Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre

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Empire and the Gothic The Politics of Genre

Edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes

Empire and the Gothic

Also by Andrew Smith and William Hughes BRAM STOKER: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic FICTIONS OF UNEASE: The Gothic from Otranto to the X-Files (co-edited with Diane Mason)

Also by Andrew Smith GOTHIC RADICALISM: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century GOTHIC MODERNISMS (co-edited with Jeff Wallace) DRACULA AND THE CRITICS

Also by William Hughes THE LADY OF THE SHROUD by Bram Stoker (editor) BEYOND DRACULA: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context BRAM STOKER: A Bibliography CONTEMPORARY WRITING AND NATIONAL IDENTITY (co-edited with Tracey Hill)

Empire and the Gothic The Politics of Genre Edited by

Andrew Smith Senior Lecturer in English University of Glamorgan

and

William Hughes Senior Lecturer in English Bath Spa University College

Selection and editorial matter © Andrew Smith and William Hughes 2003 Chapter 13 © Dominic Head 2003 All other chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–98405–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Empire and the Gothic : the politics of genre / edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Enlightenment Gothic and postcolonialism / Andrew Smith and William Hughes – Discovering Eastern horrors : Beckford, Maturin, and the discourse of travel literature / Massimiliano Demata – Charlotte Dacre’s postcolonial moor / Kim Michasiw – Frankenstein and Devi’s pterodactyl / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – Pushkin and Odoevsky : the ‘Afro-Finnish’ theme in Russian Gothic / Neil Cornwell – A singular invasion : revisiting the postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula / William Hughes – Beyond colonialism : death and the body in H. Rider Haggard / Andrew Smith – Horror, circus, and orientalism / Helen Stoddart – Burning down the master’s (prison)-house : revolution and revelation in colonial and postcolonial female Gothic / Carol Davison – Crossing boundaries : the revision of Gothic paradigms in Heat and dust / Mariaconcetta Costantini – The ghastly and the ghostly : the Gothic farce of Farrell’s Empire trilogy / Victor Sage – Arundhati Roy and the house of history / David Punter – The number of magic alternatives : Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic nights / Andrew Teverson – Coetzee and the animals : the quest for postcolonial grace / Dominic Head. ISBN 0–333–98405–6 (cloth) 1. Gothic revival (Literature) 2. Horror tales, English – History and criticism. 3. Political fiction, English – History and criticism. 4. Decolonization in literature. 5. Imperialism in literature. 6. Postcolonialism. 7. Literary form. I. Smith, Andrew, 1964– II. Hughes, William, 1964– PR830.T3 E536 2003 823’.0872909 – dc21 2002029889 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Lorna Sage

Contents Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Notes on the Contributors

xi

Introduction: Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism Andrew Smith and William Hughes 1 Discovering Eastern Horrors: Beckford, Maturin, and the Discourse of Travel Literature Massimiliano Demata

1

13

2 Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor Kim Ian Michasiw

35

3 Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

56

4 Pushkin and Odoevsky: the ‘Afro-Finnish’ Theme in Russian Gothic Neil Cornwell

69

5 A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula William Hughes

88

6 Beyond Colonialism: Death and the Body in H. Rider Haggard Andrew Smith 7 Horror, Circus and Orientalism Helen Stoddart

103 118

8 Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House: Revolution and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic Carol Margaret Davison

136

9 Crossing Boundaries: the Revision of Gothic Paradigms in Heat and Dust Mariaconcetta Costantini

155

vii

viii Contents

10 The Ghastly and the Ghostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrell’s ‘Empire Trilogy’ Victor Sage 11 Arundhati Roy and the House of History David Punter 12 The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic Nights Andrew Teverson

172 192

208

13 Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Postcolonial Grace Dominic Head

229

Index

245

Preface This volume combines postcolonial theory with scholarship on the Gothic. Gothic images of alienation, fragmentation and Otherness are read through postcolonial ideas relating to alterity. This coming together of two areas of critical enquiry reassesses both the Gothic and the idea that the colonial and the postcolonial can be unproblematically periodized. Following an introduction which explores the historical background, the book addresses a range of writings from Ireland, England, imperial Russia, India and South Africa from the lateeighteenth century to the present day. Andrew Smith and William Hughes

ix

Acknowledgements We would like to thank Eleanor Birne at Palgrave for her enthusiasm for this project and Emily Rosser and Becky Mashayekh for their patience. We would like to thank Jeff Wallace for his advice and Colin Gent for his technical support. We would also like to thank Joanne Benson and Diane Mason for their love, support and tolerance throughout the editing process.

x

Notes on the Contributors

Neil Cornwell is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Bristol. A graduate of London University, he wrote his PhD while lecturing at Queen’s University, Belfast. Among his books are two studies of Vladimir Odoevsky (1986 and 1998), The Literary Fantastic (1990), Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades’ (1993; second edition 2001), and The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (1999). He has also edited Reference Guide to Russian Literature (1998) and The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature (2001). He is Russian editor of the (online) Literary Encyclopedia. Mariaconcetta Costantini is Associate Professor of English at the University ‘G. d’Annunzio’ of Pescara (Italy), where she received her PhD in English Literature. She has published extensively on Victorian literature (Gaskell, Dickens, Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Hardy and Wilkie Collins), postmodern fiction and the postcolonial novel. She is the author of Poesia e Sovversione. Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins (2000). Carol Margaret Davison is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Windsor. She was granted her doctorate from McGill University in 1998 and is the editor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897–1997: Sucking Through the Century and the author of Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Fiction (forthcoming from Palgrave). Massimiliano Demata is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bari, Italy, and lives and works in Oxford. He has taken his DPhil at St Cross College, University of Oxford, and was a Fulbright Fellow at Yale University. He has published articles on Byron, the Gothic Novel, Romantic women poets and the history of the book and, together with Duncan Wu, has co-edited British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review. Bicentenary Essays (forthcoming, 2002) for Palgrave. Dominic Head is Professor of English at Brunel University. He gained an MA and a PhD at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Modernist Short Story (1992), Nadine Gordimer (1994), and J.M. Coetzee xi

xii Notes on the Contributors

(1997), all published by Cambridge University Press, and The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (2002). William Hughes was educated at the Liverpool Collegiate School and the University of East Anglia. He is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Bath Spa University College. His recent publications include Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (2000) and Bram Stoker: A Bibliography (1997), and he has also co-edited three volumes of critical essays: Contemporary Writing and National Identity (1995, with Tracey Hill), Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (1998, with Andrew Smith) and Fictions of Unease: The Gothic from Otranto to The X-Files (2002, with Andrew Smith and Diane Mason). He is editor of Gothic Studies, the journal of the International Gothic Association, published by Manchester University Press. Kim Ian Michasiw received his doctorate from the University of Toronto and is currently Associate Professor and Chair of English at York University. Editor of the OUP edition of Zofloya, he has published articles on Percy Shelley, William Gilpin, Henry Mackenzie, Elvis Presley and various professional issues. He is working on alternative subjectivities in the later eighteenth century, from Edward Young to Joanna Southcott. David Punter is Professor of English at the University of Bristol. His many publications include books on the Gothic (The Literature of Terror, 1980, revised edition 1996, and Gothic Pathologies: the Text, the Body and the Law, 1998) and on the postcolonial (Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, 2000), as well as other books on Romanticism, critical theory and contemporary writing. Victor Sage, who is a graduate of the Universities of Durham, Birmingham and East Anglia, is Professor of English Literature in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He was a founder member of the International Gothic Association and has written widely on the Gothic tradition. He is the editor for Penguin Classics of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth The Wanderer and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. He is currently writing a cultural history of European horror for Polity Press. Andrew Smith completed his PhD at Southampton University. He is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Glamorgan. He is the

Notes on the Contributors xiii

author of Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century (2000) and has co-edited (with William Hughes) Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (1998), (with Jeff Wallace) Gothic Modernisms (2001) and (with Diane Mason and William Hughes) Fictions of Unease: the Gothic from Otranto to The X-Files (2002). His monograph, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle is forthcoming. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of many books, including A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). Helen Stoddart is a Lecturer in Film and Literature in the Department of English at Keele University. She is a graduate of the Universities of Glasgow (MA) and Reading (PhD). She has published a number of articles on Gothic film and fiction. She is the author of Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (2000), and is currently working on a further related project. Andrew Teverson took his MA and BA at Durham University, and PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His forthcoming publications include essays on Vikram Chandra’s fiction, the sculpture of Anish Kapoor and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He is currently working as a Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London.

Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism Andrew Smith and William Hughes

Theories of postcolonialism and scholarship on the Gothic might, superficially, appear to be the product of rather different intellectual, cultural and historical traditions. The Gothic, a fantastical literary form that had its heyday in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries might seem to inhabit a different world than that confronted by writers working in postcolonial contexts in the twenty-first century. However, the picture is more complex than this because an historical examination of the Gothic and accounts of postcolonialism indicate the presence of a shared interest in challenging post-enlightenment notions of rationality. In the Gothic, as in Romanticism in general, this challenge was developed through an exploration of the feelings, desires and passions which compromised the Enlightenment project of rationally calibrating all forms of knowledge and behaviours. The Gothic gives a particular added emphasis to this through its seeming celebration of the irrational, the outlawed and the socially and culturally dispossessed. It is this challenge to Enlightenment notions of rationality which has also drawn the attention of postcolonial critics. Such criticism has tended to focus on how the epistemic shift from Renaissance humanism to Enlightenment humanism registered a corresponding shift from knowing to understanding. This new Enlightenment humanism placed the stress on how the subject knows, rather than what he or she knows. Such a shift makes the (Cartesian) subject the measure of all things, and this conceptualization of humanity was reliant on defining the human in relation to the seemingly non-human. According to Leela Gandhi, ‘Western humanism produces the dictum that since some human beings are more human than others, they are more substantially the measure of all things’.1 It is this Enlightenment view which helps to construct the racial hierarchies which would come to underpin colonialism. The 1

2


claim that such a position relies on the exclusion of ‘otherness’ finds its corollary in the Gothic’s fascination with raising often difficult questions about what it means to be human. The Gothic use of non-human and ab-human figures such as vampires, ghosts and monsters of various kinds is calculated to challenge the dominant humanist discourse, and thus becomes, as this volume shows, a literary form to which postcolonial writers are drawn, as well as constituting a literary form which can be read through postcolonial ideas. Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1970) explored how the development of the human sciences was related to the emergence of an Enlightenment subjectivity. For Foucault, in the eighteenth century, the subject becomes both an object of knowledge (one that is understood ‘scientifically’) and a subject who knows (one that is interpreted ‘metaphysically’).2 For Leela Ghandi this supposedly ‘objective’ status of the subject contributed to certain pseudo-scientific taxonomies relating to race, and has a vestigial presence in much of today’s science. Such a humanist position is grounded in the Cartesian notion that the self is at the centre of the world and the consequence of this for Ghandi is that: the all-knowing and self-sufficient Cartesian subject violently negates material and historical alterity/Otherness in its narcissistic desire to always see the world in its own self-image. This anthropocentric world view is ultimately deficient on account of its indifference to difference, and consequent refusal to accommodate that which is not human.3 However, the process of refusal is perhaps more dynamic than this since the Cartesian subject is dependent on excluding the Other in order to determine its own position; as a result, a series of binary oppositions such as Occident/Orient, black/white and civilized/savage come to underpin colonialist ideas. One consequence of this is that Enlightenment subjectivity generates its own opposite, in such a way that the subject is precariously defined through historically contingent (and therefore provisional) oppositions. Also, this kind of science will try to account for what it by definition cannot know and in the process draws attention to its own failings. It is this paradox that David Punter sees as central to an understanding of the ambivalence of the early literary Gothic: he notes that ‘[t]o consider the passions and the emotions as mere subject faculties to be brought under the sway of all-dominant reason, as the Enlightenment thinkers did, will render those faculties all the more

Introduction 3

incomprehensible.’4 The Enlightenment therefore produces its own doubles. This reference to doubling is not fortuitous. The function of the double is central to Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), which has been highly influential on Gothic scholarship.5 Freud claims that the uncanny, the unheimlich, becomes truly uncanny when it collapses into its ostensibly opposite term ‘homely’ or heimlich. This conflation of opposites (which occurs because the home is also the place of dangerous ‘private’ secrets) enables a Gothic collapse between living/ dead, human/non-human, and self/other. This model of collapse also underpins the process in which the colonizing subject is displaced in its confrontation with racial otherness, an otherness that is both strange, distanced and exotic, and yet the site upon which racial, psychological, and sexual anxieties are projected. In effect difference and distance become erased. These links between colonialism and the Gothic are clear in an early work such as William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) which is discussed in this volume by Massimiliano Demata (Chapter 1). Michael Franklin has referred to Beckford’s novel as a ‘landmark in the history of European literary Orientalism’ and has noted that other notable contributions to this coming together of the Gothic and the colonial include such Gothicized poems as Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir (1798) and Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810).6 This is to acknowledge that the early Gothic incorporated within its anti-Enlightenment fervour a set of complex views on the East, although often in order to consolidate rather than to question the kind of Orientalism identified by Edward Said.7 One of the defining ambivalences of the Gothic is that its labelling of otherness is often employed in the service of supporting, rather than questioning, the status quo. This is perhaps the central complexity of the form because it debates the existence of otherness and alterity, often in order to demonize such otherness. However, any restoration of Enlightenment certainty tends to be compromised by the presence of a debate within the Gothic concerning the relationship between rationality and irrationality. Gothic tales, their contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences, provide a dense and complex blend of assertion and doubt, acceptance and defiance, and truth and falsity and in this way they provide a space in which key elements of the dominant culture become debated, affirmed and questioned. It is because of this that a postcolonial mode of enquiry, one underpinned by a poststructuralist scepticism, is able to open up the political dimension of these narratives without denying

4


their fundamental complexities. Postcolonialism helps to isolate images of Self and Other in such a way that they identify how a particular brand of colonial politics works towards constructing difference, whilst at the same time indicating the presence of the inherently unstable version of the subject on which such a politics rest. In other words, postcolonialism explains the Gothic’s instabilities by other means. It is important to note that there are therefore two related issues which this volume addresses. One is concerned with analysing work by writers whom we consider to be writing out of a postcolonial context. In this volume this aspect of postcolonial criticism includes work by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, J.M. Coetzee and J.G. Farrell. These writers have used the Gothic in their writings in order to examine how images of otherness have been made to correspond to particular notions of terror (in terms of either political uprisings or anxieties about race, for example). In this way their work acknowledges this link between the Gothic and the colonial, and this acknowledgement is generated out of a postcolonial reassessment of such a link. The other issue which this volume addresses concerns Gothic writing which was produced within a colonialist context, and which may be usefully interpreted in the light of postcolonial ideas. In this way it becomes possible to examine such texts as Vathek for example, in order to illustrate how a Gothic language of otherness becomes conflated with images of colonial otherness. Again, it is the politics of the fiction which are the issue here. These early, colonial, Gothic narratives are illuminated by such postcolonial readings which are responsive to the complexities both of the form and to the culture from which they were produced. This is also to acknowledge that there are clear differences between the terms ‘empire’ and ‘postcolonialism’. Some of the essays in this volume read how postcolonial texts rework earlier anxieties about empire, whereas others read, postcolonially, earlier narratives of empire. This volume follows the pioneering work of Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (whose work is included here) on orientalism and postcolonialism. It is also indebted to that scholarship on the Gothic which has considered the relationship between the form and colonialist ideas. The key text in this area is, clearly, Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (1988) in which he usefully identified the emergence of an Imperial Gothic with which subsequent Gothic writers were forced to contend.8 Brantlinger, like his contemporary Chris Baldick, has established as a consequence of his pioneering critical stance a mode of criticism – and, potentially, a discursive limitation – which subsequent critics have had to bear con-

Introduction 5

stantly in mind when working in this relatively unexplored corner of the Gothic field. If the present collection can be said to have moved significantly beyond the temporal and spatial limitations necessarily imposed by Brantlinger upon his volume, then it might also be recognized as having moved beyond the characteristic (and persistent) intertextuality which Baldick has brought to bear in his own landmark contribution to the postcolonial and imperial Gothic, In Frankenstein’s Shadow (1987). Baldick is emphatic throughout his study that Gothic writers up to and including Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence have exploited ‘the Frankenstein myth’, which is functionally a discursive and cultural trope as much as a fictional paradigm, and in consequence have shaped a whole consciousness wherein and whereby monstrosity and deviance might be perceived and communicated.9 Baldick’s rhetoric, though, is at times tense and even forced, as if to evade the notion that the drive to shape, create or synthesize which he applies to an encoded vision of colonization might not be applied with equal force to any aspect of nineteenth-century mission. What is crucial about Baldick’s contribution to postcolonial criticism is not the paradigmpersistence (or intertextual equivalence) which allows him to suggest, for example, that Conrad’s Congolese expedition is ‘the equatorial equivalent to Walton’s voyage’ but rather the more subtle point, echoed in the later work of H.L. Malchow, that the Gothic, in both its fictional and critical guises, may shape another discourse – not merely the cultural commentaries upon world politics and local monstrosities, but equally the tenor of criticism itself.10 The implication of the papers which follow is that critical landmarks of the importance of the writings of Baldick and Brantlinger ought to be acknowledged, but need not be slavishly followed. As Malchow and Gelder both assert, Imperial Gothic might conventionally be considered as a vehicle through which to dissipate or proclaim ‘cultural malaise’, a phenomenon that advances an unsettling of the customary structures of fiction as well as those of fictionalized (or encoded) colonial governance.11 This is, in many respects, a rather reassuring use of demonization, a Gothicizing of culture through the Gothic languages of both fictional symbolism and critical Othering. A more troubling view comes, paradoxically, from Gelder’s own writing on Postcolonial Gothic. Viewed against the grain of critical closure, the figure of the vampire, a Gothic myth as potent and persistent as that of Frankenstein’s creation, arguably holds the potential to transform the troublesome deviant into an enfranchized and outgoing citizen of the world.12 As Alexandra Warwick suggests, in ‘colonial Gothic’, both landscape and people (indigenous or otherwise)

6


are seen as uncanny, ‘beyond the possibilities of explanation in European terms’.13 As the essays in this collection demonstrate, this may often be the case, but the Gothic and the uncanny may also be present all too often in the newly appreciated mundane, the heimlich as much as the unheimlich.14 The chapters in this book explore writings from a range of different national contexts, including England, Ireland, India, South Africa and imperial Russia. The volume is chronological and extends from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. Such a diverse range of texts, periods, and national and cultural contexts indicates just how far it is possible to employ postcolonial ideas in order to situate or reconsider the Gothic. This volume also bears testimony to the diverse range of approaches and readings which may be developed through such a postcolonial reading of the Gothic. The volume opens, appropriately, with a study of the earlier phase of Gothic, and through consideration of two central though underexplored Gothic-colonial fictions. In ‘Discovering Eastern Horrors: Beckford, Maturin, and the Discourse of Travel Literature’ (Chapter 1), Massimiliano Demata explores the influence of travel writing concerning the East on William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Demata argues that travel writing during this period was influenced by the kind of empiricism which would ultimately be employed in shaping Orientalism, whose underlying hegemonizing strategies objectified the mysterious and made it safe according to Western standards. However, both Beckford’s and Maturin’s writings argue that the ‘reality’ of the East represented in travel literature could not be easily subjected to Western dominance. For both writers the sense of horror in travel narratives captures the European fear of its contact with the Eastern Other. Their adoption of ‘real’ characters and of stories drawn from travel literature expanded the essence of horror by literally transplanting the alien, violent and potentially subversive experiences of the East onto the ‘domestic’ body of Gothic fiction. Demata’s essay thus provides a unique insight into how the early Gothic both exploits and resists images of Otherness as part of its potentially subversive critique of Orientalist ideas. In ‘Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor’ (Chapter 2), Kim Michasiw examines Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806) by locating the novel’s representation of the title character within the context of the debates that ultimately led to the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. The essay examines how Zofloya compares with other literary representations of Moors, which consistently suggest that such representa-

Introduction 7

tions are a response to the traumatic blow dealt to notions of innate European superiority by the 750-year Moorish colonial enterprise in Spain. Michasiw argues that Dacre harnesses a number of key, if residual, stereotypes – the Moor as romance aristocrat unfit for modernity, as corrupted scientist, as connoisseur of chaos – and uses these to challenge the reigning abolitionist discourse that characterized contemporary Africans as simple, pastoral and primitive. He concludes this important essay by arguing that the novel provides a direct, if dangerously ambiguous, challenge to an abolitionism that may only sustain itself with the prop of the infantalized innocence of Africans. In ‘Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl’ (Chapter 3), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explores the complex formulation of colonialism in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) by arguing that the latter is constructed out of a specific English cultural identity which is subtly reflected in the novel. However Frankenstein’s examination of the origins of society suggests Shelley’s scepticism about dominant models of civilization, and in this way he inaugurates a radical debate about the nature of humanism. Spivak contrasts Shelley’s version of history with that of the contemporary writer Mahasweta Devi, who in her tale ‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha and Puran Sahay’ raises questions about pre-history and whether it can ever be empirically recovered. Vital questions concerning epistemology, history and culture are explored in a groundbreaking postcolonial reading which the editors have been given exclusive permission to reprint from The Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999).15 In ‘Pushkin and Odoevsky: the “Afro-Finnish” Theme in Russian Gothic’ (Chapter 4), Neil Cornwell argues that Russia fought a colonial war with Sweden over Finland in the eighteenth century, a war which coincided with the founding by Peter the Great of the city of St Petersburg. Peter the Great, and images of colonial conflict, are revisited by Odoevsky in The Salamander (1841) and by Pushkin in The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827) and this revisiting suggests a desire to reassess this colonial conflict. Cornwell concentrates on the Gothic aspects of the treatment of colonial-historical themes in these works, and applies recent studies of colonialism in Russian literature and of the treatment of history in Pushkin’s fiction in order to develop his postcolonial reading. Cornwell also assesses the ongoing growth of interest in Pushkin’s ‘Africanism’ and how this relates to his writings. This chapter makes an important contribution to the understanding of how Russia’s imperial past was responded to, and renegotiated, by Russian writers whose own cultural and racial position granted them unique insights.

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William Hughes, in ‘A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (Chapter 5), reassesses critical claims that Dracula (1897) represents a fantasy of reverse colonization by focusing on how the novel develops, and attempts to contain, images of colonial invasion. Hughes notes that in the later parts of the novel there are attempts to comprehend the Count’s invasive strategy by comparing the vampire first to a fox, and then to that most exotic of colonial beasts, the tiger. Van Helsing echoes this analogy by depicting the Count as a ‘man-eater, as they of India call the tiger’, yet fails to realize the irony of his words. For Van Helsing, the anthropocentric man-eater, having rejected lesser prey, was eternally hungry for the supreme banquet of human flesh and would ‘prowl unceasing until he got him’. This analogy exposes the effective invasion script within the novel. The Count’s apparently systematic invasion is driven by an individual and carnal appetite which is persistently rendered as a form of cultural, religious or sexual offensive by those ranged against him. Hughes’s essay provides a timely reading of how Stoker’s novel is susceptible to postcolonial criticism, as well as providing an investigation into how the colonial itself may be mapped over the alternative territory of the individual – itself a colonial motif. In ‘Beyond Colonialism: Death and the Body in H. Rider Haggard’ (Chapter 6), Andrew Smith explores Haggard’s cycle of novels concerning Ayesha: She (1888), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1921) and Wisdom’s Daughter (1927). He argues that such novels, far from being complicit with a language of colonial Othering, demonize images of colonial tyranny that are implicitly associated with Ayesha. Conversely, representations of the Western body (such as Holly’s in She) challenge the idea of a colonial strategy of ‘othering’, a strategy which recycled images of the primitive drawn from theories of degeneration. Smith then examines how these novels formulate a complex metaphorics of death in which the ‘otherworld’ of Africa is substituted by the ‘other world’ of death and ghostly presences. It is this world which reflects on the decline of empire (the death of dynasties) and on the meaning of individual death. Smith argues that this move into metaphysics creates a postcolonial contact zone in which debates relating to empire, politics, and morality are renegotiated in a way which unsettles the notion of colonial authority. Helen Stoddart, in ‘Horror, Circus and Orientalism’ (Chapter 7), argues that the emergence of the circus in the late eighteenth century coincided with the beginnings of what Edward Said has referred to as ‘modern Orientalism’. The circus borrowed the colonial impulse to

Introduction 9

travel the world, discovering and exploiting new entertainment markets, whilst selling itself in the West through constructing spectacles out of the trophies of Western expansion. The circus both fetishized eastern beauty and staged the popular fears of danger and monstrosity associated with it. Stoddart focuses on a range of popular literary and film texts including The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1963), Carnival of Souls (1962), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1963), Circus of Horrors (1960), Nightmare Alley (1947), Freaks (1932) and The Vampire Circus (1971). Stoddart argues that these texts reveal how the circus operates along a precarious line between outlawry and custom. It is this which suggests an alliance with the Gothic whilst simultaneously offering a unique perspective on orientalist fantasies which are specific to this alliance. In ‘Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House: Revolution and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic’ (Chapter 8) Carol Davison reads Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as a classic example of the Female Gothic, one which, problematically, functions as a mother text to later works of postcolonial Female Gothic fiction. Davison explores the nature and implications of the feminist postcolonial response to Brontë’s novel in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She argues that within the Female Gothic (of colonial and postcolonial varieties) issues of colonial/imperial and sexual politics are often deftly interwoven in order to illuminate both the sexualized aspects of the colonial/imperial project and the colonial/imperialistic nature of sexual politics. In a concluding reading of Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (1977) Davison argues that the postcolonial Female Gothic is now an established genre, despite its apparent adaptability. Davison’s essay thus provides an important reassessment of the Female Gothic and charts the emergence of a new form of Gothic writing from which it is descended. She also emphasizes how issues associated with colonialism and postcolonialism come to bear on the Female Gothic tradition. Mariaconcetta Costantini, in ‘Crossing Boundaries: The Revision of Gothic Paradigms in Heat and Dust’ (Chapter 9), explores Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s use of the Gothic in Heat and Dust (1975). She argues that the novel’s twofold structure reveals how the second narrative, set in contemporary India, suppresses the Gothic elements of the first narrative, set in the 1920s. She argues that the first narrative, concerning an affair between Olivia and the Nawab, constructs the Nawab as a Gothic villain, one which is ultimately challenged by the manifold contradictions which turn him into a liminal being caught between a British stereotype of the devilish persecutor and his real-life status as a

10 Empire and the Gothic

mediocre, decadent Indian prince. The second narrative represents the possibility of moving beyond this world of potential horrors and celebrates the possibility of birth and renewal. Costantini’s chapter provides an important reassessment of the novel as well as illustrating how the novel debates, within it, the relationship between Gothic and postcolonial modes of writing. In ‘The Ghastly and the Ghostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrell’s “Empire Trilogy” ’ (Chapter 10), Victor Sage examines Farrell’s early (inwardlooking and self-conscious) fiction in relation to his imperial trilogy: Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Sage explores the connections between these texts and the Protestant Irish Gothic tradition of Charles Maturin and Sheridan Le Fanu by comparing the treatment of history and its imperial dimensions. Sage pays close attention to the distinctive features of style in Farrell’s writings, exploring how fictional self-consciousness and the self-consciously grotesque disrupts attempts at constructing an ‘objective’ chronicle of the events. In particular Sage examines how a number of stylistic features function to alter and introduce irony into the discourse of history in a postcolonial way. David Punter, in ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’ (Chapter 11), explores the various images of haunting to be found in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). He argues that the novel’s main characters are haunted by the traumatic events of their past; but similarly their environment is haunted more emphatically by the ghosts of empire. Punter explores the relationship between these images of empire and the essentially European notion of the Gothic. He examines how images of ruins both represent the past and yet also, in the novel, pose a fatal attraction for the present. The very ‘post’ in postcolonial here represents the inability of living in the ruins, or the colonial aftermath; and thus the narrative of the novel constructs itself not around a linear retelling of the past but around a traumatized evasion of that past, involving a continuing Gothic loss of coherence, a constant inability to avoid returning to the scene of an ineradicable crime. Punter is one of the most influential critics working on the Gothic and this essay also reflects his more recent interest in postcolonialism. In ‘The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic Nights’ (Chapter 12), Andrew Teverson explores the impact of The Arabian Nights on a Gothic Orientalist tradition. He argues that Rushdie’s sampling of this tradition does not, as some critics have argued, simply reinscribe Orientalist preconceptions of the ‘East’, but rather enables him to use the tales for a postcolonial agenda. Teverson

Introduction 11

argues that Rushdie uses The Arabian Nights as an example of a hybrid narrative collection of tales within tales within tales, rather than as an exclusive and homogenized narrative body. Teverson thus constructs an original reading of Rushdie which locates him in relation to this Orientalist Gothic tradition, a reading which has so far been overlooked by critics both of the Gothic and postcolonialism. Dominic Head, in ‘Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Postcolonial Grace’ (Chapter 13), traces the development of J.M. Coetzee’s ethical vision, and in particular that dynamic which suggests that the fear of the Other might be translated into care and compassion. Coetzee’s groundbreaking second Booker Prize-winner, Disgrace (1999), is considered as a possible culmination of this development. This novel is situated at the nexus of the postcolonial, the Gothic, and the ecocritical and it contests the anodyne version of post-apartheid South Africa (the so-called ‘rainbow nation’), evoking a nightmare of fear and transgression instead. A way out of the circle of terror, and the bleak new postcolonial tyranny that is depicted, is implied in the novel’s moral philosophy. Head draws on Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), and its concern with animal rights in order to show how the ethical vision of Disgrace offers another kind of transgression to received ideas about ethics and politics. Head’s essay thus brings together Gothic notions of transgression with the postcolonial in order to construct an important reassessment of post-apartheid South Africa. With the exception of Spivak’s landmark essay, all of the essays in this volume have been specially commissioned for this volume. The diversity of views, texts, contexts and histories examined here bear testimony to the rich and highly complex relationship which exists between the Gothic and theories of postcolonialism. It is hoped that such diversity will stimulate debate over what is in effect a new and exciting area of intellectual enquiry.

Notes 1. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 30. 2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences ([1970], London: Tavistock, 1982), pp. 303–40. 3. Ghandi, Postcolonial Theory, p. 39. 4. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: The Gothic Tradition, 2 vols, Vol. 1 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), p. 24. 5. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, trans. J. Strachey, ed. A. Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).

12 Empire and the Gothic 6. Michael Franklin, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1998), pp. 21 and 170. 7. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient ([1978] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). 8. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). 9. Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and NineteenthCentury Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 253. 10. Ibid., p. 165. 11. H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 231; Ken Gelder, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’ in Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature, pp. 180–1. 12. Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 122, cf. p. 123. 13. Alexandra Warwick, ‘Colonial Gothic’ in Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature, pp. 261–2, at p. 262. 14. Alongside these generic explorations it is also important to acknowledge that there has also been some significant work on specific authors which has explored how the Gothic and ideas of Orientalism relate to each other, a link suggested by B.J. Moore-Gilbert in Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). In addition Peter Morey’s recent essay on Kipling in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, eds, Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 201–17, relates the Gothic to the images of imperialism in Kipling, arguing that images of Gothic instability enable us to critically re-read the status and function of imperialism in Kipling’s narratives. 15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 132–46.

1 Discovering Eastern Horrors: Beckford, Maturin and the Discourse of Travel Literature Massimiliano Demata

For correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, [Vathek] far surpasses all European imitations; and bears such marks of originality, that those who have visited the East will find some difficulty in believing it to be more than a translation. Lord Byron, note to The Giaour (1813).1 I have often thought in writing my wild tales (whose only merit in my eyes is that they had the good fortune to please you) that life supplied examples of vicissitude enough to make the romance-writer fling down his pen in despair – some of these I have experienced, and one I have lately witnessed which, if my heart be allowed to be a judge, transcends them all. Charles Maturin, letter to Walter Scott, 5 January 1820.2 The first of the two passages quoted above, a famous section of Byron’s note to The Giaour, indicates an important aspect of William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). In his praise of the work, Byron implicitly underlines the importance of ‘realism’ in the handling of certain materials and sources as a criterion for the evaluation of literature. Indeed, Byron held literary ‘correctness’ in such importance that in 1817, in a letter to John Murray, he wrote that I hate things all fiction & therefore the Merchant & Othello – have no great associations to me – but Pierre has – there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric – and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.3 13


Byron emphasized what was for him a crucial aspect of literature: its adherence to fact and ‘truth’ even in its wildest inventions of fiction. Unlike Beckford, Byron knew the ‘facts’ of the East by having travelled there in 1809–11, but Beckford’s picture of oriental customs and culture, derived from secondary sources, struck him as authentic and genuine. According to Byron, Beckford had to be praised because he engaged with ‘real’ characters and events and, accordingly, offered a picture of the East which was reliable and credible even though it was presented in the usual escapist narrative conventions of a tale. Writing more than three decades after the appearance of Vathek, and possibly when he was about to complete his masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Charles Maturin faced an altogether different kind of problem. Indeed, the issue of ‘facts’ raised by Byron would have sounded to him misleading, or, at best, something of an understatement. In his letter to Scott, the Irish writer argued that the resources of fancy were completely exhausted because ‘life’ presented ‘vicissitudes’ whose horrendous nature went beyond anything an author could conceive in writing ‘tales’, no matter how ‘wild’. As a consequence, in Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin engages with real-life events, which are enfolded in the usually escapist narrative space of a tale. The novel was indeed written from quite a different perspective from that of Beckford. Maturin had found momentary popularity with his drama Bertram in 1816, but constantly faced financial hardship and the misery of living, as he often complained in his few extant letters, in a culturally and socially deprived context. When one looks at the personalities and careers of Beckford and Maturin, there could not be two more different writers: an ante-litteram English dandy, whose fame for his extraordinary erudition was accompanied by a scandalous private life, has very little in common with an Irish clergyman, who constantly struggled to earn a living, let alone literary recognition. Yet, affinities between the two writers, whose works appeared just at the beginning and at the end of the lineage of the ‘classic’ Gothic novel, are as remarkable as their differences. The two protagonists of the novels, the Caliph Vathek and the Faustian wanderer John Melmoth, share the physical and psychological nature of the Gothic villain in that both are over-reaching, satanic characters in pursuit of a forbidden knowledge which will also be the cause of their tragic end. Even more importantly, Beckford and Maturin share a similar concern with the shifting relationship between fact and fiction, and in particular with the ‘facts’ offered by travel literature and other works on the

Discovering Eastern Horrors 15

East. The two writers did not employ the oriental ‘other’ as a narrative decoration or to create an aura of exotic interest, but rather as a real, tangible presence which somehow strengthened, and was a founding element of, the horror content of their narratives. Both writers continuously referred to documents and sources on what was, for themselves and their readers, a real Orient, devoid of the fancy and improbability of the Arabian Nights or of legends without basis in fact; it was an Orient whose mixture of beauty and horror could be described and presented to the Western reader through references to works written by those who had a thorough knowledge of it by having visited and studied it. This chapter discusses the place of Vathek and Melmoth the Wanderer in the context of the contemporary Orientalist and imperialistic projects, and particularly the implications of the presence of concrete, nonfictional elements, mainly deriving from travel books, within a context whose traditional narrative basis was grounded in ‘fiction’. Beckford and Maturin did much more than decorate their ‘tales’ with Oriental materials to lend reality to otherwise fictitious stories. They employed travel literature and other works of a scientific nature to legitimize their narratives, or, in other words, to make them seem real and concrete, with the effect that readers recognize elements of ‘reality’ within a fictional context. The effect is that in both Vathek and Melmoth the Wanderer the readers’ perspective is thrown back onto a reality which is not the reassuring narrative space of a ‘tale’ but rather the looming, often threatening presence of a real ‘other’. The picture of the East presented by Beckford in Vathek revealed to late-eighteenth-century readers a world which was still obscure or, at best, the domain of fictitious or semi-legendary notions. Commercial interests, particularly after Pitt’s India Act of 1784, were driving Britain towards a much more direct involvement in Indian affairs. However, before William Jones’s foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 there was little or no real knowledge of Indian culture. Similarly, in Beckford’s time, general interest in the Near and Middle East, the main geographical and cultural background of Vathek, was negligible at worst, circumstantial at best. British foreign policy had traditionally devoted little or no attention to the Near East. Diplomatic relationships with the Ottoman Empire, which included modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Egypt, were neglected to such an extent that the reports sent periodically to London by the British Embassy at Constantinople were never read.4 During the eighteenth century, the activities of the Levant


Company, the chartered body of British merchants who lived and worked in the Ottoman Empire, were in steep decline.5 Furthermore, very few British travellers visited the still very dangerous Ottoman provinces, and as a consequence, the number of English works about these regions was negligible. In Beckford’s time the two most reliable ‘scientific’ works on the Near East written by English authors were still Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), which even Byron and Southey would later read, and Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1667). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Embassy Letters’ (written 1717–18, but first published in 1763), the translation of the Arabian Nights (1705–8) and the numerous Oriental or pseudo-Oriental tales which descended from it still provided readers with the only available literary and (seemingly) authentic descriptions of Islamic culture, religion and society. According to Roger Lonsdale, Vathek, with its learned account of Eastern manners, culture and religion, paved the way for British academic – and, later, commercial – interest in the East.6 When Vathek first appeared in print in 1786, it was originally advertised as ‘The History of Caliph Vathek. An Arabian Tale from an Unpublished Manuscript with Notes Critical and Explanatory’.7 The Oriental imagery of Beckford’s work was so convincing that many at the time believed that it was a translation from an Arabic original.8 Indeed, in the eyes of contemporary readers and reviewers, Vathek stood out as a unique literary artefact. With its subtitle – ‘An Oriental Tale’ – Beckford’s work was immediately placed within the tradition started by the Arabian Nights, but most critics also pointed out the innovations it brought to that tradition. More than any other previous Oriental or pseudo-Oriental tale, Vathek’s strength lay in its realistic picture of Oriental society, a picture whose accuracy and credibility did not originate in the text of the novel alone, but mainly in its extensive and extraordinarily complex notes. These notes were compiled by Samuel Henley, a renowned scholar with a thorough knowledge of Arabic and Persian languages who had earlier encouraged Beckford’s own interest in Oriental cultures. It was indeed Henley who first suggested to Beckford the idea of substantiating the events and costumes described in Vathek with some learned commentary. Their frequent correspondence during the painstaking work of annotating and translating Beckford’s work from French into English reveals how carefully and scrupulously Beckford worked to enrich the picture of the Caliph’s adventures with the evidence provided by the most reliable sources of knowledge of Oriental culture, including John Richardson’s Dissertation on the Languages, Literature, and Manners of the


Eastern Nations (1772) and Barthémy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (1697).9 The notes followed the text of the tale of Vathek and filled one-third of the 1786 edition. In their learned depiction of Eastern culture and religion, the importance of the notes nearly outweighed the interest aroused by the fiction of the tale of the Caliph, to the extent that the Gentleman’s Magazine suggested that the tale had been ‘composed as a text for the purpose of giving to the publick the information contained in the notes.’10 Modern criticism has continued to consider the unique character of Vathek as dependent on its interplay of romance and realistic picture of Oriental customs. In this sense, Martha Pike Conant’s discussion of Vathek as the best example of the ‘imaginative’ Oriental tale, which, following the example of the Arabian Nights, combined mystery and magic with a sense of reality and verisimilitude, has become canonical and has continued to influence more recent readings of Beckford’s work.11 The plot itself provided Beckford and Henley with the opportunity of displaying their great knowledge of Oriental geography, culture, religion and political institutions. In the volume of Vathek, the tale is followed by the notes; in other words, the work is presented in such a manner that the fictional level (the history of the Caliph) is kept physically separate from the learned account in the notes. However, these two levels overlap and are often confused, as the ‘fiction’ of the tale is constantly directed to, and explained by, the notes. The notes to the text of Vathek often add a sinister dimension to the plot by allowing the reader to approach ‘real’ events or characters beyond the surface of the ‘fictional’ level. Perhaps the most significant example of the use of historically based sources is the account of the character of the Caliph himself. The description of the physical and moral attributes of Vathek takes up the opening two pages of the 1786 edition. There is indeed an air of immediacy and matter-of-factness in the figure of the Caliph: the notes scrupulously discuss his unusual features and the exotic locations related to his own life, while the etymology of the word ‘Caliph’ is explained by referring to Habesci’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1784) and d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale. A note on Vathek’s notoriously frightening gaze covertly refers again to a section of d’Herbelot’s work and comments that ‘The author of Nighiaristan hath preserved a fact that supports this account; and there is no history of Vathek, in which his terrible eye is not mentioned’ (p. 123).12 In other words, readers are asked to believe that the author of the notes is certain that Vathek did indeed have


terrible eyes, and actual historical evidence validates this. The mention in the text of Caliph Omar Ben Abdalaziz, from whose restrained philosophy of pleasure Vathek differs so much, is again immediately elaborated in the notes by the portrait of a figure who really existed and is discussed as a real person in the Bibliothèque Orientale. Alkoremi, the palace that Vathek inherits from his father and that he has enlarged, overlooks the city of Samarah, which was, as a note tells us, ‘a city of the Babylonian Irak’ (p. 124), a real place whose history is again derived from d’Herbelot’s work. In this interplay of fact and fiction there exists a sense of spatial and temporal distance: Vathek’s story is set in a context which few readers could experience at first hand. However, very often Beckford pushes the boundaries of the ‘other’ into a historical and cultural frame which is much closer to that of the readers. An instance of this is the Giaour’s appearance at Vathek’s court and the marvellous gifts he brings to the monarch (pp. 5–6). This episode is substantiated by its recalling actual historical facts. As a note to this episode points out (p. 126): That such curiosities were much sought after in the days of Vathek, may be concluded from the encouragement which Haroun al Raschid gave to the mechanic arts, and the present he sent, by his ambassadors, to Charlemagne. This consisted of a clock, which, when put into motion, by means of a clepsydra, not only pointed out the hours, but also, by dropping small balls on a bell, struck them; and, at the same instant, threw open as many little doors, to let out an equal number of horsemen.13 Here the intersection of text and notes, reality and fiction, has subtler implications: the gifts brought by the Giaour to the Caliph – slippers which enable the feet to walk, knives which move without human intervention – may be part of the fantasy world of Vathek, but the effect of their miraculous workings are no less remarkable than those seemingly magic objects brought by the Saracen embassy to the court of Charlemagne. The movement from the text to its note brings about a reversal and confusion of the West-East opposition: Charlemagne the Christian and Vathek the Muslim are both visited by strangers from seemingly more advanced stages of civilization who brought to them artefacts which caused disruption: Muslims in Charlemagne’s case, a ‘Giaour’, that is, a non-Muslim and an ‘infidel’ from India, in that of Vathek (significantly, ‘Giaour’ was an appellation which, in Western literature on the Orient, usually referred to the Muslim definition of


Christians and Europeans). Vathek succumbs to the Giaour’s temptation, repudiates Islam and eventually causes his own ruin, while the technological superiority of the Arab world in the Middle Ages led Europe and Christendom to the brink of destruction – and of conversion to Islam. Beckford seemed to have felt a predilection for the power of certain exotic or unknown objects. The acts of witchcraft performed by Carathis, Vathek’s mother, in the enclosed, claustrophobic space of a typically Gothic environment, in order to ingratiate herself with the demonic powers, reveal a side of ‘magic’ whose very tangible implications go beyond a grotesque exhibition of the fantastic: By secret stairs, contrived within the thickness of the wall, and known only to herself and her son, she first repaired to the mysterious recesses in which were deposited the mummies that had been wrested from the catacombs of the ancient Pharaohs. Of these she ordered several to be taken. From thence she resorted to a gallery; where, under the guard of fifty female negroes mute and blind of the right eye, were preserved the oil of the most venomous serpents; rhinoceros’ horns; and woods of a subtile and penetrating odour, procured from the interior of the Indies. (pp. 30–1) Here Beckford is presenting a catalogue of objects which were no doubt familiar to Western travellers, collectors and archaeologists. A note on ‘mummies’ warns readers that they do indeed exist, and ‘are frequently found in the sepulchres of Egypt’ (p. 129). It may be said that Beckford reverses Belinda’s luxurious toiletry in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712/14): the ‘unnumbered treasures’ and ‘India’s glowing gems’ (I, 129, 133) adorning Belinda’s beauty as a sort of colonial trophy are replaced by poisons and other deadly essences, while instead of ‘The tortoise here and elephant unite, / Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white’ (I, 135–6), Carathis uses ‘rhinoceros’ horns’ to effect magical transformations.14 The mysterious qualities of these objects ‘procured from the interior of the Indies’ indicate, to Beckford’s readers, that those distant countries which were entering Britain’s commercial and colonial domination could disclose threatening secrets. The bordering of the known with the unknown occurs very frequently in Vathek. The dark spaces and unexplored geographical areas experienced by the characters of Vathek are not distant from the readers’ own perception of the Orient as a threatening dark space which, in


Beckford’s time, could be glimpsed occasionally and with great difficulty, and could therefore become a source of anxiety. Beckford’s whole narrative strategy produces this effect on more than one occasion. While travelling in pursuit of the wealth promised by the Giaour, the royal procession loses its way in the middle of a storm at night and is threatened by ‘wild beasts’: there were soon perceived in the forest they were skirting, the glaring of eyes, which could belong only to devils or tigers. The pioneers, who, as well as they could, had marked out a track; and a part of the advanced guard, were devoured, before they had been in the least apprized of their danger. The confusion that prevailed was extreme. Wolves, tigers, and other carnivorous animals, invited by the howling of their companions, flocked together from every quarter. The crashing of bones was heard on all sides, and a fearful rush of wings over head; for now vultures also began to be of the party. (pp. 45–6) Vathek is unable to react to this dreadful occurrence and Bababalouk, the chief of Vathek’s eunuchs, orders fires to be lit immediately in order to keep the beasts away. ‘Ten thousand torches were lit at once’, and, as recalled by the corresponding note, this stratagem was related by William Marsden’s History of Sumatra (1783) as being actually used by local populations to frighten tigers (p. 135). When as a consequence of the torches’ fire a forest near Vathek’s procession catches fire, Beckford immediately refers this event from the tale to a real fact, and a note argues that ‘Accidents of this kind, in Persia, are not unfrequent’ (p. 136), a statement followed by a passage from Richardson’s Dissertation, in which such occurrences are described as being caused by ‘kings and great men’. There is much in the key passages discussed above which pulls Vathek in the direction of the Gothic. While Beckford’s novel lacks the whole array of Gothic paraphernalia, such as medieval Catholic settings or haunted castles, certain psychological and narrative implications place Vathek within the same tradition of Gothic fiction begun by the novels of Walpole and Reeve. Beckford often uses dark, enclosed and claustrophobic spaces, while his attention to magic and necromancy would soon become stereotypes of the novel of horror. Frederick S. Frank has shown the limitations of a definition of Vathek as merely an ‘Oriental tale’. He has convincingly traced a number of elements in Beckford’s work which are consistent with the terror motifs which had been in-


troduced by Walpole and Reeve and which would be developed by Radcliffe and Lewis.15 In particular, Frank has related a key text of Gothic aesthetics, Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ (1773), to Beckford’s horror fiction and particularly to the character of the Caliph himself, who is overwhelmed by a perverse ‘otherness’ as a result of his unholy and tragic quests.16 Frank’s argument is convincing but rather limited, as it does not take into account the fuller implications of Barbauld’s argument and, particularly, her emphasis on the effects of the ‘objects of terror’. Barbauld’s discourse on the psychological effects of the ‘objects of terror’ refers both to real life and to the act of reading itself. In particular, she reflects on the balance between pain and pleasure caused by certain events, both in real life and in fiction, and on ‘the pleasure constantly attached to the excitement of surprise from new and wonderful objects’: A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of ‘forms unseen, and mightier far than we,’ our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers. Passion and fancy co-operating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.17 This is certainly the case with Vathek’s frantic quest for the treasures of the pre-Adamite sultans. Furthermore, Barbauld mentions ‘Oriental Tales’ as a genre on more than one occasion and refers to the particular amazement that readers draw from the descriptions of fantastic realities contained in them. However, while she stresses the fictitious and fantastic nature of such fictions as the Arabian Nights, she also adds that the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the circumstances of a scene of horror, the more pleasure we receive from it; and where they are too near common nature, though violently borne by curiosity through the adventure, we cannot repeat it or reflect on it, without an over-balance of pain.18 Within a ‘tale’, these ‘circumstances of a scene of horror’ which happen to be ‘too near common nature’ derive from their proximity to common occurrences or natural events. The fantastic elements of Vathek are intermingled with frequent references to real-life events, places or characters


– the ‘common nature’ of so many aspects of the Eastern reality portrayed by Beckford. Crucially, therefore, Barbauld’s text shows how Beckford’s use of Oriental elements is consistent with the literary and aesthetic tenets of the Gothic, and in particular with those narrative elements which showed how within human experience the ‘domestic’ could be in close proximity to the ‘alien’. A Gothic reading of Vathek must therefore take into account the actual import of its Eastern elements. Indeed, within the perspective of recent discussion of ‘orientalism’, the authenticity of Beckford’s picture of oriental society has often come under attack from those who have emphasized Beckford’s mostly antiquarian and second-hand knowledge of the East. Having never travelled to those countries described in his tale, Beckford delved into his personal library and drew from it most of the materials on which his imagination worked to create Vathek. These materials, ordered in Henley’s notes, presented a picture of Oriental society which, according to modern criticism, is intrinsically false or, at best, the result of works which effectively operated a mediation between Beckford and a ‘visible’ but ultimately unknowable (by Beckford) East.19 A work such as d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale, Beckford’s own favourite, is, after Edward Said’s analysis, now discredited as an example of Orientalism because it belonged to a class of texts which expressed the West’s attempt to dominate the East and to present it in a way which has no direct relationship to a ‘real’ geographical, social and cultural entity. According to Said, d’Herbelot’s picture of the East, for all its catalogue of data, historical and geographical facts, customs, traditions and religious rites, ‘did not attempt to revise commonly received ideas about the Orient. For what the Orientalist does is to confirm the Orient in his reader’s eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already firm convictions.’20 While in terms of absolute authenticity the intrinsic weakness of the sources used by Beckford and Henley cannot be denied according to today’s standards, these sources represented the only modern and reliable information on the East available to readers and writers at the time. If in the 1780s a stereotype of the East already existed, it was a fragmented one based on a limited number of works (and on an even smaller number if one should want to define an ‘English-born’ stereotype) and on an image of the East which, as Beckford fully realized, was scientifically inadequate or weak. A Saidian critique of Vathek can be (and has been) used to show Beckford’s quiescent, if somewhat unsettling, consent to the dominating Western approach to the East, but tells us very little of the actual import and reception of Beckford’s erudition


and of Vathek’s ‘realism’ in the context of late-eighteenth-century fiction, and, even more importantly, cannot explain the meaning of the novel as a horror story taking up elements placed geographically and culturally in a position of ‘otherness’.21 The statement by Byron which opened the present chapter can be understood in view of Beckford’s disclosure of what he thought his readers should perceive as the real Orient.22 By assuming this, one is thus able to see the full meaning of Beckford’s attempt to create in Vathek a narrative space in which the ‘tale’ is intruded upon by elements of ‘reality’, a narrative space which discloses to readers the dangerous proximity and closeness of the alien presence of the Oriental ‘other’. The way Beckford handles his materials and places them within his tale reveals a complex strategy in which domestic and alien, real and fictitious, familiar and unfamiliar converge and mingle. In Vathek, the East is posited in terms of a mysterious dark space of which we can only glimpse fractured or partial images through the works written by Western explorers or historians. The East is a vacuum which is beginning to be filled by such works as Vathek, an ‘other’ which is resistant to the West’s ‘rational’ understanding but whose knowability depended on structures of thought which projected an aura of sinister and tangible immediacy. In Vathek Beckford often seems to dramatize the hesitating, stammering and unsettled voice of the West facing the ‘beyond’ of the East, an unknown domain which can only be represented as fragmented and obscure. Beckford and Henley’s use of their ‘scientific’ sources attempts to place the mysteries of the East within an experiential space available to all readers. However, the sense of otherness projected by Vathek, negotiated through Beckford’s erudite representation of the East through his sources, does not manage to project a fully reassuring sense of distance and alterity from the West. As a true Orientalist, Beckford inscribes the language of the West into the East. At the same time, however, the East resurfaces into the West in shapes which are the domain of the uncanny. The familiar and orderly remembrance of Charlemagne is compared to (and threatened by) Vathek’s Eastern tyranny and horrific actions. The East is presented as an unhomely presence in the domestic space of the West and is potentially suffocating and horrific because it is open to any interpretation. Vathek opens up a space of interaction between East and West which cannot be simply conceived as part of Said’s formulation of colonial discourse as an apparatus of power, consciously defining and reducing marginalities and ‘othernesses’ as products of the Western Eurocentric


hegemony. If anything, Vathek enacts the difficulties in understanding the ‘other’ – the ‘other’ from the West’s own senses and reason, which cannot fully comprehend the encoded and obscure geographical and cultural language of the East, but also the ‘other’ from the ‘other’ itself, the ‘other’ from the Caliph Vathek, who cannot decipher the inscriptions of the Giaour’s sabre and is pushed to overreach the boundaries of his own being by entering unknown regions and consequently facing Eblis (and a strangely Christian punishment for a tale set in the East!).23 Vathek’s own identity is precariously constructed since it cannot be entirely defamiliarized and made ‘other’ from the West: Carathis, his mother, is Greek and he is therefore already a visible product of cultural miscegenation. In order to understand the world outside himself, the Caliph needs to construct a new identity, losing his own Muslim faith and becoming fully himself an ‘other’, a Giaour, an infidel. In other words, as a (potentially) colonized, and, at the same time, in his own way, a colonizer, Vathek’s own identity is reshaped and violated according to the external pressures of the ‘outside’, or the ‘beyond’. Unlike Beckford, Maturin could not and did not call himself an ‘Orientalist’. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he was certainly an omnivorous reader, but his expertise on Oriental culture and languages was much narrower than Beckford’s. Certainly Melmoth the Wanderer cannot be defined an ‘Oriental Tale’ in the same mould as that of Beckford or his French predecessors. Maturin came after, and was influenced by, the works of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Unlike Vathek, Maturin’s novel does not present imaginary adventures in exotic lands, neither is it instrumental in giving an exhaustive and learned picture of Oriental manners. Oriental motifs are present, however, in both the structure and theme of Melmoth the Wanderer. While Vathek was, as its subtitle implied, an ‘Oriental Tale’, the working title of Melmoth the Wanderer was ‘Tales’. The novel is therefore shaped along a narrative medium with very definite connotations: like the Arabian Nights or the collection of Oriental tales copying their scheme, Melmoth the Wanderer consists of a series of ‘Tales’ with a tenuous unifying link: the Faust-like protagonist John Melmoth, who is very often absent from the narration.24 The narration shifts from Ireland to Spain, England and the Indian Ocean within a very broad chronological range and is presented in a much more fragmentary manner than the plot of Beckford’s work. The clearest indication of Maturin’s Orientalism can be found in the ‘Tale of the Indians’, which, according to Heinz Kosok, is ‘one of the fiercest attacks on colonialism anywhere to be found in nineteenth


century literature.’25 This tale alludes to the destructive effects of Europeanization through the events of the life of Immalee, a Spanish woman who lived as an innocent bon sauvage on a remote Indian island ever since a shipwreck left her there while still an infant. Immalee paradoxically embraces Christianity despite Melmoth’s disparaging descriptions of it. She falls in love with the Wanderer himself and is eventually found and brought back to native Europe, where, in a typical act of colonial (re)naming, she reverts to her old name and is rechristened as Isidora, only to die in a prison of the Inquisition after giving birth to her and Melmoth’s child.26 The Oriental, or non-European, also surfaces in a series of references to real-life events which Maturin takes from travel literature and other works on distant regions of the globe. Similarly to Vathek, the use of travel literature in the footnotes of Melmoth the Wanderer leads the reader to view the ‘fiction’ of the tales within a disturbing and tangible aura of reality.27 The few passages in Melmoth which direct the reader’s attention to the authority of certain travel books show not only that Maturin had learned Beckford’s lesson very well, but also that he could handle the ‘real’ scenes offered by his sources more radically than his predecessor. In his use of travel literature, Maturin uses an encoded language in which a very radical critique of European colonialism foreshadows his own troubled sense of Irishness. Of all the tales of Melmoth, the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, related by Alonzo Monçada, who becomes a priest against his will, following his parents’ vows, is the one which most clearly delves into more conventional Gothic elements.28 The story of Monçada’s long stay in a Spanish convent and his escape from it is dotted with a series of gruesome episodes. In one of them, two newly ordained priests are often seen in a suspiciously intimate friendship. The authorities of the convent spy upon them and it is soon discovered that the pair are actually husband and wife, and the only way for them to meet and live together was for her to join the order as a novice. When the Superior, aided by Monçada himself, finds out the truth and sees the young couple embracing each other, the shock is great and can only be compared by Monçada to something altogether inhuman: Here I must do the Superior reluctant justice. He was a man (of course from his conventual feelings) who had no more idea of the intercourse between the sexes, than between two beings of a different species. The scene that he beheld could not have revolted him more, than if he had seen the horrible loves of the baboons and the Hottentot women, at the Cape of Good Hope; or those still more


loathsome unions between the serpents of South America and their human victims, when they catch them, and twine round them in folds of unnatural and ineffable union. (p. 207) Maturin’s perspective is obviously anti-Catholic: only in a Spanish convent could the most natural union, that between a man and a woman, be considered sacrilegious, unnatural and even beastly. Yet, there are even subtler implications. In order to characterize fully the moral darkness of those who live in a certain environment, Maturin compares the Superior’s thoughts to scenes of lurid strangeness: for him, the sight of husband and wife together is as ‘unnatural’ as the union between women and baboons in South Africa, or as the mortal embrace between snakes and their victims in South America.29 Maturin thus suggests that the distance between the readers’ values and those of the convent is no less than that between Europe and the southern hemisphere (and there is indeed a good dose of macabre irony on Maturin’s part in inserting a reference to the Cape of Good Hope in a context which for Monçada was devoid of any). The crudity of the scene is referred to by Maturin as coming from a specific source. The footnote to ‘human victims’ tells the reader: ‘Vide Charlevoix’s History of Paraguay’. The reference is to Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, whose History of Paraguay, first published in French in 1756, was translated into English in 1769. Maturin is here using a source which had a certain scientific legitimacy: Charlevoix was a French Jesuit missionary (and therefore, implicitly, an instrument of colonialism himself) who had travelled to North America between 1719 and 1729. His most popular work, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France (1744), offered new information on the indigenous populations and its impact and reputation were such that it was used by Adam Ferguson in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and William Robertson in History of the Reign of Charles V (1769). The evidence collected by Charlevoix was indeed extremely important for the Scottish philosophers as it provided them with useful indications in their analysis of the evolution of mankind through different stages of civilization.30 Yet, Maturin does not use the work which Charlevoix is most famous for. Instead, he draws from the less well-known History of Paraguay. The History was very different from Charlevoix’s earlier book on North America, as it mainly consisted of a detailed chronicle of the discovery and conquest of Paraguay from 1516 up to Charlevoix’s time; it was a


‘history’ in the fully colonial sense of the word, as it only begins when Paraguay was first ‘discovered’ by the Spanish and thus ignores its ‘pre-European’, indigenous history. The only information on the natives and their environment contained in the two volumes of the work is in the first 27 pages of the first volume; it is from this short section that Maturin drew the passage which he used for the episode of the husband and wife surprised in the convent. In his outline of the animal world of Paraguay, Charlevoix describes the dangers posed by the reptiles which can be found in that region. He relates two deadly encounters of large water snakes with humans. In the first of them, an Indian of the tallest stature, who happened to be fishing up to his middle in water, [was] swallowed alive by a huge snake, which the next day vomited his prey ashore quite whole, all to the bones which were smashed to pieces, as if they had been bruised between two mill-stones.31 This is followed by a similarly horrid episode, related to Charlevoix by one Father Montoya, who was one day called upon to hear the confession of an Indian woman, whom, while she was washing some linen on the banks of a river, one of these animals attacked, and, as she said, offered violence to her: the missionary found her stretched on the very spot, where she said the thing had happened; she told him she was sure she had but a few minutes to live, and in fact expired almost as soon as she had finish’d her confession.32 In the second passage, the English translation of the snake’s actions has a degree of linguistic ambiguity which the French original somehow lacks: the snake ‘offered violence’ to the Indian woman but this seems to allude to a violent sexual union between a snake and a woman.33 In both episodes, the snake has come out victorious from its struggle for food, but the embrace has inevitably been fatal for its victim. Their ‘union’ can never fully take place because of the total incompatibility between the snake and its victim, who can neither be digested nor made pregnant. It is such incompatibility, this ‘unnatural and ineffable union’, that Maturin reproduces in his picture of the Superior’s reaction to the view of husband and wife together. The episode in Melmoth the Wanderer and its source reveal Maturin’s anxiety over the colonial enterprise. Charlevoix, the unnamed traveller


to the Cape of Good Hope and Monçada had all travelled and reported to Europe the horrors they witnessed: Charlevoix published written accounts of his travels to America once he got back to Europe, while Monçada escaped from Spain to Ireland to narrate his ‘Tale’ to the young John Melmoth. Maturin seeks to convey to his readers the effect produced by the scene on the Superior, and warns them that the unnatural ‘unions’ witnessed and described by those who have visited the Cape of Good Hope and Paraguay do take place and can be reproduced in Spain, much closer to home. Through Monçada’s report, Maturin thrusts the monstrous strangeness of the woman-baboon and snakevictim unions inside the space of a novel set in a Catholic country, a familiar setting for Gothic novel readers but also one resembling Ireland. In their explorations, Charlevoix and the travellers to the Cape of Good Hope have revealed and reported a shocking vision of human life, a ‘heart of darkness’ which is no longer uncharted territory for the West but which the West, by conquering it, has also absorbed in all its obscure and often horrid aspects. Paraguay was, after all, a Spanish colony, the Cape of Good Hope was under British control, while in Spain itself men and women were kept under the brutal tyranny of the Inquisition. Another event, Monçada’s taking the holy orders, is again presented in terms of proximity with reality: I have read of a wretched Jew, who, by the command of a Moorish emperor, was exposed in an area to the rage of a lion who had been purposely kept fasting for eight and forty hours. The horrible roar of the famished and infuriated animal made even the executioners tremble as they fastened the rope round the body of the screaming victim. Amid hopeless struggles, supplications for mercy, and shrieks of despair, he was bound, raised, and lowered into the area. At the moment he touched the ground, he fell prostrate, stupefied, annihilated. He uttered no cry – he did not draw a breath – he did not make an effort – he fell contracting his whole body into a ball, and lay as senseless as a lump of earth – So it fared with me; my cries and struggles were over – I had been flung into the arena, and I lay there. I repeated to myself, ‘I am to be a monk,’ and there the debate ended. (pp. 91–2) Maturin points to the ‘wretched Jew’ in a footnote: ‘Vide Buffa – Anachronism prepense.’ The anachronism deliberately used by Maturin is a reference to John Buffa, whose Travels through the Empire of Morocco


was published in 1810, much later than the events described in the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’. Readers are invited to believe in Monçada’s narration on the basis of real-life facts documented by a witness, the traveller John Buffa, who in his Travels reported what had happened to an unfortunate Jew who had incurred the wrath of Muley Yezid, a ferocious ruler of Morocco notorious for his hatred of Jews. By saying ‘I have read’, Monçada (and, one should add, Maturin) refers to an external source which authenticates the pain inflicted on him (‘So it fared with me’) in his taking the vows against his will. At the same time, of course, ‘we’, as readers, ‘read’ Monçada’s narration itself and are put in a dual position of control over, and knowledge of, what is narrated by both Buffa and Monçada. The episode denotes what may be called Maturin’s anxiety of imperial conquest and oppression. The victim’s resignation with regard to his destiny is similar to the prostration experienced by the conquered in the presence of a conquering ‘beast’ which is hungry for flesh – and for power. Empires crush individuals through tyranny and forced conversions. There is a sinister cycle entailed in all conquests: Catholicism absorbed Monçada but, of course, was itself an ‘Empire’, which was close to dominating the four corners of the globe and as such was an instrument of colonization which converted the colonized; the Moors, themselves the object of persecution in the Spain of the Inquisition, had ruled over the Jews of Morocco and often sent them to a cruel death, the destiny of those who refused conversion; but of course, in Maturin’s time, the only empire which ruled on more than one continent – and in Ireland itself – was Great Britain. For Maturin, imperial conquests and domination were real, as there was much evidence of them both in the history of mankind and all over the world – in Morocco, in Spain, and in Great Britain. Maturin does not say what happens to the Jewish victim mentioned in Buffa’s work, but he seems to imply that Monçada’s spiritual death has a parallel in the Jew’s physical death. However, Maturin indicates that the saddest stories of conquest and domination can generate torments or even illusions worse than death. Indeed, Monçada does not die and survives to tell his story but is perpetually haunted by his own experiences. Incredibly, in Buffa’s story, the Jew survives as well; the chilling horror of a seemingly atrocious death is replaced by a sense of calm relief and even of defiance: While in this attitude, the animal approached him, ceased roaring, smelt him two or three times, then walked majestically round him,


and gave him now and then a gentle whisk with his tail . . . After a short time had elapsed, the Jew, recovering from his insensibility, and perceiving himself unmolested, ventured to raise himself up, and observing the noble animal couched, and no symptom of rage and anger in his countenance, he felt animated with confidence. In short, they became quite friendly, the lion suffering himself to be caressed by the Jew with the utmost tameness.34 Maturin does not give the full version of the story as the Jew’s survival may have affected the tragic tone of the reference he used. However, no such caution would have been necessary in any case: the lion may be momentarily tame and even be teased by its victim, but he would always retain a position of absolute power of life and death; the Jew may still be alive, but this story, which the self-deceiving Jewish narrator enriches with ‘a number of annotations and reflections . . . all tending to prove the victory of their nation over the heathens’, cannot change a dark destiny of slavery and oppression.35 Because of severely restricting laws and of his own precarious position within the Church of Ireland, Maturin could not offer an explicit critique of Britain’s domination over Ireland. In the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, Spain is Maturin’s explicit target, but he is implicitly speaking of England, the imperial power of the present and, possibly, the future.36 He could not declare it directly but, from his own Irish perspective, Britain’s conquest of Ireland had somehow squeezed out Irish identity. His early novels were mainly shaped after Sidney Owenson’s works and he was clearly influenced by her discussion of Irish themes in the wider context of Britain’s colonialism.37 All of this does not make Maturin, the Protestant clergyman, and therefore in theory in a position of dominance, an Irish nationalist eager to shake off the imperial yoke of Britain. In a way, it was quite the opposite. Maturin was genuinely interested in the destiny of his own country, but his perspective is that of an Irishman who did not see the Act of Union of 1801 with Britain as a real union between equal national communities. Instead, he clearly resented Britain’s hegemony. All colonial conquests (in Ireland, South America or South Africa) may indeed be lethal for the colonized and the effect had mainly been, for the Irish, suffocation and death: just like the snakes of South America, which ‘twine round’ their victims ‘in folds of unnatural and ineffable union’, and which give a sinister air to the conquest of the colonizer, the Union of England and Ireland had resulted in the victory of the former but could determine the death of the latter.


Thus, Maturin offers a sophisticated critique of the colonial enterprise in a kind of text whose traditional means and ends had in the past usually avoided collisions with colonial issues. Like Beckford, Maturin deploys travel literature to show the tangible proximity of the horrid realities in distant regions. Melmoth the Wanderer, however, was written 34 years after Vathek and at a time when the colonial enterprise and conquest were no longer a possibility or an option but a tangible reality. The ‘geography’ available to Maturin was much vaster than that in which Beckford lived and wrote his masterpiece: by the time Melmoth the Wanderer was written, the colonial enterprise was well under way, and the European overseas conquests were opening up to reveal all their horrid mysteries. Knowledge of the world and Beckford’s own tentative Oriental scholarship had been expanded; the dark and impenetrable forest of the Caliph Vathek, the ferocity of whose animal beings he could only guess, had now become an open, visible and ‘unnatural’ spectacle of cruelty and destruction. The dividing line between the two writers is their different positions regarding the ‘Orient’ and the colonized. Beckford studied it with all his erudition and from a position which was (perhaps not deliberately or actually, but at least potentially) one of domination. Maturin uses very similar narrative strategies to deploy the West-East intercourse and to make it concrete, but at the same time he speaks from the position of a dominated subject within an ever-expanding Empire; he could therefore offer a perspective which was both hegemonic and hegemonized, dominating and dominated. Maturin was a colonized within a colonizing Empire – he was not an ‘Orientalist’ but, so to speak, an ‘Orientalized’ who felt like a stranger in his own land – an Empire whose parts were not united.

Notes 1. Lord Byron, Byron’s Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), vol. 3, p. 423. 2. The Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, ed. Fannie E. Ratchford and William H. McCarthy, Jr (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1937), p. 95. 3. Lord Byron, letter to John Murray, 2 April 1817, Byron’s Letters and Journals (London: John Murray, 1981), vol. 5, p. 203. 4. On British neglect of Near-Eastern affairs up to the early decades of the nineteenth century see M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question 1774–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1966), and Allan Cunningham, Anglo-Ottoman Encounters in the Age of Revolution, ed. Edward Ingram (London: Frank Cass, 1993).

32 Empire and the Gothic 5. See Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), pp. 136–78. 6. Roger Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’ to Vathek (1786), ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xxv. All subsequent references to Vathek are from this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text. 7. This advertisement was published in the Morning Chronicle. Quoted in Guy Chapman, Beckford ([1937] London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), p. 202. 8. Readers had good reason to believe in the authenticity of Vathek. In the introduction to his own English translation of Beckford’s original French version which he first published without Beckford’s permission, Samuel Henley seemed to imply that the work did indeed have an original in Arabic. The implications of the seemingly multiple translations of Vathek are discussed by Adam Roberts and Eric Robertson, ‘The Giaour’s Sabre: A Reading of Beckford’s Vathek’, Studies in Romanticism 35 (Summer 1996), 199–211. 9. See Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London: William Heinemann, 1910), pp. 125–36. 10. Gentleman’s Magazine 57 (January 1787), 55. Quoted in Lonsdale, ‘Preface’ to Vathek, p. xvii. 11. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), pp. 61–71. Of course, the analysis of the interplay of romance and realism has become much more refined and persuasive. See for instance Kenneth W. Graham, ‘Beckford’s Adaptation of the Oriental Tale in Vathek’, Enlightenment Essays 5 (1974), 24–33, and Malcolm Jack, ‘Introduction’, Vathek and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. xix–xx. 12. The note does not give a reference to its account of Vathek’s gaze but Roger Lonsdale traces its source again in d’Herbelot’s work. 13. Haroun al Raschid was Vathek’s grandfather; cf. Vathek, p. 124. 14. Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, Collected Poems, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London: Dent, 1963), pp. 76–96, at p. 80. 15. Frederick S. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved’, in Kenneth Graham, ed., Vathek and the Escape from Time. Bicentenary Revaluations (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 157–72. Older assessments of Beckford’s work within the Gothic tradition include Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror (London: Constable, 1921), pp. 94–9, and Devandra Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: Arthur Barker, 1957), pp. 132–5. 16. Frederick S. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved’, p. 169. 17. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ (1773), in E.J. Clery and Robert Miles, eds, Gothic Documents: a Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 127–31, at p. 129. 18. Ibid. Italics mine. 19. On Beckford’s ‘mediative’ re-elaboration of and voracious attitude towards his sources of knowledge on the East see in particular Frederick Garber, ‘Beckford, Delacroix and Byronic Orientalism’, Comparative Literature Studies 18 (1981), 321–2.

Discovering Eastern Horrors 33 20. Edward Said, Orientalism ([1978], London: Penguin, 1991), p. 65. Said, however, acknowledges that the Bibliothèque ‘was more capaciously thorough than any work before it’ (p. 64). A Saidian reading of Vathek is offered by El Habib Benrahhal Serghini, ‘William Beckford’s Symbolic Appropriation of the Oriental Context’, in C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen, eds, Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 43–64. 21. In opposition to Said and, it seems to me, to Serghini’s rather extremist views, John Garrett, in his ‘Ending in Infinity: William Beckford’s Arabian Tale’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5 (October 1992), 15–34, argues that Beckford’s representation of the East, however ‘Westernized’, still allowed a space of authenticity – or at least sincerity. I largely agree with Garrett’s detailed analysis of ‘Beckford’s overlaying of one cultural topography (English, Christian, known) upon another (Arabic, Islamic, unknown)’ (p. 16) in the narrative practice of Vathek but I find his views partly unsatisfactory as, apart from a discussion of the Faustian spirit of the Caliph Vathek, he bypasses the implications of the Gothic within the colonial discourse. 22. Byron, Poetical Works, vol. 3, p. 423. 23. In this sense, Garrett intriguingly describes Vathek as an over-reacher who acts as a typically Western geographer travelling in a world with whose different set of values (and even spatial, geometrical values) he finds himself at odds. John Garrett, ‘Ending in Infinity: William Beckford’s Arabian Tale’, pp. 22–8. 24. The structure of Melmoth the Wanderer as a nest of ‘tales’ is discussed by Dale Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 101. 25. Heinz Kosok, ‘Charles Robert Maturin and Colonialism’, in Mary Massoud, ed., Literary Inter-Relations: Ireland, Egypt, and the Far East (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), pp. 228–34, at p. 228. 26. Joseph W. Lew, in ‘ “Unprepared for Sudden Transformations”: Identity and Politics in Melmoth the Wanderer’, Studies in the Novel 26 (Summer 1994), 173–95, offers an extensive discussion of the ‘Tale of the Indians’ in the Irish and colonial context. 27. Travel literature was not the only instrument used by Maturin to draw the reader close to real-life events and people. Of course there was Ireland itself, and references to certain cruel episodes of its recent history bestow an even more sinister colouring upon the misfortunes of the novel’s characters. See Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer [1820], ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 251n., 256n., 257n.. All subsequent references to Melmoth the Wanderer are from this edition and will be given in parentheses in the text. 28. Paradoxically, according to Amy Elizabeth Smith the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’ was also the one in which, on the basis of some of the typical Gothic tropes, Maturin felt greater freedom than everywhere else in the novel to experiment in both the narrative structure and the psychology of the characters: Amy Elizabeth Smith, ‘Experimentation and “Horrid Curiosity” in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’, English Studies 74 (1993), 524–35. 29. Melmoth the Wanderer has been read as an endless story of broken or unnatural unions, especially of family ties. See Jack Null, ‘Structure and


30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

Theme in Melmoth the Wanderer’, Papers in Language and Literature 13 (1977), 133–47. See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 57–64, 120–2, 139. Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, History of Paraguay, 2 vols (Dublin, 1769), vol. 1, p. 21. Ibid., pp. 21–2. In the original sentence in French, the action is described as ‘avoit fait . . . violence’, which in eighteenth-century French clearly indicated rape. John Buffa, Travels through the Empire of Morocco (London, 1810), p. 152. Ibid., pp. 152–3. Although he exclusively discusses the ‘Tale of the Indians’, I largely agree with Lew’s argument, according to which ‘Spain’s Catholicism mimetically doubles, and even helps to produce England’s own fierce Protestantism’. See Lew, ‘ “Unprepared for Sudden Transformations” ’, p. 186. For a discussion of Maturin’s fervently Irish and anti-colonial feeling in his early novel The Milesian Chief (1811), see Kosok, ‘Charles Robert Maturin and Colonialism’, pp. 230–2.

2 Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor Kim Ian Michasiw

‘Hah! Say you so, enchanting Moor?’ exclaimed Victoria, half frantic with joy at the meaning contained in his words; and, breathless with contending emotions of hope and doubt, seizing his hand, she pressed it to her bosom. ‘Signora! Be calm, be composed’, cried Zofloya, ‘and honour not thus, unworthily, the lowest of your slaves.’1 Thus an early exchange between Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria di Loredani and her Moorish familiar Zofloya in the 1806 novel bearing his name. Zofloya’s self-designation as ‘slave’ is, at one level, a trace of his ironic participation in the discourse of Romance. Within that discourse, most men in Victoria’s orbit are, or ought to be, enslaved, as Zofloya’s deft use of the plural indicates. Those other men are not, however, of African descent; they do not participate in the other discourse of slavery, present in 1806 in England (if not in Dacre’s imagined sixteenth-century Venice). In England in 1806 the Houses of Parliament and the newspapers were filled with debate concerning the abolition of Britain’s participation in the West African slave trade. In permitting Zofloya to call himself a slave, Dacre is insisting that the current status of his race not be forgotten, that the increasingly asymmetrical power relations between Victoria and Zofloya be understood with reference to African slaves and their European masters. Or rather she is insisting that Zofloya be understood in relation to the discourse of abolitionism and the constructions that discourse had imposed upon the African. As I will argue below, the conventional discourse of abolitionism fed and throve upon the pathetic figure of the ‘dying negro’. Dacre, in contrast, insists upon the African as a figure of power, and a power particularly associated with a white woman. In her revisionist project Dacre 35


has recourse to another, superceded figure for the African, the Moor, a term replaced in almost all abolitionist texts by ‘the Negro’ and surviving in political discourse only as part of the racialized epithet ‘blackamoor’. By drawing upon the literary and historical associations of the Moor, Dacre enables herself to attack one of the most cherished elements of abolitionist orthodoxy, the inherent pathos of the African. That such an attack is double-edged goes, I think, without saying and I will return to those edges in all their dangerous ambiguity at the essay’s close.

‘Rosa Matilda’ performs an abolitionist poem Dacre’s Hours of Solitude: A Collection of Original Poems (1805) may be understood as a tour through the popular sub-genres of shorter poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. The two volumes are announced as being by Charlotte Dacre ‘better known by the name Rosa Matilda’, the pseudonym she had adopted for her contributions to newspapers. Many of the poems bear sub-titles of the order of ‘written at sixteen’ which serve to separate them from the soi-disant 23-year-old who publishes them.2 In its emphasis on age, the collection creates something like a kunstlerroman, with lyric snapshots of the poet coming of age through a process of experimentation with a variety of fashionable forms and topics. There are ballads, brief love lyrics, imitations of Ossian, coupleted odes, poems ‘after the manner of some Modern poets’, attempts at blank verse narrative and experiments with elaborate stanza forms. Recent readers have been most intrigued, though, by her more sanguinary and/or overtly Gothic poems ‘Julia’s Murder’, ‘Death and the Lady’, ‘The Maniac’, ‘The Murderer’, ‘The Skeleton Priest’.3 As pertinent to Zofloya, however, are two other poems in more conventional genres: the Orientalist ‘Moorish Combat’ and the abolitionist ‘The Poor Negro Sadi’. On the face of it Dacre’s exercise in abolitionism is utterly conventional.4 The generic terms from the abolitionist lyric were laid down in 1773 in Thomas Day and John Bicknell’s ‘The Dying Negro’, which is sub-titled ‘a Poetical Epistle Supposed to be written by a Black, (who lately shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames); to his intended wife’.5 The poem details the pastoral innocence in which the speaker lived while in Africa, the treachery and violence of the white slavers, the misery of the slave ship, and the torments of slave labour. Individualizing the poem is the

Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor 37

account of the speaker’s reciprocated love for a white servant whom he loves despite his acute consciousness of her obscure birth. Notable too is the speaker’s overt longing for revenge. Vastly popular, ‘The Dying Negro’ was frequently reprinted. Even more, it was imitated with increasingly differentiated variations.6 Standard abolitionist poems treat all, or a part of, a relatively uniform narrative. That fabula begins in a more or less idyllic West Africa. The slave ships arrive and with a greater or lesser degree of treachery or violence, the slave-to-be is torn from his family, his wife, his beloved. The captive then lives through, or dies amid the inhuman conditions of, the ‘middle passage’. Arriving either in the West Indies or America the captive is sold at market and plunged immediately into an alternation between brutally difficult labour and even more brutal beatings. He may or may not escape but that escape leads only to recapture and/or to death. Death by drowning or as a consequence of ill-treatment and exposure are preferred. Day and Bicknell’s pistol is not much emulated. This narrative may be treated extensively or intensively. Characters may be named, developed, localized, or the enslaved and their captors may be treated anonymously. The poetic speaker may be the poet or the poet may ventriloquize the enslaved African. Moments within the generic fabula may be selected as the work’s primary focus or the entire movement may be represented. The scene of the final escape and death may be in the West Indies or it may be in Britain itself. The poem may be written in ballad stanzas, in rhyming couplets or in blank verse. A given poet’s choices among these options influence considerably the poem’s ideological emphases and suggest certain stresses within the edifice of abolitionism. A more extended treatment of the moment of capture tends to place greatest blame for the iniquities of the trade on the merchants and, occasionally, on the African middlemen who brought the slaves to the coast. Dilating on the middle passage vilifies sailors and their captains, while a focus on conditions in the West Indies directs the attack to the planters and their white overseers. Bringing the Dying Negro to Britain obliges the common reader to take stock of her or his share of the responsibility. As merchants exercised considerable direct political influence and as attacks on sailors and their captains became more vexed during the long wars with Revolutionary France, the ‘Creole’ planter becomes the most convenient recipient of blame, a blame that shapes itself into accusations of deviance, even devolution. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s characterization is typical:


In sickly languors melts his nerveless frame, And blows to rage impetuous Passion’s flame. Fermenting swift, the fiery venom gains The milky innocence of infant veins. There swells the stubborn will, damps learning’s fire, The whirlwind wakes of uncontroul’d desire. The effects on Creole women are analogous: ‘See her, in monstrous fellowship, unite/ At once the Scythian and the Sybarite.’7 Abolitionist verse is not entirely clear whether these effects derive from the practice of slave-holding, from association, even at a considerable remove, with Africans, or from the hot, enervating climate of the tropics. Rigorous abolitionist writers recognized that too great an emphasis on climate and its malign impact on human character led either to questions about the moral potential of the African, or to a notion of racial difference that played directly into the arguments of ‘polygenists’ who argued that Africans were not in fact of the same species as Europeans.8 The efforts of the scrupulous are, however, outweighed by the common knowledge that hot climates rendered white men and women indolent, cruel and subject to sensual appetites. We are not far here from Zofloya’s Victoria, though Victoria has not the excuse of a tropical climate. More crucial to the present purpose, though, is the image of the African developed and promulgated in abolitionist writings. Africans are always victims, are always rendered the passive recipients of torment. The convention of the Dying Negro depends strongly on the choice of death being the one active position the enslaved African can assume. Slave rebellions certainly took place and not all abolitionist poets, as we have seen, are reluctant to call for the African’s revenge, but the slave who escapes, gathers followers about him, and rises against his erstwhile masters is not a figure for abolitionist verse. Poetic justice is better carried out by hurricanes and volcanoes than by armed African insurgents. The pre-captive African is above all an innocent being. That innocence may show itself in one of two primary modes. The first we might short-hand as the simple savage, the second as the tropical swain. Day and Bicknell are firmly in the former camp. Their ‘dying negro’ recalls his freedom: Ye streams of Gambia, and thou sacred shade! Where, in my youth’s first dawn I joyfully stray’d


Oft have I rouz’d amid your caverns dim, The howling tiger, and the lion grim, In vain they gloried in their headlong force, My javelin pierc’d them in their raging course. (ll.126–131) Living at one with a nature that is something like a wild animal show, this sort of African does not labour but dwells in abundance, spear in one hand, faithful mate in the other. He is manly, valiant, monogamous, individualistic, an Ossianic hero translated into an opulent landscape and freed from Ossian’s obsessive tribalism. This individualism is of considerable importance, since it flies in the face both of what ethnographic knowledge there was about West Africans and of what we might call the Oroonoko tradition. Aphra Behn’s enslaved prince, especially as mediated by Thomas Southerne’s dramatic adaptation, has extensive influence in anti-slavery fiction but less force among the poets. Oroonoko has been deprived of his people and those people might always be regathered about him. This potential has appeal to more conservative writers on slavery. In Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné the captive prince Yambu sulks in his tent until he is restored to his ruling position by the humanitarian planter Savillon. Such overt belief in aristocracy is, however, a bad fit with the governing bourgeois values of abolitionism. Moreover, the thought of hierarchically organized groups, which existed latently among the plantations, is not a comforting one even to those rhetorically enthused by the thought of the negro’s revenge. More comforting, and hence more prevalent, is the African as innocent agrarian, tending his larger or smaller fields at peace, at least until the slavers come. The idealized yeoman farmer carries immense prestige across a number of ideological positions in the later eighteenth century. A working relation to the land is a precondition to civic virtue among all who subscribe to the ideals of liberty and property, and the smaller landowner is far less susceptible of the vicious influences of luxury than is the holder of vast estates. Thus the African as farmer torn both from land and family and obliged to work another’s land in perpetual indentures is an ideal figure for pathos. And that, above all, is what the enslaved African becomes. He (or she, though the lot of the female African is one far less frequently represented) is the occasion for sympathetic tears and righteous indignation. His plight is a call to action from the British public. The negro is ‘poor’, ‘dying’, ‘wronged’. His revenge is to be enacted by cosmic forces rather


than by his own hands.9 It is certainly not to be pursued by groups of the like-minded oppressed. Dacre’s ‘The Poor Negro Sadi’ appears to conform on the key generic issue of affect. It appears entirely conventional in other ways as well but, as noted, variations in emphasis within the genre can be telling. The poem begins with an apostrophe to the poor negro ‘the lone victim fate dooms for a slave’ (l.2).10 Dacre has chosen not to permit her African to speak; her poetic speaker directly addresses the European reader: And believe, when you see him in agony bending Beneath the hard lash, if he fainting should pause, That pure are to heaven his sorrows ascending, And dear must you pay for the torture you cause. (ll.13–16) Sadi becomes an excuse for the speaker’s exhortations and an occasion for melting the hardened European heart. Dacre touches briefly on the early episodes in the generic narrative. Wrenched from ‘his innocent dwelling/ And torn from Abouka, the wife of his soul’ (ll.5–6), Sadi endures force-feeding; he ‘resolves to escape, or he dies’ (l.26). Plunging into the ocean he swims to an English ship by which he is rescued but the ‘sable victim of sorrow’ (l.33) is transported to ‘Albion’s shore’ (l.38) rather than returned to Africa. The greater part of the poem is devoted to Sadi’s helpless wanderings in England on whose ‘plains’ he is ‘cast’ (l.42). Friendless, forlorn, unable to find food or shelter, Sadi wanders despairing for three days and nights. Wishing only to die, he stretches himself on a doorstep. But even there he cannot find peace; he is dragged away and left in a freezing field by ‘hell-born tormentors’ (l.63). The poem follows with an address to Heaven, characterized here as an agency that has observed Sadi’s torment and noted only that ‘Pure, pure to thy throne his last sighs are aspiring/ Tho’ sable his skin, tho’ unchristian his tone!’ (ll.75–6). It concludes with a repetition of the initial apostrophe. Against the generic background sketched above, several elements stand out. The first is the English setting of Sadi’s final torments. The poem insists that the Mansfield decision that a slave became free the moment he arrived on British soil had done little to improve the lot of such free Africans.11 Setting oppression at home eliminates the easy blame of degenerate Creole: Sadi’s ‘hell-born tormentors’ are of solid English stock. Attributing Sadi’s death to the cold performs a reversal of the deadly climate argument which supported the English in their disinclination to do physical labour in the tropics.


More striking still is the poem’s ruthless pathologization of Sadi. He is poor, lone, forlorn, unpitied, wretched. He suffers horror, anguish, sadness, despair, and horror again. He ends his sufferings in hopeless submission, no longer imploring. Even his one moment of apparent triumph, being hauled from the sea on the point of death by drowning is punctured by the speaker’s proleptic interjection: But vainly preserv’d, sable victim of sorrow! An end far more dreadful thine anguish must have Tho’ a moment from hope it faint lustre may borrow, Soon, soon, must it sink in the gloom of the grave. (ll.33–6) While it would be rash to suggest that Sadi is the most unremittingly pathetic of the dying negroes who populate abolitionist verse, it is difficult to see how an increase of pathos might be achieved. The poem performs one aspect of its genre so intensely and in such isolation from mitigating, contrasting elements, that the pathos becomes grotesque. We might think of it, on the model of the psychoanalytic part-object, as a part-affect cloven off from any emotional context and fetishized. This apprehension of the grotesque is amplified by a prosodic decision that can only be labelled bizarre. The attentive reader will have observed something odd about the poem’s rhythm. ‘The Poor Negro Sadi’ is composed in a ‘headless’ anapestic tetrameter; that is, each line commences with an iamb and is then followed by three anapests, the anapest in the second foot being effected most often by a kind of enforced demotion, a calculated oppression, as it were, of words that ought to bear stress. If the reader will forgive a moment’s scansion, I will illustrate. ˘ x ˘ ˘ x ˘ ˘ x ˘ ˘ x ˘ At length in a moment of anguish despairing ˘ x˘ ˘ x ˘ ˘ x ˘ ˘ x Poor Sadi resolves to escape, or he dies: ˘ x ˘ ˘x ˘ ˘ x ˘ ˘ x˘ He plung’d in the ocean, not knowing or caring ˘ x ˘ ˘ x ˘ ˘ x ˘ ˘x If e’er from its waves he was doom’d to arise. (ll.25–8)


This is among the most regular of the poem’s stanzas and illustrates well the metre’s insistent quality. Matters become more complicated in the second foot of many lines as in the five lines beginning with ‘The poor negro Sadi’ (ll.1, 21, 42, 44, 77). In such lines the lexical stress on the first syllable of the word ‘negro’ is negated, hence demoted, by the word’s placement, following upon the strong stress of ‘poor’, and by the metrical pattern. Thus the designator ‘negro’ is demoted to stresslessness on five of the seven times it appears in the body of the poem. In its other two appearances it is involved in exactly the same metrical process, save that on those occasions the victim is the word ‘wretched’: ‘In vain, wretched negro! Thou lookest around thee/In vain, wretched negro! So lowly dost bend’ (ll.49–50). It is as if the word ‘negro’ itself breeds metrical coercion. Tensions between metric and lexical stress occur in the second foot on several other occasions: twice each with ‘cold’, ‘keen’ and ‘lone’. All of these are key pathos-bearing adjectives and all suffer demotion. Moreover, there is one line in which the metre and stress come into collision throughout and that is in the stanza describing Sadi’s death: ‘His shrunk heart scarce flutter’d, scarce heav’d his faint breath’ (l.70). It is hard labour to read this line as a series of anapests. We might dismiss this as the work of a mediocre poet on a bad day, save that the irregularities crop up where the rendering pathetic of Sadi is most intense. Why employ anapestic tetrameter here, a verse form more usual for slight amatory poems and for satires?12 At the turn of the nineteenth century there was a short-lived fashion for anapestic elegies, a fashion which commenced with Cowper’s ‘The Poplar-Field’ and persisted through Wordsworth’s experiments in the mode in Lyrical Ballads.13 More pertinently, for the present purpose, in the 1790s non-iambic metres were closely associated with radical politics. The early numbers of the reactionary Anti-Jacobin Review are filled with vitriolic attacks on prosodic innovation. The preferred mode of anti-Jacobin attack was parodic imitation and the Review’s dutifully republished ‘Jacobin’ poems are all in ‘deviant’ metres. In the fourth number the Review offers ‘La Sainte Guillotine’, ‘a specimen of Jacobin poetry, which we give to the world without any comment or imitation. We are informed . . . that it will be sung at the Meeting of the friends of Freedom.’14 The poem begins: ‘From the blood bedewed vallies and mountains of France/ See the Genius of Gallic invasion advance’ (ll.1–2). It marches on in perfectly formed anapestic tetrameters. As a poet frequently writing for the popular press, Dacre cannot have been unaware of the Anti-Jacobin Review’s persistence in connecting non-


iambic meters, and especially triple meters, with lovers of the guillotine. This makes her decision the more striking. Does she work in the metre because it was the metre in which abolitionist works were written, or because it was the medium in which parodic imitations of radical works were penned?15

Charlotte Dacre exhumes the Moor ‘The Poor Negro Sadi’ has at least a hint of being a ventiloquized abolitionist lyric commissioned by the editors of the Anti-Jacobin Review. This hint gathers context when we turn back a page or two in Hours of Solitude to examine that volume’s other staging of race, ‘Moorish Combat’. From the opening stanzas’ description of the heroic lover Marli, readers of Zofloya are on familiar ground: A snow-white turban crown’d his brow severe, Its crescent sparkled like the beamy morn; A dazzling vest his graceful form array’d, And gems unnumber’d did his belt adorn.16 (ll.5–8) Marli’s costume is identical to Zofloya’s in Victoria’s prophetic dream. Marli is lingering about the mouth of a cave in which dwells his beloved Ora. He appeals to her to leave the cave and join him, which she soon does, albeit not without a ‘trembling pause, as doubtful of her doom’ (l.24). They fervently embrace and surrender to their mutual passion: ‘How vain to stem their rapture as it flow’s/ Or whisper to their stagg’ring sense beware’ (ll.33–4). His eyes wander over her charms while she stares down demurely. At which moment the narrative shifts to ‘fierce Zampogni’ (l.39) the rival who shoots down upon them ‘like a flaming meteor’ (l.40) sparkling sabre in hand. Marli and Zampogni fight. Marli has initially the upper hand until ‘mysterious fate directs the flying steel’ (l.63) and Zampogni’s blade finds its target. The dying Marli resigns Ora to his rival and that rival hastily seizes his prize. Too hastily, as he has failed to observe the ‘dagger, in her vest till now conceal’d’ (l.73) that Ora buries in Zampogni’s breast and then in her own. We have entered an African world far removed from that of ‘Negro Sadi’. It is unlikely that Sadi’s courtship of ‘the wife of his soul’ Abouka, bore much resemblance to this scene of Moorish passion, battle and murder. The ‘pathetic negro’ of the abolitionist tradition is deeply


attached to family but only in the most domestic way. He is a poor, unarmed farmer, not a warrior swathed in gold and gemstones. The negro woman may be caring and maternal as she becomes popularly, especially after the publication of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in 1799,17 but an apostle of heroic love she was not. The Moor designates something very much other than the negro.18 The Moor, like the gypsy and the Jew, was once Europe’s internal Other. Unlike gypsies and Jews, though, the Moors’ presence in Europe had a definite termination date. Their ‘alien’ presence in Europe had ended with the conquest of Granada in 1492. Expelled, converted by force or killed, the Moors had ceased to be as a nation or a people. Fortuitously their disappearance coincides with the discovery of the New World and the inception of the long modernity and they become, in their literary incarnations, prisoners of time, figures of all that had to be expelled in order for the modern world to come into being for good and ill. Thus Othello, the exemplary lover and warrior who is hopefully befuddled by domesticity and peace. Thus Dryden’s doomed Granadans in The Conquest of Granada 1 & 2, too intimately attached to the codes of love and honour to function in the world that is coming into being. The elegiac Moor of later seventeenth-century drama aligns well with the Cavalier court threatened on all sides by bourgeois, dissenting values. The heroic Cavalier ideal recognized itself as destined to marginality and masquerade and thus found congenial self-representations in peoples nearing extirpation. Whether there were Moors or Peruvians mattered little. Lost, though, in the representations of the doomed is any sense of how the flourishing civilizations they made might have come into being. Those devoted absolutely to passion and honour administer bad kingdoms and build collapsible cities. Dryden’s Granadans have beauty, love and moral excellence, but under their guidance the State falls like a leaf.19 Seventeenth-century representations of the Moors, then, see them as representative of cultural orders superceded by more adaptable peoples. That adaptability is a virtue is not, however, certain and the British were not at all certain that the development of imperial Spain was anything like progress. There are two lines of literary development across the eighteenth century which are of importance here. The first is the cult of the colonized Gaelic peoples of the British periphery. At the centre of this cult are the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson, the literary sensation of the 1760s. The key historico-cultural point of Macpherson’s project is that the ancient Gaels were, in terms of sensibility, far more advanced


peoples than the Teutonic barbarians who displaced them. Macpherson accepts the historical inevitability of the inheritance of the world by the sons of little men but he does so with vast regret. This regret is of a different order than that of Dryden’s for his Granadans, for it is for a nation, or a race, rather than for a class, for a culture in its totality rather than for a fragment of that culture. Furthermore, Macpherson’s model is easily translated to other cultures. If refined Gaelic culture is doomed to extinction at the hand of barbarians, so (at least potentially) were the advancements of the Moors. The second line of development is Gothic, with its dependence upon the Inquisition as agency of arbitrary power. In the best-known Gothic works of the 1790s, the Inquisition manifests itself as the secret police force of the Roman Catholic Church. Its enormities are directed at private Christian citizens (and at those in error within the Church). The role of the Inquisition in the ethnic cleansing of Spain after 1492 awaits Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) to receive full treatment and there the focus is on the forced conversion of Jews rather than of Moors. At the same time, the role of the Inquisition in the creation of Modern Christian Europe appears as a linked metonym even when the inquisitors are plying their trade in Italy. The shadowy presence of the Inquisition in The Monk’s Madrid, flirts more nearly with memories of genocide. And if, as David Mogen and his colleagues argue, ‘Gothicism results when the epic moment passes, and a particular rift in history develops and widens into a dark chasm that separates now from what has been’, the role of the Inquisition in the extirpation of Moorish culture is just such a rent.20

Zofloya dispatches the negro Zofloya, in its confirmed rejection of the designation ‘negro’ and its embrace of the Moor, appears at first sight to withdraw from contemporary debate about Africans, but I think it finally does not. As I have observed elsewhere, the first point the narrative makes, in its long-delayed introduction of its title character, is that of Zofloya’s great personal beauty.21 Beauty is an attribute that Africans, in so far as they are designated Moors, are allowed; the African, designated as negro, cannot be beautiful. The possibility of the beautiful black man or woman is much debated in aesthetic texts but in artistic representations and, increasingly after the turn of the nineteenth century, in ethnography, objective beauty was denied to the negro. Matters had not quite reached the point that they did in the 1830s when ethnographers were


arguing that ‘a strong and handsome people’ like the Fante or the Mandinka of West Africa could not be negroes.22 The association of the term negro with the impossibility of beauty was, however, well ingrained. J.F. Blumenbach’s 1795 classificatory description will serve as a representative: Colour black; hair black and curly, head narrow, compressed at the sides; forehead knotty, uneven, malar bones protruding outwards; eyes very prominent; nose thick, mixed up as it were with the wide jaws; alveolar edge narrow, elongated up front; upper primaries obliquely prominent; lips very puffy; chin retreating. Many are bandy-legged.23 Zofloya is granted numerous qualities that Dacre’s contemporaries, even the most committed of anti-slavery activists, would have denied to Africans and he negates any number that they would have asserted. Though exquisitely polite, Zofloya is a solitary. He displays none of the signs of devoted emotional attachment to family made famous in abolitionist verse. He lacks devotion to the elderly, and suggests Lilla’s elderly aunt as the subject for Victoria’s first poisoning. He displays nothing of the passionate temper supposed to be inevitable in Africans. Although he is the medium for Victoria’s revenge, he displays none of the supposedly endemic vengefulness of the African character. He is inclined neither to indolence nor to debauch. He shows much fidelity to Victoria but none to Henriquez, his master, nor to his first Spanish master, of whom more below. Racially different he may be but ‘negro’ he is not. He does, however, appear in the non-dream portion of the novel by disappearing, or more properly by dying, an art in which, as we have seen, the literary negro specialized. It is worth observing in some detail the manner, and order, of the presentation of Zofloya after he manifests himself in Victoria’s dream. His presence in the dream puzzles Victoria. At first she cannot think who the Moor might be whose person she had a confused idea of having seen frequently before. After a minute’s reflection, she identified him for Zofloya, the servant of Henriquez. Why he should be connected with her dreams, who had never entered her mind while waking, she could not divine. (p. 137)


The unseen, deferential servant who, though ‘tall [and] commanding,’ (p. 137) merely attends his master suddenly becomes only too visible to Victoria and too accomplished, it would seem, ever to have been missed. Zofloya’s sum of beauties and perfections inspires a homicidal fury in the old servant Latoni, who stabs the Moor with his dagger and dumps his bleeding body into a canal. Latoni makes this confession while he lies dying of a mysterious illness. It is after that confession and death, but before Zofloya’s return, that we learn Zofloya’s history; that is, the introductory history is provided in the place of a eulogy: unlike the revenger, Zofloya does not (cannot at this point) speak his history. He is, of course, a Moorish noble, reduced by chance of war to a menial station. Henriquez is his second master. The first is ‘a Spanish nobleman, who, pitying his misfortunes, considered him rather as a friend than as an inferior’ (p. 141). That nobleman, intimate also with Henriquez, becomes embroiled in a quarrel that costs him his life. On his deathbed the Spanish noble ‘recommended to [Henriquez’s] future protection, the Moor Zofloya’ (p. 141). The narrative does permit Zofloya to recount the night of the attempted murder. In contrast to the narrative voice, which attributes Latoni’s crime to jealousy, the Moor waives any knowledge of or speculation upon the assassin’s motives. He does, however, make an important claim for another order of knowledge: ‘Fortunately, none of my wounds proved to be serious; and being in possession of a secret transmitted to me by my ancestors, for speedily healing even the most dangerous ones . . .’ (p. 142). Zofloya’s medical and pharmacological knowledge, though modelled perhaps on Matilda’s arcane learning in The Monk, is attributed to his ancestors. It is an inheritance from his culture rather than the tutelage of a single eccentric father. Given the infancy of mind attributed by both pro-slavery and abolitionist writers to Africans, when designated with the term negro, the emphasis on the Moorish cultural heritage is no innocent gesture. Moreover, when the narrator first describes Zofloya’s cultivation, she attributes it in part to the ‘Spanish nobleman’. The Moor, on the other hand, in his infrequent backward glances, ties himself firmly to his non-white culture. Racial debate at the turn of the nineteenth century strove occasionally to distinguish North Africans from Sub-Saharans and to figure those ‘tawny’ Africans as quasi-Semitic and thus above black Africans, if below Europeans, on the scale of the races. Dacre’s descriptions are notable for


their refusal of any visible bleachings of her Moor. The question of colour is voiced openly by Zofloya himself: ‘Does the Signora believe, then, that the Moor Zofloya hath a heart dark as his countenance?’ (p. 151). Zofloya insists on the Moor’s blackness, a complexion emphasized by his frequently invoked white turban and bracelets of pearl. The turban, the pearls, and Victoria herself, are glimmering white ornaments around the Moor’s concentrated darkness. Zofloya is as black, as visibly different, as any negro, dying or otherwise, in abolitionist literature, and this in a novel acutely conscious of gradations of colour within races. The tiny, flaxen-haired Lilla is consistently contrasted, especially in the mind of Henriquez, with the tall, dark-haired Victoria. Henriquez though he treated [Victoria] with friendship and respect . . . he did no more: first because he was absorbed in Lilla; and secondly, because being so completely, both in mind a person, the reverse of that pure and delicate being, he not only failed to view them as two creatures of the same class, but almost thought of Victoria with a tincture of dislike, from the very circumstance of her being so opposite to his lovely mistress. (p. 138) It is worth pausing over the quasi-biological phrase ‘two creatures of the same class’ which more than hints at a polygenist logic. For Henriquez, physical and moral difference classify Lilla and Victoria as belonging to separate species and it was precisely on grounds of physical and moral difference that the African was derided. Lilla is the quintessence of whiteness, a status picturesquely figured later in the novel when the narrator dilates on the chiaroscuro effect of the insensate Lilla’s ‘snowwhite arms, bare nearly to the shoulder . . . her feet and legs resembling sculptured alabaster’ contrasting with Zofloya’s bare back as he carries her to captivity (p. 203).24 This level of racialized thinking appears confined to Henriquez, except to the degree that Victoria comes to absorb it, but Henriquez, especially when set against his old-fashioned, philosophical voluptuary brother, is the novel’s representation of the coming race.25 Victoria, Zofloya and the narrator in their different ways contribute to keeping race as the centre of the novel. Zofloya alone, however, insists that the status of his relationship with the novel’s Whites not be forgotten. Henriquez and his extended family may persuade themselves that they treat Zofloya ‘rather as a friend than an inferior’ (p. 141) but the Moor chooses to disagree. Zofloya self-identifies as ‘the lowest of


your slaves’ (p. 151), and as ‘the slave of your wishes’ (p. 162). Victoria might choose to regard these as courtly metaphors, but in 1806 a black man referring to himself as the slave of his white interlocutor cannot wholly be a figurative exaggeration. Especially not when Zofloya’s status is never clarified. Is he a free man who is acting as a servant to Henriquez, or is he owned by the Spaniard? In an early scene of Zofloya standing silently behind Henriquez’s chair at dinner, the reader is not privileged to observe the interactions of master and man. Victoria’s growing intimacy with the Moor is rigorously focalized through her and is densely woven with the gap between Zofloya’s inherent majesty and the servile postures he adopts. Even toward the novel’s close when his deference fades and his ascendancy over all around him is palpable, the Moor will not let reference to his status rest. After Zofloya has let down his guard enough to suggest that they both know they are ‘affianced’, Victoria involuntarily starts and demands to know his meaning. He replies ‘A truce, fair Victoria, to folly! – am I not thy equal? – Ay thy superior! – proud girl, to suppose that the Moor, Zofloya, is a slave in mind!’ (p. 242). With the not-incidental reference to her fairness, Zofloya reminds Victoria that even she sees him within a role she cannot bring herself to name. Within pages Zofloya, the Moor, is revealed to be mere drapery for Satan himself who stands ‘a figure, fierce, gigantic, and hideous to behold’ (p. 267). But even Satan in propria persona underscores ownership when he assures Victoria that it has been he all along, ‘under the semblance of the Moorish slave (supposed the recovered favourite of Henriquez)’ who has guided her steps to perdition (p. 267). If we are the sort of reader who believes that final revelations transform, we are perhaps relieved that Zofloya is no Moor and never was. But Dacre’s text is so riven with the discourse of race and slavery that the need to place Dacre’s Moor amid that debate is not waived by the simple claim that he was not a Moor after all, but merely in an expedient disguise. This leaves us with a set of fairly difficult questions about the way in which Dacre’s Moor aligns himself with debates on race. Zofloya’s rejection of the pathetic and pathologizing designator ‘negro’ is the text’s foundational move. Insisting on Zofloya’s racial difference, on his blackness, and on the cultivation of his cultural heritage, Dacre’s text wrests Africans out of the primitive realm where both pro-slavery and abolitionist texts preferred to lodge them. Moreover in insisting that Moorish culture’s prime attributes were scientific and artistic and radically muting, until the final scenes, Zofloya reminds its reader of one of European modernity’s guilty secrets and the source of some several of


its claims to superiority.26 In emphasizing Europe’s erased debt to Africa, Zofloya files a salutary protest against the primitivism and pathos of abolitonism’s negro. The embrace of the designator Moor is more complex still in its proffer of a self-identifying position to the African subject. Though ‘Moor’ brings with it chains of association less positive than those emphasized in Zofloya, Dacre is only too aware of the power of renaming. Her own acts of self-designation have been detailed and analysed in Lisa M. Wilson’s ‘Female Pseudonymity’, which underlines her awareness of the linkage between label and identity.27 More immediately pertinent, when considering race, is the example of her father. Born Jacob Rey, renaming himself John King, and known to all as Jew King (with all of the effrontery of that irreligious ‘christian’ name), Dacre’s father appears consciously to have inhabited the extraordinarily rigid designator, ‘Jew’. By all accounts King charged right through the canonical racist strategy of giving dogs bad names and hanging them to make that ‘bad name’ pay all the way to his marrying the dowager Countess of Lanesborough and genteel retirement to Venice. If embracing the Moor could do for Africans what embracing the Jew did for Jacob Rey. . . . The reader will already have formed objections, or at least recognized the pitfalls inherent in the strategy of reclaiming racist designations. How much damage did John King’s confirmation of everything the British bigot ‘knew’ about Jews do to the aspirations of other Jews in England? What is to be gained in the shorter or longer term by refiguring the African not as the pathetic victim of a militarily superior and historically more advanced culture but rather as equal or superior beings ‘by a combination of events, and the chance of war . . . reduced to menial circumstance’ (p. 141)? Such circumstances might easily be reversed, as Zofloya’s growing ascendancy demonstrates. His influence over Victoria is one thing; his influence over Leonardo’s troop of banditti is something else. During his stay with the banditti, ‘[t]he Moor Zofloya occasionally accompanied a chosen troop . . . in their adventurous excursions.’ Those chosen were ‘ruffians rather than robbers, and the bloodhounds of the band’ who on returning ‘unaminously . . . swore, that when he was among them, they felt impelled to deeds which otherwise would have remained unattempted’ (p. 245). Under Zofloya’s guidance these ruffians’ proclivity to rapine and bloodshed assumes monstrous dimensions. Upon learning that Zofloya is really Satan, the reader may be reassured but memories of the bloody slave-rising in Sainte-Domingue were slow to


die and such hagiographic memoirs of Toussaint l’Ouverture and James Stephens’s Buonaparte in the West Indies (1803) were more than counterbalanced by anti-Jacobin ripostes.28 Fear of the ‘negro’s revenge’ was real enough among the West Indian planters and Toussaint’s victory made history of that fear. Though less immediate for those safely domiciled in Britain, the fear of the African was very much a part of racial thinking and was directly addressed by abolitionist pathos. In rejecting that pathos, Dacre reopens the way to the psychically more powerful, morally less trammelled African, reduced to servitude and the more vengeful for it. Her novel demarcates the way in which vengeance may be exacted, who its first victims will be, and how that vengeance will move from the domestic space outward to the larger social sphere. Zofloya gains his power through the agency of a corruptible white woman, takes his vengeance first on those among the women who are incorruptible – elderly aunts and hyperblonde virgins. Thence to masters and their families and outward, through the power to command inherent in those beyond good and evil, to the society at large. Zofloya’s last nonsupernatural act is to command and to be obeyed by the Duke of Savoy’s soldiers, sent out to capture the banditti: ‘Signors . . . retire immediately from the cavern – if you persist in remaining, evil must betide you! You impede my movements, and will yourselves suffer’ (p. 264). Thus the menial slave concludes his progress by commanding the troops and all is traceable back to Victoria. The similarity of this narrative to various racist meta-narratives which were current by the middle years of the nineteenth century is clear. Parental indulgence has led Victoria to the indulgence of passion; passion indulged is an invitation to the Moor and once invited the Moor’s ascendancy is guaranteed. Had Victoria been properly socialized she would have regarded Zofloya with the conditioned reflex of disgust with which Henriquez regards her deviations from the ideal whiteness of woman. In light of later narratives, we can see Victoria as going native, we can see Zofloya’s kidnapping of Lilla as inter-racial rape, we can see Zofloya, in his role of tempter, as the voice of alterity threatening the frail network of repression and renunciation upon which nineteenth-century Western civilization is founded. All this is to suggest that as Dacre’s text is prescient in focusing male desire on the child-like figure of Lilla, it also anticipates the so-called scientific racism of the 1830s and after.29 Few views of Africans could be further from that of orthodox abolitionism than that found in Robert Knox’s Races of Men (1846):


If there be a dark race destined to contend with the fair races for a portion of the earth, given to man as an inheritance, it is the Negro. The tropical regions of the earth seem peculiarly to belong to him; his energy is considerable: aided by the tropical sun, he repels the white invader. From St Domingo he drove out the Celt; from Jamaica he will expel the Saxon; and the expulsion of the Lusitanian from Brazil, by the Negro, is merely a matter of time.30 In the struggle of the races that is, in Knox’s view, the future only the negro can vanquish the fair races. The great struggle will be to conclude where the ‘tropical regions’ end. Few in the abolition debates could envision this conquering African but, under the guise of the Moor, Zofloya can and does. Zofloya’s restoration of dignity, self-worth and culture to the African is, as noted, a salutary and necessary corrective to abolitionism’s pathetic, dying negro. What lies on the other side, though, of an African ‘thy equal – Ay thy superior’ (p. 242)? As with Lewis’s conjuring up of the learned, crafty, desiring woman in The Monk’s demonic Matilda, the spectre raised by the potent, magnetic, knowing Moor is not banished by unveiling him as Satan. However Christianly superstitious the reader, the domesticated woman and the enslaved African are far closer to home than Satan, and their possible liberations far more frightening. As it is the Gothic writer’s job to inspire fear, we may conclude that Dacre is doing no more than she should. At the same time we might consider her example as salutary as well in illustrating how the banishing of one mode of racialized thought may prepare the way for another.

Notes 1. Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or The Moor, ed. Kim Ian Michasiw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 152–3. All subsequent references are to this edition, and page numbers are given in the text. 2. Dacre’s age remains a mystery. Most recent researchers have, however, been persuaded by the dates mentioned in her death notice that she was close to a decade older than she claimed. 3. See Adriana Craciun, ‘ “I hasten to be disembodied”: Charlotte Dacre, the Demon Lover, and Representations of the Body’, European Romantic Review 6.1 (Summer 1995), 75–97. 4. There is something somewhat belated about Dacre’s exercise in the genre. Charlotte Sussman has argued persuasively that abolitionism peaked in 1792–93 and like other radical causes suffered a diminution in the years fol-


5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

lowing. ‘Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792’, Representations 48 (Fall 1994), 48–69. Thomas Day and John Bicknell, ‘The Dying Negro: a Poetical Epistle Supposed to be written by a Black, (who lately shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames); to his intended wife’ (London: W. Flexney, 1773). Although my focus here is on abolitionist verse, many of the same characteristics feature in other abolitionist genres, including, or especially, the parliamentary oration. Lord Grenville’s speech to the House of Lords on 24 June 1806 is a remarkably extensive tour through abolitionism’s narrative and affective commonplaces. See Substance of the Debates on a Resolution for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London: John Hatchard, 1806) pp. 88–110. The analogous but more metered terms of abolitionist argument in the works of the movement’s key spokespeople, Thomas Clarkson and Anthony Benezet, and discussed by Peter J. Kitson, ‘ “Bales of Living Anguish”: Representations of Race and the Slave in Romantic Writing’, ELH 67 (2000), 515–37. ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., on the Rejection of the Bill for abolishing the Slave Trade’, ll. 49–54, 61–2. The Poems of Anna Laeticia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994). Philip D. Curtin points out that the lack of a theory of acquired immunity and the unavoidable recognition that Africans thrived in environments that were the white man’s grave prompted later eighteenth-century doctors to argue ‘that God had endowed Africans with immunity to fevers so that they could live their lives in their own way without interference . . . . In this way the misunderstanding of the medical men came ultimately to be enshrined at the core of ‘scientific’ racism’. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964) p. 84. Nicholas Hudson emphasizes also ‘the extent to which the abolitionist movement itself adopted a “racial” outlook on non-Europeans’: ‘Nation to Race: the origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, 3 (1996), 251. By Hudson’s logic, the designation ‘Moor’ is a sign of pre-racial thinking while ‘negro’ is an entirely racialized term. Unless the revenge is entirely personal, as in The Wrongs of Almoona, or the African’s Revenge (Liverpool: H. Hodgson, 1788), attributed to William Roscoe, in which Almoona’s beloved wife is taken from him by his Spanish master. Almoona, in a fit of honour, visits and kills his wife to save her from a fate worse than death. Later Almoona, fighting with the British against the Spanish colonists, encounters the dying Spaniard and forgives him. Almoona, with his vaguely Islamic name, has ties not only to the Oroonoko precedent but also to the older literary tradition of the Moor, of which more below. Charlotte Dacre, Hours of Solitude, 2 vols (London: n.p., 1805), vol. 1, pp. 117–22. The ease with which such repatriation campaigns as that for the Province of Freedom in Senegambia, led by Granville Sharp in the mid-1780s, were able to collect hundreds of volunteers from among the black poor of London is one indication of the difficult life of the free African. The first-


12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

year mortality rate among black settlers in the Province of Freedom was 39 per cent. These are the uses to which Dacre puts the form elsewhere in Hours of Solitude. See ‘Alas, Forgive Me’ and ‘The Reply’ and in the satirical ‘Fracas Between the Deities: addressed to Mr. F—, an enthusiastic votary at the shrines of Bacchus’. Margaret Garner, ‘The Anapestic Lyrical Ballads: New Sympathies,’ Wordsworth Circle XIII, 4 (Autumn 1982), 183–8. L. Rice-Oxley, ed, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1924), p. 12. The one other ‘serious’ use of anapestic meter in Hours of Solitude occurs in the highly ambiguous elegy ‘To the Shade of Mary Robinson’. Robinson, of course, was something of the ‘poster-girl’ for critiques of the debased status of women through the 1790s. Robinson had also some not entirely savoury connection with Dacre’s father, the usurer and gangster John King. See Anne K. Mellor, ‘ “Making an Exhibition of Her Self”: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Scripts for Female Sexuality’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22 (2000), 271–304. Charlotte Dacre, ‘Moorish Combat’ in Hours of Solitude, vol. 1, pp. 108–12. Line references will be given in parentheses in the text. Park describes an incident when, in deep distress, he is succoured by a group of African women. They improvise a song about his condition, a song he translated literally but which was soon retranslated into poetry by Georgiana Cavendish and set to music by G.G. Ferrari. Cavendish’s poem became a fixture in later editions of the Travels. The extirpation of the Moors in Spain is a far more central element in the literature of the Iberian peninsula than in that of Britain. For an overview of the Moor in Spanish literature see Israel Burshatin, ‘The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem, and Silence’, Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985), 98–117. Julie Ellison, in ‘Cato’s Tears’, ELH 63 (1996), 571–601, suggests that the preIberian Moors of Addison’s Cato and James Thomson’s Sophonsiba have an entirely different ideological function in which certain Moors may be seen as heirs of the true Rome. David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders and Joanne B. Karpinski, eds, Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), p. 16. Kim Ian Michasiw, ‘Introduction’ to Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or the Moor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. vii–ix. Curtin, The Image of Africa, p. 370. J.F. Blumenbach, ‘On the Natural Variety of Mankind’ in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. T. Bendyshe (London: n.p., 1865), p. 264. One might suggest that had the designation ‘Moor’ been active in the mid-nineteenth-century, the Fante and Mandinka might well have emerged as Moorish peoples. I note also Zofloya’s thoughtful provision of a mantle of leopard skin for the captive Lilla. Whatever the actual range of the leopard in the wild, such skin is very much an emblem of the Africa of the slave-trading posts and Lilla’s imprisonment, however facilitated by Victoria, is another form of ‘the African’s revenge’ in the European imaginary.

Charlotte Dacre’s Postcolonial Moor 55 25. Victoria’s brother Leonardo shares something of this manner of thought as when in his role as masked chief of banditti he greets Zofloya’s assertion that Victoria ‘will be mine’ with visible agitation ‘ “Your’s!” he muttered – but suddenly checking himself . . .’, (p. 239). 26. Walter Scott makes a similar point in The Talisman’s Saladin – warrior, statesman, and physician – when contrasting his myriad talents, skills and graces to the lumbering boors who are Western European nobles during the Crusades. Set further back in time, however, and further east, The Talisman does not engage so nearly with Western modernity’s foundational crimes. Similarly Scott is more comfortable with the expulsion of the Jews in the twelfth century than with Spain’s treatment of the Jews or with its extirpation of the Moors at the end of the fifteenth. 27. Lisa M. Wilson, ‘Female Pseudonymity in the Romantic “Age of Personality”: the Career of Charlotte King/Rosa Matilda/Charlotte Dacre’, European Romantic Review 9, 3 (Summer 1998), 393–420. 28. Notable among these is George Walker’s novel The Vagabond (1799), which recycles the report that Toussaint’s troop had employed, as their standard, a white infant impaled on a spear. 29. On which see Seymour Drescher, ‘The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of European Scientific Racism’, in his From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 275–311. 30. Robert Knox, Races of Men: a Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations (London: Renshaw, 1850), p. 456.

3 Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerges out of a particular conjuncture of British class history. A text of nascent feminism, it remains cryptic, I think, simply because it does not speak the language of feminist individualism that we have come to hail as the language of high feminism within English literature. Barbara Johnson’s brief study tries to rescue this recalcitrant text for the service of feminist autobiography.1 Alternatively, George Levine reads Frankenstein in the context of the creative imagination and the nature of the hero. He sees the novel as a book about its own writing and about writing itself, a Romantic allegory of reading.2 I propose to take Frankenstein out of this arena and focus on it in terms of English cultural identity. Within that focus we are obliged to admit that, although Frankenstein is ostensibly about the origin and evolution of man in society, it does not deploy the axiomatics of imperialism for crucial textual functions. Let me say at once that there is plenty of incidental imperialist sentiment in Frankenstein. My point, within the argument of this essay, is that the discursive field of imperialism does not produce unquestioned ideological correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book. The discourse of imperialism surfaces in a curiously powerful way in Shelley’s novel, and I will later discuss the moment at which it emerges. Frankenstein, however, is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction (family and female) and social subject-production (race and male). That binary opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory – an artificial womb where both projects are undertaken simultaneously, though the terms are never openly spelled out. Frankenstein’s apparent antagonist is God himself as Maker of Man, but his real competitor is also woman 56

Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl 57

as the maker of children. It is not just that his dream of the death of mother and bride and the actual death of his bride are associated with the visit of his monstrous homoerotic ‘corpse’, unnatural because bereft of a determinable childhood: ‘No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing’.3 It is Frankenstein’s own ambiguous and miscued understanding of the real motive for the monster’s vengefulness that reveals his competition with woman as maker: I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. (p. 206) It is impossible not to notice the accents of transgression inflecting Frankenstein’s demolition of his experiment to create the future Eve. Even in the laboratory, the woman-in-the-making is not a bodied corpse but ‘a human being’. The (il)logic of the metaphor bestows on her a prior existence that Frankenstein aborts, rather than an anterior death that he re-embodies: ‘The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being’ (p. 163). In Shelley’s view, man’s hubris as soul-maker both usurps the place of God and attempts – vainly – to sublate woman’s physiological prerogative.4 Indeed, indulging a Freudian fantasy here, I could urge that, if to give and withhold to/from the mother a phallus is the male fetish, then to give and withhold to/from the man a womb might be the female fetish in an impossible world of psychoanalytic equilibrium.5 The icon of the sublimated womb in man is surely his productive brain, the box in the head. In the judgment of classical psychoanalysis, the phallic mother exists only by virtue of the castration-anxious son; in Frankenstein’s judgment, the hysteric father (Victor Frankenstein gifted with his laboratory – the womb of theoretical reason) cannot produce a daughter. Here the language of racism – the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission – combines with the hysteria of masculism into the


idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than subjectconstitution; and is judged by the text. The roles of masculine and feminine individualists are hence reversed and displaced. Frankenstein cannot produce a ‘daughter’ because: she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate . . . [and because] one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (p. 158) This particular narrative strand also launches a thoroughgoing critique of the eighteenth-century European discourses on the origin of society through (Western Christian) man. Should it be mentioned that, much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions, Frankenstein declares himself to be ‘by birth a Genevese’ (p. 31)? In this overtly didactic text, Shelley’s point is that social planning should not be based on pure, theoretical, or natural-scientific reason alone, which is her implicit critique of the utilitarian vision of an engineered society. To this end, she presents in the first part of her deliberately schematic story three characters, childhood friends, who seem to represent Kant’s three-part conception of the human subject: Victor Frankenstein, the forces of theoretical reason or ‘natural philosophy’; Henry Clerval, the forces of practical reason or ‘the moral relation of things’; and Elizabeth Lavenza, that aesthetic judgment – ‘the aerial creation of the poets’ – which, according to Kant, is ‘a suitable mediating link connecting the realm of the concept of nature and that of the concept of freedom . . . (which) promotes . . . moral feeling’.6 The three-part subject does not operate harmoniously. That Henry Clerval, associated as he is with practical reason, should have as his ‘design . . . to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade’ (pp. 151–2) is proof of this, as well as part of the incidental imperialist sentiment of which I speak above. It should be pointed out that the language here is entrepreneurial rather than missionary: He came to the university with the design of making himself complete master of the Oriental languages, as thus he should open a field


for the plan of life he had marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his eyes towards the East as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention. (pp. 66–7). Yet it is, of course, Victor Frankenstein, with his strange itinerary of obsession with natural philosophy, who offers the strongest demonstration that the multiple perspectives of the three-part Kantian subject cannot co-operate harmoniously if woman and native informant are allowed into the enclosure. Frankenstein creates a putative human subject out of natural philosophy alone. According to his own miscued summation: ‘In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature’ (p. 206). It is not at all far-fetched to say that Kant’s categorical imperative can most easily be mistaken for the hypothetical imperative – a command to ground in cognitive comprehension what can be apprehended only by moral will – by putting natural philosophy in the place of practical reason. I should hasten to add here that a reading such as this one does not necessarily accuse Mary Shelley of writing a successful Kantian allegory. The most I can say is that it is possible to read the novel, within the frame of imperialism and the Kantian ethical moment, in a politically useful way. Such an approach must naïvely presuppose that a ‘disinterested’ reading attempts to render transparent the interests of the hegemonic readership. (Other ‘political’ readings – for instance, that the monster is the nascent working class – can also be advanced.) Frankenstein is constructed in the established epistolary tradition of multiple frames. At the heart of these, the narrative of the monster (as reported by Frankenstein to Robert Walton, who then recounts it in a letter to his sister) is of his almost learning, clandestinely, to be human. It is invariably noticed that the monster reads Paradise Lost as true history. What is not so often noticed is that he also reads Plutarch’s Lives, ‘the histories of the first founders of the ancient republics’ (p. 123), which he compares to the ‘patriarchal lives of my protectors’ (p. 124). And his education comes through ‘Volney’s Ruins of Empires’, which purported to be a prefiguration of the French Revolution, published after the event and after the author had rounded off his theory with practice (p. 113). Volney’s book is an attempt at an enlightened universal secular, rather than a Eurocentric Christian, history, written from the perspective of a narrator ‘from below’.7


This Caliban’s education in (universal secular) humanity takes place through the monster’s eavesdropping on the instruction of an ArielSafie, the Christianized ‘Arabian’ to whom ‘a residence in Turkey was abhorrent’ (p. 121). In depicting Safie, Shelley uses some commonplaces of eighteenth-century liberalism that are shared by many today: Safie’s Muslim father was a victim of (bad) Christian religious prejudice and yet was himself a wily and ungrateful man not as morally refined as her (good) Christian mother. Having tasted the emancipation of woman, Safie could not go home. The confusion between ‘Turk’ and ‘Arab’ also has its counterpart today. We will gain nothing by celebrating the time-bound pieties that Shelley, the daughter of two anti-evangelicals, produces. It is more interesting for us that Shelley differentiates the Other, works at the Caliban/Ariel distinction, and cannot make the monster identical with the proper recipient of these lessons. To me, this scrupulous distancing is a mark of the book’s political importance. Although he had ‘heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the helpless fate of its original inhabitants’ (p. 114, emphasis mine), Safie cannot reciprocate his attachment. When she first catches sight of him, ‘Safie, unable to attend to her friend [Agatha], rushed out of the cottage’ (p. 129). At one moment, in fact, Shelley’s Frankenstein does try to tame the monster, to humanize him by bringing him within the circuit of the law. He ‘repair[s] to a criminal judge in the town and . . . relate[s his] history briefly but with firmness’ (p. 189) – the first and disinterested version of the narrative of Frankenstein – marking the dates with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation . . . When I had concluded my narration I said, ‘This is the being whom I accuse and for whose seizure and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a magistrate’. (p. 190) The sheer social reasonableness of the mundane voice of Shelley’s ‘Genevan magistrate’ reminds us that the radically other cannot be selfed, that the monster has ‘properties’ that will not be contained by ‘proper’ measures: ‘I will exert myself’, he says and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes. But I fear, from what


you have yourself described to be his properties, that this will prove impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is pursued, you should make up your mind to disappointment. (p. 190) In the end, as is obvious to most readers, distinctions of human individuality seem to fall away from the novel. Monster, Frankenstein and Walton seem to become each other’s relays. Frankenstein’s story comes to an end in death; Walton concludes his own story within the frame of his function as letter-writer. In the narrative conclusion, he is the natural philosopher who learns from Frankenstein’s example. At the end of the text, the monster, having confessed his guilt toward his maker and ostensibly intending to immolate himself, is borne away on an ice raft. We do not see the conflagration of his funeral pile – the selfimmolation is not consummated in the text: he too cannot be contained by the text. And to stage that non-containment is, I insist, one of Frankenstein’s strengths. In terms of narrative logic, he is ‘lost in darkness and distance’ (p. 211) – these are the last words of the novel – into an existential temporality that is coherent with neither the territorializing individual imagination, nor the authoritative scenario of Christian psychobiography. The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social subject-production – the dynamic nineteenthcentury topos of feminism-in-imperialism – remains problematic within the limits of Shelley’s text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength. Earlier, I offered a reading of woman as womb-holder in Frankenstein. I would now suggest that there is a framing woman in the book who is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor yet encircling. ‘Mrs. Saville’ (p. 15), ‘excellent Margaret’ (p. 17), ‘beloved Sister’ (p. 22) are her address and kinship inscription. She is the occasion, though not the protagonist, of the novel. She is the feminine subject rather than the female individualist: she is the irreducible recipient-function of the letters that make up Frankenstein. Here the reader must read with Margaret Saville in the crucial sense that she must intercept the recipientfunction, read the letters as recipient, in order for the novel to exist.8 Margaret Saville does not respond to close the text as a frame. The frame is thus simultaneously not a frame, and the monster can step ‘beyond the text’ and be ‘lost in darkness’. Within the allegory of our reading, the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text. It is satisfying for a postcolonial reader to consider this a noble resolution for a nineteenth-century English novel. Shelley herself abundantly ‘identifies’ with Victor Frankenstein.9


Shelley’s emancipatory vision cannot extend beyond the speculary situation of the colonial enterprise, where the master alone has a history, master and subject are locked up in the cracked mirror of the present, and the subject’s future, although indefinite, is vectored specifically both toward and away from the master. Within this restricted vision, Shelley gives to the monster the right to refuse the withholding of the master’s returned gaze – to refuse an apartheid of speculation, as it were: I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee . . . How can I move thee? . . . [He] placed his hated hands before my [Frankenstein’s] eyes, which I flung from me with violence; ‘thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me’. (pp. 95, 96) His request, not granted, is, as we have seen, for a gendered future, for the colonial female subject. I want now to advance the argument just a little further, and make a contrasting point. The task of the postcolonial writer, the descendant of the colonial female subject that history did in fact produce, cannot be restrained within the specular master-slave enclosure so powerfully staged in Frankenstein. I turn to Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha, and Puran Sahay’ to measure out some of the differences between the sympathetic and supportive colonial staging of the situation of the refusal of the withholding of specular exchange in favour of the monstrous colonial subject; and the postcolonial performance of the construction of the constitutional subject of the new nation, in subalternity rather than, as most often by renaming the colonial subject, as citizen.10 Devi’s work is focused on the so-called original inhabitants or a¯ div¯ asis (and the formerly untouchable lowest Hindu castes) in India, over 80 million at last count, and massively under-reported in colonial and postcolonial studies.11 There are 300-odd divisions, most with an individual language of their own, divided into four large language groups. I have frequently made the obvious point that, in the interest of placing the subaltern into hegemony – citizenship of the postcolonial state, constitutional subjectship – the movement Devi is associated with imposes a structural unity upon this vast group. This is an abuse of the Enlightenment rather than divisive identitarianism. In ‘Pterodactyl’, Devi brings into the foreground this ab-usive (or catachrestic – there is no literal referent for the concept ‘original Indian nation’ or a¯ dim bh¯ aratiya j¯ ati) spirit of aboriginal unity in her postscript:


[In this place no name – such as Madhya Pradesh or Nagesia – has been used literally. Madhya Pradesh is here India, Nagesia village the entire tribal society. I have deliberately conflated the ways – rules and customs of different Austric tribes and groups, and the idea of the ancestral soul is also my own. I have merely tried to express my estimation, born of experience, of Indian aboriginal society, through the myth of the pterodactyl.] – Mahasweta Devi.12 At the end of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust writes at length of the task before him – the writing, presumably, of the many-volumed book that we have just finished. Devi’s gesture belongs to this topos. After the experience of the entire novella, the author tells us that the only authority in the story is rhetorical. She hands us the gift of a small but crucial aporia, the truth-value of the story, as an interpolation within square brackets, ‘the severe economy of a writing holding back declaration within a discipline of severely observed markers.’13 This truth is not exactitude. We cannot ‘learn about’ the subaltern only by reading literary texts, or, mutatis mutandis, socio-historical documents. ‘It is just that there be law, but law is not justice.’14 It is responsible to read books, but book learning is not responsibility. The native informant is not a catachresis here, but quite literally the person who feeds anthropology. The closing note of the novella tells us that the author will not be one of these. In the story itself there are at least two powerful figures who cannot be appropriated into that perspective. Part of that immunity to appropriation comes through the theme of the resistance to development (hinted at in the interstices of my reading of Marx) as aboriginal resistance. The most extreme case is that of Shankar, who could rather easily have filled the bill for an authentic native informant, but to whom the very suggestion would be irrelevant: ‘I can’t see you. But I say to you in great humility, you can’t do anything for us. We became unclean as soon as you entered our lives. No more roads, no more relief – what will you give to a people in exchange for the vanished land, home field, burial-ground?’ Shankar comes up close and says, ‘Can you move far away? Very far? Very, very far?’ (p. 120) Devi stages the workings of the postcolonial state with minute knowledge, anger and loving despair.15 There are suppressed dissident radicals,


there is the national government seeking electoral publicity, there are systemic bureaucrats beneath good and evil, subaltern state functionaries to whom the so-called Enlightenment principles of democracy are counter-intuitive. Then there is the worst product of postcoloniality, the Indian who uses the alibis of development to exploit the tribals and destroy their life-system. Over against him is the handful of conscientious and understanding government workers who operate through a system of official sabotage and small compromises. The central figure is Puran Sahay, a journalist. (Devi herself, in addition to being an ecologyhealth-literacy activist and a fiction writer, is also an indefatigable interventionist journalist.) The conception of Puran’s private life, delicately inscribed within the gender-emancipation of domestic society among the committed section of the metropolitan and urban lower middle class, would merit a separate discussion. In the novella he leaves this frame scenario to climb the Pirtha hills and descend into the Pirtha valley, aboriginal terrain in development. (This ‘unframing’ of Puran may also be a ‘liminalizing’.) The fruit of his travels is the kind of organizing reportage that Devi herself undertakes, in the form of a report for his ally, Harisharan. We do not see the more public report he will write for the newspaper Dibasjyoti. There is also a report not (to be) sent, but ‘sent’ to the extent that it is available in the literary space of the novella, that challenges each claim of the decolonizing state with a vignette from these hills. Like the monster in Frankenstein, Puran too steps away from the narrative of this tale, but into action within the postcolonial new nation: ‘A truck comes by. Puran raises his hand, steps up’ (p. 196). I have so far summarized a story involving subaltern freedom in the new nation. But that story is also a frame. Before I proceed to disclose the curious heart of the story, let me remind the reader that the indigenous caste-Hindu non-elite self-‘free’ing women, Saraswati, Puran’s woman-friend, and the wives of the other committed workers, wait in the frame outside this one. The narrative of subaltern freedom and even middle-level indigenous female (self-)emancipation cannot yet be continuous.16 The heart, then: a story of funeral rites, and through it the initiation of Puran, the interventionist journalist, into a subaltern responsibility that is at odds (asymptotic, asymmetrical, aporetic, out of discursivity, différend) with the fight for rights. An aboriginal boy has drawn the picture of a pterodactyl on the cave wall. Puran and a ‘good’ government officer do not allow this to become public. No native informant, again. Through his unintentionally successful ‘prediction’ of rain, Puran


becomes part of the group’s ongoing historical record. He sees the pterodactyl. Or, perhaps, the pterodactyl reveals itself to him in the peculiar corporeality of the spectre.17 If the exchange between the nameless monster (without history) and Victor Frankenstein is a finally futile refusal of withheld specularity, the situation of the gaze between pterodactyl (before history) and a ‘national’ history that holds aboriginal and non-aboriginal together is somewhat different. There can be no speculation here; in a textual space rhetorically separated from the counter-factual funeral, the aboriginal and the non-aboriginal must pull together. Here is Puran as the pterodactyl looks, perhaps at him: You are moveless with your wings folded, I do not wish to touch you, you are outside my wisdom, reason, and feelings, who can place his hand on the axial moment of the end of the third phase of the Mesozoic and the beginnings of the Kenozoic geological ages? . . . What do its eyes want to tell Puran? . . . There is no communication between eyes. Only a dusky waiting, without end. What does it want to tell: We are extinct by the inevitable natural geological evolution. You too are endangered. You too will become extinct in nuclear explosions, or in war, or in the aggressive advance of the strong as it obliterates the weak . . . think if you are going forward or back . . . What will you finally grow in the soil, having murdered nature in the application of man-imposed substitutes? . . . The dusky lidless eyes remain unresponsive. (pp. 156–7) For the modern Indian the pterodactyl is an empirical impossibility. For the modern aboriginal Indian the pterodactyl may be the soul of the ancestors, as imagined by the author, who has placed her signature outside the frame.18 The fiction does not judge between the registers of truth and exactitude, but simply stages them in separate spaces. This is not science fiction. And the pterodactyl is not a symbol. The pterodactyl dies and Bikhia, the boy struck dumb – withdrawn from communication by becoming the pterodactyl’s ‘guardian’, its ‘priest’ – buries it in the underground caverns of the river, walls resplendent with ‘undiscovered’ cave paintings, perhaps ancient, perhaps contemporary. The aboriginal is not put in a museum in this text. He allows Puran to accompany him. The burial itself is unlike current practice. Now, Shankar says, they burn bodies, like Hindus: ‘We bury the ash and receive a stone. I’ve heard that we buried the bodies in the old days.’


And this memory is contained, of course, within the imagination of an imagined identity, fictive practices. This mourning is not anthropological but ethico-political. (Puran has situated his study of anthropology, transcodings of the native informant’s speech, as useful but unequal to these encounters.) Puran, a caste-Hindu, remote stranger in a now Hindu-majority land, earns the right to assist at the laying-to-rest of a previous aboriginal civilization, itself catachrestic when imagined as a unity, in a rhetorical space textually separate from a frame narrative that may as well be the central narrative, of the separate agendas of tribal and journalistic resistances to development, each aporetic to the other, the site of a dilemma. The funeral lament, the unreal elegy that must accompany all beginnings, is placed at the end of the narrative, just before Puran hops on the truck, and the postscript signed by the author begins. The subject of the elegy is suspended between journalist-character and author figure: Puran’s amazed heart discovers what love for Pirtha there is in his heart, perhaps he cannot remain a distant spectator anywhere in life. Pterodactyl’s eyes. Bikhiya’s eyes. Oh ancient civilization, the foundation and ground of the civilization of India, oh first sustaining civilization, we are in truth defeated. A continent! We destroyed it undiscovered, as we are destroying the primordial forest, water, living beings, the human. A truck comes by. Puran raises his hand, steps up. (p. 196) In my estimation ‘Pterodactyl’ is necessarily bound by the reach of the European novel. We have no choice but to allow the literary imagination its promiscuities. But if, as critics, we wish to reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to the nostalgia for lost origins, we must turn to the archives of imperialist governance.

Notes 1. Barbara Johnson, ‘My Monster/My Self’, Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982), 2–10. 2. Mary Poovey, ‘My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism’, PMLA, 5, 95, 3 (May 1980), 332–47. See also George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 23–35. 3. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 115. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text.

Frankenstein and Devi’s Pterodactyl 67 4. In the late 1980s, I had suggested that the reader consult the publications of the Feminist International Network for the best overview of the current debate on reproductive technology. I would now suggest following, on the one hand, UN publications, and on the other FINRRAGE. In the final analysis, there is no substitute for field reports by local women. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason ends with a tiny bit of that with respect to child labour. 5. For the male fetish, see Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961–76), pp. 152–7. For a more ‘serious’ Freudian study of Frankenstein, see Mary Jacobus, ‘Is There a Woman in this Text?’ New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982), 117–41. My ‘fantasy’ would of course be disproved by the ‘fact’ that the opposition male/female is asymmetrical, and that it is more difficult for a woman to assume the position of fetishist than for a man; see Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, Screen 23 (Sept.–Oct. 1982), 74–87. Again, another category ‘mistake’. I had written the above before undertaking a study of Melanie Klein. I should do without the apology now. I have expanded this point of view in Spivak, ‘ “Circumfession”: My Story as the (M)other’s Story’, forthcoming. 6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Howard (New York: Hafner Press), pp. 36, 37, 39. 7. Constantin Francois Chasseboeuf de Volney, The Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, (London: n.p., 1811). In Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian has showed us the manipulation of time in ‘new’ secular histories of a similar kind. The most striking ignoring of the monster’s education through Volney is in Sandra Gilbert’s otherwise brilliant ‘Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve’, Feminist Studies 4 (June 1980). Her subsequent work has most convincingly filled in such lacunae; see, for example, her piece on H. Rider Haggard’s She (‘Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness’, Partisan Review 50, 3 [1983]: 444–53). 8. ‘A letter is always and a priori intercepted . . . the “subjects” are neither the senders nor the receivers of messages . . . The letter is constituted by its interception’. Jacques Derrida, ‘Discussion’, after Claude Rabant, ‘II n’a aucune chance de l’entendre’, in Affranchissement du transfert et de la lettre, ed. Rene Major (Paris: Confrontation, 1981), p. 106; my translation. Margaret Saville is made to appropriate the reader’s ‘subject’ into the signature of her own ‘individuality’. 9. The most striking internal evidence is the ‘Author’s Introduction’ that, after dreaming of the yet-unnamed Victor Frankenstein figure and being terrified (through, yet not yet quite through, him) by the monster in a scene she later reproduced in Frankenstein’s story; Shelley began her tale ‘on the morrow with the words “It was on a dreary night of November” ’ (p. xi). Those are the opening words of Chapter 5 of the finished book, where Frankenstein begins to recount the actual making of his monster (p. 56). 10. It should be mentioned that Mahasweta Devi’s work is by no means representative of contemporary Bengali (or Indian) fiction and therefore cannot serve as an example of Jamesonian ‘third world literature’. 11. Dhirendranath Baske, Paschimbanger Adibasi Samaj (Calcutta: Shubarnorekha, 1987), vol. 1, projected from p. 17.

68 Empire and the Gothic 12. Mahasweta Devi, ‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha and Puran Sahay’ in Imaginary Maps, trans G.C. Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 95–196, at p. 196, translation modified. The catachresis involved in ‘original Indian nation’ is not just that there is no one ‘tribe’ including all aboriginals resident in what is now ‘India’. It is also that the concept ‘India’ is itself not ‘Indian’, and further, not identical with the concept Bha¯rata, just as ‘nation’ and ja¯ti have different histories. Furthermore, the sentiment of an entire nation as place of origin is not a statement within aboriginal discursive formations, where locality is of much greater importance. I point this out in some detail because, first, the word catachresis is one of the worst offenders in the general crime of inaccessibility – second, even the most hegemonic identity would show itself to be catachrestic under close scrutiny; and, finally, the (ab)use of the Enlightenment in the interest of building a civil society brings the subaltern discursive formation into crisis, makes it deconstruct. It should also be mentioned that the word ‘tribal’ although no longer internationally favoured because of the African situation, may still be found in domestic usage in India, where the word is used over against ‘caste’. 13. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 32. 14. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority’ in Common Law Review: Reconstruction and the Possibility of Justice 11, 5–6 (1990), 920–1045, at 947. 15. Devi joined the legendary undivided Communist Party of India in 1942. She has been as much a part of the anti-colonial struggles as she has been witness to the failure of decolonization. There is little ‘colonial discourse’ writing in her fiction. In ‘Choli ka pichhe’ (‘Behind the Bodice’), in Devi, The Breast Stories, trans. Spivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 1997), p. 140, there is a brilliantly ironic moment which is opposed to the laying of all the ills of contemporary society at the door of British colonialism. 16. A small moment in the text which contributes to Puran’s liminalization. But it is the denial of such differences which can give rise to the global sisterhood required for the financialization of the globe. Who is silenced by the female hero? (See pp. 353–421, the last movement of the book.) 17. Jaques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 6 and passim. 18. For the labyrinthine dynamics of the author’s signature promising that (the gift of) the text is factually counterfeit, see Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 107–72. The interest here is not merely ‘speculative’. It has something like a relationship with the fact that, reading literature, we learn to learn from the singular and the unverifiable.

4 Pushkin and Odoevsky: the ‘AfroFinnish’ Theme in Russian Gothic Neil Cornwell

Where the Finnish fisherman, Nature’s sad foster child, Alone on the low banks Would cast in unknown waters His old net, now The animated banks Are crowded with the tall masses Of palaces and towers . . . . (Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman)1 The question of colonialism in nineteenth-century Russian literature is usually associated with the Caucasus, especially since the publication in 1994 of Susan Layton’s study, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. Discussion of this whole issue has been somewhat broadened since Layton’s book, particularly with the appearance of Ewa M. Thompson’s radical study, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (2000). The political situation in the Caucasus, of course, remains unfinished business, and a problem that is still very much with post-Soviet Russia today. However, a colonial war had also been fought with Sweden over Finland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the founding by Peter the Great of the city of St Petersburg. This episode, its prehistory and its aftermath, is revisited in an unusual Gothic-folkloric manner by Vladimir Odoevsky, in his ‘dilogy’ (a double-tale) of 1841, eventually known as The Salamander (Salamandra). Contributions to the Russo-Swedo-Finnish historical theme had been made earlier in Russian literature in the eighteenth century and, more particularly, in the 1820s by Evgenii Baratynsky and Aleksandr Pushkin. 69


I Out of the Kievan principality, founded according to the chronicles by Varangians (Vikings – including, it is thought, some Finnish speakers) under Rurik in the ninth century who converted to the Greek form of Christianity in the tenth, there subsequently emerged the more centralized state of Muscovy. Having thrown off the so-called Tatar Yoke, the Moscow-centred power, stretching from Novgorod in the north to Kiev in the south, reverted to the name ‘Rus’, and, in the early fifteenth century, its ruler adopted the title of tsar (or Caesar). Conscious of its Byzantine heritage, and fortified by the notion of Moscow as ‘the Third Rome’, Rus was soon pursuing a policy of territorial aggrandisement – sooner or later, in all directions. Unlike many empires, it has been noted, Russia chose to concentrate on adjacent lands or, in Ewa Thompson’s words, developed ‘an imperial appetite for colonial possessions contiguous to ethnic Russia’.2 Conquests over Tatars and Turks to the south, and Poland-Lithuania to the west, as well as expansion to the east (towards Siberia), were followed by rivalry with Sweden, the main military power of northern Europe, which culminated in the Great Northern War (1700–21). Peter the Great, the victor in this conflict, opening his ‘window to the west’ and founding his Baltic capital, assumed the Latinized title of imperator and began a programme of Westernization and attempted modernization, which were further pursued by Catherine the Great in the second half of the eighteenth century. Annexation and assimilation (both political and cultural) were key aspirations of the regime. In the mid-eighteenth century, however, at a time of diplomatic rapprochement, Russia – imperial aspirations notwithstanding – voluntarily underwent a process of reverse cultural imperialism by adopting French as the working and social language of court and aristocracy (by now largely a ‘serving nobility’, replacing or augmenting the old boyar elite who claimed descent from Rurik). This served, apart from anything else, as ‘an aristocratic badge of class’.3 One historical philologist speaks of the Russian aristocracy going through ‘a veritable fever’ of French imitation in the second half of that century: indeed, ‘it became almost obligatory in aristocratic homes to have the children instructed in French from the outset, and the habit of speaking and reading French trained them even to think in French’.4 This ‘passable gallicization’ – in many ways a surprisingly neglected aspect of Russian cultural history – thus reached its peak around the turn of the nineteenth century, but received a fatal setback with the Napoleonic

Pushkin and Odoevsky 71

invasion and, in more general cultural terms, underwent what Martin Malia terms a ‘collapse of Russia’s Gallic Enlightenment with the Decembrist adventure’.5 Nevertheless, the usage of French survived in court circles and the practice of employing foreign tutors to the children of the elite continued until the Revolution. Meanwhile, the gains made by Catherine, followed by the events of the Napoleonic era, meant that, from 1814, Russia’s western frontiers were now fixed in a manner that was to last until the Great War of 1914–18. As a main victor of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Russia assumed, from the Congress of Vienna, its most commanding position yet as a European power. Russia’s European policy was now to defend these existing frontiers, and indeed the established status quo in Europe, through the Holy Alliance. The colonial acquisition of the Caucasus continued unabated. The later years of Alexander I, and the accession of Nicholas I – which was greeted by the unsuccessful ‘Decembrist’ revolt (of 14 December, 1825) carried out by more liberal elements of the nobility – together with repression in Poland and an implacable posture towards the European reform movements of 1830, ushered in a period of bleak reaction, at home and abroad, which was to last until its temporary and partial alleviation in the next reign, in the wake of military humiliation in Crimea. It was in this period that the spectre of a Russian menace was perceived to arise over Europe; the second quarter of the nineteenth century (the period in which the works of immediate interest to us were written) has been called ‘the age par excellence of black literature about Russia’.6 It may not be coincidental, however, that this was precisely the period in which Russian literature first began to assert itself as a serious European cultural force. On its northern flank, Russia had chiefly prosecuted the acquisition of Finland and adjacent Baltic coastal territories at the expense of the Swedes, who had taken advantage of the Mongol invasions of Russia to push to the Neva. The Treaty of Täysinä in 1595 brought to an end one long period of conflict, largely resulting in the repulsion of the Russians and leaving an Arctic frontier and taxation rights favourable to Sweden, plus Swedish possession of Estonia.7 The Russians, who had founded isolated northern Orthodox monasteries to convert the Lapps, retained limited territorial and fishing rights. In Karelia too, Finnish speakers had ‘acquired their Orthodox form of Christianity from Byzantium, via Novgorod’.8 The spread of Swedish (Lutheran) cultural influence in the seventeenth century, when Finland was governed as ‘simply a group of Swedish provinces’, was widely resented, particularly among Russian Orthodox sections of the Finnish population, many of whom decamped


to Russian-held territory during the fighting of 1656–57.9 The Great Northern War enabled the foundation of St Petersburg in 1703 ‘at the outskirts of the empire’ – ‘the future capital amidst the Finnish marshes’, as Peter the Great opened his window to Europe; it also led to the Russian occupation of Finland, remembered as ‘the Great Wrath’.10 Russian occupational repression at this time competed with the longstanding Swedish policy of conscription: half of Charles XII’s troops raising the siege of Narva had been Finns.11 The Treaty of Nystad (1721) ended the Russian occupation of Finland, but forced vital Baltic coastal territorial concessions from the Swedes and left Russia as the major northern power. Further hostilities broke out in 1741–43 (there was a ‘Lesser Wrath’ of 1742), leading to some further Russian gains, and again in 1788–90. In the middle of the diplomatic and military maelstrom of the Napoleonic era, Russian armies again overran Finland, though this time they encountered hostility both from the Swedish nobility and the Finnish peasantry. The settlement of 1809 led to the absorption of a Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian Empire, although with a strong level of local legal and institutional autonomy. Alexander I handed back to the Grand Duchy the territories annexed by the treaties of 1721 and 1743. The final break with Sweden and the relative autonomy under tsarist Russia achieved, after initial guerrilla resistance, a reasonable level of acceptance. However, a Russian garrison remained stationed in Finland and many Finns later served in the Russian army in Finnish military units – helping (ironically, it may seem) in the suppression of the Polish revolts of 1830 and 1863. In nineteenth-century Russian imperial Finland, some 85 per cent of the population counted themselves as Finnish-speaking; the remainder, mainly of the middle and upper classes, claimed Swedish as their mother tongue, and this remained the main administrative language; Russian, from 1809, was used in the Governor General’s office and in communications with St Petersburg only.12 Systematic russification was not introduced until the unwise attempts made near the end of the century. The Finno-Russian frontier, traditionally an oscillating blur, was now fixed, and it remained in place from 1812 until the Winter War of 1939–40, one of the events that unfolded from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Such was the historical-political background to the works of Russian literature now to be perused. However, a few further cultural points still need to be made. Otto Boele, in his study The North in Russian Romantic Literature, sees the locus of the foundation of St Petersburg


as emblematic of a larger process, by which ‘the North turned into a vehicle for the expression of Russia’s “new” europeanized identity’, in place of the East, ‘symbol of the old non-European Russia!’.13 ‘Since the eighteenth century was infatuated with science and technology’, Boele continues, ‘the northern light [aurora borealis] would eventually prove to be a far more powerful metaphor for the new orientation (the ‘light’ of science) than the spiritual light of the East [Ex oriente lux]’.14 With the reforming and technological emphases, therefore, of Peter the Great, ‘a minority starts to emerge which partakes of a different culture than the rest of the population’, among which small group (largely made up of merchants, self-made men, and Russianized foreigners) ‘the North takes precedence over the East as the embodiment of Russian distinctiveness’.15 Featuring within, or assimilated into, this ‘North’ was at least some notion of Sweden-Finland.16 The literary-historical depiction of this region had resulted in cultural stereotypes: of the Swede as the ‘stubborn enemy’ (upornyi nepriatel, from Batiushkov’s ‘Excerpt from a Russian Officer’s Letter on Finland’, of 1809) and the Finn as the ‘sad foster child of nature’ (Pushkin’s pechal’nyi pasynok prirody – see the epigraph to this essay, page 69); overall the Finn was stereotyped as ‘the aboriginal of the North’.17 By the early-nineteenth century, the period to which we now turn, Boele argues, ‘particular circles in Russian society came to develop a “hardy” national self-image which was mirrored by the “effeminate” heteroimage of the French’; the Other was conceptualized as ‘Southern’ (not forgetting, of course, here too the Caucasus), or as ‘Northern, but alien’.18 The Swede, then, was consistently seen as the enemy, but, as such, ‘in terms of equality’; the Finn, however, in more classic ‘lazy native’ mode, was seen as victim, both of war and nature, and as defenceless impoverished local, lacking in ambition, or a bystander, engaged in the standard Finnish occupation of fisherman – a primitive representative of ‘the ultimate northern people’.19

II Let us now see these themes and images reflected in literary works that take us into Romanticism and Gothicism. Firdous Azim reminds us that ‘the Gothic mode subverts and challenges the presuppositions of the realistic school, disturbing the easy narrative of growth that capitalist [and imperialist] ideology would have liked to provide for its subjects’.20 References to Finland were to be found in works by Lomonosov and Derzhavin, as well as, naturally enough, in Karamzin’s History of the


Russian State. Konstantin Batiushkov and the cavalry-poet Denis Davydov had served in the campaign that preceded the constitutional arrangement of 1809 and left their own remarks on Finland. The metaphysical poet Fedor Glinka, who had fought in the Napoleonic campaigns as early as 1805–6, yet lived until 1880, was exiled in 1826, for Decembrist associations, to Russian Karelia, where he produced his northern narrative ‘tales in verse’, such as The Maid of the Karelian Forests (Deva karel’skikh lesov, written from 1828).21 However, more authentic ‘Finnish’ works of Russian literature came from Evgenii Baratynsky, who experienced what he felt to be his own ‘Finnish exile’, serving there in the Russian garrison from 1820 to 1825.22 In the early elegy Finland (Finliandia, 1820), Baratynsky creates a barren and timeless atmospheric picture of granite stones, standing like ‘bogatyrs on guard’ (Bogatyri storozhevye: shades of the byliny of the Russian north), in a blurred but wild locality, peopled only with the shadows of forgotten heroes – ‘the land of Odin’s children’.23 Such a geographical, historical and mythological pan-Scandinavian blur is, then, in itself typical of Russian perceptions of Finland in the times preceding the 1835 publication of the Kalevala. Of yet further Romantic and imperial interest, though, is Baratynsky’s more mature narrative poem Eda (written 1824–25; revised 1832).24 The plot of Eda is simple enough; the eponymous Finnish peasant girl (whose name presumably owes something to the Icelandic eddaic poetry) is seduced and abandoned by a (nameless) Russian hussar who is billeted on her family (according to Baratynsky’s 1826 preface) on the eve of the 1807–9 campaign. As such, to those familiar with Russian literature, it evokes comparison with Karamzin’s sentimentalist tale Poor Liza (Bednaia Liza, 1792) and Pushkin’s more nearly contemporaneous Byronic ‘southern’ narrative poem The Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazskii plennik, 1821), to which it may seem a northern analogue, ‘told in a toned-down Byronic manner’.25 It also, in some respects, anticipates the ‘Bela’ episode of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1840) and the same poet’s eponymous Demon. In all four cases an indigenous heroine perishes as a result of relations with an apparently callous Russian colonizing officer (or, in the last instance, an invasive supernatural entity). A standard literary-Romantic reading apart,26 Eda is open to feminist and philosophical interpretations,27 but may clearly be subject as well to an imperialist, or post-colonial reading.28 The invader, his ‘victory’ (the militaristic pobeda)29 and the motivation of Eda’s abandonment through the treacherous machinations of the ‘the violent Swede’,


together with the frequent merging of heroine with landscape, cumulatively suggest the symbolic rape of Finland by an anonymous and unfeeling Russia.30 Having finally ‘plunged her face into the dust / With a silent moan of mortal agony’, Eda seems set to join ‘in the earthy dust the cast-down faces of their gods’ and mythic heroes invoked in the earlier Finland.31 Also of subsequent interest to us is the hussar’s quasiincestuous longings, in the poem’s opening lines, for his ‘sister of wondrous beauty’.32 Eda does have a voice, in several passages of speech and thought, though the impact of this may be compromised to an extent by what Luc J. Beaudoin terms ‘narrative transvestism’ and ‘narratorial intrusion’, or fusions in point of view.33 Such elements of ambiguity are likely to be reinforced by a consideration of the poem’s epilogue.34 The epilogue to Eda, which was not published in Baratynsky’s lifetime, refers explicitly to the historical background, giving sympathy to ‘the fallen people’, reviving the contrived poetical landscape of Finland, alluding to Finnish peasant resistance, yet celebrating the comprehensive defeat of Sweden and referring to the enforced recognition by that power of ‘the eagle of Poltava’. In the final lines, Baratynsky, as a mere peacetime poet, defers to the right of a genuine participant in these events, the warrior-bard Davydov, complete with his hero’s laurels, to sing of such exploits. Such tones struck both Baratynsky and the censorship as ambivalent. This seems particularly so when this epilogue is compared to the strident tones of its counterpart in Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus.35 This particular example of what has been termed ‘the imperial sublime’ was criticized privately by another poet of the Pushkin pleiad, Petr Viazemsky, who saw it as ‘anachronistic rapture’ and objected to poetry becoming ‘the ally of butchers’.36 Baratynsky’s epilogue may thus be considered a contribution to this hushed polemic and an implied ironic reproof to the chivalric values of (the still active) Davydov.37 Eda, then, harks back to the process of the Russian Empire’s acquisition of Finland, but is written and published (revised and republished) at a slightly later stage, from a standpoint of imperial status quo. The allusion to ‘the eagle of Poltava’ points back to that battle of 1708 – a key turning-point in the struggle for Baltic supremacy and a high point of Russian northern imperial history – and on to Pushkin’s attempted heroic epic, or ‘glaring and assertive hymn to Russian nationalism’38 in celebration of that event, Poltava (1828).39 Here the Ukraine, considered as a Russian province, replaces Finland, and the ageing local Hetman, Mazeppa, engages in a Gothic-type romance with a maiden smitten with improbable love for him (as he is about to behead her father), while


‘betraying’ Peter the Great in alliance with Charles XII.40 This particular variant of forbidden love contrasts with other Romantic manifestations of that phenomenon, and with Byron’s treatment of the same protagonist (at a far more youthful stage) in his poem Mazeppa of 1818. In another pre-Pushkinian treatment of the Mazeppa theme, Voinarovsky (1825), by the soon-to-be-hanged Decembrist leader Konstantin Ryleev, Mazeppa (and his nephew Voinarovsky) are treated as Ukrainian patriots in a narrative delivered (in flashback) from Siberia.41 The poem was published only with cuts, changes, an imposed preface and interlinear annotations, to ‘correct’ the historical perspective.42 One further Russian work of the period is the poorly esteemed historical novel Mazepa (1833–4) by the Polish-born journalist and writer Faddei Bulgarin.43 Surprisingly, perhaps, for the work of a man remembered mainly as a creature of the autocratic establishment, Bulgarin’s novel is held to be, in its ideological and historical approach, less one-sided than (in their respective ways) the preceding works by Ryleev and Pushkin. This has been put down in part at least to his attempts to emulate Scott as master of the historical novel; from Scott too, and from an earlier Russian model, Karamzin’s tale of Nordic incest, The Island Bornholm (Ostrov Borngol’m, 1794), Bulgarin seems to have drawn certain Gothic features.44 Azim writes of Beckford’s Vathek: ‘the Gothic combines the novel of sentiment, the novel of adventure and the Oriental tale to create a form where the dangers of and a notion of dangerous sexuality become its main focus’; with the adjective ‘northern’ (or Scandinavian) substituted for ‘oriental’, this statement could equally cover Karamzin’s Danish tale and Odoevsky’s Finnish dilogy The Salamander.45

III In the same year that he wrote Poltava, Pushkin was turning to prose, to compose a historical romance – loosely based on the life of his own great-grandfather, Abram Hannibal, an Ethiopian captured as a boy by the Turks, acquired in Constantinople by the Russian ambassador and sent as a gift to Peter the Great – subsequently entitled The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (Arap Petra Velikogo, 1827–28; published 1837).46 The text breaks off abruptly in its seventh chapter. Ibrahim, as Pushkin names his protagonist, having sojourned amid amorous diversion in the bosom of Parisian high society, returns to his imperial benefactor in St Petersburg and is betrothed to a boyar’s daughter (Peter’s initiative to integrate his protégé into the society of the Russian capital).47 Peter, here


depicted in more domestic circumstances, is still alluded to as ‘the hero of Poltava’ and ‘the mighty and dread transformer of Russia’, consonant with the work’s epigraph, and one minor character introduced is a captive Swedish officer, resident in the boyar’s palace.48 Vladimir Odoevsky’s The Salamander enjoys a curious ‘dilogical’ (or double-novella) structure.49 Its constituent parts were first published separately, both in 1841, as ‘The Southern Shore of Finland at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century’ and ‘The Salamander’ respectively; in 1844 the second part was renamed ‘Elsa’ and The Salamander became the overall title. Dealing, in its first part, with a Finnish orphan displaced during the Great Northern War and taken under Peter the Great’s wing, The Salamander treats occult-folkloric Finnish themes before developing, in its second part, into a tale of monetary greed, forbidden sexuality and alchemical frenzy. Dubbed with some justice Odoevsky’s ‘The Finn of Peter the Great’, Odoevsky’s tale may clearly be seen as analogous to Pushkin’s The Blackamoor.50 Details traceable to Poltava and The Bronze Horseman (and indeed to The Queen of Spades [Pikovaia dama], 1834) also play a part.51 However, Odoevsky envelops these elements in his own appropriation of a mystical Romanticism acquired from the European literary and esoteric traditions, and proceeds to an elaborate Gothicization of his imperial theme.52 The Salamander is – his philosophical frame-tale-novel Russian Nights (Russkie nochi, 1844) excepted – Odoevsky’s longest work of prose fiction, comprising a quintessentially Romantic mixture of styles, genres and narrational techniques. The ‘dilogical’ division, while preserving a genuine continuation in narrative terms, signals a radical leap as regards narrator, chronological standpoint and generic emphasis; it also shifts the main locus of action from St Petersburg to Moscow.53 Original drafts had indicated a tale of alchemy set in medieval Italy, displaced through the Inquisition to Germany and France.54 This Gothic theme, introducing a Faustian alchemical quest, blurs into the lost primitive sorcery of the ancients (here represented by the Finns, ‘a people of antiquity who have been brought forward to our epoch’) and Finnish legend – now (though only since 1835)55 known from The Kalevala. From earlyeighteenth-century Finland, by way of a St Petersburg ‘which had only just risen from the Finnish marshes’, we are projected forward to a Moscow ghost story of the 1830s, in which echoes of this imperial past – and present – may be coming home to roost.56 In Part I, from the rugged Finnish setting of the opening and the atmospherics of ‘A Finnish Legend’ – a remarkable mythic depiction of the ongoing Great Northern War in the spirit of Finnish folklore and


storytelling,57 heavily indebted to the Finnish studies of Iakov Grot58 – the action moves to the defamiliarized new city of St Petersburg. Yakko, the adopted son of a poor fishing family (Odoevsky here combines two standard Finnish stereotypes) caught up in the Russo-Swedish conflict, is witness to the clairvoyant powers of his foster-sister Elsa, utilized by her grandfather Rusi (stereotyped too as ‘a cunning Finn’) to divine in the fire the fate of her father at the hands of the Swedes.59 Brought to St Petersburg by Zverev, a young Russian officer, he is educated in Holland (with Peter the Great ‘attentively watching over his developing abilities’) in the care of Zverev’s family, before returning to Russia to find favoured service as a specialist in typography: ‘the half wild Finn, under the mighty hand of Peter, was to become one of the instruments of Russian enlightenment’.60 Now called ‘Ivan Ivanovich Yakko’,61 he returns to Finland to seek out the ‘almost half wild’ Elsa and takes her back to St Petersburg.62 A strong conflict of cultures ensues between Elsa and the Zverevs, her Russian hosts (indeed, Russo-European, in that Zverev père is half-Dutch) – primitivism versus embourgeoisement – with ‘sorcery’ alleged on both sides. The one bewitched, however, is Yakko, equally by his two ‘sister’ figures: the homely charms of the dark-haired (relatively ‘southern’) Mar’ia Egorovna, daughter of the family, and the untrammelled abandon of the blonde (northern) Elsa. Already with the reputation of a ‘sorceress’ in Finland and capable of ‘out of body’ visions of her homeland, Elsa revives the threads of sorcery through jealousy; her ‘sister in the fire’ tells her that she and Yakko are one, to be united in ‘a single flaming thread’.63 Yakko’s dilemma seems resolved when Elsa is rescued by a Finn during the great 1722 Petersburg flood and taken home to Finland.64 He salves his conscience by delivering a purse of money for Elsa’s presumed wedding; ‘the last thread is broken’, or so he thinks: it is farewell to Suomi, Russia is now his ‘real fatherland’.65 The story of the Finnish girl and the rich Petersburg nobleman dissolves into Finnish legend.66 In Part I of The Salamander historical setting and European technological values take precedence over the purportedly folklorically based fantastic.67 In Part II the reverse is the case; as anticipated by the Benvenuto Cellini epigraph,68 primitive Finnish sorcery blends into European alchemy, and the legend of the Finnish treasure (Sampo) with the philosopher’s stone, to debase the enlightenment brought to Peter’s Russia. Part I has an impersonal omniscient narration; Part II, in contrast, opens a century later in Moscow, with an introductory section drawing philosophical lines of rationalism and mysticism between an apparently authorial narrator and his Faust-like uncle (in the sense of


Faust, protagonist of Odoevsky’s Russian Nights), a self-appointed adept in matters occult. Following a haunted house (or bewitched boyar mansion) visitation, the narrative, reverting to ‘the third decade of the eighteenth century’, is indeed given over to the uncle (via his nephew’s ‘memory’).69 Yakko’s fortunes have sharply deteriorated following the death of Peter; ‘slandered and banished’ as a ‘poor parvenu’ and saddled in Moscow with a nagging alcoholic wife Mar’ia, who condemns him as ‘an accursed Finn, a sorcerer, a heretic’, he regrets his ‘little sister’ (sestritsa) Elsa and is reduced to slaving over a hot alchemical stove in thrall to a miserly Count.70 Now Yakko himself sees and converses with a salamander in the likeness of Elsa in the alchemical fire, and the real Elsa appears, seemingly oblivious to her other self. When the two Elsas fuse, at least to Yakko’s perception, this heralds the demise of the vodkasodden Mar’ia – a victim of spontaneous combustion. Salamander-Elsa guides Yakko to produce gold, whereupon – unwilling to divide the spoils – Yakko takes over the body and identity of the old Count, with the apparent assistance of Elsa’s long-dead grandfather, Rusi.71 When the Count-Yakko wants to dispatch Elsa back to Finland, in order to contract a lecherous marriage to a teenage Russian princess, he is metamorphosed (by Salamander-Elsa, in a reversal of Yakko’s earlier fraternal wedding visitation) back into his former self and consumed in a conflagration that fulfils the Salamander’s prophecy of Part I (and, appropriately enough too, the anticipations of Odoevsky’s commentaryforeword). The hauntings of the 1830s occur in a ‘new’ boyar palace built on the site of the razed dwelling. Otto Boele recognizes The Salamander as an ‘exceptionally rich story’, but without following Odoevsky’s protagonist beyond his turn ‘into a civilized and educated European’, while the main narrative viewpoint utilized the voices of ‘a (Russified) Finnish boy and a Finnish girl’, introduces complications deemed to lie beyond the scope of his Northern theme per se.72 From the perspective of the present chapter, however, Odoevsky’s dilogy, when read against the texts summarized above, clearly advances the Finnish imperial theme in nineteenth-century Russian literature in the direction of what we might now acknowledge as ‘Imperial Gothic’.73 In respect of Baratynsky’s Eda, we can point to the respective representations of the rugged Finnish landscape, the ersatz incest theme suggested by invocations of the word sestritsa, Odoevsky’s idiosyncratic bi-cultural play on the figure of the faithless lover, and his significant development (through cultural advancement and his own contacts with the Grand Duchy) of Finnish mythology. Odoevsky’s depiction of


a Finnish preference for Russian ‘protection’ over that of Sweden (the Veineleisi rather than the Ruotsi) would appear even to have some historical justification for the 1700s; from the perspective of the imperial actuality of the late 1830s, though, this may be more problematic.74 The dichotomies of Russia-Sweden and Russia-Finland (plus Russia-Europe), however, serve only to introduce a lengthy series of dualities and couplings in The Salamander: two countries and cultures (at various levels) and the Romantic ‘two-world’ system (dvoemirie: found too in the metaphysical attributes of Baratynsky’s poetics); two stories (the dilogy); and doubled family and ‘sisterly’ situations.75 However, it is from Pushkin’s works that particularly striking reverberations may be detected. Taking these in arguably ascending order of importance, the ruthless acquisitiveness of the Yakko of Part II, leading him to murder by desire (‘all is permitted to a rich man’), is reminiscent of Hermann’s determined rapacity in The Queen of Spades, while the occult European alchemical level (and the chronological leap) parallels Pushkin’s Parisian anecdote of the Count Saint-Germain.76 The clearest echo of The Bronze Horseman is, of course, the motif of the flood, but Yakko personifies ‘Nature’s [and Finland’s] sad foster-child’ – Pushkin’s epithet of the epigraph to this essay. There is also a reflection of the ‘cosmogonic struggle’ (in the flood and within the hellfire of the alchemical athanor) between the forces of cosmos and chaos discerned in The Bronze Horseman by Svetlana Evdokimova, and of the ‘unorganized chaos’ from which St Petersburg itself has emerged, as has the ‘wretched Finn’ (in Mar’ia’s denunciation of Yakko, the ‘accursed Finn’) – but to which, though, like Pushkin’s ill-fated protagonist Evgenii, he is destined to return.77 Moving to comparison with Poltava, we can see (significantly, this time from a Finnish standpoint) another mythic depiction of ‘Peter’s miraculous exploits’ and another version of the ‘inverted fairy tale’ constituting ‘an integral part of the myth of the cosmic Russian empire’, plus a similar ‘interweaving of the stories – a personal story and a mythologized historical event’.78 A parallel may also be drawn between the Ukrainian Cossack girl (Maria), descending into derangement, and her Finnish counterpart’s embracing of visionary sorcery, while the mooted relationship between the old Count-Yakko and the young princess echoes that between Mazeppa and his godchild Maria (Kochubei’s daughter) – a reversal too of the purported ‘affair’ between Hermann and the octogenarian Countess. However, we return to The Blackamoor of Peter the Great as a principal prototext. Odoevsky, one of the editors of the ‘thick’ journal the


Contemporary (Sovremennik) in the period immediately following Pushkin’s death, would have enjoyed close familiarity with the manuscript of this work.79 According to the German biography of Abram Hannibal, Pushkin’s main source, Peter ‘wished to make examples’ that would ‘put [Russians] to shame . . . even from among wild men – such as Negroes’.80 So why should not Odoevsky’s ‘half wild Finn’ be ‘gradually transformed into an educated European’?81 Ibrahim matures in Paris and Yakko in Holland, an alternative Petrine fount of Western progress. Yakko had also been in Paris, while, another German source affirms, Hannibal may even have been ‘a homeless little Mohr (Negro), acquired in Holland by Peter I to serve as a ship’s boy’.82 In addition to parallels in European education, Ibrahim and Yakko both achieve betrothal into Russian families after attending court Assemblies. Almost identical too are their respective visions of Petrine Russia as ‘workshop’ and ‘machine’.83 While it is uncertain how Pushkin would have continued his ancestral romance, the historical Hannibal too fell upon leaner times after the emperor’s death, being ‘vaguely accused of political intrigue’; while ‘Pushkin’s presentation of Abram’s Siberian period is false’, and Petr Petrovich Petrov (‘alias Abram Gannibal’) certainly avoided anything resembling Yakko’s fate, the reality – according to Nabokov at least – was far removed from the ‘independent brilliant personality’ wishfully envisaged by his descendant.84 Part II of The Salamander may suggest the ‘revenge’ of the multimetamorphosed Ivan Ivanovich Yakko, both for the loss of his glittering Petrine career and for the ultimate failure of his apprenticeship in cultural assimilation; but the ultimate retribution is of course wreaked by the eponymous (of Part II) Elsa.85 In St Petersburg ‘the subject of mockery and hatred’, this ‘poor child of nature’ strikes back in Moscow – at Russian society and at her faithless sibling-lover – on behalf not only of the empire, but of her female sex, that perpetually colonized half of humanity.86 In this instance, it is with a particular vengeance that, in Azim’s terms, ‘the inner secret enemy, the Romantic self of the Gothic heroine, cannot be completely extricated, and constantly pushes against the textual surface to disrupt and interrupt the narrative of her growth’.87 Odoevsky’s twist on what Sakharov sees as ‘the symbolic depiction of machine-Russia’ is thus a highly Gothicized one, open to postcolonial and feminist readings.88 Ewa Thompson alleges an absence in Russia of ‘that healthy dis-ease with which the once-presumptive cultures began to look at themselves’, while, according to Edward Said, ‘representation itself has been characterized as keeping the subordinate subordinate, the inferior inferior’.89


Whereas Prince Odoevsky, himself the last of a line descended from (the Nordic-Varangian) Rurik and subsequently Russia’s ‘premier nobleman’, could never be described as a radical firebrand, he was capable, along with certain literary contemporaries (earlier: Ryleev, Viazemsky and perhaps Baratynsky) of at least selected moments of dis-ease as the Russian Empire careered on its post-Decembrist course towards military reverses in the Crimea and a grotesquely overdue introduction of reforms.

Notes 1. Mednyi vsadnik (1833); quoted here from Otto Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1996), p. 219. Among several available full translations are those by Walter Arndt, in Alexander Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyric Poetry, trans. Walter Arndt (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1983), Catharine Nepomnyashchy in Christine Rydel, ed., The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), and A.D.P. Briggs in idem, ed., Alexander Pushkin, (‘Everyman’s Poetry’), (London: Everyman, 1997). 2. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 9; Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 1. 3. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: an Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 208. 4. G.O. Vinokur, The Russian Language: a Brief History, trans. Mary A. Forsyth, ed. James Forsyth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 111. 5. Martin Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes: From The Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 38, 144. For a comment on the ‘cultural imperialist’ reaction to this phenomenon, see Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 54–6 and 83, n. 4. 6. Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes, p. 98. 7. Fred Singleton, A Short History of Finland, rev. A.F. Upton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 36–7. 8. Ibid., p. 16. 9. Ibid., p. 42. 10. Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 19, 215; Singleton, A Short History of Finland, p. 46. 11. Singleton, A Short History of Finland, p. 46. 12. Ibid., p. 73. 13. Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 19, 21. 14. Ibid., pp. 21–2. 15. Ibid., p. 22. 16. See in particular Boele’s Chapter 7, ‘The “other” North’, ibid., pp. 213–48. 17. Ibid, pp. 246, n. 1, 214. 18. Ibid., p. 9. 19. Ibid., pp. 218, 221.

Pushkin and Odoevsky 83 20. Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel (London: Routledge 1993), p. 27. 21. This work was published in full only in 1939: for text, see A.S. Nemzer, and A.M. Peskov, eds, Russkaia romanticheskaia poema (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Pravda’, 1985), pp. 315–60. 22. I am indebted for insights into Baratynsky and Finland to Michael Basker’s paper, ‘Russian Poets on Finnish Impressions’, given to the BASEES Nineteenth-Century Studies Group at Bristol (July 2000) and to contributions to the ensuing discussion from Robin Milner-Gulland. 23. E.A. Baratynsky, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. V.M. Sergeev, intro. I.M. Toibin, ‘Biblioteka poeta’, large series, 3rd edn (Leningrad: Sovestskii pisatel’, 1989), pp. 72–3. 24. E.A. Baratynsky, Eda, trans. Christine Rydel, in Rydel ed., The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism, pp. 124–30; Baratynsky, Eda, in Baratynsky, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, pp. 229–44. 25. Luc J. Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins: Russian Romantic Verse Tales and the Idealized Woman (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 214. The hussar was originally named Vladimir, had a Byronic curl and was termed ‘villain’ (zlodei) and ‘unclean spirit’ (dukh nechistyi): see variants (Baratynsky, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, pp. 359–68). 26. Geir Kjetsaa, [Geir Khetso], Evgenii Baratynskii: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1973), pp. 356–68. 27. See Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins. 28. Briefly considered by Kjetsaa, Evgenii Baratynskii, pp. 364–6; Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 227–8. 29. Baratynsky, Eda, in Rydel, ed., The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism, p. 128. 30. Ibid., p. 129. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 124. 33. Beaudoin, Resetting the Margins, pp. 76–7. 34. The epilogue, omitted from Rydel’s translation of Eda, written in 1824 and rejected by the censorship, was first published only in 1860 (Baratynsky, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, p. 432). Although it appears in the text of most modern editions (e.g. Nemzer and Peskov, Russkaia romanticheskaia poema, pp. 243–4), Sergeev’s ‘Poet’s Library’ edition of 1989 confines it to the ‘Other editions and variants’ section of the apparatus (Baratynsky, Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, pp. 367–8). 35. The epilogue to this poem is, for some reason, omitted in the only available English translation, (under the title ‘The Captive in the Caucasus’) in the volume Alexander Pushkin by A.D.P. Briggs; however an excellent idea of its flavour is furnished by the extended quotation given in Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 101. 36. The term is suggested in Harsha Ram’s essay ‘Russian Poetry and the Imperial Sublime’ in Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally, eds, Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 21–49; see ibid., p. 48; and Layton, Russian Literature and Empire, p. 107. Ewa Thompson goes further in this direction: ‘Of all the great Russian writers, Pushkin was probably the crudest jingoist’ (Thompson, Imperial Knowledge, p. 67).

84 Empire and the Gothic 37. On Baratynsky’s nevertheless close relations with Davydov, see Kjetsaa, Evgenii Baratynskii, pp. 100–1, 113, 117. 38. Svetlana Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 173. 39. Alexander Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura., 1975), vol. 3, pp. 170–213; Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyric Poetry, pp. 324–69. 40. Ivan Mazeppa (1639–1709) spelt his name with a double ‘p’ in the Latin alphabet, but with a single ‘p’ in both Ukrainian and Russian. Debreczeny sees Poltava as a less unambiguously imperialist work than surface readings suggest, in that the narrative-authorial voice of ‘the poet laureate of the imperial court’ (i.e. Pushkin) is only one voice among several: Paul Debreczeny, Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 123–40. Pauls approaches the work from a Ukrainian perspective and stresses Pushkin’s historical distortions: see John P. Pauls, Pushkin’s ‘Poltava’ (New York: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1962). The most sophisticated reading, though, is that provided by Evdokimova: see Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, pp. 173–208. 41. Nemzer and Peskov, eds, Russkaia romanticheskaia poema, pp. 113–50. 42. Ibid., pp. 548–50. 43. The popularity of this Romantic theme is stressed by Roman Stal-Stocki: ‘The most prominent poets, artists and composers, such as Byron, Hugo, Ryleyev, Pushkin, Shevchenko, Slowacki, Frich, Boulanger, Liszt, Tschaikovsky, Payne, Gottschal, Lepky and Staryts’ka created notable works centred around Mazeppa’ (‘Preface’ to Pauls, Pushkin’s ‘Poltava’, p. vii). 44. Bulgarin’s Mazepa is thus described by Mark Al’tshuller, in his Epokha Val’tera Skotta v Rossii: Istoricheskii roman 1830-kh godov (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii Proekt, 1996), pp. 126–31. On Karamzin’s story, see Derek Offord, ‘Karamzin’s Gothic Tale: the Island of Bornholm’ in Neil Cornwell, ed., The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 37–58. 45. Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel, p. 185. 46. Originally published in Sovremennik 6 (1837). See Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, vol. 5, pp. 7–37; Pushkin, Complete Prose Fiction, trans. Paul Debreczeny (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), pp. 11–40; and, (as ‘Peter the Great’s Blackamoor’), Pushkin, The Queen of Spades and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers, ed. and intro. Andrew Kahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 209–45. On the Russian word arap and the choice of the word ‘blackamoor’ by translators, see Andrew Kahn’s note: The Queen of Spades, p. 265. For an enlightening analysis of what she considers ‘a Romantic fragment’, see Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, pp. 139–72 (255n2). 47. In a fascinating piece of research, published as an appendix to his voluminous edition of Evgenii Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov investigates sources for the origins and career of Pushkin’s ancestor, ‘Petr Petrovich Petrov’, or Avraam Petrov, alias Annibal (Hannibal, or in Russian ‘Gannibal’), 1693?–1781: Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, in Eugene Onegin: a Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, trans. Vladimir Nabokov with a commentary,


48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

4 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), vol. 3, pp. 387–447. Ibrahim (Russian ‘Ibragim’) is the Turkish form of Abraham (Avram, or ‘Abram’): ibid., p. 394. Any idea of direct descent from the Carthaginian Hannibal (ibid., p. 397) is implausible (ibid., p. 432). Pushkin, The Queen of Spades, pp. 220, 209. Vladimir Odoevsky, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. V.I. Sakharov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 1, 141–219; Vladimir Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, trans. Neil Cornwell (London: Bristol Classical Press and Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 133–212. V.I. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy, IX (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), pp. 224–30, at p. 227. On Odoevsky and Pushkin, their literary and personal relations, see Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, and Neil Cornwell, The Life, Times and Milieu of V.F. Odoyevsky 1804–1869 (London: Athlone Press and Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 241–8. See Cornwell, The Life, Times and Milieu of V.F. Odoyevsky and Vladimir Odoevsky and Romantic Poetics (Providence, RI and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998). In her essay on ‘the crisis of engendering in The Salamander’, Cynthia Ramsey points out that, on the death of the ‘father’ (Peter the Great), Yakko decamps to ‘mother’ Moscow (see: Ramsey, ‘Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskii’s The Salamander’, in Neil Cornwell, ed., The GothicFantastic, pp. 145–69, at p. 166). See Odoevsky, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, p. 353. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 133. Ibid., p. 147. The elimination of previous Finnish settlements on the site of St Petersburg had become standard practice in Russian writings. On the foundation of the city, see Michael Basker’s note ‘The Petersburg Background’, in A.S. Pushkin, Mednyi vsadnik / The Bronze Horseman, ed. Michael Basker (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000), pp. xxxv–xliv. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, pp. 137–40. See Odoevsky’s note or ‘commentary’ (Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2, pp. 141–2), presented in The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales as an ‘Author’s Foreword’ (pp. 133–4); indeed, Elsa sings passages now collected in the recently published The Kalevala (ibid., pp. 168–72). On Grot’s publications on Finland of 1839 and 1840, see M.A. Tur’ian, ‘Evoliutsiia romanticheskikh motivov v povesti V.F. Odoevskogo “Salamandra” ’, in Russkii romantizm, ed. K.N. Grigor’ian (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), pp. 187–206 at p. 190n. In 1846 Odoevsky bought himself a small estate in Finland, where he attempted in vain to ‘break the strings’ tying him to St Petersburg (Cornwell, The Life, Times and Milieu of V.F. Odoyevsky, p. 18). Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 142. Ibid., pp. 148, 149. Cf. Abram Gannibal, once known as ‘Petr Petrovich Petrov’ (Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 432); Yakko, rather than being accorded (the pseudopaternal) Peter’s names, takes the archetypal Russian name and patronymic. Ramsey (‘Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskii’s The Salamander’, p. 163) sees the central theme of the dilogy as ‘the problematic


62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

nature of a national identity based on the law of the father’ (pointing also to the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini epigraph to ‘Elsa’: see below). Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 152. Ibid., pp. 153, 167. Now called ‘Lizaveta Ivanovna’, Elsa’s shared patronymic ‘indicates a future conflict of sexual desire’ between herself and Yakko (Ramsey, ‘Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskii’s The Salamander’, p. 160). According to Nabokov (‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 423), September 1706 saw ‘the first inundation in “Piterburh” (or “Paradis”, as [Peter] fondly called the town he had just founded’). Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 176. Elsa does not, however, embark on amorous intrigue with Zverev fils (who has now vanished from the plot); ‘the dangers evoked by the savage colonial Other’, combined with those of ‘a transgressive sexuality’ (Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel, p. 186) are here directed only at Elsa’s partly assimilated ‘sibling’. As mentioned above, there is a blur between fantastic elements derived from European and Finnish traditions; moreover, for all the supposedly Finnish basis (Odoevsky’s ‘commentary’), it has been affirmed that salamanders are a quantity unknown in Finnish folklore (Tur’ian, ‘Evoliutsiia romanticheskikh motivov v povesti V.F. Odoevskogo “Salamandra” ’, p. 189). ‘We were sitting in front of the fire; suddenly father hit me so hard that I cried. “Don’t cry”, said father, “you’ve done nothing wrong”; at that moment the Salamander appeared in the fire; “I hit you so you don’t forget it and so you’ll pass this event on to your children” ’ (Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 177). Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., pp. 189, 190. Such ‘body-switching’ (‘body-hopping’, or ‘spirit travelling’) has become a relatively common feature of modern Gothic: see for instance Paul Wendkos’s film The Mephisto Waltz (1971), Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999), and recent episodes of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Odoevsky’s use seemingly represents an early example of the phenomenon. Boele, The North in Russian Romantic Literature, pp. 231–2; 246n3. ‘Imperial Gothic’ is a term used by Patrick Brantlinger in his Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988). Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 136. Ramsey (‘Gothic Treatment of the Crisis of Engendering in Odoevskii’s The Salamander’, p. 157) attaches significance to the author-narrator’s ‘embedding the old name for Russia (Rus’) into Rusi’s name’. The possible listing of dualities seems almost endless: foreign-native, St Petersburg-Moscow, the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, the 1820s–40s (or mysticism versus rationalism), alchemy-folklore, history-legend, the historical and Gothic genres. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 190. Yakko had displayed psychopathic tendencies as a boy in his violent ‘hatred for the Swedes’ (ibid., p. 145). He had himself seen evidence of European alchemical achievement


77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

in Paris and Vienna (ibid., pp. 191–2). Odoevsky depicts Saint-Germain as an occult mage in his own ‘Letter IV [to Countess Ye. P. Rostopchina]’ of 1839 (ibid., pp. 60–5). Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, pp. 217, 229. According to Evdokimova’s reading, Evgenii ‘fails [his] initiation’, as ‘a man who places himself outside the history of his family and his land is doomed to ruin’ (ibid., p. 231); Odoevsky’s Yakko contrives to do this with both his families and lands. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 148; Evdokimova, Pushkin’s Historical Imagination, pp. 198, 207. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, pp. 225–6. Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 420. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, p. 147. Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, p. 436. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, p. 228. Nabokov, ‘Abram Gannibal’, pp. 433–4, 438. Tur’ian, ‘Evoliutsiia romanticheskikh motivov v povesti V.F. Odoevskogo “Salamandra” ’, p. 193. Odoevsky, The Salamander and Other Gothic Tales, pp. 176, 168. Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel, p. 104. Sakharov, ‘Eshche o Pushkine i V.F. Odoevskom’, p. 230. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge, p. 28; Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 95.

5 A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula William Hughes

Over the past decade Gothic criticism has arguably proved as responsive to innovation in the theory of colonial and postcolonial fictions as it was to developments in literary psychoanalysis some forty years earlier. The rise of a postcolonial discourse within the field, though, in a sense makes problematic the boundaries and definitions which demarcate what it is to be textually, discursively Gothic, and also highlights the temporal considerations which fracture as well as unify the integrity of the genre. For critics applying psychoanalysis to the Gothic in the 1960s, the situation was relatively uncomplicated: for Maurice Richardson, writing in 1959 for example, the psychoanalysable Gothic was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, not Richard Matheson’s equally vampiric novel I Am Legend, published five years earlier in 1954.1 Dracula, a non-contemporary artefact, essentially encodes a pattern of neurosis and repression which, because of its labyrinthine oppressiveness and sheer difference, functions in its own right as an effectively Gothic signifier, an intrusion of the repressive, guilty past into the enlightened, all-seeing present. In a sense, therefore, in this ‘enlightened’, self-conscious age, there should be no perception of a ‘Gothic’ present, no repressed self breaking through in a troublesome, rebellious literature – or, at least, no texts of this nature that ought to be recognized as being worthy of criticism. For the Gothic critic writing at the opening of the twenty-first century, however, the situation is considerably more complex. Immediately, the simplistic temporality which stratifies the genre into a definitive first wave bounded loosely by Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley, a halfhearted, sensationalist revival under Collins and Le Fanu and a final, decadent collapse under Stoker, Wilde and Machen, becomes disrupted by the acknowledgement of a continuing Gothic tradition, at least in 88

A Singular Invasion 89

Britain, across the Edwardian period, and a flourishing – and often subcultural – heritage through the mid- to late-twentieth century.2 This expanded temporality, which implicates the present, is intimately connected with the rise of a postcolonial consciousness among Gothic critics, and an acknowledgement of the Gothic as both a genre and a discursive practice among those who work with literatures arising from, or depicting, colonized or formerly colonized nations. That contemporary literatures could be both Gothic and the product of postcolonial cultures should come as no surprise. ‘We live in Gothic times’, as Angela Carter astutely observed in the ‘Afterword’ to Fireworks (1974), and in a world where dispossession, invasion and apocalypse are contemporary cultural motifs whose puissance has long outlived the simplistic binary of a neo-imperialist, capitalist West and a cryptoimperialist communist East. The Gothic, in such readings, continues to rehearse the collapse of a stable world, the destruction or disruption of countries, regions and cities recognizably local to some, though markedly exotic to other readers located but a nation’s length away. The same might equally be said, arguably, with regard to the genre’s continued interaction with the integrity of sexual boundaries or the absolute truths which uphold the exclusivity of religious sectarianism. The human body, with its quantum of pain and abjection, ought possibly to be seen as the last – if not the most appropriate postmodernist – Gothic territory, but Fred Botting’s notion of a subcutaneous horror which circulates ‘with a supplementary contamination of borders and a pervasive and free-floating anxiety’ might be equally be applied to a more conventionally geographical terrain.3 As Botting argues, horror is neither what it used to be nor, indeed, ‘where it used to be’.4 In a world of shifting signification, where ‘[t]errors of the night are replaced by terrors of the light’, the discourse of Gothic adds meaning, attempts to fix again the chiaroscuro of acceptable and unacceptable, to locate the reader in a familiar terrain of fear and outrage.5 Gothic has to be the face of the postcolonial because the culture of Gothic – grandiose, oppressive, deviant and yet awesome in the power of its presence – is somehow not merely the face of the past, but of the imperialist past also. Equally, it might be added, Gothic inflects the relationship of the past to the present, marking a continuity even as other discursive interests attempt to force a hiatus between then and now. Superficially, Gothic – to be Gothicized, even – liberates that past, allows it to again be present in all its oppression and arbitrary injustice. Yet, arguably, the imposition of Gothic, its preoccupations and implications, limits what we can say about either past or present. The


same criticism, needless to say, might be levelled at the theoretical and cultural determinations which may be imposed through the discourses of the postcolonial. Postcolonial readings of the Gothic are thus, in a sense, readings of the past – whether that past be located in a text literally from that past, or implicated upon that past – through the filter of a conscious, and occasionally apologetic, present. Such readings may equally imply the imposition of a symbolism not readily available to a previous audience, where Mary Shelley’s nameless Creature may become not merely an abstracted Rousseauan Noble Savage but equally an accessible Caliban, the latter with its misspelt, anagrammatical double, cannibal, a victim to be pitied by the postcolonial world, a threat to be feared by those forbears implicated in Empire. The relationship between God and Adam, explicit in Frankenstein, may thus be overwritten, its implication of creation over and above colonization dispersed.6 To borrow a valuable concept from Foucault, therefore, the postcolonial, postcolonialized Gothic might be said to perform a service, a function in the present, translated or mediated as it is through the discourses of criticism. Such fictions affirm a Gothic past and prefigure a Gothic present – but allow the perceiving or criticizing self that edge of distance which separates the self from those ‘other Victorians’ – here rendered as ‘other imperialists’ – of the present, as much as those of the past.7 A complex programme of inscription and evasion is thus engendered, one which in effect represents the colonization or hollowing-out of genre and of historicity, and its exploitation for the ideological or discursive purposes of the (transient) present. Postcolonialism forces the critical reader to read Dracula in a certain way, much, indeed, as recent developments in the same theoretical field have transformed the approach to Wuthering Heights. In the case of Brontë’s novel, merely geographical Romanticism and the provincial exotic have been superseded by a powerful indictment of the British slave trade in Africa and the Americas, and indeed of repressive slaveries closer to home.8 Heathcliff, no longer simply the Byronic or Gothic isolato enmeshed in his own guilt and mystery, becomes instead a synecdochal ‘tragic hero of the age of emancipation and reform’.9 In such accounts, though, if Heathcliff be ‘a modern Hamlet [who] dies as a martyr and hero of social change’, he paradoxically lacks the individuality of that emblematic character – as if Hamlet, as in some psychoanalytical readings, might come to stand for the psychoses of all humanity.10 Count Dracula, who may equally emblematize the isolato of Gothic and Byronic antecedent – Manfred, Montoni, Schedoni, and


Melmoth are all generic ancestors for Stoker’s Count – comes equally to stand in synecdochal relationship to the legions which he threatens – implicitly but never explicitly – to import to the shores of England. Count Dracula, of course, provides a tempting figure around which the motif of invasion might be developed. Like George Du Maurier’s Svengali, as Nina Auerbach notes, he comes out of ‘the mysterious East! The poisonous East’, though this East is not so much the location of ‘Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies’, as Edward Said would have it, but the locus of an immigration problem unwelcome and distasteful to many Britons, whether it be in the context of late-Victorian Russian pogroms or more recent upheavals in the Balkans.11 For Jules Zanger, therefore, Count Dracula specifically vocalizes the ‘hostile perceptions’ of a British public responding to a subtle ‘invasion’ of displaced European Jewry, by vilifying the victims of Eastern pogroms in ‘a socially acceptable manner’.12 As H.L. Malchow, acknowledging the influence of Patrick Brantlinger, suggests, in such readings, ‘Imperial Gothic is to a large extent racial Gothic’ – a Gothic of competitive races, and fluctuating ascendancies.13 But Count Dracula is not Jewish, and the one Jew in the novel, implicated as he is within Stoker’s characteristic anti-semitism, is clearly delineated as such, set aside as separate from his occasional employer, the Boyar Count who respects the sacred emblems of the West’s Christianity.14 For the majority of critics, though, this racial Other remains tantalizingly undefined, a racially and geographically vague oppositional force threatening ‘to penetrate “the heart of the Empire” ’.15 It must be said, however, that this critically appropriated East is not the geographical territory explicitly rendered in Stoker’s novel, but rather a fiction based on an effective suspension of belief in the novel’s earliest stated locality, Transylvania. Clearly Transylvania, though a territory both exotic and colonized in the past by the eastern powers of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, cannot represent a sphere of conventional British interest akin to an India, a China or an Africa, those locations of imperial Gothic returns in Kipling, Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle. It is, quite simply, outside the political sphere of British national or imperial presence, a component not of formal or informal Empire but of geographical generalization – here the hinterland of the Balkans – the imposition of which marks areas of sporadic interest outside of formal national control or interest best denoted as areas of policy rather than of politics.16 Nor again can Harker’s timid, monolingual incursion into that country as a secondary businessman – an employee first of Hawkins and then of Dracula – be regarded as an invasive act sufficient to


motivate an aggressive return to the heart of Empire. Harker travels to serve and to obey, rather than to conquer, and his urbane, Continental employer is no savage tribesman, no ignorant peasant.17 Indeed, as Boyar he lives in discrete isolation, in a feudal world which may reflect the archaic West as much as negative perceptions of the contemporary Ottoman East. In short, though, Harker is no colonist, Count Dracula no subaltern subject ready for exploitation, and Transylvania, partaking as it does of both the Germanic-sounding ‘Mittel Land’ (p. 7) and the polyglot, multi-racial Carpathians (pp. 6, 2), is no Orient in the conventional imperial sense. This confusion between the named and the non-specific, between an identifiable Transylvania and a generalized East, effectively challenges the assertions of critics as diverse as Jules Zanger, Patrick Brantlinger and Christopher Frayling, wherein the novel is read as an allegory of colonization. Such readings enforce an appropriation whereby the specific location – Transylvania – becomes in effect meaningless within the postcolonial discourse, its status only as an Other place, an inland Illyria.18 At most it – ‘the East in the person of the Count’, as Cannon Schmitt depicts the invasive personality – represents an East far less defined than that of Said, an East which, for all this non-specificity, still ‘tries to get its own back on the West’ for crimes which remain both unnumbered and unspecified.19 It would appear, therefore, that the invasion script of Dracula is most effective when read not as an incident- or racialgroup-specific incursion, but as an abstracted conflict of Orient against Occident – a conflict which may unite the representatives of the West against any challenge to the latter’s cultural integrity or hegemony.20 It is this facet of conflict, this drive whereby the beleaguered West perceptibly gains both unity and a sense of purpose in the face of the Count’s incursion, that facilitates the continued re-scripting of the vampire as, in Stephen Arata’s words, ‘the representative or embodiment of a race’ or even as an individual who may ‘stand in for an entire race’.21 The implication of Arata’s work, and indeed, of that of many other critics, is that Count Dracula can never be regarded as an individual, but only as a race-synecdoche whose symbolic qualities arguably exist emphatically in interpretative opposition to a pluralized unity. In effect, the vampire has to return home to the West, and has to colonize that centre-imperial terrain, because the West, personified here as a (twentieth-century) critical idiom, has anachronistically created him in order to preserve its own identity – or to express a perception of its own postcolonial guilt. This Count Dracula, it must be said, is the vampire of literary criticism, and not necessarily that of Stoker’s novel, and his


invasion, as interpreted, is arguably a projection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century unease rather than an unequivocal signifier of nineteenth-century crisis. It remains impossible for the reader to ignore the invasion script, for it is an explicit script, whose presence is conveyed in Harker’s awareness of the implications of the Count’s move westward (p. 51). But it is possible to resist the critical drive which transforms both that invasion and its singular invader into an event within the logical force of postcolonial discourse through close reference to the novel as a nineteenth-century fiction, and to the manner in which the Count is made to participate in a colonial, rather than postcolonial, discursive mythology. This colonial mythology, it must be added, is seemingly oblique though frequently acknowledged in the perception of the Count’s character and aspirations. Fox-hunting, according to one late-nineteenth-century source, is ‘a thoroughly English sport, pursued by the middle and upper classes with courage and ardour.’22 Significantly, it is one of the distinctive social practices exported to colonial outposts by the British – functioning there as both a reminder of the home country and a reinforcement of its social exclusions – as well as one of the sports whose trappings are most frequently – and unsuccessfully – emulated by parvenus and foreigners as diverse as R. S Surtees’ cockney grocer, Jorrocks, and Wilkie Collins’s Italian exile, Professor Pesca.23 Count Dracula, for all his explicit desire to be unnoticeable and ‘like the rest’ (p. 20) of his social equals in England does not emulate the British by donning hunting pink, though no doubt he would be fully cognisant with the conventions of riding to hounds through his perusal of the ‘vast number [of] English books . . . and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers’ which treat of ‘England and English life and customs and manners’ (p. 19) contained in his castle.24 The Count, however, is subject to the sporting discourses which support the social and nationalistic practice of hunting – though, it must be acknowledged, he is scripted here as the prey rather than one who joins in the chase. Van Helsing makes this much clear when outlining his plan of campaign to the group assembled at Seward’s asylum. Referring to Count Dracula’s house at Piccadilly, the Professor determines: ‘We shall go there and search that house; and when we learn what it holds, then we do what our friend Arthur call, in his phrases of hunt, “stop the earth,” and so we run down our old fox – so? is it not?’ (p. 292). In hunting terminology, a fox’s ‘earth’ or burrow is ‘stopped’ in order to keep the animal above ground for the hunt.25 Indeed, these ‘phrases of hunt’ are again recalled, as when Van Helsing notes that ‘He, our enemy, have gone away’ (p. 315) – an allusion to the horn call given


when the fox breaks cover – and where he suggests that the pursuit resembles ‘a pack of men following like dogs after a fox’ (p. 315).26 Elsewhere, Van Helsing opens the group’s final campaign of pursuit with the exclamation ‘Tally ho! as friend Arthur would say when he put on his red frock!’ (pp. 313–14). This unacknowledged context at first sight disrupts the established colonial reading of the Count’s invasion and retreat, though the signifier of the fox – and, consequentially, that of fox-hunting – is overdetermined. Much may be made, for example, of the fox’s reputation (possibly undeserved though admittedly ‘proverbial’) for ‘cunning and intelligence’, so often applauded by the hunter – as indeed the Count’s endeavours are admired by Van Helsing (p. 321).27 Certainly, for Van Helsing, ‘Our old fox is wily; oh, so wily, and we must follow with wile’ (p. 314). The fox, like the Count, has ‘pointed’ ears and exudes a ‘peculiar scent or odour’, attributes which have in the past been associated with the latter’s otherness or, indeed, foreignness.28 Both vampire and fox are largely nocturnal, each repairing to its respective ‘earth-home’ (p. 240) when the evening’s predation draws to a close.29 The fox, again, though verminous and at times associated with the spread of rabies as well as the destruction of livestock, remains primarily a domestic – and indeed, territorial – animal rather than an invasive threat.30 It appears that only the abiding image of a group of hunters united in pursuit of a singular prey unites this most domestic and English reading of the Count’s bestial nature with that of critics influenced by postcolonial theory. Little, paradoxically, might be extracted from the other, more exotic, beast associated with the Count – the tiger. The Count, having infected Mina Harker, retreats from Britain and from the group which has successfully ‘stopped his earths’ by sanctifying his scattered coffins. Mina Harker questions the Professor, effectively diverting the bestial associations of the Count from one predator to another: ‘But will not the Count take his rebuff wisely? Since he has been driven from England, will he not avoid it, as the tiger does the village from which he has been hunted?’ (p. 320). England is the village, it would seem, but the enemy remains a lone predator – ‘the tiger’ – faced by a community. He is certainly no invading army, strong in its numbers. Notably, Van Helsing enthusiastically embraces the possibilities presented by the image: ‘Aha!’ he said, ‘your simile of the tiger good, for me, and I shall adopt him. Your man-eater, as they of India call the tiger who has once taste blood of the human, care no more for other prey, but prowl


unceasing till he get him. This that we hunt from our village is a tiger, too, a man-eater, and he never cease to prowl. Nay, in himself, he is not one to retire and stay afar. In his life, his living life, he go over the Turkey frontier and attack his enemy on his own ground; he be beaten back, but did he stay? No? He come again, and again, and again.’ (p. 320) Van Helsing neglects to make the one statement which links the tiger with the fox, and indeed, which effectively associates both animals with the predator-Count. The tiger and the fox, literally as well as reputedly, are solitary hunters, individual predators: Kipling’s Shere Kahn, from his The Jungle Book of 1893, for example, hunts alone, and is defeated by a bovine and vulpine collective led by the boy, Mowgli. The defining image here is not bestiality, nor an exoticism which may be translated into foreignness, nor indeed a simple motif of invasion: it is, rather, the perception of a solitary, individualistic and often ingenious predator who holds the potential to defeat the forces of collectivity. This aspect of the Count’s invasive propensity has been acknowledged before, though never in relation to how such activities are rendered through the mythologies of colonial discourse. Robert A. Smart, for example, reads the vampire as a representative of monopoly capital, the revenant’s defeat being assured only by the ‘combined enterprise of a young band of entrepreneurs’.31 Smart’s debt to the influential work of Franco Moretti is here acknowledged by his extended quotation from the latter’s Signs Taken for Wonders, which configures the Count as ‘a true monopolist’ who ‘will not brook competition’.32 In Smart’s reading, though – and at times in Moretti’s, also – the conceptualization of monopoly seems curiously internal with regard to its locational implications, and thus not entirely congruent with the ‘strange intonation’ which mars the Count’s otherwise ‘excellent English’ (p. 15). The Count, in such readings, is far too English, his foreignness successfully elided beneath his mastery of the discourses of finance which he aspires to take, arguably, not to an extreme but to a logical conclusion of absolute possession and control, whether the object be fiscal or physical. Monopoly, for Smart, implicates the financial interiority of the nation rather than replicating its external relationships in the greater world – this is the threat of the ‘rogue trader’, as it were, over and above that of the imperialist. The paradox is that, viewed through his success within the discourses of finance and accumulation, Dracula may function for a time as the ultimate Englishman.


Such things take the vampire far from images of empire and imperial conquest. Yet Smart and Moretti effectively hold the key to the novel’s curious inversion of imperial politics and colonial relationships. The conventional postcolonial reading of Dracula, as has been acknowledged, is synecdochal – the vampire is not Dracula, the character, but imperial Britain encoded and inverted, the invading nation invaded by its own processes of invasion and cultural infiltration. It matters not, in such readings, whether the Count might be equated with any other racial group: the implication is that the ‘they’ has become a ‘he’ or an ‘it’ – and that this ‘he’ or ‘it’ occupies a position once held by the ‘us’ that is now the threatened ‘they’. For all this, though, Count Dracula resolutely retains his status as a ‘he’ – an individual, Moretti’s monopoly capitalist, or his equivalent figure in the consciousness of empire. Count Dracula is thus not merely implicated within the imperial mythology of combatant and aspiring races but is a participant in an equally pervasive and potent myth of colonialism – that of the Great Man or Imperial Hero. Though the myth of individual achievement – emblematized as it may be, for example, through unlikely images of Pharaoh (single-handedly) building the pyramids – has been much discredited by modern historians, it still retains a certain currency with regard to nineteenth-century perceptions as to how empire was assembled. Empire, even when lauded by the nation-state, is seldom a concerted policy arising from a central or governmental source. As Dennis Judd observes, late-Victorian British policy-makers ‘were generally reluctant to commit themselves either financially or in terms of time and energy to a wholesale, virtually non-stop, process of colonial expansion’.33 That said, successive British governments were for the most part ‘content to let capitalist entrepreneurs undertake the dirty work of conquest and penetration on their behalf’.34 Judd exemplifies Cecil Rhodes as one such figure, but parallel laurels might be claimed by Robert Clive in the eighteenth century, or by Sir George Goldie and Sir William Mackinnon in Rhodes’s own day. What is clear, though, is that imperialism – or the viewing of imperialism – inclines to the personification of significant movements and events in much the same way as modern criticism, except that the notion of racial synecdoche becomes secondary to the myth of the exceptional leader. The great man may, if the myth is enhanced, come to symbolize some of the supposed or perceived qualities of the nation he represents, even though his quest – as Judd argues of Rhodes – remains individualistic and fiscal even where it embraces the notion of a nationally or racially


defined empire.35 Even in the midst of this mythologization, his name remains, ensuring that his status is still defined through individual identity, selfhood and perceived personality rather than national or racial origin pure and simple. It is that abiding self, that identity of the exceptional individual, rather than the broader racial context of origins, which has cities or countries named after it – Stoker names a fictional pioneering settlement after one of his later heroes, just as, by the time of his death in 1902, Rhodes had ‘countries named after him’.36 It is this individuality to which statuary is raised, and which lends its many names to political movements and systems of conquest and government. Count Dracula, in Stoker’s novel, is depicted as just such an individualist. He operates, and has always operated, not at the behest of a government, nor in the van of some unequivocally nationalistic yearning or aspiration, but as one who annexes in his own right, and often in his own name, with armies that effectively disappear behind the grandeur of self. ‘Here I am noble’, the Count asserts in his Transylvanian stronghold, ‘I am boyar; the common people know me and I am master’ (p. 20). Dracula, admittedly, retains the racial imperative, encoded in his proud boast to Harker that ‘We Szekelys have a right to be proud’ (p. 28), but this racial ‘we’ becomes progressively undermined as the chronicle of Szekely/Dracula history is recounted for the Englishman’s benefit. The irony of Harker’s recollection of the Count’s memoirs of past battles is vested in the latter’s use of an ‘I’, or more emphatically a ‘we’ which causes him to speak ‘as if he had been present at them all’ (p. 28). The vampire at first clarifies this usage, which Harker at one stage suggests is ‘like a king speaking’ (p. 28), through an assertion that ‘to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride . . . their glory is his glory . . . their fate is his fate’ (p. 28). Subtly, in Dracula’s own account, punctuated by rhetorical questions and rendered verbatim by Harker, the Count’s ‘ “we” . . . spoke almost in the plural’ (p. 28), appears to move from a specific association with the Szekelys – ‘Who more gladly than we throughout the four nations received the “bloody sword” . . . ?’ (p. 29) – to a more individualistic reference point within the Dracula family itself: ‘who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground?’ (p. 29, my italics). The ‘who’ emphatically bridges the gap between the race, the family, and the individual – and that individual, as Van Helsing later suggests, may well have been the speaker himself, ‘that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-Land’ (p. 240).


Van Helsing draws support for this attribution from the work of an explicitly academic associate, ‘My friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University’ (p. 240). Modern critical writing has consistently associated this figure with that of Arminius Vámbéry, dismissed as merely ‘an adventurer and master of obscure languages’ by Stoker’s most recent biographer, Barbara Belford, but better known in his own day as a traveller, political writer and, indeed, ‘chair of languages and oriental literature in the University of Pesth’.37 Much critical energy has been expended upon speculation that Vámbéry provided Stoker with historical information which allowed him to model the character of the vampire Count upon the warlord Vlad the Impaler, the historical Dracula. The status of the fictional Arminius, though, might arguably be more than a simple acknowledgement of this unsubstantiated relationship. If the fin-de-siècle reader was inclined to associate the fictional Arminius with Vámbéry, then he or she might well be inclined also to recall that the Professor was not merely a renowned linguistician but was also acknowledged as ‘a master of eastern lore . . . [and] one of the keenest observers of eastern politics.’38 Arminius’s status in the novel, therefore, is arguably as much that of a mythologist, even an ethnologist, than that of a conventional historian. Arminius is implicated in the cultural myth of that ‘great and noble race’ (p. 241) – the family Dracula rather than the Szekelys – as much as in its factual history. In a sense, through association with this and with Vámbéry’s well-known belief in ‘the regenerative power of Western civilisation’, the fictional Arminius becomes the ideal bridge between the folk mythologies of the past and the East, and the political iconographies of the present and the West. Arminius, who, like Dracula never presents his own account in the novel, becomes another eastern source to be mediated by the Western voices who control the novel and who shape the invasion text through the prevailing imagery of Western empire. Harker, Van Helsing, Arminius and even Count Dracula, who speaks infrequently but emphatically, are all functioning within the contemporary myth of the Great Man, the Rhodesean Colossus, rather than that of the race, pure and simple. It is the Count, not the Szekelys nor even the East, that is most clearly and consistently rendered as the threat to be encountered.39 The postcoloniality of Dracula is thus more complex than might first be imagined. The myth of races and of racial invasion, so frequently encountered in contemporary criticism, is not the single focus or sole implication of the Count’s individual campaign in England. Though undoubtedly available as a contextual locus of unease in the nineteenth century, this myth is perhaps more important as a factor in the politics


of contemporary criticism, where the rhetoric of oppressive nationality has eclipsed that of celebrated individuality. The individual, indeed, is arguably paramount in the novel, as Van Helsing strikingly observes when he suggests that the Count ‘have done this alone; all alone!’ (p. 321). Count Dracula travels alone to England and Lucy Westenra, his sole convert – if vampirism might be equated to a religion or a political creed – herself functions not as a dedicated or supportive foot soldier but as an individualist in her own right, acting as predator both selfishly and locally. If such behaviour – Harker’s fear of the Count’s creation of ‘a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons’ (p. 51) – might be still construed an imperialism, the Count’s most-quoted remark about the expansion of his influence might well serve as a corrective. ‘Your girls’, says the vampire to the assembled men-folk, ‘are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures to do my bidding, and to be my jackals when I want to feed’ (p. 306). The vampire’s words, though, evoke not the language of invasion but that of the hierarchicalized imperial world, the symbolic jungle which Van Helsing later adopts as an emblem of the vampire’s predation. The coda to the Count’s boast is crucial. The jackal, ‘nocturnal in habits and cowardly in nature’, is no equal of those predators with which it chooses to be associated: ‘The jackal has frequently been named the “lion’s provider,” from the belief that it guided the king of beasts to prey. But there appears to be no truth in this idea; the jackal usually accompanies the larger carnivora in the hope, no doubt, of participating in their prey.’40 The emphatic and possessive ‘my’ both demonstrates a familiarity with the jungle myth, embraced by Kipling among others, whilst conclusively locating power and ownership within singular hands: ‘when I want to feed’.41 There is no reciprocity here, but only the celebration of the single-minded individual – so beloved of Western imperialism – and of his gratification. Other vampires are merely incidental, a consequence – ‘like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water’ (p. 214) – rather than an intention of the singular invasion.

Notes 1. Maurice Richardson, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’, Twentieth Century 166 (1959), 419–31. 2. See, for example, Terry Phillips, ‘The Rules of War: Gothic Transgressions in First World War Fiction’, Gothic Studies 2, 2 (2000), 232–44; Lucy Armitt, ‘The Magical Realism of the Contemporary Gothic’, in David Punter, ed., A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 305–16; Jerrold Hogle,


3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

‘The Gothic at Our Turn of the Century’, in Fred Botting, ed., The Gothic (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 153–80. Fred Botting, ‘Future Horror (The Redundancy of Gothic), Gothic Studies 1, 2 (1999) 139–55, at p. 141. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. M.K. Joseph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 100. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One, an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley [1976] (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 5, 7, 8. See, for example, Maja-Lisa von Sneidern, ‘Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade’, English Literary History 62 (1995), 171–96; Christopher Heywood, ‘Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights’, Review of English Studies 38 (1987), 148–97. Christopher Heywood, ‘Africa and Yorkshire Unchained’, in (ed.), Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), pp. 57–70 at p. 63. Ibid., p. 68. Nina Auerbach, ‘Magi and Maidens: the Romance of the Victorian Freud’ in Lyn Pykett, ed., Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 22–38 at p. 23; Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 1. Jules Zanger, ‘A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews’, English Literature in Transition 34, 1 (1991), 32–43 at 36. Elsewhere, though possibly less convincingly, Stephen D. Arata suggests that ‘For Stoker’s audience, Dracula’s invasion of Britain would conceivably have aroused seldom dormant fears of an Irish uprising’: see ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’, Victorian Studies 33 (1990), 621–45, at 63. H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 231. Brantlinger defines imperial Gothic in Chapter 8 of his Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 227–54. As Jules Zanger admits, respect for Christian ceremonial or iconography plays no part in the stereotype of the Jew in a racist British culture which can be tentatively dated back to 1145. See ‘A Sympathetic Vibration’, 37. Rhys Garnett, ‘Dracula and The Beetle: Imperial and Sexual Guilt and Fear in Late Victorian Fantasy’ in Rhys Garnett and R.J. Ellis, eds, Science Fiction Roots and Branches (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1990), pp. 30–54, at p. 30. British possession, if not influence, has historically been negligible in the Balkans: see Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 1. An 1896 map, reproduced on p. xiii, suggests that the Carpathian Mountains form the border of the Balkans, the territory of Transylvania itself lying within the borders of political Austria-Hungary. The Balkans, fictionalized as the Land of the Blue Mountains, also form the background to Stoker’s 1909 pseudo-vampire novel, The Lady of the Shroud. In this work, however, Stoker explicitly develops the notion of the region as having had interests in common with Britain in the past. See Bram Stoker, The Lady of the Shroud,


17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

ed. William Hughes (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2001), p. 290, cf. p. 303. As Harker’s employer, the Exeter solicitor Mr Hawkins, suggests, Harker ‘is discreet and silent, and has grown into manhood in my service. He shall be ready to attend on you when you will during his stay, and shall take your instructions in all matters’: Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. A.N. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 17. Subsequent references are to this edition, and will be given in parentheses in the text. Illyria, the location of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, signifies (admittedly in common with other regions in the Balkans) a ‘semi-mythical remoteness, an imaginative “end of the known world”, an area distant but still recognisable in many respects’: Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, p. 9. Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 141; Christopher Frayling, Nightmare: the Birth of Horror (London: BBC Books, 1996), p. 107. Cf. Schmitt, Alien Nation, p. 141. This notion of racial (or racialized) union in the face of hostility is also a theme in The Lady of the Shroud, where the Land of the Blue Mountains opposes the adjacent Turkish cultural and military presence, and where the Balkan states unite in a confederation to which Turkey itself eventually becomes a signatory: see Stoker, The Lady of the Shroud, pp. 325–9, 343–4. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist’, p. 640. Anon., ‘Fox-Hunting’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia of Universal Information, ed. John M. Ross (London: Thomas C. Jack, 1882), 12 vols, vol. 5, p. 99. On the consequences of Australian fox-hunting, see Terence Carroll, Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man (London: Futura, 1984), p. 75. To wear pink, or the livery of any hunt, without being a member of the same, would of course be a social transgression of consequence: see G.R.M. Devereux, Etiquette for Men, second edition (London: Pearson, 1904), p. 78. R.S. Summerhays, ‘Stopping Earth’, Summerhays’ Encyclopaedia for Horsemen (London: Frederick Warne, 1966), p. 315; Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a FoxHunting Man [1928] (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 33. Carroll, Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man, p. 62. Strictly speaking, fox-hounds are always referred to as hounds rather than dogs: see Devereux, Etiquette for Men, p. 78. Van Helsing, as a Dutchman, would probably not know of this convention. Anon, ‘Fox’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia of Universal Information, ed. Ross, vol. 5, p. 98; Carroll, Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man, pp. 88–9. The Count is described as ‘cunning’ by Van Helsing (p. 240). Anon, ‘Fox’, p. 98; Stoker, Dracula, p. 18. Carroll, Diary of a Fox-Hunting Man, p. 86. Ibid., pp. 74–5, 89–90. Robert A. Smart, ‘Blood and Money in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: the Struggle Against Monopoly’, in John Louis DiGaetani, ed., Money: Lure, Lore and Literature (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 253–60, at p. 254. Ibid., p. 257.

102 Empire and the Gothic 33. Dennis Judd, Empire: the British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (London: Fontana, 1997), p. 119. 34. Ibid., p. 120. 35. Ibid., p. 117. 36. Bram Stoker, The Man (London: Heinemann, 1905), p. 351; Judd, Empire, p. 119. 37. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996), p. 260; Anon., ‘Vámbéry, Arminius or Hermann’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia, ed. John M. Ross (London: Thomas C. Jack, 1884), 12 vols, vol. 12, p. 393. 38. Anon., ‘Vámbéry’, p. 393. 39. J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West (London: Guild Publishing, 1985), p. 330. 40. Anon, ‘Jackal’, The Illustrated Globe Encyclopædia, ed. John M. Ross (London: Thomas C. Jack, 1884), 12 vols, vol. 6, pp. 541, 542. 41. Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, from The Jungle Book [1894], The Jungle Books (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 35.

6 Beyond Colonialism: Death and the Body in H. Rider Haggard Andrew Smith

It is difficult to think of another novelist with such obvious colonialist credentials as Sir Henry Rider Haggard. Haggard worked in the colonial service in the 1870s in South Africa and played an administrative role in the British annexation of Boer-held territories. He raised the Union Jack during the ceremony on 24 May 1877 that formally registered the annexation of the Transvaal Republic. Indeed at this ceremony he completed the oration when Melmoth Osborn, the political secretary to the Secretary for Native Affairs, was so overcome by emotion that he was unable to complete the speech. Even when his writing career became his main source of income Haggard was still active in the colonial service and was a tireless campaigner for the development of British colonies. He proposed that, after the First World War, selected British subjects, resident in Britain, should be compelled to emigrate to, and so repopulate, threatened colonial countries. In 1895 he stood, unsuccessfully, for election as a Conservative member of parliament for East Norfolk and he was involved with organizations such as the Council of Public Morals and the National League for Promotion of Physical and Moral Race Regeneration.1 He was a close friend of Kipling and was knighted twice, in 1912 and 1919, for his political, rather than literary, activities. Such a pedigree has inevitably conditioned the perception of his writings. Wendy R. Katz, for example, in Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire (1987) has argued that Haggard was guilty of, amongst other things, anti-Semitic racial stereotyping and misogyny.2 Marysa Demoor argues that Haggard’s tendency to exploit racial stereotypes was a consequence of his adherence to the formal, structural, demands of the adventure novel. However, Demoor also argues that even ‘Haggard was not unaware of the complicated dialectic between “savage” and 103


“civilized” ’, and that when he deviated from the narrative constraints of the adventure novel he sought to break down these colonialist binary distinctions.3 This ambivalence in his writings has recently attracted much critical attention. Barri J. Gold, for example, in an argument concerning images of motherhood and genealogy in She (1887) argues that: Haggard’s novel generally supports English patriarchy and imperialism. Still, at certain moments, the narrative betrays itself by revealing the power and importance of the mother, the mythic character of European scientific superiority, and the violence of English imperial and patriarchal practice.4 Tim Murray has argued, in a similar if more demotic vein, that ‘There is more to [Haggard] than his simply being a hack imperialist, just as there was to Stevenson and Kipling, but it is difficult to find amongst all the imperialist puff’.5 My principal argument in this chapter is that whilst Haggard’s writings do consolidate certain prejudices, they also explore the possibility of moving beyond a colonialist identity politics reliant on conceptions of racial otherness. I want to pursue the idea that Haggard’s work contains two, seemingly irreconcilable, impulses. One is to lament the decline in Britain’s colonial status (in works published between 1887 and 1923) and the other is to positively explore a new (putatively postcolonial) identity politics. This paradox can be historically accounted for as a consequence of the refashioning of colonialist subjectivity, made necessary by Britain’s colonial demise. In effect a different kind of Other is needed in order to situate the colonial Self. For Haggard the problem which confronts him is that the older dualities on which colonialism rested, of Self and Other, West and East, White and Black, are threatened with erasure during the period. My argument is that in their representation of the relationship between the living and the dead, Haggard’s novels symbolically represent this moment of transition. She, for example, explores at great length the possibility of death and resurrection in ways which suggest that Haggard is using such a Gothic exploration to map what another kind of life, one beyond colonialism, might look like. This is because his construction of the relationship between the living and the dead symbolically formulates a new type of identity politics, one in which the self’s very instability functions as a threshold into another possible world that transcends the colonial. In this way Haggard’s model of a life beyond death constructs a world of

Beyond Colonialism 105

community relations (where there is companionship with the dead) in which the possibility of racial harmony is explored. On a symbolic (and theoretical) level it suggests the need to kill off the old (the colonial) and embrace the new. However, because this transition is associated with loss and grief Haggard also references this change in an emotional register which emphasizes the despair felt on the part of the dying colonial subject. I will explore Haggard’s fascination with death in the four novels concerning the adventures of Ayesha: She (1887), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1921) and Wisdom’s Daughter (1923). My central claim is that death and the possibility of an after-life in Haggard’s writings, anticipates a postcolonial space in which all kinds of races and classes co-exist. Barri J. Gold has acknowledged that it is ideas about death and the possibility of resurrection which form the central drama of She. The question which Gold asks is: ‘How can this novel be so blatantly fascinated not only with death but with corpses in particular?’6 The eroticization of corpses in She, for Gold, is subtly linked to the way in which Ayesha blurs the distinctions between the living and the dead. This fascination with liminal states (between the living and the dead) symbolically refers to a moribund colonialism which is able neither to look back nor to progress. It also indicates the presence of a colonial unconscious which develops Freudian ideas of the uncanny whereby images of ontological order are shattered by an inability to distinguish between life and death. For Freud, the return of the dead is one of the most uncanny experiences as it suggests the precariousness, the permeability, of our quotidian notions.7 Ayesha becomes both the double of a colonial subjectivity, and the pathway to a world which transcends colonialism. However, the idea that the dead are not quite dead and that the living are not quite alive does not have a sole provenance in Freud’s uncanny. It also ghosts more material readings of death (which also produce a Gothic context for Haggard’s writings) such as that to be found in George Henry Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life (1860) in which he claims that in chemical terms the dead never quite die (and that given proper care people might live until they were 400 years old).8 T.H. Huxley in Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1868, revised 1885) restates the idea that the transmutation of chemical particles suggests death never really occurs and that, crucially, ‘death’ suggests a model of democracy which is fed by this transformed ‘life’. For Huxley the ‘scattered atoms’ of the decomposed body ‘will be gathered into new forms of life’, so that:


The sun’s rays, acting through the vegetable world, build up some of the wandering molecules of carbonic acid, of water, of ammonia, and of salts, into the fabric of plants. The plants are devoured by animals, animals devour one another, man devours both plants and other animals; and hence it is very possible that atoms which once formed an integral part of the busy brain of Julius Caesar may now enter into the composition of Caesar the negro in Alabama, and of Caesar the house-dog in an English homestead.9 In death a distribution of the body becomes possible, a distribution which crosses all kinds of boundaries, racial, national and the species divide. The end of empire, the end of dynasties (the end of Caesar) makes this possible. Death thus becomes a curiously democratic process and Haggard develops this in symbolic ways.10 In the novels concerning Ayesha he establishes a debate about life and death, empire, science and sexuality, one which reverses a colonialist’s charter in order to map out what another world, one which exists beyond colonialism, might resemble. Haggard in She consciously compromises a quasi-Darwinian language of natural hierarchies. Ludwig Horace Holly, the narrator, is a Cambridge academic whose simian appearance belies his intellectual credentials; he states that he once overhead a conversation between two women in which one of them testifies that his appearance had ‘converted her to the monkey theory’.11 Later in the novel, in the adventures set in southeast Africa, he is likened to a baboon. Holly possesses intellectual and physical strengths, and he comes to function as a foil to Ayesha’s alternative ideas about life, death and empire. The novel’s critique of a crude form of Darwinism, one which typically underpinned Western theories of racial superiority, indicates Haggard’s interest in colonialist constructions even as he challenges them. On one level the novel argues for the possibility of overcoming death through reincarnation. Leo Vincey, Holly’s ward, becomes for Ayesha the reincarnated form of the priest Kallikrates whom she had loved, and killed for infidelity, some 2000 years previously. We are later informed that Ayesha had bathed in the Fire of Life, which had granted her this extended existence. The novel provides one explanation, from Ayesha, that Leo Vincey is the resurrected Kallikrates, and a biological explanation, via Holly, that Leo is a genetic descendant of Kallikrates. The principal lesson that Holly learns from Ayesha concerns the inevitable decline of empires. Ayesha explains that empires are transi-


tory because they are subject to death and rebirth in much the same way as people. Ayesha, however, is also an arch-imperialist and Holly witnesses in Ayesha an image of a debased and violent colonialist attitude which, through exaggeration, provides a demonic version of British imperial ambitions. This becomes clear towards the end of the novel when Ayesha threatens to depose Queen Victoria and rule the dominions; for Holly the anxiety is that: In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world had ever seen, it would be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life. (p. 193) The novel is quite explicit in its condemnation of empire-building even whilst elsewhere it falls back on to some crude racial stereotyping in the representation of the cannibalistic tribe, the Amahagger. However, this anti-imperialist message is paralleled by a more Gothic and complex one which concerns life and death; it is one in which Haggard tries to turn such an anti-colonialist impulse into a metaphysics, and in doing so develops an alternative politics. This metaphysics produces an alternative, non-Darwinian, version of events. However, in this debate Darwinian ideas function as the Other to this alternative world and are therefore crucial to its construction. The novel organizes a series of dialogues between Ayesha and Holly in which Ayesha’s occupies what is, for Haggard, a discredited Darwinian position. Shawn Malley has argued that: [Ayesha] is depicted not as a mystic, but as a scientist who . . . approaches psychic phenomena as objects of rational, psychological study. The universe Ayesha inhabits and explores as a eugenicist, astronomer, chemist, physicist, geologist, and archaeologist is a decidedly Darwinian one.12 However, it is not thereby a purely theoretical one. Ayesha is a scientist who experiments through a process of trial and error which contrasts with Holly’s more abstract, non-heuristic and naive rationalizations. Holly learns not only about the passing of dynasties, but also that what he understands as life requires revision. Ayesha may be a eugenicist, who has created various races during her 2000-year wait for Kallikrates, but she also understands that the living and the dead are more closely


related than is allowed in Holly’s rationalistic philosophy. In this way Ayesha functions as a strange Gothic hybrid composed of malicious and egotistical impulses (a strange female version of the evil genius, or the mad scientist) whose very philosophy constitutes a Gothic metaphysics of death. Her Darwinian associations are reflected in her ability to create, and manipulate, biological life, yet her occult philosophy acknowledges that there is more to existence than just that. As in the science of Lewes and Huxley the dead are never quite dead, and the living are never quite alive. The novel might appear to endorse a pseudo-Darwinian moment when Ayesha seemingly dies when she enters the Flame of Life for a second time and shrivels into a monkey-like form, but the sequels to the novel seek to account for her subsequent transformations. It is these transformations which are important, because Ayesha’s continuing presence means that history is kept alive, and throughout her many transformations and her 2000-year existence, that history is a colonial history. Holly is a professional archaeologist who tries to keep the past alive, but the very presence of Ayesha is a testimony to the continuing presence of the past. History might in this instance be a history of empires and their decline, but there is also a narrative concerning the after-life in which the colonialist racial hierarchies are held in abeyance. In the Ayesha novels Haggard develops a scientific agenda that suggests the living and the dead are closely related. This is turned into a metaphor for Ayesha’s struggle between the spiritual and physical worlds. The body never really dies (as witnessed by Ayesha’s many transformations) but this suggests the presence of a spiritual dimension that exists independently of the body. The body is freighted not only with desire but also by social, sexual and racial differences. In ‘life’ characters are placed within a bodily hierarchy that relies on animal identifications. Holly is a baboon, Leo is a lion, the Amahagger elder Billali is described as a goat. These animal corollaries exemplify the ‘natural’ place of each character whilst they are, more obviously, indicators of their respective social positions. The ‘death’ of the body eradicates these differences and suggests the possibility of a more democratic, potentially postcolonial, spiritual dimension. Laura Chrisman argues that ‘Ayesha/She functions not simply as imperialism’s other but as its double, antithesis, and supplement. Her presence – and her gruesome extinction – are necessary for imperial selflegitimation. But this is an imperialism already in crisis.’13 The double nature of Ayesha is underlined by the way in which the conflation between the living and the dead tropes the collapse between Self and Other, a collapse which erases difference and destabilizes an imperial


language of Othering. The novel indicates the presence of an uneasy tension in which the relationships between West and East, Self and Other, Living and Dead define each other. This tension creates stasis, but the very irresolution of opposites means that the imperialist argument, which accords greater weight to the Occident than the Orient, cannot be developed. For Chrisman, the novel’s use of such dualities captures the essence of Haggard’s identity politics in which the older, colonial, sense of self defined by its relation to a racial Other is compromised, so that She represents ‘the idea of an identity defined through displacement, meditation through others, but equally troubled by the alternative, an absolute and untouchable, autochthonous existence’.14 Ayesha’s imperious and imperial standing represents this failure of a now-demonized subjectivity. Ayesha also represents, by acting as the gateway to a world of the dead, the possibility of moving beyond such a world of colonial identity politics. It is through how the dead live and why it is necessary to search them out that Haggard considers the construction of an alternative form of identity politics. For Chrisman such a move indicates the emergence of a new form of an ‘imperial (un)conscious’, a new tension between knowing and unknowing, between the living and the dead, in which the dead are allowed to have their say.15 The significance of the transition from the living to the dead is further developed in Ayesha: The Return of She (1905). The story is told, significantly, from the point of view of the dying Holly, who views his impending death with an anticipation that, once free of the body, he will discover another, more spiritually meaningful, life. This other world is secular, as it is associated less with God than with Ayesha herself. Holly recounts a moment when he and Leo are buried by a snowdrift: ‘I abandoned hope and prepared to die. The process proved not unpleasant. I did not see visions from my past life as drowning men are supposed to do, but – and this shows how strong was her empire over me – my mind flew back to Ayesha.’16 As Ayesha seems like an imperial leader in life so she seems to command the world of the dead. Later in the novel Holly believes that Ayesha resides in a ‘hall of shades’ where her empire is specifically over the dead, here: She seemed a Queen of Death receiving homage from the dead. More, she was receiving homage from dead or living – I know not which – for, as I thought it, a shadowy Shape arose before the throne and bent the knee to her, then another, and another, and another. (p. 211)


The moment is not quite as supernatural as Leo and Holly’s imaginations suggest, because, crucially, Ayesha indicates that she only exists as a product of their projected anxieties and wishes, ‘I . . . am but a magic wraith, foul when thou seest me fair; a spirit-bubble reflecting a thousand lights in the sunshine of thy smile, grey as dust and gone in the shadow of thy frown’ (p. 216). What she reflects, demonically, is their own colonial ambitions. This is less an Orientalist projection of otherness than a suggestion that their ambivalence about identity is manifested through her. The colonial Other (Ayesha is variously Greek/Asian) becomes their ‘(un)conscious’ as she represents their desire to move beyond identity politics into a world of death, where identity is suspended. This also refers to what Gail Ching-Liang Low has termed the ‘colonial uncanny’ in which the ‘uncanny . . . reflects back to the colonial identity another image of itself based on the inversion of its normal structure: a home that turns out to be some other being’.17 On an overtly political level, if in She Ayesha had appeared as a rival to Queen Victoria, it was only because she seemed like an exaggerated version of her. There Ayesha was a Queen with grand imperial ambitions, isolated in a profound and lengthy state of mourning for her lost love, and to a contemporary reader these parallels with Victoria must have been quite clear. In Ayesha: The Return of She, Ayesha is also a dangerous colonialist who has designs on the subjugation of China; for Holly ‘Ayesha’s ambitions were such as no imperialist-minded madman could conceive’ (p. 239). It is Ayesha’s attachment to the physical world which diverts so markedly from the spiritual world which she also, at least for Holly and Leo, inhabits. It is these two aspects of Ayesha which compose an explicit debate about the relationship between body and soul, a debate which relocates (as Ayesha acknowledges in her status as imperial projection) anxieties that colonialism has become demonic and needs replacing (killing off) with a new form of community politics (the strange companionability provided by the dead). This means that the living and the dead are brought together because the death of colonialism is the start of a new kind of life. Ayesha represents both of these worlds, and so becomes a complex and ambivalent trope for a fear of imperial decline. These questions concerning authority are repeatedly played out through the different demands of the body and the soul. The base demands of the flesh conflict with the higher qualities of a spiritual world. This suggests that this other world, this spiritual dimension, is governed by a need for community and compassion which is not to be found in the more war-like imperial world. That Haggard wants to


emphasize the conflict between these two worlds is illustrated in She and Allan (1921). It is also a novel which focuses on the way questions of psychological and emotional instability reflect wider instabilities in colonialism. She and Allan is Allan Quatermain’s (significantly posthumous) account of his encounter with Ayesha. The novel develops the idea that the self is unstable. Allan acknowledges that the self is naturally a series of selves, none of which is more defining than any other. Allan notes at the outset, ‘of one thing I am quite sure, we are not always the same. Different personalities actuate us at different times’.18 This uncertainty also reflects on authority by posing the question of what controls the self, as Allan notes: ‘Everything rules us in turn, to such an extent indeed, that sometimes one begins to wonder whether we really rule anything’ (p. 2). Such an anxiety makes historical sense given that Haggard is writing in the 1920s from a vantage point which enables him to reflect on Britain’s colonial decline. The tensions in She between a range of binary oppositions indicate the presence of an emergent renegotiation of colonial subjectivity. In this later novel this tension is broken because Allan defends a positive model of racial otherness. Allan is thus not associated with colonialism, as seen in the greeting given him by the chief Umslopogaas, ‘. . . I greet you well, Bold one, Cunning one, Upright one, Friend of us Black People’ (p. 27), and this is also apparent in Allan’s subsequent condemnation of the racially motivated hatred of Thomaso, who refers to Umslopogaas as ‘that nigger’ (p. 55). However, in keeping with the earlier novels, this political message exists alongside a fascination with the dead. Allan is not quite the imperial adventurer he ostensibly appears to be; his quest is not one for geographical or economic dominance, but rather for the dead. Zikali, a mystic and psychic hermit who shares some powers with Ayesha, notes ‘You . . . seek certain women who are dead to learn whether they still live, or are really dead, but so far have failed to find them’ (p. 34). Imperial ambitions are replaced by this search for another world. Also, although Allan is struck by Ayesha’s beauty, he is not drawn to her in the way that Leo and Holly were in She; rather Ayesha becomes important to Allan only to the degree that she provides a conduit to the world of the dead. He asks her, ‘I come to ask you, O Ayesha, to show me the dead, if the dead still live elsewhere’ (p. 154). However, Ayesha would rather teach him a crude democratic philosophy in which all kinds of differences become erased: ‘Learn Allan . . . that all humanity is cast in the same mould’ (p. 184), so that outward quests for others (whether dead of alive) can be replaced by inner journeys where all identity is to


be found. This also extends the suggestion in The Return of She that Ayesha exists as a figure of projection – she becomes a mirror of a colonial unconscious that, in a moment of the uncanny, searches for the dead in order to develop a new consciousness, one which comes into existence through an assertion of similarity rather than difference. The Other becomes the same in a gesture which effectively abolishes the differences between genders, races and cultures. However in order to discover this identity it becomes necessary to lose that marker of social, racial and biological distinction – the body. In order to effect this and to enable Allan to meet the dead, it becomes necessary to kill Allan by degrees. Ayesha tells Allan, ‘To kill you outright would be easy, but to kill you just enough to set your spirit free and yet leave one crevice of mortal life through which it can creep back again, that is most difficult (p. 254). Allan makes this journey in a chapter entitled ‘The Lesson’. Crucially it is memory, or rather the failure of memory, that becomes significant. Whereas Ayesha is associated with remembrance, Allan is associated with forgetting. This means that for Allan this other world is not quite what he had anticipated. He sees a group of ‘people’ composed of men, women and children approaching him: ‘all these uncounted people were known to me, though so far as my knowledge went I had never set eyes on most of them before. Yet I was aware that in some forgotten life or epoch I had been intimate with every one of them (p. 258).’ He discovers his father, brothers and sisters who have sensed that they have been called but are unable to discern Allan’s presence because they have forgotten him. The explanation given by Mameena (Allan’s deceased former African love) is that as they have lost their bodies they have lost the need to desire and consequently to love as ‘they have grown too fine for love’ (p. 261). For Allan, a definitive man of action, this loss of the body compromises his sense of identity and yet an attachment to that heroic body is not enough. The predominant mood of the novel is one of grief. Meeting the dead is not the consoling experience that it should be, but there is also a view that this other world contains an image of community where compassion prevails. The problem is that in order to join this world you need to be properly dead and not merely in a liminal state of suspended animation. Allan is therefore granted access to a world which promises a better ‘life’ even as his feelings of alienation register disappointment that he appears to have been forgotten in that world. Allan, consequently, sees this other world as hell rather than heaven: ‘I had seemed to descend, or ascend, into Hades, and there had only seen things that gave me little joy and did but serve to reopen old wounds’ (p. 289). To move beyond


the body is to move beyond desire, and it is this human need for desire which, according to Ayesha, explains Allan’s restless quest for adventure and disappointed soul-searching. She tells him, ‘Hast never heard that there is but one morsel bitter to the taste than desire denied, namely, desire fulfilled? Believe me that there can be no happiness for man until he attains a land where all desire is dead’ (p. 276). This might sound like a version of Hell but Haggard gives it a spiritual credibility which associates it with peace and freedom. The novel therefore rehearses the tensions found in the earlier novels and tries to move beyond them. However, it also provides a political reassessment of grief. Allan’s feelings of loss are not ones that reflect on the departed, but ones which reflect on his own loss of self. The basic tension in the novels is between a lament for a lost colonial world and a desire to move beyond that colonial world. A loss of self is necessary if a truly postcolonial form of subjectivity can be developed, one that is not predicated on a notion of otherness. Allan’s liminal moment is thus symbolic of the colonial subject, drawn to a world of colonial adventure and yet yearning for images of peace and compassion from which they are, as yet, excluded. It is this idea which Haggard addresses in the final novel of the quartet. Wisdom’s Daughter, published in 1923, narrates the events of She, touches on She and Allan and is actually set within the time-scale of Ayesha: The Return of She. Haggard can do this because the chronology in the novels is not the same as the order in which they were published: She and Allan is from Allan Quatermain’s posthumous papers and refers to an earlier part of the story. Wisdom’s Daughter is therefore also a reassessment of those earlier novels and self-consciously reflects on the earlier constructions of colonial anxieties. Haggard regarded Wisdom’s Daughter as the clearest distillation of the ideas which he had developed throughout his writing career, On 1 August 1923 he wrote to Rudyard Kipling, ‘In that book is my philosophy . . . the Eternal war between Flesh and Spirit, the Eternal Loneliness and Search for Unity’, which was an acknowledgement of Kipling’s earlier judgement on the novel ‘that it represented the whole sum and substance of your convictions along certain lines’.19 One of the significant factors of the novel is that it tells the story from Ayesha’s point of view, rather than mediating her through the kind of hero-worshipping engendered in Holly, and to a lesser extent in Allan Quatermain. I am not going to suggest that this enables the subaltern to speak because Ayesha is both Other and the same to the European adventurers that she encounters. However, her version of events does try to complete the cycle even though, in keeping


with the ambivalence that had governed the other novels, the novel closes on a moment of incompleteness and requires an external editorial hand to close the tale. The story is not a simple retelling of the earlier narratives, and in fact often contradicts some of the earlier claims (Ayesha, for example, had told Allan Quatermain that Kallikrates was beautiful but intellectually deficient, and that her wait for his return was a curse, not a duty of love). These contradictions are quickly explained as the consequence of a necessary politicking. The novel relates how Ayesha became a priestess of Isis, who represents a chaste spiritual world, but that her future has largely been determined by the spiteful actions of Aphrodite, who had introduced her to a world of desire. Aphrodite taunts Isis with ‘We are at war and in this war I shall be conqueror, for I am eternal and all life is my slave, because my name is Life’; whereas Isis belongs to a world without desire, and so represents the dead.20 Ayesha, whilst nominally a priestess of Isis, is more obviously of Aphrodite’s party. Her imperial ambitions are apparent from an early age, ‘I sought to rule the world’ (p. 13), yet this is tempered by the view that empires are transient. Standing in the ‘desolate Valley of Dead Kings . . . I came to know all the littleness of Life and the vanities of earth. Life, I saw, was but a dream; its ambitions and its joys were naught but dust’ (p. 28). Ayesha becomes the earthly representative of Isis and her advice and wisdom means that she becomes much prized by various regimes with colonial ambitions because she appears to be able to tell their futures and advise on military tactics. Her mission as prophesied to her is to ‘destroy Egypt, or rather her apostate priests and rulers, and afterward once more build up the worship of Isis in some far land that should be revealed to me’ (p. 87). The novel however, makes it unclear whether she is following the decrees of the spiritual Isis or the mischievous Aphrodite. Ayesha’s interest in empire and her desire for Kallikrates appear to be a consequence of Aphrodite’s influence, whereas her intimations of a world of the dead come from Isis, and this becomes the form through which the clash between the physical and spiritual realm is played out. Ayesha acknowledges that ‘there is one grandeur of the earth and another of the spirit’ (p. 188), and that the former is a world of passing imperial ambitions. Significantly such wisdom is granted to Ayesha by a visit from the dead who ‘told me strange stories of the past and of the future; tales of a fallen people, of a worship and a glory that had gone by and been swallowed in the gulfs of Time’ (p. 215). The notion that the dead are not quite dead is developed in Ayesha’s encounter with the Flame of Life. She comments that ‘Perhaps . . . not Life but Death inhabited


that flame’ (p. 239), an anxiety represented in the title of the novel’s final chapter ‘In Undying Loneliness’. In her wait for Kallikrates’ return ‘I sought out the dead in their habitations . . . and found not a few of them’ (p. 299) and although she gains a companionship with the dead she fails to find the spirit of her father. To relinquish life is to gain a community but this is necessarily at the expense of one’s personal history, a suggestion which echoes a colonialist strategy of erasing difference by suppressing the past.21 A loss of self becomes both liberating and frightening and this relocates Haggard’s idea that to move beyond a colonialist politics creates a new version of community, although at the price of a self-identity which has been fashioned through Empire. However, Ayesha now occupies a position which echoes that of Allan Quatermain, as she too confronts the impersonality of death and yet is forced to acknowledge that the communality of the dead provides a meaningful escape from the constraints of everyday life (especially as she is condemned to inhabit Kôr until Kallikrates’ return). The point seems to be that to move into a world of the dead requires a new formulation of subjectivity. If at the time there was, in cultural terms (via spiritualism), in medicine (such as in the work of Lewes and Huxley) and in psychoanalysis (in the form of Freud) a claim that our conceptualization of death was inadequate, then the issue becomes one of knowledge. The implicit question raised by these novels is how is it possible to know this non-material world, how is it possible to imagine a world which exists beyond colonial notions of otherness? These novels ultimately produce a version of a possible world which exists beyond the colonial, although they fail to explain that world properly because they exist on its cusp, as Laura Chrisman notes: Haggard is an apologist of Empire, a writer not noted for his sophistication. Precisely because of this he serves as an example of how imperialism even at its most basic is capable of constructing itself as a contradictory process, of commenting upon its own selfmythologising, and economic, imperatives, while in the course of pursuing them; is able, in sum, to reveal a great deal of selfknowledge but doesn’t know what to do with this knowledge.22 For Haggard the anxiety is that in joining the dead you lose a sense of who you are, but that this becomes a necessary journey to make given the transient nature of both life and empires. Haggard therefore represents, if not a postcolonial politics of liberation, at least a stage on


the way to such a liberation, with all the attendant anxieties which go with this sense of loss and the requirements of a new necessary selffashioning.

Notes 1. Peter Beresford Ellis, H. Rider Haggard: A Voice from the Infinite (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 6–7. 2. Wendy R. Katz, Rider Haggard and the Fiction of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 3. Marysa Demoor, ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show: Rider Haggard’s Exotic Romances’ in C.C. Barfoot, ed., Beyond Pug’s Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997) pp. 173–82, at p. 179. I am also aware that there is another debate here which concerns the degree to which Haggard is consciously in control of colonialist images. My view in this essay is that the texts seem to diverge so markedly from the life, that the texts’ challenge to colonialism can only be explained in historical terms. Yet, it seems to me that Haggard’s subversion of Darwinian ideas is knowing, although he seems unaware of the political consequences of such a subversion. In this view I follow Laura Chrisman, whose arguments I develop elsewhere in this essay. Where I indicate that Haggard has developed a critical line on colonialist ideas, this is to suggest what the texts do, rather than to claim that this was a consciously developed project on his part. 4. Barri J. Gold, ‘Embracing the Corpse: Discursive Recycling in H. Rider Haggard’s She’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 38, 3 (1995), 305–27, at 305. 5. Tim Murray, ‘Archaeology and the threat of the past: Sir Henry Rider Haggard and the Acquisition of Time’, World Archaeology 25, 2 (1993), 175–86, at 180. 6. Gold, ‘Embracing the corpse’, 316. 7. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) in Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva. Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, trans. J. Strachey, ed. A. Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 339–76. 8. George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols, vol. 2 (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1860), pp. 416, 439–40. 9. T.H. Huxley, Lessons in Elementary Physiology [1868, revised 1885] (London: Macmillan, 1898), pp. 20–1. 10. Huxley’s use of analogy in this instance also suggest that his argument is as much cultural as medical. 11. Henry Rider Haggard, She ([1887] Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1995), p. 2. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in the text. 12. Shawn Malley, ‘ “Time Hath No Power Against Identity”: Historical Continuity and Archaeological Adventure in H. Rider Haggard’s She’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920, 40, 3 (1997), 275–297, at 290. 13. Laura Chrisman, ‘The Imperial Unconscious? Representations of Imperial Discourse’, Critical Quarterly, 32/3 (1990), 38–58, at 45. 14. Ibid., 47. 15. Ibid., 57.

Beyond Colonialism 117 16. Henry Rider Haggard, Ayesha: The Return of She [1905] (Polegate: Pulp Fictions, 1998), p. 47. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. 17. Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 114. 18. Henry Rider Haggard, She and Allan ([1921] New York: Ballantine, 1978), pp. 1–2. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. 19. Ellis, H. Rider Haggard, pp. 1, 248. 20. Henry Rider Haggard, Wisdom’s Daughter: the Life and Love Story of She-WhoMust-be-Obeyed ([1923] New York: Amereon House, n.d.) p. 8. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. 21. For a more substantial account of how a denial of the past is related to colonialism see Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139–70. 22. Chrisman, ‘The Imperial Unconscious?’, 40.

7 Horror, Circus and Orientalism Helen Stoddart

My accidental discovery recently of a Marvel Comics pop-up book, Ringmaster and His Circus of Crime, featuring the Incredible Hulk, provoked in me a certain nostalgic amusement; but it also provided some lurid confirmation of what I had long suspected to be a wellworn connection in the popular imagination between circuses and the Gothic.1 The six-page children’s book has the Hulk arrive fortuitously late to a circus which is in the process of being held in thrall by an evil Ringmaster: ‘I am the Ringmaster! Watch me closely! Do not take your eyes off me for a second! Look at the spinning lines on my hat – the stars on my jacket! Now you are all under my power!’ Lucky for him, Bruce Banner is late for the show, so he is not hypnotised. (pp. 1–2) Bruce leaps in and tackles the mesmerizing Ringmaster whose lackeys are in the process of pick-pocketing the entranced audience’s money and valuables, though they emerge from their trance astonishingly ungrateful: Thanks to the Hulk, the Circus of Crime was captured. But, since no one knows that, some think the Hulk was helping the criminals! ‘Bah!’ bellows the jade giant, ‘even when Hulk does good, people think he’s bad!’ And with one huge leap, the most misunderstood man-monster on Earth disappears into the night. (pp. 5–6) 118

Horror, Circus and Orientalism 119

Interestingly, the ringmaster is pictured with a little white beard and looks very much like an Uncle Sam figure who turns the audience’s patriotism against them by using the very stars and stripes featured on his hat and coat to dupe them into a state of complete passivity.2 Already, though, his proclamation, ‘I am the Ringmaster’ invites a reading of the circus ring as a hypnotic circle which, under his influence, mirrors and controls the human eyes it attracts towards it: the ring is both a figure for the fascinator/fascinating and for the eye of the fascinated. The associations made in this small piece of juvenilia between circus and outlawry – and even criminality – are both stark and highly familiar. The ‘outlaw circus’ has a long history with its roots stretching back at least to the circus’s origins on the south side of the Thames when it grew up alongside various other, mostly either socially disreputable or legally dubious, forms of leisure and entertainment.3 This suspicion of the circus because it at least seems to side-step the law, if not always being in full contravention of it, has been perpetuated in numerous representations of it going back to Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).4 Secondly, hypnotism or indeed mesmerism is the central plot device here and it is one that percolates throughout all the texts I shall discuss in this chapter.5 The implications of this practice become more fully and meaningfully visible when they are read with reference to Edward’s Said’s concept of Orientalism, a cornerstone of postcolonial theory which contributes much to an understanding of the many public and aesthetic anxieties which have surrounded circuses, both real and fictional.6 Thirdly, there is a clear implication here that criminality is contagious; in fighting the circus Bruce Banner is, at least in the minds of the ignorant, bound up with it. Of course this is also partly because Banner has the unusual facility of being able to turn into an enormous green man of the sort you might more reasonably expect to see in a carnival freak show. It is this act, therefore, which also foregrounds the phenomenon of bodily transformation which will be so central to this discussion. Although many fictions feature ways in which the function, appearance or identity of a body may be transformed (especially in the area of cartoon characters where, after all, lots of super heroes do this), the power to transgress the conventionally understood limits of mental privacy and interiority have their history in Gothic and fantasy literature and in this genre they predominantly appear as signs of the uncanny or of a potentially evil genius at work. This evidence of ocular power, as Judith Halberstam has already pointed out, frequently works to mark out individual figures in terms of a racial difference that is specifically identified as Jewish.7


The texts which locate the circus as a site for outlawry and outrage, as I suggest above, are numerous, but can be divided into those which incorporate some element of supernatural activity and those which can be classified as more straightforward thriller or crime romances. In the latter category could be included the popular murder mystery literature and thrillers which have circus or carnival/sideshow settings or figures such as Nigel Morland’s The Corpse at the Circus (1945),8 Andrew Spiller’s Phantom Circus (1950),9 Anthony Abbot’s The Murder of the Circus Queen (1933),10 Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke (1938),11 and Jean Marsh’s Death Visits the Circus (1953),12 as well as films such as The Unknown (dir. Tod Browning, 1927), The Devil’s Circus (dir. Benjamin Christiansen, 1926), Man on a Tightrope (dir. Elia Kazan, 1953), Circus of Horrors (dir. Sidney Hayers, 1960),13 Circus of Fear (dir. John Moxey, 1966), Carney (dir. Robert Kaylor, 1980) and Funny Bones (dir. Peter Chelsom, 1994). The texts which I will focus on here, however, all harbour one of two elements which are key for this argument. They feature human figures whose coherence, recognizability or mental and bodily privacy is challenged in a way which either is overtly, or is suspected of being, supernatural. The agent or force which precipitates this physical and/or mental interference frequently does so through a form of intense ocular confrontation which may itself be offered to a paying audience as a form of spectacular entertainment. At the same time the agent of invasion is either directly or indirectly implicated as a supernatural or ‘otherworldly’ power through reference to longstanding Orientalist discourses. The small piece of twentieth-century children’s text discussed above, therefore, is bound to a longer history of viewing the dangers enacted and embodied by circus and carnival performers in a way which can be related both to Said’s concept of Orientalism and to dramas or tropes more commonly rehearsed in Gothic fictions. The history and development of the circus and of modern Orientalism, perhaps unsurprisingly, share a parallel trajectory. Both have their origins in Britain in the 1770s, moving towards increasing global expansion and pre-eminence in the nineteenth century; lingering glories in the early twentieth century were then closely followed by post-World War II crisis and decline.14 During this time the circus borrowed the colonial impulse to travel the world, discovering and exploiting new entertainment markets whilst selling itself in the West through increasingly popular shows. These represented the trophies of Western expansion, often within sensational and spectacular dramas reconstructing aspects of distant landscapes that formed the backdrop to dramatizations of Western military conquests in Africa, the Americas and Asia.15


At the same time depictions of these circus shows within representational forms of art have often worked both to fetishize Eastern beauty and to stage popular fears about the dangers and monstrosity which came to be associated with the East. By the early nineteenth century European spectators were able to view the performing wild animals from around the world which had become the trophies of imperial expansion and which were showcased first in circuses and later in zoos. As William Hazlitt’s now famous essay, ‘The Indian Jugglers’, demonstrates, they also enjoyed human performances which were new and visually transfixing.16 Jugglers had clearly been a familiar sight since at least the medieval period but now new and more daring ones had arrived in Britain from Asia and the Mediterranean countries and these were accompanied on the streets of London by sword swallowers and snake charmers. Hazlitt’s essay attempts to capture the startling skill of the performer while also emphasizing the juggler’s Oriental origins and the connection between this and his power to fascinate: To catch four balls in succession in less than a second of time, and deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand again, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up flowers or meteors or throw them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents . . . to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire.17 Thus, figuratively, the balls are like ‘ribbons’ and ‘serpents’, but the juggler’s eyes do not just perceive these objects, they dominate and control them. Hazlitt imagines the juggler’s project as a fire (a figure for the power of imagination itself) which is both startling and also potentially dangerous. What is more, Hazlitt, you could say, is almost mesmerized by fascination itself since his fascination is doubled by the fascinating power of the juggler over his own juggling balls; it is a fascination which is both exotic and, in its rapid movement and bodily dexterity and beauty, constitutes an entrancing visual spectacle. John Whale, however, observes that: although one reviewer refers to the sword-swallowing as the ‘chef d’oeuvre of the marvellous’ which is done with so much ease as to prevent any pain to the spectators, it is this part of the act which actually generates most unease and which breaks the spell of astonishment produced by the mesmeric facility of juggling.18


The phrase ‘breaks the spell’ jumps out of this passage as a confirmation of the suggestion of the presence of mesmerism within the dynamic between juggler, balls and spectator. More interesting, however, is the fact that although Hazlitt is delighted to witness a display of physical agility and, subsequently, to jazz it up with figurative implications of magic and even witchcraft (‘the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children’, p. 129), he is suddenly stopped in his rhetorical tracks and horrified when the spectacle moves on to become a dramatic illustration of the permeability of the body’s material and fleshly boundaries. The fact that the sword causes no pain when it enters the man’s body only makes matters worse in this respect because it implies the presence of an unnatural power or potential. What is crucial here is the suggestion that the performer’s skills are acceptable while their dynamics are fully visible, but they immediately become a source of profound anxiety once they harbour the possibility of private, interior and undisclosed practices or potential. Later in the nineteenth century these figures would be replaced by stage mesmerists and hypnotists who gained widespread public notoriety by combining the power of ocular fascination with an (apparent) ability to break through the pre-established limits of the private self to an undisclosed or unconscious mind. Daniel Pick has carefully and extensively outlined the early connections made between mesmerism (which also came to be of interest to European scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) and both Judaism and Orientalism.19 The connections made between these three in earlynineteenth-century literature and culture contributed heavily to the widespread and now well-documented demonization of Jewish people, and the impression of a strange and untrustworthy people possessed of a controlling and sinister gaze was most effectively solidified by the popular association of all three with lives dominated by vagrancy, inscrutability and forms of theatrical charlatanism.20 The innately theatrical qualities of mesmerism itself meant that it developed quickly (by the 1820s) into a variety and music-hall entertainment and of course it is George Du Maurier’s fictional creation, Svengali, who now stands as the most notorious embodiment of mesmerism’s Oriental and Jewish roots.21 At the same time Pick points out that, although ‘political diatribes and fiction all contributed to the pool of writings about the disturbed minds and the mesmeric power of the Jews’, writing on the subject of mesmerism at the end of the nineteenth century ‘sometimes noted that the real origins of trance-induction lay not in Vienna or Paris, but much


further to the East’ (p. 132). It is this very particular cultural demonization of Eastern European figures capable of ‘trance-induction’ that implicates the significant role in nineteenth-century anti-semitic discourses of Gothic literature, and most specifically Bram Stoker’s Dracula.22 Although Montague Summers’s scholarship demonstrates the widespread presence of a European vampire mythology before this point, Stoker’s novel established a version of the vampire in which cerebral and sexual domination became key defining features as well as ones which influenced subsequent depictions.23 Not only this, but even in the first chapter Jonathan Harker is told that the Carpathian villagers who make a sign of the cross and ‘point two fingers’ towards him are offering a ‘charm or guard against the evil eye’ (p. 6) and later Mina’s account of Lucy’s seduction in the grounds of the Abbey gives details of the ‘long and black’ figure leaning over which has ‘a white face and red, gleaming eyes’ (p. 90). Lucy herself can only remember that the figure was ‘dark’ with ‘red eyes’ (p. 98), features which stand in stark contrast to Arthur Holmwood’s eyes which, we are told, ‘gleamed’ with ‘the strong young manhood that seemed to emanate from him’ (p. 121). Thus Dracula’s unnatural and powerful gaze is dramatically present in the novel both as a code of racial otherness and as a source of horror. But the novel’s careful genealogical portrait of the ancestral line of ‘we of the Dracula blood’ (p. 29) back to the pre-modern and ancient ‘tribe(s)’ (p. 28) of Europe, together with his facility for shape-changing into various forms of predatory animal has further significant implications. As Pick points out, it was a Jewish scientist named Albert Moll who sought to undo the association between Judaism and mesmerism, since it was believed that the latter clearly indicated the survival of something connected to a primitive or pre-modern mentality, as well as powers which recognized no social, sexual or racial boundaries, and was therefore potentially transgressive in all these areas. Moll gathered examples of the phenomenon from Egypt, Japan, Persia, Africa and various Islamic countries so that by the 1840s speculation began about relative racial susceptibility. It seems almost paradoxical that mesmerism be associated both with less ‘civilized’ societies (eastern or pre-modern) as well as with the potentially politically, psychologically and sexually transgressive powers to unseat civilized minds, and yet this is also precisely the combination of attributes which make Dracula, and the vampires which followed him, such a threatening combination of primitive and voracious appetites and tyrannically hypnotic mental powers. Importantly, the feared psychological power of Jews was also seen to


have an inverse relationship to their physical strength since the connection made between Jews and ‘the “shadow side of things” ’ and thus, Pick argues, between Jews and women meant that ‘the dominant diagnosis’ was that ‘the “womanly” physical weakness of the Jews necessitates their adoption of particular techniques of defence and attack.’24 Of particular relevance here, however, is Pick’s speculation about how these three connected terms of Orientalism, mesmerism and Judaism influenced the arrangement of the original psychoanalytic scene: With his patients reclining on a couch, and his own chair placed behind their heads Freud deliberately eschewed the eye-to-eye contact that had been a consistent feature of nineteenth century hypnotic entertainment and medico-psychiatric treatment. One reason he gave for this was that he could not bear to be looked at all day long by his patients, but perhaps more importantly it served to emancipate the patient from the traditionally powerful gaze of the physician or psychiatrist. On the other hand, recognition of the patient’s enormous emotional investment in the analyst, with all its displacements and condensations of earlier relationships, was to become central to Freud’s own theorisation of the patient’s ‘transference’ to the analyst, a clinical concept very significantly developed by his followers.25 Pick suggests here that Freud’s decisive move to place his patients on a couch in front of him, thereby removing the possibility of eye-to-eye contact between patient and analyst, was a defensive gesture made in anticipation of the connections which might be made between mesmerism, hypnotism and himself as a Jew. He was also, Pick argues, keen to avoid any suggestions of theatricality since ocular confrontation had constituted such a key feature of nineteenth-century hypnotism as popular stage entertainment. Even so, the issue of patients’ mental transferences to their analysts and their analysts’ potentially unnatural influence over their patients has been fundamental to the work and concerns of subsequent analysts and has featured widely in the formation and critiques of the disciplines of psychoanalysis.26 William Lindsay Gresham’s thriller Nightmare Alley provides a particularly striking dramatization of the inter-association of some of the above terms within a fictional circus/carnival context.27 On the whole the novel belongs to that category of circus fictions described above which do not contain any supernatural element. Although the central figure is a stage ‘mentalist’ named Stanton Carlisle, he is depicted as a


cynical hustler and the narrative action works to debunk and expose his sideshow act as hocus pocus, even if it does arrange itself formally with reference to the tarot cards as each of the 22 chapter-titles refer to one of the 21 tarots plus the Joker. Carlisle, however, is plagued with guilt over the various deceptions he has practised and suffers also from a recurrent paranoid nightmare (to which the novel’s title refers) in which he is ‘running down a dark alley and rooms were vacant and black and menacing on either side’ (p. 58). Ahead of him, ‘far down at the end of it a light burned; but there was something behind him, close behind him, getting closer until he woke up trembling and never reached the light’ (p. 58). His worst mistake of all is made when he arranges to see a psychologist to help him with his sleep loss. In the first moment that they are described as being together in the same room, it is the dynamics of possible and impossible eye contact in the consultation room which are the source of Carlisle’s initial conversation: ‘Lie back on the couch.’ ‘I don’t know what to talk about.’ ‘You say that every time. What are you thinking about?’ ‘You.’ ‘What about me?’ ‘Wishing you sat where I could see you. I want to look at you.’ (p. 136) Clearly on one level Carlisle’s anxiety is based on his nascent sexual desire for the psychologist Lilith Ritter for whom he will later fall: Lilith’s initial removal of ocular contact here merely intensifies his growing vulnerability in her presence. At the same time this scene is the starting point for an elaborate confidence trick played by a psychologist on a professional con man (Carlisle) who believes himself unstoppable. Not only do her professional skills match his, they supersede them and he is thereby finally humiliated because the man Stanton believes he is conning out of thousands of dollars (with the psychologist’s help) in order to be with her, turns out to be her partner in an elaborate trick on him which he has been unable to detect. In the light of Pick’s research outlined above, it is interesting therefore, that she is not only female, but also that she is called Lilith Ritter, since Lilith is a name of semitic origin which not only refers to a vampiric demon of the night, but also to the evil first wife of Adam who became the Devil’s Dam.28 Where Carlisle second-guesses human action and motivation,


she is able to exert such sexual and psychological influence over him that he acts entirely according to her instruction and, as he is led off for psychiatric treatment, can no longer distinguish between nightmare and reality: ‘Dream – Nightmare. Delusion. Nothing . . . nothing real. Tongue . . . naked . . . talk . . . money . . . dream . . . nightmare’ (p. 192). So although this is not strictly a supernatural novel, its interest in sideshow ‘mentalism’ leads it to contrast this with the greater and, in its terms, more sinister and powerful techniques of professional psychological investigation in a way which produces a fictional restatement of longstanding associations between femininity, Judaism and sinister mental influence. The suggestion of Lilith Ritter’s vampiric power over Carlisle as she sucks out his powers of self-determination and rationality is emphasized throughout the text in a familiar Gothic language which describes her ‘animal tastes’ and ‘superanimal’ brain which ‘always hooked into his own by an invisible gold wire’ (p. 140) and her hand which turns from ‘warm’ to the ‘chilled’ hand of ‘a dead woman’ (p. 141). In moments of trauma Carlisle persistently tries to cover and protect his eyes with his hands but in his final attempt to do so in Lilith’s presence she appears to stop him as ‘it seemed that all the pain in him was concentrated in the back of his right hand in a sudden, furious stab like a snake bite’ (p. 191) and she finally smiles triumphantly over him. Clearly this implied connection between vampirism and an unnatural power to manipulate unconscious (especially sexual) desire by a figure identified as semitic is a clear echo of the anti-semitic impulse in Dracula. Yet it is also easy to see what it is about the fictional context of a circus or carnival that allows it to accommodate vampiric figures so readily: they are visually mesmerizing, physically restless and itinerant, bound up in Western fears and fantasies about the East, physically and sexually unstable and dangerous, a challenge to the boundaries between life or death and wild or civilized, and blind to the class or racial status of those they draw into their fold. As I have argued above, the intimate and parallel histories of the circus and Western colonial expansion mean that it is easy to see why the texts I shall discuss here represent the circus in ways which may perpetuate certain nineteenth-century colonialist and Orientalist fantasies. At the same time it is clear that their distinctive postcolonialism lies in the manner in which they act out residual, perhaps instinctive, Orientalist fears (latent in Hazlitt) in a way which both intensifies the intimacy and the destructive power of the objects of fear and betrays a much-quickened sense of loss and helplessness amongst those who encounter those objects. It is in this sense that these


representations of the circus and circus-sideshow figures are both more modern and more Gothic than Hazlitt’s. For Hazlitt the Indian Juggler’s power to ‘fascinate’ with his eyes operates as a metaphorical figure through which Hazlitt (as an intellectual and a figure representative of colonial power) articulates an idea about Romantic genius through his greater power as an artist. In the twentieth-century texts I am looking at, however, the power of the mesmerists is both irresistible and beyond anyone’s control. Such is violently the case in Eleanor Smith’s highly mediated short story ‘Satan’s Circus’ (1932), in which a narrator relates a story told to him by a juggler about the fate of a young circus co-worker named Anatole, who dies violently while performing with the tigers in the Circus Brandt.29 The circus is run by Carl and Lya Brandt who, though they profess to be Austrian, are said to be ‘queer people’ whom even ‘their own people’ call ‘gypsies’. Others have dubbed their show ‘Satan’s Circus’ since they ‘wander the whole earth as though the devil himself were at their heels’ (pp. 9–10). The juggler confides that he left the show because he could not stand ‘working with people who give me the creeps’ (p. 12) and he is not alone in his instinctual trepidation in their presence. When the Brandts toured ‘in that wild part of Rumania [sic], somewhere near the Carpathian mountains’, they emerged from their caravans to discover that all the villagers had ‘scattered like rabbits’ and ‘on every door was nailed a wreath of garlic’ (p. 14), and the animal menagerie was always terrified of them. The young Anatole, a runaway from the Foreign Legion, is targeted from the start as someone both dispensable and highly open to blackmail. The text allows for no doubts about the Brandts’ vampiric identity. It tells us of Carl’s ‘darting black head like a snake’s’, his face, ‘yellow as old ivory’, his ‘tiny, dark, imperial beard’, ‘sharp and broken teeth’ and ‘appearance of an addict’ (p. 16). These are mirrored in Lya’s absence of colour (‘all was all black and white’), her eyes which burn like a ‘devil’s’, and the fact that she would never show her teeth (p. 17). The circus mythology refers to her as a ‘she-devil’ who ‘walks’ regularly at night, terrifying the animals (p. 26). She deliberately enters the circus ring one night while Anatole is doing an act with the tigers, thereby causing his death, and is later seen feasting on his already ripped and torn body. It is at this point that, ‘with all the ferocity of a starving animal she flung herself upon the body, shaking it, gripping it tightly to steady its leaden weight while she thrust her face, her mouth, down upon that torn and bleeding throat’ (p. 37). The circus’s night-time movements between towns, spectacular offerings of near-death encounters, distraction of audience belief


and harbouring of wild animals provides the perfect cover, in this story, for these vampires by offering them a welcome complicity in, and cover for, their sinister appetites. Like Dracula, the Brandts combine aristocratic decadence (the ‘imperial beard’, ‘ivory’ complexion and addict’s face) with racial otherness (the ‘black’ head and gypsy branding) and a primitive, bestial appetite. Yet here the circus setting also creates a space in which the tiger, far from functioning as a trophy of Western man’s ability to tame and control even the most ferocious representatives of the animal kingdom (and, by implication, the countries from which it was taken), takes out the would-be tamer’s throat and is closely followed by the vampire who shadows and replaces him. Robert Young’s late Hammer horror film The Vampire Circus (1971), also presents an evil circus but its representation here in film complicates and intensifies both the impact of the performers’ mesmeric powers and their ability to interfere with the normal visual perceptive function. In common with other Hammer productions of the period, the film is set in a vaguely nineteenth-century rural European past, this time apparently in Serbia, though the characters’ names are Germanic.30 The ‘Circus of Nights’ makes its appearance at the end of a debate amongst local town officials and professionals about the medical crisis precipitated by what later turns out to be an outbreak of rabies, but which is referred to at this point as a ‘plague’. Dr Kersch is infuriated by the way the other townspeople indulge a belief that the disease may be connected to an outbreak of vampirism 15 years earlier, the source of which was Count Mitterhaus. We see him staked through the heart at the start of the film but learn that he is still buried in the town. As a medical doctor Kersch’s impassioned outburst (‘Must you go on believing in old wives’ tales? The vampires exist only in legends, the imagining of diseased minds!’) constitutes the sort of bourgeois, rationalist proclamation of the professionalism which is so typically at the heart of Gothic, and especially Hammer, horror. At the same time it turns out to be the cue for the arrival of the Circus of Nights whose members will so spectacularly undermine Kersch’s exclusive faith in the material world. Not only does their name form the last words on Mitterhaus’s lips but now their entry in the film is facilitated by a point of view shot from Kersch, just as he condemns ‘the imaginings of diseased minds’, ‘legend’ and ‘old wives’ tales’, terms to which, through this cinematic technique, they are immediately bound as the shot pans across from him and down to the dancing dwarf who, followed by a ‘gypsy woman’, leads them in. The smooth transition from the doctor’s outward gaze to the consequent arrival of the players in the town square sets up a pattern


of expectation and desire (even in denial) between the people of the town and the vampires who will feed off them. This desire is structured through a series of shot-reverse-shot sequences within the film in which the enquiry is initiated by the human and in which the object of their gaze, in being visually present, is rendered more, rather than less, ambiguous and possibly imaginary. The most extended and striking example of such a technique occurs in the sequence in which the romantic young couple Anton and Dora sit in the front row of the circus watching the vampire’s twin children, Helga and Heinrich, perform a fantastical acrobatics sequence.31 The sequence begins with the smooth editing-together of shots of the human acrobats’ bodies flying up into the air with a shot of birds of prey in the air, thus creating the visual impression that they are indeed capable of magical transformation into birds. The audience’s gasps at their acrobatic performance have already been rendered aurally ambiguous in that they constitute a sound bridge between this and the previous scene in which Emile is shown on the verge of biting into the neck of a young girl, Rosa. Thus the gasp of horror at another vampire victim is conflated with the active pleasure and surprise of the delighted circus audience: fear and desire expressed in the same cry. As they land back to earth the acrobats face Dora and Anton and a shot-reverse-shot sequence establishes a double eye-line match between them which is then intensified by the twins’ internal diegetic voice whispering ‘Dora’ at Dora and Anton. Clearly entranced, they are then led into a carnival hall of mirrors. Perhaps for obvious reasons, the hall of mirrors appears in a variety of other dark or fantastic fictions about the circus, including Charles G. Finney’s short story ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’ (1956)32 and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1963).33 In each case it functions to expose a latent fear, absence and hence vulnerability in the person who contemplates a reflection of themselves which is then transformed into a frightening and dangerous image. This image turns out to be not so much a distorted reflection but rather an image of the character’s projected desire and fear which has been wrenched (albeit from a willing victim) from a private, mental space into a spectacular public frame. Instead of themselves, Anton and Dora see the twins who beckon them further so that they walk into and through the mirror to where Mitterhaus awaits them. Thus the editing techniques, as well as the framing device of the mirror, ensure that the twins, as well as Mitterhaus, are marked as both visually fascinating and imaginary. This means that the dynamic between the vampires and their victims is more complex than merely one


between a monster and its prey. A further example of the inclusion of structural visual ambiguity appears in the sequence immediately following the circus’s arrival in town, in which two young boys approach one of the circus wagons. As they peer into one of them their point-ofview shot is presented as a series of rapidly alternating shots of a black panther and of the vampire Emile (Mitterhaus’s cousin). The spectator’s eye is only allowed to rest on each of the two images for about a second and this creates a confusion about whether it is the eyes of the young boys which project confusion onto the object, or the panther/vampire which is itself an unstable object. As in ‘Satan’s Circus’, the anti-semitic connection between the vagrant, parasitic vampire and the mesmerist is given a further Orientalist twist as the vampire becomes interchangeable with a wild and exotic animal. As I have suggested above, it is also important that in all these encounters, the texts imply that these monstrous, vampiric figures cannot be framed or even correctly identified by the human eye precisely because theirs is the eye which frames and controls. In this sense they represent a very Gothic uncertainty about their physical existence even as, at the same time, they guarantee the spectacular and fascinating power of these figures. A similar, but more light-hearted, drama of about visual ambiguity occurs at the beginning of ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’ when a variety of different pairs of characters are presented hotly debating whether one exhibit in the circus is a bear or a Russian (pp. 9–18). Although the narration is in the third person, it offers its readers no independent statement about the ontological status of the exhibit. The ‘Catalogue’ attached to the end of the story lists and describes all the figures presented in the narrative (human, animal, mythical, geographical, vegetable, religious) which contains both a ‘SONORAN GRIZZLY: The country cousin living in Mexico of the great family Ursus Horribilis’ (p. 86) and ‘A RUSSIAN’ (p. 79). The first question in the penultimate catalogue section, entitled ‘THE QUESTIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS AND OBSCURITIES’, is ‘Was it a bear or a Russian or what?’ (p. 91). In both this and Vampire Circus, then, the curiosity of spectators is sharpened by a circus figure which the text categorizes as human or animal (but not both or either one) and it is the investigating eye of the circus outsider that actively seeks out the curious and dangerous object. In ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’, however, Dr Lao, although a crude Orientalist stereotype and commonly referred to as ‘the Chink’, is a rather benevolent if ‘screwy’ figure with no evil, demonic or power-hungry plan. On the other hand, the bear is one of several figures that function as textually unresolvable ontological conundrums. This means that,


although thematically the narrative is full of overblown Orientalist fantasies, and a sense of irreconcilably parallel Eastern and Western values and symbols is set up (‘I have my own set of weights and measures and my own table for computing values. You are privileged to have yours’, p. 72), structurally this fantastical narrative itself cannot sustain the ‘stability’ and ‘sense of eternality’ which Said has identified as belonging to Orientalist discourse.34 Said has opposed the terms ‘vision’ and ‘narrative’, associating them with, respectively, stasis or ‘synchronic essentialism’ and ‘a constant pressure’ since narrative allows for the tearing away of ‘detail’ from the habitual or repeated vision of the Orient to which it has been attached. Yet what is most interesting about Said’s distinction is the way he attributes to narrative the introduction of an ‘opposing point of view, perspective, web of vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by the vision’.35 His figurative use of the Greek god Apollo to denote Western classical conceptions of poetry and music is itself an example of ambiguous narration since ‘Apollonian’ may be taken to refer both to Apollo, the Greek God of poetry, music, archery and prophecy, as well as to Apollonius of Perga or Apollonius of Tyana. The latter, a Pythagorean philosopher/mathematician, was also a renowned magician and it is this figure who appears as the magician in Dr Lao’s circus. He is both a magician on his own and a player in Lao’s final show in the circus triangle (not the ring). Although he takes on Satan in this show with a crucifix, thereby reducing Satan to a ‘burst of flame in the centre of the tent’, the applause he receives is ‘unconvincing’ and the magician, ‘drowned in thought . . . plodded back to his quarters’ (p. 71).36 Thus the ‘serenity’ and stability of the Western vision which Said names ‘Apollonian’ is doubly unsettled here in a narrative in which this name is not only a sign for sophistry and shape-changing but one which is greeted by an ingloriously ‘sparse’ appreciation by the audience. Of course it is important to qualify this application of Said’s terms to a fictional text. For him, narrative means the writing of history and not literary narrative and he sees this narration of history as being opposed to other ‘synchronic’ discourses within Orientalism, such as law and economics. Although Said constantly mobilizes a rhetoric of theatre, spectacle and performance in his early accounts of Orientalist discourses in the nineteenth century, he is also careful to point out that his focus here is not on aesthetic representations as such, but scholarly ones.37 As Bart Moore-Gilbert points out, Said goes on to consider literature and painting in his later volume, Culture and Imperialism, but the texts he considers here belong fairly exclusively to the canons of high art (Verdi,


Austen, Conrad).38 Said displays a certain implicit faith in the idea that the ‘characteristic “complexity” of this work allows it to escape being mechanically determined by the “latent” power of the base’. Yet, as Moore-Gilbert suggests, not only does he analyse these texts within a framework which already means they are limited to confirming the assumptions that already underpin his argument, but ‘he also at times comes close to reinscribing some of the problems involved in the older humanist model of “common culture” but this time on a global, not a national scale’.39 What is most interesting about Moore-Gilbert’s critique of Said for this argument is his claim that ‘the kind of “ideological” critique developed in Orientalism is primarily thematically orientated and therefore generally oblivious to the complications and instabilities apparent in different kinds of textuality, notably in ‘literary’ instances of colonial discourse’.40 Whereas for Said literature and films may be just another vehicle for Orientalist discourse, Moore-Gilbert draws attention to the inherent and particular complexities and fault lines which are constituitive of all forms of fictional articulation. The texts (films and literature) discussed above all constitute examples of the way circus performers have functioned to represent in the popular European imagination, often through popular entertainments, associations between the circus, Orientalism, mesmerism and unnatural mental influence. The circus or the carnival forms a crucial backdrop in each, dramatizing a form of highly spectacular popular culture that has an implicit but highly visible connection with colonialist history and is allied to the popular genre of Gothic fantasy. The cross-fertilization between the two, Gothic and circus, furnishes these texts with a series of key figures – transforming bodies, crazy mirrors, mesmerizing ringmasters, con men, vampires, murderers and magicians – which act out thrilling possibilities for reimagining the limits of the human body and mind while also confirming Hazlitt’s anxieties about the trouble with things you cannot see. Gothic as a genre has always invested in intense spectacle whilst coupling this with warnings about magic, dissimulation and the untrustworthiness of ocular perception, or even supernatural influence, which shadow such pleasures. Indeed film in particular has always acted out anxieties about the possibility that eyes are not simply organs which facilitate human ocular reciprocation, but are also potentially organs of seduction, control, censure and violence. Yet these texts also all contain a complex and ambivalent articulation of both projected desires and denials around a set of monsters who are familiar but other, fascinating but unrepresentable, beautifully exotic but equally terrifying, clandestine yet always on show. It is in these terms that they can


be understood as dramatizations of specifically Gothic postcolonial anxieties.

Notes 1. Stan Lee, Ringmaster and His Circus of Crime (London: Pan, 1983). All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. 2. The ringmaster here is particularly resonant of the famous American clown, Dan Rice, who performed in various capacities between 1848 and 1881. Rice sported distinctive chin whiskers as well as a top hat and red and white striped jacket, although the Uncle Sam persona is one he adopted rather than originated. See Robert J. Loeffler, ‘The World of Circus Becomes a Model for Early Political Cartoons’, White Tops, 56, 1 (1983) 19–26. 3. For further details of this reputation see, Marius Kwint The First Modern Circus: Astley’s Amphitheatre in London, 1768–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 4. Charles Dickens, Hard Times ([1854] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 5. As Roger Luckhurst has pointed out, although these terms have become almost synonymous, mesmerism became a scientifically disreputable term in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas Anton Mesmer’s theory of ‘animal magnetism’ (a term coined by Mesmer in the 1780s) had claimed that the process of mesmerism involved the passing of mesmeric fluid, between mesmerist and patient, by 1843 James Braid offered the term hypnosis to describe the purely physiological effect of monotonous repeated movement of the eyes. In scientific circles, therefore mesmerism became discredited in favour of the more discreet scene of hypnosis in which the process of transference between one individual and another might remain untainted by any sort of material contact. Thus, from the mid-century onwards the distinction between the two terms also marked a distinction between popular theatrical entertainers who continued to advertise themselves as mesmerists and scientific investigations into the possibility of hypnotism. See Roger Luckhurst, ‘Trance-Gothic’ in Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys, ed., Victorian Gothic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 148–167. 6. Edward Said, Orientalism; Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995). 7. See Eve Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 18–9, 34; and Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: the Making of Monstrosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 8. Nigel Morland, The Corpse at the Circus (London: Vallancy Press, 1945). 9. Andrew Spiller, Phantom Circus (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1950). 10. Anthony Abbot, The Murder of the Circus Queen (London: W. Collins and Sons & Co., 1933). 11. Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke (London: Chatto & Windus, 1938). 12. Jean Marsh, Death Visits the Circus (London: John Long, 1953). 13. A novelization of this film was written by George Baxt (London: Mailton and Co., 1960). 14. Edward W. Said cites the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1798) as the starting point for modern Orientalism whereas the circus began in London in


15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

1768, though it did not begin to spread its wings internationally until Philip Astley set up an amphitheatre in Paris in 1783 and Charles Hughes, of the Royal Circus, built his in St Petersburg and Moscow in 1793. See Edward Said, Orientalism, pp. 42 and 87–8; and Marius Kwint, The First Modern Circus. As Robert W. Jones points out in the context of the formation of London Zoo, ‘the animals were to be viewed as metonyms for imperial triumph, civic pride, the beneficence of God or scientific discovery.’ He also argues that with ‘Prince Albert as its President from 1851 until his death in 1861, the Zoological Society of London could claim (and it often did) to be part of this greater colonial scheme’ in an official and institutionalized way, whereas circuses were only able to offer an unofficial and haphazard access to these sights. Robert W. Jones, ‘ “The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime”: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic’, Journal of Victorian Culture (1997), 1–25, at 5. William Hazlitt, ‘The Indian Jugglers’ [1825] in Jon Cook, ed., William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 128–45. Ibid., p. 128. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. John Whale, ‘Indian Jugglers: Hazlitt, Romantic Orientalism and the Difference of View’ in Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds, Colonialism, Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 206–20, at p. 211. Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: the Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). See also, Alison Winter, Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998). See Pick, Svengali’s Web, pp. 1–43. George du Maurier, Trilby ([1894] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Bram Stoker, Dracula ([1897] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. See also Judith Halberstam’s detailed exploration of the anti-semitic resonances (particularly in the details of physiogomy) of Stoker’s text in Skin Shows: the Making of Monstrosity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 91–101. Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe ([1929] London: Bracken, 1996). Daniel Pick, Svengali Web, p. 164. Above all, it was believed that the Jews possessed special powers of psychic manipulation and also of demonic potential: an association which had been repeatedly articulated by those who were distrustful of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s. See ibid., pp. 129–31. Ibid., p. 165. Pick quotes from Jung whose critiques of (especially Freud’s) psychoanalytic practice were specifically based on his belief that it ‘had an especially pernicious effect on gentile minds’ because it was a ‘system of thought stemming from innately Jewish propensities and peculiarities, and could not be generalized, or at least only through a kind of dogmatic imposition’. Ibid., p. 162. William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (New York: William Heinemann, 1947). All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London: Cassell, 1981), p. 327.

Horror, Circus and Orientalism 135 29. Lady Eleanor F. Smith, Satan’s Circus and other Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932). All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. 30. For further discussion of the use of settings in these films see Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 31. The two key females in the narrative are called Dora and Anna: the first is the doctor’s daughter, the second is the school teacher’s wife. It is hard to resist reading this as a Freudian reference and indeed joke on the scriptwriter’s part since Mitterhaus the vampire makes his way to these two professional men through the women connected to them, both of whom are vulnerable because of their unfulfilled sexual desires. Thus, Anna is to be the beguiled victim of a hypnotizing, parasitic vampire. 32. Charles G. Finney, ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’ in Ray Bradbury, ed., The Circus of Dr. Lao and Other Improbable Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 1956), pp. 1–77. All subsequent references are to this edition, and are given in the text. A film version of this story, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao was directed by George Pal in 1963 and stars Tony Randall as Dr. Lao. 33. Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes ([1963] London: Bantam, 1977). The story was also filmed, with the same title, by Jack Clayton for Disney films in 1983. 34. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 240. 35. Ibid. 36. The story goes on to pinpoint the contradictory nature of Apollonius’s action in this scene, again under ‘Questions and Contradictions’: ‘Why should Apollonius of Tyana, who claimed superiority to Christ, fall back on the crucifix to banish Satan?’ (p. 91). 37. For example, he discusses the ‘theater of effective Western knowledge about the Orient’ (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, p. 43), and the ‘idea of representation itself’ is argued to be a ‘theatrical one’ in which ‘the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined’ (p. 63). See also ibid., pp. 67, 71, 79 and 185. 38. Edward W. Said, Culture and Orientalism ([1993] London: Chatto, 1994). 39. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 66–7 and 71. 40. Ibid., p. 56.

8 Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House: Revolution and Revelation in Colonial and Postcolonial Female Gothic Carol Margaret Davison

When examined through Darwinian lenses as a type of literary species, the Gothic genre may be described as tremendously adaptable. Indeed, in the generic survival of the fittest, the Gothic arguably leads the pack. As John Paul Riquelme has recently claimed about this genre and twentieth-century fiction, for example: The transformations, adaptations, and other prominent traces of the Gothic in modern writing indicate the persistence of a cluster of cultural anxieties to which Gothic writing and literary modernism, along with postcolonial writing and some popular forms of expression, continue to respond.1 While my aim here, in part, involves identifying and interpreting the persistent ‘cluster of cultural anxieties’ in several works of a subgenre I am calling Empire Gothic fiction, isolating and assessing the permutations of the persistent cluster of literary conventions and symbols through which they are expressed is equally material. Foremost among these is the haunted, contested castle that Montague Summers describes as that genre’s foremost ‘character’.2 This multi-faceted emblem undergoes significant renovations as the Gothic is increasingly secularized and domesticated (i.e. ‘brought home’ to England) in the course of the nineteenth century. The noteworthy shift from ‘foreign’ Roman Catholic settings to more familiar domestic backdrops is, however, somewhat deceptive as a cultural gauge of changing national preoccupations. While the Gothic may rear its head in the drawing rooms of London 136

Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House 137

and Bath in the early to mid-nineteenth century, it by no means becomes exclusively domestic in its focus. In fact, in several noteworthy instances, domestic Gothic works of this era foreground the interconnectedness of home and empire, thus ‘suggest[ing] something of the enormous influence the question of empire had on British culture’.3 In such ostensibly ‘domestic’ Victorian works as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1), for example, the spectre of empire occasionally looms large. In these Gothic-inflected classics, economic anxieties regarding a principal source of British wealth are distilled into dramatic ‘return of the repressed’ episodes featuring such ‘invading’ and uncanny colonial figures as Bertha Mason and Abel Magwitch. As such, these works sow the seeds for two subsequent, related developments – the Imperial Gothic of the fin de siècle, which taps anxieties about the degeneration of British institutions, the threat of going native, and the invasion of Britain by demonic colonial forces, and the postcolonial Gothic of the late twentieth century, which features the re-animated traumas of a nation’s colonial past.4 Given their preoccupation with imperialism and its impact domestically and abroad, all of these generic developments may be classified under the rubric ‘Empire Gothic’. Central to the Empire Gothic’s narrative treatment of the complex, often vexed relationship between home and empire is the contested, haunted manor house. This hybrid of Walpole’s imaginary cosmic castle and the historic English country house speaks, like its forebears, to issues of material and spiritual inheritance.5 Like the country house, an ‘institution representing the structure and tradition of English society’, stability and custom are among its paramount features.6 Despite its location (on domestic or foreign soil) or classification (manor house, country house, Great House or colonial estate), it is usually bolstered by colonial wealth and functions as a prominent signpost of the British ‘civilizing mission’ and its attendant patriarchal power and authority.7 As Anne McClintock astutely explains in her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, this ostensibly exclusive domestic site veils the more aggressive aims and multifarious dimensions of that mission: Etymologically, the verb to domesticate is akin to dominate, which derives from dominus, lord of the domum, the home. Until 1964, however, the verb to domesticate also carried as one of its meanings the action ‘to civilize.’ In the colonies . . . the mission station became a threshold institution for transforming domesticity rooted in


European gender and class roles into domesticity as controlling a colonized people.8 The manor/Great House in Gothic fiction functions as a similar ‘threshold institution’ for, in its domesticating/civilizing enterprise, it yokes private and public sphere agendas and concerns. Further, it functions as a mixed gendered site – a ‘female space, . . . literally the proper “place” for women, . . . [which is] simultaneously . . . the site for the reproduction of the patriarchal family’.9 The Empire Gothic’s manor/Great House may also be described, to borrow from the work of Mary Louise Pratt on imperial travel-writing, as a fertile ‘contact zone’ between home and empire where ‘disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’.10 As such, and in keeping with traditional Gothic conventions and plot dynamics, the manor/Great House is a site of historical and cultural, conscious and unconscious, collisions and collusions. There, the repressed sins of the fathers return, spawning uncanny encounters between past and present, and various manifestations of the foreign/imperial and familiar/domestic, or what Homi K. Bhabha describes as ‘the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, [and] the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other’.11 Symbolic purifying revolutions frequently result which reduce the manor/Great House to ruins. In this narrative dynamic of revelation, indictment and purification, the empire Gothic’s closest generic relative is perhaps the Female Gothic which, on the basis of established gender ideology, advances, to varying degrees, a critique of enlightened paternalism. Indeed, the two genres of Empire Gothic and Female Gothic were probably first combined in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the text that constitutes my principal focus here. By way of Edward Rochester’s estate of Thornfield Hall, the Ur-manor/Great House in the Empire Gothic tradition, which is tenanted by Rochester’s mad Jamaican Creole wife Bertha Mason, Brontë’s deceptively simple novel explores the often related ideologies, as McClintock reminds us, of domesticity and imperialism. To date, the most common interpretive problem plaguing Jane Eyre has been the tendency to misread the relationship Brontë establishes between the text’s domestic and imperial aspects. In this regard, it is significant to note that Jane Eyre’s critical reception in the past few decades has not only been fought, principally, on the frontiers of feminism and postcolonialism, but has, with the rare exception, involved a face-off between feminists and postcolonialists. Although initially heralded in the 1970s by such critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as a prototypical female Bildungsroman promoting


female autonomy and self-determination, this ‘cult text of feminism’ was thereafter denounced in the 1980s, beginning with Gayatri Spivak, for reproducing ‘the axioms of imperialism’.12 Feminists and postcolonialists have failed, however, to see the ‘big picture’ that is Jane Eyre. While heavy-handed agendas have been the cause of most instances of interpretive myopia, another has been the failure to bring issues of genre, especially relating to the Gothic, to bear on the imperial dimension of Brontë’s narrative strategies. Although most of the generic examinations of Jane Eyre focus on the Gothic, Gothicists have fared equally poorly in their critical assessments as they have tended to focus on Jane Eyre’s Female Gothic component at the expense of its Empire Gothic aspect.13 Although Victorianists such as Deirdre David and Susan Meyer did much in the 1990s to bring the domestic and imperial threads of this intricately woven novel together – a work that David astutely characterizes as possessing a ‘romantic plot imbricated by empire’ – they failed to recognize that Brontë’s calculated and inventive tropological and narrative strategies in what is undeniably a cryptic symbolic economy are fundamentally indebted to the Gothic.14 Q.D. Leavis’s nutshell sketch of Brontë’s signature style from the 1966 Penguin edition of Jane Eyre still serves as a valuable decoding guide. As Leavis so articulately describes it, A good deal of the effect of the book depends on the reader’s making out associations, and the parts are not mechanically linked by a plot as in most previous fictions but organically united (as in Shakespeare) by imagery and symbolism which pervade the novel and are as much part of the narrative as the action.15 Extrapolating on Leavis’s insights, it should be noted that consideration of the generic provenance of much of the novel’s imagery and symbolism and of its narrative dynamics and conventions is also key to a more complete interpretation. The present essay urges a return to Thornfield’s haunted halls in order to promote the recognition and articulation of Jane Eyre’s role as a rich cultural matrix of both the Empire and Female Gothic traditions. Alongside an examination of its generic inheritance, consideration should be given to this text’s ideologically loaded theme of inheritance, for it yokes home and empire along moral and economic lines. With a critical lens focused on the Empire Gothic’s manor/Great House, an in-depth examination will be undertaken of Jane Eyre’s major tropological strategies and their ideological implications. While, as Sara Suleri


has claimed, ‘the tropologies of gender . . . obsess the literatures of imperialism’, the tropologies of imperialism also frequently obsess the literatures of gender.16 In fact, recent scholarship has isolated a topos of ‘feminism in imperialism’ in ‘key nineteenth-century novels’ where ‘a vocabulary and imagery of oppressed oriental womanhood’ is deployed.17 In the light of Brontë’s manipulation of this tropological tradition and other narrative and symbolic strategies, the transmutations of the Empire/Female Gothic and its capital sign, the manor/Great House, will be briefly examined, in its foremost postcolonial ‘offspring’ that may be said to be consciously and unconsciously ‘haunted’ by Jane Eyre – Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), an intended ‘prequel’ that both clarifies and distorts its ‘mother text’. In its investigation of the location and make-up of colonial and postcolonial epistemological terror, this essay participates in the ongoing Gothic-related project urged by Terry Castle in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny of historicizing the uncanny. Further to this and in the light of recent postcolonial debates, two complementary cautions regarding the popular tendencies of postcolonial criticism will be kept firmly in mind – Sara Suleri’s perceptive reminder that ‘the concept of the postcolonial itself is too frequently robbed of historical specificity’ and Bruce Robbins’s observation that the empire is generally conceived in a nebulous and reductive manner as ‘the “unconscious” of 19thcentury culture’.18 About half-way through Jane Eyre, following Grace Poole’s ostensible attack on Roger Mason, Jane is plagued with questions regarding her master’s house, Thornfield Hall. ‘What crime was this’, she wonders while tending to Mason’s wounds, ‘that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner? What mystery, that broke out, now in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night?’.19 Similar concerns had earlier obsessed this perpetual questioner (pp. 39, 109). In reaction to Mrs Fairfax’s comment that Rochester shuns Thornfield (p. 159), Jane wrangles with the conundrum, ‘What alienates him from the house?’ (p. 178). The subsequent exposure of Bertha’s imprisonment on the third floor and of Rochester’s story regarding his ‘capital error’ (p. 247) of being deceived by his ‘avaricious, grasping’ (p. 332) father into marrying, unbeknownst to him, a wealthy yet ‘intemperate and unchaste’ woman genetically predisposed to madness (p. 334), securely establishes Thornfield’s role as an exem-


plary Gothic manor house: it is, like its owner, accursed and characterized by secrecy. Possessed of ‘the aspect of a home of the past – a shrine of memory’ (p. 137), Thornfield Hall is haunted by the sins of the fathers that are, in part, domestic and associated with the mistreatment of women. ‘Vault-like’ (p. 129) and a ‘mere dungeon’ (p. 244), Thornfield is the literal asylum of its master’s wife, a type of ‘Bluebeard’s castle’ (p. 138). As such, it entirely undermines John Ruskin’s portrait of the ideal Victorian home as ‘the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division’.20 In Rochester’s family estate, the ‘more intangible prison of female propriety’ that tyrannized women’s lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is literalized.21 In keeping with the established Female Gothic tradition that focuses on ‘women who just can’t seem to get out of the house’, the passionate, enraged-yet-confined Bertha Rochester raises the spectre of a loveless, lust-driven marriage transacted as a form of commercial exchange that, effectively, imprisons and enslaves the wife.22 Albeit in an exaggerated form, Bertha represents the married Victorian woman whose autonomy and identity were denied as she became a femme couverte under the law. In terms of her significance to the domestic aspect of Jane’s psychomachia, Bertha’s role is fairly clear: she functions as a monitory figure who taps deep-seated fears relating to what Brontë’s cautious little elfin governess refers to as the ‘catastrophe’ of marriage (p. 228). As Rochester’s confessional story testifies, such a catastrophe is more likely to occur when passion outweighs reason and, in a new spin on the Female Gothic, it is demonstrated also to affect men negatively. These disasters must be avoided if Jane is to be rewarded with a companionate marriage and family fortune at journey’s end. Thus, following in the footsteps of such foremothers as Emily St Aubert and Ellena Rosalba, Jane Eyre, the governess, must learn self-governance and gain fortitude during her pilgrim’s progress. Bertha’s brutal and dramatic death two months after Jane’s departure from the Hall (p. 452) not only literalizes the femme couverte’s death-in-marriage situation, it marks the removal of the major material impediment to Jane’s marriage to Rochester. Further, it symbolically signals, according to feminists of various stripes, the temperance of Jane’s ‘hunger, rebellion, and rage’, and of the passion that binds her to Rochester, a passion strong enough to make him an icon that, temporarily at least, spiritually blinds her.23 In this instance, Thornfield is ‘a would-be whore/horror house’ of temptation wherein Bertha functions as ‘Jane’s dark double’, the embodiment and


expression of the governess’s generally repressed passion which could, if unleashed, prompt her to become Rochester’s mistress.24 That Bertha’s initial incarceration almost exactly coincides, historically, with the rebellious younger Jane’s confinement in the red-room at Gateshead Hall further forges the Jane–Bertha bond. In terms of Jane Eyre’s tropological structure, imperialist tropes are repeatedly brought to bear on its central preoccupation, the Woman Question, an extremely prominent issue in the 1840s. Indeed, images of the Empire/Orient are evoked almost exclusively in Jane Eyre in relation to gender issues. The Empire is a site of female oppression where women are exchanged, collected and displayed like commodities, only to be ‘grilled alive’ (p. 441) in a ritualistic sati when deemed to be no longer useful. Perhaps foremost among the novel’s Empire/Orient images, however, is that of marriage as a form of slavery or ‘peculiar institution’, a popular equation forged by women writers before and during Brontë’s period.25 As Joyce Zonana writes, these ‘feminist writers learned to approach issues of sexuality by putting them in oriental terms. Prostitution, the marriage market, and the habit of keeping mistresses . . . [were] figured as Eastern intrusions into a Western ideal of monogamous romantic love and marriage’.26 In the light of this and Jane’s pursuit of the companionate, egalitarian marriage ideal, she must be ritually purified of her ‘Inner Bertha’, the impassioned and decidedly unchristian ‘revolted slave’ (p. 46) with whom she is semiotically associated after her dispute with John Reed. With the rare exception, critics have regarded Brontë’s imperialist tropes as quite specifically limited in their application to the Woman Question. This limitation has been the main source of Jane Eyre’s disparagement among postcolonial feminists. In this regard, although Audre Lorde’s comments in her essay, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, are not addressed to Jane Eyre, they apply. Lorde writes, ‘Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street’.27 Drawing on the implications of Lorde’s statement, a significant distinction exists between marital slavery and slavery, a distinction that postcolonial feminists claim Brontë totally elides. As they see it, in fact, Brontë is entirely unconcerned with the issue of slavery. In the words of Penny Boumelha: There are . . . ten explicit references to slavery in Jane Eyre. They allude to slavery in Ancient Rome and in the seraglio, to the slaver-


ies of paid work as governess and of dependence as a mistress. None of them refers to the slave trade upon which the fortunes of all in the novel are based. Quakers, of course, had been among the first and prominent opponents of English slavery, but Jane’s own Quakerishness, so often commented upon, leads her only as far as a stern opposition to distant or metaphorical forms of enslavement.28 Arguing that restricting Brontë’s political critique to the oppression of middle-class women is to play things critically safe, Deirdre David advances another somewhat similar take on Brontë’s tropological strategy in Jane Eyre.29 In David’s opinion, Jane is ‘a symbolic governess of Empire’ who promotes maintaining ‘high moral standards in the governance of that Empire’ at ‘a specific historical moment when women were called upon to be agents in the labor of both renovating and expanding Britannic rule’.30 Thus are the novel’s domestic tropes at the service of its imperial theme according to David. Like other postcolonial feminists, she maintains that Brontë condones rather than challenges the patriarchal status quo. Flying in the face of established criticism, I would maintain that Brontë is entirely cognizant of the crucial difference between marital slavery and slavery, and that she advances a joint critique of both in Jane Eyre. Contrary to David’s claim, Jane decidedly rejects St John’s offer to accompany him as a missionary to India where, in her words, he will enter ‘his wild field of mission warfare’ (p. 394). As this phraseology implies, Jane is fairly critical of the imperialist enterprise. Indeed, as Michael Wheeler persuasively argues, Brontë satirizes St John’s mission: ‘. . . Jane Eyre finds her own interpretation of Christianity through rebellion against the extreme position of those who try to dominate her’.31 St John’s harsh Calvinism promotes judgement without mercy (p. 378), a combination she suggests is unChristian when she later describes God as having ‘tempered judgement with mercy’ in Rochester’s case at the novel’s end (p. 477). In Jane’s opinion, St John has yet to discover, at the point where she encounters him at Moor House, ‘the peace of God which passeth all understanding’ (p. 378). Further, Brontë suggests that ‘civilization’ is, to some degree, grounded in barbarism. An imperial ‘crime’ also haunts Thornfield Hall. Given the cultural make-up of its inhabitants and the origins of its prominently featured financial ‘blood supply’, Jane Eyre puts a decidedly colonial spin on the ‘sins of the fathers’ recipe. Like so many other novels in the Victorian canon, it ‘turns upon questions of inheritance’.32 With one crucial exception, Jane Eyre’s various inheritances, all diverted


and denied yet restored by novel’s end, are conspicuously associated with Jamaica. According to Boumelha, Bertha represents ‘not only madwoman in the attic, after all, but also skeleton in the closet, the “dark” secret, the maddening burden of imperialism concealed in the heart of every English gentleman’s house of the time’.33 Imperialism, however, does not appear to be indicted as a whole. Instead, in the tradition of the Godwinian Gothic, which denounces Britain’s propensity towards certain unethical economic practices, Jane Eyre condemns Britain’s engagement with an unarguably barbaric trade, namely slavery.34 The ambiguity around Bertha’s race and her act of ultimately destroying Thornfield by conflagration link her, as Susan Meyer perceptively comments, with the Jamaican Maroons.35 These black anti-slavery rebels first emerged in the seventeenth century during Cromwell’s attack on the Spaniards in Jamaica.36 Their cause garnered further support from French Revolutionary principles at the end of the eighteenth. Gaining their name from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning ‘wild’ or ‘untamed’, these former slaves sometimes had female leaders and lived in Jamaica’s wild mountain country. In retaliation against the British and with the aim of enlarging their community, they often swept down on the colonialists at night, setting fire to the fields, and stealing cattle and other livestock.37 Thus, Brontë’s fire-bearing Bertha enacts ‘precisely the sort of revolt feared by the British colonists in Jamaica’.38 The cunningly labelled ‘great plague house’ of Thornfield Hall (p. 173) is thus transformed, despite its geographical location, into a plagued Great House. Figuratively sustained by colonial blood transfusions in the form of Bertha’s £30,000 dowry, it is possessed and maintained by a violent ‘race’ (p. 137) who carry what is suggested is a ‘filthy burden’ (p. 336) of sin with their involvement in the slave trade. As with Brontë’s indictment of non-companionate materially driven marriage, the colonial trade in human flesh is condemned as a grotesque, anti-Christian practice. In forging this parallel, Brontë adopts a common strategy in Wilberforcean writing during the Abolition and Emancipation decades when slavery debates were extended into the discourse surrounding ‘domestic issues relating to labour and social conditions, especially of women and children’.39 She also weighs in on an issue vital to the economic well-being of a number of families in her immediate neighbourhood of Cowan Bridge (p. 184). While Jane possesses a certain compassion for Bertha – she deems Rochester’s treatment of her ‘inexorable’, ‘vindictive’ and ‘cruel’ (p. 317) – Brontë’s categorically Protestant novel promotes a Reformation (associated with Jane) as opposed to a Revolution (associated with Bertha),


the latter movement being traditionally identified in Britain, and especially in Gothic fiction, with irrationality and with France. Indeed, reformation, something of which Rochester claims he is yet capable (p. 167), is the order of the day in Jane Eyre. It yokes the novel’s two predominant tropological threads as a reformation in British imperial practices is advocated alongside a reformation of the existing marriage institution. It is not true to say, therefore, that ‘the novel represses the history of British colonial oppression and, in particular, British enslavement of Africans, by marking all aspects of oppression “other” – non-British, non-white, the result of a besmirching contact with “dark races” ’.40 In classic Gothic fashion, the long-repressed Bertha expresses, in her deliberate conflagration of Thornfield, the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons. It is more than simply possible, therefore, ‘to see the “ruin” of Rochester as the “ruin” of colonial practices’; however, the ‘crime’ that plagues Thornfield is not, as David argues, the ‘invasion into West Indian society by a greedy gentry class in search of profitable marriage’.41 While this is an error, one that Rochester readily concedes is his, it is not, as he emphasizes, a crime such as might involve the ‘shedding of blood or any other guilty act, which might make the perpetrator amenable to the law’ (p. 247). The crime that haunts Thornfield Hall is slavery. Thus, Jane’s prim black Quaker dress (pp. 130, 160) is not simply a fashion statement or a sartorial sign indicative of her plainness and honest plainspokenness. Its symbolism extends beyond her proto-feminist role as a crusader against marital slavery. In what is truly, as Gilbert and Gubar argue, a palimpsestic narrative ‘whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning’ (p. 73), Jane and her ‘dark double’ Bertha are, on one level at least, sisters in arms. The monster, Bertha, fulfils her symbolic monitory function as a crusader against continued involvement with the slave trade. Jane rejects the role of missionary to India in order to embrace, in true Scheherazade style, the role of native missionary to a jaded and untrusting husband who is ironically and symbolically self-described as ‘hard and tough as an indiarubber ball’. Jane’s mission involves converting him back to emotional, loving, human flesh (p. 163) and so purify Thornfield of colonial ‘contamination’ (p. 334). In this regard, as Meyer cogently contends, Brontë manipulates a prevalent motif that derives from middle-class domestic ideology, that of ‘keeping a clean house’.42 Jane Eyre’s historical backdrop and narrative strategy regarding other contentious political issues are also vital in the establishment of Brontë’s moralizing message. In comparison with her sister Emily’s Wuthering


Heights, a text obsessively exact in its attention to details of historical chronology, Jane Eyre has long been faulted for its apparently nebulous historical setting and anachronisms. Q.D. Leavis, for example, confesses to total incomprehension with regard to Brontë’s rationale in backdating her novel, and issues the scathing observation that the ‘general confusion of dates and eras and fashions and facts [in Jane Eyre] is even more irrational than Dickens allowed himself’.43 In support of this claim, Leavis notes that Rochester essentially ‘plagiarizes’ Lord Byron’s Childe Harold, a work published in 1814, when he relates the account of his travels throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century.44 Such a reference, however, does not damage the historical accuracy of Jane Eyre’s setting as it is not alluded to as a published text in the course of Rochester’s account. A direct literary reference is provided, however, in another instance where it furnishes the only indication, in an otherwise ‘timeless’ text, of Jane Eyre’s precise historical backdrop. Jane’s allusion, while yet at Moor House, to the ‘new publication’ (p. 396) of Sir Walter Scott’s 1808 poem Marmion, informs the reader that Jane Eyre chronicles the period 1798–1818, the last ten-year period of which (1808–18) is only briefly mentioned in the novel’s closing chapter (p. 475). Given these dates, Brontë appears to be true to form as a superb architect of symbolic structure. In terms of its imperial activities, Britain was undergoing a noteworthy reformation during this period, one that involved the peculiar institution of slavery. While Denmark abolished the slave trade in 1803, Britain followed suit in 1807.45 The abolition of slavery as a whole in Britain and its colonies was to follow in 1833. Given these dates, Bertha burns down Thornfield at a significant moment, namely on the heels of the abolition of the slave trade. Indeed, it may be argued that her destructive act signals an overdue end to that traffic, an act that Brontë, taking poetic licence, extends by way of tropological resonances to the marriage institution of the 1840s which she perceives as promoting a similar ‘traffic’ in women. This strategy of veiled political allusion is consistent in Jane Eyre. Lending support to Gilbert and Gubar’s claims regarding the palimpsestic nature of many nineteenth-century women’s novels, Elsie Michie has perhaps best illuminated the deeper, more politically subversive nature of Brontë’s novel.46 She unearths the oblique but undeniable references to the potato famine during Jane’s experiences at Lowood (p. 78), and to Chartism when Jane fervently discusses female rights with Rochester (p. 298).47 On this front, the significance of the provenance of Jane’s familial inheritance, derived from her uncle’s successes as a Madeira wine


merchant, has yet to be noted. While Jane’s distribution of her £20,000 among her cousins has been interpreted as signalling an end to the sins of her forefathers, the implication of its source has remained overlooked. The island of Madeira was under British rule between 1807 and 1814. Thus, Jane receives her inheritance in 1808 after the slave trade’s abolition. In the light of these facts, Jane Eyre is a successful attack on ‘the acceptance of inequities on earth’, the main theme of The Pilgrim’s Progress.48 Brontë’s novel not only gestures, in its final moments, toward a future heaven on earth in both Jane’s union with Rochester and by way of the Second Coming (p. 477), it anticipates a revolutionary secular apocalypse – albeit linked with what some may consider a problematic vision of a guiding, enlightened Christianity – involving greater equity and treatment for women and all inhabitants of the British Empire. In terms of literary history, Jane Eyre has cast a long shadow. Beyond its countless Bildungsroman-grounded offspring, its Gothic progeny include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ – a text haunted by Bertha Mason – and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.49 In terms of its Postcolonial Gothic successors, Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain is one of many works marked by its influence. Perhaps Jane Eyre’s most renowned and controversial descendant in this domain, however, is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, an imagined prequel written to vindicate Bertha Rochester and to counter what Rhys considered to be Brontë’s antiCaribbean standpoint.50 Set shortly after the passing of the 1833 Emancipation Act, Wide Sargasso Sea is a Female Gothic narrative gone nightmarishly wrong, as the Gothic vision of domesticity is realized as opposed to avoided. The novel’s first section, recounting the tormented, insecure childhood of Bertha, née Antoinette Mason, in Jamaica, follows a fairly traditional Female Gothic plot recounting the childhood calamities and nightmares of its protagonist. Antoinette’s experience in a convent, an ambivalent temporary refuge of ‘sunshine and death’ where she is nurtured in the fine art of self-repression and fed with the romantic tales of beautiful and wealthy female saints ‘loved by rich and handsome young men’, is also related.51 This opening sequence comes to a horrific climax in the second section chronicling her honeymoon in the ominously named area of Massacre, and her merciless post-marital battle with Rochester. Related largely through his eyes, this narrative component is traditional Imperial Gothic writ large: as Rochester confronts a territory gendered as female and characterized by secrecy and excess, he wrestles with his own psychic demons, the ominous possibility of ‘going native’, and the recognition, urged by terrifying


experiences with an excessive wife who is in many respects his double, that civilization is an eternally threatened cultural construct grounded in barbarism. The brief third section, set in England, dovetails with Jane Eyre and concludes as the displaced, disoriented Antoinette, identifying with the former slaves who incinerated her childhood home, prepares to set fire to Thornfield Hall. As Spivak has convincingly illustrated, ‘feminism and a critique of imperialism become complicit’ in Wide Sargasso Sea.52 In this respect, Rhys’s revisionary narrative functions as a ‘double’ text to Jane Eyre. It also consciously mirrors and reconfigures many of Brontë’s narrative and symbolic elements, especially its fire imagery. Concerned with the ‘identifying relationship between self and place’, and marked by a characteristic ‘post-colonial crisis of identity’, Wide Sargasso Sea puts a decidedly postcolonial and postmodern spin on Jane Eyre as it repeatedly ‘dismantle[s] assumptions about language and textuality and . . . stress[es] the importance of ideological construction in social-textual relations’.53 Indeed, Rhys’s most innovative and provocative insights focus on the relative nature of terror, and the role of language in the creation and maintenance of patriarchal power. The empire, Wide Sargasso Sea suggests, is partly a fiction as is ‘the self/Other division imposed by imperialism’.54 In the light of these insights, Rhys places in the foreground the importance of perspective and both presents and subverts the process of imperial othering. Her visualization of the West Indies ‘in all its socio-cultural complexity, and not merely as an “otherness machine” ’ is soberingly realistic, particularly with regard to its treatment of hybrid ethnic and/or class identity.55 Antoinette’s desperate lack of personal and national identity as a Creole is a result, in part, of a tyrannical history that valorized purity. In the view of Caribbean novelist Wilson Harris, postcolonial hybridity ‘is constantly struggling to free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued the “pure” over its threatening opposite, the “composite” ’.56 Antoinette and Rochester, in his union with her, are essentially haunted by the nightmares of history – familial ghosts and those of British imperial history (p. 137). While Rochester may ultimately be accommodated by denying Antoinette, she is not so fortunate. Rhys’s complex social perspective also undermines, particularly with regard to the concept of justice, the moral and epistemological certainties of Jane Eyre. It is, rather notably, ‘Bertha’, a character grotesquely wronged and silenced in Brontë’s novel, who disputes Rochester’s claim that slavery was a question of justice and asserts that there is, in fact, no such thing as justice (p. 137). Likewise, it is ‘Bertha’ who articulates


the nature of Rhys’s revisionary enterprise when she tells her combative husband that ‘[t]here is always another side to every story’ (p. 128). In fact, she discovers that some stories are, tragically, never told, such as that of the 14-year-old St Innocenzia whose skeleton is buried under the convent chapel’s altar (p. 53). As regards the role of language in creating and maintaining patriarchal power, it is the oppressed in Wide Sargasso Sea who recognize and articulate the nature of patriarchal strategy. Christophine, a former slave from Martinique given as a gift to Antoinette’s mother on her wedding day, says of her alleged freedom: No more slavery! She had to laugh! ‘These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing. They got magistrate. They got fine. They got jail house and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up people’s feet. New ones worse than old ones – more cunning, that’s all.’ (pp. 21, 26) By way of what Christophine describes as a demonically new-andimproved form of patriarchy, the sins of the fathers are repeated by the sons. Slavery, as Christophine sees it, is not eradicated from the imperialist formula but merely institutionalized. The same holds true, she suggests, with marital ‘slavery’. When Antoinette rejects Christophine’s advice to leave Rochester, Christophine’s remark that ‘All women, all colours, nothing but fools’ (p. 109) implies that women have internalized their subservient role and oppressed condition. Rhys underlines, however, that the letter of the law also remains a vital component of women’s oppression. Prior to Antoinette’s marriage, her Aunt Cora unsuccessfully implores Antoinette’s brother Richard to arrange a legal settlement which will ensure Antoinette’s legal protection (p. 114). Antoinette’s later attack on him with a knife when he visits her in England and informs her that he cannot legally interfere between her and her husband provides evidence that this apparently mad wife perceives a connection between the letter of the law and her domestic imprisonment (p. 184). The idea of relative cultural perspectives hovers over Wide Sargasso Sea and is explicitly addressed in a conversation where Antoinette and Rochester confess that they view each other’s homeland as ‘a cold dark dream’ (p. 80). Nowhere is this concept of relativity more in evidence, however, than in the characters’ reactions to various manor/Great Houses – domestic spaces modelled on the various similarly ambivalent and haunted ‘asylums’ in Jane Eyre. Secure for some and insecure for


others, these sites, like Mr Luttrell’s slave estate that opens Wide Sargasso Sea, embody the will to civilize and the legacy of a barbaric history. Abandoned when Luttrell grows tired of awaiting compensation after the passing of the Emancipation Act and drowns himself, his house is believed by the black islanders to be haunted (pp. 17, 18). Antoinette’s dilapidated childhood home of Coulibri Estate, with its overgrown, wild garden, is also dreaded, and she later reveals that she was even fearful there after sunset (pp. 19, 32). The home of a plantation-owning family ‘marooned’ by the Mother Country, Coulibri is subsequently burned to the ground by figurative Maroons (pp. 18, 26). This fate is both symbolically and morally appropriate as the sins of the ‘Mother Country’ are visited on her children, a dynamic that is also allegorically played out in the relationship between Antoinette and her negligent mother (pp. 38–45). Rochester’s Imperial Gothic adventure, sandwiched between Antoinette’s two Female Gothic narrative sequences, also features the ‘sins of the fathers’ dynamic. In a manor/Great House named Granbois, Rochester, anticipating Jonathan Harker’s experiences in Transylvania and Kurtz’s in Africa, wrestles with the ghosts of family history. In a place whose history has been, notably, forgotten, Rochester confronts repressed aspects of himself and his relationship with his father whom he feels sold him off in a Faustian exchange for a beautiful, wealthy woman (pp. 65–6, 70). Tragically and ironically, Rochester is increasingly revealed to be his father’s son, a true son of the Empire, and a Gothic husband as he beds a black servant girl and figuratively murders his wife by annihilating her voice and identity (p. 140). The threat of powerlessness is especially bound up for Rochester with the image of a feminized island whose wild and excessive vegetation jeopardizes civilization. From Rochester’s perspective, Granbois, the awkward house on stilts that emblematizes the British civilizing mission, seems to know it cannot last (pp. 71–2). Antoinette’s stepfather, Mr Mason, also remarks that the forest in Massacre threatens to ‘swallow up’ Granbois (p. 89). Notably, Rochester’s hallucinogenic reading of this beautiful but deadly dream/nightmare landscape is combined with his reading of his femme fatale wife whom he believes changes at night (p. 92). Rochester responds to his wife’s vulnerability with domination but comes to the realization that he may never dominate the island. Like the nation that will remain haunted, as Homi Bhabha eloquently argues, by a sense of its transitory social reality, Granbois taunts and haunts Rochester with the fact that his power is ephemeral and relative.57 Looking back at ‘the shabby white house’ as he departs from the ‘God-forsaken island’,


Rochester observes: More than ever before it [the house] strained away from the black snake-like forest. Louder and more desperately it called: Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death by ants . . . Don’t you know that this is a dangerous place? And that the dark forest always wins? (p. 166) Rochester’s return to England with a zombified, enslaved, and incarcerated wife who is renamed and transplanted after a reverse Middle Passage, is, in his eyes, an act of survival and triumph that involves extraordinary denial. The novel’s concluding sequence in Thornfield, however, presents Antoinette’s ultimate attainment of revenge and symbolic freedom. In her eyes, Thornfield is a colourless ‘cardboard house’ devoid of light, and not, as it is for her alcoholic guardian Grace Poole, ‘big and safe, a shelter from the world outside which, say what you like, can be a black and cruel world to a woman’ (pp. 181, 178). Drawing on the equation Brontë forges between the peculiar institution and marriage, Rhys portrays Antoinette’s fiery finale as an act of resistance. Having discovered logic and language to be at the service of patriarchy, Antoinette creates another means of signifying that may be called ‘pyroglyphics’: she figuratively writes ‘revenge’ in fire as she incinerates the master’s prison-house.

Notes 1. John Paul Riquelme, ‘Toward a History of Gothic and Modernism: Dark Modernity from Bram Stoker to Samuel Beckett’, Modern Fiction Studies, 46 (2000), 585–605, at p. 589. 2. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London: Fortune Press, 1938), pp. 410–11. 3. Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. vii. 4. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 230; Ken Gelder, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1998), pp. 180–1, at p. 181. 5. At least one critic, Richard Gill, has noted the connection between Gothic fiction and the English country house. This singular location provided, among other things, he says, ‘properties of horror to the Gothic romancer’: see Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: the English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 6.

152 Empire and the Gothic 6. Ibid., pp. 14, 16. 7. Given Ireland’s relationship to Britain, the tradition in Anglo-Irish literature of the big house could also be included here. Notably, it too seems to have developed out of the Gothic novel. Gill argues that this tradition was influenced by Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent from whence it descended to such writers as Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, and Joyce Cary (ibid., p. 240). 8. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 35. 9. Paula E. Geyh, ‘Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping’, Contemporary Literature 34 (1993), 103–22, at 106. 10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 6, 4. 11. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto ([1764] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 5; Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction’, in idem, ed., Nation and Narration, ([1990] London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–7, at p. 2. 12. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [1979] (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 339; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12 (1985), 243–61, at 244 and 243. 13. Although Gilbert and Gubar classify Jane Eyre, principally, as a variety of female Bildungsroman, they also describe it as ‘moral gothic’ (The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 337). Their in-depth reading of Bertha as Jane’s ‘dark double’ (ibid., p. 360) and their assessment of their relationship, which they argue is ‘the book’s central confrontation’ (ibid., p. 339), illuminates much of Jane Eyre’s Gothic nature. 14. Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire and Victorian Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 84. 15. Q.D. Leavis, ‘Introduction’, to Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [1847], ed. Q.D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 13. 16. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 15. 17. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s texts’, p. 259; Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: the English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 81. 18. Sara Suleri, ‘Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition’ [1992] in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: a Reader (Brighton: Harvester, 1994), pp. 244–56, at p. 246; Bruce Robbins, ‘Colonial Discourse: a Paradigm and its Discontents’, (a review of Daniel Bivona, Desire and Contradiction: Imperial Visions and Domestic Debates in Victorian Literature, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Literatures, Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds, Macropolitics of NineteenthCentury Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, and Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature), Victorian Studies 35 (1992), 209–14, at 213.

Burning Down the Master’s (Prison)-House 153 19. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre ([1847] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 239, emphasis added. Subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. References will be given in parentheses in the text. 20. John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ [1871], in Harold Bloom, ed., The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin (New York: Da Capo Press, 1965), pp. 189–219, at p. 194. 21. E.J. Clery, Women’s Gothic From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (Horndon: Northcote House, 2000), p. 1. 22. Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Perils of the Night: a Feminist Study of NineteenthCentury Gothic (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 10. 23. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 339, 342. 24. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: the Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 222; Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 360. 25. Mary Wollstonecraft repeatedly promotes this ‘woman as slave’ equation in her 1792 publication, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s description of female slavery, however, involves a certain volition on the woman’s part. She argues that women submitted to slavery due to their ‘short-sighted desire’ to appeal to men: Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792], in Sylvana Tomaselli, ed., A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 65–294, at p. 116. In his otherwise progressive 1825 work, Appeal of one Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery, William Thompson promotes this association to an excessive and offensive degree when he deems white women more enslaved than their black counterparts (London: Virago, 1983, p. 196). 26. Joyce Zonana, ‘The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre’, Signs 18 (1993), 592–617, at 604. 27. Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ [1979], in Sister Outsider (Freedom, California: The Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 110–13, at p. 112. 28. Penny Boumelha, ‘ “And What Do the Women Do?”: Jane Eyre, Jamaica and the Gentleman’s House’, Southern Review 21 (1988) 111–22, at 113. 29. David, Rule Britannia, p. 96. 30. Ibid., pp. 80, 97. 31. Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830–1890 (London and New York: Longman, 1985), pp. 168, 169. 32. Boumelha, ‘ “And What Do the Women Do?” ’, 112. 33. Ibid. 34. See my chapter on William Godwin’s St Leon in my forthcoming book AntiSemitism and British Gothic Fiction (Palgrave). In my reading, Godwin portrays and indicts a socio-economic world view, one he fears is rapidly on the rise, that he associates with Jews and thus promoting what he suggests is the ‘Judaization’ of Britain. 35. Susan Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, in Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, eds, Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 159–83.

154 Empire and the Gothic 36. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 164; Paul Zach, ed., Jamaica (Hong Kong: Apa Productions, 1983), p. 33. 37. Zach, ed., Jamaica, p. 49. 38. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 166. 39. Christopher Heywood, ‘Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights’, Review of English Studies 38 (1987), 184–98, at 196. 40. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 174. 41. David, Rule Britannia, pp. 83, 84. 42. Meyer, ‘Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy of Jane Eyre’, p. 24. 43. Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Leavis, p. 488n.1. 44. Ibid., p. 489n.1. 45. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, p. 280. 46. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 73. 47. Elsie Michie, ‘From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25 (1992), 125–40, at 137, 138. 48. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 370. 49. Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 201. 50. Jean Rhys, ‘Fated to be Sad’, Interview by Hannah Carter, Guardian, 8 August 1968, p. 5. Rhys’s feelings about Charlotte Brontë were, therefore, nothing short of ambiguous. In a letter to her close friend Francis Wyndham in 1964, Rhys declared her ‘very great and deep admiration for the Brontë sisters ([t]hough Charlotte did preachify sometimes)’: Jean Rhys Letters, 1931–1966, ed. Diana Melly and Francis Wyndham (London: Deutsch, 1984), p. 271. 51. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea ([1966] New York and London: Norton, 1982), pp. 56, 53. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. References will be given in parentheses in the text. 52. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, p. 251. 53. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Literatures ([1989] London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 8–9, 165. 54. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, p. 169. 55. Carmen Wickramagamage, ‘An/other Side to Antoinette/Bertha: Reading “Race” into Wide Sargasso Sea’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35 (2000), 27–42, at 39. 56. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, pp. 35–6. 57. Bhabha, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.

9 Crossing Boundaries: the Revision of Gothic Paradigms in Heat and Dust Mariaconcetta Costantini

The passage from traditional to twentieth-century Gothic is marked by a combination of conservative and innovative elements. On one side, contemporary tales of terror and persecution continue ‘to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values’. On the other side, they testify to the development of a complex genre which challenges dominant discourses ‘in diverse and ambiguous ways’.1 If eighteenth-century writers evoked the uncanny to question the utopianism of progressive ideals, later practitioners have used Gothic paraphernalia to represent a wider process of dispersion that affects ontological, existential and linguistic categories alike. The picture becomes more intricate if we consider some recent combinations of Gothic formulas with other genres. In postmodern fiction, for instance, the horrors and the excesses of the unheimlich are extended to the narrative level, so that the sense of displacement of modern life is also conveyed by textual pastiche. This hybridizing process is directly connected with the need to render the multiplication of meanings and identities consequent on the dissolution of a monologic, highly structured view of reality. In other words, the interplay of forms and styles implies that dominant ideologies are tested and weakened by the emergence of otherness in a world in which boundaries are increasingly blurred. The idea of transgressing limits is the semantic pivot of contemporary Gothic, which goes a step forward in questioning legitimated hierarchies. In addition to displaying the ‘underside’ of the official world, it heralds transition by depicting a heterogeneous counterworld, in which the marginalized and the excluded clash and mingle with the centres of power. Sexual, legal or psychological barriers are thus 155


weakened by the materialization of a composite and multifarious reality, while new social and existential questions come to the fore. Among these latter, postcolonial issues of race and identity are of paramount importance and deserve more critical attention. The recent development of postcolonial studies has posed some pressing hermeneutic problems. Confronted with the need to devise appropriate critical methods, scholars have also coped with the difficulty of interpreting the syncretic quality of the new phenomenon, which blends with diverse narrative modes and ideologies – from postmodern montage effects to magical realism, from horrific representations of oppressive systems to open parody, from feminist vindications to transgressive sexual issues. In particular, postcolonial fiction proves fertile ground for Gothic plots and figures, which well exemplify the tensions and the consequences of imperialistic relations. The result is ‘postcolonial Gothic’, a new genre (or sub-genre) that is still largely unexplored. Apart from a few critical investigations, postcolonial scholars have mainly privileged socio-political questions. Less attention has been paid to Gothic narrations of the Empire or of post-Independence realities, in which the ‘ghosts’ of colonial domination reappear in new alarming shapes. But what are the reasons for such a theoretical impasse? First of all, we must take into account the ambiguity of the term ‘postcolonialism’, which is a potential site for interpretative contestation. Generally applied to the ‘new literatures’ initiated in the former European colonies in the 1960s, it has also been used more widely to denote a critical investigation of ‘the processes and effects of, and reactions to, European colonialism from the sixteenth century up to and including the neocolonialism of the present day’.2 This latter definition includes disparate narrative manifestations: from early stories of imperial mysteries and anxieties, to later representations of neocolonial threats, to the most recent supernatural-realist fiction produced by native authors. We are thus faced with the problem of tracing similarities between various ideological stances, of investigating how Gothic is used to incarnate or exorcize fears of otherness in different historical and cultural contexts. How can we relate the shadows of doubt that obscure Joseph Conrad’s exoticism with the violent and grotesque Africa depicted by Ben Okri? What are the connections between the crisis of imperial propaganda announced by Robert Louis Stevenson and the transcultural world portrayed by Salman Rushdie? To answer these questions we should examine the genre diachronically and determine the crucial stages of its development. What is still needed is a comprehen-

Crossing Boundaries 157

sive analysis of the different ways in which colonial or postcolonial writers have adopted Gothic devices to voice fear or disorientation throughout the centuries. The literary transition from a Western viewpoint to the colonized’s perspective is well illustrated by the works of some ‘cultural expatriates’, who experience a condition of in-betweenness that grants them a double outlook on both political and metafictional matters. A case in point is the fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Like other migrant authors, Jhabvala has a personal history of displacement and exile.3 Her long residence in India does not only provide settings and characters for her novels and short stories, but also gives her a chance to develop a two-sided view of reality. Despite some negative responses to her works,4 she can be regarded as a ‘border-crossing intellectual’ who tries to combine two cultures in a new syncretic whole.5 Her ability to traverse limits emerges in the very structure of her works, whose complexity defies univocal or simplistic readings. Moreover, her interest in Gothic, which dates back to her university years, confirms her inclination for ontological and narrative ambivalence.6 As Judie Newman pointed out, Jhabvala’s fiction is characterized by ‘a strong strain of Gothic’ which ‘feature demon lovers, mysterious Indian palaces with intricately concealed secrets, ruined forts, poison, willing victims, plus the eroticisation of spirituality, with gurus standing in for sinister monks, and ashrams for convents.’7 These motifs are closely intertwined with postcolonial conflicts – domination versus submission, hegemony versus diversity, language versus silence – which appear in all their tensions and aporias. Exactly because of her liminal position, Jhabvala manages to conflate old formulas with contemporary problems, so that many imperialistic clichés are exploded by the contact with an altered reality. This process of revision is at the core of the novel Heat and Dust, whose elaborate structure is a criss-cross of postcolonial issues (political, socio-cultural, sexual, linguistic and metanarrative) and Gothic paradigms. First published in 1975, Heat and Dust threatens established categories with its plot of seduction and persecution which defies, rather than confirms, imperialistic stereotypes. If at first sight its wide range of Gothic topoi and strategies might seem to evoke the intrinsic conservatism of traditional tales of terror, on reflection they appear as indexes of a profound transformation of philosophical and literary principles.8 By organizing narration in two interwoven sequences – a ‘framed’ Gothic story, in which past events are reconstructed retrospectively, and a narrative ‘frame’ centred on the effects of transculturation – Jhabvala


aims at producing a two-sided text which can correct historical ‘distortions’. In brief, she employs structural parallelism to revise some prejudiced ideas of British colonialism, which are ironically exposed in the ‘framed’ story to be challenged in the ‘frame’. One of her main targets is the paternalistic relation of father-child adopted by the theorists of imperial power to validate the subordination of ‘inferior races’. As we will see, Jhabvala shows her postcolonial concern for racial discrimination by appropriating this very nexus and reversing its Eurocentric valency. First, she problematizes the homology between childhood and primitivism to expose the limits of a hierarchy of human races based on the idea of immaturity. Secondly, she combines the colonial antithesis adulthood versus infantilism with a Gothic scheme of victimization, to unveil all the negativity of a will-to-power disguised as ‘paternal’ condescension. Thirdly, she applies the resulting double paradigm (father–child + villain–victim) to both temporal dimensions (the colonial age of the ‘framed’ story and to the more recent epoch of the ‘frame’) in order to highlight the rapid transformations of cultural stereotypes in half a century. This last stage of revision does not only regard racial prejudices but also sexual ones, since the disquieting implications of the woman’s seduction in the remoter sequence are reversed by the liberation of her modern counterpart. The complexity of Jhabvala’s experimentation, which is carried out at three main textual levels of Heat and Dust (the level of characterization, as well as the spatial and the metafictional ones), is not easy to catch. It is only by perceiving the antiphrastic procedure she adopts that her deconstructive attitude becomes evident. In the main, Jhabvala anticipates Said’s analysis of Orientalist discourse, since she displays the faults inherent in the Western construction of the exotic Other. To accomplish this subversive aim, however, she does not challenge imperialistic notions explicitly but uses parody and montage effects to dismantle narrative conventions. Precisely, she deflates a whole range of Gothic paradigms, both traditional and modern ones, to invalidate their racist bias, and simultaneously weaves them with other narrative modes to produce a ‘hybrid’ postcolonial text. Heat and Dust opens with a short recollection of past events. After summing up her family history, the anonymous narrator announces her project of telling the story of Olivia Rivers, her step-grandmother who eloped with an Indian prince fifty years earlier, in 1923. This dark and obscene story attracts her attention despite the censure imposed by the elder members of her family. If they consider the scandal a ‘forbidden


topic’, the young narrator is driven by an intense wish to solve the mystery of Olivia’s behaviour.9 To fill in the many gaps left by letters and first-hand testimonies, she travels to India, hoping to discover the truth by tracing the woman’s steps. Yet her journey proves more than an epistemological search. ‘India always changes people, and I have been no exception’, she announces before telling her adventures, which she carefully tries to distinguish from the objective of her narrative effort: ‘But this is not my story, it is Olivia’s as far as I can follow it’ (p. 2). The ambiguity of this latter statement testifies to the complex meaning of her investigation into Olivia’s secrets. On the one hand, her claim for detachment has an antiphrastic valency, since it suggests that her narrative inquest is also an existential quest for identity. While visiting the places where Olivia lived, the narrator undergoes similar experiences of fascination and displacement, which turn her into a puzzling ‘double’ of her step-grandmother. In so doing, she seems to find a temporary solution to her personal and generational crisis (like other young Europeans, she seeks in India a spirituality that might replace the unsatisfying materialism of the West). On the other hand, however, her attempt to differentiate her story from Olivia’s must be read as a hint to the cultural and social changes which have occurred in the span of fifty years. Instead of passively imitating her ancestor, the anonymous voice shifts from heterodiegetic to homodiegetic narration to relate her own ‘passage to India’, which amounts to an experience of difference in sameness. This view is confirmed by a comparative analysis of the Gothic formulas and the actantial relations of Heat and Dust, which reveals significant discrepancies between the two narrative sequences. Before examining the text in detail, let us briefly summarize the two interwoven plots. One of them deals with Olivia’s adventures, which are reconstructed in 12 sections of varying length.10 After marrying Douglas Rivers, a District Officer at Satipur, Olivia settles in India but soon feels very lonely. She shuns the company of her boring and prejudiced countrymen and, since her husband is always busy at work, spends most of her time shut up in their bungalow. One day she meets the Nawab of Khatm and develops a close friendship with him and Harry, an Englishman living at the prince’s palace in an ambiguous position. The strong and shadowy character of the Nawab fascinates both Olivia and Harry, who are divided between disquiet and passion, suspicion and surrender. In the end Olivia forms a liaison with the Indian prince and, soon afterwards, she discovers herself to be pregnant. Oppressed by the worry of delivering a coloured baby, she undergoes a painful abortion. The Indian midwives who practise it use a primitive


method that makes her sick, so that the truth is easily discovered by an English physician. From this point onwards, she disappears from the scene. The reader is informed that she seeks refuge at the Nawab’s palace and later moves to his chalet in the Himalayas, where she spends the rest of her life secluded from the outside world. The second narrative sequence, which opens and closes the text, includes the fragmentary flashbacks of the first story that is somehow ‘relived’ by the protagonist-narrator. After an initial shock due to the extreme decay and poverty of Indian society, she yields to the fascination of the exotic country. Unlike her predecessor, however, she shows a clear disposition to crossing boundaries, since she adopts local habits of clothing, eating and living, and even manages to learn Hindustani.11 Equally different is her sexual life, which at first seems to parallel Olivia’s, but finally leads her to a divergent course of action. Her affair with Chid, an English convert to the Hindu religion, is replaced by a more involving relationship with her Indian landlord, Inder Lal, who impregnates her. After considering abortion for a short while, the narrator decides to give birth to her baby and, without informing her lover about her state, leaves for the mountains. The protagonists’ antithetical choices with regard to abortion and submission to their lovers, is the most apparent gap between the two stories. Further divergences can be traced at the level of characterization, by examining the Gothic passional syntax of both sequences. In the first place, Jhabvala challenges the equations suggested by outward similarities between the characters (narrator = Olivia; Inder Lal = Nawab; Chid = Douglas/Harry), since she reconfigures the power relations of the ‘frame’ in subversive terms. If we pay due attention to the narrator’s actions, which are marked by the modality of wanting (i.e., to have experiences, to write a story, to have her baby, to be free), we can realize how far she is from embodying the victim role played by her stepgrandmother. Secondly, the author insinuates doubts in the ‘framed’ sequence itself. Instead of drawing types who are ethically and socially recognizable, she creates effects of actantial instability by problematizing any simple polarities between good and evil, powerful and powerless characters. Still ‘in embryo’ in the remoter sequence, this deconstructing strategy becomes more evident in the 1973 story, which unveils the negative consequences of colonialism on Indian economy and society. Let us first investigate the passional configuration and the Gothic paraphernalia of Olivia’s story. From a generic perspective, its plot evidences many Gothic ‘ingredients’, which are combined with the theme


of colonial oppression. If Olivia and Harry play the role of helpless victims, their ‘seducer’ is a typical Oriental villain, who associates with a gang of dacoits (compared to ‘medieval bandits’ on p. 133), leads an immoral and riotous life, usurps the ‘good hero’ of his wife, threatens the colonialists’ authority, possesses great strength of will and personal magnetism, lives in a labyrinthine old palace, and has a strong relish for dark love (when he seduces Olivia, he combines Eros with Thanatos by telling her a Gothic story of violence, p. 137).12 His lustful and fierce personality makes him a formidable antagonist of the ‘noble and fair’ (p. 6) Douglas Rivers. The more the Nawab is associated with outward and inward ‘darkness’, the ‘fairer and nobler’ Douglas appears, as testified by Olivia’s preoccupation about the baby’s colour: ‘Douglas says they [the Rivers babies] all have white-blond hair till they’re about twelve.’ ‘Babies don’t have hair.’ ‘Indian babies do, I’ve seen them. They’re born with lots of black hair. . . .’ (p. 162). The chromatic opposition white/black is here connected with the ethnocentric idea that Europe is the model of humanity – an idea that dates back to Kant’s hierarchy of ‘races’ and is later appropriated by colonial theorists.13 Further proofs of Douglas’s role as a ‘white champion’ can be found in his heroic manliness and in his paternalistic attitude to the Indians, as the following quotations illustrate: He was upright and just. (p. 1) She had always loved him for these qualities – for his imperturbability, his English solidness and strength; his manliness. (p. 116) ‘Their usual tricks. They’re full of them. They think they’re frightfully cunning but really they’re like children.’ (p. 38) ‘Supposing things change – I mean, what with Mr. Gandhi and these people’ . . . He had no doubts at all, he said ‘They’ll need us a while longer,’ with easy amused assurance. (p. 89) The father-child relation he tries to establish with the dominated is, however, challenged by the Nawab’s usurpation. The Indian prince, who represents the dangerous Other, defies the spokesman of British


superiority at two different levels: diegetically, by seducing and impregnating his wife, and linguistically, by appropriating and reversing some clichés of colonial discourse. This latter act of usurpation is suggested by his qualification of Dr Saunders in ‘inhuman’ terms (he is compared to an animal on p. 121), as well as by the tender strictness he shows in speaking to and about Harry: ‘Go to sleep! We are not talking with you but with each other . . .’ (p. 44); ‘. . . he is like a child that doesn’t know what it wants! We others have to decide everything for him’ (p. 78). Douglas himself is once treated with father-like condescension. In returning home from work he is welcomed by the prince, whose selfconfident behaviour reverses their roles of guest and host: ‘He sprang to his feet to receive Douglas and held out his hand in hearty English greeting. It was as if he were the host and this his house in which it was his duty to make Douglas welcome’ (p. 56). If Douglas and the Nawab compete to fulfil the role of dominators, the objects of their conflict merge together into a Janus-faced victim figure. Olivia, whose beauty awakens male desire, and the ‘feminine’ Harry – he is ‘a very improper Englishman’ (p. 43) who shrinks from the aggressiveness of British culture14 – are both connoted in terms of womanish vulnerability and become the target of the two virile antagonists: the fair representative of imperialistic manliness, on one side, and his devilish Indian counterpart, on the other. The result is a triangular scheme in which the Oriental villain challenges the Western hero by stealing two of his ‘possessions’. The equation between the victims is confirmed by their dominant passions. First, Olivia’s and Harry’s behaviour is modalized in terms of not-knowing and being unable to break their dependence on the seducer (both refuse to acknowledge reality and annul their own will to please the Nawab). This modalization is evident in sentences such as ‘I don’t know’, ‘I’d like to know’ (pp. 142–3) referring to the prince’s misdeeds they try to ignore, or in the contorted meaning of the expression ‘he ought to want to’ (p. 75), used by Olivia to explain Harry’s (and indirectly her own) inability to resist. A second proof of their likeness is the jealousy they feel of each other. Olivia’s envy of the friendship between the two men, Harry’s sudden ‘umbrage’ when he foresees her affair with the prince, (‘You’re jealous, Harry, that’s what it is. Yes you are! . . . You want to be the only one’, [p. 130]), and his final departure for England when he is replaced by Olivia, are all symptoms of a levelling passion ruled by ‘a principle of an approached identity’. From a Greimassian perspective, each of the two victims can be seen as the other’s alter ego, since they are gradually equated to the


rival simulacrum they project: ‘For them to be compared, the two simulacra of rivals must be comparable’.15 This Gothic pattern of usurpation (villain versus hero), seduction (villain – victims) and depersonalization (victim1 = victim2) is reinforced by other terrific or mysterious elements, such as the ritual of suttee or widow-burning, the secrets of the purdah (the female apartments of the palace in which intruders are spied upon or poisoned), or the abortions practised in the dark and filthy alleys of Khatm. Considered all together, these elements seem to connote Indian culture in terms of savagery and barbarism, while the English community appears as a bulwark of civilization. Yet we should avoid concluding that Heat and Dust is imbued with colonial propaganda. As we have already suggested, the Gothic plot of the ‘framed’ story is undermined by some deconstructive strategies that dissolve clear-cut antitheses to invalidate the imperial rhetoric and ethos from within. A first effect of disorder is created by the moral ambiguity of the ‘good hero’. To question traditional characterization, Jhabvala underlines the inner weaknesses of Douglas Rivers, who is far from proving an outstanding model. Through irony and indirection she taints his figure with hypocrisy (‘I just told them, in a roundabout way, that they were a pack of rogues’, p. 38), gives his conduct childish connotations (‘[he had] the eyes of a boy who read adventure stories and had dedicated himself to live up to their code of courage and honour’, p. 40), and associates his admiration for British military heroes with sterility. This latter connection is implicitly drawn by Olivia during one of their Sunday walks in the British cemetery. In noticing Douglas’s reverence for the victims of the Mutiny, she feels oppressed by sadness and gets angry ‘both with him and the dead heroes’ (p. 107). Overcome by her mood, she relates it to her inability to get pregnant, thus establishing a parallel between heroism and infertility that is iterated a few pages later: ‘But now suddenly she thought: what manliness? He can’t even get me pregnant!’ (p. 116). The subversive implications of this nexus are confirmed by the Nawab’s act of seduction, which amounts to more than a private event. Thanks to his fecundity, he does not only deprive Douglas of his reproductive function but also reverses colonial relations, by appropriating a paternal role. Equally disruptive are some positive features of the prince’s personality. His tenderness for Olivia, his romantic idealization of his ancestor Amanullah Khan, a rude but heroic warrior, and his political vulnerability, make him more sympathetic and ‘human’. In marked contrast with traditional villains, the Nawab is a ‘round character’ who


can behave like a gentle lover, a worshipper of courage and a defender of his oppressed country. The very fact that he seduces Olivia in the open air mitigates his aggression. Instead of the Gothic palace of Khatm, he chooses the grove outside Baba Firdaus Shrine to start his affair with the woman – a natural, beautiful, and sacred spot which is doubly connoted in terms of fertility (an oasis in the desert, it is also the locus where Indian women make votive offerings to get pregnant). In the second sequence, the dismantlement of stereotypes turns into parody and hybridism. Gothic formulas are still present in the first journal entry, where the narrator tells of her arrival in India. A few pages later, however, she succeeds in overcoming her fear of the unknown. Her passage from horror to attraction is emblematic of change and reinforces the demolition of clichés carried out at the structural level. An analysis of the first section of the narrative ‘frame’ will clarify this point. After reconstructing her family history, the narrator describes her first night in Bombay, where she meets a Christian sister who has long worked there as a missionary. Influenced by the old woman, who retains a jaundiced view of India (‘Because you see, dear, nothing human means anything here’, p. 6), she perceives the city as a frightening inferno, in which sick and crippled people, comprising derelict Europeans, wander in the dirty streets ‘like souls in hell’ (p. 6). The sister herself is compared to a ghost and assimilated to the spectral atmosphere of the place, since her negative visionariness is a product of a religious and cultural bias that stifles any signs of vitality. Things change abruptly in the second entry written a fortnight later (p. 6). From this moment onwards, the narrator learns to master her contempt for the unheimlich and progressively merges with Indian culture. Her adoption of local habits testifies to her triumph over colonial prejudices as well as to her reconfiguration of two Gothic paradigms: respectively, the traditional female victim who is warned on her arrival in a strange place, and the modern-Gothic travelling heroine who can escape perils only by deciphering the misleading appearance of a male authoritarian figure.16 The first paradigm is turned upsidedown by the narrator’s integration into the exotic environment, which invalidates the missionary’s obsolete world-view.17 The second paradigm is counteracted by the innocuous conduct of her two lovers, who fail in reproducing the patriarchal model embodied by Douglas and the Nawab. By escaping Gothic categories, the narrator inaugurates a new course of action which is not only anti-paternalistic and antipatriarchal, but also fully respectful of cultural and racial differences.


Against the values of the past, she appears as a postcolonial subject, who asserts the need for a harmonious society. The privilege she grants to the cultural encounter is confirmed by her decision to give birth to a half-breed baby who prefigures the end of colonial antagonism. To make this encounter even more subversive, Jhabvala parodies all the Gothic relations of the first story. A close look at the actantial and passional scheme of the ‘frame’ will reveal her attempt to overturn the persecution-victimization triangle of the ‘framed’ sequence. Generally ignored by critics, who have insisted on the superficial analogies between the two structural layers, this underlying scheme is essential to make out the author’s ideological position with regard to postcolonial issues. If we summarize the narrator’s adventures, we obtain a triangular pattern of inter-personal relations that is apparently reminiscent of the first sequence: an Englishwoman goes to India, is drawn into a liaison with a countryman and later replaces him with an Indian lover, who gives her a baby. Other details seem to validate this correspondence: Inder Lal resembles the Nawab in having a strong-willed mother, a mentally unstable wife and a job marked by plots and treachery (although he is only a government officer); the blond Chid plays a similar sexual role to Douglas but also shares much with Harry (apart from stomach problems, he has the same experience of disillusionment and departure from India); the narrator starts her affair with Inder Lal in the very place where Olivia is seduced.18 Yet, the passional trajectory of the second story is significantly altered. The dominant role played by Douglas and usurped by the Nawab is here fulfilled by the narrator alone, who cancels the tensions between the two juxtaposed heroes. No less to the point, her sexual victims are neither jealous nor imitative of each other. More than merging into one figure, they exemplify two different kinds of postcolonial failings that are unmasked and overcome by the protagonist: the Westerner allured and defeated by India without being successfully integrated (Chid) and the petty bourgeois native who idealizes Western lifestyle and values (Inder Lal). A clear index of the narrator’s position of strength is her gradual distancing from Olivia’s model. If her ancestor is a passive fallen woman who reproduces literary archetypes (like Tennyson’s heroines she waits long for her lover and, after retiring from the world, sits in her chalet ‘glancing up from her embroidery to look out over the mountains’, p. 175), the narrator manages to evade socio-sexual clichés. Bigger and taller than her lovers, she lacks Olivia’s graceful beauty and is explicitly compared with hijras (or eunuchs, pp. 9–10). These physical


traits are reinforced by her strong personality. After yielding to Chid’s sexual aggressions, for instance, she starts to rebel against her victim role: ‘Every now and again he gets those monstrous erections of his and I have to fight him off . . . Today I got so exasperated with him, I threw him out’ (p. 80). Similarly, it is she who decides to have an affair with Inder Lal: Sunk in his own troubles, he was no longer interested in my wishes. But I wanted him to be . . . I laid my hand on his. . . . I could feel his hand tremble under mine: and then I saw that his lips trembled too . . . There was certainly fear in his eyes as they looked at me. He did not know what to do next, nor what I was going to do next . . . Although the next few moves were up to me, once I had made them he was not slow to respond. (p. 127) The modal ‘wanted’ and the sequence of actions (she takes his hand and makes the first moves) equate the narrator with the Nawab, while Inder Lal’s fear has much in common with Olivia’s sense of being trapped by her seducer (p. 137). The Gothic structure of the ‘framed’ sequence is thus upset in the ‘frame’ by the protagonist’s slippage from victimhood to authority. But what are the real implications of this actantial reversal? First and foremost, the narrator epitomizes the end of colonial conflicts in post-independence India. Differently from Olivia, who suffers the consequences of a struggle for supremacy, she nullifies the opposition villain/hero by blending the two antagonists into her authoritative figure. Secondly, she embarks on a diachronic and synchronic journey to discover the insubstantiality of cultural frontiers and power relations. Unlike Douglas and the Nawab, she is a ‘harmless’ dominator who does not try to assert the racial superiority of her people, but uses her lovers to gain a deeper knowledge of India and herself. The very fact that she lacks the arrogance and the cruelty of the two colonial heroes (she never willingly persecutes her ‘victims’ nor tries to limit their freedom) turns her into a provocative emblem of transformation. A product of the liberated Seventies, the narrator impersonates an open-minded Westerner who dispels the remnants of colonial hostility. Her sexual emancipation is not only a parodic reversal of the equation political oppression = seduction (exemplified by Olivia’s tragic affair), but also the symbol of a free encounter with the Other. A confirmation of her supercession of colonial prejudices can be


found in her perception of the places once inhabited by Olivia. The ruined palace of Khatm inspires her with an elegiac sense of passing away, but retains none of its former Gothic connotations. Similarly, the sight of the abandoned British cemetery makes her feel that all the tensions of the colonial past are definitely buried: ‘It is strange how, once graves are broken and overgrown in this way, then the people in them are truly dead’ (p. 24). If the overgrown tombs of the dead soldiers testify to the disappearance of Douglas’s heroic model, the limbless marble angel erected by the Saunders has lost both its Western appearance and its symbolic value (in the ‘framed’ sequence it represented the British fear of a hostile environment). The same fate is reserved for the colonialists’ bungalows, which have been turned into municipal offices. Described as places of corruption and tricks, they are nonetheless potentially regenerative loci, since their conversion is an integral part of the process of ‘Indianization’. Closely related to the idea of transculturation is the question of female emancipation. A comparison between the two stories reveals Jhabvala’s attempt to overturn Gothic role-playing by depicting a group of liberated women who escape the gloomy fate of their remote ‘doubles’. The most obvious example is offered by the narrator, whose liminal figure is both physically and psychologically distant from Olivia. Her success in avoiding duplicating her step-grandmother’s model is both due to her personal strength (her courage and independence from male support) and to the different world she is living in – apart from ‘progressive’ Europe, she experiences a new India in which some relevant changes have taken place. By focusing on the narrator’s individual and environmental potentialities, Jhabvala rewrites the Gothic plot of the first story from a feminist angle. The main targets of her revision are the objectivation of women consequent on the masculine use of sex as an instrument of power, the rigid sequence sin-fall-punishment, and the Orientalist view of the East as a mysterious and threatening woman. As we have already seen, the narrator counteracts the negativity of female objectivation by appropriating a male role. In so doing, she also infringes the traditional regulations of female sexuality, her adulterous and inter-racial affairs being neither condemned nor punished. Whereas Olivia pays for her ‘sin’ with a seclusion that amounts to a social suicide, her step-granddaughter is rewarded with superior knowledge and a blissful state of maternity: ‘It was absolutely clear to me now that I wanted my pregnancy and the completely new feeling – of rapture – of which it was the cause’ (p. 165). The contrast between the two women is made


patent in the conclusion. Unable to see the mountains from Olivia’s chalet because of a heavy rain, the narrator decides to climb further up. Her ascension is a symbol of freedom that contrasts with the idea of imprisonment associated with the chalet – a peculiar building ‘with a dash of Gothic cathedral’ (p. 74) from which Olivia looks out like a twentieth-century Lady of Shalott.19 The last target of the narrator’s criticism requires more attention. In order to reverse Orientalist clichés, Jhabvala portrays some provocative figures of women who challenge the equation female = corrupt(ing) otherness. First of all, she insinuates doubts about the ‘healthy model’ that the colonizers’ wives should provide to counteract Indian ‘unwholesome’ femininity. An effective example is the parodic characterization of Mrs Saunders, whose mental instability is explicitly connected with sexual mania. Her vulgarity, her inclination towards thoughts of death and her obsession with sexual harassment, are nothing but symptoms of a morbid disposition that is akin to the Western idea of exotic femininity (quite ironically, Mrs Saunders is the wife of the strictest spokesman of colonial ethos, who finds ‘something weak and rotten’ [p. 170] in Olivia). Equally disrupting is Olivia’s defence of suttee. Driven by a wish to contradict her countrymen, the woman asserts her admiration for this supreme expression of wifely love. Her paradoxical statement ‘I’d be grateful for such a custom’ (p. 60), which positively impresses Douglas (‘She saw his hard look melt away into tenderness’, p. 60), makes a contradiction come to the fore, since it implies a coincidence of the British Angel-of-the-House model with a barbaric custom. Secondly, Jhabvala demonstrates the groundlessness of imperialistic prejudices by reversing the stale typification of the ‘framed’ sequence. If in the colonial past all native women appear as corrupted figures (for example, the fanatic suttees, the dangerous midwives, the purdah plotters and, especially, the mysterious Begum, who duplicates the Nawab’s act of penetration by arranging Olivia’s abortion), in the second story they are replaced by positive modern ‘doubles’.20 An emblematic character, in this regard, is Maji – a midwife who becomes a friend of the narrator’s. In sheer contrast with the female models produced by colonial ethos, Maji represents an advanced Indian woman, whose mental balance and wisdom derive from her ability to combine tradition with innovation, rationality with spirituality. A strong and generous widow who escaped suttee (the practice was abolished much earlier), she never denies the sacredness of the ancient ritual nor condemns the practice of abortion, which she sees as a social necessity. At the same time,


however, she convinces the narrator that she should keep her baby, thus assuming the role of a propitiatory goddess: ‘a supernatural figure with supernatural powers which it now seemed to me she had used not to terminate my pregnancy but to make sure of it: make sure I saw it through’ (p. 173). Her ability to solve tensions and heal conflicts is exemplified by her preparation of a ‘fertile’ ground for a multicultural society, in which past and present, West and East, can harmoniously coexist. In this sense, she counterbalances the negativity of the old missionary of Bombay, whose sterile ghostliness derives from the total commitment to a repressive ideology (a lethal blend of Christian selfsacrifice and racist ‘humanism’). The true heir of Maji’s ideal femininity is the narrator herself, who fulfils a maternal function at three different levels: literally, culturally and metafictionally. Apart from bearing a half-breed child, she represents a ‘fecund’ cultural hybrid, who outdoes the imperfect models incarnated by her lovers. Unlike Chid, she does not yield to the fascination of India to experience a later stage of disillusionment, but mediates between the two realities. (Chid’s passivity is symbolized by his burning up his clothes and shaved hair on a suttee-like ‘funeral pyre’, pp. 64–5.) Equally innovative is her cultural openness by comparison with Inder Lal’s narrow-mindedness. The Indian clerk, who is ‘blinded’ by a total admiration for Western values (‘He says why should people who have everything – motor cars, refrigerators – come here to such a place where there is nothing?’, p. 95), provides a negative model of transculturation, which is confirmed by other ‘Westernized’ minor characters (such as the Nawab’s nephew, Karim). Roughly the reverse is true of the narrator, who plants the ‘seeds’ of Indian spirituality into her European ‘womb’ to generate a hopeful alternative.21 The same maternal image is applicable to the metanarrative function she fulfils. To tell her (and Olivia’s) story, the narrator plays two roles together: she acts both as the reader-interpreter of some fragmentary testimonies (letters, interviews) and as the creator of the narrative sequences which fill in the numerous textual gaps. In accomplishing this double task, she acquires a writerly status, which turns her into the author’s alter ego. Like the narrator, who is busy with deciphering (and producing) stories, Jhabvala explores the process of text-construction and experiments with various techniques to renew the Anglo-Indian tradition. The result of her efforts is Heat and Dust, an innovative text deriving from the combination of different narrative modes: from dramatic to pictorial, from epistolary to exotic, from (post)colonial to Gothic. This latter style, in particular, is parodied to reproduce all the tensions


and the transformative energies of the contemporary world. Whereas in traditional Gothic the idea of transgression was linked to the threat of disintegration of an orderly system, in Jhabvala’s narration it refers to the continuous process of dissolution and reconstitution of limits (socio-cultural, ontological and stylistic ones), which is the distinctive feature of postcolonial reality.

Notes 1. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–2. 2. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 188. 3. Jhabvala was born in Germany of Polish Jewish parents. In 1939 the family escaped to Britain, where she received her education. After marrying an Indian architect, she spent 25 years in India. In 1976 she took up residence in New York. 4. Most expressions of dissent came from Indian critics, who accused her of perpetuating colonial stereotypes. An example is Nissim Ezekiel’s objection to the Booker Prize she received for Heat and Dust in 1975; cf. ‘CrossCultural Encounter in Literature’, The Indian P.E.N., 43, 11–12 (NovemberDecember 1977), 5. 5. Cf. Gita Rajan, ‘(Con)figuring Identity: Cultural Space of the Indo-British Border Intellectual’, in Gisela Brinker-Bagler and Sidonie Smith, eds, Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 80–1. 6. In her MA thesis Jhabvala discusses some preconceptions of the Oriental tale, among which there is the Gothic paradigm of the ‘unfortunate maiden fallen into the hands of a dusky seducer’. Judie Newman, The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (London and New York: Arnold, 1995), pp. 71, 83. 7. Ibid. 8. In investigating some basic contradictions of Gothic, Fred Botting defines the genre as ‘open to a play of ambivalence, a dynamic of limit and transgression that both restores and contests boundaries’: Botting, Gothic, p. 9. 9. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (London: Abacus, 1991), p. 2. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will be given in parentheses in the text. 10. The first eleven sections about Olivia are all introduced by the date 1923. They alternate with another eleven sections written in the form of journal entries and set in 1973, which are diegetically and thematically congruent. In the twenty-third, and last, section the stories of Olivia and the narrator are finally brought together without any time markers. 11. Despite her affair with the Nawab, Olivia has no desire to cope with the cultural Other. She never learns the local language nor mixes with ‘uncivilized’ Indians (not surprisingly, she admires the Nawab’s European qualities most). Besides, she furnishes both her houses in a cosy Western fashion, as Harry makes clear by comparing her sitting room to an ‘oasis’ (p. 33) in the Indian desert.

Crossing Boundaries 171 12. It is no coincidence that the modal to want is obsessively pronounced by the Nawab or reported by his two ‘victims’. For instance, Harry repeats it to convince Olivia to accept his invitation, after declaring that ‘one does not say no to such a person’ (p. 34): ‘Olivia, he wants to give a party.’ . . . ‘He most particularly wants you to come. Of course there’ll be a car.’ ‘Douglas is dreadfully busy.’ ‘He wants you both to come. He wants it most awfully. . . .’ (p. 35, my emphasis). 13. According to postcolonial scholars, the Enlightenment philosophers were responsible for the limited interpretation of the word ‘humanity’. A muchquoted prejudice is Kant’s view of the ‘white brunette’ as the perfect skin tone, and his arrangement of the other races in a descendant order according to their approximation to the ‘white’ ideal – from the first race of very blond northern Europeans to the fourth race of olive-yellow Indians, who are placed even lower than black Africans; cf. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Postcolonial African Philosophy: a Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 1–21. 14. Often compared to E.M. Forster for his ambiguous relation with Indian males, Harry personifies the Forsterian liberal humanist creed. His belief in the primacy of personal relations is emphasized by his criticism of the manly behaviour of his countrymen abroad as well as at home. Notice in particular his equation of colonialism with the bullying system of British schools: ‘They’re the sort of people who’ve made life hell for me ever since I can remember. At school and everywhere’ (p. 161). 15. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Jacques Fontanille, The Semiotics of Passions: From States of Affairs to States of Feelings, trans. Paul Perron and Frank Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 152 (both quotations). 16. Cf. Laurie Sucher, The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: the Politics of Passion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 12–13, 62. For the heroine of modern Gothic see also Ellen Moers, Literary Women: The Great Women Writers (New York: Anchor Books, 1977). 17. ‘. . . the novel departs from the formula, in which the heroine-victim discovers, to her chagrin, that the warnings were correct.’ Laurie Sucher, The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, p. 106. 18. See Judie Newman, The Ballistic Bard, p. 44. 19. Cf. Jasmine Gooneratne, Silence, Exile and Cunning: the Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (London: Sangam Books, 1991), p. 239. 20. The parallelism is explicitly drawn in the text. When a midwife inserts a twig into Olivia’s vagina, the Begum stares at the Englishwoman with a face that resembles her son’s: ‘She did look like the Nawab, very much’ (p. 168). 21. According to ethnologists, pregnancy is a threshold stage between two ritualized acts of border-crossing. On this view the narrator’s state can be read as a cultural rite of passage that prefigures the ‘birth’ of an integrated society; cf. Arnold Van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909).

10 The Ghastly and the Ghostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrell’s ‘Empire Trilogy’ Victor Sage

My starting point is a small but haunting moment in J.G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip (1978), an image which, though insignificant from the point of view of the plot, stands out from the page. Matthew Webb, the plump, owlish, idealist son of Old Webb, has just arrived in Singapore, at the behest of Walter Blackett, his father’s old partner. He is taken to the (misnamed, decrepit) Mayfair Building, ‘a vast and rambling bungalow built on a score of fat, square pillars’, where Matthew’s father has spent many of the last years of his life in the company of the beautiful Vera Chaing. Matthew is taken round the side of the building: ‘Here he glimpsed a tennis court, disused, from whose baked mud surface giant thistles had grown up and now waited like silent skeleton players in the gloom.’1 The richness of this image is linked to its ambiguity. This is a grotesquely comic moment, worthy of Dickens, and it is also a profoundly uncanny moment. Rude natural growth forms a parodic metaphor for the British imperial culture that has already substantially vanished, whose decay is personified, with reversed anthropomorphic shock, as ‘silent skeleton players in the gloom’, waiting for the last trump, or, bathetically, for the game to begin, for someone to serve. Whether one sees it as predominantly uncanny or predominantly grotesque and comic depends on what metaphorical weight we, as readers, give to the adjective ‘skeleton’ (is it more like the phrase ‘a skeleton crew’, or a strange echo of The Ancient Mariner?); or how much (of ourselves) we are prepared to yield to the potential sublime of this ‘gloom’ and the sinister nature of the jungle’s encroachment; and connect them with the insubstantial state of these long-dead players masquerading as nastily material, life-size growths? It may be objected that this epiphany is just a trope, an isolated metaphor, a Dickensian jeu d’esprit, and that one should not make 172

J.G. Farrell’s Imperial Gothic 173

such a fuss about it. But an obvious structural extension of this figurative logic is the extraordinary scene in this novel in which Matthew and Vera visit what is, for him, a ‘decidedly creepy place’ (p. 344), a Chinese Dying House, where the dying are brought by their families and where Matthew, ‘blundering between these racks of moribund people in the gloom . . . felt like Orpheus descending into the underworld’ (p. 340). Here, they are surrounded by the dying smallholders from one of his own rubber plantations, who have been ruined by the corrupt practices of the firm he has inherited from his father, Blackett and Webb: ‘Quite true, sir,’ piped up another quavering voice at Matthew’s elbow, causing him to start violently and peer into the gloom where another of the shadowy cadavers, hitherto lying supine on the lowest rack and displaying no signs of life, had now collected up two sets of bones and thrown them over the side of his tray; after dangling uncertainly for a while they anchored themselves to the floor and proved to be legs; then, with a further scraping of bones, their owner levered himself politely to his feet and stood swaying beside Matthew. ‘Quite true, sir. Controller of Rubber listen only to European estates. He have five men on his committee from estates . . . only one smallholder! On his Rubber Regulation Committee he have twenty-seven men from estates, still only one from smallholders. And yet smallholders produce half country’s rubber! That is not fair, sir. It is disgusting. Quite true, sir.’ And he sank back with a moan into the shadows and a moment later there came a rattling sound. ‘Oh dear,’ thought Matthew, ‘but still, he’s probably had a good innings.’ (p. 345) The Blimpish slang of ‘good innings’ here is, to the modern reader, strikingly inappropriate in tone; it neatly reveals the unconscious narcissism involved in Matthew’s liberal idealism. But the threat is immediately renewed: others are waiting to take his place, plucking at Matthew’s clothes, all displaying, in their skeletal living–dead state, and in the yellowing documents they fumble for in their deathbeds, proof of the plot of the European Estates to starve out and destroy the indigenous smallholders. Vera has led her fat, bespectacled Orpheus into this Chinese Underworld where the sins of the imperial fathers are visited upon the son. The danse macabre – the profane resurrection – is a mixture of last trump and Complaints Commission:


All around him in the semi-darkness, as if summoned by the last trump for a final dispensation of justice over the doings of this imperfect world, supine figures were sitting up and casting off their shrouds and bandages, while others were clambering down from the tiers of shelves on which they had been stretched. He sighed again and looked at his watch as they crowded round him. (p. 347) The hybrid effect is genuinely disturbing. Pathos mixes with gallows humour. Horror, and the threat of the ‘sinister’ Other, is present in the metaphor, but dismissed to the periphery of the reader’s response, and may not even be precisely identified (Death? the Chinese?). We can’t quite tell which sort of scene we are in. The ‘skeleton’ in this scene is a spectre of fair play resurrected to haunt the liberal conscience of the second generation. Matthew’s bluff, defensive joke – the way the text cancels the last trump with his glance at his watch – shows graphically the limits of his ability to empathize, in a familiar (but here quite inappropriate) gesture of comic resignation that might come out of a Carry On film. The upsurge of the Gothic register here is inseparable, on the one hand, from the novel’s satirical, but precise exposure of the way Blackett and Webb went about creating a monopoly of the resources of rubber production; and, on the other, from a Dickensian comedy of the grotesque body that carnivalizes the apocalypse. At this point, it is worth broadening the critical picture, because the hybridity of these effects creates an interpretative puzzle. Farrell’s reputation as a writer is based on his contribution to the historical novel. Traditionally, the historical novel is assimilated to a form of neo-realism, according to the most influential analysis of it – Lukács’s The Historical Novel. In this persuasive version of the genre, it is Scott and not Dickens, for example, who yields the teleological model for how the Plot of History is to be represented. The ‘Empire Trilogy’ thus moves through Troubles (1970) and The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) towards its one great realist goal, and The Singapore Grip emerges, for some, as the ‘Tolstoyan’ apotheosis, its greater realism justifying, in many eyes, Farrell’s maturity as a writer. There is no doubt Farrell himself compounded this view, and was pleased with the reviewer who made this point.2 R.G. Binns’s lively account of Farrell in his 1986 Contemporary Writers monograph, which helped keep Farrell’s reputation alive, is nowhere near as reductive as this, but you can feel the pressure of this view on


his account of Troubles, for example. It is clear that he wants to keep the Gothic in its place: The Majestic hotel, like the House of Usher, is ineluctably doomed and collapses into ruins at the end of the narrative. But Troubles, though sometimes described as Gothic, and while it makes use of some of the properties of this genre, conveys the idea of decay and sickness in a rather different sense from Poe. Farrell is interested in tangible physical decay rather than disorder of the psyche and the atmosphere at the Majestic too often dissolves into comedy or irony ever to feel chilling or frightening. The claim which is sometimes made that the Majestic’s fiery end is a reworking of a Gothic convention rather overlooks the fact that arson attacks on large properties owned by the Anglo-Irish gentry were commonplaces at this period in Irish history (Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September [1927], which is also set against the background of the troubles, ends with the great house Danielstown burning to the ground).3 Realism cancels out Gothic; in the bracing air of reference to the ‘historically real’, the Gothic cannot survive, because (the assumption is visible) Gothic is (1) an exhausted nineteenth-century genre; and (2) a kind of writing devoted to ‘the psyche’. Interestingly, Elizabeth Bowen’s reputation has shifted in the 1990s from the old standard view of her as a female clone of Henry James with regard to realism, to an explorer of the Anglo-Irish Uncanny, so the idea of bringing her as a witness has a different resonance now, after the recent work of W.J. McCormack, Roy Foster and Julian Moynahan on the hyphenated and insubstantial void, the life-in-death and death-in-life, present in the writing of the Anglo-Irish tradition.4 There may be other reasons for Bowen’s feeling of affinity with Farrell’s trilogy than corroboration of its realism. Modern Gothic is not just a matter of genre conventions: we assume it is still relevant in the post-war period, because its recultivation of the Sublime is a discourse about decay, of both the psyche and what Count Volney referred to in the early nineteenth century as the Ruins of Empires. And that discourse, I shall argue, acts an anti-historicizing language. In Farrell, these effects arise out of an ironically pure and repeated concentration on the motif from the horror tradition of moments of misperception, often (but not exclusively) of peripheral vision. This is the tradition of what I will call la coda dell ’occhio – ‘the tail of the eye’.


The expression goes back at least to Le Fanu, another Anglo-Irish Gothic writer, who acknowledges the Italian origins of his phrase in describing the phenomenon (though the phenomenon itself is much older). The phrase, and the phenomenon, is then appropriated in the next generation by Le Fanu’s editor and disciple, M.R. James, who makes it the basis of many of the nasty epiphanies in his own stories, and thus makes it available for twentieth-century writers.5 These epiphenomena, arising on the retina or in the ear, occur momentarily. In the horror tradition, they are usually described in a rhetorical sequence that always ends up reasserting a sceptical or disbelieving, cynically materialist, viewpoint, denying them as illusions or, rather, delusions of the individual subject, momentary derangements of the perceptual apparatus. Closer acquaintance usually reveals a mundane object, and yet, nervously, after the misperception has been efficiently banished, transformed by reason, it often lingers on in the text as an uncanny moment. This is a tradition that goes back to Ann Radcliffe’s adaptation of Burke and Gilpin’s rhetoric about obscurity, distance, and sublime landscapes.6 The story of the nineteenth-century Gothic is the story of the domestication of the sublime. The sublime is provoked by Nature, or, its human equivalent, ruined military or ecclesiastical architecture, the grander and more ambitious the better. The eighteenth-century Gothic adds an analogy with the graveyard, the skull beneath the skin. By the 1840s, all this has been translated indoors, and not without humour: for the emotionally myopic Lockwood, coming from the Midland counties of England, the parlour of Wuthering Heights is absurdly ‘vast’, more like a Cathedral nave than a domestic space, and full of threatening peripheral obscurities: ‘. . . and other dogs haunted other recesses.’7 (It is also worth reminding ourselves that peripheral vision is an evolutionary advantage in a world of predators.) Civilization has retreated from the place and what remains is ‘other’: wild, anarchic, barbarous, dangerous, and – one of Farrell’s favourite terms – ‘sinister’. Farrell’s reader often finds him or herself imprisoned in a pair of short-sighted eyes, or trapped in one of the other senses, peering into the ‘gloom’ like Matthew at the skeleton players behind the Mayfair. Here, from Troubles, is Major Brendan Archer, arriving back at the Majestic Hotel after a trip to Dublin in 1919: The Major did not arrive until after dark and it would not have surprised him to find nobody there to greet him. However, as he climbed the stone steps and dragged open the massive front door he saw there


was a glimmer of light in the foyer. The electric light appeared not to be functioning but an oil lamp was burning dimly on the reception desk and beside it, asleep on a wooden chair, was the old manservant, Murphy. He started violently as the Major touched his arm and gave a gasp of terror; it was true that there was something eerie about this vast shadowy cavern and the Major himself felt a shiver of apprehension as his eyes tried to probe beyond the circle of light into the darker shadows where the white figure of Venus flickered like a wraith.8 Looking ‘beyond the circle of light’ is a fixed and repeated moment throughout Farrell’s trilogy. It is the uncanny point at which the surface of the world begins to transform itself into its grotesquely true dimensions. Here, the ‘wraith’ of Venus – a perfect piece of pretentious imperial bric-a-brac which he will ship home to England as the only thing remaining from the conflagration – is a metaphor for Brendan’s futile search for love (and, increasingly, truth) amongst the more alarming aspects of the Irish ‘gloom’. The reading process in Troubles is not primarily a forward movement, but a lateral exposure to the burgeoning vitality of decay, a scattering of signs which the reader has already encountered early on in the gloom of the Majestic Hotel’s Palm Court. This sublime space is the emblematic setting for the first encounter between the Major, and Angela, his fiancée: The foliage, the Major continued to notice as he took his seat, was really amazingly thick; there were creepers not only dangling from above but also running in profusion over the floor, leaping out to seize any unwary object that remained in one place for too long. A standard lamp at his elbow, for instance, had been throttled by a snake of greenery that had circled up its slender metal stem as far as the black bulb that crowned it like a bulging eyeball. It had no shade and the bulb he assumed to be dead until, to his astonishment, Angela fumbled among the dusty leaves and switched it on, presumably so that she could take a good look at him. Whether or not she was dismayed by what she saw she switched it off again with a sigh after a moment and the gloom returned. (p. 18) Farrell’s negative sublime here – the energy of this indoor jungle which arises from its cultural decay – is carried on the vehicle of farce. The


farce is the farce of entropy, matter that exchanges its functions (a process that corresponds to mistaken identity in the farce’s plot) in a lively-looking fashion, while constantly getting older. Time does not exist in the ‘battlemented mass’ of the Majestic. Instead, objects repeat the message of their perpetual decay to the Major’s eyes. Angela soon spends most of her time dying in some remote room upstairs. She is his reason for being there. Meanwhile his eyes are glued on the trays brought up and down the stairs by the cook, whose agency, and even presence, vanish even as they are implied: Apples – after all, there was a mountain of them in the apple house which had to be eaten – played a significant part in the diet of those living at the Majestic. One day, however, he noticed a raw apple travelling upstairs that looked so fresh and shining that it might even have been an early arrival of the new season’s crop. On the way down it was still there on the tray but one despairing bite had been taken out of it. he could see the marks of small teeth that had clipped a shallow oval furrow from its side, the exposed white flesh already beginning to oxidize and turn brown, like an old photograph or a love-letter. (p. 65) The technique is purely metonymic: the ‘realistic’ detail here is a celebration of decay. The apple has already become sepia, history, a record of an apple, as it starts to rot. Angela whose trace it is, is in a sense, already dead, as indeed is Dr Ryan, who comes to visit her: These visits normally took a long time. The reason was that Dr Ryan, however alert his mind, had to cope with a body so old and worn out as to be scarcely animate. Watching him climb the stairs towards his patient was like watching hands of a clock: he moved so slowly that he might not have been moving at all. One day the major saw him on his way upstairs, clinging to the banister as a snail clings to the bark of a tree. After he had smoked a cigarette and glanced through the newspaper he happened to pass through the foyer again and there was the doctor, still clinging to the banister and still apparently not moving, but nevertheless much nearer to the top. (p. 70) The pastiche of Beckett here is unmistakable: Angela, whose ‘blooming’, as Beckett put it, ‘is a budding withering’, has already disappeared. Dr


Ryan’s mind, uncluttered as it is by much of a body, is unusually clear: his muttered philosophy is that of entropic decline, expressed as loss of substance: There is no rock of ages cleft for anyone and one must accept the fact that a person (‘You too Edward, and the Major, and this young boy as well’) . . . a person is only a very temporary and makeshift affair, as is the love one has for him . . . and so Edward must understand that this young girl who had just died, his beloved daughter Angela whom he, Dr Ryan, had assisted into the world, even at the height of her youth and health was temporary and insubstantial because . . . people are insubstantial. They really do not last . . . They never last. (pp. 140–1) Ryan sees clearly that the English will lose Ireland, and questions interestingly whether they really want it. This is for him a political point – in a negative way, he supports the Republican cause – but it is also part of a more general process. He sees the body – the beauty of a fine woman ‘like a flaring match’ – as a machine in a perpetual state of entropic decline. Now this notion of entropic decline also includes the process of recording history itself, which is a process of burial. While Brendan is in Dublin, he just misses witnessing the shooting of an innocent civilian, encountering the body of the old man at Northumberland Road, shot on the canal bridge by an assassin disguised as a sandwich man, who had asked him the time: ‘A gold watch, linked by a chain to the top button of his waistcoat, still lay in the palm of his right hand encircled by long ivory fingernails’(p. 91). The pathos of this image is related to the notion of a historical moment and the warmth and vitality of the corpse, a pathos disturbed only by the prophetically monumental ‘ivory’ of the fingernails. As he moves away, Brendan is thinking, after Lady Macbeth: ‘How new the blood of an old man looked! Not at all faded, weary, desiccated like the man himself.’ And this prompts him to watch for the entry of this event into ‘history’: The Major read this newspaper account and the next day and the next day found one or two more. But although it was mentioned in passing once or twice, the murder of the old man had been classified and accepted. It was odd, he thought. An old man is gunned down in the street and within a couple of days this senseless act is both


normal and inevitable. It was as if these newspaper articles were poultices placed on sudden inflammations of violence. In a day or two all the poison had been drawn out of them. They became random events of the year 1919, inevitable, without malice, part of history. The old man lying on the bridge with his watch in his hand was a part of history. (pp. 92–3) History (so-called history) is made up of ‘events without malice’. The text of Troubles is ironically scattered with newspaper reports, placed there, not for ‘verisimilitude’ or ‘authenticity’, but for the opposite – to make the reader witness the congealing process, the entropic decline of full and living truth into dead narrative: conventional clichés, generality, and ‘random events’ – things not seen or experienced by anyone. The drawing of poison is equivalent for Brendan to the drawing of substance. This amounts, negatively, to a defence of fiction against recorded history. Farrell saw his own writing as a struggle to resurrect life in the corpse of language. During the early writing of The Siege of Krishnapur he wrote: Although I’ve written some forty pages, to me they are difficult to distinguish from forty corpses stretched beside my typewriter. Life is not in them. I waste hours massaging their hearts and holding mirrors over their mouths. From time to time I become convinced that the mirror has clouded faintly. But the next time I look the thing is as dead as ever. . . .’9 Whatever consitutes the breath upon the mirror is the linguistic equivalent to the ‘malice’ of events: style, metaphor, wit, when successful, are true substance, momentary resistances against the inexorable process of dying. Linguistic ‘poison’ – the sheer energy of mis- or hallucinated perception arising momentarily in the ‘gloom’ beyond the ‘circle of light’ – gives life and truth to the language of the fictional text. I think we are now in a position to confront one or two puzzles in the criticism of Farrell’s work. I have been insisting on the hybridity of his effects: that the impure combination of the grotesque, the humorous and the uncanny, lies at the heart of his political critique of the empire in his trilogy. But that also there is no mimetic parallel, easy or


otherwise, between ‘history’ and the plots of Farrell’s novels, which proceed by witty and decorative set pieces that are often static and expository, variations on a theme of inertial endgame, not teleologically structured forms that imitate the tragic or triumphant movement of history, which has brought empire coherently (or even incoherently) to an end. It is sometimes said that, as Binns puts it about Troubles: ‘The case for change is made negatively, through the prejudice and irrationality of the Anglo-Irish, and the Republican viewpoint is only obliquely present in the novel.’10 This might be said about all the ‘Others’ in the Trilogy – they are part of the ‘silence’ and the ‘gloom’, not the ‘circle of light’. The same is true of both the Sepoys in The Siege of Krishnapur and the Chinese, Indians, Malays and Japanese in The Singapore Grip. These masses are not realistically portrayed; they do not have ‘viewpoints’ in a (democratic) process of representation of both sides in a debate. These texts insist on the narcissism of the little ‘circle of light’ and the entropic encroachment of the gloom and the silence. This is the source of their negative sublime, their repeated exploitation of peripheral vision. Now that the biography of Farrell is published and available, we can see more easily the substratum of connections between his first three novels and the Empire trilogy. Those early novels, in their agonized search for a form, seek to come to terms with what happened to the author in life. Farrell was born into what his biographer refers to as an ‘expatriate void’.11 His mother was Irish and lived in England, his father was English, and after he had come back from India, went to live in Ireland. Farrell spent his childhood in Ireland and then was brought over to attend a prep. school at Jodrell Bank in the Cheshire Plain and then a public school, Rossall, just outside Liverpool.12 He was a handsome, barrel-chested centre at rugby football. Struck down by polio during his first year at Oxford, he spent six months in an iron lung and almost died. He became a skeleton. This process made him into a writer and a profoundly self-conscious individual. He began to see that the personal history he had taken for granted – that serene progress onwards and upwards – was not the one he was now doomed to endure. There was no ‘path’ to the future. He had suddenly entered a dark underworld: Both the Slade Isolation Unit and the Wingfield Morris Hospital were situated near Brasenose, and it was impossible to forget that hedonistic student life co-existed with a hellish underworld equipped with instruments of exquisite torture.


He kept a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to hand and talked of Beckett’s Malone Dies. . . .13 The tone of his early novel, The Lung (1965), is complex: it renders the bitterness and sheer boredom, the despair disguised by jokes, and the tormented narcissism of a young man faced with a kind of living death: ‘Away into the night and silence. But that was half the trouble. The night was O.K. but what of the silence? The silence against which in slow motion he was unable to avoid seeing the endlessly repeated film strip of his own, sad, sour thoughts.’14 This is an exposure of the narcissism of the subject, as well as a gallows satire on the poverty of the imagination. The knowledge of one’s own non-existence is like a dark and empty cinema that lies behind – that guarantees, so to speak – the poverty-stricken and repetitive flickerings of consciousness. Death forces that pathetic little filmstrip to go on running on a kind of loop. Farrell felt he had been robbed of his identity, and that he existed as an inauthentic witness. He started reading Beckett, Camus and Sartre. Time is contracted into space in this metaphor: biography, the history of the self, is metonymically compressed into a form like a large concentric building, as Boris, the protagonist of his third novel, A Girl In The Head (1967), explains to his friend Alessandro, who, appropriately, has already left: You know, Sandro, I sometimes feel that I’m made up of a whole series of antechambers with interconnecting doors leading by stages towards my real self. You deal with almost everyone you meet in the first antechamber, the people you know well in the second or third antechamber and so on . . . But something has gone wrong. I’ve never been able to find the person who can unlock those final doors and enter the room where I really am . . . the real me, sitting and waiting in utter silence for someone to get to know me after all these futile years of my life. . . .15 Here the personal history of the individual is a maze-like building in which the self is lost to others, and even, in a sense, to itself, sitting at its own centre. Time is collapsed into a labyrinthine space which, in this case, still bears traces of the (Victorian) fiction of maturity. Here it is confined to the futility of a personal biography, but this Kafka-esque image bears a significant relation to one of Farrell’s favourite metaphors for larger historical process – the ruined building. The ‘Mayfair’, the


decayed bungalow in The Singapore Grip, where Matthew catches his glimpse of the giant thistles as ‘skeleton players’, was the name of the hydrotherapy pool in the Slade Hospital: In Mayfair, the blue-tiled hydrotherapy pool in the private wing, he watched bleakly as the overweight female patient in front of him was winched up out of the water, seeing her as a whale about to be clubbed with a mallet and himself as a living skeleton.16 The breaking down of Farrell’s body, and the consequent destruction of his confidence, coincided with the Suez crisis, and when the severely damaged young man emerged from his hellish underworld in 1957, and was able to look around, he realized the same process was occurring at large in the history of his times: The British national shock after Suez, overflowing into letters and columns and radio discussions, affected Jim profoundly, and his own predicament emphasised the historical shift. The red on the map, commentators forecast, was going to shrink at accelerated speed, a point confirmed by Ghana’s independence and the proposal of a European Common Market, signalled by the Treaty of Rome. The abrupt downturn in British power coincided with his own personal lost ground.17 The biography makes it clear that, after this realization, Farrell collected coincidences and correspondences between his own personal biography and the collapse of empire. He was teaching English in a lycée in Toulon, for example, when the French imperial adventure in Algeria collapsed; the parallels with Ireland were not lost on him.18 The Harkness Fellowship he won to the United States in 1966–7 was the point at which he was able to convert biography into history. And the final inspiration for Troubles and the beginning of the Empire trilogy was the discovery, while he was still partly at New Haven, of the ruins of the gigantic, imperial-style Ocean View Hotel on Block Island, which had burned down the previous July.19 The Siege of Krishnapur begins with the picturesque device, culled from countless nineteenth-century novels and redolent of Dickens, Hardy and Forster, of the ‘hypothetical observer’. This European traveller, moving like a fly across the plains of Northern India, seeks relief in some distant white walls which are clearly made of bricks, ‘because bricks are


undoubtedly an essential ingredient of civilisation; one gets nowhere at all without them.’20 But this brisk assumption ironically blinds the observer’s eyes: There are no people to be seen. Everything lies perfectly still. Nearer again, of course, he will see that it is not a town at all, but one of those ancient cemeteries that are called ‘Cities of the Silent’, which one occasionally comes across in Northern India. Perhaps a rare traveller will turn off the road to rest in the shade of a mango grove which separates the white tombs from a dilapidated mosque; sometimes one may find incense left smouldering in an earthenware saucer by an unseen hand. But otherwise there is no life here; even the rustling leaves have a dead sound. (p. 10) This moment of misperception is the vehicle of a melancholy and sublime meditation on the ruins of empire: Krishnapur itself had once been the centre of civil administration for a large district. At that time European bungalows had been built there on a lavish scale, even small palaces standing in grounds of several acres to house the Company representatives of the day who lived in magnificent style and sometimes even, in imitation of the native princes, kept tigers and mistresses and heaven knows what else. But then the importance of Krishnapur declined and these magnificent officials moved elsewhere. Their splendid bungalows were left shuttered and empty; their gardens ran wild during the rainy season and for the rest of the year dried up into deserts, over whose baked earth whirlwinds of dust glided back and forth like ghostly dancers. (p. 10) The whole of this landscape is a metaphor for the stillness and silence of death, in which dust is jerked mockingly into life by random gusts of wind. These ‘ghostly dancers’ – fictions inhabiting the ‘Cities of the Silent’, metonymic heralds of the characters and plot of the novel to come – play out their insubstantial actions like a phantasmagoria against the terminal backdrop of baked earth. This landscape is full of ‘sinister’ presences. The equivalent perspective to the ‘European traveller’ is the ingénue figure of idealist, George Fleury, newly arrived at Krishnapur. George is invited to tea by Rayne, the opium agent. Since Rayne’s bungalow is some way from his own


residence, there is short-cut through a portion of jungle. Rayne has sent his bearer to accompany Fleury. On their journey they discover a shrine, which the bearer explains to Rayne is for ‘Lord Bhairava’, who is represented as ‘a small fat man with a black face and six arms’: Lord Bhairava’s eyes were white in his black face and he appeared to be looking at Fleury with malice and amusement. One of his six arms held a trident, another a sword, another flourished a severed forearm, a fourth held a bowl, while a fifth held a handful of skulls by the hair: the faces of the skulls wore thin moustaches and expressions of surprise. The sixth hand, empty, held up its three middle fingers. Peering closer, Fleury saw that people had left coins and food in the bowl he was holding and more food had been smeared around his chuckling lips, which were also daubed with crimson, as if with blood. Fleury turned away quickly, chilled by this unexpected encounter and anxious to leave this sinister garden without delay. (pp. 54–5) There is a trail of Gothic motifs which lead to this ironically presented confrontation with the Other. The ‘worm-pocked skeleton’ of the flagpole is an obvious memento mori, a reminder to the reader that all of this scene – the presence of the Europeans in India, including that of the character, Fleury himself – is already dead, a fragile imaginative reconstruction. The geraniums have turned (through heat and neglect, but this is not explained) into a ‘glaring, nightmarish growth’. Fleury’s uncanny encounter with the animated watcher, the statue of Lord Bhairava, is grotesque and comic in tone, as well as disturbing – it is done indirectly through Fleury’s ignorance, and his narcissistic projection of alarm, as much as through an articulated reading of the signs. The exact reading of those signs is left to the reader, who can easily go as far as seeing that Fleury’s vampiric or cannibalistic fantasy – it is not blood, but betel juice – is wrong; and yet is torn between regarding the Lord Bhairava as a spiritual presence in an exalted state of indifference to Europeans, and the suspicion that the local population are making a gesture of reclamation, and even asking this aspect of Siva to bring destruction to the British. The result disturbs; it is an ominous collusion between reader and text, whose absurdity does not diminish, but increases, its Gothic impact as a memento mori for a whole culture.21 The self-conscious anachronism of the text – there are many points at which we move in and out of the nineteenth century – is tied to repeated acts of morbid animation:


He thought again of those hundred and fifty million people living in cruel poverty in India alone . . .Would Science and Political Economy ever be powerful enough to give them a life of ease and respectability? He no longer believed that they would. If they did, it would not be in his own century, but in some future era. This notion of the superiority of the nineteenth century which he had just been enjoying had depended on beliefs he no longer held, but which had just now been itching, like amputated limbs which he could feel although they no longer existed. (p. 200) The suddenness of the ‘amputation’ leaves the past moment still apparently twitching in the present. The reader is placed in an interesting position here, imagining the loss of Victorian optimism – the belief in progress – as a ‘ghostly’ physiological illusion, a metaphor for a kind of historical uncanny (Fleury suddenly is made, momentarily, in a slip of historical paradigm, to sense his own ‘modernity’) that is derived from the idea of a gap in reality caused by a delusion of the senses. The whole culture of the Victorians is reduced to technology, its emblem of progress, in the shape of the contents of the Great Exhibition, and then inverted into a barbaric, but grotesquely domestic engine of slaughter. The technique is deliberately static. The comic set piece allows us to glimpse the universe of death, the silence and stillness which has been pressing through all along, amongst a shower of teaspoons: He peered over the parapet. Below nothing was moving, but there appeared to be a carpet of dead bodies. But then he realized that many of these bodies were indeed moving, but not very much. A sepoy here was trying to remove a silver fork from one of his lungs, another had received a piece of lightning conductor in his kidneys. A sepoy with a green turban had had his spine shattered by The Spirit of Science; others had been struck down by teaspoons, by fish-knives, by marbles; an unfortunate subadar had been plucked from this world by the silver sugar-tongs embedded in his brain. A heart-breaking wail now rose from those who had not been killed outright. (p. 289) This is mock-heroic satire, a curiously miniaturized picture of slaughter; technically, it is a list, which works by repetition and rhetorical varia-


tion. Again it expands a single moment, miming the adjustment of perception – the sheer amazement and then the reading of the signs – after the event. Tonally, there is an interesting contrast between the resolutely cheerful ‘plucked from this world’, and the ‘heart-breaking wail’ (whose heart is ready to break: the Collector’s? the reader’s?) of the wounded, which injects an awful pathos into the grotesquerie. At the end of the siege, when the remaining Europeans are fighting hand-to-hand and retreating from room to room of the old Residency, the Collector finds himself jammed in one of the doorways, like a tubetrain passenger, with a crowd of corpses, ‘a few inches from his nose the face of a dead sepoy grinned at him with sparkling teeth . . . so close that he could smell the perfume of patchouli on the corpse’s moustache’ (p. 295). Tactically, he needs to stay there and not retreat too quickly. One can’t get closer than this to the malice of events. A page later, in an absurdly embarassing comic moment, the whole action is repeated and the mordant joke is reanimated: Again there was a sharp skirmish at the door. Soon the bodies began to pile up here, too; and yet again the Collector and his men had to put their shoulders to the carnal barricade to prevent it from being ejected into the hall; and yet again, as if in a dream, the Collector found his face an inch from that of an amused sepoy and thought: ‘It surely can’t be the same man!’ for from this corpse’s moustache there was also a scent of patchouli. But the Collector had no time to worry about the locomotion of corpses. . . . (p. 296) The macabre nature of these set-piece jokes is purely Gothic and impurely farcical: all corpses look alike, and they are all equally amused at one’s efforts in life. It is perfectly possible to confuse the identity of one with another, no matter who they are. In this respect, for the Collector, they are just like sepoys, all of whom (confusingly, for him) seem to wear patchouli oil. The end of the novel is a case of peripheral vision. When the siege is finally lifted, the relievers and the survivors stare at one another across the parapet, unable to believe their eyes. The latter stare at Lieutenant Stapleton ‘as you might stare at orange rats trying to get into bed with you’ (p. 308); while the coarsely ambitious commanding officer of the relief force, the Lieutenant’s uncle, General Sinclair, perfectly blind to any form of uncanny resemblance, thinks he has ‘never seen


Englishmen get themselves into such a state before; they looked more like untouchables’ (p. 309). What I have been arguing above is a simple case for the links between Farrell’s writing and a Gothic inflection of the sublime. This Danse Macabre is strikingly present in the opening scene of his last, unfinished novel, The Hill Station (1981), in which the egregious Mr Lowrie scans the people getting off the train at Kalka, on their way up to Simla: ‘Poor ghosts! They gathered here under Mr Lowrie’s sparkling eye, as on the bank of a dark river, waiting to be ferried to the other side. With practice Mr Lowrie had grown skilful at telling which of them would not return’ (p. 24). Lowrie is the ferryman, and Simla the Elysian Fields to which they hope (in vain) to ascend. Lowrie seeks instead to divert them into the cemetery. The figurative pattern, stopping just short of allegory, is a continuous one: its moments of peripheral vision link, quite self-consciously, Farrell’s comic tone to his theme of entropic decline; the insubstantiality of the body and illusory, death-driven nature of imperial culture. My point is quite compatible with Ehrendorf’s famous ‘Second Law’ in The Singapore Grip: ‘Things are slightly worse at any given moment than at any preceding moment’(p. 295); but it suggests that this formula describes, not just the march of history, but the march of oblivion too.

Notes 1. J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip (Fontana: London, 1979), p. 112. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will be given in the text in parentheses. 2. See Lavinia Greacen, J.G. Farrell: the Making of a Writer (Bloomsbury: London, 1999), p. 353. The reviewer was Timothy Mo, in the New Statesman. For the picture of Farrell’s growing maturity and its link to an increase in realism, see John Spurling’s formulation: ‘Farrell’s new ability to inhabit more and more of his characters . . . was accompanied by a new skill in matching the inner and outer actions of the story. There is no outer world in The Lung or A Girl in the Head, only flashbacks to Sands’s and Boris’s pasts. In Troubles the outer world is either deliberately shadowy or conveyed rather too crudely by the bald insertion of paragraphs from contemporary newspapers. In Krishnapur and Singapore the outer world and Farrell’s fictional world coalesce. In Singapore especially – a triumph of the imagination in which there is a fictional assimilation of massive amounts of documentary material – one feels that for the first time Farrell has arrived exactly where he wants to be. Now he is telling not just a story, but history itself, from inside and outside.’ See John Spurling, ‘As Does The Bishop’, in J.G. Farrell, The Hill Station, ed. J. Spurling (London: Fontana, 1982), p. 167. All subsequent references to The


3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Hill Station are taken from this edition. Page numbers will appear in parentheses in the text. R.G. Binns, J.G. Farrell (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 60. For the presence of Lukács in the argument about the genre, see pp. 14–15. See W.J. McCormack’s account of Bowen, in Dissolute Characters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); J. Moynahan, The Anglo-Irish Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and, for the historical connection between the Anglo-Irish and the occult, see Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), Chapter 11, ‘Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’. Cf. the following: ‘Cleve either felt or fancied, seeing, as the Italians say, with the tail of his eye, that she was now, for a moment, looking at him, believing herself unseen’: J.S. Le Fanu, The Tenants of Malory, 2nd edn (London: Bentley, 1868), p. 50. This example preserves the young man’s narcissism, as he sees a girl in a chapel who looks uncannily like Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci. M.R. James also uses this phrase (without reference to the Italians) to describe an uncanny moment in which the subject is being watched: ‘It began when I was first prospecting, and put me off again and again. There was always somebody – a man – standing by one of the firs. This was in daylight, you know. He was never in front of me. I always saw him with the tail of my eye on the left or the right, and he was never there when I looked straight for him. . . .’ (‘A Warning to the Curious’, Collected Ghost Stories (Ware: Wordsworth, 1992), p. 313. For a discussion of misperception in Ann Radcliffe, see Victor Sage, ‘The Epistemology of Error: Reading and Isolation in The Mysteries of Udolpho’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y 6 (October 1996), 107–13. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. David Daiches (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 47. J.G. Farrell, Troubles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 94. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will be given in the text in parentheses. Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 276. Binns, J.G. Farrell, p. 52. Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 104. The prep. school’s rambling buildings housed a reputed ghost, nicknamed ‘Count Jodrell’ by the boys. See Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 30. Ibid., p. 107. J.G. Farrell, The Lung (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 43. J.G. Farrell, A Girl in the Head (London: Cape, 1967), p. 207. Greacen, J.G. Farrell, p. 92. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 145. ‘In its heyday, equipped with a sumptuous ballroom and the world’s longest bar boasting 101 stools, the Ocean View had been known as the Queen of the Atlantic Coast. The loyal clientele had included President Ulysses S. Grant and the Vanderbilts; and with so many judges, company presidents, and politicians in summer residence, a telegraphic link to the New York Stock Exchange had been installed. The hotel had even held a session of the US

190 Empire and the Gothic supreme Court’: ibid., p. 224. The ruins of this hotel, which formed a sudden vision of the Majestic, exhilarated him. 20. J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur ([1973], London: Orion, n.d.), pp. 9–10. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page references will be given in parentheses in the text. 21. Cf. the following: ‘The traditions of the Bhairava Tantras are Kapalika, the basic form of their ascetic observance being that of the skull . . . Worshipped within an enclosure of cremation grounds they themselves wear the bone ornaments and brandish the skull-staff of the Kapalika tradition . . . Though the Svacchandatantra, which is the authority for this cult, teaches the worship of certain secondary forms of Svacchandabhairava such as Kotaraksa (‘the Hollow-Eyed’) and Vyadhibhaksa (‘the Devourer of Diseases’), which being visualised as terrifying, gross-bodied and black, are close to the standard Bhairavas of the Kapalika tradition, Svacchandabhairava himself, the deity of daily worship, has milder elements that make him transitional in type between the calm Sadasiva of the Saiva Siddhanta and the gods of the Kapalika mainstream. Stewart Sutherland, Leslie Houlden, Peter Clarke, and Friedhelm Hardy, eds, The World’s Religions (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 670–1. The problem for the reader is: is this Lord Bhairava of the ‘standard’, or ‘transitional’ type? To answer this question, it would seem we have to put ourselves outside the symbolism of the European ‘Gothic’. And yet, if it is of the ‘standard’ Kapalika type, then the ‘skull beneath the skin’ is essential to it and it is a kind of Tantric Danse Macabre. If it is a ‘transitional’ type, then it is more likely to be an emblem of calmness and perhaps indifference to mortality, and is perhaps less ominous in itself. One could even regard both types as purely ‘homeopathic’, but there is an element of homeopathy, of course, in the European memento mori tradition. But the question still arises: has the statue been placed there as the cultural equivalent of a ‘reversion to nature’ in the flagpole and the geraniums? And the answer seems to be yes, and Fleury’s ingénue alarm is vindicated at another level. There is a passage in Farrell’s ‘Indian Diary’, which shows that he gave to Fleury what had been his own misperception in this case: ‘I see things without understanding them. It took me ages to realize that what appeared to be splashes of blood all over the pavements of Bombay was merely people spitting betel juice’ (The Hill Station, p. 211). He records seeing a ‘Bhairava erect in metal’(p. 245) in the National Museum of Calcutta. He frequently castigates himself in the diary for not noticing, or for not seeing, things. For example, in Agra: ‘While waiting for the tourists to arrive on the Taj Express from Delhi so that the bus would fill up and go, I sat in a little park. On a lawn a few feet away a figure wrapped in some canvas was lying, one bare brown foot protruded. It was early morning. He had evidently slept there (after dark in winter it must be cold). What I suddenly realized was that I hadn’t noticed him. I’d seen him, been vaguely aware of the fact that there was someone there, and discarded the matter as not sufficiently interesting to think about consciously’ (p. 215). The unexpected presence of the statue in this scene may derive from a mysterious incident at Lucknow. Farrell comments on a bagpipe band he watches at the Carlton Hotel, and his mind goes back to an earlier incident: ‘It resembled the Sunday afternoon affair I saw in Jaipur when I glimpsed the lady with four arms standing in the shrub-

J.G. Farrell’s Imperial Gothic 191 bery. Thinking of that incident, why didn’t I stop and look more closely?’ (p. 228). It is interesting to see how these moments of mis- or underperception, which are a mixture of writerly self-castigation for wasting an opportunity to observe, and a feeling that it is his moral and political duty to be sharply aware of poverty, despite its ubiquitousness, are handed on to Fleury, and become ‘sinister’ in this episode in the novel, whereas in the diary they are not so.

11 Arundhati Roy and the House of History David Punter

Perhaps the most significant and enduring problem in postcolonial criticism is that the use of the term ‘postcolonial’ has an inevitably distorting effect. This is in one sense inevitable in that the postcolonial world itself is distorted; not, of course, in the sense of having been twisted away from some recognizable master-trajectory or severed from some putative condition of origin, but in deeper senses to do with obfuscations of desire, impossible hybridities, the haunting ineradicability of paths not taken.1 But it is also inevitable in the sense that the very use of the ‘postcolonial’ label immediately places each text, each discourse, each representation under a specific sign. That sign is at the same time ludicrously over-specific and fatally overgeneral. The over-specificity lies in the invalid claim that any text can be viewed within such a totalizing frame; the writings of Salman Rushdie, Amos Tutuola, Derek Walcott are characterized by a set of obliquities, an uncontainable excess that automatically propels them beyond the reach of any such label. The over-generalization lies in the dismissal of difference, the smoothing over of the myriad different fragments of history and geography that ‘construct’ the ‘postcolonial world’; or, we might better say, that construct the world as postcolonial. The term ‘Gothic’, of course, suffers from – and is constructed by – its own parallel problems. It would be unnecessary – and indeed impossible – here to rehearse the vicissitudes of the notion of Gothic through history; suffice it to say, however, that there are significant questions that need to be addressed in any attempt to use the term in a postcolonial context, precisely because its referents are to a particular, complex, refracted version of European history.2 Even, however, as one says this, it becomes immediately obvious with what alarming frequency the Gothic has called into being its own Other; its very 192

Arundhati Roy and the House of History 193

‘European-ness’, even its ‘euromanticism’, its embroilment in shifting boundaries, migratory flights, feudal points of order, strongholds of reason falling in a relentless series to the approach of the barbarians. It is precisely this that produced the American Gothic tradition from Brockden Brown on; just as more recently it has answered, or been answered by, a call from within the postcolonial, whether one thinks of the crazed and labyrinthine intricacies of Rushdie’s architectures or of the introspective and claustrophobic worlds of Margaret Atwood.3 One way of approaching the interfaces of these issues would be by beginning from the supposition that Gothic represents a specific view of history. One might refer to this view as an ‘expressionistic’ one, a view that abandons minutiae and details in favour of the grand gesture, the melodrama of rise and fall, a view in which terror and pity are the moving forces; but it would also be a more troubling view, for it would have also to deal with the impossibility of escape from history, with the recurrent sense in Gothic fiction that the past can never be left behind, that it will reappear and exact a necessary price. We might refer to this, then, as history written according to a certain logic: a logic of the phantom, the revenant, a logic of haunting, and it is here that the connection with the postcolonial comes most clearly into view. The very structure of the term ‘postcolonial’ itself, its apparent insistence on a time ‘after’, on an ‘aftermath’, exposes itself precisely to the threat of return, falls under the sign of repetition. One of the most obvious texts here would be Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), with its agonizing insistence on the implacability of trauma, its refusal to review the past as something that is over and done with. The past, on this view of history, is right in our midst: hence also, of course, contemporary debates around cultural and racial blame and apology, hence the nature of recriminations and restitutions, hence the insistence on the memorial, the monument to suffering, even though the only form such a monument can or should take is the form of a ruin. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) grounds itself, I would claim, on some such view of history, and this is emblematized, as in classic Gothic fiction, in the form of the house; but here there are three houses, complexly intertwined with each other, three loci which are inseparable one from another and which at the same time bind together the disparate threads of history and chronology. The first of these is the house in Ayemenem where the remains of the Kochamma family, the shattered family at the heart of the narrative, live; or have lived, at various stages of the past and in various conditions of dissolution and decay. It would be difficult to miss the Gothic resonance: ‘Filth had laid


siege to the Ayemenem house like a medieval army advancing on an enemy castle. It clotted every crevice and clung to the windowpanes. Midges whizzed in teapots. Dead insects lay in empty vases.’4 There is, however, a second house, ‘on the other side of the river’ (p. 52). Just as the ‘Ayemenem house’ had once been a ‘grand old house’ (p. 165), so this second house, now empty, owns to a complex past history. It is the house which used to belong to the ‘Black Sahib’, the ‘Englishman who had “gone native” ’ and who had ‘shot himself through the head ten years ago when his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school’ (p. 52). Still tied up in litigation between the white man’s secretary and his cook, the house lies empty, across the river from the Ayemenem house; it will, however, be the scene of the novel’s terrible denouement. But these two houses are haunted by a third house, the metaphorical house (although Estha and Rahel, the twins at the centre of the narrative, interpret it literally) described by their uncle Chacko: He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside. ‘To understand history’, Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells . . . But we can’t go in’, Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out’. (pp. 52–3) He then goes on to explain how this has come to be, how it is that India has been excluded from the historical process, turned into a ghost on the very terrain of its own land.5 From the very beginning, then, The God of Small Things is a narrative of the impossible. It seeks to tell a story while reminding us that the story cannot be told: hence the fragmentary nature of the narrative, its violent temporal shifts and lapses, hence the sense that it is always haunted by other stories that have been more or less forcibly suppressed. Within this environment of radical homelessness it is possible to sense the decay and collapse of all three of these houses: none are capable of providing shelter, any more than the Gothic castle, despite the sternness of its walls, the remoteness of its location, can provide succour or distinguish containment from incarceration. The Black Sahib, we are told, chose Ayemenem – or perhaps it chose him – as ‘his private Heart of Darkness’ (p. 52), and throughout the text this epithet is transferred to the house which was his but which has become, by the time of the present of the novel and after the time of


disaster, a hotel. What, we might ask, would be the most appropriate name for such a hotel, a place constructed from death, violence and imperial exploitation? It is, obviously, the Hotel Heritage, which here effortlessly and phantomatically occupies the same space as the heart of darkness; ‘heritage’, indeed, becomes the ‘heart of darkness’, the very means of obscuring history from sight, the false and crazy monstrosity erected on the site of the colonial, the edifice of denial. Kari Saipu, the Black Sahib, is now of course a ghost. Furthermore, he is a dead ghost: we know that because his ghost has been killed, ‘pinned . . . to the trunk of a rubber tree, where . . . it still remained. A sickled smell, that bled clear, amber blood, and begged for cigars’ (p. 199). If only it were possible to deal with history so simply, so conclusively, to lay the joint ghost of empire and paedophilia with a single stroke, and thereby to allow for a coming to independence, a growth towards freedom, unimpeded by the spectres of the past. But the spectres return and multiply. There are, for example, the ghosts of lost objects, like those that populate the room of the boy-twin Estha, whose life and memory have been ruined by trauma: The terrible ghosts of impossible-to-forget toys clustered on the blades of the ceiling fan. A catapult. A Qantas’ koala (from Miss Mitten) with loosened button eyes. An inflatable goose (that had been burst with a policeman’s cigarette). Two ballpoint pens with silent streetscapes and red London buses that floated up and down in them. (p. 91) These are ghosts that were all present as silent witnesses to the terrible denouement of the novel, the police attack on the Untouchable, Velutha, whose punishment for an affair with the twins’ mother Ammu constitutes the text’s final tragedy; the toys represent again the impossibility of a complete telling of history and therefore signify a different kind of exclusion from the history house. There is the exclusion that is a direct consequence of imperial rule; there is the further exclusion, nuanced always by discursive power, that is a function of representation itself, the impossibility of gathering together the evidence on which any ‘true’ account might be based. In the face of these exclusions, the texture of the narrative becomes riddled and shot through with secrets: this room, for example, ‘had kept its secrets. It gave nothing away’ (p. 91). Just so Velutha himself becomes a ghost, but in at least a redoubled way. Ghosted in his lifetime by the


customary invisibility that is the inevitable corollary to the status of the ‘untouchable’, he is ghosted again in representational terms by those who remain unaware of the part he has played in the story – by Chacko’s English ex-wife Margaret, for example: Strangely, the person that Margaret Kochamma never thought about was Velutha. Of him she had no memory at all. Not even what he looked like. Perhaps this was because she never really knew him, nor ever heard what happened to him. . . . He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors. (pp. 264–5) Like any Gothic text, then, The God of Small Things attempts to tell an impossible tale, to sew together a thing of shreds and fragments, a monstrous creation that is also vampiric in that it can find no reflection of itself. Opposed to this in the text – but therefore also contained within it, subverted by the radical inadequacy of story – is the dance of Kathakali, the traditional re-enactment of legend and myth, and here secrets recur in a different guise: It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. (p. 229) The familiar, then, as opposed to the unfamiliarity of the three houses, their symbolization of death, ruin, decay; a house to live in as opposed to a house to die in, a house from which the monsters of empire, of caste, of touch and the loss of touch have been banished, a fiction of completeness and of an unbroken chain of history which will bind together rather than act as a dragging weight – such as might be carried by, for example, a tethered ghost. Where, then, do these monsters originate, by what forces and progenitors is it possible to be exiled from one’s own history? One such origin lies in Pappachi, the patriarch of the Kochamma family, who ‘had been an Imperial Entomologist’ (p. 48). In his subordination to imper-


ial norms (‘Until the day he died, even in the stifling Ayemenem heat, every single day, Pappachi wore a well-pressed three-piece suit and his gold pocket watch’, p. 49) and in the disappointment that has accompanied and overshadowed his career (his one discovery, a rare moth, being named after somebody else), Pappachi prefigures the doom of his entire family, torn between anglophilia and caste bigotry. His secret, his frustration, his desire; his wife-beating; Pappachi is an exile in his own house, visiting his inner violence down the chain as the policemen who beat Velutha express their detestation of contamination by an Untouchable by breaking his bones. But in another sense, monsters have no origins; or rather, they are necessarily if phantasmagorically extruded from the very material of the social structure. When Velutha’s own father, Vellya Paapen, tells the secret that will lead to his son’s destruction and to a wider chaos, in his view it is Velutha who is the monster, a monster for having ‘spawned’, from whom he asks ‘God’s forgiveness’: ‘he offered to kill his son with his own bare hands. To destroy what he had created’ (p. 78). But in truth the monstrosity, the generation of monsters, is beyond control; whether within the history house or outside it, a general process of monstrosity is at work, sometimes in secret, sometimes in full view, sometimes haunting the margins of the text, the borderlands between Ayemenem and the outside world. Even Chacko, the genial, ineffectual Chacko, who has been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and who has ‘returned’ rootless, homeless, placeless, his marriage wrecked, his location in history shattered, and who has, at least, stopped his father from beating his mother (albeit at the cost of a lifelong silence between father and son), even Chacko, in the aftermath of the discovery of his sister Ammu’s affair with Velutha, succumbs. He it is who orders Ammu, with her daughter, the girl-twin Rahel, to leave Ayemenem. Pack your things and leave, Chacko had said. Stepping over a broken door. A handle in his hand. And Ammu, though her hands were trembling, hadn’t looked up from her unnecessary hemming. A tin of ribbons lay open on her lap. But Rahel had. Looked up. And seen that Chacko had disappeared and left a monster in his place. (p. 302) The troubling, then, of the line, the ‘shadow-line’,6 between the human and the monstrous becomes one of the (monstrous) subtexts


of The God of Small Things; there are no exceptions, no exemptions from this inexorable logic. Just as in Frankenstein we might say that the monstrousness of the scientist’s ambitions achieve little more than the construction of a massive projection, a new housing for his own social alienation, so here a different kind of attempt at domination ripples through the social fabric, distorting everything with which it comes into contact. The policemen who attack Velutha may be acting out an ancient caste vengeance; but at the same time, and inextricably, they are wearing the uniforms of the colonial masters. The twins, Estha and Rahel, figure in the text as the consequences of this process of continuous damage. Estha is forced to betray Velutha, and is thus in some sense responsible for the violence; Rahel feels in her own way responsible for the other great tragedy of the text, the drowning of Sophie Mol, Chacko and Margaret’s daughter. For Estha, the consequence is a lifetime of silence; for Rahel, an utter inner emptiness that reduces her to the condition of an automaton. But as always in the text, the origins of trauma are over-determined. Estha, for example, has an encounter with a soft-drink salesman who forces him into a sexual act, an act that makes him physically sick. But the reason why it is Estha who is subjected to this ordeal appears inseparable from his position as the son of an anglophile family; it is the English songs he is singing that first catch the salesman’s attention, the oddities of his English pronunciation that permit a disastrous prolongation of their conversation. The entire novel, then, can be seen as a painful exploration of the hidden roots of trauma, but the results of this exploration can never be submitted to a single interpretation. What can be said is that they are inextricably involved with the nature of taboo, and that this taboo is symbolized in Sophie Mol, child of an Indian father and a white mother; Sophie Mol, of whom Rahel poignantly says, ‘If she gets dirty she’ll die’ (p. 210). It could indeed be said that this is precisely what happens: by ‘returning’ (a crucial term applied to almost all of the main characters in the text at one point or another) she submits herself to the preordained contamination of Ayemenem, its history and its secrets, but against these she has no means of inoculation. She was taller than Estha. And bigger. Her eyes were bluegreyblue. Her pale skin was the colour of beach sand. But her hatted hair was beautiful, deep red-brown. And yes (oh yes!) she had Pappachi’s nose


waiting inside hers. An Imperial Entomologist’s nose-within-a-nose. A moth-lover’s nose. She carried her Made-in-England go-go bag that she loved. (p. 143) In her very being, Sophie Mol crosses boundaries, as, in a different way, does Velutha, and for them there can therefore be no mercy. Their fates are not in the hands of individuals; rather, they fall victim, like the Gothic heroine, to a war-machine, an apparatus of terror that has no regard for individual subjectivity, that grinds on regardless. Perhaps the most troubling scene in the text is the one where, after years of enforced separation, Estha and Rahel meet again (again they ‘return’, again they are revenants) and, it would appear, silently make love. The intolerable grief of this scene derives not only from the traumatic events of the past, nor from our knowledge that there is no remedy for such events; it derives from the hopeless plangency of such an attempt to make whole again that which has been brutally severed, whether it is the twins themselves, torn apart in the wake of the tragic events of Ayemenem, or the fragments of story dispersed to the four winds, or the fate of an entire culture cut off from self-knowledge by the violent imposition of a different set of rules. The figuration of the fantasy of wholeness as incest underscores the impossibility of moving forward into free, independent relationships while the entire apparatus of caste and empire binds and forbids at every move. In the end the events of Ayemenem – the death of Sophie Mol; the beating of Velutha; the banishing of Ammu for her relationship with Velutha; the forced separation of the twins, who are seen as responsible for Sophie Mol’s death – become too great, too fearful to be referred to in detail any more; history draws a shroud down over them, and they are known only as ‘the Terror’. The establishment of the Heritage Hotel suggests a way of encountering and trying to deal with this Terror (by converting the raw meat and blood of history into something cooked and sanitized): The back verandah of the History House (where a posse of Touchable policemen converged, where an inflatable goose was burst) had been enclosed and converted into the airy hotel kitchen. Nothing worse than kebabs and caramel custard happened there now. The Terror was past. Overcome by the smell of food. Silenced by the humming of cooks. The cheerful chop-chop-chopping of ginger and garlic. The


disembowelling of lesser mammals – pigs, goats. The dicing of meat. The scaling of fish. (p. 127) But the Terror, of course, has crept, as it does in the Gothic, into the very language itself. Chopping, disembowelling: in the context of the past events which are interlaced with this vision of a ‘cured’ present, these words shift and change, they create memories, they reminisce, they do not cover over the past but bestow on it a fateful persistence, like the words that Estha, trapped in his traumatized silence, can no longer pronounce. When asked whether he had been kidnapped by Velutha, it was he who, under the severest of pressures from his relatives, said ‘Yes’; and since he uttered that one lie, a lie that permitted the attack on Velutha to go unpunished, no other words have passed his lips. The Terror, then, seen from one aspect is a terror of being sealed in; of being locked into a version of history that one knows to be a lie, of being unable to utter – or perhaps even remember – the words that might set it right. Chacko has sought to escape this fate through words: he is liable to come up with classical English quotations at the least provocation. But these words are impotent; they do not have the power to change anything, least of all Chacko’s own fate as a variously displaced person. His words, we might say, are uttered only outside the closed windows of the History House; therefore they have no purchase on the charmed circle within, they have no reverberation, no echo. But the Terror is not only that which lies in the withholding of words, that which stuns into a lifelong silence; it is also that which inexorably propels words out, words that will result in violence and tragedy. The words, for example, of Velutha’s father, Vellya Paapen: Then the Terror took hold of him and shook the words out of him. He told Mammachi what he had seen. The story of the little boat that crossed the river night after night, and who was in it. The story of a man and woman, standing together in the moonlight. Skin to skin. (p. 255) Silence is no remedy, but neither is the telling of a story. ‘The Terror’ here combines two associations. On the one hand, it stands for Vellya Paapen’s own terror at having witnessed an association between an


Untouchable – his own son – and Ammu, a Touchable; on the other, it stands for the inexorable power of story itself, as though what moves Vellya Paapen to words is not some subjective desire or wish but rather an objective necessity that ensures that what must be told is told. Thus the terror in some sense becomes narrative itself, implicated in an impossible knot of impotence and power; in a very literal way, here Vellya Paapen’s words are not his own, just as Estha will spend the rest of his life in an attempt to demonstrate that the word ‘Yes’ was not his, that he would prefer to be incapable of any utterance at all than to own to the consequences of the one word he spoke. At this point, perhaps it is necessary to think again about the Gothic. In The God of Small Things, we can readily find a repertoire of ghosts, monsters and haunted houses; and we can find these linked at many points – although never exclusively – with issues to do with the aftermath of imperial rule. But this is never a matter of simple ascription. It is, rather, a question of reinscription, or of superinscription: a matter of codes of practice, of behaviour, of representation, being read differently. The Terror in which we find ourselves in The God of Small Things is a terror of redoubled incomprehension; the terror of being inside a situation where the very means for getting our bearings have been whittled away, where they have been partly supplanted by the superimposition of an uncompleted project. Yet this goes through a further turn of the circle: for what is revealed in this baleful light is the incompleteness of all narrative, the dark underside of the (incestuous?) pretence of wholeness that governs conventional narrative expectation. Gothic proliferates, it constantly exceeds the boundaries allotted to it; just so, the fate of the postcolonial is constantly to resist attempts at definition, at categorization. Gothic operates, as various critics have pointed out, beyond the law7 – or at least it gestures towards the possibility of such operation; in the realm of the postcolonial – whether this be a geographical construct, a historical moment or a mode of reading and interpretation – there are also doubts about the law, and about the pretensions to stability which it claims to incorporate.8 Thus the discourse about taboo in The God of Small Things moves towards a discourse of the law, and in particular of what Roy refers to as the ‘Love Laws’; and it does so particularly in the ambiguous scene in which – perhaps – Estha and Rahel’s tragic love for each other is consummated: There is very little that anyone could say to clarify what happened next . . . Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and


Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-coloured shoulder had a semi-circle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much. (p. 328) That, the beast-men in The Island of Doctor Moreau chant, is the law.9 They chant it because they have been forced to; because it is, they have been told, what separates them from the animal, from all that lies on the ‘other side’. But what if the law has a very different function from that? What if the law exists – as an anthropological definition would suggest – to prevent a certain haunting, to keep the ghosts of forest, desert, jungle where they ‘belong’? What if it exists to keep them from emerging and reminding us of all we have lost; from reminding us of the god of loss – who, according to the text, is also the ‘god of small things’, the god who respects no master-narratives but is present only in the most intimate of exchanges, the most loving moments in a lover’s discourse? Contravention of the law is unforgivable. For Margaret, marrying an Indian, becoming the mother of Sophie Mol, there is not one death to be endured but two: first the death of her second husband – to recover from which she has brought Sophie Mol to Ayemenem in the first place – and then Sophie Mol’s own death. An uncanny repetition plays itself out down the line, and rouses the voices of the ghosts: ‘When Margaret Kochamma saw her little daughter’s body, shock swelled in her like phantom applause in an empty auditorium’ (p. 263). How Margaret deals with these deaths, we do not know: but we do know how Estha and Rahel deal with their part, the complex layers of denial that come to cover over and usurp their personalities – a denial that begins as early as Sophie Mol’s funeral: When they lowered Sophie Mol’s coffin into the ground in the little cemetery behind the church, Rahel knew that she still wasn’t dead. She heard (on Sophie Mol’s behalf), the softsounds of the red mud and the hardsounds of the orange laterite that spoiled the shining coffin polish. She heard the dull thudding through the polished coffin wood, through the satin coffin lining. . . . Inside the earth


Sophie Mol screamed, and shredded satin with her teeth. But you can’t hear screams through earth and stone. Sophie Mol died because she couldn’t breathe. (p. 7) It is necessary, then, to build a story, a different story, what I have referred to elsewhere as a ‘text instead’;10 in this case the necessity derives from the terror. There must be another story in terms of which our own agency, Rahel’s agency, can be denied, a story that will fix events in a trajectory of destiny for which we need never feel responsible. It is also, perhaps, necessary to build a story – as one might, for example, build a house – in which death can have a place, in order to welcome death in from the shadows, to reduce its terror. Velutha has a brother, Kuttappen, a ‘good, safe Paravan’ – Untouchable – who ‘could neither read nor write’ (p. 207). Kuttappen has been injured long ago and is paralysed from the chest downwards. After his mother dies, he was moved into her corner, the corner that Kuttappen imagined was the corner of his home that Death had reserved to administer her deathly affairs. One corner for cooking, one for clothes, one for bedding rolls, one for dying in. He wondered how long this would take, and what people who had more than four corners in their houses did with the rest of their corners. Did it give them a choice of corners to die in? (pp. 206–7) But for Kuttappen, as for the other characters, this attempt to domesticate death is not enough. As he lies on his back, year in, year out, watching ‘his youth saunter past without stopping to say hello’ (p. 206), he increasingly finds that ‘insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant (lighting cigarettes, refilling glasses)’ (p. 207). For Kuttappen there is no possibility of escape; the uncanny fantasy of premature burial reaches out to encompass him too: ‘on bad days the orange walls held hands and bent over him, inspecting him like malevolent doctors, slowly, deliberately, squeezing the breath out of him and making him scream’ (p. 207).11 It is at this point that we can return to the question of what these matters have to do with the postcolonial. When Estha returns to Ayemenem, years after the days of the Terror, his silence is accompanied by a further traumatic reaction: he cannot stop walking.


Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit, and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils. (p. 13) Death, then, spreads everywhere: it has no origin and no end, it inflects the landscape and provides its own alternative story, its own ‘text instead’, in which rural poverty, the caste system, traditional hygiene and international aid are all consigned to the role of bit-part players. In the face of this onslaught, words can only exercise an apparently interruption of the state of things. Chacko, as we have seen, tries to punctuate history with words: [his] room was stacked from floor to ceiling with books. He had read them all and quoted long passages from them for no apparent reason. Or at least none that anyone else could fathom. For instance, that morning, as they drove out through the gate, shouting their goodbyes to Mammachi on the verandah, Chacko suddenly said: ‘Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men’. (p. 38) The occasion is the drive to the airport to pick up Margaret and Sophie Mol when they first ‘return’ to India; the quotation, of course, is from the opening passage of The Great Gatsby, and it would obviously be possible to suppose that in fact Chacko has chosen it quite carefully.12 It certainly fits his own situation to an extent, and the lines immediately preceding it, which describe ‘an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness’ could be seen as relating at least to Chacko’s conception of his own character, even if these aspects have been long since buried in the sticky heat and dust of Ayemenem. But this would not be to the point: the point is rather that, although Chacko may have realized something about the ‘foul dust’ of Ayemenem, his awareness is itself doubly buried – buried from the capacities of others, of his own family, and buried in the sense that those inside the History House are paying no attention to his attempt to mark and alter the helpless passing of time, the slow careless seepage of Kuttappen’s youth. What would also be to the point would be to see these words as ones that also, through the permanently exilic figure of Gatsby, call


attention to the overarching postcolonial problem of the relations between language and experience – the problem, to put it in other words, of translation. What is it, we might ask, that would need to be done to Chacko’s experience to make it available to interpretations derived from Scott Fitzgerald? While in England, Chacko proves completely incapable of looking after himself; Margaret is first drawn to this helplessness and then, after their marriage, repelled by it. Returned to India, there is no space the right shape for Chacko to fit into: among other things, his words are a continuing declaration of his own inappropriateness, of the ruinous nature of his relation to his own surroundings. Rahel, similarly displaced, on a train in New York, observes a crazed fellow-passenger and decides that ‘memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones – a fleeting look, a feeling’ (p. 72). On her return to India, she returns to the river – the river where Sophie Mol drowned, the river that separates the Ayemenem house from the house of the Black Sahib, the river that comes to signify taboo and the unbridgeable divides in Indian society, the river across which Ammu and Velutha used to row to their assignations on the far bank. Now the river greets Rahel with ‘a ghastly skull’s smile, with holes where teeth had been, and a limp hand raised from a hospital bed’ (p. 124). Even what has been a potent symbol, a symbol of potency, has been drained, lost: has come under the edict of the god of small things, the god of loss. Seen from one point of view, the loss is ‘the Loss of Sophie Mol’, which ‘stepped softly around the Ayemenem House like a quiet thing in socks. It hid in books and food. In Mammachi’s violin case’ (p. 15). As time goes further on, ‘Sophie Mol became a Memory, while The Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. Like a fruit in season. Every season’ (p. 267). But the loss is also incorporated in the Untouchable body of Velutha, who is as near as the text ever gets to being identified with the god of small things. After he knows that he has been betrayed by his own father, he too goes down to the river. He stepped onto the path that led through the swamp to the History House. He left no ripples in the water. No footprints on the shore. He held his mundu spread above his head to dry. The wind lifted it like a sail. He was suddenly happy. Things will get worse, he thought


to himself. Then better. He was walking swiftly now, towards the Heart of Darkness. As lonely as a wolf. The God of Loss. The God of Small Things. (pp. 289–90) The god of small things, then, would be a god for whom no masternarratives exist; a god who exists, if at all, in the scattered shards of history, the ruins of memory; a god who promises a certain freedom, but only at a terrible price. In so far as the main characters in The God of Small Things are haunted by the traumatic events of their past, it is also true that their environment is haunted by its own ghosts: the ghosts of empire mingling inextricably, shadowily, with other spectres, all applauding the steady progress of loss, the reduction of the river to a skull, the impotence of speech, the spread of silence and emptiness. The narrative of the novel constructs itself not, then, around a linear retelling of the past but around a set of traumatized evasions and denials of that past and thus stands at a pivotal point between narrative coherence and a submission to the violent and uncanny pointlessness of fate; much, we might say, as Gothic narrative, with its diminutions of subjectivity, sublime transcendences of personality, assertions of a notion of story without adequate beginning or end, also does. If Gothic is constantly threatened by a proliferative loss of coherence, which we may read as a continuing inability to avoid returning to the scene of an ineradicable crime, then we may see The God of Small Things as inhabiting a cognate terrain, a terrain on which the phantoms of an imposed history become and remain indistinguishable from the ‘prior’ phantoms of the ‘native’. Under these circumstances, it is a text subject to multiple hauntings, an ‘aftermathic’ text where the past can only be inscribed and interpreted through the doubtful and phantomatic interweavings of the present.

Notes 1. See, for example, Homi Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial Critic’, Arena 96 (1996), 47–63. My present essay springs from previous remarks I have made about The God of Small Things in my Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 2. See, for example, Robin Sowerby, ‘The Goths in History and Pre-Gothic Gothic’ and Neil Cornwell, ‘European Gothic’, in David Punter, ed., A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 15–26, 27–38.

Arundhati Roy and the House of History 207 3. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Secker and Warburg, 1961); Donald Ringe, American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 4. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997), p. 88. Further references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text. 5. See Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul, On India: Writing History, Culture, PostColoniality (Stirling: Oxford Literary Review, 1994). 6. Cf., of course, Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), and Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line (New York: Doubleday and Page, 1924). 7. See, for example, Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); David Punter, Gothic Pathologies: the Text, the Body and the Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1998). 8. See, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, In my Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (London: Methuen, 1992). 9. H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau ([1896] London: Everyman, 1993). 10. See Punter, Gothic Pathologies, pp. 1–18. 11. See Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. XVII, p. 241 ff. 12. See F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby ([1926] London: Penguin, 1990).

12 The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie’s 1001 Gothic Nights Andrew Teverson

1001, the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities – a number beloved of poets and detested by politicians, for whom all alternative visions of the world are threats. (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children)1

Bhabha’s Gothic In the first essay in his edited collection of meditations on nationhood, Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha includes the transcript of a lecture delivered by Ernest Renan to the Sorbonne in 1882. In this lecture, written, in part, in response to the rising threat of German nationalism in the late-nineteenth century, Renan rejects the idea that nation should be based upon racial origin (and that ‘[t]he Germanic family . . . has the right to reassemble the scattered limbs of the Germanic order, even when these limbs are not asking to be joined together again’) and suggests instead, that secure and stable nations are more likely to be those that have forgotten their origins.2 ‘The essence of a nation’, argues Renan, is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth . . . every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of St Bartholomew . . . there are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.3 208

The Number of Magic Alternatives 209

These observations of Renan’s may, surprisingly, owe something to the more anarchic wisdom of Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in the same year that Renan delivered his lecture to the Sorbonne, published his discourse on knowledge, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), in which he suggests that the will towards knowledge (of all kinds) is, paradoxically, equivalent to the will towards ignorance. To know something clearly, according to Nietzsche, it becomes necessary not to know, or to suppress, all the perplexities, all the strangeness, all the conflicts, that might disrupt the claim of that article of knowledge to solidity – or in the case of Renan’s nation, solidarity. The difference between the two thinkers, is that Renan – as a politician-diplomat in an increasingly insecure Europe – recognizes the importance of maintaining the ‘lifepreserving’ fiction of national coherence whilst Nietzsche launches his assault upon the foundations of conventional knowledge to formulate the demand of a poet-philosopher and ask: to what extent can the truth bear incorporation, to what extent are we strong enough, intellectually, to assent to all (and infinite) alternative visions of the universe simultaneously.4 Homi Bhabha’s own discussion of nationhood in Nation and Narration, ‘DissemiNation’ (1990), published a century after Renan and Nietzsche’s disquisitions, revisits the idea, introduced by Renan, that the nation is a fiction forged by the ‘forgetting’ of all those elements that might threaten the coherence of the national narrative. Unlike Renan, however, Bhabha does not see the wisdom of maintaining this particular fiction of nationhood, but, in the spirit of the Nietzschean poetphilosopher, sets out to disrupt the phenomena of the nation, and in so doing create a new idea of nation based, not upon the will to exclude and forget, but upon the attempt (paradoxical and sublime) to remember everything – to leave no margin unturned. This is partly because Bhabha sees the act of exclusion (the forgetting) as a mechanism that does not occur only in the distant past of the nation, but in every moment of its present. That which must be forgotten for the sake of ideal national unity is not only a diversity of allegiance that existed in the moments or centuries before the fusion of the nation into a political formation – it is also the diversity that exists synchronically, in the ongoing performance of national identity, and which must be denied by any pedagogical and a priori view of nationhood that attempts to represent the nation as homogenous and holistic. Bhabha also resists the imperative to forget because that which is forgotten in the ‘unified’ nation is not only the ancient hatred or the unresolvable grudge but any manifestation of cultural difference (class, race or gender) that


impedes the ‘progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion’ – to be the many as one’.5 Bhabha employs a number of subversive strategies in ‘DissemiNation’ designed to resist the act of ‘repression’ implicit in the ideal of the homogenized nation. One of the most effective forms of resistance used by Bhabha depends upon the idea, developed from Freud’s analysis of repression, that that which has been repressed does not remain so, but returns in distorted and often monstrous forms to threaten the ‘unity’ of the subject. It is these moments of monstrous return (of grotesque doubling), for Bhabha, that serve to show the weaknesses and fractures in the idea of the Heim because they reveal the extent to which the cosy myth of the ‘many as one’ has been built upon a will to ignorance: a will to deny the differences that exist within the nation, and a will to secure the nation’s boundaries against that which it conceives as ‘other’. This is an idea that Bhabha illustrates by reference to Goethe’s Italian Journey and to a critical analysis of it by Mikhail Bakhtin, in which Bakhtin claims that the Italian Journey ‘represents the triumph of the Realistic component over the Romantic’. ‘Goethe’s realist narrative,’ notes Bhabha (summarizing Bakhtin), produces a national-historical time that makes visible a specifically Italian day in the details of its passing time: ‘The bells ring, the rosary is said, the maid enters the room with a lighted lamp and says: Felicissima notte! . . . If one were to force a German clockhand on them, they would be at a loss.’ For Bakhtin, it is Goethe’s vision of the microscopic, elementary, perhaps random, tolling of everyday life in Italy that reveals the profound history of its locality, the spatialisation of historical time. (p. 143) This realist vision, suggests Bhabha, serves to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression. There is, however, another non-naturalist conception of time at work in Goethe’s narrative that serves to disrupt the realist vision of time: ‘[t]here is’, notes Bhabha, ‘always the distracting presence of another temporality that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present . . . the ghostly (Gespenstermässiges), the terrifying (Unerfreuliches) and the unaccountable (Unzuberechnendes)’ (p. 143). This doubleness of time must be ‘continually surmounted by the structuring process of the visualisation of [national] time’ (p. 143) if the realist vision of the nation is to be sustained, but the act of surmounting, Bhabha argues, will always be


imperfect. The lingering ‘apprehension of the “double and split” time of national representation’ (p. 144) will have already opened up a ‘liminal uncertain state of cultural belief’ that ‘leads us to question the homogenous and horizontal view associated with the nation’s imagined community’ (pp. 143–4). The Gothic register employed by Bhabha here is no accident. The Gothic, because it originates as a literary discourse that challenges Enlightenment ideals of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘unitary’ (whether in terms of self, body or book), is already poised to threaten the ‘unitary’ vision of nationhood which Bhabha associates with Enlightenment thinking. This idealized vision of the nation, as Bhabha presents it, aspires to the condition of beauty: to be one made out of many, a manifold transformed into a rationally ordered whole. The Gothic irruption, as a mechanism of the sublime, reminds us that representation is always under threat from excess, and that any representation which aspires to the condition of wholeness must be harbouring ghosts that, should they be revealed, would confound that representation’s dreams of totality. The ghosts and grotesques of Bhabha’s theory, in this capacity, become part of an oppositional army, deployed to reveal the lacunae and the ambivalences in the realistic conception of the nation, and so indicate the points of weakness from which that conception of nation can be prised apart. This, however, is only half the story – for whilst Bhabha is indisputably employing the Gothic in this oppositional, and therefore fundamentally reactive, role it is also apparent that he wishes to use the Gothic and its excessive mode of representation in more constructive and creative ways. He rejects the Enlightenment vision of nationhood, because such a vision always requires the identification of an ‘Other’ (the dream of reason produces monsters) but he also wants to make possible a means of imagining the modern, disseminated nation, that does not have resort to othering tactics, but which is capable, nonetheless, of giving a sense of belonging and a sense of collective-agency. He wants to create a vision – a utopian vision, perhaps – of a complex time of national narrative that does not require the suppression of alternative temporalities, alternative possibilities, but incorporates, without homogenizing, diverse temporalities and diverse narratives, and so enables him to envision: a form of living that is more complex than ‘community’; more symbolic than ‘society’; more connotative than ‘country’; less patriotic than patrie . . . less homogenous than hegemony . . . more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications than can


be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. (p. 140) The Gothic register that emerges in Bhabha’s work facilitates the representation of this complex national time because it offers the model for an aesthetic – or an anti-aesthetic – that is capable of (to return to Nietzsche’s words) ‘bearing incorporation’. It makes possible, through its relationship with excessive discourses, a mode of representation in which the object (in this case the nation) can appear to be both present, because a form is invoked, but also not-present, because that form is always gesturing beyond itself to the ghosts and shades and shadows that have had to be banished in the process of making form. This means that the experience of nationhood, for Bhabha, will always be an uncanny one, because, in words that he has borrowed from Lévi-Strauss, the performance of national belonging will involve an engagement in ‘forms of activity which are both at once ours and other’ (p. 163). It also means that the experience of the modern disseminated nation, in Bhabha’s terms, will be sublime, because nation will become something that can be apprehended, but never grasped or envisioned in its final state. The variety of the sublime employed by Bhabha in his attempt to define the disseminated nation, however, will be slightly different from the more orthodox sublime formulated, famously, by Immanuel Kant in his third Critique; for whilst, in Kant’s presentation, the sublime becomes yet another mechanism for making the multiform into one (since the failure of the senses to grasp a phenomenal ‘whole’ is only a prelude to the elevation of the reason which, as a supersensible faculty, enables the mind to ‘employ itself upon ideas involving higher finality’, in Bhabha’s work, which follows in the footsteps of Fanon and Kristeva, the challenge is accepted ‘to think the question of community and communication without the moment of transcendence’ (p. 153).6 The sublime act of over-reaching, in this case, operates to produce ‘a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities’ (p. 148), but offers no mechanism for the surmounting of that liminality – so that the liminal actually comes to constitute the time and space of the nation. If we follow Vijay Mishra’s argument in The Gothic Sublime, this nontotalizing variety of the sublime has its roots in the anti-Kantian tradition of the Gothic novel, which also refuses the Romantic moment of transcendence and replaces it with ‘the liminality of the unthinkable’.7


‘[W]here Kant and the Romantic sublime offered the possibility of selftranscendence’, argues Mishra, The Gothic subject no longer seeks permission for what is fundamentally an illicit communion with the sublime. The metaphorics of soaring and overcoming, of the triumphant return of the subject to the fold of reason, are now replaced by those of the abyss and dissolution as the subject is dragged into the sublime object.8 It is this characteristic of the Gothic sublime, according to Mishra, that makes it ‘a kind of traumatized earlier moment’ of the Lyotardian or postmodern sublime.9 In Bhabha’s usage, however, where sublimity is connected to the problems of nationhood specifically, we can also see how the sublime becomes expedient in a postcolonial capacity, as a means of constructing a liminal, non-totalized idea of community. The Gothic, in this sense, is not just a moment of subversion that terrorizes the boundaries, borders and categories of Enlightenment representation, it is also a vehicle for reconstruction, which gives Bhabha an architecture (or anti-architecture) that enables him to imagine the impossible form that the disseminated nation might take.

Impossible architectures Another text which is preoccupied with the question of how to write the nation without the moment of transcendence, and without the prerogative to ‘forget’ the internal differences that characterize the life of the nation, is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). In Midnight’s Children, however, this preoccupation is linked specifically to the problem of how to write a history for India after independence. To what extent is it possible to tell the history of post-independence India without leaving any of the competing national narratives out of the account? What kind of form can be found for the telling of the national narrative now that the national narrative can no longer be united through its opposition to British rule? What kind of impossible architecture is required? Rushdie’s egotistical and obsessive narrator Saleem Sinai believes that he can impose a form on recent Indian history, based on his own autobiography. He succumbs, as he himself observes, to ‘the illusion of the artist’: that ‘the multitudinous realities of the land [are] the raw and unshaped material of [his] gift’ (p. 172). The reader, however, and on occasion Saleem himself, is made aware that Saleem’s


dream of ‘encapsulating’ India using his gift is a hubristic dream, because the diversity of the tale that is to be told renders all acts of encapsulation inadequate. Indian culture, as Rushdie has suggested on several occasions, is so plural and the history of its allegiances and borrowings so hybrid, that no representation could account for all the different elements that combine to make the lived life of the nation. The ‘defining image of India is the crowd’, as he notes in ‘The Riddle of Midnight’, ‘and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once’.10 In Midnight’s Children a number of the characters, as well as Saleem himself, are involved in the task of imagining ‘architectures’ or strategies of containment which enable them to master this crowd by converting it into something coherent and imaginable (and therefore manageable and ‘meaningful’). Perhaps the most pointed instance of this is the attempt made by the peepshow owner, Lifafa Das, to encompass all India by forcing it into his picture-postcard exhibition and allowing viewers to witness it frame by frame. At first Lifafa is confident that he has achieved his aim and walks the streets inviting punters to ‘come see everything, come see! Come see Delhi, come see India, come see!’ (p. 73). As time goes by, however, Lifafa becomes increasingly dissatisfied with his encompassment and starts trying to fit even more into his exhibition: ‘The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box’ (p. 75). Finally, Lifafa’s dream of encapsulation is shattered, unceremoniously, when he is mobbed and nearly murdered by a crowd of Muslims because he is a Hindu. ‘Hindu! Hindu! Hindu!’ chants a little girl who has been unable to see his show: [a]nd chick-blinds are flying up; and from his window the girl’s father leans out and joins in, hurling abuse at a new target, and the Bengali joins in in Bengali . . . ‘Mother raper! Violator of our daughters!’ . . . and remember the papers have been talking about assaults on Muslim children, so suddenly a voice screams out . . . ‘Rapist! Arré my God they found the badmaash! There he is!’ And now the insanity of the cloud like a pointing finger and the whole disjointed unreality of the times seizes the muhalla, and the screams are echoing from every window, and the schoolboys have begun to chant, ‘Ra-pist! Ra-pist! Ray-ray-ray-pist!’ (p. 76)


The problem that confronts Lifafa Das in this episode, like the problem that confronts Saleem in his attempts to unify the Midnight’s Children, is that people do not forget their differences easily. He attempts to forge a unitary idea of nationhood that will encompass the multitudes in a single frame, and he discovers that though the differences within the multitude may be suppressed by the imposition of an aesthetic order, they will not go away; repressed, they will only return – but with even more strength and even more violence. His experiences, in this respect, hold up a mirror to the experiences of the Indian nation, post-partition, which is also trying to find a new form for itself, and which is also failing with violent and bloody results. This new India, as Rushdie suggests in one of the most forceful satirical passages of the novel, has been ‘brought into being by a phenomenal collective will’ and is a dream that all Indians have temporarily agreed to dream, but because it is a dream that is not supported by any realistic historical idea of the ingrained and insurmountable cultural differences within India, it also becomes ‘a mass fantasy [that] . . . would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood’ (p. 111). In passages such as this Rushdie is playing the role of the pessimist, and providing a fictional illustration of the idea implicit in Bhabha’s work: that the forcible imposition of a myth of unity, and the repression of difference for the sake of unity, will not make difference disappear; it will only smooth the cracks over, whilst resentment is left to incubate in darkness, until it returns in monstrous, grotesque and violent forms.11 The ‘rituals of blood’ that fracture and fragment the idealized vision of a united India, in this sense, can be regarded as equivalent to the irruptions of ‘the ghostly . . . the terrifying . . . and the unaccountable’ (Bhabha, p. 143) that fracture and fragment the realist conception of a ‘homogenized’ nation in Bhabha’s account, cited above. In both cases, writer and theorist are attempting to demonstrate the limitations of any form of nationality that seeks an a priori total expression and takes no account of the divergent experiences of those members who make up, and perform, the life of the nation. The roles of pessimist and satirist, however, are not (contrary to the opinion of some commentators) the only roles that Rushdie can play. Like Bhabha he offers a critique of conceptions of nation that he finds inadequate or destructive, but he does so in order to imagine alternative narrative architectures that can communicate nation-ness without diminishing the perplexing and ambivalent operations of cultural difference. Even whilst Rushdie is showing how unitary ideas of nationhood result in disruption and violence, therefore, it is also necessary to


recognize that he is attempting to demonstrate that there can be a form of national architecture, or anti-architecture, that can incorporate difference without surmounting it or reducing it. This alternative architecture, I would suggest, is embodied primarily in the ghost-ridden textuality of Midnight’s Children itself; as a novel that, despite the drive for closure exhibited by its narrator, neither achieves completion nor surmounts the inconsistencies and aporias that litter the text. Saleem, as has already been suggested, strives to achieve a total vision of both his life and the life of the nation that he describes, and throughout the text he is troubled by the need to impose structure and meaning upon his experiences. As he notes on the first page of his narration, ‘there are so many stories to tell . . . such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane’ that he will have to ‘work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if [he is] to end up meaning – yes, meaning, something’ (‘I admit it’ he adds, ‘above all things, I fear absurdity’) (p. 11). Saleem fails in this self-imposed task because, like the narrators and heroes of Beckett’s novels and plays (who also suffer from a terror of absurdity and meaninglessness), he is unable to draw the multiple strands of his autobiography/history into a network of meaning before exhaustion and fragmentation overtake him. Towards the end of the novel, for instance, he meets a man who has extruded a 15-inch turd and is about to tell his tale, when he realizes that he is too tired, too decayed, to do so. ‘Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story’, laments Saleem: The hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life . . . but now I’m disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write . . . Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting for August 15th. There is still a little time: I’ll finish tomorrow. (p. 440) The failure of Saleem’s attempt to tell the ‘whole’ story, however, indicates not the absolute impossibility of representing history, or autobiography, or nation post-partition, but the impossibility of representing it in the all-encompassing fashion that is his ideal: he fails only to the extent that he is unable – like Lifafa – to give us a total vision of India that incorporates everything there is to be told. The text of Midnight’s Children, however, which both is Saleem’s narrative and is in excess of Saleem’s narrative, suggests the possibility of an alternative


mode of representing nation because it shows that, even without a total explanation being achieved, even without all the stories being told, even without a conclusion being reached, a representation of nation, or a performance of nation-ness, has nevertheless been enacted. This enactment is Midnight’s Children itself – which does not attempt to assimilate all the narratives into its own necessarily limited frames, but gestures beyond its own frames to the potential narratives, the untold tales of defecating men, that are incorporated as shadows, half-presences and potentialities, even as they are excluded from the official narrative organization. The effective ‘meaning’ of Midnight’s Children, in this sense, whilst not attained by Saleem as narrator, comes to exist in what Bhabha would call ‘the hybrid moment outside the sentence’ whilst the text remains a sublime fragment of a tale that is so vast it is incommunicable; that is so complex we can never impose closure upon it.12 In constituting itself as a story that is only a fragment of a larger and potentially infinite narrative Midnight’s Children bears comparison with another potentially infinite narrative collection – the Arabian Nights; a text that Saleem cites repeatedly because the exigencies of its narrator Scheherazade reflect, to some extent, his own exigencies. She too was telling tales against the clock, using her furious inventiveness to hold off the moment at which Shahriyar has decreed her death, and she too (perhaps most importantly for our purposes) had an endless tale to tell. Like Saleem her story-telling had to end at some point – when, in this instance, Shahriyar relented and released her from her sentence – but her true genius was to know that, barring external and arbitrary interventions, she could, if necessary, have gone on telling tales for all eternity (and it is for this reason, no doubt, that Richard Burton, in the terminal essay of his translation, cites an Arabic legend that no man can finish the Arabian Nights without dying first: no life can outlast narratives that are continuously woven from the ever-varying texture of experience).13 In the Arabian Nights, as in Midnight’s Children, this potent fertility of tale-telling is symbolized by the number 1001: a number that expresses eloquently the paradoxical nature of story-telling operated in both collections, because it holds out the promise of a body of stories – a thousand and one tales of a numinous midnight – but it also suggests that this body of stories will have no end because there will always be one more tale to tell – or one more pickle jar to fill. The magic of this formulation, if we follow Jorge Luis Borges’ argument in one of his essays on the Nights, results from the fact that 1001 is both a number and not


a number at the same time. It is an imaginable amount, 1001, but it is also ‘consubstantial with the infinite’ because it means not a thousand nights plus a night, but a thousand nights and one more night, and one more night, and one more night ad infinitum, where each night grows out of the frame of all previous nights, and so changes the constitution of all previous nights.14 For Borges this sense of spiralling narrative infinitude induces in the reader or hearer of the Nights a kind of ‘vertigo’ or awe in the face of the never-ending, and this in turn makes him or her aware of an excess of possible metaphysical realities. For Rushdie too, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, the magic of the number 1001 is linked to its capacity to alert us to the possibility of multiple ‘alternative realities’ – although in Midnight’s Children, I would suggest, the multiplicity of the number 1001 is connected more explicitly to an idea of numinousness in national culture, since 1001 is also the number of the Midnight’s Children who will come to constitute the first generation of Indians born into an independent state. The excessiveness of the number of midnight, in this more nationalistic capacity, gives Rushdie a means of imagining a utopian (but fantastical) national formation that both exists as a coherent numerical entity (1001) – but, simultaneously, is not monumental and ‘whole’, since the additional ‘1’ implies that infinite additions that can be made to the narrative of the nation, without there being a point at which the additions will add up to a totality. The number 1001, in other words, will give Rushdie the numerical principle for community that – as the epigraph also suggests – is ‘beloved of poets’ (and Nietzschean philosophers) who struggle for a sublime vision of unending incorporation, but ‘detested by politicians’ (and Renanian Diplomatists) who wish to create a coherent vision of the world that can be managed and controlled. The narrative model of the Arabian Nights, in this way, gives Rushdie a means of concretizing, or allegorizing, an approach to cultural difference within the nation that is also explored in the work of Bhabha. For Bhabha, cultural difference should not be understood (as it is understood in liberal discourse) ‘as the free play of polarities and pluralities in the homogenous empty time of the national community’. Cultural difference, Bhabha argues, should be seen as ‘a form of intervention [that] partakes in the logic of supplementary subversion’ (p. 162). Each emergent form of cultural knowledge, according to this model, is not subsumed within the nation in such a way that the teleology of the nation remains unchanged. Each emergent form of cultural knowledge is a supplement to the nation and, like the supplementary question put to a motion in parliamentary debate, challenges and transforms the


sense of the motion as it was expressed before the question was put. ‘[W]e cannot contextualise the emergent cultural form by locating it in terms of some pre-given discursive causality or origin’ writes Bhabha: We must always keep open a supplementary space for the articulation of cultural knowledges that are adjacent and adjunct but not necessarily accumulative, teleological or dialectical. The ‘difference’ of cultural knowledge that ‘adds to’ but does not ‘add up’ is the enemy of the implicit generalisation of knowledge or the implicit homogenisation of experience, which Claude Lefort defines as the major strategies of confinement and closure in modern bourgeois ideology. (p. 163) The narrative model of the Arabian Nights, where each new narrative (1001+1) does not accumulate to make up an epic plot, and where each additional tale is like a supplement to the tales that have so far been told, provides Rushdie with an appropriate analogy for this sense of cultural additiveness and cultural subversion. It enables him to show that there is no point at which the tales told by Saleem in negotiation of the nation will reach some kind of conclusion, but it also enables him to show that the narrative of the nation, in some sense, can be told – if it is told as a perplexed and ambivalent story that is continuously under threat from the infinite stories that have not yet been spoken. In this respect Rushdie has created in Midnight’s Children, through the Arabian Nights, an embodiment of the idea expressed cryptically in Bhabha’s ‘DissemiNation’ – that it is ‘at the insurmountable extremes of storytelling, [that] we encounter the question of cultural difference as the perplexity of living and writing the nation’ (p. 161).

Gothic Nights In the work of Bhabha, as suggested at the start of this chapter, this conception of the disseminated nation is formulated, in part, by reference to Gothic discourses. The Gothic, I argued, gives Bhabha a mode of writing that is ‘ambivalent’ and ‘doubling’ because it implies that there are more causalities (to paraphrase Borges) than can be imagined using the causality that we know. In Midnight’s Children, as the previous discussion would suggest, Rushdie is attempting to define a similar conception of nationhood, but does so, not by reference to the duality and ghostliness of Gothic fiction, but by reference to the infinite and


intertwining narrative architectures of the thousand-and-one tales of the thousand-and-one nights. Rushdie’s sublime, it might seem as a result, is a sublime developed using the example of ancient Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic story-telling whilst Bhabha’s is developed using the example of Gothic fiction and art. The briefest investigation of the development of the Arabian Nights, however, would serve to show that Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic storytelling, particularly in the form of the Nights, was no minor influence in the development of Gothic fiction and that – as a result – the narrative sublimity of the Nights and the terrorizing sublimity of the Gothic are more closely interconnected than might be at first supposed. Some commentators, indeed, have suggested that the idea of a sublime Nights, as an excessive and overwhelming form of narration, does not develop until after the Arabian Nights was introduced into Europe and became, in time, one of the staple sources of the Gothic tale.15 Rana Kabbani, in Europe’s Myths of Orient, for instance, argues that the idea of ‘a circular narrative that portrayed an imaginary space of a thousand and one reveries’ is not one that springs from the Indian or Arabian Nights at all, but a Western reading of the Nights that appeared in the course of its adoption by Orientalist scholars in the early eighteenth century.16 Prior to this adoption, Kabbani writes, there was no definitive text of the Alf Laila wa-laila [literally ‘one thousand nights and a night’] but numerous variations on that particular sort of oral narrative . . . It was only when a European encountered these stories, decided to translate them, and produced a set text that remained in currency for over a century (1704–1838) that they became institutionalised in the way they are known in the West.17 It is in the process of institutionalization and formalization, Kabbani goes on to argue, that scholars are ‘seduced into seeing those aspects [they] had expected to see’: a sublime narrative that reflects the supposed excess, irrationality and violence of the East.18 This view of the Nights, which Kabbani suggests is first promoted by translators and mediators of the collection such as Antoine Galland, is reinforced by fiction writers who appropriated the Nights once it had become common cultural currency in Europe. William Beckford, in particular, in his eccentric and unclassifiable exercise in the bizarre, Vathek (1786), initiated the vogue for using the Nights to imagine ‘architecture[s] unknown in the records of the earth’, and is largely responsible for transforming the collection into a pretext for, in the words of a con-


temporary reviewer, ‘a machinery, not only new, but wild and sublime [which] seizes on the mind, and pervades the whole composition’.19 At least one eighteenth-century commentator on Vathek attributes these excessive architectural qualities directly to the Nights themselves: Vathek, suggests the Monthly Review, ‘preserves the peculiar character of the Arabian Tale, which is not only to overstep the nature of probability, but even to pass beyond the verge of possibility, and suppose things, which cannot be for a moment conceived’.20 As Kabbani’s argument would imply, however, this is as much a vision of the Arabian Nights created by Galland and Beckford themselves, as it is a faithful rendering of the Nights as it would have been heard in the Middle East and India in the preceding centuries. Indisputably, the Nights, in its Middle Eastern and Indic forms, is excessive and improbable, but the idea that it passes ‘beyond the verge’ and that it supposes things that ‘cannot be for a moment conceived’ suggests a peculiarly eighteenthcentury preoccupation. It is arguably Beckford’s mutated version of the Nights – exotic, extreme, threatening – rather than the Nights themselves (whatever they may be), that had the profoundest influence upon later appropriations of the Oriental tale in Europe. When James Hogg, Jan Potocki, Matthew Lewis and Charles Maturin come to the collection, it is likely that they do so under the shadow of Beckford’s nightmare vision, and even when writers less consistently Gothic in their oeuvre cite the Nights their emphasis upon its terrifying qualities suggest the presence of the Beckfordian rather than the Scheherazadian muse. Coleridge, for whom the Nights was a crucial influence, notes that it was an early reading of the Nights and other tales that had ‘habituated [him] to the vast’, and claimed that a childhood reading of a particular Nights story caused him to be ‘haunted by spectres whenever [he] was in the dark’.21 Similarly, Thomas De Quincey, in his Suspiria de Profundis, which is haunted from start to finish by Orientalist imaginings, recalls the Arabian Nights in association with profound ‘horror and grief’.22 Even 200 years later when Bram Stoker has Jonathan Harker mention that his journal ‘seems horribly like the beginning of the “Arabian Nights” ’ he is referring back to the Gothicised Nights invented by Beckford, with its presage of incipient disorder, incipient loss of self, and incipient loss of homeland.23 These terrors conjured by the Nights in the Gothic and Romantic imagination have a twofold source. On the one hand the terror of the Nights is a product of its association with the Orient which, as Europe’s ‘other place’, is a locus of the unknown, the excessive and the terrible. The second ‘terror’ of the Nights, nascent in Beckford, fully formed in


Maturin, is architectural, and is linked to the fear of loss of control, of accumulating disorder, of alienation, of loss of coherent boundary. What terrifies De Quincey, what terrifies Coleridge, what is terrifying in Maturin and Potocki is the architecture of sublimity, embodied by the Nights, that threatens the reader with incarceration in tales upon tales upon tales (one more night and one more night and one more night) and entrapment in frames upon frames upon frames.24 In Vathek this architectural terror of the unending is registered in elements of the plot – in the Caliph’s monstrous fate, or in the Halls of Eblis which, like the Nights, allow its occupants to go ‘wandering on, from chamber to chamber, hall to hall, and gallery to gallery; all without bounds or limit’.25 It is also (almost) registered structurally in the tales within tales that the strangers Vathek and Nouronihar encounter in the Halls of Eblis begin to tell, but that Beckford did not complete.26 Had they been completed these tales within tales would have forged a direct link between Beckford’s novel and the Chinese-box narrative structure of the Nights; as it is, it is left for Beckford’s Gothic successors to embody the sublime architecture of the Nights in the narrative structure itself. Perhaps the two most successful examples of this embodiment come in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which folds tale within tale to tell the jigsaw wanderings of its Byronic anti-hero, and (a novel much admired by Rushdie) Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which adapts the Arabian Nights formula to tell the tale of the peregrinations of its hero Alphonse van Worden as he makes his way through the Sierra Morena.27 If it is in novels such as these that the idea of the Nights as a terrorizing and overwhelming narrative architecture develops, and if, as has been suggested, Salman Rushdie makes use of the Nights primarily because it gives him the precedent for a narrative collection that is so excessive and extreme it is able to confound the form-making preoccupations of his hero Saleem, the implication must be that Rushdie’s Nights are less the Nights that would have been told and circulated by storytellers in Syria, Persia, India and Arabia, and more the Nights that were appropriated by European writers and translators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rushdie’s Nights, it might seem, are not the Nights of Indian story-telling, but a more modern Nights – mediated and transformed by their passage through the alchemical laboratories of Gothic fiction. Perhaps the strongest support for this contention comes from an observation made by Rushdie upon Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa, in which he recognizes the novel’s clear derivation from the Arabian Nights, yet chooses not to emphasize the ancient story-


telling heritage that this gives the novel but, perversely, the impression of ‘modernity’ that an Arabian Nights-style narrative imparts. ‘It reads,’ he notes, ‘like the most brilliant modern novel, like it was written yesterday . . . there are connections to Calvino, to any of those riddling writers, and it has all kinds of Gothic aspects, it’s also very sexy’.28 The implication behind this observation is that the Nights Rushdie seeks to reproduce in his own ‘modern’ novels (which were written ‘yesterday’) are not the Nights of the older story-telling tradition but the ‘modern’ Nights that originate in self-conscious Gothic tales such as Potocki’s, which in turn seeded the tricksy, metafictional experiments of writers such as Borges or Italo Calvino. The possibility that Rushdie’s Nights are the Nights shaped in eighteenth-century Europe, in the Gothic Orientalist novel, clearly raises some ideological problems for him. If the Gothic Orientalist Nights, as Kabbani observes, has proved a key source in the Western construction of a sensual, tyrannical, extravagant, mysterious East, and if the apprehension of infinite recursion is based upon the Western fear of an amorphous and all-subsuming Orient, then Rushdie, in reproducing this text in his own fictions, is clearly opening himself up to accusations such as those levelled by Aijaz Ahmad, that he is, in his use of sources, reinforcing the very discourses that he sets out to challenge. A number of arguments can be, and have been, offered to defend Rushdie against these charges. It can be argued, for instance, that Rushdie is self-consciously appropriating the Orientalist Nights in order to interrogate Orientalism and re-appropriate the Nights for his own ends. It is also possible to argue that Rushdie is interested in the Nights because, as an ‘Eastern’ narrative that has been used as a vehicle for ‘Western’ Orientalism, it has become one of the ‘broken mirrors’ that enables the migrant, also a hybrid of two or more cultures, to better understand his or her own complex cultural position. ‘The broken mirror’, as Rushdie has famously argued, ‘may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed [because] . . . . [t]he broken glass is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also . . . a useful tool with which to work in the present’.29 Both of these arguments have been explored elsewhere and will not be considered further here.30 The possibility of another kind of argument, however, is opened up if we take into account both the reasons for which Gothic writers employ the Nights, and the reasons for which Rushdie might, in turn, appropriate them. On one hand, as we have seen, the Nights are regarded as a source of terror by Gothic writers because they are associated with the ‘East’ as a mysterious and threatening ‘other’ place. To the extent that Rushdie


uses the Nights to conjure up this vision of fearsome and exotic otherness, we might argue, he is indeed risking accusations of neoOrientalism from hostile critics. On the other hand, however, we have also seen that the Nights become terrifying in Gothic fiction, because, as a model of sublime narrative over-reaching, they represent a threat and a challenge to the orderly forms of narrative promoted by Enlightenment rationalist philosophies. To the extent that Rushdie uses the Gothic Nights in this capacity, we might argue, he is making use of a narrative source that can provide him (as the Gothic provides Bhabha) with the precedent for an antagonistic narrative formation that resists the idealized conceptions of society and nationhood implicit in Enlightenment narratives, and that can support the formulation of an alternative conception of society and nationhood based upon non-totalizing and non-universalizing principles. Not only does this suggest that Rushdie is able to make use of the Nights for reasons other than those immediately connected with its role as an Orientalist text, it also gives us the paradoxical, but ultimately satisfying argument, that Rushdie, in using the Nights of the ‘Orient’ as a narrative precedent for a challenge to the universalizing principles of Enlightenment rationalism, is deploying a collection that has played a significant role in the ‘othering’ of the Orient by the West in order to strike a blow against the very philosophical systems upon which that othering rested. In order for the Nights to fulfil this function in Rushdie’s fiction, however, there must remain one crucial distinction between the Arabian Nights of Midnight’s Children and the Arabian Nights of Vathek or Melmoth. In Gothic fiction the function of the Nights is to alarm (and console) the European reader with a nightmare vision of all that s/he believes Europe is not. This means that the terror of the Nights, like Gothic terror more generally, tends to fulfil a conservative function: it reminds the reader of the perils attendant upon a seduction by unreason, by showing him/her how an alliance with numinous Eastern nights leads ultimately to the disordering, and dissolution, of body, soul and state. Rushdie’s fiction follows an equivalent pattern in so far as he too uses the Gothic Nights to disrupt and disorder body, soul and state; unlike the writers of Gothic fiction, however, Rushdie does not present this disruption as a nightmare to be shunned, but as an enabling mechanism to be embraced. This difference in the evaluation of the nation as locus of sublime excess is perhaps most apparent in the contrast between Rushdie or Bhabha’s analyses, and the analysis provided by Edmund Burke in his


Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). For Burke, the sublime is a fundamentally anti-social aesthetic because it offers a challenge to the order and coherence that he sees as the principal social virtue. When such disorderly passions become associated with nation-making, as they are, according to Burke, in the formation of the French nation during and after the Revolution, the result is a ‘strange chaos of levity and ferocity’ in which ‘everything seems out of nature’ and in which ‘[a] monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues and nations’ combine to create an idea of community that is ‘deformed’ and ‘abominable’.31 In the nation created as Gothic-sublime object, for Burke, all categories become confounded and all order is lost: genres become intertwined (the scene is ‘tragicomic’, p. 11), the people are transformed into ‘a mixed mob’ (p. 79), and even architectural principles are threatened (‘[a]s they have inverted order in all things, the gallery is in place of the house’, p. 79). There is, Burke concludes, nothing constructive in this sublime and excessive form of the nation, it is fitted only to perpetuate destruction as (like one Nights narrative seeding another) each successive disruption unfolds further, self-proliferating disruptions: The Assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms . . . . have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy, but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction. (p. 79) For Rushdie and for Bhabha, the nation created as sublime object is also anti-social, but only to the extent that it subverts Burke’s idea of sociability. The same mixing of genres, of voices, of narratives, of nations is a feature of Salman Rushdie’s texts; Rushdie, too, confounds the tragic with the comic, one race with another, one architecture with another, but in Rushdie’s case this state of hybridity is not anathematized; on the contrary, it is treated as a thing of potential because it provides the key to the disseminated nation of the migrant’s imagination that exists without teleology and without finality. The hybrid nation of Rushdie’s imagining is still comparable to the conception of nationhood that Burke regarded as an abomination, because it is a conception of nationhood that appals Enlightenment principles of order and coherence. Rushdie and Bhabha, however, have taken the thing that Burke found abject, and made a virtue of its leakiness, its fluxiness, its abhorrence of boundary.


At the start of this chapter I suggested that the Gothic serves two connected but diverse functions in the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha. On the one hand, it operates as a form of terrorism because of its association with the disruptive anti-aesthetic of the sublime that, in the words of Donald Pease, has ‘a power to make trouble for categorizing procedures’.32 The Gothic sublime, in this capacity, becomes a means of resisting the order, the rationalism, implicit in the aesthetic category of the beautiful, which is the founding aesthetic of Enlightenment ideology and, consequently, of the conceptions of the modern nation developed during the Enlightenment. On the other hand, however, I also argued that the Gothic sublime serves a more constructive function in Bhabha’s theorization of the disseminated nation since it opens up a nebulous space for alternative ordering systems that do not require closure, and do not require definitive representation, but can nonetheless exist as viable modes of thinking and being. It is now possible to suggest that the Gothic and the sublime play a similar dual role in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. On the one hand, Rushdie shows how conceptions of nationhood that depend upon ideals of totalization and unification will be fractured by irruptions of violent bloodshed as cultural difference that has been repressed returns in vengeful and disruptive forms. On the other hand, Rushdie also shows how a sublime architecture borrowed from the Arabian Nights – as seen through the lens of the Gothic writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – can be used to imagine a form(lessness) for a national experience ‘that classic rules about form or structure’ are no longer sufficient to represent.33

Notes 1. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1993) p. 212. All subsequent references are taken from this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text. 2. Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ (1882) in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 8–22, at p. 13. 3. Ibid., p. 11. 4. Fredrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882) in R.J. Hollingdale, trans. and ed., The Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 60. 5. Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139–70, at p. 142. All subsequent references are from this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text. 6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), II.23, p. 92.

The Number of Magic Alternatives 227 7. Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 233. 8. Ibid., p. 226. 9. Ibid., p. 20. 10. Salman Rushdie, ‘The Riddle of Midnight’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), pp. 26–33, at p. 32. 11. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this idea in Rushdie’s fiction comes not in Midnight’s Children but in Shame with the character of Sufiya Zinobia who, ‘preternaturally receptive’ to ‘the unfelt shame of those around her’ (pp. 122 and 141), is periodically transformed from Beauty into Beast. As a beast, according to Rushdie’s narrator, she represents ‘the will to ignorance, the iron folly with which we excise from consciousness whatever consciousness cannot bear’ (p. 199). 12. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern’, in The Location of Culture, pp. 171–97, at p. 181. 13. Richard Burton, trans., A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, now Entitled: the Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night, 10 vols, (Kamashastra: Benares, 1885), vol. 1, p. 166. 14. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ in Seven Nights, trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1984), pp. 42–57, at pp. 45–6. Foucault has a similar, but subtly different conceit. He suggests that the extra night of the Thousand and One Nights ‘is one night too many . . . a thousand would have been enough’. This one night too many, for Foucault, becomes ‘the fatal space in which language speaks of itself.’ See Michel Foucault, ‘Language to Infinity’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 53–67, at p. 58. 15. Antoine Galland introduced the Nights to Europe in 1704 when he published the first two volumes of his translation Les Mille et Une Nuits. Many of the tales from the Nights had already been circulating before this time, borne along trade routes, or carried home by religious crusaders, but this was the first time that the Nights had become available to the literary elite as a body of work legitimised by scholarly annotations. 16. Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press [now Palgrave Macmillan], 1986), p. 24. 17. Ibid., p. 23. 18. Ibid., p. 25. 19. William Beckford, Vathek in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 149–255, at p. 243. Henry Maty, A New Review, June/July 1786; quoted in Roger Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’ to Vathek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. xx. 20. The Monthly Review, May 1787; quoted in Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’, p. xix. 21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. 1., ed. E.L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 347. 22. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 69. 23. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 42. 24. This second terror, I would suggest, connects the Nights, as one of the key architectural sources of the Gothic narrative, to another architectural source


25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

of Gothic horror: the drawings of Piranesi which also formalise the formdefying and give structural basis to the apprehension of the infinite. In evidence of this, the famous description of Piranesi’s Carceri (or Dreams as he calls them) given by De Quincey sounds not unlike a description that he might also give of the Nights. See De Quincey, Confessions, p. 70. Beckford, Vathek, p. 250. Additional episodes for Vathek were written by Beckford, but never published in his lifetime. They were rediscovered and published early in the twentieth century. Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, trans. Ian Maclean (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). The Manuscript remained incomplete at Potocki’s death in 1815. Portions of it were published in 1805, 1814 and 1815. The first modern edition appeared in French in 1989. Salman Rushdie, ‘What are you Reading Currently’, in the Guardian G2T (9 June 1995), p. 4. Rushdie had not read the novel until the appearance of the full English translation in 1995, though he claims to have been interested in it since he saw a Polish film version when at Cambridge. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, pp. 10–11. For instance, they are implicit in Stephen Baker’s recent discussion of the issue in The Fiction of Postmodernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). ‘Rushdie’s writing’, Baker argues, ‘seems unable to escape the discourse of Orientalism’ (p. 170) but ‘. . . it is as though [it] . . . were to exist at a slight angle to Orientalist practice, neither quite fitting in nor fully divorced’ (p. 171). Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. H.D. Mahoney (Indianapolis: Merrill, 1955), p. 11. All subsequent references are taken from this edition, and are given in parentheses in the text. Doanld Pease, ‘Sublime Politics’, in Mary Arensberg, ed., The American Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 21–9 at p. 21. Quoted in Mishra, The Gothic Sublime, p. 28. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, p.168.

13 Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Postcolonial Grace Dominic Head

Coetzee and the Gothic It is clear that decolonization, in its concentration on ‘process, not arrival’, and with its propensity to generate new cultural and political energies, embodies a host of ongoing challenges to given (colonial) cultural and epistemological boundaries.1 A fertile area of cross-fertilization thus emerges between the postcolonial and the Gothic, especially where the latter – a post-Enlightenment phenomenon – is conceived as less an unrestrained celebration of unsanctioned excesses and more an examination of the limits produced in the eighteenth century to distinguish good from evil, reason from passion, virtue from vice and self from other. Images of light and dark focus, in their duality, the acceptable and unacceptable sides of the limits that regulate social distinctions.2 The examination of those limits continues to prove fertile, and a fascinating locus of this interaction of the postcolonial and the Gothic is the literature of South Africa, which has a long history of treatments of repression, terror and the uncanny. Indeed, if the uncanny is accurately defined as the effect of ‘the irruption of fantasies, suppressed wishes and emotional and sexual conflicts’, one might consider colonial South Africa, before as well as during the apartheid era, as an obvious place to look for instances of the postcolonial uncanny.3 One of the most notable instances of this is J.M. Coetzee’s depiction of Magda in In the Heart of the Country (1977): Magda, the daughter of colonialism (intellectually and historically), is depicted as being raped by the servant that she desires (Hendrik), and this is one element in the book’s 229


demonstration that her attempts to establish a new epoch, based on a love for the people, and not just the land, is defeated by her own intellectual baggage. In successive novels Coetzee has deployed a controlled evocation of terror in order to analyse the colonial and emerging postcolonial psyche, and the ‘terror’ is invariably made to uncover the faultlines and contradictions in given forms of discourse. Dusklands (1974) provides an excellent example of this, in summary. Here Coetzee offers an implicit analysis of colonial contexts of writing by placing in parallel two situations with their associated discursive modes: the Defense Department analysis of the US involvement in Vietnam, and the travel writing of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonizers of the Cape. In Dusklands, the exposure of colonial violence is relatively straightforward, however. More complex problems arise through the testing of limits for the liberal White, confronted with terrors that stretch his or her resolve. The ethical awakening of the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) is interesting in this connection. An essential component of this is the magistrate’s dawning awareness that he is tainted by the operations of the barbarian agents of ‘Empire’ and shares something of their mindset. Coetzee’s Gothicism is at its most pronounced here, since the process of doubling, through which a character identifies with the object of fear, is a central strategy for self-revelation in Gothic fiction.4 The treatment of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians reveals the extent (and so also the limits) of Coetzee’s Gothicism. Torture is another standard Gothic motif, and an excellent way of unleashing repressed violence into the fictional world, and so of examining the hidden corners of the rational bourgeois psyche. But torture, or the possibility of it, was a fact of daily life for many people in apartheid South Africa, so the representation of it in Coetzee’s fiction strikes a chilling, and literal chord. Coetzee has written of Waiting for the Barbarians as being a novel specifically about torture and its impact on the ‘man of conscience’. In his essay on this topic he goes on to consider the justification for, and also the dangers in, the preoccupation with torture in the South African novel. Writers are drawn to the topic, argues Coetzee, first because the connection between torturer and tortured is an extreme, compelling metaphor for authoritarian oppression more generally; and, second, because there is no individual interaction more private and extreme than that which occurs in the torture chamber. Coetzee’s implication is that the novelist feels a moral obligation to interrogate this hidden

Coetzee and the Animals 231

‘vileness’, but finds therein an archetypal situation of fictional creativity, ideal for the revelation of dark human mysteries.5 So far, so Gothic. But in discussing the potential pitfalls of this fascination Coetzee sharpens its political significance, and makes us aware of the actual context that overshadows – and so diminishes the ethical viability – of our interest in the literary motif. The basic dilemma in the treatment of torture in a context such as apartheid South Africa is that the writer fails either by ignoring it, or by ‘reproducing’ it through representation. The generation of ‘fear’ is then entirely negative, quite unlike the productive Gothic exploration of hidden psychological impulses: the writer becomes the unwitting agent of the repressive state, reproducing the fear upon which its power depends. Resolving this dilemma is the difficult task the writer faces, in seeking to imagine torture and death on his or her terms.6 Coetzee resolves the problem very well in Waiting for the Barbarians. In those scenes where the magistrate is tortured, Coetzee treads a fine line between prosecuting the character’s moral journey, and generating a stultifying fear of moral protest. He is successful because he makes us share the magistrate’s wondering bewilderment at the activities of the torturer, as here in his appraisal of Joll: Looking at him I wonder how he felt the very first time: did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that at that instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.7 Along with the amazement, there is also an element of empathy, an engagement with the idea of transgression and initiation. The affinity hinted at here between the magistrate and Joll is part of the magistrate’s self-critique. But beyond this evocation of psychological terror lies Coetzee’s trepidation about the reality of apartheid. Here, as throughout his work, a consciousness of the troubling tension between world and text fashions the mode of writing, steering him away from the exploration of ‘excess’ (as a preliminary to the reassertion of reason) that is more usually associated with the Gothic. The allegorizing impulse also concerns Coetzee in this novel, ensuring that his treatment of fear has, as a focus, another intellectual and discursive dilemma. Even in Age of Iron (1990), Coetzee’s most realistic


novel of the apartheid era, the threat to the white, liberal sensibility is steered skilfully away from the generation of reactionary terror: for Mrs Curren, her emerging sense of personal insignificance is made manifest through an exploration and development of the confessional mode, and this literary project becomes the book’s main focus. The representation of violence, however, remains fraught with difficulties. The limitations that Coetzee interrogates in his depiction of Magda in In the Heart of the Country are certainly clear: her failure to get fully beyond the codes of South African pastoral inhibit her attempts to find a way of loving the people and not merely the land. It is risky, of course, to depict the rape of a white woman by a black man in the exploration of postcolonial intellectual repression. In doing so the writer runs the clear risk of generating the kind of reactionary terror which would short-circuit the more productive implications of the Gothic, because the fantasy about the black man as rapist is a recurring topos in the discourse of racism. In the Heart of the Country eschews the problem through its elaborate narrative procedures: this is a ludic, postmodernist novel in which the certainty of event is made open to doubt, and secondary to the investigation of how discourse constructs the self: ‘I make it all up in order that it shall make me up’ is Magda’s instructive summary of this impulse.8 As with Age of Iron, Coetzee’s literary self-consciousness prevents the novel from generating a regressive terror. The multiple rape that lies at the heart of Disgrace (1999) – a novel that is more bluntly realistic than Coetzee’s earlier novels – is more problematic. The actual event is not described, but the brutality of it and its effects is made quite clear. David Lurie’s daughter Lucy seems to accept her father’s analysis of the rapists, or some version of it, that ‘it was history speaking through them’.9 By refusing to lay charges, and by accepting the arrangement offered by her neighbour Petrus – to become an additional ‘wife’ to him, in exchange for his protection, even though he has a family connection with one of the rapists (p. 200) – she seems to capitulate to a protracted exercise in blackmail and extortion. Of course, the parallel between the sexually predatory Lurie and the rapists is obvious enough. But as the punitive sexual violence endured by Lucy seems bound up with Petrus’s expansionist designs on Lucy’s land, her defeat seems to epitomize a depressing postcolonial lesson. As Elizabeth Lowry puts it: ‘what Disgrace finally shows us is the promised victory of one expansionist force over another, with women as pawns, the objects of punitive violence.’10 This might seem to close down the productive ‘fear’ that the Gothic can generate since, rather than an informed exam-


ination of the colonial psyche, we are presented with a simple contest of brutal regimes. Confession is another theme in Coetzee’s oeuvre that reveals both the extent and the limits of his Gothicism, especially in connection with Disgrace. In both Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994) Coetzee engages in an extended investigation of the potential of the confessional mode, seeking to extract from it a secular equivalent of absolution. The most notable use of confession as a Gothic device is found in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which Hogg uses two narrative perspectives, thus making the first-person confession of ‘sinner’ Robert Wringhim subject to doubt. Hogg’s Gothicism is representative of those ‘fantasies of the late Romantic period’ in which the ‘difficult relation of self to world’ becomes a focus.11 Coetzee’s use of confession reads back to Dostoevsky, but his development of the mode fashions a postcolonial equivalent to Hogg’s agonized Romanticism. Age of Iron is the principal text, an extended letter/first-person confession in which the dying Mrs Curren addresses her absent daughter, living in the US, and comes to terms with her own insignificance in the struggle of resistance in late-apartheid South Africa. In a characteristic double-move Coetzee finds a way of circumventing the problems associated with secular confession, and of establishing a position of limited authority for a protagonist who has been cast aside by the currents of history.12 In Disgrace Coetzee seeks a secular equivalent of absolution, too; but now he has recourse to other means that are quite different to his rich investigations of the confessional mode in previous novels. Confession, in fact, becomes banal in Disgrace. This is clear in the episode in which Lurie is brought before the committee convened to consider the complaint brought by Melanie Isaacs, the student with whom Lurie has an affair. Ostensibly, this is an ‘inquiry’, but it soon becomes clear that some members of the committee have prejudged the issue. Dr Farodia Rassool is the punitive feminist who carries the burden of Coetzee’s censure. Forgetting the committee’s brief, she seeks to punish Lurie, and forces him to make a ‘confession’ of guilt (pp. 51–2). But Lurie’s willingness to accept the charges, and his confession that he ‘became a servant of Eros’, are not presented in the terms that Rassool requires: that is, a confession to the ‘abuse of a young woman’ (p. 53). One is initially reminded of Colonel Joll’s pursuit of truth/pain in Waiting for the Barbarians, where torture is used to generate the desired ‘truth’. In that novel, the allegorical dimension, embracing the


mutability of language as well as the imperial mindset, affords a treatment of ‘interrogation’ on more than one level. The more overtly realistic codes of Disgrace, by contrast, make this episode seem a flat renunciation of political correctness. The real challenge here is to the liberal sensibility that might have to accept the integrity of a ‘confession’ made in terms that seem quite other to the normative codes of a situation. Moreover, in the context of a contemporary South Africa experimenting with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this demonstration of a hearing in which justice is predetermined strikes a disturbing note. Critics of the TRC have suggested that it might have had ‘a very partial and selective approach to the truth’, and that ‘had it been more balanced, expert and authoritative, its impact would have been far greater’.13 Just as a certain kind of feminist might find it uncomfortable to confront the ‘otherness’ of male desire, so did the TRC struggle to remain impartial at all times.14 Coetzee’s coded warning here about the machinations of neocolonialism tallies with his representation of the expansionist designs of Petrus.15 The immediate political resonance of Disgrace is ominous and depressing. There is, however, another way of approaching this novel, and this may be unlocked by the essential component of the Gothic: its ability to generate counter-narratives that display ‘the underside of enlightenment and humanist values’.16 Such a challenge is nowhere more apparent than in Coetzee’s treatment of animal rights in Disgrace and in The Lives of Animals (1999), books that need to be read as complementary works.

Coetzee and the animals My interest in these works locates another (associated) intellectual nexus – the point of intersection between postcolonialism and ecocriticism. Taken together, these two books offer a unique insight into the issue that lies at the heart of the ecocritical project; namely, how do the aesthetic effects and ethical questions generated by literature bear on the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature? And since eco-criticism seems to me to raise interesting questions about the nature of literary studies, perhaps inviting a re-evaluation of its premises and procedures, these books by Coetzee are particularly germane. Both deal extensively with the ethical justification of teaching and studying literature at university level.


However, if The Lives of Animals and Disgrace invite a discussion of professional self-consciousness, they also oblige us to engage with the more obvious question of animal rights. In The Lives of Animals Coetzee invites us, at one level, to share a ‘literal cast of mind’ with Elizabeth Costello, who insists that ‘when Kafka writes about an ape’, he is ‘talking in the first place about an ape’.17 The consideration of animals, perhaps, is not substitutable, a convenient vehicle, merely, used to bring into the foreground more general questions of professional ethics. Perhaps the problem of animal rights is bound inextricably together with questions pertaining to professional ethics and literary aesthetics in these works. And if this implies a challenge to given cultural and epistemological boundaries, these boundaries may have a bearing on the teaching and reception of literature, as well as on the utilitarian evaluation of animals, a notorious legacy of Enlightenment rationality. The Lives of Animals, containing two metafictional stories that comprised the 1997–98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, serves to complicate the relationship between these areas of attention. In Costello, Coetzee invents a celebrated novelist who is invited to speak at ‘Appleton College’, and chooses to discourse on animals, a particular hobby-horse of hers. Coetzee’s listeners (and readers) cannot know the extent to which Costello espouses the author’s own views, and this forces our attention through and beyond the literal content to a consideration of the metafictional frame. Costello’s views are meant to arrest our attention, however. Her views are systematically challenged by other characters in the narrative, though she is sometimes seen to occupy the intellectual as well as the moral high ground. Much of the book reveals connections with work on moral philosophy and animal rights. The thrust of Costello’s convictions about equality is that animals may well (in Peter Singer’s words) ‘possess both memory of the past and expectations about the future, . . . that they are self-aware, that they form intentions and act on them.’ This refutes ‘the doctrine that places the lives of members of our species above the lives of members of other species’, and removes the justification for killing those non-human animals that possess the attributes of ‘persons’.18 In Singer’s reflection on The Lives of Animals – a (perhaps misguided) attempt at fiction in imitation of Coetzee – he distinguishes his intellectual position from that of Costello: ‘There’s a more radical egalitarianism about humans and animals running through her lecture than I would be prepared to defend’ (p. 86). Even so, her familiarity with the kinds of argument that Singer and others have espoused suggests a


significant intellectual marker, a post-Christian challenge to the doctrines of ‘speciesism’.19 This signals the book’s principal evocation of ‘terror’, the exposure of self-interest implicit in humanist reason and rationality. Coetzee seeks to make his readers uneasy on this score; but, in another unsettling manoeuvre, he takes us beyond a straightforward rational and literal engagement with the arguments. The question of sympathy is crucial, here. Our reception of the principal characters is determined as much by the domestic drama as it is by the quality of the arguments. Costello has come to stay with her son John Bernard, and her daughter-in-law, Norma. John is a professor at the college, and Norma is an embittered philosopher who has failed to secure an academic post. There is mutual hostility between Norma and Elizabeth, but it is Norma’s failure to extend hospitality to her ageing mother-in-law that is emphasized. Norma scoffs at Elizabeth during her public lecture, seeks to undermine her at the dinner, ridicules her ideas in private, and refuses, though she is awake, to get up to say goodbye on the morning of her departure. Thus, even where Norma might offer an important corrective to Elizabeth’s views, we are not inclined to let her carry the day. One of the most important observations is given to Norma, in fact: that ‘there is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason’ (p. 48). Elizabeth’s arguments might be seen to be undermined by this difficulty; but Coetzee coaxes his readers to sympathize with Elizabeth rather than Norma, and so to experience the principle of sympathy over reason that Elizabeth seeks to advance. The kernel of Costello’s objection to reason lies in the account of experiments on an ape in a cage, designed to encourage him to overcome the practical difficulties of reaching food placed increasingly further from his reach. Costello suggests that the thoughts of an ape in such an experiment might conceivably be focused on its relationship to its captors – ‘why is he starving me? . . . Why has he stopped liking me?’ – rather than on the more mundane ‘how does one use the stick to reach the bananas?’ (pp. 28–9). Yet the ape is driven from ‘the purity of speculation’ and towards ‘lower, practical, instrumental reason’. In her reformulation of this opposition, Costello pits ‘ethics and metaphysics’ against ‘practical reason’. As her argument develops, Costello privileges ‘fullness, embodiedness’ over ‘thinking, cogitation’ (p. 33). She is interested in sympathy, the faculty of the heart ‘that allows us to share at times the being of another’, insisting that ‘there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination’ (pp. 34–5). In the seminar presentation in ‘The Poets and the


Animals’ Costello demonstrates, through a reading of Ted Hughes’s poems ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’, that the literary imagination can foster this sympathetic faculty: in these poems, she argues, Hughes is ‘feeling his way toward a different kind of being-inthe-world’ which involves ‘inhabiting another body’ rather than another mind (p. 51). A revealing aspect of this is what her son calls her ‘antiecologism’ (p. 55): Costello is struck by the irony that the knowledge and appreciation of ecosystems, which justifies an ecological philosophy, can be comprehended by human beings alone, and so cannot lead to the state of at-oneness she seeks. The implication is clear: the capacity for sympathy, for a different kind of being-in-the-world, is frustrated by humanity’s intellect (pp. 53–4). It remains true, however, that the sympathetic faculty, which the literary effect can promote, is identified by dint of intellectual effort, much as Costello’s war with reason has to be conducted through a process of careful reasoning. Costello implicitly accepts (as, it seems, does Coetzee) the double-bind that she also laments. Her visit to Appleton College serves to demonstrate the inevitability of this double-bind, and to imply an inevitable contradiction inherent in our benign interventions in the non-human world. She demonstrates that it is the essence of our Being to be caught between sympathy and reason, much as Coetzee’s text puts his readers through the same contradictory experience. It is a profound realization, and a deft literary enactment. The subtlety of this can be contrasted with the reaction of Costello’s son. On the last day of her visit he asks her: ‘Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?’ (p. 58), and the reader should recognize the blunt inappropriateness of this question which entirely misses the point. Costello has shown that it is the business of literature and of literary analysis to foster and examine the human faculty for sympathy with another as an ethical imperative, even while the experience and the process might reveal crucial limitations and contradictions. This revelation of the paradoxical nature of ethical experience – and the relationship of literature to it – has significant implications for academic life, as we shall see. But the mechanistic, causal chain implied in the son’s question, ‘do you believe that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?’, is of a different order of thinking. It is, in the terms established by The Lives of Animals, an unethical question, of the same order as ‘how does one use the stick to reach the bananas?’ The ethical questions that The Lives of Animals asks us to consider are ‘what is the relationship between literature and the faculty of


sympathy, and how does the intellectual life frustrate this faculty?’ At the end of the book the son attempts to console his mother, overcome by the terror of her vision, where the reasoning element (which invites her to draw a comparison between the slaughterhouses and the Holocaust) links up disastrously with her empathic sense: she senses a stupefying crime being committed by meat-eaters all around her, and this poisons her social relations (p. 69). This is articulated on the drive to the airport and, sensing that his mother is also affected by an intimation of her own mortality, the son makes an attempt to comfort her: ‘he pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. “There, there,” he whispers in her ear. “There, there. It will soon be over” ’ (p. 69). This apparent confirmation of impending death is hardly the most comforting offering. And the son’s lack of sympathy, his inability to imagine even his own mother’s being, is indicated in his implied observation – ‘the smell of cold cream, of old flesh’ – which suggests his cold appraisal of a woman who will soon be a corpse. In perhaps the most lucid immediate critical response to Disgrace, Mike Marais argues that Coetzee ‘appears to stage a particular aesthetic and ethical problem’ in the novel, a problem which centres on death as both a literal and ineffable thing.20 Following Maurice Blanchot, Marais speculates on the notion that ‘language brings death into the world’, since ‘through language, the subject negates the being or presence of things’. This view of language means that the attempt, through literature, to reach beyond the ontological solitude of the individual monadic subject is already undermined: ‘in attempting to represent the other, the representational medium of the text always inevitably forecloses on, and therefore negates, the other.’ Marais suggests that Disgrace finds a way round this state of imprisonment, initially through its self-conscious acknowledgement of this parlous state, which is implied in Lurie’s opera ‘about Teresa Guiccioli’s repeated and futile attempts to summon the dead Byron’. The recognition of such futility produces a positive implication, however: ‘it is only through its failure to represent the other that the literary text may recognize the other as other’. It is this recognition that opens the way to genuine care and compassion for the other, and that suggests that the novel ‘may inspire ethical action’.21 In this reading, the ‘failure to instantiate the other is also a failure to eliminate the other’, and this ‘enables the excession of the other’. Marais suggests that there have been other ‘figures of death and excession’ in Coetzee’s work – John in Age of Iron, and Pavel in The Master of


Petersburg – key figures in Coetzee’s ongoing project to examine, selfconsciously, ‘the relation to alterity that is established in writing’. Death is the crucial figure for ‘an alterity that cannot be contained’, and that opens up the possibility of ethical action. In accordance with this logic, Marais reads Lurie’s ‘mercy-killing of the lame and stray dog which he has grown to love’ as ‘a loving gift, or sacrifice . . . to death, the absolute other’. I wish to applaud these ‘preliminary observations’, which strike me as being astonishingly perceptive for a review article.22 Marais’s reading also serves to bolster the argument for Coetzee’s continuing use of Gothic effects, suggesting that figures of death and excession have become more central in his novels of the 1990s. However, I also wish to question the emphasis this article gives, the version of the ethical it outlines for Disgrace. There is certainly a more obvious moral tale to be found in the novel, rooted in the events depicted, and the career of Lurie towards some kind of redemption. This is not to say that a selfreflexive engagement with ethics and aesthetics is not there to be found: indeed, all of Coetzee’s novels engage with these issues, and can be seen to operate on more than one level. My quibble is simply that the different ‘levels’ should be seen to cohere, that the ethical view should be consistent across the various planes of signification. The treatment of death presents an obvious problem in this connection, if we give credence to Marais’s reading. The productive state of consciousness encouraged by recognizing uncontainable and unrepresentable death as the perfect figure of alterity may not square fully with the novel’s evocation of actual death. In The Lives of Animals, of course, the son’s lack of sympathy (or ethical capacity) is indicated in his cold appraisal of his mother nearing death. Sanguinity about death indicates a failure of imagination, a negative ethical capacity. The crucial episode in Disgrace, the locus of Lurie’s redemption, is the one in which he takes responsibility for the humane killing of the dog that has befriended him. Bev Shaw, the woman who runs the Animal Welfare League clinic, has indicated that it is a moral imperative to ‘mind’ if one is to perform the mercy killing of animals: ‘I wouldn’t want someone doing it for me who didn’t mind. Would you?’, she asks Lurie (p. 85). This ‘reverence’ might seem to lend death that aura of uncontainable alterity; yet Coetzee may be more interested in distinguishing between competing interests and different kinds of death. Lurie’s progression towards redemption is recorded specifically in terms of his responses to animals after his departure from Cape Town, and after his arrival at his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the Eastern


Cape province. An indication of his capacity for change is given in the scene in which he repeats, rather mechanically, the view of the ‘Church Fathers’ that, unlike the souls of humans, the souls of animals ‘are tied to their bodies and die with them’. Yet he makes this remark when Lucy has found him asleep in the cage of the abandoned old bulldog bitch, Katy (p. 78). His body inclines him towards an affinity that he is not yet able to articulate. Indeed, his most crass pronouncement comes in the following scene, in reply to Bev Shaw’s sense that he likes animals: ‘I eat them, so I suppose I must like them, some parts of them’, he quips (p. 81). Coetzee is careful to discredit Lurie in this scene in which his shameful appraisal of Bev Shaw’s unattractiveness is given in lingering detail (through Lurie’s focalization, pp. 81–2). This is before the attack on the farm, with the physical assault on Lurie and the multiple rape of Lucy. With hindsight, however, a parallel between the predatory Lurie and Lucy’s rapists is unavoidable; so, too, is the sense that Lurie’s journey towards redemption requires him to give up his predatory masculinity and become a different kind of animal. The attackers pour methylated spirits over Lurie and set light to him. His burns are not severe, but he suffers a mild disfigurement that serves to underscore the loss of physical attractiveness he has already begun to feel in middle age, and to which he initially responded with ‘an anxious flurry of promiscuity’ (p. 7). The attack does not entirely alter his attitude to sex: there is the episode in which he buys the services of a prostitute after being humiliated by Melanie Isaacs’ boyfriend (though this occurs after the more thoughtful inward expression of thankfulness for the way that he has been enriched by all his sexual partners (pp. 192–4)); and there is the earlier equivocal episode of his liaison with Bev Shaw, which he sees as a kind of personal abasement (p. 150). This is no simple progression towards a personal awakening; rather, it is the fumbling readjustment of an ageing individual who feels himself to be ‘not a bad man but not good either’ (p. 195). It is Coetzee’s singular achievement to have found a way to make the readjustment of his (sometimes appalling) protagonist coherent, moving and convincing. It is the response to animals that supplies the clarity, of course, and this emerges especially after the attack. An important scene is the one in which Petrus acquires some sheep, two black-faced Persians, to slaughter for his party. Exasperated at the treatment of these animals, Lurie unties them and allows them to drink and to graze (p. 123). As the moment of slaughter gets nearer, he becomes increasingly concerned for them, feeling that ‘suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him’ (p. 126). Pushed by Lucy to explain his


reaction, he insists that he has not changed his ideas, that he still does not believe ‘that animals have properly individual lives’. ‘Nevertheless’, he says, ‘in this case I am disturbed. I can’t say why’ (pp. 126–7). What has come home to Lurie, in a rural location where butchering is a domestic task, is the fact of slaughter. This may seem like the predictable horror of the urban-dweller confronted with the harsh realities of rural subsistence, but the moral dimension to this is more complex. To Lurie’s emerging sensibility, the keeping of animals is incompatible with killing them. It is this utilitarianism at which he baulks, a response that may not be dependent on an identification with individual animals, but is certainly inspired by an identification with their suffering as sensate beings, as much as by a projected code of civilized human behaviour. Lurie’s evolving responses to animals, and specifically to the killing of animals, suggests that death is not (or not just) a figure of mysterious or uncontainable otherness, but that a more specific argument about it is being constructed. The fact that Lurie comes to distinguish between different kinds of killing, and different kinds of death experience, suggests the true ethical focus. When Lurie baulks at the utilitarianism of keeping animals for slaughter, and follows the path that obliges him to participate in humane killing, he takes responsibility for the dispensing of death. He understands the imperative to ‘mind’ about killing that an empathic and imaginative outlook necessitates; but he also accepts the responsibility of making a moral choice. When Lurie decides to ‘give up’ the dog that has befriended him, he has chosen the moment at which the death should occur. He could keep the dog for a while longer, but knows the moment must come when this decision will have to be taken. Death is thus not ‘uncontainable’ in this practical sense. There is a partial parallel, here, to the way in which the Gothic evokes that which is excessive and which induces fear, but does so in order to re-examine limits and to reassert a principle of reasoning. In a similar process, Lurie encounters the fear of the postcolonial backlash, and the broader horror (as he sees it) of the arrogant human treatment of animals as things. He then discovers a new humility that inverts his former sense of selfimportance as a predatory sexual being of a particular caste, a process that is provoked by the imaginative, the intuitive, but that is resolved by the reassertion of reason and the gaining of self-knowledge. In one sense, the ending is remorseless, since the killing of the dog is also the extermination of the only being that responds to his music, and his effort of composition is the final assertion of his professional intellectual self. But there is a logic in the pattern that smothers this


‘creativity’, and the falsity it embodies. Lurie’s professionalism is enshrined in his affinity for the Romantic poets: ‘For as long as he can remember, the harmonies of The Prelude have echoed within him’ (p. 13). Yet his brutal education in South African rural life undermines the false pastoral. There is a poignant moment at the end of the novel when he encounters the ‘lightly pregnant’ Lucy working in a field, engrossed in her labour, an idyllic scene ‘ready-made for a Sargent or a Bonnard’.23 But there is an imperative that this pastoral image must be seen to dissolve, given that the perceiving eye is discredited: ‘The truth is, he has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite all his reading in Wordsworth’ (p. 218). There is, of course, a degree of ambivalence in a story of the way in which personal disgrace can lead to something that approximates a state of grace, and some reviewers were perplexed by some of the apparent contradictions. Adam Mars-Jones, for example, felt that Coetzee had produced ‘a story of redemption and of collapse, just as a famous optical illusion is simultaneously a duck and a rabbit, but can only be seen at any one moment as one or the other.’24 But this is inevitable in a novel that demonstrates that human experience is necessarily caught between sympathy and reason. Coetzee, as we have seen, uses the fear of intellectual and social collapse in order to discover the boundary of reason. A kind of terror is evoked at the spectacle of the judgemental liberal academic – specifically in the brittle feminist Dr Farodia Rassool – that is also, by extension, a terror of possible neocolonialist developments in the new South Africa. Similarly, a horror of instrumental reason is generated, especially where this is revealed through a utilitarian attitude to animals. These fears are concentrated in the career of Lurie, and in the exhibition of his emotional, intellectual, aesthetic and political bankruptcy. His state of grace, premised on an intense empathy with abandoned and condemned dogs, and denoted by his willing acceptance of the ‘visitorship’ that marks his new start with Lucy (p. 218), conjoins three key attributes: empathy, responsibility and meekness. If it is helpful to trace the Gothic elements that occur in Coetzee’s work – especially where these locate and invite a reassessment of the limits of reason – it is also appropriate to acknowledge that Coetzee’s Gothicism is an understated strain: rarely does his work evoke excess to the degree commonly associated with the Gothic. Indeed, the pursuit of meekness might, finally, be seen to take his work in a quite different direction. I intend ‘meekness’ in the sense in which Norberto Bobbio defines it. For Bobbio, meekness is a ‘social virtue’, but one that is ‘the antithesis


of politics’ understood as the expression of ‘the will for power’. In Bobbio’s conception, ‘the meek are cheerful because they are inwardly convinced that the world to which they aspire is better than the one they are forced to inhabit.’ A meek person can thus ‘be depicted as the precursor of a better world’.25 In much of his fiction, but especially in Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace, Coetzee has been working towards this kind of celebration, in which meekness emerges as a new kind of ethical-political grounding. Lurie has to start again with nothing – other than the discovery of his own better impulses – in order to emerge untainted, and is content to do so. The novel’s Gothic elements recede, along with the terror that they evoke. Redemption is in the ascendancy, here, and this is an extraordinary conclusion to a novel that is unequivocal in its presentation of postcolonial violence and misunderstanding. Coetzee, as in all of his fiction, ties together ethics, politics and aesthetics; and in confronting apparently insurmountable difficulties – ideological, political and generational – he conjures an astonishing and affecting aesthetic solution.

Notes 1. I quote Helen Tiffin on the importance of ‘process’: see ‘Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse’, Kunapipi 9 (1987), 3, 17–34, 17. 2. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 8. 3. Ibid., p. 11. 4. The two most obvious instances of this ‘doubling’ are found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in the affinity between Frankenstein and his monster, and in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, in the identification between Caleb and Falkland. 5. See J.M. Coetzee, ‘Into the Dark Chamber: the Writer and the South African State’, in David Attwell, ed., Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 361–8, at p. 363. 6. Ibid., p. 364. 7. J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians ([1980], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 12. 8. J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country ([1977], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 73. The rape itself is described differently five times in consecutive passages (pp. 104–7). This both emphasizes the sense of violence and ordeal, whilst also suggesting the possibility of fantasy, with Magda as psychological victim. 9. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker and Warburg, 1999), p. 156. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in the text. 10. Elizabeth Lowry, ‘Like a Dog’ (review of Disgrace and The Lives of Animals), London Review of Books, 21, 20, 14 October 1999, pp. 12–14, at p. 14. 11. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 49.

244 Empire and the Gothic 12. In an important essay Coetzee dwells on the ‘double thought’ that makes confession unreliable in Dostoevsky. See ‘Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky’, in Doubling the Point, pp. 251–93. 13. R.W. Johnson, ‘Why There is No Easy Way to Dispose of Painful History’ (review of The Truth About the Truth Commission by Anthea Jeffery), London Review of Books, 21, 20, 14 October 1999, 9–11, at 9, 10. 14. Ibid. Johnson locates particular atrocities where the final TRC Report is highly selective in the evidence it uses. 15. Graham Pechey has argued that, after the election of 1994, South Africa entered ‘not exactly a postcolonial phase but the latest of its neo-colonial phases’. See ‘The Post-Apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary’, in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds, Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 57–74, at p. 59. 16. Botting, Gothic, p. 2. 17. J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 32. Subsequent page references are to this edition and are given in parenthesis in the text. 18. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 115, 117. 19. Ibid., pp. 88–9. 20. Mike Marais, ‘The Possibility of Ethical Action: J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’, Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 5 (2000) 1, 57–63, 60. 21. Ibid., 59, 60. 22. Ibid., 61, 62. 23. Both the French painter Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) and the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) (who was best known for his society portraits) turned to nature studies in their later years. 24. Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Lesbians are Like That Because They’re Fat. Stands to Reason’ (review of Disgrace), Observer, 18 July 1999, 13. 25. See Norberto Bobbio, In Praise of Meekness: Essays on Ethics and Politics, trans. Teresa Chataway (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), pp. 24, 35, 34, 31. Coetzee’s conception of ethical action embraces non-human nature, of course; Bobbio’s does not.

Index Africa, 35–6, 38, 40, 44, 45–6, 47, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 53n8, 54n24, 91, 120, 123 Ahmad, Aijaz, 223 anti-semitism, 91, 122–4, 125–6, 134n24,n26, 153n34 Arata, Stephen, 92, 100n12 Auerbach, Nina, 91 Azim, Firdous, 73, 76, 81 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 210 Baldick, Chris, 4, 5 Baratynsky, E.A., 74–5, 79 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 21–2, 37–8 Beckett, Samuel, 178, 182, 216 Beckford, William Vathek, 3, 6, 13–24, 31, 220–1, 222, 224 Behn, Aphra, 39 Belford, Barbara, 98 Bhabha, Homi, K., 138, 150, 208, 209–13, 215, 217, 218–20, 224, 225, 226 Binns, R.G., 174–5, 181 Bobbio, Norberto, 242–3 Boele, Otto, 79 Borges, Jorge Luis, 217–18 Botting, Fred, 89, 229, 234 Boumelha, Penny, 142–3, 144 Bowen, Elizabeth, 175 Brantlinger, Patrick, 4, 5, 92 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre, 9, 137–47, 148 Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights, 90, 145–6, 176 Bulgarin, Faddei, 76 Burke, Edmund, 224–5 Byron, Lord, 13–14, 146 Carter, Angela, 89 Castle, Terry, 140

Chrisman, Laura, 108, 109, 115 Coetzee, J.M., 11, 229–43 Age of Iron, 231–2, 233, 238 Disgrace, 232–3, 234, 235, 238–42 Dusklands, 230 In the Heart of the Country, 229–30, 232 The Life and Times of Michael K, 243 The Lives of Animals, 234–8 The Master of Petersburg, 233, 238–9 Waiting for the Barbarians, 230–1, 233 Collins, Wilkie, 93 Coleridge, S.T., 221, 222 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 91 Dacre, Charlotte, 35–55 Zofloya, or The Moor, 6–7, 35, 45–52 Hours of Solitude, 36–7, 40–3 David, Deirdre, 139, 143, 145 Demoor, Marysa, 103–4 De Quincey, Thomas, 221, 222, 227–8n24 Devi, Mahasweta, 7 ‘Pterodactyl, Pirtha and Puran Sahay’, 62–6, 67n10 see also India Dickens, Charles Great Expectations, 137 Enlightenment, the, 1,2, 3, 58, 62, 64, 71, 78, 155, 171n13, 211, 213, 224, 225, 226, 229, 235 Empire Gothic, 136–40, 142 Farrell, J.G., 10, 172–91 A Girl In The Head, 182 The Hill Station, 188 245

246 Index

Farrell, J.G. – continued The Lung, 182 The Siege of Krishnapur, 174, 180, 181, 183–8 The Singapore Grip, 172–4, 181, 183, 188 Troubles, 174, 176–80, 181, 183 see also Ireland Female Gothic, 9, 136–54 fin de siècle, 98, 137 Finney, Charles G. ‘The Circus of Dr. Lao’, 130–1 Fitzgerald, Scott The Great Gatsby, 204 Foster, Roy, 175 Foucault, Michel, 2, 90, 227n14 Frank, Frederick S., 20–1 Franklin, Michael, 3 Frayling, Christopher, 92 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 57, 124, 210 see also uncanny Gelder, Ken, 5 Gandhi, Leela, 1–2 Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan, 145, 146, 152n13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 210 Gold, Barri, J., 104, 105 Gresham, William Lindsay Nightmare Alley, 124–6 Haggard, Henry Rider, 8, 91, 103–16, 116n3 She, 104, 105, 106–9, 110, 111 Ayesha: The Return of She, 109–10, 112 She and Allan, 110–13 Wisdom’s Daughter, 113–15 Halberstam, Judith, 119 Harris, Wilson, 148 Hazlitt, William, 121, 127, 132 Hogg, James, 233 Huxley, T.H., 105–6 hybridity, 148, 155, 164, 174, 180, 211, 217, 255

India, 58, 62–6, 67n10, 68n12, 91, 95, 120, 157–70, 183–8, 190–1n21, 193–206, 213–26 see also Devi, Mahasweta; Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer; Roy, Arundhati; Rushdie, Salman Ireland, 24–31, 152n6, 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 183 see also Farrell, J.G.; Maturin, Charles; Stoker, Bram Jackson, Rosemary, 233 James, M.R., 176 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 157 Heat and Dust, 9, 157–70 see also India Johnson, Barbara, 56 Johnson, R.W., 234 Judd, Dennis, 96 Kabbani, Rana, 220 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 59, 161, 212, 213 Katz, Wendy R., 103 Kipling, Rudyard, 12, 91, 95, 99, 103, 113 Kosok, Heinz, 24–5 Leavis, Q.D., 139, 146 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 10, 176 Levine, George, 56 Lewes, George Henry, 105 Lewis, Matthew The Monk, 45, 47, 52 Lorde, Audre, 142 Low, Gail Ching-Liang, 110 Lowry, Elizabeth, 232 Lukács, Georg, 174 MacKenzie, Henry, 39 Macpherson, James, 44–5 Malchow, H.L., 5, 91 Malley, Shawn, 107 Marais, Mike, 238–9 Mars-Jones, Adam, 242 Maturin, Charles, 10, 13, 221, 222

Index 247

Maturin, Charles – continued Melmoth the Wanderer, 6, 14, 24–31, 45, 222, 224 see also Ireland mesmerism, 19, 121–4, 126, 128, 132, 133n5 Meyer, Susan, 139, 144, 145 McClintock, Anne, 137–8 McCormack, W.J., 175 Michie, Elsie, 146 Mishra, Vijay, 212–13 Mogen, David, 45 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 131–2 Moretti, Franco, 95, 96 Morrison, Toni Beloved, 193 Moynahan, Julian, 175 Murray, Tim, 104 Nabokov, Vladimir, 81 Newman, Judie, 157 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 209, 212 Odoevsky, Vladimir, 7, 69, 81–2 The Salamander, 77–80, 81 see also Russia Orientalism, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8–9, 10–11, 12, 15, 22, 110, 119, 120, 122, 126, 130, 131–2, 133n14, 142, 158 see also Said, Edward Pease, Donald, 226 Pick, Daniel, 122–3, 124, 134n24 Pope, Alexander The Rape of The Lock, 19 Potocki, Jan The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, 222, 223 Pratt, Mary Louise, 138 Punter, David, 2 Pushkin, Alexsandr, 7, 69 The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, 80–1 Poltava, 75, 76–7, 80 see also Russia

Radcliffe, Ann, 176 Renan, Ernest, 208–9 Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea, 9, 149, 147–51 Riquelme, John Paul, 136 Romanticism, 1, 42, 56, 74, 76, 77, 80, 127, 210, 213, 221, 233, 242 Roy, Arundhati The God of Small Things, 10, 193–206 see also India Rushdie, Salman, 10–11, 214 Midnight’s Children, 208, 213–26 Shame, 227n11 see also India Ruskin, John, 141 Russia, 69–82 see also Odoevsky, Vladimir see also Pushkin, Alexsandr Said, Edward, 3, 4, 8, 22, 23–4, 33n21, 81, 91, 120, 131–2, 133n14, 158 see also Orientalism Schmitt, Cannon, 92 Smart, Robert A., 95 Smith, Lady Eleanor F. ‘Satan’s Circus’, 127–8 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 5, 7, 56–62, 67n9, 90, 198 Singer, Peter, 235 South Africa, 229–43 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 4, 12, 148 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 8, 88, 90–102, 123, 126, 128, 131, 150, 221 see also Ireland Suleri, Sara, 139–40 Summers, Montague, 123, 136 Thompson, Ewa, 81 Tiffin, Helen, 229

248 Index

uncanny, 6, 23, 105, 110, 112, 119, 137, 138, 140, 155, 164, 172, 175, 176, 177, 180, 185, 186, 187, 202, 203, 206, 210, 212, 229 see also Freud, Sigmund Warwick, Alexandra, 5–6

Whale, John, 121 Wheeler, Michael, 143 Young, Robert The Vampire Circus, 128–30 Zanger, Jules, 91, 92, 100n14 Zonana, Joyce, 142

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