge); structures (property relations); superstructures (institutions and the state itself ). See The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell), 85. However, it is symptomatic of the blindness to an ontological consideration of land that Lefebvre never refers to the enclosure acts. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari address the state appropriation of land in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), see esp. 437–445. In each of these philosophical works, however, land is always subordinate to some “larger” issue. One could also consider the unthought relay of postcolonialists, colonial historians, and environmentalists addressing the ontology of land: a postcolonial theorist such as Anne McClintock, for instance, examines how colonized land was coded as “virgin” and penetrated by male explorers in an “erotics of ravishment”; Mary Louise Pratt explores, among other things, how the Linnaean system of classification was disseminated on a global level by Europeans in the eighteenth century; the historian William Cronon analyzes how English colonists reterritorialized the land of New England, dismissing the native American nomadic relation to the land as wasteful; and environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin shows how the enclosure movement has had a direct and destructive impact on the environment. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22–23; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 24–37; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 33–39; and Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991), 5–40. See also Broad, Cavanagh, and Bello, “Sustainable Development in the 1990s.” Said, Culture and Imperialism, 83. Micheal Turner, Enclosures in Britain: 1750–1830 (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 34. Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure (Kent: Wm Dawson and Sons, 1980), 54. W.E. Tate, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1967), 27. See the Michel Foucault interview “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 68. Quoted in Cronon, Changes in the Land, 5. Cronon also explores the ecological potential of the itinerant nature of Indian villages. See esp. 37–38. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 193. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 125. In addition, the massive eighteenth– and nineteenth–century migrations—“flights from the land”—that increased the size of industrial city settlements represented the countryside to many as an empty space that was “backward and ‘dark.’ ” Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 174.

178 / notes 32. Robert T. Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico with the Other Islands of the West Indies (New York: Century Co., 1898), 418–419. Quoted in Kelvin A. SantiagoValles, “Subject People” and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898–1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 30. 33. See James A. Delle, An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 3; Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 24; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 219; Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987); Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). 34. William V. Spanos, America’s Shadow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 96–97. 35. Ibid., 97. 36. Use-rights gave laborers not owning a farm access to “uncultivated waste,” which “included the right to pasture animals needed to work their holding or supply their households—also the right to gather fuel for household consumption, and stone and timber in order to make repairs to their dwellings and barns.” Robert Maning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 18. 37. Under the open-field system, parliament members argued, the Commons and forests lay unprotected by being left open; in such an unterritorialized state, it was thought, the Commons will attract only vagabonds and other “deviants” seeking to escape an “honest day’s labor.” See Maning, Village Revolts, 113. 38. A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1650–1640 (London: Metheun, 1986), 56. 39. Court of Common Pleas, volume 6, folio 59 [1603]. 40. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “inhabitant.” 41. This is not to argue that there were not such things as wars over land before enclosures, but that land relations in war become more of an administrative issue, that wars over land become wars over the discursive administration of land. Or to put it differently, the rise in land documentation—the “sheet of language” covering the land that I mentioned earlier—indicates the extent to which England “went to war” against its own land. 42. The term “moorish” warrants close examination, for by the time of the early eighteenth century it had become a code word signifying an area of “Common” land held to be useless and unsightly; moorish Commons were locations thought to be treacherous in their potential for harboring vagabonds, displaced villagers, and landless laborers. 43. “[We] were by our last observation 7 degrees 22 Min. Northern Latitude, when a violent Tornado or Hurricane took us quite out of our Knowledge” (32), “about the 12th Day the Weather abating a little, the Master made an

notes / 179

44. 45. 46.

47.

Observation as well as he could and found that we has about 11 Degrees North Latitude, but that he was 22 Degrees of Longitude difference West from Cape St. Augustino” (32), “but our Voyage was otherwise determined, for being in the Latitude of 12 Deg. 18 Min.” (32). Lennard J. Davis has commented on this moment at length. See his Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1987), 62–63. Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 11. Hereafter cited as T. This extension of London, and of the town in general becoming an enclosing entity aggrandizing the countryside has been documented by Peter Clark and Paul Slack in English Towns in Transition: 1500–1700: “[T]he two centuries since 1500 had been a period of substantial urbanization,” (12); “The importance of the domestic trades in London’s economy was nothing new. Already in the last Middle Ages London merchants had established a network of trading connections across the Home Counties. . . . But now this network was consolidated and extended to cover a large sector of the kingdom. Thus, by the end of the sixteenth century, London merchants . . . were busy supplying Northern consumers with general wares and commodities” (66). The influence of the town was not only limited to its control of the expanding market economy; it added to a developing political centralization as well, with the distance between towns, and their relative autonomy being erased in favor of the largest centers of control: “The chartered rights which towns had seen as guarantees of their autonomy had by the late seventeenth century become pawns in a large and complex political game which eventually eroded the independence of all but the great cities” (126). Along with the increasing power of the enclosure commissioners as a new type of administrator, the town clerk gained in administratorial status as well: “By the mid-seventeenth century the town clerk was often the lynch-pin of civic administration” (132). This centralization shows a marked contrast to the old country or “market” towns that might be said to be more of the idea of the country. In the early sixteenth century, there were more than 500 of these small communities. In opposition to the modern town, country towns had as their “center” the local agrarian market, which varied greatly from region to region, and which “determined the lay-out of the rest of the town” (18). These older towns in some cases were a temporary condition of the agrarian order, coming to life once of a week on market day (19). See also Peter Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson and Co., Ltd., 1984), esp. 13–61. And Richard Perren, “Markets and Marketting,” in Agrarian History, Volume VI, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 191–194. Arthur Young also felt towns to be important. See his Annals of Agriculture, II, (London: R. Philips, 1784), 420–421. Before the post–civil war enclosure period, there was relatively little communication and no cohesion between the countries surrounding even London. Areas of the countryside—villages, hamlets, small communities— were sharply localized. It was not until the eighteenth-century period of enclosure, along with the nineteenth-century building of railways, that a significant homogenization of these regions occurred. See Everitt, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV: 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967),11–17.

180 / notes 48. I refer to the term “problematized” in the sense of Althusser’s “problematic,” a term he develops to signify an ideological framework that circumscribes and delineates “the forms in which all problems must be posed.” The problematic predetermines the questions that an inquirer can ask and consequently determines the answers these questions produce. It creates and deploys a “visionary field” and as such illuminates a way of understanding while throwing other approaches into darkness. The problematic questions what it makes visible within its field of vision (“problematizes” it), but refuses to acknowledge what it determines to be inessential or invisible (events, objects, people, or thoughts it would consider to be “unproblematic”). See Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar (London: Verso, 1979), 25–26. 49. The phrase “world picture” is a reference to Heidegger’s essay “The Age of the World Picture.” The modern phrase “world picture,” Heidegger argues, is indicative of how the realm of reality is structured by and for the will of the human subject. The phrase points to how the realm of the possible is enframed by a specific system of representation that constrains that which can come to be, that which can enter the field of representation in order that it remain held within the normalizing frame of the picture. “Getting the picture,” consequently, names not some neutral act of understanding, but how the limited order of representation exercises authority over how we come to understand, and what we can understand. Heidegger’s de-structuring of this everyday phrase thus shows how the human subject is manipulated by the picture of the world that has come to hold sway, but also how the phrase conceals this manipulation by duping the subject into thinking that she/he stands outside the picture as if free from any ideological imperatives. See Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, 129–30, emphasis added; op. cit. 50. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 7. 51. Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 222–262. 52. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11. 53. In a press conference, Lord Robertson, secretary general of NATO, argued the following concerning the Kosovo crisis in the wake of the bombing campaign: “Roberston said NATO would be no less resolute in preventing the expulsion of minorities from Kosovo than it was in protecting the Kosovo Albanians last year, even if it meant ‘building walls and barbed wire’ around their communities. Having minorities group into enclaves . . . may be the only way to keep the communities safely in Kosovo for the time being,” United Nations Press Release, July 18, 2000, UNMIK/PR/296. 54. Broad, Cavanagh, and Bello, “Sustainable Development in the 1990s.” The Robinson Crusoe effect can be seen informing the manner in which global institutions such as the World Bank indirectly influence the structure of curriculum at the university level. In a recent issue of boundary 2, Ronald A.T. Judy addresses the ominous transformation that literary departments are now facing in Tunisia. In the wake of the World Bank’s report on the economy of Tunisia,

notes / 181 the nation has been advised to reform in order to properly enter into the global village. Because English has become the “global language,” a department that formerly taught French and Arabic literature and culture is now facing the possibility of becoming an “English language” department designed to teach English as solely a technological “second language.” See Judy, “Some Notes on the Status of Global English in Tunisia,” in boundary 2, 26 (2) (Summer 1999): 3–29. For a discussion of “surplus extraction” see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 394; Susan George, “Managing the Global House: Redefining Economics,” in Global Warming: The Greenpeace Report, ed. Jeremy Leggett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 438–456. 55. Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 23–24. 56. Ibid., 39–59. See especially 41–44, where he cites the journal boundary 2 in particular for “romanticizing” the local.

Chapter Two

The Territorialization of Land

1. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 40. 2. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xii. 3. This point in particular is powerfully argued by William V. Spanos in Heidegger and Criticism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 4. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 60. Hereafter cited as P. 5. William V. Spanos, America’s Shadow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 6. For an extended discussion of the extra-ideological, see Slavoj Zizek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 1994). 7. Ibid., 15. 8. Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology,” in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 15. 9. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 42. Emphasis added. Hereafter cited as PLT. 10. Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 357. Hereafter cited as ATP. 11. Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 139. 12. Ibid., 196. 13. W.E. Tate, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1967), 28. 14. Gordon Batho, “Landlords in England,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV: 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 256.

182 / notes 15. Joan Thirsk, in her article “The Common Fields,” describes the open-field system as follows: It is composed of four essential elements. First, the arable and meadow is divided into strips among cultivators, each of whom may occupy a number of strips scattered about the fields. Secondly, both arable and meadow are thrown open for common pasturing by the stock of all the commoners after harvest and in fallow seasons. In the arable fields, this means necessarily that some rules about cropping are observed so that spring and winter-sown crops may be grown in separate fields or furlongs. Thirdly, there is common pasturage and waste, where the cultivators of strips enjoy the right to graze stock and gather timber, peat, and other commodities, when available, such as stone and coal. Fourthly, the ordering of these activities is regulated by an assembly of cultivators—the manorial court, in most places in the Middle Ages, or, when more than one manor was present in a township, a village meeting. . . . It is unthinkable that all [four elements] have always existed together. (In Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History, ed. R.H. Hilton [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], 10–11). 16. Tate, The English Village Community, 97. 17. Lord Eversley, Commons, Forests and Footpaths: The Story of the Battle during the Last Forty-five Years for Public Rights over the Commons, Forests and Footpaths of England and Wales (London: Cassell and Company, Ltd., 1910), 7. 18. For the specifics of feudal social hierarchy, see Richard Lachmann, From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England, 1536–1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 19. See, for instance, Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (London: Lutterworth Press, 1954); and Maurice Beresford and John G. Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages (London: Lutterworth Press, 1971). 20. “According to James I’s surveyors, the inhabitants of forests were everywhere ‘increasing in such abundance’ that they would soon thrust one another out of their possessions by violence, from mere ‘want of inhabitations,’ ” Alan Everitt, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce,” Chapter VIII, Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV: 1500–1640, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 409. 21. Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in Agrarian History, Volume IV, 223. 22. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 17. 23. Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” in Agrarian History, Volume IV, 224. 24. For a fascinating and extensive account of enclosure riots and social protest see Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 25. Ibid., 228. 26. A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1986), 56. 27. John Thirsk, “Agricultural Policy: Public Debate and Legislation,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume V Part 2: 1640–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 318–319, 372.

notes / 183 28. Philip Pettit, The Royal Forests of Northamtonshire: A Study in Their Economy, 1558–1714 (Gateshead: Northumberland Press Ltd., 1968), 14. 29. Joan Thirsk, Tudor Enclosures (London: Historical Association, 1958), note, 22. 30. G.E. Mingay, “Farming Techniques,” 277. 31. Tate, The English Village Community, 32. “Large and small [farms] alike produced largely for consumption, perhaps only secondarily for sale or exchange,” 27. See also Thirsk, Agrarian History, Volume IV, 106. 32. Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980), 18. 33. Micheal Turner, Enclosures in Britain: 1750–1830 (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 23. 34. From Sinclair’s memoirs reported in Halevy, E., A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, Volume I: England in 1815 (1960), 230. Quoted in Micheal Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure, 88. 35. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 23. 36. Thirsk, Agrarian History, Volume V Part 2, 543. 37. As opposed to the number of parliamentary enclosure acts before this time, with eight acts passed between the years 1724 and 1729, thirty-nine acts in the 1730s, and thirty-nine in the 1740s. It must be remembered that these figures represent parliamentary acts of enclosure, and that individual acts continued as well—long before and after this period. See Thirsk, Agrarian History, Volume V, Part 2, 381. 38. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 17. 39. Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (London: Wakefield Press, 1972), Volume IX, 180–181. 40. Ibid., Volume VIII, 79. 41. In 1860, enclosure came under question again. An opposition movement began, which argued that the Commons and open land should be held as having great value for the health and recreation of the country’s citizenry, and that open spaces should no longer be cultivated, or coopted as potential building sites. The members of this movement considered that the open spaces left on the outskirts of cities, and in the countryside, needed to be maintained on the basis of adding beauty to the landscape. A Commons Preservation Society was formed, and eventually won a number of court cases against large landowners and lords of manors to keep the remaining open lands from being enclosed. But by this time in the long history of enclosures, these “open spaces” had begun to signify an “aesthetic” nostalgia that was something other than the social collectivity of former Common lands. 42. There is not enough space here to appropriately treat many of the important works on the enclosure movement that were written before and after World War II. In addition to the texts already cited in this and the previous chapter, a list of the more significant works would have to include the following: J.V. Beckett, The Agricultural Revolution (London: Blackwell, 1990); Peter Clark and David Souden, ed., Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London: Hutchinson, 1987), esp. Chapters 7 and 9: “Migration in England during the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries” and “Migrants in the City: The Process of Social Adaptation in English Towns, 1500–1800,” both by Clark, 213–252; 267–291; C.G.A. Clay, Economic Expansion and

184 / notes

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

Social Change: England 1500–1700, Volume I, People, Land, and Towns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Lord Eversley, Agrarian Tenures: A Survey of the Laws and Customs Relating to the Holding of Land in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and of the Reforms Therein during Recent Years (London: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1893); E.C.K. Gonner, Common Land and Inclosure (London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd., 1912); J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer: 1760–1832, A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911); B.A. Holderness and Micheal Turner, eds., Land, Labour, and Agriculture: 1700–1920 (London: Hambleton Press, 1991); Gilbert Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common Fields (1907. New York: Augustas M. Kelley, 1968); R.H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Burt Franklin, 1912); Edith H. Whetham, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume VIII: 1914–1939; J.A. Yelling Common Field and Enclosure in England: 1450–1850 (London: Macmillan Press, 1977). Thirsk, Agrarian History, Volume V, Part 2, 534. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Vintage Books: New York, 1979), 138. Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1797 ed. ), I: 249. See John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1971). Between one-quarter and one-third of the population were considered to be too poverty-stricken to be assessed for taxation purposes in the period 1523–1527. . . . The wage-earner’s position was a tenuous one. Any one who was maintaining himself at one moment might find himself without visible means of support at the next. The rural labourer was better off than his urban counterpart in this respect, for whereas a town-dweller seldom had any alternative means of support, a countryman could often supplement his earnings from the produce of such land as he possessed. (79) “During the period 1500 to 1640, despite a threefold increase in monetary terms, real wages dropped by as much as 50 percent. Those that had to rely on wages alone, and their number increased as the century progressed, invariably found themselves in real difficulties, and their plight was made worse by the fact that there was no guarantee of regular employment” (80). Allen, Enclosures and the Yeoman, 1. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, ed., Newton Abbot, David and Charles (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing; Repr. 1969, 1884). In the seventeenth century and onward, the tendency was for fathers to provide sons with land, which meant that, if the father was not to lose land, he would have to gain more in order to impart it to his sons. See Christopher Clay, “Landlords and Estate Management in England,” in The Agrarian History, Volume V, Part 2, Chapter 14, 171. C. Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (London: Longman, 1984). Clay, “Landlords and Estate Management in England,” 184. Ibid., 190. Edith H. Whethem, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume VIII: 1914–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

notes / 185 54. Prince, Agrarian History, Volume VI, 76. 55. G.E. Mingay, “Conclusion: The Progress of Agriculture, 1750–1850,” in The Agrarian History, Volume VI: 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 969. 56. Ibid., 60. 57. Enclosure’s effect on the development of a market economy can be seen even as early as the sixteenth century. See Joan Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England,” in The Agrarian History, Volume IV, 15. The period also begins to be marked by patterns of specialization: “There can be little doubt that in the sixteenth century most towns still served a purely local area and specialized in marketing no particular type of commodity.” Everitt, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce,” 490. 58. Caird, English Agriculture, (London: Routledge, 1968), 484–485. 59. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 15. 60. Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 11. Hereafter cited as T. This extension of London, and of the town in general becoming an enclosing entity aggrandizing the countryside has been documented by Peter Clark and Paul Slack in English Towns in Transition: 1500–1700: “[T]he two centuries since 1500 had been a period of substantial urbanization” (12); “The importance of the domestic trades in London’s economy was nothing new. Already in the last Middle Ages London merchants had established a network of trading connections across the Home Counties. . . . But now this network was consolidated and extended to cover a large sector of the kingdom. Thus, by the end of the sixteenth century, London merchants . . . were busy supplying Northern consumers with general wares and commodities” (66). The influence of the town was not only limited to its control of the expanding market economy; it added to a developing political centralization as well, with the distance between towns, and their relative autonomy being erased in favor of the largest centers of control (126). Along with the increasing power of the enclosure commissioners as a new type of administrator, the town clerk gained in administratorial status as well: “By the mid-seventeenth century the town clerk was often the lynch-pin of civic administration” (132). This centralization of power within the town and hierarchization of its presence in the English landscape shows a marked contrast to the old country or “market” towns that might be said to be more of the idea of the country. In the early sixteenth century, there were more than 500 of these small communities. In opposition to the modern town, country towns had as their “center” the local agrarian market, which varied greatly from region to region, and which “determined the lay-out of the rest of the town” (18). These older towns in some cases were a temporary condition of the agrarian order, coming to life once of a week on market day (19). See also Peter Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson and Co., Ltd., 1984), esp. 13–61. And Richard Perren, “Markets and Marketting,” in Agrarian History, Volume VI, 191–194. Arthur Young also felt towns to be important: “It is the union to a spot, the concentration of wealth that is alone powerful enough to give that impulsive motion that

186 / notes

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

is felt at the very extremities.” Annuls of Agriculture, II, (London: R. Philips, 1784), 420–421. Alan Everitt, Landscape and Community in England (London: Hambleton Press, 1985), 11. Ibid., 16. M.L. Parry and T.R. Slater, eds., The Making of the Scottish Countryside (1980); quoted in Turner, Enclosures in Britain: 1750–1830 (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 29. Elizabeth Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics (1926; New York: Arno Press, 1972), 11. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Arthur Young, Political Essays concerning the Present State of the British Empire; Particularly Respecting I. Natural Advantages and Disadvantages. II. Constitution. III. Agriculture. IV. Manufactures. V. The Colonies. and VI. Commerce (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1772), 517–518. Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics, 158–159. A more substantial, though by no means complete, list can be found on the title page of Young’s Travels in France in the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789 (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1976). It would be a very easy but an useless task to expatiate on the benefits attending inclosure; they are so obvious that in order to attain them above 2000 acts of parliament have passed at an enormous expense to enable parishes to remedy the effects of the ignorance and prejudices of our ancestors. While 2 or 3 millions of people divided the whole kingdom among them it was not of much consequence whether the lands were open or inclosed but as numbers increased, the necessity of a better cultivation was felt; and when the population trebled and quadrupled, this necessity became more imperious, till at last it was found that the progress of parochial application to parliament was too slow to answer the increasing demand for food; and very earnest endeavours were made by the Board of Agriculture to procure a general inclosure, one of the most meritorious attempts that has been made by any body of men in this Kingdom. Elements and Practice of Agriculture, MSS. 34,824, 4–6, British Museum (quoted in Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics, 101). Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics, 24. Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour through the North of England, Volume I. (London: W. Strahan, 1770), 524–525. Arthur Young, A Six Month’s Tour through the North of England, Volume IV (London: W. Strahan, 1771), 338–340. Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics,154. Arthur Young, Farmer’s Letters, Letter VIII, 312, 1768 ed. (quoted in Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics, 32). For example, “Certain it is, that cultivation in Britain should keep pace with that of America, for upon cultivation depend power, wealth, and national influence. If the prosperity of the kingdom is at a stand, while that of America is in the full flood of fortune; it will soon ebb with Britain. With proper conduct this may long be kept off, but that conduct cannot consist in leaving

notes / 187

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

a third of the national territory waste and uncultivated.” Arthur Young, Observations on the Present State of Waste Lands of Great Britain, (London: W. Nicoll, 1773), 54. Arthur Young, Reflections on the Present State of Affairs at Home and Abroad, (London: J. Coote, 1759), 27–28. Arthur Young, “State of the Cotton Manufactory of Great Britain,” Annals of Agriculture, 12 (London: R. Philips, 1789): 518. Ibid., 519. Young, Political Essays, 427–429. In this sense, Young parallels Adam Smith, who conceived of urban growth in terms of the interdependence of the town and the country. See Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 67. Young, General View of the Agriculture of Lincolnshire, (London, Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1813), 437. References to enclosed land as being moral land are frequent throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “Let those who doubt go round the commons now open, and view the miserable huts, and poor, ill-cultivated, impoverished spots erected, or rather thrown together . . . which . . . affords them a very trifle towards their maintenance, yet operates upon their minds as a sort of independence; this idea leads the man to lose many days’ work, by which he gets a habit of indolence; a daughter kept at home to milk a poor half starv’d cow, who being open to temptations soon turns harlot, and becomes a distressed ignorant mother instead of making a good useful servant,” John Billingsley, Board of Agriculture Report (Somersetshire, 1794). Arthur Young, “Preface,” in A Course of Experimental Agriculture, Volume I, 1770 (quoted in Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics, 154–155). Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics, 106. “Suppose in Britain an order of knighthood was instituted with the common distinctions of a ribband, &c. to be conferred on all who formed a complete farm inclosed, manured, and lett, of at least two hundred acres of land which was waste before such improvement” Hunt, Arthur Young on Industry and Economics, 127. Gordon Batho, “Landlords in England,” in Agrarian History, Volume IV, 276. Christopher Clay, “Landlords and Estate Management in England,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1640–1750: Agrarian Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Chapter 14, 162. Everitt, “The Marketting of Agricultural Produce,” 565. Ibid., 565. Tate, The English Village Community, 52–53. Ibid., 50. J.A. Chartres, “The Marketting of Agricultural Produce,” in Agrarian History, Volume V, Part 2, 307. Ibid., 467–68. G.E. Mingay, “Introduction,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3. Hugh C. Prince, “The Changing Rural Landscape, 1750–1850,” 7. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 12. Ibid, 13.

188 / notes 100. Ibid., 19–20. 101. Ibid., 77. 102. W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), 157–159. 103. Tate, The English Village Community, 113–114. 104. See also Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure, 61–66. 105. Tate, The English Village Community, 117. 106. J.H. Porter, “The Development of Rural Society,” in Agrarian History, Volume VI, 846. 107. For the costs involved in an enclosure see Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 53. 108. J.V. Becketter, Agrarian History, Volume VI, 605. 109. Sir Charles Hussey, quoted in Thirsk, Tudor Enclosures, 9. 110. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 111. W.G. Hoskins, The Midland Peasant (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1957), 193–194. Tate describes this communal structure more extensively: [M]anufactured goods as were needed were bought on market day or at fair time in the neighbouring borough. Meat was largely home-fed and homekilled, and bread usually . . . home-baked, often then from flour locally milled from home-grown wheat or maslin. . . . Now, or course, the village shopkeepers are largely the mere distributing agents for Dutch cheese, New Zealand butter, Danish or Irish bacon, American ‘cereals’ and the like, West Indian sugar entering the country by Liverpool, Virginian tobacco reaching them via Bristol, Indian tea coming through the Port of London, and so on, with such home-produced luxeries as cakes from Kensington, chocolate from Birmingham and soap from Birkennead. The shopkeeper, or course, makes none of these, but despite the competition, of late, of the “supermarket” in the neighbouring town, he gains a comfortable livelihood by purchasing them at one price and retailing them at a considerably higher one. Even the innkeeper—formerly often a village artisan or smallholder, who brewed his beer and managed his small holding in his slack hours—is now in his (“tied”), “tenanted” or “managed” house the dependant, often indeed the mere employee, or a brewery company perhaps a hundred miles away. (28) 112. Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” 207. 113. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 420. 114. Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing,” 207. 115. J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 110. Neeson’s book contains a wealth of information on thinking an alternative form of collective economy from that of enclosure. See especially Chapter One, “The Question of Value” and Chapter Six, “The Uses of Waste.” 116. With the increase in heavy population in certain areas of the country, stinting did not always work. See, for example, Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure, 148–149. Unstinted Commons existed, for not all villages employed this form of regulation. Not surprisingly, the most overcrowded unstinted Commons came to be used by supporters of enclosure who wished to paint all open-field systems as being inefficient and subject to overcrowding. See Neeson, Commoners, 113, 115. 117. Neeson, Commoners, 7, 13, 36. See also W.G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp, The Common Lands of England and Wales (London: Collins, 1963): “The

notes / 189

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124.

reporters to the newly founded Board of Agriculture, who traveled round the country in the 1790s and early 1800s, were almost unanimous in condemning the use of the commons,” (54–55). For the relation between enclosure and the increase in a landless class, see Alan Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” in Agrarian History, Volume IV, Chapter VII, 398–99. Ibid., 406. J.V. Beckett, “Landownership and Estate Management,” in Agrarian History, Volume VI, 547. Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” 408. Ibid., 418–419. “On many farms . . . the semi-feudal conditions . . . were beginning to give way to a specifically commercial nexus between masters and men. On large arable farms especially, where many labourers were employed in production for the market, and where it was imperative for farmers to keep an eye fixed firmly on prices and profits, the frictions between masters and men were often acute,” Everitt, “Farm Labourers,” 440. Tate sees the developing hierarchy of “possessors” and “dispossessed” to extend even deeper than a master/servant dialectic: Enclosure has had much to do with making the English village a class society of clearly demarked possessors and dispossessed. It is partly due to enclosure that throughout much the greater part of England we have no longer a landed peasantry. It may well be due to enclosure that the village nowadays is the abode of an assembly of disconnected individuals and classes, rather than that of a well-knit and finely graded community, with class distinctions, it is true, but these much more blurred than they became in later times. . . . In the open-field village each class tended to shade off into its neighbours above and below, rather than to be divided from them by clearly ruled boundary lines which only a rather exceptional individual might pass, and this with some difficulty. (31)

Chapter Three Problematizing Enclosure in Eighteenth-Century English Literature 1. Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, “Subject People” and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 1898–1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 21. 2. Ibid., 21. 3. Ibid., 28–29. 4. Ibid., 29. 5. Robert T. Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico with the Other Islands of the West Indies (New York: Century Co., 1898), 418–419. Quoted in Santiago-Valles, “Subject People,” 30. 6. James A. Delle, An Archaeology of Social Space: Analyzing Coffee Plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains (New York: Plenun Press, 1998), 3. 7. Ibid., 28. 8. Ibid., 38.

190 / notes 9. Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 24. 10. Waltern Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 219. See also: Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and its ritual expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987); Henry A. Landsberger, Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1973); Francis G. Snyder, Capitalism and Legal Change: An African Transformation (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). 11. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 34; Joseph Conrad, Victory, ed. Robert Hampson (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 341. 12. J.R. Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic History Review, 36 (1983): 483–505. 13. James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 1986), 2, 4. 14. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government: An Essay concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976). 15. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: Am Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Edward Mallin, English Landscaping and Literature: 1660–1840 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966); Jeffrey Spencer, Heroic Nature: Ideal Landscape in English Poetry from Marvell to Thomson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); James Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979). 16. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, 2–3. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 43. 19. Spencer, Heroic Nature, 298. 20. Ibid., 300. 21. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997), 24–26. 22. For more details see Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918), 3 volumes; and F. Homes Dudden, Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times (Hamden: Archon Books, 1966), 2 volumes. 23. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (New York: New American Library, 1979), 34. Hereafter cited as TJ. 24. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 2. Quoted in Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 98. 25. Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape, 100.

notes / 191 26. Ibid., 101. 27. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert A. Greenberg (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1970), 149–150. Hereafter cited as GL. 28. Martin C. Battestin, “Introduction,” in Joseph Andrews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), xxxii. 29. Ibid., xxiv. 30. Ibid., xxvii. 31. Ibid., xxxi. 32. Ibid., xxxvi. 33. For more information on enclosure riots, see Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 34. Ibid., xxxix. 35. Ibid., xl. 36. O.M. Brack, Jr. ed., The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), note 347. Hereafter cited as HC. 37. Thomas R. Preston, “Introduction” to Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), xxvi. 38. There is some question as to whether or not Smollett actually has Taylor in mind, though Taylor’s paintings fit Bramble’s descriptions in the novel. See Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 364, note 2. 39. William V. Spanos develops the full power of the important difference between interesse and the metaphysical perspective in his Heidegger and Criticism (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993). 40. Preston, “Introduction,” xxvii. 41. Ibid., xxvii. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., xxviii. 44. Ibid., xxix–xxx. 45. Ibid., xlvii. 46. Ibid. 47. Tobias Smollett, Roderick Random (New York: Penguin, 1997).

Chapter Four Inhabiting Land in the Age of Empire: Twentieth-Century Literature 1. I have developed and resituated within the history of enclosure acts this difference between “mapping” and “tracing” made by Deleuze and Guattari: All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. . . . Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations. . . . The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree. . . . The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map . . . fosters connections between fields. . . . The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. . . . A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the

192 / notes

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

tracing, which always comes back “to the same.” The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence.” (A Thousand Plateaus trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 11–12) Donald Maxwell, The Landscape of Thomas Hardy (London: Cassell and Company, Limited, 1928), 56. Hermann Lea, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (London: MacMillan and Company, 1925), xvii. For a lengthier discussion of the history of Hardy criticism, see Lennart A. Björk, Psychological Vision and Social Criticism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1987), 55–69. Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel (London: Arrow Books, 1962), 49–62. See also Arnold Kettle, Hardy the Novelist: A Reconsideration (Swansea: University College of Swansea, 1966). Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), xiv. Ibid., 136. Ibid. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 137. See also Perry Meisal, Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Meisal’s work is informed by the same subject/object dichotomy; he argues that Hardy comes to focus on the historical development of the “alienated” individual who has arisen out of the new “urban sensibility” that has developed in opposition to the old world of the “rural.” His book traces what he sees to be a overarching movement in Hardy’s novels from a focus on communities to “individual-oriented novels.” When he takes up the question of land (constructed in the form of a binary opposition—the rural in opposition to the urban) expressly in relation to The Return of the Native, he comes to the following conclusion: “Hardy . . . uses landscape . . . only . . . as a reflection . . . of his characters’ moods and natures” (71). Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. James Gindin (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1969), 2–3. Hereafter cited as RN. John Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 11, 23, 7, 5. D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix I: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, quoted in Marko Modiano, Domestic Disharmony and Industrialization in D.H. Lawrence’s Early Fiction (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1987), 20. Modiano, Domestic Disharmony, 15. Modiano, Domestic Disharmony, 90. Modiano, Domestic Disharmony, 95. Roger Ebbatson’s Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction, 1859–1914 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980) picks up on the nomadic flow of land remarked upon by many of Hardy’s critics: “The keynote of Nature in Lawrence is energy and movement”; “Lawrence seeks ‘unknown modes of being’ in images of flux and dynamism” (28). He even somewhat explodes Darwinism to think multiplicity as a nonderivative substantive by referring to the neo-Darwinian world of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe (a book that

notes / 193

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Lawrence remarks upon in his letters as having been influential in his development as a thinker). From here, Ebbatson comes to look for characters in Lawrence’s texts struggling to get to “open spaces,” such as the episode of Anna’s claustrophobic reaction to the fixed, predetermined movement of Lincoln Cathedral in The Rainbow. But all of this releasing of movement from a preconceived design only comes to a concentration on the strain of individualism in Lawrence’s novels, his exploration of the “emergence of the individual” within the group, and the “liberation . . . man may find in Nature” (41–44). Anne Fernihough, D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetic and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 10. D.H. Lawrence, “Introduction to These Paintings,” in Phoenix I: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward McDonald (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1936), 570. Ibid., 570. Alcorn, Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence, 93. D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 13–14. Hereafter cited as R. Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 83–84. Wilfred Stone’s archetypal characterization of the earth in Forster’s work is drenched in an apolitical primo-logical problematic: “Earth, the great mother— whose womb is symbolized by the cave—is something to escape from as well as return to, for it imprisons as well as releases. . . . The Marabar caves are dry, but in their very rocks are reflections of the primal moistness, the amniotic fluid of the Great Mother,” Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E.M. Forster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 309, 313. John Edward Hardy takes a similar approach when he reads the field at the end of Howards End as representative of a “fertility principle.” Hardy’s argument is antithetical to my own in relation to Lawrence’s development of the “rift” effect, for he maintains that Howards End is a narrative about “healing the rift” between polarities such as country and city, man and nature, the seen and the unseen. See his “Howards End: The Sacred Center,” in Critical Essays on E.M. Forster (Boston: G.K. Hall and Company, 1985), 113–121. Frederick Crews, obversely focuses on what he sees to be Forster’s central humanist theme: “Forster . . . upholds a pure individualism . . . [and] takes the individual human norm as the measure of everything.” Although an exception should be made for certain interesting possibilities that arise in Crews’ last chapter, in which he begins to consider what he calls Forster’s “eclectic principle”—an intense self-criticism of the very essence of humanism as a process of knowledge construction that is also “paralyzing” because of its limitations. See Frederick Crews, E.M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). Lionel Trilling’s work on Forster, for that matter, is in some ways more complex than Crews’ concerning this matter of liberal individualism. See his E.M. Forster (Norfolk: New Directions, 1943). More recent work such as Roger Ebbatson’s essay on Forster in Lawrence and the Nature Tradition rechannels the symbolic force of Forster’s landscape. Ebbatson, for instance, reads the presence of nature in general in Forster’s novels as an “overwhelming power” that lies ultimately beyond the control of the individual. Still, Ebbatson tends to limit this ontology by banishing the force of

194 / notes

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

“Nature” as nihilism (209–238). A similar categorization of nature and the space of the Marabar caves informs Alan Wilde’s work on Forster, who, like so many others, imposes the “satisfying” telos of unity on the shoulders of nature. See Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 54–89. Peter Widdowson’s E.M. Forster’s Howards End: Fiction as History (London: Sussex University Press, 1977) similarly understands the novel to be a search for “harmony” and “completeness.” Frederick P. W. MacDowell also makes a comparable claim: “Forster is at once preoccupied with a timeless unity and with the concrete manifestations of that unity in time.” See his E.M. Forster (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), quoted in Critical Essays (139). MacDowell similarly harvests the land— this time in A Passage to India—in terms of its service to man as a “cyclic fertility ritual” (140). He goes so far as to suggest that the key difference between the “Eastern mentality” and the Western moralist lies in this covetousness of order: “The Eastern mentality senses that the disorder of the universe presupposes an ultimate order; the conventional Western moralist or religionist would impost his own order upon the universe instead of responding to the strong chaotic currents within it which go beyond mere negation or mere affirmation” (143). Thus the eighteenth-century argument between Augustanism and latitudinarianism resurfaces in the Western field-imaginary of the twentieth century, only replanted in the imperial terms of Western “rationality” and “sovereignty” in opposition to an Eastern exotic “organicism” and “mysticism.” Benita Parry’s essay “A Passage to India: Epitaph or Manifesto?” (in Critical Essays, 165–175) has a number of trenchant things to say on this issue of Forster’s critique of humanism and imperialism, but she regards the presence of the earth as “neutral” in the novel, thus overlooking the potential of Forster’s development of an antihumanism on the basis of a resistant earth. Other than Jameson and Suleri, Brian May’s The Modernist as Pragmatist: E.M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism is the most recent work on Forster that somewhat concerns my thematization of identity in terms of inhabitancy. However, May ultimately connects Forster’s critique of sovereign individualism to Richard Rorty’s liberal pragmatism, and the Rortian notion of the contingent self does not think the possibilities of Deleuze and Guattari’s “exchange-limit” structure nor Heidegger’s resistant “earth,” both of which foreground an essential “warding off.” Frederic Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 50–51. Emphasis added. Ibid., 65–66. Ibid., 58. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 144. Ibid., 144. Ibid. Ibid., 145. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 28.

notes / 195 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

[T]he methodology of . . . science becomes circumscribed by means of its results. More and more the methodology adapts itself to the possibilities of procedure opened through itself. This having-to-adapt-itself to its own results as the ways and means of an advancing methodology is the essence of research’s character as ongoing activity. And it is that character that is the intrinsic basis for the necessity of the institutional nature of research. (Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row, 1977], 124) E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” in The Collected Tales of E.M. Forster (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), 149. E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), 288. Hereafter cited as LJ. E.M.Forster, Howards End (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 214–215. Hereafter cited as HE. Richard Lachmann, From Manor to Market: Structural Change in England, 1536–1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). See Arthur H. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909). I am indebted to Phil Rogers for this information. Forster, Howards End, 22. I owe a debt here to Christopher Fynsk, who has discussed in a different context the importance of what he calls, after Heidegger, the “realm of the possible and the presumable.” See Language and Relation: . . . That There Is Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 70. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1984), 79–80. Hereafter cited as PI. J. Hillis Miller argues that the unseen throws into relief the realization “that Nationalist assumptions are ideological delusions.” Miller, however, turns this extra-ideological appeal of the unseen into a call directed towards each individual reader: “It is up to you . . . a matter of the spontaneous truth of your own emotions in response to the unseen as it is mediated by Howards End.” His essay therefore attempts to capture the force of the unseen within the apparatus of a free-floating, apolitical humanism. See J. Hillis Miller, “Just Reading Howards End,” in Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Howards End, ed. Alistair M. Duckworth (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 481–482. For specifics on Forster’s time spent in India, see G.K. Das, E.M. Forster’s India (London: MacMillan Press, 1977). I use the “institutionalized” here to make a distinction between Foucault himself, and the academic Foucauldians who capitalized upon his theories in subsequent decades. Christopher Fynsk explores this nondiscursive irreducibility in his discussion of historical change in Heidegger’s essays on language: Language and Relation, 44–45. All but “perforated sheet” and “earthquakes” come from Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997). Hereafter cited as SV. The metaphor of the sheet is from Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin Books, 1991). Hereafter cited as MC. Earthquakes refers to The Ground

196 / notes

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

beneath Her Feet (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999). Hereafter cited as GB. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: Doubleday, 1959). Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 153. Hereafter cited as CN. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xiii. Ibid., xii. Teresa Hubel, Whose India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 1. Emphasis added. Salman Rushdie, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers,” in East, West (New York: Random House, 1995), 102. Ibid., 102. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 230. Ibid., 219. See note 52. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 137. This is Slavoj Zizek’s insight into the question of ideology in his article, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek (New York: Verso, 1994), 6. B.B. Misra, The Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–1834 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1959), 72–73. Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, Volume II: New Continents and Changing Values (London: Longmans, 1964), 26. Much has been made of the idea of the “multitude” in recent criticism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write on the potential of “the multitude” as a liberatory means to rethink the obviated ideas of separated “peoples” and the unavoidable hierarchies of “class relations.” See their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: the Penguin Press, 2004). But without a sustained critique of the still very present ontology of enclosure the multitude can only remain, to invoke Midnight’s Children, an “annihilating many-headed monster.” See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005); and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (New York: Stanford University Press, 1998). From an address to the National Press Club, Washington DC, 1993. Robin Broad, John Cavanagh, and Walden Bello, “Sustainable Development in the 1990s,” in Paradigms Lost, ed. Chester Hartman and Pedro Vilanova (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 89. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 94. For a full development of this idea of stewardship and sustainability, based on the ideas of relation developed in this book, see my chapter on the genealogy of the environment of the mid-Atlantic states, “Ecology and Environment,” in The

notes / 197 Mid-Atlantic Region: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures, ed. Robert P. Marzec (Westport, CO: Greenwood Press, 2004), 67–95. 72. See http://www.banterminator.org/. Accessed May 10, 2006. 73. Victoria Dompka, Victoria, Alexander De Sherbinin, and Lars Bromley, Water and Population Dynamics: Case Studies and Policy Implications (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1998); Robert McC. Netting, Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); S. Shackleton, G. von Maltitz, and J. Evans, “Factors, Conditions and Criteria for the Successful Management of Natural Resources Held under a Common Property Regime: A South African Perspective,” Land Reform and Agrarian Change in Southern Africa Occasional Paper, No. 8 (Cape Town: Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape, 1998); Angus Lindsay Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2003); and the Via Campesina website: http://viacampesina.org/main_en/ index.php Accessed May 10, 2006.

Index

Agrarian History of England and Wales, 54–56 Agricola, 11 Althusser, Louis, 85,180 n. 48 Anderson, Benedict, 71 Austen, Jane, 30 Mansfield Park, 55, 78 Battestin, Martin C., 94–97 Bhabha, Homi, 158, 165 Brontë, Emily, 150 Wuthering Heights, 5, 176 n. 10, Brontë, Charlotte Shirley, 5 “Capability Brown,” 84, 86 Commons, the 3–7, 10, 12, 24, 27, 29, 42–44, 46–50, 52–54, 58, 61, 74, 88, 100–102, 115, 130–133, 141–143, 151, 169, 170–171, 175 n.8, 178 n.37, 178 n.42, 182 n.15, 183 n.41, 187 n.83, 188 n.116, 189 n.117, 197 n.73 Conrad, Joseph, 60 Heart of Darkness, 5–6, 81 Victory, 81 Defoe, Daniel, 22–23, 26, 49, 51–52, 62, 68, 86, 96–97, 100, 126, 149 Robinson Crusoe, 1–4, 13–17, 21, 78 A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 19–22, 57–61, Deleuze, Gilles (and Félix Guattari), 23, 77

And “becoming,” 131–132 And “deterritorialization” 116 And “lack,” 138 And “exchange-limit” and “stockpiling” 16, 37–42, 158, 194 n.25 And “mapping” vs.“tracing,” 191 n.1 Delle, James, 80 Derrida, Jacques, 28, 33 And “Chaos and Instability,” 131 And pharmakon, 132 Descartes, 99 East India Company, 2, 50, 60–62, 82, 111, 168 Ecology, 2, 10–11, 25, 29, 41, 135,171, 177 n.29, 196 n.71 Eliot, George Adam Bede, 5 Middlemarch, 78 “Earth working,” see Georgia Enclosure, 1–5, 8–24, 28–31, 34–37, 42–43, 46–51, 53–58, 77–78, 86, 92, 100–102, 107–108, 130–135, 168–173 And “high yield,” 19–20, 23–24, 45, 54, 56–57, 170, 172 Parliamentary acts of, 1, 8, 10, 48–51, 79, 86, 117, 151, 183 n.37 Riots, 9, 47, 96, 182 n.24, 191 n.33 And temporality, 16 Enclosure award, 66–71

index / 199 Everitt,Alan, 66, 179 n.47, 189 n.118, n.123 “Extra-Ideological,” the, 32, 34, 37, 141, 155, 164, 175 n.4 Fabricant, Carole, 92–93 Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews, 86, 94–95, 97–99 Tom Jones, 3–4, 86–92, 94, Fernihaugh,Anne, 125 Forster, E. M., 6–7 Howards End, 7, 78, 139–150 “The Machine Stops” 138–139 A Passage to India, 150–153, 173 Foucault, Michel, 10, 52, 105, 154–156, 195 n.46 And discursivity, discourse, 25, 70, 138, 154–155, 159, 162, 166, 168 Gateward’s Case, 12, 47, 101 Georgia (georgos), (earth-working) 11–12 Girouard, Mark, 92–93 Hardy,Thomas, 7 The Return of the Native, 113–123 Sketch-map of Egdon Heath, 113–116 Hardt, Michael (and Antonio Negri), 196 n.65 Heidegger, Martin, 7 And Aletheia, 31–32, 35, 104, 110, 133–134 And “Earth” (and “World”), 7, 30–37, 38, 40, 71, 75, 104, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119–122, 138, 140, 148, 158, 194 n.25 And metaphysics, 24, 122, 133, 148, 175 n.3 And “Origin of the Work of Art,” 33–35 And Parmenides, 27, 31–33 And phusis, 33–35, 121

And “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27, 34 Hoskins,W.G., 71 Hasted, Edward The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 50 Hubel,Teresa, 157, 160 Imperialism, 3, 8, 21–22, 26, 28–30, 36–37, 81, 115, 119, 136, 148, 150, 153, Inhabitancy, inhabitant, 12–14, 48, 52, 54, 57, 73–74, 80, 101–102, 116, 118 And gender, 91–92 Individualism verses, 18, 28, 35, 109–110, 124–128, 134–135, 158–160, 171–173 And “masterless men,” 12, 48, 74 Intellectual property rights, 171 Jameson, Fredric, 33, 135–137, 139, 148, 153 Johnson, Edward, 10 Kets Rebellion, 47 Kipling, Rudyard, 6, 80–81, 159 Lacan, Jacques “The Real,” 2, 133, 138, 175 n.4 Land And agricentrism, 83, 125, 126 Committee of, 168 “Golden Age,” (rural simplicity), 54, 84–85, 96 And “improvement,” 19–20, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, 69, 79, 106, 109, 142 And landscape critics, 83, 123–126 And mead sticks, 44, 73 And the open-field system, 35, 43–46, 49, 66, 71–73, 75, 178 n.37, 182 n.15, 188 n.116, 189 n.124

200 / index Land––continued Panoptic land, 52–53, 57, 83 And strip farming, 43–44, 52 And the Saxon system, 43, 46 And territorium, 27, 36–40, 56, 61, 75, 148 And the “topographer,” (topography) 98 And wastelands, 17, 46, 49–50 Landless Workers Movement, 172 Lawrence, D. H., 83, 123–126 The Rainbow, 7, 126–135 Lea, Hermann, 117 Linebaugh, Peter (and Marcus Rediker), 48 Locke, John, 82 Marxism, 23, 37, 41, Maxwell, Donald, 117 Mingay, G. E., 56 Modiano, Marko, 124–125 Multitude, the, 166–167 Nation, nationality, 154–168, 171, 173 NATO, 23–24 Neeson, J. M., 74 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 154, 155, 159–160

Rifkin, Jeremy, 170 Robbins, Bruce, 26 Rodney,Walter, 80 Rushdie, Salman The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 167–168 Midnights Children, 161–167 The Satanic Verses, 163, 195 n.48 Said, Edward S. Culture and Imperialism, 5, 8, 22, 113, 156, 172 Santiago-Valles, Kelvin, 11, 78–79 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 5, 175 n.8 Sinclair, John, 50 Singh, Jyotsna, 155–157 Smollet,Tobias, 77, 97 Humphrey Clinker, 4, 100–111 Spanos,William V., 11, 31, 191 n.39 Spivak, Gayatri, 28 Statute of Merton, 46 Subjectivity, see Inhabitancy Suleri, Sara, 137–138 Tate,W. E., 54, 66 Thirsk, Joan, 68, 72–73 Thompson, E. P., 5

Postcolonialism, 8, 11, 25–26, 28–30, 41,138, 154, 156–161, 162, 168 Postmodernism 6, 35, and capitalism, 33

Vagrancy acts, 12, 48

Richardson, Samuel Pamela, 4, 55

Young,Arthur, 1, 5, 61–65, 79, 106,185 n.60, 187 n.76

William, Raymond, 8, 29, 175 n.6 Williams, Merryn, 117–119

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