Comedy Fantasy and Colonialism

Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism

Graeme Harper, Editor

Continuum

Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism

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COMEDY, FANTASY AND COLONIALISM Edited by

Graeme Harper

Ai continuum • W W L O N D O N

•

NEW YORK

CONTINUUM The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017-6503 © Graeme Harper and the contributors 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. First published 2002 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-4866-6 (hardback) 0-8264-4919-0 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Comedy, fantasy and colonialism / edited by Graeme Harper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8264-4866-6 (hb) — ISBN 0-8264-4919-0 (pbk.) 1. Wit and humor—History and criticism. 2. Fantasy literature—History and criticism. 3. Imperialism in literature. I. Harper, Graeme. PN6147 .C57 2002 809'.917—dc21

2001047581

Typeset by CentraServe Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

Contents

List of illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

VII

ix xiii

Introduction

1

Displacement, dualism and belief: exploring colonial comedy and fantasy Graeme Harper

9

Ukcombekcantsini and the fantastic: Zulu narratives and colonial culture Mark L. Lilleleht

23

The game is up: British women's comic novels of the end of Empire Phyllis Lassner

39

CHAPTER FOUR

James Morier and the oriental picaresque James Watt

CHAPTER FIVE

Cubans on the moon, and other imagined communities

58

73

Jill Lane

CHAPTER six

Fairies on the veld: foreign and indigenous elements in South African children's stories Elwyn Jenkins

CHAPTER SEVEN

Magic realism: humour across cultures Mary Ellen Hartje

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mr Punch's crinoline anxiety: the Indian Rebellion and the rhetoric of dress Terri A. Hasseler

89 104

117

CHAPTER NINE Cape-to-Cairo: Africa in Masonic fantasy 140 Peter Merrington

vi CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CONTENTS Laughing matters: the comic timing of Irish joking Laura Salisbury Two hundred years of colonial laughter in Malta: Carnival and Pantomime in Malta under British rule Vicki Ann Cremona and Toni Sant Trickster-outlaws and the comedy of survival Jonna Mackin

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Capturing the antipodes: an imaginary voyage to Terra Australis Paul Longley Arthur CHAPTER FOURTEEN Conclusion Graeme Harper

158

175 189

205 218

Selected bibliography

221

Index

233

List of illustrations

Figure 1 'The British Lion's Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger', Punch, 22 August 1857

121

Figure 2 'Willing Hands for India', Punch, 29 August 1857

122

Figure 3 The Clemency of Canning', Punch, 24 October 1857

123

Figure 4 Too "Civil" by Half, Punch, 7 November 1857

124

Figure 5 'Preface', Punch, 25 December 1858

136

Figure 6 Glyph designed by Herbert Baker showing 'Symbols of Rhodes' Way from Cape to Cairo'

149

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Contributors

Paul Longley Arthur is based in the Department of English at the University of Western Australia. His publications on European historical, cultural and literary representations of Australia and the Antipodes draw upon doctoral research carried out in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. He has held a number of visiting scholarships to the Australian National University, at the Humanities Research Centre (1999), the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research (1998), and the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (1997). He won the University of Western Australia's Graduates Association Travel Award for research in 1996. Outside university life he is a violinist, and has performed around Australia and internationally with classical musicians and popular groups, including the Aboriginal band Yothu Yindi. Vicki Ann Cremona is Senior Lecturer and Academic Coordinator of the Theatre Studies Programme at the University of Malta. Her main research areas are ritual, carnivals and festas. Recent publications include Costume in Malta, a book co-edited with Nicholas de Piro (Patrimonju Publishing Ltd, 1998), and the Journal of Mediterranean Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (1998), which she edited under the general title Ancient Theatrical/Ritual Spaces: Action and Communication. She has published articles in international journals, and a chapter on 'Spectacles and "Civil Liturgies" in Malta during the times of the Knights of St John' in The Renaissance Theatre: Texts, Performance, Design, Volume 2 (Ashgate, 1999) edited by Christopher Cairns. She also does practical work in drama therapy. Graeme Harper is Director of the Centre for the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Wales, Bangor. His publications include Black Cat, Green Field (Transworld), Swallowing Film (Q) Colonial and Postcolonial Incarceration (Continuum), and a range of work in various journals, anthologies and books, including Ariel, Dalhousie Review, Sight and Sound, CineAction, Southerly and Outrider, as well as original works of fiction and film. He holds doctorates from the University of Technology, Sydney, and from the University of East Anglia. His awards include the Australian National Book Council Award for New Writing, the Premier's Award for Writing, a Commonwealth Universities' scholarship and a European Union fellowship.

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Ellen Hartje is an Associate Professor of English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where she teaches literature and composition. Her academic background in English Romanticism led her to an interest in magic realism via various aspects of Romantic theory that correlate with magic realist literature. She began her work in magic realism in 1994; since that time she has made numerous academic presentations on magic realism, served as thesis director for magic realism study, and designed and taught magic realist fiction courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. Terri A. Hasseler is an Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Bryant College. Her research is on Third World feminism and Western women in India. She currently serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the United States Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. Elwyn Jenkins was born in Natal and educated in South Africa, Namibia and the UK. He has taught English in schools, colleges of education and universities, and is an Emeritus Professor of English of Vista University and a Research Fellow of the Children's Literature Research Unit at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Jill Lane is Assistant Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. She is presently writing a book on race, nationalism and blackface performance in Cuba during the anticolonial wars. She is co-editor, with Peggy Phelan, of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998). Phyllis Lassner teaches gender studies, writing and holocaust studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of two books on Elizabeth Bowen, several articles on modern women writers and, most recently, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (Macmillan). She has also written the introduction to the reprint of the 1910 feminist novel by the Danish writer Karin Michaelis, The Dangerous Age, and collaborated on new introductions to reprints of two novels by Phyllis Bottome: Old Wine and The Mortal Storm (all published by Northwestern University Press). Mark L. Lilleleht is currently completing his dissertation in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of WisconsinMadison. He is also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Studies (Nigeria). Jonna Mackin is a former Fulbright scholar at Friedrich-Wilhelm Universita't in Bonn, Germany, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH. She has published on T. S.

CONTRIBUTORS

xi

Eliot and music hall comedy ('Raising Life to a Kind of Art' in T. S. Eliot's Orchestra, Garland Publishing, 2000). She is currently writing a book on comedy and ethnicity in twentieth-century American novels. Peter Merrington teaches nineteenth-century literature, modernism and creative writing in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His research interests concern the relation between literature and public history from circa 1880 to 1930 in South Africa, and parallel activities in Britain and the other British 'dominions'. He has published on the late-Victorian concept of 'heritage', on the performance genre of the 'new pageantry', and on the relationship between fiction and 'nation-building' in the early twentieth century. Laura Salisbury is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, on comedy and ethics in the work of Samuel Beckett. She has published on Beckett's comedy and is a co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies. Toni Sant has worked since 1985 as a theatre director, musician and broadcaster in Malta, England, Germany and the USA. He was trained in broadcast production by the BBC in London and Belfast, read theatre studies at the University of Malta, and holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, where he is presently finishing his PhD dissertation on performance and the Internet. Since 1998 he has been a visiting lecturer at the Centre for Communication Technology and the Mediterranean Institute Theatre Programme at the University of Malta. He currently teaches at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. James Watt is a lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre, and Cultural Conflict 1764-1832 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and is currently researching a book on the oriental tale and its offshoots, c.1700 - c.1850.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jon Cook, Director of the Centre for the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of East Anglia and Dean of the School of English and American Studies. Jon supervised the development of both my creative and critical writing during that period in which I was studying for my second doctorate. It was at that time, while working to 'unearth' the 'creative secrets' of the comic and the fantastic, that the idea of a book on comedy and fantasy in colonial societies first emerged. I thank Jon for his encouraging, erudite responses to my writing - responses which have continued, generously and openly, ever since. Likewise, thanks to Janet Joyce for supporting the project, and to Valerie Hall for her notable logistical prowess. Things have been in safe and friendly hands with the crew at Continuum. Linda Jones, our departmental Research Administrator, has ensured that drafts have been chased up, ordered and organized (a task which has sometimes been more considerable than logic would suggest it should be). Without her support and energy this book could not have been completed. My sincere thanks to her. Warmest thanks to the Department of English at the University of Wales, Bangor, for granting me a period of study leave in the 1999/2000 academic year in order to complete the majority of the editorial work on this book. Thanks also to Louise, Myles and Tyler, who have lived with my interest in comedy and fantasy and colonialism longer than anyone. Both Myles and Tyler have grown to understand that their father will not always 'Be serious for a minute!' or restrict himself to living within the boundaries of reality. An occasional burden for any family. Finally, my warm appreciation goes to the contributors. It is the aim of this book to bring together a range of writers and a variety of approaches; to show that, both within different contexts and in a number of significant ways, comedy, fantasy and colonialism have actively and distinctively intersected. My thanks to all the writers for their lively commitment to this work.

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For my father Arthur William Harper (1936-2002) who introduced his children so well to the joys of comedy and fantasy

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Introduction

Isn't the colonial condition a contradictory one? The imposition of one cultural perspective on top of another, or the promotion of a point of imperial law over an indigenous one, or the engagement of a set of exploitative economic possibilities over and above an established set of communal ones, is surely paradoxical, even in some way a 'challenge to the literal'. A challenge because it places in strange disequilibrium the surely natural state of equitableness between humans. Or not? Unfortunately, in the study of colonial situations, playing the ingenue in this way seems a rhetorical act lost in the distant past. Postcolonial 'Studies', colonialism and the colonized have all become part of a well-oiled intellectual machine running on shared and established understandings, and travelling steadily along a recognized academic path suitably decorated with relatively certain moral positions and agreed ethical displays. Yet the engines of neither comedy nor fantasy move easily along this kind of path. Not least because they depend upon highlighting the inconsistencies in our world views. That colonialism likewise raises questions of inconsistency goes without saying. Indeed, the moral positions of both imperialists and the colonized (sometimes based on economic principles or religious ones, sometimes founded on the vagaries of exploration and discovery or on the fortunes of invasion or war) have challenged both the participants, and- the intellectuals who have considered them, to find terms to describe the inconsistent outcomes of these engagements - terms like 'abrogation' and 'appropriation', like 'dislocation' and 'displacement' - all of which have relevance also to the discussion of both comedy and fantasy. The statement that comedy and fantasy must be grounded in cultural circumstance (regardless of whether they are the products of a colonial or imperial situation or not) is commonsensical enough, yet far from easy to expand upon. For example, take the study published in 1988 entitled National Styles of Humour,1 which tried to ground humour in a discussion of national types and national preoccupations: at worst an essentialist notion, at best a brave attempt to find out how humour relates to historical and social circumstance. That study's unfortunate failure to approach the full extent to which humour emerges out of cultural context and individual reaction is merely evidence of how difficult it is to speak generally

2

INTRODUCTION

about the forces that define and structure the comic. The same can be said of any discussion of fantasy. What, after all, determines where we draw the line between fantasy and reality? To a great extent that line is deemed socially appropriate and is generally agreed. And yet, even within a stable cultural context (which, of course, the colonial situation frequently is not), individuals incorporate their own 'levels' of agreement with reality and their own points of departure from it. It would be naive to suggest that this can be compounded into some kind of national or racial grid, or plotted out in a version of metaphysics founded on one global set of principles. What flourishes as fantasy or emerges as comedy determines, and is determined by, who and what we are. It was Sigmund Freud who, in 'Jokes and the Comic', set out one half of the 'comic equation'. He wrote: Mankind have not been content to enjoy the comic where they have come upon it in their experience; they have also sought to bring it about intentionally, and we can learn more about the nature of the comic if we study the means which serve to make things comic.2 Freud can hardly be regarded as an eclectic cultural commentator, focusing overly on an individualist interpretation of the world to the disadvantage of any discussion of the social whole. A discussion of both comedy and fantasy in colonial cultures needs to be grounded in both the social and the personal. It requires reference to the ways in which individuals have effected, and been affected by, colonialism, to both indigenous and imported comedy and fantasy, and to the wider cultural context of these things, whether drawn from the pre-colonial past or from the imperialized present. Giving substance to those references is the aim of Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism. Before the battle a French soldier tells his comrade: There's nothing to worry about; we're sure to win. I heard the priest ask God to be on our side.' 'But the German priest did the same thing/ his friend replies. 'Really, now! Since when does God understand German?'3 A question of language! Beginning with a discussion of the critical language surrounding fantasy and the fantastic, Mark Lilleleht, in 'Ukcombekcantsini and the fantastic: Zulu narratives and colonial culture', looks at the relationship between African traditions and definitions of fantasy in Western literary critical texts. Using a specific case study, Lilleleht shows how some Western definitions run counter to actual practice in indigenous African fantasy. Of particular importance here are contrasting forms of narrative and the role of the storyteller. The analysis of the telling, and publication, of the Ukcombekcantsini story says much about the interaction between Zulu and English narrative forms, as well as about the differing views of the audiences consuming these narratives. Undoubtedly, the relationship

INTRODUCTION

3

between 'who tells' and 'who listens' is a fundamental starting point for a discussion of comedy, fantasy and colonialism. Phyllis Lassner approaches this relationship from 'the other side'; considering the role of British women colonial writers at the close of Empire. As Edward Said has noted, referring to the same phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century: The sense for Europeans of a tremendous and disorienting change in perspective in the West-non-West relationship was entirely new, experienced neither in the European Renaissance nor in the 'discovery' of the Orient three centuries later.4

Lassner, concentrating on the works of Rumer Godden and Olivia Manning, notes the colonial anxieties that such a change in perspective produced. She also makes plain that these anxieties can be identified, in tandem, with a broadly cultural angst and a set of gendered roles. Novels of imperial incline, told by 'settlers' or even 'conquerors', offer some insight into the psychology of those in the colonizing position when faced with this position's undermining. In this case, fantasy and mimicry assist the representation of violence and decline. Importantly, however, Lassner also shows that these are women writers, individuals (regardless of their colonial or anti-colonial stance), who take risks with their writing, drawing on the open cultural tension around them to consider the clash of consciousness beneath. While Lassner's analysis considers fantasy and gender, James Watt, in 'James Morier and the oriental picaresque', focuses on national types and comedy. Watt uses his analysis of Morier's works to consider how such texts can 'stage' the contacts between imperialists and the colonized. In this case Morier's The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828) survey Persian society, defined from a Eurocentric point of view, the Persian character, and contribute to a popular European mode of engagement with the 'oriental'. Morier's picaro travels in suitably meandering style through Persia's comically 'corrupt' society, shimmying between delusion and delight and observing the differences between English and Persian culture. Thus, in this fictional typifying of the colonized, a 'factual' journey is borne, albeit a journey whose knowledge is more conjecture than truth. The master of fantastic cartography', writes Jill Lane, 'was, without question, the political satirist Raimundo Cabrera, who sent his imagined Cubans not to Africa but to the moon in his 1888 play, Del parque a la luna (From the Park to the Moon).' The popular theatre genre teatro bufo, is the subject of Lane's chapter, 'Cubans on the moon, and other imagined communities'. As Persia was an imagined cultural geography given 'factual' identity through readers' engagement with Morier's works, so the teatro bufo provided a site of imagined release from Spanish imperialists in Cuba. But the genre did not promote an egalitarian Cuba. Importantly, it was a

4

INTRODUCTION

platform for the expression of class superiority, and for the promotion of an idealized version of Cuban independence. This idealized version allowed 'white' Cubans to incorporate 'blackness' or 'Africanness' into a sense of independent national identity. Racial impersonation thus became idealized nationalist sentiment; part of what Lane concludes is a significant anti-colonial fantasy. Idealization also plays a role in Elwyn Jenkins's chapter on foreign and indigenous elements in South African children's stories. 'Writing for children', notes John Stephens in his study of the language and ideology in children's fiction, is usually purposeful, its intention being to foster in the child reader a positive apperception of some socio-cultural values which, it is assumed, are shared by author and audience.5

In Jenkins's work, the dominant relationships engendered in this premise find their way into writers' depictions of talking animals, forgotten fairies and animal biographies. The melding and re-configuring of imported elements within indigenous terrain and under local conditions forms one half of a reconstruction of national identity. The other half involves the appropriation of indigenous folktales. As Jenkins writes, 'on the whole the variety of plots and characters borrowed from indigenous folktales is limited'. Decisively, however, it has been those elements borrowed from the indigenous that appear to have outlived the 'foreign' fantasies. Whether magic realism, one of the best known of 'fantasy' modes often identified with colonial literature, is 'foreign' or indigenous is a point of debate. Mary Ellen Hartje, in 'Magic realism: humour across cultures', suggests that this mode actually crosses cultures. Therefore, to locate it in one cultural situation is to ignore its ability to transfer between one location and another. Hartje's introduction to the mode traces its links to German Post-Expressionism and to Absurdist literature, considers the role of humour in magic realist texts, and discusses a number of Latin American writers who employ this mode. As Gerald Martin has observed in his work on Latin American fiction in the twentieth century, the influence of external forces and essentially colonial elements on Latin American literature has been such that this literature can, in effect, be considered 'a branch of Western literature'.6 And yet, it is the same colonial influence which imbues the more rebellious side of magic realism, and makes it a mode often identified with indigenous challenges to 'imposed' or colonizing versions of reality. In that way, this rebelliousness is as much in the larger realms of metaphysics as it is in the more structurally specific realms of plot or narrative. Hartje suggests that it is the objectified voice of magic realism that is at the core of this rebellion. Rebellion is also the theme of Terri Hasseler's chapter 'Mr Punch's crinoline anxiety: the Indian Rebellion and the rhetoric of dress'. Hasseler considers the use of the image of British women clad in crinolines in

INTRODUCTION

5

the British periodical Punch during the period of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-59. While Myra Macdonald has suggested, referring to the late twentieth century, that 'fashion and bodily adornment are now at least languages over which the media have lost full control',7 in the case Hasseler makes it would seem that the use of a female fashion image was very actively controlled to stir imperial as well as male sentiment; thus the mid-nineteenth-century media merged the rhetoric of colonial protection with that of femininity. That the representation of the crinoline was comic does not merely displace a serious colonial anxiety; rather, it makes plain that popular humour can be used with considerable and serious political intensity. Comedy, notes Hasseler, becomes a way of 'negotiating . . . anxieties'; in this case both the anxiety over a colonial 'possession' and the anxiety British men felt about the control of the personal, domestic space. Peter Merrington's analysis focuses not so much on 'space' as on a journey through it. In 'Cape-to-Cairo: Africa in Masonic fantasy' he follows the history of what he calls a 'staggered orientalism' swinging from an 'east-west to a south-north axis' and, through this swing, producing in South Africa certain assumptions about identity and geography. Such geographic fantasy has an enduring colonial history elsewhere too. Indeed, the cultural links between white Australia and the one-time 'home country', Great Britain, could be said to have relied considerably on fantasizing away the distance between the two countries. Certainly the hermetic maintenance of a 'European' identity in a fundamentally Asia-Pacific region was for a long time an act of active imagination. Merrington also considers the role of some very distinctive elements in colonialist mythology in these geographic fantasies, specifically, the ritual and history of Freemasonry in unifying the fantasies of European identity and imperial African possession. The Cape-to-Cairo idea turns out, ultimately, to be a 'set of ideas and images', a composite colonial fantasy. Not so much composite as conversational, the role of the joke in relations between the Irish and the English is explored by Laura Salisbury in 'Laughing matters: the comic timing of Irish joking'. Delia Chiaro, in her study of the language of jokes, notes that 'the frame of put-down Irish joke serves as a front to express deeper feelings going on'.8 She relates this joke as indicative: There was a Scotsman, an Italian and an Irishman. They wanted to watch the Olympic Games but they didn't have tickets, so they decided to go as athletes. The Scotsman pulled a bollard out of the ground, put it over his left shoulder, and went to the ticket office and said: Tock McTavish, Scotland, Caber Tossing.' And in he went. The Italian found an empty plate, put it under his left arm, went to the ticket office and said: 'Giovanni Bianchi, Italy, Discus Throwing.' And in he went. The Irishman scratched his head and thought. Then he put some barbed

6

INTRODUCTION

wire under his left arm, went to the ticket office and said: Taddy Murphy, Ireland, Fencing.'9 Salisbury's work suggests that parody plays a role in the Irish-English 'joking' relationship and that it is a far more dialogic relationship than at first imagined. While undoubtedly English stereotyping of the Irish has an oppressive role to play, the notion that this exchange is entirely controlled on the surface of the joke is naive. Knowingness in Irish comedy suggests that quite the opposite reading might be possible. The employment of imported or imposed literary forms for indigenous purposes is confirmed by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in their seminal The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, when they write that 'in some sense all post-colonial literatures are cross cultural because they negotiate a gap between "worlds" '.10 Whether there is such a thing as posf-colonial literature is far too large a question to be explored at this point; however, certainly in colonial literature the negotiation of these world gaps is prevalent. Of course, we should not think of these negotiations as restricted solely to literature. In fact, Vicki Cremona and Toni Sant explore very similar negotiations through an analysis of Pantomime and Carnival in colonial Malta. Cremona and Sant's work centres on a consideration of indigenous Carnival as well as on the importation of the British Panto and its acquisition as a political and social tool. That both these forms, at some point, masqueraded as innocuous fun seems less notable than that they were so readily identified as simultaneously subversive and conservative cultural vehicles. That this analysis potentially confirms some of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas regarding ritual spectacle, comic verbal compositions and the genres of billingsgate is natural.11 Bakhtin's statement below, however, would seem fundamentally disproved by Cremona and Sant's analysis: During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's renewal, in which all take part.12 In Malta 'all' did not necessarily 'take part', nor were the laws only those of Carnival, nor was anything renewed; rather, social hierarchies were confirmed and the status quo was maintained. How, therefore, do we configure and compare the roles of Carnival and Pantomime in Malta? This is the subject of Cremona and Sant's analysis. Jonna Mackin does not begin with a question; she begins with a statement. That statement is that humour acts as a political unconscious in fiction, in this instance in the fiction of Native American writers. Mackin, primarily considering the writing of Anishinabe (Chippewa) novelists Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor, examines how humour assists in 'realigning . . . individual and collective identifications'; how it employs, for example, the figure of the trickster, who is 'outside and

INTRODUCTION

7

above social and behavioural systems'; and how it often employs fantasy in these instances to rearrange 'pyschosymbolic' material. Speaking generally, James Wilson has said, in his work on Native American history, that 'Native Americans were unconcerned if their neighbours' myths differed from their own'.13 However, in the instances Mackin considers the 'neighbours' are frequently European Americans and the use of indigenous myths, and the trickster figure bound up in the Native American world view (frequently invoking both humour and fantasy), helps to reconfirm the national and social identities of writer and reader. These instances, and the celebration of the power of the trickster, are part and parcel of a long-held cultural determination for both Native American and settler American. While Mackin examines the methods by which an indigenous culture re-confirms its sacred beliefs, Paul Longley Arthur, in 'Capturing the antipodes: an imaginary voyage to Terra Australis', examines the role of the European imagination in confirming and contextualizing the colonization of the antipodes. That many of the accounts of voyages to the antipodes had a less than complete relationship with facts was fundamental to how they were used by European imperialists for the moralizing of their antipodean mission. The genre of the 'fabulous voyage', Arthur notes, became a political and social tool applied to the popular imagination, and functioned as a 'forum for registering and negotiating' Europe's changing ideas about its own role in the antipodes. Physical distance was, undoubtedly, one restriction on European exploration of the Pacific; however, psychological or aesthetic distance must also be understood as a barrier to such colonization and the exploitation of antipodean resources. The genre of the imaginary or fabulous voyage was one way in which Europeans crossed that barrier, albeit making plain that imperialism and its hold on reality had a decidedly 'flexible' relationship. Of primary importance to the study of comedy and fantasy is the role played by these two modes of communication in establishing world views. In the first instance, these modes make it clear that what we see in front of us is not always what actually is there. Considered within the tenets of colonialism, modes such as those of comedy and fantasy take on an even greater cultural importance as they become, more so, sites for challenging or confirming identity, of recognizing or attempting to negate cultural hegemony, of appropriating imposed forms of social or artistic engagement, and of exploring the cultural and political changes brought about by a colonial regime. Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism examines a number of instances of both modes in operation, sometimes seeing that one contains or employs the other, but most notably establishing that a close examination of the function of these modes gives insight into the ways in which world views within the colonial environment are formed, confirmed and re-formed.

8

INTRODUCTION

Notes 1. Avner Ziv, National Styles of Humour (Westport, Greenwood, 1988). 2. Sigmund Freud, 'Jokes and the comic' in Robert W. Corrigan (ed.), Comedy: Meaning and Form (Scranton, Chandler Publishing Company, 1965), p. 255. 3. Avner Ziv, Personality and Sense of Humour (New York, Springer, 1984), p. 54. 4. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 237. 5. John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (London, Longman, 1992), p. 3. 6. Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London, Verso, 1989), p. 4. 7. Myra Macdonald, Representing Women (London, Arnold, 1995), p. 221. 8. Delia Chiaro, The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play (London, Routledge, 1992), p. 48. 9. Ibid., p. 49. 10. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London, Routledge, 1989), p. 39. 11. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Boston, MIT Press, 1968). 12. Ibid., p. 7. 13. James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (London, Picador, 1998), p. 9.

CHAPTER ONE

Displacement, dualism and belief: exploring colonial comedy and fantasy GRAEME HARPER

The powers of disbelief

'Man', wrote William Hazlitt, 'is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.'1 A behaviourist sentiment, of course, which at the time must have peeled out to the frontiers of British imperial influence. Indeed, some years later a naturalized English writer Joseph Conrad gave this same sentiment flesh in Heart of Darkness2 through the enduring, split persona of Mr Kurtz. Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers was first published in 1818, the year of Karl Marx's birth, and the year in which the dominions of the Holkar of Indore, the Rajput States and Poona came under British control. Hazlitt himself was born forty years before, aligning his birthdate with Captain James Cook's discovery of Hawaii and, even more significantly, with the year in which Congress prohibited the import of slaves into the USA. Many of us are drawn by a natural curiosity to such 'coincidences' of history; they suggest 'patterns' in behaviour, possible connections between the independence of the 'individual' and the co-dependence that creates a 'society'. The latter is what Christopher Lloyd refers to in Explanation in Social History when he says: 'Without a tacit belief that society is an ordered and historical entity there would be no point in making an enquiry into its nature, its relationship to action, or the causes of its actions.'3 The former is what he recognizes when he notes: 'a basic requirement is a model of humans as agential and social beings, who structure the world through intentional action and have their action structured by the social world.'4 Comedy and fantasy, so co-dependent on this interaction between the individual and society, play a significant role in colonial cultures, indeed a heightened role. Heightened because they appear to be, both in practice and in their provision of textual evidence, often simultaneously protective of a 'pre-colonial' ideal and supportive of a 'postcolonial' mentality. But this needs further examination - and a denial. Is the 'pre-colonial' that culture which precedes imperial invasion and

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bears the marks solely of an indigenous cultural outlook? If so, then it is associated with the use of those most common of words, 'native', 'original' and 'traditional'. That all three of these words carry dubious purist connotations would, in this case, be both true and unhelpful. Certainly a discussion of colonialism assumes preceding conditions and, by inference, initiates a search for pre-colonial social and textual characteristics. This reflects on colonial comedy and fantasy by locating those characteristics in that important 'traditional' ideal. For example, both Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts5 and Onuora Nzekwu's Blade Among the Boys6 deal with clashes between African rites and imperializing Christian beliefs. In Tutuola's story the protagonist is transformed into various things, including a cow, a horse, a camel and a ju-ju stick in the neck of a large pot. In Nzekwu's story the clash is represented in a more 'realistic' fashion. The story's protagonist chooses to become a Catholic priest rather than to take up his traditional tribal position, and is openly questioned by his family for doing so. While undoubtedly a definition of fantasy must be culture specific, it seems reasonable to suggest that, in a general way, Tutuola's story employs fantastic tropes and types drawn from a pre-colonial world, while Nzekwu's story draws likewise, but relies on no such fantasy. Following this scheme, the 'postcolonial' would be something different. The postcolonial would represent the aftermath of a set of discursive practices which would include the abrogation of aspects of imperial culture and the appropriation of others. It would include a reconstructed language, bearing elements of both of these actions, and an element of cross-cultural communication distinctive to the after-effects of a defined imperial invasion. Thus we might include in this category texts such as Unna You Fullas,7 a book for older children written by indigenous Australian Glenyse Ward, or Midnight's Children,8 Salman Rushdie's 'birth in/on Independence' novel. In Unna You Fullas the differences between 'native' and 'imported' languages are related directly and the author includes a glossary of Nyungar (that is, indigenous) words and 'special words', including the Nyungar word mumaries, meaning spirits, and wadjela, meaning white person. The novel largely reveals the hybridity of these languages, rather than the battle between them, and the fact that, in a novel fundamentally about language, the author relates the high degree of language hybridity at play, giving some sense of the ways in which Unna You Fullas might be labelled postcolonial. Ward's book contains comedy; it is located on the surface level of its post-invasion discourse, the literal level - as in this exchange between a class of Aboriginal Australian school children and the German nuns of the 'native' mission: 'Who does zhis note belong to?' She read it out, 'B.R. loves G.S., in a heart!' Everyone clicked straight away and started shouting and yahooing, which made me real shame [sic].

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'Be quiet everybody. Glenysen Sprattsen oontz Billy Rice stand up.' Billy gave me a cheeky grin. I felt sick in my stomach and turned the other way. Everyone around thought it was a big joke.9

Rushdie's novel, alternatively, includes both comedy and fantasy. Rich Mary, who never dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth, which have fallen out anyway .. . My special blends: I've been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-size pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon .. .10

Here, then, in Rushdie's work, is a sense of a 'coming together' of an imported and an indigenous world view (from the consumption of CocaCola to the indigenous symbolic value of pickling). And yet, based on the examples above, does the idea of a pre-colonial/postcolonial divide really hold much water? Like the term postmodernism, the descriptions 'pre-colonial' and 'postcolonial' seem well placed to give a sense of history, of chronology. In a similar way to postmodernism, however, any possible support for them seems to derive from the entirely a-temporal. Indeed, the empirical evidence available does not easily bear out a simple, evolutionist separation. For example, in Paul Stoller's study of colonialism, spirit possession and Hauka in West Africa, it is notable that the primary phase of indigenous mimicry of white invaders occurred during the 'golden age' of colonialism, and that the plastic art impressions of that time incorporated indigenous myths as much as figures recreated from actual, contemporary sightings of whites. The comic, likewise, played a role here. The white man, in these mbari house creations, was presented as 'humorous caricature'.11 While mbari represents a reaction to colonialism, fitting well with postcolonial abrogation/appropriation theory, it does not appear to be a post colonial use of humour in that the foundations of it lie in immediate mimesis rather than, as the title of Stoller's book might suggest, in memory. Any interpretation of these artefacts therefore is decidedly posthoc. The 'representation' and the 'chronology' do not effectively support one another. One remains displaced from the other. In a similar vein, Edward Said points out that: we have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and culture experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more 'foreign' elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.12

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Said's point is poignant. We must deal with comedy and fantasy in colonial situations as notable elements of a negotiation, not of a settlement. We must acknowledge that this practice of negotiation began prior to any Western invasion of the non-West, or European invasion of the nonEuropean (for example), because it is the product of both the negotiations of an individual with his or her surrounding society, and of the negotiation between societies. That historical points can, for reference, be marked on this in a linear, evolutionist fashion does not diminish the importance of dealing with these occurrences as points of contact between the idea of society/the individual as a static entity and of society/the individual as a dynamic entity. This idea is not associated with the 'clocktime' of any evolutionist analysis, but with the 'durational time' relevant to a consideration of different kinds of representation and to how these kinds of representation negotiate realms of power and control, and of the meanings attached to them. Comedy and fantasy are particularly strong 'negotiating techniques' because they overtly highlight our powers of belief and disbelief. They make plain what is popularly accepted as 'untrue' and, for their wider dissemination, conversely rely on points of personal agreement between members of one or more social or cultural groups. They are not limited to any particular textual form; however, they are strongly performative and, in their performance at the 'site of truth-telling', dramatically exemplify the often unspoken elements of cultural stasis or cultural dynamism. Defining colonial comic texts

Critically we have come to accept something of a synonymy between the adjectives 'comic' and 'comedic'. There initially appears little reason to question this; 'comedic', after all, does not immediately appear to offer any advantages over 'comic', and is therefore used comparatively less often, and could be considered to have been replaced by comic in most critical discussions. But what if, in approaching the work of such 'colonial' writers as Salman Rushdie, Glenyse Ward, or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez, we were to examine closely whether their texts should be seen as primarily descendants of a preliterate, non-Western, mythopoeic tradition (the legacy of oral storytellers), or whether their formal origins lie perhaps in the influence of other written texts, the literate influences of both the indigenous and the imported? Of course, I am thinking initially of the influence of James Joyce and Ulysses on modern Latin American fiction,13 particularly linking to Gerald Martin's suggestion that 'the development of Latin America has been circumscribed by external forces and essentially colonial throughout its development (making Latin American literature, inescapably, a branch of Western literature)'.14 Etymologically, the word 'comedy' is tied closely to verbal display.15

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We know that comedy was originally a village song; it referred to village merry-makings (in which songs still take a conspicuous place). To be more specific, Greek comedy can be traced to village revels and elements of the festivities connected with the worship of Dionysus. The chorus in Greek comedy might best be thought of as deriving from the practice of Attic revellers masquerading as birds or frogs or fishes, or similar. So the original, historical meaning of 'comedic' (at least as it is understood in the West) has always been associated with nonchalance, playful relaxation and indulgence. The word 'comic', however, does not tie itself so closely to the chorus; and thus not to song. In order to use the word 'comic' in the critical analysis of the written texts of colonialism we need to address it first by dealing with its written not its colloquial verbal identity. It is primarily for this reason that it is, in truth, the comedic with which Mikhail Bakhtin deals in Rabelais and His World.16 It is not the comic. This is not to deny the importance to studies of cultural change of what is now over thirty years of discussion of Bakhtin's analysis of 'comic' popular culture. But it is to say that a misrepresentation has been, and is being, generated, by Bakhtin (if not merely in the translation into English of Rabelais), and by ourselves when we equate the Bakhtinian argument on 'comic verbal works' with a discussion of modes of comedy. The problem lies in a Western privileging of the verbal that narrows the discussion of types and methods of the comic. Through this phonocentric overvaluing we dilute the possibility of determining specifically the stylistic and philosophical make up of the colonial comic in written texts. The three principal theories universally employed in the field of 'comedy studies' also fail to make any useful distinctions of type. The Superiority Theory broadly aligns itself to the notion that laughter involves an element of scorn; it is a theory of laughter, then, rather than a consideration of the comic mode. It is with this theory that we most often associate the work of Aristotle, Plato and Thomas Hobbes. The Incongruity Theory speaks, generally, of amusement. Amusement, the Incongruity Theory postulates, arises from a clash between thoughts and perception and a particular set of circumstances. Under the tenets of this theory can be included Henri Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,17 as well as contributions by S0ren Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. Finally, the Psychic Release Theory takes a physiological approach. Laughter, in this paradigm of psychic release, is a venting of excess energy. Freudian analysis naturally takes precedence here, whilst other notable, contemporary contributions include Daniel Berlyne's 'Arousal Jag Theory of Laughter'.18

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Defining colonial fantasy writing While the three primary theories applied in 'comedy studies' fail to be specific enough about the modes of comedy/the comic to give a good sense of the forces at play in colonial texts, primary discussions in a consideration of fantasy are considerable and pointed. To name a few of the well documented: Tzvetan Todorov's often quoted The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre19 dissects the form and functions of the fantastic genre using specific extended textual examples, and is also frequently cited as a primary contribution to the critical consideration of genre in its entirety. Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics,20 too, is an extensive comparative study, which uses an analysis of the works of Dostoevsky and others to consider the origins of plurality and polophony in the novel, making much of the link to menippean satire and provides, as Simon Dentith notes, 'the strongest statement of the historic carnival, and carnivalised forms of writing, with the growth of the novel'.21 Rosemary Jackson, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion,22 picks up on both the work of Todorov and of Bakhtin, including fantasy's links to the menippea, and neatly adds Freudian theory to 'complete the treble', including a typology to conclude, and an afterword on the nature of the 'unseen' and the 'hidden'. In essence, all three works are laudable yet none of them deals greatly with the difference between fantasy in one culture and that in another, and certainly there is no mention of colonial fantasy. Of Freud's work, which is the basis for Jackson's additions to Todorov's analysis and which has long formed the crux of much discussion of fantasy in general,23 Hanna Segal has made the telling comment that 'unlike his theory of dreams, Freud never worked out in full a theory of unconscious phantasy . . . one could say generally for Freud that phantasy was pretty close to day-dreaming',24 while Richard Webster, in Why Freud was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, has added that 'Freud's own view was that well-adjusted individuals never indulge in day-dreams'.25 Where, then, does this leave colonial fantasy? Despite questions about the intention and terminology of Freud's consideration of fantasy, undoubtedly psychoanalytic analysis, together with structural analysis, has something to offer. However, given that modern imperialism and both these theoretical approaches involve the imposition of European ideas on non-European situations, it looks awfully like a Eurocentric problematizing to suggest colonial fantasy is some version of a maladjusted day-dream. In this sense, Slavoj Zizek is much closer to the mark than Freud when he states that: the relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real that it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at

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the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its 'repressed' point of reference.26

Indeed, that the experience of colonialism generally (in all its guises) makes more plain displacement activities such as this, which reinforce a division between the world of the mind and the world of the body, is supported by a broad range of empirical evidence; for example, in clashes between indigenous tradition and imperial ideals, or between settler economies and native ones or, in the age of European imperial explorations, between Western and non-Western aesthetics. Colonialism thus heightens a fundamental human dualistic displacement, that of the mindbody - which has led many critics to favour evolutionist models solely, or equally dubious conflictivist ones. Neither approach on its own is adequate. The primary point is that colonial fantasy locates itself at the point of displacement. This displacement is multifaceted, and is social as well as psychological and physical. A typological examination of displacement brings us closer to both the origins and forms of colonial fantasy and of colonial comedy. A typology of displacement

In psychoanalysis 'displacement', of course, infers the shifting of effect from one item to another to which it doesn't really belong. This is particularly so in a dream. The implication of this meaning is of more 'purposeful' displacement, as when feelings of aggression are aroused by a powerful figure and expressed toward one less powerful in order to avoid retaliation - however unconscious the displacement may be. To quote Freud: Omission, modification, fresh grouping of material - these, then, are the activities of the dream-censorship and the instruments of dream-distortion . . . We are in the habit of combining the concepts of modification and rearrangement under the term 'displacement'.27 The remarkable thing about the procedure of the dream-work lies in what follows. The material offered to the dream-work consists of thoughts - a few of which may be objectionable and unacceptable, but which are correctly constructed and expressed. The dream-work puts these thoughts into another form, and it is a strange and incomprehensible fact that in making this translation (this rendering, as it were, into another script or language) these methods of merging or combining are brought into use.28

It is the function to the wishes in dreamer. It thus the dream as it

of the dream to preserve sleep by permitting expression such a form as not to shock the ego and so awaken the happens that the manifest content of the dream (that is, is recalled upon waking) differs considerably from its

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latent content (that is, its unconscious significance). For the psychoanalyst, latent content can be revealed by the process of free association, in spite of the fact that it has been carefully disguised by the processes of 'displacement', 'condensation', 'plastic representation' and 'fixed symbolism'. Psychoanalysis, however, is not the only field in which 'displacement' activities are significant. In the general discussion of visual representation the word 'displacement' is applied to eidetic reduction; that is, the distortion of a visual image by inversion, or confusion of right and left, or up and down. The term is used for a type of vivid imagery that is projected into the external world and not merely 'in one's head'; thus a half-way house to hallucination. It is also a term applied to the ability or disposition to project these images. Eidetic reduction is the second of six reductions in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology - reductions carried out in an effort to purify the apperception of a mental phenomenon. The first is the 'psychological reduction', which eliminates the idiosyncrasies of the perceiver or analyst himself. The second is the 'eidetic reduction', which sets up the phenomenon as a perceived essence. Later 'reductions' ensure there is nothing left but 'pure transcendental ego' whose apperceptions, just because they have been refined through so many sieves of subjectivity, are now purely objective. By bracketing the entire world of historical and empirical reality (the noted phenomenological bracket: epoche), Husserl believed that acts of intentionality could be directed solely towards the 'essence' of the bracketed phenomenon in question. He sought direct access to 'essential' content; content which he saw as being complete and objective. In the field of ethology, too, 'displacement' is related significantly to a certain type of 'bracketing' action. It is the elicitation of an instinctive response by an inappropriate object or event or animal. The term is applied to animals' movements which, to someone who knows their primary function and causation, appear entirely out of context. Thus the cat stalking the rubber mouse, the caged bird responding with sexual display to its owner who has managed (consciously or unconsciously) to imitate the appropriate sounds of courtship, and the Pavlovian dogs ('sound' in this case producing effects in the absence of the real stimulus). Displacement activities seem to occur most frequently either when two wholly or partly incompatible behaviour systems are simultaneously elicited or, alternatively, when a behaviour system is elicited but is prevented from running its full course by the absence of stimuli. Human instances of displacement activities include, in specific circumstances, scratching, lighting a cigarette, yawning, pacing up and down, and even impulsive talking. There are various theories concerning the causation of ethological displacement. For example, the 'Disinhibition Theory' is based on the observation that when one behaviour system is strongly brought forth it suppresses other systems. It therefore posits that when two such systems

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are brought forth simultaneously they suppress each other, including the suppressing effect that each normally exerts on third systems. Another theory, discussed in terms of rest-and-sleep systems, argues that the central nervous system reacts to the hyper-excitation caused by conflicting motivations by activating the sleep system with all its secondary movements. There is also the popular application of the term to human activities which are 'out of context' merely in the sense that they are undertaken as an escape (conscious or otherwise) from some more urgently needed activity. Putting to one side definitions of 'displacement' meaning 'the weight or volume of fluid displaced by a floating object' (specifically the weight of water displaced by a ship), and the 'volume displaced by a piston', in contemporary literary theory, the word 'displacement' has been applied to a discourse of alternative worlds. In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale refers to a 'spatial displacement of words', 'transworld identities', 'worlds within worlds': Critics have often described postmodernist writing as discontinuous, but have not always recognised the connection between the semantic and narrative discontinuity and its physical 'objective correlative', the spacing of the text. Postmodernist texts are typically spaced-out, literally as well as figuratively.29

According to McHale, postmodernist fiction, with its recursive structure, proffers changes in ontological level, 'changes of world', and emphasizes techniques of embedding and nesting. This is said to be distinct from the structures and formal notions of modernist fiction. It is the game plan of such postmodernist fiction to emphasize and even exploit movement between displaced structural and thematic elements, in this way accentuating contrast, parallelism and interaction between different diegetic levels. Some critical writing about postcolonial literature also makes much of this. In postcolonial writing 'there are two broad categories', writes D. E. S. Maxwell: In the first, the writer brings his own language - English - to an alien environment and a fresh set of experiences: Australia, Canada, New Zealand. In the other, the writer brings an alien language - English - to his own social and cultural inheritance: India, West Africa. Yet the categories have a fundamental kinship . . . [The] intolerable wrestle with words and meaning has as its aim to subdue the experience to the language, the exotic life to the imported tongue.30

Similarly, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back argue that a sense of self is eroded by dislocation and cultural denigration, and so 'the dialectic of place and displacement is always a feature of postcolonial societies' (my italics).31 What seems missing in both Maxwell's analysis and that undertaken by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin is the sense that the mode of the struggle

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here is a heightened sense of an already existing mind-body opposition (which I am loathe to call Cartesian because that suggests a simplified biological causal interaction, and this is far from that) and to a great number of discursive instances in which displacement activities form part of all our reactions to the world. Because comedy and fantasy work at the coalface of displacement, the way they are used alerts us very effectively to the struggles endemic in the colonial condition. In summary, a typology of displacement reveals its primary components to be the shifting of effects from one situation to another; distortion; a distillation or reduction of elements to their 'essence'; instinctive but 'incompatible' responses; contrasts and parallelisms; and the promotion of a dialectic.

A case study Here is a specific instance in which the displacement activities of comedy and fantasy meet in a colonial text. Magic realist or fabulist writing requires an elliptic narrative of relatively constant and expeditious rhythm. In order to transgress, if not entirely destroy the ontological boundaries of realism, such narratives demand a highly refined diegetic structure. These are narratives which have an organic perception of the novel not dissimilar to that understood in the paradigms of modernism, particularly in the Joycean model (quite directly in the case of Latin American fiction); the novel as physical body, structuring, multifaceted and alive; the novel as equally spatial and temporal. We can see some of this in the following colonial examples. The first is from Peter Carey's Australian historical picaresque lllywhacker. I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar. I say that early to set things straight. Caveat ernptor. My age is the one fact you can rely on, and not because I say so, but because it has been publicly authenticated. Independent experts have poked me and prodded me and scraped around my foul-smelling mouth. They have measured my ankles and looked at my legs. It is a relief to not worry about my legs any more. When they photographed me I did not care that my dick looked as scabby and scaly as a horse's, even though there was a time when I was a vain man and would not have permitted the type of photographs they chose to take. Apart from this (and it is all there, neatly printed on a chart not three feet from where I lie) I have also been written up in the papers. Don't imagine this is any novelty for me - being written up has been one of my weaknesses and I don't mention it now so that I may impress you, but rather to make the point that I am not lying about my age.32 The second is from Ben Okri's Booker Prize novel of Nigerian independence, The Famished Road.

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And then, to crown our amazement, the news reached us that Madame Koto had bought herself a car. We couldn't believe it. No one along our street and practically no one in the area owned such a thing as a car. People owned bicycles and were proud of them. One or two men owned scooters and were accorded the respect reserved only for elders and chieftains. But it most certainly was news for a woman in the area to own a car. We clung to our disbelief till we saw the bright blue little car, with the affectionate face of an enlarged metallic tortoise. It was parked in front of her bar. We still clung to our disbelief even when we saw her hopeless attempts at driving it, which resulted in her running over an old woman's stall. She promptly had the stall rebuilt and gave the woman more money than she had possessed in the first place. We watched her learning to drive the car. She was much too massive for such a small vehicle and at the steering wheel she looked as if the car was her shell and she merely the third eye of the tortoise. The fact that the car was too small for her was the only consolation that people had. But we were still amazed.33 And the third is from Salman Rushdie's transmogrified account of Indian independence, Midnight's Children. I have entitled this episode somewhat oddly. 'Alpha and Omega' stares back at me from the page, demanding to be explained - a curious heading for what will be my story's half-way point, one that reeks of beginnings and ends, when you could say it should be more concerned with middles; but unrepentantly, I have no intention of changing it, although there are many alternative titles, for instance 'From Monkey to Rhesus', or 'Finger Redux', or - in a more allusive style - 'The Gander', a reference, obviously, to the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight. But 'Alpha and Omega' it is; 'Alpha and Omega' it remains. Because there are beginnings here, and all manner of ends; but you'll soon see what I mean.34 In these three extracts displacement of narrative, voice, belief, intention, expectation, relevance and reasoning produces a series of epistemological and ontological dislocations and ejects a set of lexical and syntactic forms. The mode of displacement here (both comic and fantastic) involves the shifting between one world and another, between a structured field of knowledge and another, far more fluid, structuring field. As indicative examples from 'colonial novels' these could easily suggest the movement between the ontological givens of a pre-colonial world and the free but not yet fully formed world of the postcolonial. However, it is almost certainly wrong to suggest that epistemological and ontological dislocation is solely the 'privilege' of the colonized. The mode here is more distinctive than that. Rather, it is like Rushdie's gander, the 'symbol of the ability to live in two worlds' at once:

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the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the world of land-and-water and the world of air, of flight.35

It is this movement, particularly in the position of the narrator, between a kind of flight and an inherent terrestriality, that gives both the narrative, and the comic mode within it, its distinctive shape. This mode represents, significantly, a re-configuration of a cognitive system bound up in an ability to 'ride' the displaced state of mind-body dualism. 'I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar', Carey's irreverent narrator, Herbert Badgery, tells us. 'I say that early to set things straight.' But nothing in these three texts can be set straight. Despite the organic, even teleological aspects of re-configuring truth claims, to continue to live in two worlds, one physical and one psychological or spiritual (as does Okri's spirit child, Azaro), is effectively to exist truthfully in neither. We longed for an early homecoming, to play by the river, in the grasslands, and in the magic caves. We longed to meditate on sunlight and precious stones, and to be joyful in the eternal dew of the spirit. To be born is to come into the world weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. So it is with m e . . . How many times had I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? And how often to the same parents? I had no idea. So much of the dust of living was in me. But this time, somewhere in the interspace between the spirit world and the Living, I chose to stay.36

While it is dubious to separate the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial into distinct hermetic periods, it can be seen how the examination of the experience of colonialism generally makes a sense of displacement between the world of the mind and the world of the body more prominent and that this has naturally brought about a degree of critical 'compartmentalizing'. Regardless of such critical over-simplification, it is important to recognize that colonial magic realist and fabulist writers produce works (used here as primary examples of 'colonial texts') which transgress such imposed 'clock time', and highlight the inherent paradoxes in their condition by creating physical, narrative (i.e., time-based) evidence of the interspersed, spatial operations of the colonial mind. Conclusion

To suggest that a displacement theory of colonial comedy and fantasy explains its entire function and form would rightly draw accusations of reductionism. However, as can be seen in the multiple ways in which displacement activities form part of our world views (wherever we are, under whatever political, social or economic system), in recognizing our

DISPLACEMENT, DUALISM AND BELIEF 21

mind-body dualism we are already caught between two formal ways of engaging in what is around us. That the mind extends the physical realm into the metaphysical is a truism. That the sensation of the physical is, in part, a formulation of the mind is so well debated as to be a correlative to this (debates which range from the divine occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche to the emphasis on sensations in the work of John Stuart Mill). That the impact of imperialism occurs in both realms is indubitable. In dealing with two forms which locate themselves so actively at the nexus of this dualism, it seems obvious that an overarching sense of how we should consider them is useful. A multifaceted understanding of displacement offers us this, identifying the ways in which colonial comedy and fantasy overtly, not subversively (in the sense Rosemary Jackson suggests fantasy as 'subversive'), makes its case. These two forms do not necessarily transform imperial/colonial relationships, but they empower both the producer and the audience to fit those relationships into the intricate grid of an existing human sense of opposition. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London, J. Templeman, 1841), p. 1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London, Dent, 1902). Christopher Lloyd, Explanation in Social History (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986), p. 1. Ibid., p. 10. Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (London, Faber, 1954). Onuora Nzekwu, Blade among the Boys (London, Faber, 1963). Glenyse Ward, Unna You Fullas (Broome, Magabala, 1991). Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (London, Picador, 1983). Ward, Unna, p. 142. Rushdie, Midnight's Children, p. 439. Paul Stoller, Embodying Colonial Memories: Spirit Possession, Power and Hauka in West Africa (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 88. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 15. Noted, not least, in the publication of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch in 1963 but could hardly be said to be absent in such works as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1968) or Carlos Fuentes's Christopher Unborn (1992). Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London, Verso, 1989), p. 4. Comedy: (O) F comedie. L. comoedia. GR. komoidia. komos: revel, plus aeidein: to sing. Comic: L. comicus. GR. komikos. komos: revel. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Boston, MIT Press, 1968). Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London, Macmillan, 1911). D. E. Berlyne, 'Laughter, play and humor', in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology Vol. 3 (New York, Random House, 1969). Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1973). Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Carl Emerson (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984).

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21. Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London, Routledge, 1995), pp. 51-5. 22. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, Methuen, 1981). 23. For example, Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford, Clarendon, 1998). 24. Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London, Routledge, 1991), p. 16. 25. Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (London, HarperCollins, 1995), p. 271. 26. Slavoj 2izek, 'Fantasy as a political category: a Lacanian approach', in Elizabeth Wright and Edmund Wright (eds), The tizek Reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), p. 92. 27. Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychoanalytical Works (London, Cassell, 1966), p. 140. 28. Ibid., p. 172. 29. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London, Routledge, 1987), p. 182. 30. D. E. S. Maxwell, 'Landscape and theme', in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London, Routledge, 1989), p. 25. 31. Ashcroft et al, The Empire Writes Back, p. 9. 32. Peter Carey, Illy whacker (St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1985), p. 11. 33. Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London, Vintage, 1992), p. 379. 34. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (London, Picador, 1983), p. 223.

35. Ibid. 36. Okri, Famished Road, p. 5.

CHAPTER TWO

Ukcombekcantsini and the fantastic: Zulu narratives and colonial culture MARK L. LILLELEHT

Fantasy and the fantastic

The critical literature of the 'fantastic' and 'fantasy', while in many cases useful in analysing particular works and particular genres of written literature emerging from the European tradition, seems of limited value when considering works outside an often narrowly defined range. Despite claims of generating a nearly universal definition of fantasy and the fantastic in narrative, most definitions are generically and culturally limited. This is not to dismiss their usefulness as analytical tools, but, as with so much literary critical work, a definition posited as the definition often turns out to be only a definition. Transcribed oral narratives from one of the numerous African traditions offer us an opportunity to challenge and refine our understanding of how the fantastic operates in a narrative and engages an audience. By analysing the Zulu narrative 'Ukcombekcantsini',1 and attempting to derive a definition of the fantastic from the operation and imagery of the narrative, without wholly setting aside the concerns raised by European and American literary critics, a definition which is much more wide-ranging and useful as an analytical tool will be sought. It may seem odd then to begin with a discussion of the definition of the fantastic. Yet the fact is that we all operate with a certain, often personalized, understanding of what is meant by the terms 'fantasy' and 'fantastic'. An analysis that fails to define its terms at the beginning becomes more a puzzle for the reader than a useful piece of analysis. What is more, an analysis which promises to define itself through concepts within a text which are not immediately recognizable can easily become either incomprehensible or laboriously tautological at best. No definition suggests itself whole cloth from a single text. The definition presented below is one rooted in a Western critical tradition, but also attempts to account for the peculiarities of a specific Zulu oral narrative.

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Background: theory and culture One is not lacking in attempts to define fantasy and the fantastic in Western literary critical texts. Perhaps the most straightforward is offered by C. S. Lewis: 'As a literary term a fantasy means any narrative that deals with impossibles and preternaturals/2 A broad definition that fits nicely with most people's conception of fantasy, it does, however, little to help the reader analyse and better understand any particular text. It is of much greater use to the scholar engaged in the quest for a structured typological or generic classification. But Lewis's two signposts, 'impossibles and preternaturals', are taken up by most critics as useful indicators that a story is utilizing the fantastic as a narrative device. In his seminal work, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov asserts that the fantastic is manifest in the hesitation one feels in deciding whether an event presented in the narrative is an illusion or something outside our world. He writes, 'At the story's end [if not before], the reader makes a decision'3 as to whether the event portrayed is illusion, and thus imaginary, or not of this world, and thus 'uncanny' or 'marvellous'. Once that decision is made, and Todorov believes that the decision is always made, the fantastic dissolves and disappears. Todorov's fantastic exists in that moment of hesitation and uncertainty alone. What he fails to recognize is that one might very well take a narrative and the elements of which it is composed as 'story'. This is Anne Wilson's point when she writes: Audiences will enjoy a fantasy and perhaps laugh at it afterwards, but they will not find it puzzling unless they are asked to explain it; it does not normally occur to anyone to ask for an explanation in depth and, far from being confused, audiences clearly find it deeply meaningful.4 Each particular story creates a secondary world of sorts, 'a world with a design and therefore a meaning that has no existence outside the work of art and the tradition that fostered it'.5 And precisely because narrative, or 'story', is constructed, it can accommodate varying degrees of 'fantastic' intrusion - even requires it in some cases. Simply put, the 'fantastic' are those narrative elements, feats or forms, characters or images, which exist as a trace of some other world or reality, but within a narrative reality that otherwise mimics our own. The world presented in a fantastic narrative is created in the sense that all narratives are, but it is grounded in the primary world of our everyday existence, a mirror image of our world, albeit cracked in places. Whereas a fantasy world is a fully realized, internally consistent world made up in part of Lewis's 'impossibles and preternaturals', the fantastic narrative is characterized by an expectation of normality continually upset by the uncertainties and problems attendant upon a confrontation with the seemingly

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impossible - the fantastic. For the fantastic is precisely that which can be doubted. Not disbelieved, but doubted. In the narrative, the injection of the fantastic brings about an instability - in plot, in characters' perceptions of events and of the world in which they live - which needs to be redressed and restabilized within the story. In a story of the fantastic, it is the instability of the fantastic, which is inherently rooted in its ambiguity and the doubt and uncertainty that surrounds it, that propels the narrative and the characters forward. The fantastic is narratively subversive in that there is often an uneasy peace established between the realistic characters and the fantastic, a peace of temporary reconciliation though not an acceptance of its permanence or immutability. This seems to run counter to how the Xhosa storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani frames her use of the fantastic (a concept which, like many commentators, she alternately refers to as fantasy and fantastic): [I]t is the task of the storyteller . . . to forge the fantasy images into masks of the realistic images of the present. These fantastic images establish and sustain inner cores; they are placed into a context of contemporary and therefore unstable images, enabling the performer to join present and past . . . [through which flows] a collection of ideas that have the illusion of antiquity and ancestral sanction.6

Her conflation of the contemporary with instability seemingly contradicts the notion that it is the fantastic which brings about the narrative instability. But look closely at how the argument is framed. Fantastic images are to be shaped into masks of the present. In the most mundane sense, this might be taken to mean that the fantastic are to take shape in images with which we are all familiar. Talking animals, monstrous births and supernatural, secret visitations, all of which appear in 'Ukcombekcantsini', the story discussed below, are given form through images with which the characters and audience are well familiar. We know what a pigeon is, but allow that pigeon to speak and this otherwise mundane creature radically destabilizes what is assumed to be known. This contemporary, familiar image has become something quite different though its physicality, and thus the mental picture we hold of it, remains largely unchanged. This is not to assert that every fantastic image must be on the surface a realistic representation with a worldly counterpart. However, within the world of the fantastic, as opposed to fantasy, the most compelling images are those which we feel we know and are familiar with, and yet somehow escape our quick characterization and classification. The use of the fantastic by a storyteller creates an anticipation and tension, keeping the audience engaged, seeking and expecting resolution. Resolution, not explanation; the fantastic introduces forms and situations that need to be buttressed and redressed through positive action rather than merely explained away. The use of the fantastic also serves at least two other purposes in the narration of a story: it allows for

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certain characteristics and/or states of individual characters to be externalized and emphasized within the narrative, and it allows for the presentation of social norms free from the potentially coercive weight of societal sanction, thus presenting them as timeless and universally applicable. As regards the externalization of personal, internal divisions, the use of fantastic imagery and forms often allows the narrator effectively to break off individual personality traits or thoughts in order to emphasize doubt, resolve, vindictiveness, or a whole host of other emotions. Such characterization through the fantastic need not be limited to individuals alone, but can also be used to suggest the state of society or a particular locality as well. In many respects, this externalizing of interior divisions and uncertainties is a way of universalizing what might otherwise be taken to be an individually or temporally specific situation. Something peculiar to an individual, wholly within one's head, might be of questionable value or significance. Bringing such states into engaged, narrative play is a means by which this subjectivity is circumvented. Similarly, and somewhat paradoxically, the use of the fantastic is a means by which societal norms or expectations might be presented free of the onus of the immediate expectations of contemporary society. The use of the fantastic places the narrative somewhat outside the everyday, explanatory realm. By situating the narrative somewhere between the everyday and pure fantasy, the teller is signalling that the resolution is to be found neither in our world nor through some otherworldly intervention. Rather, resolution will often come in the form of a harking back to what are presented as timeless values. Through the use of the fantastic 'the performers can communicate elemental social ideals and affirm community standards'7 without seeming to preach. While the fantastic operates somewhere between the realms of mimetic and marvellous representations, 'without their assumptions of confidence or presentations of authoritative "truths" ',8 it is the unstable nature of the fantastic which allows for the emergence of these truths as the narrator chooses to present them. If, on the other hand, we present the fantastic as made from stuff that merely 'compensates for deficient causality'9 and that operates to 'exempt the text from the action of the law',10 we risk diminishing the value and power of the fantastic and effectively limit the functional breadth of the fantastic. We risk also draining the fantastic of its purposefully mysterious character. This is especially notable in considering texts from the past or from other literary and oral traditions. In our rush to explain we too often view the fantastic as a cultural artefact and fail to note its deeper, functional and meaningful significance. What might be accepted, revelled in and enjoyed may appear as nothing more than mere curios to the reader. 'Some texts seem easy to read, but lack any trace of the "otherness" one feels should be imprinted by the various cultures and languages.'11 This quest for a sense of 'otherness' too often blinds us to

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the real work of the fantastic and greatly reduces the scope of our analysis. The story to be analysed, 'Ukcombekcantsini', was told to the Rev. Canon Henry Callaway by Lydia Umkasetemba some time during the 1860s, and is part of an astounding collection of Zulu tales rather patronizingly entitled Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus. Callaway was collecting material in Zululand about fifty years after the great wars and centralization of the Zulu state under Shaka. Zululand's rulers, following Shaka's consolidation and expansion of the kingdom, found themselves in an increasingly precarious situation at the time Callaway worked within the region. The Natal, to the south of the Zulu kingdom, had been declared a British colony in 1843 and the colonial government subsequently initiated a programme of removals of the African population to locations'. The Zulu kingdom was also under constant pressure from both Boer and British colonial settlers and their governmental patrons. The Zulu have traditionally lived in dispersed homesteads, termed kraals, consisting of two or three generations of a family. A man can take multiple wives, each of whom has a household within the kraal. Each household, headed by a female, provides for itself, any dependent children and contributes a share to the kraal. One's descent is traced through the father's line and individuals are required to marry outside of the lineage, traced back effectively through five or six generations. The Zulu also practise a form of bridewealth termed lobola, wherein the groom's family gives over or promises a certain number of cattle to the bride's father. When married, the woman goes to live with the man's family. Practising a mixed farming and livestock raising economy, the women perform mainly the agricultural and household tasks while the men tend the cattle and sheep herds. Children are incorporated into appropriate gender roles early on and are typically organized into age sets.12

Background: Callaway and the collection The Reverend Canon, later Bishop, Henry Callaway was an odd mixture of a man. Born in England in 1817, he arrived in Natal in 1854 as an Anglican minister and a trained doctor. He began collecting oral tales as a way of learning the language: 'At a very early period I began to write at the dictation of Zulu natives, as one means of gaining an accurate knowledge of words and idioms.'13 Callaway published many of these tales in the local newspapers and in small, manuscript volumes throughout the 1860s. His goals for this project slowly changed as he began to collect more and more material. Not only did he come to view this collection as an opportunity to discover 'what was the character of the mind of the people with whom we are brought into contact',14 he also envisioned both student and popular editions of his work, presenting the

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Zulu original and his English translations for European audiences and as a way of encouraging Zulu youth to read: We want to teach the young Kafirs to read. We must, then, give them some inducement to read; and where can we find a greater than by giving them the traditionary tales of their forefathers, in the same words as they have heard around the hut-fires?15

Offensive characterizations aside, it is astounding to read such encouragement from a European missionary, a missionary who also writes that '[i]t would be a great mistake to teach an English child to read solely from the Bible' as missionaries had been doing with Zulu children in their charge.16 To read his reflections on the tales and translations today, one is struck, if not surprised, by the seeming open-mindedness of the man, only to read on and discover the often virulently racist and patronizing view he had of Africans. In part this seems to spring from his desire to make everything rationally understandable - 'every thing human is valuable'17 - without letting go of his core conviction that 'there is nothing in common between the two races'.18 The introductory notes to his published collection strike a universalist note: 'man has every where thought alike, because every where, in every country and clime, under every tint of skin, under every varying social and intellectual condition, he is still man'.19 But while such a sentiment 'suggests itself to a man of warm affections and tender instincts',20 it stands against all reason, as Callaway understood it. The artefact, the collected tale, had a value not possessed by the people from whom it was collected. He writes: the Zulu are a degenerated people; . . . they are not now in the condition intellectually or physically in which they were during 'the legend-producing period' of their existence; [they] have sunk from a higher state.21

While such remarks and characterizations can be understood as part of the general anthropological theories of nineteenth-century European thought to which he was greatly indebted, they are strangely disconcerting when placed next to some of Callaway's other, more 'enlightened' assertions. For instance, he writes of 'Umpengula, my native teacher'22 without a hint of irony. In the introduction to his work, Callaway explains briefly how he went about collecting these tales, but says little about the environment or setting of the collection process. He writes: A native is requested to tell a tale; and to tell it exactly as he would tell it to a child or a friend; and what he says is faithfully written down. We have thus placed before us the language as nearly as possible such as it is spoken by the natives in their intercourse with each other. And, further, what has been thus written can be read to the native who dictated it; corrections be made; explanations be obtained; doubtful points be submitted to other natives; and it can be subjected to any amount of analysis the writer may think fit to make.23

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As a linguistic exercise, which was Callaway's initial purpose, there seems much to recommend this course of action. Yet it also illustrates the myriad difficulties in attempting to render an oral tale into a written text and how a collection of tales differs from the original performance and presentation of those tales. For his part, Callaway was aware of the difficulties this transition presented, writing that 'much is concealed that can only be uncovered by living among the people'.24 He writes that after he published shortened, preliminary versions of the collection at hand, 'several [Zulu] came and offered themselves as being capable of telling me something better than I had printed'.25 Among these 'voluntarily tendered' stories is Lydia Umkasetemba's 'Ukcombekcantsini'.

The story: a summary

The story itself is simple yet strangely unsettling. Readers are encouraged to visit Callaway's version, for what follows is only a cursory summary, eliding much of the rhythm and sense of the story evident even in the translation of the Zulu original. It goes something like this. There is a kraal where the king's many wives give birth to nothing but crows. One of the king's wives, however, is barren and is mocked and jeered relentlessly by the other women. One day when working in the fields two pigeons come to the barren queen and scarify her, collect the clotted blood, and tell her to place it in a large covered vessel for two months. Two children - real children - a girl (Ukcombekcantsini) and a boy emerge after those two months. Fearful of the jealousy of the other women of the community, the queen keeps the children hidden and commands them to keep to their house. Keeping their mother's counsel, they grow to young adulthood. One day Ukcombekcantsini suggests that they fetch water for their mother. By the river they encounter travellers from a distant settlement who are struck by Ukcombekcantsini's beauty. Time passes uneventfully until one day a young man by the name of Ukakaka, the son of the king of this other settlement, returns with a large retinue and herds of cattle as lobola to ask for Ukcombekcantsini's hand in marriage. The village women, who are still unaware of Ukcombekcantsini's existence, are derisive yet hopeful, while the king and his counsellors are shocked and somewhat annoyed (for they fear they are being mocked) that anyone would waste so much time and so many resources on crows. It is finally revealed by Ukcombekcantsini's mother that the king does, in fact, have a son and a daughter. After much feasting, Ukcombekcantsini is betrothed to Ukakaka and the two set off for his home kraal, though with a warning from Ukcombekcantsini's mother that when the party reaches the high land between the two settlements, they ought not to pursue the green animal they will encounter. Not surprisingly, the proscription is violated and while Ukakaka and

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his men are off pursuing the beast, Ukcombekcantsini is coaxed off her mount by an imbulu, a 'tree iguana or monitor/26 who takes Ukcombekcantsini's place on her ox as she and her attendants flutter away into the trees as finches. On returning, Ukakaka notices that something is amiss his bride no longer shines. This is not my bride, he says, but they press on, only to be greeted further on by the finches chirping away, 'Ukakaka the king's child gone off with an animal! Out upon him, he is running off with an Imbulu!' On arriving home Ukakaka's father, the king, is none too pleased with the ugliness of the bride. Swearing that his bride was a beautiful maiden, Ukakaka refuses to call her his wife, though the matter is left otherwise unresolved for the time being. One day when all of Ukakaka's village is out in the fields, Ukcombekcantsini and her attendants come as finches to the only member of the village who remains behind: an old, crippled woman by the name of Uthlese. Taking on human form, they clean, gather firewood and water and brew beer for the entire village, pledging Uthlese to secrecy. For her part, because of the pledge, and much to the delight of the other villagers, the immobile Uthlese claims the work as her own. Only on the third day does Uthlese confess to Ukakaka, who doubts her claims, that it is, in fact, Ukcombekcantsini and her handmaidens who are doing the work. Ukakaka then returns to the kraal early the next day to confront Ukcombekcantsini. The two are reconciled, the king informed, and a trap laid for the imbulu - who is finished off by the entire village - and finally the marriage of Ukakaka and Ukcombekcantsini is sanctified. The fantastic at work The most striking elements of the Ukcombekcantsini story are, not surprisingly, the fantastic ones that Umkasetemba weaves through the tale: the village of crow children, the speaking pigeons, the birth and growth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother, the imbulu and the transformation of Ukcombekcantsini and the maidens into finches. The importance of the fantastic as it operates in this story is not so much in the elements themselves but in the relationships which exist between such elements and 'normal' (even normative) behaviour patterns. Although Ukcombekcantsini is the central figure of the story, the narrative lacks a single, omnipresent character. Rather, the story is divided into two narrative halves, bridged partly by an ensemble of characters (some of whom we meet in only one half or the other) and partly also by the continuity of the fantastic. It reflects something of the paradox of the fantastic to speak of continuity and the fantastic in the same clause. Inherent in the fantastic is its unstable nature, which is rooted in the ambiguity cultivated by the use of 'impossibles and preternaturals'. The tensions and problems introduced by the use of the fantastic are what bind the narrative together. The

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dynamic element is introduced when balance is momentarily upset, then restored once again. This pulsating symmetrical/asymmetrical exchange is central to the oral performer's art.'27 The lingering asymmetries are what keeps the story moving and the audience engaged. The episode on the high lands and the introduction of the imbulu neatly divides the narrative into two halves and serves as both a further complication and a means of binding the two halves together. The story could end at the point at which Ukcombekcantsini and her brother are introduced to their rather. In fact, Callaway includes one story in his collection, 'Amavukutu',28 which repeats the same basic story, though in much less detail, and ends with the introduction of the child to the father, neatly tying up the narrative concerns. Also, we must be careful when it comes to decoding the fantastic images as solely and singularly reflective of specific elements of the culture from which it springs. We can understand the crows as a way by which the storyteller deprecates the other women of the kraal29 or as indicative of some deeper problem. Todorov warns against treating narrative elements as a 'symptom' of culture.30 Scheub also warns that the 'analyst must . .. not mistake the cultural elements found in such narratives for reflections of the culture itself'.31 It is important to look beyond merely what the fantastic stands in place of, and concentrate on what it stands in relation to. One critic, writing on this same tale, comes to the conclusion that, In Zulu folktales bizarre monsters are introduced at various points, but these are probably too fantastical and remote from everyday life to be really frightening. Real life relationships within the family, on the other hand, are immediate and can be disconcertingly problematic, and these, it is suggested, are subliminally handled in those tales that contain the 'mythic' content referred to.32

If we look at the fantastic merely as a place-holder or as symbolic of something else, usually conceptualized as something deep in a people's cultural memory, we deprive the fantastic of what may be its most productive and evocative sense. The story opens not on the normal world but on a world already radically destabilized by the fact that all the children of the kraal are crows. It would be tempting therefore to frame the entire narrative as a fantasy rather than as a narrative that utilizes fantastic elements. Yet there is no indication at any point in the story that the fantastic events and characters are ever accepted as natural or as anything but out of the ordinary. They are wondered at, cause amazement and consternation, and even in the case of the kraal of crows, are made peace with. But they are never fully embraced as part of the nature of things. The non-rational phenomena of [the fantastic] simply do not fall within human experience nor do they reach accord with the natural laws of the universe.'33 The women of the kraal taunt Ukcombekcantsini's mother with the words: 'We

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indeed do give birth only to crows; but you give birth to nothing.'34 Similarly, Ukcombekcantsini's mother laments her ill-treatment: 'This is done to me because I do not give birth even to these crows.'35 The generalized standard, having given birth, is emphasized by the women of the kraal, not what they have given birth to. The fantastic nature of their own births is shunted to the side. There is implicit in the women's statements, a recognition of the inadequacy of these crow children, but also a degree of resignation. When Ukakaka's people come with the cattle to fetch the still unknown Ukcombekcantsini there is universal disbelief that anyone would waste so much wealth on mere crows, but a rather facetious hope springs eternal: the women crying '[W]hich is the damsel among all these of ours? That mother will be glad whose daughter shall be selected with so many cattle as these.'36 The abnormal nature of the birth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother is not just established through their mother's barrenness but also through the birth of the other 'children' of the kraal. The ethnographic literature is rife with references to the horror of not having children: To a woman .. . childlessness is the greatest of all misfortunes, for not only will she be taunted and gibed at by her more fortunate sisters, but she may even be divorced on that account.'37 Likewise, The chief wife's position in any village is ... so important that if she fails in her duties [one of which is to produce an heir] she can no longer hold office . . . She will simply be given a hut near the gate or at the side of the kraal, and left with only the necessities of existence, while a new virgin wife is sought to take her place.38

This is clearly what has become of Ukcombekcantsini's mother, the displaced queen, when the story opens. But the fantastic nature of the other women's children makes their own positions precarious. If parents are the link to the ancestral past, then a generation of crows, of nonhumans, threatens not only to disrupt the present but also to explode the people's connection to both their past and future. When Ukakaka comes to the kraal and the women take up the taunting of Ukcombekcantsini's mother, the king and other men of the kraal upbraid the women. The women's taunts are made not on the basis of their children but on the fact of their birth. In a society where a normal birth results in fantastic children, the way to break this cycle is by an inversion of this dynamic, whereby a fantastic birth results in normal (read: human) children. Another striking aspect of the conception and birth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother is the nature of the assistance given to their mother by the pigeons. As the Zulu traditionally understood conception, '[mjenstrual blood in a woman is regarded as an unformed child. When a man's sperm is introduced, it causes the blood to form into a clot which develops ultimately into a human being.'39 The pigeons do not impregnate Ukcombekcantsini's mother, but rather remove from her the clot that becomes Ukcombekcantsini and her brother. This woman, forced back

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onto her own resources because of her barrenness, has wholly within herself the fruits of her fertility; the king's sperm gives crows, not human children. Just as the birth of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother does not correct the instability of the kraal but only serves to add another dimension to the narrative, so too does the introduction of the imbulu as the wedding party treks to Ukakaka's home add a layer of narrative instability that needs to be resolved before the story can be concluded. The imbulu is a frequently occurring character in Zulu tales. Callaway glosses it as 'a large land lizard, living mostly in forests. It is a stupid harmless animal.'*0 In Zulu folklore the imbulu takes on a more insidious quality: 'It is a creature full of deceit',41 'obsessed by a desire to transcend its animalism.'42 Such definitions go a way towards explaining why the imbulu does what it does within the story, but do little to help explain why it is included within the story in the first place. Structurally, the time on the high lands serves as the narrative mirror of the story: the green creature's flight and the hunters' pursuit in effect trigger the imbulu's pursuit of Ukcombekcantsini and her party's flight (in the form of finches). The narrative turns back on itself to roughly replay the events of the first half of the story. One of the disconcerting things for the reader is that some of the characters to whom we are introduced in the first part fail to reappear in the second. Ukcombekcantsini's mother, father and brother are all left behind. At one level, this is not wholly unexpected. The marriage of a woman constitutes a break with her own people and an integration into her husband's lineage. The word used by the Zulu to mean marriage, enda, literally translates as 'to go on a long journey'.43 Much more important to the story is what this narrative 'leaving behind' signifies in terms of the characters' identity. A person's identity is completed externally, through one's relationship with others, just as the fantastic is resolved through the intervention and mediation of a third party. Ukcombekcantsini's mother is 'completed' through the birth of her children. Her husband, 'who no longer regards me as a human being, because I have no child',44 now marvels at her 'great courage'.45 The son, Ukcombekcantsini's brother, who refuses to be named by his mother, likewise becomes fully a man when his father throws himself on him in joy. The father too becomes fully a king when he learns of his children, especially his son. There are no more loose ends for these three characters: they have assumed their proper roles and the storyteller can move on. On the other hand, Ukakaka's refusal to call the imbulu-asUkcombekcantsini his wife effectively leaves Ukcombekcantsini incomplete, unresolved. One of the most effective ways in which fantastic elements are introduced into a narrative is through marginal communities and objects. Narrative play at the margins and periphery of society certainly is not limited to fantastic elements, but the very fact that the fantastic, which is predicated on both doubt and believability, is so often introduced into

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secondary communities and through marginally acceptable objects allows for effective cultivation of these two emotions. Our core understanding of these marginal areas is so uncertain to begin with that the fantastic, while to be wondered at, cannot be dismissed out of hand as a priori impossible. The tale provides numerous examples of this interplay between the marginal and the fantastic. Both Ukcombekcantsini's mother and Uthlese reside at the edges of their respective communities - both are marginalized by the community and are physically 'lacking' (the mother, fertility; Uthlese is without legs) - and both serve as the means by which the fantastic is introduced into their kraals. The case of Ukcombekcantsini's mother is self-evident. Uthlese, although she does not play a direct role in summoning Ukcombekcantsini into the kraal of Ukakaka's father, does serve as the link between Ukakaka and Ukcombekcantsini. Uthlese is able to put off the people of the village with her explanations, but is unable to deceive Ukakaka. Ukakaka, who doubted his bride on the high land - 'it seems to me that this is not my bride'46 - also doubts his own mind and is therefore unable to provide a complete explanation of the fantastic transformation of his bride, and proves unable to take a positive step to rectify the imbalance. Yet this same man is not fooled by Uthlese's claims, nor is there any indication that he should be. Uthlese's limitations are obvious and she possesses no fantastic abilities or characteristics that might effectively mask her shortcomings (as in the case of the imbulu). The fantastic not only can be doubted but sows doubt within those \vho come into contact with it. The hunters who accompany the bridal party are quick to dismiss the odd appearance of Ukakaka's 'bride' and the derisive, warning words of the finches as 'the manner of birds of the thorn country'.47 Ukakaka's own mind conjures doubt and confusion, but the men, perhaps an extension of Ukakaka's own sense of things, merely shrug off the talking birds that sing their chastisement and provide excuses for the imbulu's appearance. Almost the same words are used by Ukcombekcantsini: first, as one of the finches sowing doubt in Ukakaka's mind - 'Out upon him, he is running off with an Imbulu';48 and subsequently in human form to make clear what it is he has done to her - 'Out upon Ukakaka! Was it not you who took me from my father's kraal and left me on the high lands, and went away with an Imbulu?'49 With these words, Ukcombekcantsini (and Umkasetemba) neatly frame the second half of the story and illustrate how frequently the fantastic holds within itself the stuff of its own resolution. The pigeons come to Ukcombekcantsini's mother after a day of digging, as she sits weeping over her fate; the castor-oil seeds that the pigeons request as payment for their assistance are not considered a food at all; the clot which becomes Ukcombekcantsini and her brother is caught in an umpanda, 'an earthen pot which is cracked, and no longer of any use but for holding seed, &c'.50 Ukcombekcantsini is tired and thirsty when the imbulu comes to her; Ukakaka mutters, '[m]y body is weak',51 when he

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first notices the change in his bride; and coming home from a long day in the fields, the people of Ukakaka's village readily accept Uthlese's explanations for all the work that's been done in their absence. However, the introduction of the fantastic at the margins and in times of weakness does not mean that it remains at the margins. Rather, the resolution of the instability and uncertainties introduced by the fantastic and other narrative elements requires that the fantastic be brought into the social centre. The most effective way by which this is accomplished is through the issuing by one character of a prohibition that is immediately transgressed by another. It is through the transgression of these prohibitions that narrative tension is heightened and a certain degree of danger is introduced. It also sets the stage for the resolution of the instability thus generated. In the first half of the story, Ukcombekcantsini's mother explicitly prohibits her children from leaving the house for fear that the crows (and their mothers) will discover and kill them. Within two paragraphs Ukcombekcantsini and her brother are marching to the river to fetch water for their mother and are discovered by Ukakaka's scouting party, the abahhwebu. The abahhwebu themselves are a marginalized people who bridge the two halves of the story: 'not of the same race'52 as their king, they bring news of Ukcombekcantsini's great beauty back to Ukakaka and his father in the first half, and then are threatened with death when the bride's beauty proves not what was promised in the second. Ukcombekcantsini's brother disavows the transgression and there is a palpable sense of worry and fear, subtly but effectively introduced after the children's explanation: 'They were then silent. They remained for many days.'53 While the fear is real, it is only through breaking the transgression and becoming known to people outside their kraal that the first half of the story can begin to move towards its partial resolution: they have made themselves known to a wider world which will, heedless (because ignorant) of the potential dangers, call them out before the community. The second half of the story sees a similar dynamic. Uthlese, who becomes something of both a mother-in-law and grandmother figure, gives Ukcombekcantsini and the maidens her word that she will not reveal their secret, only to tell Ukakaka all when he comes to her, certain that she is not being truthful. The people of the village, satisfied and happy with the work Uthlese seems to be doing for them, are not about to question her. In fact, they give up questioning her after the third day. It is precisely in this moment of acceptance, of not questioning the source of the marvellous event (be it good or ill fortune), that significant events occur. So satisfied with having 'an old woman who will work for us',54 the people of the kraal do not question; just as the women of Ukcombekcantsini's mother's kraal, so sure of her barrenness, taunt and mock her when Ukakaka arrives with the lobola cattle. Whereas these women are thoroughly surprised by the revelation of Ukcombekcantsini and her brother, there is an indication that the women of Ukakaka's kraal recognize

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that '[t]here is something wonderful which is about to happen here at home'.55 Conclusion

Here we see the real power of the fantastic at work, beyond standing in symbolically for something else or indicative of some other world or higher power. For here the fantastic operates in the narrative and in the audience to create space, an opening. The fantastic generates doubt, within the narrative, of the type that asks 'what happens next', rather than doubt as to the truthfulness or possibility of the reality presented. The fantastic at work in the story indicates something is not quite right here, rather than 'this can't be'. Such clumsy explanations of some of the underlying narrative structures simply cannot do justice to the elegance of Umkasetemba's story. Umkasetemba also wonderfully nurses the tension generated by the events of the story before launching into a rocket-like resolution, which first pitches us into another new cycle of dramatic tension and then finally resolves matters without resorting to a sugary sweet ending. As should be clear by this point, the fantastic is not the sole narrative element at work in Umkasetemba's story. But it is a fundamental part of the narrative, both in what the fantastic elements suggest as to the meaning of the story and in how they work to keep the narrative moving towards an effective, meaningful resolution. Similarly, it allows the storyteller more flexibility and superficial neutrality in presenting a mirror to the instability that wracked the Zulu nation in the nineteenth century. If we make the mistake of trying to decode the fantastic piece by piece as they appear in the narrative, rather than looking at how they are woven into the everyday, we risk missing some of the more deft and quite marvellous aspects of this artfully crafted work. Notes 1. Rev. Canon Henry Callaway, Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus (London, Triibner and Co., 1868), pp. 105-30. 2. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 50. 3. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 41. 4. Anne Wilson, Magical Thought in Creative Writing: The Distinctive Roles of Fantasy and Imagination in Fiction (Stroud, The Thimble Press, 1983), p. 9. 5. Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition, ed. Harold Scheub (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 82. 6. Ibid., p. 19. Emphasis added. 7. Harold Scheub, 'Fixed and nonfixed symbols in Xhosa and Zulu oral narrative traditions', Journal of American Folklore, vol. 85 (1976), p. 270.

ZULU NARRATIVES AND COLONIAL CULTURE 8. 9. 10. 11.

37

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London, Methuen, 1981), p. 35. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 110. Ibid., p. 159. Denise A. Godwin, 'Discovering the African folk-tale in translation', South African Journal of African Languages, vol. 11 (1991), p. 109. 12. The cultural practices outlined here are more traditional and hold better for the Zulu at the time of Callaway's collection of the tales. Needless to say, social and cultural developments of the past hundred years and more have reshaped such practices. 13. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 1. 14. Ibid., p. ii. 15. Ibid., p. 1. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', second page. 18. Marian S. Benham, Henry Callaway, M.D., D.D., First Bishop ofKaffraria: His Life-History and Work: A Memoir (London, Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1896), p. 57. 19. Callaway, Nursery Tales, unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', second and third pages. 20. Benham, Henry Callaway, p. 132. 21. Callaway, Nursery Tales, unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', third page. 22. Ibid., p. 130. 23. Ibid., p. i. 24. Benham, Henry Callaway, pp. 252-3. 25. Callaway, Nursery Tales, unnumbered 'Preface to the First Volume', first page. 26. C. M. Doke, Zulu-English Dictionary (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1958), p. 173. 27. Harold Scheub, The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 157. 28. Callaway, Nursery Tales, pp. 72-3. 29. Ibid., p. 105. See footnote 36. 30. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 151. 31. Harold Scheub, 'Body and image in oral narrative performance', New Literary History, vol. 8 (1976-77), p. 345. 32. W. D. Hammond-Tooke, 'The "mythic" content of Zulu folktales', African Studies, vol. 47, no. 2 (1988), p. 99. 33. Vernon Hyles, 'The poetry of the fantastic', in Patrick D. Murphy and Vernon Hyles (eds), The Poetic Fantastic: Studies in an Evolving Genre (New York, Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 8. 34. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 106. Emphasis added. 35. Ibid., p. 110. Emphasis added. 36. Ibid., p. 113. 37. Eileen Jensen Krige, The Social System of the Zulus (Pietermaritzburg, Shuter and Shooter, 1957), p. 61. 38. Ibid., p. 40. 39. Absolom Vilakazi, Zulu Transformations: A Study of the Dynamics of Social Change (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1962), p. 56. 40. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 118. See footnote 50. Emphasis added. 41. Krige, The Social System of the Zulus, p. 352. 42. Scheub, 'Fixed and nonfixed symbols', p. 270. 43. Harriet Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (London, Academic Press, 1977), p. 66. See also Doke, Zulu-English Dictionary, p. 56. 44. Callaway, Nursery Tales, p. 110. 45. Ibid., p. 116.

38 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

MARK L. LILLELEHT Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 107. See footnote 42. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 126.

CHAPTER THREE

The game is up: British women's comic novels of the end of Empire PHYLLIS LASSNER

Postcolonial theory and British women colonial writers

Many postcolonial theorists have argued that despite the power wielded by the British Empire, anxiety prevailed as the political psychology of its overseers.1 Even with all the trimmings of upward mobility and authority that the heights of Empire afforded, British colonial agents suffered dislocation in conflicted cultural climates that could never become a home away from home. Their Liberty-decorated bungalows and gated tennis clubs could only camouflage the tensions created by colonialism's incompatible exclusionary and missionary policies.2 Goals and principles the British considered progressive were undermined on two fronts: by ancient and polysemous civilizations which resisted transformation into unified but alienating national entities, and by British claims to superiority, the logic of which was not supported by their inability to understand, much less appreciate the traditions of those they colonized.3 The paucity of happy colonized faces reflecting the Raj's good intentions served as a constant reminder of colonial insecurity and instability. In Homi Bhabha's terms, as constituted by 'colonial power and knowledge', the colonized other is a figure of mimicry 'that is almost the same, but not quite' (Bhabha's italics), and therefore represents 'a process of disavowal' and a 'sign of the inappropriate'.4 The effect of this conflicted 'resemblance and menace' is that the mimicry of British manners calls the imperial self into doubt, and whether intended as compliment or mockery, being mirrored in the manners of the inferior ensures the 'strategic failure' of 'colonial appropriation' and 'disrupts its authority'.5 Compounding this affront, as the British Empire ended, history denied the colonizers any laurels that might have made withdrawal less vainglorious. And so, as many memoirs, fictions and reports attest, leaving the Empire behind was fraught with ambivalence about cultural and social identity, sense of purpose and moral righteousness.6 As the official imperial relationship drew to a close, British women writers like Olivia Manning, who lived in Palestine and Egypt in the 1940s, and Rumer Godden, who was raised in India, translated their

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experiences and responses into fictions that dramatized women's internalized colonial anxieties.7 Such writers represent an 'imperial femininity', according to Simon Gikandi, recording 'the female subject's ambivalent interpolation by the ideologies of empire'.8 Understanding full well the colonizing import of representing the orientalized other as a menacing if spellbinding mystery, Manning and Godden satirize the consciousness that projected fears of imminent and embodied dangerous thrills from both sides of the imperial divide. At those moments when the colonial was becoming postcolonial, these writers delineate the process through which the female colonial agent is made to recognize her anachronistic and untenable position. She discovers her own otherness at a site which has already rejected any possibility that the colonial project will not contaminate itself.9 In turn, those who are labelled the colonized resist the term's oppressive designation by becoming agents of their own distinct moral visions and political fates.10 This imaginative and complex representation effects a political and historical critique through another transformation: that of genre. Both Godden and Manning reject the outcome of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, with its wistful, romanticized understanding and even acceptance of the politically fated impossibility of intimacy or even friendship between colonizer and colonized, and their reified opposition.11 Instead, Godden's 1953 novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, and Manning's 1974 novel, The Rain Forest, use satire and parody to show how the disorder and instability represented by colonized sites and peoples become catalysts for resistance and insurrection against the Empire's civilizing and romanticizing impulses.12 Through multifarious tragic-comic colonial encounters and events, these novels argue against writing the fiction of imperial history 'as a romantic . . . compensation for its tragic acts and consequences'.13 These fictions show how the lingering effects of colonialism can be understood by reflecting back on the deferred pace that characterized the protracted denouement of the Empire. In representing that longeur as a defining moment instead of an anti-climax, Godden's and Manning's novels show how the intensity of feeling on both sides of the colonial divide could produce its own violence, even as the British were leaving for good and the colonized declared their independence. It may very well be that such violence could be translated into comedy precisely because the game of Empire was finally up. But as these novels show, comedy also serves the trenchant purpose of analysing the self-delusions that produced the agonies of Britons coming to terms with their ill-fated attempts to forge their identities and sense of purpose on the backs of the colonized.14

Rumer Godden's cross-cultural satire

Kingfishers Catch Fire was inspired by an incident that drove Godden out of India, which had been her home since the age of six months. The

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incident, in which a servant poisoned her, is fictionalized as an analysis of the self-deluded thinking that, even after two hundred years of rule, the British could enlist the respect and support of the colonized.15 Using archly critical voices, which in dissonant harmony mock and deflate her characters' best intentions, Godden unmasks the complex social and cultural infrastructures that seemed to make coherent sense of Britain's imperial presence in India. By the end of her colonial plotting, these bases of knowledge produce not wistful understanding, but the destructive expression of fierce mutual desire that cannot be explained as romantic. Evoking an anachronistic British presence at the moment of Indian Independence, Godden portrays the young widow of a colonial officer who decides to stay in India and embark on her own adventure of selfdiscovery and independence. With two children in tow, Sophie believes it is possible to prove her self-sufficiency by integrating Western habits into what she construes as the natural ecology of Kashmir; she will learn the crafts by which its various peoples subsist off the land's scant bounty. Her destabilizing passage through this experience positions her in what Judy Little has described as 'the liminal stage . . . a borderline area or condition', in which individuals 'have neither their old selves and old positions in society nor their new ones'.16 Certainly Sophie's quest places her 'betwixt and between .. . socially and psychologically'.17 The comedy in Kingfishers Catch Fire derives from the correspondence between liminality and the 'patterns of quest comedy', but in Godden's rendering, the very instability of liminality leads to violent consequences.18 Violence breaks out as Sophie reaps the consequences of ignoring how her presence subtends the fragile rapprochement between the communities that comprise Kashmiri society. In her exploitation of their economic interdependence, Sophie believes she is creating a harmonious social order. But its distortions only mirror her own vexed role in the social politics of both romance plotting and colonial agendas at the end of Empire. This microcosmic debunking of the missionary spirit of British colonialism is shaped as a comedy of misguided manners.19 Sophie's renovation of Dhilkusha, her rented cottage in the Himalayan foothills, to pristine simplicity, takes on an imperious outlook. She has used local resources in the service of self-interest while claiming to bring progress to those below. Even as the poisoned love potion concocted by a desperate servant impairs Sophie's already blurred vision, and her enclave disintegrates into violent resistance, she allows herself to be seduced by claiming a new understanding of 'those people'.20 While Sophie is made to develop a sense of responsibility for her intervention in the fate of the Kashmiris, a multivocal narrative also clarifies why neither Sophie nor her colonial compatriots are willing to relinquish their fantasied relation to India: the subcontinent's 'beauty in people and things' is a kind of love potion in itself, an elixir whose life-enhancing qualities make the Britons believe they can be even better colonizers.21 The comedy that exposes this fantasy as a poisonous self-delusion

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derives much of its effect from what Bakhtin has theorized as a discourse of tension, which is made up of dialogized voices competing with one another from different perspectives. In turn, this tension is translated into comedy through the technique of parody, which can 'expose to destroy' the expressed point of view of another through implied mockery.22 In terms of dramatizing the external power struggles between colonized and colonizer and their internalized tensions, Judy Little's analysis of women's comic writing exposes a subversive element in dialogic discourse, by showing how the language of power can be deployed to mock that of control: When these writers humor the sentence, they make it unsay, or partly unsay, what it seems to say. In so doing, these women expose the ambivalent structures of language and its implied worldview. Power is revealed as a linguistic posture . . . while gender categories unravel in the linguistic stripping.23

In Kingfishers Catch Fire, the gender categories established by literary romance conventions and by colonial relations 'unravel' through a tense and mocking dialogic discourse. As power is invested in the imperial project, in the resistance of the colonized subject and in the female colonist, internalized tensions explode in the exposure of their ambivalent, indeed love-hate, relations with each other. Dialogic tension sets the tone of the novel in a prologue which deploys and mocks the conventions of romance writing. And while romance in so many colonial novels is now condemned as 'nostalgia for the Raj', in Kingfishers Catch Fire romance conventions are used to show how they support ambivalence about the end of Empire in serious colonial discourses.24 Resonating with the fairy-tale incantation, 'Once Upon a Time', the prologue's opening words are 'Long Afterwards', a rhetorical move which establishes the narrator's resistance to romantic fantasies about Britain's relations with India. What Godden is objecting to is not only the structural expectation in fairy tales of imminent and supernatural danger - the terror of unfathomable monstrousness - but the defence against it embedded in a ritually expected 'Happily Ever After'. For Godden the danger in fairy-tale plotting is its Manichean duality that plots innocence and evil as distinct, unrelated and inhuman forces, devoid of human responsibility. In self-conscious and critical opposition to the antihistorical safety net of fairy tales, the novel's 'Long Afterwards' marks the beginning of a narrative set in an historical time and place, which will dramatize how the evocation of timeless and mysterious, indeed magical, danger is itself dangerous. This is because when applied to a story of India, its fairytale suggestion of a timeless, mysterious Orient already condemns the subcontinent and its people as inherently threatening, but, in their resistance to Western ways of knowing, also ineffectual. In historical effect, the shadowboxing which issues from this standoff with the inscrutable other prevents a confrontation with the all-too-human responsibility for the

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tensions that will erupt in violence. As the main narrative takes a long look backwards at the interlocking behaviours and events that lead up to the prologue's English setting, it plays out the prolonged but particular time of ending Britain's presence and complicated relationship with India. The consequences of this revision can be imagined as threatening the life of the romance convention itself, especially as readers' expectations of 'Happily Ever After' are mocked and therefore resisted by the dialogue which follows 'Long Afterwards'. Sophie and Toby, her would-be knight errant, defy the idea that narrative resolution means domestic harmony as they contest each other's interpretations of narrative time and thus draw attention to its gendered politics: ' "Not so long," said Toby, "it's only two years"; "Ages afterwards," said Sophie—', echoing and therefore invoking the narrator's support.25 Toby, whose exacting sense of time marks him as prototypically pragmatic and grounded in realist conventions of male authority, is mocked as a romantic in disguise by Sophie's recognition, beginning with this prologue and by her resistance, to the end, to his 'always rescuing me'.26 To accept Toby's romantic paternalism, which tempts her 'to run into his arms like a child', means that Sophie would abandon her 'tender' vision of Kashmir's 'beauty in people and things' to his 'savagely' protective denunciation of its people as 'rabble, ugly and menacing'.27 In its offer of sanctuary, Toby's green and gentle England would also tame the wayward woman who has chosen to live 'far from her own kind' and so, in effect, it harbours her greatest fear.28 English sanctuary denies her autonomy from England's vision of her. Unlike the predetermined resolution of romance, Sophie's odyssey of self-determination is suspended throughout the novel as a risk. As we shall see, no matter how we interpret the prologue's domestic scene, it is destabilized by the end of the novel and, in combination, prologue and conclusion produce a multivalent critical awareness involving interlocking relationships between colonial and domestic politics. Sophie's 'homesick' longing for Kashmir in the prologue, and the chaos her presence later instigates, become directly implicated in the colonizing domestic order Toby offers her.29 At the end of the novel, convinced she has recognized her 'mistakes' and learned to 'respect' the Kashmiri's 'own truth', Sophie takes off with her children to start anew once again, this time in Lebanon.30 Yet even if this concluding adventure is self-mocking, especially in relation to the domesticated prologue, it does leave Toby behind and asleep, suggesting that he embodies an idea as moribund as Britain's twohundred-year conviction that it was rescuing India from itself. Godden's trope of narrative time is particularly resonant here. For despite its decline over the course of the twentieth century, just as the Raj clung to the social codes and cultural attitudes celebrated by Queen Victoria's Jubilee, so Godden's modern setting paradoxically evokes the manners and morals of an earlier age. Sophie's temptation to find stability and safety in Toby's arms recalls the nineteenth-century 'ideology of the "lady"' which, according to Gail Finney, implies not only 'the passivity

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and desire for male approval associated with ladylikeness', but is 'antithetical to the creation of humor'.31 But as Godden's reversal of Once Upon a Time suggests, modernity, in the form of a woman's struggle against stability and safety, will also 'necessitate . . . [the] aggressiveness, satire, and ridicule, not niceness' that defines comedy.32 Sophie's aggressive quest for self-determination becomes the target of satire not because the novel judges her escape from a prescribed dependency as ridiculous, but because she thinks she's shedding the 'ideology of the "lady"' without noticing that it's attached to her position high above the Kashmiri villagers. The assumption of individuation and autonomy on which Sophie's self-determination is based still makes her the memsahib, obscuring those others on whom her quest depends for support and who are exploited without regard to their own subjectivity. Because the novel assumes that the social and cognitive spheres of colonial authority are self-enclosed and cannot critique Sophie's responses, Godden represents wisdom, as so often in her fiction, in a child.33 Of Sophie's two children - Moo, a small boy, and 8-year-old Teresa - it is the girl who activates dialogic tension with her mother. While Sophie chooses the 'helter-skelter' of India instead of 'forsak[ing] her life and end[ing] in Toby's Finstead', Teresa shapes her fate by raising insoucient questions and commenting archly on her mother's plans.34 'We shan't be poor whites/ she [Sophie] announced to Teresa. 'We shall be peasants.' The thought that they were not peasants did come into Sophie's mind, but she pushed it down. 'How shall we be peasants?' asked Teresa fearfully.35

While there is always humour, as Judy Little reminds us, in 'the inversion of the usual authority so that clowns mock kings'36 or children mock their elders and betters, the use of mockery also exposes the rhetorical structures of authority. Moreover, mockery only works as humour if its technique of parody captures the precise diction and tone of the powerful. Teresa's question is funny because inverting Sophie's definitive declaration into a question exposes the absurdity of their being either 'poor whites' or 'peasants' when, unlike the peasants of Kashmir, they have the option to return to genteel comfort. Teresa's question points out that not only can't they become peasants, but even to try performs a farce that will further mock the power invested in their political ability to choose roles. That such a choice is supported by their colonizing position is also linked by Teresa's question to another source of Sophie's power. It is as though Sophie's self-centred search for a new kind of woman's authority has blinded her to the power invested in her by her maternal role: one which the child must resist to locate her own sense of self. With the narrator's guidance, which supports the child's wisdom, the reader is invited to share the rebellious satire in Teresa's anxious question about the unforseen relationship between her mother's quest for independence

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and the condition of otherness. In its narrative pattern, Teresa's responses serve as an epistemological strategy. It deromanticizes the exotic mystery of otherness by identifying it as the construction of a colonizing project. What assuage the reader's anxieties, if not Teresa's, are the hints that selfdetermination for self and other is inconceivable so long as to 'Sophie [India's] strangeness was romance'.37 While the narrator's support of Teresa's suspicious questions guides the reader, the plot leaves the child to fend for herself. The radical isolation to which she is subjected is not merely the function of motherchild alienation, however, but of the political psychology of colonial relations. Just as Sophie cannot tolerate the child's challenge because it asserts an authority that reverses their roles, so she clings to her maternal imperative in relation to the Kashmiris; she constructs them as children who can't possibly know what's best for themselves. This maternalism is exposed as part of Sophie's self-delusion, in aligning her with those she accuses of colonial manipulation - the missionaries, who, for 'all their love and zeal. .. wanted to bend' the people they worked for.38 The comic irony of Sophie's anticolonial critique boomerangs when, instead of colonizing either Teresa or the Kashmiris, Sophie's maternal discourse becomes the identifiable enemy against which the unknowable other can wage a definitive rebellion. The Kashmiris mock Sophie's intentions to improve their lot by refusing to assimilate to her 'horrified' view of them and by connecting her vision to Toby's: 'They were mystified as to why she should worry' about their 'dirty habits'; 'This altruism made them uneasy.'39 Sophie's 'determinfation]' to teach the Kashmiris the ideology of selfless and mutual help implies a form of coercion that also recalls Toby's rescuing mission in the seductive power of its 'strange protective tenderness'.40 But just as Teresa's question undermines the governing power of Sophie's self-righteous rhetoric, so the Kashmiris find 'something corrupting in Sophie's new ideas': 'But - if everyone helps themselves, who will need all this help?' they ask of her.41 Parody as cultural critique

The interpretive effect of this question aligns Teresa with the Kashmiris and creates 'two texts within one: the parody itself and the parodied or target text: both present within the new text in a dialogical relationship'.42 While the 'target text' is Sophie's wilful naivete, the novel takes the risk that the instrument of parody may deflate itself. The developmental appropriateness of Teresa's naivete, that which marks her and her questions as cute, might also target the Kashmiris as cute natives, branding them as backward. However, Godden's depiction of the Kashmiris (whose sense of difference and blossoming anger resist the colonizer) parodies Sophie's assumption that she can know them and hence enfold them into her English domestic order, just as Toby would embrace her. Parallel to

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this parodic relationship, Teresa, like the Kashmiris, will struggle to free herself from the strings attached to maternal self-sacrifice; rather than affirm the conservative self-replication of maternal ideology and follow her mother's lessons, she destabilizes it by showing the absurdity of a woman searching for her own autonomy and oppressing another's subjectivity.43 Teresa chafes against Sophie's maternal pedagogy by noting, through a series of mocking questions, that her mother's choice of primer, The Wise Teacher, is too 'full of ideas'; teaching 'arithmetic in a new way, by clapping and hopping' drives the student-daughter to ask, 'Can't we learn it the old way by writing it in sums?'44 By mocking Sophie's authoritative voice, Teresa's old-fashioned preference exposes Sophie's progressivism as an oppressive form of control that in its reflection of colonial relations, is, in the novel's historical context, an anachronism. Supported by the intervention of the post-colonial moment, Teresa's nostalgia creates a critical space in which her own subjectivity can thrive. In contrast to Teresa's method, the servants learn to mimic Sophie's methods as a way of earning her approval and absorbing her power. Despite their differences, however, as child and servants appropriate maternal colonial power, they also use 'the one voice to subvert the other, [and] such parodic dialogizing functions as an emancipatory strategy'.45 This opposition of Teresa and the servants creates a different kind of risk for the novel's critique of colonialism in the way it addresses two questions central to postcolonial theory: 'can the subaltern speak?', or what kind of agency is possible in situations of extreme social inequality?46 The novel dramatizes this risk by mocking the Englishwoman's assumption that it is possible for her and the villagers to get to know and understand each other.47 Within the historical-political context of its 1953 publication, the success of this satire is based on the trust that, because the colonial discourse supporting Sophie's assumption is already discredited, she is an appropriate satiric target - no harm done now that the Empire is over. In turn, however, this trust suggests a critical perspective on the postcolonial question which not only assumes but demands integrity and authenticity for the speaking colonized subject. But nowhere in the postcolonial question is there to be found its cognate: integrity and authenticity for the speaking colonizing subject. If the cognate were present, it would then beg the question of how readers should respond to the possibility that the colonizing postcolonial subject is being caricatured, and in effect is a one-dimensional construction that in its essentialism mirrors that which is so disturbing when the subject is the colonized. The novel shapes our response through its conflicted relationship between Sophie and her Kashmiri servants. Sophie's conflation of a Victorian-sounding 'Servant troubles!' belies an indigenous, multicultural tension reflecting Kashmir's rule by a Hindu rajah over a largely Muslim population, a polity complicated by the internalized vision and presence of colonial power even after its departure.48 Nabir Dar, Dhilkusha's long

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time Muslim caretaker, and Sultan Sheikh, Sophie's Hindu servant, are not merely individual competitors for her affirmation, but scions of 'two chief village families whose 'bitter rivalry' formed the 'etiquette' of the political structure of the village long before a British presence.49 Despite its ubiquitous power, however, for Sophie, the rivalry is 'for so pitifully little . . . some of it was almost funny', that is, until the political balance is upset by Sophie's failure to recognize how situating herself as arbiter of the well-being of the village poisons it instead.50 Blaming Nabir for the cycle of petty crimes her arrogance has inspired leads to humiliating and driving him away, the effect of which shows the debilitating consequences of colonial ambivalence about its indirect rule. Failing to trust the local ethical and political ecology, which she had claimed to understand and even assimilate, Sophie creates a vulnerability the village had previously withstood. Without the presence of Nabir's meliorating effect, his rival Sultan is left with no mediator between his ambitions and Sophie's. Appropriating her illusory power and knowledge, Sultan sabotages her desire to make These people . . . my people', and in so doing, highlights the novel's mockery of Sophie, implying, in effect, the absurdity of colonial maternalism authenticating the integrity of the colonized.51 In his efforts to gain her sympathy, Sultan effects a parody of her 'alchemy'.52 That is, with the desperate logic of a colonized subject, he catalyses the dubious science of Sophie's herbal workshop and concocts a love potion out of a mix of her English recipe and his impoverished substitution of ground glass for the required pearls. In its mockery of the expropriating power of English knowledge and imperial trading practices, the potion turns out to be poisoned not just with Sultan's rage for affirmation. It is also poisoned by Sophie's attempt to impose British empirical rationality and the imperial order of its economic exploitation of the complicated commerce of village healing practices. The horrific and comic effect generated by this alternative medicine coalesces as the critical guide to the novel's anti-colonial politics. Sultan's love potion incites mood swings and erotic longing in Sophie, but the only sexual intimacy that results demonstrates how the power of her colonial maternalism feminizes the postcolonial manservant. Both Nabir, who is constructed along the lines of the stereotypical manly Muslim, and Sultan, as the effeminate Hindu, are rendered ineffectually passive-aggressive agents by Sophie's rule.53 And yet it is from within this frame of colonizing reference that these men assert their most effective threat and speak for themselves in a subversive discourse of their own. As the shock of their insurrection opens Sophie's eyes, she is forced to see how her power has turned them into a parodic reflection of herself and that she 'had turned into some sort of monster', in effect, as though she had poisoned herself.54 At the end of the novel, the indigenous beauty of Kashmir answers the postcolonial question by violating the postcolonizer's greatest fear. As Kashmir pronounces its irrevocable separateness

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and wholeness from Sophie's peripheral vision of it, the only authentic healing the postcolonial Englishwoman can represent is to leave.55 Olivia Manning's satire of imperial adventure

Olivia Manning's 1974 novel, The Rain Forest, depicts a very late departure of the British from an imaginary island colony off the coast of east Africa. Recalling, if not invoking E. M. Forster as the iconic British anti-colonial novelist, Manning's protagonists are the Fosters, an English couple who experience the emotional costs of their own irreconcilable relationship as they participate in the social and political dissolution of the British colonial service. The political underpinnings and consequences of these damaged relationships are woven into an intricate tapestry of tensions among the various communities inhabiting the island. Al-Bustan, once a key site of the Arab slave trade, now festers from political rivalries as the remaining Arab community, descendants of the African slaves, and formerly indentured Indians chafe against each other as well as the British who, in turn, are forced to realize that they are as alienated from their subjects as they are from modern Britain. Like Godden, Manning uses the tension created by cross-cultural dialogue to provide satiric glosses on the fate of the Empire and its constituents. Instead of focusing on individual character development, however, The Rain Forest depicts the foreclosed development of those who have come to Al-Bustan to find themselves as well as of those communities stunted by a sustained history of being colonized.56 Each individual and community offers a critically mocking commentary on the others' real, remembered and mythic pasts, as well as on the irreconcilable relationship to the colonial present and their ambitions for an independent future. The island's cyclical history of conquest and exploitation is so interwoven that it questions any definition and distinctiveness of indigenous, colonizing and settler peoples. Caught in this interweave are not only its longstanding Arab, Indian and African communities, but its shifting tide of colonial administrators, its South African, English and oil state speculators, and its drugged drop-outs from the West. The dynamic vibrancy that this mixture might represent is questioned, however, by Al-Bustan's 'mixed breeds' who 'suffer the abject humility of belonging to no tribe or race', yet who 'manage the plantations and [are] the government's most loyal supporters'.57 Instead of representing political heterogeneity or dynamism, this genetically multicultural profile has mutated into a political and economic standoff monitored impotently by a British colonial administration. These tensions are both complicated and sorted out in Manning's satire of each community's political ambitions as the imperatives of each are shown to be self-deluded and self-cancelling. Instead of representing viable, self-determining and progressive alternatives to British imperialism, none of these communities bodes well for any improvement over

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past or present oppressors. Taking no sides or prisoners, the novel assigns political responsibility for its ensuing violence to each community, and in so doing, destabilizes prevailing models of analysis that constitute colonizer and colonized as oppositional. Manning, who travelled and lived in Central Europe, the Balkans, and in Palestine and Egypt during the Second World War and afterwards, showed her keen powers of using satire to analyse social politics in the Balkan and Levant trilogies. Her work illustrates Gail Finney's 'ironic conclusion: for women to be humorous in a way that achieved large-scale recognition, they had to become involved with serious things'.58 Where Godden disguises her comedy through the perspective of the wise child who seeks the power of political knowledge, Manning's comedy derives from the perspective of adults' sustained ignorance. In turn, this ignorance serves as a defence against their complicity with the power of dominant political knowledge. Her protagonists, 'lost children', are in fact an English couple whose marriage had 'begun in love', but 'was breaking up in rivalry and discontent'.59 Like the inner workings of the colonial project, and like the contested relations it encourages, the tension between Hugh and Kristy Foster reflects an organic disorder that may be irreversible and insoluble. In its narrative cycle of bitterly disappointed hopefulness, this tension mocks the self-perceptions of both the colonized and latter-day colonial settlers, who are all portrayed as 'displaced persons' in an inconsequential colony of a latter-day and disintegrating Empire.60 For Hugh, Al-Bustan, which can mean a personal garden refuge in Arabic, offers 'sanctuary', but in a world where 'corruption was everywhere', it also provides a last chance to accommodate himself to success.61 Kristy is a writer whose candid observations won her cache in London but pariah status among the colonial wives, whose 'refrigeration of the will' represents a society that 'without service conventions . . . wouldn't know how to behave'.62 The Daisy, the cramped gilt and red embossed pension of lowerlevel British functionaries, mocks the exclusive design of a colonial enclave, especially as its strict enforcement of social hierarchies only highlights its clientele's hollow mimicry of authority and power. However ceremoniously they guard their imperial protocols, the group is lorded over by a Cockney proprietor and Akbar, her 'henchman', a 'pure-bred Nubian, directly descended from the blacks pictured in Queen Hatshepsu's tomb. On Al-Bustan, where blood is so mixed, he has the authority of pure breeding.'63 The novel underscores its mockery of both cultural supremacy and natural order by constructing the island as constantly shivering in its political and geological instability. Its persistent 'small earthquakes' reflect 'why, in this unreliable world, the English held to their conventions as their only certainties'.64 In her narration of the powerless and graceless end of Empire, Manning provides a mocking answer to Simon Gikandi's question: 'Why does the English nation, which derives its imperial authority from a certain claim to the universality of its values, nevertheless thrive on narratives that celebrate its exclusiveness?'63

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If the colonial settlement is represented as childish in its fierce and deluded attention to rules of engagement, the novel also satirizes the selfrighteous imperial perception of its subject peoples as children who have no capacity to understand the superior rules of Western logic and decorum. In another self-mocking setting in another community, the only shop in Al-Bustan's Medina with a 'western-style' plate glass window but no display, Kristy meets a disparate group of Muslim and Christian Arab young men, deeply engaged in unpacking the hidden agendas of imperial politics.66 In their ironic juxtaposition to each other and to the structures of colonialism, they also express passion for the kind of commercial development that represents the disastrous ecological consequences of colonialism. The object of their desire is anything 'high rise', an intended affront to the British policy of keeping them 'close to the ground' and therefore 'primitive'.67 This symbol of economic power and cultural prestige is not only a pun on the meaning of uprising as rebellion, but a parody of phallic power. In effect, the comic doubling exposes Manning's mockery of Western ideas about progress in the young men's mimicry of Western ideas about progress.68 Even with the most symmetrical satiric tapestry, this appropriation of a tacky Western construction could easily be seen as mocking the Arabs themselves. We see this happening, for example, in Evelyn Waugh's 1932 novel, Black Mischief, where even its cut-throat mockery of the British and French legations and the self-serving sympathy of British adventurer Basil Seal cannot ameliorate the viciously gross representation of its African island's Blacks. The rhetorical effect of Waugh's satire, 'rooted in rituals designed to reaffirm the continuity and stability of nature and/or society', is 'marked by a "deeply conservative ability to absorb and defuse emotions that threaten" . . . its reinscription of fixed, traditional gender roles and hierarchies of power'.69 Manning, by contrast, subverts colonial values by clarifying her critical stance through the analytical empathy of a discontented Englishwoman. Isolating her quest for regeneration from both her husband and the colonial enclave enables Kristy's observations to begin, like Sophie, with her 'liminal' position, where their 'annulled identity . . . expresses sometimes their freedom from the usual norms of behaviour':70 Their [the Arabs'] excitement, Kristy thought, was childish, yet they were not children. Their plans were daydreams but what else had they on this small island, stagnating, they felt, under British rule.'71 The critical corrective of this statement invites the reader to share the process of Kristy's understanding and to use it as a guide by which to reject the absolute certainty of the bureaucratic stereotyping of the colonial office. In contrast to its exclusionary policies and practices, Kristy ventures into building a critical community that includes the intervention of Dr Gopal, an Indian Hindu antique dealer (whose name recalls Forster's Dr Godpole). Speaking from a continuously shifting marginal position in the history of colonial relations, Gopal analyses the imperial policy that claims to be about the 'self-rule' of subject peoples, but precludes it by infantiliz-

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ing them: The British want power for the Africans? They say: "The Arabs are dead, the Africans not yet born." The British, who put down slavery, see the Africans as their children and so they have a pro-African policy/72 The novel's satire of colonial paternalism takes a bitter turn when it attacks the colonial regard of itself as a vigorous and vital progenitor of progressive civilization. After eleven years of marital decay, but 'roused' by their first night in the colonial enclave, the Fosters have brutal and angry sex, and as a result, Kristy becomes pregnant.73 Instead of relishing her fertility as a sign of new possibility, 'She felt resentful, believing that the foetus inside her was drawing the life from her.'74 The enervating signs and symptoms of Kristy's pregnancy ironically awaken her to the relationship between women's biological determination and their condition as colonial agents. Inspired by her own sense of depletion, she is at first 'enchanted' but then dismayed by a mother bird's 'assiduous devotion to the greedy beaks above', an instinct which, she realizes, has developed so that 'However you dress it up, we are tricked.'75 The narrative symbiosis here between biological and colonial drives for generation and continuity highlights the reliance of both on the same foundational principles. Like the traditional beliefs that perpetuate women's care-giving imperatives, colonial survival leads not only to exploitation but, in its relentless need for self-justification in a climate of contestation, colonialism depends on a rhetoric of maternal selflessness. The biological language of maternal instinct camouflages the self-sacrificing subjugation of both the fertile woman and the colonized subject by dressing them both up as indispensable. In Manning's construction of this project as a 'trick', the nature of the colonial mission of selflessness turns out to be selfeliminating. And so it is no surprise when Kristy miscarries her unborn child in a place that embodies the dead end of Empire. All of the novel's social, cultural and political hierarchies and divisions are shown to be equally self-perpetuating and self-defeating. As individual character development is enfolded into questioning the objectifying meanings of colonized and colonizer, the novel exposes a history of continuous destabilization, where claims for an authentic indigenous people who belong to the land and to whom the land belongs are also questioned. As Lorna Sage notes in her review of the novel, 'No one belongs: the Arabs came as traders, the Africans as slaves, the Indians as shopkeepers'.76 Each community, as though constructing indigenous legitimacy, exploits and demonizes the others, asserting an exclusivity that blinds it to the others' competing self-interested plans for dominance. That the only authenticity may lie in these rivalries is suggested by the island's topographical split. Towering twin peaks separate the populated side of Al-Bustan from the 'primeval' wilderness beyond, referred to as 'a place of ill-omen', as it was originally intended to frighten runaway slaves but is still felt to be a place of unknowable and unconquerable danger.77 Like the novel's depiction of the colonial project in relation to local conflicts, the peaks are parodic, self-cancelling images of phallic domina-

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tion. They recall E. M. Forster's 'abruptly, insanely' rising rocks of the Marabar Hills, but only to mock their suggestion of a 'violent male principle'.78 When Manning's peaks aren't disappearing into 'mist', they are overwhelmed by their own doubleness, suggesting an all-too-powerful maternal nurture - phallic breasts.79 The geological equivalent of the omnipresent past, with an aweinspiring presence that is all too easily reified as myth, the peaks cast shadows on both civilization and wilderness, as well as on independent plans for the future and narratives of origin and freedom. As a formidable deterrence to exploration, they also ensure that locating and identifying the idea and nature of the indigenous may be dangerous. To cross over to the other side, as did runaway slaves, could not ensure that they would discover either who they were or freedom - whether from their most recent oppression or from being imprisoned by and in fear of themselves and the outside world: 'Having escaped one set of tyrants, they would at once fit themselves out with another'.80 It is as though in their pact with each other, nature and culture have each been given the role of devil, and so the island's menacing topography can only mirror the selfdestructiveness of all who would construct a colonial landscape. This interpretation is offered by Simon Hobhouse, a doctor who opts out of treating colonial disorders but who is besotted with the rain forest's mysterious if dangerous order. As though his diagnosis foretells the island's fate, the novel climaxes with an explosion by Arab insurrectionists that destroys the government headquarters and most of its British officers. Hobhouse rescues Hugh from these colonial aftershocks but then subjects him to their mirror image in the rain forest. Their trek ends in disaster and ambiguity when the doctor succumbs to nature's deadly defence - an insect bite - and Hugh must find his own way back to the equally threatening anti-colonial offence. The end of the novel merges its satiric strands to show the folly of elevating the imperial adventure to science and anti-imperial violence to political romance. Imperialism and the rage for exploration are satirized as conjoined self-destructive efforts to impose British empiricism and political pragmatism on a system of island cultures that defies extant taxonomies of natural order and civilization and cultural and racial identity. From the beginning of British occupation through to its end, the definitions of moral and scientific principle and law that form its political infrastructure fail to make sense or order out of the complicated political history and living circumstances of Al-Bustan's people. In its own tensely dialogic constructions of competing island communities, Al-Bustan defies the Union Jack that is the hallmark of the British as an island of incontestable intellectual and political superiority. Moreover, it defies the inscription of mythic heroism in narratives of violent resistance and rebellion, as the disorder inherent in insurrectionist bloodletting betrays another kind of dead end.

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Conclusion

If Godden's paeon to E. M. Forster's ending finds ominous humour in colonial dissonance, the ending of The Rain Forest locates hope in the menacing comedy of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust.8* Manning's conclusion is clearly inspired by Waugh's, where the Englishman is trapped by a white man deranged by the illusion that he represents a civilizing mission. Irrevocably estranged from his wife, and mourning the death of his young son, Tony Last is lost, with no hope of rescue, in a rain forest, reading Dickens aloud to a mad scientist. With his mad scientistguide dead, Hugh Foster must find his way out of the rain forest and discover if, in the wake of Kristy's miscarriage and the end of Empire, there is an alternative narrative. In leaving their resolutions open to question and completion, but handicapped by cyclical waves of colonizing impulses, Godden and Manning rely on comedy not only to relieve the bleak possibility that even alternative narratives may be so afflicted, but as a regenerative force in itself. The self-mocking strategies of their colonial comedies place critical pressure on any sense of narrative inevitability and predisposition for the return of repressed imperialism in either domestic or political modernity. It is thus no accident that the postcolonial setting of Kingfishers Catch Fire is compromised but questioned by the relationship between the novel's representation of domestic colonization in the prologue and its gesture towards a liberatory ending, and that Manning's fictive Empire hangs on, even without a life-support system, until 1974, when in reality, East Africa had been celebrating its independence from Britain for eleven years. For these writers, if the transition to independence is possible, then, like the positions of their female protagonists, it too must be seen as liminal. Not only 'betwixt and between', these women are irresistibly torn between desiring the protective security of an order that becomes paradoxically liberatory, by supplying the terms and limits of knowledge and movement, and the urge to discover one's own limits and dangers. By extension, both novels suggest that the discursive opposition between colonizer and colonized is its own form of repression in denying the complicated and often collaborative relationship between colonial subjects. The danger in this repression is expressed in the plots that can only take place in a liminal space. Here, as Manning shows, Hugh may be set free from the imperial adventure but he will run headlong into the possibility that the newly liberated may, in their heady moment of power, repress their own shifting history of oppression and assume the identity of their oppressors. In this sense, the 'mimic man' also takes on new resonances. Just as Sultan and Sophie in Kingfishers Catch Fire almost lose themselves in their efforts to mimic the other, so the struggle against imperialism is fraught with the danger that the liberated will disappear into the violence that also identifies the oppressor. Even as violence may be conceived as

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the only means of liberation, as Godden and Manning show, what is ominously comic is that such mimicry will lead to a self-destructive end. Rather than imagining a self-perpetuating violence as the dead end of the burgeoning political consciousness of the colonial woman and colonized man, Godden and Manning use their devices of mimicry or doubling to create two subjects with open endings. Both novels gesture towards an alternative in the unsteady state of the colonized, and in Sophie's and Kristy's ultimately suspended positions. While it has been the postcolonial habit to criticize anti-colonial writers for either not representing or misrepresenting the colonized, Godden and Manning refuse to expropriate the fate of these subjects and instead leave them to take up their own story, to 'control their own Orient' as the colonizers depart.82 Their creative risk takes them in another direction. They invest critical political questions in female characters who as a result take responsibility not only for their own fates but for their participation in ending the Empire. Whether we read Godden's prologue as the end of Sophie's quest or the end of the novel as another beginning, whether Kristy will accept Hugh when he returns or remain isolated if he does not, the narrative insistence on these possibilities represents the hopefulness that issues from imagining that there must be alternatives to the dead ends of seemingly endless cycles of colonizing oppression and violence. Notes 1. Jenny Sharpe asserts that the anxiety of the colonizer appears as the 'threat of the dark rapist' and is a sign of 'a crisis in British authority [that] is managed through the circulation of the violated bodies of English women': Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 3, 4. Such a thesis does not, however, allow for stories of power contests that are not related to rape fantasies. 2. Ruth Roach Pierson, 'Introduction', in Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 1-20. She sees 'European bourgeoisie with its gender ideology of separate spheres' and its 'cult of domesticity' as interdependent with colonialism, p. 5. 3. Kenneth Ballhatchet notes that once Indians with Western education could 'compete successfully . . . The British could no longer assert their right to power on grounds of superior knowledge or intellect: instead they turned to arguments of racial superiority.' Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), p. 7. 4. Homi Bhabha, 'Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse', in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Staler (eds), Tensions of Empire (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998), pp. 153, 154. 5. Ibid., pp. 154, 155. Rosemary Marangoly George complicates the dynamic of mimicry in her assertion that colonizer and colonized collaborate in their shared history of colonialism; The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4. 6. See Paul Scott's novel Staying On (London, Heinemann, 1977). Simon Gikandi notes that 'the value' that is 'nullified' with 'the collapse of the empire' is the racism inherent in the imperial history that constitutes English identity; Maps of Englishness (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 70. While the term 'postcolonial' has spawned a growth industry of narratives and cultural criticism about empire coming home and writing back, little attention is paid to colonials who didn't necessarily choose to

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become postcolonial, and especially those in the unsettling space of being anti-imperial and calling a colony home. 7. In an interview with Kay Dick, Manning claimed that 'I haven't got a lot of imagination like Iris Murdoch: I write out of experience. I have no fantasy. I don't think anything I've experienced has ever been wasted.' Kay Dick, Friends and Friendship: Conversations and Reflections (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1974), p. 31. 8. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 146. 9. In her review of feminist approaches to the roles of white colonial women ('Gendering colonialism or colonising gender', Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 13, no. 1/2 (1990), pp. 105-15), Jane Haggis calls for studying the 'net of interaction' between white women and those 'of other social groups' in order 'to restore conflict, ambiguity and tragedy to the centre of historical process', pp. 114,115. Cooper and Stoler's interdisciplinary approach shows that 'the notion of the civilizing mission gave way after World War II to the notion of development, embodying in a subtler way the hierarchy that civilizing entailed', Tensions of Empire, p. 35. 10. George questions contested uses of 'colonial subject': 'Can one be subject to someone else and tied to one's own identity at the same time?', The Politics of Home, p. 25. Margaret Strobel sympathizes with 'those European women who tried to make a positive contribution in the colonies and . . . move beyond the ethnocentrism and sexism of their culture and period', European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991), p. ix. 11. Benita Parry, 'Materiality and mystification in A Passage to India', Novel, vol. 31, no. 2 (Spring 1998), pp. 174-94, argues that 'the perplexity with which [Forster's] novel reconfigures the distant, alien complex of cultures . . . signals an anxiety about the impasse of representation', p. 176. Her contrast of Forster's indirect 'aversion to empire' with even less critical 'contemporaneous' novels of 'manners' does not consider novels like Godden's, which though mild-mannered in its parody, depicts insurrection, not as a transcendent gesture, but as violently real. 12. Where Bhabha identifies 'figures of farce', and a self-reflexive 'comic turn' in subjecting colonial power to 'mimicry', Godden and Manning show colonizer and colonized mimicking each other in a 'farce' of respective self-deception and misappropriation; Bhabha, 'Of mimicry and man', p. 153. 13. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 103. 14. Gikandi raises the 'interpretive problem' of 'how to read the grand narrative of imperialism when it has lost its authority and legitimation?', Ibid., p. 32. 15. See Anne Chisholm, Rumer Godden: A Storyteller's Life (London, Macmillan, 1998); Jon and Rumer Godden, Two under the Indian Sun (London, Macmillan, 1966); Rumer Godden, A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep (New York, William Morrow, 1987); Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms (New York, William Morrow, 1989). 16. Judy Little, Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woo//, Spark, and Feminism (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 3. 17. Ibid., pp. 3, 4. 18. Ibid., p. 4. Gikandi shows a conceptual connection between women's comedy and colonial fictions: 'because of their liminality in the culture of empire . . . women writers came to read colonialism as ... a threat because it was a patriarchal affair in which women were excluded in the name of a stifling domestic ideology; it was an opportunity because it destabilized the very categories in which this ideology was formulated'; Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 121. 19. Ballhatchet notes that 'Like Eurasians, missionaries also occupied an ambiguous position on the margins of the social distance between the ruling race and the peoples of India'; Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj, p. 111. 20. Rumer Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire (Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 1994). 21. Ibid., Prologue. 22. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 364. 23. Judy Little, 'Humoring the sentence: women's dialogic comedy', in June Sochen (ed.), Women's Comic Visions (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 31.

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24. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (New York, Verso, 1992), argues that despite the popularity and 'high' female 'profile' of such 1980s films as Jewel in the Crown and Out of Africa, there 'has been little feminist cultural criticism', perhaps because it is assumed that British-made depictions of colonial society make them 'racist', p. 230. It may also be because their female characters challenge postcolonial assumptions that they are either solely victims or complicit with imperialist ideologies. 25. Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Prologue. 26. Ibid., p. 8. 27. Ibid., p. 215, Prologue, p. 225. 28. Ibid., p. 2. 29. George analyses how 'homesickness', the 'search for the location in which the self is at home is one of the primary projects of twentieth-century fiction in English'; George, The Politics of Home, p. 3. 30. Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 229. Until it became a French mandate after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, Lebanon was part of the Ottoman's province of greater Syria; as a national entity, its borders were established in 1923 by European powers at a conference in San Remo. 31. Gail Finney, 'Introduction: unity in difference?', in Gail Finney (ed.), Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (Langhorne PA, Gordon and Breach, 1994), p. 2. 32. Ibid. 33. See, for example, Breakfast with the Nikolides (Boston, Little, Brown, 1942), The Greengage Summer (London, Macmillan, 1958), The River (Boston, Little, Brown, 1946), The Peacock Spring (London, Macmillan, 1975). 34. Godden, Kingfishers Catch Fire, pp. 226, 30, 226. 35. Ibid., p. 31. 36. Little, Comedy, p. 2. 37. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 31. Sophie's romantic scripting of the colonized supports Suleri's contention that 'an anxious impulse' rendered 'colonized peoples . . . interpretable within the language of the colonizer' (Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992)), but the same cannot be claimed for all colonial women writers, as Godden's satire shows, p. 7. 38. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 229. 39. Ibid., p. 83. 40. Ibid., p. 111. 41. Ibid. 42. Lizabeth Paravisini and Carlos Yorio, 'Is it or isn't it? The duality of parodic detective fiction', in Earl F. Bargainnier (ed.), Comic Crime (Bowling Green, Ohio, Popular Press, 1987), p. 182. 43. Finney, 'Introduction', p. 11. 44. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 79. 45. Finney, 'Introduction', p. 8. 46. Gayatri C. Spivak, 'Can the subaltern speak?', in Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988). Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, Routledge, 1995), p. 140. 47. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 81. 48. Ibid., pp. 75, 9. 49. Ibid., pp. 37, 72, 127. 50. Ibid., p. 72. 51. Ibid., p. 42. 52. Ibid., p. 121. 53. Mrinalini Sinha, 'Giving masculinity a history', Gender and History, vol. 11, no. 3 (November 1999), pp. 445-60, notes how 'imperialist thinking' divides 'the so-called "manly" peoples of the Punjab and the North-West Frontier Provinces [from] the

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

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"effeminate" peoples of Bengal and the more "settled" regions of British India, or between virile Muslims and effeminate Hindus', p. 447. Kingfishers Catch Fire, p. 208. Sophie fits most of Ware's description of 'the Foolhardy' female British character in India - 'feminist inclinations . .. part of her unwillingness to conform', finding India fascinating, and bringing 'disastrous consequences both for herself and for her racial community', p. 232. But Sophie also defies the idea that India's 'exotic mysteries . . . repel her' with her honest if self-deluded desire to understand and work with the Kashmiris, p. 232. Manning also examines the enervating effects of colonialism on the character of British colonizers in her novels School for Love (London, Heinemann, 1951), set in wartime Jerusalem, and Artist among the Missing (London, Heinemann, 1949), set in Cairo. Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest (London, Heinemann, 1974), p. 24. Finney, 'Introduction', p. 3. The Rain Forest, pp. 6, 4. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 14,17. Ibid., pp. 11, 94. Ibid., p. 139. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, p. 50. The Rain Forest, p. 145. Ibid., pp. 148-9. Ibid. David McWhirter, 'Feminism/gender/comedy: Meredith, Woolf, and the reconfiguration of comic distance', in Gail Finney (ed.), Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (Langhorne PA, Gordon and Breach, 1994), p. 190. Little, Comedy, p. 3. The Rain Forest, p. 149. Ibid., pp. 148, 147. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., pp. 144-5. Lorna Sage, 'A nasty piece of work', London Observer (31 March 1974), p. 38. The Rain Forest, pp. 44, 50. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 137; Parry, 'Materiality and mystification', p. 179. The Rain Forest, p. 50. Ibid., p. 274. Norman Shrapnel sees The Rain Forest as 'a comedy without laughs, an elaborate practical joke ending in cries of pain'; 'Fashions of guilt and virtue', Manchester Guardian Weekly (4 May 1974), p. 21. Parry, 'Materiality and mystification', p. 185.

CHAPTER FOUR

James Morier and the oriental picaresque JAMES WATT

James Morier In 1895, three years before he became Viceroy of India, George Nathaniel Curzon contributed an introduction to the new Macmillan and Co. edition of James Morier's novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, first published in 1824. Morier's work was presented by Curzon as an enduring comedy, which depicted a likeable rogue or scoundrel - 'one part good fellow, and three parts knave' - struggling to prosper in a 'general atmosphere of cheerful rascality and fraud'.1 Curzon also made much larger claims about the continuing relevance of Hajji Baba, however, describing Morier as a 'professional satirist' who had depicted 'a Persian of the Persians', and thereby captured the essence of the country and its population.2 The demand for a reprint of Morier's novel, according to Curzon, was proof both of 'the intrinsic merit of the book as a contemporary portrait of Persian manners and life', and of 'the fidelity with which it continues to reflect the salient and unchanging characteristics of a singularly unchanging Oriental people'.3 Curzon underwrote this assessment of Hajji Baba with reference to his own experience: 'No one who has not sojourned in Persia', he wrote, 'can form any idea of the extent to which Hajji Baba is a picture of actual personages, and a record of veritable facts. It is no frolic of imaginative satire only; it is a historical document.'4 James Morier was born in Smyrna around 1780, the son of a Swiss merchant who worked as Consul for the Levant Company in Constantinople. Morier became a diplomatic envoy of the British government during his mid-twenties, and travelled extensively in the Near East. He is best known, though, for the novels that he wrote later in his life, such as Hajji Baba, Zohrab the Hostage (1832), and Ayesha, the Maid of Kars (1834). This chapter will focus primarily on Hajji Baba, along with its sequel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828), and it will examine the way that Morier employed the device of the wandering hero or picaro, already popularized in the period by Byron, as a means of surveying modern Persian society, and staging the contact between Persians and Europeans. Early nineteenth-century novels such as Thomas Hope's Anas-

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tasius, or, Memoirs of a Greek (1819), William Browne Hockley's Pandurang Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo (1826), and James Bailie Fraser's The Kuzzilbash: A Tale of Khorasan (1828) also dealt with the adventures of roguish heroes in the Levant, India, or the Middle East. Morier's Hajji Baba, however, was regarded by contemporary reviewers as a particularly memorable work, affording, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, an 'easy and humorous introduction' to the 'manners and customs . . . peculiar to the Persians'.5 Throughout the nineteenth century, and beyond, indeed, numerous readers described Hajji Baba as an authoritative depiction of Persia and its people, endorsing the claim of the racial theorist Count Gobineau that it was 'le livre le meilleur qui ait ete ecrit sur le temperament d'une nation asiatique'.6 Any account of the reception of Morier's work has to recognize, of course, that the 'knowledge' provided by Hajji Baba did not simply translate into imperial mastery. Hajji Baba nonetheless proved to be a remarkably enduring novel that was repeatedly seized upon as evidence of an essential and unchanging Persian character, and privileged as a source of information about the East in general.

Representations of Persia Awareness of Persia in eighteenth-century Britain was due partly at least to the long history of European travel in the region, and the growing commercial interests of the East India Company. Persia was also known to readers as a result of works of pseudo-travel such as Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721), and of 'oriental tales' such as John Hawkesworth's Almoran and Hamet (1761) or Frances Sheridan's The History of Nourjahad (1767). Montesquieu's work was arguably less interested in Persia than in Louis XIV's France, however, while 'Persia' in other eighteenth-century tales or romances served largely as a congenial setting for works that dealt in terms of abstract morality and the universal human condition. In other words, works of fiction in this period that were mainly or partly set in Persia paid little attention to accuracy or detail, and resorted instead to a register of exoticism - sultans, viziers, harem wives and eunuchs familiar from the many translations of the Arabian Nights, or collections such as Petis de la Croix's Persian and Turkish Tales. Towards the end of the century a more scholarly interest in the cultures of the East began to develop in tandem with the consolidation of East India Company rule in India, as writers such as Sir William Jones sought to make Eastern languages, literature and mythology more accessible to European readers. Knowledge of Persian for example, Jones claimed in 1771, would open up to readers 'a number of admirable works . . . by historians, philosophers, and poets'.7 Jones nonetheless tended to focus primarily on ancient or early medieval history, and interest in the present condition of Persia only began to compete for attention with its renowned cultural heritage after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798.

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The growing geopolitical importance of the Near and Middle East, allied to the sharp backlash against the scholarly enthusiasm for Eastern cultures, represented most famously by James Mill's The History of British India (1817), heightened the demand for more 'realistic' coverage of the region as a whole. As far as Persia is concerned, this imperative was reflected especially in the reception of Thomas Moore's poem Lalla Rookh; an Oriental Romance (1817). After noting that 'of late years the circumstances of the times have brought us into such familiarity with the Eastern continent', the British Review's critic, for example, registered his impatience with the way that Moore's apparent absorption in romance exoticism made him oblivious to the mundane realities of the East. Where 'groves and baths and fountains, and fruits and flowers, and sexual blandishments' provide 'the only or principal bliss or ambition or business of a people', the review claimed, 'there dirt and every disgusting impurity is sure to prevail, and there man tramples upon man'.8 Although the fashion for literary exoticism survived throughout the nineteenth century, many travellers to the region aligned themselves with this increasingly influential 'anti-romance' position, and sought to return the attention of the reader to what they represented as a more prosaic actuality. As James Bailie Eraser stated in the preface to his Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan (1825), 'the extreme degree of poverty, depravity, and weakness which characterize the country, are by no means understood'.9 'The Eastern tales that delighted our youth, describing scenes of wonder, voluptuousness, and inexhaustible riches', according to Eraser, had served 'to throw over the quarter of the globe an illusion of magic and magnificence'; so compelling is this aura, he claimed, that it can 'hardly fail to envelope [the East] for ever, unless dispelled by cold and accurate realities'.10 This distinction between romance and reality, past and present, informs all of Morier's writing. Like Eraser, Morier was involved with British diplomatic missions to Persia in the early nineteenth century. Whereas Eraser served the East India Company, Morier served the Crown, travelling with the embassies of Sir Harford Jones in 1807 and Sir Gore Ouseley in 1810, which sought to negotiate a treaty that would safeguard Britain's interests in the region, and in particular the overland route to India. Morier's first two published works, accounts of the travels he undertook while serving under Jones and Ouseley, intermittently refer to the state of the negotiations between Britain and the Shah, but are dominated by a casual and digressive commentary on the people of modern Persia and their customs and manners. While an influential Company servant such as Sir John Malcolm sometimes acknowledged the curbs on despotic rule, Morier's first Journey straightforwardly dismissed the recent political history of Persia as 'little else than a catalogue of the names of tyrants and usurpers, and a succession of murders, treacheries, and scenes of misery'.11 Taking this backdrop for granted, Morier's travelogues focus much more on the character of 'the Persian' under such an arbitrary government:

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the habitual despotism which the people are born to witness, familiarises them so much to every act of violence which may be inflicted on themselves or on others, that they view all events with equal indifference, and go in and out of prison, are bastinadoed, fined, and exposed to every ignominy, with an apathy which nothing but custom and fatalism could produce.12

In comparison with contemporaries such as Malcolm, Sir William Ouseley, or Sir Robert Ker Porter, Morier had relatively little to say about the ruins of Persepolis or the poetry of Firdawsi, Hafiz and Saadi. Instead, he frequently complained of 'a state of exile' in a country that supplied 'nothing to attach the heart'.13 'I am sick of Persia & every thing belonging to it', Morier wrote to his mother in 1812, 'and I don't think I shall ever have a wish to write again about it/14 The Adventures of HajjT Baba

Morier's two Journeys had already caused offence in Persia by the time that Hajji Baba was published, to the extent that the British Foreign Secretary George Canning was apparently warned in 1822 that Morier would not be welcome back in the country.15 Despite the claim of the letter cited above, however, Morier's first work of fiction returned (if indirectly) to the same ground of his experiences as a junior diplomat in Persia, and in particular to Sir Harford Jones's mission of 1807. Following the example set by Scott's Waverley novels, Hajji Baba begins with an Introductory Epistle, from the authorial surrogate 'Peregrine Persic' to the Swedish antiquary and orientalist 'the Rev Dr Fundgruben', a figure in the mould of Scott's Dryasdust. Persic recalls the excitement he felt on being 'appointed to fill an official situation in the suite of an ambassador' bound for Persia: 'that imaginary seat of Oriental splendour! that land of poets and roses! that cradle of mankind! that uncontaminated source of Eastern manners lay before me'. From the vantage point of experience, however, Persic explains that 'perhaps no country in the world less comes up to one's expectation than Persia, whether in the beauties of nature, or the riches and magnificence of its inhabitants'.16 After accentuating the distance between the romance and reality of Persia, Morier's editorial persona goes on to recount his chance encounter with the government agent Mirza Hajji Baba, recently returned from Britain. Hajji meets Persic's demand for a representative or typical figure: 'a pure Asiatic', 'a native Oriental', willing 'to write a full and detailed history of his own life'.17 Morier's novel offers itself as the first-person narrative of Hajji Baba, albeit supplemented with several embedded tales, and divested of 'the numerous repetitions, and the tone of exaggeration and hyperbole which pervade the compositions of the Easterns'.18 Beginning with an account of his modest origins as the son of a barber, Hajji goes on to reinvent himself in a wide range of roles, assuming at different times (among many other

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guises) the identity of a scribe, a water-carrier, a tobacco-seller, a pupil of the Shah's physician, an assistant to the chief executioner, a dervish, a merchant, and (finally) a member of a diplomatic mission to Britain. Though Hajji experiences what Morier's editorial persona describes as 'the vicissitudes which are sure to attend every Persian',19 there is no change or reform in his essential character. Hajji's narrative seems so aimless and meandering to the reader, as Patrick Brantlinger has claimed, since it all but tells the same story over and over again.20 All of Hajji's actions are informed by his determination to seize upon any chance of 'advancing myself in life',21 to the extent that early in the novel - after he has been taken prisoner by a Turcoman' tribe - he even helps to lead a raid on his native city of Ispahan. During his brief spell as an executioner, Hajji claims in mitigation to be the victim of a larger system of despotism, 'an atmosphere of violence and cruelty', that overpowers the will of the individual: 'I heard of nothing but of slitting noses, cutting off ears, putting out eyes, blowing up in mortars, chopping men in two, and baking them in ovens.' Immediately after attributing his conduct to 'the example of others', however, Hajji clearly accommodates himself to 'all the importance' of his new role: ' "In short, I am somebody now", said I to myself; "formerly I was one of the beaten, now I am one of the beaters".'22 The other Persian characters who figure in Hajji's narrative are similarly preoccupied with their personal advancement, to the exclusion of any larger concerns. As Curzon put it in his 1895 introduction, Morier's work is faithful to a society in which 'a despotic sovereign is the apex of a halfcivilised community of jealous and struggling slaves', and 'where the scullion of one day may be the grandee of the next'.23 Morier's novel depicts a situation where people submit to, and cringe before, the authority of the Shah - styled throughout as 'the Centre of the Universe' or 'the King of Kings' - but compete against each other to progress within the system that he heads. The Dervish Sefer, for example, avowedly exploits human 'weakness and credulity', relying upon his 'impudence' rather than his 'learning': By impudence I have been a prophet, by impudence I have wrought miracles, by impudence I have restored the dying to health - by impudence, in short, I lead a life of great ease, and am feared and respected by those who, like you, do not know what dervishes are.24

Later in the novel the Shah's physician refers to smallpox as 'a comfortable source of revenue', and therefore attempts to counter the efforts of a 'Frank', or European, doctor to promote vaccination: 'We cannot allow him to take the bread out of our mouths.'25 The absence of any alternative set of values is underlined by the fact that Hajji's mother even tries to deny him his inheritance, after the death of his father. Islam fails to provide a moral centre, meanwhile, since so many of the characters depicted fail to understand what their religion is meant to consist of, and

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only perform 'the mummery of five washings and prayings per day'26 for reasons of expediency. Hajji is unrivalled in his mimicry of devotion, to the extent that he is recognized as the 'model of a true believer'.27 Despite this reputation, though, Hajji at one point confesses 'an ignorance so profound, that I could scarcely give an account of what were the first principles of the Mohamedan faith';28 he admits at an early stage that he does not even merit the 'Hajji' prefix, since he has not made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Other characters, such as the merchant Osman Aga, privately consume alcohol even though they 'denounced eternal perdition to those who openly indulged in it';29 like the lawyer Mollah Nadan ('knows nothing'), the self-professed 'living Koran',30 many figures in Morier's work talk about fasting and penance even though their own bodies are 'portly and well-fed'.31 Persian society is characterized in Morier's novel, then, by an allpervasive, albeit frequently comic, corruption. Even as Hajji is made to expose this corruption from the inside, however, Morier's work also tells the story of his ultimate triumph within the system. Towards the end of the novel, Hajji makes exaggerated claims about his wealth and the standing of his family, in order to win the hand of 'Shekerleb, or Sugarlips',32 the widow of a Turkish Emir: alluding to his father's trade as a barber, for example, Hajji represents him as 'a man of great power', who 'took more men with impunity by the beard, than even the chief of the Wahabi himself'.33 This deception is inevitably exposed, and Hajji loses his wife, but in attempting to gain redress he makes contact with the influential figure of the Persian ambassador in Turkey, Mirza Firouz. The ambassador is not only 'wonderfully interested' and 'much amused'34 on hearing of Hajji's adventures, but he also recognizes Hajji as 'one who has seen the world and its business',35 and decides to employ him as an agent to gain information about the intentions of 'the rival dogs',36 Britain and France, competing for influence in early nineteenth-century Persia. Hajji is rewarded by Mirza Firouz, therefore, and Morier's work in effect celebrates the status of its hero as a rogue or scoundrel - or as 'one part good fellow, and three parts knave', to recall Curzon's phrase. Importantly, though, this conclusion also enables Morier to introduce Europeans into his work, and to offer a more authoritative outside perspective on Persian society. The Introductory Epistle written by 'Peregrine Persic' initially presents the opposition between 'the nations that wear the hat and those who wear the beard' as a primarily 'amusing' contrast.37 This contrast is sometimes developed at the level of appearance, as the members of the 'English' (not British) embassy in Persia are described as being 'disagreeably obstinate in their resolution of keeping to their own mode of attire',38 and unwilling to adapt to ceremonial custom. More commonly, though, 'the boundless difference' between the Persians and the English is described in terms of 'manners and sentiments'.39 In the course of Hajji's research into the character of the different national embassies in Persia, he comes to recognize that 'a certain tribe of

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infidels called Ingliz' are 'the most unaccountable people on earth'.40 Hajji is able to compare the French with his fellow Persians, stating that Napoleon is 'one whom we need not be ashamed to class with the Persian Nadir',41 and claiming in general 'to discern many points of similitude between them and ourselves'.42 (According to the Eclectic's review of Hajji Baba, indeed, the people of Persia were 'aptly termed the Frenchmen of Asia'.)43 The English, by contrast, are all but untranslatable since, as the Shah's grand vizier explains, 'they know not what a bribe means',44 and '[t]hey pretend to be actuated by no other principle than the good of their country . .. words without meaning to us'.45 Not only are the English said to be motivated by the alien notion of serving their own country, as the grand vizier states, but they also display what Hajji refers to as an 'extreme desire to do us good against our inclination'. Recounting the initial impact of the English towards the end of his narrative, Hajji claims that they put themselves to infinite trouble, and even did not refrain from expenses to secure their ends. They felt a great deal more for us than we did for ourselves; and what they could discover in us worthy of our love, we, who did not cease to revile them as unclean infidels, and as creatures doomed to eternal fires, we were quite at a loss to discover.46

Morier's retrospect on the British involvement in Persia in the early 1800s is, of course, a highly partial one. The British government recognized the strategic importance of Persia and, after the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, sought to forge a relationship with the Qajars that would guarantee the Persian defence of British interests in the region; in the words of Edward Ingram, the British 'expected . . . to defend the Indian Empire to the last Persian'.47 Whereas the apparent French ambition 'to conquer India from the English'48 is depicted in its most naked form, the nature of the English interest in Persia is represented in far more altruistic terms. Towards the end of the work, for example, an 'infidel doctor'49 insists that the 'blessing' of smallpox vaccination be spread to Persia, regardless of the cost, while the English ambassador proposes to offer the gift of 'a certain produce of the earth', the potato, that would similarly be 'of incalculable benefit to the people of Persia'.50 Not only does Morier's novel cast the English as benign and disinterested improvers, but it also makes little mention of any specific Persian agenda or negotiating position. The Qajars actively courted both the British and the French in this period, in an attempt to secure the military support to combat Russian incursions in the Caucasus. Yet according to the Shah's grand vizier in Morier's work, 'not one individual throughout the whole empire' understands the concept of 'the good of the country', 'much less would he work for it'.51 Instead of crediting the Persians with the capacity to consider their own interests, Morier represents them shamelessly exploiting the good will of the English ambassador and his party, studying only 'how to turn them to account'.52

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Hajji Baba in England This refusal to conceive of Persia as an equal negotiating partner is just as apparent in Hajjt Baba in England. Continuing where Hajji Baba left off, Morier's sequel is based upon Hajji's account of his role in Mirza Firouz's mission to Britain; the character of Mirza Firouz is modelled on Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, who travelled to Britain in 1809, seeking to secure the ratification of the Preliminary Treaty of Tehran. Abul Hassan's own journal frequently betrays his impatience with the speed of negotiations, and what he takes to be the British reluctance to commit to an agreement: 'spending my time sight-seeing in London only increased my discontent. I urged them to make every effort to repulse the Russians . . . and to expedite my return'.53 Rather than describe Mirza Firouz as the representative of Persian interests, however, Morier's work infantilizes him as a comic figure; Hajji Baba in England reintroduces Mirza Firouz to the reader as the author of a letter complaining about Morier's previous novel, in which he had briefly figured: I am offended with you, and not without reason. What for you write Hajji Baba, sir? King very angry, sir. I swear him you never write lies; but he say, yes - write. All people very angry with you, sir. That very bad book, sir. All lies, sir. Who tell you all these lies, sir? What for you not speak to me? Very bad business, sir.54

Morier cited this letter as an encouragement to write a sequel to Hajji Baba: a further corrective satire 'by which they [the Persians] may be led to reflect upon themselves as a nation'.55 Unlike earlier works of 'pseudotravel', such as Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World (1762), or picaresque narratives such as Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Hajji Baba in England shows very little interest in cultural comparison or dialogue. As the Oriental Herald's reviewer stated, Hajji simply lacks the authority or even intelligence to provide any criticism of English society: 'he is so very unattractive a mixture of knave, fool, and coward, that we have conceived an unmingled contempt towards him; and have no desire whatever to hear anything he may have to say'; the 'habits and institutions' of England 'must have been entirely beyond the scope of his comprehension'.56 In Morier's terms, the contact between Britons and Persians yields a benefit only to the latter: Touch but their vanity, and you attack their most vulnerable part. Let them see that they can be laughed at, you will make them angry. Reflection will succeed anger; and with reflection, who knows what changes may not be effected?'57 Hajji Baba is shown to relish his new status as chief secretary to Mirza Firouz: 'if any of my readers know what we Persians are, they will readily ascertain the reasons of exultation'.58 His confidence is quickly shaken, however, as the ignorance of the Persian party is repeatedly exposed. Hajji is sceptical when told that the world is round, for example, and the

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members of the embassy are shown to have little consciousness of what is beyond the borders of their own country: 'who amongst us knew where England was? Not a soul. All that we saw of sea and sky might be the country of the infidels, for aught we knew.'59 On arrival in England, Hajji is immediately consumed by awe and wonder, marvelling at everything from his experience of travel in a horse-drawn carriage to the fact that 'every body seemed to be on an equality in this strange country'.60 Company rule in India constitutes 'a miracle in government', but as Hajji concedes, 'we were in the country of miracles', where 'not a day - no, not an hour passed without our hearing or seeing something which all the grandfathers Persia ever had, or might have, had never even seen in a dream!'61 Though Hajji sometimes complains about 'the extraordinary ignorance of the English with respect to us and our religion',62 he plays throughout the role of a naive rather than a critical traveller. If Hajji is surprised to find out that there is no slavery in Britain, or that the rule of law prevails over Persian-style despotism, his English hosts nonetheless clearly understand Hajji and his fellow Persians, and humour the members of the embassy as if they were children. Mirza Firouz is told, for example, that the British have outgrown ceremony and 'etiquette', but that 'in consideration of your being Persians, and knowing no better, we do not hesitate in giving you as much of it as you please'.63 Only towards the end of the work do any of the Persians begin to acquire a 'mature' recognition of their national inferiority, as Mirza Firouz censures Mohammed Beg for his continuing faith in astrology: 'You have read only your own books, but see, these people have read both ours and theirs!'64 Crossing Turkey on a 'jaded mule',65 en route to Persia, Hajji is unable to avoid contrasting 'our present rate and mode of travelling to the extraordinary things which we had seen in England!';66 when asked by the Shah about how 'Frangistan' ranks with Persia, Hajji carefully replies that 'there can be no comparison'.67 Reception and influence

At the close of Hajji Baba in England, Mirza Firouz and Hajji Baba are shown finally coming to terms with what 'England' has to offer Persia. Morier sometimes signalled the potential for change in Persia by blaming the government for its betrayal of the people. 'In talent and natural capacity, the Persians are equal to any nation in the world', Morier stated in the introduction to Hajji Baba in England, and 'in good feeling and honesty, and in the higher qualities of man, they would be equally so, were their education and their government favourable to their growth'.68 After referring to this passage in his review of Hajji Baba in England, Sir Walter Scott argued that Morier was primarily concerned to bring about 'the illumination of Persia', by fixing 'the attention of the leading men of the nation on the leading faults of the national character'.69 Scott, like his

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friend Sir John Malcolm, accepted that the government of Persia was despotic, but - in line with the stadial theory of the Scottish Enlightenment - attributed this to the fact that Persia remained in the kind of feudal state that most European nations had left behind. Such a claim about the backwardness of Persia could still be made to underwrite assertions of an essential Western superiority, of course, but this incorporation of Persia into the universally applicable narrative of stadial development nonetheless meant that the Persians themselves were, in theory at least, credited with the ability to consider their own interests, and govern their own country. If Morier sometimes addressed the malign role of 'government', however, many readers appealed to his works as evidence that Persians were inherently unable to transform their own circumstances, and claimed that the 'faults of the national character' identified by Scott were all but permanent. For the Quarterly Review, for example, Hajji was not only an archetypal Persian but also a figure depicted against the static and timeless backdrop of 'every day eastern life', where 'the form of society continues changeless and imperishable, amidst the revolution of ages and the ruin of empires'.70 Similarly, according to the Eclectic Review, Morier presented an accurate picture of the 'unrelieved deformity' exhibited by 'a nation of slaves', a people so degraded that even 'their best apologist' concedes them to be 'thievish, selfish, venal, and incapable of any act of spontaneous generosity'.71 Although these readers of Morier's work showed little interest in physiological classification, the concept of 'national character' that they employed was clearly continuous with emergent ideas of race. Scott claimed that Persian national character was a unitary and knowable entity in his discussion of Hajji Baba, but the other reviewers cited above went further, and implied that this 'essence' was more or less immutable or permanent.72 James Bailie Eraser, whose cynical and embittered travel writing has already been quoted, listed the 'prominent features' of 'the Persian character' as 'falsehood and treachery in all their shapes, cunning and versatility, selfishness, avarice, and cowardice'. For Eraser, this analysis of national character was clearly more authoritative than a focus on institutions or forms of government as a means of explaining the state of modern Persia: 'let the facts and anecdotes recorded by Herbert, Chardin, Hanway, and others be examined, and the records of the reigns of Nadir Shah, Aga Mohamed Khan, and their successors; and then let it be judged whether the picture be just or otherwise'.73 Along with Morier and Eraser, many other writers of fiction in the period employed this language of typification. Identified by one reviewer as 'a palpable copy of Hajji Baba', William Browne Hockley's novel Pandumng Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo (1826), for example, participated in the large-scale reaction against 'eulogizers' of Hinduism by asserting that 'the Hindoo', 'from the rajah to the ryot', is 'ungrateful, insidious, cowardly, unfaithful, and revengeful'.74 Sir Henry Bartle Frere, in his 1873 preface to a reprint of Hockley's novel, recalled his gratitude to a friend

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who had recommended it to him, along with Morier's Hajji Baba and Eraser's The Kuzzilbash, as 'the only books he could find which gave any idea of what would now be called the inner life of orientals'.75 Frere used the evidence provided by Pandurang Hart as a means of gauging how far India had come under British rule, in 'recovering from a state of debasement which would shock any educated native at the present moment'.76 Whereas Hockley's novel was only of interest to Frere because of its 'substantially correct representations of the state of things in those provinces . .. two generations ago',77 writers on Persia in the late nineteenth century apparently continued to find Morier's work of more lasting relevance. Hajji Baba remained such a useful guide to the national character, as Curzon emphasized, since Persia ('of the East, most Eastern') seemed to have changed so little.78 Persia became, in effect, a 'semicolony' towards the end of the nineteenth century, but nonetheless avoided being completely absorbed into a British or Russian imperial system; if Persia was still a piece 'on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world', in Curzon's terms, the Persians themselves were 'as yet unawakened to the summons that is beating at their doors'.79 Other writers in the 1890s, besides Curzon, returned to Morier's novel as a reliable source of information on Persia and its peoples. According to Major-General Sir Frederic Goldsmid, who supervised the construction of telegraph lines across Persia in the 1870s, Hajji Baba was too realistic to be a satire, since 'there is nothing in it with which [the Persian reader] would be dissatisfied, or in which he would detect a moral lesson'.80 First-hand experience (the 'feel') of Persia, Goldsmid claimed, only served to confirm the accuracy of Morier's work: 'the more we understand of Persia and the Persians, the more keenly do we recognize the truthfulness and humour of this conception of the national character'.81 During the First World War, Hajji Baba seems to have provided another British General, L. C. Dunsterville (Kipling's Stalky), with his main resource for assessing the 'possible hostility of Persians' to a clandestine operation against German forces in the region. Though 'the inhabitants were well armed and strongly resented our intrusion', Dunsterville claimed, 'a study of Persian character in the world-famous book of "Haji Baba of Ispahan" led one to discount the dangers of this hostility'.82 Conclusion

The evidence considered above suggests that, in Edward Said's influential terms, Hajji Baba is a prime example of an 'orientalist' text, which produces the reality that it claims simply to describe, and grants an essentialized character to a people whose voices it refuses to credit. Even if Morier's novel seems remarkably confident in its judgement of Persia, any assessment of the cultural 'work' that it performed still needs to be complicated. Readers engaged with Hajji Baba in different ways, and sometimes

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appealed to their personal experience in order to dispute the authority that Morier's work had assumed. According to Sir Harford Jones, therefore, it would be wrong 'to estimate the national character of the Persians from the adventures of that fictitious persona [Hajji Baba]', since (as Morier occasionally acknowledged) 'the greater part of [the Persians'] vices originate in the vices of their Government'.83 In a recent study of intelligence gathering in British India, C. A. Bayly has argued that what we now think of as 'orientalist stereotypes' were often a reflection of how little was known about particular Eastern societies, functioning less as 'tools of epistemological conquest' than as 'conceptual fig-leaves to conceal desperate ignorance'.84 Rather than simply offering its readers the means to 'master' Persia, therefore, it should be recognized that the evidence provided by Hajji Baba ultimately led a figure such as Dunsterville to overlook the strength of feeling against the British in Persia, and to underestimate the indigenous forces of nationalism in the region.85 Even if we cannot take for granted here the conjunction of knowledge and power, the continuing influence of Hajji Baba nonetheless remains a phenomenon to be reckoned with.86 Hajji Baba clearly contributed to, and helped to popularize a fund of received ideas about the explanatory force of national types and essences. Equally important, Hajji Baba was often elevated above other available authorities - usurping their academic capital in the process - as a source of information about Persia, and sometimes the East in general. As Curzon claimed in his 1895 introduction, Morier's novel was a 'historical document', and its 'delineation of national customs' constituted 'an invaluable contribution to sociology'; despite its status as 'imaginative satire', Morier's work was even 'more truthful' than 'the more serious volumes of statesmen, travellers, and men of affairs'.87 Notes I am very grateful to Nigel Leask and Joanna de Groot for reading the first draft of this chapter. 1. James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, introd. George Curzon (London, Macmillan and Co., 1895), pp. x-xi, xii. 2. Ibid., pp. xiii, x. 3. Ibid., p. ix. 4. Ibid., p. xiv. 5. Sir Walter Scott, 'Review of The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan in England and The Kuzzilbash: A Tale ofKhomsan, Quarterly Review, 1829' (pp. 354-78) in loan Williams (ed.), Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 357. 6. Cited in Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, 'Orientals in picaresque: a chapter in the history of the Oriental tale in England', Cairo Studies in English 1961/62 (Cairo, 1962), p. 166. 7. Sir William Jones, A Grammar of the Persian Language (London, 1771), p. i. Persian remained the medium of official correspondence in British India until 1834. 8. Review of Lalla Rookh, The British Review, vol. 10 (1817) (pp. 30-54), pp. 31-2. Javed

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Majeed discusses the reception of Lalla Rookh, and emphasizes the anti-imperialist coordinates of Moore's poem, in Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (London, Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 93-107. 9. James Bailie Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, in the Years 1821 and 1822. Including some Account of the Countries to the north-east of Persia; with Remarks upon the National Character, Government, and Resources of that Kingdom (London, 1825), p. v. According to William Thackeray's traveller 'M. A. Titmarsh', 'The much-maligned Orient... has not been maligned near enough', Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by Way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople, and Jerusalem: Performed in the Steamers of the Peninsular and Oriental Company (London, 1846), p. 264. 10. Fraser, Narrative, p. 158. 11. See, for example, Sir John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia, from the Journals of a Traveller in the East, 2 vols (London, 1827), I, pp. 131-2; James Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, in the Years 1808 and 1809; in which is included, some Account of the Proceedings of His Majesty's Mission, under Sir Harford Jones, Bart. K. C. to the Court of Persia (London, 1812), p. xi. 12. Morier, Journey through Persia, p. 26. 13. James Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, between the Years 1810 and 1816. With a Journal of the Voyage by the Brazils and Bombay to the Persian Gulf. Together with an Account of the Proceedings of his Majesty's Embassy under His Excellency Sir Gore Ouseley, Bart. K. L. S. (London, 1818), p. 390. 14. See Henry McKenzie Johnston, Ottoman and Persian Odysseys: James Morier, Creator of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, and His Brothers (London, British Academic Press, 1998), p. 179. 15. Ibid., p. 200. 16. James Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, introd. C. W. Stewart (London, Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 5. Unspecified references are to this edition. 17. Ibid., p. 3. 18. Ibid., p. 13. 19. Ibid., p. 8. 20. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 144. 21. Hajji Baba, p. 87. 22. Ibid., p. 177. 23. Hajji Baba, introd. Curzon, p. xi. Gary Kelly offers an interesting reading of Hajji Baba as an attack on the effects of court culture and despotism in general; English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (London, Longman, 1989), pp. 214-20. 24. Hajji Baba, pp. 58-9. 25. Ibid., p. 98. 26. Ibid., p. 285. 27. Ibid., p. 260. 28. Ibid., p. 280. 29. Ibid., p. 18. 30. Ibid., p. 322. 31. Ibid., p. 321. 32. Ibid., p. 389. 33. Ibid., p. 393. 34. Ibid., p. 416. 35. Ibid., p. 419. 36. Ibid., p. 421. 37. Ibid., p. 13. 38. Ibid., p. 436. 39. Ibid., p. 437. 40. Ibid., p. 425.

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41. Ibid., p. 426. 42. Ibid., p. 433. 43. Review of The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan, Eclectic Review, vol. 21, April 1824 (pp. 341-55), p. 342. 44. Hajji Baba, p. 440. 45. Ibid., p. 441. 46. Ibid., p. 442. 47. Edward Ingram, Britain's Persian Connection 1798-1828: Prelude to the Great Game in Asia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 2. 48. Hajji Baba, p. 431. 49. Ibid., p. 443. 50. Ibid., p. 444. 51. Ibid., p. 441. 52. /bid., p. 442. 53. Abul Hassan Khan, A Persian at the Court of King George 1809-10: The Journal ofMirza Abul Hassan Khan, trans, and ed. Margaret Morris Cloake, introd. Denis Wright (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1988), p. 64. It is sometimes claimed that Morier based Hajji Baba, rather than Mirza Firouz, on Abul Hassan. Probably the most famous Persian to visit Britain in this period was Abu Talib Ibn Muhammad Khan Isfahani, whose Travels, sometimes critical of British society, were translated from Persian into English by Charles Stewart in 1810. 54. James Morier, The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan in England, 2 vols (London, 1828), I, p. xvii. Future references are to this edition. Marziah Gail has claimed that this letter was modelled on one that Morier received from the historical figure of Mirza Abul Hassan; Persia and the Victorians (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1951), p. 75. 55. Hajji Baba in England, I, p. xxii. 56. Review of The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan in England, Oriental Herald (1828) (pp. 451-66), p. 465. 57. Hajji Baba in England, I, p. xxii. 58. Ibid., I, p. 4. 59. Ibid., I, p. 106. 60. Ibid., I, p. 202. 61. Ibid., I, p. 268. 62. Ibid., II, p. 315. 63. Ibid., I, p. 246. 64. Ibid., II, p. 128. 65. Ibid., II, p. 330. 66. Ibid., II, p. 331. 67. Ibid., II, p. 340. 68. Ibid., 1, p. xxiii. 69. Sir Walter Scott, 'Review of Hajji Baba in England' in loan Williams (ed.), Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 361. 70. Review of Hajji Baba, Quarterly Review, vol. 30, Oct. 1823 (pp. 199-216), p. 201. 71. Review of Hajji Baba, Eclectic Review, vol. 21, April 1824, p. 342. 72. My discussion of the intertwined concepts of race, culture and national character owes a great deal to Nicholas Thomas's Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994), especially chapter three: 'From past to present: colonial epochs, agents, and locations', pp. 66-104. For a brief, 'exceptionalist' account of the British character, see Morier's first journey through Persia (1812): Morier represents himself explaining to the 'First Minister' of Tabriz that British naval superiority over the French 'consisted not in the ships, but, by the blessing of God, in the men that were in them', p. 283. 73. Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, pp. 174-5. Eraser's assessment of modern Persia seems, in part at least, to have been conditioned by his disillusionment with the

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75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

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JAMES WATT Persian reaction to British overtures: 'they do not appear sensible of the high importance of British influence to their most vital interests', p. 232. Review of William Browne Hockley, The Zenana; or a Nuwab's Leisure Hours, Monthly Review, April 1827 (pp. 166-72), p. 166. William Browne Hockley, Pandurang Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo, 3 vols (London, 1826), I, p. xiv. Morier's contemporaries are briefly discussed in Frances Mannsaker's interesting essay, 'Elegancy and wildness: reflections of the East in the eighteenth-century imagination', in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 175-95. William Browne Hockley, Pandurang Han, or Memoirs of a Hindoo, introd. Sir Henry Bartle E. Frere, 2 vols (London, Henry S. King & Co., 1873), I, p. v. Ibid., I, pp. vii-viii. Ibid., I, p. vii. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), p. 12. For the 'semicolony' status of Persia, see Nikki Keddie and Mehrdad Amanat, 'Iran under the later Qajars, 1848-1922', in Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) (pp. 174-212), p. 181. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, pp. 3-4, 12. Curzon's account of a changeless Persia can be read, like Eraser's (quoted above), as a symptom of frustration at the British failure to exert a decisive influence over the region. James Morier, The Adventures ofHajji Baba of Ispahan, introd. Major-General Sir Frederic Goldsmid (London, Lawrence & Bullen, 1897), p. xx. Ibid., p. xxiii. Major-General L. C. Dunsterville, The Adventures of Dunsterforce (London, Edward Arnold, 1920), p. 13. Cited in Gail, Persia and the Victorians, p. 63. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in British India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 52. Modernizers in late nineteenth-century Persia even made use of a reworked version of Hajjt Baba, translated into Farsi. According to Peter Avery, reformists accepted Morier's novel as 'a political satire' - 'at least until it became known that it was not the invention of a compatriot but originated from what they regarded as an English author's skit on their ways'; 'Printing, the Press and literature in modern Persia', The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7 (pp. 815-69), p. 863. In the foreword to Henry McKenzie Johnston's 1998 biography of Morier, a former British Ambassador to Iran, Sir Denis Wright, endorses Curzon's verdict on Hajjl Baba's status as 'a penetrating study of Persian character and manners'; Ottoman and Persian Odysseys, p. xiii. Hajji Baba, introd. Curzon, p. xiv.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cubans on the moon, and other imagined communities JILL LANE

iNo hay libertad en la tierra! iVan a buscarla en el cielo! Raimundo Cabrera, Del parque a la luna

Blackface Cuba There is no liberty on earth! They search for it in the sky!' says a character from the Cuban writer Raimundo Cabrera's hit play, From the Park to the Moon.1 This biting political satire, staged for popular audiences in Cuba in 1888, suggests that during the years of struggle for independence from Spain, Cubans would be more likely to find social and civic freedom on the moon than under the heavy hand of Spanish colonial bureaucratic authority - promises for reform simply not withstanding. The play forms part of a popular, revue-style theatre genre known as the teatro bufo, which combined short comic plays, original popular music and participatory social dance. The genre's popularity coincided with the island's protracted struggle for independence from Spain in the years marked by the beginning of the first war in 1868 to the end of the last in 1898. As will be argued in this chapter, the teatro bufo provided an important social space in which to imagine and articulate the as-yet-unrealized nation of Cuba for the predominantly white and pro-independence criollo (Cuban-born) class that, over time, developed such anti-colonial and nationalist identifications.2 Put another way, the teatro bufo provided the space for a class aspiring toward dominant power to practise, again and again, their imagination of possible and desired Cuban futures. Racial impersonation proved to be an important trope within that developing imagination. The bufos not only made constant recourse to blackface in representing black or African stage characters, but the teatro

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bufo as a whole showed a persistent, near obsessive concern with the place and meaning of 'Africanness' and 'blackness' in Cuba's evolving public culture. The teatro bufo became famous for developing a range of dance and music forms which combined, appropriated and reinvented Spanish and African musical styles, rhythm, choreography and instrumentation in increasingly complex and innovative mixtures; the lively guaracha and later, the erotic danzon, were signatures of the genre. Through its wealth of original short plays, the teatro bufo similarly developed a repertoire of well-known stock 'black' characters, the comic negrito or 'little black' being by far the most prevalent. The negrito took on many forms over the years, beginning as doltish African-born slave or bozal in popular writing and performance as early as the 1840s. The figure was later reincarnated into a wide range of free urban black figures, including the negro catedrdtico or black 'professor', the black aristocrat, the black professional and the black citizen, as well as a range of black urban criminal 'street' types, such as the negro cheche, the negro de manglar, the ndnigo, and so on.3 After the first war of independence, the negrito was joined by the mulata, an equally contrived stage figure that engaged a growing fascination with miscegenation, and ultimately came to embody the special erotics of Cuban racial and cultural mixing, or mestizo.)'e. What each of these elements shared in common is a pleasurable indulgence by white actors and audiences in racial (and frequently racist) impersonation: dancing 'African' rhythms, singing ostensibly 'black' street songs, or enacting 'black' characters in blackface was, apparently, an especially pleasurable and - somehow - a specially productive experience for the predominantly white criollo audiences who patronized this theatre. However, these elements claimed to share in common something well beyond the exotic or erotic charge of cross-racial contact. Publicity, press reviews and other published remarks, along with meta-commentary in the plays themselves, repeatedly characterized the teatro bufo as a specially 'Cuban' genre, whose varied 'black' and mulatto features offered special and unique insight into 'Cuban' - not black, not African - life, customs and sensibility. Each of these elements staged an appeal to recognizably 'Cuban' forms and images, at a time when the status of 'Cuba' as a viable national or cultural entity was the source of acute civil tension and, in 1868 and again in 1895, the grounds for war. Throughout the period, the teatro bufo thus took on a special and frequently dangerous burden of producing a palpable and persuasive sense of cubania (Cubanness), usually in opposition to the 'Spanish' or 'peninsular', with frequent anti-colonial and proto-nationalist investments. In its particular use of blackface, the teatro bufo became a primary site for the imagination of cubania as a racialized national identity. The question that this genre raises is not why blackness or Africanness ultimately became an integral part of the Cuban national imagination given the demographic weight of Africans in Cuban society and the overwhelming wealth of African cultural values and social practices, it is

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no surprise at all that African culture commands a privileged place in Cuban culture. Rather, taking into account the deeply vexed political and social reality of slavery (existing until 1886), racial inequality and white racial panic throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the question is, rather, why did white Cubans, who were otherwise beneficiaries of slavery, segregation and other racial privileges, take such an active part in cultivating a sense of 'blackness' and 'Africanness' in the process of developing their own anti-colonial sentiment and national identity - an identity which, in the minds of many white patriots, did not initially include black citizens at all? Attention to why and how racial impersonation came to serve as a crucial mode for the imagination of a newly emerging national community will guide the discussion that follows. Cartographic fantasy, or bufos in Africa

In 1882, the teatro bufo's prolific author, Ignacio Saragacha, wrote a remarkable little play - arguably one of the most significant in the entire bufo repertoire - entitled Bufos en Africa (Bufos in Africa). The play is a meta-theatrical reflection on the teatro bufo itself, featuring all of the major bufo actors of the day, at that time all forming part of the company known as the 'Bufos de Salas' or the bufo company run by director/actor Miguel Salas. Miguel Mellado, Saturnino Valverde, Isabel Velazco, Carmen del Valle, Lolita and Ventura Rosello, Joaquin Robreno, along with Miguel Salas are all cast as themselves in the piece. The opening finds the company rehearsing another play, El ultimo mono (The Last Monkey) at the Teatro Albisu, one of the primary venues for bufo performance in Havana and where, indeed, the play Bufos en Africa may have premiered.4 Miguel Salas arrives late to the rehearsal with the news that a major theatre impresario in Madrid, Miguel Arderius, has invited the company to perform in the Spanish capital. This particular invitation is notable, since Arderius was the producer of an earlier Spanish company, the Bufos Madrilenos, who toured Havana in 1866, and proved to be one source of inspiration for the first Cuban bufo company, the Bufos Habaneros, back in 1868. When Saragacha imagines that Arderius would invite the Bufos de Salas back to Madrid, it is in part an anti-colonial fantasy of the colonial 'copy' meeting, challenging and surpassing its peninsular 'original'. Thus the actors set out to take their blackface act 'back' to Spain the seat of colonial power - where they will have the opportunity to demonstrate their singularity, difference, and perhaps superior talent in relation to the metropole. However, Saragacha does not allow the bufos to fulfil this anti-colonial fantasy: in Act Two of this transatlantic misadventure, the actors are instead shipwrecked on the shores of a remote and decidedly savage Africa. The teatro bufo company is thus sent 'back' to the other 'source' of

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its own blackface performance, falling captive to the very Africans whom they otherwise impersonate, mock and abuse. As it turns out, the bufos are captured in blackface, since they had been performing on deck for the ship's crew when the storm rose. While Saturnino Valverde's costume cross-dressed and blacked up as a comic black woman - seduces the Africans into thinking he is a real woman, the rest of the bufos' use of blackface only further provokes the ire of the Africans. Identifying them as Cuban, the head of the tribe (now played by Mellado) sees an opportunity for revenge: his own father was captured and now lives as a slave in Cuba. The Africans thus hold the actors responsible for the mistreatment and abuse of their fellow Africans in Cuba, both in and out of the theatre. As punishment, the avenging Africans throw all the blackface actors in a pot for that evening's dinner. What, we might ask, are these bufos doing in (and with) Africa - not only in this play, but throughout the period of anti-colonial struggle with which the bufo genre coincides? In such plays, the teatro bufo proposed and then energetically rehearsed and revised - a complex imagined geography, one which mapped the literal, cultural and social terrain between Africa, Cuba and Spain in an ongoing effort to articulate, celebrate and direct a developing sense of national belonging. Bufos en Africa illuminates a key strategy of this theatre to which I will lend particular attention here: a trope I call cartographic fantasy, in which plays make recourse to unreal, imagined geographies in order to better delineate and re-imagine a 'real' space or locale. Reference to geographic places outside Cuba enters the teatro bufo after the first war of independence, and was increasingly used as a plot scenario thereafter. Francisco Fernandez's 1879 play, La fundacion de un periodico o Los negros periodistas (The Founding of a Newspaper, or The Black Reporters), for example, responds to Fernandez's own experience of exile during the war. The comedy is set in New York, a favoured destination for Cuban exiles, but in the place of an exiled revolutionary we find a Cuban slave who has won the lottery and decides to establish a black newspaper in the northern city; the play finds its humour (and its racism) in the constant failures of the ex-slave to perform his new role as journalist 'properly'. By the 1890s, recourse to imagined travel, particularly to Africa and the African Caribbean diaspora, became a persistent plot device, represented by such plays as Cacia's Los Africanitos (The Little Africans, 1895), which focused on political corruption in the 'African' town of 'Magarabomba', Alfredo Piloto's Un Matrimonio en Haiti (A Wedding in Haiti, 1893) and Del infierno a la gloria, viaje fantdstico-comico-lirico (Fro Hell to Glory, a Fantastic-Comic-Lyric Voyage, 1897), Vincente Pardo y Suarez's Los principes del Congo (The Princes of the Congo, 1897), as well as his very popular 1896 play El Sultan de Mayan o El mono tiene rabia (The Sultan of Mayari or The Monkey has Rabies). The cartographic fantasies in these plays map and re-map the coordinates of national belonging in deceptively literal ways: as we shall

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see, the trope is fascinating not because it refers to 'actual' places, but because it devotes so much energy to marking out the ideological space which itself allows one to imagine or re-imagine 'real' places, like Africa and especially Cuba, to begin with. Central to the teatro bufo's representational economy was its practice of defining Cuba in the terms of its 'others' - both its internal others (Africans, slaves, black Cubans) and its external other (Spain as a colonizing power). Fantastic cartography takes this tendency and gives it a location, providing geographic correlatives to the social, racial and national co-ordinates of Cuban life. Edward Soja reminds us that 'representations of space in social thought cannot be understood as projections of modes of thinking hypothetically independent of socio-material conditions'.5 The engagement with geography necessitates an engagement with history: to send Cubans 'back' to Africa or Spain rewrites the historic circum-Atlantic movement of Spanish and African peoples to Cuba in the first place. Fantastic cartographies allow for new, unexpected ways of mapping the relation of these 'others' to Cuba that speak to the complex struggle for power facing white criollos in their social life. Communities, imagined and fantasized

In an important remembrance of the teatro bufo from 1946, the Cuban essayist and playwright Federico Villoch illustrates the complexity of this developing national imagination. He recalls the era of the Bufos de Salas, when he himself was an eager young patriot and aspiring playwright, as one in which 'el alma criolla se expansionaba . . . hasta lo indecible oyendo sus guarachas y sus canciones, y riendose hasta perder el aliento con sus dicharachos y chistes de sus tipos populares' (the criollo soul expanded beyond description hearing its own guarachas and its songs, and laughing until out of breath with its own word-plays and jokes from its popular characters). For the first time in social memory, he notes, Havana was home to 'un teatro lleno todas las noches de bote en bote meses y meses' (a theatre chock-full every night, month after month). For Villoch, the teatro bufo evokes deep affection precisely because it evoked a feeling of national community. He recalls: la honda emocion que estremecia al publico apenas se hacia en escena la mas ligera alusion al ideal de independencia; los estruendosos aplausos que se le tributaba apenas aparecia un tribune popular en el teatro; el regocijo que se experimentaba viendo en escena un bohio, una carreta cargada de cana. the deep emotion that shook the public at the slightest allusion on stage to the ideal of independence; the thundering applause bestowed upon popular orators at their mere appearance in the theatre; the joy one experienced seeing a bohio [a rural palm hut] on stage, or an oxcart filled with sugarcane.

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In a remarkable formulation, Villoch says that his generation remembers the teatro bufo 'con mas fijeza y carino siendo como un adelanto a cuenta de Cuba Libre. ..' (with more clarity and affection as an advance credit on Free Cuba, emphasis mine). To forget the teatro bufo 'seria olvidarse de ellos mismos' (would be tantamount to forgetting themselves).6 Here the teatro bufo's imaginative re-combination of topical jokes, fictional sugar plantations and real political figures, along with intoxicating music and dance, creates a palpable experience of national community and national identity - but one that is nonetheless decidedly virtual, not yet real, a veritable 'credit' against the Free Cuba yet to come. Villoch suggests that there is a fundamental relationship between the fantastic imaginings of this theatre and Cuba's developing 'imagined community'. Indeed, he later claims that in these critical years between the wars of independence - which saw the emergence of what Nancy Fraser would call a 'counter-public sphere'7 in Cuba, marked by increasing anti-colonial activism on legal, political and military fronts - 'los bufos hicieron tanto por el ideal cubano, como los mas elocuentes oradores y habiles politicos de aquella epoca' (the bufos did as much for the ideal of Cuba as the most eloquent orators or able politicians of the day).8 But how is it, exactly, that blackface Cubans in a pot in Africa inspire the affection and deep 'national longing' (in Timothy Brennan's phrase)9 that Villoch describes? That racist jokes interpellate Villoch into the field of the nation-in-formation? Villoch's essay suggests an implicit relation between imaginary geographies and the making of 'real' national space. Put another way, these performances illuminate the relation between a theatrical imagination and recent invocations of the social imagination, so prevalent in the aftermath of Benedict Anderson's seminal work on 'imagined communities' as the fundamental structure of national identification.10 Writing after Anderson, Arjun Appadurai finds the practices of the imagination central to the formation of any social imaginary, which he defines as 'the landscape of collective aspirations'.11 Fantastic travel away from Cuba in Bufos en Africa and similar plays evoked precisely this landscape of collective aspiration. Audiences did not so much learn the intellectual contours of patriotism, or feel an explicitly politicized need for independence, but rather, the plays, music and dance allowed them to grasp and begin to shape a fundamental desire for national belonging itself. To borrow a formulation out of context from Slavoj Zizek, fantasy's primary accomplishment goes much further than conjuring an image or a hallucinatory fulfilment of desire; 'fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates, that is, it literally "teaches us how to desire" '.12 It maps the very place and logic of the desiring imagination. Through fantastic cartographies, criollos like Villoch studiously imagined fantastic alternatives to their racially segregated and still-colonial society. Existing social geographies of nation, class and race were temporarily suspended, rearranged and replaced with fantastic alternatives: in

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the teatro bufo it might be possible for Cuban actors to be featured in the great theatres of the colonial metropole; it might be possible for 'savage' Africans to judge the moral conduct of white Cubans. Fantasy becomes a staging ground for social change, but - we should beware - it is not because the fantasies harbour an explicit social critique, as though each carried a secret, serious message for its chosen audience. These fantasies do not hide political allegories or cloak images of more desirable social futures from a colonial censor or political authority. Rather, it is precisely the indulgence in what was otherwise seen to be patently ludicrous that began to open the imagination to other possibilities. These fantasies may function as what Zizek calls an 'empty gesture': an offer 'which is meant to be rejected', a necessary, but false opportunity to choose the impossible. In this view, the avenging African is the empty gesture towards the fantasy of racial and social justice in mid-century Cuba; the system allows us to imagine the possibility that an African could judge his captors or abusers, but only so that the African's ludicrous persona can itself more forcefully re-instantiate the existing ideological rule that Africans not only do not have recourse to such justice, but that it is really not merited in the first place. To maintain what Zizek calls 'the phantasmic support of the public symbolic order', the ideological system must allow for choices 'which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rule is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system'.13 But this operation is also what makes an ideological system vulnerable. The lesson of the 'empty gesture' is that sometimes the subversive course of action is, again in Zizek's terms, not to 'disregard the explicit letter of the Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick this letter against the fantasy which sustains it'14 (emphasis original). A figure like the blackface African offers the chance to take the fantasy seriously, to find in its ludicrousness something compelling and worth retaining. In blackface comedies, what is retained is not, finally, recourse to racial justice or even an overt commitment to black Cuba; rather, what is retained is the otherwise elusive sense of 'Cubanness' that is evoked and given shape through these theatrical forms. By indulging anti-colonial fantasies too long and too often, proto-national Cubans begin to accept the symbolic empty gesture and thereby begin to upset, however subtly, the symbolic order that demanded the gesture's refusal. Here we begin to glimpse what Zizek calls the 'radical ambiguity of fantasy within an ideological space'. It maintains a false opening which actually limits the range of available social choices, at the same time that the presence of that false choice evokes the alternate social choices that have thereby been repressed. In its vivid engagement with issues of nation, race and anti-colonial sentiment, the teatro bufo thus became a prime site for the production of ideological space itself. As such, it offers a keen example of what Arjun Appadurai calls the imagination as social practice, with emphasis on the

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multiple nuances of the word 'practice'.15 As a primary site for the formation of national community and Cuban public sphere, the teatro bufo engages the dialectical relation between practice as rehearsal and practice as realization. Between the rehearsal and the realization, we find the infinitely complex process whereby the social is imagined and becomes real. It is the process by which, as Michael Taussig puts it, the real is 'really made up'.16 This intersection between rehearsal and realization also happens to be the crucial and difficult conjuncture between performance and performativity itself: between the really made up and the made up real. Illuminating just a fraction of this process, in the teatro bufo we find an imagination of Cuba that is, as it were, making its bid for the real. Along the way, the history of the teatro bufo may illuminate how notions of race and racism organize not simply the shape of national communities, but one's embodied sense of the real itself. Cubans on the moon: travestied imagination

The master of fantastic cartography was, without question, the political satirist Raimundo Cabrera, who sent his imagined Cubans not to Africa but to the moon in his 1888 play Del parque a la luna (From the Park to the Moon). The play is one of the finest in the teatro bufo repertoire, and launched Cabrera to well-deserved fame as a playwright. Del parque a la luna follows the interspatial exploits of a host of disgruntled Cubans whose unhappy life in the Cuban colony prompts them to take advantage of the latest electrical technology, and escape to the moon. Through this fanciful premise, Cabrera stages a comprehensive review of the Cuban citizenry, as each new character enters the stage and tells his or her story. In the process, the opening scenes illuminate the dire effects of colonial economic exploitation on the Cuban social body. Among the desperate citizens, we find workers, teachers and recent immigrants to the city, all driven to hunger, poverty and the streets by the economic crisis of the late 1880s. We also find Rosa, a tragic mulata at her sentimental wits' end with the racial conflict in Cuba: 'El Sol de mi patria brillante y hermoso / no ofrece a mis ansias la luz ideal' (the Sun of my shining and beautiful nation, does not shed ideal light on my anxieties)17 she sings, as part of the lyrics of 'La Cubana', her farewell serenade to the Cuba that betrayed her. We also find a progressive journalist, whose oppositional writings have inflamed the colonial authorities; despite the ostensibly free press, he finds himself with fourteen citations for his arrest thanks to the abuse of the law by colonial officials. Finally, we meet a Cuban proprietor who has lost his entire fortune to the Spanish tax collector; the diligent collector, in turn, chases him all the way to the moon and back, and charges him extra for the travel and food. As the Cuban astronauts are electrically vaporized and reconstituted moments later on the lunar landscape, in a great flourish of theatrical

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lighting effects, two men - a liberal and a conservative - watch the lunar launch. The conservative asks, '