The Non-Literate Other: Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English. (Costerus NS)

The Non-Literate Other Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English COSTERUS NEW SERIES 171 Series Ed...

Author: Helga Ramsey-Kurz

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The Non-Literate Other Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 171 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper

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The Non-Literate Other Readings of Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Novels in English

Helga Ramsey-Kurz

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2007

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2240-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ix

INTRODUCTION

1

I

ILLITERACY AS A THEORETICAL ANATHEMA

17

Chapter 1

In the Humanities: Tabooed

19

Chapter 2

In Literary Studies: Ignored

39

II

Illiteracy as a Literary Theme

57

Chapter 3

Illiteracy in Earlier Fiction

61

Chapter 4

Illiteracy in Twentieth-Century Fiction: Heart of Darkness

77

III THE NON-LITERATE WITHOUT: UNLETTERED CALIBANS IN DISTANT EUROPE Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

101

Unearthing the Pre-Literate Mind: William Golding’s The Inheritors

109

Projections of a Post-Literate Mind: Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains

123

Postcolonial Returns to a Pre-Literate Europe: David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life and Gillian Bouras’ Aphrodite and the Others

139

vi

The Non-Literate Other

IV THE NON-LITERATE IN SIGHT: THE UNLETTERED NATIVE IN CONTACT NARRATIVES

163

EARLY CONTACTS IN FICTIONAL AFRICA

171

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

But a Glimpse in the Rear View Mirror: The Unintelligible Native in Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter

181

Arrivals on a Bicycle: The Unintelligible Colonist in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

191

Meeting in the Desert: Mirages of Literate and Non-Literate Barbarities in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

205

LATER CONTACTS IN NEW ZEALAND AND NORTH AMERICA Chapter 11

V

Islands of Preliterate Orality: Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Patricia Grace’s Potiki

THE NON-LITERATE WITHIN: ESTABLISHED FORMS OF NON-LITERACY IN LITERATE CULTURES

ILLITERACY FORGED BY THE INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM Chapter 12 Chapter 13

221

231

259 265

The Outcaste’s Longing to Learn: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

275

Learning to Belong to the Outcastes: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

297

Table of Contents

BLACK ILLITERACY FORGED BY SLAVERY AND RACISM Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16

vii

317

The Lure of White Literacy: Richard Wright’s Black Boy

331

Resisting White Literacy: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

347

Forging a Black Literacy: Sapphire’s Push and Ernest J. Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying

VI THE ILLITERATE RETURNED: ILLITERACY IN MIGRANT LITERATURE Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19

367

383

The Illiterate Mother: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

397

The Illiterate Daughter: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

411

Generations of Illiteracy: Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter

425

CLOSING REMARKS

437

BIBLIOGRAPHY

449

INDEX

489


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The idea for this book was sparked by David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon. The text was given to me by Jake Ramsey, a voracious reader who became illiterate: an eye operation, which improved his ability to see, destroyed his capacity to process what he saw. The damage was irreversible and its effect on Jake’s life almost impossible for others to fathom. One person capable of understanding was Jake’s son who had moved to Austria without any knowledge of the German language. The illiteracy he suddenly found himself in was as total as his father’s. Still, it was temporary and in this respect similar to the handicap of a group of adults I worked with in Innsbruck several years ago. Life had put them out of touch with writing. Watching them revive their literacy skills has been more than a uniquely rewarding experience. It has also alerted me to the nonchalance with which most literates tend to take their access to writing for granted. In light of the endemic ignorance of illiteracy and indifference to illiterates, especially amongst those comfortably at home in the world of books and letters, the interest friends and colleagues have expressed in my work has been absolutely vital. I owe special thanks to Marc Delrez, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Heidi Ganner, Janette Turner Hospital, Michael Ramsey, Ulla Ratheiser, and Janice Schiestl. They never stopped giving me the feeling that my ideas were worth turning into a book and, what is more, they never stopped expecting this book to appear in print. The person most responsible for helping this to actually happen is Cedric Barfoot, whose adamant insistence on crystalline clarity throughout the editing process has added yet another dimension to my understanding of literacy. It has shown me that literacy is not only a condition to be acquired by learning but also one to be facilitated by a guardedly unpretentious use of language. Unlike in crystals, in writing there is nothing to be gained by the loss of clarity. Small perturbations in the characteristically simple structure of crystals produce highly valued sapphires or rubies. Larger disturbances turn them black. But arguments unnecessarily convoluted leave the reader in a darkness even blacker. Or as Cedric Barfoot has canvassed what he believes

x


one must strive to accomplish even when writing on a subject as badly charted as that of illiteracy: Transparent and crystal clear the prose even on topics heated to produce black titanium crystals glistening facets and dark edges of light.

Permission to reprint a modified version of the paper “Does Saleem Really Miss the Spittoon? Script and Scriptlessness in Midnight’s Children”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXXVI/1 (© 2001), 127-45, has been granted by Sage Publishers. The support of the Austrian Science Foundation by means of a “Charlotte-BühlerHabilitation Grant” is also gratefully acknowledged.

INTRODUCTION


In the second scene of Romeo and Juliet, Capulet turns to a servant, hands him a piece of paper, and instructs him to invite everyone on it to “an old accustom’d feast”.1 So accustomed does Capulet seem to giving such orders that he does not stop to ask whether his servant can read. However, “Find them out whose names are written here!”, the exasperated servant calls out as soon as his master is out of earshot: It is written that the shoe-maker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his nets; but I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ, and can never find what names the writing person hath here writ.

Still, the problem Capulet’s servant is faced with is not insurmountable. “I must to the learned. In good time” (I.ii.38-43), he swiftly resolves and wastes no time in begging Romeo, who is just coming in, to decipher his master’s writing for him. Obviously, if Capulet’s messenger could read, the young Montague would not have learned, as he soon does, of the feast at which he will meet and fall in love with Juliet. The fact that Capulet’s servant is illiterate sets the “fearful passage” of Romeo’s and Juliet’s “death-mark’d love” (Prologue, 9) in motion. This does not mean, however, that the accident of Capulet’s guest list falling into Romeo’s hands is only an ominous fluke. To understand this, it is important to bear in mind that the exchange between unlettered servant and learned master shrewdly plotted by Shakespeare constituted a perfectly ordinary transaction in Elizabethan times. If Shakespeare comments on the servant’s illiteracy as emphatically as he does, Shakespeare must have a special goal in mind, such as that of identifying the coincidence of the encounter between Romeo and the servant, and the tragic events ensuing from it, as the product not only of fate but also of a specific social reality. In this reality, the illiterate is no outsider but assumes a safe position within the confines of a strongly diversified culture. The structural relevance Shakespeare strategically assigns his unlearned character reflects this position and, with it, the special understanding of literacy prevalent in the early modern period in England, a time when printing and manuscript cultures existed side by side and were contributing to the evolution of a proto-bureaucratic nation state 1 Romeo and Juliet, I.ii.20, from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander, London, 1951 (all further Shakespeare references will be to this edition).

4


without, as yet, seeming to threaten a still intact oral culture. In a climate informed by a progressive diversification of writing technologies and literate competences, an uneven distribution of literacy skills and the gradual emergence of a learned elite,2 the public was alerted rather by displays of more advanced literacy skills3 than by complete ignorance of any letters. As Peter Beale shows, while the majority of the population would still identify themselves as non- or semi-literate, it was learned individuals who would be viewed with suspicion and hostility and made the butt of satires by contemporary dramatists.4 Sensitive to the insecurities generating such an attitude, Shakespeare, too, while frequently portraying ignorant, “unlesson’d” or “unschool’d” simpletons with emphatic fondness, and, more pertinently even, allowing them to be viewed with similar fondness by their fellowbeings, routinely represents his more lettered characters as objects of dislike and distrust. Occasionally, he construes this distrust as an expression of the speaker’s own paranoid fears, as in the case of Dogberry, who advises his watchman not to boast of his reading and writing skills but to “let that appear when there is no need of such vanity” (Much Ado About Nothing, III.iii.17-18); or in that of the rebel and clothier Jack Cade, criticizing the new ways of the ruling classes, as he proclaims: Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? That parchment, being scribbl’d o’er, should undo a man? (King Henry the Sixth, Part Two, IV.ii.74-75)

And when the clerk whom his men have arrested confesses that he can write, Cade, too, takes this as a confession of villainy and treason and 2

Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, translation of L’histoire et pouvoirs de l’écrit (1988) by Lydia G. Cochrane, Chicago, 1994, 344-45. Cressy also notes that “Literacy was by no means a necessity in early modern England, and its mystery was limited to less than a third of the population” (Cressy, 838 and 842). 3 Especially of “fine penmanship”, which at the time also involved cutting quills and preparing ink, and literacy in Latin and Greek, “the gilded culmination of the most rarefied scholarly élite” (Cressy, 842). 4 See Laetitia Yeandle, “In Praise of Scribes (Book Review): Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England by Peter Beal, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1998”, Shakespeare Studies, XXVIII (2000) (19-08-2003): http://search. epnet.com/direct.asp?

Introduction

5

orders that the clerk be hanged “with his pen and inkhorn about his neck” (IV.ii.104). By contrast, Berowne eloquently reasons his abhorrence of those “continual plodders” who derive their authority merely from books: These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights That give a name to every fixed star Have no more profit to their shining nights Than those that walk and wot not what they are. (Love’s Labour’s Lost, I.i.88-91)

After all, he knows that too much to know “is to know nought but fame; / And every godfather can give a name” (I.i.92-93). Similarly plausible are the words with which Imogen curses reading and writing when she realizes that her husband has been destroyed by Pisanio’s “forged letters” and exclaims, “To write and read / Be henceforth treacherous!” (Cymbeline, IV.ii.317-18). Of all of Shakespeare’s characters it is probably Prospero who pays most dearly for placing too high a premium on book learning. He loses his dukedom to his brother because he himself is too “transported / and rapt in secret studies” (The Tempest, I.ii.76-77), too dedicated to the “bettering” of his own mind. Though firmly ruling the island on which he is marooned, the literally “well-versed” Prospero, is an outcast, an exile, alien and displaced. His slave, the “hag-born”, “brutish”, “monstrous” Caliban knows only too well that, without the books he has brought with him, Prospero is “but a sot, as I am nor hath not / One spirit to command” (III.ii.89-90), for the island demands to be sensed and experienced not visually but aurally. Its spirits work their miracles unseen, chasing over the sands “with printless foot” (V.i.34). As Caliban informs Trinculo and Stephano: The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, ... (III.ii.120-33)

6


In his culture, or “soundscape”,5 Caliban’s deformity, to which only the intruding humans take offence, bears little meaning, and the charge of ignorance pronounced by his master, no justification. As Caliban reminds Prospero, it was he that showed him “all the qualities o’ th’ isle” (I.ii.337) and thereby enabled him to subject its inhabitants. Prospero, though, can only remember that his slave did not know his own meaning, but would “gabble” like a “thing most brutish” (I.ii.356-57). The foreign ruler of the island values the islanders’ orality only where it is used to express their willing acceptance of his aesthetics. Rarely taking note of his subjects’ artistic exploits, Prospero typically stops to listen when he hears Ariel sing a folksong he has taught him. “Why, that’s my dainty Ariel!” Prospero exclaims approvingly, adding, not without affection, “I shall miss thee; ...” (V.i.95). What Prospero is unable to see is obvious to the audience: the savage Caliban is more human than Prospero’s favourite, Ariel. Caliban is the one who mingles with the shipwrecked humans washed to the island’s shore and becomes their ally in a base and foolishly plotted, yet thoroughly human scheme to overthrow Prospero. Only briefly do Stephano and Trinculo marvel how the monster could possibly have learnt to speak their tongue. Soon they become used to seeing Caliban as one of their own kind, and in a state of drunken stupor Trinculo calls out: Servant-monster! The folly of this island! They say there’s but five upon this isle: we are three of them; if th’ other two be brain’d like us, the state totters. (III.ii.5-6; italics added)

Yet, it is not Trinculo’s rhetoric alone that lends greater humanity to Caliban than his master ever concedes him. What brings him closer to Shakespeare’s audience than Prospero’s learned wisdom ever permits the Duke to get is Caliban’s orality.6 His orality is what redeems the alleged monster. Unlettered but gabbling and grunting, the figure of Caliban provides a mirror image to the Elizabethan groundling, engaging him in a direct rapport, while the controlled and forbidding speeches of the well-read and lettered Prospero can only command attentive silence. Yet silence is a more “exotic” feature of 5 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor, Chicago, 1999. 6 See Smith, especially Chapter 4, 119-21.

Introduction

7

the Elizabethan theatre, whose acoustic properties render it more like Caliban’s island. It therefore is Caliban, Smith suggests, who is more at home on the Elizabethan stage than the tyrannical Prospero, forerunner of, and yet already slave to, Cartesian philosophy “with its privileging of visual experience and its ambition to speak with a single authoritative voice”.7 The representation of the unlettered subject as integral part of the social fabric portrayed by the literary text remained a common strategy in English literature well into the nineteenth century. But the sympathetic treatment of an Other inhabiting a cultural space outside or beyond literate civilization and hence never really within reach of the text is a more recent phenomenon. It presupposes not only an understanding of the non-literate as distinctly other or apart from literate culture but also a sense of the limitations of literate thought and expression. As the present study documents, its is in probing these limitations that twentieth-century novels rediscovered a topic consistently overlooked in other Western discourses of culture, that of illiteracy or what will, for reasons to be explained later, also be termed “non-literacy” or “scriptlessness”. Yet, before it can describe how writers from different cultural backgrounds retrieve the theme of nonliteracy from the systematic anathematization it has been subject to in almost all domains of the humanities in the second half of the twentieth century, it will deal with the question of why, in the first place, the Western academy has so consistently and for so long avoided touching on aspects of literacy and illiteracy. To fully grasp the importance of this question it is worth taking note of the following figures: in the world today there are approximately one billion illiterate adults8 (or one in three women and one in five men).9 Although, according to UNESCO, relative illiteracy 7

Ibid., 26. Which, at present, is twenty-seven percent of all adults. 9 This corresponds with UNESCO’s estimate that in 1995 885 million adults (i.e. persons fifteen years old and above) worldwide did not have basic reading and writing skills. It is also worth noting at this point that, according to 1990 forecasts for the year 2000, the absolute numbers of illiterates would decline from 905.4 to 869.4 million (cf. “Illiteracy”, Globalization, The Dilemma of the Definition, Defining the Dilemma [20-08-2003]: http://www.geocities.com/hayattpolitics /illiteracy.html). The estimated total midyear world population was 5.5 billion in 1995 and 6 billion in 1999 (cf. US Bureau of the Census, “Total Midyear Population of the World: 1950-2050”, 8

8


rates have been decreasing, the absolute number of illiterate people keeps growing owing to the rapid increase of the world’s overall population.10 The problem is particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia, and the Middle East,11 areas where literacy rates averaged below sixty percent in 1995. In Bangladesh, two out of five children leave school too soon to become literate and one out of five never starts school. By comparison, thirteen percent of American seventeen-years olds are functionally illiterate; at least a million of these will go on to graduate from American high schools.12 Admittedly, while the statistics on Third World illiteracy rates are largely consistent, there is comparatively little agreement on the absolute illiteracy numbers in more developed countries. For instance, corresponding rates for the United States range between one and twenty-five percent.13 Clearly this scatter is due to different definitions of illiteracy being employed in different surveys. Not all of them take into account that the definition of illiteracy advanced by the United Nations as “the inability to read and write a simple message in any language”14 is useful only to comprehend the problem in poorly literate countries. In extensively literalized societies completely International Data Base, data updated 17-07-2003 [18-08-2003]: http://census.gov/ ipc/www/worldpop.html). 10 It is estimated that thirty to fifty million people are added each year to the total number of illiterates. 11 Nearly ninety-eight percent of illiterates live in developing countries, and fifty percent, in. South Asia. In 1970, for every one hundred illiterates in industrialized countries there were 882 in developing countries. Now there are 1,873. Or, putting it in a different way, in 1970 there were nine times as many illiterates in developing countries as in industrialized ones. Now there are eighteen times as many. 12 See “Literacy”, Feed the Minds: Christian Communication Worldwide (20-082003): http://feedtheminds.org/literacy/about.php. 13 According to the UN definition of illiteracy, America has an overall illiteracy rate of about one percent. By contrast, the US Office of Education holds that, at least in 1990, five percent of the adult population living in the United States were functionally illiterate, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, in turn, estimates that functional illiteracy among adult Americans ranges at around thirteen percent, and the National Institute for Literacy claims that more than twenty percent of Americans aged seventeen and older read at or below a fifth-grade level, i.e. far below the level required in most workplaces. According to the 2003 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, finally, no less than twenty-five percent of US adults are functionally illiterate (cf. David R. Olson, “Literacy and Schooling”, Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003 Ultimate Reference Suite CD-ROM). 14 “Definition of Illiteracy”, Columbia Encyclopaedia, 6th edn, 2003 (19-092003): http://www.encyclopaedia.com/html.

Introduction

9

different demands require different definitions. Recognizing this as early as 1940, the US Bureau of the Census adopted the concept of “functional” literacy to complement its definition of illiteracy - the inability of any person over ten years of age to read and write in any language. Its definition of functional literacy again reflects the intangibility of the problem. With symptomatic vagueness it was stated that any person with less than five years of schooling would be “unable to engage in social activities in which literacy is assumed”. The standards of definition have been fluctuating considerably ever since. Between six and eight years of schooling tend to be regarded as the minimum criterion for functional literacy by different authorities at present. General confusion seems the almost inevitable consequence of recent endeavours to chart the forever shifting dividing line between fully integrated, because sufficiently lettered, and increasingly marginalized, because insufficiently schooled, members of modern societies, between insiders and outsiders, “centrics” and “ex-centrics”, users and non-users of the latest sites of information transfer and reproduction. This is not the only criticism that has been voiced with regard to the perennial search for ways of distinguishing between literacy and illiteracy. As Olson complains, the essentialist debate has caused literacy to be viewed almost exclusively as “the simple ability to read and write”. Far from being “a matter simply of decoding graphs into sounds and vice versa”, Olson insists, literacy presupposes many other faculties: it involves competence in reading, writing, and interpreting texts of various sorts. It involves both skill in decoding and higher levels of comprehension and interpretation. These higher levels depend upon knowledge both of specialized uses of language and of specialized bodies of knowledge.15

Even if individuals are not highly skilled in literate activities, Olson argues further, they know what it is to be literate. This means that they know what texts are, “how they are written and interpreted, how they accumulate to form a tradition, and how they are consulted and used

15

Olson, “Literacy and Schooling”.

10


in multiple ways in a literate society”.16 Olson calls such knowledge “environmental” or “lay” literacy17 and contrasts it with other literacy skills too sophisticated for a functionally literate person to perform. These skills, Olson insists, remain the prerogative of an elite equipped with a high level of literate competence in certain specialized fields such as science, law, or literature. It is an impressively detailed catalogue Olson provides of those skills which any literate society must strive to produce at least in a small percentage of its population: In addition to specialized vocabularies, high levels of literate competence involve knowledge of specialized grammatical constructions that serve to set out explicitly the logical form of an argument and of specialized genres or literary forms such as description, explanation, argument, and instructions that can be used for building complex linguistic structures or genres, such as narrative and expository texts. These specialized skills require for mastery many years of formal schooling. Once such forms are acquired in literate contexts they can also be used in speech. For this reason literacy is not tied exclusively to writing; just as one can write in an essentially oral style, so one can speak in a manner characteristic of written language.18

For Olson, high or “elite” literacy is neither a privilege nor a luxury but a prerequisite for the maintenance and advancement of all the different literacies practised in a society. It facilitates the creative production and reception of texts in the process of which a culture mobilizes and applies, probes and refines, renews and transforms its various literate competences. Just as the principal function of any writing system is “to preserve language and information through time and across space”, one of the principal functions of high literacy, and especially of literature as an application of it, may be said to be the preservation of a culture’s literacy through time and across space. As Olson asserts, the literacy standards of a society are determined mainly by “the range of functions its script serves and the breadth of 16 Similarly, the UNESCO defines illiteracy as “the inability to use reading and writing with facility in daily life” (cf. “Illiteracy”, Lindamood-Bell™: Definitions and Terminology Resource [20-08-2003]: http://www.lblp.com/definitions/illiteracy.htm). 17 Another term suggested by Nash is “cultural” literacy (cf. Ronald H. Nash, “The Three Kinds of Illiteracy”, p. 2 of 7 [20-08-2003]: http://www.google.com/ search?Q=cache:w…t/ummit/nashtki.html+illiteracy&hl=de). 18 Olson, “Literacy and Schooling”.

Introduction

11

its readership”. “With the growth of readership”, he explains, “come increased production of materials to be read, increased number of social functions the script is used for, and the invention of new, more specialized genres of writing”. Literature not only contributes significantly to the growth of readerships,19 but also responds to the varying social functions of writing by mimicking, parodying, and thematizing them, and actively partakes in the invention and production of new genres of literate articulation. Literature, in other words, is not just a product of literate culture. It also interacts with the infrastructure by which it is produced. As this book will show, it even reaches beyond it to acknowledge spaces outside literate culture and position itself in relation to them. Strangely enough, since the early twentieth century this has remained a task reserved almost exclusively to writers of literature and the reason for this is not merely a shortage of information for other members of the “literate elite” to process. In fact, ample material exists that could have elicited a response from domains at least adjacent to imaginative writing. It is known, for instance, that of 4.2 billion adults in the world, nearly one billion are illiterate. It is also known that worldwide 572 million people use English as a first or second language.20 What is it that has prevented scholars in English studies so far from noting, and stating, that there are nearly twice as many illiterates as there are speakers of English in the world? Or that the number of adult users of English21 is lower than that of illiterates in South Asia alone? What is it that has kept critics and scholars from considering that the staggering success of Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things is staggering only as long as one ignores the vast 19

In fact, the availability of reading material has been found to be far more conducive to the literalization of a society than the availability of schooling, and, conversely, the lack of reading material, far more serious a problem in countries with poor literacy rates than the lack of schools and teachers (cf. Olson, “Literacy and Schooling”). 20 David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, Cambridge, 1995, 107. A similar number (namely 508 million) is given in “English: A Language of United Kingdom”, Ethnologue.com, 19p (18-08-2003): http://www. ethnologue.com/show.language.asp?code=ENG. According to other sources, the number of English speakers ranges between 473 and 730 million (cf. e.g. “Frequently Asked Questions”, The British Council United Kingdom [20-09-2003]: http://www. britishcouncil.org/english/engfaqs.htm). 21 The former being 380 million, which is approximately two thirds of the latter – 572 million (cf. US Bureau of the Census).

12


numbers of people who have not bought, nor ever will buy or read the book. In 1997, when the novel was first published and swiftly advanced to the rank of the fifth biggest selling book in the world, 230,000 copies were sold in the United Kingdom, a country with a population of fifty-five million. 150,000 copies were purchased in India, a country with over one billion inhabitants but admittedly with only slightly more than eleven million speakers of English.22 The English and American publishing industries together produce 200,000 titles every year23 – a large number until one considers that there are nearly 400 million adult users of English. As Emilia Ferreiro establishes, worldwide the publishing industries are catering for, at best, twenty percent of the world’s population.24 Eighty percent thus have either highly limited or no access to books at all. The international appeal of literature, and especially that of the different Anglophone literatures, belies the comparative small size of its readerships. The writers studied in this book seem to be acutely aware of this. They understand that the “textual communities” in which their works are produced, circulated, consumed, and processed, are not the same as the communities about which they write. They are aware that, as broadly published, multiply translated, and widely known writers, they have been appropriated into a global culture from which the majority of the globe’s population is barred. They know that the vastness of the territory this culture claims its own is only virtual and that they themselves are eagerly set up as icons by their publishers to demarcate this space. The sense of dependence this knowledge engenders inevitably is at odds with their sense of belonging they derive from their simultaneous rootedness in a local culture. This culture conveys a feeling of home that the world in which the writers have gained international acclaim does not and cannot supply. It is 22

“A Million and Counting”, Frontline: India's National Magazine, XV/2 (24 January-6 February 1998) (19-09-2003): http://www.frontline.onnet.com/fl1502/1521 340.htm. Admittedly, this source states that only 80,000 hardback copies were sold in India by the end of 1997. The estimate of 150,000 copies altogether is based on the fact that both in the UK and Italy the number of paperback copies sold was ten percent lower than that of hardback copies. 23 This number comprises old and new titles (cf. Book Marketing Limited, “Sizing the UK Book Market”, Books and the Consumer 2000 [18-08-2003]: http://www. bookmarketing.co.uk/bookmarket.asp). 24 Emilia Ferreiro, “Reading and Writing in a Changing World”, Publishing Research Quarterly, XVI/2 (2000), p53 9p (20-08-2003): http://search.epnet.com/ direct.asp?an= 3913284&db=afh.

Introduction

13

also for this reason that in their fictional explorations of what they identify as their native culture, they regularly portray individuals who do not have books, who do not read books, who cannot read. Yet what, at the outset, may look like an escape from an all too overwhelming, if not disturbing or threatening world of letters often proves a form of creative reconciliation with one’s own literacy and the ambivalent cultural into which it forces one. The notion of writing ultimately crystallizing in the individual narratives varies, although not randomly, as the literary journeys beyond the familiar world of letters are always charted against a distinctive historical background. The novels studied in this book are grouped accordingly into texts which are set in Europe and which interrogate received narratives of Western cultural progress (Section III), texts set in sub-Saharan Africa, recording the tensions produced by the imposition of an alphabetic culture on oral societies (Section IV, Part 1), texts set in New Zealand and North America, documenting the long-term consequences of an indigenous society’s assimilation of alphabetic literacy (Section IV, Part 2), texts portraying the coexistence of literate and illiterate people in India (Section V, Part 1), texts recalling the banning of black people from literacy during slavery (Section V, Part 2), and, finally, texts describing the immersion of Asian migrants in a culture with a foreign writing system (Section VI). The main setting of each novel is always the illiterate person’s home into which the narrative intrudes, either to re-enact an historical usurpation and thus expose it or to go even further and symbolically restore the usurped land to its rightful owner or owners. In any case, the intrusion is not an epistemic violence but exemplifies a way in which literacy may be employed to undo or at least counteract such violence. The new readings of writing yielded in the process also open up new possibilities of understanding illiteracy. It is not simply placed in direct opposition to literate culture. Instead it may be located also at a significant remove from the literate culture in which the text itself is implicated (as in the novels studied in Section III) or placed in immediate contact with it (as in the novels discussed in Section IV). In contrast, the narratives analysed in Sections V and VI describe illiteracies which manifest themselves inside literate cultures, either as a long accepted part of these cultures or as an entirely novel and barely recognized phenomenon. While differing in the way they place

14


the illiterate, the narratives compare in how they offset selfconsciously fictional treatments of illiteracy against carefully historicized descriptions of specific literacies. Regularly this serves to deconstruct received assumptions of the illiterate’s historical insignificance and assert the existence of truths other than those recorded in writing are asserted. At least as salient as formal and structural parallels between the individual novel is the fact that they appeal to an awareness of illiteracy at a time when this seems to be considered an utterly unfashionable pursuit by most of the Western literate elite. Chapter 1 explains why and how illiteracy has been anathemized so systematically in the humanities since the early twentieth century. It attributes this tendency to the structuralist prioritization of speech over writing on the one hand and to a growing scholarly interest in orality since the 1960s on the other. Although it corrected the phonocentric bias of linguistic and literary studies, the post-structuralist valorization of the graphein at first also failed to draw attention to the issue of illiteracy. More recent studies on the history and functions of writing, and especially of writing systems other than the alphabetic script, seem to point in a new direction by having at least departed from a rigorous denial of the phenomenon. As will be shown in Chapter 2, a similar development can be noted in literary studies, which, under the enduring influence of structuralism, has also denied writing any epistemic significance in its own right. Logically, it too has appropriated the concept of orality in the first place to describe why and how literature responds to, represents, and uses non-literate modes of expression. This is particularly evident in narratology which routinely construes the narrative act as an oral performance, thereby overlooking the possibility that metafiction could, among other things, be the expression of an enhanced awareness of the actual writtenness of a text. Section I closes by pointing at the metafictional resourcefulness of the theme of illiteracy and suggesting that it might indeed be due to their special awareness of language and its colonizing and decolonizing capacity that postcolonial writers address this theme with such remarkable frequency. While Section I investigates the implications of the insistent anathematization of illiteracy in the humanities, Section II addresses aspects of its thematization in literature. It begins with an analysis of

Introduction

15

the circumstances which caused illiteracy to be recognized as a social problem at the beginning of the nineteenth century and prompted contemporary British writers to engage in heated debates concerning the implementation of compulsory schooling for nearly a hundred years after that. These debates were soon carried into the Romantic and Victorian novel, which provided an ideal forum to negotiate the benefits and dangers of mass literacy. They reached a turning point towards the end of the century after a dramatic surge of literacy rates in England. The radical rethinking of literate culture in which this resulted is also reflected in contemporary metafictional exploitations of the theme of illiteracy. To show this, Section II continues with a close reading of Heart of Darkness. The analysis as an early instance of European prose fiction self-consciously interrogating the cultural significance of writing and using the image of the unlettered Other to reflect on its own writtenness as an expression of that significance. Rather than justifying the inherent racism of Conrad’s portrayal of the African native, the analysis attributes it to the uncertainties about contemporary literate culture which clearly pervaded metadiscursive reflection at the time. Special attention will be paid to explicit comments on writing and literacy in Heart of Darkness as they seem to anticipate the deep scepticism informing so many appraisals in postcolonial literature of the dubious role the written word played in the colonial enterprise. From the controversial issue of Conrad’s Othering of the African native Chapter 4 moves to representations of non-literate otherness in twentieth-century narrative fiction, offering some general reflections on the approach taken to the texts studied in Sections III to VI. This approach draws on the discussion of the subaltern25 in postcolonial theory, albeit not without registering a special omission: For although it frequently describes subalternity in terms of a linguistic disadvantage, making extensive use of metaphors of speechlessness and silence, mute(d)ness and voicelessness, postcolonial theory has not as yet discovered illiteracy as a particular form of subalternity. If it had, Gayatri Spivak would perhaps have phrased her seminal question 25 As Elleke Boehmer explains, postcolonial theorists use the term “subaltern” to refer to subjects “of inferior or subordinated rank” and to signify, like “Other”, “that which is unfamiliar and extraneous to a dominant subjectivity, the opposite or negative against which an authority is defined” (Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, 2nd edn, Oxford, 2005, 21).

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concerning the subaltern’s ability to “speak up” for herself in a different way. Instead she casts herself in the role of the subaltern’s spokeswoman when she could define herself more accurately as the subaltern’s scribe. In contrast to literary scholars and theorists, writers of imaginative literature seem to observe this fine distinction scrupulously. Sections III to VI try to make visible their special awareness of the materiality of the writing in which they engage. In so doing they suggest attributing fictional representations of illiteracy to an imaginary identification with the non-literate Other prompted by the realization that the experience of difference may in itself be a form of sameness.

ILLITERACY AS A THEORETICAL ANATHEMA


CHAPTER ONE IN THE HUMANITIES: TABOOED

The incontrovertible fact that one in four of the world’s adult population is illiterate begs the question why scholars of the humanities and particularly of literature have paid so little attention to the issue throughout the twentieth century. As the following will show, there is no simple answer to this question. For a start, the conceptualization of illiteracy itself is far from an uncomplicated matter. This becomes obvious if one tries to see the phenomenon in isolation and understand it as an autonomous category, which illiteracy is not. Instead it constitutes part of a binary construct, an opposite – of literacy. “Illiteracy” always implies a difference from or a lack of that by which literacy is defined. More than that, it manifests itself only in relation to a literate culture. Individuals or cultures without a script are not comprehended as illiterate purely on account of their orality but only when they come into contact with a writing system or its users. It is solely by virtue of their particular relationship to a literate civilization, then, that they qualify as “il-”, “non-”, or “preliterate”. Logically, of all the coordinates by which an illiterate’s cultural position is determined, at least one will always be literacy. This explains why it was not before the nineteenth century that Western societies began to perceive and discuss illiteracy as a relevant social, political, economic, and moral concern. As long as illiteracy constituted a cultural norm and literacy an exception to this norm, no need was felt to view the absence of literacy skills as a great problem. But as soon as literacy changed from a privilege reserved for a wealthy minority into an economic necessity for everyone, it began to be debated as a marker of social and cultural identity.1 Yet, the keen interest nineteenth-century intellectuals expressed in illiteracy subsided rather quickly once Western societies had attained what was considered “universal literacy” and started to comprehend literate competence as a self-evident accomplishment rather than as a moral choice. As a result, the attention of early twentieth-century intellectuals shifted from the apparently vanishing minority of those still unable to read and write to the progressively growing masses they 1

On this see also Chapter 2.

20

Illiteracy as a Theoretical Anathema

were suddenly able to reach and perhaps even to educate through their writings. It may be more than a mere coincidence that just at this time, when writing was being discovered as a means of mass communication, European cultures saw the ascendancy of structuralism and with it a novel way of theorizing language. Drawing on Aristotle’s idea of language as a means of signification independent of material, as well as of social, political, and economic realities, structuralist theory located the meaning of human utterances exclusively in their metaphysical features, their immaterial systemic regularities, while disputing that the concrete medium through which a linguistic message was transported possessed any significance, let alone any signifying capacity. For Saussure and his followers writing was little more than a visual representation of speech, a transposition of essentially immaterial sounds and words onto paper, parchment, wood, or stone, or, in other words, as immaterial speech made material – as “coagulated speech”.2 In construing written language as a mere appendage to spoken language, as a mode of articulation reliant on and therefore secondary to speech, structuralist theory also revived the originally Aristotelian notion of pure thinking as an act of transcending plain substance. In so doing it enforced the typically Western tendency to privilege the abstract over the concrete, the spiritual over the physical, and the immaterial over the material. Half a century later it would be to this tendency that Jacques Derrida would attribute the peculiar “spirit of signlessness” by which he believed all Western thinking to be permeated. He would argue that in having championed the sound over the visual sign in all its conceptualizations of language since antiquity the West had omitted to cultivate any awareness of the semiotic function of writing. In accordance with the structuralist habit of relegating writing to a secondary status, in 1967 Roland Barthes noted: A language does not exist properly except in “speaking mass”; … a language is possible only starting from speech; historically, speech phenomena always precede language phenomena (it is speech which 2 Aleida and Jan Assmann, “Nachwort: Schrift und Gedächtnis”, in Schrift und Gedächtnis: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation, eds Aleida and Jan Assmann, Munich, 1983, 266.


21

makes language evolve), and genetically, a language is constituted in the individual through his learning from the environmental speech.3

The same attitude informs also the work of David Olson, who still asserts in 1994: Writing is dependent in a fundamental way on speech. One’s oral language, it is now recognized, is the fundamental possession and tool of the mind; writing, though important, is always secondary.4

Drawing on Derrida, Jens Brockmeier asserts that due to a typically Western phonocentric bias the “problem of writing” possessed no “distinctive identity”, neither as a general theoretical, nor as an historical issue, nor as a specific contemporary constellation – at least until the 1960s.5 Likewise, Brockmeier points out that before then the phenomenon of literacy had never been conceived of as “an independent epistemic object” by contemporary linguists.6 Almost inevitably, the opposite of literacy, illiteracy, featured even more obliquely in Western academic discourse during the first half of the twentieth century. Structuralism practically encouraged Western thinkers to overlook the inability to read and write as a social concern and to elide the complex questions illiteracy raises as an epistemological problem. In the course of the 1960s, however, a new awareness of writing took shape which also allowed for a reconsideration of the phenomenon of illiteracy, albeit only in certain manifestations better termed “non-“ or “pre-literacy”. As Brockmeier outlines, it was in direct response to the dramatic technological, infrastructural, and social changes brought about by the advent of electronic media and transforming the Western world at an unprecedented pace that scholars started to query the structuralist prioritization of speech over writing. The threat to established forms of written communication which the new technologies for reproducing and transmitting knowledge 3 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, translation of Eléments de sémiologie by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, London, 1967, 16. 4 David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading, Cambridge, 1994, 8. 5 Jens Brockmeier, Literales Bewusstsein: Schriftlichkeit und das Verhältnis von Sprache und Kultur, Munich, 1997, 55. 6 Ibid., 53.

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demanded not only disturbed the West’s comfortable reliance on universal literacy as a self-evident cultural accomplishment,7 but also prompted a departure from the structuralist idea of the immateriality of language. This made it possible for literacy to be conceptually appropriated into a rapidly diversifying cultural landscape and for writing to be apprehended anew as no longer constituting the principal means of communication and representation in Western civilization. Instead it began to be regarded as a medium containable within and dependent on other media. Written texts began to be discussed as independent epistemic objects, as self-contained systems of representation, and as autonomous and coherent complexes of signs. As it became possible to see writing as much more than a graphic image of speech or a self-evident anthropological feature, literacy, too, turned into an increasingly popular object of interdisciplinary investigation.8 Of course, in light of the insistent eschewing of writing and literacy as academic concerns throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, one cannot resist noting a certain irony pertaining to the sudden discovery of the validity of these issues as serious theoretical concerns. As Roy Harris poignantly observes: It says a great deal about Western culture that the question of the origin of writing could be posed clearly for the first time only after the traditional dogmas about the relationship between speech and writing had been subjected both to the brash counter-propaganda of a McLuhan and to the inquisitorial scepticism of Derrida. But it says even more that the question could not be posed clearly until writing itself had dwindled to microchip dimensions.9

McLuhan and Derrida may have formulated the most radical and therefore also the most widely noticed attacks on the phonocentrism of structuralist theory in that they expressly championed the repressed opposite of speech (or parole) – writing (or écriture). Nonetheless other scholars deserve to be mentioned here as well for supporting the new linguistic trend that generated McLuhan’s history of print culture and Derrida’s theory of the primacy of graphic signs over sounds. The main focus of these scholars may not as yet have been exclusively on 7 8 9

Ibid., 65-70. Ibid., 69-70. Roy Harris, The Origin of Writing, London, 1986, 158.


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writing, let alone on literacy. Speech still remained central to the work of Milman Parry, Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody, Ian Watt, and Walter Ong, as well as to that of Leroi-Gourhan, Lev Vygotsky, and Aleksandr Lurija – not, however, as a paradigmatic linguistic performance but as one with a semiotic purpose markedly different from that of written texts. Accordingly, the structuralist concepts of “parole” or “speech” were replaced by that of “orality”, which was strategically employed and promoted in systematic comparisons of literate and non-literate cultures, literate and non-literate thought processes, and literate and non-literate perceptions of and reactions to the world. At the same time, the abstract grammars inspired by structuralist theory were superseded by systematic descriptions (“grammatologies” in their most philosophical form) of the concrete features of spoken and written texts. The diversity of the approaches chosen to document the materiality of human communication was remarkable. The ensuing studies ranged from reconstructions of the oral transmission of the Iliad and the Odyssey10 to descriptions of neurophysiological changes in the bicameral mind caused by alphabetization,11 from interpretations of the ascendancy of Greek analytic thought and rhetoric as a result of the introduction of vowels into the alphabet,12 to historical accounts attributing developments in the social structure of chirographic cultures to changes in these cultures’ literate practices.13 10 Milman and Adam Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry, Oxford, 1971; Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24, Cambridge: Mass, 1960; Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, A History of the Greek Mind 1, Cambridge: Mass, 1963. 11 Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston, 1976. 12 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, but also “Prologue to Greek Literacy”, in Lectures in Memory of Louise Taft Semple: Second Series, 1966-1970, eds C.G. Boulter et al., Norman: Okla, 1973, 229-91, The Origins of Western Literacy: Four Lectures Delivered at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, March 25, 26, 27, 28, 1974, Toronto, 1976, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences, Princeton Series of Collected Essays, Princeton, 1982, and The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, New Haven, 1986. 13 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Themes in the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 1977, Kathleen Gough, “Implications of Literacy in Traditional China and India” and Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy”, both in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. with an Introduction by Jack Goody, Cambridge, 1968, 69-84 and 27-68.

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In the process, a number of qualities came to be identified as specific to writing. McLuhan famously analysed its demands on human vision. Eisenstein explored the shift from “scribal” or “chirographic” to print or typographic literacy. Illich, Sanders, Clanchy, and others addressed its independence of the temporal and local context of its conception and thought about the concomitant possibility of its commodification. Derrida emphasized the written text’s capacity to exist in the absence of its author and to acquire new meaning beyond that author’s death. Scribner, Cole, and Olson, finally, commented on the contingency of its con- and reception on the respective agents’ (that is, the author’s or the reader’s) command of a special technology and possession of the necessary tools to use this technology. Profiled as one pole of a binary construct, writing could no longer be dismissed as a mere representation of speech. Yet, even if (or because) this meant that literacy finally came to be comprehended as an integral property of Western civilization in its own right, illiteracy remained an anathema. Not only did the new awareness of the semiotic significance of writing fail to prompt studies on illiteracy. Such studies were in fact strategically avoided, as the comments of contemporary scholars on the then popular orality-literacy binary reveal. In these comments, the term “orality” is repeatedly referred to as an ideal solution to the problem of breaking with the overt primitivism of early twentieth-century studies of non-literate cultures. The heavy reliance of these studies on such formulations as “without writing”, “illiterate”, “primitive”, or “savage” was felt to preclude any scientifically objective treatment of cultural otherness and to cause people and peoples without script to be incorrectly represented as inferior, ignorant, and deficient. By contrast, the concept of “orality” was seen as facilitating a politically correct, even egalitarian description of the differences between typographic and auditive, between Western alphabetic and non-Western non-alphabetic societies, because such a description would give primacy neither to the written nor to the spoken word. Reflecting on the telling titles of the anthropological works La Pensée sauvage (1962) Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétes inférieures (1910), La Mentalité primitive (1923), and The Mind of Primitive Man (1922) by the structuralists Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Franz Boas, respectively, Walter Ong therefore observes:


25

The terms “primitive” and “savage”, not to mention “inferior”, are weighted terms. No one wants to be called primitive or savage, and it is comforting to apply these terms contrastively to other people to show what we are not. The terms are somewhat like the term “illiterate”: they identify an earlier state of affairs negatively, by noting a lack or deficiency.14

After this curt but explicit dismissal of the term “illiteracy”, Ong goes on to grant that the new attention to orality and orality-literacy contrasts had caused “a more positive understanding of earlier states of consciousness to replace “these well-meant, but essentially limiting approaches”.15 Possibly Ong was not aware of the fact that, with his special justification of the term “orality”, he effectively sanctioned the subsequent rigorous tabooing of the term “illiteracy” and the systematic negation of the phenomenon itself by other scholars. Nor did it seem to occur to anyone else that the advancement of orality as a new research interest was to be undertaken entirely at the expense of a serious discussion of illiteracy. Instead the invention of the literacyorality binary was hailed as a breakthrough in the humanities. Eric Havelock, for instance, proclaimed the “discovery of orality” a turning point in the age of modernism,16 and J.S. Bruner predicted that this 14

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New Accents (1982), London, 1988, 174. Likewise, in his re-reading of “A Writing Lesson”, a chapter about Lévi-Strauss’ travelogue Tristes Topiques, Derrida declares the expression “society without writing” dependent on “ethnocentric onerism” and “upon the vulgar” because it suggests that people be ordered along a scale of sophistication according to the degree of their possession of the graphein. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translation of De la grammatologie by G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, 1976, 109. 15 Ong, 174. 16 Eric A. Havelock, Als die Muse schreiben lernte, translation of The Muse Learns to Write (1986) by Ulrich Enderwitz and Rüdiger Hentschel, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, 47-56. Admittedly, in his paper “The Oral-Literate Equation”, Havelock notes that “It is of course, a mistake to polarize these [orality and literacy] as mutually exclusive”. Yet even though Havelock does not posit as radical an opposition between orality and literacy as others do, his analysis does not allow for a consideration of illiteracy as a category located at the interface of orality and literacy either. (Eric A. Havelock, “The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern Mind”, in Literacy and Orality, eds David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, Cambridge, 1991, 11.) In “Literacy: An Instrument of Oppression”, also contained in the collection Literacy and Orality compiled by Olson and Torrance, D.P. Pattanayak criticizes this omission, recalling Shirali’s dictum that “the power and arrogance of literacy knows no bounds” (Shirali as quoted in Pattanayak, 105).

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discovery would cause a fundamental change of the intellectual climate in Western societies.17 Even today scholars still like to believe that the recognition of orality ushered in a totally new era in the field of letters and learning, that it actually marked the beginning of the cognitive turn.18 Irrespective of its obvious benefits, however, the introduction of the allegedly neutral (or neutralizing) concept of “orality”, instead of removing the ethnocentric bias of Western scholars against non- or pre-literate cultures, at best transformed that bias. Many of the evaluations of purely oral cultures it inspired have since been criticized for their inherent reductionism. It is with profound scepticism that assertions according to which cultures without writing have no history, and hence no “sense of difference between past and future”, lack “introspectivity”, “analytical prowess”, and “concern with the will as such”,19 are incapable of abstraction, and can intellectualize experience only mnemonically20 are received today. This scepticism has been enforced by ethnographic studies proving that almost all linguistic and cognitive properties originally identified as prerogatives of literacy can also be traced in oral cultures and that, in literate as well as oral societies, human beings may exhibit forms of behaviour which scholars have identified as specifically literate.21 Even Walter Ong’s groundbreaking work on the basic differences between orality and literacy as epistemic systems has come under attack. He has been criticized especially for his claims that non-literate people do not think in categorical terms but in terms of practical situations, that they do not operate with formal deductive procedures, resist definitions of even the most concrete objects, and have difficulty in articulate self-analysis.22 Distrustful of the essentialist assumptions 17

J.S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Words, Cambridge: Mass, 1986, 72. Brockmeier, 64. 19 Ong, 30. 20 Ibid., 36. 21 For a detailed catalogue of arguments based on a comprehensive review of empirical studies, see Brockmeier, 211-20. 22 Ong, 51-54. To support his claims, Ong offers an elaborately argued catalogue of nine main characteristics distinguishing oral from literate consciousnesses. In any oral culture, Ong asserts, thought and expression tend to be (1) “additive rather than subordinative” (as oral discourse cannot develop a grammar as fixed as written discourse can), (2) “aggregative rather than analytical” (as oral cultures rely on accumulations of “epithets and other formulary baggage”), (3) “redundant and ‘copious’” (in that oral cultures “encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility”), (4) 18


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underlying the attempts undertaken by Walter Ong, but also by Jack Goody, and Ian Watt at delineating “the intellectual differences between simple and complex societies”,23 Mari Rhydwen, for instance, asserts: A division of human cultures into those that are oral and those that are literate coincides with other binary divisions (for example developed/underdeveloped or developing, civilized/ primitive) based on other criteria: economic, technological and historical. Whether such coincidence reflects a causal relationship is unproven, though Ong argues persuasively for the case.24

Rhydwen makes the uncomfortable suggestion that in trying to distance themselves from the phonocentric bias of structuralism, scholars advancing the orality-literacy dichotomy only manoeuvred themselves into a sort of graphocentrism based on tenets no less problematic than those advanced by structuralist theory. She faults Goody for implicitly promoting the view “that the consciousness of the literate tradition is more objective and hence more true”25 and charges the proponents of the “great divide theory”, who distinguish so scrupulously between oral/auditive and chiro- or typographic cultures, with, in reality, favouring literacy as the far more desirable of the two forms of cultural organization. It is true that Walter Ong identifies writing as “the most momentous of all human technological inventions”.26 “Without writing”, he is convinced,

“conservative and traditionalist”, (5) “close to the human lifeworld”, (6) “agonistically toned” (as, with interpersonal relations being constantly “kept high” in oral exchanges, both attractions and antagonisms must dominate verbal communication), (7) “empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced” (since only writing can separate the knower from the known and thus “set up conditions for ‘objectivity’”), (8) “homeostatic” (as “oral societies live very much in a present”) and, finally once more, (9) “situational rather than abstract” (since “oral cultures tend to use concepts on situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld”) (ibid., 37-49). 23 Goody and Watt as quoted in Mari Rhydwen, Writing on the Backs of the Blacks: Voice, Literacy and Community in Kriol Fieldwork, St Lucia, 1996, 10. 24 Rhydwen, 9. 25 Ibid., 11. 26 Ong, 85.

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Illiteracy as a Theoretical Anathema the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.27

“Writing ...”, Ong reflects at another point, “enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure”,28 and “free[s] the mind for more original, more abstract thought” than oral discourse could ever permit.29 “Thus writing from the beginning did not reduce orality but enhanced it”, Ong concludes. Believing that literacy “opens possibilities to the word and to human existence unimaginable without writing”, Ong does not doubt that every oral culture today, even if it values its oral traditions and would agonize over the loss of these traditions, “wants to achieve literacy as soon as possible”.30 Holding the desirability of literacy as indisputable fact, Ong finally poses that not only oral cultures which have come into contact with writing but, in fact, any human being exposed to written discourse is bound to endorse literacy readily and effortlessly. Resistance to literalization, in turn, seems to constitute a negligible, if not even unthinkable category in his view. What was scarcely reflected in the supposedly objective discourse of literacy and orality which commenced in the 1960s is that with the term “literacy”, scholars were referring practically exclusively to the writing skills that had developed in Europe since the evolution of the Greek alphabet around 800 BC. As Albertine Gaur points out, the Eurocentric notion of literacy prevalent in the academy until the late twentieth century dates back to the Middle Ages. Then the terms “litterae” and “grammatica” were used to refer to Latin as a particular system of letters and orthography, rather than as a foreign language. A person who could not read or write Latin was seen as “unlettered” even when able to read and write in a vernacular language. This also explains why, in German, the word for “illiteracy”, namely “Analphabetismus”, literally translated, means the inability to master the alphabet.31 In the 1960s, the restriction of Western discourses of literacy to the post-Roman cultural convention was only enforced by 27

Ibid., 78. Ibid., 7. 29 Ibid., 24. 30 Ibid., 175. 31 Albertine Gaur, Literacy and the Politics of Writing, Bristol, 2000, 171. 28


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the application of the term “orality” either to pre-historic (or preEuropean) cultures or to cultures that existed in the awareness of Western societies as distinctively non-European cultures. Thus the concept of orality did assimilate the connotation “ignorance of the alphabet” after all and, according to Mari Rhydwen, even came to imply a “[lack of] willingness to accept, uncritically, [the] implicit rules of Western intellectual tradition”.32 Like several other twentieth-century scholars, Ong, too, put the alphabet above all other writing systems and argued that it was the invention of the alphabet that facilitated the ascendancy of Greek civilization to analytic thought. He promotes the Greek alphabet as a particularly democratizing and internationalizing script for its simplicity and straightforward adaptability to different languages.33 With his enthusiastic praise of the alphabet, Ong reiterates a position already advocated in 1942 by David Diringer, who attributed the global “victory” of the alphabet over other scripts to the fact that it is the most easily accessible and hence the least elitist script. Despite the relatively uncomplicated principles of coding underlying the alphabet, Ong chooses to value its appropriation as a unique intellectual feat. He explains: The alphabet, though it probably derives from pictograms, has lost all connection with things as things. It represents sound itself as a thing, transforming the evanescent world of sound to the quiescent, quasipermanent world of space.34

In the processes of learning to use the alphabet, then, the human subject acquires completely new ways of thinking and advances to a 32

It is with respect to this point that Rhydwen criticizes Goody, arguing by way of reference to Goody’s contentious interpretation of the Chinese attitude to formal logic, as “an articulate expression of what happens in an oral culture” that “what Goody really means by literate thought ... is thought that conforms to the norms of the Western scientific tradition” (Rhydwen, 11). Another severe critic of Goody is Harry Falk who in “Goodies for India – Literacy, Orality, and Vedic Culture” (in Erscheinungsformen kultureller Prozesse: Jahrbuch 1988 des Sonderforschungsbereiches “Übergänge und Spannungsfelder zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schrifltichkeit”, ed. Wolfgang Raible, Tübingen, 1990, 103-20) interrogates Goody’s “world formula to human cultural history” (120) according to which rational thinking can originate only when writing exists and writing was therefore also a prerequisite of scientific reflection in India. 33 Ong, 90. 34 Ibid., 91.

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new level of consciousness. Equally, Marshall McLuhan regards the internalization of the alphabet as a process completely different from that of learning any other script, mainly because the translation of sounds into visual codes demands the total isolation of vision from all the other senses. “Only the phonetic alphabet produces a gap between the eye and the ear, between the semantic meaning and the visual code”, McLuhan writes: “and for this reason it is the phonetic alphabet alone that is capable of leading man from his tribal existence into civilisation.”35 The almost euphoric accounts of both the invention of the alphabet and the successful alphabetization of Western societies formulated in the 1970s and 1980s are informed by more than the deep reverence of writing Alberto Manguel identifies as an inherent feature of all literate cultures.36 They also convey a growing sense of pessimism concerning the future of Western cultures as chirographic and print cultures, as cultures of books, archives, libraries, of histories documented on paper and parchment.37 The increasing significance of electronic écriture had made scholars aware of the historicity of hitherto customary literary practices,38 and, consequently, of the danger of a whole era in which information storage and communication had been conducted chiro- and typographically coming to an end.39 Arguably, it was also as a nostalgic reprisal of the “Gutenberg galaxy” in the light of its imminent demise that scholars began to devise histories according to which the evolution of writing from pictures via linear script forms, to the representation of phonetic elements reached its eventual peak in the alphabet.40 Analogously, alphabetic literacy was construed as having metamorphosed from a prerogative of clerical and gentile elites, into a more and more generally accessible technology, to ultimately be laid down as a human right, guaranteed through free schooling. The impression created in many of these histories that the literalization of the West was both a linear and natural evolutionary process has, however, not necessarily been corroborated by historical 35

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto, 1962, 33. 36 Alberto Manguel, Eine Geschichte des Lesens, translation of A History of Reading, Berlin, 1998, 16. 37 See Brockmeier, 33. 38 Ibid., 69. 39 Ibid., 33. 40 Gaur, 2.


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evidence. Nor has the construction of illiteracy as a temporary phenomenon progressively receding in direct relation to the allegedly continuous rise of literacy rates and standards in Europe.41 It is symptomatic of the inaccuracy with which illiteracy is treated wherever it does attract academic attention that even Jacques Derrida touches on the topic only lightly and rather dismissively. He for instance rejects Lévi-Strauss’ argument that the imposition of total literacy onto indigenous peoples equals an “enslaving violence” with the flippant remark that it “cannot be rigorously deduced” from such premises that liberty is the result of “illiteracy and the absence of military service, public instruction or law in general”.42 Even if meant ironically, his telling identification of illiteracy as a symptom of anarchy makes clear that there is no room in Derrida’s analysis for illiteracy as an historical form of exclusion from the cultural communities he posits or from the systems of signification he theorizes. In fact, an existence completely without “writing” is impossible for Derrida, who insists that practically all signifying practices deserve to be attested “the dignity of writing”.43 Furthermore, holding that all humans are able to engage in such practices (which Derrida explicitly defines as a making use of proper 41 As David Cressy has shown, for instance, in the case of Great Britain, the detailed analysis of available historical material leads to a far more complex picture, proving that the importance of literacy has always varied with social, cultural, and historical circumstances and that the popularization of literacy has always seen periods of acceleration as well as of recession. Cressy’s findings are confirmed by other sources, according to which in the Middle Ages, for instance, England had far better provisions of schools than in Victorian days. Thus William Smith observes that the mass of people in medieval England were “by no means sunk in brutish ignorance” and that the number of those who could read the vernacular (as evidenced by the demand for books in the vulgar tongue) is proof that the latter part of the Middle Ages was certainly not a time of general illiteracy. Correspondingly, he records a surge in literacy in the Elizabethan period which was not matched, as is commonly assumed, by any development in the seventeenth century, nor when English society became more commercial and more complex in the eighteenth century. He also stresses the need to take into account considerable social and geographical variations in the early modern period resulting from the remarkable prosperity of weaving villages. Moreover Cressy warns of an all too optimistic reading of the cultural climate in England during the Industrial Revolution, emphasizing the particularly low literacy rates in the urban centres at the time (William H. Smith, “Education, History of”, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1969, VII, 982-90, and Cressy, 837-47). 42 Derrida, 132. 43 Ibid., 110.

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names for the purpose of classification44), Derrida forbids himself to think of illiteracy as constituting a serious social problem. Instead his totalizing egalitarianism reduces it to a mere myth. So did, albeit in a different way, cultural theorists, sociologists, and anthropologists, especially in the US, beginning to write about the fall of the entire West into a new state of illiteracy around the middle of the twentieth century. In their discussions of the impact of the electronic media on literate cultures, they invariably treat writing as a collective property, literalization as a collective destiny, and any cultural developments, such as the advent of new technologies of communication, as collective experiences. At the same time they argue that the growing dependence of Western cultures on electronic media must inevitably result in the decline not of certain strata of Western societies, but of the entire Western population into a condition of postliteracy. This applies to such pioneering works on the literalization of cultures as The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) by Jack Goody, “The Consequences of Literacy” (1968) by Jack Goody and Ian Watt, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) by Marshall McLuhan, or The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988) by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, in which the protagonist is never conceived as an individual human being or an individual group but always as the entirety of a society, if not even of mankind.45 While in these studies the illiterate as a potentially problematic deviation from the existing norm is completely passed over, illiteracy is discussed at great length as a potential norm of the future. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, for instance, Neil Postman anticipates that “the third great crisis in Western education” after the introduction of the alphabet and the invention of the printing press46 will be the

44 “If writing is no longer understood in the narrow sense of linear phonetic notation, it should be possible to say that all societies capable of producing, that is to say of obliterating, their proper names, and of bringing classificatory difference into play, practice writing in general” (ibid., 109). 45 For a discussion of the ideological reason and implications of this development, see Paul Goetsch, “Der Übergang von Mündlichkeit zu Schriftlichkeit: Die kulturkritischen und ideologischen Implikationen der Theorien von McLuhan, Goody und Ong”, in Symbolische Formen, Medien, Identität, ed. Wolfgang Raible, ScriptOralia 37, Tübingen, 1991, 113-29. 46 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourses in the Age of Show Business (1984), London, 1987, 149.


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decline of typography in America caused by the persistent expansion of entertainment industry especially via television: We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word. To be sure there are still readers and there are many books published, but the uses of print and reading are not the same as they once were; not even in schools, the last institutions where print was thought to be invincible. They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for existence implies parity. There is no parity there. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens.47

The illiterate of the future as foreseen by Postman has very little in common with the illiterate of the present. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman, by skilful employment of the collectivizing pronoun “we”, involves the reader in his scenario of a cultural apocalypse and the reader is invited to envisage him- or herself as a subject without script. As a consequence, however, it is already in the act of reading that Neil Postman’s “Huxleyan Warning” of the complete abandonment of the alphabet for the sake of the pictographic language of television turns into a Utopian vision, whose tremendous success as a book ultimately disproves in a most ironic fashion the author’s hypothesis that “Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them”.48 Arguably, the prospect of humankind’s return to a new form of scriptlessness, to which scholars in the humanities were first alerted by Marshall McLuhan’s famous proclamation of the end of the Gutenberg Age in the early 1960s, quenched the last remaining interest in already existing forms of illiteracy. After all, in view of the newly discovered pervasiveness of writing in modern societies, the scope of the changes a demise of typography threatened to bring about appeared to take on positively staggering dimensions. By comparison, even the shocking differences between the literacy standards in developed and developing countries, respectively, had to appear fairly unspectacular.

47 Ibid., 28. Cf. also Barry Sanders, A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age, New York, 1994. 48 Ibid., 144.

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In retrospect, the announcements of the imminent onset of a postalphabetic era, formulated either as pessimistic warnings of a complete cultural impoverishment or as euphoric promises of an unprecedented cultural renewal, have been everything but corroborated by their own effectiveness in print, let alone by the way in which electronic media have been appropriated by literate cultures. Thus, in more recent years, the future of literacy has come to be seen in a different light again. At least in part this has been due to the fact that, although electronic media have been accepted into practically all spheres of human existence, this has not steeped Western societies into the expected state of complete illiteracy after all. Scholars have had to acknowledge that, rather than threatening written communication, electronic media have encouraged it in various significant respects; rather than corroding literacy skills or rendering them redundant, the computer has necessitated their sophistication and specialization. Participation in the written infrastructure of a society now presupposes not only the command of a script but also the ability to put this command to increasingly complex use. Accordingly, Myron C. Tuman describes “online-literacy” as an entirely new form of literacy in which traditional intellectual abilities combine with technological manipulative skills as well as with dialogic competences to form a new “operative unity”.49 This symbiosis of different literacies, Brockmeier believes, might even undermine the traditional predominance of a single medium or of individual media with which human societies used to be confronted in the past. More than that, they might even help to prevent these new media from acquiring the hegemonic status they have so frequently been predicted to assume in the highly complex information societies of the future.50 Admittedly, Albertine Gaur still views the new literacies much more sceptically as a threat to the knowledge collected, stored, and made available by individual societies. Processed electronically, such knowledge, she fears, is far more susceptible to corruption, interference, and misuse than it has been ever before.51 Regardless of how contemporary scholars choose to evaluate the effects of the electronic media, something other than an urgent 49

Myron C. Tuman, Word Perfect: Literacy in the Computer Age, Pittsburgh, 1992, 24. 50 Brockmeier, 73. 51 Gaur, 168.


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warning of the complete demise of literate civilization has been recognized meanwhile as being imperative. Attention has been drawn to the ongoing diversification of literacy skills and the futility of going on to construct orality and literacy as monolithic formations. Instead, it is argued, they need to be understood as multi-layered phenomena capable of continually producing new interfaces, thereby changing a vast continuum of communicative practices, ranging from primary orality to literate behaviour underpinned by highly sophisticated technologies.52 In the careful mapping of this continuum the term “orality” is bound to prove insufficient to describe all forms of scriptlessness. After all, in denoting the availability of a medium other than writing and the integration into a culture founded on a noetic system other than literacy, “orality” is profoundly unsuited to circumscribe the kind of linguistic and cultural otherness and exclusion characterizing the cultural situation of non-literates living within or on the margins of a literate society. To denote such cultural positions, a recuperation of the term “illiteracy” seems avoidable only with the invention of alternative concepts to complement that of orality. While this is yet to happen, other avenues to a new understanding of illiteracy seem to be opening up as scholars take note of the poststructuralist call for a less self-assuredly Eurocentric and more critical and comprehensive examination of literacy. In The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, for instance, re-examine the effects of literalization on Western notions of truth, reality, and fiction. They reconstruct the gradual invalidation of the spoken word following the advancement and growing authority of writing in Western cultures and document how this authority was asserted in most spheres of human coexistence. This led to fundamental changes in administration and jurisdiction, religious and political propaganda, national and personal identity, knowledge storage, reproduction, and transmission, and public and private communication. As Illich and Sanders show in the process, the transference of the Christian ideal of truthfulness from the spoken (or orally “given”) word to the written word seriously destabilized accepted ideas of authority and eventually caused new concepts of trustworthiness or reliability to form. In critically highlighting the 52

Brockmeier, 202.

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resultant insecurities, Illich and Sanders depart from the hitherto almost celebratory accounts of Europe’s alphabetization, anticipating what has since developed into a convincing counter-version specifically to “the western ‘grand narrative’ of progress, in which the present Western world represents the highest point of civilization”.53 Mari Rhydwen rejects this narrative with the vehemence characteristic of postcolonial deconstructions of Western ideas of culture and civilization in her work on the literalization of nonEuropean indigenous peoples, Writing on the Backs of the Blacks (1996). Reviewing various “Western-style” discussions of literacy and tracing different ideological approaches to the issue, Rhydwen develops an unusually nuanced notion of scriptlessness. Remarkably, she does so without providing an exact definition of this notion. Identifying illiteracy instead quite vaguely as the opposite of any idea of literacy, she convincingly conveys the variability of the concept. Writing on the Backs of the Blacks illustrates how scriptlessness can be understood either as a grave condition of political disadvantage or as an endangered component of aboriginal identity, either as a brutally imposed or as a cruelly denied form of acculturation, either as a subject’s limitation to the use of a vernacular language or as that subject’s exclusion from a powerful master language. Rhydwen’s analysis ultimately raises the question whether, like literacy, illiteracy, too, “is different in different contexts or whether it is just a matter of interpretation”.54 For Rhydwen, this question obtains particular pertinence in any negotiation of transcultural phenomena, as it is in culturally heterogeneous contexts that one is most directly confronted with the difficulty of determining literacy and illiteracy. In themselves transcultural enterprises, studies taking into consideration also other than alphabetic scripts show with special clarity that what is literacy in one cultural context may even be experienced as illiteracy in another. For while literacy may be coterminous with one’s inclusion in one culture, it can simultaneously mean one’s exclusion from or distance from other cultures possessing a different script. The relativity of 53 Helen Carr, “American Primitives”, The Yearbook of English Studies: Ethnicity and Representation in American Literature, XXIV (1994), 199 (see also Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization, New York, 1986). 54 Rhydwen, 13.


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literacy is demonstrated by works such as Florian Coulmas’ Über Schrift (1982), G. Sampson’s Writing Systems (1985), and Roy Harris’ The Origin of Writing (1986), and such impressively comprehensive publications as Harald Haarmann’s Universalgeschichte der Schrift (1990), Henri-Jean Martin’s The History and Power of Writing (1994), A. Robinson’s The Story of Writing (1995), M.P. Brown’s Writing and Script (1998), and Albertine Gaur’s Literacy and the Politics of Writing (2000). No longer limited to devising a Eurocentric genealogy of writing, these works advance a comparative evaluation of the role of literacy in different cultures of the world. In so doing, they appeal to and help to build an awareness of the complex plurality of highly sophisticated writing systems either pre-dating the invention of the alphabet or coincident with its evolution, and prove that there is “not one history of writing but different histories, reflecting different forms of information storage, answering different needs”.55 Even if they do not explicitly address questions of illiteracy either, the studies just referred to still may be said to prepare the ground for the recognition of new forms of illiteracy fermenting at the new interfaces that, as a result of global demographic, economic, and technological processes, have developed between cultures with different writing systems. Not screened from but increasingly susceptible to such illiteracies, modern literate societies may begin to feel the need and the challenge to investigate illiteracy and its history anew as an all-pervasive phenomenon manifest at the very centre of cultures with most sophisticated literacies. It is on such an awareness of illiteracy as a product of cross-cultural contact, as an aspect of multiculturality, and as an indication of cultural indeterminacy that the readings of modern and postmodern fictional constructions of scriptlessness need to be based. Only thus can one do justice to the complex answers given in twentieth-century narrative literature to the questions of how to understand literacy and how to conceive of its very opposite, a condition commonly described as “illiteracy” but also termed more neutrally “non-literacy”, “scriptlessness”, or “nonwritingness”56 here.

55

Gaur, 4. Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures, Montreal, 1989, 109. 56


CHAPTER TWO IN LITERARY STUDIES: IGNORED

“Discursive practices make it difficult for individuals to think outside them”, Ania Loomba concludes by way of reflection on Foucault’s understanding of “discourse”.1 This may explain why, despite the centrality of writing and literacy to literary studies, the peculiar history of the concept of “illiteracy” (or rather of its elision throughout the twentieth-century) has not taken a noticeably different course in this particular field of academic inquiry. Rather the ideas on literacy and writing formulated outside the domain of literary studies in the course of the last century were readily appropriated and reiterated by scholars of literature. Instead of advancing their own theories of the writtenness of their object of research, they allowed themselves to be guided by the work of anthropologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and linguists, taking for granted that these would draw extensively on literature for evidence supporting their findings. Their willing surrender of academic territory has not been entirely inexpedient, though. The abandonment of such seemingly mundane concerns as the literacy standards outside, on the margins, as well as at the centre of certain book cultures to other academic disciplines has certainly simplified the construction of literature as a widely accessed and indeed universally accessible public site and, logically, of literary criticism as a scholarly exercise institutionalized for the benefit of a perfectly homogenously literalized collective. Originally engendered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European nationalism, Western criticism from its beginnings has relied on such constructions and promoted literature – and above all, of course, vernacular literature – as a collectively shared cultural heritage to enforce a sense of belonging and unity across social barriers. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries literature was seen as a means to “diffuse polite social manners, habits of ‘correct’ taste and common cultural standards” and thereby “incorporate the increasingly powerful but spiritually rather raw middle classes into

1

Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, The New Critical Idiom, London, 1998, 39.

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unity with the aristocracy”.2 The emergent working class was not to be excluded either from the scheme of disseminating aristocratic greatness and noble spirit. They, too, should be improved, as Matthew Arnold suggested, by way of exposure to “the best culture of their nation”.3 According to Timothy Brennan, it was the complicity of contemporary writers in nineteenth-century nation-shaping that eventually secured the institutionalization of literary studies and the installation of an official apparatus of literati responsible for the compilation and administration of national archives of literature in most European countries. Since then, it has never really been doubted that the beneficiaries of these literati’s work would be not just certain privileged classes but, indeed, the people, that is, all citizens of the nation state. For Brennan, literary study has remained enmeshed in the European ideology of democracy to this day, even if the “people” this ideology invokes became, increasingly after the late nineteenth century, inseparable from the modern working class.4 Against the background of the ready theoretical inclusion of the “folk”, the “plebeians”, and later of the “proletariat” in literary and critical explorations, the systematic occlusion of the illiterate is only seemingly inconsistent. After all, the special image of the “people” underlying the egalitarian commitment of literary scholars to, and their identification with, the lower classes really accommodates only assumptions of the lower classes’ political, economic, and social disadvantage. It is not so easily reconcilable, however, with the notions of ignorance and cultural inferiority commonly associated with illiteracy, for the simple reason that discursive or intellectual disadvantages do not lend themselves to the same kind of rationalization that poverty, for instance, invites. While the latter may be apprehended romantically as a price to be paid, fairly or not, for moral superiority, the former prompts no such compensatory projections. That the notion of “illiteracy” does not operate like that of “poverty” is also due to the way “illiteracy” was understood in the early days of European nationalism. Then universal alphabetization was identified as a prerequisite of national coherence. While literacy 2

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1996, 15. Matthew Arnold, quoted in Eagleton, 21. 4 Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, Basingstoke, 1989, 13. 3


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was accordingly propagated as a special moral virtue, ignorance of the alphabet was declared a safe passage into moral bankruptcy. Demonized as a moral danger to literate societies, illiteracy was never assimilated into the Western nationalistic discourses from which the idea of literary studies as an essentially democratizing cultural force originates.5 Coincident with the attainment of universal literacy in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the officious warnings of illiteracy formulated by late Victorian thinkers subsided. A different approach was taken to education as a means of social and national control. Instead of reading as a literacy skill, the close reading of literature now came to be promoted as “the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of social formation”.6 No room was left for discussions of literacy in the resultant professionalization of critical analysis, which, significantly enough, was still advocated on the grounds that the masses had to be provided moral sustenance by way of initiating them into the cultural treasures of human civilization. Instead of the involuntarily illiterate now it was the complacently ignorant, those theoretically able but evidently unwilling to appreciate the intrinsic value of literary writing, who were charged with moral corruption. Instead of illiteracy, philistinism was now regarded by such renowned champions of literary studies as F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards, William Empson, and L.C. Knights in England as a particularly deplorable form of cultural villainy. In the subsequent development of the study of literature, as little attention was devoted to aspects of literacy and illiteracy as in other fields of research. With the endorsement of the structuralist notion of the immateriality of human utterances and the supremacy of speech over writing, literary scholars, too, consigned these two themes to oblivion – the former, admittedly, only temporarily, until it was recuperated as the opposite of orality, the latter practically indefinitely as its enduring absence from critical discourse suggests. In spite of their own understanding of literature as a body of texts composed and recorded in writing, twentieth-century critics readily embraced the 5

See Paul Goetsch, “Der Analphabet in der englischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts”, in Motive und Themen in der englischsprachigen Literatur als Indikatoren literaturgeschichtlicher Prozesse: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Theodor Wolpers, eds Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock and Alfons Klein, Tübingen, 1990, 242-62. 6 Eagleton, 27.

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Aristotelian notion revived by structuralist theory that writing represents but a visual rendering of speech. By tacit agreement they simply failed to recognize that the term “literature” precludes the recognition of oral utterances as literature and that, strictly speaking, the expression “oral literature” is only an oxymoronic construction. Little need was seen to study the specific features and functions of the alphabet (or of any other script) and to apprehend the literacy of individual writers and their readerships, or the act of putting down a text in writing as in any way relevant to the meaning of the text under study.7 By adhering to the idea of writing as a visual realization of speech, scholars of literature and especially of narratology helped to sustain the “stigma of the secondary, derivative, subsidiary”, which pertained to writing well into the post-structuralist 1970s.8 Arguably, it was the special phonocentric bias of twentieth-century literary critics and theorists that prevented them from appropriating Walter Ong’s binary opposition of orality and literacy in the same way as representatives of other academic disciplines had done. While outside literary studies, orality came to be studied around the middle of last century as a noetic economy9 diametrically opposed to literacy, within the field of literature, the concept of orality was employed quite differently. As Aleida and Jan Assmann explain, it was assimilated to invoke and enforce the traditional Western idea of understanding as the result of a revitalization of “dead letters” and their transformation into speech through oral explication. At first comprehended as an element of literary reception, “orality” came to

be theorized as an integral part of the literary text itself, rather than as an aspect apart from it. It was not (nor could it plausibly be) posited as the opposite of literacy, but as a rather special kind of literacy event. Symptomatically, the work of Paul Goetsch, who was one of the first not only to query but also to attempt to correct the 7

For a discussion of the resistance of literary studies to discourses on the mediality of writing, see Ong, 155-56, and Cornelia Epping-Jäger, Die Inszenierung der Schrift: Der Literalisierungsprozeß und die Entstehungsgeschichte des Dramas, Stuttgart, 1996, 13-17. 8 Assmann, 266. 9 The expression “noetic economy” seems a useful alternative to the term “epistemology” here as it helps to imagine systems of thought and perception as also materially structured entities.


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marginalization of oral traditions in the field of literary studies, discusses not its orality in its own right so much as modes and instances of how it is represented and transcribed in literature.10 To this end, Goetsch draws on the distinction forwarded by Koch and Oesterreicher between the material realization of speech and writing and their conceptualization. Oral and written utterances, Koch and Oesterreicher argue, are distinguishable not only by virtue of the medium through which they are conveyed.11 There are also preconceived notions of orality and literacy which guarantee that a spoken text remains recognizably oral, even if written down, and written texts remain distinctively literate performances, even if delivered orally. Goetsch’s declared aim is to reveal how literature activates, employs, and deploys these particular notions.12 Almost inevitably, the question fails to arise in the process whether Western literature (or, more generally speaking, Western literate thinking) at all differentiates between literate and non-literate oralities. As in Koch and Oesterreicher,13 in Goetsch, too, the focus stays on highly literate forms and constructions of orality and highly sophisticated oral realizations of literacy.14 An even more rigorous occlusion of non-literate oralities from literary studies can be observed in the field of narratology, where the term “speech” is insistently used to refer to the highly literate act of narrating a story in written form. This is far from an unconscious slippage, as Seymour Chatman’s makes clear with his emphatic assertion in Story and Discourse (1978) that speech alone is capable of representing ideas, while writing cannot do more than represent 10 See Paul Goetsch, “Vorwort” and “Mündliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur”, in Mündliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur, Tübingen, 1990, 7-16 and 17-35. 11 Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher, Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch, Ronanistische Arbeitshefte 31, Tübingen, 1990, 5. 12 This is also one of the aims of other participants in the large-scale research project on orality and literacy (Übergänge und Spannungsfelder zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit) initiated by Wolfgang Raible in at the University of Freiburg as well as of the research on literary orality in short fiction currently conducted by the Research Group CRILA (Centre de Recherche Inter-langues d'Angers) of the University of Angers. 13 The study by Koch and Oesterreicher remains constricted to the literate context of contemporary Romance cultures. 14 This is not to belittle the work done in this context but to enhance the onesidedness which a consistent concentration on orality imposes.

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speech. Disputing that a text’s materiality can in itself be constitutive of meaning, Chatman furthermore insists, that the material book is not “a literary work”. The “physical condition” of a book, he stresses, “does not affect the nature of the aesthetic object fixed by it”. To unearth the “virtual narrative” contained in a book, its meaningless surface of typo- or chirographically rendered symbols must be “penetrated” in an act that entails far more than plain reading, but a form of transcendence through which the text’s deeper meaning eventually is “unearthed”.15 Such an act alone deserves to be called “interpretation”, while reading is little more than a physical act of looking at the book’s pages. This is, of course, a far cry from Marshall McLuhan’s proclamation that the medium is the message. So is Chatman’s postulation that “all written texts are realizable orally [and] innately susceptible of performance”. Any reader knows this intuitively, Chatman argues, and therefore always constructs an agent, “a teller” mediating the story he or she is reading, a “someone – person or presence – actually telling the story to an audience, no matter how minimally evoked his voice or the audience’s listening ear”.16 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan seems to think along similar lines when she notes that “the empirical process of communication between author and reader is less relevant to the poetics of narrative fiction than its counterpart in the text”.17 Following Wolfgang Iser’s conception of the written text “as having a virtual dimension which calls for the reader’s construction of the unwritten text”,18 RimmonKenan declares: “In my view there is always a teller in a tale, at least in the sense that any utterance or record of an utterance presupposes 15 Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: NY, 1978, 26-27. 16 Ibid., 28, 147 and 33-34. 17 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983), London, 1988, 89. 18 Significantly, in his analyses of this virtual dimension Iser does not conceive of reading merely as an act of decoding graphic signs either, but explicitly defines it as a more complex activity involving the audience’s compliance with specific instructions given by the author as to how to imagine reality. (Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (1972), 3rd edn, UniTaschenbücher 163, Munich, 1994, 127.) Despite his call for a differentiation of reading competences or “horizons” with which different readers or readerships are equipped to produce different interpretations of texts, Iser never considers the possibility that an author might refer to a degree of readerly incompetence warranting the theorizing of an “implicit non-reader”.


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someone who has uttered it .... a ‘higher’ narratorial authority.”19 “Utterance”, in Rimmon-Kenan’s work, is also employed to refer to orality as an aspect of narrative fiction and to emphasize the primacy of speech over writing in the narrative act. For Rimmon-Kenan, too, the identification of narration as an oral performance or event is more helpful than the postulation of acts of reading and writing, which, to her mind, does little to clarify the “specificity of narrative fiction”.20 Whether the narrator is able to read and write or not is unimportant to both Rimmon-Kenan’s and Chatman’s conception of the narrative act. This is not an entirely facetious observation, even if the explicit identification of a narrating agent as illiterate by the author would be seen as a purely mimetic gesture and hence as an illusory ploy by both theorists. As Patricia Waugh and Mark Currie show, there is also another way of reading specifications of the act of telling especially when they address the actual or fictional writtenness of the narrative in which they occur. In fact, as Currie and Waugh shrewdly note, the idea shared by Rimmon-Kenan and Chatman that in isolating a literary text from the material reality of its con- and reception one lays open the higher meaning of that text is particularly difficult to reconcile with the metafictional attempts of postmodern writers to assert precisely that reality.21 Waugh and Currie contend that their rigorous theorizing of the narrative act as a purely aesthetic orality event restricts Chatman and Rimmon-Kenan to reading metafictional reminders of the comparatively mundane act of writing in entirely pessimistic terms as expressions of a literary crisis, of a loss of overall meaning, and of cultural disorientation. Indeed, apart from perpetuating popular reductionist constructions of postmodernity as an expression of cultural entrapment and paralysis, such a reading completely elides the discursive potentialities of metafiction. A recognition of these potentialities seems to have become possible only towards the end of the twentieth century, when Patricia Waugh, finally proposed attributing the self-reflexivity of twentieth-century writings to “a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience of the world”(emphasis added). At the same time Waugh claims that the 19

Ibid., 88. Ibid., 118-19. 21 Patricia Waugh, “What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About It?”, in Metafiction, ed. Mark Currie, London, 1995, 40. 20

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enhanced awareness of meta-levels of discourses and experience in postmodern cultures “is partly a consequence of an increased social and cultural self-consciousness”, as well as of “a greater awareness within contemporary culture of the function of language in constructing and maintaining our sense of everyday ‘reality’”.22 Waugh’s evaluation of metafiction is as optimistic as the comments on the “almost obsessional preoccupation with writing” that cultural theorists and critics discerned in twentieth-century literature. Refusing to see this preoccupation as an indication of “undecidability”, Jens Brockmeier, for instance, proposes comprehending it as the symptom of an emergent “literal sensuousness” prompted by the growing importance of visual and aural media.23 Brockmeier emphatically denies that the attempts in postmodern writing to transcend language through language need to be understood as gestures of resignation to the impossibility of obtaining certainty through linguistic expression. Instead he proposes seeing even the most explicitly self-negating metafictional strategies as ultimately generating highly productive moments within literary texts investing the language of modernity with completely new meaning. Thus re-activated, Brockmeier suggests, language is not only able to reflect the literacy of its speakers but can even serve as a means to articulate the distinctly literate consciousness of its writers. Unlike Brockmeier’s analysis of the phenomenon of metafiction, Waugh’s is founded on the structuralist idea of the immateriality of language. As a result, it does not accommodate the possibility that metafiction might actually explore fiction itself as concrete matter and, in so doing, negotiate the material relationship between the linguistic system on which fiction relies and the world to which it refers. Her own approach essentially forbids Waugh from considering the causal link suggested by Brockmeier between historical changes in the literate practices and infrastructure of Western cultures and the periodic flourishing of metafiction. As we write, Brockmeier observes, we do not simply refer to language, but we relate to language as such, and we turn it into an object of sensual-practical creation, perception, and reflection. Therefore, literalization transforms our linguistic awareness and, in fact, engenders meta-discursive thought processes

22 23

Ibid., 41. Brockmeier speaks of “poetologische Sonderfälle literaler Sinnlichkeit” (245).


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to the extent that meta-language may justly be identified as a distinctive element of the discursive reality of literate cultures.24 It is not difficult to see this could provide a rather useful explanation for the relative popularity of metafictional writing during certain periods in the history of Western literatures. Admittedly, Bradbury and Fletcher, who insist and prove that metafiction is not a phenomenon as recent as has frequently been assumed, dispute that there is any relation between the mode of “narrative introversion” they believe to have been spawned by an international “crisis of presentation” in the twentieth century and the “mode of self-conscious narration” characterizing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century narratives.25 Inger Christensen, on the other hand, detects a “greater likeness than dissimilarity between eighteenth and twentieth century metafiction” and holds that the expressions “the introverted novel” and “the self-conscious mode” seem equally applicable to Tristram Shandy as to Ulysses26 and Rüdiger Imhof reasons that “a good deal of what is operative in twentieth-century metafiction, and especially in postwar metafiction, has been anticipated by Cervantes and Sterne”.27 Reviewing the longstanding theoretical debate on the evolution of metafiction, Michael Scheffel finds it surprising that literary scholars have still not come up with a convincing historical perspective on the issue.28 He, too, seems unfamiliar with the widely neglected work of Illich and Sanders, who, in The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, offer a detailed comparative account of how contemporary ideas of writing and the truth value of written material affect the role of the narrator in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Thus Scheffel repeats once more what Illich and Sanders demonstrated before him – namely that in order to understand the intermittent resurgence of metafiction, one would have to comprehend the distinction between literature and reality as an historical phenomenon and trace it back to the literate culture of antiquity, more 24

Ibid., 284. John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury, “The Introverted Novel”, in Modernism: 1890-1930, eds Malcolm Bradbury and John McFarlane, Penguin, 1976, 395-96. 26 Inger Christensen, The Meaning of Metafiction: A Critical Study of Selected Novels by Sterne, Nabokov, Barth and Beckett, Oslo, 1981, 89. 27 Rüdiger Imhof, quoted in Michael Scheffel, Formen selbstreflexiven Erzählens: Eine Typologie und sechs exemplarische Analysen, Tübingen, 1997, 6. 28 Ibid., 5. 25

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precisely to Aristotle’s historical distinction between historian and poet and to Plato’s analogous rejection of poetry as propagation of untruths. It is no coincidence that the question on which Illich and Sanders base their study is exactly that of the truthfulness of literature. What is more, they take into account how changes in the perception of writing per se and of its reliability as a vehicle of knowledge have insistently been transforming not only the Western idea of fiction but also the ways of realizing, as well as of formulating that idea, especially in narrative literature. The evidence Illich and Sanders find in the process perfectly corroborates Scheffel’s thesis that self-reflexivity is neither the hallmark of a certain literary period nor the distinctive feature of a particular genre but a general feature of “literariness” or “fictiveness”.29 It proves that whenever the cultural practice of writing underwent a major change this had a noticeable impact on the way writers of fiction configured the relationship of their narrators to the written word. Thus the growing popularity of secular writing rendered it politic for Chaucer, for instance, to dissimulate the authority of the narrators of The Canterbury Tales in order to avert the charge that his text was challenging the Bible’s exclusive claim to credibility. By contrast, Mark Twain devises a text reflecting Huckleberry Finn’s semi-literacy: thereby placing his teller at a safe remove from a readership utterly ignorant of the world portrayed in the novel. By way of contrast to this implied ignorance, Huckleberry Finn’s apparent lack of learning is translated into a form of insider knowledge and his tale invested with special credibility. For Illich and Sanders, references to literacy and illiteracy are clearly more than comments on contemporary societies serving a purely mimetic function. In keeping with Brockmeier’s thesis that literacy is a precondition of meta-discursive reflection and that different literacies produce different forms of such reflection, they explain how invocations of literacy and the lack of it can function as metafictional comments that appeal to an awareness of the complex notions of writing by which a text is determined and with which it interacts as the product of a specific literacy. It makes sense that such appeals should occur above all in typical print genres, abound in the novel, and gain frequency as the literacy standards of a culture increase or change. This would certainly explain why metafiction is so 29

Ibid., 90.


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predominantly a feature of postmodern writing but also why it manifests itself in writing prompted by the invention of printing as well as by other advances in the reproduction and distribution of written thought. A comprehensive historical study linking the development of metafiction to that of Western literacies would require not only a narratological approach free of the phonocentric bias of structuralist theory. It would also demand that we reconsider received narratives of literalization and the impact of this literalization on the development of literature and the evolution of individual literary genres. To date such narratives postulate a fairly uninterrupted linear rise in Western literacy rates between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries (and, in so doing, largely disregard the discontinuities and irregularities in Western literalization as pointed out, for instance, by Cressy and Smith). Accordingly they interpret references to illiteracy in literary texts either as the reactions of writers to contemporary processes of alphabetization30 or as nostalgic reconstructions of a disappearing or an already extinct orality.31 Remarkably, the principal concern of such 30

See, for instance, Edward Le Comte on Mailer in “‘No One in School Could Read or Write So Well as Me’: Our Semiliterate Literati”, Greyfriar: Siena Studies in Literature, XXVI (1985), 31-48; Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders on Chaucer, Defoe, and Twain in The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind; Barry Sanders, “Lie It as It Plays: Chaucer Becomes an Author”, in Literacy and Orality, eds David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, Cambridge, 1991, 111-28; Goetsch (1990) on the illiterate in nineteenthcentury English literature; John G. Bayer, “Narrative Technique and the Oral Tradition in The Scarlet Letter”, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, LII/2 (May 1980), 250-63; and Lynn Shakinovsky, “The Return of the Repressed: Illiteracy and the Death of the Narrative in Hawthorne’s ‘The Birthmark’”, American Transcendental Quarterly, IX/4 (December 1995), 26981. 31 See, for example, Paul Goetsch, “Mündliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur”, in Mündliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur, ed. Paul Goetsch, ScriptOralia 18, Tübingen, 1990, 17-35; Martha K. Cobb, “From Oral to Written: Origins of a Black Literary Tradition”, in Tapping Potential: English and Language Arts for the Black Learner, eds Charlotte K. Brooks et al, Urbana: Ill, 1985, 250-59; Klaus Benesch, “Oral Narrative and Literary Text: Afro-American Folklore in Their Eyes Were Watching God”, Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, XI/3 (Summer 1988), 627-35; Eva Boesenberg, “Das Überleben der Sprache in der Stille: Zur Adaption mündlicher Erzähltradition in drei Werken zeitgenössischer afro-amerikanischer Autorinnen“, in Mündliches Wissen in neuzeitlicher Literatur, ed. Paul Goetsch, 229-50; Konrad Groß, “Survival or Orality in a Literate Culture: Leslie Silko’s Novel Ceremony”, in Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, eds Reingard Nischik and Barbara Korte, Würzburg, 1990, 88-99; Craig Tapping, “Voices Off: Models of

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readings seems to be not so much illiteracy itself as the remedies to the phenomenon offered by the authors, not so much the narration of an individual’s exclusion from a clearly defined cultural context, which illiteracy always implies, as the visions of cultural integration at which illiterates arrive, either through alphabetization or through the espousal of orality as an alternative inflection of cultural identity. Projecting onto literary texts a view of illiteracy as a transitory condition to be either transcended in the process of learning a script or escaped by resorting to an alternative medium, literary critics have ignored the possibility that illiteracy may be introduced into a literary text as a structure that constitutes meaning even without having to be resolved or transformed. This omission is consonant not only with a general lack of awareness of the metadiscursive dimension of the theme of illiteracy or of what one might describe in Robert Scholes’ terms as the “metafictional resourcefulness”32 of the issue. It also corresponds with the assumption of the superiority and the indubitable desirability of alphabetic literacy. The same assumption is central to the argument that the replacement of predominantly oral genres or traditions by more literate ones is due to a natural or inevitable decline of non-literate audiences and a simultaneous enrichment of the culture in question.33 Without its underlying Eurocentrism, however, such a view proves somewhat difficult to sustain, especially when the history of individual genres or the literatures of individual ethnic groups are studied against the more destructive and repressive forces at play in processes of alphabetization. Orality in African Literature and Literary Criticism”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, XXI/3 (July 1990), 73-86 and “Literary Reflections of Orality: Colin Johnson’s Dr. Woreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World”, World Literature Written in English, XXX/2 (Autumn 1990), 55-61; Thomas H. Jackson, “Orality, Orature, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o”, Research in African Literatures, XXII/1 (Spring 1991), 5-15; Ezenwa, Ohateto, Contemporary Nigerian Poetry and the Poetics of Orality, Bayreuth African Studies, Bayreuth 45, 1998; Derek Wright, “Orature into Literature in Two East African Novelists”, in Contemporary African Fiction, ed. with an introduction by Derek Wright, Bayreuth African Studies 42, Bayreuth, 1997, 139-52; and Craig MacKenzie, “Translating Oral Culture into Literary Form: The Short Fiction of Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Njabulo Ndebele and Bessie Head” in Contemporary African Fiction, ed. with an introduction by Derek Wright, Bayreuth African Studies 42, Bayreuth, 1997, 57-65. 32 Robert E. Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, Urbana: IL, 1979, 115. 33 This has been a common interpretation since Ian Watt advanced his thesis in 1957 that the rise of the middle class, the rise of literacy, and the rise of the novel were related and nearly simultaneous.


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What was unlikely to be accomplished in the metropolitan centres of literary studies was achieved outside them – in contexts whose multiethnic composition prevented literary scholars from succumbing to the illusion that they were working within and for a homogeneously literalized society, and which rendered practically untenable the idea of distinctive national literatures and national languages forming collectively accepted and shared commodities. Emancipated from this idea the construction of literature as a universally accessible and universally relevant cultural institution came under scrutiny – not without prompting also a reassessment of the limits of literary discourse. With according vehemence Bill Ashcroft rejects the hitherto uncontroversial view “that writing is infinitely transmissible and hence infinitely interpretable”. “Infinite transmissibility assumes a totally homogeneous world”, he argues: “It elides the political and cultural limits of interpretation and subsumes all writing into a universalist paradigm.”34 Analogously, Ania Loomba criticizes Western literary criticism for deeming itself above politics altogether, “interested only in something called ‘the’ human condition”, and “hostile to any discussion of cultural difference, colonialism and imperialism”.35 By contrast, its “‘prismatic’ perception of cultural pluralism”36 has enabled postcolonial criticism to perform “fundamental reassessments of modes of knowledge production” – especially “with a new interest in representation and discourse”.37 In its beginnings, postcolonial critical theory strove with particular fervour to deploy “European traditions of literate discourse”, “inherited canons and modes of representation”, “inherited notions of what passes for history”, “inherited language”, and “the games [it] plays against our perceptions”,38 aiming to unearth some authentically postcolonial mode of perception and reflection. Inevitably, this led also to an intensive questioning of the suitability of the English 34 William D. Ashcroft, “Constitutive Graphonomy: A Post-Colonial Theory of Literary Writing”, in After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing, eds Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin, Sydney, 1989, 61-62. 35 Loomba, 48. 36 Graham Huggan, “Opting out of the (Critical) Common Market: Creolization and the Post-Colonial Text”, in After Europe, eds Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin, 38. 37 Padmini Mongia, “Introduction”, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, London, 1996, 4. 38 Craig Tapping, “Oral Cultures and the Empire of Literature”, in After Europe, 86-94.

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language for the communication of the postcolonial experience.39 Despite (or because of) its development into a globally shared cultural commodity, critics and writers disputed the efficacy of a language inherited from a former colonial power and voiced their doubts that English could ever be divested of the cultural bias with which it was charged when installed as a master discourse in the colonies. In conjunction with the systematic interrogation of colonial discourse and those in command and control of it, questions of the mediality of language also began to be raised by postcolonial theorists. In his contribution to After Europe: Critical Theory and Postcolonial Writing, Craig Tapping, for instance, exposes the “cultural blindness” of traditional literary studies vis-à-vis non-literate forms of reflection. It is this blindness that he holds responsible for “the subordination of non-European peoples wherever literacy [had] confronted orality”.40 For him, European culture privileges documents and texts with notions of authority: through [them] that same invading culture defines itself, and the concept of civilisation and humanity ... the gap between discursive orders is clear ... there is no authority without documents; and, without authority there can be no “truth” or “meaning”, “purpose” or “justification”. Groups of humans who do not use script are – by definition – inferior, and often less than human.41

While, according to Tapping, European typographic cultures successfully derive their rather doubtful supremacy from their failure to acknowledge the humanity of their illiterate antagonists, literate postcolonial cultures have had to learn to acknowledge the humanity of the non-literate Other and, in the process, have been developing sophisticated ways of expressing that acknowledgement. Tapping’s diagnosis of the culturally Other’s linguistic marginalization and suppression was supported by other postcolonial critics and, in fact, constituted one of the main themes of postcolonial criticism and theory in the last two decades of the twentieth century. His particular emphasis on scriptlessness, though, has remained a unique attempt to 39 The language debate has been particularly well documented by John Skinner throughout his book The Stepmother Tongue: An Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction, Basingstoke, 1998. 40 Tapping, 88. 41 Ibid., 88- 89.


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theorize linguistic inferiority, unlike all other postcolonial theorists, not as an oral or aural phenomenon, that is, as silence, voicelessness, muteness, or speechlessness,42 but as a condition caused in the first place by the global dissemination of Western (and specifically Anglophone) literacy. It is only recently that more attention has been paid again to this historical process, which Homi Bhabha has, perhaps with somewhat overly poetical irony, described as “the triumph of the writ of colonialist power”.43 In large-scale research projects scholars have been reconstructing the evolution of individual postcolonial book cultures. Other projects have been devoted to specific aspects of paper production, demand, and use as well as to questions of book market development in settler and other colonies.44 At the same time, the discussion of language dissemination and appropriation has begun to take into account the hard facts gained through language and literacy surveys. All this suggests a deliberate move away from narratives like Bhabha’s, of “the sudden fortuitous discovery of the English book” in the “wild and wordless wastes of colonial India, Africa, the Caribbean”.45 Works like John Skinner’s The Stepmother Tongue or Ismail Talib’s The Language of Post-Colonial Literature (2002) illustrate the usefulness of a more pragmatic description of the roles played by the English language in different colonial and postcolonial contexts, roles only insufficiently classified as those either of a lingua franca or “master language”. Their underlying methodology offers a feasible alternative to the generalizing, if not totalizing assumptions of human discourse developed under the influence especially of Foucault and Derrida and legitimizes the call for greater historical and regional specificity, as formulated, for instance, by Ania Loomba.46 42

See also my reading of Spivak on pages 106-107 below. Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817”, in The Location of Culture, London, 1994, 107. 44 The work done within the context of the HOBA (The History of the Book in Australia) Project and within the History of Print Culture in New Zealand Research Programme deserves to be specially mentioned here, as well as the research inspired and supported by SHARP (The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, founded in 1991). 45 Bhabha, 102. 46 Mainly because of their failure to consider the interrelation between different discourses, Loomba criticizes, the work of postmodern thinkers (“including Foucault”) has been of little help in the task of recovering the subaltern subject in 43

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An admittedly very important point Spivak makes in defence of Foucault and Derrida is that all metropolitan intellectuals are masters of obfuscation, having perfected the art of masquerade in their representations of subaltern agency. She argues that to escape the blame of epistemic violence scholars of subalternity insistently stage themselves as absent non-representers who let the subaltern speak for themselves even if it is obvious that these cannot “speak” at all. Such dishonesty, she explains, renders the suppressed Other only more intangible than the familiar theoretical assertions of its indeterminacy make it out to be. Correspondingly, Sara Suleri claims that scholarly discourse routinely specularizes, exoticizes, and fetishizes subaltern agency in order to distract from the academy’s ignorance of nonWestern traditions.47 Her argument, too, urges a more precise mapping of the position of the postcolonial intellectual in relation to the subaltern Other. Such mapping would entail a careful examination of the global printscape within which postcolonial scholars and writers circulate in highly literate manner their highly literate notions of nonliterate subalternity. This, however, seems impossible without a reconsideration of globalization which, as Robertson complains, has so far been discussed only superficially and with no attention “to larger civilizational contours and bases, except for frequently invoked clichés about ‘late capitalism’ and/or the salience of ‘the multinational corporation’”.48 In reducing globalization, as Robertson puts it, to an “intellectual play zone” in which residual social-theoretical interests and world-ideological preferences may be brandished at random, scholars of the later twentieth century have successfully avoided defining their own place in the international arenas in which they interact. Instead they have helped to perpetuate the image of the colonial history. Even more strongly condemning, O’Hanlon and Washbrook argue that “Derridean and post-modern thinkers (including Foucault) display a depthlessness and make it impossible for us to understand how societies function” (Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXIV/1 [January 1992], 141-67). In so doing they echo Eagleton’s charge that the work of Derrida has been “grossly unhistorical” and “politically evasive” (Eagleton, 205). 47 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago, 1992, 6 (see also Huggan, “Opting out of the (Critical) Common Market”). 48 Roland Robertson, “Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept”, in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (A Theory, Culture and Society Special Issue), ed. Mike Featherstone, London, 1990, 16.


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metropolitan intellectual as a “globetrotting scribbler” or modern “nomad” of high learning, as a master of vast spaces routinely traversing large distances to meet the subaltern in her Third World habitat and collect, if need be with the help of some native informant – the kind of life experience which global mobility and membership in an international litocracy seem unable to supply. As Spivak notes, this modern type of scholar exists without geopolitical determinations, somewhere on some “international periphery” and partakes in “a continuistic ‘unconscious’ or parasubjective ‘culture’” conjured by “theoretical verbalism”.49 Likewise, the mediations whereby literary works are selected, translated, published, reviewed, explicated, and allotted a place in the archives of postcolonial and other literatures have been barely described. So have, as Aijaz Ahmad points out, the technical and managerial efforts that go into the compilation and administration of such archives.50 In theory, these archives remain immaterial places progressively growing, taking up more and more space, yet never seen as being actually frequented and never studied for this frequentation and its history. As has been stated at the beginning of this chapter, the terms in which a person’s exclusion from literate culture is perceived will always and inevitably be defined by and contingent on the way in which literacy is conceptualized by literates. As long as these terms are vague, the phenomenon of illiteracy remains practically intangible, and the individual marked by it, invisible. Theoretical haziness about the location of literate culture and its sites of literary production and consumption inevitably obscures the coordinates of non-literate alterity. Conversely, in trying to make subjects unable to read and write visible, literary texts also give greater visibility to the literacy of the culture or cultures in which they are so self-evidently implicated. They may represent these cultures as regional formations but almost invariably treat them as integral parts of a larger international system at the same time. Thus they invoke a world in which literature may be distributed everywhere yet still not be accessible to everyone. Emphasis, however subtle, on this sad contradiction renders geographical distances between literate and non-literate people and 49

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, London, 1994, 71, 68, and 69. 50 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London, 1992, 44-45.

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peoples secondary. Enhancing instead the synchronicity of their existences, it creates a sense of shared involvement in global processes that allows a new form of identification with the culturally Other. Arguably, this effect warrants the postulation of a specific postcolonial metafiction in literary representations of non-literacy that reconnects the postcolonial text to the metropolitan centres of literary production and challenges a global litocracy to take responsibility for the local cultures it portrays.

ILLITERACY AS A LITERARY THEME


As Walter Ong has said, “we can never forget enough of our familiar present to reconstitute in our minds any past in its full integrity”.1 What follows is the contention that no literate can ever comprehend “the pristine human consciousness which was not literate at all ... perfectly”. Any understanding of the non-literate mind, according to Ong, is further impeded by the fact that discourses on non- or illiteracy (or what he prefers calling “orality”) must take place in writing. For “once the word is technologized”, Ong explains, “there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available”.2 Yet, whether the absence or lack of a script is most adequately and authentically represented in writing is, as Ong also concedes, more than doubtful. After all, such representations are merely transcriptions or translations and hence always in some way an adulteration of the actual phenomenon. As far as Marshall McLuhan is concerned, any rendering of non-alphabetic thinking in letters therefore constitutes an aggressive and militant act of reduction and distortion, of assimilation and liquidation.3 Still, the point of this work is not to expose the epistemic violence committed whenever a writer attempts to write about illiteracy. Rather the aim here is to show how the awareness of the danger of committing such violence prompts individual writers to seek ways of avoiding it, of directing it away from the non-literate Other onto their own texts and onto themselves and their own culture. This need not be a conscious gesture of self-negation, however. It can also represent an attempt to preserve the constructive moment of what is only too easily condoned as discursive usurpation, especially from a postcolonial point of view. Therefore, the object of this study is to consider the processes of conception, interpretation, and transliteration of illiteracy, processes in which actual illiteracy is not mimetically represented but replaced by an image, an idea, or an explanation of how scriptlessness might be understood, imagined, perhaps even remembered, however vaguely and erroneously, from a literate person’s point of view. This does not mean that concrete manifestations outside literature will be passed over altogether. In fact, they shall be considered as potential sources of inspiration for literary explorations of scriptlessness. It shall be shown that more often than not descriptions of non-literate otherness are actually occasioned by the author’s own confrontation 1 2 3

Ong, 15. Ibid., 80. McLuhan, 61.

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with illiteracy, either as an aspect of the immediate cultural environment or through an encounter with a foreign culture. Hardly ever does illiteracy in a literary text represent a purely fictional construct referring to no specific historical condition of scriptlessness whatsoever. The evident historicity of literary treatments of illiteracy may of course be comprehended as yet another proof of the text’s preoccupation with itself and its own literacy (rather than with the non-literate), that is, as a proof of its self-reflexivity or metafictionality. It may, more specifically, be read as a modality of positioning that text in relation to the literate culture (or cultures) to which it appeals.

CHAPTER THREE ILLITERACY IN EARLIER FICTION

Because literary explorations of scriptlessness practically always refer to actual situations, they do not feature in writings from periods before mass literacy was achieved; nor do they surface before literacy was assimilated into a collective cultural consciousness and literary works began to be addressed to broader readerships who actually identified as actively reading recipients of literary texts. It was only then that an idea of illiteracy was at all able to take shape and that a public discourse on illiteracy could commence. In England, this happened in the course of the nineteenth century, which is surprisingly late given that printing, fed by the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, blossomed already in the sixteenth century with the Reformation and with European expansion in the New World. Yet, as Peter Roberts shows, at the beginning of the eighteenth century illiteracy was still not perceived as a social problem. After all, “reading for pleasure was not a normal practice in the society of the time, reading for business reasons was not absolutely necessary, and reading of the Scriptures was not attractive to many”.1 Letter writing was still a relatively new medium and there existed no formal or actual requirement for literacy either for voters or for representatives.2 The studies by Terry Belanger, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Carey McIntosh confirm this picture, revealing that “England in the 1790s was a well-developed print society”,3 whereas a century earlier, in 1695, “print culture was still in its infancy”.4 In 1695, Eisenstein asserts, the life of the written language for most Britons was “scribal”

1 Peter A. Roberts, From Oral to Literate Culture: Colonial Experience in English West Indies, Barbados, 1997, 135. 2 Although, as Roberts points out, it was not seen as a requirement for the voters until a later time. Significantly, the written ballot was not generally instituted in Britain until 1872, which is after it had become commonplace in Australia and the United States (Roberts, 121). 3 Terry Belanger, “From Bookseller to Publisher: Changes in the London Book Trade, 1750-1850”, in Book Selling and Book Buying: Aspects of the NineteenthCentury British and North American Book Trade, Chicago, 1978, 8. 4 Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture, Cambridge, 1998, 169.

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more than printed.5 Only a few hundred professionals were involved in the printing, binding, distribution, advertising, and selling of books. By 1790, however, McIntosh claims, “thousands of people made their living from jobs in the printing world all over Great Britain, and the majority of the population had to deal one way or another with printed texts”.6 The development of Britain into a full-dress print culture in the course of the eighteenth century was not an entirely smooth process. It was propelled by the Copyright Act of 1709, which abolished censorship and perpetual rights on individual manuscripts, thereby liberalizing the British printing and book trade.7 Yet at the same time, it was impeded by legal measures taken against the distribution of political information, such as the Stamp Act of 1712, which put a tax on every single newspaper copy.8 Paper consumption was still minimal and administrative structures were still embryonic9 as the majority of eighteenth-century Britons could not write well enough to sign their names or read handwritten texts. Nonetheless, there was considerable familiarity with reading,10 material for which was supplied not only by the extremely popular lending libraries but also by cafés, tobacconists, and haberdashers.11 The lucrative business of book lending generated private borrowing outlets as well as university, school, and municipal libraries so that by the end of the eighteenth century, the British Museum had grown out of the Parliament’s acquisition of private collections; the Bell’s British Library had been extended to hold an inventory of 100,000 volumes in 1787;12 and subscription libraries and town public libraries had been 5 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols, Cambridge, 1997. 6 McIntosh, 170. 7 Martin, 277. 8 Ibid., 119-21 and 414. 9 Ibid., 293. 10 McIntosh, 171. By the middle of the sixteenth century, books tended to move from the great hall or the study to the bedroom and even the kitchen and there is evidence that many yeomen, tradesmen, and merchants read the Bible, books of piety, or John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments and works of jurisprudence (Martin, 354). 11 Kathryn Sutherland, “‘Events … have made us a world of readers’: Reader Relations 1780-1830”, in The Romantic Period, ed. David. B. Pirie, The Penguin History of Literature, 1994, V, 12. 12 Martin, 171.


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founded in Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds.13 In other places public reading rooms and circulating libraries granted extensive access to books and periodicals. Around 1790 some six hundred libraries and lending libraries were in operation in England and served a total clientele of fifty thousand persons.14 Already in the first half of the century booksellers had set up in larger cities and English peddlers were doing a thriving business in abridged versions of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. This was only the beginning of the distribution circuits for low-priced books expanding and of popular novels, books of hours, school texts, and almanacs being printed in impressive pressruns.15 As a result, while very few examples of printing before 1695 have survived, the number of published items recorded in the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue amounts to 69,229. Their buyers were no longer only city dwellers. As McIntosh documents, by the end of the eighteenthcentury, the institutions of literacy could be found throughout Great Britain, in towns, even villages, and country homes. Inland-shipment via a vastly extended canal-system16 guaranteed a speedy distribution of printed matter and was breaking down the isolation of partially literate communities all over England.17 Almost inevitably, local papers, magazines, and periodicals were founded18 and began to fill with announcements for the opening of private schools. “Gradually a new public formed”, Martin writes: a public already accustomed by family tradition to reading the ‘Bible or a pious work’ as they gathered in the evening. That public could already spell out the ballads posted on the walls of the home or read chapbooks, but henceforth it developed a taste for other texts … reading continued to spread to the humbler categories of a society in which everyone ... felt surrounded by written culture.19

With the coming of age of European print culture in the eighteenth century the written word was firmly established as the basic unit of 13

Ibid., 353. Paul Kaufman, quoted in Martin, 354. 15 Martin, 238. 16 Ibid., 415. Turnpike acts were passed between 1750 and 1780 and by 1790 England could boast of 2,223 miles of canals (McIntosh, 35). 17 Martin, 240. 18 McIntosh, 170. 19 Martin, 355. 14

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communication and exchange. It had penetrated every part of public life, and become so conspicuously omnipresent that men and women felt bound across traditional skills and trade divisions by the very act of reading. For Kathryn Sutherland literacy finally made it possible for “the concept of class below the middle” to develop. “There was … an urgent awareness”, Sutherland writes, “that society, its ranks and relations, its modes of communication, and even its fantasies were being reordered by the printing-press, and that something amounting to a revolution in consciousness was taking place”.20 The concrete experience which produced such feeling, along with a new sense of inhabiting a distinctive cultural space and sharing a distinctive cultural identity, is vividly invoked in Sutherland’s description of the cultural landscape taking material shape just before and during the Romantic period: At the opposite end of the market from rare books, experimentation with new typefaces and graphic processes led to a huge expansion of wall posters, cheap pictorial prints, and political cartoons. Even the illiterate, particularly in London, were increasingly addressed as ‘readers’, of pictures if not of words; while the proliferation of poster literature, ‘the language of the walls’ as it was called, seemed set to turn the urban landscape into a textual field, a book for all to read. Playbills, civic notices established written communication at this time at the heart of cultural practices whose traditional meanings were not primarily textual … every available space on London street walls was now plastered with virtually aggressive reading material, ‘telegraphing’ in dense black titles its essential message to a new semi-literate public.21

It is in this climate that an awareness of illiteracy finally began to form. “In Britain the first great national political debates on literacy took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century”, R.A. Houston reminds us: “In the last years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries, observers of the British Society realized that illiteracy was a common and probably undesirable phenomenon [which was] also ... far from evenly distributed.”22 This, however, did not produce unanimous agreement on the need to abolish illiteracy 20

Sutherland, 43. Ibid., 9. 22 R.A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, Cambridge, 1985, 2. 21


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altogether. On the contrary, the population explosion which England witnessed at the turn of the century and which despite significant educational advances led to a dramatic growth of the actual number of illiterates23 caused many to recognize in mass literacy a serious danger to social stability. The urban middling and working classes (petit bourgeois, artisans, and factory workers)24 were seen not only as hitherto innocently barred from education but also as the potentially most threatening readerships to emerge once they were able to engage in critical inquiry.25 “The fear that a multilayered readership would promote a dangerous proliferation of oppositional discourses, an explosive rivalry of ‘truths’”, Sutherland writes, “was matched by an equal concern that a radical literature would act as cement to otherwise scattered grievances”.26 A heated debate over the benefits and risks of promoting reading but also writing amongst the lower sections of society ensued. There were visionaries following the liberal views of Rousseau and Pestalozzi and advocating mass literacy on the grounds that education of the poor in all branches of knowledge, including party politics, was the best security for “the peace of the country, and the stability of the government”.27 They were opposed by sceptics who believed that every nation state needed a large reserve of unlettered people willing to perform unskilled work and who, intimidated by the events in France, warned that literacy among the “swinish multitude” would breed dissent, radicalism, and crime.28 Yet, this debate could not avert the advance of literacy set in motion by such technological improvements as the paper-machine, the 23

Between 1780 and 1830 the population of Great Britain had doubled, from approximately 7 to 14 million. Between 1801 and 1821 the population of Greater London expanded by over 40 %. According to Martin (399), it rose from 960,000 to 2,300,000; between 1800-1850. The reading public, it is estimated, grew from 1.5 to 7 million (Sutherland, 5-6). By the end of the eighteenth century, literacy had reached a level of 35 to 40 per cent and continued to rise significantly in the following decades. 24 Sutherland, 6. 25 Ibid., 46-47. 26 Ibid., 21. 27 Henry Brougham (1824), founder of the SDUK, quoted in Sutherland, 43. Two further prominent proponents of mass education were Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster. Another was William Cobbett, editor of the Political Register (1802-35), who identified access to the skill of writing as well as to that of reading a socially empowering, a political rite of passage (Sutherland, 34). 28 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Mary Thale, Cambridge, 1972, 198.

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stereotype, and the steel press. It could only delay it – together with the introduction of a complete system of universal compulsory schooling in England and Wales. The latter was not achieved until 1880 owing to England’s prolonged reliance on philanthropic initiative and its hesitance to allow the state to intervene in educational affairs. As a result, a two-tier educational system developed in the course of the nineteenth century which consisted of expensive governing schools to educate the future governing elite and of poorly funded schools that “aimed less at encouraging upward mobility than on imparting just enough literary knowledge to teach the children of the poor how to read the Bible and learn from it how to be industrious”.29 Judged unnecessary for most, writing was simply not taught in the schools of The Anglican National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, while the Wesleyan Methodists even went as far as placing a total ban on writing in their schools.30 “In this way”, Gaur ironically concedes, “the limited and carefully graded introduction of literacy was ... a success”.31 The damage caused by this laissez faire policy transpired when, in 1858, the Newcastle Commission started an inquiry into the state of national elementary education and, in its report of 1861, revealed grave defects and glaring inefficiency especially in private-venture schools. The report finally encouraged the liberal Gladstone administration to carry out the reforms against which there had been so much vehement resistance, because it was felt that “giving education to the labouring classes ... would ... teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants ..., render them factious and refractory, [and] enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity”.32 With the prohibition of school fees on the elementary level and the introduction of a special fee grant, free schooling was legally secured to every child in Great Britain by the beginning of the 1890s. Its effects were considerable. The average school attendance increased from two

29

Gaur, 174. Sutherland, 5. 31 Gaur, 174. 32 From a declaration of the President of the Royal Society against the 1807 Bill for Universal Elementary Education quoted in Gaur, 172-73. 30


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million in 1876 to four million in 1881.33 Subsequently, illiteracy fell from thirty-three percent among men and between forty-five and fifty percent among women in the 1830s to below ten percent among men and women in the 1880s.34 Almost from the moment illiteracy became a public concern at the beginning of the nineteenth century it also featured as a central theme in literature. It is worth bearing in mind that in keeping with a general indifference to writing and a practically universal lack of interest in questions of literacy before then, eighteenth-century English literature passes over illiteracy lightly. Mostly it ignores it altogether, or if it addresses the issue it does so with characteristically unperturbed sanguinity. The illiteracy of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, for instance, represents an almost endearing feature compared to the affected modernity cultivated by his mother Mrs Hardcastle. Similarly in The Rivals Sheridan has illiteracy appear as a far lesser evil than the kind of ignorance he ascribes to the figure of Mrs Malaprop, who advises her niece to “illiterate” her lover from her memory.35 That the inability to read and write was felt to be of no consequence in the eighteenth century is also documented in The Complete English Tradesman, in which Defoe describes how a nearly illiterate man, limited to the use of what seem to be desperately primitive accounting techniques, still brings his business to prosper. Likewise, in Moll Flanders literacy is clearly not construed as a precondition of the eponymous heroine’s progress through a world increasingly organized and managed with the help of the written 33 Despite the dramatic population growth at the time, in terms of percentage to population, the figures suggest a rise school attendance of 8.06 % in 1878 and of 10.61 % in 1881 (Smith, 986). 34 By comparison, in 1760, male illiteracy amounted to 40% and female illiteracy even to 60%. Cf. also Altick according to whom, in 1840, 67% of men and 51% of women in England and Wales could sign their wedding certificates with their own names, whereas by 1900, 97.2% among men and 96.8% among women were able to do so. As regards the difficulty of assessing what counts as illiteracy, see also Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900, Chicago, 1963, 170-71, and R.S. Schofield, “Dimensions of Illiteracy in England 1750-1850”, in Literacy and Social Development in the West, ed. Harvey J. Graff, Cambridge, 1981, 201-13, as well as Laurence Stone, “Literacy and Education in England 1640-1900”, Past and Present, XLII (1969), 69-139. 35 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, “The Rivals: A Comedy”, in The Rivals, The Duenna, A Trip to Scarborough, School for Scandal, The Critic, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Cordner, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, 1998, 19.

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medium. Both Moll’s knowledge of letters in her and her experienced use of modern banking and postal services are simply taken for granted and remain unaccounted for throughout the novel – as does the astonishing literacy of the simple servant girl who in Richardson’s novel Pamela routinely resorts to letter writing in any moment of emotional crisis. In the latter case, all the author offers is a curt clarifying remark that she learnt to read and write from her father, a teacher by profession. The tuition Pamela received from her parent is given no further mention in Richardson’s novel. Learning to read and write was evidently not experienced as a significant process of initiation into a special cultural practice in his time. This is also the impression Defoe conveys in Robinson Crusoe with Friday’s apparent indifference to Crusoe’s abilities to use pen and paper and to draw wisdom from the Bible. Quite characteristically, while the islander questions the book learning Crusoe tries to impart to him, he falls to his knees in speechless veneration when Crusoe shoots a goat. It is the introduction Friday subsequently receives into the use of firearms on which Defoe elaborates, not necessarily, however, to suggest Crusoe’s recognition and encouragement of Friday’s savage nature but, arguably, to stress the usefulness of more rudimentary survival skills than reading and writing. Significantly these skills prove indispensable not only in the confined space of a deserted island but also on Friday’s and Crusoe’s journey through Europe. On this journey, Crusoe has to discover once more that the ability to use a gun may, at least at times, prove far more vital than any amount of book learning. A similar ironic querying of the actual usefulness of literacy is performed in Joseph Andrews, which in its account of the protagonist’s education,36 may mention his advancement to “Writing and Reading”,37 albeit only parenthetically. Far greater importance is ascribed to Joseph’s training in such competencies as keeping birds and dogs, riding race horses, and serving a lady as her “foot-boy”, the latter entailing such profane exercises as carrying her prayer book and singing psalms. Alleged excellence in these earns Joseph a position with the curate Adams, 36

The corresponding chapter is given the promising but misleading title “Of Mr Joseph Andrews his Birth, Parentage, Education and great Endowments, with a Word or two concerning Ancestry”. 37 Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr Abraham Adams and An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1742), ed. with an Introduction by Douglas Brooks, London, 1970, 18.


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whose outstanding book learning, the novel typically notes, has rendered him “as entirely ignorant of the Ways of this World, as an Infant just entered into it could possibly be”.38 The consistent belittling of literacy skills in eighteenth-century narrative prose is remarkable especially given the acute awareness of their texts’ writtenness which the authors express at the same time. Tristram Shandy is a particular case in point with its continual references to the materiality of writing and at the same time its demonstrative blindness to the difficulty of accessing literary texts, especially if these texts are as intricately self-reflexive as Sterne’s own narrative. There is no false (or other) modesty about the narrator’s flamboyant displays of his own extraordinary learning and literacy. For him, he tries to make the reader believe, to be well read, versed, and lettered is a perfectly ordinary accomplishment attained under perfectly ordinary circumstances and of use always and everywhere, even in the most ordinary situations. “Writing”, as he puts it at one point, “when properly managed … is but a different name for conversation”.39 This, of course, is an understatement barely concealing Sterne’s own fascination with the novelty of the idea that reading and writing represent universally accepted as well as universally practised forms of entertainment and intellectual selfimprovement. Analogously, the narrator’s oblivion to the possibility that someone might possess no knowledge of letters at all demands to be read as an indication not of a lack of social awareness on the part of Sterne’s hero but of the author’s determination to yield a blatantly radicalized account of the cultural trends of his time. Thus he could do justice, also stylistically, to the spectacular changes these trends had wrought. “I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all ….”,40 Tristram Shandy establishes categorically not even stopping to think that some people “are no readers” because they are unable to read. Sterne’s hero seems to rule out this possibility altogether. Illiterates do not really exist in his view of the world. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, illiteracy had become a form of cultural difference and disadvantage too serious to 38

Ibid., 19. Laurence Sterne, Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), ed. with an Introduction by Samuel Holt Monk, New York, 1950, 93. 40 Ibid., 6. 39

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lend itself to comic exploitation or downplaying any longer. Writers were forced to see and acknowledge the otherness of those still excluded from the new print culture in which they had come to assume such a central role. They themselves were now the assets of an emergent industry and market, courted and cared for by publishers who had risen from relative insignificance into the position of “powerful entrepreneurs, capable of ‘making’ authors and creating markets for their wares”.41 The new specificity of their cultural role required a greatly differentiated assessment of the context or landscape in which they were enacting this role. Writers were challenged to draw “a new mental map of the complex public and its textual desires” and to conceive of “a new way to organize audiences according to their ideological dispositions, their social distances, and the paradoxically intense pressure of their proximity as audiences”.42 In the process, those segments of society who were “no readers at all” also had to be ascribed more exact coordinates. Along with a plurality of readerships equipped with shifting and competing literacies the unlettered masses of non-readers thus entered the awareness of nineteenth-century authors as well as their writings. Beside a mass reading population and “its unknowable heterogeneity”,43 contemporary writers were faced with something even more unknowable – the otherness of individuals unable to access their writings let alone to write their own texts. In the wake of the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and, later, of the Industrial Revolution and under the influence of the ongoing controversy over the benefits and dangers of mass literacy, this otherness was bound to be construed in the first place as a socio-economic, moral, and political problem. Accordingly, where the figure of the illiterate appears in Romantic and Victorian literature it is to epitomize mainly disadvantage and inferiority and thereby function both as a warning to the ruling classes not to oppose the introduction of universal free schooling and as an appeal to the lower classes to undertake every effort possible to educate themselves. Not surprisingly the ambition to reach the entirety of the latter target group was frustrated in the process. As Sutherland reminds us, one must not overestimate “the extent to which the labouring poor 41

Sutherland, 36. Jon Klancher quoted in Sutherland, 25. 43 Sutherland, 40. 42


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identified with their literary inscription either as Paineite workerscholars or as members of a growing family of the morally regenerated”.44 These sections of society, she explains, were more easily reached by way of “sub-literary” genres such as broadsheet ballads, lurid accounts of allegedly true crimes, and cheap reprint libraries.45 Still, the insistent launching of written appeals even to those unable to read is of interest as behaviour symptomatic of a society having recently endorsed a new technology of communication but as yet unable to understand the limitations of that technology. In the course of the nineteenth century this changes so that the initial unquestioning faith in the universal transmissibility of written messages comes to be satirically epitomized by figures such as that of Mrs Pardiggle, the self-appointed “School lady”, “Reading lady”, and “Distributing lady” in Bleak House, fiercely committed to the distribution of knowledge amongst the poor yet deaf to their assertions that they cannot read the books she expects them to study for their own improvement. For such ironic portrayal of literalizing zeal to find expression in imaginative writing, a more thorough negotiation of the implications of literacy and of the differences between literate and non-literate thinking first had to take place within literary discourse. It was, above all, in narrative fiction, and especially in the novel that nineteenthcentury writers compared illiterates and literates, their unequal places in society, the different careers open to them, the moral development their learning (or the lack of it) held in store for them, and the personal ties they were able to forge with or without its help. The discrepancies discovered in the process provided material for complex psychological dramas of alienation, enacted, for instance, by Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights or by Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend. While the differences are sustained throughout these two novels, the disparity between literate and illiterate characters is resolved in other texts narrating an individual’s gradual acquisition of the ability to read and write. In such works, the transition from illiteracy to literacy tends to be carefully extended to accommodate descriptions of schoolrooms, studies, and libraries, as well as accounts of contemporary teaching methods and materials, and portrayals of public school teachers or privately hired tutors and governesses. 44 45

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 22-24.

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Apart from offering an increasingly elaborate iconography of literate culture, nineteenth-century writing also developed an increasingly differentiated picture of the manifold literacies and illiteracies produced by the laissez faire policy that had been adopted in educational matters in Britain. The absence of a universal school system meant that there was no uniform way of learning to read and write. Logically there was no single pattern either according to which stories recounting an individual’s initiation into literate culture had to evolve. There are tales of glorious success such as that of John Halifax by Mrs Craik or of Hester Wilmot by Hannah More and tales of dismal failure such as that of De Bracy in Ivanhoe or of Krook in Bleak House. Some novels such as Great Expectations, The Mill on the Floss, or Jude the Obscure tell of children learning to read and write. Others tell of adults trying to learn what they were denied in their childhood, as, for instance, Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, or the farm workers in Adam Bede. Rarely do nineteenth-century novels record a relapse from literacy to a state practically equalling illiteracy. Heathcliff, who after the death of old Mr Earnshaw loses “the benefit of his early education” along with “any love for books or learning” and cultivates an air of “mental deterioration”,46 remains an exception. As a rule, the process of learning to read and write is represented quite differently, namely as an irreversible transformation, an irrevocable break with one’s nonliterate past. It is also for this reason that literacy, even while its indispensability is hardly negated in nineteenth-century British writing, is not always recommended unreservedly as a safe passage to social mobility or material, let alone moral, improvement. The corrupting power of learning forms a central theme in many Bildungsromane of the time and is given very special attention in Mary Shelley’s portrayal of both Frankenstein and his monster, whose evil nature is invoked only when he comes into contact with the civilized and learned world of his creator to be rejected by it for his repugnant appearance. While at first the forgivable reaction of an unpretentious child, this rejection turns into a brutal injustice when reinforced by the cottagers with whom the creature has been living, secretly observing and trying to emulate their refinement. The

46

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847): Authoritative Text. Backgrounds. Criticism, eds William M. Sale and Richard J. Dunn, 3rd edn, London, 1990, 52-53.


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“powers of eloquence and persuasion”47 he has cultivated in the process sadly fail him when he reveals himself to the De Laceys. In their eyes, he still is but an abominable creature and it is the disappointment at their inability to read him otherwise that causes the monster to finally endorse the role of the unassimilated savage and demonic brute ascribed to him. Ironically, when he leaves the cottage, he is as literate as the people who have rejected him for his apparent otherness. Yet, as he puts it himself, “the effort [has] destroyed all [his] remaining strength”48 and only deprived him of the innocent delight he used to take in such simple pleasures as the sound of a stream flowing and the sight of the moon as long as he lived in complete emigration and unawares of his difference. All he has ultimately gained from his reading of Paradise Lost (along with Volney’s Ruins of Empires, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werter) is a sharpened sense of his own fall and expulsion from his blessed retreat after he has tasted the fruit of knowledge. The idea of the moral superiority of the illiterate implied in the monster’s own account of his gradual penetration of the world of letters remains a recurrent motif in nineteenth-century literature. Apart from Romantic celebrations of the unadulterated naturalness of the still illiterate child English novels offer descriptions of such superiority in pronouncedly sympathetic portrayals of lower-class illiterate females. Unaffected kindness, genuine loyalty, and commonsensical wisdom distinguish such characters as Susan Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Dolly Winthrop in Silas Marner, and Mrs Grose in The Turn of the Screw from the highlystrung, selfish, and devious literates around them. Nonetheless their lack of schooling is not their triumph. Far from recommending that lower-class females should be kept in a state of amiably harmless ignorance, Hardy, Eliot, and James stress the dependence into which such ignorance manoeuvres the women in their stories. Acknowledging the indispensability of literacy as well as the irreversibility of the process of alphabetization, they see the evolution of British culture into a fully-fledged print culture with the same scepticism with which they observe other developments marking the onset of modernism. 47 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), ed. M.K. Joseph, Oxford, 1980, 220. 48 Ibid., 135.

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While still part of a general criticism of Western civilization in Mary Shelley, the questioning of the moral integrity of literates and literate society in later writers seems prompted by a direct response to more specific contemporary developments. This holds true also of Charles Dickens, who provides what probably is the most differentiated reading of illiteracy in nineteenth-century England. With the carefully nuanced descriptions he offers of different people’s attitudes to and experiences of learning, notably in Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens calls in question contemporary propaganda according to which alphabetization serves the material and moral improvement of all peoples within and outside Europe. Although his focus is not on Britain’s colonial subjects abroad but on the lower classes of urban England, Dickens’ interpretation of learning (at least as provided in nineteenth-century Britain) as a precarious process of assimilation into a brutally capitalist system does anticipate the objections to imperialist cultural policies that began to be voiced by seditionists outside Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. Dickens develops his criticism of literate culture from an angle almost diametrically opposed to that of Sir Walter Scott, whose idealistic celebrations of oral Scottish folk culture and Romantic portrayals of Scottish peasants and vagabonds influenced the nostalgic treatments of non-literate “natives” in later nineteenth-century novels such as The Pioneers by Cooper or Allan Quatermain by Henry Rider Haggard.49 As Goetsch points out, it is by stressing the superstitious suspicion and awe of writing apparently felt by the illiterates he portrays, Scott effectively Others his unlettered characters and exoticizes their lack of learning. He does so at the cost of attaching the stigma of cultural backwardness to those whose oral culture he wishes to protect and preserve. Four and a half decades after the publication of The Antiquary in 1816 and its portrayal of Edie Ochiltree, the illiterate “news-carrier, … minstrel, and … historian”,50 Dickens in Great Expectations submits a completely different analysis of illiterate otherness, granting its intrinsic strangeness but also insisting on every 49 Many of the examples mentioned in this section have been found with the help of Paul Goetsch’s comprehensive paper, “Der Analphabet in der englischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts”. 50 Walter Scott, The Antiquary (1816), ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Nicola J. Watson, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, 2002, 44.


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literate’s familiarity with it. To this end he appeals to his readers’ memory of their own pre-literate childhood in subtly delineating how his protagonist, still a young boy at the beginning of the novel, fails to make sense of the meaning of the gravestones of his late parents and siblings and the letters written on them: The shape of the letters on my father’s [tombstone], gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.51

There is nothing romantic about Pip’s bewilderment, nothing suggesting the need to preserve his innocent ignorance. The novel’s opening passage leaves no doubt that Pip’s understanding of the world will have to change in the course of the narrative and that, in fact, one of the novel’s intentions is to narrate the protagonist’s appropriation of literacy. Nonetheless Dickens’ rendering of Pip’s initial illiterate incomprehension, sympathetic and comical at once, is more than a quaint and light-hearted opening. It is a first plea to take into consideration and even identify with those not included in the reading population addressed by the novel. This plea is renewed in the later characterization of Joe Gargery and Magwitch, two illiterate adults undergoing dramatically dissimilar careers also due to how each of them resolves the dilemma of never having had any schooling. Unlike Scott, Dickens abstains from construing characters like Joe and Magwitch as belonging to a world different and apart from that of his literate protagonists and readers. Instead he insists on ascribing them a place within the increasingly print-based and typographically fashioned cultural landscape of his time and refuses to exempt the educated inhabitants of this landscape from their responsibility for their lesser educated fellow-beings. While in Bleak House, Dickens 51

35.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861), ed. Angus Calder, Penguin, 1965,

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suggests that even if the non-literate’s otherness exceeds the literate’s grasp, this does not consign them to separate universes but makes it mandatory that literates should still try to realize the scope of their own incomprehension of what it means to be illiterate. The systematic familiarization of the unlettered individual in Dickens needs to be seen in relation to a growing awareness of illiteracy in actual life. If Dickens’ illiterate characters no longer represent creatures at once alien and alienating like Mary Shelley’s monster, Brontë’s Heathcliff, and Scott’s De Bracy, this is also an indication of the mastery English society gradually gained over the phenomenon of illiteracy in the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, Dickens’ insistence on the essential knowability of the unlettered Other may even be seen as foreshadowing the abandonment of the theme in English literature after the attainment of universal literacy. For once its treatment was limited to purely mimetic representation, illiteracy could continue to feature in literature only as long as it was also an actual social concern. After writers had ceased to exploit it also imaginatively and subject it to fictionalization, the theme was bound to vanish from literature again the moment it had lost its historical legitimization.

CHAPTER FOUR ILLITERACY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION: HEART OF DARKNESS

The loss of illiteracy as an intellectual concern discussed in the previous chapter appears to have been enforced by the Eurocentrism which has encouraged many twentieth-century writers to take the homogenous literalization of human societies and even more so their own literacy for granted. By contrast writers, mostly but not exclusively from outside Europe, with a sense of their own implication in the history of colonization have retained an interest in illiteracy especially as a form of potentially subversive deviancy from Western master cultures. Arguably, one can even posit a specificity of postcolonial writing where literary texts express an awareness of the expansion of European print culture beyond national boundaries and the formation of new literate cultures with locally based yet globally connected. In the articulation of this awareness the retrieval and restyling of illiteracy as a form of cultural otherness has played a more than crucial role. As will be shown, it has led to the evolution of a typically postcolonial metafictionality in the form of an acute sense of the exclusion of those from literary reception whose plight postcolonial literature describes. Accordingly, postcolonial explorations of illiteracy self-consciously locate the writing subject, the author, in the paradoxical position of a mediator representing one of two opposing cultural positions while in reality being, inescapably, a representative of the Other. This schizophrenic situation is resolved where the author strictly abstains or refrains from writing in the name of the scriptless Other but returns to the fictional distancing performed by earlier nineteenthcentury writers. As in the case of these writers, this does not necessarily signal a complete indifference or insensitivity to the social disadvantages illiteracy implies. Rather it reflects a growing insecurity concerning the possibilities of effective representation, an insecurity engendered by the realization that the uses to which the English language and, with it, alphabetic writing had come to be put in the course of the colonial enterprise were barely conducive to a genuinely sympathetic understanding of the forms of otherness encountered outside Europe.

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A text informed by this insecurity and one of the first to offer a correspondingly self-conscious treatment of the non-European scriptless Other is Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s rendering of the African native in this text has attracted broad critical attention since Chinua Achebe famously condemned it for parading “in the most vulgar fashion” longstanding prejudices against Africans and for freely exhibiting Conrad’s “antipathy to black people”, his “problem with niggers”, his “xenophobia” by reducing Africa to a “metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity”.1 The clearest indication of Conrad’s racism in Heart of Darkness, Achebe argues, is his strategic withholding of human expression from the African natives. “It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the ‘rudimentary souls’ of Africa”, he asserts. In place of speech they are given a violent babble of uncouth sounds, allowed to exchange but short grunting phrases, and most of the time described as “too busy with their frenzy” to communicate at all.2 The vehemence with which critics have responded to these charges is probably also due to Achebe’s simultaneous criticism of the academy for having failed to note or to admit “the preposterous and perverse arrogance” informing Heart of Darkness, simply because “white racism in Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked”.3 To a large extent, the responses critics have since formulated not only in Conrad’s but also in their own defence4 revolve around the 1

Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, in Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn, Norton Critical Editions, London, 1988, 252 and 257-60. 2 Ibid., 255. 3 Ibid., 257. 4 Conrad has since been praised emphatically for his opposition to imperialist policies, criticized for venting only a “muffled” political protest against colonialism in his oeuvre, and condemned for the crude racism allegedly underlying his writing. The dazzlingly contradictory readings of Heart of Darkness generated in the past twentyodd years have prompted Chantal Zabus to divide these critics essentially into two factions: “the ‘poachers’ (Achebe, Janmohamed, Obiechina) and the ‘rangers’ (Hampson, Harris, Nazareth, Viola, Said)”. While, for Zabus, the former are driven by a morbid obsession of “crocodilian mishaps” and the ambition to hunt down racist or colonialist alligators afloat in the literary mainstream and its tributaries, the latter assume the equally doubtful protectionist stance of “gamekeepers of colonial literature”. (“Answering Allegations against ‘Alligator’ Writing in Heart of Darkness and Mister Johnson”, in Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures, eds C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen, DQR Studies in Literature 11, Amsterdam, 1993,

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theme of language and, more specifically, around that of orality.5 What has been ignored in the process, however, is the careful distinction Conrad draws between the highly literate eloquence of the white representatives of Europe in his narrative and the pre-literate voices turned silences of the blacks he has appear mostly on the margins or in the background of his text. This is important as it is this distinction which may actually be seen as providing the “alternative frame of reference”6 which, according to Achebe, Conrad fails to supply. Thus the reader cannot differentiate, Achebe contends, between Conrad’s own viewpoint and the actions and opinions of his characters. “It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary”, Achebe observes. To show that Conrad actually did try to make this provision, references to language and literacy and to the opposites of these, silence and scriptlessness, will be examined in the reading of Heart of Darkness that follows. The aim of this reading will not be to refute Achebe’s criticism of Heart of Darkness or to reinforce the novel’s canonical status in the West, which Achebe queries so emphatically. Instead it will suggest that both the prominence of the Europeans as characters and speakers and the overtly reductive treatment of Africans in Heart of Darkness, rather than affirming contemporary prejudices against the non-European Other, serve systematically to criticize them. Achebe apprehends the failure of the African native to appear centre stage in Heart of Darkness as a clear proof of Conrad’s racism, which, he argues, Conrad otherwise manages to hide behind semisincere avowals of concern about the atrocities waged by King Leopold of the Belgians in the Congo. Nineteenth-century English liberalism, Achebe maintains, while requiring all Englishmen of decency to be deeply shocked by these atrocities, did not prevent them 116-38.) For another useful summary of the critical discussion, see Andrea White, “Conrad and Imperialism”, in The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, ed. J.H. Stape, Cambridge Companions to Literature, Cambridge, 1996, esp. 179. 5 Cf. especially Julika Griem’s study of Heart of Darkness in Brüchiges Seemannsgarn: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Werk Joseph Conrads, ScriptOralia 81, Tübingen, 1995, 148-65, and Tony Tanner, who reads the use of voice in Heart of Darkness “as an attempt to rephysicalise language, as it were, to get it off the page and back into the mouth, and make us aware of how immediately related it is to the body” in “‘Gnawed Bones’ and ‘Artless Tales’ – Eating and Narrative in Conrad”, in Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration, ed. Norman Sherry, New York, 1976, 34. 6 Achebe, 256.

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from sidestepping the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people. Instead it permitted the cultivation of a covertly racist rhetoric gratifying the Western desire for another world, for an “antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization” in comparison with which “Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest”. It is, however, also possible to argue that far from asserting Europe’s “spiritual grace” by invoking a dark, bestial, horrid African Other, Heart of Darkness traces a total lack of grace in the white man’s perception of and interaction with non-European Others, a lack which Conrad’s European characters, notably the vainglorious Mr Kurtz, do not even possess the grace to stop and think about. In order to demonstrate that Conrad, the “talented, tormented, man”,7 as Achebe calls him, was not so tormented by the “precariousness of Western civilization” as to need “constant reassurance by comparison with a more primitive Africa”, it is necessary to attempt a less polarized reading of African and European civilizations than Achebe advances in “An Image of Africa”. Aware of this, Andrea White specifies the historical context in which Heart of Darkness was written and recalls that “imperialism was never the stable monolith that it might appear to be from a distance”. She suggests understanding Conrad’s oeuvre as an attempt to trace distinctive moments in the development of the British Empire, “from the loosely administered, ad hoc arrangement in Malaya, to the intensified scramble for land in Africa, to the financial dependencies established in South America”.8 White’s emphasis, rather than being on the language used by Conrad to describe Africans,9 is on the shifting nature of European imperialism between 1880 and 1914, “a period during which colonial conquests accelerated greatly and worldwide”, and on Conrad’s personal inheritance of both “a sensitivity to oppressive autocracy and a profound scepticism about the idealism of social, and particularly nationalistic, movements”.10 7

Likewise Said describes Conrad as “a self-conscious foreigner writing of obscure experiences in an alien language, and … only too aware of this” (Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge, 1966, 4). The fact that Conrad does not write in his first language is also stressed by Julika Griem, who, not completely convincingly, argues that Conrad never managed to use English as a natural medium but stayed engaged in a stylistic battle with it all his life (Griem, 43). 8 White, 180. 9 This, according to Zabus, forms the main focus in most other studies of Heart of Darkness (Zabus, 118). 10 White, 180.


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This approach leads White to identify the specific understanding of “culture” prevalent in late nineteenth-century Europe as one reason for the enduring critical disagreement concerning the ideological position Conrad assumes in Heart of Darkness. She believes that modern readers tend to forget that a century ago “culture” referred to “a single evolutionary process ... the basic, progressive movement of humanity” and by way of citing James Clifford she reminds us that: while contemporary anthropological and sociological thinking had spread knowledge about non-European peoples, it had done little more than codify difference in order to explain ‘their barbarism’ and ‘our civilization’. ‘By the turn of the century, however ... evolutionist confidence began to falter, and a new ethnographic conception of culture became possible. The word began to be used in the plural, suggesting a world of separate, distinctive, and equally meaningful ways of life’ ….

White believes that this was not Conrad’s understanding: As an early modern, he sensed the current of a world-wide disruption of peoples and ideas, of exiles and rootlessness, but while his writing acknowledges and even participates in the decentring of monolithic unities and traditional hierarchies, it also expresses his sense of loss and anxiety in response to the perceived disorder.11

For Ian Glenn it is owing to Conrad’s articulation of this same sense of loss and anxiety in the depictions of Kurtz and Marlow that Heart of Darkness has held “an unanalyzed power and fascination”. The novel has survived, Glen is convinced, because it captures so perfectly the class ambivalence of so many Western intellectuals in the twentieth century and not because of its early treatment of colonialism or its dramatization of the clash between nineteenthcentury virtue and twentieth-century decadence.12 Jeffrey Williams, too, pays special attention to Conrad’s treatment of the emergent class of Western professionals and recommends reading Heart of Darkness “in terms of a sacralization of the mode of narrative”. Such a reading, Williams believes, demonstrates the ideological “mission” of modern 11

Ibid., 196-97. Glenn, quoted in Jeffrey J. Williams, Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition, Cambridge, 1998, 180. 12

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narrative “to normalize and internalize what might be called the culture of the novel” and, more specifically, “to establish the discerning taste for sophisticated narratives – narratives of ambiguity”.13 In Williams’ view, Heart of Darkness “hypostasizes a hyperbolic desire and drive for narrative” characteristic of a cultural situation in which “narrative investment becomes a possessive sign of cultural capital”. Not without reason, Williams argues, the narratives told in Heart of Darkness are “made available” not to just anyone, but exclusively to those in the professional community: Rather than the all-encompassing hailing of narrative interest across class, age, and gender lines in Joseph Andrews, the narrative circle [in Heart of Darkness] is limited to the professional circle. And rather than the more frivolous demonstration of narrative desire for diverting narratives of leisure class entertainment … in Heart of Darkness … the drive for narrative carries much more serious stakes ... assuring the tenuous position of those rising not on inherited capital but on newly attained cultural capital, via professional accreditation and membership.14

Its underlying perception of narrative as cultural capital, to Williams, turns Heart of Darkness into an “exemplary proto-modernist text” which typically foregrounds “the formal problematics of gathering and collating a definitive narrative account”, the undoing of “narratorial assurance”, and the “disruption of the traditional hero”.15 As a result, Williams argues, the actual hero in Heart of Darkness is not Kurtz but Marlow. The fact that Kurtz is enigmatic and for the most part unrealized as a character only signals his status as “narrative register over which the other characters pose their explanations and articulate their interest”. Williams concludes, “that interest, seemingly natural and unquestioned is peculiar and excessive”.16 And it is this “excessiveness” of Marlow’s drive to hear of Kurtz and to tell his story that, to Williams, “conspicuously asserts the centrality of the narrative of narrative”.17 13

Williams, 153. Ibid., 179. 15 Ibid., 147. 16 Ibid., 151. 17 Ibid., 152. 14


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The question, then, which readers of Heart of Darkness are led to ask themselves, is not what will become of Kurtz in Africa, but what will become of Marlow, the narrator, in the process of telling his tale on the Nellie in Gravesend. What F.R. Leavis has called Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery”18 never allows the reader to forget that there is a narrative in progress and to wonder towards which ending this narrative will steer. In fact, in bombarding, as Achebe puts it, his readers with “emotive words and other forms of trickery”, Conrad not only sends his reader into a “hypnotic stupor”19 but also keeps alive the desire for a closure that releases Marlow from his compulsion to speak. For the images invoked in Heart of Darkness mainly serve to conjure voices rather than visions, moments of subjective experiencing rather than actual events, a talking self rather than the world which that self once encountered. Almost inevitably, Marlow’s idiosyncratic way of asserting his voice produces a disturbing imbalance, hinting at the presence of listeners not allowed to interrupt as well as at the absence of other witnesses whose version of the narrated events remains untold. This ultimately creates the impression that Marlow’s narrative is not, as Griem suggests,20 a celebration of human speech but a very critical analysis of its silencing capacity. To believe that Heart of Darkness unconditionally idealizes oral narration is to overlook the significant difference between Marlow’s speaking, so elaborately staged in Conrad’s narrative, and the speaking attempted by the African native, but insistently muffled and marginalized by the narrator. Even though Marlow delivers his stories orally, the kind of telling in which Conrad’s narrator engages has very little to do with the mode of oral expression and communication he keeps identifying as a characteristic of the black “savages” inhabiting the African wilderness. Marlow’s narrative is addressed to an audience consisting of a lawyer, an accountant, a director of companies, and the narrator, all of them no doubt sufficiently educated or “literate” to fully grasp the symbolic dimension of his “discoursing” as well as that of Kurtz’s. With his audience, Marlow shares a fairly intimate knowledge of Western history and literature, of French and Latin, of European and African geography, and, not 18

Leavis quoted in Achebe, 253. Achebe, 253. 20 Griem, 156. 19

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least importantly, of the workings of colonial administration, a bureaucracy utterly dependent on writing. As Robert Hampson states, the common culture of Marlow and his listeners is “a culture grounded in the shared educational background of English public schools” and a severely limited one for that.21 It finds expression in Marlow’s “passion for maps”,22 his awareness of language and linguistic nuance, his eloquence, his detestation of unand half-truths, and his deep respect for the binding power and authority of the written word. Even when lost in the darkest “featureless” jungle, Marlow retains his sense of connectedness to European literate culture. Symptomatically, he keeps remembering that his mission into the “heart of darkness” is the outcome of a letter of recommendation and the subsequent sealing of a contract with his own signature; one of his tasks on this mission is to transport letters to various company-owned camps on the way; one of the incidents he chooses to include in his account of his journey is his retrieval of an abandoned book on seamanship from complete decay and its restitution to its owner; the act which concludes his mission, finally, entails the handing over of the remaining pieces of Kurtz’s writings to the deceased’s “Intended”. The high level of literacy that distinguishes Marlow’s tale also distinguishes the speeches of his alter ego, Kurtz. The narrator of Heart of Darkness may portray Kurtz as endowed with, in fact, existing almost purely as a voice – “A voice, a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart” (HD, 96) – and others may hold the opinion that Kurtz, while a splendid talker, “really couldn’t write a bit”, nonetheless, Kurtz’s orality, like Marlow’s, is one informed by a remarkably sophisticated form of literacy. Indeed, Marlow, as the teller of the tale, actually is the voice that Kurtz is only said to be.23 Accordingly, Kurtz’s existence more often than not is evidenced in writing: in the packet of letters Marlow presents to 21

Robert Hampson, “‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The Speech that Cannot Be Silenced’”, English, XXXIX/163 (Spring 1990), 16. 22 Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”, in Heart of Darkness and Other Stories (1902), with an Introduction and Notes by Gene M. Moore, Wordsworth Classics, Ware: Hertfordshire, 1999, 35. 23 Vincent Pecora appropriately asks of the voices in Heart of Darkness, “Is it still ‘people’ who are speaking here?” in his paper “Heart of Darkness and the Phenomenology of Voice”, English Literary History, LII/4 (Winter 1985), 994.


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Kurtz’s fiancée, in the report on the “Suppression of Savage Customs” Marlow makes over to some journalist, in “family letters and memoranda without importance” (HD, 100) he passes on to some cousin of Kurtz’s, as well as in a note demanding the immediate removal of an expatriate assistant from the country. Conversely, when Kurtz is actually evoked as the grand speaker he is famed to be, it is again written words – poetry – that he delivers. “You ought to have heard him recite poetry”, Marlow is told by one of Kurtz’s admirers. But he never has the chance to do so. Instead he reads the report Kurtz was commissioned to write for the “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” – “Seventeen pages of close writing”, “eloquent, vibrating with eloquence”, “a beautiful piece of writing”: It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lighting in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!” (HD, 77-78)

Quite ironically, what Marlow and Kurtz have in common also separates them. Even though they share the same language and therefore, as Marlow believes, moments of extraordinary intimacy, it is the uses to which they put their means of expression that ultimately drives Marlow to vent his doubts as to whether “the fellow was exactly worth the life [of his native helmsman whom they] lost in getting to him” (HD, 78). With conspicuous consistency Conrad has Marlow question the progressive encroachment of literate European civilization on Africa. With corresponding scepticism he takes in the omnipresence of paper, printed or scribbled upon, even in places seemingly untouched by, because out of reach of the Western world of letters. Harmless notes pencilled in the margins of a book or the anonymous message scrawled on a piece of board and left on the bank of the river as a warning to Marlow and his crew are placed in sharp and sad contrast to the meticulous book keeping religiously conducted

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by the loathsome manager of the Central Station, an individual with “no learning, and no intelligence” (HD, 49) yet with the power to infuse his environment with a disconcerting “air of plotting” (HD, 52). Still, Marlow’s indignant remarks on this “papier-mâché Mephistopheles” (HD, 54) and clandestine reader of the Company’s confidential correspondence form only a mild reproach compared to the attack on imperialistic discursive practices that Conrad launches with Marlow’s portrayal of the ominous figure of Kurtz. In this attack, even such innocent literate practices as the recitation of poetry and the idealistic talk of love or of other higher Western sentiments obtain a demonically manipulative dimension, prompting Marlow to condemn them as mere pretences of civilization whereby a form of baseness is concealed too appalling for him to repeat to his audience. Kurtz’s “unbounded power of eloquence – of words – of burning noble words”, turns out to be a power of evil with which he holds spellbound both the “savages in the bush” whom he has made his personal subjects and his no less gullible expatriates. Interpreting Kurtz, as Yuan-Jung Cheng does, as the defenceless victim of a dangerous African wilderness, whose “spell”, “ghost”, or “lure” invades the colonialist “from body to soul” and gradually effects his “spiritual decomposition”24 means overlooking the importance of the fact that what enables Kurtz to penetrate the heart of darkness and sustains him there is his European education coupled with a specifically European presumptuousness, or what Cheng terms a “‘Faustian’ lack of restraint” and what Eugene Goodheart identifies as a “nineteenth-century legacy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment”.25 Even his systematic arrangement of the severed heads on his fence, yet another instance of his penchant for cryptic messages, which he challenges the horrified Marlow to decode, suggests a curiously complex (or highly literate) notion of communication. As Cheng correctly notes, “the problematics of language itself” constitutes the axis of Conrad’s critique of European civilization.26 This also corresponds with Martin Ray’s reading of Heart of Darkness as a text 24 Yuan-Jung Cheng, Heralds of the Postmodern: Madness and Fiction in Conrad, Woolf, and Lessing, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory 4, New York, 1999, 32-37. 25 Eugene Goodheart, Desire and Its Discontents, New York, 1991, 25-26. 26 Cheng, 41.


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criticizing above all the imperialist practice of superimposing language upon the indifferent land and people so as to “control its colonies while simultaneously using it to distance and gloss over the truth”.27 This does not mean, however, that, as Cheng believes, “reality and fiction are literally interchangeable” in Heart of Darkness and that for Conrad “truth is relative, depending on one’s perspective”.28 “Therefore,” Cheng determines, “both parties [Kurtz and Marlow] are right in their own terms”.29 It may be true that “Marlow’s vague and inconsistent use of the terms ‘real’ and ‘reality’ throughout the novel” problematizes “the boundary between reality and discourses upon it”;30 the “gaps” in Marlow’s account may even be indicative of a certain madness endemic to the narrative;31 and Conrad’s ultimate conclusion may indeed be that “there is no objective authorial representation of reality”.32 The crucial point, however, is that Marlow’s attitude to truth still differs radically from Kurtz’s. Unlike Kurtz, who claims to “know” truth and therefore believes himself entitled to command the “extermination of brutes”, Marlow does not presume to pronounce life or death sentences over any human subjects. Instead he becomes increasingly aware of his own fallibility not only as a narrator but also as a recipient of Kurtz’s messages and therefore makes no attempt to convince his listeners that his account is more than a subjective reconstruction of his “inconclusive experiences” (HD, 35). In fact, as if to give a final proof of the doubtfulness of his own credibility, Marlow in the end even volunteers the confession that he, who so detests lies, chose to lie to Kurtz’s “Intended” rather than tell her what Kurtz’s last words really were. Therefore, even if, as Cheng argues, neither Kurtz nor Marlow are absolutely truthful,33 Marlow is still more truthful than Kurtz. It is through him as the teller of the story that Heart of Darkness conveys 27

Martin Ray, Joseph Conrad, London, 1993, 23. Cheng, 49. 29 Ibid., 45. 30 Bruce Henricksen, Nomadic Voices: Conrad and the Subject of Narrative, Urbana: Ill, 1992, 62-63. 31 Cheng, 52. 32 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, New York, 1991, 8. 33 Cheng, 45. 28

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“how the possibility of fictionality in literature ... turns into a critique of the world and of literature itself”.34 It is because of Marlow’s and Kurtz’s rootedness in European literacy that, contrary to many critics’ objection to Conrad’s racism, Heart of Darkness demands to be read as “a critique of Eurocentric civilization, not one of African wilderness”.35 Recalling Kurtz’s rather liberal handling of “truth”, Marlow, who himself distinguishes so scrupulously between the different truth values of contracts and other documents (especially those bearing his own signature) and that of poetry or fiction, realizes the difficulty of positioning himself within his own narrative. Arguably, this is above all why he lets his tale oscillate undecidedly and insecurely between pro- and anti-colonialist perspectives, allowing it to become increasingly inconclusive, yet at the same time, more and more overtly different from the kind of colonial discourse in which Kurtz participates. Chantal Zabus’ legitimate warning not to ignore the Marlow-Conrad cleavage notwithstanding, epistemological insecurity is a condition Marlow and Conrad do share. Marlow’s failure to make his position vis-à-vis British colonialism unambiguously clear in his own narrative is not unrelated to Conrad’s own ambivalent situation. It is in the project of negotiating one’s own passage through prevailing discourses without getting caught in a dangerous current or running aground and wrecking one’s vessel that the scriptlessness of the African native so elusively portrayed in Heart of Darkness obtains particular importance. Clearly, the African’s preliterate and hence, for Marlow, almost inaudible and invisible orality provides a perfect foil to the literate narrator’s speechlessness, his utter inability to grasp in words, let alone in letters, an existence beyond the confines of literate civilization, an existence in a featureless, dark territory, in an obscurity far more resilient to inscription than those blank spaces on the maps of the earth that used to fascinate Marlow as a child. In recording the blacks’ “babble of uncouth sounds” (HD, 46), their “burst of yells” (HD, 63), and their “howling” (HD, 64), as he describes their bodies “streaming of perspiration” (HD, 41), their loins wrapped in black rags whose “short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails”, their meagre breasts panting together and their eyes staring “with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages” (HD, 34 35

Ibid., 30. Ibid., 47.


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43), Marlow not only articulates a sense of the native’s backwardness but also lays bare the insufficiency of European epistemology, the limitations of Western learning, and the inefficacy of Anglophone eloquence and literacy, none of which suffice to adequately grasp the Other. For all his learnedness, the narrator must fail in the end at justly interpreting the native subjects he encounters. His readings remain but plain surface readings of the Other and, as such, a reflection of his own incomprehension and inadequacy. Why the open ocean has such a special appeal to Marlow, who likes to rely on the security of his experience and learning, becomes understandable in the light of his discomfort and perplexity at the unexpected sight of humans on his journey up the river, humans so totally other that they even resist translation. As long as he steers safely clear of new land and new people, his course is entirely determined and controlled by his own knowledge and understanding of maps and charts. Following the recorded routes of earlier seafarers, Marlow sails with greater certainty even in seemingly infinite spaces empty of landmarks than on his trip up the Congo. This inland journey fills Marlow with unease because on it his nautical literacy is of little use. He knows that travelling inland may lead to events and encounters impossible to apprehend in familiar terms. The sixty-yearold copy of An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship he finds “in the wild and wordless wastes” he crosses is barely as grand an “insignia of colonial authority” as Bhabha makes it out to be in his reading of Heart of Darkness.36 It really is only a pathetic “triumph of the writ of colonialist power”, an instance of “Entstellung displacement”,37 but not, however, in the sense Bhabha interprets its image, namely as an emblem subject to both historical transformation and discursive transfiguration. At the place where it is found the text on seafaring is useless and stands no chance of being transfigured by “repetition”, that it accrues new meaning as it is reread by new readers. There are clear signs that for a long time nobody has returned to the volume which Marlow retrieves from a pile of rubbish and of which he remarks that it is “not a very enthralling book” but one making for rather “dreary reading”. It is only to Marlow that it represents something of an “amazing antiquity” (HD, 65) because of the unlikely location in which he has 36 37

Bhabha, 102. Ibid., 107 and 108.

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stumbled upon it and because of the unaccountably encrypted comments someone has inserted in the margin. The possibility that the strange ciphers in the book are proof of another literate culture than his own having penetrated the land he is traversing before him does not trouble Marlow the way it troubles Major Joll in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (a text which will be discussed in the following chapter). In fact, he is moved by the thought that someone else may have found himself at his wit’s end, that he is not the first to have reached the limits of his discursive and imaginative scope, and to have nonetheless tried to hold on to some form of logical expression in “this nowhere”. He recalls “it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility”: “What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored?” (HD, 66) This “flash of insight” provides an explanation for Marlow’s obsessive desire to resume speech back in Britain, in an environment in which his words are not divested of their meaning. In the process of translating his journey into an oral narrative he indeed seems to regain a certain degree of control over his experiences. He finds words even for those moments that struck him speechless when they actually occurred. It does not matter to him that, as preconceived formulations of otherness, his words fall short of his promise to relate “the incomprehensible” (HD, 34), the “unspeakable” (HD, 78). In contrast to Marlow, Conrad chooses not speech but writing as his medium and in transcribing Marlow’s tale records all those telling slippages that may escape even the most attentive of Marlow’s listeners but are not meant to be overlooked by Conrad’s reader. From the perspective of the disengaged and invisible scribe Conrad has “the fraught text of late nineteenth-century imperialism”, as Bhabha puts it, “implode within the practices of early modernism”.38 Part of these practices is the subtle metafictional probing of a text’s epistemological limits. In Heart of Darkness these are reached where the narrative includes the African native. At such moments the novella documents a dual constriction: that of the narrator in describing the African and that of the narrative in correcting the narrator’s description and offering an alternative rendering of the unknowable or unspeakable Other. The latter is declared impossible in Heart of Darkness, which ultimately is able to accomplish little more than Marlow and conveys only poor but telling portrayals of the non-European Other, telling 38

Ibid., 107.


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above all as far as Conrad’s awareness of the unenlightened and heartless nature of the nineteenth-century colonialist discourse of alterity is concerned. Published at a time when full literacy had finally been attained in Britain, Heart of Darkness still reflects a profound uncertainty concerning the usefulness and durability of writing and the beneficial character of literate culture. At first glance, Conrad’s criticism of literate civilization seems to go even as far as an emphatic espousal of the folk art of oral narration in the manner suggested by Walter Scott at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A closer examination, however, reveals that this is not the case. While the most eloquent speakers in his tale are highly literate, those living outside European literate culture are not really given a voice. Their orality is subjected to overt distortion. Their scriptlessness, on the other hand, is implicitly identified as the essence of their otherness. While expressed only indirectly by way of systematic structural marginalization of the figure of the non-literate in Heart of Darkness, this otherness is formulated much more openly in later writings. In the course of the twentieth century the figure of the non-literate Other comes to assume an increasingly prominent role in narrative fiction. What has encouraged writers to invent and experiment with different forms of scriptlessness has been a growing interest in cultural otherness (and especially with linguistic manifestations of it) compounded with a growing fascination with the cultural practice of writing. It is above all in narrations of cultural contact and conflict that illiteracy has been introduced and imaginatively explored as a marker of difference. In corresponding texts it has been identified as a cause of alienation and misunderstanding, but also of personal attraction and dependence. As such it may crucially determine the course of the action, providing a motive for conflicts over questions of cultural belonging, loyalty, and betrayal. Unlike in narratives of the nineteenth century, however, such conflicts are not directed towards such a simple resolution as the illiterate’s initiation into writing. Alternative scenarios are offered in twentieth-century literature, scenarios meant no longer to promote mass literacy, but more often than not to fulfil the opposite end, namely to cast doubt on the intrinsic value of literate cultures and to expose their uses of writing as a means of covert epistemic control and violence.

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The novel has provided an ideal forum for such negotiations as it allows not only an extensive study of the difference between illiterate and literate consciousnesses and the necessary development of illiteracy into a central theme by means of direct and indirect references to writing both as an act and as an object. As a typical print genre, it also accommodates the sort of metafictional reflection through which descriptions of illiteracy are translated into comments on literacy and literature. It is in this process of translation or inflection that the illiterate becomes the Other not only of any writing subject but of the author of the literary text and its reader. As the critical reception of Heart of Darkness shows, this special complication has so far been largely overlooked owing to the far greater interest of critics in the questions concerning the kind of orality writers ascribe to their non-literate characters and the way in which they realize this orality in their texts. Here, such questions will be sidestepped especially where they have already received broad scholarly attention as in the case of Chinua Achebe, Patricia Grace, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston. This is not to deny the significance of speech and speechlessness in the works of these and other writers but to simply allow for the consideration of an additional and hitherto neglected dimension of linguistic otherness and exclusion contrasting with the intrinsic writtenness of the literary text. Like constructions of orality, invocations of illiteracy in twentiethcentury narratives of cultural contact draw on specific historical situations, thereby extending the negotiations of non-literate otherness they offer into a discourse of historiography. This discourse tends to interrogate methods of falsifying history in the process of recording it in writing and of eliminating more controversial accounts of the past, notably those illiterate witnesses might have to offer. At the same time it identifies fiction as a means of rescuing such accounts from oblivion and asserting them as counter-versions to approved reconstructions of past events. Yet, the evaluations of the political significance of literature thus advanced are never wholly optimistic as they are always formulated in the awareness of writing ultimately being an inadequate means of reproducing the experiences of illiterates. In light of the epistemological impossibility of rendering illiteracy in the language of the fully literalized subject, any narrative reflecting on its own writtenness must eventually declare its own fragmentation.


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Remarkably, in all the novels studied in the following chapters this coincides with the explicit dissolution of the portrait of the scriptless Other whose disappearance invariably seems to constitute the only possible closure to the narrative’s temporary intrusion into the life of the illiterate. With the fading out of the image of the illiterate, the presence and validity of letters is reconstituted and literate authority, at least in part, restored. The goal of this study is not, however, to merely catalogue structural consistencies in the rendering of illiteracy by twentiethcentury writers. The following interpretations also aim to relate the special thematic significance with which illiteracy is invested in each text to the cultural and historical situation to which it refers. Moreover and most importantly, they are meant to document the extraordinary frequency with which illiteracy is addressed and developed into a paramount theme in the twentieth-century novel. This has presupposed, first of all, the compilation of a body of texts from a spectrum of cultural contexts wide enough to reflect the astonishing synchronicity with which writers all over the world have been engaging in the construction of a space beyond the limits of literate culture. This synchronicity is far from accidental: it results from the evolution of a book culture whose reach, though global, has still remained disturbingly exclusive. Probably also because of the pressure to cultivate a certain global mobility themselves to partake in this book culture, writers from Britain’s former colonies seem particularly aware of the disparities and asymmetries engendered by the dissemination of alphabetic literacy and by its economic exploitation by an international publishing industry. Their sense of inhabiting, at least geographically, a peripheral place, though ameliorated by the foundation of publishing houses outside the traditional centres of literary production in the course of the twentieth century, has encouraged their identification with the culturally marginalized and discursively disadvantaged. So has their need to define themselves as different from the colonizing power whose language and forms of artistic expression they have inherited. As Timothy Brennan has shown, this need developed already in the early days of the postcolonial nation states when the ideal of cultural plurality was endorsed by anticolonial nationalists and appropriated into a new overarching notion of national identity. To enforce their opposition through a shared sense of difference, the

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proponents of postcolonial nation states rejected the European notion of national cohesion founded on equality or rather homogeneity. This gave special impetus to the discourse of otherness which has since become one of the most important distinctive features of postcolonial literature. This discourse is marked by an open appreciation of and active search for semblance in the Other, a desire to overcome or bridge difference. As Megan Vaughan observes, every colonial person is “in some sense, already ‘Other’” and it is for this reason that postcolonial literature is able to offer more authentic or more sympathetic portrayals of otherness than writings from the colonizing centres, which invariably are informed by “the need to objectify and distance the ‘other’ in the form of the madman or the leper”.39 Though, reluctant to see denial, distancing, and distortion as specifically European or colonialist practices, Mary Louise Pratt,40 too, registers a typically postcolonial preoccupation with questions concerning the representability of otherness. This preoccupation is equally manifest in postcolonial theory, which Williams and Chrisman define as a “critique of the process of production of knowledge about the Other”.41 As such, postcolonial theory construes otherness in the first place as a linguistic phenomenon as it is through language that any knowledge is produced. At least this is one of the tenets postcolonial theory has absorbed from poststructuralist philosophy and developed further. Under the influence of Foucault and, later, of Derrida, it developed its Marxist identification with the “wretched of the earth” into a discourse of language as an instrument of colonization and of discursive Othering as a strategy of suppression potentially invertible into one of subversion. In this discourse linguistic disadvantage has come to be recognized as a particular category of otherness and constructed along the orality/literacy binary in terms of a speech- or voicelessness. This 39

Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Stanford: Calif, 1991, 10. 40 According to her model of transculturation as an always mutual cultural exchange both coloniser and colonized are equally capable of such manoeuvres of Othering. “Literature written on both sides of the colonial divide”, she insists, “often absorbs, appropriates and inscribes aspects of the ‘other’ culture, creating new genres, ideas and identities in the process” (Loomba, 68). 41 Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, “Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: An Introduction”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 8.


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does not preclude an introduction of the concept of illiteracy into the debate. In fact, such an extension might even allow the correction of certain assumptions concerning the very nature of the Other’s cultural exclusion and the actual possibilities of her or his inclusion. To see this it is first of all necessary to consider the postcolonial idea of literature as a means of discursive empowerment of the Other. Postcolonial theorists hold that in acquiring the discursive means of Othering one becomes able to mimic the Otherer, to counteract and invert the process of Othering. The national literatures of Europe’s former colonies are seen as the products of such acquisition, appropriation, or seizure of the colonizer’s language. In them the traditionally Othered apparently take control over their Othering, simulate it, and transform it into an Othering of the colonizer. How much control the colonized is actually able to assert in the process has remained an unresolved question, though. Theorists and writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o believe that the assimilation of the language in which one has been Othered is in itself a further submission to Othering, a form of mimicry that is only partially voluntary and hence also only partially ironic. Worse, it is a form of mimicry almost impossible to control because with the adoption of another language one always adopts an alien and essentially self-alienating noetic economy. Ngugi asserts in Decolonising the Mind, his 1986 “farewell to English”, “a specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality, but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history”.42 Conversely, theorists like Graham Huggan and Bill Ashcroft believe that this economy can be transformed in the event of appropriation. Convinced of the ability of language to creatively extend and adapt to new uses, Huggan theorizes a “process of creolization” through which existing paradigms are decontextualized. This generates new spaces to accommodate the Other, while Ashcroft postulates a postcolonial “counter-discourse” that reasserts “the margins of language use over the dominance of a standard code”.43 Both Ashcroft and Huggan believe that it is language variance, the innovative application of established structures, that can conjure 42

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, The Politics of Language in African Literature, Studies in African Literature New Series, London, 1986, 15. 43 Ashcroft, “Constitutive Graphonomy”, 62.

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genuine otherness in postcolonial, or to use Ashcroft’s terminology, in “cross- or sub-cultural” texts, because, unlike language assimilation or language appropriation, language variance “affirms the distance of cultures at the very moment in which it proposes to bring them together”.44 According to Ashcroft, such affirmation takes place at the interface of different codes,45 creating an “aphasic cultural gulf” or “metonymic gap”,46 an “immense ‘distance’ between author and reader ... the distance traversed in the social engagement which occurs when authors write and readers read”.47 It is in this gap or distance that an identity is formed which, for Ashcroft, constitutes the dynamic centre of all cross-cultural literature: an identity marked by linguistic “différence and absence”.48 Ashcroft’s postulation of a void as the place in postcolonial writing at which established modes of Othering and conceptions of the Other can be subverted reflects not only his indebtedness to Derrida and Lacan, who theorize human subjectivity as a complex linguistic construct forever evading complete definition, but also his proximity to Homi Bhabha. It is Bhabha’s conviction that the colonized subject must resist pressures and temptations to cultivate a fixed identity visà-vis the colonizer. He believes that fixity must be avoided in any ideological (that is, in any anticolonial) construction of otherness. For fixity “connotes rigidity as an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition”.49 To endorse fixity, Bhabha claims, is to accept the colonizer‘s invitation “to be different from those that are different”.50 Instead the colonized must seek to appropriate the language of the colonizer, to cultivate a variable identity, constantly shifting between established discursive practices and shared conceptual orders, forever evading inscription. Bhabha “fixes” this quality of evasiveness discursively by terming it “hybridity” or “in-betweenness”. 44

Ibid., 71. Ibid., 61. 46 Ibid., 72 and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, Key Concepts Series, London, 1998, 137-38. 47 Ashcroft, “Constitutive Graphonomy”, 63-64. 48 Ibid., 71. 49 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question”, in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia, 37. 50 Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 117. 45


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For Bhabha, Huggan, and Ashcroft alike the seizure of the colonizer’s language by the colonized subject for creative selfassertion seems to constitute an entirely unproblematic process. In their works, questions regarding concrete constraints to a subject’s discursive scope simply do not arise. Their trust in the unlimited availability of any language, even that of colonial suppression to everyone marks a problematic departure both from Marxist ideology as well as from Foucault and his idea of the subject’s inescapable entrapment in the language of existing power regimes. As a consequence, their attempts to deconstruct the binary opposition of the colonizer and the colonized and to construct in its stead the constantly shifting interdependence of Self and Other, and as a corollary of this interdependence, the indeterminacy of postcolonial identity have attracted vehement criticism. They have come under heavy attack for encouraging an imprecise and ahistoric, at times even romanticizing, view of “difference” which, while helping to project an optimistic view of alterity, explains nothing.51 What “kind of an argument is it to say that the subaltern’s ‘voice’ can be found in the ambivalence of the imperialist’s speech?”, Rey Chow, for instance, challenges Bhabha’s concept of hybridity: It is an argument which ultimately makes it unnecessary to come to terms with the subaltern since she has already “spoken,” as it were, in the system’s gaps. All we would need to do would be to continue to study – to deconstruct – the rich and ambivalent language of the imperialist!52

Chow’s argumentation indicates a shift of focus from the language used by a literate elite in an ideological discourse of otherness to the dual exclusion of those with no access to that language. Not only are the discursively disadvantaged she projects misrepresented to the point of distortion in the ongoing theoretical debates of subalternity; they are also completely ignorant of the kind of representation to which they are subjected. 51

Cf. especially Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality”, in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, 276-93, and Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third ‘World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry, XX/2 (Winter 1994): 328-56. 52 Rey Chow, “Where Have All the Natives Gone?”, in Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, 127-28.

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Chow’s paper is, of course, based on Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which insists on the “essential untranslatability”53 of the subaltern discourse. Object formation and subject constitution in postcolonial texts about the subaltern, to Spivak, represent linguistic processes which only deflect from the subaltern’s silence. Instead of thinking the subaltern as equipped with a voice that only needs to be heard, Spivak demands that the subaltern’s silence be heard. For Spivak the subaltern’s speechlessness is not an intellectual pose, a silence by choice, a deliberate gesture of denial, but an involuntary exclusion from dominant discourse, a straightforward inferiority or disadvantage. Without a voice, Spivak argues, the subaltern is not only unable to protest against the atrocities she must suffer, such as the Indian ritual of sati, of widow burning; her historical part as victim of such atrocities, too, remains unacknowledged and hence subject to obfuscation, if not to total denial. To overlook that the subaltern cannot speak, Spivak therefore asserts, is not only to disown responsibility for the “wretched of the earth” but to allow for their plight to be ignored altogether. Such repression functions well as a “sentence to disappear”, she explains by way of citation of Foucault, “but also as an injunction to silence, affirmation of non-existence; and consequently states that of all this there is nothing to say, to see, to know”.54 There “is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak”,55 Spivak insists and famously adds in an interview: “If the subaltern can speak, “then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more.”56 “Rather than saying that the native has already spoken because the dominant hegemonic discourse is split/hybrid/different from itself, and rather than restoring her to her ‘authentic’ context, we should argue that it is the native’s silence which is the most important clue to her displacement”, Chow paraphrases Spivak’s viewpoint: “It is only when we acknowledge the fact that the subaltern cannot speak that we can begin to plot a different kind of process of identification for the native.”57 Instead of vague theoretical formulations of Othering as a 53

Ibid., 128. Foucault, quoted in Spivak, 102. 55 Spivak, 103. 56 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Harold Veeser, “The New Historicism: Poltical Commitment and the Postmodern Critic”, in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym, New York, 1990, 158. 57 Chow, 128. 54


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process of discursive disempowerment what Spivak and Chow demand is a reading of subaltern silence as a concrete condition of exclusion generated by concrete historical circumstances. As if in order to rhetorically give special substance to this exclusion, Chow and Spivak make extensive use of such terms as “speechlessness”, “muteness”, “silence”, or “voicelessness”. Yet with their essentially phonocentric translations of socio-cultural marginalization into acoustic absences (and, to that, into a physical disadvantage) they eclipse and implicitly downplay a significant aspect of the problem they address: they themselves remain silent about a crucial difference between themselves as spokeswomen of the subaltern and those they represent. This difference consists in their ability not only to speak but, more importantly even, to read and write highly literate treatises on subalternity. Their own status as representers therefore remains as safely unchallenged by the subaltern as their representations of the same. Even if subalterns were able to speak up for themselves this would not automatically give them access to those institutions at which their plight is discussed. As most subalterns can actually speak, the question that really should be asked is if they are also able to read and write. The pertinence of this question turns the title of Spivak’s essay into a rhetorical ploy to which it is rather tempting to reply that even if the subaltern can speak, she is still subaltern as long as she cannot read and write. What is not merely a facetious comment on Spivak and Chow is of particular relevance to the processes of identification, mirroring, and distancing regularly prompted by the appearance of an illiterate in twentieth-century writings. Such appearances insistently culminate in moments in which literate people (that is, the author, reader, literate narrator, or a literate character) becomes aware of their own literacy as that which renders a full comprehension of the illiterate forever impossible. Almost invariably, too, this discovery strikes the literate speech- or wordless, creating the impression that the illiterate’s discursive inferiority has mysteriously been reduplicated. The resultant sense of sameness is misleading, though, and cannot be sustained. While the literate’s speechlessness is eventually dissolved and translated into a literary account of it that of the illiterate is regularly enforced, as mentioned above, by a special staging of the illiterate’s exit from the text.

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The kind of recognition dramatized in the narratives under study here is perhaps best described in terms of Slavoj Žižek’s model of the dualism of “imaginary identification” and “symbolic identification”: In imaginary identification we imitate the other at the level of resemblance – we identify ourselves with the image of the other inasmuch as we are “like him,” while in symbolic identification we identify ourselves with the other precisely at a point at which he is inimitable, at the point which eludes resemblance.58

Identification with the Other at a point at which one is inimitable and eludes resemblance is exactly what the encounters of literate and illiterate subjects in literature are about. While at first invoking a resemblance between the illiterate and the literate by suggesting that they are equally ignorant of each other, these representations eventually establish the inimitability of the non-literate Other. They do so by postulating the literate’s entrapment in a typographic mode of thinking as ultimately the only condition on which “the ignorance of the illiterate” is predicated. In the end, this ignorance is always the literates’ who cannot grasp the illiterate’s otherness with the means they have available. It does not compare with the illiterate’s lack of knowledge because it does not entail a real disadvantage, nor produce a serious dependence. The literate always remains in the powerful position of the representer or interpreter of the non-literate and may choose to conceal the inadequacy of the representational tools of literacy by simply declaring the inscription of the Other infinitely deferred. Such a Derridean or Bhabhalean solution is not what the texts discussed in the following opt for. Their admissions of discursive defeat are far more finite. They lead to closures which mark their authors’ acceptance that signification cannot continue where comprehension has proven impossible.

58

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York, 1989, 109.

THE NON-LITERATE WITHOUT: UNLETTERED CALIBANS IN DISTANT EUROPE


Because the subject of this study is a particular form of cultural marginality it may appear somewhat ironical if the first two novels to be analysed here are by two British writers so widely acclaimed that marginality seems one of the most unlikely attributes to be associated with their names. What is more, neither The Inheritors (1955) by William Golding nor Heroes and Villains (1969) by Angela Carter dwell explicitly on conditions of exclusion; nor does either of the texts seem formally determined by an opposition of centre and periphery. What warrants continuing this study with a discussion of these two texts is that both narratives can be shown to maintain and complete the development which eventually led to the disappearance of the theme of illiteracy from twentieth-century British fiction. As has been suggested in the analysis of Heart of Darkness in the previous chapter, this development consisted in a move from an intensive querying of the achievements of literate civilization to an eventual acceptance of mass literacy as a given so self-evident that it seems to have rendered any further interrogation of illiteracy redundant. The Inheritors (whose title is taken from a book written jointly by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford in 1901 and concerned with the destruction of one civilization by another1) is set in prehistoric France and describes the extermination of a Neanderthal tribe precipitated by the advent of a group of Cro-Magnon people. Heroes and Villains is set in a post-nuclear England and portrays a barbarian clan competing for survival with an ominous caste of former scholars and with gangs of essentially subhuman mutants. In their highly pessimistic evaluations of the evolution of humankind in the past and in the future, respectively, Golding and Carter locate not only the decline of human civilization but also whatever apex may have been reached before this decline within Europe. Though effectively eclipsed or expressly pronounced desolate, Western civilization remains Carter’s and Golding’s cardinal preoccupation in The Inheritors and Heroes and Villains and it is clearly enough in opposition to this civilization that they construe their fictional worlds as the locations of cultures (in the widest sense of the word) operating without a script. Golding does so only implicitly by occasionally foregrounding the complete absence of visual signs from the life of the Neanderthal community he depicts, while Carter explicitly posits the obsolescence of literacy in the England of her dystopian novel.

1

Hilda D. Spear, William Golding: The Inheritors. Notes, Harlow, 1983, 30.

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As a result, for both novelists non-literacy constitutes a philosophical concern, a theoretical proposition, an anthropological phenomenon. It poses not specific social problems but general ontological questions. Shared by all or most of those at home in the fictional world invoked, the scriptlessness of the allegorical characters portrayed by Golding and Carter is extraordinary, abnormal, or unusual only for outsiders, who, on account of their literacy, are either alienated or fascinated by it. The role of the outsider being reserved exclusively to the reader in The Inheritors and almost exclusively to the central character whose perspective the reader is led to share in Heroes and Villains, the “non-writingness” imagined and imaged by Golding and Carter needs to be studied as a structure asserting itself in the first place metafictionally rather than thematically. This is not to say, however, that Golding’s and Carter’s imaginative constructions of non-literacy remain too formalized and neutral to transport any political meaning. In addressing such issues as human evolution along the principle of natural selection and the asymmetries and dependences produced by technological progress between allegedly advanced and allegedly backward societies, Carter and Golding engage in a discourse in many respects similar to the essentially counter-hegemonic appraisals of culture undertaken in postcolonial literatures. Kevin McCarron focussing on the theme of cultural contact in The Inheritors proposes reading Golding’s prehistoric characters, the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon people, as the archetypal colonized and colonizers, respectively. He even suggests comprehending Golding’s use of cannibalism in The Inheritors as a metaphor of the “desires and appetites for complete absorption” which the colonizer denies himself and logically must project onto the conquered people, the colonized.2 Likewise Lorna Sage emphasizes Carter’s preoccupation with “the question of what it meant to be English” and her belief “in the kind of reverse-anthropology which involves studying your own culture as if from elsewhere, cultivating the viewpoint of an alien”. “I am the pure product of an advanced, 2 Kevin McCarron, William Golding, Writers and Their Work, Plymouth, 1994, 10. See also Stefan Hawlin, “The Savages in the Forest: Decolonising William Golding”, Critical Survey, VII/2 (1995), 125-35, and Philippa Tristram, “Golding and the Language of Caliban”, in William Golding: Some Critical Considerations, eds Jack I. Biles and Robert O. Evans, Lexington: Ky, 1978, 39-55.

The Non-Literate Without

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industrialised, post-imperialist country in decline”, Sage recalls Carter commenting on her own implication in the history of British colonialism.3 The Australian writers David Malouf and Gillian Bouras, too, deal with literacy and questions of civilizing progress and decline, drawing heavily on historical material in their novels An Imaginary Life (1978) and Aphrodite and the Others (1994), respectively. In their explorations of the “textualisation of history”,4 both novelists use nonliteracy as a matrix to define their own highly ambivalent role as antipodean writers with close affinities to Southern Europe.5 In the process the traditional image of this particular part of the Old World as the cradle of Western civilization and in addition as the birthplace of alphabetic writing is subverted. Greece and Asia Minor, respectively, are translated into settings in which a writer in exile – the Roman poet Ovid in An Imaginary Life and an autobiographical projection of Gillian Bouras in Aphrodite and the Others – is surrounded by people unable to comprehend his or her writerly needs because they are illiterate. What Ovid and Gillian at first experience as a profound depravity, as a barbarism cruder than anything they could have imagined they gradually come to appreciate as a marvellous alternative to their own entrapment within a culture sophisticated to the point of decadence. Non-literacy in particular, while initially viewed as a sign of inferiority in each novel, is eventually seen as an ideal form of epistemological freedom prerequisite to the kind of dignified innocence the protagonists learn to admire in their unlettered Gegenüber.6 3

Lorna Sage, Angela Carter, Plymouth, 1994, 2-3. Lee Spinks, “Allegory, Space, Colonialism: Remembering Babylon and the Production of Colonial History”, Australian Literary Studies, XVII/2 (October 1995), 173. 5 David Malouf has been living in southern Tuscany for a major part of the year for over twenty-five years now. Gillian Bouras went to live in Greece with her Greek husband in 1980 and has recorded the experiences in two books, apart from Aphrodite and the Others, namely A Foreign Wife and A Fair Exchange. 6 In this book “Gegenüber” is used to refer to the Other not as any opposite number, but as an agency whose physical existence constitutes an inescapable reality for the narrating or narrated Self. The German word gegenüber (commonly used as an adverbial preposition and probably best translated as “vis-à-vis”) adequately stresses both the spatial opposition and proximity prerequisite to the mirroring of two subjects in each other from which can ensue true (rather than purely theoretical) selfrecognition. 4

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By inference, in all these four novels, the strategic mystification of the non-literate Other also serves a critical interrogation of the authors’ specific historical situation. Golding’s interest in the concept of Original Sin7 which he first expressed in Lord of the Flies before he reformulated it in more historical/theological terms in The Inheritors was shaped under the influence of the Second World War, before which, as he recalls in a 1962 lecture, he had believed in the “perfectibility of social man”.8 The war, he states, taught him what one man could do to another and caused him to believe “that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creature”.9 As Linden Peach outlines by way of reference to Lorna Sage, Carter’s fourth novel, Heroes and Villains, “mocks the cultural landscape of the 1960s such as the glamour of underground, countercultural, movements; the siege of university campuses; the rebirth of dandyism; and the power acquainted by intellectual gurus such as Timothy Leary”.10 Instead of invoking straightforward binarisms such as those of patriarchy and matriarchy, wilderness and civilization, reason and instinct, the novel yields complex hybrid structures suggesting not so much a categorical rejection of the asymmetries determining Western cultures but a desire to formulate ways of their creative metamorphosis. The inventions offered in An Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others of an ideal Other uninformed by literate culture, while also readable as general statements on human nature, are complicated by the authors’ awareness of their own culture’s difference from the cultures of the Old World. Malouf and Bouras assert this difference precisely by locating their unlettered characters within Europe and identifying them as Europeans. In so doing, they effectively project the same charge of cultural backwardness back onto the Old World by which the inhabitants of Europe’s former colonies so often are (and allow themselves to be) reduced to mere inheritors of European culture. The Inheritors and Heroes and Villains perform no comparable retaliatory gesture but also invert established notions of cultural 7

For a study on how Golding uses The Inheritors to redefine this concept, see Arnold Johnston, Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding, Columbia: Mo, 1980, 21-35. 8 Golding, quoted in Johnston, 1. 9 Ibid., 2. 10 Linden Peach, Angela Carter, Houndmills, 1998, 71, and Sage, 18.


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superiority and progress with the help of equally subtle manoeuvres of placing or contextualizing the non-literate Other and soliciting the reader’s identification or disidentification with their protagonists. To this end, Golding and Carter choose a fabulist narrative mode supporting the location of their stories in seemingly unidentified spaces, apparently disconnected from the world in which the reader knows the actual texts to have been written. The characters of The Inheritors, Virginia Tiger observes accordingly, move in “an uncountry”, in “a landscape only archetypally connected to the overt world ... a discrete independent universe with laws provided by the author”.11 “It is all happening ‘on the edge’, in no man’s land, among the debris left by past convictions”, Lorna Sage likewise remarks on what she perceives as the essence of both Carter’s personal history and her fiction.12 This does not mean, however, that either Carter or Golding set their narratives in indistinct exotic places. In fact, rather than alienating the reader, the authors strategically engage their audiences in a continuous process of recognition as they direct them through their imaginary worlds. What causes these worlds to appear foreign, unheimlich, unreal is not their topography but their inhabitants and the events they bring about.

69.

11

Virginia Tiger, William Golding: The Dark Fields of Discovery, London, 1974,

12

Sage, 4.


CHAPTER FIVE UNEARTHING THE PRE-LITERATE MIND: WILLIAM GOLDING’S THE INHERITORS

In following the slow and physically strenuous journey of the Neanderthals in Golding’s novel from their winter cave, through forests and marsh land to their summer quarters, the reader (or, to be more precise, any British or North American reader) of The Inheritors traces features of an all too familiar habitat: birches, beech trees, brambles, thorn bushes, and ivy; owls, ravens, buzzards, hawks, woodpigeons, moorhens, and starlings, foxes, goats and deer. The more outlandish inhabitants of Golding’s fictional landscape, beasts such as hyenas, cave bears, and sabre-toothed tigers, remain consigned to the novel’s background, reduced either to mere acoustic phenomena or figments of the characters’ minds. With the initial impression of its inherent foreignness thus deconstructed, and its familiarity to the reader established, the novel’s setting determines not only that Golding’s characters should be identified as the reader’s “immediate predecessors”,1 but also that Golding’s reader identifies with these characters. This identification is above all a matter of comprehending the peculiar logic underlying the characters’ perception of their environment. As the following passage makes clear, this involves more than simply picturing the landscapes charted in The Inheritors: There was always light where the river fell into its basin. The smoky spray seemed to trap whatever light there was and to dispense it subtly. Yet this light illumined nothing but the spray so that the island was like the whole leg of a seated giant, whose knee, tufted with trees and bushes, interrupted the glimmering sill of the waterfall and whose ungainly foot was splayed out down there, spread, lost likeness and joined the dark wilderness. The giant’s thigh that should have supported a body like a mountain lay in the sliding water of the gap and diminished till it ended in disjointed rocks that curved to within a few men’s lengths of the terrace. Lok considered the giant’s thigh as

1

Golding, quoted in Tiger, 71.

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The Non-Literate Without he might have considered the moon: something so remote that it had no connection with life as he knew it.2

Grasping the complicated geography of the novel’s setting presupposes an appreciation of the characters’ heightened susceptibility to sensory impressions, of the continuous shift of perspective and change of scenery reflecting the Neanderthal people’s profound restlessness, and, not least importantly, of their idea of land (and more specifically of the land off which and in which they live) as an anthropomorphic entity. With his extensive use of figurative language, which enables Golding to represent his setting not just as a material reality but as an intellectually challenging experience, he involves readers in a hermeneutic process through which they eventually move from simply viewing the characters’ pre-literate consciousnesses from outside to an empathic understanding of them. It is this effect that Frank Kermode has praised as a wholly original technical feat.3 For quite perplexingly, as Tiger observes, although the point of view chosen by Golding is technically omniscient, the formal mode consists in something very different: “we see most events ... over the shoulder of the pre-rational mind.”4 For Tiger, this mind “merely report[s] a series of inexplicable events”.5 In actual fact, it accomplishes far more than that, as it produces inconsistencies or ruptures in the narrative which readers are required to fill with their better understanding (their literate reading) of the narrated events. As a result, the reader is led not only to assume the Neanderthal’s point of view but also to appropriate the prehistoric hero’s logic and language. To bridge the gaps, as it were, in Golding’s tale, readers must, for instance, come to understand that by “flying twigs” Golding (or rather his main character Lok) means arrows and that by “curved sticks” he means boughs, that “bone hand” is Lok’s name or “picture” for a comb, and that a “dead snake” is what he sees when he sees a whip. The homines sapientes, for Lok, are not humans but “bone-faces” who come across the river not in boats but in “dark and smooth, and hollow” “logs”. As they approach, they keep dipping, as Lok sees it, not paddles but sticks in the water, “sticks that ended in 2 3 4 5

William Golding, The Inheritors (1955), London, 1961, 40. Frank Kermode, “Coral Islands”, Spectator, 22 August 1958, 257. Tiger, 76. Ibid., 77.

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great brown leaves” (I, 115). Overhearing their exchanges, Lok makes out not words but “bird-noises … bumps and creakings” (I, 136). Reading Lok’s mind becomes synonymous with deciphering a text in another language, a language heavily reliant on visual images as if the sounds the Neanderthals exchange were not all there is to their communication. Indeed, thoughts they are unable to articulate they at least announce by declaring that “a picture” has occurred to them. In silent communal contemplation rather than conversation they eventually come to share their pictures. Towards the end of the reader’s carefully monitored initiation into that language and, through it, into the workings of the characters’ preliterate minds, the initial sense of alienation at the Neanderthals’ profound otherness is replaced by one of sympathy. This allows the various disasters with which the prehistoric community is confronted and which ultimately result in the extermination of this community to be observed with compassion. The reader feels horror at the suggestion that one of the Neanderthals has been killed and eaten by the Cro-Magnon people, alarm when Fa and Lok, too, are defeated by the “new people”, and relief the narrative discloses that at least the youngest Neanderthal, “the new one”, will survive. These responses differ significantly from the detachment with which the reader follows the passing away of the old man Mal shortly after the opening of the novel. At this point in the novel the strangeness of the individual characters still prevails. With corresponding reserve Golding narrates the scene in which the people attend to their dying leader and, after his death, bury him: The movements of his body became spasmodic. His head rolled sideways on the old woman’s breast and stayed there. Nil began to keen. The sound filled the overhang, pulsed out across the water towards the island. The old woman lowered Mal on his side and folded his knees to his chest. She and Fa lifted him and lowered him into the hole. The old woman put his hands under his face and saw that his limbs lay low. She stood up and they saw no expression on her face. She went to a shelf of rock and chose one of the haunches of meat. She knelt and put it in the hole by his face. “Eat, Mal, when you are hungry.” (I, 90)

Though anticipated, Mal’s death, when it happens, seems sudden and swift. This impression is enforced by the marked simplicity of

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Golding’s sentences and the detached accuracy informing his descriptions of the individual characters’ actions. It is also enforced by Golding’s immediate shift of focus from Mal to the surviving Neanderthals and their reactions, which appear remarkably free of emotion. The two females’ mechanical preparation of Mal’s burial and the simultaneous commencement of Nil’s keening which, while filling the air and travelling across the water, remains inexpressive of any distinctive feelings, the old woman’s equally expressionless face, and the oddly optimistic undertones of her appeal to the deceased to accept her offering of food – all this contributes to emphasize the distance from which the passing away of Mal is narrated. This same distance is suspended in the course of the novel so that the reader is able to share the characters’ and notably Lok’s bewilderment at the increasingly unpredictable events. A climax in the reader’s and Lok’s joint reading of these events is reached as Lok watches the Cro-Magnon tribe become completely inebriated and perform some sort of hunting ritual involving the mutilation of one of the men. From his hiding place high up in an acorn tree Lok and Fa (and the reader) look down on the people who will supersede them, observing how one member of the strange creatures, Tuami, draws the image of a stag on the ground. The drawing confounds Lok, who has never even thought of translating the pictures in his mind into visible form. Not yet aware what it is that makes Lok’s body suddenly go “wintry chill” (I, 146), the reader, too, is alerted by the sudden presence of a stag lying flat on the ground yet racing along, always staying in the same place. Yet, at the same time as the details of the image are gradually absorbed by Lok the reader comprehends that what Lok is looking at is but a painting. More importantly, even, the reader also becomes aware that Lok is still unable to distinguish between the real thing and its representation. Unlike the reader, Lok cannot read the image of the stag correctly, and feels caught by the small dark eye of the animal Tuami has drawn. Towards the end of The Inheritors this fine difference between the reader and Lok is deferred as well. The following scene finally relies on the reader’s complete identification with Lok as an involuntary witness of Fa’s destruction towards the end of the novel: Fa was sitting by the water holding her head. The branches took her. She was moving with them out into the water and the hollow log was free of the rock and drawing away. The tree swung into the current


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with Fa sitting simply among the branches. Lok began to gibber again. He ran up and down on the terrace. The tree would not be cajoled or persuaded. It moved to the edge of the fall, it swung until it was lying along the lip. The water reared up over the trunk, pushing, the roots were over. The tree hung for a while with the head facing upstream. Slowly the root end sank and the head rose. Then it slid forward soundlessly and dropped over the fall. (I, 216)

There is no discrepancy anymore between Lok’s and the reader’s perception of Fa’s drowning. Both share the same picture, which is drawn in simple and unambiguous sentences. The central theme or force in this picture is not Fa but the log dragging Fa down the waterfall. What kills Fa aids the advance of the “new people” who arrive and leave in hollowed-out trunks. The bitter irony of this lends special meaning to Lok’s desperate pleas to the floating tree. His gibbering makes sense to the reader as more than a superstitious appellation. The shock of Fa’s unexpected end is the last insight Golding’s narrative allows into Lok’s inner being, a consciousness forever trying frantically to adjust to new situations. While the fatality of Fa’s fall dawns on Lok and, simultaneously, on the reader, Golding fashions a radical change of perspective whereby Lok, as the only Neanderthal remaining on the river, is suddenly reduced to a “red creature”, trotting around aimlessly, halting, peering, crouching, “its long arms swinging, touching, almost as firm a support as the legs” (I, 217): It was a strange creature, smallish, and bowed. The legs and thighs were bent and there was a whole thatch of curls on the outside of the legs and arms. The back was high, and covered over the shoulders with curly hair. Its feet and hands were broad, and flat, the great toe projecting inwards to grip. The square hands swung down to the knees. The head was set slightly forward on the strong neck that seemed to lead straight on to the row of curls under the lip. The mouth was wide and soft and above the curls of the upper lip the great nostrils were flared like wings. There was no bridge to the nose and the moon-shadow of the jutting brow lay just above the tip. The shadows lay most darkly in the caverns above its cheeks and the eyes were invisible in them. Above this again, the brow was a straight line fledged with hair; and above that there was nothing. (I, 218-19)

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This passage unmistakably revokes H.G. Wells’ description of Neanderthal man, which Golding has chosen as an epigraph for The Inheritors. In this description Wells speculates that the Neanderthalis must have been an “extremely hairy”, ugly, repulsively strange, “possibly cannibalistic”, and “gorilla-like monster”.6 Golding’s imaging of Lok, though toying with a similar ethnographic stance and mimicking Wells’ pseudo-objective discursive mode, is significantly different in that it does without the prejudice which in Wells’ text, as John Peter puts it, is “as humiliating as it is unexpected”.7 Through its pronounced neutrality the careful depiction of Lok effectively mocks Wells’ observations thus completing Golding’s scheme to invert the rationalistic attitude towards natural selection that Wells advocates not only in his Outline of History but also in his adventure story “The Grisly Folk”, from which The Inheritors takes its plot. Golding shares neither Wells’ view of evolution as progress and of civilizing progress as moral improvement, nor does he endorse Wells’ belief in the indisputable superiority of modern man over his predecessors.8 The narrative’s own progress from an increasingly sympathetic treatment of Lok and his folk to the dispassionate inscription of the same character as but an unknown specimen of a primate-like race entails a lapse similar to the one Golding has humankind undergo as the CroMagnon man supersedes the Neanderthalis. The lapse is humanizing and dehumanizing at the same time. Accordingly, the change of 6 The entire passage from H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, quoted by Golding in his epigraph, reads “…We know very little of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this … seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetly brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature .… Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern man in his Views and Reviews: ‘The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may be the germ of the ogre in folklore …’” For an extended discussion of how Golding has used Wells’ Outline, see Bernard S. Oldsey and Stanley Weintraub, The Art of William Golding, New York, 1965, 45-47. 7 John Peter, “The Fables of William Golding”, The Kenyon Review, XIX/4 (Fall 1957), 586. 8 Cf. the interview with Frank Kermode, quoted in Tiger, 71. According to Bernard Oldsey, Wells’ Outline to History played a considerable part in Golding’s upbringing because it was accepted as a kind of rationalist’s gospel by his father. It was upon reading it as an adult that Golding came across Wells’ depiction of Neanderthal man and found it so absurd that he decided to try and correct that picture. (“William Golding”, in Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists, 19301959, ed. Bernard Oldsey, West Chester: Penn, 1983, XV, 124.)


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narrative mode, which at once strips Lok of his name, his identity, his history and, most pertinently, of his humanness, for all the objectivity it facilitates, also exposes the epistemic violence inherent in the discursive methods cultivated by human civilization along with literacy. But, as Johnston asserts, Golding’s aim in The Inheritors is much more than an upending of Wellsian history.9 The perspectival manoeuvres in The Inheritors have another effect even more important than the implicit ironic deconstruction of modern inscriptions of prehistoric man. They allow him to demonstrate the positive value of the kind of imaginative rediscovery of the past Golding attempts by inventing a preliterate consciousness. For Golding, creative invention constitutes an incontestable mode of reconstructing an unrecorded past. His fictional inscription of prehistoric human existence is founded on the syllogism that, for want of written counter-evidence, no representation of the Neanderthal can really be declared fallible, not even if it posits the Neanderthal as an intellectually and emotionally refined being. Therefore Mark KinkeadWeekes and Ian Gregor propose reading The Inheritors as a provocatively fictional re-invention of human life before Homo Sapiens. “Any account of the novel that does not centre on its qualities of imaginative exploration”, they argue, “ought ... to be highly suspect”.10 For them, The Inheritors represents “a fictional tour de force, taking us to an otherworld and othertime that we enjoy for their own sake, irrespective of historical considerations”. This corresponds with their understanding of the mode of the novel as “one of discovery, not an exercise in literary archaeology, science fiction or a fable about the Fall”. “By committing himself so radically to the viewpoint of his People”, they argue, “by doing his utmost to ensure that he is kept out of his normal consciousness, Golding does contrive to see things new, not merely see new things”.11 It is important to bear in mind that, in the case of The Inheritors, the advocacy of an imaginative identification with prehistoric man, does not automatically mean a destabilization of the narrative, a putting at jeopardy of the narrative’s persuasiveness. Conversely, 9

Johnston, 24. Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor, William Golding: A Critical Study, London, 1967, 68. 11 Ibid., 69. 10

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Golding’s temporary abandonment of his openly inventive mode by way of withdrawal from Lok’s perspective at the end of the novel and his unexpected adoption of a rather detached narrative style must not be misread as a move towards greater discursive control (and hence also towards greater authority) over the Neanderthal’s pre-literate otherness. On the contrary, the distance created between the narrator and the Neanderthal can only be comprehended as an expression of uncertainty on the narrator’s part. More than anything else, the sudden reduction of Lok to “it” marks the narrator’s disengagement from the narrated events, his own reduction to a dispassionate executant of the narrative, who does not even share the reader’s knowledge of the characters’ names, let alone the understanding of the non-verbal consciousnesses of Lok, Mal, Ha, Fa, Nil and Liku, which the reader has acquired in the course of the first eleven chapters of the novel. In spite of its precision and articulateness, the ethnographic description of the Neanderthal inserted in Chapter Eleven of The Inheritors fails to provide any insights into “the creature” as profound as those already offered. Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor write that “what is seen is accurate, and yet meaningless without the understanding that so manifestly does not accompany the vision”, and describe the effect of the sudden change of perspective in the penultimate chapter: To watch Lok so coldly … is to make us uneasily aware of how blind we would have been even if some accident of time has placed us on the terrace at that moment. We watch while [Lok] retraces the whole circuit of the tragic action, so small-looking now … and the effect is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope so that everything is diminished. Yet the final effect is just the opposite …. For there rises in us a passionate reaction against this vision, a sense of poignant pity and loss far more powerful through this excess of understatement than could have been achieved by any direct appeal to emotion.12

The lack of deeper understanding of the Neanderthal so obvious in the pseudo-scientific portrait of Lok offered at the end of the novel is measured not only against the reader’s knowledge of and familiarity with the Neanderthals as fictional characters. Golding compares it also to how the Cro-Magnon people in The Inheritors process their 12 Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes, William Golding: A Critical Study of the Novels, 3rd edn with a Biographical Sketch by Judy Carver, London, 2002, 85 and 90.


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encounter with Lok and his tribe. Towards the end of the novel, these, too, as Ted Hughes puts it, “begin to look less like demons of original depravity, more like helplessly possessed and forlorn castaways, who are full of plans and plots and enterprise”.13 This is accomplished through another final change of perspective in the last chapter, shifting from the anonymous and uninvolved narrator who reduces Lok to “the red creature” to Tuami, the artist and emergent leader of the New People. While allowing the actual figure of Lok to fade out completely in the process, Golding successfully restores his vision of prehistoric man as endowed with an all too familiar humanness and finally engages the reader in Tuami’s attempt to retrospectively understand his encounter with the Neanderthals: He rested his eyes on the back of his left hand and tried to think. He had hoped for the light as for a return to sanity and the manhood that seemed to have left them; but there was dawn – past dawn – and they were what they had been in the gap, haunted, bedevilled, full of strange irrational grief like himself, or emptied, collapsed, and helplessly asleep. It seemed as though the portage of the boats ... from that forest to the top of the fall had taken them on to a new level not only of land but of experience and emotion. The world with the boat moving so slowly at the centre was dark amid the light, was untidy, hopeless, dirty. (I, 224-25)

What renders Tuami’s introspective reverie so much more human (and consequently even more convincing) than the brief ethnographic discourse preceding it is the uncertainty by which it is informed and of which Tuami himself is acutely aware. “I am like a pool”, Golding has Tuami think as he tries to make sense of the events by the waterfall, “some tide has filled me, the sand is swirling, the waters are obscured and strange things are creeping out of cracks and crannies in my mind”. The Cro-Magnon man’s realization of his own intellectual limitations merits special attention here, above all because it leads Tuami to reflect the possibility of obtaining a clearer idea of things by resorting to visual representation. “If I had charcoal and a flat stone” (I, 227), he reflects the lack of the necessary means which would 13 Ted Hughes, “Baboons and Neanderthals: A Rereading of The Inheritors”, in William Golding: The Man and His Books: A Tribute on His 75th Birthday, ed. John Carey, London, 1986, 168.

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enable him to express his experiences in a picture, not a mental picture, but a concrete image revoking moments that otherwise might be irretrievably lost to either incomprehension or oblivion. Unlike the Neanderthal people, who communicate mainly by telepathic picture and mime, Tuami depends on real images for certainty. Without the necessary tools to create such images, however, his grasp of the world hardly surpasses Lok’s. All he knows for certain is his uncertainty. In the end, the sense of an enduring darkness obstructing his vision of what lies ahead of him, links and likens Tuami to the Old People and simultaneously seems to set him at a distance from the modern reader, as well as from the rather sinister figure of Marlan, whom he hears whispering in the final scene, “They [Lok and his people] live in the darkness under the trees”. Yet, Tuami is not convinced by Marlan’s rhetorical attempt at relegating the Other – “them” – to the darkness where he himself has been and perhaps has even felt that he belongs: Holding the ivory firmly in his hands, feeling the onset of sleep, Tuami looked at the line of darkness. It was far away and there was plenty of water in between. He peered forward past the sail to see what lay at the other end of the lake, but it was so long, and there was such flashing from the water that he could not see if the line of darkness had an ending. (I, 233)

The vision recalls an earlier scene which shows Lok looking over to the island where the New People live and seeing nothing, owing to the total darkness created by the waterfall which traps all the light there is in its luminous spray, rendering invisible everything outside its own dull whiteness. Like Tuami, Lok is denied the enlightenment he seeks in the seemingly impenetrable world around him. This does not mean, however, that Tuami’s realization at the end of the novel of his inability to look beyond the darkness before him puts him on a par with Lok. Rather it marks Tuami’s arrival at an understanding of Lok which no other character and no other narratorial voice in the novel is ever able to reach. In apprehending that there might actually be an ending to the line of darkness he sees in the distance and that its invisibility is a matter not of there being no light but of him not being able to discern it, Tuami grasps the relativity of both knowledge and ignorance. He understands that what is unknown to him may be known by another and that what is unknown to another he himself may know. It is the awareness of the specificity of his own conception


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of the world that also leads Tuami to speculate about what he would know if he had the right tools (charcoal and a flat stone) at his disposal and to worry about the rightfulness of his people’s actions against “them”, “the creatures”, the hairy red “devils”. “What else could we have done?” (I, 227), he cries out as if appealing to someone who holds the key to a truth different from what he has always held to be true so far. The desire to find other truths than those he already knows is part of his realization of the validity of other perceptions than his own and absolutely central to his experience of the Other. Founded on an appreciation of his own epistemological limits, it enables Tuami to picture, however vaguely, what it must be like for the Other to encounter the unknown in an Other like himself. Though not infinite either, Tuami’s imaginative powers certainly surpass Lok’s. The “creature” who is told by his own people that he has only “a mouthful of words and no pictures” (I, 38) in his head does not have any conception of difference or alterity. The only abstraction which he seems able to master is the projection of likeness onto things and living beings which, in reality, are radically dissimilar. The arbitrariness of his associations is really only symptomatic of his inability to comprehend more complex connections, such as that between the images he watches the new people make and the mental pictures these images represent. For Lok, the stag Tuami draws on the forest ground or the portrait of a Neanderthal the young leader of the new people paints on rock are not representations of Tuami’s perception of reality, but exist entirely in their own right – like Liku’s little Oa doll, an “old root ... twisted and bulged and smoothed away by age into the likeness of a great bellied woman” (I, 33). It is impossible for Lok to see that the Oa doll is not Oa but merely a projection of his own (which is also his people’s) “picture” of the earth-goddess Oa onto an oddly shaped piece of wood. As far as Lok is concerned, the Oa doll and Oa are identical. Oa has articulated herself in the doll. With no conception of human subjectivity at all, Lok expects sameness even where there is none, which allows him to identify unconditionally with any Gegenüber yet at the same time renders his undiscriminating likening of himself to others a potentially dangerous or even self-destructive attitude. Symptomatically, for instance, he keenly follows the scent of the Other, certain that he knows who is moving ahead of him even before he has lain eyes on the creature:

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There built up in Lok’s head a picture of the man, not by reasoned deduction but because in every place the scent told him – do this! As the smell of cat would evoke in him a cat-stealth; as the sight of Mal tottering up the slope had made the people parody him, so now the scent turned Lok into the thing that had gone before him. He was beginning to know the other without understanding how it was that he knew. Lok-other crouched at the lip of the cliff and stared across the rocks of the mountain .... (I, 77)

Not a wise fool, who is aware of his own mind’s fallibility, but a true dunce, Lok must die tragically unenlightened. He never becomes aware of the other people’s capacity to destroy him and his people because he is unable to read the signs which foreshadow his demise correctly. In comparison to Lok, Tuami appears highly literate, capable of interpreting his own people, his environment and the events culminating in the destruction of the Neanderthals with sufficient accuracy to fear his own annihilation and therefore try to avert it. His reading of the Neanderthals is the final vision Golding offers the modern reader. He closes his narrative the moment this vision begins to shape in Tuami’s mind. In so doing, Golding resumes his plea for an empathic understanding rather than scientifically reliable knowledge of modern man’s predecessors. McCarron’s observation that Tuami’s antagonist, Marlan, has the last word in the novel is only partially correct.14 Strictly speaking, the last written word remains with Tuami, who, in the final scene, turns away from Marlan to go on wondering if “the line of darkness had an ending”. It is thus that, for the reader, Tuami, the Cro-Magnon man, comes to represent not only the historical but also the final textual link to Lok, the Neanderthal, already invisible, but still remembered vividly by Tuami at the very end of The Inheritors. Even in terms of the novel’s narrative structure, then, Tuami’s consciousness is of one higher order than Lok’s because, unlike Lok’s, it is able to accommodate reflections of the Neanderthal not just as an Other but also as an experience of otherness. This capacity presupposes a meta-discursive awareness more characteristic of literate than of preliterate thinking. Indeed, his own reaction to the encounter with the Neanderthal stresses that the figure of the Cro14

McCarron, 14.


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Magnon man represents a being less removed from modern than from Neanderthal man, that, in other words, it constitutes a matrix onto which Golding projects features of modern literate thinking. As Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor remind us, “we are the inheritors ....”,15 and as such we share a special insight with Tuami, who survives also thanks to his ability to grasp his own dependence on material means of visual representation not only in order to understand what has happened but also to draw the necessary conclusions from his experiences. On yet another level, the novel itself leads to a similar realization of the limits of modern Western thinking as it shrewdly exposes, by way of critical reference to Wells, the defects of contemporary historiography. For, as Wells’ construction of Neanderthalis illustrates, where there is uncertainty for want of written records modern historians may all too readily compensate this uncertainty by indulging in speculations on the defects of the Other instead of addressing and admitting their own lack of knowledge. It is also to counteract the historiographic convention of reducing the Other to a foil of the historian’s own ignorance, then, that Golding can be said to identify Lok’s intuitive comprehension as a special form of humanity and humaneness in the middle and main part of The Inheritors.

15

Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor, 74.


CHAPTER SIX PROJECTIONS OF A POST-LITERATE MIND: ANGELA CARTER’S HEROES AND VILLAINS

If Golding’s criticism of contemporary historiography serves to legitimize his idea of fiction as an imaginative reinvention of the past, Angela Carter’s portrayal of a degenerate Western “litocracy” responsible for crudely ethnocentric inscriptions of non-literate otherness fulfils a very similar function. As Meaney puts it, Carter produced with Heroes and Villains “a kind of revenge upon anthropology”.1 In Anja Müller’s view, Heroes and Villains is “a farcical reconsideration of Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage and the naturally good man”, also recalling the pedagogical principles proposed in Émile.2 Unlike the idealized vision of education developed by Rousseau, the experiment in Carter’s novel fails as the noble savage never evolves into the free and self-sufficient survivor of Rousseau’s experiment. His master consciously abstains from teaching him to read and write. While the savage dies and the master disappears in the end, the female protagonist, from whose perspective the novel is told, assumes the role of both, trying to appropriate the culture of her late husband’s barbarian people and to impart some of her literate knowledge to them as their mistress at the same time. The novel closes, however, before this vision of a matriarchal reenactment of Rousseau’s experiment even begins.3 Though compromised, as Mahoney argues, by the realist framework of the Bildungsroman,4 Heroes and Villains remains a post-apocalyptic dystopia, not without confounding the conventional binarism between 1

106.

Gerardine Meaney, (Un)like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction, London, 1993,

2 Anja Müller, Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed, Heidelberg, 1997, 46, note 5. 3 This also explains why, as Mahoney points out, within the feminist work on Carter, the novel is rarely discussed. Mahoney concedes that an important exception of this is Gerardine Meaney’s reading of Heroes and Villains in (Un)like Subjects. See Elisabeth Mahoney, “‘But Elsewhere?’: The Future of Fantasy in Heroes and Villains”, in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, eds Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton, London, 1997, 73 and 74. 4 Mahoney, 73.

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“civilized” and “barbarian” on which, according to Linden Peach, this particular genre relies. The novel’s deliberate and self-conscious transgression of its own generic limits goes hand in hand with its special interest in language and the possibility of transcending linguistic conventions. For Peach, “One of the most innovative aspects of Heroes and Villains is the way in which the confusion created by nuclear war … is pursued at the level of semiotics”. Not only has destruction made naming and defining profoundly difficult ventures in the post-nuclear world Carter describes. What is more, the author allows her protagonist to step outside the only realm left in which the kind of signification familiar to the reader still seems to be practised albeit with dubious success. The language but also the literate practices of the patriarchal society in which Marianne in Heroes and Villains has grown up, rather than supplying her with an identity, only serve to suppress it. Abandoning these practices for another noetic economy even if this requires a leap into the unknown and the espousal of what seems to be a more primitive mode of self-expression, appears a plausible regression towards selfhood under the circumstances. By joining a community of barbarians Marianne undergoes what in Carter’s own terms is “a process of uncreation”5 in which her female Self finally is able to constitute itself. The role of literacy in the gradual crystallizing of the heroine’s self has been completely overlooked in the feminist criticism of Heroes and Villains. This is the more surprising as writing is identified as one of the most important conclusive links bridges to the past that the main characters in Carter’s futuristic post-cataclysmic fantasy have lost. It is also because the nomadic tribe of Barbarians whom Carter places at the centre of the novel live in an essentially scriptless world without any libraries and have forgotten how to read that Carter’s employment of a pre-novelistic form seems particularly appropriate. She chooses the formula of picaresque narrative, introducing into it motifs from European Romance fiction and fairy tale elements, one being an orphaned heroine venturing into a foreign world. Compounded with a move forward into the future, this heroine’s, Marianne’s, lapse back into a more primitive form of existence suggests a disruption of the normal course of time. Indeed, the characters in Carter’s novel never 5

Peach, 89.

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feel that time is passing, “for time [is] frozen” and clocks only exist to carve “the hours into sculptures of ice”.6 Apart from a rough idea of age and a very basic sense of seasonal changes, which regularly force the nomadic Barbarians in Heroes and Villains to seek warmer quarters for winter, the characters of the novel seem to exist without any conception of time. Like Golding’s prehistoric subjects, they appear to live in an historical vacuum. Although they know that they have a past, they are unable or unwilling to recall it, as this would mean recalling an event too traumatizing to remember. It is only obliquely that they refer to this event as “the blast” (HV, 2), “the hurricane” (HV, 40), or as a moment when “the sky opened an umbrella of fire” (HV, 69). What the reader learns to interpret as a nuclear catastrophe has left the characters with a civilization so fragmented that all it facilitates is only a most rudimentary form of human coexistence motivated solely by the individual subjects’ anxiety for plain survival. Three different types of societies have evolved from a formerly prosperous, but meanwhile obsolete culture: The “gentle” villagers who live in the remains of former towns and on the desolate outskirts of equally desolate larger cities, the Barbarians, nomadic tribes inhabiting the distant “unguessable” forest (HV, 4), and the “Out People”, creatures “wilder than beasts” occupying erstwhile cities, “living there in holes in the ground” (HV, 107). The villagers are joined in farming communities “with the intellectual luxury of a few Professors who [correspond] by the trading convoys with others of their kind in other places” (HV, 9). Self-supporting at the simplest level, they export their agricultural produce “in return for drugs and other medical supplies, books, ammunition, spare parts for machinery, weapons and tools” (HV, 2), but they are also organized enough to possess barracks, schools and museums, as well as a professional army for protection against the Barbarians. The villagers regard the Barbarians as “the rabble” who come “to ravage, steal, despoil, rape and, if necessary, to kill”. The farming communities dread them as their most dangerous enemies, almost too alien to be considered human:

6

Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (1969), Penguin, 1981.

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The Non-Literate Without Like hobgoblins of nightmare, their flesh was many colours and great manes of hair flew out behind them. They flashed with curious curved plates of metal dredged up from ruins. Their horses were bizarrely caparisoned with rags, small knives, bells and chains dangling from manes and tails, and man and horse together, unholy centaurs crudely daubed with paint, looked twice as large as life. (HV, 5)

The wildly exotic appearance of the unlettered primitives forms a sharp contrast to that of the Soldiers in the villages. Clad in uniforms of black leather and plastic helmets with glass visors, every one of the soldiers looks “clean and proper, shirts and dresses white as paper, suits as black as ink” (HV, 4: emphases added). Ironically, while the literate soldiers wear the insignia of their learning as easily disposable items of clothing, the more elevated status some of the seemingly uncivilized Barbarians are assigned by their tribe is inscribed directly onto their skins, which are covered with elaborate tattoos showing patterns of snakes, birds, suns, and stars, as well as scenes from the Bible. Imagination and playfulness seem to be special features of the Barbarians and a lack of both a characteristic of the Villagers. Yet this impression is somewhat misleading. As Peach stresses, Carter does not establish a rigid binarism between the Professors/soldiers and the Barbarians but “explores the blurring of conventional boundaries and binarisms and the ways in which such artificial boundaries are maintained”.7 To this end she reveals that the author of the “moving pictures” literally embodied by the Barbarians is Dr Donally, once a Villager and, as such, member of the highly esteemed caste of the Professors, meanwhile self-appointed tutor to Jewel, the leader of the Barbarians. “He came with a snake in a box when my father, poor old sod, was old and ill”, Jewel remembers. “And the Doctor came riding on a donkey and ... had cases of books and a whole lot of needles, for the tattooing. And colours, he brought with him, a whole lot of colours” (HV, 27). With his books and needles and colours, the archetypal colonist cunningly ingratiates himself with the gullible natives who, in exchange for the spectacular rituals and ceremonies he choreographs for them, surrender their bodies to his creative urges. The excruciating pain they suffer under his hands leaves Donally unperturbed: “what else do you expect from intellectuals”, he asks with cold indifference; 7

Peach, 86-87.


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“we are accustomed to examine things and scarcely bother ourselves about the hurt feelings of the things we examine, why should we?” (HV, 124). The Barbarians have no difficulty in understanding Donally’s cynicism. It is clearly not some intellectual inferiority that makes them his dependent subjects. Jewel in particular is everything but a simpleton and indeed epitomizes an odd combination of encyclopaedic knowledge and folk wisdom that he both articulates with an eloquence which baffles Marianne when she first meets him. What prevents him and anyone else of his people to become Donally’s equal is his master’s refusal to initiate him into writing as a means of strategic manipulation of others. Unlike Lok in The Inheritors, whose ignorance also encompasses a total lack of awareness of his own disadvantage, Jewel comes to see his own deficiency with increasing clarity. He begins to realize that, with the Doctor’s signature on his back, he is doomed to be “nothing but an exhibit” (HV, 124) wherever he goes. This insight is not only correct. It also effects a split between the physical shape created by Donally and the consciousness articulating itself in dialogues mainly with Marianne, the narrator protagonist. It is an indication that, for all of Donally’s endeavours to reduce Jewel to a spectacular “icon of otherness”, “a work of art”, “a fantastic dandy of the void ... subsumed to the alien and terrible beauty of a rhetorical gesture” (HV, 71-72), the prince of the Barbarians remains his master’s counterpart, a character hardly less developed than that of Donally. While wilfully diminished in Donally’s view to “the sign of an idea of a hero” and willingly responsive to Donally’s orders to take off his shirt and let him see his picture, his “masterpiece”, on Jewel’s back, Jewel’s presence in the text does not depend on Donally’s awareness of it, nor is his development controlled by Donally. Donally’s propaganda fails to conceal the limitations of his own pathetic authorship. “Observe the last work of art in the history of the world”, Donally urges Marianne on one of such occasions in a fit of mad pride: “Observe the grace of line and the purity of execution” (HV, 95). “I’ve made my mark” (HV, 131), Carter has him assert at another point, ironically using the same diction with which, earlier on in the novel, Marianne expresses her horror at the mutilation of her husband’s skin. “It is like the mark of Cain” (HV, 96), she observes at the sight of the grotesque design of the legend of the Fall of Man.

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“You can never take all your clothes off .... Or be properly by yourself, with Adam and Eve there all the time” (HV, 85). Donally obstinately defends the practice of tattooing as “the first of the postapocalyptic arts” (HV, 125). A victim to his own delusions, the Doctor firmly believes that, in leaving the world of the Professors and joining the Barbarians, in moving from “editing texts or doing research” (HV, 62) to inscribing human bodies, he has advanced to a higher form of existence. With her vivid description of the ways whereby the Professors in her village seek to know the Barbarians they hold captives Marianne tries to communicate to Jewel that Donally’s methods of subordination and inscription are but a gaudy dramatization of the very same practices he used to employ as a man of letters in his former life. “They would put you in a cage so everyone could examine you”, Marianne warns Jewel not to return to the village with her and goes on to list the Professors’ various techniques of determining otherness: ‘They’d walk around you carefully in case you bit them and clip off your hair and take photographs of the picture on your back, a relic of the survival of Judaeo-Christian iconography, they’d find that very interesting. They’d take away your coat of fur and dress you in a dark suit and set you intelligence tests where you had to match squares with circles and circles with squares. And give you aptitude tests. And manual dexterity tests. And Rorschach blot tests. And introversion/extroversion tests. And blood tests. And many other tests. And everything you did or said would be observed and judged, sleeping and walking, everything, to see how you revealed your differences, every word and gesture studied and annotated until you were nothing but a mass of footnotes with a tiny trickle of text at the top of the page. You would be pressed inside a book ... and all the time you’d be a perfect stranger.” (HV, 123-24: emphasis added)

Interested in the workings of the Barbarians’ minds, yet not in the least in the thoughts generated by these minds, the Professors may accumulate data about their enemies’ intelligence, but they never attain a true understanding of them. Nor is this what they aim to achieve with their scientific evaluations of otherness. The sole purpose of Donally’s “research into the moeurs of savage tribes” (HV, 132) is to control the Barbarians’ consciousness and monitor every one of their actions.


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Herself a former Villager and literate, Marianne can read Donally in a way impossible to Jewel, who, humiliated by her better understanding of his tutor, tries to shrug off her reading of Donally’s “masterpiece” as a horrible mutilation. He reminds her that he himself cannot see it. Yet, for Marianne, this does not render the disfigurement on his back less hideous. On the contrary, Jewel’s fatalistic indifference to the injuries his alleged tutor has inflicted on him makes her realize the wider implications of the Doctor’s scheme not to teach his pupil to read and write but to keep him in a state of complete illiteracy, or in what Donally himself calls “a crude state of unrefined energy”. As Donally explains to Marianne, “literacy would blur his outlines, you wouldn’t see which way he was going any more” (HV, 62). Illiteracy, in turn, secures that Jewel remains an object of inscription as it prevents him from choosing, or perhaps even conceiving, his own script. Even as an adult, he has to accept that one day Donally might “flay [him] and hang [him] up on the wall ..., [that he] might even make [him] up into a ceremonial robe and wear [him] on special occasions” (HV, 86) because, with no control over his own story, Jewel has no other choice. To exist at all in the fantastic world created by Carter, Jewel depends on literates, namely on Donally and Marianne and, on another level, on the reader, to acknowledge his presence. “You can read, read me” (HV, 79), he appeals to Marianne, longing to be authorized into another story than the one Donally wants him to enact and in which he is but an invention of the Professors, a mere projection of their fears outside the safe haven of their villages (HV, 82). Indeed, her own extensive knowledge of literature, which she acquired as a child in the library of her father, a Professor of History, at first seems to allow Marianne to imagine Jewel as the protagonist of many different stories. At one point Jewel reminds her of the noble savages to which her father would devote his research (HV, 36) or of the pictures of American Indians she has seen in her father’s books (HV, 49); at another point she feels driven to call Jewel a “Yahoo” and to abuse Donally for inappropriately naming Jewel “the Prince of Darkness”, which, she argues, “only a crazy literato” would do, “for he [the Prince of Darkness] was a gentleman, as I remember” (HV, 63). Then again, Jewel appears to her “strangely magnificent as an Antediluvian king or a pre-Adamite sultan” (HV, 71) or as a figure in

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the romantic woodcuts “at the head of the ballads in her father’s rarest books” (HV, 37). The learned comparisons, however, do not hold. The web of intertextual references Carter has her cast out to capture an idea of Jewel tears. None of the images of the Barbarians Marianne recalls finding in her father’s library when she was a child suffices to really contain the otherness concealed behind Jewel’s colourful facade. Like the “text” on his back, the texts she read in her childhood fail to capture Jewel’s scriptless otherness. Whatever “romantic attraction” the idea of the Barbarians Marianne may once have felt to hold has entirely evaporated (HV, 52). By the end of the novel, she has thoroughly revised the idea of the Barbarians she has developed from literary inscriptions of them as well as from her own literate interpretation of her first encounters with them: “quite dissolved was the marvellous, defiant construction of textures and colours she first glimpsed marauding her tranquil village”, the narrative finally establishes, “it had vanished as if an illusion which could not sustain itself in the white beams of the lighthouse” (HV, 147). As Gerardine Meaney observes, in Carter’s post-nuclear setting, “any renewal is inevitably warped, the concept of eternal continuity has become ironic”.8 There no longer is a discourse capable of capturing the uniqueness of the Other and of translating it into a lasting concept of exquisiteness. Accordingly, Jewel barely feels flattered by Marianne’s confession that he is “the most remarkable thing” she has ever seen. Rather it comes as a devastating blow to him that “Not even in pictures had [she] seen anything like [him], nor read [his] description in books” (HV, 137). For Jewel this means that he can turn nowhere for proof of his existence. The self-doubt into which he is steeped by this discovery equals the insecurity Golding has his central character Lok suffer when, in a moment of disorientation, his eyes desperately search those of an older member of his tribe and fail to find a trace of recognition in them. Panic overcomes Lok and he feels “cut off and no longer one of the people” (I, 78). Marianne causes similar fear and despair in Jewel as she pronounces him unsuited for abstraction and thereby consigns him back to Donally’s tutelage, declaring tattooing the only form of inscription he can ever hope for: 8

Gerardine Meaney, “History and Women’s Time”, in Angela Carter: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Alison Easton, Basingstoke, 2000, 101.


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… you with your jewels, paints, furs, knives and guns, like a phallic and diabolic version of female beauties of former periods. What I’d like best would be to keep you in preserving fluid in a huge jar on the mantelpiece of my peaceful room, where I could look at you and imagine you. And that’s the best place for you, you walking masterpiece of art, since the good Doctor educated you so far above your station you might as well be an exhibit for intellectuals to marvel at as anything else. (HV, 137)

As this brutal verbal assault on Jewel’s pride suggests, for all her claims to being more civilized and, hence, more humane than any of the Barbarians, Marianne is not the innocent she professes to be. Her learning renders herself no less susceptible to violence than the rest of her new family whose brutal ways she so abhors. “I have destroyed him”, she confesses soon afterwards, not without feeling the same “warm sense of self-satisfaction” (HV, 147) by which she is suffused earlier, after she has for the first time in the life killed a human in combat. The fall from innocence, which she has so far believed entirely Jewel’s destiny, turns out to be also hers. She herself is, in Jewel’s words, “Eve at the end of the world” (HV, 124). In coming to understand Jewel’s words, she at last admits, “When I was a little girl, we played heroes and villains but now I don’t know which is which any more, nor who is who, and what can I trust if not appearances?” (HV, 125) Therefore, implicit in the title of Carter’s novel is the same ambiguity encoded in the title of The Inheritors. Like Golding, Carter too questions the smug Western equation of civilizing progress with moral improvement. As in The Inheritors, the author’s doubts in this equation are raised once more right after the tragic expiry of the non-literate Other has been pronounced and the surviving parties as agents of a “fitter” culture essentially blamed for it. Marianne’s remorse after Jewel’s death indicates the protagonist’s internalization of this blame as does Tuami’s fear that, perhaps, they – the New People – could have acted differently towards Lok and his folk. Her final sense of guilt contrasts sharply with the abuses she hurls at Jewel with as yet unchallenged pride when she comes to live with the Barbarians. Then she still believes that an existence in the midden of vomit and all-pervading excrement to which Jewel has brought her is not for her but only for those sub-human creatures infested with lice, gangrene, ringworm, and open sores to whom she is introduced. Although Marianne never

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finds out into whom or into what to place her trust, she learns not to trust appearances, neither the appearance of the Barbarians, which seems at once repulsive and irresistible, alienating and intriguing, nor the all too familiar appearance of the Professors. As Mary Hallab notes, the civilization of the latter can flourish only in a complete vacuum. The Professors can indulge in their intellectual pursuits only as long as they remain securely sheltered from direct experience of reality. They are innocents, Hallab explains, only insofar as they “reject the horrors and limitations – and responsibilities – of experience [and] see the world as extensions of themselves, as amenable to their wishes”. It is their learned blindness to reality that enables them to “make themselves the gods of [a fragmented whole and to] deny their own humanity, their own role in the chaotic and imperfect human community”.9 Marianne casts her lot with the Barbarians in the end and in so doing, Hallab argues convincingly, “moves, however, reluctantly, toward a more expanded vision”.10 The “fall” she thus chooses to suffer does not mark an entirely negative turn of events because it entails a loss of innocence in the sense not of an original and joyful form of inexperience, but of a naivety deliberately cultivated out of a lack of interest in more mundane aspects of life. Marianne’s flight from the village leads her well beyond what the Professors’ specialized learning encompasses. Not only does she gain insight into the life of the Barbarians, of whom she has never known more than their outward appearance from brief encounters and reasonably reliable representations in her father’s book. She also comes into immediate contact with a tribe of mutants whose deformities exceed the Professors’ wildest imaginations. Even Jewel’s singular barbarism fails to compare with the outlandishness of these figures, appropriately called “the Out People” for the fantastic shapes the human form acquires amongst them: One man had furled ears as pale, delicate and extensive as Arum lilies. Another was scaled all over, with webbed hands and feet. Few had the conventional complement of limbs or features and most bore marks of 9

Mary Y. Hallab, “Carter and Blake: The Dangers of Innocence”, in Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Joe Sanders, Westport: Conn, 1995, 178. 10 Ibid., 181.


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nameless diseases. Some were ludicrously attenuated, with arms and legs twice as long as those of natural men, but one was perfect in all things but a perfect miniature, scarcely two feet long from tip to tip. (HV, 110)

“Fantasy”, Samuel Beckett notes, “by its very ability to make nonsense its sense and impossibility its reality, undermines the referential claims of language”.11 With her fantastic description of the Out People, Carter may be said to complete her project of undermining the referential claims of language and to extend the simple opposition between Professors and Barbarians into a much more complex structure. While a straightforward binarism like that between the village intellectuals and the illiterate barbarians, according to Meaney, can never really “contravene” let alone “violate”12 reality but ultimately only reinstitute its norms,13 the triangular constellation created by way of introduction of the Out People has the power to confuse these norms. Indeed, the appearance of the Out People effects a confusion outranging by far Marianne’s moral bewilderment as to who in the story are the “villains” and who are the “heroes”. Apart from indirectly calling in question the Professors’ notion of barbarism as beasthood, Carter’s evasive portrayal of the Out People exposes the tendentiously pseudo-realistic (rather than openly fantastic) quality of those Western inscriptions of savageness to which Carter keeps alluding throughout Heroes and Villains as the primary source of inspiration for the Professors’ (and especially for Donally’s) fantasies. Like Golding, Carter reads these inscriptions as badly disguised projections of the insecurities of a Western learned elite, including even such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin, Lévi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim “and so on, all marked by fire and blood” (HV, 62). In Heroes and Villains, the accounts of otherness this elite has accomplished are rejected as mere assertions of a dominant discourse oblivious to the potentialities of critical introspection and self-doubt. By contrast, Carter’s own text insistently negotiates its own limits, which seem to be reached with the representation of the Out People. 11

Beckett, quoted in Meaney, “History and Women’s Time”, 86. In the contravention and violation of the real, Joanna Russ sees the main task of speculative fiction (Joanna Russ, “The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction”, Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, XV/1 [December 1973], 52). 13 Meaney, “History and Women’s Time”, 87. 12

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Already their shapes are too fantastic to be adequately reproduced in writing. Even as linguistic constructs, they appear de-formed by a figurative language that tries to capture what is inexpressible in literal terms and by textual gaps marking what is describable not even in figurative language. Yet, it is not merely the inefficacy of language that the self-consciously incomplete and imperfect inscriptions of the Out People are meant to reflect. They always also draw attention to the possibility of abstaining from a discursive usurpation of the Other altogether. The text itself may be read as exemplifying such restraint in never venturing beyond descriptions of the Out People’s physical features, in its resistance to inscribing, ever so cursorily at least, also their consciousness. The mind of the Out Person, the “man/not-man” (HV, 114) remains anathema. Quite paradoxically, rather than narrowing the novel’s discursive scope, this implicit demarcation of the text’s outer limits expands it. By refraining from claiming the Out People’s minds for literary inscription, Carter manages to place the images of their faceless and depersonalized bodies in ironic opposition to the extensively individualized Barbarians, thereby breaking down the novel’s binary structure. The resultant proliferation of otherness is by no means less productive of ambiguities than a literary excursion into the Out People’s consciousness would be. In fact, while the latter would inevitably lead to a delimitation of possible meanings and ultimately to a fixation of the Out Person’s otherness, the former has the opposite effect of retrospectively invalidating and confusing established positions. In the end, Marianne wonders not only who the villains are and who the heroes; she cannot tell anymore either whether the life of the Barbarians is “proof of the speed with which [they are] sinking backwards or evidence of their adaptation to new conditions” (HV, 43). At the same time, the reader is required to decide whether Jewel’s position resembles the Professors’ or the Out People’s, whether, in comparison to the Out People, he and his people are more similar to, than different from, the Professors and whether the Barbarians qualify at all as the villagers’ true Others, given that the Out People are so far more other than them. In this confusion, Marianne’s return to the village after Jewel’s death represents, though not an unlikely, only one of several possible closures to the novel. It is clear to her that such a move would presuppose that Marianne renounce experience for the sake of book


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learning, that she, in fact, forget her own experience of living amongst the Barbarians and content herself with passing the Professors’ version of barbarism on to the child she is expecting. Yet, rather than reinstating the high-caste villagers’ paternalistic view of the Other and, with it, ironically, of reality, Carter sustains her narrative’s fantastic mode until the very end of Heroes and Villains. She closes the novel with the more utopian than dystopian suggestion that Marianne might choose to forget her learning, shed her education, and undergo a sort of deculturation, reaching a state of total scriptlessness after all at its very end. Already very early on in the novel, the narrative’s development towards such a closure is foreshadowed by the introduction of the figure of Mrs Green. As a young woman, as rebellious as Marianne, Mrs Green also ran away from village life, which had become unbearable for her after her husband’s death. Though she has been living with the Barbarians for many years, she has never completely capitulated to their ways but retained some of the attributes of the seemingly so much more refined villagers. When Marianne first catches sight of her, she has the impression that this “stately old lady ... shone like a washed star in that filthy company and ... was obviously of some consequence in the tribe” (HV, 14). At this point, Marianne does not yet know that Mrs Green will soon become something of a parent substitute and confidante cum chaperone for her. “The thing to remember about them is, they don’t think”, the older woman advises Marianne shortly after her arrival at the Barbarians’ camp. “They jump from one thing to the next like kids jumping stepping stones and so they go on until they fall in the water.... They like bright colours ...., beads, things that shine” (HV, 39). The detachment with which Mrs Green characterizes the Barbarians is that of a foster mother in the role of which she assumes a position within the tribe almost as powerful as Donally’s. In fact, she embodies the perfect antithesis to this charlatan who has no other wisdom to impart to Marianne than the cynical aphorisms he keeps painting on the walls of the Barbarians’ communal abode for her to read. This eccentric way of communicating with Marianne contrasts not only with the Barbarians’, who “scarcely exchanged a word with one another” (HV, 14) but mostly conduct their activities in complete silence “for there was little need to talk and very little to talk about,

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anyway” (HV, 44). It also differs from the oral rapport which develops between Mrs Green and Marianne and seems to constantly belie the futility of speech suggested by the Barbarians’ silence. Mrs Green’s characteristic orality, the reader learns, is actually the result of her disavowal of literacy. She has simply forgotten how to read so that the copy of Great Expectations she keeps together with other personal belongings, dresses, aprons, hairpins, and a little case of needles, in a box in her room, has come to possess a rather odd symbolic value for her. Having become illiterate, Mrs Green no longer expects that she will ever return to the village. It is for a much humbler existence that, after Jewel’s death, she joins the fishermen on the coast, leaving her own position within the tribe for Marianne to fill. Yet, though pregnant, Marianne is not prepared to adopt the role of nurturer and nurse. Her ambition is rather to exploit the power she has discovered in herself and assert it to replace Donally, who has vanished without a trace after Jewel’s – his creation’s – violent destruction. “I shall stay here and frighten them [the Barbarians] so much they’ll do every single thing I say”, Marianne promises at the end of the novel. “I’ll be tiger lady and rule them with a rod of iron” (HV, 150). Inevitably, Marianne’s forgetting of her cultural origins will ultimately be different from Mrs Green’s. Although she will have no books to help her because her father’s as well as Donally’s libraries have barbarously been burnt, she seems determined to forge a potentially literate culture of her own by eschewing the “gift of naming” and reverting the “process of uncreation” whereby nature has come to exist unacknowledged, undifferentiated, and nameless. Standing on the sea-shore with Jewel and marvelling at its wonders, Marianne realizes that she can hardly put a single name to them, “though everything had once been scrupulously named. The fans, fronds, ribbons, wreaths, garlands and lashes of weed had once been divided into their separate families, wracks, tangles, dulses, etc. Purse sponge, slime sponge, breadcrumb sponge, blood red sponge ...” (HV, 136). The discovery prompts her resolve that she will neither “surrender [like the Out People] to namelessness”, nor begin a subspecies of man “imbibing a suitable indifference to the outside world with its mother’s milk” (HV, 137). Instead she determines that the purpose of her reign over the Barbarians as Tiger Lady will be to lead them towards enlightenment and some sort of learning after all. This is finally suggested by the image of the lighthouse, which she


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believes to be the twin of the white tower in which she was born when she sees it for the first time: ... and, upon the cliff, a white tower glistened like a luminous finger pointing to heaven. It was a lighthouse. Its light was put out, like the woman’s eyes, but here it stayed and if there were no longer any storm-tossed mariners to give thanks for its helpful beams, yet, functionless as it was, it was intransigent. To Marianne, it looked the twin of the white tower in which she had been born and she was very much moved for, though neither tower any longer cast a useful light, both still served to warn and inform of surrounding dangers. Thus this tower glimpsed in darkness symbolized and clarified her resolution; abhor shipwreck, said the lighthouse. She fell in love with the integrity of the lighthouse. (HV, 139)

The final merging of Marianne’s old life with her new life, which is suggested by the uncanny identity between the two lighthouses, marks a new beginning facilitated by the heroine’s recognition that, rather than having to choose between the two modes of existence which she has come to know, she must reconcile herself to a position between them and make it her task to direct the Barbarians away from their fierce rejection of the villagers’ civilization to a position as hybrid as her own.


CHAPTER SEVEN POSTCOLONIAL RETURNS TO A PRE-LITERATE EUROPE: DAVID MALOUF’S AN IMAGINARY LIFE AND GILLIAN BOURAS’ APHRODITE AND THE OTHERS

With their portrayal of pre- and post-literate societies respectively, both William Golding and Angela Carter may be said to fictionally transcend the cultural situation in which they themselves write, not, however, without commenting explicitly or implicitly on that particular situation. Most obviously, the absence of writing from the non-literate otherworlds described in Heroes and Villains and The Inheritors suggestively hints at the omnipresence of the written word and its power in modern civilization; less obviously, it also calls in question received notions of literacy as a self-evident and enduring feature of Western cultures by dismantling the popular assumption of the transition of human societies from non-literate to literate formations as a linear and irreversible process. At closer analysis, the implicit criticism of the complacency of Western literate cultures which Golding and Carter advance in The Inheritors and Heroes and Villains proves remarkably similar to what has come to be identified as a typically postcolonial scepticism of Western notions of cultural superiority and supremacy. Carter’s and Golding’s proximity to this position is manifest especially where they interrogate writing as a means of comprehending and controlling the Other and where they express their distrust of discursive “Othering” as an exercise merely of a hegemonic power’s self-assertion. What nonetheless distinguishes Carter’s and Golding’s critique of literate cultures from that of non-European writers is the catholicity of their argument. In Heroes and Villains as well as in The Inheritors, the non-literate is placed in opposition not to a specific culture but to human civilization in general. The fact that Carter’s novel is set in England and Golding’s in France is largely irrelevant, because the authors’ aim is not to place the story they relate in special relation to the cultural history (or future) of either of these two countries. With precisely such an aim in mind, David Malouf in An Imaginary Life and Gillian Bouras in Aphrodite and the Others set their novels, by contrast, in thoroughly documented and thoroughly charted historical

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contexts, whose geographic distance from the locus of the texts’ conception, Australia, is tantamount to the temporal distance from the extratextual reality established in The Inheritors and Heroes and Villains. Bouras submits a very personal autobiographical portrayal of her mother-in-law embedded in what appears to be a meticulously researched documentation of the circumstances which caused Greek farming women born in the first decades of the twentieth century to miss out on schooling and remain illiterate all their lives. Malouf offers a self-consciously imaginative exploitation of the historical fact of Ovid’s expulsion from Rome to the Eastern limits of the Roman Empire which were under constant threat of invasion by Barbarian hordes during the reign of Emperor Augustus. The way in which both Malouf and Bouras draw on historical events in their portrayals of illiterates deserves attention because it turns their novels into very special instances of the particular interest Australian writers have been expressing in aspects of scriptlessness over the past one hundred years. Malouf and Bouras are not the only Australian writers profoundly interested in the theme of illiteracy. Indeed, the frequency with which this theme has been addressed in Australian literature makes it tempting to posit a specifically antipodean preoccupation with questions of writing and non-writingness, an idiosyncratic fascination with the limits of literate culture and their transgression. Over the past hundred years, this fascination seems to have yielded increasingly sophisticated readings of illiteracy. The marked historicity of these readings corresponds with a tendency to identify illiteracy as a disadvantage shared across racial and ethnic boundaries by aborigines, migrants, and certain groups of white Australian-born citizens alike. Moreover, in literary projections of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia illiteracy is associated with figures of convicts and itinerant workers, probably the best known instance being the 1981 autobiography A Fortunate Life by A.B. Facey, who, born in 1894 and practically orphaned at the age of two, received no formal education. After the First World War, during which he served at Gallipoli, Facey taught himself to read and write and began to compile notes about his life. His semi-literate accounts of the legendary Gallipoli campaign have no doubt contributed to the aura commonly associated with the figure of the unlettered underdog in contemporary Australian writing.

Postcolonial Returns to a Pre-Literate Europe

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Deliberate fictionalizations of illiteracy in Australian literature were also produced before Facey’s uniquely authentic depictions of what it means to be unable to read and write. They set in after a period of public disputes concerning the contemporary state of the Australian school system not quite as ardent as the controversies going on in Britain at the same time.1 It is barely mere coincidence that when these controversies ended in Europe with the attainment of universal literacy at the end of the nineteenth century, Australian writers began to introduce illiterate characters into their works with increasing frequency. They did so for varying reasons. In her novel My Brilliant Career (1901), for instance, Miles Franklin includes the portraits of the illiterate farmers Mrs and Mr M’Swat, who employ the heroine Sybylla Melvyn as governess of their children without really understanding the purpose of learning to read and write. Franklin’s vivid descriptions of the ineffectiveness of schooling in the Australian outback echo the critical depictions Henry Lawson offers of bush schools, representing them as places at which school masters shamelessly assert their colonizing power over unlettered children and adolescents. At the same time Franklin’s characterization of the ignorant M’Swats as insensitive brutes anticipates Barbara Baynton’s portrayal of the illiterate bully Billy Skywonkie in Bush Studies (1902). In Coonardoo, first published in 1929, Katherine Susannah Prichard addresses the disadvantage of non-literate Aboriginals confronted with white literate culture. This aspect, while only touched upon by Prichard, is given greater attention in the novel Capricornia (1939) by Xavier Herbert and finally translated into an open discussion of Aboriginal illiteracy in My Place (1987) by Sally Morgan. Yet another approach to illiteracy is taken by Judah Waten, who in Alien Son (1952) narrates the cultural exclusion of a well educated female migrant from Russia unable to speak, let alone to read or write English and therefore completely dependant on her Australian-born children to act as her interpreters, readers, and scribes. In contrast to Waten’s sympathetically account of his mother’s cultural exclusion, Peter Carey’s construction of Herbert Badgery, narrator protagonist of Illywhacker (1985), as an illiterate aims to stress the fantastic fictiveness of this character’s life story. It is the 1

These can be found documented for instance in The Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays, eds Brenda Naill and Ian Britain, Melbourne, 1997.

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self-confessed liar and con man himself who claims that he could not read until late in life. He does so not to win the reader’s sympathy, but to warn the reader not to expect recorded history to verify his tale. In all of these instances, illiteracy is unambiguously represented as an integral part, good or bad, of the Australian idiom. This makes it the more noteworthy that David Malouf and Gillian Bouras place the illiterates they describe in a European context. It will be argued that in so doing they become able to use non-literacy as a matrix to define their own highly ambivalent role as antipodean writers with close affinities to Southern Europe. In the process, the traditional image of Southern Europe as the cradle of Western civilization and as the birthplace of alphabetic writing is subverted. Greece and Asia Minor, respectively, are translated into settings at which writers in exile – the Roman poet Ovid in An Imaginary Life and an autobiographical projection of Gillian Bouras in Aphrodite and the Others – are surrounded by people unable to comprehend their writerly needs because they are illiterate. What Ovid and Gillian at first experience as a profound depravity, as a barbarism cruder than anything they could have imagined they gradually come to appreciate as a marvellous alternative to their own entrapment within a culture sophisticated to the point of decadence. Non-literacy in particular, while initially viewed as a sign of inferiority in each novel, is eventually seen as an ideal form of epistemological freedom which alone seems to facilitate the kind of dignified innocence the protagonists learn to admire in their unlettered opposite number. This almost romanticizing validation of scriptlessness at the expense of literate culture invites a comparison of An Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others with pre-twentieth-century colonialist narratives of exploration, which regularly lead from a Western metropolis into some unknown wilderness outside Europe. In having their protagonists travel to a wild zone, not somewhere in the New World, but in Southern Europe, Malouf and Bouras invert this trajectory, thereby undermining the received opposition of the Old World as thoroughly charted and tamed territory and the New World as a realm of vast uncivilized spaces. Malouf and Bouras, two writers acutely aware of the standard perception of Australian nature as hostile and barren, translate exactly this perception into evocations of equally barren and hostile European land. Significantly, to this end, they do not choose any place in the Old World for representation but a


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region conventionally perceived as harbouring Europe’s oldest civilization and famous for its wealth of ancient monuments. Gillian Bouras, for instance, sets her novel in a Peloponnesian village and portrays the Greek countryside surrounding it as a habitat only of most resilient of plants and creatures. Civilization appears transient in Bouras’ rural Greece, where any more vulnerable form of existence or any attempt, however modest, at subjecting the land to cultivation seems doomed to decay: In summer one can walk endlessly on ochre-coloured earth, gather oregano and wildflowers, see nobody and hear nothing except the relentless shrilling of cicadas. A distant haze smudges blue mountains; here and there cypress trees stand like dark-green sentinels. The hedgerows grow high and thick, and the years have produced a tumble and twining of prickly pear, ivy, mastic and blackberry. Piles of wood, safe in the forks of trees, wait to be collected before the first rains come; sheep and donkey dung has been swept into small cones. The only sign of change is the occasional glimpse of a crumbling mudbrick house standing deserted amid the straggling remains of an orchard, a salutary reminder of the inevitability of decay.2

An Imaginary Life, Malouf’s “watershed work” and his most acclaimed,3 is set in an even more forsaken location. As if consciously echoing the words with which Arthur Phillip, governor of the first permanent European colony on the Australian continent, summarized his impression of Australian land as “forest-clad”, “unkempt”, and “uncanny” territory “offering less assistance to first settlers than any other country in the world”,4 Malouf has Ovid sketch his place of exile as a an oppressive emptiness, an unchanging “desolateness” which “day after day fills [his] mind with its perspectives”.5 Colourless, scentless, silent, and cold, the inhospitable terrain quenches any more refined form of existence:

2

18.

Gillian Bouras, Aphrodite and the Others (1994), Ringwood: Victoria, 1997, 17-

3 Philip Neilsen, Imagined Lives: A Study of David Malouf, UQP Studies in Australian Literature, St Lucia, 1990, 3. 4 Arthur Phillip, quoted in James Ford Cairns, “Australia: III. History”, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1969, II, 786. 5 David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978), Sydney, 1980, 15.

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The Non-Literate Without A line of cliffs, oblique against the sky, and the sea leaden beyond. To the west and south, mountains, heaped under cloud. To the north, beyond the marshy river mouth, empty grasslands, rolling level to the pole. For eight months of the year the world freezes. Some polar curse is breathed upon the land. It whitens overnight. Then when the ice loosens at last, and breaks up, the whole plain turns muddy and stinks, the insects swarm and plague us, hot mists steam amongst the tussocks. I have found no tree here that rises amongst the low, grayish brown scrub. No flower. No fruit. We are at the ends of the earth. Even the higher order of the vegetable kingdom have not yet arrived among us. We are centuries from the notion of an orchard or a garden made simply to please. (IL, 15)

Any reference to cultural progress seems carefully avoided in both novels, thus sustaining the impression that their settings are most unlikely birthplaces of an enduring, let alone a thriving, civilization. Whether it is the bleakness of the land that has prevented its inhabitants from trying to attain at least some degree of civilization or whether it is the barrenness of its inhabitants’ minds that has kept them from cultivating their surroundings seems impossible to tell. The perfect correspondence between the simplicity of the people’s lives and the plainness of their environment remains profoundly enigmatic to the first-person narrator, dramatized in either case and cast in the role of the displaced ethnographer-cum-writer alienated by the absolute stasis which this correspondence engenders. Both, Gillian, a teacher from Melbourne and mother of three sons by a Greek immigrant, and Publius Ovidus Naso, “Roman of the equestrian order, poet” (IL, 18), once famous and favoured, now banned for life from the Roman empire, have always been at home in a culture of swift change and progress. Their clearly idealized invocations of this culture occur almost exclusively in the context of nostalgic reveries. An actual return remains impossible for Ovid and only a vaguely contemplated option in Gillian’s narrative. Instead of actually going back to Australia, Gillian enjoys imaginary journeys backward to the early 1970s, for instance, when the new Whitlam government began to transform the cultural climate in Australia, charging it with new optimism and enthusiasm. She also revels in the recollection of her Greek mother-in-law coming to Australia to be overawed by her middle-class suburban home, what with all “The


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space, the carpeted floors, the bathroom, the kitchen and its appliances, the large gardens front and back”, and, of course, television (AO, 130-31). As a special personal triumph she cherishes the memory of taking Aphrodite – Yiayia – to see Como, “most graceful of Victoria’s colonial mansions” and witnessing one of Aphrodite’s rare displays of amazement at this manifestation of “extreme wealth, ... great beauty, and ... domestic yet grand, opulent, unattainable, splendour”. Two decades later, Gillian still likes to believe that, for Aphrodite, the experience must have been “a village woman’s glimpse of heaven” (AO, 136). Ovid, too, nostalgically associates his former life as having with a particularly auspicious phase of transition in the history of the Roman Empire. He defines himself as the child of “an age of soft selfindulgent muddle, of sophisticated impudence, when we all seemed to have broken out of bounds at last into an enlightenment so great that there was no longer any need for belief” (IL, 25).6 In this life, Ovid remembers, he used to feel free to believe in himself and to discover for his generation a new national style. He was allowed to proclaim the end of patriotism and of war and to demand other literature to be written than “guides in verse to bee keeping and sheep drench” and other concerns to be addressed by poets than “the loves of shepherd boys with a taste for Greek”. The age he believes he has helped to create with his poetry “has its existence in the lives and loves of [the emperor’s] subjects. It is gay, anarchic, ephemeral and it is fun” (IL, 26). “But I am here, and all this, all of it, is far behind me”, Ovid reminds himself and the reader of the present:

6 The implicit comparison Malouf is drawing here between Rome and London as thriving centres of imperialist expansion is obvious. Still, this does not suggest that Malouf’s representation of Asia Minor as an unknown wilderness or wasteland serves solely to establish an analogy to Australia as the most forbidding of all of England’s colonies. A far more complex process of projection and re-inscription is at work here, a process which also encodes Malouf’s own migration from Australia to Italy (as Aphrodite and the Others records Bouras’ migration from Australia to Greece). In Malouf’s portrayal of Asia Minor, the twentieth-century Australian traveller’s perception of South-East Europe (to which Malouf, in fact, refers explicitly in a direct address to the reader at the beginning of the novel [28]) and the Roman exile’s may be said to converge, thereby facilitating a reading of the text not only as an inscription of the margins of ancient European civilization but also as a discursive re-invasion of a meanwhile thoroughly inscribed site of European history by total wilderness.

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The Non-Literate Without I am dead. I am relegated to the region of silence. All I can do is shout. And that is what I am doing. (IL, 27)

The cultural developments in which they once used to be implicated seem to have been suppressed, undone, or even reversed in the worlds to which Gillian and Ovid find themselves transported in Aphrodite and the Others and An Imaginary Life. A sense of having moved backward rather than forward, of having returned to an earlier form of existence rather than of having progressed to a new level of experience overwhelms them. They look back on the existences they have left behind, coming to the ironic conclusion that the lifestyle they have forsaken was much further advanced than the kind of life ahead of them. Worse even, as exiles unable to maintain any contact with their spiritual homes, they feel that their own intellectual scope is progressively crippled, that against their will they become like the people they live with, or that they are reduced to beings even superior to them. When one moves from Australia to rural Greece, Gillian observes, “all confidence eventually evaporates, and many aspects of the personality become atrophied .… in extreme cases even sanity is threatened”. The fear that, in coming to Greece, she has given herself up completely gives Gillian nightmares in which she takes on the shape of a large, dark, and hairy monster walking on all fours and with a drooping nether lip, “truly horrible to look at” (AO, 113). In Imaginary Life Ovid feels equally disfigured. He complains that his life has been “stripped to the simplest terms” (IL, 16) and remarks that he feels “as if [he] had suddenly slipped back a step in the order of things, or been transformed, by a witch’s curse, into one of the lower species”. Writing from the “limits of the known world”, from a place of “utter desolation” (IL, 26), Ovid begins to believe that he can no longer address his letters to his wife or his lawyer in Rome or even to the emperor. He finds himself exiled “not just to a wild place, but beyond the bounds of the language he can use”.7 Hence all he can do is appeal to a reader who lives in another century and whose face and form he cannot imagine. “You can have no idea”, he confides in this 7

In fact, as Malouf himself once explained, this extreme form of isolation was his very first interest in writing An Imaginary Life (see “Interview by Jim Davidson”, in David Malouf: Johnno, Short Stories, Poems, Essays and Interview, ed. James Tulip, St Lucia, 1990, 294).


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reader, “how far we have come, or how far back I have been to see all this; how rudimentary our life is in its beginning” (IL, 30). Like Gillian’s seemingly loosely assembled notes and diary entries, Ovid’s direct addresses are made with no expectation of a reply. They are written in the awareness of their writtenness, of their capacity to preserve their author’s reflections for an indefinite amount of time beyond the moment of their conception. They also enhance the impression that the first-person narrators of An Imaginary Life and of Aphrodite and the Others are constructed as totally void of social contacts, and as existing in a silence more extreme than the silence of the solipsism in which any modern scribes produce their writings. It is the first-person pronoun of highly educated individuals with no one to turn to in their writings but themselves or to an imaginary audience outside the world to which they have moved. Inside these worlds, nobody seems to speak their language and, worse even, nobody has a need for writing, least of all for the kind of writing in which they both engage, Ovid as a poet, Gillian as a chronicler of Aphrodite’s story. It is on account of their literacy, then, that Gillian and Ovid are exiled not only from their former, but also from their present lives. “They feed me. They provide a corner where I can sleep. They are not uncivil”, Ovid concedes. Yet, aching for the refinements of the Latin tongue, “that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken” (IL, 21), he still deplores that where he has come to live, the most basic things prove impossible to translate back into his own idiom (IL, 22): But no one in Tomis speaks my tongue, and for nearly a year now I have heard no word of my own language; I am rendered dumb. I communicate like a child with grunts and signs, I point, I raise my eyebrows, questioning, I burst into tears of joy if someone – a child even – understands what I am trying to say. In the open I go about shouting, talking to myself simply to keep the words in my head, or to drive them out of it. My days in this place, my nights, are terrible beyond description. (IL, 17)

On one occasion, when a woman hands him some seeds, offering along with it a word in her language – Kors-chka! –, Ovid is reminded of how he would use the Latin names of seeds in his own poetry: merely for the acoustic effect the words would produce but with no idea at all what any but the commonest of the seeds looked like.

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Tasting one of the seeds of Korschka and realizing that its flavour can bring neither the expected shock of recognition to his palate, nor a name to his mind, the poet comprehends with dismay that he might have to learn everything all over again like a child. He wonders whether, for the rest of his life, he will be reduced to “Discovering the world as a small child does, through the senses, but with all things deprived of the special magic of their names in [his] own tongue” (IL, 22). Likewise in Aphrodite and the Others, Gillian is suddenly overcome by a deep sense of futility as she realizes how ludicrous her exercise of translating people’s lives into stories must appear to someone like her mother-in-law who has no use whatsoever for “ta grammata”, for letters. Gillian knows that Aphrodite has always resented her reading and writing, “for they are not work” (AO, 31), and suspects that her mother-in-law secretly chuckles about her, and regards her writerly ambitions as evidence of “a hitherto unknown moral failing in [her] character”, as proof of her slothfulness (AO, 147). Gillian contends “she is, I think, fairly convinced that I am mad: eccentric at best, insane at worst” (AO, 7), and speculates that Aphrodite must think of her mainly as a woman who does not talk, or talks only in a certain manner ... but makes noises which make no sense. She cannot speak very well ...; she does not have the gift, is not talented in that way. She knows no riddles or rhymes, is ignorant of proverbs and spells, cannot make jokes. ... Even after she learns to talk, this second woman is often silent, watching and gazing, looking at who can guess what. And at times like these, she does not seem to listen to anything or anybody, but makes squiggles and lines, notes in a little book. (AO, 12-13)

Gillian’s conjectures as to how her mother-in-law might read are never verified so that the reader is invited to wonder whether it really is the illiterate woman who condemns her daughter-in-law because she cannot spin, weave, knit, or crochet. What Bouras’ text actually suggests is that the narrator despises herself for her inability to make proper knots, or to put a pannier on the donkey. While Gillian claims that it is Aphrodite who thinks her totally ignorant, it is she herself who believes she is deficient. “She does not understand how important rope is”, she imagines Yiayia say to herself: “She has not the least idea of the basic importance of


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knots.” This self-depreciation via the figure of Aphrodite is followed by a peculiar gesture of self-assertion. As if to disprove her mother-inlaw’s secret charge of ignorance and incompetence, Gillian uses her narratorial voice to proffer the information that, in Greece, “much can depend on the strength of a tether and on the ability to tie knots that do not slip”. Unfortunately her illiterate mother-in-law cannot read what cultural wisdom she has to impart. More ironically even, the insider knowledge Gillian tries to display proves insufficient to secure her an insider status in the village community. While capable of weaving the “thread of time, the weight of history” (AO, 13) into a fabric of written words to philosophize about the “basic importance” of knots, Gillian remains a far cry from tying real knots: when she tethers the donkey, he still pulls free because she has tied the rope the wrong way. Their cultural and linguistic isolation and the resultant sense of being stranded in a place far too alien for them to ever become truly part of it, bring to mind the predicament of such archetypal traveller figures as Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Jack Martin, Allmayer, Frankenstein, or Kurtz, braving worlds which have never before been comprehended in any form of writing and reaching the limits of their expressive scope as they engage in a discourse with the unlettered inhabitants of these worlds. Contemporary notions of literacy and culture dictate, of course, that these figures should be portrayed (if only ironically) as models of heroic resistance against barbarism. Their accounts of savage lands and people are always meant to signify also some kind of victory of lettered thinking over the dangers to civilization believed to loom in Britain’s distant colonies. Like their literary precursors, Ovid and Gillian respond to their displacement by way of recourse to their own literacy – to reading and writing letters and diaries. In the process, they begin to see their writing as a kind of social obligation or cultural mission. They come to justify their writing as an exercise through which they might reach an understanding of the Other and communicate this understanding to others. “I wanted to make a gesture”, Gillian typically explains her resolution to set down Aphrodite’s story, “to catch ... the life which is flowing away from us every minute”. “This has been, in a sense, a labour of love” (AO, 7), she adds meaningfully. Likewise, Ovid holds on to the belief that with his writing he is fulfilling a mission, even if he has no reason to hope that his writings will ever be read. His

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declared goal is to record for his inheritors “any notion ... of what earth was in its original bleakness, before we brought to it the order of industry, the terraces, fields, orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens of the world we are making in our own image” (IL, 28). However, also like their literary precursors, Gillian and Ovid remain far from a real understanding of the Other. On the contrary, in the same way they subject their new environment to linguistic settlement and transform the topographic void which is their new home into a verbal construct, they also subject the native Other to conceptual usurpation, reducing it to a Caliban figure, an “orphaned bastard” as Roslyn Jolly puts it, “with close links to the animal world, ... a shocking, primitive and abominable alter ego”.8 Malouf has Ovid describe the barbarians as “another order of beings, those who have not yet climbed up through a hole in their head and become fully human” (IL, 20). To his ears, their atavistic utterances are but grunts, moans, and crows, the yammering and howling of creatures reduced to communicating in a “barbarous guttural tongue”, or what he also terms a “no-language” (IL, 52). Still, he concedes that the Getae are “only relatively savage”, less savage than the “real barbarians” he has yet to see and hear “yowling and yelping like wolves” (IL, 56). They are also less savage than the wolf child whom Ovid, tracks down in the forest outside Tomis, whom he captures with the help of the villagers, and subsequently attempts to tame. The ensuing relationship between the child and Ovid as his captor, tamer, master, teacher, and eventually as his pupil forms the core of the novel. In it, Ovid’s new companion, too, is reduced to a silent object of inscription, an evasive and forever intangible Other.9 Before it begins to dawn on Ovid that the Child might actually be his own childhood Self (or at least its Doppelgänger) beckoning him to return

8

Roslyn Jolly, “Transformations of Caliban and Ariel: Imagination and Language in David Malouf, Margaret Atwood and Seamus Heaney”, World Literature Written in English, XXVI/2 (Autumn 1986), 297. 9 This, in fact, is how critics mostly read Malouf’s portraits of illiterates or semiliterates, thus ascribing such characters a fairly subordinate role in Malouf’s work. See, for instance, Peter Bishop, “David Malouf and the Language of Exile”, Australian Literary Studies, X/4 (October 1982), 419-28; Maryanne Dever, “Secret Companions: The Continuity of David Malouf’s Fiction”, World Literature Written in English, XXVI/1 (Spring 1986), 62-74, or Nick Mansfield, “Body Talk: The Prose of David Malouf”, Southerly, XLV/2 (June 1989), 230-38.


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into a his own past, Ovid views “the creature” more as an animal than as a human being: Outlined against the blue light between two birches about fifty yards off, crouched like an animal, staring at us, a small boy as lean as a stick, with all the ribs of his torso showing under the tanned skin, bony elbows and knees, and straight black hair to the shoulder, He springs up at my cry and goes bounding away into the woods. (IL, 4849)

Observing the child in captivity, Ovid notes how the boy “howls, scratching at the wall like an animal, spitting [and] showing his teeth and his hands with all the fingers tense and extended like claws” (IL, 106). He records with an ethnographer’s detached interest how “nothing like a human sobbing ever comes from him” (IL, 73), how he excites himself with his hand as he has seen monkeys do, how his limbs twitch like a dog’s in his sleep, and how his hairline all along the spine, “reddish in color like a fox” (IL, 75), terrifies the women. “The rumour that he is covered with hair and has hooves ... is absurd”, he tries to convince himself and his reader. And yet, when the boy lays his fingertips on the back of his hand, he cannot help feeling “As if an animal has come up in the dark and touched me with its tongue” (IL, 79). As a twentieth-century Greek woman, Aphrodite does not lend herself to exactly the same reductive representation. Still, Gillian, too, succeeds in portraying her mother-in-law as a Caliban figure of sorts by exploring what she regards as the older woman’s most alienating and, at the same time, most fascinating feature: her illiteracy. It is Aphrodite’s inability to read and write that inspires Gillian to put down her story in letters because no one else has ever done so and Aphrodite herself never will. “It is Yiayia’s voice in particular that I try to write down”, she announces at the beginning of Aphrodite and the Others, posing the rhetorical question, “for are not voices as individual as fingerprints?” (AO, 3-4). Illiterate or oral people, the self-appointed biographer argues to legitimize her project, depend on others to tell them who they are. “Oral people are not, usually, selfanalytical”, she expounds:

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The Non-Literate Without They cannot see themselves, obviously, as a ‘layer cake of texts’. Their sense of self most often comes through the evaluation of outsiders. They are what other people say (AO, 6).

To enforce her diagnosis of Aphrodite’s incapacity to explain – or even to be – herself, Gillian refers to the cases of “Panayota, Evgenia and all the other faceless, nameless Peloponnesian women” (AO, 8) whose families did not consider them worth sending to school as girls and of whom Gillian, therefore, doubts that they can at all understand the connection “between the vast outside world and their own tiny, inward-looking one”. “And did these women realize”, she wonders, “that they were never able to confront information from the outside world directly, that they could not know it in the way they knew facts in their own world?”. Convinced that whatever knowledge Greek village women in Aphrodite’s position could obtain would have been processed and then passed on to them by their male relatives, Gillian doubts that the females of Aphrodite’s generation actually possess any idea “of history, of the years of schism, national defeat, and seesawing between monarchy and republic” (AO, 37-38). Yet, Gillian’s misapprehension of Greek women’s relation to history does not remain uncorrected. She eventually learns that the women of rural Greece survived the years of war everything but unawares and uninformed. Without the women, her son’s history textbook informs her, there would have been no victory. Grandmothers would mind the children while their mothers would make bread for the army or carry ammunition where transports could not go. The women of Kalamata clapped and cheered at the prisoners who were marched through the streets by the Germans and threw them bits of food while the men abstained from such demonstrative gestures. And during the famine in 1941 and 1942, the girls in Yiayia’s village kept resistance fighters supplied with food. Unlike their literary precursors, the narrators of An Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others undergo a process of realization in which their perception of the Other changes quite dramatically, causing them to revise their initial notion of scriptlessness as a sign of intellectual inferiority. Writing plays a central role in this process. It is in translating the non-literate into written language that both Ovid and Gillian finally arrive at a completely new appreciation of the Other’s consciousness. Bouras makes this particularly clear by contrasting the written portrait


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of Aphrodite with the photographs Gillian has collected of her motherin-law. In the twelve years she has been living in Greece and which are in part documented in these photographs, Gillian never reaches the understanding she attains as she is working on her mother-in-law’s biography. A first sign of their relationship beginning to change is a shift of tone in Gillian’s description of Aphrodite’s ignorance. It is a shift from fascination and pity to affectionate amusement which insistently undermines Gillian’s ambitious socio-historical cum anthropological analysis of the case of her illiterate mother-in-law. Gillian’s conscientiously researched case study metamorphoses into an increasingly personal story as quotations from scholarly literature (including ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders and Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong) are replaced by passages in which the author seeks to find and formulate her own interpretations of Aphrodite’s otherness. In the process, she comes to value Aphrodite’s perception of the world, so different from her own, as an inexhaustible source of quaint anecdotes. She records her alarm when she finds that Aphrodite is trying to cure her sick donkey with Coca Cola; she records how, during a rare conversation of politics, Yiayia suddenly produces a role of paper which turns out to be a large photograph of Karamanlis and passionately declares, “He’s the one for me ... He’s very, very good” (AO, 107). She observes how Aphrodite refers to people from a village two kilometres away as foreigners and is puzzled when she grinningly replies to her question what this makes of her, Gillian: “That’s different. You’re ours” (AO, 112). She recalls introducing her mother-in-law to a monoglot Australian who had to suffer being bombarded with questions and comments of increasing loudness because Aphrodite would simply refuse to accept that he could not understand Greek. She imagines Aphrodite on her first flight to Australia, bewildered by “the capsule of steel which will somehow get her to the other end of the world in an amazingly short time” (AO, 127) and confused by the forever unchanging view from her window of which she does not realise that it is not the tarmac at Athens airport, but the plane’s wing (AO, 128). These instances bear a significant resemblance to those scenes in An Imaginary Life where Ovid records the puzzlement with which the barbarians and the wolf child take in his writing. This is, for instance,

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the case when he catches the Child secretly studying his writing implements: He shuffles across the floor towards the parchment roll and stares at it, pokes at it with his forefinger, then lowers his head and sniffs. How it must puzzle him that the roll still smells of animal hide. Once again the ink fascinates him. He sniffs at that also, but is careful not to spill it. He takes the stylus in his hand, and has been observant enough to grasp it clumsily, but correctly, between thumb and forefinger. He looks pleased with himself. He dips it in the ink, finding great difficulty in getting the pen, balanced as it is between his fingers, into the hole. He crouches over the pot, and there is, on his face that look of utterly human concentration that one sees on the faces of small children when they are trying for the first time to draw, or make strokes for writing or thread a needle – the eyes fixed, the tongue pointed at the corner of the mouth and moving with a gesture of the hand, as if it too were one of the limbs we have to use as men, one of our means of pushing out into the world, of moving and changing its objects. (IL, 80-81)

It is the dramatization of bewilderment, the Other’s enactment of the same kind of consternation Gillian and Ovid have always mistaken for a prerogative of their learning that facilitates a first sympathetic understanding of, even a momentary identification with the Other. The comic quality of the above scene is contingent on the child’s total oblivion to the presence of an observer who is translating every detail of his action into writing. This does not mean that the savage boy is merely an object of ridicule, specularization, or exoticization. In An Imaginary Life as well as in Aphrodite and the Others, the secret gaze of the literate outsider following the scriptless Other eventually ceases to gratify the need for reconciliation with human civilization, by which, as Paul Lyons believes, modern men and women are driven. Instead of reinforcing their faith in their own culture, the spectacle of the “primitive”, the “savage”, and the “barbarous” because they are the uneducated Other forces Gillian and Ovid to accept that, rather than a constructively communicative and hence socially relevant gesture, writing is an antisocial exercise that only isolates writers further and further from the subjects they try to understand by writing about them. With the explicit questioning of writing and literacy, which must needs follow this realization, Bouras and Malouf transcend the


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“ethnocentric narcissism” which Lyons holds to be only too characteristic of traditional colonialist representations of the native as an atavistic and ignorant Other. As Abdul JanMohamed has pointed out, such renderings are nothing but projections of the inadequacies sensed in modern cultures onto the figure of the native whose otherness is strategically represented as a gross deformity so as to deflect from and thereby preserve the structures of civilized mentality.10 It is not from some ethnographic ingenuity but for the sake of this particular agenda, Lyons contends, that Anglophone writers have frequently attributed savage, even cannibalistic tendencies to those living outside the familiar territory of literate civilization. Hence, too, the insistent demonizing or criminalization of the illiterate in nineteenth-century fiction.11 It seems legitimate, then, to regard it as a departure from established literary conventions that both Malouf and Bouras deny their narrators the possibility of recuperating a sense of superiority in the act of inscribing a non-literate Other12 and instead reduce them to mere figures of endurance, caricatures of what Mike Marais has called “the intrepid tamer of the wild”.13 “I am the least person here”, Malouf has Ovid admit, “– a crazy, comic old man, grotesque, tearful, who understands nothing” (IL, 17). And “mine is the defeat”, Gillian admits, “for, try as I might, and I did try, I could not be what she and others wanted, could not become what her world demanded as a right” (AO, 2). As she herself puts it, she finally comprehends “the privilege and the poverty there is in being literate” (AO, 7) and sees that “Highly literate people [like her] cannot imagine a world without books, a world without the search, discovery and discipline of writing” (AO, 130-31). “For months,” she reflects 10 Abdul JanMohamed, “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and Literate Modes in Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, XV/4 (October 1984), 19-39. 11 As mentioned in Chapter 2, for instance in Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, or Our Mutual Friend. 12 On Malouf’s portrayals of the native Other and his transcendence of colonialist discourse, see also Marc Delrez and Paulette Michel-Michot, “The Politics of Metamorphosis: Cultural Transformation in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon”, in The Contact and the Culmination, eds Marc Delrez and Benedicte Ledent, Liège, 1997, 150-70. 13 Mike Marais, “‘Omnipotent Fantasies’ of a Solitary Self: J.M.Coetzee’s ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXIX/2 (1993), 48-65.

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I had been using my own tools to shape a world I now know I can never live in, had been trying to make sense of the years spent feeling isolated because I have ta grammata, and because ta grammata I have are not the right ones. There I was struggling to write a biography of an illiterate person and becoming daily more aware of the contradictions involved in the task. (AO, 9: cf. 83)

What she once identified as ignorance Gillian now understands as another form of knowledge. She ceases to view Aphrodite’s lack of schooling, her illiteracy as naivety or ignorance. In fact, she comes to see herself as unenlightened in comparison to her mother-in-law and begins to accept that, in their relationship, it is she who must assume the role of the pupil and learn the things Aphrodite deems necessary for her to know. “Yiayia cannot read, write, ride a bicycle or drive a car”, Gillian reflects: She has never worn makeup, stayed in hospital or had an operation. She cannot swim, and has only once been in a boat. She does not possess a clock or watch. (AO, 96)

Yet, in spite, or, in fact, because of such disadvantages, Yiayia is less deluded than are people “who try to nail time down by reducing it to space” (AO, 96) and who have “imbibed the notion of flatness through different maps and projections” (AO, 95). More importantly even, the older woman’s consciousness is not burdened with the kind of extravagant and apparently useless skills and insights her daughter-inlaw may call her own. Her knowledge, though rudimentary, is absolutely essential to the continuity of life in her village: She can … kill rabbits and hens and use up every portion of a pig. She has a huge store of genealogical data, and a sizeable store of mirologia, the songs of fate sung at funerals. She can lay out a corpse. (AO, 96)

In the end Gillian admits “her own small world has made mine larger”: “She has given me, strange though it may seem, a link to my own past” (AO, 7-8). Ovid’s relationship to the barbarians undergoes a similar transformation as he becomes aware of the fallaciousness of his own understanding of the world and discovers that, rather than trying to


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convert the barbarians to his mode of thinking, he ought to obtain some insight into theirs by learning their language, which he finds “oddly moving” and not at all like Latin, “whose endings are designed to express difference, the smallest nuances of thought and feeling”. The barbarians’ tongue, he explains, somehow seems “closer to the first principle of creation, closer to whatever force it is that makes things what they are” (IL, 65). Willingly, therefore, he allows himself to be initiated into this other language and, indeed, comes to feel profoundly liberated by his escapes into the new medium. “I am a Roman”, he reminds himself when, roaming the surroundings of Tomis with the barbarians, he follows the invitation to join the men’s hunting ritual and catches himself trying to imitate their bloodcurdling death cry. “I am a Roman and a poet. But that breath and the sound it [the cry] carries still moves out from my body into the world, and I feel freer for it” (IL, 45). While, earlier in the novel, he attempts to teach one of the children in Tomis to speak Latin and even to read and to write it, Ovid now advances to seeking instruction from the barbarians himself. From the old man in whose house he stays he learns how to weave nets, which he finds to be a profoundly satisfying aesthetic occupation – like weaving texts in spoken or written language. “I am happy to learn all this”, he therefore notes, explaining: What is beautiful is the way one thing is fitted perfectly to another, and our ingenuity is also beautiful in finding the necessary correspondence between things. It is a kind of poetry, all this business with nets and hooks, these old analogies. (IL, 64)

A new phase in his transformation from teacher and poet to keen student of the barbarians’ silent skills commences when Ovid’s relationship to the wolf child leads him outside the village, which he will finally leave together with the Child, “his Child”. Venturing further and further into the land of the “real barbarians”, whose savageness, like the Out People’s in Heroes and Villains, by far exceeds that of the barbarians, and, at the same time, penetrating deeper and deeper into complete wilderness, Ovid discovers that his companion’s language, too, functions just like writing, as a medium of poetic appropriation of one’s immediate environment. In land utterly alien to him, the child’s language, Ovid realizes, remains a means of

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communicating with nature far superior to his own attempts at capturing the surrounding world in letters: He also assumes, on our walks, the role of teacher, pointing out to me tracks in the grass and explaining with signs or gestures of his body, or with imitation sounds, which bird or beast it is that has made them .... All this world is alive for him. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read. (IL, 93)

In seeking to emulate the Child’s wordless communion with nature, Ovid expects to find the ultimate form of self-expression for himself. “Once, in the early days of my desolation, I thought I might learn to write in the language of the spiders”, the poet declares: “Now, led by the Child, I am on my way to it. The true language” (IL, 97). For Ovid, this “true language” constitutes “some earlier and more universal language than ... Latin”. While he describes Latin as “a language for distinctions, every ending [of which] defines and divides”, he celebrates the Child’s language as “a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation” and proclaims: We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again. (IL, 98)

The recuperation of what he lost by growing up and into a celebrated poet – the “part of our nature that we share with the wolves” (IL, 10) – presupposes a return to a state of being in which self-assurance is replaced by an innocent, primeval bewilderment at human nature and its creative capacity, at “all that we have discovered and made – in ourselves and in the world around us” (IL, 81). As Malouf has Ovid put it, the cynical metropolitan poet, who barely knew a seed, flower, or tree, “had to enter the silence to find a password that would release [him] from [his] own life” (IL, 32). And as Malouf himself puts it in the Afterword to his novel: “My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of ‘the changes’ live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display” (IL, 154).14 It is a rehabilitation of the exile Ovid, 14

Analogously, in an interview with Nikos Papastergiadis, Malouf explains the point of Ovid’s exile as an opportunity for the poet to metamorphose into a better


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then, that Malouf tries to accomplish by making the poet’s words, once callously presented under the mere guise of truth, come true in the reality of his fiction. The price for being taken literally, however, is that Ovid be portrayed as ultimately merging with his alter ego, the wolf child, and metamorphosing into a preliterate being himself. This metamorphosis must end with the poet’s extinction, that is, with his physical death in the moment of which he does not know whether he will be remembered at all, whether any writing of his will escape the banning of his books from libraries and the public burning ordered by Emperor Augustus. “Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known?”, he demands of the reader: Has some phrase of mine slipped through as a quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man’s poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated? Have I survived? (IL, 19)

The question of survival, of being remembered after one’s death, of “leaving one’s mark”, as Carter has Donally put it in Heroes and Villains, is also raised, albeit with a slight difference, in Aphrodite and the Others where Gillian laments that her mother-in-law’s memory, “the precious storehouse of the oral/illiterate person” (AO, 66), is failing and where she explains that the purpose of her recording Aphrodite’s story is not to immortalise herself, but to secure Aphrodite the place in history which she, like so many other Greek women, filled without their own people taking any notice of them. Arguably, Ovid’s question, “Have I survived?” is an expression of the same patriarchal self-centredness that has occluded women from the official history of Greece. Coming from Ovid, it is an absurd question, at least in the eyes of the modern reader who is at once made aware that already its formulation at the beginning of An Imaginary Life presupposes that Ovid has survived and is remembered. With it, Malouf effectively foregrounds the fictionality of his story through which he gives, indeed gives back, to Ovid an imaginary life, one that being, an inspired and less self-interested poet as follows: “The sting of the punishment is not just the exclusion from home but also the necessity to define a different relationship to language. Ovid’s crime is, after all, in his exorbitant and rather decadent use of language” (Nikos Papastergiadis, “David Malouf and Languages for Landscape: An Interview”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, XXV/3 [July 1994], 83).

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has little basis in actual fact. As Malouf himself explains in the Afterword to An Imaginary Life: “what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible events” (IL, 153). Rather than an act of resuscitating the historical Ovid, of calling up his spirit, the reconstruction of the poet’s last years, for Malouf, represents an act of transforming his image, of manipulating the world’s memory of him. The power of writing as a mode of prolonging or extending life constitutes a central theme in most of the novels studied in this book. In the four works analysed in this chapter and in Chapters 5 and 6, it may be seen as even more than a thematic concern. Apart from reflecting the possibilities of an individual’s metaphysical survival, these novels actually exemplify such survival in presenting their central characters not only as agents of certain developments, but also as products of an active remembering. Tuami remembers Lok and the other Neanderthals after they have died; Marianne listens to Jewel’s brother Johnny recounting her husband’s death, Gillian records and reconstructs retrospectively her mother-in-law’s life; Ovid appeals to the modern reader, the “unknown friend” (IL, 18) living in another century, to take note of his tale. Thus inscribed, the memory, the idea of the characters is invested with the same textual substance as are their ‘actual’ lives. Spelt out, put down on paper, these lives obtain material reality, becoming an illustration of the deceased’s story continuing beyond his or her death. Rather than separating ‘actual’ from after-life, the event of the subject’s death seems to be embedded between them and to combine them into a coherent whole. Thus it marks at best an open ending, not, however, a total closure. Metafictionally, explicit and implicit reflections on how the Neanderthal Lok, the Barbarian Jewel, the illiterate Aphrodite, or Ovid – and, with Ovid, the wolf child – “survive” in another’s (or in an Other’s) consciousness and eventually are appropriated into a literate discourse require to be read as highly critical comments on twentieth-century Western historiography. As has been argued in the case of The Inheritors, Tuami’s recollection of Lok marks a counterdiscursive intervention in received constructions of primitive humans. Bouras and Malouf, in turn, query the one-sidedness of the received history of European cultures by exposing its strategic occlusion of any form of existence that fails to corroborate the picture of South Eastern


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Europe as the cradle of literate civilization. With their re-invention of non- and illiteracy as aspects of European cultural history, they destabilize the popular myth of the “grand narrative of progress”,15 according to which the West has always assumed the highest point of civilization, and posit the existence of other stories, broadly unacknowledged only because they have never been written down. In the process, they take care not to isolate the alternative trajectories of cultural development they devise from documented history. Using public knowledge of Ovid’s exile and of the turbulences of twentiethcentury Greek history, respectively, Malouf and Bouras not only validate their own tales of “imaginary lives”, but also create an impression of the fragmentary nature of received histories. On the surface, the counter-histories Malouf and Bouras offer appear Eurocentric on account of their being set mainly in Europe. However, the link to Anglophone Australian culture which is established implicitly in An Imaginary Life and only cursorily in Aphrodite and the Others is still obvious. More than that, it acquires special significance in relation to the conflicting associations which the Eastern Mediterranean evokes in Australian cultural consciousness. South Eastern Europe is perceived as the place where, as Gillian Bouras points out, alphabetic thinking commenced and where, as David Malouf reminds us, the first literary endeavours in the history of Western civilization were undertaken. Yet it is also the place of origin of a major part of the Australian population, for many of whom the displacement they suffered upon their arrival in Australia must have been intensified by the foreignness of the English language and the resultant sense of having regressed into a state of complete illiteracy. As the grandson of a Lebanese immigrant who never learnt to speak English, David Malouf possesses the same awareness of the migrants’ linguistic deprivation and disadvantage that Gillian Bouras cultivated both as a teacher of English to non-Anglophone immigrants and as the wife of a Greek migrant. Quite unconventionally, instead of identifying the immigrant’s cultural displacement as a phenomenon specific to New-World societies, both Bouras and Malouf place it in a wider historical context and provocatively suggest seeing it also as a European concern. In so doing, they also contest the myth of the Old 15

Carr, 199.

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World’s cultural superiority, apparently more deeply engrained in Australian thinking than in the thinking of other former settler colonies. To it, A.A. Phillips, one of Australia’s leading literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century, attributes a prevailing Australian attitude of cultural self-depreciation and subservience to European culture, famously terming this attitude “Cultural Cringe” in an essay that appeared in Meanjin in 1950. If the Australians’ cultural servility has since transformed, as Mary Kalantzis hopes,16 into proud acceptance of their uniqueness as a hybrid Eurasian people espousing civic pluralism and productive diversity, it is also owing to the kind of revaluation undertaken in An Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others of Australian literate culture and its origins. Neither of the two novels simply aims to disown non-literacy as a feature of Australian culture altogether. Nor do the two texts identify scriptlessness as a straightforward sign of inferiority. On the contrary, with a sensitivity to cultural hubris that may deserve to be described as typically postcolonial, Bouras and Malouf scrupulously avoid insinuating that the absence of writing from a culture is an indication of that culture’s backwardness. What, for them, remains a far more conclusive indicator of a literate culture’s level of civilization is its awareness of non-literate alterity and its capacity to appropriate it into its collective consciousness and take on responsibility for it. It is a modest gesture that the latter entails in the eyes of Malouf and Bouras. All they insist that literates who try to capture a non-literate Other in writing need to do is to draw attention to “the intractable problem of representing but not speaking ‘for’ the ‘other’”, and to acknowledge “those moments when the coherence of discursive systems is called into disrepute” because it is in these moments that the sign of difference is most clearly articulated.17

42.

16

Mary Kalantzis, “Cultural Cringe and Its Others”, Meanjin, LIX/3 (2000), 39-

17

Spinks, 173.

THE NON-LITERATE IN SIGHT: THE UNLETTERED NATIVE IN CONTACT NARRATIVES


As long as literate and non-literate individuals and groups exist independently of each other within their different noetic systems the concept of illiteracy is redundant. It becomes necessary only where an occasion for comparison arises. In the novels discussed in the previous chapters this occasion is generated through a move outside the cultural contexts in which the narratives themselves are implicated. The glimpse the reader catches of pre-historic man in The Inheritors, Marianne’s abduction and acceptance into a post-nuclear tribe of barbarians in Heroes and Villains, Ovid’s exile in An Imaginary Life, and Gillian’s sojourn in the village of her late Greek husband in Aphrodite and the Others all suggest an act of transgression from the familiar into the realm of the unknown, if not of the uncanny. Where this move constitutes more than a perspectival manoeuvre,1 the character undertaking it is alone, entering as an exile, adventurer, or pioneer of sorts into an entirely new and alien world. The gaze Marianne, Ovid, or Gillian applies yields self-consciously subjective descriptions of encounters with non-literate persons, narratives in which each of the literate observers remains locked in the position of the spellbound outsider. The ensuing relationships between the displaced literates and those they have come to live with resist description in conventional terms. Typically, the spectacular wedding ritual performed for Marianne and the barbarian prince Jewel in Heroes and Villains is only to compensate for the lack of any deeper bond between them. The savage Jewel with his grandiosely tattooed back can never return Marianne’s exacting gaze but must suffer his own reduction to a passive object of contemplation and does so most painfully when with his wife. Likewise the moments of intimacy invoked between the literate and non-literate protagonists in An Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others pass without generating any mutual understanding. Instead the non-literates in these two novels remain enigmatic and distant, and, most importantly, free of any conscious desire to change, let alone to appropriate the literate protagonists’ mode of thinking. Indeed, the autonomy the scriptless Other embodies prompts scribes like Ovid and Gillian, but also Carter’s heroine Marianne, to dream of a way of disowning their book learning, of undoing their education, and of forgetting their literate skills – in short, of shedding their literacy altogether. With the projection of such this impossible development

1

In fact, only in The Inheritors is this not the case.

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the narratives themselves finally transcend the extra-textual reality in which they at first seem rooted. By contrast, the narratives studied in this section undertake no comparable transgression. They remain embedded within a distinctive historical context as they, too, recount certain moments of contact between literate Anglophone regimes and non-literate native communities. Their frame of reference never extends beyond the culture within which they themselves are implicated. In The Heart of the Matter (1948) Graham Greene charts the administrative structures set up by British colonists in an unidentified West African colony during the Second World War. In Things Fall Apart (1958) Chinua Achebe traces the origins of Nigerian written literature back to the first exposure of an Igbo community with Western civilization. In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) J.M. Coetzee recounts a white colonialist’s discovery of his unwitting involvement in a brutal scheme to exterminate a group of desert nomads. In Potiki Patricia Grace queries the appropriation of Western literacy into Maori culture, while in Love Medicine Louise Erdrich records the effects of a very similar process on a Chippewa family. The historical specificity of the tales determines the mode in which the cultural encounters are told as well as the constellations that arise from these encounters. Accordingly, the literate characters in the narratives examined here are no longer the fantastically displaced individuals the lonely scribes Ovid and Gillian represent in An Imaginary Life and Aphrodite and the Others. Rather they are presented as the voluntary or involuntary agents of a vast and powerful machinery systematically employing writing as a means of suppression and exploitation. This facilitates a criticism of Western literate civilization much more poignant and searing than the general querying of the intrinsic value of writing and book learning undertaken in Aphrodite and the Others, An Imaginary Life, Heroes and Villains, and, indirectly, also in The Inheritors. Whereas these novels raise few concrete charges against literate civilization, the narratives by Greene, Achebe, Coetzee, Grace, and Erdrich do. They identify writing as an instrument of conquest, as a central means of controlling, disowning, and transforming indigenous societies, of corroding their oral traditions and in the process destroying their integrity and cohesion, of destabilizing their value systems and generating asymmetries and conflicts which effectively weaken their

The Non-Literate in Sight

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defence against corruption and exploitation. While a perfectly harmless and mostly well-meant exercise in Malouf and Bouras, writing is configured as a profoundly dangerous and damaging activity in The Heart of the Matter, Waiting for the Barbarians, Things Fall Apart, Potiki, and Love Medicine. These novels grant writing a power more devastating even than that of Dr Donally’s oddly perverted applications of literacy in Heroes and Villains. Unlike Donally’s graffiti, the writings Greene, Coetzee, Achebe, Grace, and Erdrich have their most literate characters produce are officially authorized by regimes taking great pride in their literacy, in fact deriving moral justification and a claim to cultural superiority directly from it. It is in the first place to negate the legitimacy of the colonial regimes they describe that the novels examined in the following chapters call in question the assumed intrinsic goodness of the wellread and erudite individual. To this end, they persistently juxtapose descriptions of their Western characters’ apparent sophistication with scenes of utmost brutality. Offices and libraries become anterooms to, if not themselves sites of torture and execution; would-be writers draw inspiration from the sight of dead bodies; shrewd negotiators resort to murderous assaults when their cleverly phrased letters fail to achieve the results they desire. Predictably, the prime target of the acts of aggression described is the scriptless native whose ultimate destruction symbolizes the futility to resist the power of the written word and encroaching culture it represents. Ali in The Heart of the Matter, Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, and Toko in Potiki must die; so must most of the barbarians in J.M. Coetzee’s novel; Nanapush in Love Medicine loses his memory and, with his past, also any desire to continue living. The blatant injustice of their defeats turns the willing espousal of literacy by other members of their community into a bitterly ironic turn of events. Indeed it is exacerbated by the fact that despite their obedient appropriation of literacy in an often painful process of indoctrination and self-denial, the strategies of communication they acquire never really enable them to assert their own rights. Their erudition and learning do not help them to change the terms which determine their negotiations with their exploiters. These terms always remain those of the colonist, most obviously so in Potiki and Love Medicine. As a result, the indigenous characters presented by Grace,

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Erdrich, and Achebe as endorsing literacy end up in even greater states of unease, beside which the ignorance of their still illiterate fellow beings comes to appear almost like a blessing. This does not mean that non-literacy is idealized unreservedly by Erdrich, Grace, Coetzee, or Achebe, let alone by Greene. Rather it is framed as a perfectly natural aspect of the African native’s culture, an aspect so natural that it begs no special description, analysis, or justification. Only in the novels set in the later twentieth century, in Potiki and Love Medicine, is the illiteracy of individual characters specifically attributed to a conscious choice against the conventional education supplied by a school system whose cardinal agenda is to exorcize indigenous modes of thinking. Obviously, this information is supplied solely for the sake of the uninitiated reader. The members of the native’s community do not need such explication. As Love Medicine and Potiki suggest, for them to live without writing is not only the original but also still the most effective form of enacting and perpetuating their traditions. In their eyes non-writingness signifies a rare form of cultural purity that endows certain members of their community with the unique ability to engage in a mystical communion with their land. Because the literate natives in Erdrich’s and Grace’s novel have lost the ability to engage in such a communion, only the illiterate may claim to be firmly rooted in those places which have not yet been permeated by writing, those realms not yet seized by inscription or occupied by zealous scribes and readers. To different degrees The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, Waiting for the Barbarians, Potiki, and Love Medicine therefore rely on settings well outside the habitat of their literate characters, places devoid of books and paper, retreats from locations crammed with papers and books, hiding places in which the non-literate may still move at will, undisturbed by the ethnographer’s curious gaze. There the literate’s vision invariably becomes blurred, distorted, confused. The ways of seeing to which the still occasional literate intruders are accustomed fail them, generating severely flawed images of the land and its people. The reflection of the face of a Mende boy in the rear mirror of a car, the mirage of a group of nomads made indistinct by the flickering heat, the sight of a decomposing body unaccountably hanging from a tree are what the confused literates’ eyes take in as they traverse such land in The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, Waiting for the Barbarians, or Love


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Medicine. On the colonists’ journeys the non-literate Chippewa, Maori, Igbo, or Mende remains invisible in the darkness, epitomizing darkness invisible. In linking the physical expansion of Western literacy directly with the seizure of native land by Western colonists and with the continuing usurpation of what little land has remained in native hands by the white elite of former colonial societies, Greene, Coetzee, Achebe, Grace, and Erdrich extend and complicate the received story of the dissemination of the alphabet. Jared Diamond synopsizes this story as follows: Writing marched together with weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest. The commands of the monarchs and merchants who organized colonizing fleets were conveyed in writing. The fleets set their courses by maps and written sailing directions prepared by previous expeditions. Written accounts of earlier expeditions motivated later ones, by describing the wealth and fertile lands awaiting the conquerors. The accounts taught subsequent explorers what conditions to expect, and helped them prepare themselves. The resulting empires were administered with the aid of writing. While all those types of information were also transmitted by other means in preliterate societies writing made the transmission easier, more detailed, more accurate, more persuasive.2

The novels studied in this section cast severe doubt on the alleged improvement of existing information flows and on the expediency of initiating preliterate societies to what Diamond holds to be “more detailed, more accurate, more persuasive” modes of knowledge transfer. At the same time they do not negate the need for native communities to endorse literacy. Their own writtenness is the most unequivocal sign that their agenda is not a nostalgic romanticization of native orality. Rather it is to advocate the invention of new applications of writing opposed to the uses to which the written word is put by colonial and neo-colonial powers. Greene, for instance, devises a mode of ironic self-deconstruction whereby the point of view of his main character is effectively invalidated to such an extent that even this character’s reading of the death of his Mende boy Ali seems to command retrospective re-interpretation. Coetzee radicalizes 2

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, London, 1998, 215-16.

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this strategy by hinting at the possibility that the literates in his novel (including the narrator) may have underestimated their enemies’ (the dreaded barbarians’) intellectual scope all along and failed to realize that these barbarians possess a writing system so intricate that no Westerner is able to access it. The implicit and profoundly ironical empowering and literalization of the native thus performed by Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians points in the direction of what Grace, Erdrich, and Achebe try to accomplish with their emphatic validation of native orality as an enduring aspect of their cultures and with their simultaneous construction of these cultures as highly flexible frameworks, inherently suited to adopt literate communication. Indeed, the special way in which Achebe, Erdrich, and Grace render and employ orality in Things Fall Apart, Love Medicine, and Potiki suggests far more than a straightforward adoption of or adaptation to a Western technology of knowledge storage and transfer. Their texts project their people’s appropriation of literacy not only as a self-preservative measure but also as a form of cultural enrichment and renewal. They invite an understanding of writing as opening up new ways of articulating Igbo, Maori, and Chippewa oralities, thereby broadening the spectrum of positions their people may assume vis-àvis their own and other cultures. As much as critics have been talking of a distinctly African, Maori, or Chippewa literary mode having been conceived by Achebe, Grace, and Erdrich, as appropriate it seems to speak of new oralities – literate oralities or “oracities” – crystallizing in their writings. The synthesis of different noetic systems they forge in their novels can be shown to enable the authors in the first place to realize their declared aim to address not so much an international audience as their own people and provide for them a new context in which to share and negotiate the experience of their native cultures. It is only as a secondary goal that they challenge other audiences to understand and respect this context also in material terms as cultural space retrieved from colonial usurpation.

EARLY CONTACTS IN FICTIONAL AFRICA


The three novels to be discussed in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 rely equally on the vantage point of an official representative of colonial power (a white male bureaucrat in each case) from whose point of view the non-literate natives portrayed are ultimately Othered. In the process the intrinsic writtenness of the individual narratives is asserted against the scriptless orality these narratives address, even if in significantly dissimilar ways. It is primarily for this commonality that The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, and Waiting for the Barbarians are juxtaposed here. Of course, the fact that all three texts are also set (or at least readable as being set1) in Africa is no mere coincidence either. This analogy, however, is qualified by the radically different angles from which Greene, Achebe, and Coetzee represent Africa. The Heart of the Matter is the literary outcome of Graham Greene’s service for the Foreign Office in Freetown, Sierra Leone, during the Second World War. Greene’s cardinal aim in this novel is to provide an authentic rendering of the community of European expatriates stationed in West Africa at the time and of their complete and utter lack of understanding of things and people African. Accordingly, Greene largely eclipses the African people from his narrative and minimizes descriptions of their land and their culture. By contrast, in Things Fall Apart it is the British colonists whom the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe strategically marginalizes in favour of his African characters, their traditions, tales, and experiences. As he himself has repeatedly noted, the novel was spawned by a profound sense of discontent with the racist inscriptions of Africans propagated by European writers such as Joseph Conrad or Joyce Cary.2 The image of Igbo culture Achebe offers in Things Fall Apart breaks with the conceptualization of Africa these writers seem to recommend. Not only is it founded on a pronouncedly non-European perspective; it also conveys a distinctive sense of appreciation of African culture with the intention of injecting a new feeling of self-worth in African audiences and to teach them, as Achebe puts it, “that their past – with all its imperfections was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them”.3 Finally, in Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee submits yet another reading of what he does not explicitly identify as Africa and the 1 The unspecific setting of Waiting for the Barbarians allows also a different interpretation. 2 He says so, for instance, in Home and Exile under the special heading “Mister Johnson’s Countryman” (Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile, New York, 2001, 18-35). 3 Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day, London, 1975, 44-45.

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African native. It is hardly surprising that as a white South African of Dutch origin, who had studied and worked in Europe and the US before he became a writer,4 Coetzee, too, should choose to recount the colonization of a native people from the point of view of an outsider, a go-between at best, not at all unlike the protagonist of The Heart of the Matter. Yet while Waiting for the Barbarians, like Greene’s novel, criticizes the brutal indifference of a colonial establishment to the colonized Other, it does not simply individualize this indifference and locate it only in certain of its characters. Coetzee goes further and identifies the inhumanity of the individual colonizers he portrays as the workings of a sinister propaganda machine systematically suppressing any understanding between colonizer and colonized. Despite the different angles from which Coetzee, Achebe, and Greene develop their stories of cultural contact and, as part of these stories, their accounts of Western literates meeting non-literate natives and vice versa, all three authors can be shown to react, consciously or not, to the standard perception of sub-Saharan Africa as untouched by literacy until the advent of the Europeans. Coetzee in particular does so not without remembering that this assumption is flawed. Already in the eighth century, literacy came to sub-Saharan Africa with the Berbers, who were the first to make the trek across the Sahara and subsequently converted many of the merchants of West Africa to Islam. It is true, however, that the masses of rural peasants retained their traditional beliefs and stayed unlettered. In the eleventh century, Islamic conversion was given new impetus by a Tuareg group of Muslim puritans, the Almoravid intervention. They caused the spread of Arabic writing as far as the Ghana Empire, from where it was diffused into the interior of Africa via the learning centres in Djenne and Timbuktu in Mali during the fifteenth century. Eventually the Arabic alphabet was adapted for Swahili, the lingua franca of central and East Africa in the nineteenth century. On the east coast of Africa, literacy was also disseminated by Arab traders and slavers from the

4

Or, as Huggan and Watson put it, as a “first-world novelist writing out of a South African context, from within a culture which is as bizarre and conflicted an amalgam of first- and third-world elements as any of this planet” (Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, Introduction, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, with a Preface by Nadine Gordimer, Houndmills, 1996, 1).

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seventh century onwards – although never becoming particularly popular there either. Christian literacy was first introduced in Africa by Greek-speaking Syrian missionaries in the fourth century AD. They brought the ancient script of the Semitic-speaking Sabaeans to Ethiopia, where it has remained the official writing system to the present day. Christians resumed missionary work in Africa only in the second half of the nineteenth century and it was then that printing commenced in Africa. Like Arabic literacy, knowledge of the Latin alphabet remained restricted to a small part of the native population in pre-industrial Africa, namely, as Ngugi reminds us, “to clerks, soldiers, policemen, and the petty civil servant, the nascent messenger class”.5 By the early 1920s the Roman script had replaced Ajami, a variation of the Arabic script used for Hausa in West Africa. At the same time it came to be commonly used for Swahili in East Africa. Still, the economic importance of mass literacy was not recognized until after Europe’s colonies began to attain independence. This also accounts for the limited success of a series of ingenious attempts made during the nineteenth century to invent special writing systems for individual African peoples. The scripts created in the process were not mere imitations of the Arabic and Latin alphabets but genuine endeavours to demonstrate abilities equal to those of Western settlers, traders, teachers, missionaries, and administrators. Though popular, these systems served communities without true political power and therefore soon disappeared again.6 One case in point is Vai, an indigenous West African form of writing used on the coast of upper Guinea. The Vai script is believed to have been invented between 1829 and 1839 by Momoru Doalu Bukere, who, legend has it, had come into contact with missionaries, learnt to admire their habit of communicating over great distances, and resolved to conceive of a means that would allow his people to do the same. With similar determination an African tailor is said to have devoted himself to the fabrication of a script for the Mende, which he allegedly accomplished in the period of three and a half months. Together with some of his dignitaries, King Njoya of Cameroon, finally, contrived Bamum, had it taught in special schools and “book 5 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Studies in African Literature New Series, London, 1981, 67. 6 Gaur, 94.

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houses” throughout the country, and encouraged its application in official documents, histories, correspondence, and Bible translation. After his death in 1932, this script too disappeared. The failures of the scripts of the Vai and the Mende, of Bamum and of Nsibidi, an iconographic Igbo script, are indicative of the enduring strength of the orally transmitted cosmologies of African societies. The diversity of African languages and the cohesive force of African oral traditions seem to have always prevented the kind of homogenizing process Europe saw in the course of its transformation into a full-blown print civilization. The chirographically organized and, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, visually biased European colonizers clearly were unaware of the obstacle that the plurality of African oralities constituted to a swift and comprehensive alphabetization of the continent. Apparently deaf to the multiplicity of African voices and blind to the difficulties which the forced imposition of Western literate thinking created for Africans, they confidently adhered to the conviction that writing was a desirable and beneficial accomplishment easily bestowed on the African native. The error of this judgment is a recurrent concern in African writing. Though rarely stated explicitly in Things Fall Apart, the threat of European literacy encroaching on African life and its damaging effects on native oral culture looms large in Achebe’s novel. The unnaturalness of its implementation in Africa is also addressed in The Heart of the Matter as well as in Waiting for the Barbarians. Despite their own dependence on writing as a tool of artistic articulation, Greene and Coetzee, too, comment on writing most critically in these two novels, stressing the destructive ends to which it is employed in the colonial enterprise. Neither in Things Fall Apart nor in The Heart of the Matter or in Waiting for the Barbarians is writing used for mediation between colonizers and colonized. Its function appears to be solely as a means of systematic and sustained alienation. At first glance, this negative view seems to derive historical plausibility from the historical (or, in the case of Waiting for the Barbarians, from the pseudo-historical) settings of the novels. All three narratives take place at times or in situations clearly predating any creative appropriation of writing by the colonized or postcolonial native. This conveniently allows for any more positive application of writing to be categorically eclipsed. Yet at least in the case of Achebe


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and Coetzee this omission has to be seen also in another light. For it stands in direct contrast to the thoroughly optimistic assumptions concerning Africa’s literalization underlying contemporary theoretical debates over the benefits of Europe’s influence on African cultures. Conducted mainly by African writers and scholars of literature, this debate has revolved above all around the legacy of European languages, notably of English, and of their adequacy as means of forging modern African literatures. The views advanced famously diverge in opposing directions. Calls to dispense with “the linguistic bequest of [their] colonial master” altogether and write exclusively in an African language, as formulated by Ngugi, have been countered by assertions that the African writer ought to “aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience”.7 One of the most remarkable features of the debate is the commitment of all contesting parties to the creation of an African literature first and foremost for the African people, in actual fact, for the African masses, and not for an international audience. While Irele, Wali, Achebe, and Ngugi alike doubt whether writing in English is ideally suited to reach the African masses, they do not seem interested in the question whether writing per se is an appropriate means to this end. They appear unconcerned by the fact that the African masses can barely be appealed to either in English or in their own tongues as long as illiteracy rates in most sub-Saharan African countries stay as high as fifty per cent and higher.8 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for instance, is optimistic that the African peasantry could derive the same confidence and sense of cohesion from literature written in African languages that the petty-bourgeoisie derived from the hybrid minority tradition of African-European writing.9 Admittedly the spectacular success of Ngugi’s novel Petals of Blood illustrates how even texts written for literate reception can be 7 See also Wole Ogundele, “Language, Theory, and Modern African Literature: Some More Questions”, in Meditations on African Literature, ed. Dubem Okafor, 1734. 8 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “Illiteracy Rates by Gender in Sub-Saharan Africa: 2000-2004” (20-08-2003): www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?ID=4927_201&ID2= DO_TOPIC. 9 Ngugi, 21. Ngugi even asks at one point, “Could I write for an audience that had never read a novel in the same way as I would write for an audience that had read or was aware of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Wole Soyinka or Ayi KweiArmah?” (75).

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made accessible to larger non-literate audiences by oral transmission.10 Despite its vital importance as a specifically African aesthetic system, oral transmission can, however, barely be relied upon to guarantee the dissemination of African writing. Nor can its theorization explain away more mundane impediments to the growth of the African literatures, such as the smallness of the African book market, the scarcity of publishing houses, the lack of distribution outlets, the high cost of books, or the reduced support of African writers by multinational publishing firms.11 On the contrary, the Marxist vision of literature as a mass medium underlying the arguments put forward by African intellectuals ultimately seems to allow no deeper understanding of the elitist nature of literary discourse and the exclusion of the African masses from it than do the colonial inscriptions of Africa in opposition to which this vision has been forged. It is for this reason that Abdul JanMohamed objects to the continuing controversy over the suitability of the English as a vehicle of African identity. The question African theorists and writers have failed to ask, he argues, is whether the medium of writing can at all “do justice” to the scriptlessness of African societies. “Doing justice” to this scriptlessness, for JanMohamed, means first of all representing the oral/mythic African cultures “authentic[ally]”, that is, in the way experienced by oral people and peoples, rather than from a

10

The channels by which Petals of Blood as well as A Grain of Wheat reached also unlettered Kenyans are used even more effectively in Ngugi’s first Gikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross, which “assumes an implied audience of hearers, rather than readers” (Oliver Lovesey, “Accommodation and Revolt: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross”, in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Anna Rutherford, Sydney, 1992, 155; see also V.S. Srinivas, “Politicizing Language: The Relevance of Ngugi’s Rejection of English”, in Indian Response to African Writing, eds A. Ramakrishna Rao and C.R. Visweswara Rao, New Delhi, 1993, 102, and James Vuiningoma, “Literacy and Orality in African Literature: The Case of Ngugi wa Thiongo”, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, IX/2 [Spring 1987], 65-70). 11 See Christopher Miller, “Literary Studies and African Literature: The Challenge of Intercultural Literacy”, in Africa and the Disciplines, eds Robert Bates, V.Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, Chicago, 1993, 224, as well as Bernth Lindfors, “Disciplinary Concerns”, in Long Drums and Canons: Teaching and Researching African Literatures, African World Press, 1995, 127, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, “Oral Power and Europhone Glory: Orature, Literature, and Stolen Legacies”, in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa, Oxford, 1998, 117.


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Eurocentric and thus distinctively literate angle.12 Further, for JanMohamed, “doing justice” to African cultures also entails rendering European literacy from outside to document and insistently highlight the foreignness still pertaining to originally European literate practices when applied in an African context. As the following readings will show, it is precisely this foreignness that Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, and J.M. Coetzee express, albeit in radically dissimilar ways, in The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, and Waiting for the Barbarians. While in The Heart of the Matter, a text set in Africa, yet written neither by an African nor for an African audience, the Othering of Western literate thinking is not an openly pursued goal, in Things Fall Apart, told almost entirely from the point of view of Africans who have never had any contact with Europeans, it certainly is. Yet rather than deconstructing its own writtenness, Achebe’s narrative accomplishes the other part of the project of “doing justice” to African cultures envisaged by JanMohamed: with his familiarization of Igbo orality in Things Fall Apart, Achebe effectively creates a matrix against which the colonialist literate practices introduced in the final part of the narrative have to be perceived as unfamiliar, foreign, alien, and alienating. Coetzee, finally, ventures beyond Greene’s criticism of Western culture by exposing the inadequacy of imperialist inscriptions of indigenousness, and even stating the implication of his own text in this inscription. Indigenous orality, it seems, is not an issue in Waiting for the Barbarians. The natives in this text are profoundly silent. Yet it is clear that their silence is a sign not of their muteness but the result of their epistemic colonization through the act of representation. More overtly than the other two novels, then, Coetzee’s text questions itself for attempting to contain in writing what exists well outside the realm of the written.

12

JanMohamed, 19.


CHAPTER EIGHT BUT A GLIMPSE IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR: THE UNINTELLIGIBLE NATIVE IN GRAHAM GREENE’S THE HEART OF THE MATTER

In his travel book Journey Without Maps, Greene describes Liberia as a country “saved from melodrama by its irony”. In an essay on Graham Greene, David Lodge notes that the same might be said of Greene’s own fiction. The Heart of the Matter, one of Greene’s most successful novels, can legitimately be classed as a melodramatic text in Lodge’s terms because it frames the tragic fall of the protagonist Henry Scobie, a Catholic Commissioner of Police in a British West African Colony, as the inevitable outcome of an almost grotesque accumulation of transgressions, such as adultery, blackmail, murder, and suicide, events dramatic enough in isolation but exacerbated in Greene’s text by their concurrence and the fact that they happen against the backdrop of the Second World War. As Lodge notes, the irony of The Heart of the Matter resides in the way Greene directs the reader’s sympathy and antipathy in the course of his narrative. As in other novels by Greene one is led to identify “not with the honest and brave, but with the criminal and cowardly; not with the rich and beautiful, but with the poor and ugly”.1 This is not absolutely clear from the beginning, though, when the central character of the novel, with whom the reader is invited to empathize, is introduced as a model of integrity and human kindness, sensitive to everyone’s problems, diplomatic in his application of authority, caring towards his dependants. Yet Scobie’s goodness proves a far more complex character trait than is apparent at the outset. This is revealed through his understanding of himself in relation to his expatriates and of their selfconscious enactment of British culture. At closer analysis one notes that it is above all by their attitude to writing in general and to British literature in particular that Greene defines each of his protagonists’ positions within the text. In so doing he accomplishes not simply a 1

As pointed out by David Lodge in “Graham Greene”, in Six Contemporary British Novelists, ed. George Stade, New York, 1976, 9.

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The Non-Literate in Sight: Early Contacts

privileging of his most literate characters, which Elizabeth Schafer regards as the main purpose of Greene’s insistent description of items containing writing and of events in which writing is produced, delivered, read, quoted, burnt, or shredded.2 In actual fact, Greene can be shown to be highly critical of the special kind of book learning displayed by his minor characters. He questions it from the point of view of Scobie, who expressly distances himself from the other Europeans in the novel and from their literary airs, declaring fairly early in the novel that he has no interest in literature and “no taste for reading”,3 least of all for poetry. All he has, the reader learns, is a “prose mind” (HM, 240) unsuited to understand his wife’s literary ambitions and obligations. Given to reading faces rather than books, Scobie knows that even if there were a book he could consult on his wife’s peculiar aspirations he would not be any wiser for it because he would never even bother to read “that sort of book” (HM, 253). On the whole, Scobie sees little use for writing other than as a means of documenting his dutiful execution of the orders he has been given. Indeed, the commissioner rarely applies his “awkward hand” outside his office. For letter-writing, he believes, does not “come easily” to him, and his police training, the reader is told, has taught him never to put even a “comforting lie upon paper over his signature” (HM, 141). Moreover, because of his open dislike, if not contempt, for any show of feelings, Scobie scrupulously avoids disclosing his own sentiments in written form. His distrust of the harmlessness of writing as a vehicle of truth is not ungrounded. As Elliott Malamet correctly points out, instances abound in The Heart of the Matter of writing obscuring and concealing, rather than revealing its own meaning: letters are misspelled or lost or stolen; cables informing Scobie about the illness and subsequent death of his daughter are sent in reverse order; official government telegrams are contradicted by other telegrams; Scobie’s diaries are terse and cryptic; as Yusef say, “Words are very complicated”.4

2

Elizabeth Schafer, “Shakespeare in Greeneland: A Note on The Heart of the Matter”, Journal of Modern Literature, XVII/4 (Spring 1991), 590. 3 Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter (1948), Penguin, 1962, 72. 4 Elliott Malamet, “Penning the Police/Policing the Pen: The Case of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter”, Twentieth Century Literature, XXXIX/3 (Fall 1993), 297.

But a Glimpse in the Rear View Mirror

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By contrast, Scobie’s expatriates seem perfectly reconciled to the distortions of meaning effected by writing and make ample use of its deceptive power, not without often enough succumbing to it themselves. With enthusiasm they engage in literate practices other than the mundane activities to which Scobie devotes himself in his office, such as writing letters, cables, diaries, reports, and notes. Their commitment is to what they deem higher concerns. They avidly read, discuss, and write poetry, go to the theatre, consume English novels shipped over from Britain, and partake in the events launched by the local library club, thus helping to build an enclave of European culture safely fenced off against the foreignness of the place in which they have come to live and cultivated their eccentric bookishness. Moreover, to underline the omnipresence of European literate civilization in the West African colony, Greene has the households and offices of his characters stacked with printed matter of all kinds: books wiped daily to avoid the damp (HM, 22), daybooks bound in pig skin (HM, 168), codebooks used for the translation of cables (HM, 168), books on African languages, books on African and other diseases (HM, 44), maps of the African continent. It is indeed a “claustrophobic intensity”5 Greene generates by simulating his European characters’ insularity and carefully omitting any descriptions of the culture of his African characters at the same time. However, the predominance of things British in the fictional world outlined in The Heart of the Matter belies the fragility of the fabric of cultural contacts and exchanges woven by Louise Scobie and likeminded English men and women. Greene enforces this impression with his insistent emphasis on the intrinsic foreignness of English books and libraries in Africa, on the difficulties of their transportation from England, and on their vulnerability to the African climate, censorship, and accidental neglect. The most dismal scene of abandon he invokes occurs on Scobie’s visit to the home of a young Englishman who has committed suicide. There Scobie finds books “stained with damp”, papers “dusty with inattention”, and a missionary filled with remorse because he declined the dead man’s invitation to share his books with him (HM, 87-88). This, the missionary ponders, might have prevented Pemberton from killing himself. Yet he was reluctant to supply the desired companionship 5

Grahame Smith, The Achievement of Graham Greene, Brighton, 1986, 92.

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because Pemberton’s books were not at all “the kind of books” he cares to read – “love stories, novels…” (HM, 86). Scobie does not condemn the missionary for his omission but offers no words of consolation either. For him, Father Clay is as guilty of “the crime of indifference” as the other eagerly literary characters around him.6 One of these is his wife, “literary Louise”, the “city intellectual” (HM, 31), as she is called derisively by others for organizing an exhibition of arts for shipwrecked seamen. Louise is known to like arts and poetry, and contemplates becoming “a professional” and turning “all this experience” she thinks she has accumulated while living in Africa into “a little money” by writing (HM, 24). Apart from Louise there is Mrs Halifax, keen organizer of library nights and so forgetful that she reads the same novels over and over again without knowing it (HM, 28). And there is Louise’s ardent admirer Wilson who professes that he does not read poetry but absorbs it “secretly, like a drug”, consumes The Golden Treasury with gusto at night, especially Longfellow, Macaulay, and Mangan, and who uses Wallace “for public exhibition” (HM, 12). It is these characters’ apparent passion for literature that Greene criticizes as a profoundly insincere pose assumed to compensate for their complete lack of interest in Africa. Scobie, who has come to know and love Africa and to appreciate the Africans’ mentality, doubts whether, to people like Louise and Wilson, truth has ever been of any real value. Rather, he suspects, kindness and lies “are worth a thousand truths” (HM, 58) for them. He winces at the banality of their sentimental and pretentiously poetic language, feels lost in the tangle of lies into which they force him, and gives up all hope that he will ever meet somebody amongst his expatriates whom he can, for once, take at their word (HM, 186). Thus estranged by his fellow-country men and women, Scobie places his trust in the only two Africans of dramatic significance in the novel: in his Mende houseboy Ali and, even more so, in the Syrian tradesman Yusef. In so doing he unwittingly undertakes a move across cultural borders, which eventually proves a fatal mistake. Ali and Yusef are inserted into the narrative separately and it is only towards the very end that the link Greene develops and sustains between them throughout the novel becomes apparent. Only then can the reader see that the fact that both characters are illiterate is more than a 6

J.A. Atkins, Graham Greene, London, 1966, 115.


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coincidence. Their inability to read and write is used as an index of their marginalized position in the society portrayed by Greene as well as of their detachment from Scobie’s Catholicism.7 To this end their illiteracy is translated also into a textual marginality insofar as neither character is fully developed and none of their tales completely told. Apart from these similarities there are important differences between Ali and Yusef. While Yusef deeply resents his pariah status and constantly and emphatically complains about it, Ali silently and with apparent contentment enacts his role of Scobie’s dependant. While Ali’s illiteracy is taken for granted and therefore remains unmentioned until shortly before his death, Yusef’s is insistently invoked by the tradesman himself, who likes to remind Scobie that, because he cannot write, no one will ever be able to hold any written proof of his illicit machinations against him. “Nothing is ever on paper. Everything is always in my head” (HM, 92), he keeps stressing. Not surprisingly, darkness is Yusef’s natural element. It is almost always at night that he makes his entrances either to catch Scobie in his sleep or to be caught sleeping. Scobie’s encounters with the Syrian invariably involve an awakening, someone’s transition from one state of consciousness into another, always happening too late to forestall the deception Yusef has contrived. The brilliant schemer Yusef who outwits all and sundry, who can quote Shakespeare as well as Syrian poetry, who has a sound knowledge of the Bible, and who speaks English fluently seems a most unlikely illiterate. Indeed, his cunning renders him suspiciously similar to the well-read Wilson, of whom the reader learns that his greatest skill is to spy on people, discover their secrets, and use them against his adversaries (HM, 75). Yusef resorts to exactly the same stratagems in which Wilson excels and employs them with the same ruthlessness in a desperate attempt to win the affection of others. The person whose friendship Yusef most desires and courts is Scobie. Yet the commissioner remains unresponsive to Yusef’s advances, thereby hurting the Syrian’s pride and provoking him to ultimately vent his frustration on Ali. The transference of his aggression onto Scobie’s boy is only a logical consequence of his deviousness. Even when he arranges for Ali to be killed by his henchmen he does so under the 7 As the names “Ali” and “Yusef” suggest, Scobie’s houseboy might be Muslim and the Syrian tradesman, Jewish. Yet, nowhere in the novel is their denomination explicitly identified.

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pretext of doing Scobie a service and disposing of a servant Scobie can no longer trust. What is mere pretence in Yusef seems genuine in Ali, the protagonist’s faithful servant of fifteen years and innocent victim of Yusef’s and Scobie’s warped relationship. His sudden death effectively canonizes Ali in establishing his moral superiority not only to his murderer but also to his master, one of whose worst sins consists in his failure to acknowledge and believe in Ali’s loyalty. This failure proves symptomatic of Scobie’s general loss of faith, his growing scepticism in what once formed the foundation of his belief. Scobie’s suspicion of Ali is exposed as ungrounded by way of references to Ali’s integrity, the most explicit of which is provided in the chapter relating Scobie’s and Ali’s excursion to a colonial outpost to investigate Pemberton’s suicide, in which Yusef seems curiously implicated. On this excursion, Scobie feels transported back to the old days when he would “go on treck” with no one but Ali. For a moment in his nostalgic reverie, Scobie looks up and into Ali’s beaming face and is overcome by a sense “that this was all he needed of love or friendship. He could be happy with no more in the world than this ...” (HM, 84-85). The brief moment of bliss, however, is soon forgotten. For unlike Yusef, Ali is in no position to remind Scobie of their bond and appeal to him for his trust. His presence is as unobtrusive and reliable as “a figure on the clock that records the striking of the hours” (HM, 100). In all the years as Scobie’s servant, Ali quietly retains a marked aloofness from his master, as he does from all the other British colonists. His distance from the foreigners ruling his country is underscored by his broken English, by his indifference to the Westerners’ intellectual pursuits, and by an illiteracy totally unlike Yusef’s, an illiteracy to which Ali seems perfectly reconciled. Accordingly it is not from Ali himself but from Scobie that the reader learns about it. In contrast to Yusef’s emphatic affirmations of his cultural otherness, the information is given only once and briefly when Yusef asks Scobie to send Ali a message. “But Ali can’t read”, Scobie retorts and Yusef rejoices at the prospect of carrying out his deadly plan yet again without having to generate any written trace of his own involvement. What he does not reckon with is that at the moment of his death Ali will be break his silence and that in the face of Ali’s death Scobie will regain faith in his boy’s loyalty and repent


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his betrayal. It is thus that the dying Ali robs his adversary of any remaining chance of winning Scobie’s friendship. The images Greene invokes as he translates the cry with which Ali ends his life into writing are worth noting: Through the window behind Yusef’s head, from somewhere among the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of the room, into the whisky, under the desk, into the basket of wastepaper, a discarded finished cry. (HM, 246)

Ali’s is clearly not a cry to enter written records, as are the other cries of his countrymen, which keep ringing throughout the novel without being noticed. There is the implicit suggestion that Ali’s silence is the African’s voice, the scriptless native’s orality as perceived by his colonizers. Deaf to the sound of tongues other than their own these colonizers do not know how to register, let alone take written note of the screams that reach their ears. Ali’s animalistic cry falls under a desk into a wastepaper basket, is discarded and forgotten. Yusef’s eloquent but ultimately ineffective babble likewise ends with a pathetic apprehensive yelp, completely ignored by Scobie rushing to Ali’s help. The narrative’s silencing of Ali as well as of Yusef corresponds with Greene’s systematic occlusion of African voices and his omission of any description of African orality from his text. So thoroughgoing is this omission that the narrative’s setting appears exchangeable by any other location with a history of British domination. As a result of this Ali and Yusef are readable as archetypal colonial subjects with no distinctive cultural profile, let alone with a history that can be reconstructed from the narrative’s superstructure. Their main function is to support Scobie’s development thematically and structurally. Once they have fulfilled this purpose, they make staggeringly swift exits from the text. All Scobie finds as he follows Ali’s piercing cry is his boy’s dead body lying in an empty warehouse “coiled and unimportant like a broken watch-spring under a pile of empty petrol drums”. Scobie registers Ali’s slashed neck and Ali’s yellow eyeballs staring up at him “like a stranger’s, flecked with red”. So complete is Ali’s departure that Scobie cannot help feeling “as if this body had cast him off, disowned him – ‘I know you not’” (HM, 247). Even prior to this, Greene has

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Yusef literally get away with the murder as he curtly announces the Syrian’s escape with the words: “That was the last Scobie ever saw of Yusef, a silhouette stuck stiffly and crookedly on the wall, with the moonlight shining on the syphon and the two drained glasses” (HM, 246). In the second half of the twentieth century especially, this strategy of relegating the natives of his non-European settings to the background of his novels earned Greene the charge of Eurocentric prejudice.8 Legitimate as this charge may be from an orthodox postcolonial perspective, it still seems worth noting that precisely because texts like The Heart of the Matter eclipse the non-British Other so systematically, they also allow the interpretation that they exhibit at least implicitly a certain level of awareness of their own limitations as writings that fail to capture an utterly alien Other. For Greene, that Other’s foreignness is not just a sub-conscious projection of the colonialist’s mind9 but poses a real epistemological dilemma as it confronts the colonizer with the impossibility for any literate to ever fully grasp a self that is not literate. Arguably, therefore, Greene’s novel not only exemplifies the unsuitability of Western literary conventions for the inscription of such an Other. The Heart of the Matter constructs this unsuitability as part of its protagonist’s predicament, which ultimately forces Scobie to acknowledge his own entrapment within literate traditions and within a far too literate mode of thinking. Upon the realization that he himself is irrevocably implicated in Western civilization and in British modes of perception and reflection, Scobie resolves to kill himself. Accordingly, the way Scobie sets about preparing his own exit (from the text and from life) can be interpreted as a last desperate attempt of the protagonist to free himself from his own dogged belief in the written word. Not without reason, the actual act of writing plays an important role in this attempt: Towards the closure of the novel, Greene describes Scobie as being consumed by an almost pathological determination to stage his 8

For a commentary on this vein of Greene criticism, see Bernard Schweizer, “Graham Greene and the Politics of Travel”, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, XXI/1 (April 1998), 95-96. 9 Or, as Schweizer puts it, the suggestion of “A figurative substitute for a region of [the] self that is not easily accessible by cognitive operations of the mind” (ibid., 101).


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death as the consequence of a fatal illness. To this end, he begins to manipulate his until then scrupulously truthful records. Thus Scobie at last appropriates the way in which the other British in the novel make use of the written medium – deceptively, as a means of distorting reality. Both the extremity of this action and its futility (in spite of his efforts, Wilson in the end discovers that Scobie did not die from a natural cause) contribute to a retrospective distancing from the novel’s protagonist. Evelyn Waugh does not seem to consider this distancing a deliberate move as he wrote in an early review of The Heart of the Matter: “To me the idea of willing my own damnation for the love of God is either a very loose poetical expression or a bad blasphemy, for the God who accepted that sacrifice would be neither just nor loveable.”10 Waugh’s emphasis on the theological implications of Scobie’s resolution to kill himself and his open rejection of the act per se as an acceptable conclusion to the novel suggests a failure to register Greene’s own criticism of his main character, a failure to be repeated in the reception of The Heart of the Matter almost throughout the twentieth century. As Elizabeth Schafer notes, “Despite Scobie’s outrageous assumption that he can take responsibility when no one else can, and despite his pride not only in his responsibility for others but also in his ability to damage them, critics often seem to be more sympathetic toward Scobie than Greene himself is”.11 To Schafer, Scobie’s “inordinate pride and rashness”, his impulsiveness and lack of introspection liken him both to Hotspur and Coriolanus and therefore forbid a reading of his suicide simply as “a human solution to the feeling that life is unliveable”.12 It is only because Greene’s allusions to Shakespeare are invariably too intricate for his audience to identify, Schafer contends, that his narrative’s gradual investment of Scobie with villainous features tends to escape the reader. Yet it is not only to enhance Scobie’s ambivalent nature that Greene inserts strategically encoded references to Shakespeare into the narrative fabric of The Heart of the Matter. Important though these references appear in foregrounding the protagonist’s personal weaknesses, they seem even more significant as markers of the kind of 10

Waugh, quoted in Peter Mudford, Graham Greene, Writers and Their Work, Plymouth, 1996, 35. 11 Schafer, 588. 12 Mudford, 36.

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insufficiencies which Greene detects in British civilization in general, especially in British civilization transplanted to a foreign context and imposed onto other peoples.13 One could almost go as far as reading Greene’s use of Shakespeare in The Heart of the Matter as an extremely witty and superbly ironic emulation of the way Shakespeare is traded in the West African colony described in the novel. Such a reading of course contradicts Schafer’s argument that Greene expects his readers to be both “interested in the literary world in all its manifestations” and “able to make connections across a wide-ranging field of reference”, in other words to be the sort of literature connoisseurs Louise Scobie and Wilson so convincingly represent. Rather it encourages the conclusion that it is for this particular type of reader that Greene deliberately reserves a special element of disillusionment as he confronts them with the destructive presumptuousness of Louise’s and Wilson’s literacy. Even if The Heart of the Matter finally dissociates itself from its protagonist by identifying his doubts as those of a deeply disturbed mind and attributing his predicament to a severe emotional disorder, thereby rescuing its own reliability as a kind of literary psychograph, it does not in the end turn to propagating the cultural position of the archetypal colonists Wilson and Louise. After all, it is with a considerable amount of self-irony that the novel itself asserts its resistance to the temptation to venture outside the secure domain of literate epistemology, as its protagonist does, in the mad expectation to comprehend the African Other.

13

Schafer, 589.

CHAPTER NINE ARRIVALS ON A BICYCLE: THE UNINTELLIGIBLE COLONIST IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART The familiarization or “de-othering”1 of the African native which one seeks in vain in Greene’s narrative, is accomplished in Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, ten years after The Heart of the Matter. Achebe’s novel is set not in a complexly literate context but in a complexly oral one. While in The Heart of the Matter it is the nonliterate African Other that looms in the background, threatening to bring down the hero in the end, in Things Fall Apart, it is the literate, in fact, the highly literate European whose absence permeates the text and whose appearance ultimately brings about the protagonist’s destruction, so that, again, the theme of contact between literate and non-literate cultures, though initially hardly addressed explicitly, determines the development of the novel from the beginning. As JanMohamed demonstrates, Things Fall Apart does not define cultural contact in principle as a negative event, not even if that contact takes place between cultures economically and martially as dissimilar as those of nineteenth-century European and African societies. In fact, Achebe seems to insist on a primarily optimistic perception of the asymmetric interfaces evolving from such encounters. Accordingly, JanMohamed reads Achebe’s novel as a constructive attempt at “deterritorializing” the English language and, along with it, the novel form by taking both out of the Western context and transforming them into vehicles of African orality. “Achebe recreates his medium according to his own demands”, Wolfgang Klooss observes likewise, “he can deprive the English language of its ‘colonial character’ and give it a special ‘Africanness’”.2 With his translation of African orality into writing, JanMohamed argues further, Achebe succeeds in recuperating “a vanishing cultural 1

This concept has been proposed by Ulla Ratheiser-Baumgartner in her work on Patricia Grace (“Mapping the Colonial Other/Mapping the Indigenous Self”, in Confluences XXV: Re-Presenting Otherness, ed. Françoise Kral, Paris, 2005, 85). 2 Wolfgang Klooss, “Chinua Achebe: A Chronicler of Historical Change in Africa”, in Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, eds Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim, Munich, 1986, 41.

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experience”3 and giving back dignity to Igbo culture by making it understood that “the colonized individual need not be ashamed of his past”.4 For JanMohamed, Things Fall Apart encourages native Africans to espouse the new chirographic culture in the making so that they might become able to write their own version of history and preserve their orality by recording it. What is more, for JanMohamed the novel does not stop short at creating an awareness of the destruction wrought by the British in Africa, but encourages its readership to discard the Manichean terms by which the West likes to interpret the relationship between oral and chirographic cultures and conceive of more constructive reconciliatory models of thinking. JanMohamed leaves little to add to his analysis of Achebe’s motives for synthesizing Igbo and Western noetic economies in a novel titled Things Fall Apart, except for one point particularly salient with regard to Achebe’s own cultural position as an African scribe writing in English rather than in Igbo: Things Fall Apart does not document the complexity of Igbo orality alone. It also explores nonliteracy or illiteracy as an aspect of the African subject’s specific otherness vis-à-vis the civilization encroaching on Igbo culture. Yet even if the title, taken from Y.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”, was to invoke the loosening of anarchy upon Africa under the influence of Western civilization, this is not exactly what the novel itself envisages as the future of Igbo culture. Rather the novel, though informed by an awareness of the dangers entailed in any cultural process of assimilation or appropriation, by virtue of its own writtenness, effectively evidences the feasibility of the cultural regeneration its author advocates. In Things Fall Apart Igbo orality is asserted, almost paradoxically, in the process of being captured in letters. The resultant tension is minimized by Achebe’s systematic elaboration of the acoustic dimension of his tale and his careful avoidance of images that could be in any way reminiscent of graphic signs, visual images that is, like writing, static and reproducible, and of sufficient symbolic content to be meaningful even when taken out of their original context. The visual images Achebe employs are predominantly non-static, in 3

JanMohamed, 37. Ibid., 35. As for further critical explanations of the novel’s immense popularity, see also Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction, London, 1991, 31-32. 4

Arrival on a Bicycle

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constant motion and flux, like spoken rather than written language. The closest resemblance to reading allowed in Things Fall Apart is in Achebe’s description of the workings of Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. Worshippers seeking knowledge from Agbala must go and consult a priestess sitting by a fire inside a dark cave, intuiting the will of her god from the rising smoke. Sometimes the worshippers too may discern the spirits ascend in the darkness, “flying and flapping their wings against the roof of the cave”,5 never uttering a sound. As a profoundly transient and changeable reading matter, the smoke studied by the priestess and the worshippers is a medium not suited to store knowledge indefinitely. So are other objects, such as the tokens of hospitality, friendship, or victory Achebe repeatedly invokes in visual images. The colourful patterns drawn on the walls of huts to celebrate the Feast of the New Yam, the human heads severed from the bodies of enemies and used as cups to drink palm wine from on occasion of the funeral of a village celebrity, grooves drawn into the soil before the sowing of a new crop are images conjured to endure only for a certain period. Equally devoid of any sense of duration are Achebe’s numerous descriptions of rituals, dances, or wrestling contests, which all reflect the idea of continuity without stasis intrinsic to Igbo cosmology.6 The narrative’s expressed privileging of progress over duration, action over inaction, the momentary over the permanent, also informs the following scene describing the coming of the locusts rather than their presence or the sight of destruction they leave behind: At first, a fairly small swarm came. They were the harbingers sent to survey the land. And then appeared on the horizon a slowly-moving mass like a boundless sheet of black cloud drifting towards Umuofia. Soon it covered half the sky, and the solid mass was now broken by tiny eyes of light like shining star-dust. It was a tremendous sight, full of power and beauty. (TFA, 39)

Finally, Achebe also pictures signs in Things Fall Apart that do bear a certain resemblance to writing. His characters draw these signs in 5

12.

6

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), African Writers Series, Oxford, 1986,

Chinua Achebe, “Chi in Igbo Cosmology”, in Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays, London, 1975, 93-103.

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chalk on the ground or on parts of their bodies, thereby obviously enacting a ritual not specially accounted for anywhere in the novel. Not only puzzling to the uninitiated reader, the chalk lines become redundant as soon as the situation by which their drawing is occasioned is dissolved. By contrast, sound never subsides in Things Fall Apart. The text is replete with acoustic images of the thunderous roars of brave warriors, the cries of beaten women and abandoned infants, the beating of drums and booming of gongs, the calls of town-criers, the cracking voice of a priestess and her piercing screams, and the shouts, murmurs, and laughter of large crowds. Even silence is described as the consonance of certain acoustic impressions in the absence of others: The night was very quiet .… Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became even more sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string. And so on this particular night as the crier’s voice was gradually swallowed up in the distance, silence returned to the world, a vibrant silence made more intense by the universal trill of a million million forest insects. (TFA, 7)

In keeping with the prominence given to sound in the world represented by Achebe, characters are cast mainly as engaged in oral exchanges. More often than not their conversations, debates, arguments, and stories are rendered in direct speech and fashioned as integral and hence highly formalized part of community life. The novel itself, which has received broad critical attention especially for its artful simulation of oral storytelling, draws heavily on unwritten lore or “living memory”, frequently referring to Igbo mythology, citing Igbo proverbs, employing untranslated Igbo vocabulary and making extensive use of formulaic expressions suggestively reminiscent of the griot tradition.7 Though never stated explicitly the total absence of writing from the lives portrayed in Things Fall Apart is never completely concealed. Achebe hints at it covertly in occasional comments on the language of 7

A griot is a storyteller in traditional West African societies who perpetuates the oral tradition and history of a village or family.


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individual characters as well as on the act of narration. The contrast between the unadulterated orality of the Igbo community and the text’s writtenness represented is further enforced graphically by way of italicized writing used to off-set the Igbo vocabulary employed. By inserting and typographically enhancing Igbo words Achebe keeps disrupting the process of silent reading and alerting the reader to the phonetic peculiarity of the Igbo language. This effect is of course most powerful where an entire poem is yielded: He [Ikemefuna] still remembered the song: Eze elina, elina! Sala Eze ilikwa ya Ikwaha akwa oligholi Ebe Danda nechi eze Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu Sala He sang it in his mind, and walked to its beat. If the song ended on his right foot, his mother was alive. If it ended on his left, she was dead. No, not dead, but ill. (TFA, 42)

Significantly, the boy Ikemefuna, who has been taken in by Okonkwo, the hero of the novel, like his own son, does not sing this song out loud but only in his mind while walking to its beat. His actual silence thus shared with the reader is part of the subtle distancing from Okonkwo, engineered by Achebe in preparation of the sudden killing of the boy by his foster father. The contrast between Ikemefuna’s secret and silent reliance on Igbo folklore and Okonkwo’s religious observation of Igbo law, which commands the killing of Ikemefuna, epitomizes the problem Achebe dramatizes in Things Fall Apart. It illustrates the ambivalent function the Igbo people’s cultural heritage fulfils by instilling a unique sense of belonging in the individual and at the same time commanding the brutal cancellation of this very belonging. As a consequence of his unconditional identification with his people’s traditions, Okonkwo internalizes this ambivalence and becomes unable to accept the changes this ambivalence urges. As Begam notes, “Both nationalist history and heroic tragedy demand that [Okonkwo] remain unyielding

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and that the Igbos honor their cultural heritage by refusing assimilation”.8 Achebe himself does not see these changes as entirely detrimental. Nor does he submit a wholly idealized description of pre-colonial Igbo culture in Things Fall Apart. Even if the text laments the corrosion of pre-literate Igbo culture under European influence it does not advocate a return to it either. “If one goes back”, Achebe replies in an interview when asked about a revival of pre-colonial Igbo culture, “there’s something wrong somewhere, or else a misunderstanding”.9 A backward movement is not what is suggested in Things Fall Apart either. Instead the novel anticipates the transcendence, for instance, of the demure suffering of Okonkwo’s wives and daughters under the anger and aggression of the ruler of their households or of the sullenness into which Okonkwo’s son Nwoye has withdrawn in response to the constant nagging and beating his father gives him. The sad demise of Ikemefuna, finally, provides the most unequivocal criticism of the archaic values advocated and embodied by Okonkwo,10 who, for all his love of the boy, obeys the Oracle of the Hills and Caves and carries out its decision that Ikemefuna’s life should be sacrificed. Onkonkwo’s active part in the killing of the boy deeply alienates his friend Obiereka and his son Nwoye who have both begun to question the intrinsic rightness of their culture’s traditions and to long for reform and cultural regeneration. While Obiereka vents his anger at his friend and reprimands him for joining in the killing of Ikemefuna, Nwoye withdraws from his father ceasing to communicate with him altogether. Something seems “to give way inside him, like the snapping of a tightened bow” (TFA, 43). Things begin to fall apart. The centre ceases to hold. Though told from the epicentre of the disintegration it records, the narrative does not fail to take into account the external influences which hasten the changes following Ikemefuna’s death. “All their 8 Richard Begam, “Achebe’s Sense of an Ending: History and Tragedy in Things Fall Apart”, Studies in the Novel, XXIX/3 (Fall 1997), 401. 9 Achebe, quoted in Kalu Ogbaa, “An Interview with Chinua Achebe”, Research in African Literatures, XII /1 (Spring 1981), 6. 10 For critical examinations of how Okonkwo represents the virtues and excesses of his culture, see G.D. Killam, The Novels of Chinua Achebe, London, 1969; Eustace Palmer, An Introduction the African Novel, London, 1972; Arthur Ravenscroft Chinua Achebe, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert, London, 1969, and Kofi Awoonor, The Breast of the Earth, New York, 1976.


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customs are upside-down”, the elders of Umuofia for instance remark on the way in which marriages have recently come to be arranged in a neighbouring village. “But what is good in one place is bad in another place”, one of them rationalizes their own resistance to the modern habits adopted by their neighbours. And, once more, Obiereka offers a shrewd reply which is followed by a telling exchange between the assembled men: “It is like the story of white men who, they say, are white like this piece of chalk”, said Obierika. He held up a piece of chalk, which every man kept in his obi and with which his guests drew lines on the floor before they ate kola nuts. “And these white men, they say, have no toes.” “And have you never seen them?” asked Machi. “Have you?” asked Obierika. “One of them passes here frequently”, said Machi. “His name is Amadi.” Those who knew Amadi laughed. He was a leper, and the polite name for leprosy was “the white skin”. (TFA, 51-52)

Obierika’s comparison of the white man’s skin colour to chalk allows for an association of the suggested advent of the Europeans with the introduction of literacy in Igboland. Of course, Obierika himself is unaware of the link he conjures. He has never used chalk in any other way than in a ceremonial gesture preceding the communal consumption of kola nuts.11 And like most of his fellow beings, he has never seen a white man (in the literal sense of the English expression) either. Nonetheless, Machi’s joke is probably not lost on the discerning Obiereka. What does seem to escape him and his friends, however, is the actual threat Western civilization represents to their culture. Unaware of the imminent danger, the men are still joined in merriment. This has changed dramatically when they congregate again six chapters later to discuss the complete annihilation of the village of Abame. By then, they have learnt to read their own situation quite differently. As a result, when Okonkwo, in an attempt to revive the 11

As Sugnet has pointed out, the gesture is explained nowhere in the novel so that the uninitiated reader is left at a complete loss as to its meaning (see Charlie Sugnet, “Things Fall Apart: Problems in Constructing an Alternative Ethnography”, in Meditations on African Literature, ed. Dubem Okafor, 72-73).

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jocular tone of their previous discussion, proposes that by “white man” his friends must mean an albino, the response is not collective amusement anymore. “He was not an albino. He was quite different”, Obiereka corrects him: “And he was riding an iron horse. The first people who saw him ran away, but he stood beckoning to them. In the end the fearless ones were near and even touched him.” What follows is an account of how the elders of Abame, upon consulting their oracle, killed the foreigner lest he should try to “break their clan and spread destruction among them” (TFA, 99). Though right in their estimation of the white man’s destructive potential, the people of Abame fail to anticipate how any evidence of the murder will be interpreted by other whites. In their naivety they resolve to tie the white man’s “iron horse” to a sacred silk-cotton tree where it stays for weeks as a trophy of sorts commemorating the defeat of the enemy. Yet, the white men who pass through their village one day read the abandoned bicycle differently. For them it provides a perfect pretext to command the destruction of Abame. While thus describing the difficulties the older generation of Igbos encounters in adjusting their vision to the white man’s ways of seeing, Achebe also discloses the younger generation’s willingness to endorse this new way of seeing. Nwoye is one of the young men attracted by the speeches and the stories of the white missionaries who are beginning to set up churches and schools all over Igboland: It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul …. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry plate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s mind was greatly puzzled. (TFA, 106)

There is a very subtle, barely noticeable shift of emphasis in this passage away from the acoustic features of language to its visible properties. The imagery of “drops of frozen rain” falling and melting on desiccated earth foreshadows the progressing inscription of African soil by European usurpers. Hand in hand with this usurpation goes the gradual destruction of native oral culture. Symptomatically, it is with increasing frequency that the Igbo people find themselves struck speechless – without “a mouth with which to tell of their suffering”


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(TFA, 127) – or, as one of Okonkwo’s eldest kinsmen puts it in an urgent plea to the younger generation, they no longer know “what it is to speak with one voice” (TFA, 120). It is part of Achebe’s scheme to give a sympathetic account of Okonkwo’s tragic fall and at the same time undertake an ironic deconstruction of his outdated heroism that he lets his central character be the last to turn silent. Unlike so many others of his people he retains his voice even when he and his kinsmen are taken captives by the whites. “We should have killed the white man if you had listened to me”, he snarls at his muted fellow prisoners (TFA, 140). Speech, however, no longer suffices to mobilize his clansmen, who have learnt to fall silent in the presence of the British. At last, when, soon after their release from prison, his people prove unable to voice any protest even against the interruption of a gathering by the arrival of a court messenger, Okonkwo finds himself struck speechless as well. Trembling with hate and, for the first time, “unable to utter a word”, he turns to the messenger, draws his matchet, and beheads the man (TFA, 146). Looking at the dead body, Okonkwo at once understands the futility of his deed. He knows that Umuofia will not rise against the whites and leaves without responding to the voices he hears asking, “Why did he do it?” (TFA, 147). Even communication with his people is no longer possible. All that is left for him to do is to forestall his own death sentence by hanging himself. In contrast to his father, Nwoye is the first in the novel to effectively lose his voice and cease to speak. In the latter part of the novel he is not only conspicuously absent from the scenes of collective debate and negotiation, which form the central part of the Umuofian’s social life. He also becomes a singularly passive object of discussion by virtue of his absence. No longer a speaker but spoken about, Nwoye leaves his family without a word and joins the missionaries. He seems predestined on account of his taciturnity to appropriate the colonizer’s quiet mode of communication and, indeed, learns to read and write, before he eventually leaves Umuofia to attend a training college for teachers. Yet even if Nwoye thus escapes the “mental confinement”12 in which his father remains entrapped, this does not mean that Nwoye’s transformation is meant to invalidate the other Umuofians’ orality. Quite the opposite, while Achebe may well 12

Gikandi, 27.

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expose the deficiencies of nineteenth-century Igbo culture he never fails to stress the integrating power of oral traditions. Achebe’s recommendation clearly is not for African cultures to adopt and emulate Western systems of articulation uncritically. Rather what Achebe seems to envisage in Things Fall Apart are African cultures confidently using Western modes of expression and communication to assert their own otherness and adapt the acquired forms of discourse and knowledge production to it. This vision is reflected in the portraits of the two missionaries Brown and Smith, who, as archetypal representatives of Christian culture introduced in the last part of the novel, function as foils to the new African into which Achebe has Nwoye develop eventually. As Wolfgang Klooss remarks on these two characters: ... neither Brown nor Smith is really able or willing to cope with the nature of African animism. Both attack the religion of the Ibos because it is part of a non-Christian culture. Their total lack of interest in Umuofia’s language and culture may thus be regarded as a logical expression of the ethnocentric prejudices of their Christianity.13

Still, it is not until the introduction of the District Commissioner as a kind of secular equivalent to Brown and Smith that Achebe definitively transcends these prejudices and accomplishes, a “semantic reorganization” in Gikandi’s terms by shifting linguistic values “from the Igbo structures to the colonial ones”, “from speech – which was the pride of Igbo culture – to writing, the mythical practice of Western history”. “But if we see writing as a process which is tied up with questions of power and knowledge”, Gikandi continues his argument, ... it is a mistake to confound Achebe and the Commissioner as writers liberated or entrapped by writing in a colonial language. Both writers use the same language and mode of representation, but their ideological function is obviously different and this difference needs to be stressed. The District Commissioner writes to compress the history of Umuofia into a general text of colonization; Achebe writes to liberate his people from that text and to inscribe the values and ideological claims of Igbo culture in the language and form that sought to repress it. The ultimate irony of his novel is that although the Commissioner has the final word in the fictional text, Achebe ... 13

Ibid., 30.


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writes the colonizer’s words and hence commemorates an African culture which the colonizer thought he had written out of existence.14

Apart from the ideological stances from which they write, what also distinguishes Achebe and the District Commissioner are the diametrically opposed notions of writing underlying their inscriptions of African peoples and their cultures. The kind of discourse which Achebe defines as best suited for a translation of African orality into written English is radically different from the kind of literacy that leads the District Commissioner to consider that “The story of this man [Okonkwo] who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading” and to contemplate the inclusion of the story in the book which he intends to write on the “Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Low Niger”. “One could almost write a whole chapter on him”, he reflects: “Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate” (TFA, 147-48). Precisely by closing on these thoughts of the District Commissioner15 the novel implicitly raises and answers the question about its final narrator’s identity, who, as should be clear from the novel’s final words, has produced a text performing the very opposite of what the District Commissioner has in mind. “What the District Commissioner ultimately achieves is not genuine understanding”, Begam notes, “but the illusion of understanding that comes with the power to control”.16 In spite of its systematic shifts in perspective, which Taiwo proposes reading as a sign of the author’s acceptance that “no one point of view is wholly acceptable”,17 Things Fall Apart ultimately shuts out all but one voice and closes by converging from an at first polyphonic or multi-perspective text to a single tonality or viewpoint. It is not the District Commissioner but the commissioner’s representer who has the last word. For some critics this representer has a distinctive identity. He clearly is an individual implicated in the Umuofians’ story, yet independent enough to view it from a distance. JanMohamed suggests that this individual may either be the adult as which Nwoye emerges 14

Ibid., 49-50. But also through Nwoye’s apostasy, of which JanMohamed has remarked that it “opens up another horizon: by espousing the new chirographic culture he creates the potential for one of his descendants to write a novel like Things Fall Apart” (36). 16 Begam, 402. 17 Taiwo, quoted by Gikandi, 33. 15

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towards the end of the novel or one of Nwoye’s descendants. This corresponds with Richard Begam’s recommendation to read Things Fall Apart as projecting an additional ending beyond its actual closure and onto its sequel No Longer at Ease. In this novel, which is both a rewriting and a continuation of Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo’s grandson Obi, a university-educated civil servant, discusses the difference between traditional or Aristotelian and modern or ironic tragedy, incidentally doing so by way of reference to The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. With his analysis, Begam argues, Obi offers also a retrospective interpretation of Okonkwo’s fall as a tragedy rendered pointless by the social changes that at first seem to necessitate it.18 For Begam, Obi makes explicit what is stated only implicitly in Things Fall Apart. Accordingly he concludes: While Achebe’s novel movingly elegizes the passing away of traditional Igbo culture, the long view it adopts – looking ahead to the future establishment of Nigeria – suggests that Achebe’s own position on the modernization of Africa is, at the very least, complicated.19

Even without the intertext invoked in No Longer At Ease it is clear that the narrative voice asserted at the end of Things Fall Apart belongs to a subject unwilling to be impartial, or, more accurately, quite willing to be as impartial as the District Commissioner believes he will be in his study of African primitives. In devoting not much more than “a reasonable paragraph” – in fact, even a bit more than a whole chapter – to the Commissioner, the narrator strips the colonist of his importance and his authority, reducing him almost to a mere afterthought, a detail which, if cut out, would not change the main story all too significantly. Importantly, this measure of marginalization can only be effective if accomplished in print. Only thus can the commissioner’s relegation to a handful of pages be made visible and the dramatic effect avoided which this figure’s sudden entry at the end of an oral delivery, for instance, would have. Despite his marginalization, the District Commissioner’s inclusion remains important in the first place for foregrounding the novel’s special bias. It reminds the reader that Okonkwo’s sad career could have been reconstructed in a completely different manner. The District 18 19

Begam, 404-406. Ibid., 397.


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Commissioner, for instance, finds no other feature of the Africans more infuriating than their “love for superfluous words” (TFA, 146). Given the way Things Fall Apart accommodates the Umuofians’ commitment to orature, he would no doubt dismiss the novel as a text littered with unnecessary comments and utterly lacking in the discipline he so strives to exhibit. His judgement is invalidated, however, through a final interior monologue in which the reader learns among other things of the District commissioner’s resolve never to attend to such undignified details as cutting down a hanged man from the tree. “Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him” (TFA, 147), he believes. His projection of how the Africans would read his behaviour stands in contrast not only to the Igbo belief that touching the body of a man who has killed himself is sacrilegious. It also conflicts with the sense indirectly communicated through the sobering bleakness of Okonkwo’s demise, that the deceased protagonist, guilty of whatever crime in his lifetime, deserves a more dignified ending than either the commissioner or Okonkwo’s own people are able to grant him. The likeness the novel establishes in the end between the commissioner and the men of Umuofia by presenting them as equally unable to overcome the same fear of failure that eventually defeats Okonkwo also serves as a marker of difference. It places the novel’s final narrator at a distinct distance from the characters loosely assembled at the end of the novel. They seem united in their lack of sympathy for Okonkwo as if as a result of the merging of African oral and Western literate traditions narrated in and exemplified by Achebe’s novel. The narrator, however, has clearly transcended this confusion and, faithful to African notions of poetic language, of what is not “superfluous” and “undignified”, seems to have found a more adequate way of using writing to give meaning to Okonkwo’s death.


CHAPTER TEN MEETING IN THE DESERT: MIRAGES OF LITERATE AND NON-LITERATE BARBARITIES IN J.M. COETZEE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

Chinua Achebe’s deconstruction of colonialist notions of writing and literate culture through his ironical reduction of the District Commissioner to a mere undignified detail is radicalized by J.M. Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians. Like Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, the protagonist of this novel is an official representative of a colonialist regime, a magistrate stationed at a tiny frontier settlement. Like Scobie, he finds himself in the role of a mediator between colonizers and natives, and gradually is drawn to the side of the latter. Like Scobie, he knows that his partiality represents a gross disloyalty to his country, even a form of treason in the eyes of his expatriates. And, finally, also like Scobie (and like the District Commissioner in Things Fall Apart) the magistrate is fully aware that the colonialist regime to which he belongs has sprung from a civilization heavily dependent on the cultural practice of writing. He professes to be a reader of the classics, declares that his favourite pastimes are the collation of maps of a certain desert region and the cataloguing of his various collections which he has accumulated during occasional pseudo-expert archaeological diggings. As he confesses he devotes himself to these pastimes mainly to avoid witnessing the brutalities to which his fellow countrymen subject the natives they hold captives. So as not to have to feel part of their machinations he keeps retreating to his office and occupying himself with his ledgers. In the course of the novel, Coetzee’s protagonist learns how his civilization, once transplanted, reduces its own agents to savage torturers set on extinguishing whatever cultural life they feel they have to compete with. His reflections on civilization also lead him to realize how his own language adapts to the task of representing the atrocities its speakers conceive and commit, and how the victims of these atrocities, the so-called “barbarians”, are captured also linguistically in the ensuing discourse. Symptomatically, as long as the native barbarians are prisoners of the settlement and as such entrapped in the

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colonialist narrative of subjection, he himself seems to possess ample discursive possibilities to capture the Other. He describes the natives as “strange animals”1 with “vast appetites” and “volatile tempers”, “sick”, “famished”, “damaged”, and “terrified” creatures “herded” in the corner of a yard to be humiliated and maltreated. Coetzee even allows his narrator to ponder if it might not be best if “these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start” (WFB, 26). The magistrate’s deeply cynical reflections do not fail to illustrate the potential brutality of the English language, and to expose the possibilities of denigration, even of extinction contained in a discourse so dissociated from the natives that it is capable of treating them as subhuman objects. The natives themselves are not granted a voice in the narrative, their silence, however, is not to be misread as the result of an innate muteness or any other form of intrinsic linguistic disability. Rather, as in The Heart of the Matter, it needs to be comprehended as the result of an unscrupulous silencing, which the novel identifies on a thematic level and at the same time performs itself by way of ironic emulation of the very modes of inscription it interrogates. Gilbert Yeoh has shown how the emphatically confessional mode of Waiting for the Barbarians supports Coetzee’s questioning of Western uses of writing and his exposure of the epistemic violence committed with the help of the written medium. By analogy with Samuel Beckett, Yeoh argues, Coetzee employs the strategy of incessant monologic self-examination to illustrate the fragility of the truth writing can produce and the impossibility for any self, however rigorously honest, to tell the truth about itself.2 Owing to the nature of consciousness, Coetzee observes in his essay “Confession and Double Thought”, “the self cannot tell the truth of itself without the possibility of self-deception”.3 For Coetzee, human consciousness dictates that “self-scrutiny is an instrument not of the truth but of a mere will to be comfortable, to be well thought of, and so on”.4

1

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), London, 2000, 19. Gilbert Yeoh, “J.M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett: Ethics, Truth-Telling, and Self-Deception”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, XLIV/4 (Summer 2003), 334. 3 J.M. Coetzee, “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky”, Comparative Literature, XXXVII/3 (Summer 1985), 231. 4 Ibid., 292. 2

Meeting in the Desert

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In light of these observations Yeoh finds it necessary to read Waiting for the Barbarians as a text systematically deconstructing its own narrator’s reliability and exposing him as both epistemologically and ethically constricted. For Yeoh, Coetzee’s narrator protagonist is driven by a desire not so much to invoke empathy with the natives as to merely stage himself as an empathetic witness of their plight. One of the mistakes the nameless magistrate makes in the process is that he never lets the subalterns he portrays speak for themselves. In his reading of Coetzee, Yeoh goes much further than Benita Parry, who regards the narrator as Coetzee’s own mouthpiece and sees the magistrate’s discursive domination of the barbarians and the resultant shrinking of the Other to a radically incommensurate being5 as the ultimate goal of the text. This leads Parry to suggest that “speechlessness in Coetzee’s fiction exceeds or departs from the psychoanalytic paradigm it also deploys to become a metaphor for … what cannot be spoken” and to conclude that Coetzee’s silent subjects “are not just ‘victims’ but ‘victors’”, “disempowered figures who cannot or will not make themselves heard in the recognised linguistic system”.6 In contrast to Parry,7 Yeoh posits a discrepancy between Coetzee and his selfinterested narrator and argues that the narrative’s systematic Othering 5

Benita Parry, “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee”, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 37-65. Other critical readings of Coetzee’s figurations of silence seem also based on a conflation of narrator and author in Coetzee’s novels. Thus Michael Marais, for instance, argues that for Coetzee silence is “a potent political tool through which the other escapes and challenges the conceptual constraints of imperial cultures whose programmes of conquest and annihilation are enshrined in language”. “Silence empowers the other as guardian”, he contends, “… in fact becomes the means through which it resists the language of imperialism.” (“The Hermeneutics of Empire: Coetzee’s Post-colonial Metafiction”, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 73-74.) Likewise Graham Huggan notes that in Coetzee silence is “a different kind of speech, a muteness to be perceived either as a form of self-protection or a gesture of resistance” (Huggan, quoted in Parry, 44). 6 Parry, 45 and 48. Admittedly, Parry also argues that Coetzee’s optimistic constructions of silence fail to perform the criticism Coetzee aims to encode in his texts, that “this potential critique of political oppression is diverted by the conjuring and valorising of a non-verbal signifying system” (Ibid. 44). 7 So does Teresa Dovey, who holds that “the Magistrate’s autodiegetic narrative should be regarded as reported speech, enclosed, as it were, by quotation marks at the beginning and the end” (“Waiting for the Barbarians: Allegory of Allegories”, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 141).

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of the barbarians, their resultant silence, and their conspicuous absence serve to underline the magistrate’s dishonesty. In Yeoh’s view, the magistrate’s scenarios, though moving, lack psychological authenticity. Thus the sentimentalized representation of suffering they offer enables him to evade the bodily violation he witnesses: As opposed to truth-telling and genuine empathy, the magistrate’s narrative is a self-serving self-deception: It enables his liberal conscience to feel sincere sympathy for the victims without countenancing the actual horror of their torture. The true motivation and effect of his narrative is self-consolidation rather than empathy and truth-telling.8

In other words, Waiting for the Barbarians calls in question the speaking for the subaltern in which the narrator pretends to engage. It is obvious from the beginning that with this markedly literate speaking Coetzee’s narrator casts little light on the true nature of the barbarians. Nor does he attempt to forge any deeper psychological understanding of them. As Yeoh points out, it is frequently enough that Coetzee exposes his narrator’s unwillingness to hear the natives, his discomfort at the mere sound of their calls, and his desire to believe that he has heard nothing. Instead of listening to their voices, he keenly speaks over their heads, overwrites their presence, trying to extinguish whatever they might be saying by translating their presence into narration, ultimately received via the silent medium of writing. The immediacy he gives to his portrayals of individual “barbarians” by delivering these portrayals in the present tense is a mere illusion. The impression of the barbarian’s proximity, which the narrative’s special temporality creates, really only belies the text’s writtenness and, along with it, their actual absence at the moment both of the conception and reception of their portrayal, their distance both from the narrator and the reader of the narrative. What the magistrate’s account at once hides and concedes, other than this absence, is its inability to fully grasp the native’s otherness. Coetzee’s narrator seems preoccupied almost to the point of obsession with the limits of his comprehensive scope. Repeatedly he asserts that the natives, when one tries to understand them as more than objects of suppression, are actually utterly intangible. Above all he says so of a 8

Yeoh, 341.


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female captive who has been barbarously mutilated by the other officials at his post. Although a special physical closeness develops between this female and the magistrate, he claims that he knows what to do with her “no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another” (WFB, 36), that “with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which [one hunts] back and forth seeking entry” (WFB, 46). The sense which the narrator invokes of her soul-, heart-, or mindlessness is enforced by his descriptions of her impaired vision. Looking into her maimed eyes, the magistrate can see nothing but her blindness, and, in describing the scars of torture on her irises, he can discursively place himself in relation to her only as her observer. He claims that there is no way he can penetrate any further, no way of reaching behind her irises, into her mind and attaining any insight into her thoughts. “I wave a hand in front of her eyes”, he asserts: She blinks. I bring my face closer and stare into her eyes. She wheels her gaze from the wall on to me. The black irises are set off by milky whites as clear as a child’s. I touch her cheek: she starts. (WFB, 28)

Like her unresponsive eyes, her body, too, to the magistrate is but a surface onto which one may project one’s own fantasies. Envisaging the figure of the woman, “closed, ponderous, sleeping in [his] bed in a faraway room”, he again concludes that “The body of the other one” is “beyond comprehension”. Convinced that the woman’s body would do anything to evade his scrutinizing gaze he even conjures the surreal vision “of her closed eyes and closed face filing over with skin”, of her face “Blank, like a fist beneath a wig … grow[ing] out of the throat, and out of the blank body beneath it, without aperture, without entry” (WFB, 45). The magistrate almost succeeds in leading the reader to believe that it is the woman herself that resists decrypting. Yet the agency with which he invests the female body here is only too clearly a ploy not to betray the narrator’s own part in the distortions he is recounting. Arguably these distortions are projections of a mind unable or even unwilling to look all too closely at the suffering of others but fit to undertake all sorts of contortions in order not to see. As Michel Naumann puts it, the magistrate’s words are but “mirrors blocking the

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road of otherness”.9 They ultimately disclose no truths about the Other but give away the narrator’s fear of such truths. The barbarian woman’s alleged elusiveness is really a reflection of the magistrate’s fixation on his own self, of a centrism that does not allow for a clear vision of any Other. His decision to return the barbarian girl to her people has to be read accordingly as a resolution to dispose of an Other whose sad presence and past keep interfering with the image the narrator is trying to draw of himself. Even if he narrates the ensuing journey as an enterprise in which he puts his own life at jeopardy for the sake of the barbarian girl, the trip is as self-interested a venture as anything else the magistrate does in the course of the novel. Under the pretext of looking for the barbarians but actually in the hope of reinventing himself, he embarks on a journey across the desert towards where the nomads winter, entering a terrain more desolate than anything he has ever seen, wind-eroded clay terraces, flat marshland, a dead salt lake stretching beneath them, “sometimes under cover many feet deep, sometimes under a mere parchment of brittle salt” (WFB, 66), sand-flats modulating into duneland. The experience allows him to cast himself in the role of the lonesome traveller, the daring discoverer, the brave conqueror. Amidst uninscribed, unmapped, uncharted, unknown land where the wind keeps blowing clouds of red dusk “from nowhere to nowhere”, the magistrate has the impression that “Dust rather than air becomes the medium in which [the nomads] live” (WFB, 65), he begins to wonder whether it is really the girl he has always wanted or the traces of history that her body bears. Typically, he can find no answer: My lips move, silently composing and recomposing the words. “Or perhaps it is the case that only that which has not been articulated has to be lived through.” I stare at this last proposition without detecting any answering movement in myself toward assent or dissent. The words grow more and more opaque before me; soon they have lost all meaning. (WFB, 70)

Ironically enough, just when he discovers that he has left behind the realm of safe signification he is overcome by the feeling that he and the girl have grown closer than in months of living in the same 9

Michel Naumann, “Coetzee’s Children of the Earth and Language” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, XV/1 (Autumn 1992), 37.


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room. For him it is another sign of this closeness that he unexpectedly finds her engaged in a lively banter with his men using the pidgin of the frontier with a fluency, quickness, and self-possession that confound him. For a moment, the discovery of her command of his language causes him to regret that he has never let her teach him her own tongue. Yet his profession of remorse comes too late to dissuade the reader’s doubts that he would ever bother to learn the nomads’ language. His reading of them reveals no ambition to comprehend more than the material surface of their appearance: Stirrups, saddle, bridle, reins: no metal, but bone and fire-hardened wood sewn with gut, lashed with thongs. Bodies clothed in wool and the hides of animals and nourished from infancy on meat and milk, foreign to the suave touch of cotton, the virtues of the placid grains and fruits: these are the people being pushed off the plains into the mountains by the spread of the Empire. (WFB, 78)

Himself irrevocably part of that Empire, worse even, as he formulates it, “a go-between, a jackal of Empire in sheep’s clothing” (WFB, 79), he remains barred from communication with the barbarians and reliant on the girl to negotiate with them on his behalf and to inform him of their refusal to enter into any of the deals he proposes. The impossibility of any fruitful exchange between him and them and the finality of his relationship with the girl whom he has been trying to grasp and inscribe as his Other in his own terms suddenly manifest themselves as inescapable truths. “She is going, she is almost gone”, the magistrate pronounces, accepting the inevitability of their parting, not without relishing their last moments together and the brief verbal exchange that ensues between them: This is the last time to look on her clearly face to face, to scrutinize the motions of my heart, to try to understand who she really is .... I touch her cheek, take her hand .... There is only a blankness, and desolation that there has to be such blankness. When I tighten my grip on her hand there is no answer. I see only too clearly what I see: … a stranger; a visitor from strange parts now on her way home after a less than happy visit. “Goodbye”, I say. “Goodbye”, she says. There is no more life in her voice than in mine.

The likeness which the narrator attempts to establish between himself and the girl in the last sentence of this passage is not

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confirmed by the narrative itself. While he may believe that “there is no more life in her voice than in [his]”, the narrative continues to show how his voice survives, as it were, while the girl’s subsides completely. In her absence it becomes clear that he has effectively traded in the real girl for the possibility to imagine her freely and to “re-form” her, as he himself puts it, out of his “repertoire of memories according to [his] questionable desires” (WFB, 79). He describes how, back at the settlement, he continues “to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her” (WFB, 89). Thus inscribed and re-inscribed the actual Other is placed at an infinite remove. Signification no longer serves to salvage truth but to shape myths with which to replace any earlier intimation of that truth. More than that, upon his return from the desert, the narrator himself eventually substitutes the Other and assumes the victim status once reserved for the barbarians. It is a doubly ironic turn of events that Coetzee contrives by having the magistrate arrive back at the garrison to be arrested for “treasonously consorting with the enemy” (WFB, 85), suspended, and subjected to the same tortures and humiliations he once knew the barbarians to be suffering. Not only does the obvious absurdity of the allegations invite the reader to comprehend the regime’s aggression against its own representatives as a perversely self-destructive urge. At the same time, the magistrate’s initial willing acceptance of his new situation exposes his desperate desire to redeem himself and the futility of trying to do so by re-enacting the barbarians’ misery. Still, the endeavour does not result in a full retrospective identification with the nomads. As Yeoh rightly observes, the magistrate’s narrative can at best create the illusion that he is united with the barbarians in identical suffering: What appears as merging identity in suffering is, upon scrutiny, the repetition of suffering with a difference …. the magistrate’s suffering seems to bring him into identity with the girl, whereas it in fact suspends him in a relationship of irreconcilable difference from her. Coetzee’s cynical point is that the magistrate’s suffering under Empire, though severe and moving to the reader, has no redemptive value. It brings him no closer toward knowing and being identified with the girl’s suffering. No matter how much suffering he undergoes and no matter how he manipulates language to construct identification, he is at a differential distance from her suffering. Any


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semblance of moral identification and empathy conveyed by his narrative is a self-deception.10

Unlike the girl or any of her people, the magistrate can narrate his experiences and bestow them onto posterity by recording them in writing. At the centre of this account he places himself as a figure gradually metamorphosing into “a beast or a simple machine” reduced to jerking his arms, pulling his beard, stamping his feet” (WFB, 93). Shocking images of his physical discomfort are meant to signal and account for his descent into wordless stupor. So expressive are these images that they almost let the reader overlook the eloquence with which this decline is narrated: I stare all day at the empty walls, unable to believe that the imprint of all the pain and degradation they have enclosed will not materialize under an intent enough gaze; or shut my eyes, trying to attune my hearing to that infinitely faint level at which the cries of all who suffered here must still beat from wall to wall. (WFB, 87)

At least on another plane removed from the narrated events, the stinking “mountain of flesh”, so damaged that he who can do no more than scream and gabble, has retained his persuasive power. And he manages to summon his rhetorical skills in his final confrontation with his successor, Colonel Joll. In this scene Joll interrogates the magistrate about a collection of poplar slips inscribed in an ancient hand. The magistrate has never been able to decipher these slips. But when told that he is suspected of using them for secret communication with the barbarians, he cannot resist the temptation to inform the colonel that the slips contain a full record of the abominations perpetrated by Joll and his men. With this ingenious move, the magistrate briefly confounds the colonel, who does not at all seem to savour the prospect that someone might have outwitted his censorship and used a foreign writing system to record all those truths he has taken such trouble to suppress. Joll retaliates by announcing what he holds to be a truth equally discomfiting for the magistrate. “You seem to want to make a name for yourself as the One Just Man, the man who is prepared to sacrifice his freedom to his principles”, he offers as a bait to continue: 10

Yeoh, 342-43.

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“You want to go down in history as a martyr, I suspect. But who is going to put you in the history books? These border troubles are of no significance. In a while they will pass and the frontier will go to sleep for another twenty years. People are not interested in the history of the back of beyond.” (WFB, 125)

The narrative itself belies Joll’s evaluation of what will be deemed “interesting reading”. Joll himself vanishes from the text to be replaced by Mandel, a warrant officer driven by far baser urges than Joll’s petty ambition to “clean up local administration” and reorganize the magistrate’s office “from clutter and dustiness” to “vacuous neatness” (WFB, 91). His barbarities exceed any of the cruelties Joll’s mind is able to concoct. For their extremity alone they must not be forgotten but recorded in detail. In trying to do so, the narrator jeopardizes his own credibility. For the horrors perpetrated by Mandel appear too gruesome for anyone who has suffered them to bear recapitulating them. That the narrator should be able to actively recall what he himself experienced seems almost as difficult to accept as the suggestion that he should be recounting his own experiences at the very moment of their occurrence. The confusion created alienates the reader and causes one to feel almost as excluded from the narrative as the barbarians around which the narrative pretends to revolve. The refraction of the figure of the magistrate, his splitting into two figures, namely the magistrate telling and the magistrate told, the magistrate as narrator and the magistrate as an object of narration, corresponds with the ambivalent identification enforced throughout the novel of the desert nomads as barbarians. Joll’s and Mandel’s actions make clear that there has always been a coming and going of barbarians even if the title of the novel seems to project their arrival beyond its own ending. Still the narrator is the only character who eventually realizes that the attribute “barbarian” is more adequately applied to the white perpetrators of barbarities than to their black victims. All other characters seem to think differently. They have been taught to identify the desert nomads as barbarians. The methods used to delete any other possibility of identification from their minds are revealed in a particularly gory episode. In this episode the narrator joins a crowd watching a handful of prisoners kneeling on the ground, bent over a pole to which they are attached by a wire threaded through their lips. He then observes Joll taking some


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charcoal and dust and rubbing the word “ENEMY” into each of their naked backs. This accomplished, Joll orders a soldier to wipe out the words again by flogging the men until the writing has dissolved in their own sweat and blood. It is barely surprising that such reading lessons instil not so much a deep sense of guilt but profound fear in the obedient observers, who are easily persuaded that hordes of barbarians are about to storm their camp to slaughter them. So petrified are the people in the settlement by such rumours that they cease to remember how their own people would cheat and humiliate the nomads whenever these would come into town to trade with them, and how their own people would follow them into the desert and bring them back into the settlement to mutilate and murder them. Instead they tell each other stories of barbarians lurking in the hollows and coming out at night to prowl about, bent on raping their women and killing all of them. Convinced against all evidence that these barbarians have dug a tunnel under the town walls, they forbid their children to play outside the gates and advise all adults to go nowhere unarmed. Eventually their collectively manufactured fiction begins to engender more symbolic gestures of resistance. “WE STAY”, they write on the walls of their houses (WFB, 143), not as a message to the barbarians, but to give each other more than verbal support against their imaginary enemy. The narrator is the only one able to see that the imminence of the alleged barbarians’ attack is but a myth circulated by the regime to justify its bellicose manoeuvres. His descriptions of the growing hysteria amongst the settlers allow the reader to observe how the obvious unlikelihood of such an attack ever happening gradually calls in question the drama of their waiting as the only drama they allow themselves to enact. The blatant futility of their waiting brings to mind the stark pointlessness of Vladimir’s and Estragon’s waiting for Godot.11 A further parallel to Beckett’s play is created through Coetzee’s rendering of the public torturing of the barbarians in direct analogy to the tragic performance of Lucky in Waiting for Godot. “Be careful! …. He’s wicked. …. With Strangers”, Pozzo, bespectacled like Joll, 11

References to Beckett’s play in Waiting for the Barbarians seem to have attracted far less critical attention than Coetzee’s invocations of Kafka’s stories. (See Patricia Merivale, “Audible Palimpsests: Coetzee’s Kafka”, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 152-67.)

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warns Vladimir and Estragon to justify the cruelty with which he treats Lucky.12 According to the intertextual framework conjured by Coetzee, it is not Godot’s failure to appear, but Estragon’s and Vladimir’s failure to notice his appearance that renders their waiting absurd. Coetzee’s suggestion may even be that Godot does appear in Beckett’s play, namely in the person either of Lucky or of Pozzo, but that Estragon and Vladimir are unable to register this appearance because it so differs from what they expect. Likewise the difference of the barbarians’13 presence in the settlement from what the settlers are waiting for infinitely defers the completion of their waiting. As David Attwell notes by way of reference not to Beckett but to C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”: There is no conflagration beyond the moment of waiting, with the effect that Coetzee interrupts and suspends the teleology of the colonial state; by showing that Empire’s images of the barbarians are wholly contingent on its own need for self-realization, he breaks open the enclosed world of signs on which Empire depends.14

The Empire’s self-realization, one might add, is contingent on its images of the barbarians. Without these images the Empire seems unable to infer any meaning from its own being. It is exactly to this end that Coetzee’s narrator keeps trying to picture the barbarians even after his return from the desert. In the process he draws on the discursive strategies employed by the Empire to realize its political ends: excessive self-scrutiny, mystification of the Other and pseudoidentification with it, and, finally, replacement of that Other by systematic self-victimization are part of his repertoire of rhetorical ruses. So is, arguably, the strategy of consigning the barbarians to an altogether different noetic system. The magistrate does so by suggesting that they possess another writing system and hence also a completely different form of thinking. As Attwell has pointed out, this accords with the Enlightenment idea of barbarians as beings a step 12

22.

13

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, London 1956,

That is, the presence of both the barbarian tormentors and the tormented barbarians. 14 David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, Perspectives on Southern Africa 48, Berkeley, 1993, 71.


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ahead of savages “because they obeyed authority, owned property, used writing materials, and domesticated animals”.15 The projection of the barbarians as literate beings has nothing to do with a recognition of sameness, let alone with an identification with the Other. Rather, one of its purposes is to release the narrator of the novel from the responsibility to speak or write for the subaltern. After all, if subalterns have their own script, they need no one, least of all a foreign scribe, to write for or about them. At the same time, the delimitation of the magistrate’s discursive terrain against that of the barbarians allows for a drastic restriction of the novel’s target audience as it excludes the barbarians and any other group with a different script. The exclusivity of the readership courted by Coetzee’s narrator is not stated openly, however. Instead it is belied by the non-specific milieu of Waiting for the Barbarians which, as Attwell argues, has misled some readers to apprehend Coetzee’s novel erroneously as a statement on writing, literature, and historiography in general: Readers of Waiting for the Barbarians frequently take the novel’s non-specific milieu to suggest a form of ethical universalism. There is a difference, however, between the universalism – which implies a humanist conception of a transcendent moral consciousness – and a strategic refusal of specificity, a refusal that is the result of being painfully conscious of one’s immediate historical location. The milieu of Barbarians is the result, I believe, of just such a refusal.16

For Attwell, the deliberate anachronisms of the novel, its very remoteness, and its denial of historical plausibility are integral part of Coetzee’s scheme to criticize not any human society, but the South African apartheid state, not any form of writing, but the kind of literature South Africa’s totalitarian government tended to encourage with its own phantasmagoric projections and vocabulary in the early 1980s when Waiting for the Barbarians was written.17 Likewise Yeoh 15

Ibid., 75. Ibid., 73. On the issue of classing Coetzee as a “supra-national” writer or defining him and his work in national terms although his novels strike one above all “as ways of escape” from the most immediate contexts, the South African, in which they were produced, see also Huggan and Watson, 1-5, as well as Stephen Watson “Colonialism and the Novels of J.M. Coetzee”, in Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee, eds Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson, 13. 17 Attwell, 74. 16

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reads Coetzee’s novel as “a broader on-going critique particularly of the white South African liberal humanist novel and its false narrative of the universal identification of all men”.18 The tale of “universal identification of all men”, which, according to Yeoh, the guilt-ridden white South Africa “tells itself to comfort itself”,19 is false because it includes far from “all men”, least of all the victims of South African apartheid. In the light of their suffering, the mere presence of these victims would reduce the white South African writer’s call for an “identification of all men” to a cynical insincerity. Hence, too, the narrator of Waiting for the Barbarians has no other choice than to relegate the barbarians to a cultural space outside that of his narrative’s reception. Given the magistrate’s implication in the nomads’ subjugation, it is not enough for him to know that they are not able to hear or read his tale. More assuring still than the chance that they are unable to access his narrative is the idea that they are too absorbed in their own writing to want to know his version of their history. Though describing the non-literate Other from radically different angles, The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, and Waiting for the Barbarians have in common that they try to establish what it is apart from an irreconcilable otherness between literate and non-literate cultures that prevents any deeper understanding of that otherness. In the process all three trace a deep-seated resistance to such understanding, an unwillingness to know the Other in their characters. The earliest text, The Heart of the Matter, reveals this resistance to insight in the most realistic manner, translating it into a moral flaw which the protagonist realizes too late to amend. As a result, it seems as if the repentance he feels in the end serves solely to help the reader to readjust to the discovery that the novel commands one’s identification with someone deeply implicated in a rather questionable story of cultural expansion, oppression, and negation. As reader, one can conveniently put one’s own ignorance of the African people and 18

Yeoh, 339. Correspondingly Dovey argues that in Waiting for the Barbarians “allegory is thematised as a means of articulating the liberal humanist crisis of interpretation” and notes, “While Waiting for the Barbarians offers a critique of a particular failure of interpretation, it places under scrutiny its own interpretive practice and … that of certain discourses of criticism” (141). 19 Yeoh, 339.


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their culture down to the distorted accounts Greene shows to be reported back to Europe from the colonies. Not without reason, the novel itself effectively simulates the indifference of European colonizers vis-à-vis native Africans and sustains the sense of their unconcern to the very end by subordinating even the tragic death of Scobie’s illiterate houseboy Ali to the protagonist’s own suicide. What actually happens to Ali in the night of his mysterious death remains untold, which ultimately allows the reader to feel as innocently ignorant as the unsuspecting victim of Scobie’s and Yusef’s machinations. Achebe, by contrast, refuses to grant the reader any such opportunity of identification with the unknowing colonized. Things Fall Apart offers, in fact almost forces insights that leave the reader completely demystified in the end. The information about oral Igbo culture his novel supplies forces the reader to acknowledge that there is another form of knowing than the literate one to which Achebe’s text appeals. Initiated into this knowing, Achebe’s reader may recognize the protagonist’s dilemma and come to understand Okonkwo’s blindness to the inevitability of change as a tragically incorrigible flaw. Yet while this understanding leads to no complete identification with the hero it does not instil a sense of superiority in the reader either. This is prevented by the appearance of the District Commissioner at the end of the novel whose way of reading Okonkwo’s life story turns out to be informed by the same fallibility to which Scobie succumbs in The Heart of the Matter. In contrast to Scobie, however, Achebe’s commissioner does not become a victim to his own flawed perception of the African Other. As there is neither repentance nor punishment, his misapprehension of Okonkwo commands no sympathy but makes the reader uncomfortably aware of the restrictedness of literate thinking. The most recent novel of the three discussed in this section, Waiting for the Barbarians, finally, explores the theme of the colonist’s incomprehension of the non-literate native in the most complexly encoded manner, deliberately challenging the readers to make up their own mind about the narrator’s credibility and to query the knowledge his narrative supplies of the Other who, though constantly invoked, is rarely close enough to permit any deeper understanding. Rather than a reader or interpreter of the barbarians, the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians turns out to be a conjurer

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of their otherness, a fabulist who, in contrast to Henry Scobie in The Heart of the Matter and the district commissioner in Things Fall Apart, consciously and unscrupulously employs story-telling as a means of transforming the truth and fashioning another self to dispose of a past too unfavourable to bear recounting. As Coetzee’s readers have to discover, it is not only the magistrate’s immediate audiences in the text that have been deceived by his rhetoric. The reader too has been fooled into mistaking the sensationalist brutality of the magistrate’s narrative for honesty and overlooking the silence Coetzee’s narrator imposes on the nomads while purporting to be speaking on their behalf. However, with the construction of the barbarians as capable of writing for themselves, the narrator exceeds his poetic licence, or so at least Colonel Joll, his sinister antagonist, thinks. The reader is not explicitly asked to agree with Joll, but not to do so on this particular point would be to miss one of the few chances Coetzee offers in his novel to extract oneself from the narrator’s propagandistic persuasion.

LATER CONTACTS IN NEW ZEALAND AND NORTH AMERICA


In contrast to The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart, and Waiting for the Barbarians, the two novels to be discussed in the following chapter, Potiki (1985) by Patricia Grace and Love Medicine (1984) by Louise Erdrich, do not narrate first or early encounters between literate and non-literate cultures. They are set well after the arrival of Western literacy in New Zealand and America and its imposition on the native peoples there, drawing on a hundred and fifty years of exchange between indigenous minority and white master cultures. Written in the early 1980s, at a time of worldwide rediscovery and reappraisal of indigenous cultures1 not only by non-indigenous establishments but by indigenous peoples themselves,2 both novels can afford to reconstruct this history in terms far less pessimistic than the accounts of European expansion submitted by Coetzee and Greene in Waiting for the Barbarians and The Heart of the Matter, respectively. Indeed, they offer an evaluation of the future of Maori and Chippewa cultures, and of Maori and Chippewa oralities in particular, whose qualified optimism bears a certain resemblance to the confidence with which Chinua Achebe affirms the principal compatibility of Igbo and Western epistemologies both in his theoretical writings as well as in Things Fall Apart. While Waiting for the Barbarians and The Heart of the Matter posit an irreconcilable difference between Europeans and Africans, 1

The period is commonly referred to as that of the Maori Renaissance in New Zealand and of the Native American Renaissance in the US and Canada. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, “Introduction”, in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction, Oxford, 2000, 3, Benjamin Pitman, “Te Taha Maori – A Culture Re-asserts Itself: Identity and Art in the Maori World” in Arts in Cultural Diversity, ed. Jack Condous, Janferie Howlett, and John Skull, New York, 1980, 243-50, as well as Jacqueline Bardolph, “An Invisible Presence: Three Maori Writers”, Third World Quarterly XII/2 (1990), 13136. 2 Because of the coincidence of their conception it is the original version of Love Medicine that is compared with Potiki here. In 1993, Erdrich published a “new and expanded version” of her first novel (readable also as the first volume of a tetralogy, with The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace making up the other three volumes). For a commentary on this rewriting see Elizabeth Devereaux, “Love Medicine Redux: New and Improved, but Why?”, Publishers Weekly, 23 November 1992, 30, Jeanne-Marie Zeck, “Erdrich’s Love Medicine”, The Explicator, LIV/1 (Fall 1995), 58-60, and Allan Chavkin, “Vision and Revision in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine”, in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 211-19.

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colonizers and colonized and abstain from even contemplating the possibility of a constructive cultural exchange between them, Things Fall Apart suggestively anticipates the espousal of alphabetic literacy as a development potentially beneficial for the Igbo people. As has been shown, thematically Achebe projects this development beyond the ending of his novel by hinting at the possibility that his hero’s son Nwoye will finally transcend the tragic fates of his father and his grandfather. Formally, however, Achebe fully realizes the synthesis of Igbo orality and English literacy he envisages within his novel Things Fall Apart itself. Like Achebe, Erdrich and Grace posit literacy and orality not as mutually exclusive absolutes, but as correlate variables and advocate the cultivation of an oral literacy (or of a literate orality) that will enable indigenous peoples in North America and New Zealand, respectively, to assert their cultural specificity. Yet while interpreting the appropriation of alphabetic literacy as an indispensable and perfectly natural development, they do not relate the refusal of some of their people to participate in this appropriation as special tragedies – quite the opposite. Grace and Erdrich systematically idealize and mystify the scriptlessness that distinguishes certain of their characters as a curiously superior form of otherness, absolutely intangible to literate Westerners and, hence, strangely immune to colonization. Only at first sight do the fates of their non-literate protagonists appear identical with those of Okonkwo or Ali, or with that of the barbarians in Coetzee. They, too, suffer destruction and loss. Yet their deaths are followed by a kind of spiritual survival, resurrection, or rebirth, which does not only negate the imminent demise of indigenous orality, but also helps to assert the aboriginal culture’s continuity – in spite of its exposure to the civilizing forces of a white literate culture. Accordingly Jacob writes that Love Medicine “is not about despair and cultural loss entirely” but about “a culture in transition” and notes that signs are present in the novel “that bode well for a Chippewa future”.3 Likewise Knudsen observes of Potiki that it 3

Connie A. Jacobs, The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People, American Indian Studies 11, New York, 2001, 95. Similarly, Bak observes that Erdrich “moved beyond the stereotype of the ‘doomed Indian’, helplessly trapped between the two cultural codes of native American beliefs and Roman Catholicism” and that in Erdrich’s fiction “intercultural conflict is not necessarily destructive, but

Later Contacts in New Zealand and North America

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performs “an active appropriation of the language and the medium of the Centre”, thereby opening up to “a renewed sense of cultural autonomy that allows for the Maori “breath of life” to be “celebrated again”.4 Gordon and Williams observe about the work of Patricia Grace that it “does not simply reflect the ongoing struggle of people and communities to adapt modernity to their own purposes and priorities” but that it conveys a sense of itself and its language being “deeply and positively implicated in the adjustments of power”.5 For Williams and Gordon Grace’s writing is free of the fear permeating the works of so many African writers that in writing in English they might contribute to a homogenization and deindigenization of their culture. Like Erdrich, Grace seems to comprehend cultural appropriation as a process in which her people have not been mastered by Western modes of thought and expression but have learnt to master them. Historically, this is not incorrect, especially as far as the Maori’s and Chippewa’s alphabetization is concerned as both the Maori and Native Americans acquired writing with remarkable swiftness and ease in the course of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. By the 1840s, literacy had spread among the Maori population without much help of English and French missionaries, mainly on a do-it-yourself basis. So receptive was Maori culture to new technology in general and especially to writing that, according to Richard Benton, there soon were “proportionately more Maori literate in Maori than English people in New Zealand (and possibly in England) literate in English”.6 In America the native population espoused literacy with equal keenness and, when prevented from doing so by white settlers, rather is available as an ambiguous source of both strength and powerlessness” (Hans Bak, “Toward a Native American ‘Realism’: The Amphibious Fiction of Louise Erdrich”, in Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Kristiaan Versluys, Postmodern Studies 5, Amsterdam, 1992, 145-70). 4 Eva Rask Knudsen, The Circle and the Spiral: A Study of Australian Aboriginal and New Zealand Maori Literature, Cross/Cultures, Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English 68, Amsterdam, 2004, 2-3. 5 Elizabeth Gordon and Mark Williams, “Raids on the Articulate: CodeSwitching, Style-Shifting and Post-Colonial Writing”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XXXIII/2 (1998), 88-89. 6 Richard Benton, “The History and Development of the Maori Language”, in Dirty Silence: Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand, eds Graham McGregor, Mark Williams, and Ray Harlow, Auckland, 1991, 12.

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devised their own scripts. Probably the most widely spread script ever invented by a Native American is the syllabary conceived by Sequoyah between 1819 and 1822 and adopted by the Cherokee Nation not only for their written constitution but also for translations from the Christian scriptures and the circulation of news in Amerindian newspapers such as the Cherokee Phoenix. Particularly well suited to the Cherokee language, Sequoyah’s script became so popular that by 1825 the vast majority of Cherokee Indians had become literate. It did not die out even after the Cherokees were brutally decimated in the time of removal in 1838 and was replaced by the Latin alphabet only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Louise Erdrich’s native language, Ojibwe,7 is still written in Oji-Cree, an adaptation of a syllabary which Methodist missionary James Evans created for the Cree between 1840 and 1846. Though promoted along with other cultural practices in a relatively recent concerted endeavour to preserve Ojibway traditions and customs, Oji-Cree is not seen as a serious alternative to the Latin alphabet, nor Ojibwe as one to English. Hostility to indigenous literacy was considerable both in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America and New Zealand. Grace and Erdrich are aware of this and in their writings expressly refer to the methods of cultural engineering employed to enforce the use of English in spoken as well as in written communication among their people. Grace severely criticizes the educational policy which New Zealand pursued until the 1970s and which entailed the extension of compulsory schooling to Maori children in the 1890s, their systematic assignation of teachers who could speak only English, and the introduction of harsh disciplinary measures against Maori children using their native language at school. Her description of the kind of indoctrination to which Native New Zealanders were subjected during their years at school lend themselves to a comparison of the accounts offered by Erdrich in Love Medicine of the forced enrolment of Native American children into state boarding schools for the purpose of suppressing indigenous languages and literacies.

7 Otherwise anglicized as “Chippewa”, “Ojibwa” or “Ojibway” and known to its own speakers as “Anishinabe” or “Anishinaabemowin”.


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Ironically enough, such censoring did not prevent the evolution of indigenous writing traditions distinctive from white uses of literacy either in America or in New Zealand, but only delayed it. Maori literature in the narrow sense of the word began to be produced only relatively recently and, as a rule, is conceived not in Maori but in English. Still, as Mark Williams insists, it is “no less authentically Maori literature than traditional songs and chants”.8 For its appeal is in the first place to Maori readers and only secondarily to pakeha and overseas audiences. This is possible because, unlike the majority of sub-Saharan Africans, most Maori are bilingual and literate. So are most Native Americans. Thus Louise Erdrich or Patricia Grace write in a situation that has never really made it necessary for them to express the same bitter resentment that Africa’s first Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, has articulated at having to write “in a language that belongs to the conqueror”.9 Instead they have been able to openly accept the hybridity of their cultural heritage and to make creative use of their ability to write for and to their own people in English. In the process they have come to conceive of non-literacy as a very special form of otherness, one that implies neither disadvantage nor social marginalization. The indigenous communities portrayed in Love Medicine and Potiki do not discriminate between people who can read and write and people who cannot. Indeed, their largely unproblematic attitude to literacy allows them to accord those untouched by any knowledge of letters a very special status in their social life as well as in the narratives these communities create in a collective endeavour of remembering and recuperating the past. This is important also to the conception of each novel as a “transitional text”, that is as one forming a bridge between traditional oral and modern written 8

Mark Williams, “Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace: The Maori Renaissance” (15-05-2003): http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/engl1392/492/williams.html. 9 Wole Soyinka, quoted in Skinner, 79. As for the attitude of other African writers such as Zaynab Alkali, J.P. Clark, Gabriel Okara, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, Ken Saro-Wiwa, or Esk’ia Mphalele to English as a medium of self-expression, see also Skinner, 77-108. On the problematic of language choice in the context of New Zealand cf. also Michelle Keown, “Maori or English?: The Politics of Language in Patricia Grace’s Baby-No-Eyes”, in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures 65, ASNEL Papers 65, Amsterdam, 2003, 419-29.

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literature by reviving myth, ceremony, traditional strategies of storytelling, and tribal ways of knowing.10 Potiki and Love Medicine loosely combine the tales recollected by individual family members to form “a chorus of different characters speaking in different cadences”.11 As multi-perspective or multivoiced novels, they extend Achebe’s notion of native individuals enacting life stories emblematic of their people’s history.12 The engagement of the individual characters with each other in a communal incantation of their history seems to be suggestive of a powerful social coherence across generational differences and temporal distances. Sensing this coherence as they become aware of their closeness to the non-literate members of their community, Grace’s and Erdrich’s often highly literate natives ultimately overcome the alienation from their culture which their indoctrination with Western knowledge has caused. They learn to see their personal story not in Western terms as a tale of individuation but as a fate shared with their ancestors. They understand that, despite the autonomy their education may have given them, they remain implicated in their people’s history of suppression, exploitation, and corruption.13 This eventually enables them to accept their aboriginality as an historically relevant category and assume responsibility for its protection and preservation. For all their optimism concerning the efficacy and integrating capacity of indigenous writing in English, Erdrich’s and Grace’s texts are never oblivious of the dangers to which minority cultures (or what

10 For example, Kathleen M. Sands, “American Indian Autobiography” and Elaine Jahner, “Intermediate Forms between Oral and Written Literature”, both in Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, ed. Paula Gunn Allen, New York, 1990, 55-65 and 66-74; and Nancy J. Peterson, “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks”, PMLA, CIX (1994), 982-94, as well as Jacobs, 46-50. 11 Dee Brown, Review of Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich, Studies in American Indian Literatures, IX/1 (Winter 1985), 5. 12 Jacobs speaks of a “tribal focus on kinship” (105). 13 Jacobs even considers this realization a generic feature of what she calls “tribal novels”, that is, narratives permeated by “oral residues” or “lingering evidence of a pre-literate epistemology” (36) manifesting themselves for instance in a sort of transcendence of Western individualism for the sake of a full integration into a tribal community.


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Grace programmatically calls “small population cultures”14) are exposed through their interaction with majority cultures. For Terrie Goldie and Cliff Watego these dangers have been exacerbated by a growing tendency among majority cultures to make their support of indigenous arts and literatures dependent on their opportunity to commercialize them. They argue that as a result genuine patronage of aboriginal cultures has degenerated into petty patronization serving mainly the purpose of indigenizing white master cultures by setting them up as milieus without which native cultures cannot thrive naturally.15 In Love Medicine and Potiki, Grace and Erdrich emphatically contradict this assumption and its underlying identification of Western civilization as the “surviving fittest”. It is above all to this end that they stress the vibrancy of Chippewa and Maori oral traditions and attest their non-literate characters almost superhuman endurance. While most critics, in isolating signs of Erdrich’s and Grace’s obstinate optimism, have stressed the retrospective orientation of their narratives, the following analysis will show that Potiki and Love Medicine may equally be comprehended as anticipatory texts projecting a re-indigenization of aboriginal epistemologies and reasserting the Maori’s and Native Americans’ claim to aboriginality as one impossible for white establishments to challenge.

14

Grace, quoted in Keown, 421. Goldie, Fear and Temptation. Cf. Cliff Watego, “Cultural Adaptation in the South Pacific Novel”, World Literature Written in English, XXIII/1 (Spring 1984), 488-96. 15


CHAPTER ELEVEN ISLANDS OF PRELITERATE ORALITY: LOUISE ERDRICH’S LOVE MEDICINE AND PATRICIA GRACE’S POTIKI

A central theme in Potiki and Love Medicine is the constant imminence of change, which in capitalist Western terms may signify progress by growth and acquisition, yet for the indigenous communities portrayed means material confinement and loss. It is against the shrinking of the actual place inhabited by the native communities described by Grace and Erdrich that their two novels may be said to assert themselves discursively. Narration, in Potiki and Love Medicine, thus serves not only the recuperation of a repressed cultural past but the repatriation of stolen cultural land. Charting this land, Grace and Erdrich give centrality to non-literate characters and in so doing suspend and even revert, at least for the duration of their narratives, the seemingly inevitable cultural transformations their novels record. As they let their focus linger on non-literate characters they create a caesura during which alternative scenarios of cultural growth in form of a cyclical event rather than an ever-accelerating unidirectional process become conceivable. The scriptlessness of Hemi Tamihana’s retarded sister Mary in Potiki, as well as that of Nector Kashpaw’s brother Eli, and of the hermit Moses Pillager in Love Medicine is contrapuntal because what it suggests is even less than a development diametrically opposed to the acculturation to which most other characters in the novel are subjected: it actually indicates complete stasis not, however, in the sense of an involuntary paralysis, but in the sense of a profound state of contentment provocatively calling in question the drive towards tragic closure which each novel as a whole seems unable to resist. In Potiki such a closure is foreshadowed by the lethal combat in which a Maori community engage to defend their land against wilful seizure by pakeha property developers. The violence they thus incite is extreme. It results in the destruction of their wharenui and in the murder of Toko, their lastborn, their potiki. While most members of the community are devastated by these events, Toko’s mother, the illiterate Mary Tamihana, continues to cherish what is left to her and

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her people and to bestow her affection onto it with unbroken faith in the vitality of her people and their culture. Her means of expression are limited, and so she resorts to singing her story, “sometimes softly, sometimes loudly, to herself and to the house”.1 Even on the morning when the Tamihanas go to look at the remains of their meeting house, Mary is capable of facing the signs of total desolation with confidence in the future. Standing amongst the disintegrated timbers, she surprises her people, who are all paralysed by the sight of the destruction, by pulling a scarred and blackened poupou from the rubble to bury it “so that the new could spring from the old which is the natural way of things” (P, 138). What, to the uninitiated Western reader, appears to be a clear symptom of Mary’s naivety and incomprehension in reality is a sign of her resilience. Rather than too limited to grasp and adapt to any changes, Mary’s mind proves too independent to be manipulated. Knowing this, her sister-in-law, Roimata, in reflecting on Mary’s idiosyncratic way of coping with loss, concludes that, in moments of crisis, “It was those who were not strong that could give ... strength” (P, 129). Even though, unlike other protagonists in Potiki, the “childwoman” never assumes the role of the narrator to tell her story in her own words, this does not mean that Mary does not have a story to tell. Yet, rather than telling it, she sings it “along pathways not known” (P, 180) to be heard only by those who listen to the whispering of the wharenui, in other words, only by those with an understanding of Maori mythology and genealogy. Likewise, Eli Kashpaw and Moses Pillager in Love Medicine represent both the durability of Chippewa culture and its almost mystical inaccessibility to outsiders. Erdrich, too, links their firm rootedness in their native culture to the fact that, in contrast to the rest of their people, they have not been contaminated by Western learning. She does so, for instance, at the beginning of Love Medicine from the point of view of Albertine Johnson, who contemplates the difference between her grandfather Nector Kashpaw and his brother Eli. With sadness Albertine notes the mental disintegration of her grandfather, once an astute political dealer “knowing white reading and writing”. “Grandpa’s mind had left us, gone wary and wild”, she muses: 1

Patricia Grace, Potiki (1986), Talanoa: Contemporary Pacific Literature, Honolulu, 1995, 15.

10. Islands of Preliterate Orality

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His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds …. Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished. The same color as water.2

At the same time Albertine cannot help marvelling at Eli’s unchanging sharpness. While the well-read Nector Kashpaw tragically ends up “remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time” (LM, 19), the illiterate Eli, formerly derided as “a nothing-and-nowhere person” (LM, 92), in old age is admired for his unrivalled hunting skills and an almost uncanny understanding of nature. The younger generation respect Eli because he is “the last man on the reservation who could still snare himself a deer” (LM, 29). The children love him for teaching them “how to care, how to listen for the proper birdcall, how to whistle on their own fingers like a flute” (LM, 92). Though structurally marginalized, precisely like Mary in Potiki, by way of careful exclusion from the narrative event in which Erdrich has the other central characters of the novel join, the figure of Eli still retains a central position within the Chippewa community. His special aura is authenticated by this community’s remembering, which acquires particular cultural importance as a collective act of salvaging a unique Chippewa individuality from oblivion. As ambivalent as Mary’s role in Potiki and Eli Kashpaw’s in Love Medicine is that of the equally unlettered Moses Pillager in the latter novel. This character’s actual appearances in the novel are restricted to a single chapter told by Lulu Nanapush, who, against all warnings, resolves to seek out Moses Pillager on his island and become his lover. She is told that Moses is windigo (“His grandfather ate his own wife!”)3 and that he rarely speaks and, if he does, speaks only Indian. The novel attributes his taciturnity to his upbringing. It discloses that his mother, “a woman who always had quick ideas”, decided to “fool the spirits” and pretend that her son was dead in order to protect him 2 Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (1984), new and expanded version, New York, 1993, 19. 3 As Jaskoski explains, windigo is “the embodiment of winter starvation, a cannibal who can devour whole villages. Windigo sickness occurs when this dangerous spirit takes possession of a human soul, causing an irresistible desire to consume human flesh” (Helen Jaskoski, “From the Time Immemorial: Native American Traditions in Contemporary Short Fiction”, in Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, eds Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer, Macomb: Ill, 1987, 57).

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from a fatal illness which was decimating their tribe. This meant that Moses had to live invisible. “Nobody ever let out his real name. Nobody saw him” (LM, 74-75), the reader learns. The invisibility defining Moses’ childhood still pertains to the figure of the adult Moses Pillager, in fact, it seems to inform his entire career, of which Erdrich strategically discloses only few details thereby preventing it from evolving into a story in its own right. As if to obey the matriarch’s resolve, Moses remains hidden as it were in the background of the novel. Lulu recalls how one summer, when she was a little girl, he came to her uncle Nanapush “and the two sat beneath the arbor, talking only in the old language, arguing the medicine ways, throwing painted bones and muttering over what they had lost or gained” (LM, 73). As an adult, walking the trail toward the centre of his island, Lulu at last stands before the enigmatic Moses, and her memory of him as the personification of her people’s original Indianness (or of what they nostalgically believe this Indianness to have been once) is confirmed: Suddenly Moses was there, sitting before me on a chair of stones. He was surprising, so beautiful to look at that I couldn’t tell his age. His heavy hair coursed all the way down his back, looped around his belt. His face was closely fit, the angles measured and almost too perfect. (LM, 77-78)

His beauty, vitality, and strength, his silent guardedness and perfect oneness with nature seem to lend Moses an Indianness superior even to young Nector Kashpaw’s. While the latter is much sought for by white film makers and painters and frequently hired for his good looks to pose as or act the model Indian, Moses remains difficult to capture either in words, or letters, or in any other medium of expression. A verbal approximation to what he is appears possible only by recourse to figurative language. Through it he is conjured as a mythical Other reconnecting his people with their cultural origins. As Lulu puts it, “He was made of darkness – weightless, fragile” (LM, 81): “He was his island, he was me, he was his cats, he did not exist from the inside out but from the outside in” (LM, 83). The ideal form of indigenous incorruptibility Mary Tamihana, Eli Kashpaw, and Moses Pillager epitomize is closely tied up with Chippewa and Maori notions of time. In Native American and Maori terms alike the stasis in which each of the three characters remains


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locked does not necessarily signify a lack of progress but simply a fusion of past, present, and future, a state of continuity maintained through a constant spiral movement involving returns as well as advances. As Miriam Fuchs succinctly points out, in Maori, “the past” translates into “the days in front”.4 Correspondingly, Maori epistemology posits the past as “both unfixed and revocable, capable of being altered into the present, which gradually slips into the future and thus becomes present time”.5 Drawing on Fuchs’ work, Elizabeth Deloughrey proposes that “Grace employs a spiral temporality where past and future time is narratively re-experienced in what she terms the ‘now-time, centred in the being’”. This enables her to depart from “the traditional linear, plot-driven narrative of the realist novel” and reform the Western individualistic narrative, “so profoundly implicated in nineteenth-century European imperialism”, into “a communal Maori narration”.6 The resultant hybridization of Polynesian and Christian temporalities generates considerable ontological and epistemological uncertainties and creates the impression that there is yet another story in Potiki, apart from the one the non-Maori readers grasp upon their first encounter with the text. Fuchs claims that “Something else is occurring ..., some other scheme of events”. Partially told and partially sensed, this other story “presses at the linear sequence, and ... circumscribes simple plot time within its more dynamic structure”.7 For the non-Maori reader to expect a resolution of the uncertainties inherent in Potiki is futile, according to Fuchs, as the novel’s indigenous story remains “almost ‘unanalysable’”8 or unreadable. In never breaking down the barriers to full comprehension she installs in her text, Grace situates non-Maori readers “at the edge of her Polynesian narrative, where they can sense its components, but are 4 Miriam Fuchs, “Reading Toward the Indigenous Pacific: Patricia Grace’s Potiki: A Case Study”, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, XXXVI (October 1993), 579. 5 Ibid., 576. 6 Elizabeth Deloughrey, “Patricia Grace’s ‘Potiki’”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, XXX/1 (January 1999), 60. 7 Fuchs, 577. Knudsen submits that this “other story”, this “underlying narrative form … barely visible to the ‘uninitiated’ eye” allows for a reading of the novel as being told “from and by the walls of the wharenui, and of the wharenui itself as providing, in fact, being the novel’s subtext (187). 8 Ibid., 580.

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unable to engage fully or even penetrate beyond its borders”.9 As Fuchs sees it, Grace’s aim is not to initiate outsiders into her native culture, but to “hold out for apparent display selected aspects of [her] culture”. Because of the partial illiteracy into which she manoeuvres the non-Maori reader, she argues, Grace’s work “may seem transparent, but as a cultural production ... is opaque”.10 Systematic alienation of the non-indigenous reader, Fuchs reminds us, is a characteristic not only of Patricia Grace’s fiction. The employment of similar strategies of what Reed Way Dasenbrock has termed “culturally coded defamiliarization”11 is equally common in other contemporary indigenous writers. Symptomatically, Barbara Pittman, in exploring the functions of the chronotope of the road in Love Medicine, registers a “movement away from linear continuity” also in Erdrich’s novel as it “tries to exist both within and without dominant culture of Euro-America”.12 Likewise David Mitchell observes that Erdrich in continuously shifting backwards and forwards between present and past produces convolutions of time and complications of action that serve to add ambiguity to her narrative.13 In Pittman’s view, it is because of the “chaos” and “disorder”, which Mitchell identifies as cardinal features of Love Medicine, that EuroAmerican-trained readers may initially perceive the novel as inscribed with the picaresque. Erdrich’s particular reader manipulation, however, eventually causes them to realize their own deficit of understanding and challenges them to try harder, as it were, to “shift position, turn, ponder, and finally integrate the story into a coherent whole”.14

9

Ibid., 581. Ibid., 579. 11 Dasenbrock, quoted in Fuchs, 581. 12 Barbara L. Pittman, “Cross-Cultural Readings and Generic Transformations: The Chronotope of the Road in Erdrich’s Love Medicine”, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, LXVII/4 (December 1995), 780. 13 David Mitchell, “Cultural Hegemony and the Native American Past in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine”, in Entering the 90s: The North American Experience: Proceedings from the Native American Studies Conference at Lake Superior University, October 27-28, 1989, ed. Thomas E. Schirer, Sault Ste. Marie: Mich, 1991, 164-65. 14 Kathleen M. Sands, “Love Medicine: Voices and Margins”, in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 35. 10


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The effect of the kind of rapport in which Erdrich engages her nonChippewa audiences is not much different, then, from what Grace accomplishes by way of systematic alienation of non-Maori readers. Love Medicine, too, in the end confronts non-Natives with their ignorance of Chippewa culture. As Rainwater puts it, Erdrich’s fiction “vexes the reader’s effort to decide upon an unambiguous, epistemologically consistent interpretive framework”. It produces “a permanent state of irresolution” in which one is left to confront epistemological dilemmas “from the perspective of one at least temporarily situated outside both systems”.15 What intensifies this “hermeneutical impasse” in Love Medicine is an ironic deconstruction of the white practice of casting and recasting the Indian in the forever unchanging role of the dying brave.16 Depictions of alcoholism and physical abuse corroding the social life on the reservation contest such stereotypes and urge a reading of Chippewa culture as a far more complex structure than popular narratives of extinction suggest. While insistently reminding their non-indigenous readers of their lack of insight into the culture of the Maori and Chippewa people, Grace and Erdrich do not provide them with an opportunity to identify with representatives of dominant white culture either. Indeed, they deny them such an opportunity by assigning white literates in Potiki and Love Medicine the part of a maha’oi haole, which is Hawaian for “intrusive outsiders who casually place themselves where they do not belong”.17 Careful not to attest these unbelonging intruders or “inferior outsiders”18 the importance they claim through their constant interference in the lives of the protagonists, Grace and Erdrich present them only as indistinct types, absent for most part of their narratives and present rarely more than as schematic figures looming somewhere in the background. As a result, even the actions they instigate seem not so much theirs as the painful experiences of the targets of their aggression.

15

Catherine Rainwater, “Reading between the Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich”, in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 165 and 167. 16 Pittman, 781. 17 Fuchs, 578. 18 Margaret J. Downes, “Narrativity, Myth, and Metaphor: Louise Erdrich and Raymond Carver Talk About Love”, MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, XXI/2 (Summer 1996), 56.

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The white characters’ reduction to mere ciphers of dominance and interference of course enforces the dramatic importance of the nonliterate characters in Love Medicine and Potiki. It is by way of contrast to the white characters’ textual marginality that Toko’s physical disability, Mary’s mental handicap, Moses’ self-imposed exile to his island, as well as Eli’s stubborn adherence to an Indianness long antiquated all acquire meaning as forms of existence which, however static, are never uncreative. Beside the white policemen, lawyers, and investors in Potiki and Love Medicine representing feature- and storyless types, Moses Pillager, Eli Kashpaw, and Mary Tamihana come to epitomize native incorruptibility. Theirs is a unique form of independence, a freedom that is literally metaphysical inasmuch as it enables them to transcend even temporal and geographic boundaries. The poem opening the prologue to Potiki captures perfectly the eccentricity and simultaneous autonomy embodied by these characters: From the centre From the nothing, Of not seen, Of not heard, There comes A shifting, A stirring, And a creeping forward, There comes A standing, A springing, To an outer circle, There comes An intake Of breath – Tihe Mauriora. (P, 7)

Of course, the “centre” which Erdrich’s and Grace’s eccentrically unlettered natives inhabit is situated at a safe distance from anything traditionally comprehended as “central” in Western terms. It signifies an indeterminate space, such as the beach where Mary can be found when she is not in the meeting-house and where she goes to give birth


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to Toko. “The shore is a ... death place. It is the wasteland ... where the sea puts up its dead”, Roimata reflects and continues: Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place – not land, not sea – there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning – or the end that is the beginning. (P, 18)

A similar uncertainty pertains to the place where the “nowhereperson” Eli lives, which is somewhere “way out in the bush” (LM, 22). His habit of going into hiding prompts comparisons with a “shy animal” (LM, 161) but also with Moses Pillager, whose island, inhabited by no one except him, is described as a place that is “small and dark at the center of a wide irritation of silver water” (LM, 73). There Moses can perfect the invisibility projected onto him by his superstitious mother and, separated by a vast body of water from the outside world, live safely quarantined from the influences disrupting the lives of the other Indians on the reservation. His sole companions in the unknown heart of the reservation are cats. Living with them he becomes “cat-like himself”, following his spirit guardian, Misshepeshu, who, as Van Dyke points out, is alternately described as “the big cat” and as “the horned lynx who lives in lakes”.19 While perceived by the outside world as “decrepit, deranged, deformed” (P, 102), the non-literate natives in both Potiki and Love Medicine at least have never been subjected to Western education, which Roimata Tamihana in Potiki remembers as a most puzzling confrontation with incongruous sets of ideas, values, and rules: At school we were given holy pictures and toffees to help us do God’s will. God’s will was for us to sit still, or stand straight on two feet. It was His will that we pray, that we have clean handkerchiefs, wear aprons, bring pennies for souls, eat our crusts, hold our partner’s hand. It was His will that we did not push or dribble, whistle, spit, swear, or make dog’s ears in books ....

19

Annette Van Dyke, “Of Vision Quests and Spirit Guardians: Female Power in the Novels of Louise Erdrich”, in The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, ed. Allan Chavkin, with an Afterword by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Tuscaloosa: Ala, 1999, 135.

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IV. The Non-Literate in Sight: Later Contacts It was God’s will that we sing the alphabet, the multiplication tables, the hymns and the catechism, and the toffees and the pictures of the suffering saints were kept in a green Jesus tin. (P, 16)

Even more openly than Roimata, Erdrich’s characters interrogate traditional Western, or more precisely, orthodox Catholic education. Most of them remember their school days as a time of brutal initiation into the intricacies of social injustice. All that Lulu Nanapush, for instance, recalls is the punishments she would receive for running away from boarding school: Once, twice, too many times. I ran away so often that my dress was always the hot-orange shame dress and my furious scrubbing thinned sidewalks beneath my hands and knees to cracked slabs. Punished and alone, I slept in a room of echoing creaks. I made and tore down and remade all the dormitory beds. I lived by bells, orders, flat voices, rough English. I missed the old language in my mother’s mouth. (LM, 68)

Lulu’s sufferings seem harmless compared to the ordeals another female in the novel, Marie Lazarre, must endure in a convent school because a senior nun believes that the half-caste reservation girl is possessed by the Devil. To exorcise the evil in her, Marie is locked into a black closet, scalded with boiling water, and stabbed through the hand with a fork. Ironically, the experience eventually convinces Marie that there must be some higher and kinder authority without the support of which she would not have been able to escape the measures of atonement to which she was subjected. At the same time, the recollection of the tortures she went through scars her for life, just as the education they receive at state schools seems to scar most other children on the reservation. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that few of them have any interest in the kind of learning imposed by “the new, the Catholic, the Bureau” (LM 263). Young Lipsha Morrissey, for instance, decides that he must quit school for the “betterment” of his “mental powers” (LM, 364). There is a startling resemblance between Lipsha Morrissey in Love Medicine and Reuben of Te Ope in Potiki, who also decides that at school he will not learn what he needs to learn. While the former proudly believes that he can do without white learning altogether because, as a descendant of Old Man Pillager, he is sufficiently


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endowed with higher powers (such as the “near-divine healing touch” [LM, 333]), the latter comes home from school one day and declares that he will not go there any more because all he is taught is disregard for himself and his people. As another character in Potiki puts it, state schools only “rubbished and ignored” (P, 65) the customs and language of the Maori. In contrast to Lipsha Morissey, Reuben resumes his education after he finds out about the sad story of his grandfather and the old man’s unanswered appeals to the government to restore to his people land of which the whites had defrauded them. Reuben goes on to study law so that he may take legal actions against the usurpers of his ancestral home. Yet the benefits of his education remain sadly oblique. While Reuben wins back his family’s property, the court decrees that compensation must be paid for all improvements allegedly made on the land by the whites. The decision steeps the people of Te Ope into near bankruptcy. The ironic twist in the outcome of their struggle for repatriation remains an unforgettable lesson to other Maori communities and prevents another family, the Tamihanas, from following Reuben’s example when, several years later, pakeha investors try to take over their property. Tragically, their decision to secede from any dealings with the whites altogether turns out an even more disastrous mistake. With their insistent rejection of the “dollarman’s” offers, they only court the gradual seizure of their land by wilful destruction, the demolition of their sacred sites, and the killing of Toko. Far too late do they comprehend that communication with the whites on Maori terms and territory is impossible. Complete defeat is finally averted by Tangimoana Tamihana who breaks with her parents’ philosophy of passive resistance and resumes Reuben’s strategy of speaking to the whites in the language of the whites. This language, however, is no longer legalese but that of straightforward violence. In response to the pakeha’s claim that the destruction of her family’s land and their wharenui was but an accident, Tangimoana stages an accident in which the enemy’s road building equipment is completely demolished. The ultimate success of her scheme is proof of the importance of mimicry, of a strategic simulation of the colonizer’s discursive habits. Literacy is seen accordingly in Potiki: as an indispensable accomplishment in the Maori’s endeavour to assert themselves against aggressors who do not speak their language, let alone understand their culture.

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For Knudsen, Potiki stands out from Grace’s earlier fiction because it is overtly political and explicitly traditional at once, offering “a rare combination of both agitational and lyrical, outspoken and meditative, MƗori voices”.20 It argues the need for an indigenous counter-history as convincingly as does Things Fall Apart. Also like Achebe’s novel, Grace’s text proposes that such a counter-history should be transported in a way accessible to members of white literate culture, yet still distinctly indigenous, in other words, in a way that bears features of both indigenous orality and indigenous literacy. Similarly, Louise Erdrich recognizes the need for a synthesis of Western and aboriginal systems of expression. While she idealizes the solid rootedness in oral Chippewa culture of such characters as Eli Kashpaw or Moses Pillager, she also grants that the form of living these characters have cultivated is possible only for the most eccentric of the Chippewa people, those living not only well beyond the reaches of Anglophone literacy but also on the margins of their own native society. Sameness with individual members of their community is what still connects them to their people. Such sameness is manifest in Gerry Nanapush, son of Moses Pillager, as well as in, June Morrissey, foster daughter of Eli Kashpaw. Both of these characters form “referential centres” towards which Erdrich’s novel seems to steer despite the apparent interest which its individual sections convey in so many other members of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe Erdrich portrays. Although Love Medicine hardly ever relates actual appearances of either June or Gerry, it consistently returns to them, having individual threads of action run together in their life stories. The account of constantly intersecting biographies begins with June’s death and the announcement that “June was gone – not only dead but suddenly buried, vanished off the land like that sudden snow” (LM, 7). It ends with Gerry’s escape from prison to Canada, closing with the comment that, like June, Gerry will not be able to return to the reservation and his people ever again. Yet, even if absence is the central theme of their stories, June and Gerry remain palpably present in the minds of the other characters. What Owens says about June applies equally to Gerry, namely that she does not return “physically” but comes home “resurrected as trickster, the fragmented culture hero 20

Knudsen, 186.


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made whole within memory and story, returning … to her Indian community as mythic catalyst”.21 The link Gerry and June represent to their people’s unwritten past as personified by Moses Pillager and Eli Kashpaw is preserved not only through their actual re-enactment of their elder’s eccentricity. It is also enforced by the memories an even younger generation has of them. In assembling these memories and showing how they keep transforming as individual characters compare notes and revise their own versions of the past, Love Medicine at once explains and mystifies the strange careers of June Morrissey and Gerry Nanapush. For Reid it is especially in this respect that Erdrich’s novel emulates the Native American tradition of story telling, which “heals itself and the tribal web by adapting to the flow of the present while never relinquishing its connection to the past”.22 In this process the reader takes on the same function as the listener in the event of oral narration. As Wong stresses, “it is the reader, rather than the unself-conscious narrators, who weaves the disparate, contradictory stories into a vision of community and history and culture”.23 The reader for instance is required to make better sense of June’s unexpected demise in a snow storm than most of her relatives do. They used to marvel at her extraordinary resilience and tell stories of how as an infant June survived alone in the forest after her mother’s death, sucking pine sap, grazing grass, and nipping buds like a deer. Some people on the reservation suspect that she did not die then because the spirits were protecting and raising her. Her aunt Marie is certain that “the woods were in June ... as if she really was the child of what the old people called Manitous”, that “the Devil had no business with June” (LM, 87). In the years to follow June refuses any help from her aunt but quietly mourns the loss of her mother, hardly speaking two words to anyone and never fighting back. Indeed, she seems to succumb to a curious flirtation with death, on one occasion even persuading her playmates to stage an execution in which she should be killed by hanging. A catastrophe is averted by the timely interception of her aunt who finds June with a neatly knotted rope around her neck, 21

Louis Owens, “Erdrich and Dorris’s Mixed-Bloods and Multiple Narratives”, in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 56-57. 22 Paula Gunn Allen, quoted in Reid, 69. 23 Wong, 5.

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telling her cousins to tighten it more before hoisting her up over the branch of a tree. “You ruined it .... I was supposed to be hanged”, her niece reproves her. Many years later Marie Lazarre still reflects, deeply mystified, “I could almost have sworn she knew what was real and what was not real, and that I’d still ruined it” (LM, 90). The only person whom June trusts is her uncle Eli Kashpaw, who takes her with him into the woods to shoot mud hens and teach her old Cree songs. “I was seeing how the girl spoke more often once he [Eli] started coming”, Marie remembers. She picked an old scrap of billed hat from a dump and wore it just like him, soft and squashed in on her hair. I began to understand what she was doing as time went on. It was a mother she couldn’t trust after what had happened in the woods. But Eli was different. He could chew pine sap too. (LM, 92)

Tragically, the knowledge the eccentric old man passes on to June, while enabling her to survive any storm on the plains, does not prepare her for survival under less natural circumstances. She dies not, as most of her relatives choose to believe, because she wandered off into a blizzard too intoxicated to spot the signs of its coming, but, as the recollection of her niece Albertine urges the reader to conclude, by choice. Instead of stating openly that June committed suicide, however, the narrative suggests only obliquely that she must have willed herself to put an end to a longstanding hurt. It is through Albertine’s fond reconstructions of her aunt’s story that it dawns on the reader that drunkenness and moral destitution do not sufficiently explain June’s demise. Instead the novel seems to submit that June ended up not so much a fallen woman, as her family would like to believe, but as a beaten one. This discovery presupposes a highly literate reading of June’s story, which only the university-educated Albertine can perform because she possesses the necessary distance from traditional Chippewa ideals. It is of symbolic significance that Albertine is “Far from home, living in a white woman’s basement ... sitting at [her] linoleum table with [her] textbook spread out to the section on ‘Patient Abuse’” when she receives a letter from her mother informing her not only about her aunt’s death but also that nobody had bothered to disturb her in her studies by asking her to June’s funeral. At once the letter creates a more than formal link between Albertine and her aunt,


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as is suggested also by the young woman’s realization how reading “that letter made [her] feel buried, too” (LM, 7). The spiritual oneness Albertine senses between herself and June is sustained throughout the novel. Also an outsider, Albertine is the only person, apart from her great-uncle Eli Kashpaw, who is not alienated by June’s otherness, but admires her for it. If, as Lissa Schneider argues, forgiveness is indeed what constitutes the “true love medicine” in Erdrich’s novel,24 Albertine possesses it and applies it to the memory of June. “Whatever she lacked as a mother”, she insists, “June was a good aunt to have” (LM, 8). Her fond and even grateful characterization of June in a sense makes up for the unforgiving picture the rest of the family and especially her son Lipsha draw of her: She always kept an extra stick of Doublemint in her coat pocket. Her neck smelled fresh and sweet. She talked to me the way she talked to grown-up people and never told me to play outside when I wanted to sit at the edge of a conversation. She had been pretty .... She had stayed pretty even when things got so bad with Gordie that she ran off alone .... She always planned that she would make it somewhere else first, then send for the boy. But everything she tried fell through. (LM, 8-9)

The girl who adores her aunt wildly grows up remembering the deceased woman’s words and finally understanding them. Absentmindedly overhearing a conversation in which somebody uses an oddly familiar combination of words, Albertine suddenly recalls what June said about her husband many years earlier: “He used the flat hand. He hit me good” (LM, 17). In remembering these words, Albertine retrieves the answer to a question all other members of her family seem either unable or unwilling to solve. No one except for Albertine Johnson can see it “laid out clear ... how down the limit [her] kind of life would have gotten June” (LM, 9). She finally grasps why her aunt had to sink so low. Her relatives choose to interpret June’s tragic end as the inevitable consequence of a madness brought on by the premature death of June’s mother and enforced by a tendency to idle degeneracy 24 Lissa Schneider, “Love Medicine: A Metaphor for Forgiveness”, Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, IV/1 (Spring 1992), 1.

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June has inherited from the Kashpaws. For Albertine, however, this is not the whole truth, but a judgement contrived and reiterated to deflect from the family’s own part in June’s death. It is against her relatives’ endeavours to suppress, deny, and forget their guilt that Albertine undertakes her remembering and reconstructs incidents of physical maltreatment June had to suffer from early childhood. She alludes to the possibility that there might be another version to the story of June’s hanging, a version according to which June’s playmates were no less determined to execute June than June herself was to be executed. As if to enforce this suspicion, Albertine’s narrative suggests that her aunt was tortured and abused by her cousins more than once. Thus she anticipates what is revealed far too late to save June or at least preserve her family’s respect for her: in the chapter significantly titled “Crown of Thornas”25 Albertine’s suspicion finally is confirmed that June’s husband Gordie Kashpaw, once a boxer in the Golden Gloves, would regularly beat her in uncontrolled rage until she left him. “So much is unconscious, passed down through generations, family to family”, Greg Sarris writes in his essay on internalized oppression and Love Medicine. “So much is unrecognizable”,26 and because of this Gordie gets away with murder – as does the father of June’s son Lipsha, Gerry Nanapush. While her family even posthumously condemn June for the life into which she allowed herself to drift, they love Gerry for his freewheeling, adore him for his notoriety, and enjoy the tales of his escapes from high security prisons. “No white man has made a jail that could hold the son of Moses Pillager”, they tell each other. “He could fly. He could strip and flee and change into shapes of swift release”, his son Lipsha raves about him. When he discovers that Gerry Nanapush is his father, he is overwhelmed with pride. By contrast, when he learns that June is his mother, all he feels is shame. As long as he does not know all about June and the oppression she had to suffer, Lipsha remains unwilling to forgive her for abandoning him when he was a little child. Instead he cherishes his anger at the woman who allegedly would have drowned him as a baby had she not been stopped by his grandmother. Yet, there is hope that he will 25

For an interpretation of this title and further biblical references in the novel, see Rainwater, esp. 164-65. 26 Greg Sarris, “Reading Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine as Home Medicine”, in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook, ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 205.


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overcome his resentment and learn the whole truth about his mother’s sad career from Albertine one day. As he himself reveals towards the end of the novel, Albertine is the only girl he has ever trusted. It is for her sake, that he returns to his people in the end, confident that his homecoming will be a new beginning. Reaching the bridge over the boundary river into the reservation, Lipsha stops and, looking into the dark, thick, twisting body of water underneath, remembers “how the old ones used to offer tobacco to the water”. Almost simultaneously, he recalls his mother June and suddenly free of any resentment he at last manages to concede, “there was good in what she did for me, I know now” (LM, 366). The idea conveyed by this ending of an emergent generation of Chippewa able to synthesize old and new forms of Indian life with the help of a far more optimistic and forgiving understanding of their people’s history, transforms the sadness underlying the reflections on June’s death at the beginning of the novel. The event does not mark the ending of June’s story. Not only does she continue to exist in the guilty conscience of her family. She also experiences a kind of rebirth in the much kinder recollections of Albertine and Lipsha. The novel’s final words have to be read accordingly as indicating the completion of the homeward journey on which June sets out one night at the beginning of Love Medicine. As dawn is breaking, Lipsha wakes from his reverie on the bridge over the boundary river, knowing that “there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home” (LM, 367). What he is bringing home is his mother’s car, which he has won on his trip and which means much more to him now that his vision of June is beginning to change.27 In a similar way, Potiki finally leads to the main character’s reconciliation with a past, at first too painful even to remember. Like Erdrich, Patricia Grace lets her narrative culminate in the sudden death of a character who has always played a particular integrating role within the native community she portrays. As in Love Medicine, this death marks a significant turning point in the narrative, forcing the natives to re-examine their self-defensively introspective position vis27 As for this homecoming as a characteristic of the orally organized Indian “homing” novel, see William Bevis, “Native American Novels: Homing In”, in Recovering the World: Essays on Native American Literature, eds Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, Berkeley, 1987, 582, and David E. Bynum, The Daemon in the Woods: A Study of Oral Narrative Patterns, Cambridge: Mass, 1978.

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à-vis white society and to face the inevitability of their assimilation to external pressures. On the one hand, Toko’s death foreshadows the immensity of the sacrifice such assimilation demands of them. On the other hand, it indicates a way of coming to terms with irreversible loss, a way which consists in the same optimistic evaluation of the future at which Lipsha in Love Medicine arrives through the reinterpretation of his personal history as son of Gerry Nanapush and June Morrissey. The ability to see that “Good can come from what is not good, good can come from sorrow, new life from old” (P, 159) is what in the end makes also the Maori in Potiki fit to face their future. More explicitly than Love Medicine, however, Potiki defines the colonized indigenes’ reconciliation with the past as a process of epistemological readjustment in the course of which available means of communication and systems of conceptualization are re-examined. Grace assigns this re-examination special importance in her novel by weaving into the main plot a separate highly symbolic story describing the genesis of the Tamihana’s wharenui. In so doing, she finds a way of reinforcing native systems of thought by which the development of her narrative is crucially determined. In her descriptions of the work of several generations of Maori woodcarvers, Grace captures the Maori idea of the artefact as representing an organically grown and forever growing expression of the native community’s story, an expression which documents past events and, as a synthesis of these, reflects the present, while also anticipating the future by virtue of its conception as a fragment to be continued by later generations.28 Central to Grace’s theory of Maori art is a thorough understanding of the woodcarver’s medium, which Grace conveys at several points in her narrative. Ratiocination on means and modes of expression, she makes clear in the process, is not a prerogative of literate societies. Grace even goes as far as asking implicitly whether white society might not lack the ability to subject its discursive practices to equally sophisticated forms of scrutiny as the agents of the most traditional Maori art forms are used to applying. Both woodcarving and the exegesis of the carved images certainly represent far more conscious

28 As Barrow observes, it is thus that through wood carving even death is turned to social usefulness in Maori life (Terence Barrow, Maori Art of New Zealand, Paris, 1978, 93). Cf. also Knudsen, 196-98.


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and concentrated exercises in Potiki than the reading and writing done by the representatives of the white establishment in the novel. While Grace has white professionals insistently misuse their literacy skills, thereby unwittingly desecrating their own culture, she describes the work of the Maori woodcarvers as a quest for truth conducted under religious observation of longstanding traditions and in the awareness of the medium and its inherent capacity to generate meaning. She describes the Maori’s deep respect for what they call “wood quiet” and believe to be “the quiet of trees that have been brought in out of the wind”. This “quiet, still, otherness of trees found by the carver, the shaper, the maker”, the reader is told in Potiki, is a watching quiet, ... because the new-limbed trees have been given eyes with which to see. It is a waiting quiet, the ever-patient waiting that wood has, a patience that has not changed since the other tree life. But this tree quiet is an outward quiet only, because within this otherness there is a sounding, a ringing, a beating, a flowing greater than the tree has ever known before. And the quiet of the house is also the quiet of stalks and vines that no longer jangle at any touch of the wind, or bird, or person passing, but which have been laced and bound into new patterns and have been now given new stories to tell. Stories that lace and bind the earthly matters to matters not of earth. (P, 87)

Grace’s poetic celebration of the Maori art of woodcarving constitutes a thoroughly constructive way of criticizing the uses to which white civilization subjects the written medium, jeopardizing not only its moral, but also its epistemological integrity. It allows for a plea to recuperate also for literate societies a mode of expression other than the aggressive discourse thriving in a climate of unashamed capitalist exploitation of land and culture. At the same time it permits Grace to remind her pakeha readers of one of the most valuable sources of regenerative energy any society possesses: the art of storytelling. In Potiki, the Maori’s determination to preserve this source at all costs is provocatively framed as proof of their cultural resilience to the influences of an increasingly storyless and therefore increasingly degenerate master culture. Still, Grace does not argue that there is no way for that culture to retrieve its stories. It seems to be her belief that this may be accomplished provided the master culture learn

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from the minority cultures it tends to ignore. Failing to do so, the “dollarman” who is given a chance to tell his story in Potiki cannot overcome his inarticulacy. One would be mistaken, though, to assume that for Grace the preservation of storytelling is synonymous with the preservation of a non-literate Maori orality. On the contrary, the storytellers in her fiction resort to all kinds of media to give expression to most diverse levels and forms of literacy. Indeed, in Potiki, Grace even interprets one of the most advanced and elaborate forms of storytelling in Maori culture, namely that of woodcarving, as an act definitely more literate than oral. The same holds true of the Maori’s reception of their carvings. Both events, the actual carving and the contemplation (or reading) of the carvings, are conducted in silence, the sort of silence Illich and Sanders identify as a distinctive feature of modern chirographic societies. That Patricia Grace should trace that same silence in Maori culture is not a mere coincidence. For Knudsen, the ritual of carving is Grace’s “guide to artistic expression and the reference for her cultural impressions”.29 With the analogies she establishes throughout Potiki between writing and woodcarving she effectively challenges Western notions of artistic creation as a profoundly individuating process. In suggesting that writers might be seen like woodcarvers, she also proposes seeing writing as an entirely communal event. In traditional Maori societies, Barrow reminds us, were “no solitary artists sitting in garrets awaiting in tortured moments the urge to create something”. For them, life and creation “flowed as a deep river, without effort and turmoil”.30 This, Potiki suggests, may also apply to modern carvers and writers willing to comprehend themselves not as excelling their fellow-beings but as working for and with them. With corresponding humbleness the carvers in Potiki concede that the wood into which they carve their stories as well as the stories that spring from their carvings possess an inner dynamic beyond their control. Logically, they may lay no claim to authorship in the Western sense of the word, namely as a form of original ownership to their works’ meaning. Rather their contribution to the artwork is like that of a midwife helping to bring into existence what already exists and thus has always belonged to their people: 29 30

Knudsen, 195. Barrow, 13.


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The tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further fruiting at the hands of a master. This does not mean that the man is master of the tree. Nor is he master of what eventually comes from his hands. He is master only of the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb that is a tree ... It is as though a child brings about the birth of a parent because that which comes from under the master’s hand is older than he is, is already ancient. (P, 7-8)

While the Maori community expects the carver’s work to be venerated by many future generations, its creator cannot hope to immortalize himself through his carvings but must accept that he “may not be known or remembered, except by a few ... those who grew up with him” (P, 8). As Grace’s novel suggests, fame is not something sought by the Maori artist, who never perceives himself as in any way separate from his people but always as part of them. With her repeated emphasis on the Maori’s sense of community Grace validates what McLuhan identifies as primitive or preliterate “tribal existence”. For Grace, the idea of oneness with one’s people is not a sign of backwardness but a prerequisite to understanding otherness. While Western societies, in viewing otherness either as a symptom of excellence or one of freakishness, invariably associate it with a condition of isolation, the Maori in Potiki are shown to accept persons both most excellently and most freakishly other fellow-beings into the centre of their community. Mary is one case in point. Her son Toko is another. Not mentally retarded like his “birthing mother”, yet physically fragile and disabled, Toko is different. Quite characteristically, the way in which his people see this difference is as a weakness and as a strength at the same time.31 On the one hand, it makes Toko dependant on their protection, support and care, on the other, it lends him a “special oldness” (P, 155) and, with it, a special wisdom in the eyes of the other Maori in the novel. When he is still very young his family already know that “Toko was something special they’d been given ... a taniwha, who somehow gave strength ... and joy to all of them” (P, 67). Throughout his life, but also after his death, his people regard him as their “precious one”, 31

For Grace’s own explanation of the status of handicapped persons in preEuropean Maori society, see Knudsen, 205, n. 46.

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their “potiki”, which may be read as either referring to the demigod Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga32 or to the fact that he is the Tamihanas’ youngest child, in Maori mythology, Tokowaru-i-te-Marama (P, 161). In spite of his oldness, he never grows up to lose his innocence; in spite of his quickness and intuition, his mind is not tamed or groomed by conventional adult learning. Toko’s “special knowing” is age- and timeless, or, as he himself puts it, “It is a before, and a now, and an after knowing, and not like the knowing that other people have. It is a now knowing as if everything is now” (P, 52). Not restrained by Western notions of time, chronology, and finality, Toko is capable even of anticipating future events. “I was the only one who saw the carved hate and anger on the face of the man” (P, 102), he realizes, yet his people do not hear him when he tries to warn them of the catastrophes awaiting them. Most of them have lost what is not really a supernatural but a natural gift in Toko, an alternative understanding of history, an awareness of another than a purely temporal logic. For Toko, foreseeing what is to come is a matter of empathy and identification with the older generation in whose past he finds his people’s future reflected. It is not by some special magic but through a sense of connectedness with his grandmother’s story that he is able to visualize the hurt, pain, and anger ahead of his family: I understood the years of hurt, sorrow and enslavement that fisted within my Granny Tamihana’s heart. I understood all at once, all the pain that she held inside her small and gentle self. And the pain belonged to all of us, I understood that too. I understood that my sister’s angry words shouted in the house of wood, the house of stories, the house of tipuna – shouted into the domain of Rongo which is the domain of peace – were a relief and a release for my Granny, causing her to shake and laugh herself to tears. (P, 102)

32

“The exploits of this hero known throughout Polynesia”, Jean-Pierre Durix explains, “include snaring the sun to make it revolve more slowly round the earth, fishing up new land from the bottom of the sea and attempting to steal immortality on behalf of his fellow human beings from Hinenui-te-po, the great goddess of darkness.” (“Patricia Grace’s Potiki or the Trickster Behind the Scenes”, in A Talent(ed) Digger: Creations, Cameos, and Essays in Honour of Anna Rutherford, eds Hena Maes-Jelinek, Gordon Collier, and Geoffrey V. Davis, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English 20, Amsterdam, 1996, 436-37.)


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There is “a night of colours. And also a night of stars” (P, 133). This rather cryptic statement of Toko’s turns out to be an expression of the same fear by which his brother Manu is overcome. Manu senses that they will all have to burn in another fire (“Burning. Burning in the night ....” [P, 135]), following the destruction of the meeting house. Nobody takes the prophesies of the two brothers seriously as nobody can understand the special way of thinking which Toko and Manu share as a result of the rather unorthodox education their mother Roimata decides to let her two potikis receive. She does so out of a conviction that “You had to trust what people knew in their hearts. People knew things in their hearts, even little kids, or especially little kids” (P, 66). Herself trained as a teacher, she resolves that her two boys, who did not belong to schools, “or rather to whom schools did not belong”, should not be taught in an environment with “desks and books, blackboards, chalk-dust, and coloured pictures ..., multiplication tables and number lines, jigsaws, scissors and paint, and an alphabet frieze, and clocks that told us when to start and stop” (P, 38). Instead she determines that they learn what they need and want to learn, because “schools [are] all right for some, but ... you [do] not always find what [is] right”. “So I became ... a teller of stories”, she recounts, “a listener to stories, a writer and a reader of stories, an enactor, a collector and a maker of stories .... we all became all of these things – tellers, listeners, readers, writers, teachers and learners together” (P, 38-39). The fact that their education is a kind of initiation into the art of storytelling does not mean that Manu and Toko grow up in blessed ignorance of the outer world. As their relatives discover in the process of teaching the two brothers, any knowledge can potentially provide material for a story. Still, the knowledge contained in the stories which James and Tangimoana bring home from school is different from traditional Maori knowledge. James’s “school stories” deal with people who live in “eggshells on paper snow” or in “matchstick villages by a paint sea”, who sit “by cellophane fires with silver chocolate-wrap feathers” and have “cardboard homes behind a paper wall that could not be climbed by the sea” (P, 40). In these stories “the charted rainfall ... and cross-sections of mountains, rivers, land and soil” tell people their future (P, 39-40). Likewise, the universe of which James learns at school can be viewed “through a peep-hole in a cardboard box, paper planets dangling from the threads against navy-

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blue space, and light coming in through the cellophaned cutout in the box’s lid” (P, 40). James’s stories are not “living stories”; nor are Tangimoana’s “book stories of queens and kings, monsters, charmers, murderers, ghosts, orphans, demons and saints”, which she writes down in old exercise books or on scraps of paper. As Roimata puts it, “They were stories, poems, lines, pages, which she left for us to find and read” (P, 40: emphasis added). Repeatedly Grace foregrounds the special materiality of the stories derived not from Maori mythology but from outside Maori culture, accentuates their papery quality and stresses the process of their making as one of putting meaning onto or into paper. This process is not just limited to the act of drawing letters, words, or whole sentences. Grace also refers to other uses of paper. She offers images of various sorts of stationary, of folded and perforated, glued and painted cardboard, and more than once of paper cuttings, thereby not only undermining traditional associations of Western literacy with immateriality and abstractedness but also reinforcing the parallel she keeps drawing throughout Potiki between literary writing and wood carving. After all, paper, in the 1980s still one of the writer’s main working materials, is also gained from trees “that may have spent further time as a house or classroom, or a bridge or pier ... Or floating on the sea or river, or sucked into a swamp, or stopping a bank, or sprawled on a beach bleaching among the sand, stones and sun” (P, 8). If the woodcarver may be regarded as bringing the figures which develop first in the forests “to other birth” with “his tools, his mind and his heart, his breath and his strangeness” (P, 7), the same can be said of the writer whose stories, too, revive the “previous life ... within the tree womb” (P, 8), making the past, of which they tell once they have been put onto paper, a part of the present. Like the woodcarvers, the writers may choose to write in order to protect his ancestors and their stories from oblivion, to reshape them in their personal ways and present their images as a gift to their people. For Grace, this certainly is the aim that a writer ideally pursues with her work. To do so, however, it is not enough for the writer to be highly literate, as it is not enough for the woodcarver to possess the skills of his craft. As is established at the end of Potiki,


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The ones who work in words or wood listen for the beat that words and wood have. Because, although they listen too for the approaching shadows and the whisperings about the edges of the land, they cannot, from where they are, hear the sounds distinctly. (P, 184)

What they need so as to fulfil their task is also an awareness of their own limitations as well as of their dependence on the support of their people, for there is a chance that some of the things they do not know may be known by others: The people work and watch and wait. They pace the tides and turn the earth. They stand, listening on the shores. They listen, hearing mostly the quiet. It is the quiet that is trees growing, the sliding of fish through water, the hovering cloud, the open-eyed quiet of the night .... The man letting crumbled earth sift between his fingers hears mainly that, but listens too for the shadows closing in, the whispering about the edges of the land. The woman throwing the line hears the flutter and splash of it as she casts. Those who fish with nets hear the creak of oars and the sliding of the net being let out over the stern. (P, 183-84)

Every human’s perspective is special and limited at the same time. By trying to listen to others and include their voices in their works, writers may achieve what they cannot achieve on their own, namely a composition of different knowledges that transcends the limitations of individual subjectivity and thus manages to convey a higher truth, a more than personal, that is to say, a communal reality. One of the most important insights the collectively conceived artwork, be it that of the Maori woodcarver or that of the Maori writer, affords is that no human perception ever is absolutely correct. In keeping with his understanding of the artist’s mission as consisting in the acknowledgement and acceptance of the fallibility of the human mind, the woodcarver in Potiki warns his apprentice to ever portray anyone in living memory. Instead of presuming that he can forestall what the future will bring, the carver must admit his own limitations and, in a gesture of submission to the unknown, leave certain spaces in his work to be filled by a later carver in possession of another, not previously attainable wisdom. The importance the younger generation thus acquire as those who will continue what has

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been begun by their elders enforces the idea of the all-importance of collective collaboration in the genesis of the artwork. The artists in Potiki are never alone. Their work will always be a polyphonic negotiation of what is right, true, and proper for their people as a whole. In the process of such negotiation, every single voice is heard. There is no chief, the Maori in Potiki try to make clear to their pakeha visitors who keep demanding to see “someone ... who has the say” (P, 118). “We all have the say, all of us together”, Tangimoana explains her people’s idea of collective responsibility and authority to a journalist who can respond only with utter consternation at so much democratic discipline. What remains too difficult for outsiders to fathom Grace constructs as a perfectly self-evident aspect of the Maori’s social life, based on a collective commitment to the tradition of open public debate at communal gatherings. Yet, the principle of free expression is observed not only at formal meetings in the wharenui but also in personal exchanges between individual family members. It is an almost ideal community that Grace portrays in Potiki as it seems to exclude no one, not even their women or children, from its discourses. They, too, are allowed to speak their minds and, what is even more important, they are heard by their elders. The polyphonic nature of their interactions also forms a structuring principle of Potiki, which is not only broken up into individual sections recounted by different characters but includes extended dialogues, reported and direct speeches. The consonance thus produced of several characters’ voices within a single character’s narrative enhances the indifference of the individual narrators’ to their own authorial status. Least concerned about his role as narrator is the eponymous hero. Toko repeatedly stresses that what he has to tell is derived from other sources than his “special knowledge”. As if determined to make his own narrative out to be but a medley of other people’s tales, Toko conceives it as a series of narrative events, occasions at which he himself represents a recipient rather than a narrator of tales. He identifies Roimata as the actual author of a major part of his account and ascribes other sections to his brother and sister; he admits to having borrowed certain facts from newspapers and television and other pieces of information from the people from Te Ope. “I was not born then, but it is all in my mind like a memory” (P,


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81), Toko assures the reader. For him, this is clear, being told a story is almost the same as being “where the real story was” (P, 84) and witnessing it oneself. In reiterating other people’s tales, Toko functions as a medium for them, giving voice to the real experts of the Maori’s suffering and thereby authorizing them to assert their versions of Maori history, however subjective or fragmentary, against what is officially defined as historical truth. As in Love Medicine, the counter-history, crystallizing from the accounts offered by individual natives does not identify the noetic economy of Maori itself as in any way superior to Western modes of understanding. The final speech which Toko delivers as a kind of epilogue after his death from the realm of the dead reveals insufficiencies in the perception of his own people which, too, help to explain part of the losses they had to experience: But they do not clearly see the big logs being rolled into position, or see themselves crouching down behind. They do not quite see the stones nesting in their own cupped palms. They do not see distinctly the white sticks stand, and do not see themselves fingering the white sticks, taking the white sticks in their hands. They do not hear distinctly the stirring within the house, the murmuring, the assembling. They do not clearly hear the footfalls, some of them their own. They cannot see the shadowless forms, forms of which they themselves may be the shadows, taking up and shouldering the sunbleached wood. And they do not distinctly see the tekoteko as they come, taking up the bones, moving in silently beside them. (P, 184)

With this rhetorically powerful delivery at the end of Potiki, Grace points in the same direction as does Louise Erdrich towards the end of Love Medicine. Like Edrich, Grace ultimately concludes that the conception of a counter-history doing justice to her people’s suppression presupposes an unscrupulously self-critical awareness amongst the Maori of their own part in this suppression as victims not only innocent but also ignorant of the forces transforming their lives and their world. Merely leaving blank spaces in an artwork to mark the limits of one’s understanding is only counterproductive in a situation where contact between cultures has generated conflict and where, therefore, to admit incomprehension is to admit defeat. Where a carver would leave a gap for someone else to insert the figure of

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Toko at a later time, Grace inserts a speech which she suggests to be delivered by the late Toko to lament a very special deficiency in his people, namely the inability to think of themselves as seeing, hearing, acting, thinking, and communicating beings. The speech is one clearly impossible to formulate in carving. It exemplifies a degree of meta-discursivity that goes well beyond the mimetic intentions pursued by the Maori wood carver. For Grace, it is only by attaining such meta-discursivity that they will move from reproducing meticulously truthful accounts on to a critical analysis and understanding of their own deeds and utterances. The prime prerequisite to such a move is that their stories are not only inscribed in wood but also put down in writing as this alone can facilitate the dissociation and subsequent re-identification with one’s past, necessary to change the future.

THE NON-LITERATE WITHIN: ESTABLISHED FORMS OF NON-LITERACY IN LITERATE CULTURES


The place which the non-literate Other inhabits in the novels studied in the previous chapters is always somewhere outside, if not far removed from the world of letters to which the narratives refer either explicitly or implicitly. Invariably, this outside is translated into open spaces, either themselves infinite or bordering on a seemingly infinite plain, forest, body of water, or desert. Mostly, these spaces are described as wild or barely cultivated landscapes, unknown, and in fact unknowable to strangers. In them, literate subjects tend to get lost and constantly verge on losing faith in their cultures’ knowledge systems. By contrast, in the texts discussed in this chapter, there are no disoriented travellers trying in vain to apprehend a foreign land by inscribing it. The topographies of the worlds portrayed are already known. Open spaces are replaced by enclosed terrains: cities, small towns, streets, market squares, school buildings, family homes, classrooms, and even a prison cell form the settings of these novels. In all of these places, writing is omnipresent. Unlike the nomads in Waiting for the Barbarians, An Imaginary Life, or Heroes and Villains, and unlike the members of the Igbo community portrayed in Things Fall Apart, the Chippewa in Love Medicine, and the Maori in Potiki, the illiterates have nowhere to retreat to, no alternative space in which they may assert their specific cultural otherness. Though at home and rooted in the same cultural terrain as the literate characters they encounter, the non-literate protagonists in the narratives discussed in this chapter occupy a position no less ambivalent than that of their counterparts in the novels by Carter, Malouf, Bouras, Greene, or Coetzee studied in this book. They are not complete strangers like these, still they may seem unheimlich in the Freudian sense of the word – as a disturbing inconsequentiality that derives its terror “not from something external, alien, or unknown but, on the contrary, from something strangely familiar”.1 Frequently, their appearance evokes fears of contamination or feelings of hatred in others not for the lowly position they occupy, nor for the deplorable existences they lead, but for insistently reminding their suppressors of the wrongs they have to suffer. The low-caste illiterates in Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935) and in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and the semiliterate or completely unlettered blacks in Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright, Push (1996) by Sapphire, Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison, and A Lesson Before 1

David Morris, “The Freudian Uncanny” (18-07-2003): http://www.theliterary link.com Port 80.

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Dying (1993) by Ernest J. Gaines challenge collective consciences, resist the forgetting whereby those responsible for their predicament try to evade responsibility, and enact counter-versions to the official histories promoted by their culture’s literati. Thus they come to embody an Other within, in fact the Other of their own culture, its alter ego: a repressed and denied, yet not forever repressible and deniable subjectivity. Inevitably, the processes of recognition, mirroring, identification, and disidentification ensuing from encounters with them are dramatically different from those related in narratives locating the non-literate outside the confines of literate culture. These processes produce affinities across cultural discrepancies practically inconceivable in other contexts where the unlettered Other remains confined to the position of the complete and, hence, completely intangible Other. The possibility of literalization plays a significant role in how these affinities develop: the relationship between illiterate servant and literate master delineated with more or less straightforwardness at the beginning of each novel may either solidify into a perverse form of intimacy enforced by gross physical maltreatment and simultaneous intellectual starvation; alternatively, it may transform into a symbiotic dependence between pupil and teacher, a relationship in which it becomes increasingly unclear whether the part of the teacher is played by the illiterate or the literate and who assumes the role of the pupil. This is due above all to the growing uncertainty as to how desirable the illiterate’s espousal of book learning actually is. What the unlettered subject longs most desperately to attain often proves attainable only at the cost of a most painful process of alienation from one’s people. It necessitates a departure that at the outset seems to allow no return. Only slowly does it dawn on the various characters that learning is not synonymous with estrangement but also affords the opportunity of a return to their people in order to aid other illiterates. Such returns are eventually performed by Gandhi and the poet in Untouchable, Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, Richard Wright in Black Boy, and Denver in Beloved. One way they turn their literacy to use for their own kind is by drawing attention to the predicament of those at the lowest rungs of their societies. This is also the cardinal aim of the novels themselves, which try to make visible in writing the longstanding invisibility of non-literate Indians and black Americans within their own cultures.

The Non-Literate Within

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Though obviously an ideal solution to the problem diagnosed, literalization is not identified as the only one in the process. Each of the six novels analysed below also asserts the need to reconstruct the unrecorded history of non-literate subalterns and to retrace their various passages to visibility (as accomplished at least in the individual narratives), even if this means unearthing tales hitherto hushed up on account of the unfavourable light they would cast on the allegedly civilized societies responsible for their banning from literacy. Thus the novels’ subversive potential comes to be nourished not only by the illiterates’ appearance in the text but also by the reconstruction of their tales within that text. The telling of these tales may itself be fictionalized and conceived as a gradual disclosure of a long-kept and carefully tended secret, or it may serve quite overtly as a pretext or a context for the articulation of a specific political agenda. In either case it constitutes a transgressive act of addressing a tabooed subject, asserting its long-denied historical significance, and thereby calling in question official accounts of the past. The difference between the idea of illiteracy thus generated and the understanding of the phenomenon created in literary explorations of the scriptlessness of native peoples is significant: whereas the novels studied in the previous section deconstruct established myths of the non-literate native’s intellectual inferiority and cultural backwardness, the novels by Anand, Rushdie, Wright, Sapphire, Morrison, and Gaines on which the following chapters focus portray a quite different kind of subaltern and describe that subaltern’s illiteracy as an actual cultural backwardness and inferiority. Accordingly, domination by homogenization is not at all their prime concern. Instead they problematize a politics of segregation founded on the belief that racial and social differences justify and necessitate the maintenance of cultural asymmetries. Finally, while writers like Grace, Erdrich, and Achebe try to counteract the demonizing of native non-literacy by valorizing native orality, novels like A Lesson Before Dying, Beloved, Push, Black Boy, Midnight’s Children, and Untouchable criticize the denial of literacy as a means of discrimination and assert that the orality of their non-literate characters, though both vital and valuable, cannot make up for the cultural marginality they suffer on account of their scriptlessness. While they may also record and thereby preserve this orality, the respective texts first and foremost want to warn of the consequence of illiteracy. To this end all writers under discussion

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here, with the exception of Salman Rushdie, refrain from idealizing illiteracy as a form of epistemological freedom and stress instead the crippling effects it has in societies as heterogeneously literalized as those of North America and India. Accordingly, their final visions are devoid of unconditional optimism. As a rule, the endings towards which they lead their novels are highly ambiguous. Metaphorical or real deaths are witnessed and survived, albeit never without the impression of an unforgettable or incurable trauma having scarred the survivors for life and impairing their sense of relief at their narrow escapes. So it is that the authors keep awake a collective memory of cultural exclusion, present this memory as an essential part of their own cultural heritage, and make their readers see it as central to their understanding of themselves as writers. At first sight, this seems an indication of their refusal to accept any form of reconciliation with their people’s past. Yet, there is another way of reading the uncompromising openness of their narratives’ endings. Rather than a fostering of old resentments, their refusal to invest the closures of their narratives with any greater finality can also be apprehended as a gesture of acknowledgement of the dazzling diversity their societies’ ultimate acceptance of their most subaltern subalterns into the domain of letters procures.

ILLITERACY FORGED BY THE INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM


Given India’s notoriously high illiteracy rates and given her intricately multilingual and multiliterate history, one should think that of all twentieth-century Anglophone literatures it is the literature of the Asian subcontinent that addresses the issue of illiteracy most frequently and most openly. However, this is not the case. General illiteracy in India ranges at sixty-five per cent and at best fifteen per cent of Indians attain the minimum literacy levels needed for reading creative writing in any language;1 further illiteracies (mainly in second languages) are rendered inevitable by the fact that India’s major fifteen languages rely on rather disparate scripts;2 and only 1.3 million people in India (out of a population of about nine billion) claim English as their mother tongue (according to the 1980 census).3 Nonetheless the inability to read or write texts either in English or in any other Indian language does not form a pre-eminent theme in Indian English literature. For G.N. Devy this is easily explained. “English”, he asserts, “is not an Indian language in the same way as it is the language of England, Ireland, Australia, Canada and the USA”.4 When Indians started to use English as their medium of expression at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this was just another instance of their characteristic eclecticism: From early in its history Indian poets and thinkers have with an amazing felicity used foreign languages for creative writing. Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic are the most striking examples of foreign languages indigenized in India. During British colonial rule English was added to this list. Literary bilingualism has been an integral part of culture in India.… Some of the writing produced … had value only as a linguistic curiosity; but among the Indians who employed English for creative writing either occasionally or entirely there were some very capable writers.5

1

John Oliver Perry, “Introduction”, in G.N. Devy, In Another Tongue: Essays on Indian English Literature, Literature in English 4, Frankfurt am Main, 1993, xv. 2 Hindi, for instance, like Marathi, uses the Devanagari alphabet of Sanskrit. Bengali and Assamese employ a slightly modified version, Gujarati a more distant one, of the same script. Punjabi and Oriya both have quite distinctive alphabets. Urdu is written in a Perso-Arabic script, whilst Kashmiri and Sindhi use either the latter or Devanagari. In the south, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayam have different versions of the ancient Granta script, while Tamil relies on an alphabet quite unlike any of these. (Skinner, 31-33.) 3 Ibid., 32. 4 Devy, n.p. 5 Ibid., 1-2.

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Warning scholars not to assign the English language a special role within Indian cultural history merely because of its European origin, Devy stresses that “British rule was an alien structure in India, but linguistic eclecticism was not”.6 Since India had strong literary traditions already before the arrival of the English language and English literature and, in modern times, has been producing high quality literature in nearly twenty languages, the socio-cultural role of Anglophone Indian writing, Devy claims, has always been extremely limited. So has, therefore, its development in generic, formal, and stylistic respects. Accordingly, Devy registers an almost total absence of drama as well as a strongly restricted range of realistic fiction in Anglophone Indian literature. Another difference Devy notes between Indian language literatures and Indian English literature is the lack of a “specific geographical base”7 in the latter. As Indian English does not belong to any specific area of India, Devy argues, Indian English literature is prone to be less representative of Indian society than any literature in Indian languages. “As such”, he concludes, “the real India has remained as inaccessible to Western audiences as ever”.8 More than that, for Devy, Indian English literature is written in a language that has “an inflated status value” and “no or little social base” and therefore constitutes an “entity with androgynous cultural traits”.9 As the most Westernized among Indian literatures it draws freely on English models and conventions, aims at a world-wide readership, and tries to present the native society and its problems in a manner attractive to buyers outside India, even at the risk of compromising its authenticity. For its reception within India, the resultant “dual tonality” is, of course, less significant than the fact that those who write Anglophone Indian literature and those Indians who read it use English as a secondary language. In Devy’s view, the bilingualism of its authors and its Indian readerships generally explains the hybrid nature of Indian English literature far better than its ambitiously global appeal. While granting that bilingual literatures tend to exhibit an astonishing wealth of swiftly appropriated vocabulary and a remarkable syntactic flexibility, Devy also insists that they are informed by an anxiety of 6 7 8 9

Devy, 2. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 11.

Illiteracy and Caste

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imminent breakdowns, which results from the constant competition between rival languages for dominance. For Devy, this is why bilingual literatures tend to be obsessed with the theme of language and given to linguistic experimentation. Paradoxically, however, the tolerance they reflect of linguistic hybridization is rarely accompanied by an equivalent acceptance of social otherness. As Devy sees it, they “thrive by a process of exclusion of social heterodoxy”10 because the language registers they assimilate belong exclusively to socially advantaged classes from different geographical areas. Although in one sense a pan-Indian literature, produced by writers from many language-cultures, and from diverse religious and geographic territories, Anglophone Indian literature remains a literature exclusively for the social upper crust to which its writers and readers belong. “The trouble with Indian English literature”, Devy concludes, “is not that it is literature of a minority but that it has been a literature of social exclusion”.11 Given that Indian English fiction is “an essentially bilingual, bicultural, upper class, socially restricted, linguistically cut off from the going concerns of Indian society, and pan-Indian literature of migration”,12 it is barely surprising that Anglophone Indian writers show relatively little interest in illiteracy either as a social problem or as an artistically challenging literary theme. There simply is little incentive for them to engage in a meta-discursive reflection on issues their culture has always deemed untouchable even in the vernacular. Thus, of all English literatures it is India’s that, though initially probably more predetermined than other literatures to accommodate discussions of non-literate subalternity, neglects the issue. In so doing it seems to corroborate Devy’s criticism that not even those postcolonial writers who claim to engage in the theme of colonial victimization ever take up the cause of the really deprived members of the cultures they purport to represent.

10

Ibid., 99. Ibid., 100. Still, elitism is not an exclusive prerogative of Anglophone Indian literature. As Asnani observes, all writers in India belong to a middle class which, “though innovative in urge, is also the most tradition bound” (Shyam Asnani, “New Morality in the Modern Indo-English Novel: A Study of Mulk Raj Anand, Anita Desai and Nayantara Sahgal”, in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. R.K. Dhawan, New Delhi, 1992, 40). 12 Devy, 100. 11

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It is doubtful whether all scholars of Indian English literature would readily agree with Devy,13 for whom Mulk Raj Anand is but a “pontificating social reformist”. At the same time, he rejects Midnight’s Children for its failure to further its readers’ understanding of Indian society.14 Indeed, Devy attests as little credibility to Rushdie’s flamboyant criticism of Indian society as he does to Anand’s heart-rending depictions of poverty. Ironically enough, in his dismissal of both authors on account of their apparent lack of social insight Devy himself overlooks the interest Rushdie and Anand express in illiterate lower caste Indians and in the cultural position they inhabit as one diametrically opposed to that of writers. Other critics who have not attributed special relevance either to the fact that Untouchable and Midnight’s Children touch on and toy with the themes of literacy and illiteracy. If these two texts are analysed in the following with regard to the interest in aspects of scriptlessness they have in common, this is not to strategically bypass the obvious differences between them. These are considerable, even if both Untouchable and Midnight’s Children happen to be written by Indians who, upon their return from an extended sojourn in Europe, were struck by the cultural and social diversity of their country and inspired to address issues that had not surfaced in Indian English literature before. After all, nearly half a century lies between the publication of Anand’s first novel and the appearance of Rushdie’s second. Not without reason do critics assign Midnight’s Children and Untouchable to two different phases of Indian history which, according to K.D. Verma, constitute also the two characteristic phases of Indian writing in English: an early phase in the first half of the twentieth century during which the European fantasy of colonialism was finally dissolved, and a later phase which saw the evolution of another fantasy or dream, namely that of the restructuring of the sociohistorical reality of an independent India. As Verma explains, because the Indian novel has its immediate context in the nationalist movement the major themes treated by novelists in both phases are “nationalism, 13 In fact, as Dieter Riemenschneider shows, the question whether Indian literature in English (notably the early Indian novel in English) is but an imitative hot-house off-shoot of European writing or whether it conveys an authentic picture of Indian concerns and issues has remained a matter of vast disagreement. (Dieter Riemenschneider, The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse: 1934-2004. Jaipur, 2005, esp. 1-72.) 14 Devy, 105.


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the East-West conflict, Gandhian ideology, the struggle for independence and various social and economic issues such as casteism, poverty and industrial development”. “In the post-independence era, however”, Verma differentiates, “the dramatic shift was to the colonial period, re-examination of imperialism, multiculturalism of Indian society, psychoanalysis of national identity and emergence of India as a sovereign nation”.15 The gradual move of Indian writers writing in English from a critical assessment of their country under British rule to visions of a new, free, and transformed India coincided with a move from stark realism, if not naturalism, to an equally stark albeit magic realism or surrealism. This is certainly how the two traditions of Indian English fiction, largely consecutive according to Verma, yet coincident in the eyes of other scholars, tend to be described. R.S. Pathak for instance sees the “compassionate realism” marking the works of V.S. Naipaul, Raja Rao, or Mulk Raj Anand continued by R.K. Narayan and Rohinton Mistri. The “pinwheeling intention”16 of Salman Rushdie, in turn, he finds emulated by Shashi Tharoor and Allan Sealy, and perfected by Vikram Seth. Chaudhuri, by contrast, observes a certain continuity in the development of Indian English literature, and contends that, with English losing its centre and becoming a transnational medium of expression used by colonizers and colonized alike, the Indian writer has been “loosened from history”, “bereft of a culture”, and freed to investigate alternative cultural spaces by way of new and unconventional routes of literary expression. This is also how Sara Suleri views the Indians’ appropriation of English and their use of it as a pan-Indian and international, or, in other words, geopolitically neutral, medium. For her, this appropriation is a development at least as instrumental in the Indian writers’ emancipation from their colonial past as the event of Independence. “If English India represents a discursive field that includes both colonial and postcolonial narratives”, she writes, “it further represents an alternative to the troubled chronology of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent”. 15

K.D. Verma, The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English, Houndmills, 2000, 4. 16 Both terms, “compassionate realism” and “pinwheeling intention” have been coined by Pico Iyer as quoted in R.S. Pathak, “Prefatory Remarks”, in Indian Fiction of the Nineties, ed. R.S. Pathak., Creative New Literatures Series 15, New Delhi, 1997, ix.

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For Suleri, “English India” is not synonymous with the history of the British rule in India, nor is it solely a linguistic concept, “a spillage from history into language”.17 Rather she sees it as the product of “vast cultural as well as continental drifts”, of the realization of “nomadic possibilities” creating “nuances of trauma that cannot be neatly partitioned between colonizer and colonized”.18 The hybridization accomplished in and through Indian English, for Suleri, mitigates the transition from coloniality to postcoloniality and in so doing facilitates the redrafting of Indian history as a narrative “extensive enough to include both imperial and subaltern materials and [to thereby] demonstrate their radical inseparability”.19 To assume that domination and subordination are mutually exclusive terms and ignore that “the functioning of language in a colonial universe is preternaturally dependent on the instability of its own facts” is simply schizophrenic, Suleri declares. Moreover, such an assumption does nothing to encourage the evolution of a non-possessive idea of nation, one that “belongs neither to the colonizer nor to the colonized”.20 The difference between Suleri’s view and Devy’s, who insists that, on account of the Britishness Salman Rushdie exhibits, he cannot be regarded as an Indian writer,21 is symptomatic of the dividedness of the academy over the cultural value of Indian literature written in English.22 The way temporary or permanent expatriate writers writing in English have positioned themselves in relation to other Indian writers has not helped to resolve the debate. Salman Rushdie, for instance, has explicitly distanced himself from early Indian English novelists such as Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan by declaring that they have many more affinities to Indian writers in the Indian languages than they do to him “who just happens to be writing in English”. “I don’t think there’s a great deal in common”, Rushdie goes on to argue: “Midnight’s Children was partly conceived as an opportunity to break away from the manner in which India had been 17

Suleri, 3. Ibid., 5. 19 Ibid., 3. 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Devy, 101. 22 So would other critics insisting on viewing the writings of British-educated authors such as Salman Rushdie as contributions to Indian culture. (See, for instance in T.N. Dhar, History-Fiction Interface in Indian English Novel: Mulk Raj Anand, Nayantara Sahgal, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, O.V. Vijayan, London, 1999, 161.) 18


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written about in English, not just by Indian writers but by Western writers as well.”23 Ironically enough, while Rushdie believes its international (or cosmopolitan) flair distinguishes his work from that of other Indian writers, Stephen Spender discerns that same quality in Anand and accords him “a leading position amongst contemporary, revolutionary novelists in England”.24 Likewise, Verma regards Anand as “Deeply rooted in the European intellectual tradition ... especially the ideas of Locke, Rousseau, Hume and Kant, the Romantic movement, the British socialist tradition, modern political and economic ideologies and the overwhelming responses to the two world wars”.25 Instead of attempting a definitive statement on Rushdie’s or Anand’s Englishness, Britishness, or Indianness, what follows will probably complicate matters a bit further in showing how in Untouchable and Midnight’s Children the portrayals of people from the lowest rungs of Indian society as illiterates aids the construction of a subalternity that subverts conventional interpretations of British colonization as the cardinal, if not the sole reason for the social injustices prevalent in colonial and postcolonial societies. In unearthing other forms of suppression and exploitation than those perpetrated by the British Raj, both Anand and Rushdie engage in the rewriting of the experience of “imperial intimacy”. In the process they move the European colonists to the absolute margins of their stories and reduce the utterances of these to ludicrously insignificant performances. It is deeply ironical that this is done in a language which the authors, and often enough also their Indian protagonists, are able to put to much more sophisticated uses than their imperial Others. With almost staggering ease the narratives thus undermine the alleged “duality of margin and center” posed by postcolonial theorists blind to the actual “mobility of disempowerment”.26 As Suleri criticizes, it is due to this blindness that most contemporary readings of alterity tend to remain trapped in the assumption of margin and centre constituting irreconcilable opposites. By contrast, in Midnight’s Children and Untouchable Salman Rushdie and Mulk Raj Anand effectively dislodge these two 23

Rushdie, quoted in Dhar, 160. Spender, quoted in Verma, 83. 25 Verma, 84. 26 Ibid., 2. 24

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opposites, acknowledging non-literate otherness “in all its pluralities, in all its alternative histories”.27 What affords them the freedom necessary to do so is their use of English which leads them into a new terrain in between or rather outside contesting dominant discourses. The resultant expansion of available discursive space enables Rushdie’s and Anand’s texts to accommodate what conventionally escapes literary inscription in Indian literature. Not only because of the peculiar status English holds in India as a secondary rather than a master language, but also because Rushdie and Anand use it to formulate specifically Indian issues, their texts acquire a special hybridity ultimately more resilient to charges of cultural betrayal than the works of other postcolonial writers who have chosen to write not in their indigenous language but in English.

27

Suleri, 1.

CHAPTER TWELVE THE OUTCASTE’S LONGING TO LEARN: MULK RAJ ANAND’S UNTOUCHABLE

What renders charges of an appropriated Eurocentrism and betrayal of his own cultural roots unwarranted in the case of Mulk Raj Anand, and especially of his pre-Independence novel Untouchable, is his commitment to the emancipation and welfare of the poorest in Indian society. This commitment is founded on a deep-seated belief in the capacity of literature to effect social changes. As Anand once observed, “the alleviation of pain ands its expiation are the only values given to our intelligentsia in the present time”.1 As far as he himself was concerned, Anand found fiction to be the best medium in which to practice this belief. Hence, when Mahatma Gandhi suggested that he should write a tract against Untouchability, he chose to write a novel. A novel, he felt, “was more human and could reproduce contrary emotions and shades of feeling”.2 For Dhar, Anand’s “vigorous, critical realism” has the effect not only of giving the English novel a new purposeful shape and form and stabilizing it as a dominant mode of fiction-writing in India, but also that of novelizing Indian historiography by systematically opposing its underlying theories of fatalistic acceptance of God, predestination, and determinism.3 As Dhar’s shows, it is mainly this acceptance that Anand holds responsible for the processes of degradation he believes to be at work in every fabric of Indian society and to determine most cruelly the lives of those with no socially approved claim to dignity.4 In granting them a place in his fictional universe and treating them with sympathy, Dhar observes, Anand has “alerted the historians to their existence [and] made people aware that historical change is the

1

Mulk Raj Anand, quoted in Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, Bombay, 1962, 357. 2 Mulk Raj Anand, quoted in C.J. George in Mulk Raj Anand: His Art and Concerns, New Delhi, 2000, 18. 3 Dhar, 84. 4 This point is also made by George (24).

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The Non-Literate Within: Illiterate by Caste

result of the will of all classes in a society and not merely of the select, privileged few”.5 Nonetheless, rather than framing the willpower of the poor as an imminent threat to social peace, Anand’s work attempts to construct human volition as an inherently positive force from which, if cultivated also by the lower classes, the entire Indian society will benefit. Though far from endorsing Western values indiscriminately and indeed often very critical of the injustices he observed in Europe,6 Anand is convinced that its acceptance of human subjectivity and its respect for the individual’s freedom of choice and action place the West at a significant advantage over other cultures. The Hindu religion, with its insistent propagation of the principle of divine intervention in human affairs and its prescription of the Indian people’s demure acceptance of God’s will, has nothing to offer, in Anand’s view, in comparison to the Westerners’ overwhelmingly confident individualism. In fact, for Anand, it is what effectively enforced the subjugation and exploitation of the Indian people by the British. “We put too much emphasis on the unknown fate and prostrated ourselves towards the deity, under the guidance of our priestly mentors”, Anand reflects.7 In mistaking colonialism for a divinely ordained fate, Anand believes, the Indians accepted it as they accepted other gross inequalities in their society with disheartening passivity and in hopeless silence.8

5

Dhar, 95-96. After his graduation from the University of Punjab in 1924, Anand went to Europe and lived there until 1932 when “in a sudden fit of revulsion against [his] own experience, in elitist Bloomsbury”, he followed an invitation by Gandhi to the Sabarmati Ashram. Yet despite the elitism he may have enjoyed in Britain, he was acutely aware of the social problems the British society was facing at the time and which led to the 1926 coal miner’s strike. “Britain”, he wrote, “was organized and run in the interest of a small minority which could suppress the majority as violently at home as it did in the Empire” (Mulk Raj Anand, Apology for Heroism, Delhi, 1975, 64). In the 1930s and 1940s Anand divided his time between Europe and India, lecturing as League of Nations School of Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva and at Workers’ Educational Association in London, joining the International Brigade in Spain, and between 1937 and 1945 associating himself with the British Labour Party. For a reading of Untouchable as a response to the “art for art’s sake ethos” of the Bloomsbury group see Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain, Houndmills, 2002, 15-55. 7 Anand, quoted in Dhar, 90. 8 Dhar, 99. 6

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It is a momentous change in the Indian mentality, then, that Anand projects in his first novel with his construction of a lower-caste Indian, in fact of an Untouchable, who wishes to learn to read and write and indeed contrives most ingenious measures to reach his goal. Anand’s protagonist Bakha is a young sweeper forbidden to attend school because, according to the Hindu belief, his touch would contaminate not only the other pupils but also the items of knowledge and learning they and their teachers use. Yet, Bakha is unwilling to accept his lot and resolves to find and hire a schoolboy as his private tutor. The journey on which he ventures for this purpose makes up Anand’s story. Within the short period of a single day9 this story takes the reader from Bakha’s mud-walled home to his workplace, a row of public latrines and private houses whose gutters he must sweep daily. From there Bakha is shown wandering through the streets of his town, to linger in front of the stalls of a market, enter the courtyard of a temple and engage in a dispute with a priest, and meet some friends for a game of hockey. Densely placed acoustic, visual, and olfactory images create the impression of everything being in motion and Bakha caught in an inescapable throng of people randomly pulling and carrying him until eventually he is thrown amidst a vast congregation of Indians awaiting the appearance of no one less than Mahatma Ghandi. When Gandhi arrives to address the gathered crowd, Bakha comes to stand next to a lawyer and a poet and to witness a passionate dispute between the two men over Gandhi and his ideas of social change. At this point, the story of Bakha’s quest for learning ends. Bakha resolves to return home to tell his family about Gandhi and his appeal to the Untouchables to emancipate themselves not only by strict adherence to their habits of cleanliness but also by helping to promote what Gandhi in Anand’s novel cryptically terms “the machine”. It is no grand technological innovation, as one might at first assume, that Gandhi is advocating. All he recommends is an improvement of the Indian sanitation system through the introduction of the flush system. After the novel’s anticlimactic return to the repulsive matter of excretion and its disposal, the protagonist, too returns home as if 9

For an analysis of the temporal structure of the novel and the relationship between narrated time and narrative time see Dieter Riemenschneider, “Mulk Raj Anand”, in Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, eds Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim, Munich, 1986, 173-89.

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finally accepting the impossibility of ever escaping the profanity of his existence. Bakha’s dream of rising above his lowly status and perhaps even transcending his Untouchability through learning seems suddenly spoilt as the learned Ghandi, along with the lawyer and the poet in Ghandi’s audience, broach (or touch upon) a subject apparently capable of invoking greater fears of contamination amongst Hindus than any other issue. As C.J. George stresses, Indian novelists before Anand, such as Bankim Chander Chatterji, Ratannath Sarshar and Rabindranath Tagore, had never ascribed “heroship” to the “so called lowest dregs of humanity, living in almost poverty, squalor and degradation”.10 In Europe, his realism earned Anand considerable approval by other writers such as George Orwell and E.M. Forster, who, in his Preface to Untouchable, praises the novel because it does not reduce Bakha to a “suffering abstraction” but conveys “the right mixture of insight and detachment, which no European, however sympathetic, could have created … because he would not have known enough about [Bakha’s] troubles”.11 Yet, Anand not only ascribes heroic attributes to low-caste Indians but also narrates his stories primarily from their point of view and in so doing allows for unexpected processes of identification across caste barriers to take place in his novels. Thus in Untouchable, Bakha, despite his pariah status, keeps comparing himself to people unlike himself: people who are not untouchable. He sees sameness where everyone else would see only insurmountable difference and endeavours to create sameness where others would interpret any assumption of likeness as sacrilege. Typically it is at the sight of a higher-caste boy on his way to school that Bakha is suddenly overcome by discontent at his own inability to read and write. Although he has never even as much as set a foot inside a school building Bakha is convinced that he understands the feelings of this child who is late for school: Bakha noticed the ardent, enthusiastic look that lighted up the little one’s face. The anxiety of going to school! How beautiful it felt! How nice it must be to be able to read and write! One could read the papers after having been to school. One could talk to the sahibs. One wouldn’t have to run to the scribe every time a letter came. And one 10

George, 29. E.M. Forster, Preface to Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935), Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, London, 1990, vi-vii. 11


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wouldn’t have to pay him to have one’s letters written. He had often felt like reading Waris Shah’s Hir and Ranjah. (U, 38)

By Hindu notions of propriety, Bakha’s thoughts mark a preposterous transgression. Not only does he afford the temporary luxury of overlooking the difference he is meant to guard between himself and members of other castes; he actually chooses to ignore it altogether. Ironically, this wickedness facilitates an insight which dutiful compliance to Hindu laws completely denies. By committing the sin of presuming to leave the limited socio-cultural space to which the existence of caste confines him, Bakha begins to comprehend that his illiteracy is a disadvantage manufactured by others and not, as insistent degradation has led him to believe, an innate inferiority he must accept as a given. “He was a sweeper, he knew”, the narrative allows, “but he could not consciously accept the fact” (U, 39). From the beginning of the novel it is made clear that what Bakha lacks is not intellectual acumen but schooling. As the passage above illustrates, Anand’s hero grasps his situation well enough to know exactly how much money he would save if he were not dependent on the services of a scribe; he even knows the literature he would consume if he possessed the skill to do so. He would read the famous Heer by the celebrated eighteenth-century Punjabi poet Waris Shah. This poem, which relates the legendary love tale of Heer and Ranjah in six-hundred odd stanzas and synthesizes Islamic and Hindu folklore in the process, is not an implausible preference for someone in Bakha’s situation given not only its open criticism of Indian priests and their hypocrisy but also its categorical condemnation of the caste system. With his allusion to this piece of ancient Indian literature, Anand foreshadows his protagonist’s final development away from the initial admiration of the British whose mannerisms Bakha learnt to copy during a sojourn at some regimental barracks. So taken is he by the ways of the English that he even procures a first primer of English with the intention to study it on his own and in the hope that this will make him a sahib one day. In the course of the day narrated in Untouchable, however, his admiration for the “Tommies” fades and is replaced by a new awareness of his own Indianness, a sense of belonging his Untouchability has always precluded.12 12

There is also an autobiographical dimension to this trajectory. Anand himself received his early education in a cantonment school which followed an English

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Well before he hears Gandhi’s wholesale dismissal of the notion of Untouchability, Bakha himself has begun to rebel inwardly against the marginal role he is assigned within Indian culture and, simultaneously, against his duty as an Untouchable to suffer this role in silence. As George puts it, he has become a Gandhi disciple without knowing it.13 Indeed, from its very beginning, the novel sets Bakha up as an exceptional person, as a subject undeserving of his lowly status into which he has been born, but also fit to transcend it. Already the outward appearance of the “child of modern India” (U, 9), as Bakha is called, distinguishes him from “the ordinary scavenger, who is as a rule uncouth and unclean” (U, 16). No onlooker, the narrative asserts, would fail to notice the “immense pent-up resources lying deep, deep in his body ... as he rush[es] along with considerable skill and alacrity from one doorless latrine to another, cleaning brushing, pouring phenoil” (U, 16). The intelligence, sensitivity, and dignity his looks suggest elicit comments to the effect that he is a “bit superior to his job” and “not the kind of man who ought to be doing this” (U, 16). Even Havildar Charat Singh, “the famous hockey player of the 38th Dogras regiment”, who has “the Hindu instinct for immaculate cleanliness” and “six thousand years of racial and class superiority” to boast of, admits to himself that, for a low-caste man, Bakha looks remarkably clean (U, 15-16). Anand’s insistent references to Bakha’s nobility, so “strangely in contrast with his filthy profession and with the sub-human status to which he [has been] condemned from birth” (U, 20), clearly serve to bias the reader in favour of the protagonist and to encourage identification with the sweeper boy. Rather than appealing to the reader’s forgiveness, the novel commands sympathy with the sweeper for his immodesty, for the contempt he feels for his own people and their “natu habits” (U, 32), and for his dismissal of them as “riff-raff”, “scum of the earth”, “dregs of humanity” (U, 36). Almost as if to downplay the political explosiveness of his dissatisfaction, Anand keeps stressing the naivety that informs it. There is something rather endearing about the fact that Bakha bemoans not so much his poverty curriculum and paid no attention to native customs or values but biased children against them, so much so that when Anand went to England, he readily succumbed to the temptation of donning the mask of the “Brown Sahib” (Anand, as quoted in George, 11). 13 George, 39.


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and powerlessness as the blatant inelegance of his existence. All Bakha wants is for the untouchables to cultivate a certain degree of courtesy and formality and to observe the most basic standards of hygiene. In light of so much modest idealism it seems easy to excuse Bakha for believing traitorously that “the original Hindu instinct for cleanliness ha[s] disappeared long ago” (U, 85) and for hating his younger brother Rakha and his “listless, lazy, lousy manner” (U, 84), which has led to his contracting malaria, a disease outcastes seem to endure with great and infuriating equanimity. Therefore the sympathy Anand’s novel exacts for its protagonist corresponds with the special bias the author contrives at the outset of his narrative. Rather than being against the ruling classes this bias at first appears to be against the Untouchables as a collective whose apparent contentment with the ghastly squalor in which they live has a thoroughly alienating effect on Bakha as well as on the reader. In the course of the novel, however, Anand qualifies his social criticism by introducing individual representatives of Indian society and exposing their part in his central character’s failure to obtain the education he craves. In keeping with his conviction that the function of narrative writing “consists in revealing man’s essential nature through the individual case”,14 Anand gradually has members from other castes emerge from the noisy, colourful, vibrant crowd with which Bakha keeps moving on his quest for Bildung. This crowd comprises Indians of all stations of society. What unites them, according to Anand, is a sadistic appetite for public humiliation and a deep-seated lust for power. Both are satisfied when Bakha inadvertently bumps into a higher-caste Hindu. At once denunciations are poured over the sweeper-boy and the hostility he feels coming from the Hindu merchants gathering around him causes him to cower and to let his whole demeanour “concentrate in humility”: “And he stood still while they raged and fumed and sneered in fury” (U, 49). As the crowd dramatically closes in and presses round Bakha, staring, pulling grimaces, jeering and leering, the young sweeper realizes that the barrier between them is insuperable, that this crowd will refuse not only to understand him but also to let him 14

Dieter Riemenschneider, “The Function of Labour in M.R. Anand’s Novels”, in Crabtracks. Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English: Essays in Honour of Dieter Riemenschneider, eds Gordon Collier and Frank Schulze-Engler, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures 59, Amsterdam: 2002, 369.

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understand them. It will not permit him, a sweeper, to look at, to “read” the crowd “with the overt, lifted eye of the ordinary man curious to know, to solve a mystery” (U, 57). Instead he is compelled to stare beyond the opaque throng of people passing in the streets and, should he absent-mindedly fix his eye on a single person, to feel shamefully like a “slave stealing an enquiry into the affairs of his master” (U, 57). The humiliating uncertainty with which this experience of metaphoric illiteracy infuses Bakha becomes even more acute whenever he happens to be confronted with individual representatives of what he otherwise perceives as a single body, an amorphous mass of people. As distinct faces and figures crystallize from the crowd, both his fear of their contempt and their fear of contamination by him erase Bakha’s sense of selfhood and transform his humbleness into a desperate longing that his Untouchability might render him invisible and thereby reduce him to even less than he already is. There is nothing to compensate for, let alone suspend the sense of disintegration that overcomes Bakha on such occasions. Least comforting of all is what his gradually sharpening vision of “the crowd” reveals. The discoveries he must make are disheartening not only for the scorn and hatred he experiences in the unfortunate faceto-face confrontations into which he keeps blundering, but also for the intense feeling of injustice they evoke in him as he is made the immediate target of the upper castes venting their superiority complex. Of all the attributes distinguishing these castes from the Untouchables, it is the one Bakha admires and wishes to emulate most, book learning, that turns out to be a particularly doubtful accomplishment. In repeatedly portraying the “touchable” Indians as engaged in all sorts of reading or writing activities and contrasting the bookishness of their knowledge with the factualness of the Untouchables’ experience, Anand develops a neatly differentiated picture of the literacies Bakha encounters. This picture ultimately calls in question the protagonist’s desire and determination to learn to read and write. The postponement of his first lesson until after the ending of the novel constitutes one of the many disappointments Bakha must countenance on the day he hears Gandhi’s speech. Still, at the end of the sixteen hours recounted in Untouchable, this no longer matters because Anand’s protagonist has also glimpsed some of the more repellent features behind the assumed superiority of India’s literates


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and come to doubt the alleged exemplariness of their performances. Scanning the delicacies on display in a Bengali sweetmeat-seller’s shop, for instance, Bakha realizes that if he chose the rasgulas, gulabjamans, or ludus, “so lushly, expensively smothered in syrup” they would not be cheap, “certainly not for him, because the shopkeepers always deceived the sweepers and the poor people, charging them much bigger prices, as if to compensate themselves for the pollution they courted by dealing with the outcastes”. Instead he asks for jalebis, and in so doing elicits only a scornful smirk from the vendor of sweets, who finds that jalebis are so coarse that “no one save a greedy low-caste man would ever buy [them]” (U, 45). Bakha seems the only Untouchable sensitive to the shopkeeper’s offensive ways and astonished by their ability to exhibit signs of refinement and crudeness at the same time. The contradictions in the schematically drawn figures are thrown into relief with the help of visual images, such as those of the “big-bellied lalla ... clad in an immaculately white loose muslin shirt”. The man is busy “writing of some curious hieroglyphics on a scroll book bound in ochre-coloured canvas” and apparently oblivious to either Bakha or his assistants unrolling bundles of cloth to his customers. It is clear, however, that his show of concentration on matters less mundane than the selling of his wares is only part of a carefully devised performance meant to “impress the rustics into buying” (U, 44). Another image captures the confectioner swiftly weighing Bakha’s sweets against some iron weights and a handful of stones he has shamelessly thrown onto his scales. He then wraps the jalebis into a piece torn off an old Daily Mail, roles the paper into a ball and flings it at Bakha. While this is obviously to avoid physical contact with the sweeper, the peculiar way Bakha registers the vendor using printed matter also suggestively hints at a certain obsolescence of the literacy that places the merchant at such an advantage over the sweeper. Bakha’s exchanges with the shopkeepers, which he conducts in the acute awareness of their proud and cruel indifference to his feelings, foreshadow the outrage resulting from Bakha’s aforementioned collision with an upper-caste Indian. Ironically enough it is some huge blocks of letters staring down at him from luridly painted signboards that distract Bakha’s attention so much that he momentarily forgets to call out the warning words with which he normally announces his approach: “Posh, posh, sweeper coming!” (U, 52). The letters have

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just reminded him that he has arranged for a schoolboy to give him lessons in reading and writing when Bakha is woken up from his dream by someone yelling abuse at him. While he struggles desperately and in vain to apologize to the man he has defiled, instantaneously the prospect of his first lesson escapes his mind. Instead of accepting Bakha’s abject demonstrations of regret, the Hindu continues to insult the mortified boy before a growing crowd of curious passers-by. Finally, the touched takes advantage of an unexpected moment of general confusion, delivers a hard blow into the face of the docile sweeper-boy, and swiftly disappears. “The coward”, Bakha thinks, barely able to control his anger at the man’s poltroonish exit, “like a dog with his tail between his legs” (U, 51). Again the reader is encouraged to share the Untouchable’s contempt at the man’s mean-spiritedness, which Anand enforces with images of the aggressor’s “flaming and red-hot eyes”, of his “closed, trembling lips which hissed like a snake’s”, and of his four-foot-ten frame pathetically trying to assume “the towering stature of a giant” (U, 47-50). The irony of the lalla’s mode of exit is obvious. In slapping Bakha with his bare hand he himself exposes the absurdity of his agitation over the sweeper-boy’s unintentional touch. So does his emphatic appeal to all bystanders to look at him and see his defilement, of which there are no visible signs. By contrast the injury he has inflicted on Bakha is audible as “a hard, clear slap through the air” (U, 50) and felt by the injured as a burning pain in his face. What is more, while the man’s defilement remains one only in his own imagination, Bakha’s figure is really dirtied: his turban falls off and his jalebis are scattered in the dust. This ironic inversion of moral grounds leads Bakha (and the reader increasingly sympathetic of Bakha’s lot) to a new understanding of his Untouchability. Bakha’s realization of the full implications of his Untouchability marks a significant turning point, which Anand accentuates by relating it as a unique epiphanic moment: ‘…. For them I am a sweeper – untouchable! Untouchable! Untouchable! That’s the word! Untouchable! I am Untouchable!’ Like a ray of light shooting through the darkness, the recognition of his position, the significance of his lot dawned upon him. It illuminated the inner chambers of his mind. Everything that had happened to him traced its course up to this light and got the answer. (U, 52)


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That this form of enlightenment, though not consciously sought by Bakha, might be superior to book learning is insistently asserted throughout Anand’s narrative as it keeps parading spiritual leaders of Indian society all of which fall drastically short of Bakha’s idea of learned sophistication. One case in point is Pundit Kali Nath, who moved by the beauty of Bakha’s sister Sohini, condescends to fill her bucket with water from the well to which, as an Untouchable, she is not allowed access. Yet he does so not without expecting certain favours from the girl in return. When Sohini refuses to meet his demands, Kali Nath publicly defames her as a loose woman and claims that she has defiled him by her touch. It is with great care that Anand develops the incident and analyses the manoeuvres whereby the lewd old Brahmin asserts his superior status even when he has chosen to think or act in a manner revealing his basest instincts. To emphasize the discrepancy between who the Pundit pretends to be and who he really is, Anand also reveals Kali Nath’s innermost thoughts and shows how they are motivated not by his religious duties, such as the study of the “holy books”, the “endless recitation of sacred verses”, or the “writing of an occasional, charm or horoscope with a reed pen” (U, 29), but by a rather morbid preoccupation with his intestines, which keep rendering his journeys to the latrines painfully unsuccessful due to a severe bout of constipation. The profanity of his worries underlines the indecency of the passes he tries to make at Sohini and calls in question the authority for which “the faithful and the devout” so willingly revere him. At the same time, the crudity of the Brahmin’s concerns draws attention to how far more sophisticated the questions are that trouble the uneducated protagonist’s mind. Again, this contrast ironically subverts the notion of contamination at first proclaimed by the priest, yet subsequently reinterpreted from the sweeper-boy’s point of view. While the crowd on the temple steps sympathizes with the priest, convinced that he must have suffered most terribly from Sohini’s and Bakha’s touch, Anand once more invites the reader to sympathize with his protagonist who, in spite of the humiliation he has just had to go through, does not hesitate to expose himself to further degradation in order to rescue his sister from the clutches of the shameless old lecher.

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Given Bakha’s humble position in Indian society, his rage at the priest seems oddly out of proportion; given Sohini’s innocence, however, his chivalry seems perfectly warranted. The result is a curious temporary transgression of the line conventionally dividing educated upper- and uneducated lower-class characters in Anglophone fiction, a transgression indicative again of Bakha’s innate ability to move on in the world: A busy street lay before the brother and sister when they emerged from the temple. Bakha ... could not concentrate on the riot of variety that was displayed in it. He had no patience to see anything or to hear anything, and he didn’t want to speak. ‘Why didn’t I go and kill the hypocrite!’ he cried out silently. ‘I could have sacrificed myself for Sohini. Everyone will know about her. My poor sister! How can she show her face to the world after this? But why didn’t she let me go and kill that man? Why was she born a girl in our house, to bring disgrace upon us? So beautiful! So beautiful and so accursed! I wish she had been the ugliest woman in the world! ...’ (U, 65)

This is not the last ironic confusion Anand creates in Untouchable of the different notions of honour and dignity professed by the different groups of Indian society. To completely invert the conventional perception of Indian society as divided into easily distinguishable sections, Anand’s text has yet to include a representative of the Subcontinent’s British population. The character introduced for this purpose towards the end of the novel is Colonel Hutchinson, chief of the local Salvation Army. In a mildly tragicomic way, this peculiar specimen of Western civilization, with his habit of dressing in the costume of the native and his determination to live among them “to achieve the true end of proselytising” (U, 121), with his fondness for study and the unique bravery with which he endeavours to belong where he is and always will be a foreigner, complements the young protagonist’s eccentric nature.15 After his unfortunate encounters with other Indians, Bakha feels deeply 15

Indeed, Fludernik reads their eccentricity as a sign of sameness, arguing that the Colonel’s ambivalence and Bakha’s mimicry function equally as markers of “colonial hybridity” (Monika Fludernik, “Colonial vs. Cosmopolitan Hybridity: A Comparison of Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan with Recent British and North American Expatriate Writing”, in Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth Century Indian Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: ZAA Studies 1, Tübingen, 1998, 264).


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flattered when the Colonel puts his hand on his shoulder and speaks to him sympathetically in wrong and badly accented Hindustani. At this moment the boy is unwilling to note that the “short fellow, pitiably weak and hobbling along on his stick” (U, 122) lacks the glamour normally attaching to the “superior, remote and reticent Englishmen” (U, 123). The sweeper-boy ignores that the Salvation Army missionary has obviously “thrown aside every weight – pride of birth and race and colour in adopting the customs of the natives”, “swamped the overbearing strain of the upper middle-class Englishman in him by his hackneyed effusions of Christian sentiment”, and “camouflaged the narrow, insular patriotism of his character in the jingo of the whitelivered humanitarian” (U, 124). Bakha tries not to hear the words with which the Colonel persuades him that he, Hutchinson, is not a sahib but an outcaste, too. So eager is the boy to project some sort of aura onto the sorry figure of the missionary that he attempts to suppress his disappointment that the padre is not dressed like the other British padres, whose European clothes have always held such fascination for him. Keen to preserve his secret delight at the Englishman’s overtures, Bakha convinces himself that, because all sahibs are sahibs, Colonel Hutchinson deserves to be seen as one too. The reader learns that the young Indian “could have cried to receive such gracious treatment from a sahib, cried with the joy of being in touch with that rare quality which was to be found in the sahibs” (U, 125; emphasis added). Happy and proud to be “in touch” with an Englishman, Bakha listens to the priest’s incomprehensible sing-song, even joins his ecstatic hymn-singing without understanding anything of the enquiries he obediently reiterates as told by the old man and, of course, without any intention to be recruited into the man’s pathetically small army of converts: “He had followed the sahib because the sahib wore trousers. Trousers had been the dream of his life” (U, 128). With this remark, the narrator divests the Englishman of the superiority the protagonist is so determined to recognize in him and exposes a final similarity16 between the two characters, whose vanity and lack of realism render 16 This similarity is different from the one Fludernik identifies between Bakha and Colonel Hutchinson. In fact, its underlying irony raises the question whether the colonial hybridity the two characters seem to share is merely an illusion. At least in Bakha’s case, this is also suggested by his subsequent flight from the Colonel as well as by his final return home.

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both of them oddly susceptible to the illusion that the other’s company is a sign of honour bestowed on them. Unaware of the fact that, with his willingness to communicate with the Englishman, he honours the missionary as much as he believes the missionary to be honouring him with his attention and sympathy, Bakha is unable to realize that the studious missionary has very little to offer apart from a number of copies of the Hindustani translation of the Bible and of the gospel of St Luke. However precious these items of printed wisdom, which Colonel Hutchinson carries around with him to thrust in the hands of unsuspecting passers-by, may appear to an illiterate, to the reader they represent ludicrously inadequate means of enticing a troubled outcaste with no ability to read to convert to Christianity. Symptomatically, Hutchinson’s bookish talk of Yessuh Messih and Christ’s superiority over all humans, who by comparison are but poor sinners doomed to await God’s pardon in well-deserved misery, is received by Bakha with a feeling of profound bewilderment which the readers, despite their better understanding of what is happening, have little difficulty in sharing. Indeed, it is at this point in the novel that the European reader becomes acutely aware of the irony of Anand’s appeal to readers to identify with the illiterate sweeper-boy, who, baffled and bored, overwhelmed and uncomfortable, tries in vain to catch anything of the muffled sounds Colonel Hutchinson is babbling, mostly to himself. Predictably, Hutchinson’s attempts to proselytize Bakha lead nowhere but come to an abrupt end when his wife appears on the scene to abuse her husband for “messing about with all those dirty bhangis and chamars” (U, 132). The mem-sahib’s “shrieking, hoarse and hysterical voice” (U, 133) and plain language catapults Bhaka back into the reality which, for a short time, he had believed he had left behind. The Englishwoman’s yells sound familiar to him, echoing those angry voices he is used to hearing in his own street. “There was a common quality in the look of hate in the round white face of the Colonel’s wife and in the sunken visage of the touched man” (U, 13334), Anand offers as an analysis of his hero’s sudden retreat. It is at this moment that the prospect of Bakha commencing his education with the help of an upper-caste boy and so escaping his humble position seems more unlikely than at any previous point in the novel. And it is at this very same moment, too, that Bakha’s quest is


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interrupted as he is absorbed into a crowd waiting for Mahatma Gandhi to appear and give a speech. For a moment, the mere announcement of the Mahatma’s arrival seems to break down all barriers between “men, women and children of ... the different races, colours, castes and creeds” (U, 136) and allows Bakha for once to feel part of the crowd. “Gandhi alone united him with them, in the mind, because Gandhi was in everybody’s mind, including Bakha’s” (U, 138), the narrator interprets the crowd’s response to the sudden fulfilment of one of its most urgent needs – the activation of a commonality uniting all Indians across the barriers traditionally segregating them. Such a union is effectively accomplished, even if only temporarily, by Gandhi’s speech. Apart from the propagation of his creed by word of mouth, it is the public delivery of his own ideas in a language and medium accessible to every Indian present that, according to Anand, accounts for Gandhi’s appeal to the heterogeneous mass. Gandhi’s words reach even an individual as humble and feeling as humiliated as Bakha when he accidentally joins the crowd. In the end it is clear that the point of Gandhi’s appearance in the novel is to enhance the symbolic meaning of the protagonist’s sudden flight from the Hutchinsons. It encourages the reader to understand it as marking the end of his unreflected admiration for the English in general (and especially for their clothes). In turning away from the trousered, yet pathetic figure of Colonel Hutchinson and his alienating citations of Western wisdom and unexpectedly becoming a witness of Gandhi’s address, Bakha practically stumbles across an entirely new meaning of learning. “He is black like me”, he ponders as he catches a first glimpse of Gandhi: “But, of course, he must be very educated” (U, 143). The learning the Mahatma demonstrates during his address is not what Bakha so far has understood by education. As Gandhi himself puts it in Anand’s novel, wisdom has nothing to do with a thorough knowledge of the scriptures. Indeed, in his own words, even the most thoroughly read Hindus have proven to be “sunk in ignorance” by denying the Untouchables access to public wells, temples, roads, schools, sanatoriums. Enlightenment, Anand has Gandhi declare, is the ability to identify with the Untouchables, to feel and be like them and to allow them to be and feel like any other Indian.

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Listening to Gandhi, whose words finally make explicit what Untouchable tries to communicate less directly on other levels, Bakha forgets about his plan to meet the schoolboy who has agreed to be his private tutor. Gandhi’s speech, which not without reason happens to take place at the very time Bakha had arranged to have his first lesson, points him in a completely different direction and encourages him to abandon – at least for the time being – his vision of obtaining sophistication by learning to read and write. Instead Bakha finally resolves to return to his father to tell him about Gandhi. Thus Bakha’s ultimate commitment is to an oral task. Part of this self-appointed mission is to repeat not only Gandhi’s call for justice to his family but also the Mahatma’s idea of how sweepers can be relieved of cleaning latrines. The solution sounds fantastically simple to Bakha as it requires no major effort on the part of the Untouchables, such as that of trying to become literate. All it involves is the introduction of the water closet. Dreaming at first only of dressing like a sahib, then longing to learn to read and write, before allowing a foreigner to tempt him with the option of finding equality in another religion, Bakha at last arrives at a drastically mundane solution. He resolves that what he must learn is all about the ominous machine that, according to Gandhi, can remove dung without anyone having to handle it. Of all people, it is a young poet Bakha overhears praising this machine. The impressive figure (significantly clad in flowing Indian robes) obviously serves as a mouthpiece for the author himself,17 who, like Gandhi, considers it as much the responsibility of the upper castes to improve of the Untouchables’ situation as that of the Untouchables themselves. For Arun P. Mukherjee this view and the way in which it is advocated in Untouchable proves that Anand is not nearly as radical a writer as most critics believe him to be on account of his open commitment to Marxist ideology. Rather, she argues, Anand’s stance is that of “an upper class, upper caste kshatriya Hindu, albeit a 17

This is also confirmed by the detail concerning the poet’s way of dressing, which brings to mind Anand’s accounts of how he changed his outward appearance during his stay at the Sabarmati Ashram and discarded his corderoy suit and necktie for Kurta-Pyjamas, “thus being converted to the Indian [he] once was” (Anand, quoted in George, 19). A more elaborate treatment of this transformation is offered in Anand’s novel And So He Plays His Part at the centre of which Anand places the poet figure of Krishan Chander Azad. For a detailed study of Gandhi’s influence on Anand see the chapter “Mulk Raj Anand: The Champion of Gandhian Humanism” in RamƗ, Jha, Gandhian Thought and Indo-Anglian Novelists, 1983, 55-85, and Marlene Fisher, The Wisdom of the Heart: A Study of the Works of Mulk Raj Anand, New Delhi, 1985.


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Marxist”.18 The opinions advanced by the poet in Untouchable only round off Anand’s reductionist inscription of the Indian subaltern as a mute and passive figure, which, in Mukherjee’s view, serves to confirm bourgeois projections of the Untouchables as incapable of assuming political responsibility and developing “oppositional activity”.19 A reading of Untouchable focussing on Bakha’s determination to change his situation by learning to read and write and on how he tries to put his plan into action yields a different interpretation. It allows us to see that the combination of learning and pragmatism, sophistication and common sense, passionate idealism and unsentimental realism embodied by the figure of the poet is meant not simply to assert the bourgeois intellectual’s superiority over the illiterate subaltern, but to specify what kind of knowledge Anand believes pre-Independence India to need most. For Anand, this knowledge is not a matter of personal achievement, let alone of an innate brilliance. Accordingly, while Bakha may be overcome by admiration for the poet, the narrative requires its reader to perceive this icon of learning from a different angle. It does so by neglecting to develop the poet into a full character. As a result the learning the poet displays appears to be not so much his own accomplishment as the prerogative of a certain caste or class and as a symptom and cause of the social inequalities described in Untouchable. While Bakha’s individualism allows for a vision of social change in the more distant future, the relative impersonality of the poet enables Anand to posit a social responsibility upon which an entire collective could be acting already in the present. Anand leaves no doubt in Untouchable that the poet is literate not for his own benefit but for the benefit of his country and especially of the poor. The purpose of his learning is that he can speak not just for himself, nor necessarily on behalf of others, but before others about the opportunities for improvement these others might have without knowing it. His function in the novel, then, is that of an informant or medium communicating knowledge from upper to lower class or

18 19

Mukherjee, 36. Ibid., 43.

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caste20 for the latter to act upon. He is an enabler of action with little doubt of the subaltern’s ability to act. Arguably, Anand appeals to the same responsible learning in his reader with which he endows the figure of the poet in his novel. This becomes clear towards the end of the novel, when the narrative gradually dissolves the identification it has been inviting all along between Bakha and the reader. Anand accomplishes this final dissociation from the hero by forcing his readers to find themselves sharing the position of the poet in their knowledge of “the machine” which, for Bakha, is still no more than a miraculous promise. Anand’s exploitation of the difference between the protagonist’s ignorance of this machine and his literate characters’ insight into the workings of the flush system is not entirely devoid of irony though. It enforces the criticism Anand keeps articulating throughout Untouchable of the routine assumption that the purity professed by upper-caste (or upperclass) Indians is an indication of their immersion in concerns so much worthier than the mundane affairs apparently constricting the Untouchables’ understanding of life. It is also to persuade the reader that his protagonist is driven by much grander urges than any of the other characters with whom he comes into closer contact that Anand fashions Bakha’s innermost thoughts in a manner reminiscent of Joyce’s stream of consciousness.21 The sophistication (or literacy) with which Anand takes the trouble to render Bakha’s thinking in Untouchable is so conspicuous that it cannot but add to the impression that Bakha’s mind has remained untouched or uncontaminated by the crudely material concerns that keep troubling people like the lecherous Brahmin priest who attempts to degrade Bakha’s sister. 20 It is in this sense that Bald’s description of the poet as a “spokesman figure” needs to be understood. In response to critics claiming that Anand’s portraits of upper-caste Indians invariably are elitist and paternalistic, Bald insists that this does not apply to the poet in Untouchable because he does not display the same classconsciousness other spokesman figures or “false prophets” in Anand’s fiction tend to exhibit.(Shuresht Renjen Bald, Novelists and Political Consciousness: Literary Expression of Indian Nationalism, 1919-1947, Delhi, 1983, 115-34.) 21 Indeed, in “The Story of My Experiment with a White Lie”, Anand himself attests to the influence of Ulysses on his own writing and especially on Untouchable. From Ulysses, he observes, he learnt, “that the disturbed, restless and paranoiac stream of consciousness of the people of our time could be reproduced, not as Joyce had done it, as so much raw material, but in the same kind of direction, so as to suggest value judgements about the characters” (George, 30).


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This is not to say that Anand completely romanticizes his hero’s predicament. On the contrary, in conceding Bakha the innate ability to learn and move on in the world, Anand only enhances the injustice of his protagonist’s failure to change his situation. At the same time, however, he also asserts that what pre-Independence India needs is not the personal fulfilment Bakha seeks in learning. Instead he ascribes far greater urgency to a comprehensive social change coerced from above and supported from below. For Anand this presupposes that intellectuals must acquire knowledge of the material conditions under which the poorest of their fellow-beings live. Only then can they conceive intelligent and practicable improvements of the satiation of the dejected. As the final dialogue between the lawyer and the poet suggests, this will automatically put an end to the slavish emulation of European ideas which, according to the poet, so many Europeaneducated Indians are dedicated to. The figure of the poet is a personification of Anand’s conviction that to attain cultural independence the Indians must remember their own traditions and return to the “natu habits” Bakha is so keen to disown at the beginning of the novel. In Untouchable, knowing one’s culture ultimately is given priority over knowing to read and write. Gandhi’s speech in the end illustrates to Bakha how any Indian, even an illiterate outcast, may contribute to a transformation of society. As Gandhi himself shows, this may be done by recourse to one’s orality. Understanding this Bakha actually redefines his mission and decides to return home to enlighten his father. Therefore the novel’s closure does not mark Bakha’s defeat nor his acceptance of his father’s prophecy that he will remain a sweeper of latrines all his life. Bakha is not defeated by “the horrible prospect of all future days of service in the town and the insults that would come with them” (U, 77). After all, he has found a suitable reply to his father’s obstinately pessimistic exhortations about the outcaste’s position in the world. “I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said about us”, he resolves as he proceeds homeward, “and all that that poet said. Perhaps I can find the poet some day and ask him about the machine” (U, 156). With this decision, Anand translates Bakha’s return home into a forward movement. It seems that, as George puts it, “Untouchable closes on a note of faith and idealism”.22 Indeed, Bakha 22

George, 29.

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is ultimately filled with the hope that “soon the age of flush system” will come and the sweepers can “assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society” (4344). Bakha’s obstinate, yet never totally self-destructive determination to overcome the obstacles to his intellectual fulfilment, clearly distinguishes him from other illiterate characters in the novels studied in the previous chapters such as Ali in The Heart of the Matter, Okonkwo and Nwoye in Things Fall Apart, or the alleged barbarians in Waiting for the Barbarians. At the outset, Bakha’s dedication to his work, the dignity and skill with which he executes his duties seem to betoken a cultural authenticity reminiscent more of Eli Kashpaw and Moses Pillager in Love Medicine, or of Toko and Mary Tamihana in Potiki. Yet as the novel proceeds, this comparison, too, proves increasingly inappropriate, given both the fierce contempt Bakha feels for his people and his desperate desire to dissociate himself from them and their cultural practices. The swiftness with which Bakha in the end abandons his plan to learn to read and write, at least for the time being, must not be misapprehended as an indication of the sweeper boy’s whimsicality. Rather it has to be seen in relation to the criticism Anand offers both of the various literacies in contemporary India and of the British presence there. In reducing the literacies of almost all of his characters to mere mannerisms of little more relevance than their mode of dressing, Anand denies both the educated Indian elite and the British colonists the superiority they claim. In so doing, he also calls in question the alleged urgency of implementing universal literacy in pre-independence India. Cynical as this questioning may appear at first glance, it does not evade reality but simply puts greater emphasis on social problems probably of greater urgency in the India of the 1930s than mass illiteracy. Untouchable forces its Western readers to believe that in Bakha’s situation living without access to the world of letters is still easier to bear than the prospect of being condemned to clean up other people’s excrement for the rest of one’s life. Not understanding this is an extravagance only wealthy literates can afford. For Anand, their blindness to the psychological implications of having to bear the mark of Untouchability is a form of ignorance far more serious than Bakha’s lack of learning and indicative of a crudity far more detrimental to any society than the illiteracy of a group.


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It is for this reason that the most immediate consequence of Gandhi’s address in Untouchable is to obstruct Bakha’s original plan for the day – yet another postponement of the protagonist’s education. Education, most critics tend to believe, features only “peripherally and incidentally”23 in most of Anand’s novels, including Untouchable. This view is remarkable not only in the light of Anand’s insistent return to the theme throughout his oeuvre but also in view of how Anand’s friend and mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, thought about education in India. “Mass illiteracy is India’s sin and shame and must be liquidated”, Gandhi is known to have declared. Indeed, as Eleanor Zelliot has pointed out, there was little room for the educated, politically conscious lower caste Indians in Gandhi’s concept of service to the Untouchables.24 Interestingly, in Untouchable, the figure of Gandhi may represent learning, but in the speech Anand has him give he does not dwell much on the theme at all. Anand restricts this function almost entirely to his protagonist. That critics should completely overlook Bakha’s quest for learning beside the more unsavoury aspects of his Untouchability, is in all likelihood a consequence not intended by the author, who himself has expressed his concern at the tendency of scholars to place a higher premium on theoretical conceptions of subalternity than on a genuine understanding of it in real life. Accordingly Anand has noted: Most critics, who have written about my novels, have not noticed that my fiction arose from the compulsions of life, which have been reenacted by me again and again. They treat my fiction ... in the dominant English manner, which implies that text is all.25

23

Premina Paul, “Major Themes in the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand”, in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. R.K Dhawan, New Delhi, 1992, 19-30; and The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A Thematic Study, New Delhi, 1983. 24 Eleanor Zelliot, “Gandhi and Ambedkar – A Study of Leadership”, in The Untouchables in Contemporary India, ed. J. Michael Mahar, Tuscan: Ark, 1972, 88. See also Gajendra Kumar, “Untouchable: A Manifesto of Indian Socio-Political Realism”, in The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A Critical Study, eds Manmohan K. and Bhatnagar M. Rajeshwar, Delhi, 2000, 151-58. 25 Mulk Raj Anand, “The Sources of Protest in My Novels”, in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English: Proceedings of the National Seminar Held at the University of Kerala on the 80th Birthday of Mulk Raj Anand, ed. Kesavapaniker Ayyappa Paniker, Trivandrum, 1987, 23.


CHAPTER THIRTEEN LEARNING TO BELONG TO THE OUTCASTES: SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

Like Anand, Salman Rushdie, breaks with the notorious elitism of Indian English literature and strategically includes detailed portraits of people marginalized by poverty and lack of learning in the panoramic picture of Indian society he offers in Midnight’s Children. Also like Anand, Rushdie assigns representatives of Western civilization a markedly subordinate role in his literary exploration of India’s cultural diversity. In the process, he subjects the official agents of European literate culture to the same kind of systematic degradation to which Anand subjects the figure of Colonel Hutchinson in Untouchable. As in the case of Anand’s novel, this strategy effects a discrete distancing from the European literary tradition on which Midnight’s Children draws openly and extensively and in which the novel is implicated also on account of its being written in English. As in Anand’s text, the result is a hybrid text, continuously oscillating between contrasting cultural positions. Also as in Untouchable, the differences between these positions can be seen as pointing at religious discrepancies. Yet while Anand’s cardinal concerns are the Hindu caste system and Hindu notions of fate and Karma, Rushdie’s preoccupation is with Islam. Even though Rushdie does not address the specific status of writing in Islam directly, it is crucially important to the special understanding of literature and book culture he advocates in his writing. For it is in opposition to the Islamic belief in the sanctity of the written word that Rushdie may be argued to celebrate the freedom of the creative writer and literature’s capacity to generate truths not only deviating from, but often irreconcilable with those advanced in consecrated texts. For Rushdie, the authority of imaginative writing (as against prophetic writing) resides above all in this particular, intrinsically subversive capacity. Accordingly, he writes in his postfatwa essay “Is Nothing Sacred?”: The elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point

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The Non-Literate Within: Illiterate by Caste form which fiction begins …. The challenge of literature is to start from this point, and still find a way of fulfilling our unaltered spiritual requirements.1

Historically, the freedom to transgress established notions of truth which the West concedes the writer of literature results from the dramatic proliferation and eventual secularization writing underwent in Christian Europe during the Renaissance. The Islamic world did not see a comparable process. In the perception of Muslims, reading and writing remained profoundly religious practices. The letter, “the written character, as it tends towards the hidden aspect of Allah”,2 stayed crucially conditioned by the Muslim calligraphic belief that “everything must pass through the sacred text”, that “writing is an absolute, the Absolute, the Sanctum Sanctorum”.3 As Sadik Alc Azm’s puts it, while bourgeois Europe, “decatholicized, modernized and laicized”, accomplished a timely departure from archaic “forms of appropriating, interpreting and acting upon the world, such as myth, magic, religion, legend, affective encounter, scholastic reason and so on”, Muslim societies have never managed to produce an illusion comprehensive, potent, and expedient enough to allow them, too, to opt for “the modern scientific systems of knowledge”.4 Srinivas Aravamudan believes that this has been only to the advantage of Muslim societies because it has spared them the corruption which Western societies have had to suffer under the “ubiquitous telekinematics of subtler and less material information”.5 Unlike the West, Avaramudan asserts, the Muslim world has had no part in the growing “hypocrisy of secular expression” and therefore is not responsible for the emergence of anti-religious sentiments in the 1 Salman Rushdie, “Is Nothing Sacred?”, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991), London, 1992, 422. 2 Khatibi, quoted in Christopher Gibbins, “Calligraphy and Dialogics: Moroccan Writings’ Islamic Intertextualities” (05-07-2000): http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/staff/ conf/poco/paper4. html, 21, 3. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Sadik Al-cAzm, “The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English 16, Amsterdam, 1994, 285-86. 5 Srinivas Aravamudan, “‘Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar’: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, 188.

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latter part of the twentieth century or for the elevation of “the allencompassing fiction of ‘national security’ to a condition of unlimited paranoia”. Islamic cultures, Avaramudan claims, cannot be accused of having allowed the “withering-away” of the “official censorship of aesthetics [and its] replacement by consensus-seeking mechanisms (regarding appropriateness, taste, offensiveness) in the mass media and publishing”. This, he believes, has been entirely the West’s doing.6 For Al-cAzm, however, their adherence to traditional notions of truth means not only that Muslim cultures have managed to avert moral contamination. Rather his fear is that the enduring faith in the intrinsic holiness of writing has entrapped Muslim societies in a cultural position so outmoded that their survival will depend on the painful realization that “the Islamic emperor has no clothes left on him anymore”.7 Hence the acute cultural nervousness that Al-cAzm diagnoses in contemporary Muslim societies beginning to grasp the necessity for modernization at the cost of traditional values and beliefs.8 In Al-cAzm’s view, this nervousness also accounts for the vehement rejection of The Satanic Verses by certain segments of Rushdie’s Muslim readership. The difference between how Muslim and Christian cultures value the written word is of relevance not only to an understanding of the surprising impact of Rushdie’s most controversial novel. It also allows a more differentiated reading of the sensibility Rushdie articulates in his work to the cultural significance of books, writing, and literacy. Deeply Islamic though Rushdie’s texts evidently are,9 they also reflect the hybrid identity of someone who left India at the age of fourteen to

6

Ibid., 189. Al-cAzm, 285. 8 This is what Paul Ricoeur anticipated already in the 1960s when he suggested that “on the one hand, [the developing world] has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandonment of a whole cultural past” (Ricoeur, quoted in Brennan, 4). 9 It seems worth pointing out that there are also readers who dispute the Islamic quality of Rushdie’s texts. So does, for instance, Timothy Brennan who insists that, apart from revealing his emotional attachments to Sufism in Grimus and Shame, Rushdie invites his audience to comprehend him as “hardly Islamic in any hard sense” (109). 7

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be educated in Britain and to return to Asia only sporadically.10 Rushdie’s perception of India is therefore bound to be distinctly that of a migrant’s. Yet, as Syed Manzurul Islam claims, this distinctiveness resides not so much in Rushdie’s overtly flawed recollections of his “long-lost meta-imaginary homeland of India”,11 as in his apparent familiarity with two radically different literacies. Between these he never ceases to oscillate, thus catering for the readerships of two (or more) cultures at once and mediating between their different perspectives. The “double-scripted discourse”12 Rushdie employs enables him to demonstrate and experiment with the possibilities of a modernized Islamic literacy, exploring the losses and gains such a modernization would entail. In so doing, Rushdie makes clear that what he advocates is certainly not the modernization of Indian culture by way of total Westernization but an application of Western notions of writing, of certain aspects of Western literacy and of Western literary values to forge a better understanding of contemporary Muslim culture within the wider context of the subcontinent’s multiculturalism. What he accomplishes in the process are “stylishly hybridised literary/cultural text[s]”13 with a capacity for provocation apparently far greater than that calculated by the author himself. Rushdie’s strategic employment of blasphemy, irrespective of the religious sensibilities he might offend, is unquestionably the most obvious reason for the unexpectedly violent responses to his writings. Another may, however, also be sought in the general lack of awareness of how uncritical of their own and how scornful of each other’s literacies both Islamic and non-Islamic cultures are. In what 10 For detailed studies of the specificity of Salman Rushdie’s hybridity, see also Josna E. Rege, “Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s Children and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties”, Studies in the Novel, IXXX/3 (Fall 1997), 34275; Sara Suleri, “Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of Blasphemy”, and Jacqueline Bardolph, “Language Is Courage: The Satanic Verses”, both in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, 221-36 and 209-20. 11 Syed Manzurul Islam, “Writing the Postcolonial Event: Salman Rushdie’s August 15th, 1947”, Textual Practice, XIII/1 (Spring 1999), 128. 12 The term is used in analogy to Elaine Showalter’s notion of a “double-voiced discourse” (see Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”, in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter, New York, 1985, 261). 13 Graham Huggan, “Prizing ‘Otherness’: A Short History of the Booker”, Studies in the Novel, XXIX/3 (Fall 1997), 424.


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ways Rushdie appeals exactly to such an awareness will be analysed in the following reading of Midnight’s Children as a translation of the particular disparities informing Indian culture into English language and into a typically English (or Western) literary form, the novel.14 “The power struggle is no longer merely between author, inner world, outer world and text; the reader himself has entered the tussle”, Keith Wilson notes, reflecting on the status of the novelist as mimetic mediator between reader and reality in contemporary literature, and adds with special regard to Midnight’s Children: “Theory about reading is forced to confront practice in writing if Rushdie’s achievement is to receive any serious discussion at all.”15 Correspondingly, Wilson holds that a full apprehension of Rushdie’s narration presupposes a particular level of literacy. “Rushdie’s ideal reader”, Wilson argues, “is deemed to have a facility at intertextual cross-referencing of kinds that most contemporary self-conscious readers might, in one form or another, be assumed to have”.16 The kind of reader Wilson has in mind is able to identify not only Rushdie’s allusions to the Arabian Nights but, more importantly, his references to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, James Joyce’s Ulysses, or Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum. Logically, this reader must be regarded as far superior to Padma, the servant to whom Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, addresses his story. Significantly, while claiming Padma’s otherness on the grounds of her ignorance of European literature, Wilson still sees this particular female figure, whom Rushdie has re-appear randomly but insistently throughout Midnight’s Children, as more than a mere listener to an orally presented tale. He expressly ascribes her the function of the “reader’s representative”, of a “convenient reader surrogate”, even as that of “lustful reader” vis-à-vis “impotent narrator”.17 Wilson chooses to agree with Timothy Brennan who, in stressing Padma’s “readerly naivety”, notes “Padma is not only a passive receptor, or disembodied 14 Similar projects have been undertaken by Bardolph (“Language Is Courage”) and Suleri (“Contraband Histories”), who both explore the uses of language, and the specificity of the Indian notion of language in The Satanic Verses. 15 Keith Wilson, “Midnight’s Children and Reader Responsibility”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, 55. 16 Ibid., 65. 17 Ibid., 64, 66, and 60. Other critics, too, define Padma’s role as that of the “reader” of Saleem’s tale. See for instance David Birch, “Postmodernist Chutneys”, Textual Practice, V/1 (Spring 1991), 3.

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voice of the national conscience, but a literary critic, whose authority rests on her being a member of the lower classes”.18 Likewise Nancy E. Batty warns of overrating Padma’s lack of learning and separating her and other lower class Indians, other “Padmas” in Midnight’s Children, from the scholars in a “potential community of readers”.19 Insisting on attributing much greater textual significance and power to the figure of Padma than Wilson does, Batty argues that Saleem makes claims for both the importance and the intrigue of his existence, but these claims are repeatedly undermined by Padma’s scepticism and by reminders of the narrator’s mundane and crumbling circumstances in the fictional present. However, the interpolation of Padma as both a character and a narratee in the novel mitigates, as well as exacerbates, the fictional autobiographer’s disadvantage: Padma becomes an index for reader-response to the framed narrative ....20

“Padma’s role as Saleem’s ‘necessary ear’...”, Batty stresses, “should not obscure her status as co-creator of his narrative”.21 It is under Padma’s influence, Batty insists, that Saleem loses his focus. Padma’s appetite for amusement rather than enlightenment constantly distracts Saleem from his own concerns and leads him to indulge in longwinded embellishments of those parts of his tale that might please and interest his listener. Eventually, Saleem’s vision gets blurred, his judgement of what is true and what is not fails him; metaphorically speaking, Saleem, in trying to satisfy Padma, ends up “miss[ing] the spittoon”.22 At the same time, Padma’s ultimate union with her master, Batty contends, turns her into a parody of King Sharyar, the “knifewielding despot” in the Arabian Nights to whom Scheherazade yields her nightly narratives.23 Critical readings framing Padma as co-editor, if not as co-author of Saleem’s tale have one thing in common: in the endeavour to define her position in relation to Rushdie’s notional reader, they consistently 18

Brennan, 105 and 101. Nancy E. Batty, “The Art of Suspense: Rushdie’s 1001 (Mid-)Nights”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, 69. 20 Ibid., 72 (emphasis added). 21 Ibid., 73. 22 Ibid., 80. 23 Ibid., 79. 19


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disregard the fact that Padma herself can neither read nor write. This is surprising, for even if Padma’s scriptlessness is referred to explicitly only once in the entire novel, and then admittedly only in parentheses, it clearly forms a central aspect of her characterization. After all, her total ignorance of letters is one of the very first things the reader learns about Padma. “Padma – our plump Padma – is sulking magnificently”, Saleem Sinai announces only to procede, as if in an aside not meant for her ears, “(She can’t read and, like all fishlovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn’t ....)”.24 All subsequent references to Padma depend on this piece of initial information to construct her unambiguously as an audience who receives Saleem’s story orally, in a preliterate, or in what Saleem himself would describe as an “old-fashioned” or “archaic” mode. This creates a limitation that renders the figure of Padma far less powerful than many critics make her out to be. Semiotically, Padma occupies the most subaltern position a figure can possibly occupy within Midnight’s Children, as she remains relegated to the very margins of the text from where she cannot even access her own characterization. Because she cannot read, her objections to Saleem’s portrayal of her depend as much on his goodwill for correction as do her pleas for a more linear and logical progression of his narration. Ultimately, she has no means of controlling whether he will make the changes she desires. Even if Saleem feels his certainties disintegrate in her absence and fluency magically return to his pen as soon as she returns, these are not effects deliberated by Padma herself. On the contrary, rather than as Saleem’s muse she sees herself as someone who must protect Saleem from his own creative urges. In this, however, she barely succeeds. In vain she attempts to cajole Saleem Sinai from his desk and to stop him from wrecking his eyes with “that scribbling” (MC, 32). There seems to be nothing she can do to cure him of his mad “fabulism” and “foolish writery” (MC, 193). The “plebeian commentator” who tries to temper her master’s erudition must accept that Saleem will not listen to her aesthetic counsels. As Timothy Brennan notes, her appeals “condition, but do not dictate the form of his writing”.25 Saleem, in turn, eventually succeeds in silencing his listener and forcing her to grant that “Of course, every man must tell his story in his own true way” (MC, 211). 24 25

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981), London, 1995, 24. Brennan, 106 and 104.

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Upon this, he can at last announce in triumph, “So much for doctors and asylums; I have been left to write” (MC, 212). Exactly from this moment, Padma recedes into the background of the novel to come to the fore only briefly when she finds Saleem himself doubting the reliability of his own memory. At this point her antagonistic force seems to have vanished. Instead of her typical complaints she surprisingly offers the consoling words, “What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!” (MC, 222). Nothing remains of Padma’s often quoted “what-happenednextism” (MC, 39) as she learns to “listen unhurriedly” to Saleem’s lengthy tale, gradually earning the narrator’s admiration and the concession that he is “entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli” (MC, 270). Saleem Sinai even admits, Because I am rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; I’m tracing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble keeping up), the risk of unreliability grows ... in this condition, I am learning to use Padma’s muscles as my guides. When she’s bored, I can detect in her fibres the ripples of her uninterest; when she is unconvinced, there is a tic which gets going in her cheek. The dance of her musculature helps to keep me on the rails; because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe .... (MC, 270-71)

As the narrator/writer/protagonist, at first “no bigger than a full stop”, expands into “a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; ... bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book – perhaps an encyclopaedia – even a whole language” (MC, 100), Padma’s object status comes to be defined more and more exclusively through her corporeality. Saleem’s growing preoccupation with Padma’s materiality emerges as a correlate to her metaphysical or meta-representational inaccessibility, that is, to that particular quality of otherness that distinguishes her from individuals whose consciousness has undergone the special formatting process of literalization. To Saleem the writer, Padma’s unletteredness represents an indecipherable enigma and links her to the illiterates Picture Singh and Tai Bibi, both “embodiment[s] of primordial India and ... the ‘anarchic’ time of infinity, [and hence] unrepresentable in the mimetic


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presence of historical time ...”.26 It is towards this India and its infinity that Saleem is irresistibly drawn in his endeavours to capture as yet unknown aspects of Indian history in his ambitious tale, a counterversion to all that has been thought, said, and above all written about his country. Yet, however strong the pull towards what is, at least in part, his true origins,27 this pull cannot effect a complete departure from the life into which Saleem was transported without his parents’ knowing so after his birth. As in the case of the “educated, stethoscoped return” (MC, 11) of Saleem’s grandfather Aadam Aziz from Europe to Kashmir, in the instance of Saleem’s return to the slum from which he was removed as an infant, the homecomer’s learning constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to his full re-integration into the world he feels he belongs. “A wet-head nakkoo child goes away before he’s learned one damn thing”, Tai furiously reproves Aadam, his former acolyte, “and he comes back a big doctor sahib with a big bag full of foreign machines, and he’s still as silly as an owl” (MC, 19). Padma’s protestations against Saleem’s literary airs echo exactly this reproof and make Saleem aware of how far his upbringing on the wealthy Methwold Estate has removed him from the India into which he was born. For him there is something exotic about Padma’s “down-toearthery”, and her paradoxical superstition. He cannot help marvelling at her “contradictory love of the fabulous” (MC, 38) and her “unscientific bewilderment” (MC, 238), her “bizarre behaviour”, “outlandish ... rage”, and “strange discontent”(MC, 121). “I began to see”, he writes, “that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle’s house I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh; …” (MC, 413). Although, or because, the world of the illiterate lies so absolutely beyond the grasp and control of the literate, Saleem Sinai remains fascinated by the perplexing idiosyncrasies of his so very different 26

Islam, 131. The question of Saleem’s origins is actually more complicated than he himself is willing to see. Saleem may profess feelings of guilt (or indeed by plagued by such feelings) for having unjustly benefited from growing up at the Methwold Estate, all at the expense of his adversary Shiva. Curiously, however, it seems to escape him that, given his real parentage (his natural father is William Methwold), he could, under somewhat different circumstances, also have been the perfectly lawful heir of the place he has such scruples about considering his rightful home. 27

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audience. He admits to feeling overwhelmed by an older learning when with Padma, who is his mistress and his wife-to-be in a marriage never to be consummated, and, most importantly, his muse, dutifully surrendering all aesthetic control to her master. The essence of Padma’s learning, Saleem guesses, is unobtainable for him because as a literate he has been corrupted by the art of exegesis and unlearnt to believe what is not spelt out in letters. Tai, just as unimpressed as Padma is by the power of letters and its mastery, shares this older learning with her. He may be known as a half-wit whose brain, as rumour has it, fell out with his teeth. Nonetheless his toothless chatter regularly inspires awe and fear in his listeners: “Awe, because Tai knew the lakes and hills better than any other of his detractors; fear, because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering, ...” (MC, 14). Obviously aware and proud of the superior wisdom he possesses, Tai replies when interrogated about his age: I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die .… I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir .... it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books .... Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can’t read. (MC, 16)

If Tai’s special knowledge is knowledge of what has not been, or cannot be recorded in writing, he might also possess some knowledge of the future that is unwritten or impossible to write. By this inference the narrator of Midnight’s Children reads the ancient ferryman and owner of the oldest shikara on Lake Dal as endowed with the gift of seeing, or of foreseeing, a future in which India will be destroyed by the invasion of foreign ideas of progress. Accordingly he describes Tai, the “living antithesis of ... the inevitability of change”(MC, 15), the “watery Caliban” (MC, 15), as a messenger bringing this very future to Aadam Aziz in the form of an urgent summons to a patient who will later become Aadam’s wife. As Tai constitutes the connecting link between the past and the future that sets in motion the history which will contain Saleem Sinai, the equally unlettered Picture Singh also seems to offer access into a future not otherwise foreseeable. Saleem is confident that this wonderful “patriarch of the ghetto” will “shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and [will] not be stopped until he, and his cause, [have] won the day ...”(MC, 399-400). For life in the community of


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the “godless”, of the “public menaces”, of the “scum of the earth” (MC, 397) has taught Saleem “that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute”, that “they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was” (MC, 399). Optimistic that the Indians’ “ancient national gift for fissiparousness” (MC, 399) would find new outlets through the unadulterated socialism advocated by Picture Singh, Saleem puts what he has kept of his previous life, his literacy, at the snake-charmers service and becomes “a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man” (MC, 397): ... his legendary artistry drew large good-natured crowds; and he made his snakes enact his message under the influence of his weaving flute music. While I, in my role of apprentice, read out a prepared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the gross inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow, the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police harassment, hunger disease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced by serpents; and then Picture Singh, concluding his act, began to talk .... (MC, 413)

The speeches Saleem writes and then reads out are only preludes to Picture Singh’s oral performances, mere complaints about the present, to be extended into images of another future by the real prophet Picture Singh. Not entrapped by versions of history recorded in writing and publicized as officially legitimized truths, the illiterate Picture Singh can afford to be a visionary. It is from his designs of a future other than the sorry future the present holds in store for him that Picture Singh derives his identity. Unencumbered by the vanity a recorded history of ancestors may instil, Picture Singh need not share the writer’s fear that he might be producing a mummy of himself, “so emptied desiccated pickled” that it cannot even bleed, or that he might end up in “the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-oftales ... as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster” (MC, 447-448). While his vainglorious obsession with how he will be remembered tragically locks Saleem into his own past, Picture Singh’s, utterly indifferent to what part he will play in some future past, remains free him to face the future and indeed engage creatively in its conception.

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While Saleem may envy Padma and Picture Singh their illiteracy, believing it to be as a blessed state of unencumbered creativity, he still abstains from celebrating it indiscriminately as an expression of “plebeian authenticity” or of “primordial, native virtue”. Saleem’s enthusiasm for Padma’s and Picture Singh’s unlettered savageness does not result from a Romantic identification with “the native, the folk, the people”.28 Rather it is due to his alienation from the lower classes of Indian society, which, despite his fervent denials, finally becomes manifest in his attitude to Picture Singh’s wife Durga, “a washerwoman whose preternatural breasts unleashed a torrent of milk capable of nourishing regiments and who ... had two wombs” (MC, 445). To Saleem, Durga embodies the most repulsive specimen of an illiterate Indian. In his eyes her entire person negates absolutely the physical mutilation and destruction for which the narrator of Midnight’s Children has cultivated such a pathological fascination. Saleem feels positively revolted at the mere idea of having his autobiography contaminated by a single reference to this overly vital, overly healthy, overly physical female. Nonetheless the figure of Durga resists his intention to omit, even deny her existence altogether in his tale. By offering her services as wet-nurse to his seriously ill son-elect, she secures Saleem the future in which he has lost all interest as a writer. At the same time, her indispensability forces him to afford her a mentioning and to concede that, “as full of gossip and tittle-tattle as she was of milk, ... she represented novelty, beginnings, the advent of new stories events complexities” (MC, 445). After all, there is no denying that it is her vitality, however irritating a material proof to Saleem of the Indian “disease of optimism”, that finally saves young Aadam’s life, just as it is Padma’s vigour that almost manages to save Saleem’s. In direct analogy to his characterizations of Tai and Picture Singh as endowed with the gift of foreseeing another future, when Saleem begins to dread the perilously imminent end of his story, Rushdie has Padma determine with “majestically unshakeable resolve”: “You listen to me, mister – but me no buts! Never mind all that fancy talk any more. There is the future to think of” (MC, 444). As Padma’s illiterate otherness reveals its most appealing aspect, Saleem for a moment feels tempted to believe that Padma has spoken some “cabbalistic formula, some awesome abracadabra” (MC, 444), 28

See Brennan, 108.


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released him from the fate predicted to Amina Sinai before his birth, and given him an alternative future. Saleem’s dilemma, however, is that he cannot escape his own otherness. Not before long, he relinquishes the idea that his life might yet take another turn and he allows himself to be reclaimed by the past he has been conjuring up in his writings. Resuming his authority as literate subject, he demands that his repeated testimonies to “a form-crazy destiny which enjoys wreaking its havoc on numinous days” should not be dismissed “as just so much ‘fancy talk’” (MC, 444). Even more determined now to construct a history in which he himself is not just included but plays the part of the protagonist, Saleem is driven to defy the impossibility of recording what does not yet exist. In a sense, he insists that his literacy has to do for him what he believes Padma’s and Picture Singh’s oralities to be doing for them. The thought that his “letteredness” might render him in any respect inferior to his unlettered Others proves utterly unacceptable to him. “No, that won’t do, I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet”, he announces, unwilling to leave the telling (or pickling) of his future to anyone else. He goes on to “de-scribe” his own end, meaningfully framing it as a disintegration into “specks of voiceless dust” in an assembly of all those who had a part in his life: parents grandparents aunts uncles sister friends enemies; one two three, four hundred million Indians, five hundred six, all uniting in a stampede to trample their creator, the narrator/author of Midnight’s Children. But Padma, though at last united with the teller and protagonist of Midnight’s Children in marriage, is not included in the finale but must exit the text in the most unspectacular fashion, discreetly drowning in the crowd gathering around her and Saleem. Her own husband, master, creator has her pass into the obscurity from which she has emerged, leaving questions about her association with Mary Pereira, about her relationship with him, and about her future role as his son’s foster mother untouched. Padma’s part in the making of Indian history goes just as unnoticed as her part in the production of Braganza Pickle, as an anonymous stirrer of the vat. Immortalization by autobiographical record is not for everyone in India and in Midnight’s Children denotes a privilege on which only Saleem can draw to assert his superiority over his unlettered vis-à-vis and have the last word.

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Disposed of and eclipsed, Padma, in turn, together with Tai Bibi, Picture Singh, and Durga comes to signify that vast part of Indian history which is not preserved, chutnified, pickled in writing, but left to waste in oblivion because its agents are not literate. In the light of her involuntary disappearance before she has had a proper part in a proper story, even the last resemblance fades between Padma and the insatiable tyrant in the Arabian Nights, whom Scheherezade is forced to supply forever with fresh entertainment. At the end of Midnight’s Children it should be more than evident that Padma is not “model for the imperious reader, constantly demanding completion of a story that has no end”,29 nor an “ally and adversary, possessing the will to redress but the power to destroy”.30 All that she is allowed to be in Saleem’s narration, is the fragment of another, more “real” (in Saleem’s sense of the word) version of Indian history, another counter-history of the subcontinent that might have offered a more optimistic outlook on independent India’s future than Saleem’s, had it ever been written down. Clearly then, Padma’s presence in Midnight’s Children serves to foreground the subjectivity and fictionality of Saleem’s narrative, not just explicitly through the incorporation of her repeated exclamations of disbelief, but also implicitly through the taciturnity about her own life imposed on her by Saleem. The most important difference between Saleem’s listener and Salman’s reader does not derive from Padma’s inability to identify the allusions to English and other Western literatures which Rushdie makes for his reader, but from the reader’s ability to identify Padma as the textual element in the function of which Rushdie juxtaposes her with Saleem. Unlike Padma, the reader, who can read her characterization, is required to acknowledge that, side by side on the page, as the translations of two individuals (imagined or real) into letters, Padma and Saleem stand for opposites such as exclusion and inclusion, absence and presence, liminality and centrality, anonymity and identity. The contrast between the two characters raises questions not just about the validity of Saleem’s fantastically subjective account but also about the prominent status he claims in his own story.31 Padma’s failed attempts 29

Wilson, 59. Batty, 80. 31 Cf. Anuradha Dingwaney, “Author(iz)ing Midnight’s Children and Shame: Salman Rushdie’s Constructions of Authority”, in Reworlding: The Literature of the 30


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to challenge his prominence and break out of the role of the silent listener highlight how the writing of one history can mean the suppression of another, how the transcription of collective experiences into letters must turn into a highly competitive act in a culture in which an inexhaustible plurality of discourses determines the making of truth. Brian May stresses that unlike other Indian writers “Rushdie focuses not on nationalist historiography’s erasures of the past”.32 However, considering Padma’s consignment to the margins of Saleem’s autobiography, one still is tempted to contend that, by basing the characterization of Padma on her illiteracy, Rushdie does after all strategically dramatize historiographic erasure in Midnight’s Children. Yet Padma is not the only victim of historiographic erasure that Midnight’s Children produces. Saleem’s desperate narrative enterprise fails to spare him a similar kind of defeat. While he manages to assert his authorial superiority over Padma on the grounds of his literacy, he fights a losing battle for the reader’s credulousness against much more powerful opponents such as magazines, history books, radio programmes, Bombay talkies, the songs of Jamila Singer broadcast on Voice-Of-Pakistan Radio, the Indian cinema, telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, the Indian census of 1961, a personal letter to himself, signed by the Prime Minister, campaign slogans on walls and banners, gossip whispered at hen-parties and canasta evenings, legends repeated in the salons of the well-to-do and time and again, newspapers, scraps of newspapers, windblown newspapers visiting his shack, newspapers quoting foreign economists, cartoons in newspapers, graphs in newspapers, the Karachi Dawn, the Times of India, the Pakistan Times, the Jang. A dazzling collection of official and unofficial truths keep pouring in on Saleem from all these channels and, simultaneously, from “the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike” (MC, 168) which he claims to be able to receive telepathically. Finding one’s own version of history and thus one’s identity in this overwhelming polyphony and “polygraphy” seems a goal attainable only at the risk of cracking up, of being torn apart under the pressure of choosing between one’s own certainties and the many different ones proclaimed Indian Diaspora, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson, Contributions to the Study of World Literature 42, New York, 1992, 157-68. 32 Brian May, “Back to the Future: History in/and the Postcolonial Novel”, Studies in the Novel, XXIX/3 (Fall 1997), 270.

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by others. The effects of the immense effort to defend his own subjectivity in the end show on Saleem, as he happens to capture a glimpse of himself in a mirror at the Shadipur bus depot: Looking upwards into the mirror, I saw myself transformed into a bigheaded, top-heavy dwarf; in the humblingly foreshortened reflection of myself I saw that the hair on my head was now grey as rainclouds; the dwarf in the mirror, with his lined face and tired eyes, reminded me vividly of my grandfather Aadam Aziz ... nine-fingered, horntempled, monk’s-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated, and now prematurely aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a human being to whom history could do no more, a grotesque creature who had been released from the preordained destiny which had battered him until he was half-senseless; with one good ear and one bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black angel of death. The young-old face of the dwarf in the mirror wore an expression of profound relief. (MC, 447)

It is as a young-old faced dwarf, as a castrated invalid ready to die that Padma meets Saleem and becomes not only his listener but also his servant and nurse. At this very point, her own physical and emotional integrity is unbroken, in fact, so obviously unbroken that it not only contrasts sharply with her master’s vulnerability but constantly threatens to deconstruct the position he claims in the text. As an illiterate excluded, but, ironically, also sheltered from the majority of discourses against which Saleem must constantly defend his personal version of Indian history, Padma does not have to suffer the humiliation, self-doubt, and fragmentation that Saleem experiences under the exposure to the 1,001 voices of the midnight’s children, but also to an infinite multitude of other discourses. Her occasional outbursts during Saleem’s narration notwithstanding, Padma remains safely rooted in her cultural heritage of superstitious beliefs, moralistic judgements, and credulous dependence. For her, there still is a “higher truth” than that contained in Saleem’s writing or scribbling, which she cannot help perceiving as the product of some unhealthy and foolish, if not blasphemous, obsession. This higher truth, in Padma’s view of the world, is absolute and therefore not subject to interpretation. An escape into another selfmade version of reality remains inconceivable for Padma, as does any other form of transcendence of the human self through its own recreation in writing. Whereas to the Western literate mind, such


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fatalism may seem to jeopardize human subjectivity and individuality, for Padma, it represents the only protection against Saleem’s sense of and desire for an ending. It guarantees that, while Saleem insistently pursues his path towards total disintegration, Padma, in spite of her willing subordination to Saleem as narrator, stays undamaged by her nocturnal excursions into his past. Arguably, it is Padma’s evident immunity to Saleem’s authorial manipulations that has led critics to overlook her illiteracy and the subaltern status to which she is relegated within Saleem’s script as a result of her scriptlessness. An ironically fortunate escape in the light of Saleem’s ultimate defeat, Padma’s survival seems to invite readings that negate her inferior status, her harmlessness, and her unconditional servitude, so praised by her master. Yet in interpreting Padma as an “imperious”, undiscerning, or insufficiently learned reader who interrupts the flow of the tale, even interferes with it, and tries to impose on it another logic or moral, critics have only re-enforced a cultural bias founded on distinctly Western critical notions of writing. To interpret Padma’s interjections mainly as disruptions of her master’s narrative, or to suggest that by arresting Saleem’s story, by “making it tame and predictable”, Padma comes to stand for “the political failures of Third-World socialism prevalent in modern decolonization struggles”,33 is not only to side with Saleem and support his eccentric subjectiveness, to advocate unconditional writerly independence, and to argue in principle the validity of fiction as truth. An interpretation along such lines also questions implicitly the reliability of illiterate consciousnesses, posits the crudeness of unlettered thinking in contrast to the sophisticated feats of the lettered mind, and, not least importantly, invites the conclusion that in Midnight’s Children Rushdie favours the specifically Western assumption of the scribe’s sovereignty over the script at the expense of the Muslim insistence on the script’s sovereignty over the scribe. A closer analysis of the role of Padma in Midnight’s Children, however, suggests that Salman Rushdie’s literary explorations of India do not really lend themselves to such appropriations. Rushdie may write in a Western language, draw on Western stylistic and generic conventions, address Eastern as well as Western audiences, and use Western avenues of publication, but the subject matter of Midnight’s Children 33

Brennan, 108.

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is contemporary Eastern literacy and the othernesses it once created and still is creating in India. This in itself renders Midnight’s Children a hybridized document of cultural difference at the very moment of its transcription. In contrast to the cultural contexts to which Rushdie offers the end product of his writing, the cultural context he lays out in his writing does not grant the writer celebrity status, nor the literary text great political or social influence; it does not seem to employ professional readers or sponsor professionally conducted studies on literature. Saleem does not consciously participate in a literary discourse, nor deliberately observe Western literary traditions. Compared to the author of Midnight’s Children, he proves just as naive and incompetent a judge of the events he narrates, as politically confused and ineffective, as critics tend to make Padma out to be. In choosing her rather than a metropolitan intellectual as his confidante, Saleem lets himself in for an enterprise in which he cannot live up to Western ideas of authorship. With his particular choice of audience, the fragmentation of his narrative is pre-programmed since it can never really contain the illiterate consciousnesses it introduces. This is not entirely deleterious. After all, Saleem submits his autobiography to the only person he can trust not to be consumed by those discourses which constantly threaten to distort his own understanding of the past. In spite of her what-happened-nextism, Padma in the end does not insist on the nightly supply of forever new truths. To be able to exert the tyranny of such high expectations over a narrator or writer is a luxury for which a reader, spoilt by free and easy access to literature, is far better equipped to afford than an illiterate listener. While, Salman Rushdie “ironically constructs the metropolitan reader as a voyeuristic consumer”, also to “draw attention to his novel as an object of Western consumption”,34 he makes sure that Padma knows her place and knows, too, that it is not for her but for himself (and, perhaps, for his son) that Saleem desires to tell his tale. The freedom she offers Saleem by accepting her own subordinate status ultimately proves that she is the only audience able to serve the purpose of his tale, a vessel that generously takes up and stores any amount of fabulation Saleem volunteers. Saleem does not miss the spittoon. In fact, he excels in a cultural practice the sad futility of which remains for Rushdie’s reader to decipher as part of 34

Huggan, 424.


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the bitterly ironical portrait of Indian culture that Midnight’s Children offers.


BLACK ILLITERACY FORGED BY SLAVERY AND RACISM


The African American’s relation to dominant literacy has been conditioned by a long history of publicly approved and religiously monitored exclusion from letters and learning. Like that of the Indian outcastes, the marginalization of African Americans by the literate ruling classes follows a trajectory different from the cultural subordination commonly associated with European expansion. African Americans were systematically kept from entering and actively participating in the master culture whose language and religion they had appropriated. By contrast, most other peoples exposed to European domination have had the rather doubtful luck of being absorbed into their colonizers’ civilization by way of forced assimilation. Those who resisted assimilation were exterminated. For American slaveholders, neither the liquidation of those they regarded and depended upon as their own property nor the forced assimilation of subjects whom they perceived as too different even to contemplate as human beings offered a practical means of sustaining their system of exploitation. Legislation against black literacy suggested itself as a much more feasible way of coercing slaves into silent acceptance of their subordination. Unlike the publicly approved illiteracy of lower-caste Indians, that of black Americans and the cultural invisibility that it produced constitutes a widely recognized historical phenomenon today. With corresponding frequency, indeed insistence, the theme of exclusion from white literate culture is addressed in modern and postmodern African-American literature. This has not escaped critical attention, as the recent enforced interest in the transition of black American culture from orality to literacy suggests.1 As in other discussions of similar transition processes, however, the ensuing discourse does not seem to do justice to the actual complexity both of the specific literacy 1

See, for instance, Henry Louis Gates; Jr., “The Trope of the Talking Book”, in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, New York, 1988, 127-169; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Cambridge: Mass, 1993; Lindon Barrett, “African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority”, American Literary History, VII/3 (Fall 1995), 415-42; Trudier Harris, “Folk Literature”, in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, eds William L. Andrews et al., New York, 1997, 28286; Roberts, From Oral To Literate Culture: Colonial Experience in English West Indies. One exception is Ronald A.T. Judy’s work (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African–Arabic Slave Narrative and the Vernacular (with a Foreword by Wahneema Lubiano, Minneapolis: Minn, 1993), which takes into account the literacy of African-Arabic slaves and its impact on the evolution of the American slave narrative.

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resulting from it nor to the intricacies of its treatment within literary texts. This may be due, amongst other things, to the fact that for a long time the beginning of African-American literature has routinely been understood as coincident with the abolition of slavery. Yet, although black literacy was strictly prohibited during slavery, African-American writing started already before Emancipation. Accordingly, in Traces of a Stream, a study of literacy and social change among African-American women, Jacqueline Jones Royster asserts the need for a reassessment of the beginnings of black American literature, surprising the academy with evidence of black females accessing the cadre of well-educated American women already in the nineteenth century. Likewise Janet Duitsman Cornelius in her work When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery and Religion in the Antebellum South (1991) documents efforts of considerable segments of southern society to promote literacy among slaves and thereby anticipating Royster’s observation that despite the displacement and the oppressive circumstances it generated, the “‘peculiar institution’ of slavery” also “dictated and strengthened certain patterns of action and belief for African American[s]” and encouraged them to acquire and use literacy both before and after Emancipation.2 In other words, black American literature sprung from a culture which, though predominantly oral, was a profoundly subversive, because secretly literate subculture. However, instead of acknowledging that the first writing by African Americans was produced in defiance of the white establishment, orthodox literary historiography has been constructing the eventual entry of blacks into literate American culture with unintentional condescension as an 2 Admittedly, Royster’s focus is on the female part of nineteenth-century African American population, which she contends to have been able to “retain a sense of self that resonated with women’s roles in West African communities” and base on it an “ethos of literate practices” (Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women, Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, Pittsburgh: Penn, 2000, 111). In terms of how material conditions might affect the formation of ethos, Royster argues, “the fact of their holding such a clear place of ‘value’ in the economic order [on account of their reproductive potential], despite the experience of pejoration that actually accompanied the place, permitted the women to construct a view of themselves as durable. They could survive and help others do the same. This view supported an ongoing commitment to long-standing cultural mandates – women’s roles in assuring the survival and well-being of the community” (112).

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emergence from a more primitive state of existence. Accordingly the Oxford Companion to Black American Literature, for instance, notes that “literacy acquires in relation to African-American life and culture the status of an important mark of citizenship within the human family” and that the evolution of African-American texts and traditions of letters “marks signal accomplishments, because they seem to provide the most manifest and least ephemeral representations of full participation in the life of the mind”.3 The patronizing undertones of such announcements tend to be overlooked by scholars of black literature. Instead it is taken for granted that an authority like the Oxford Companion should even go to the trouble of reminding its readers that “literacy is of paramount value to any community and [bears] great benefits in terms of self-worth, socioeconomic worth, social mobility, access to information and knowledge, and even rationality, morality, and orderliness”.4 The community of nineteenth-century slaveholders hardly shared this view. Like contemporary opponents to mass literacy in Britain they had every reason to fear rebellion and to dread black literacy as a safe route into complete anarchy. Apart from petty crimes such as the forgery of grocery lists to obtain eatables from county stores in the name of their masters, slaveholders also feared that “reading slaves” would issue passes and free papers for fugitive slaves and, worse even, learn about the discontent of slaves at other places: In effect, slaveholders recognized the likelihood of an occasional call to freedom from the hearts of enslaved men and women. This fact alone was manageable. What was not so predictable was the potential effects of insurrectionist leaders who were able to read books about revolutions and revolutionary heroes and heroines, newspaper reports of whatever insurrections were occurring or had occurred, and abolitionist pamphlets that encouraged the quest for freedom and proclaimed a growing support for the ending of slavery. Literacy in this context was deemed dangerous and intolerable ….5

Slaveholders obviously felt that most brutal measures were both necessary and warranted to prevent slaves from acquiring even very 3

Lindon Barrett, “Literacy”, in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 443. 4 Ibid., 442. 5 Royster, 127.

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rudimentary literacy skills and not even shrank from such extreme precautions as amputation to prevent slaves from trespassing into their culture. Yet, criminalization of black literacy through excessively severe punishment was not entirely effective and failed to intimidate all slaves into accepting their blackness as a lifelong exile from the world of letters. For this, writing was spreading far too rapidly in antebellum America, which saw the emergence of the most numerous reading public the world had ever known and the foundation of hundreds of new periodicals catering for the growing intellectual needs of the masses.6 Newspapers and periodicals were also the media in which the increasingly contentious issue of slavery was debated by slaveholders and abolitionists alike. They served not only journalists in the North to advance their abolitionist ideas but also irate Southerners to vent their protest against antislavery propaganda. Indeed, a sinister reciprocity can be observed between the growing popularity of the abolitionist press in the north and the increasing severity of the measures for which the press in the south would be employed to uphold slavery against all odds. Moreover, it was also in writing that they replied to abolitionist journals, issued increasingly stringent laws against all Negroes, free and slave, advertised slaves for sale and published profiles of runaway slaves. There can hardly be any doubt that even those who never dared to try and acquire even most basic skills of written communication must have possessed some awareness of their emancipation being fought for and against not only in slave insurrections and on battlefields in the Civil War, but in yet another manner and medium. Such knowledge, along with the awareness that writing, when used for the issuing of free papers, actually had the capacity to seal a slave’s release into freedom, account for the well documented appreciation of the written medium by African Americans. As Jones informs us, the blacks fully grasped “the symbolic and practical significance of literacy”. They understood “the implications of literacy and learning in political, economic, and social progress” and could see clearly – also from the extent to which they were denied access to it – “that education could make a difference for individuals and for whole communities”.7 However limited their own command of letters, they 6 7

Starling, 17. Jones, quoted in Royster, 123.

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would place immense faith in the written word behind which they evidently believed a higher than human, infallible and just authority. As Marion Wilson Starling reports, therefore they would devise most ingenious ways and means to gain some mastery of the alphabet. Not infrequently they would do so with the assistance of a white accomplice found amongst children or mistresses of slaveholders. Yet even when their access to written texts, writing materials and tools was more restricted, they would try to learn to read and write, for instance, by offering to hold the Bible for their masters when these were reading aloud from it on Sundays, which would allow them to look at the words recited and memorize them. However fiercely the whites may have condemned literacy in slaves as a sinful or even criminal presumption, such ploys were not regarded as offensive transgressions by the blacks themselves. After all their own perception of the Bible was as a text access to which was not at all a white prerogative. In fact, many of them were convinced that “the sole value in knowing how to read” was “the power it provided human beings to learn the will of God”.8 Slavery, according to this view, constituted an offence against God because it denied them not only the God-given skills of reading and writing but also the enlightenment these skills were meant to bring. This view found clear expression in the slave narratives written by former or fugitive slaves already before Emancipation describing their authors’ suffering and eventual liberation in an overtly autobiographical form. Therefore both thematically and by virtue of their own writtenness slave narratives represent practical applications of the abolitionist ideology they respresent. As William L. Andrews explains, In the nineteenth-century slave narrative freedom is understood 1. most naively as a place – the North. 2. most pragmatically as an economic condition .... 3. most ideally as a state of the mind and spirit characterized by a sense of awareness of self and a sense of individual potential to affect the world and to effect one’s own future.9

The subversive potential of slave narratives resided not only in their open advancement of the idea of black emancipation through 8

Starling, 56. William L. Andrews, “Narrating Slavery”, in Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice, eds Maryemma Graham, Sharon Pineault-Burke, and Marianna White Davis, London, 1998, 25. 9

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intellectual improvement. It also derived from the fact that their publication meant the sudden “coming out” of numerous blacks not just as literates but even more as authors of texts sufficiently sophisticated to merit being called “literary”. Given the popularity of the conviction that blacks were both unworthy and incapable of active participation in literate culture, the public visibility of highly literate blacks was vitally important to encourage African Americans to overcome the prevalent assumption that blackness is essentially synonymous with lifelong illiteracy. White Americans also were suddenly required to readjust their image of the blacks. They too had to begin seeing them as agents of a culture as sophisticated and complex as their own.10 Accordingly Gates observes that “The slave narrative ... helped usher in a central line of thinking about AfricanAmerican literature as an oppositional tradition, devised to refute racist allegations that ‘its authors did not and could not create ‘literature’”.11 Not only has the perplexingly sophisticated style of some of the slave narratives prompted sceptics to query their authenticity and to argue that they must have been written by white campaigners against slavery, it has also generated a growing interest in the specific nature of African-American literacy and in its history. Admittedly, 10

Admittedly, this is not a position shared by Cynthia Hamilton, who, stressing the characteristic “restrictiveness” of the generic formula of slave narrative (440), observes that “all [slave] narratives pander to the abolitionist polemic of victimization” and that slave authors stay entrapped in the “interpretative framework which bestows meaning on the slave’s life within the context of the institution of slavery” and denies authority to the black speaker (433-34). Hamilton attributes this to “the reluctance of a largely white audience to accept a black writer on his own terms” which would invariably force slaves telling their story to accept “the insult of authorizing conventions” permitting but a “blinkered and partisan perspective” hampering their narratives’ expressive scope (434-36) Indebted to the Romantic notion of the freely creative writer-as-artist, Hamilton seems to underestimate the liberating effect that access to the written medium and permission to use it publicly must have had for the African American even in spite of other limitations imposed on their expressive scope. Even when bowing “before the dominant middle class sensitivities and sensibilities of the period” (435), the authors of slave narratives must be conceded to have contributed to a change of attitude enabling blacks perhaps not immediately to transcend the role of victim but to escape at least that of the intellectually inferior brute (Cynthia S. Hamilton, “Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative”, Journal of American Studies, XXX/ 3 [December 1996], 429-45). 11 Gates, quoted in Jennifer Fleischner, Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family, and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives, New York, 1996, 15.

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corresponding scholarly attention was temporarily deflected by a critical return to the Harlem Renaissance and by the renewed preoccupation with African orality that this period inspired with its insistence that the roots of African-American culture have to be sought outside the domain of letters. For a while, the powerful assertions of the beauty of blackness formulated during the Harlem Renaissance and founded on a revaluation of alternative forms of cultural codification such as “musical production, folklore, and nightlife”12 caused scholars to ignore that the orality they were studying was actually generated by way of a systematic suppression of an equivalent literacy. It is only recently that critics have come to concede that, in trying to deconstruct the cultural centrality of literacy, to supplant the medium of writing by music and speech, and to redefine the black American self in terms of its African origins, the proponents of the Harlem Renaissance steered dangerously close to a kind of Romantic primitivism. Thus Henry Louis Gates, for instance, observes that the Harlem Renaissance “failed to find its voice, which lay muffled beneath the dead weight of the convention of romanticism, which most black writers seemed not to question but adopted eagerly”.13 Scholarly attention has since been directed also to black American intellectuals who, in the course of the 1930s, suspended the predominantly aesthetic discourse of the Harlem Renaissance and, under the impression of urbanization, institutional racism, and war, turned to more pressing social concerns. As Bernard Bell has shown, their new commitment found expression in a new naturalistic vision in the African-American novel between 1937 and 1952.14 At the same time, their focus in their perception of black culture shifted from black orality, which had been celebrated so enthusiastically during the Harlem Renaissance, to illiteracy as a 12

Barrett, 444. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self, New York, 1987, 257. The problematic consequences of an African American discourse attempting to recast the black American in the role of the noble savage, as outlined by Gates, have been recognized also earlier by writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Jessie Redmon Fausset. They dissociate themselves from the renewed Eurocentric visions of the black Other by programmatically choosing as their protagonists representatives of the black middle class and portraying them “as well trained both in education and citizenry” (Barrett, 444). 14 Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, Amherst, 1987, 150-51. 13

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specifically black American predicament. This is not to say that black American writers after the Harlem Renaissance, or in reaction to the Harlem Renaissance, simply and conveniently returned to comprehending the difference between blacks and whites in terms of an opposition between culturally inferior illiterates and culturally superior literate rulers. Rather they now began to develop a more differentiated awareness of the literacy their people had acquired relatively recently and of the illiteracy in which they had been retained as a measure of strategic Othering during slavery. Significantly, narratives recounting a black character’s gradual acquisition of the ability to read and write tend to treat literacy not like contemporaneous European fictions as a precondition of social integration but as a source of conflict with white society. This difference has since turned into a characteristic of African-American writing. In fact, in twentieth-century black American fiction, the migration north of well educated protagonists continues to be construed hardly as a closure but far more often as a beginning to a quest in which the main character will time and again be made painfully aware of white America’s misgivings about “black literacy” and literate blacks. The novels by Wright, Angelou, Ellison, Walker, and Morrison, for instance, follow this very mode of recording the profound distaste harboured by white Americans for signs of learnedness in their black fellow beings. Invariably they construe it as an historically grown and enduring peculiarity and explicitly or implicitly trace it back to the special aversion which would drive slaveholders to protect their own culture even by way of torture and murder. For a long time forbidden to participate actively in the booming cultural industry the proliferation of writing in nineteenth-century America had generated, yet, insistently reduced to passive objects of inscription by that same industry, inevitably blacks have come to assume a rather ambivalent role towards literacy. This is also reflected in their literature and in the historical reconstructions of their cultural past they attempted in writing. Their uncertainty as to the benevolence the literate culture in which they have always assumed a marginal position finds symbolic expression, for instance, in a dream at the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, in which the protagonist is handed an official envelope by his grandfather and told to read the letter, which is “stamped with the state seal”. Upon

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opening the envelope, the narrator finds another inside it and another, endlessly, as it seems, until, finally, he comes across a short message in precious letters of gold, reading: “To Whom It May Concern, ... Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.”15 The dreamt-up warning foreshadows the confusing chase to follow from the first-person narrator’s combat with an ominous establishment, a combat in which literacy proves a vital prerequisite to shifting, at least occasionally or temporarily, from the position of the persecuted to that of the persecutor. If any generalizing observation on the treatment of the themes of writing, literacy, and literate culture in black American writing can be ventured at all, it is that rather than clarify their authors’ position within and in relation to dominant literacy, black American novels tend to confuse it. More often than not they do so in electing to treat the writers’ confusion as their main concern. Arguably, it is the African-American writers’ evident difficulties in placing themselves in relation to dominant literate culture that gives special relevance to the recurrent figure of the non-literate and semi-literate black subaltern. Unlike writers from other Anglophone backgrounds, twentieth-century African-American novelist employ this figure not in the first place as a cipher of some intangible otherness but primarily as a symbol of contemporary American blackness borne out of a complex history of cultural exclusion, participation, and self-assertion. Consistently narrated as an experience generating a unique sense of familiarity, the encounter with the non- or semi-literate Other has become identifiable, even without explicit marking, as a sudden meaningful turning point in the alienation process which black protagonists undergo as a consequence of their submersion in a dominant literate culture. The appearance of the non- or semi-literate black regularly serves to destabilize the trajectory along which a black subject is being corrupted by white civilization. This corruption tends to be construed as a process of gradual sophistication, albeit at the price of profound disillusionment. The encounter with or return to a black who has not received such sophistication calls in question the willingness of the black student of white literate culture to pay that price. As if to suddenly disrupt the gradual refinement of the narrative voice reflecting the protagonist’s assimilation of white literate 15

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947), London, 1965, 32.

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epistemology and at the same time his or her dissociation from a personal and cultural past, the Negro who is hardly, if at all, literate is introduced into the narrative as a telling reminder of the protagonist’s history and as a warning not to betray that history. The protagonist may represent a direct antithesis to such characters as Dr Bledsoe in Invisible Man, known to have come to college in his early youth as “a barefoot boy who in his fervour for education had trudged with his bundle of ragged clothing across two states” (IM, 98). Once a director of that same college, Bledsoe proves totally oblivious of his origins and indifferent to the ambitions of students driven, like he once must have been, by a painfully acute sense of disadvantage to try and improve their situation by learning. The most important counterweights to this archetypal traitor of the black race in Ellison’s novel are Lucius Brockway, senior engineer in the paint factory, Mary, the protagonist’s landlady, and, finally, Ras the exhorter. It almost seems as if the race these characters represent were one apart from that of the black college boys working in New York to return to school down South, or from that of the “fundamentalists” who sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone ... with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas, black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what shirt, what shade of grey was correct for spats and what would the Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event ...; who never read the financial pages though the purchased the Wall Street Journal religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against the body and grasped in the left hand .... (IM, 208)

The protagonist narrator of Invisible Man cannot help noting something special, something absolutely distinctive about these characters, secretly scorned by the Brotherhood for their apparent lack of learning and sophistication. While professing that it is their policy to strive and “reach people through their intelligence” (IM, 283), the brothers’ chief strategy, in reality, is to bypass people with inferior educational backgrounds altogether and systematically prevent their inclusion into the community. As part of their scheme to direct their ideology at a certain “intelligence”, they for instance instruct the protagonist to break off all contacts with his landlady and motherly friend Mary, of whom he is certain that, in spite of her poor schooling,

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“she knew very well how to live [in Harlem], much better than I with my college training – training! Bledsoing, that was the term” (IM, 239). Their expectation is that he should dissociate himself from “the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street”: “Our job is not to ask them what they think”, one of the brotherhood’s leaders informs him, “but to tell them!” (IM, 380). It is as a contrast to the brothers and to the “scientific socialism” to which they subscribe that Ellison introduces the figure of the eccentric Ras, the exhorter. What distinguishes this character is above all the crude rhetoric he has cultivated as if in conscious opposition to the superior learnedness the brothers like to exhibit. With his particular idiom, Ras challenges those “educated fool[s] who t’ink everything between black mahn and white mahn can be settled with some blahsted lies in some bloody books written by the white mahn in the first place” (IM, 303). He insists that, in contrast to the “young blackmen with plenty education”, he is not “a black traitor to the black people for the white people”. Convinced that the three hundred years of black blood it has taken to build the whites’ civilization “wahn’t be wiped out in a minute” (IM, 300), he cannot see what kind of education a black can possibly expect to gain by “go[ing] over to the enslaver” (IM, 303). As the case of Ras the exhorter makes clear, in Invisible Man, the ungrammaticality of the half-literate characters’ language no longer serves to mark out a cultural disadvantage, but to differentiate between opposing ideologies, which, for Ellison, are not merely reflected in, but indeed generated by contrasting epistemologies.


CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE LURE OF WHITE LITERACY: RICHARD WRIGHT’S BLACK BOY

Invisible Man is not the first black American novel stressing the political implications of both literacy and illiteracy in a society divided by racism. Richard Wright’s “fictionalized autobiography”1 Black Boy does so too. At closer analysis this work, which was first published in 1945, reveals positively perplexing similarities to Mulk Raj Anand’s novel above all for its special treatment of non-literacy as the peculiarity of a subculture bred by a complexly literate society through systematic educational discrimination. Like Untouchable, Black Boy processes personal experiences of cultural inferiority and narrates them from the point of view of a gifted and ambitious young male, fiercely determined not to accept the uninspired existence to which he is constricted by virtue of his caste. “I saw a bare, bleak pool of black life and I hated it”,2 Wright recollects, invoking the same sense of profound discontent that causes Bakha in Untouchable to try to escape his situation through learning. There are also stylistic similarities between Untouchable and Black Boy. Wright’s description of black American life in the first half of the twentieth century is marked by the same didacticism and naturalism that distinguishes Anand’s representation of the milieu of the Untouchables. With shocking frankness Wright describes the poverty and desolation in which he grew up, invoking an environment “profoundly alien to the average reader”.3 He portrays himself as a drunkard before he begins school, who knows nothing better to do with his life than to roam the streets and beg drinks at the doors of saloons. Alternatively he joins a crowd of black children, like himself abandoned by their working parents for the day. Their favourite pastime is to observe from a distance a collection of outdoor privies so 1

Katherine Fishburn, Richard Wright’s Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim, Metchuen: NJ, 1977, 6. 2 Richard A. Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, New York, 1945, 151. 3 Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright, with a Preface by Harry T. Moore, Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Ill, 1969, 16.

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ramshackle that they provide a perfect view of their half denuded visitors and their different ways of performing the act of excretion. Wright’s description of this particular voyeuristic indulgence has the same effect Anand creates with his exacting portrayal of Bakha as engaged in the act of sweeping latrines: it foregrounds the very baseness of the impulses nourishing the protagonist’s mind, thereby lending extra plausibility to his desire for learning as a means to improve his situation. Nonetheless, Wright’s realism does not solicit the same sympathetic identification with the central character that Anand’s novel commands. According to Margolies, although Wright writes about himself and his own people, he alienates his readers with his systematic reduction of individual blacks to figures that assume relevance in his autobiography merely as foils to Wright’s persona. What is more, like Untouchable, Wright’s narrative does not accommodate the development of human relationships.4 The central character remains alone and preoccupied with the improvement of his personal situation. Yet whereas towards the end of Untouchable Bakha resolves to resume the relationships he at first wishes to relinquish, young Richard makes no attempt to repair the everincreasing estrangement between himself and his family. As a result, the dominant stance of Black Boy is one of overt egocentrism. This, and not only, as Fishburn suggests, Wright’s emphasis on the protagonist’s development into a writer, turn Black Boy into a Kuenstler- rather than a Bildungsroman.5 For Margolies, the solipsism celebrated by Wright in his autobiographic novel is not reconcilable with the traditional cause of black writing, which is to advance “Negro freedom”: Insofar as the reader identifies Wright’s cause with the cause of Negro freedom, it is because Wright is a Negro – but a careful reading of the book indicates that Wright expressly divorces himself from other Negroes. Indeed rarely in the book does Wright reveal concern for Negroes as a group. Hence Wright traps the reader in a stereotyped

4 On this point see also Charles T. Davis, “From Experience to Eloquence: Richard Wright’s Black Boy as Art”, in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger): A Casebook, eds William L. Andrews and Douglas Taylor, Casebooks in Criticism, Oxford, 2003, 88-89. 5 Fishburn, 7.

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response – the same stereotyped response that Wright is fighting throughout the book: that is, that all Negroes are alike and react alike.6

Margolies essentially echoes the reservations voiced also by some of Wright’s contemporaries. While on the whole the first edition of Black Boy was received enthusiastically, quickly rising to the top on the New York Times bestseller list,7 it seems to have affronted black intellectuals like Du Bois, who dismissed the novel as a work of art “patently and terribly overdrawn”.8 In Davis’ view this reaction is plausible not only because Black Boy offended Du Bois’ middle-class sensibilities but also because it confronted its readers with a reality simply too painful for the more advantaged blacks in the North to accept.9 According to this reality black people in the South of early twentieth-century America were not simply innocent victims of marginalization. Black Boy provocatively suggests that they courted and exacerbated their own ghettoization through their lack of creativity, ambition, and kindness. “They were vocal about the petty individual wrongs they suffered”, Wright’s persona reflects, “but they possessed no desire for a knowledge of the picture as a whole” (BB, 181). He notes how smoothly his peers “acted out roles that the white race had mapped out for them” (BB, 216). Instead of a critical faculty enabling them to escape these roles, he feels, they developed in them “a delicate, sensitive controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotions from all that the white race had said was taboo” (BB, 216). Revelling in ignorance they disallowed themselves any of “those intangible sentiments that bind man to man”. There was not “real kindness in Negroes”, he concludes. “Negros had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization”. Somehow they lived “in it but not of it” (BB, 45). Ironically, it is their lack of kindness, that, in Wright’s view, turns blacks into devout believers, blind followers of a creed founded on “snobbery, clannishness, gossip, intrigue, petty class rivalry, and 6

Margolies, 18. William L. Andrews and Douglas Taylor, “Introduction”, in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger): A Casebook, eds William L. Andrews and Douglas Taylor, 3. 8 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Richard Wright Looks Back”, New York Herald Tribune, March 4, 1945, 2. 9 Davis, 97. 7

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conspicuous displays of cheap clothing” (BB, 166-67). For some time, young Richard allows himself to “be seduced by it all”, trying to live “the life of an optimist” (BB, 167) and to endure his grandmother’s attempts to convert him. Eventually, however, he rebels against the zealous proselytizing to which his relatives seem so given. In refusing to practice the anti-individualism preached by the African-American Church, Richard, in Wright’s narrative, like Bakha in Untouchable, becomes guilty not so much of sacrilege as of disloyalty. The discomfort this instils in him brings to mind the profound sense of inadequacy Bakha feels at the end of a day during which every deviation from his daily routine, whether deliberate or purely accidental, has earned him gravest disapproval: I walked home slowly, asking myself what on earth was the matter with me, why it was I never seemed to do things as people expected them to be done. Every word and gesture I made seemed to provoke hostility. I had never been able to talk to others, and I had to guess at their meanings and motives .... Finding no answer, I told myself that I was a fool to worry about it, that no matter what I did I would be wrong somehow as far as my family was concerned. (BB, 158)

Despite, or in fact because of the hopelessness of his own situation, Richard remains acutely aware of other and, above all, of better existences lived by his peers. Again, like the Untouchable Bakha in Anand’s novel, he follows the movements of the schoolchildren in the neighbourhood with special attention and longing. Wright recounts how the children would stop and play en route to their homes and how he would thumb through the pages of their school books, which they would leave on the sidewalk, and question them about “the baffling black print” (BB, 29). Such episodes anticipate the longing finally instilled in him by a young schoolteacher and lodger at his grandmother’s, initiates him into the world of fiction. Interrogated about the books the boy sees her read, she begins to tell him the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives. Enchanted by the tale, Richard has the impression that the world around him is coming to new life, that it is beginning to “be, throb, live”. “As she spoke, reality changed”, he recalls: the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow. (BB, 47)


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Against the schematically drawn mentor/muse Wright places the equally de-individualized figure of his illiterate grandmother, who, upon discovering her grandson’s new interest, categorically bans all works of fiction from her house, declaring them “the Devil’s work” (BB, 48). Her determination to retain him within the limited scope of her unlettered existence finally causes Richard to choose the path into the forbidden terrain of literature, to endorse what his family holds to be an abominable vice, and to do so ceremoniously by pledging his resolve in desperate earnest: I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders .... my mother and grandmother ... had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. (BB, 48)

In restricting his analysis of Bakha’s estrangement from his family to the short time span of a single day, in which Bakha does not even manage to begin the tuition for which he has made special arrangements, Anand plausibly sustains Bakha’s illiterate otherness until the very end of the novel and thereby never abandons the option of Bakha’s reconciliation with the world of the Untouchables. By contrast, Wright’s novel progresses well beyond the protagonist’s discovery of a world outside his own which he might be able to access through book learning. The purpose of Wright’s text is to relate the transformation of a naive and illiterate black boy, who by the age of twelve has still not had one full year of formal schooling (BB, 112), into a professional writer. As Stepto puts it, Wright’s effort is “to create a persona who experiences major moments of literacy, personal freedom, and personal growth ... and … maintains in a very clearheaded way his vision of a higher literacy and a better world”.10 Given the novel’s orientation towards this particular end, it is not surprising that Richard’s reconciliation with his past should be deferred to a later stage in his life. Indeed, it is not until twenty-odd years after he left the South that Richard returns home to experience the estrangement his education has wrought between himself and his father: 10 Robert B. Stepto, “Literacy and Ascent: Richard Wright’s Black Boy”, in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger): A Casebook, eds William L. Andrews and Douglas Taylor, 108.

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The Non-Literate Within: Black Illiteracy A quarter of a century was to elapse [before] I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of the Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper ... a quarter of a century during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality ... I was overwhelmed to realize that he could never understand me or the scalding experiences that had swept me beyond his life and into an area of living that he could never know. (BB, 42)

My “father was a black peasant”, the grown-up Wright explains, “... whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city – that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed-of shores of knowledge” (BB, 43). In spite of the apparently insurmountable difference between son and father, a tie in the end becomes discernable between them which is sustained by the shared knowledge and experience of exclusion from white literate culture. Ironically enough, it is only in the process of dissociating himself from the legacy of cultural inferiority and escaping from the “barrenness of black life” to “alien and undreamed-of shores of knowledge” that at last Richard becomes aware of the white Americans’ hatred for their black fellow-citizens. The further he advances in his education and the more eloquently he phrases his requests for access into the world of letters, the more likely a target of racist aggression he becomes. From complete ignorance of racism (after all, “Nothing about the problems of Negroes was ever taught in the classrooms at school”: BB, 181) and the naive conviction that there were “good white people, people with money and sensitive feelings”, only waiting to make his acquaintance, he soon advances to a more realistic evaluation of his situation or to what Wright himself terms “a Negro’s reality ... of the white world” (BB, 163). One of the discoveries most difficult for him to accept in the process is that blacks must always be careful to pander to the vanity of the whites and feign inferiority when dealing with them so as to abate their deep-seated fear of blacks “who knew, however dimly, the worth of their humanity”. The principal of his school, who warns Richard not to deliver his own speech at the night of graduation but to accept a


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version written for him by someone else, fails to teach him that “whites placed a premium on black deceit” (BB, 219). By the end of the novel, however, Richard has learnt his lesson and become able to act like the other Negroes in his environment when dealing with whites, pretending to conform to their laws, always grinning and bowing. He, too, has grasped the benefits of looking “as unbookish as possible” (BB, 270), of pretending that he cannot read, of building a screen of lies to conceal his knowledge and ambitions. Richard learns to protect himself by hiding his literacy behind a façade of ignorance not too threatening to whites convinced that book learning is cultural terrain they must defend against black usurpers. To avert their aggression he assumes a pose he once used to detest in blacks. Meanwhile he knows better. Still, his mimicry never amounts to the same self-degradation other blacks contrive to fend off racist resentment. The fact that, at the end of his autobiography, Wright is still able to assert that it never occurred to him that he was in any way an inferior being (BB, 283), distinguishes him from Shorty, the elevator operator, of whom Wright notes, Psychologically he was the most amazing specimen of the southern Negro I had ever met. Hard-headed, sensible, a reader of magazines and books, he was proud of his race and indignant about its wrongs. But in the presence of whites he would play the role of a clown of the most debased and degraded type. (BB, 248)

To extract but trifling amounts of money from white customers, Shorty willingly plays the buffoon for them and allows them to vent their unsatisfied racist urges by abusing him both verbally and physically with all the aggression they can (or wish to) summon up. Asked by Wright how he can possibly bear such prostitution, he simply retorts: “Listen, nigger, ... my ass is tough and quarters is scarce” (BB, 250). Despite his learning, Shorty’s story in the end proves as tragic as that of Wright’s father. When he meets Shorty for the last time, Richard suddenly grasps that he is moving to the North not to end like Shorty without a future and without any hope for change: “I’ll never leave this goddamn South,” he [Shorty] railed. “I’m always saying I am, but I won’t . . . I’m lazy. I like to sleep too goddamn much. I’ll die here. Or maybe they’ll kill me.”

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The Non-Literate Within: Black Illiteracy I stepped from the elevator into the street, half expecting someone to call me back and tell me that it was a dream, that I was not leaving. This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled. (BB, 281)

The story of Shorty effectively qualifies Richard’s own ascent to literacy. It illustrates that a formal education alone, while a prerequisite to emancipation, does not necessarily, nor automatically guarantee freedom.11 Rather the case of Shorty seems to suggest that to assert one’s independence against the odds of racial discrimination one must first reach some form of reconciliation with one’s own otherness. For Richard, this means that he must learn to face the state of ignorance he once shared with his people and not keep fleeing from it. Repeated encounters with blacks who cannot read or write help him to do so. They transport him back to the “squalid hovels [where he] had learned to curse before [he] had learned to read” (BB, 109) and eventually force him to accept semi-literacy and illiteracy as far too pervasive features of his people’s cultural history and present to ban from one’s own consciousness. He realizes that to have grown up in an environment that “contained nothing more alien than writing or the desire to express one’s self in writing” (BB, 133) is in itself a formative experience. It suddenly strikes him as meaningful that “Read and count was about as much as most of the people [he] met could do, grownup or children” (BB, 64). The impression of his people’s lack of schooling, created earlier in the novel, is renewed when Richard takes a temporary job with an illiterate insurance agent whom he accompanies on his sales trips to do the writing and figuring for him. On these trips, he is confronted with such profound ignorance in the children of his customers that, for the first time in his life, he appreciates his literacy as a privilege. At the same time, the realization that there are black children who possess no books to read and, worse even, who read no books at all, evokes a novel sense of responsibility in him. Seeing that the main reason for his clients to buy insurance from him is to connect themselves with someone or something “that would make their children ‘write ’n speak lak dat pretty boy from Jackson’” (BB, 151), 11

This assumption underlies Stepto’s reconstruction of Wright’s passage toward literacy and freedom within the context of such works as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), or Native Son.


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Richard begins to question the ends to which he has put his literacy skills so far. In the process he remembers his illiterate grandfather, a Civil War invalid, who never received his disability pension, only because someone, whom he had asked to help him fill out his discharge papers, had misspelled his name. In retelling his grandfather’s story, Richard arrives at a better understanding of the long letters to the War Department, which his grandfather would never tire to dictate to people willing to assist as his scribes. It dawns on Richard that these letters probably contained a history more important and more interesting than the information recorded in the official documents his family has kept of the case. Although he knows that he will never be able to retrieve this history, he resolves at least to do justice to the disappointment his grandfather suffered when his painstaking pleas to the authorities were finally dismissed. To prove his active participation in the Civil War, his grandfather had laboriously reconstructed the conversations he had had during the war and the battles in which he had fought. He had also meticulously listed all the places he had seen and the regiments and companies with which he had been in combat. As if in an attempt to authenticate this neat compilation of historical data, whose value had been negated so meanly by the War Department Richard composes a moving account of the moment when his grandfather learnt that all his efforts had been in vain. With this account he transforms not only the ending of his grandfather’s story but also the context in which it requires to be read: He would stare at the black print for a long time, then reluctantly, distrustfully hand the letter to me. “Well?” he would say. And I would read him the letter – reading slowly and pronouncing each word with extreme care – telling him that his claims for a pension had not been substantiated and that his application had been rejected. Grandpa would not blink an eye, then he would curse softly under his breath. “It’s them goddamn rebels,” he would hiss. As though doubting what I had read, he would dress up and take the letter to at least a dozen of his friends in the neighbourhood and ask them to read it to him; finally he would know it from memory. At last he would put the letter away carefully and begin brooding again, trying to recall out of his past some telling fact that might help him in getting his pension. Like “K” of Kafka’s novel, The Castle, he tried

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The Non-Literate Within: Black Illiteracy desperately to persuade the authorities of his true identity right up to the day of his death, and failed. (BB, 154)

The surprising link Wright establishes towards the end of this passage between his illiterate grandfather and the figure of K in Kafka’s The Castle is symptomatic of his idea of literature and its sociocultural function. As much as the inclusion of the story of his grandfather in his autobiography allows Wright to contextualize his own tale of how he became a writer, the comparison of his grandfather with a character from European literature serves to decontextualize the old man’s tragic fate and place it in a wider framework. With his allusion to Kafka, Wright deconstructs the impression he creates at the outset that his grandfather’s desperate and vain endeavours to assert his identity against white American authorities represent no more than yet another re-enactment of a stereotypical tale. In dissociating the case of his grandfather from the received story of black suppression and associating it with a completely different narrative, Wright isolates the figure of his grandfather from the black collective, which he himself keeps experiencing as a hostile amorphous crowd threatening to consume his individuality and to sacrifice it to a mad cult (rather than culture) of suffering. By suggesting that his grandfather’s story is far more widely applicable than as an illustration of the injustices inflicted on black Americans, Wright recuperates for his grandfather the identity and place in history that he was denied in his lifetime. Writing about other blacks, rewriting their histories, re-inscribing their identity – these are the tasks to which Wright learns to put his own literacy in the course of Black Boy. Driven by a new sense of involvement in his people’s non-literate past, he decides to try and outwit the system banning blacks from white knowledge, for instance by denying them access to public libraries. It is no longer purely for the sake of his own intellectual improvement that Richard seeks the assistance of an Irish immigrant to obtain the kind of literature in which he expects to find a better explanation for the motives of racism than he has been given by his teachers. What he finds in the books he secretly obtains from the library, however, is not a study of the specific form of racism rife in the southern states of contemporary America but a general exploration of the nature of prejudice in a language so foreign to him that he momentarily re-experiences a kind of illiteracy:


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... I opened one of the books and read a title: A Book of Prefaces. I was nearing my nineteenth birthday and I did not know how to pronounce the word “preface.” I thumbed the pages and saw strange words and strange names. I shook my head, disappointed. I looked at the other book; it was called Prejudices. I knew what that word meant; I had heard it all my life. And right off I was on guard against Mencken’s books. Why would a man want to call a book Prejudices? The word was so stained with all my memories of racial hate that I could not conceive of anybody using it for a title.

Shocked by the novelty of Mencken’s theories, Wright can barely picture the author as a civilized being but imagines him “as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority”. And yet, feeling that he himself has “somehow overlooked something terribly important in life” (BB, 271-72), he resolves to venture even further into the forbidden terrain of fiction and literary criticism where he finally, catches the “glimpses of life’s possibilities” (BB, 283) he has been seeking: “I would read and wonder as only the naive and unlettered can read and wonder”, he recalls, “feeling that I carried a secret, criminal burden about me each day” (BB, 275-76). In a sense, reading does to Richard, what the translation of his grandfather’s story into writing posthumously does for his grandfather. The further his reading removes him from his illiterate past, the closer he comes to a sympathetic understanding of that past. Broadening his cultural horizon not without loosening the ties by which he has always felt inescapably bound to southern black culture and the legacies of slavery and racism. The literature he consumes opens up new possibilities of reconciliation with the straitened environment in which he grew up. Such reconciliation, he learns from works “written by men like Dreiser, Masters, Mencken, Anderson, and Lewis”, must take place in the form of a discourse, not condemning but “defensively critical” (BB, 283) of American society. For Wright, one way of mustering the forgiveness such a discourse presupposes is through the written word and its capacity to wake, even in the most brutally mangled self, the hope “that life could be different, could be lived in a fuller and richer manner” (BB, 281). “The external world of whites and blacks, which was the only world I had ever known”, he concludes at the end of Black Boy, “surely had not

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evoked in me any belief in myself. The people I had met had advised and demanded submission .... It had been only through books ... that I had managed to stay alive ...”(BB, 282). Perhaps it is true that Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man “are exceptions to the rule because of their open interest with the power of literacy for African American writers”. Still, as this statement stands, it fails to do justice to the remarkable complexity of both Wright’s and Ellison’s treatment of the theme. As the above analysis tries to show, it is not merely because “a facility with written language enables the protagonist’s ultimate escape from his circumstances”12 that references to literacy and learning are of special importance in Black Boy. In repeatedly returning to questions regarding the social relevance of writing, especially for marginalized groups such as America’s blacks, Wright also deviates from contemporary notions of African-American character and culture. He appeals to a new awareness of the black subaltern as part of the masses, the “common people”, and, hence, as “the metaphor for America and modern man”.13 Wright’s particular understanding of literacy and its significance for black Americans is an important aspect in his rejection of both the concept of black consciousness and the values of African-American culture.14 Still, a closer examination of his view of literate America does not necessarily corroborate Wright’s alleged “complete alienation” from black culture.15 It rather shows that what Wright rejects is an all too essentialist position founded on a reappraisal of orality and non-literacy or illiteracy as more original or authentic parameters of blackness than literacy. Wright’s objections to the kind of cultural essentialism advocated by his contemporaries during the Harlem Renaissance predate attempts of later twentieth-century African-American writers to forge an entirely new concept of black American literature with the help of the idea of black orality. These writers insist on seeing black writing as the result of a hybridization of culturally specific oral and written traditions. They identify the discursive tension between orality and literacy as the essence of their culture and try to capture this tension in their work. In so doing they depart from what has been termed “the 12

Barrett, 444. Bell, 153 and 167. 14 Ibid., 155. 15 Ibid., 156. 13


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Wright paradigm of naturalism”16 as well as from an evaluation of literate and non-literate epistemologies in terms of social, economic, and political advantages and disadvantages. Their approach to their culture’s different systems of perception and expression is idealistic in that it accommodates the confident belief that the cultural marginalization of blacks in the past can and in fact must be remedied by the confident assertion of their cultural centrality in the present and the future. Accordingly, one may see it is as an expression of optimism that their works synthesize narration and documentation, fictionalization and anticipation, thereby leading well beyond the generic confines of naturalistic autobiography to a more open, imaginative, and experimentalist literary form challenging established notions of reality and truth. From Wright’s point of view, the ultimate result of this development could of course also be argued to have been a “complete alienation” from the socio-historical reality of black subalternity. Indeed, as the reception of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, for instance, shows, the integration of non-literate traditions and epistemologies into the Western logic of text does not completely satisfy all theorists of African-American culture. In the case of The Color Purple, it has even prompted stormy debates whether Walker’s recreation of a subliterate black folk speech does not violate received standards both of “art” and of “blackness”.17 One of the main conclusions to be drawn from these debates is that it is impossible to solve the question of what constitutes the epistemological basis of African-American writing by way of recourse to the fixed opposites of orality and literacy. Seeing this, Marion Kraft arrives at a completely new reading of The Color Purple, one which suggests interpreting the protagonist’s illiteracy as a metaphor not only for her implication in the history of slavery but also for the complex, almost intangible nature of her cultural role. After all, as bell hooks points out, nearly illiterate as Celie is, it is incredible that she should find the time and space to write at all.

16

Ibid., 167. Cf. Marion Kraft, The African Continuum and Contemporary African American Women Writers: Their Literary Presence and Ancestral Past, European University Studies/Europäische Hochschulschriften 14, Series xiv, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, Frankfurt am Main, 1995, 129. 17

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Drawing on bell hooks, Kraft argues convincingly that Celie does not really write her story but tells it and that it can only be on yet another textual level that her story undergoes a transformation into letters – that is, letters “to God, to her beloved sister and to a larger audience”.18 “The Color Purple”, Kraft concludes, “is neither just a discourse on orality and literacy, nor just the story of Celie’s plight, struggle and liberation”.19 Instead of casting African Americans as “deprived of all remnants of their previous culture”, The Color Purple “celebrates not only personal survival of those oppressed by slavery, colonialism, racism and patriarchal hierarchy”, but also “the cultural traditions that have outlived disruptions”.20 Positing a dialectics (rather than an opposition) of literacy and orality, Kraft proposes comprehending Walker’s novel as a “speakerly text” which does not simply romanticize Africa and its influence on the African-American experience but which also “deals with social contradictions and conflicts” through a unique storytelling mode that endeavours to be a new kind of “communication with spirits”.21 Kraft’s analysis of The Color Purple as a conscious attempt to deconstruct the received binarisms of voice and letters, orality and literacy is not applicable to Alice Walker’s oeuvre alone. Sensitive to the new awareness of the complex epistemological functions of speech and writing emergent towards the end of the twentieth-century, Kraft’s work opens up new avenues also for the study of other postmodern African-American writers. The following chapter will try to demonstrate how her special application of Gates’ concept of the “speakerly text”, with its emphasis on the close inter-relatedness of oral and literate epistemologies in the African-American context, lends itself to a reading of Beloved and the particular fusion of preverbal, preliterate, oral, and highly literate modes which this novel performs. As Jean Wyatt has argued Toni Morrison creates this fusion to flout “basic rules of normative discourse”.22 Like Walker’s agenda in The Color Purple (at least according Kraft’s interpretation of the 18

Ibid., 133-34. Ibid., 138. 20 Ibid., 141. 21 Ibid., 128. 22 Jean Wyatt, “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, CVIII/3 (May 1993), 474. 19


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novel), Morrison’s in Beloved is to achieve a balance between mimetic and diegetic, oral and written, African and Western traditions by merging oral and written structures, and producing a unique “confluence of styles, patterns of expression, and attitudes”.23 This also allows Morrison to unobtrusively incorporate elements of the gothic in her novel and to develop it into the “primary generic template”24 for Beloved. Thus Morrison strategically synchronizes the structures of two separate and radically different yet coincident discourses: that of European Romanticism and that of American abolitionism. “What a gothic framework allows”, Hamilton explains, “is coverage of the same general area as that of the slave narrative, but in a manner which highlights the significance of aspects of experience slighted by the slave narrative: the psychology of violation, victimization and scapegoating”.25 Originally Romantic elements come to assume an abolitionist purpose in Beloved insofar as the gothic exposes the perversity of slavery by acknowledging the “ghostly presence” of as yet unheard narrative voices before exorcizing them.26 The realistic mode of the traditional slave narrative is not able to yield a similar “examination of the pathology of slaveholding”.27 For the slave narrative implicitly and categorically precludes any open display of authority on the part of its author and prescribes instead a kind of rhetorical subordination by which the slave or former slave downplays her literacy. Conversely, the Romantic fantasy, by definition depends on its author being identified unequivocally as an absolutely reliable agent of truth. For her account to be trusted, the author (in contrast, of course, to the narrator28) of 23 Madelyn Jablon, Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature, Iowa City, 1997, 114. 24 Cynthia S. Hamilton, “Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative”, Journal of American Studies, XXX/3 (December 1996), 445. 25 Ibid., 441. 26 Ibid., 445. 27 Ibid., 441. 28 Illiterate narrators do indeed feature regularly in gothic tales. Granted the capacity to understand the world in a way absolutely alien to the implied reader and author, they are characterised as particularly likely media through which supernatural forces may assert their existence. And yet, what secures the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief”, is never the essential foreignness of the narrator’s nonliterate perception alone, but the very tension repeatedly activated/evoked between the narrator’s non-literacy and the text’s inherent literacy (which, by further implication, is also the author’s literacy).

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supernatural tales cannot afford to exhibit a real lack of the principal accomplishments of basic learning. Arguably, it is from this subtle difference between the slave narrative and the gothic that the invocations of the preliterate past of black culture in Beloved derive their authority.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN RESISTING WHITE LITERACY: TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED

It is said that for Morrison the slave narrative represents “a culturally originary moment and a rich, barely tapped literary inheritance”. It is also said that especially in Beloved, Morrison tries to validate the voice of the slave narrator, traditionally attested only poor literary authority. As Caroline Rody notes, Morrison does so in the awareness of the difference between herself as a best-selling author and her literary foremothers, the truth-status of whose tales is debated even today: Though it is Morrison’s “huge joy” to help slave authors to “surface” in contemporary writing …, it is also her lot to view them from across a great divide and see in them the dim faces of origin she will never fully capture. In the jealous longing of the abandoned daughter, the novel [Beloved] figures its relationship to the unknown ancestressmuse of the African-American women’s literary renaissance.1

Critics, concerned with the spiritual bond Morrison conjures between herself and her literary antecedents in her fictional returns to the subject of slavery, commonly overlook that her appraisal of early black literacy is rarely performed without a highly critical evaluation of its contemporary white equivalent.2 In Beloved Morrison’s scrutiny of the cultural superiority which white citizens of later nineteenthcentury America would assume over blacks on the grounds of their alleged learnedness is concentrated in her portrayal of the sinister figure of schoolteacher. In contrast to the careful psychological analyses Morrison offers of all her other characters in Beloved, her 1

Caroline Rody, The Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fiction of History, Oxford, 2001, 34. 2 This is the case not even in Dauterich’s reading of Beloved and Jazz, one of the most recent studies on the hybridization of orality and literacy in Morrison, which acknowledges that in integrating written and oral forms and rewriting Western narrative to create “a uniquely African American Form of expression”, Morrison gives special prevalence to the theme of illiteracy especially in Beloved (Edward Dauterich, “Hybrid Expression: Orality and Literacy in Jazz and Beloved”, The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought, XLVII/1 [Autumn 2005], 27-28).

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portrayal of this figure is uncompromising. It accommodates not a single explanation, let alone excuse for his brutality other than primitive racist resentment. Not even his learning and “pretty manners” are invoked to function as a redeeming feature. Indeed they, too, serve to present schoolteacher as the Devil incarnate, deceiving everyone with his affected airs, yet in reality set on breaking every black in his charge. The slaves at Sweet Home are not aware of his fiendish scheme when the little man arrives “with a big hat and spectacles and a coach box full of paper” “to put things in order” after the demise of their master.3 In their unlettered innocence they misread his unusually cultured ways as signs of special sophistication and note with awe that he “Talked soft and spit in handkerchiefs” and knew “Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never [used] it even to His face” (B, 37). One of the three females at the centre of Morrison’s novel, Sethe, remembers schoolteacher particularly well. “Nothing to tell except schoolteacher”, she replies when her daughter asks her about how she escaped slavery. Because of her ink-making skills, Sethe would feel reasonably safe with schoolteacher, believing that he depended on her to write the book to which he would apply himself every evening. Unable to read, she is unaware that she and the other slaves at Sweet Home are the contents of this book. Not until much later does she realize that what schoolteacher is recording are ethnographic data about blacks obtained from unsuspecting individuals like herself by way of persistent questioning and close observation.4 “I thought he was a fool”, she explains many years afterwards: “And the questions he asked was the biggest foolishness of all” (B, 191). What schoolteacher is really like dawns on Sethe when one day she inadvertently hears him talking to his pupils about her and that schoolteacher has told the boys to describe or, as he calls it, to “do” her by listing her “human characteristics” as well as her “animal ones” in neatly divided rubrics in their notebooks (B, 193). The offensiveness of the exercise is ironically elaborated by an account of how Sethe goes to her mistress to ask her what the word “characteristics” means. It is a lesson of a different kind that Mrs 3

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), New York, 1988, 197. As Peach reminds us, this, of course, is a reference to the crude Darwinist views propounded by Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton (Linden Peach, Toni Morrison, Macmillan Modern Novelists, London, 1995, 106). 4

Resisting White Literacy

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Garner unwittingly gives the young woman. In the end Sethe comprehends schoolteacher’s notion of human and animal characteristics in blacks as well as do his pupils. “Schoolteacher was teaching us things we couldn’t learn” (B, 191), Sethe remembers. Yet despite his policy of systematic denial and degradation she learns to see that he is “schoolteacher” by name only – as does Paul D, another slave at Sweet Home and victim of schoolteacher’s aggression. “Schoolteacher ... knew the worth of everything” (B, 228), Paul D concludes after he has had to listen to his own worth being discussed by schoolteacher in terms of the “dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future” (B, 226). The money from “this here one” – schoolteacher coldly calculates Paul D’s price – would earn him two “young ones, twelve or fifteen years old”. And together with “the breeding one [Sethe], her three pickaninnies and whatever the foal might be” (B 227), this would raise the value of Sweet Home and make him rich. The insight into literate culture schoolteacher with his callous expediency gives the blacks provokes their unconscious resistance to it. As Trudier Harris outlines, this becomes most clearly manifest in the way the former slaves “rememory” Sweet Home: In remembering what it was before schoolteacher arrived, Sethe and other of its inhabitants imbue it with an aura of myth, of folktale larger than life .... Schoolteacher’s appearance is significant in contributing to this image, for as he destroys what once was, that former state is highlighted even more in the memories of those who knew it earlier. The mythical Sweet Home, then, assumes such proportions in direct relation to the memories of atrocities that spoiled its paradisaiacal state.5

The distinctly oral quality of their memories, Harris goes on to argue, lends a folkloristic bent to both the characters’ perception and the territory on which they reside. Thus their narratives resist usurpation by schoolteacher and reclaim instead what he has taken away from Sethe and the other slaves. Paul D’s illiteracy needs to be understood in a similar way, not so much as a consequence of slavery (indeed, his first master offers to let him learn to read and write) but as a pose of defiance cultivated in 5

Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, Knoxville:Tenn, 1991, 176.

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reaction to schoolteacher and the dubious form of education he embodies. Paul D has never considered literacy an accomplishment important for blacks to acquire. He is convinced that there is nothing important for blacks to be learnt, least of all from books or newspapers. After schoolteacher’s arrival at Sweet Farm, his indifference to the world encoded in “those black scratches” (B, 155) which fill up the pages of all kinds of printed matter solidifies into almost cynical dismissiveness. Books and newspapers, he declares, are “a waste of time” (B, 230) for him. He even refuses to look at the pictures in newspapers, because he is certain that whatever may be said about blacks in print, they will never be represented benevolently or truthfully: A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro’s face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby or outran a street mob. Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of the ordinary – something whitepeople would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps. And it must have been hard to find news about Negroes worth the breath catching of a white citizen of Cincinnati. (B, 155-56)

It is important that Morrison endows Paul D, one of the main illiterate characters in Beloved, with a differentiated understanding of the mass culture into which he and his people begin to be absorbed after the abolition of slavery. The man with the “educated hands” and “waiting eyes” (B, 99) is not an ignorant simpleton but possesses insights apparently equivalent to conventional literacy skills. In fact, his non-literate discernment is expressly identified as an “awful human power”, likening him to the powerfully enigmatic figure of the Cherokee he asks for advice on his escape north. For the Indian, too, literacy is not an indispensable competence. Age-long attention to the signs of nature has enabled his people to do without the maps used by the whites. When he learns that Paul D cannot read, he smiles and tells him to follow the tree flowers. “As they go, you go”, he prophesies. “You will be where you want to be when they are gone”. Following the instructions of the Cherokee and applying himself to reading the signs of spring sauntering North, Paul D after five months finds


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himself in Delaware, where he finally begins to forget schoolteacher and whatever he associates with him: “the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper” (B, 113). Significantly, in contrast to Paul D, the Cherokee is literate. Yet sadly, his people’s appropriation of white literacy has proven to be of little use to them. Morrison digresses from her narrative to make this point and offer an eccentric synopsis of the Cherokee Indians’ more recent cultural history. In so doing, she forwards what seems to be the Cherokee’s officially acknowledged part in the shaping of contemporary America, ironically reducing it to a peculiar series of accidents rather than of concerted efforts to partake in the whites’ culture: Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive life rather than Oklahoma. The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half their number two hundred years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led Oglethorpe through forests, helped Andrew Jackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, been experimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers, shot bear and translated scripture. All to no avail. (B, 111)

The dignity with which the Cherokee suffer their decimation by brute devastation and disease remains strongly impressed on Paul D’s memory. It is especially in contrast to their discreetly applied wisdom that the whites in Beloved, however well educated in conventional terms, appear savage agents of a pathetically degenerate civilization. The ineffectuality of this civilization looms large throughout Beloved and is effectively enhanced by recurrent images of newspapers “gnawed on the edges by mice”, newspapers used to line pallets and cover dirt floors, and newspapers sitting discarded in heaps in the corner of some shed. These help to signal that the “old days of letters, petitions, meetings, debates, recruitment, quarrels, rescue and downright sedition” (B, 260) are definitely over when the narrative begins. No longer united in a spirited struggle for the same cause, as some of them were when fighting for the abolition of slavery, blacks and whites in Beloved coexist in a strange state of exhaustion and defeat, the former, in Bhabha’s terms, “a community-in-

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discontinuity”.6 An atmosphere of despondency prevails, which is vividly captured in the carnival episode preceding Beloved’s miraculous re-incarnation. For Sethe, her visit to the carnival is her first social outing in eighteen years. Filled with anticipation she ignores the heat, ignores the “doomed roses” dying along the lumberyard fence, and ignores the homeless men sleeping in the open field. It seems that nothing can stop her from enjoying the excitement “of seeing white-people loose” and watching them “make a spectacle of themselves” (B, 47-48) – for the sake of their black audiences. She ignores that the show they are offered is “a lot less than mediocre” and takes no notice of the barker abusing his black customers, of the One-Ton Lady spitting at them, or of the Arabian Night Dancer cutting her performance to three minutes instead of the usual fifteen. Instead she absorbs “thrill upon thrill upon thrill” and lets herself be transported into state of exhilaration in which she may even believe that she is not treading the dust under her feet but gliding over it, holding hands with Denver and Paul D, just as the threesome of their shadows does all afternoon (B, 48). Still, images of “dying roses” and “rotten roses”, of a “Wild African Savage” shaking his bars and yelling “wa wa”, and of Paul D feeding Sethe with candy she does not really want taint the impression of Sethe’s happiness. The reader is not allowed to forget that the bliss experienced by Sethe and the other characters at the carnival can only be temporary. Slavery’s “signifying disciplines of dressage”7 are not simply unlearnt through a temporary reversal of roles. The entertainment received for the price of two pennies does not really grant oblivion but marks a rather ambivalent ending to the drama about to be disclosed in flashbacks as the individual protagonists “rememory”8 their personal stories in the chapters to follow. In the reconstruction of this drama, the narrative keeps returning to schoolteacher as the epitome of all the evil wrought by white American culture. Tragically, Sethe, herself a victim of that culture, 6

Homi K. Bhabha, “By Bread Alone: Signs of Violence in the Mid-Nineteenth Century”, in The Location of Culture, 199. 7 April Lidinsky, “Prophesying Bodies: Calling for a Politics of Collectivity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, in The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison, eds Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, London, 1994, 205. 8 On “rememory” functioning in Beloved “as a trope for the imagination of one’s heritage” and the physical quality Morrison ascribes memories, see Rody, 28, and Peach, 101, respectively.


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feels responsible for its crimes. “I made the ink”, she accuses herself towards the end of the novel: “He [schoolteacher] couldn’t have done it [that is, mistreated blacks, patronized, tortured and murdered them] if I hadn’t made the ink.” The statement is a clear indication of Sethe’s mental disorder at the end of the novel, which Morrison emphasizes further by casting her heroine in a pose strikingly reminiscent of Ophelia despairing over the loss of her beloved. “Jackweed raise up high …. Lambswool over my shoulder, buttercup and clover fly”, Sethe sings, when Paul D finds her, lying on her bed, her hair, “like the dark delicate roots of good plants”, spreading and curving on her pillow (B, 271). Sethe, like Ophelia, in the end is unable to forgive herself for her own ready acquiescence to schoolteacher’s requests and insists that, by supplying the ink for schoolteacher’s odd perversions of the functions of learning, she allowed herself to become an accomplice to the atrocities her master committed. It is not only in order to escape his violence but also to withdraw from the influence of schoolteacher’s learned mind and to protect her own children from it that Sethe decides to leave Sweet Home in search of a life without “even the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made” (B, 6). Sethe herself never advances from the role of the ink-maker to that of the ink-user. Unlike other slave narratives, Beloved does not construct the female slave’s liberation as an entry into literate culture. Admittedly, there is mention in the novel of Sethe learning the alphabet immediately after her successful escape from Sweet Home. The way, however, in which this information is imparted rules out that her introduction to written language acquires the same importance it possesses in other works of African-American literature. Sethe’s acquisition of basic literacy skills is listed along with the cultivation and sophistication of other everyday competencies, without reading and writing being attested particular value. Indeed, in Morrison’s analysis of her main character’s gradual emancipation, Bildung, in the classic sense of the word, plays only a secondary role: Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own; which made it better: one taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day. That’s how she got through waiting for Halle. Bit

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The Non-Literate Within: Black Illiteracy by bit ... along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self another. (B, 95)

Sethe remains at a level of learning not even definable as semiliterate. She can recognize some seventy-five printed words, half of which she knows from newspaper clippings recounting the grim story of how she murdered her own children. This barely matters in the seclusion of her new life. As far as Sethe is concerned, no person, however lettered, possesses more authority than she does to tell and explain this story. She does not believe in the authenticating power of the written word and, by the end of the narrative, has become completely independent of the literate culture into which all other characters gradually become absorbed. Indeed, in the eyes of others she appears to represent a serious threat to that culture. Rumour has it that “Everytime a whiteman come to the door she got to kill somebody”. Her illiteracy, Paul D concludes half in jest, is a blessing for the local postmen because it means that they do not have to risk their lives delivering letters to her house. “Wouldn’t nobody get no letter” (B, 265), Stamp Paid retorts, greatly amused by the idea of the unlettered Sethe sabotaging the local mailing system. Stamp Paid’s and Paul D’s punning jocularity makes light of the rigorous exclusion from emergent facilities of literate communication (post, press, and other forms of print) experienced by black Americans towards the end of the nineteenth century. Implicit in Morrison’s almost cynical allusion to the blacks’ cultural marginalization sustained well beyond the abolition of slavery is the assertion of alternative modes of accessing and subverting the emergent infrastructure of modern literate society and of retrieving “texts that lie beyond or are occluded by authoritative versions”.9 As the darkly humorous exchange between the two men exemplifies, recourse to orality constitutes one such alternative. Indeed, for Sethe and the other inhabitants of 124, once “a way station where messages came and then their senders”, where “bits of news soaked like dried beans in spring water – until they were soft enough to digest” (B, 65), speech represents the only way of asserting their personal experiences against officially recorded history. The “rememoring” in which they engage together is an exclusively oral exercise of activating the past, of 9

Peach, 97.


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invoking it, and conjuring up its long-absent agents even against forces tabooing that past.10 Baby Suggs’ public appellations to the dead, Sethe’s tales of the horrors she has undergone, complemented by Paul D’s account of his escape and his journey north, and Denver’s attempts to piece her mother’s tales together to a coherent whole all are symptomatic of an inability (or unwillingness) to forget, of a desperate need to keep the past alive. The efforts of the three women, Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Denver, finally are rewarded by Beloved’s unexpected return and sustained by the uncanny figure’s sojourn with them. Called up by Sethe’s and Baby Suggs’ insistent reiterations of past events, Beloved herself appears to challenge the message encoded in the few letters on her gravestone. Too brief, too incomplete to put the child’s soul to rest, the affirmation of her mother’s love, hastily chiselled into the pinkish stone, seems to, metaphorically speaking, cry out for Beloved’s ghost to emerge and to, literally, embody what the seven letters fail to express. Years later, Sethe still wonders whether, if she had offered her own body for more than ten minutes to the graver, he would have given her “the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely)”, instead of forcing her to settle for “the one word that mattered”. The single word “Beloved”, Sethe knows later, is more than an awkwardly insufficient expression of her loss. Lacking the “welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones”, Beloved’s grave stands as a constant reproach to the living and a permanent provocation to the dead, not only for the degrading way in which its inscription was obtained. Accordingly, once she has realized that “Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the engraver’s son was not enough” (B, 4-5) to put her infant’s soul to rest, Sethe begins to read the strange occurrences in her house (such as mirrors shattering, trembling floorboards, moving furniture, tiny handprints appearing in cakes and chickpeas) as signs of her late infant’s venom.11

10 On Sethe’s story as a forbidden tale, a tabooed subject, see Aoi Mori, Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse, Modern American Literature: New Approaches 16, New York, 1999, 117. 11 In spite of her obvious discursive disempowerment, critics tend to read Beloved as superior to all other characters owing to a power seen primarily as evil, demoniacal, or parasitic. Cf. for instance Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison, 153-58.

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It is clear that only a being will resort to such signs that either possesses no voice to make itself heard or has never acquired the more advanced skill of self-expression through writing. As Morrison’s novel keeps reminding the reader, Beloved is not even two years old when she dies: “Too little to understand. Too little to talk much even” (B, 4). When she returns as an adult, she still does not possess anything other than pre-literate means of communication. The first thing Paul D notices as soon as the strange young woman appears on their doorstep, raises her voice, and tells them her name, is “the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name”. “They heard the voice first – later the name” (B, 52), the reader is told. Beloved is a character more voice than name, more sound than writing, even when silent.12 For Beloved’s silence, like that of so many “coloredwomen” of her time, has nothing to do with the soundlessness in which writing is either produced or consumed. Rather it refers to a story rigorously denied and eclipsed from recorded history. Paul D knows that it bespeaks a sorrow impossible to describe or to inquire into. Symptomatically, even when fast asleep, Beloved’s silence is accompanied by the sound of heavy breathing, which Paul D and Sethe, not yet aware of Beloved’s true identity, nor, therefore, of her immortality, initially interpret as the sign of some life-threatening illness. With their concern for Beloved’s well-being, Morrison commences her ironic subversion of conventional notions of the inherent spirituality of ghosts which she sustains throughout the novel by means of repeated references to Beloved’s corporeality.13 As a reincarnation of precisely that which letters have proven unable to express, in other words, as the personification of the direct antithesis to what her name signifies in writing,14 she cannot be merely a spirit in the traditional sense of the word. Literally embodying an Other that resists abstraction, Beloved requires to be described as a physical 12

For Harris, the “sheer sound” of her voice compares to the power invoked in some folktales “in which there is a magical component to the spoken world” (Harris, 169-70). 13 On this, see also Harris, 157. 14 Critics understand “Beloved” mainly as a collective term designating “not a single child but the pain and anguish of the 60 million blacks who have been enslaved, tortured and killed” (Peach, 102). This does not seem to do complete justice, though, to the special intention behind Sethe’s choice of the name.


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entity instead, bearing her own signs of a distinctively material otherness. Apart from her unmistakable gravelly voice “and the song that seemed to lie in it” (B, 60) and apart from the characteristic sound of her breathing, it is some barely visible marks on her forehead that finally establish her identity and, along with it, the narrative’s expansion into the domain of the supernatural. These marks, imprints of Sethe’s fingers left from when she held up the dying girl’s head with bloodied hands for everyone to see, underline the symbolic subversion of the written medium suggested by Beloved’s return from the dead as an event uncannily invalidating the announcement of her death on her gravestone. The scars prove an effective reminder of the violence inflicted on Beloved. Still, they are not just yet another visible reproach against Sethe for killing her own daughter. Rather they demand to be read as symbols of a shared legacy of suffering, repairing the fractured bond between mother and daughter on the basis of the knowledge that the mother’s body, too, has had the mark of slavery imprinted on her, not for herself, but for others to see, feel, and remember even beyond her death. As inscriptions of the common experience of most extreme physical violence, both the fingerprints on Beloved’s forehead and the “revolting clump of scars” (B, 21) on Sethe’s back forge a bond that extends back in time to include also Sethe’s mother, yet another woman, branded for her blackness by some unknown agent of white civilization purporting to own her. Indeed, all Sethe can remember of her “ma’am” is her mother taking her behind the smokehouse to bare her breast and show her a circle and a cross burnt into the skin on her rib. Evidently more truthful than letters, the scar tissue on the bodies of three generations of black females combine to a counter-discourse in Beloved which records, in a shockingly naturalistic manner, what tends to be omitted from official versions of black history. Still, for all their expressiveness, the visible signs of mutilation, even though they imprint themselves on the memories of those who have actually laid eyes on them, ultimately remain sadly without the authority assigned to letters, as they do not endure, like paper, but fade, once decomposition sets in, from public consciousness. As the case of Sethe’s mother shows perhaps most clearly in Beloved, scars do not facilitate the comforting detachment from the past which the written medium makes possible by virtue of its capacity to reserve what has

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long ceased to exist for later retrieval from oblivion. The sad futility of her mother teaching Sethe to recognize her by her branding transpires when she is hanged and, by the time they cut her down, nobody, can tell whether her body did bear the sign of a circle and a cross or not (B, 61). Thematizing the different functions and effects of white literacy in varying, yet carefully tuned ways, the stories of Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother, and Sethe herself, of Paul D and Beloved, but also of Stamp Paid, the most literate character of all of them, may be said to complement each other perfectly in their emphatic negation of the benefits of white literacy. This negation is linked to a desperate longing for oblivion, which these characters erroneously expect to find by going north. For resentments and aggression fester and quench all hope for a new beginning for the black community Morrison describes in her novel. In so doing, she systematically deconstructs the popular idea of a thriving black oral counter-culture, effortlessly beginning to bloom after the abolition of slavery.15 Instead she emphasizes the wearing uncertainty dominating early black communities still haunted by a past too close and too terrible to forget and faced with the sole yet hardly appealing option of processing that past by assimilating cultural practices as yet known to them only as instruments of their own suppression and exploitation. Sethe’s resigned words “I’m tired .... So tired .... I don’t have no plans. No plans at all” (B, 271-72) express not only her personal fatigue but also the desolation of her people, and notably of the women among them. They capture a pessimism absent from both the traditional slave narrative and Romantic gothic fiction. Though a synthesis of these two genres, Morrison’s novel offers neither a celebration of the fugitive slave’s escape into physical and material freedom nor an idealization of the black subject’s imaginary faculties, suddenly set free by the abolition of slavery. If not more realistic than the way in which the subaltern’s liberation tends to be narrated in either genre, Morrison’s assessment of the beginnings of modern African-American culture certainly deserves to be seen as far more sensitive to the odds against which blacks began to articulate their ethnic identity after the Civil War.

15 As Linden Peach, too, points out, Morrison views emancipation most critically as an event that “brought not freedom but the widespread slaughter of former slaves” (99).


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This is also of relevance with regard to the special role Sethe’s daughter Denver plays in Beloved. Denver is the youngest and only one of Sethe’s children born free, the only one not visibly scarred by her people’s history, and the only one, too, able to share her mother’s story and to maintain a major role in it as witness of Sethe’s worst ordeals, as antagonist and confidante and, finally as saviour of Sethe’s life. Her evolution from unborn “foal”, to new-born baby, from unencumbered toddler to her mother’s sole companion in prison, from an eager schoolgirl enjoying the company of her peers to a mute, almost autistic child fanatically mourning her murdered sister, from resentful adolescent to caring adult contrasts sharply with any of the other careers recounted in the novel. Protected when still in her mother’s womb by schoolteacher’s nephews who dig a hole for Sethe’s enlarged abdomen before “playing on her” and taking the milk from her breasts; protected again at her birth by Amy, the “whitegirl” on her way to Denver, and, hours later, by the warmth of a coat donated by a black boy helping Stamp Paid to take her and her mother upriver; protected, once more, from her mother’s fatal blow by Stamp Paid, and saved, finally, from domestic disaster by her former teacher, Lady Jones, Denver seems predestined to survive the catastrophes impinging on the lives of all the other blacks around her. Her special ability to elicit help even from complete strangers, an ability manifest already in the first days of her life, allows the reader to anticipate that Denver’s story will take a course different from the stories of all other characters in Beloved. Her development can at last encompass an intellectual liberation and is not limited to the physical freedom her mother achieves by fleeing from Sweet Home. Denver’s quest eventually leads her beyond the familiar into a world different from what her own people have told her the world of the whites to be like. Already in the first part of the novel, seven-year-old Denver makes her way to Lady Jones who, “for a nickel a month, ... did what whitepeople thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time for and interest in book learning” (B, 102). Within a year, Denver learns to spell and count and, what is even more important, experiences an atmosphere of learning, totally unlike anything the other members of her family have ever known: The nickel tied to a handkerchief knot, tied to her belt, that she carried to Lady Jones, thrilled her. The effort to handle the chalk expertly and

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The Non-Literate Within: Black Illiteracy avoid the scream it would make; the capital w, the little i, the beauty of the letters in her name, the deeply mournful sentences from the Bible Lady Jones used as a textbook. Denver practiced every morning; starred every afternoon. She was so happy that she didn’t even know she was being avoided by her classmates ... (B, 102)

“Book learning”, for a whole year so real and so tangible, dissolves into memories of acoustic and visual images the moment Denver’s history catches up with her and retrieves her from the peaceful enclave of Lady Jones’s parlour. The shock of being reminded by one of the other pupils of her mother’s crime and her own sojourn in prison catapults Denver into a state of total indifference to the outside world and effectively ruptures the story of her progress. Struck deaf and dumb and paralysed by complete apathy, Denver decides that “... there was no point in going back to Lady Jones if you couldn’t hear what anybody said”. Instead she resolves to apply herself to learning “to read faces and ... how to figure out what people were thinking, so I didn’t need to hear what they said” (B, 206). In other words, the devastating impact of her regained memory drives Denver to exchange the kind of learning offered by Lady Jones for the nonliterate wisdom applied in her home. She gradually internalizes the superstitious beliefs cultivated by her guilt-ridden mother and her care-worn grandmother. Consumed by their obsession with Beloved’s ghost, she disconnects herself from the present thus also risking the special future this present might hold in store for her. No longer enacting a story that promises to evolve separately from that of the other characters, she also ceases to be different from Sethe and Baby Suggs, Halle and Paul D, different, that is, from the older generation who have never known the freedom she has known all her life. Yet, the corrosion of Denver’s identity in light of her mother’s and her grandmother’s history, which the sudden merging of Denver’s story with the story of these two women suggests, constitutes only a temporary threat. The education Denver has received at Lady Jones’ cannot be undone completely. During her self-imposed imprisonment at 124 fond memories of her schooldays resurface, though heavily encoded, in her fantasies of a reunion with her father, the “angel man”, who is remembered by his family for his love of “Animals and tools and crops and the alphabet”, for his ability to “count on paper”, and for his capacity to “tell where it hurt and [to] fix it too” (B, 208). Denver does not know that her father has been living in a state of


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complete mental derangement ever since he bore witness to the whipping schoolteacher’s nephews give Sethe. Therefore she never gives up hope that Halle will come to live with her and Beloved and restore her to the world of learning of which she used to be a part “until it got quiet” around her. Out of a sense of having been cheated by Sethe, whom she holds responsible for the silence into which she has drifted and resents for her refusal to disclose to her the whole truth about Beloved’s death, Denver fixes her mind on her father, cherishing what distinguishes him most from his wife as well as from other blacks: his literacy. “If you can’t count they can cheat you. If you can’t read they can beat you” (B, 208). This, Baby Suggs tells Denver, used to be her father’s motto. Despite the derision it earned him, Halle would pursue with determination his plan to learn to read and write. It is thus that he eventually can buy free his mother. The tale of how her father’s learning saved her grandmother and the memory of Baby Suggs’ desperate longing to be able to read the Bible assure Denver that literacy is an accomplishment worth aspiring to after all. In her dreams her unknown father comes to embody what she herself longs to be and what she, indeed, has the potential to become. Yet as long as she does not know the whole truth about her father’s story she stays entrapped in the past, like all the other characters in the novel, and therefore unable to resume her previous course of learning. The caesura in Denver’s education extends over several years and is finally brought to an end by Beloved’s sudden disappearance a few months after her equally sudden first appearance. During this period of suspended conventional learning, Denver applies herself with increasing obsession to the oral reconstruction of her family history. In dialogues with Beloved and Sethe, she begins to re-live key events of her earlier existence up to the moment when her mother attempts to kill her and her siblings in order to spare them a return to slavery. The effects of this re-enactment of the past prove devastating, mainly because the exercise precludes a forgetting or “leaving behind” or a “putting to rest” of bygone events. Breaking down temporal distances and restoring immediacy to the re-collected incidents, it generates confusion, conflict, and new despair. Still, it is not simply for the sake of opening old wounds that the three women evoke the past in oral reflections. The systematic deconstruction of their stories (and, by implication, of their identities) only precedes a process of

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reconstruction in the course of which a new understanding of the past is reached. The most important re-construction described in the novel is, of course, that of Beloved’s death. It finally appeases Sethe’s mind enabling her to let go of Beloved and release her into an after-life in which the dead daughter no longer has to enact a vengeful ghost but may continue to exist as a harmless spirit of nature. Beloved is not brought back to life for ever. Her death is not undone in the process of the other female characters’ remembering. It is not the past but Sethe’s and other people’s memories of it that are changed in the end. Denver’s part in this change is opaque. Beside her mother, she assumes an increasingly passive role as the novel leads up to the re-staging of the scene that culminated in Beloved’s killing nearly twenty years earlier. Sethe’s and Baby Suggs’ insistent remembering of the events resulting in this killing, not only have called up Beloved’s spirit, but also prompt Denver to retreat into the position of the unsuspecting child aware neither of the pain and desolation felt by her mother, nor of the imminent danger. Accordingly, all she can relive is her own incomprehension and defencelessness at the time, while her mother must re-experience the horror of the situation in all its intensity. In the event, Sethe at last discards the burden of her guilt and finds a way of reacting to the approaching danger that leaves her own children unharmed. Instead of repeating the mistake of trying to save her children by murdering them, she allows herself to vent her wild despair on someone else present: a white male, who, although not schoolteacher, her tormentor, but ironically her long-standing benefactor, derisively nicknamed the “bleached nigger” (B, 260), still appears to her a more suited or deserving victim of her resentment than any of her own children. The symbolic measure of correcting a previously committed wrong settles what up to this point has rendered Sethe unable to face the memory of her daughter. The manner in which Sethe’s inner conflict is resolved in the end does not fail to have the intended alienating effect on the reader. It is clear that the text’s inherent logic is hardly able to accommodate the unexpected turn of events which points beyond the familiar generic limits of gothic fiction. The ending of the novel leads particularly close to these limits as it identifies the figure of Beloved not just as a ghost who challenges the living to put her to rest, but also as the personified memory of an unresolved traumatic experience.


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Morrison’s structurally complex attempt to incorporate in her ghoststory-cum-slave-narrative this psychologically plausible conclusion reflects a special awareness of the restrictions of literate epistemologies. There can be no doubt that Morrison understands the medium of writing as one which, by definition, depends on a clear differentiation between past and present and, indeed, reinforces this differentiation by virtue of its own enduring presence as actual text. By inference, writing is not nearly as suited for a therapeutic reediting of the past as are the oral returns to former times undertaken by the protagonists in Beloved. For Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Paul D, a translation of their experience into lasting material signs can only mean the finality they have learnt to dread as slaves. For good reason, they favour the indeterminacy of an existence without letters over the kind of assurance with which others have issued estimates of their bodies’ value, hand written listings of their human and animal features, and sensationalist accounts of their stories. Their choice suggests nothing as ambitious as a conscious cultural decision to assert their specific orality, for instance, as an aspect of their African descent. Rather their omission to endorse white literacy needs to be seen as part of their endeavour to free themselves not only from the influence of the master culture that has always Othered them, but above all from the memory of living under the agents of that culture. In Beloved, then, Morrison can be said to reflect the highly complex and even contradictory ways in which literacy features in the history of black American literature. She even makes the unconventional suggestion that immediately after slavery some blacks had reason to feel that the espousal of literacy conflicted with their emancipation from the traumatic legacy of suppression. Hence individuals like Sethe, Paul D, or Sixo, whom Morrison describes as those most brutally mistreated under slavery, eschew literate culture also after they have attained freedom. Denver, on the other hand, represents a new generation able to perceive book learning not as a threat but as a possibility of self-improvement. In letting her novel close with Denver’s resumption of her education, Morrison extends her special reappraisal of African-American orality. She expands it into an historical evaluation of African-American culture which implicitly takes into account also the evolution of a distinct autonomous African-American literary tradition in the course of the twentieth century. While she may depart from the popular convention

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of using the career of an aspiring black intellectual as the trajectory along which to develop her analysis of culture, she does not completely eclipse the perspective she herself assumes as a postmodern black American writer. Nor does the historical setting of her novel force her to do so. Instead it seems to allow Morrison to retrace her own implication in black American literary history to a very specific moment in the past, not normally identified as particularly conspicuous point in the development of African-American writing, yet evidently spectacular in her evaluation of the circumstances that generated a black American literate culture. In Beloved, these circumstances are not directly associated with the abolition of slavery or with the movement north of vast numbers of fugitive slaves. Freedom, in other words, whether obtained by escape or granted legally, is not identified by Morrison as the main impetus behind the literalization of black Americans in the late nineteenth century – just as slavery is not defined explicitly as the cause of their illiteracy. In questioning the uncomplicated linearity of the received history of African-American culture and composing a counter-history from the personal stories of individual blacks, Morrison unearths far more complex motives for the espousal of, or for the conscious abstinence from, literate learning by black Americans than the conflicting legacies of slavery and emancipation constitute. The reasons for Sethe’s daughter Denver to seek out her former teacher after ten years of insistent non-communication with the outside world are, firstly, a desperate need for someone “who wouldn’t shame her on learning that her mother sat around like a rag doll, broke down, finally” (B, 243) and, secondly, her absolute confidence that of the few people she knows she can trust Lady Jones unreservedly. Denver’s faith in her teacher is rewarded by immediate and complete understanding and an offer of help so discrete that the girl is spared the embarrassment of having to accept what she can never repay. Other women in the community begin to follow Lady Jones’ example of motherly care and to take turns in delivering food to the doorstep of Denver’s house, never allowing themselves to be seen in the act but always leaving scraps of paper containing their hand written names along with their donations: Every now and then, all through the spring, names appeared near or in gifts of food. Obviously for the return of the pan or plate or basket; but also to let the girl know, if she cared to, who the donor was,


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because some of the parcels were wrapped in paper, and though there was nothing to return, the name was nevertheless there. Many had X’s with designs about them, and Lady Jones tried to identify the plate or the pan or the covering towel. When she could only guess, Denver followed her directions and went to say thank you anyway – whether she had the right benefactor or not. When she was wrong, when the person said, “No, darling. That’s not my bowl. Mine’s got a blue ring on it,” a small conversation took place. (B, 249)

The experience of the women’s use of writing16 in their collective demonstration of solidarity encourages Denver to allow a white woman to “experiment” on her and to teach her “stuff”. When they meet for the last time in the novel, even Paul D realizes that Denver no longer needs to be warned that there is “Nothing in the world more dangerous than a white schoolteacher” (B, 266). Safely accepted into a community which has found its very own applications of the written medium, Denver can be relied upon to assert her identity in the learning process to which she allows herself to be subjected. The feeling that Denver has acquired not only the necessary confidence but also a special understanding of her people’s story creates a longing in Paul D to talk to Denver more than he has ever done or wanted to do before. Yet, their conversation is interrupted and he never learns her version of the events. The subtle rupture in the narrative produced by Denver’s and Paul D’s unfinished conversation lends itself to an interpretation more tenable than is obvious at first glance. What legitimises attributing special importance to the omission of Denver’s own account of what happened at 124 is, first of all, that it is followed by an awkwardly inarticulate and ungrammatical attempt made by Paul D to formulate what he would have liked Denver to explain in her words: He left her unwillingly because he wanted to talk more, make sense out of the stories he had been hearing: whiteman came to take Denver to work and Sethe cut him. Baby ghost came back evil and sent Sethe out to get the man who kept her from hanging. One point of agreement is: first they saw it and then they didn’t. (B, 267) 16 It is symptomatic of the tendency to construe black culture as a predominantly oral culture and ignore the importance of its literacy that Lidinsky describes the gestures of female support narrated in this part of Beloved as “offerings of dialogic orality” (210), ignoring the fact that Lady Jones’ main role in the novel is to initiate Denver into literate culture.

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The helplessness reflected in this passage not only refers back to Denver’s announcement that she will accept Miss Bodwin’s offer to teach her “book stuff” and to send her away for further education afterwards. It also serves to emphasize the cultural significance of Denver’s plans for her people as it finally establishes a connection between understanding and linguistic competence, or, more precisely, between understanding and literacy. Thus the scene of Paul D’s and Denver’s last encounter in the novel provides a justification for literate learning which Paul D has never managed to accept. It permits the expectation that literacy will render future generations of blacks capable of processing their past in a manner more coherent and, therefore, also less painful than the way in which Paul D and his contemporaries allow themselves to be haunted by their memories. However, as Denver’s story illustrates, the purpose of “book learning” is neither to exorcize ghosts by literally signing away the past to oblivion nor to appease troubled minds with the wellformulated answers sought by Paul D to the often tormenting inconsistencies in their stories. As her special relationship to Lady Jones suggests, Denver’s learning will involve instead an appreciation of the limits of literacy, a feeling for when her silent understanding (or simply a scrap of paper containing her signature) is all that is needed. So it can be claimed that a further meaning is encoded in the two characters’ final parting. Toward the end of the scene, Paul D asks Denver whether she really believes Beloved to be her sister. The girl, however, does not give a clear answer nor does she wish to hear Paul D’s opinion. “I have my own [opinion]” (B, 267), is all she says, thereby indicating that she has learnt to see the validity of anyone’s story. Clearly, Denver has come to understand that for all her learning she does not possess the answers to Paul D’s questions, that her story, or Sethe’s, or Beloved’s are but personal recollections, though equally worthy of cherishing and passing on. The final section of the novel constitutes a highly poetic articulation of precisely this realization. It allows the interpretation that the authorial voice behind it is Denver’s, and that, by implication, Morrison’s identification, at least at the very end of the novel, is with Denver and the ambiguity Denver embodies rather than with any other of her characters. This interpretation is corroborated also by the history of black writing and literacy, black orality and illiteracy Morrison advances in Beloved.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN FORGING A BLACK LITERACY: SAPPHIRE’S PUSH AND ERNEST J. GAINES’ A LESSON BEFORE DYING

Texts such as Beloved, Black Boy, and Invisible Man may be said to have alerted African-American writers to the initial difficulties their people had in espousing literacy and forging a literate culture of their own. Arguably it is owing to their influence that black literacy and illiteracy have been addressed with increasing openness in black American literature in more recent years. Two novels deserve special mention here as instances of how African-American writers have moved on both from the fictional returns to slavery ventured by Morrison in Beloved and from the autobiographical accounts of the making of black writers undertaken by Wright in Black Boy. The widely acclaimed novel A Lesson Before Dying (1993) by Ernest J. Gaines and the lesser known1 novel Push (1996) by Ramona Lofton, who writes under the name of Sapphire, are set in the twentieth century and tell the story of illiterate blacks whose cultural stance is neither one of self-conscious opposition to white literate culture, nor one of desperate longing for integration into it. Rather in Push and A Lesson Before Dying illiteracy is associated with a state of inaction and, hence, of stasis from which the unlettered subject is unable to escape without help. This intensifies the impression of the hopelessness of the principal character’s situation; and at the same time it lends special importance to the figure of the teacher Gaines and Sapphire introduce into their narratives not only to account for the eventual transformation of their illiterate protagonists into silently, yet visibly articulate individuals.2

1 The attribute “lesser known” deserves to be qualified here as Push has certainly been acclaimed by teachers in American literacy schools for its naturalistic depiction of an adult student re-entering school and recommended as particularly well suited teaching material inciting student reading and writing (see Anson M. Green, “Risky Material in the Classroom: Using Sapphire’s Novel Push” [10-03-2006]: http://www2 wgbh.org/MBCWEIS/LTC/ALRI/usingpush.html). 2 Accordingly, Sapphire has remarked that one of her main intentions in writing Push was to convey the “power of intervention in a human being’s life who is troubled” (Owen Keehnen, “Artist With a Mission: A Conversation with Sapphire”,

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The figure of the teacher also allows Gaines and Sapphire to present their own experience from a convincingly authentic angle. As Gaines once observed in an interview, for him, this experience coincided with his first attempts at writing: I probably started writing when I was only seven or eight or nine because I lived on a plantation at False River. Very few of the older people who lived on the plantation could read or write: Both their reading and writing was very limited, so I would always write their letters for them and then read the letters that they would get in the mail. I also read the Bible and things like that for them.3

Likewise Sapphire, who worked as a literacy teacher for teenagers and adults in New York for eight years, has commented on her preoccupation with questions of literacy and illiteracy in her writing. Asked about the central character of Push, she noted: She’s a composite of many young women I encountered when I worked as a literacy teacher in Harlem and the Bronx for 7 years. Over and over I met people with circumstances similar to hers, many with her amazing spirit. I wanted to create a novel with a young person like that. To me she has not existed in literature before. She existed on TV … but as a statistic – as an 18-year-old HIV+ woman who can't read with two children. I wanted to show her as a human being, to enter into her life and show that she is a very complex person deserving of everything this culture has to offer.4

Implicit in Sapphire’s expressed wish that her readers should understand her protagonist as “a very complex person deserving of everything this [that is, American] culture has to offer” is the charge that that same culture fails to recognize the intrinsic value of its illiterate members and even construes them as deserving of the neglect that has shaped their careers. “The tesses paint a picture of me wif no brain”, Sapphire’s heroine, Clareece Precious Jones knows: “The tesses paint a picture of me an’ my muver – my whole family, we Owen Keehnen Interviews [10-03-2006]: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/ Keehnen/Sapphire.html). 3 “An Interview with Ernest Gaines”, by William Parrill (1986), in Conversations with Ernest Gaines, ed. John Lowe, Literary Conversations Series, Jackson: Mo, 1995, 172. 4 Keehnen, 1.

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more than dumb, we invisible.”5 To assert herself against the view that she is but “Ugly black grease to be wipe away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for” (P, 31), Precious must learn to read and write. Similarly Gaines conceives the alphabetization of his central character as a process of subverting the popular equation of illiteracy with an innate intellectual and moral inferiority. As in Push, in A Lesson Before Dying, the gradual emergence of an alternative discourse of non-literacy, which insists on the illiterate’s ability and desire to learn, effects a transgression of generic limits. According to Babb, Gaines’ questioning of traditional views of American history and culture in A Lesson Before Dying “displaces traditional modes of ordering a novel”. As a result, Gaines “breaks with a history that devalues African-American culture” and “substitutes in its place a rich communal folk history” along with narrative conventions “rooted in African-American orality”.6 What Babb overlooks is that in allowing his protagonist to acquire the ability to read and write, Gaines, like Sapphire in Push and like Morrison in Beloved, gives special value not only to African-American orality but also to African-American literacy and so extends the conventions not only of American but, even more specifically, of black American writing. For this reason, too, it is important to see that Gaines and Sapphire construe their protagonists’ advancement to literacy as more than an externally wrought miracle. By locating the capacity for improvement within their main characters they indirectly posit their own culture’s potential for self-renewal even against the odds of persistent discrimination and repression. The immensity of the transformation which Sapphire’s and Gaines’ main characters undergo under the influence of their teachers in Push and A Lesson Before Dying is measured against the extremity of the situation in which they are placed from the start of the narratives. Right at the beginning of A Lesson Before Dying, Jefferson, an unwitting party to and only survivor of a liquor shop shootout, is convicted of murder and sentenced to death by electrocution. Though, obviously unfounded, the sentence is clearly irreversible so that the reader expects the novel to steer towards no other ending than the 5

Sapphire, Push (1996), London, 1998, 30. Valerie Babb, “Old-Fashioned Modernism: ‘The Changing Same’ in A Lesson Before Dying”, in Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, ed. David C. Estes, Athens: Ga, 1994, 251-53. 6

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dying announced by the title of the novel. The inevitability of the novel closing tragically also qualifies the optimism connoted by the noun “lesson”. In fact, the prospect that the learning recounted will end in death invokes a profound sense of futility. Ironically, this futility is precisely what the narrative eventually turns out to contest. For in learning to write, Jefferson becomes able to survive, at least metaphorically, in the minds of others. The incorporation of his diary in the novel allows the reader to hope that at least in the recollection of his readers he will stay alive as more than the brute murderer to which he was reduced during his trial. The title of Sapphire’s novel is equally ambivalent, referring to the hours of labour awaiting the heroine Precious Jones, pregnant by her father for the second time in four years. The verb “push” also refers to the self-improvement Precious has decided to accomplish before her death, which appears almost as inevitable as Jefferson’s in A Lesson Before Dying since Precious has been diagnosed HIV positive. As for Jefferson, for Precious, too, literacy signifies a mode of transcendence, of metaphysical survival of a story no longer enacted like that of her ancestors by an entire collective, but lived through in tragic isolation. The two young blacks at the centre of Push and A Lesson Before Dying seem literally singled out by fate to die prematurely. What reconnects them to those who, in all likelihood, will survive them is their final resolution to outwit fate in the short time left to them and to bring their life stories to a conclusion of their own imagining. Gaines’ and Sapphire’s emphatic assertions of the resilience of black Americans against systematic erasure never amount to an open celebration of it. This is prevented by their uncompromisingly realistic treatment of their protagonists’ sad careers. Neither Gaines nor Sapphire suggests that the limited literacy skills their protagonists acquire can significantly transform their situation in the short time covered by the narratives. All their learning can do for Jefferson and Precious in their lifetime is to help them accept their stories and to give expression to this acceptance. The modesty of this goal corresponds with the novels’ limited scope which in both cases remains rigorously constricted to the small worlds Jefferson and Precious know. Push and A Lesson Before Dying both capture the claustrophobic atmosphere of life in a dank tenement apartment in mid-1980s Harlem, and in the strictly segregated small town of


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Bayonne in 1948. The confinement of the narrators’ movements to short trips between the local school building, to a number of private homes, and to the local prison house in A Lesson Before Dying, and between a college classroom and a two-room flat in Push intensifies the dominant sense of limitation. So does the concentration of each narrative on a single relationship between two characters, developing inconspicuously and with little dramatic effect7 over the relatively short period of only a few months and not even two years, respectively. The pace of this development, too, correlates with the main characters’ discursive and intellectual confinement and enforces the apparent hopelessness of their endeavours to transcend this confinement.8 The narratives’ demonstrative unpretentiousness ultimately turns out to be their underlying aim, in keeping with which the main characters’ development takes place silently and visible only to a few. Unlike the persona of Black Boy the protagonists of Push and A Lesson before Dying do not learn to read and write to become widely acclaimed writers. The texts Precious and Jefferson produce are for a very small group of confidantes, most importantly their teachers, Grant Wiggins in A Lesson Before Dying and Blue Rain in Push. Both of them are blacks devoted to imparting literacy skills to other black people. In their teaching they differ radically from the condescending or even brutal instructor figures in Invisible Man, Black Boy, or Beloved. What they set in motion is a process of mutual initiation into a shared culture and into aspects of that culture hitherto unknown either to the teachers themselves or to their pupils. Correspondingly, the rather unconventional teaching methods gradually developed by Grant Wiggins in A Lesson Before Dying and 7 According to Beavers, calmness of action is a hallmark of Gaines: “Rather than dramatizing a violent explosion embodying radical change”, he explains, “Gaines’s fiction depicts a slower reaction, one that is no less disruptive, largely because the participants continue to adhere to conventions, despite the pervasive nature of the changes taking place” (Herman Beavers, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction, Philadelphia, 1995, 173). 8 “Throughout most of he novel”, Carmean writes about the main character of A Lesson Before Dying, “Jefferson is silent, his lack of voice indicative of both his rage and inability to be heard, Convinced that no one will accord him human dignity, Jefferson avoids language because “hogs don’t talk” (Karen Carmean, Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion, Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers, Westport: Conn, 1998, 119-20).

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employed with impressive virtuosity by Blue Rain from the beginning of Push involve introducing their pupils into something other than the basic applications of reading and writing. Encouraging their protégés to express themselves freely in letters, to find their very own way of asserting their thoughts in written form, Blue Rain and Grant Wiggins usher in a process of self-acceptance and individuation which eventually enables Precious and Jefferson alike to understand their situation as one that still demands to be lived actively rather than endured impassively. The activity of writing acquires special significance in this context. What Babb remarks about A Lesson Before Dying also pertains to Push: There is an ingenious stress on both the power of voice and the power of writing, for while Gaines crafts a language suitable to articulating the thoughts of a young man whose life is over before it has begun, it is the act of writing down these utterances that begins Jefferson’s regeneration.9

The assistance their teachers give them is rewarded by the pupils’ growing appreciation of what their learning does to them. Jefferson writes in his diary: “you been so good to me mr wigin an nobody aint never been that good to me an make me think im somebody.”10 The notebook containing these words documents Jefferson’s final acceptance of his teacher’s advice to write down his thoughts and emotions instead of surrendering to complete mental paralysis while waiting for his execution. Jefferson’s writing is marked not only by mangled spelling, but a growing meta-discursive awareness. Included in his notes is the self-conscious remark that what he has chosen to do is, “to jus put down anything come into my hed an if it aint rite jus scratch over it an go on ...” (LBD 229). In grasping the complete absence of pre-meditation from his musings, Jefferson has actually advanced to a new level of consciousness, a more sophisticated form of literacy than the unorthodoxy of his orthography and grammar may reveal at first glance. Precious Jones offers a similar declaration in the journal book Blue Rain instructs her to keep. Her writing appears even more heavily encrypted than Jefferson’s. It seems suggestive of a highly 9

Babb, 260-61. Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (1993), New York, 1994, 232.

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individualized notion of language, creatively deployed by Precious Jones in her emphatically poetic addresses to her teacher. As an expression of her deep and, at first, even unconditional adoration of Blue Rain, Precious’ text still appears as dialogic as Jefferson’s. Again, rather than a barrier to understanding, the overt lack of orthographic and grammatical correctness of the protagonist’s writerly endeavours demands to be seen as an appeal or challenge to the reader to experience the task of deciphering posed as an engagement with another script: One yr I ben scool I like scool I love my techr ... Blue wmon who tech me who hep me I don no whut to sa it hard to xplxn i nver tel mi hole store. (Push, 91-93)

In working out certain consistencies in Precious’ idiosyncratic spelling the reader (that is, the teacher Precious addresses explicitly and, at the same time, the reader of the novel) gets to know the protagonist’s personal code. In a sense, the novel simulates a process of familiarization or literalization not unlike the one the protagonist goes through in the course of the novel. The most important effect of this simulation seems to be that the reader becomes capable of a dual identification, namely with the barely literate pupil and the highly literate teacher as addressee of her pupil’s writings at the same time. This is important as Blue Rain’s role, like Grant Wiggins’ in A Lesson Before Dying, is not that of a passive recipient. Rather she acts as a co-creator of her pupil’s text, thus instilling a growing sense of belonging in Clareece. What nourishes Precious’ and Jefferson’s rekindling feeling of attachment is their teachers’ unfailing interest in them and their writings. In patiently transcribing all of Precious’ messages into correctly spelt phrases, Blue Rain, for example, commits herself not only to teaching correct or standard English but also to learning her student’s language. Although she strictly refrains from using Precious’ ungrammatical English herself, Blue Rain succeeds in communicating the mutuality of their discourse to Precious. Intrigued by the possibility that she might be as much Blue Rain’s teacher as Blue Rain is hers, Precious attempts to emulate her teacher, who never tires of reminding her not to forget to put the date on her journal entries. “Mz Rain / Dan frget rite day Ms R” (Push, 72), the young girl mimics her teacher in one of her letters, and, unlike on previous occasions, does not forget to sign her note in the manner

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Blue Rain always does, namely by placing “Ms” before her own name. The exchange of roles marks the advancement of Precious to the position of her teacher’s equal. The act of pushing to which the title of the novel refers is no longer conceived as one of coercion but of the self-motivation to learn. The idea of pushing oneself instead of being pushed, of applying one’s own energies to the attainment of one’s goal rather than relying on the assistance of external forces gradually crystallizes in Sapphire’s novel, transforming Blue Rain’s role as teacher into that of a midwife repeatedly urging Precious to keep pushing with her own force whatever creative potential may be waiting for expression inside her. Precious fears that the birth of her second child will be as traumatic as that of her first, which, she believes, she only survived because of a Spanish ambulance man who expertly advised her when to push. Because she is unable to retrace her rescuer, whom she likes to think of as god because “No man was never nice like that to [her] before” (Push, 11), Blue Rain must take his place and function as protectress, birth assistant, and promoter of new life. Ironically, Blue Rain, a lesbian with no children of her own, has no idea of what it means to give birth and raise children. Typically the only advice she has for Precious is to give both her children up for adoption. Precious is appalled by her teacher’s lack of understanding and overcome by a deep sense of pity for her: the same pity Blue Rain felt when she discovered that Precious is illiterate. “She is just ABC teacher, not no social worker or shit” (Push, 79), Precious generously excuses her teacher’s ignorance of the deeper meaning of motherhood, seeing that despite her eloquent talk of “isms” Blue Rain does not know everything: Ms Rain love Color Purple too but say realism has its virtues too. Izm, smizm! Sometimes I wanna tell Ms Rain shut up with all the IZM stuff. But she my teacher so I don’t tell her shut up. I don’t know what “realism” mean but I do know what REALITY is and it’s a mutherfucker, lemme tell you. (Push, 83)

Blue Rain’s final acceptance of Precious’ decision to bring up her children herself is expressed only implicitly through the ready support she gives the young mother in putting her plan into practice. Her main role in the novel is to recede into the background as Precious learns to


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control her story herself. Accordingly, towards the end of Push, the narrative ceases to yield any more of Blue Rain’s notes. Precious finally is the only narrator or, in fact, the sole author of her story. This is also signalled by the final part of the novel which is made up of a collection of texts Precious and her class mates have produced under Blue Rain’s supervision. The distinctive style and typeface of this collection simply titled “class book” allow it to be seen as a discrete unit, an anthology in its own right, edited to expressly credit not the teacher but her pupils with the authorship of their own texts. By contrast, throughout A Lesson Before Dying, the teacher Grant Wiggins remains the main narrator. Of the thirty-two chapters making up the novel, thirty are told from his point of view. Grant’s accounts of his visits and of his attempts to monitor Jefferson’s progress are complemented by descriptions of how his own life changes under the impact of the events leading up to Jefferson’s execution. Instead of the illiterate’s literalization it is the teacher’s gradual realization of his function as Jefferson’s teacher that remains the narrative’s cardinal concern. Thus the lesson recounted is as much Grant’s as it is Jefferson’s. At the beginning of the novel, the reader learns how Grant’s aunt pleads with him to go and see Jefferson in prison and restore some sense of pride in him so that Jefferson may face his execution “like a man”. Grant, however, is convinced that what he can do as a teacher, namely teach “what the white folks ... tell [him] to teach – reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic” (LBD, 13), will not be enough to repair his shattered sense of self. He fears that all he would be doing is to tell someone “how to die who has never lived” (LBD, 31). Yet, it is precisely because he is a teacher that Tante Lou has elected him as Jefferson’s last companion. For the shrewd woman gathers that it is above all his lack of learning that keeps Jefferson from coming to terms with his sentence. She does not ask Grant to give Jefferson lessons in the conventional sense of the word. Her hope is that the teacher’s erudition and sophisticated manners alone will impact on Jefferson and awake some higher feelings in him so that he may at least muster all the pride left in him to die with dignity. This is a complex scheme which the old woman puts before Grant with the explanation that Jefferson must be granted some kind of rehabilitation after the gross degradation his own defendant caused him by declaring him an unthinking “hog”, a “cornered animal”, “a thing that acts on

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command”. Instead of saving the accused, the defendant’s final appeal to the jury to forgive Jefferson for never having evolved further than his ancestors “in the deepest jungle of blackest Africa”, only adds another crime to the charge, that of being too uncivilized to deserve staying alive: A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn. That is what you see here, but you do not see anything capable of planning a robbery or a murder. He does not even know the size of his clothes or his shoes. Ask him to name the months of the year. Ask him does Christmas come before or after the Fourth of July? Mention the names of Keats, Byron, Scott, and see whether the eyes will show one moment of recognition. Ask him to describe a rose, to quote any passage from the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. ... What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this. (LBD, 7-8)

Beavers astutely reads the lawyer’s closing argument as an appeal to the all-white jury to “acquire a new form of literacy” and “view Jefferson with new eyes”, namely as devoid of any intentionality and hence incapable of hostility towards white society. Yet by drawing on the familiar rhetoric of African-American inferiority, originating in nineteenth-century phrenology and keenly applied during slavery, the lawyer, according to Beavers, is doomed to fail in his endeavour to save Jefferson’s life.11 “The lawyer’s narrative becomes incoherent”, Beavers explains: “largely because it neither argues for a new social order, nor challenges the present one; indeed, his most grievous error is his failure fully to conceptualize his audience, to cross racial lines to tell a new kind of story.”12 For all their simplicity, Tante Lou’s verbal appeal to Grant to undo the defendant’s offensive assertion of Jefferson’s unworthiness reveal far greater pragmatic wisdom than the well-educated lawyer’s dismally unsuccessful ploy.13 Its success 11 While Beavers is convinced that this is the purpose of the defence attorney’s delivery, Babb accords it a far more malevolent stance, stressing that the summation itself “has all the earmarks of dogma used to devalue African Americans” (Babb, 253). 12 Beavers, 175. 13 In her life experience and shrewdness, Tante Lou of course resembles the most famour female protagonist in Gaines’ oeuvre, the illiterate Miss Jane Pittman. For a


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hinges on its modesty. After all, Tante Lou’s plan presupposes not the conversion of a master class to a new literacy, but merely the endowment of a single individual with some understanding of the purpose of most rudimentary reading and writing skills. Ironically enough, of all people it is Grant Wiggins, raised by Tante Lou to receive a better education than any of his peers in Bayonne, who is at first unable to grasp the purpose of this plan. Grant’s scepticism, which he hardly dares express before his aunt, is conveyed mainly in interior monologues. His secret reveries reveal an almost pathetic indifference, a state of lifelessness and inertia, unpardonable in light of Jefferson’s predicament. The misery of the illiterate convict calls in question Grant’s doubts in the usefulness of teaching. In light of what awaits Jefferson, Grant’s imaginative returns to his former teacher, Matthew Antoine, seem a dubious form of escapism. The reader cannot help feeling that it is mainly to justify his own apathy that Grant keeps recalling how Antoine used to urge him to see the futility of trying to “wipe away – peel – scrape away the blanket ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years” (LBD, 64). Comparing the behaviour of his pupils to that of the old men who never had the chance to go to school, Grant is struck by how little the plantation has changed since he himself was a schoolboy and concludes that Antoine must have been right after all. “There’s no life here”, the embittered old man used to tell him: “There’s nothing but ignorance here” (LBD, 65). Grant overlooks that what Antoine never seems to have acknowledged is that the children at the plantation at least have a makeshift school to attend, whereas most of the older generation remained illiterate because “To learn anything, [they] had to attain it by stealth and through an innate sense of things around [them]” (LBD, 41). Obstinately refusing to acknowledge any sign of improvement, Antoine would go on prophesying that his pupils’ destiny was either to die violently or “to run and run” (LBD, 62). The warning brings to mind the dream in which the central character in Invisible Man discovers that the official letter his grandfather has given him contains nothing but the command, “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running”. study of the role of women in Gaines, see Marcia Gaudet, “Black Women: Race, Gender, and Culture in Gaines’s Fiction”, in Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, ed. David C. Estes, 139-57.

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Tante Lou’s fierce optimism and Antoine’s disparaging pessimism do little to resolve Grant’s inner conflict. The opposing views dividing the community of blacks and at conflict inside Grant seem to make simple kindness impossible and to prevent Grant from offering the support Tante Lou asks him to give Jefferson. His inability to act fills him with growing discontent and anger, which he vents on his pupils albeit only to feel even greater frustration. The critical self-portrait Grant gives of himself as first-person narrator adds to the tension created by repeated reminders of Jefferson’s pending execution. The growing brutality of Grant’s outbursts in class ironically suggests that it is not only the convicted Jefferson who needs to be released from the brutishness in which he seems entrapped and poses the question whether Grant is indeed the person best qualified to do so. The unnerving stasis, in which the narrative appears to be suspended, is broken when Grant goes to see the planter Henri Pichot to ask him for permission to visit Jefferson in prison. This episode, too, is charged with tension created by expectation and delay. Grant has to wait for hours in Pichot’s kitchen to be heard by the planter and the other whites who have assembled in the library for drinks and to discuss Grant’s request. Convinced that “nobody can make that thing [Jefferson] a man” and that one “might as well let him go like he is” (LBD, 46), they can see little point in Tante Lou’s wish to see Jefferson reformed. “I think the only thing you can do is just aggravate him …. And I’d rather see a contented hog go to that chair than an aggravated hog” (LBD, 49), the local sheriff argues, adding dismissively and with none of the grammatical sensibility Grant strategically displays in the conversation to irritate his listeners: “There ain’t a thing you can put in that skull that ain’t there already” (LBD, 50). The whites’ open detestation of his (or any other black’s) learning is a central theme in A Lesson Before Dying. It prompts the sheriff to warn Grant that he might be “just a little too smart for [his] own good” (LBD, 49) and is just as manifest in the school superintendent who tellingly inspects the children’s teeth rather than their intellectual achievements when he comes to visit Grant Wiggins’ school. As Carmean points out, the incident sharpens Grant’s awareness of the connection between his students and Jefferson.14 It also makes him see an analogy between the superintendent’s disregard for his work as a 14

Carmean, 119.


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teacher and the whites’ keen anticipation of witnessing a black man’s debasement at the moment of his execution. At the same time he realizes that there is really little difference between the perverse pleasure which the white men seem to derive from the spectacle of Jefferson’s apparent boorishness and the resentment they exhibit at his learning: their attitude to any black is informed by the conviction that education is and must remain entirely a white prerogative. Therefore prompted to identify with Jefferson as a victim of the same hubris he has known all his life, Grant decides to comply with his aunt and to try to inject some self-esteem into Jefferson. In the process Grant himself undergoes a transformation. He gradually sheds the cynical indifference and cold resignation with which he at first seeks to persuade Tante Lou and Miss Emma to accept that Jefferson, once convicted, is well past needing anyone’s help. He overcomes the fear that his visits to Jefferson might humiliate him in the eyes of the whites, and “break [him] down to the nigger [he] was born to be” (LBD, 79). He grasps that he would disgrace himself and his own kind far more if he did not try to alleviate the strain of Jefferson’s last waiting. Grant begins his tuition by bringing Jefferson biscuits and sweet potatoes and using his visits to the prison to remind Jefferson that he is not a hog but a human being. He then organizes a transistor radio for Jefferson and supplies him with a pencil and paper knowing that these are but modest items of luxury. As Reverend Ambrose believes, Grant should be having conversations about God with Jefferson instead. Reading, “writing, and ’rithmetic”, the pastor reminds Grant, is not what the community sent him to school for. In the eyes of the priest, the teacher has failed in his task. Not without glee, he tells him so: And that’s the difference between me and you, boy; that make me the educated one, and you the gump. I know my people. I know what they gone through. I know they done cheated themself, lied to themself – hoping that one they all love and trust can come back and help relieve the pain.” (LBD, 218)

For Beavers, the pastor’s pompous condemnation of Grant and the mundane nature of his exchanges with Jefferson are indicative of a special “ability to link imagination and performance” and to conceive of himself and his flock as inhabiting a redemptive space: “Gaines’s

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Ambrose”, Beavers writes, “sees himself as a communal resource whose function is not therapeutic, but analgesic”. As a result, his “successful enactment of tribal literacy”15 forms a stark ironic contrast to the self-critical appeal with which the teacher urges Jefferson to try and see some worth in himself: “... I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be. To them, you’re nothing but another nigger – no dignity, no heart, no love for your people. You can prove them wrong. You can do more than I can ever do. I have always done what they wanted me to do, teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Nothing else – nothing about dignity, nothing about identity, nothing about loving and caring. They never thought we were capable of learning these things. ‘Teach those niggers how to print their names and how to figure on their fingers.’ And I went along, but hating myself all the time for doing so.” (LBD, 191-92)

With Grant, Gaines draws the figure of a teacher totally unlike schoolteacher in Beloved. He is black and, although shrewdly opportunistic at critical moments, not at all reconciled to racist discrimination. Most importantly, he eventually allows himself to be guided by his own pupil. His ability and willingness to learn the lesson Jefferson teaches him not only before but also at the moment of his dying distinguish him from Reverend Ambrose. Obviously insensitive to the horror and embarrassment of Jefferson’s execution, the preacher announces that he will attend it. The idea appals Grant, who suddenly realizes the need for a theology for his people “that is more than an opiate for suffering”.16 Defying Ambrose’s admonitions, he does not give up the hope that Jefferson may find the strength not to die as Reverend Ambrose would have him die: He [Reverend Ambrose] will be strong,” Wiggins suspects, attempting to envisage the scene from which he has chosen to stay away. “He is going to use their God to give him strength. You just watch, Jefferson. You just watch. He is braver, braver than I, braver than any of them – except you, I hope. My faith is in you, Jefferson. (LBD, 249)

Grant’s hope is not disappointed. His efforts do not prove in vain. As a witness of the execution reports back to him, Jefferson “was the 15 16

Beavers, 177. Babb, 259.


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strongest man there .... And straight he walked” (LBD, 254). The message completes the young teacher’s lesson. Humbled and suddenly indifferent to the reverend’s petty ambition to be seen as “the educated one”, he steps before his class, not like Ambrose wearing a mask of bravery, but crying. As Carmean formulates it: “At the novel’s end, Grant, the most detached and eloquent character, will be unable to express the depth of his feelings in words.”17 A symbolic sameness with Jefferson settles over the class in this final scene, as they rise before their teacher “with their shoulders back” (LBD, 256). While all the other characters in the novel have retreated elsewhere, shamefacedly, to process the knowledge of Jefferson’s death and their implication in it, this young community seems powerfully united by the knowledge that Jefferson’s story is not too disgraceful to remember, but something that its main protagonist, as one of them, has made worth retelling.

17

Carmean, 120.


THE ILLITERATE RETURNED: ILLITERACY IN MIGRANT LITERATURE


In the novels discussed so far, non-literacy is invariably conceived of as a condition preceding literacy. Implicit in this conception is the understanding of literalization as both an irreversible process of acculturation in a single direction. The respective fictional constructions of the non-literate as Other are based on this understanding. They identify scriptlessness as a form of thought and perception irrevocably transcended in the moment of literalization. To use the words of the British novelist Anita Brookner, “once a thing is known, it can never be unknown”.1 The fictional explorations of nonliteracy studied in the previous chapters suggest that, once one has learnt a script, one must always go on reading the world as a literate since there is no way of forgetting, or unlearning the writing system one has acquired. Quite differently, the writings addressed in the final three chapters of this book do not posit literacy and non-literacy as necessarily consecutive and therefore mutually exclusive modes of thinking. Instead they describe situations in which highly literate subjects suddenly find themselves rendered illiterate as a result of their confrontation with a script unknown to them. Logically, the narration of their histories follows a trajectory diametrically opposed to that underlying most other literary inscriptions of non-literate alterity. In proposing that illiteracy does not have to precede literacy but can also follow it, that it may form not the beginning but the end of a subject’s quest, not the starting point but the final outcome of a process of acculturation. They do not only challenge Western notions of book learning as an inalienable advantage – they also expose the material limitations of literate knowledge. The stance assumed in the fictional constructions of non-literacy analysed below could not be more truly post-colonial. For the historical situation in which each narrative embeds the literate subject’s return to illiteracy ensues not directly from colonial expansion but from its aftermath: the collapse of European empires, the gradual weakening of Europe’s cultural hegemony, the assertion of other civilizations, cultures, and literacies as potentially productive, influential, and even dominant systems, and the resultant evolution of a new quality of cultural exchange, significantly determined by such dramatic demographic developments as mass migration to (and not, as formerly, from) the alleged centres of Western civilization. Recording this historical shift of orientation, the texts studied below, rather than responding to the global dissemination of Anglophone literacy and its 1

Anita Brookner, Look at Me (1981), London, 1982, 5.

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imposition on non-Western societies, record a process in the opposite direction, namely the West’s inundation with foreign literacies and oralities and the systematic appropriation of these to the point of their total absorption by Western civilization. Accordingly, the narratives reflect on themselves as translations and transcriptions of an Other originating in a foreign, that is, nonalphabetic, writing tradition.2 Mainly for this reason writing predominates in the corresponding texts thematically, formally, and meta-discursively at once. On a more comprehensive scale than in other texts, descriptions of culturally specific writing materials, conventions, and rituals, of reading tools, facilities, and practices combine to create variegated spaces of literate activity and to convey the impression that the characters inhabiting these spaces and the events making up their stories are as much written as they are fictional. In the meticulous portrayals of worlds never short of paper and ink but indeed crammed with writing of all kinds, literacy finally comes to be conceived of as a phenomenon in its own right, as an aspect of cultural identity apart from speech. Under the carefully differentiating scrutiny this presupposes, writing is profiled as a certain individual’s (or a certain group’s) command of a particular code, as that individual’s (or group’s) access to a specific infrastructure created and owned by a specific culture. Correspondingly, illiteracy, rather than being identified in general terms as the inability to understand and make use of any writing, is explored as a condition of exclusion from only one specific system of graphic signs. Logically, there is no need to conjure a world totally without letters (or of other graphic signs), to project a world beyond the confines of the literary text. Instead of bordering on a beyond or an outside into which the narrative discourse refrains from venturing, the cultural landscapes charted in the works discussed in this chapter remain finite and commensurable. Such commensurability, enhanced by the material allpervasiveness of the written medium, far from simplifies the negotiation of cultural otherness. Less foreign than the completely non-literate, the figure of the Other who knows how to read and write in one script, yet not in another resists inscription in straightforward 2 As Yuan puts it, the China narrative “becomes a translation of a translation – in fact, a cultural reconstruction” (Yuan Yuan, “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan”, Critique XL/3 [Spring 1999], 297).

The Illiterate Returned

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oppositional terms. Instead a theorizing of subtle nuances of alterity, a discrimination of “diverse modalities of hybridity” as demanded by Ella Shohat,3 seems necessary to grasp the implications of belonging, by birth or descent, to more than one literate culture without being able to actively participate in all of them. The authors of The Woman Warrior (1975), Obasan (1983), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa and Amy Tan, were each born and educated in the West. Nonetheless, they write not only about their own alienation from the culture of their origin – Chinese and Japanese, respectively – but also about the foreignness of their parents in the country to which they migrated in the first half of the twentieth century. In so doing they process their families’ special experiences of discrimination, in the form of brutal hostility against Japanese Canadians towards the end of the Second World War, as well as the utter disregard for the learning of highly educated Chinese migrants to America in the early twentieth century. These experiences stand in contrast to the favourable and indeed enthusiastic reception of the works of Tan, Kogawa, and Kingston by American and Canadian readers. The success of their writings testifies to an interest in and an acceptance of cultural otherness in the countries in which they grew up that their parents never seem to have known. Still, this acceptance is not unconditional. It presupposes the writers’ full assimilation into what Lawrence Rosenwald has ironically described as a “devotedly monoglottal” mainstream.4 Rosenwald insists that despite their official commitment to cultural diversity in the more recent past, the USA has always privileged a single language and a single script over all other available media of human interaction and thereby successfully maintained a certain level of homogeneity against all prevailing trends towards cultural diversification.5 This also applies to Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. The standard justification for their unofficial policy of 3

110.

Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-colonial’”, Social Text, 31-32 (Spring 1992),

4 Marc Shell, “Babel in America: Or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States”, Critical Inquiry, XX/1 (Autumn 1993), 127. 5 Accordingly Judith Oster recalls Theodore Roosevelt’s credo, “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people” (Roosevelt, quoted in Judith Oster, Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature, Columbia: Mo, 2003, 169.

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homogenization is that culturally pluralistic societies “must have some kind of common linguistic tool if communication is to occur at all”.6 However, to interpret the absence of other languages – and literacies – from American, Australian, Canadian, and British mainstream cultures as a natural ingredient of social coherence is to underestimate the pressures put on non-Anglophone immigrants to Anglophone countries not only to give up their primary languages but also to repress the traumatic experience of language loss. For Tove Skuttnabb-Kangas, the assimilationist immersion education practised in most parts of the world, and especially where “killer languages” like English dominate, effects a reductionism so damaging that one may justly speak of “linguistic genocide”.7 Skuttnabb-Kangas warns that the systematic denial of mother tongue medium instruction to minorities prompts involuntary transfers to majority languages. The resultant language loss not only weakens ethnic cultures but also deprives the world of its most important depositories of linguistic diversity. According to Kenji Hakuta, the effects of what Louis-Jean Calvet has termed “glottophagie”8 are nowhere as dramatic as in America.9 For, as Marc Shell puts it, “forgetting language difference … is still the urgent component of … America’s understanding of itself”.10 As a result of “the sheer magnetic power of American linguistic assimilation”, Rosenwald believes, the multicultural literature produced in America, though rich in scenes of language and dialect contact, has no collective triumphant accomplishment of linguistic diversification to relate, nor a corresponding utopia to project.11 Instead America’s ethnic literatures, in conforming to the dictate of 6 Te-hsing Shan, “Redefining Chinese American Literature from a LOWINUS Perspective: Two Recent Examples”, in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors, A Longfellow Institute Book, New York, 1998, 118. 7 Tove Skuttnab-Kangas, “Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: The Threat Form [sic] Killer Languages”, in The Politics of English as a World Language, ed. Christian Mair, 33-34. 8 That is, the “eating” of other languages by English (Louis-Jean Calvet, quoted in Rosenwald, 341). 9 Kenji Hakuta, Mirror of Language: The Debate of Bilingualism, New York, 1986, 166-67. 10 Shell, 127. 11 Lawrence Rosenwald, “American Anglophone Literature and Multilingual America”, in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors, 341.


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monolingualism prescribed by mainstream US culture, restrict themselves to yielding “tenacious, imprecise approximations” to America’s linguistic history and topography. The same sad pattern therefore keeps repeating itself as ethnic literatures develop: a phase of extensive reflection on English as a foreign language tends to be followed by one of self-conscious assimilation, before migrant or ethnic writing transforms into cosmopolitan writing which, practically indifferent to its linguistic origins, merely generates “unilingual puddings with lots of multilingual plums”: To unofficially but predominantly anglophone America comes a nonanglophone immigrant group. The nonanglophone-speakers retain their language for a while; probably their nonanglophone literature records the pressures exerted by English on their language, probably the English language is expanded by loanwords taken from their language, and probably, as members of this group begin to write of themselves in English, these English texts dramatize the linguistic encounter. Probably, after a while, the intensity of the encounter diminishes, the texts dramatize the linguistic encounter less often.12

As far as Chinese American writing is concerned, the dramatization of the linguistic encounter has remained a major preoccupation for over two decades. American born writers especially, who are insiders more to English than to the Chinese culture they depict, appear deeply interested in such encounters. Yet rather than locating them at the interface of the Chinese American community and white American society, their narratives let them occur within the Chinese American community itself. Thus differences in language and literacy have come to be translated from a barrier between Caucasian Americans and Chinese immigrants into a barrier dividing different generations of Chinese Americans.13 This inevitably produces new 12

Ibid., 345 and 341. This is not to contest Lee’s argument that in choosing English to recount the Asian American’s linguistic alienation, writers like Maxine Hong Kingston reinscribe cultural difference in the white-dominant American society (Ken-fan Lee, “Cultural Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingston’s and Tan’s Ghost Stories”, MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, XXIX/2 [Summer 2004], 123). This reinscription does not simply happen on another textual level than the thematic location of difference in the ethnic community; the ethnic community itself is a but a microcosm simulating a Chinese life, yet thriving on American soil, as it were, and therefore “related more to the 13

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scenarios in the drama of linguistic assimilation to which a character’s appropriation not only of English but also of the alphabet may add a significant complication. For such appropriation invariably proves the beginning of an irresolvable conflict of loyalties turning into a fundamental linguistic dilemma when the other language (and script) in which the migrant’s tale is not told begins to haunt the teller, demanding to be recognized as a legacy that can never be discarded. The ways are varied in which Chinese American writers attempt to overcome the sense of betrayal resulting from the choice of language and medium that their implication in two cultures requires them to make. For Chinese writers in America writing in Chinese about Chinese Americans, the solution seems to be to court audiences in China with portrayals of America.14 For immigrant and sojourner Chinese American writers, who shift from their primary language to English, it seems to consist in seeking “primarily to explain and justify China and Chinese ways to the Western world”.15 American-born Chinese American writers, at least as much at home in English as in Chinese, in turn, need to find yet another approach. As Amy Ling explains, they tend to be more individualistic and to have an inward focus. Because they have grown up as a racial minority, imbibing the customs of two cultures, their centres are not stable and single. Their consciousness ... is double; their vision bifocal and fluctuating .... they look inward with an urgency to comprehend and balance the bicultural clashes they have known and must reconcile .... Their purpose is to explain themselves to themselves.16

Remarkably, it is above all in immigration narratives by writers who have never lived in their parents’ or grandparents’ culture and therefore may never have acquired a full command of their families’ original language and script, that the foreignness of spoken and written Chinese or Japanese is given special consideration. This is, for present American situation than to their original context in Chinese society” (Yuan, 292). 14 On this group of writers, see for instance Te-hsing Shan, who names Helena Kuo and Lin Tai-yi as its most prominent representatives. 15 Amy Ling, “Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition behind Maxine Hong Kingston”, in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction, New York, 1999, 136. 16 Ibid., 137.


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instance, the case in Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior and in Obasan by Joy Kogawa. In spite of the broad critical attention and acclaim these two texts have received, their authors’ pronounced interest in the vanishing ability of American or Canadian born Asians to participate not only in the oral but also in the written discourses of the cultures from which they originate has gone largely unnoticed. This is due to the same phonocentric bias that has caused Western critics to overlook the centrality of the theme of illiteracy in other works studied in this book. Yet it is also symptomatic of a tendency in Asian-American studies to understand “Asian” as merely an “adjectival supplement to the more emphatically posited ‘American’” and to pay little attention to the relevance of Asianness for Asian America.17 As if to counter this deficit and give concrete substance to this Asianness, Amy Tan undertakes what at first glance appears to be an unusually direct inquiry into the specificity of Chinese writing in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Yet, what Amy Tan discloses in the process is, above all, her own distance from the Chinese writing tradition, which is reflected by her descriptions of the Chinese ink-making trade, of ancient inscriptions on oracle bones, and of the fascination these inscriptions inspire in American archaeologists, of Chinese soothsayers and antiquaries, and of letter-writing as the only means of maintaining human bonds during the political upheavals in China in the first half of the twentieth century. Tan’s text is informed by an almost obsessive nominalism, suggestive not so much of her familiarity with Chinese culture as of her alienation from it. The mass of ethnographic and historical details she supplies combine into an informative, yet not necessarily sympathetic picture of Chinese writing traditions. Images foregrounding the materiality of Chinese writing, while exoticizing Chinese literate practices, create an illusion of tangibility that belies the alienation inevitably felt by the uninitiated Westerner when confronted with a piece of Chinese writing. Rather than trying, like Tan, to dissuade this sense of alienation in their writings, Kingston and Kogawa endeavour to capture and comprehend it as an essential aspect of their own cultural identities. This endeavour proves charged 17 Belinda Wai Chu Kong, Species of Afterlife: Translation and Displacement in Twentieth-Century Chinese-English Contexts (Arthur Miller, Gao Xingjjan,Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Ha Jin), Ph. D. Thesis, University of Michigan, 2005, 4.

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with difficulties. After all, Kingston and Kogawa, like Tan, try to process in Western form and language their personal affinities to a literate tradition fundamentally different from the one in which they live, communicate, and work and through which they primarily define themselves. As Ken-fang Lee phrases it: “In weaving the old cultural references from both Chinese and American backgrounds into their work Tan and Kingston also bring the ‘newness’ and ‘foreignness’ into the wor(l)d.”18 One foreignness Kingston, Tan, as well as Kogawa convey in The Woman Warrior, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and Obasan is that of the Chinese and Japanese scripts to readers literate only in alphabetic systems. Unlike the letters of these systems, Chinese characters “do not represent meaningless sound units but words and with them, by implication, ideas and concepts”.19 The same holds true of Japanese characters, which essentially are adaptations of Chinese signs to the phonetic requirements of the Japanese language.20 The lexical extensions which the Chinese language has undergone over the past four thousand years have effected a growth of the repertoire of Chinese characters to about 50,000 different signs, only 3,500 to 9,000 of which, however, are commonly listed in modern dictionaries. To the outsider, most of these signs represent arbitrary combinations of strokes with no relation whatsoever to the meaning they designate. To the initiated user of Chinese, their pictorial origin is often obvious, so that even today, many characters can be shown to have their root in pictures derived from nature and other concerns central to the agrarian society which fostered Chinese writing. Still transporting their original meaning, Chinese pictographs, then, may be seen as fulfilling a dual historical function: while, like any other script, a means of recording the present, they afford insights into China’s cultural past at the same time. Such insights are of interest not only to the historian. Some knowledge of the history of the Chinese script is absolutely essential 18

Lee, 106. Gaur, 87-88. 20 In Obasan, Kogawa addresses the illiteracy of the descendants of Japanese migrants and in so doing reflects on a script closely related to Chinese writing, yet also different from it. The Japanese, who had no script of their own, began to appropriate Chinese writing and paper-making technologies from the fourth century onwards. However, as their language was not sufficiently represented in ideographs, they extended the Chinese script by two independent syllabaries so that modern Japanese is a hybrid of three different writing systems (Gaur, 129 and Haarmann 395404). 19


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for any reader of Chinese, especially to understand the written fixation of abstract concepts. This, Henri-Jean Martin explains, is why the original representation of Chinese characters is always explained at school.21 The historical role of the Chinese script has prompted a great deal of speculation on the part of Western scholars over its impact on the mentalities of Far Eastern peoples. It has been central to the argument, for instance, that far more than other writing systems the Chinese script encourages associative thought processes or to the claim that it is the Chinese script that renders the Chinese people’s “reflective awareness and spontaneity in the moral realm” radically different from the mental categories and frameworks of Western societies.22 “Thanks to its origins”, Martin writes, the Chinese script expresses totally different preoccupations from alphabetic writing systems. It reflects the mentality of a people for whom superior wisdom lies in a conformity with nature, but who esteem abstraction as the path to the comprehension and interpretation of nature.23

Apart from expressing “something of the natural order of the world”, one of the earliest purposes of writing in Chinese was that of divination, “the science that revealed connections between words and things, proper names and the deductions that could be drawn from them, the reality of the written word and the message it transmitted”.24 The first goal of Chinese writing, Martin suggests, was “to furnish not an instrument of communication, but a tool of symbolization”.25 Accordingly, the first Chinese scribes were guided not by the idea of “noting down a linguistic utterance”, but by an understanding of writing as a means of translating the concrete and singular into the abstract and general, of deriving universally applicable truths from isolated phenomena and perceptions. In the case of the invention of the Chinese script, Martin therefore concludes, it would be “more accurate to speak of the creation of a written language, not simply a writing system”. 21

Martin, 22. Joseph Needham and Jacques Gernet, quoted in Martin, 89. 23 Martin, 22. 24 Ibid., 89. 25 Ibid., 21. 22

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Not representing, translating, or replacing other signifiers (in the way in which the letters of the alphabet represent, translate, or replace sounds), Chinese characters have to be seen as possessing a meaning of their own. They offer, as Martin puts it, “the possibility of dissecting the signifier to advance knowledge of the signified”.26 Transporting the signified differently from spoken Chinese, at times even lending the signified an altogether different significance, Chinese writing plays a special role in the negotiation of meaning, facilitating semantic reconciliation, for instance, where spoken Chinese loses its intelligibility owing to the vast number of homophones in Chinese. Accordingly Martin explains: “Because homophones are in principle represented by different signs, a Chinese speaker can trace the corresponding sign in the hollow of his hand or write it down on a scrap of paper if his interlocutor has not understood the sense of a word.”27 As a medium complementing, often completing speech and rendering it more explicit in the process, yet never simply copying spoken utterances, the Chinese script engenders writing and reading processes quite unlike those common in alphabetic cultures. The indebtedness of Chinese exegetic conventions to the art of divination, the proximity of Chinese calligraphy to painting, as well as the ancient idea, still prevalent in China, of writing as a form of asceticism mastered only after a long apprenticeship are some of the most obvious indications that both writing and reading in Chinese tend to be employed to a far greater extent as contemplative activities than are literacy skills in Western societies. “Because it is made up of images”, Martin observes, “the ideographic page demands a certain effort of reorganization that is all the more active because all the characters that compose it are rich in ambiguities”. Compared to the ease with which alphabetic systems are learnt, the input required of the individual reader and writer of Chinese is phenomenal. While the simplicity of alphabetic systems makes it possible for reading and writing to become wholly automatized activities, the complexity of the Chinese script presupposes concentrated attention to the material shape of the graphic sign in the process of deciphering it. As a consequence, whereas metadiscourse in alphabetic cultures is focussed on the 26 27

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 23.


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phonetic features of language, and thus on the immaterial aspects of linguistic utterances, metadiscourse in cultures with ideographic scripts takes into special account the visual realization of words and the aesthetic expressiveness of materially realized symbols. The kind of metadiscourse Chinese and Japanese scripts encourage, their complex historical significance, their efficacy as means of abstraction and symbolization (and, in the case of Chinese, of linguistic reconciliation where oral communication is in danger of breaking down), their intricacy, and, not of least importance, their profound foreignness to outsiders can be shown to feature prominently in the literary interrogations to which Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, and Amy Tan subject their own hybrid cultural identities. Though practically omnipresent in the lives of the Asian communities described in The Woman Warrior, Obasan, and The Bonesetter’s Daughter, to the migrants’ daughters, from whose point of view these communities’ histories are told, writings in Chinese and Japanese, respectively, never convey a sense of familiarity but appear profoundly alien. Whether the women narrators possess some knowledge of their parents’ script or none at all, the ideographs, which form such an ubiquitous component of their private worlds, never fail to capture the essence of their own families’ foreignness, of a strangeness deeply unsettling because it manifests itself where it is least expected, namely in that which is, and in those who are, most familiar to the narrator protagonists.


CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE ILLITERATE MOTHER: MAXINE HONG KINGSTON’S THE WOMAN WARRIOR

The Woman Warrior is replete with images of writing. There are birth charts and immigration papers, permission slips and school diplomas, anthropology books and dictionaries, writings on laundry packages, words pinned on the cloth of corpses, letterings on shop windows and office doors, and warnings stencilled on boxes containing fragile items. Her characters in America stay in contact with their homeland through an uninterrupted flow of letters “on blue airmail paper” reporting the latest atrocities committed by the Communist regime, begging for money, and arranging for more members of the family to emigrate to the United States.1 Along with the information, requests, threats, invitations, promises, truths, and untruths which these items of writing contain, they document the Chinese immigrants’ struggles to assert their cultural and historical identity not only vis-à-vis non-Asian Americans but also vis-à-vis those of their own kind born or raised (or both) in America. This links the innumerable allusions to writing in The Woman Warrior to the many references Kingston makes to other discursive practices, such as “talk-story”,2 chanting folk tales or reciting special spells against misfortunes. These are complemented by images of paper, not in the form of written messages, but of origamied replicas: “paper suits and dresses, spirit money, paper houses, paper automobiles” (WW, 22) are donated to the spirits of the dead; artful cut-outs are brought as souvenirs from China. They represent mythical figures not infrequently engaged in the act of writing, such as “the scholar who always carries a fan ... His brush and quill and scrolls tied with ribbon

1 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975), London, 1981, 51. 2 “Talk-story” is an Hawaiian pidgin phrase, borrowed street language selected by Kingston “To describe the passing down of tales from the old generation to the young” (Susan Brownmiller, “Susan Brownmiller Talks with Maxine Hong Kingston, Author of The Woman Warrior”, in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, 178).

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jutt[ing] out of lace vases” or “an orange warrior-poet with sword and scroll” (WW, 111). The many different uses of paper, modalities of representation, and forms of communication to which Kingston refers in The Woman Warrior seem to blur rather than clarify the meaning she ascribes to writing. This corresponds not only with the narrator protagonist’s initial difficulty in positioning herself as her mother’s biographer but also with her idea of writing, and especially of the Chinese script, as representing an intrinsically unreliable medium. More than once in The Woman Warrior, Kingston associates the unreliability of the written medium with the ambiguity of Chinese ideographs. She describes how she becomes most acutely aware of the intangibility of Chinese writing when she attempts to Romanize the spelling of individual Chinese words or to translate them into English. In the confusion into which she is propelled by such efforts, the narrator has the impression that Chinese symbols “lifted their feet, stretched out their wings and flew like blackbirds” (WW, 66-67), or that their individual strokes transform into two black wings of a bird crossing the sun (WW, 26). Lee believes that the way Kingston describes Chinese ideographs creatively and imaginatively is bound to be received differently by readers who are familiar with the Chinese script and those who are not. He points out that for the latter, it may be impossible to imagine exactly what Kingston describes, while readers with knowledge of the Chinese script can visualize the ideographs she is representing verbally.3 What the uninitiated reader is able to share with the reader literate in Chinese, though, is Kingston’s vision of Chinese characters suddenly coming to life, changing their form, and in the process taking on a completely new meaning under the eyes of the reader. Such a transformation is most artfully rendered in the chant of Fa Mu Lan, in which Kingston suggestively compares the strokes of a Chinese ideograph with the shape of a black bird that the inspired writer must follow to reach the end of the woman warrior’s tale. Whether drawn in ink, pencil or charcoal, blurred beyond intelligibility or as distinct as the narrator’s childhood memories, the strokes direct the writer warrior from ignorance through confusion to enlightenment, at the point of which the writer’s awareness of the sign 3

Lee, 107.

The Illiterate Mother

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as sign vanishes and the ideograph is perceived as “just two black strokes”: The call would come from a bird that flew over our roof. In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for ‘human’, two black wings. The bird would ... lift into the mountains (which look like the ideograph ‘mountain’), there parting the mist briefly that swirled opaque again. I would be a little girl of seven the day I followed the bird away into the mountains. The brambles would tear off my shoes and the rocks cut my feet and fingers, but I would keep climbing, eyes upward to follow the bird. We would go around and around the tallest mountain, climbing ever upward. I would drink from the river, which I would meet again and again. We would go so high the plants would change, and the river that flows past the village would become a waterfall. At the height where the bird used to disappear, the clouds would grey the world like an ink wash. Even when I got used to that grey, I would only see peaks as if shaded in pencil, rocks like charcoal rubbings, everything so murky. There would be just two black strokes – the bird. Inside the clouds – inside the dragon’s breath – I would not know how many hours or days passed. Suddenly I would break clear into a yellow, warm world. New trees would lean towards me at mountain angles, but when I looked for the village it would have vanished under the clouds. (WW, 26)

The ordinary act of looking also becomes a form of highly imaginative reading at other moments during the story of the woman warrior, whenever Fa Mu Lan miraculously catches a glimpse of her previous life in the reflection in water, in the flames of a campfire, or in the evening sky. “As the water shook, then settled”, she recounts one such occasion, “the colours and lights shimmered into a picture, not reflecting anything I could see around me. There at the bottom of the gourd were my mother and father scanning the sky, which was where I was” (WW, 28). “I stared into the fire,” she tells of another, “which reminded me about helping my mother with the cooking and made me cry. It was very strange looking through water into fire and seeing my mother again. I nodded, orange and warm” (WW, 31). Similar metaphoric extensions into the surreal also distinguish Kingston’s treatment of speech and music. Comparisons of a human subject’s voice to “a crippled animal running on broken legs”, claims that the same voice is jarred by splinters and “bones rubbing jagged

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against one another” (WW, 152), or similes which liken the high notes issued from a reed pipe to “icicles in the desert” (WW, 186) all point at a thoroughly unorthodox view of language, which seems to accommodate only in part conventional distinctions between speech and writing, orality and literacy, English and Chinese. These opposites tend to merge in The Woman Warrior, a text which keeps allowing the reader to forget that almost all the dialogue it records are translations from Chinese into English. Only occasionally is the reader’s attention drawn explicitly either to English as the medium transporting the narrative or to Chinese as the medium in which the narrated exchanges are actually being enacted, with the thematic focus, however, remaining clearly on the Chinese language and on Chinese discursive conventions and idiosyncrasies. Therefore a host of explanations of Chinese words and of interpretations of individual ideographs are offered, imparting, for example, that the gold circles crossed with seven red lines on the metal tube holding Brave Orchid’s medical diploma represent “‘joy’ ideographs in abstract” (WW, 57), that the Chinese “I” has seven strokes, that the word “dream” translates into Chinese as “the language of impossible stories” (WW, 82), or that the ideograph used on packages to mark fragile contents literally means “use a little heart” (WW, 61). The “the charming words” of the language used by Caucasian Americans yield no equivalent peculiarities and, also acoustically, English does not stand comparison with Chinese, as it is not uttered with the same shrillness and volume with which the immigrants’ voices ring through Chinatown: They turn they radio up full blast to hear the operas …. And they yell over the singers that wail over the drums, everybody talking at once, big arm gestures, spit flying. You can see the disgust on American faces looking at women like that. It isn’t just the loudness. It is the way Chinese sounds, chingchong ugly, to American ears, not beautiful like Japanese sayonara words with the consonants and vowels as regular as Italian. We make guttural peasant noise and have Ton Duc Thang names you can’t remember. And the Chinese can’t hear American’s at all; the language is too soft and western music unhearable. (WW, 154)


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The thematic emphasis on Chinese effectively deflects from the fact that the novel4 itself is written in English, that the narrator’s language is not Chinese, and that her primary script is that of the Roman alphabet. As a result, the impression is created that the English language, both in spoken and in written form, is oddly absent from the lives Kingston describes in The Woman Warrior.5 The same quality of inaudibility and invisibility seems to pertain to English that the Chinese migrants ascribe to its users, the Caucasian Americans, by identifying them as ghosts, “Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-andDime Ghosts ...” (WW, 90).6 On a purely thematic level, then, Kingston’s text may be said to perform exactly the same categorical negation of English, which the author identifies as one of the most alienating aspects of her parents’ generation, who callously ask “What do numbers matter?” when reminded that the dates on their 4 Because of its autobiographical content, some critics have been hesitant to read The Woman Warrior as a fictional text. Nonetheless the term “novel” will be used freely here as this chapter is not primarily concerned with the generic categorization of The Woman Warrior, a matter significantly complicated by Donald C. Goellnicht’s suggestion to comprehend Kingston’s narrative as a hybrid of theory, fiction, and autobiography. Drawing on Barbara Christian’s claim that “people of color have always theorized” and that theory therefore is inherent to ethnic literature (or at least to certain forms of it), Goellnicht proposes that The Woman Warrior, as well as Obasan, ought to be seen as “theoretical fictions or fictionalized theory, autobiographical theory or theoretical autobiography” (Donald C. Goellnicht, “Blurring Boundaries: Asian American Literature as Theory”, in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-kok Cheung, Cambridge, 1997, 341). 5 Conversely, Quinby identifies language as “one of the ‘invisible presences’” marking The Woman Warrior out as a memoir (Lee Quinby, “The Subject of Memoirs: The Woman Warrior’s Technology of Ideographic Selfhood”, in Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Laura E. Skandera-Trambley, Critical Essays on American Literature, New York, 1998, 130). In Lee’s terms, Kingston “challenges the concept of English as a unitary, linear, and continuous entity and invites readers to engage with cultural translation”. English is made “‘foreign’ to its own monolingual native speaker”. “For those who are monolingual”, Lee observes further, “this experience of reading puts them in the labyrinth of heteroglossia and forces them to confront multicultural discourses” (Lee, 107). 6 On ghosts in The Woman Warrior, see Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English (Excerpts)”, in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook”, 164-65, as well as David Leiwei Li, “Re-Presenting The Woman Warrior: An Essay of Interpretive History”, in Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Critical Essays on American Literature, New York, 1998, 193.

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immigration papers are wrong, arguing that, after all, “White Ghosts can’t tell Chinese age” (WW, 97); or who sardonically declare that the law forbidding bigamy in America simply “doesn’t matter”, should a Chinese man wish to take a second wife (WW, 131); who unashamedly instruct their children to lie to Americans and to “Talk the Sales Ghosts down. Make them take a loss” (WW, 152), and who stubbornly refuse to believe that white Americans cannot speak Chinese, insisting that the “ghosts” feign ignorance of their language only to spy on them. The almost neurotic hostility to Anglophone American culture which Kingston attests her migrant characters erupts most violently when they are confronted with their own children’s appropriation of the English language. At best, their fluency in the ghosts’ language is perceived as a profitable accomplishment acquired for the benefit of the entire family. Mostly, however, the older Chinese tend to view their offspring’s command of English with profound suspicion and to interpret it as the main reason for their alienation from the Chinese culture. Symptomatically, they perceive this alienation not as a difference but as a lack. For them their English speaking descendants are “Ho Chi Kuei”, which as Lee points out, in Cantonese means “ghost-like”, or “sook Sing”, which means “bastard”.7 Ignorance of Chinese is considered pardonable only in the very youngest generation. The inability of the adolescents to translate what they say into Chinese, in turn, is deplored as a sign of degeneracy; so is their use of English in private exchanges with other Chinese. Yet even if indicative of a most tragic experience of cultural deprivation, the parents’ disapproval is recorded not uncritically, nor without humour. In Lee’s view, Kingston (or rather her narrator) “creates a parody by ironically bringing in the experiences of ‘alienation’ and ‘defamiliarization’ of ethnic people living in the so-called ‘melting pot’ or ‘salad bowl’.8 As part of her scheme of ironically mimicking the repressive ways of the older Chinese migrants, she reduces many of those guilty (like herself) of having betrayed their Chinese roots to nebulous figures without distinct physical features, without distinct histories or personalities and, most importantly, without a name. Disowned by the narrator in the same way the narrator’s father has disowned his “drowned-in-the-well sister” (WW, 13), the younger 7 8

Lee, 111. Ibid., 112.


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Chinese in The Woman Warrior stand punished in the only way someone like Brave Orchid would find appropriate for children who have disgraced their family. The ironic nature of the blanks Kingston inserts in her text in imitation of her older relatives’ disregard for her own generation receives special emphasis through Moon Orchid’s dismissive reflections on her sister’s eldest daughter, whose American name, Moon Orchid finds, sounds like “Ink” in Chinese (WW, 120). Nowhere in the novel, not even in the passages recounted from the aunt’s point of view, is the girl’s name disclosed, nor its phonetic resemblance to the Chinese word for ink explained. For the aunt, the niece remains but an “absent-minded and messy” girl, forever “smeared with ink” and with no name that can be remembered properly. The reader, in turn, is given to understand that the alleged bearer of the name “Ink” is the author herself and sensitive to the appropriateness of her English first name, “Maxine”, for what a similar word denotes in Mandarin.9 Moon Orchid’s inability to understand the new meanings her language acquires in the American context confers special importance onto her niece as mediator between the two cultures between which the immigrants live. “Maxine clearly situates herself between Chinese and American”, Ling notes, “attributing an identity to herself through the modulation of voice”.10 Her command of English (or “American”) allows the younger woman to transliterate her parents’ and her aunt’s rejection of American culture into an expression of that same culture. Through Maxine’s acts of narrative revision by translation, “the cycle of doom is broken and the past digested”,11 the spell of the Other’s invisibility is broken. Though still called “ghosts”, albeit in written English, the younger Chinese, just like their unidentified aunt, whose fragmented story of transgression keeps haunting the family even in America, assume material form as their lives are transferred onto paper. Writing in English to undo the Chinese immigrants’ rhetoric of denial and its tragic consequences, Kingston knows, is anything but a 9

The Mandarin word for “ink” is “mò shuӿ” or “mò shuir”. Amy Ling, “Maxine Hong Kingston and the Dialogic Dilemma of Asian American Writers”, in Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, 174. 11 Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent Americna Literature, Charlottesville: Va, 1998, 11. 10

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harmless enterprise. While for her people disowning somebody by tacit denial is punishment, telling on another person is revenge. “The idioms for revenge”, she explains, “are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families’”: “The reporting is the vengeance – not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (WW, 53). In giving a name to a crime, in revoking it in writing, the culprit’s guilt and shame are made both public and permanent. While in the eyes of her parents a language of ghosts and therefore invisible and inaudible at once, English, as the medium in which Maxine conceives her Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, represents a potent means of self-assertion.12 In exposing her parents’ prejudices and superstitions and recording their gruesome tales about China, in disclosing carefully tended family secrets and revealing her relative’s hidden fears and resentments, Kingston, apart from breaking the silence she has cultivated to make herself “American-feminine” (WW, 155), reacts to the injuries she has received from her own people; or, as Rabine rightly notes, She … transforms the oral story into writing and by this act denies the power of the community that maintains its cohesiveness through the oral tradition. A story that is oppressive when orally transmitted within the context of family and community is liberating when transformed into writing.13

In the process, she extracts herself from the story into which she has been willed by her mother, the story of a woman warrior, deeply rooted in Chinese traditions, fighting her parents’ cause in America disguised as an interpreter, typist, airline attendant or, perhaps, even as a doctor. Though Brave Orchid’s daughter concedes, “The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar” (WW, 53), she finally subverts “the designated position defined by her mother’s past experience”.14 “What we have in common are the words at our backs” she explains. “And I have so many words – ‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too – that they do not fit on my skin” (WW, 53). Yet, this does not mean that she must re-enact the legend of Fa Mu Lan’s “perfect 12 This is suggested here in spite of David Leiwei Li’s charge that the Western critic’s hope for the salvation of the Asian American female through the power of the English language is an expression merely of colonialist benevolence (Lee, 197). 13 Leslie W. Rabine, “No Lost Paradise: Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston”, in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, 95. 14 Yuan, 299 and 298.


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filiality”, according to which the woman warrior has oaths and names carved on her back by her father, along with her people’s grievances and her parents’ address – so that the loyal daughter may never forget them and always find her way back to her kin (WW, 40). The futility of the mission for which, she suspects, her mother has loosened her tongue by cutting her frenum is only too obvious to the narrator/author of The Woman Warrior, who comically reflects, To avenge my family, I’d have to storm across China to take back our farm from the Communists; I’d have to rage across the United States to take back the laundry in New York and the one in California. Nobody in history has conquered and united both North America and Asia. (WW, 50)

In resorting to writing, rather than, like her mythical role model, to more concrete forms of combat, Brave Orchid’s daughter achieves her own emancipation from the traditional Chinese ideal of the warrior. For, in Chinese, wu, “warrior”, like zhi, “raw material, not yet polished or decorated”, is an antonym of wen, which signifies “a set of marks” combining to form a simple written character, while also referring “to the vein in stone or the grain in wood, to bird tracks, to the tracings on a tortoise shell, and, by extension, to literature, courtesy, and manners”.15 By implication, then, her decision to wage her personal war in letters enables Kingston to synthesize the opposing principles of chaos and order, destruction and creation, barbarity and civilization, represented by wu and wen. What she accomplishes is a text using the language and script of one culture to capture the specificity of another and in so doing give expression to her acceptance of her own hybridity. Though a novel focussed on the theme of immigration to America, The Woman Warrior barely relates this acceptance to her persona’s assimilation into Anglophone, let alone Caucasian, American culture, but construes it almost entirely as a matter of finding one’s place in the community of Chinese Americans. For Maxine, this mainly means defining this place in relation to her mother. Though she may tell her mother towards the end of the novel, “I’ve found some places in this country that are ghost-free. And I think I belong there ...”, she knows that she cannot avoid her childhood home forever. The daughter 15

Martin, 20.

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realizes that she must reconcile herself not only to the difference that separates her from Brave Orchid but also to the sameness that creates a lasting bond between them. Not closing without the accomplishment of this reconciliation, The Woman Warrior may be said to end on a highly optimistic note. Still, there is a profoundly sad side to Kingston’s discovery of herself within her mother, closely related to her literacy in English and her decision to become a writer. This transpires when one considers the career recounted in The Woman Warrior in the context of Kingston’s family history: Kingston’s father had received a rigorous education in China for a career as a professional scholar. He had studied the ancient Chinese classics, traditional Chinese philosophy, poetry, and calligraphy, before he went to America to work as a window washer and gradually save enough money to invest in a laundry. Unlike most Chinese women of their generation, Kingston’s aunts and her mother could read. In early twentieth-century China, this in itself was unusual. Kingston’s mother even had trained in medicine and midwifery, run a practice as a Western-style physician, and superintended a field hospital during the Second World War. Upon her arrival in America, she, too, had to discover that there was no demand for her expertise in the American medical system. The only work she found was as a tomato picker, cannery worker, and housecleaner.16 In The Woman Warrior, Kingston does not openly address how her parents’ removal from their intellectually stimulating professions must have exacerbated their sense of deprivation and displacement in America. Still, she tries to reconstruct at great length the life her mother must have led as a physician, highly respected for her learning, indeed, renowned “for being brilliant, a natural scholar who could glance at a book and know it” (WW, 63). “When after her medical training, Brave Orchid returned to her home village a doctor”, Kingston’s story runs, “she was welcomed with garlands and cymbals the way people welcome the ‘barefoot doctors’ today”: My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair. She had gone away ordinary and

16

E.D. Huntley, Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion, Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers, Westport: Conn, 2001, 1-2.


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come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains. ‘When I stepped out of my sedan chair, the villagers said “Ahhh,” at my good shoes and my long gown. I was always dressed well when I made my calls. Some villagers brought out their lion and danced ahead of me ….’ (WW, 73-74)

In China, we learn, Brave Orchid was even rich enough to keep a slave, whose excellent skills included a high command of the Chinese script. Before Brave Orchid buys this slave, she puts her to the test. The irony with which Kingston invests the corresponding scene is so subtle that it almost escapes the reader: Pondering whether she should buy the girl or not, Brave Orchid produces an American pencil of all things. With it, she writes something in Chinese, “a felicitous word such as ‘longevity’ or ‘double joy’”, which she then shows to the girl, telling her, that if she is able to memorize and reproduce it correctly, she will buy her (WW, 77). In the United States, the same proud woman doctor and employer of a slave is little more than a slave to her husband, to her customers, and to the ghosts she believes either to have followed her to America or who want to drive her back to China. Although Kingston portrays Brave Orchid as a deeply superstitious and fiercely intolerant, if not paranoid and xenophobic female, her narrative makes allowances for her bitter resentment. “You have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America”, Brave Orchid rebukes her children not entirely without reason (WW, 74). After all, her sons and daughters seem to have no way of knowing what their mother has forfeited by coming to America. Indeed, to foreground their ignorance Kingston lets it surface in the narrator’s language, which, she tells Brownmiller, is meant to sound “a lot more naive than I am”.17 “Why didn’t you teach me English?” (WW, 48), Kingston has her persona thoughtlessly reprove her mother, thereby exposing the daughter’s indifference to Brave Orchid’s exclusion from the ghosts’ language and blindness to the shame associated with her cripplingly poor command of English. Occasional slippages in her narrative betray that the daughter (at least as a woman writer or writing warrior) is not completely ignorant of her mother’s handicap. For instance, she recalls how her parents once were called to her school to account for the disorderly behaviour 17

Brownmiller, 177.

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their daughter had been displaying. In her reconstruction of the incident, the narrator lets slip that “the teachers looked serious, talked seriously too, but [that her] parents did not understand English” (emphasis added, WW, 149). Likewise, on another occasion, when explaining why Brave Orchid, herself a surgeon, could not do as Moon Orchid’s husband did and practise openly in the United States, she has the mother curtly retort that this was “because she could never learn English”, because she was not “smart enough to learn ghost ways” (WW, 135). It is only indirectly, through the story of Brave Orchid’s sister Moon Orchid, that Kingston explores what it must have meant for an educated Chinese woman like her mother to come to live in a culture in which she is essentially deaf, dumb, and illiterate. Persuaded by her sister to join her in the United States, seek out her unfaithful husband, and force him to take her in as his lawful wife, Moon Orchid emigrates to America to relive the trauma of Third Wife whom her father had brought back from his travels and whose language nobody understood: “At first she talked constantly ... After a while she never talked any more” (WW, 81). Rather than as a gradual process of disintegration, Moon Orchid’s retreat into silence and a state of confusion in which her inability to understand English no longer matters is described as an abrupt change triggered by her encounter with her husband, who deals her a fatal blow by declaring her unfit to live in his house because she would not be able to speak to his “important American guests”. “You can’t talk to them”, he blames her, “You can barely talk to me” (WW, 139). It is from Moon Orchid’s reaction that the reader can glean the enormity of the insult she has received: Moon Orchid was so ashamed, she held her hands over her face. She wished she could also hide her dappled hands. Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts. (WW, 139)

Disowned by her husband and, hence, annihilated socially, Moon Orchid believes herself deserving of further destruction and is suddenly seized by paranoid fears that some ghost, possibly Mexican, because she cannot speak Spanish either, might be plotting against her life. Eventually, there is no other solution for Brave Orchid than to


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have her admitted to a mental asylum. Shortly before Moon Orchid dies, she tells her sister, who has come to visit her in the hospital: “Oh Sister, I am so happy here .... we understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I understand them.” (WW, 144)

The story of Moon Orchid precedes the final chapter of the novel, which is titled “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”. Before it closes with a short tale of the poetess Ts’ai Yen and the song she invents to the sound of the reed pipes played by the barbarians who hold her captive, this last section of The Woman Warrior thematizes silence and the failure to sing, or rather, to raise one’s voice enough to be heard singing. In the process, it compares Brave Orchid’s exclusion from Anglophone American culture with the difficulties experienced by her daughter as a result of her bilingual upbringing. With her shift of focus from her mother’s linguistic depravity to her own desperate attempts at finding a voice to speak for herself, Kingston’s inscriptions of displacement and inarticulateness become significantly more explicit. With an openness she seems unable to muster when writing about Brave Orchid’s marginalized position, she records the speechlessness, voicelessness, and silence inhibiting her as a child and preventing her from developing a sense of belonging either to the community of Chinese immigrants or to the other, the Anglophone America. The articulate manner with which she conveys, at least retrospectively, the claustrophobia of her entrapment within her own muteness is above all proof of the daughter’s eventual attainment of a voice, of her cultivation of an adequate and effective way of selfexpression, central to which is her choice of English as the medium in which to write her own stories. This choice, inevitably, leads to her dissociation from her mother’s stories and marks a break in the novel, after which the figure of the mother recedes into the background. This coincides with the beginning of a new chapter in which the narrator recapitulates from a new distance the mother’s habit of talking-story. As she ultimately comprehends, this distance is both unavoidable and necessary. For it at last facilitates the daughter’s acceptance of her role as a translator whose accounts of her mother’s predicament, even if only imperfect reconstructions of the original story, fulfil a special

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purpose in that they make Brave Orchid’s history accessible to nonAsian readerships. It is the mediating capacity of the other culture’s language or “instruments” (such as the letters of the alphabet) to which the tale of Ts’ai Yen alludes as it describes how the abducted woman begins to express her sorrow in songs about China and about her family there. “Her words seemed to be Chinese”, the story reads, “but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch barbarian phrases about forever wandering” (WW, 186). An important role is assigned to Ts’ai Yen’s children in the tale as intermediaries between the barbarians and their mother, whose lament they help to make understandable (or at least audible) to her captors. “The children did not laugh”, Kingston writes, “but eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter campfires, ringed by barbarians” (WW, 185). When Ts’ai Yen is ransomed after twelve years in captivity, she brings her song back from the savage lands. Though originally composed to the music of the barbarians’ reed pipe, Ts’ai Yen’s own people readily adopt it and sing it to their own instruments. The “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”, Kingston offers as a final observation at the very end of her Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts, has become an integral part of Chinese folklore because “It translated well” (WW, 185).

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE ILLITERATE DAUGHTER: JOY KOGAWA’S OBASAN

The idea of linguistic transformation with which Maxine Hong Kingston concludes The Woman Warrior is formulated also at the beginning of Obasan. In the Foreword to the novel, Joy Kogawa writes, There is a silence that will not speak. Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice … is to embrace its absence .... Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word .... Words, when they fall, are pockmarks on the earth. They are hailstones seeking an underground sea.1

There are truths unspoken and unwritten, meanings not yet discovered, still unformulated. This is what the central character and narrator of Obasan, Naomi Nakane, discovers as she searches for a way of coming to terms with her family’s disintegration and the mystery of her mother’s disappearance at the end of the Second World War. To unearth deeper meanings, she eventually comprehends, one must learn to conduct speaking and listening, writing and reading as quests for the unsayable, for that which lies beyond what humans believe imaginable, beyond the obvious and expected. As Devereux puts it, Naomi must “recover from the ‘amniotic deep’ a ‘freeing word,’ or a language which liberates her”.2 What Kingston allows to be buried by language, underneath an avalanche of words uttered 1

Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1983), New York, 1994, np (emphases added). Cecily Devereux, “The Body of Evidence: Re-Membering the Past in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan”, in Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women’s Writing, eds Coomi S. Vevaina and Barbara Godard, New Delhi, 1996, 23143. And in a comparison of Obasan and Beloved, Grewal notes that “the terrain of both novels is ... how to name that which is both unnamed and unnameable, how to mediate silence and speech, and how to transform wreckage into a body of grace” (Gurleen Grewal, “Memory and the Matrix of History: The Poetics of Loss and Recovery in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, in Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures, eds Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan, Boston, 1996, 142). 2

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thoughtlessly, irrationally, often despairingly, and to devastating effect, Kogawa has her characters embed with great care in silences to protect others from hurt. What is accomplished by Brave Orchid’s and Moon Orchid’s tirades, laments, warnings, and spells in The Woman Warrior, is achieved by the strict abstinence from speech and writing practised by Naomi Nakane’s mother and aunt in Obasan. While rendered unrecognizable by words in The Woman Warrior, truth is made intangible by the absence of words in Obasan. In both novels, signification, of which silence is but one variation for Kogawa, becomes obsolete and demands renewal. For the sake of such renewal the narrators ultimately resort to recording their stories in a language of their own. By writing, they resolve inconsistencies, fill vacancies in the tales they have received, explain to themselves in their own terms what others have been unable to explain to them. Often translation must suffice in the process as a means of approximation to truths too difficult to tell. Indeed, in making bearable what would cause excessive hurt if delivered as raw fact proves a way of reconciliation with the past as well as with cultural difference. To synthesize English and Asian narrative conventions, both Kingston and Kogawa have the English-speaking narrators of The Woman Warrior and Obasan reconstruct from memory and in translation folktales their mothers once told them in Chinese and Japanese, respectively. Remarkably, in each novel one of these tales is about a child living in idyllic seclusion with an elderly couple until the time comes for that child to leave in order to explore and conquer foreign lands. Yet this is already where the similarity ends between Kingston’s use of the tale of the lonely warrior and Kogawa’s way of integrating it in her novel. While in The Woman Warrior, the chant of Fa Mu Lan represents an idealizing account of the heroine’s unparalleled bravery, her stoic endurance of barely imaginable hardships, and her glorious victories won in the disguise of a male, Naomi’s recollections of the Momotaro-story in Obasan remain rigorously limited to the hero’s unencumbered life with “the old old man and the old old woman, white-haired and bent double with age” (O, 66). Moreover, while Maxine recalls the tale of Fa Mu Lan with mixed unease, feeling that it sums up her alienation from her mother, Naomi, in her own retelling of the Momotaro-story, salvages a sense of the harmonious togetherness her mother’s descriptions of the aged couple and their “whispery rice-paper house” (O, 66) would convey.

The Illiterate Daughter

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The act brings back to the narrator of Obasan delicious moments of closeness to her mother, moments she cherishes fondly as a gift, “round and complete as an unopened peach ready for a fresh feasting” (O, 67). Symptomatically, Naomi recalls that, not even when Momotaro had finally to set out on his journey, was the understanding between him and his grandparents spoilt either by sadness or by resentment: ... silence falls like feathers of snow all over the rice-paper hut,” she relates. “Inside the hands are slow .... There are no tears and no touch. Grandfather and Grandmother are careful, as he goes, not to weight his pack with their sorrow. (O, 67)

In Naomi’s shortened version of the Momotaro-story, the hero never returns, nor does there seem to be any urgency for him to do so. After all, unlike Fa Mu Lan, Momotaro does not carry with him, inscribed on his back, the sufferings and expectations of his elders. This leaves him free to travel while the old folks wait, alone in the misty mountains and knowing that “What matters in the end, what matters above all, more than their loneliness or fears, is that Momotaro behave with honor. At all times what matters is to act with a fine intent” (O, 68). The noble discretion of Momotaro’s grandparents, the sense of freedom their stories instil in their grandson, and the faith they place in him that he will never disgrace them strike a chord in Naomi who remarks of her own childhood: I cannot remember that I was ever reprimanded or punished for anything, although that seems strange and unlikely now. The concept that a child could do wrong did not seem to exist. There was no need for crying. (O, 68)

It is the perfect unanimity among Japanese Canadians to which Kogawa here alludes, the affectionate trust of the older members of the immigrant community in the younger generation, and their willing acceptance of their otherness that form the most obvious thematic contrast between Obasan and The Woman Warrior. The reasons for this contrast are not difficult to make out. While both Kogawa and Kingston record the progressive fragmentation of the ethnic communities to which they belong, their own experience forces them

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to understand this fragmentation in completely different terms. Kingston narrates it as a psychologically complex process of cultural assimilation and mutual estrangement. Kogawa attributes it to crude measures of liquidation employed by the Canadian government against its Japanese citizens in reaction to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour. In other words, while Kingston accuses the ethnic community itself of allowing its social fabric to tear under the strain of dislocation, Kogawa blames external forces openly and wholesale for the destruction of her protagonist’s family and of so many other Japanese Canadian families during and after the Second World War. In the context of this specification, cultural assimilation is explored not, as in The Woman Warrior, for its effects on individual immigrants and their families but for how it is itself affected by immigration policies which propagate assimilation as the immigrant’s responsibility, yet prevent such assimilation wherever this seems opportune. This contradiction remains a central theme throughout Kogawa’s novel as it exposes the racist practices assumed by the Canadian government against subjects of Japanese origin in the wake of the events of 7 December 1941. Obasan is an emphatic assertion of Canadianness of these citizens, strategically portraying them as people who have grown up on a daily fare of English literature including the tales of Peter Rabbit, the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Girl of the Limberlost, and The Prince and the Pauper. They are proud owners of King George/Queen Elizabeth mugs commemorating “the royal visit”, who hoist the Union Jack at the top of their gardens, and whose children enjoy making scrapbooks of the Royal Family. The instances Kogawa offers as proof of the loyalty of her Japanese characters to the British Crown form an ironic contrast not only to the charge of collective treason brought against Japanese Canadians. As illustrations of their willing mimicry of a patriotism reduced to the thoughtless perpetuation of colonial clichés, these instances also qualify the subtle ways in which Kogawa’s characters express their national pride in their own words: “I am Canadian”, Naomi, for example, finds written in her aunt’s manuscript. The statement is underlined and circled in red, “so hard that the paper was torn” (O, 47). On the same page she also discovers the following declaration:


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The exact moment when I first felt the stirrings of identification with this country occurred when I was twelve years old, memorizing a Canto of “The Lady of the Last Minstrel.” So many times after that, I repeated the lines: sadly, desperately, and bitterly. But at first I was proud, knowing that I belonged. This is my own, my native land. (O, 47-48)

Aunt Emily’s recollections grow into yet another “canto” or song recounting how she would wave the words “This is my own, my native land” around “like a banner in the wind”, when she was still politically unenlightened, how she would “cling desperately” to them once the war had started, and how the words changed into the question: “Is this my own, my native land?”, after her home had been sold and she herself “re-registered, fingerprinted, card-indexed, roped and restricted”. Even then, she insists, the answer would remain the same: “Yes. It is. For better or worse, I am Canadian” (O, 48). The fact that Aunt Emily’s medium of self-expression is not Japanese but English is not commented upon in Obasan; nor is the circumstance that the primary language of the narrator Naomi is also English and that her tale and, as a direct consequence, the novel Obasan, are conceived in English. It would be wrong, however, to conclude from this that, for Kogawa, the linguistic preference of her characters, and especially of her narrator, is not an issue. Rather the absence of any explicit metadiscursive discussion of the subject needs to be read as a deliberate omission whereby the author strategically evades any definitive renunciation of the Japanese language and, with it, of Japanese traditions. Instead of expressly excluding the possibility of her characters recording their recollections in Japanese from the outset, Kogawa implicitly sustains it for the sake of its deconstruction at the point when the narrative begins to record the gradual disappearance of the Japanese language from its characters’ lives. Japanese words and phrases inserted in the narrative and then translated, phonetically exact transcriptions of the broken and characteristically accented English of the older Japanese Canadians, recurrent accounts of gatherings held in a mixture of English and Japanese may all create the impression of the characters oscillating constantly and automatically between languages. Yet, the bilingual nature of their oral exchanges only belies the corrosion to which the older characters refer implicitly when they remark that the Nisei, the second generation Japanese, are “not very Japanese-like” (O, 48) or

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that the Sansei, the third generation Japanese, have become “so thoroughly Canadian” (O, 100). There are recurrent hints in Obasan that many of the Issei, the first generation Japanese, speak no English at all or not enough to cope with “all the problems and regulations” (O, 113). Their dependence on younger Japanese for translations conveys probably most clearly how redundant their language has become for them as Canadian citizens. To survive in the Canada of the 1940s, turns out to be above all a matter of being able to read all the printed material – newspapers, form letters, documents, and maps – issued to administer and publicize the measures dictated by the Canadian government against its citizens of Japanese descent. Reading, for Naomi’s family, obtains a new, sinister meaning. It is everything but and “Extravagant, playful act whose raison d’être has to be established”. While in Chinese American literature intellectual pursuits and art in particular tend to be represented as “antithetical to the self-justifyingly ‘serious’ activities”, in Obasan reading and writing are also identified as activities serving utterly profane purposes.3 Before the novel can reflect on literature as self-expression, it must deal with these. For, as Kogawa herself declares, “The minority writer’s project begins with the act of defining or naming ‘the enemy,’ the wolves … that you’re supposed to be attacking”.4 In describing the gross perversions to which the Canadian authorities would subject the written word in the name of patriotism, Kogawa exposes a particularly evil side to that enemy, thus “taking into her own hands … the naming power previously possessed only by the dominant group”.5 The wanted lists and blacklists of Nisei marked out for deportation, the signs posted on all highways saying “Japs Keep out” (O, 103), the letters in the papers declaring the Japanese a “lower order of people”, “stench in the nostrils of the people of Canada” (O, 139-40), and demanding that “further propagation of the species” be prevented (O, 116) in order to preserve the “British way of life”, are all illustrations of what Aunt Emily later identifies as the palpable power of print, wondering how she and all the other Japanese could have failed to notice the blatant lies issued by the government, the false promises, 3

Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Culture: From Necessity to Extravagance, Princeton, 1993, 166. 4 Kogawa, quoted in Devereux, 232. 5 Devereux, 233.


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the overtly racist accusations. “What a bunch of sheep we were”, she blames herself retrospectively: “Polite. Meek. All the way up the slaughterhouse ramp” (O, 45). By the time Naomi’s family begin to grasp the seriousness of their situation they no longer possess any effective means of protest. The Japanese newspapers in Canada have been closed down, letters and postcards by Japanese subjects are censored, whole families are moved to places with no provision for the education of their children. “We are the despised rendered voiceless”, Naomi writes, describing their elimination from Canadian culture, “stripped of car, radio, camera, and every means of communication, a trainload of eyes covered with mud and spittle .… We are the scholarly and the illiterate” (O, 132). As the communication within the community breaks down, no incentive to maintain the Japanese language remains. Where there are schools, the adults decide that it would be “unwise” to allow their charges to attend Japanese-language classes. At the same time, they find it wise and politic to hide their children’s too overtly Japanese first names (“Tak for Takao, Sue for Sumiko, Mary for Mariko”) and to shorten “long, unspellable, unpronounceable” surnames. “My books are signed M. Naomi N., or Naomi M.N.”, Naomi explains: “If Megumi were the only name I had, I’d be called Meg.” (O, 241) All this takes place after the homes of the Japanese have been looted and their personal mementos of Japan stolen or destroyed, among them ornaments, musical instruments and scrolls, items symbolizing more than the owners’ attachment to a place, namely, their attachment to something other than a purely British Canadian culture. In correspondence with Kogawa’s understanding of silences, absences, vacancies, and voids not as signs of nothingness but as first manifestations of an imminent process of restoration, replenishment, or completion,6 her narrative swiftly shifts at this point from an 6 Seeing this presupposes a departure from the conventional negative understanding of silence applied, for instance, in Devereux’ reading of Obasan, according to which “silence is denial and amputation, while the finding of voice is the text’s process of remembering” (236). In line with this reading, Devereux perceives the enduring silence of Naomi’s mother as a sign of her erasure. By contrast, Manina Jones at least senses that Obasan “enacts a kind of paradox: it is its own wake, the celebration of a story that is both lost and found” (Manina Jones, “The Avenues of Speech and Silence: Telling Difference in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, in Theory between the Disciplines: Authority/Vision/Politics, eds Martin Kreiswirth and Mark A. Cheetham, Ann Arbour: Mich, 1999, 228). This remains reconcilable with the understanding of silence in Kogawa proposed here, namely not as a suppression, but

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account of what her characters have lost to a description of how they continue life after this loss. “There is a word for it”, Naomi writes in an attempt to give a name to the new life she and her family try to live without all those objects in which their cultural identity used to be encoded. “Hardship” is the word that comes to her mind and that, for Naomi, epitomizes this other life. By “hardship” she means in the first place a life without refinement, without luxury, without the benefits of culture, a life in such squalor and discomfort that it eventually kills the human subject’s responsiveness to such things as beauty, learning, and civility. “Is it so bad?”, Naomi remembers her Aunt Emily, who was spared deportation and forced labour, asking incredulously. “Do I really mind?”, she also asks herself and concludes: “Yes, I mind. I mind everything.” For even in retrospect there is no way of not minding the rawness of the life they were forced to lead, exiled to the margins of the culture in which she had grown up: The flies and flies and flies from the cows in the barn and the manure pile – all the black flies that curtain the windows .... It’s the chicken coop house we live in that I mind. The uninsulated unbelievable thin-as-cotton-dress hovel never before inhabited in winter by human beings .... It’s the bedbugs and my having to sleep on the table to escape the nightly attack, and the welts over our bodies. And all the swamp bugs and the dust .… And the muddy water from the irrigation ditch ... and the tiny carcasses at the bottom of the cup .… Or it’s standing in the beet field .… We are tiny insects crawling along the grill and there is no protection anywhere. The eyes are lidded against the dust and the air cracks the skin, the lips crack, Stephen’s flutes crack and there is no energy to sing anymore .... There are no other people in the entire world. We work together all day. At night we eat and sleep. We hardly talk anymore. The boxes we brought from Slocan are not unpacked. The King George/Queen Elizabeth mugs stay muffled in the Vancouver Daily Province. The cameraphone does not sing. (O, 233-36)

One important discovery Naomi makes as she tries to describe the horrors of her years in exile is that these horrors can be told, that her as a deferral of articulation, as a protective measure chosen to let a story, or history grow with time and give it a chance to be disclosed at the right moment, that is, when it is no longer hurtful. This certainly is the main motive for Obasan’s protracted silence and nowhere in the novel is this criticized as a loss or waste of time.


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language, English, does suffice to capture them, that she herself possesses the capacity to retrieve what she has always believed too unbearable to remember. Yet, while forced to admit the feasibility of a personal history contesting the official stories of forever “grinning and happy” Japanese “evacuees”, she remains convinced of the futility of such an endeavour. The misuses of writing she herself has witnessed during her childhood and adolescence, to her, are only repeated by the “paper battles” fought by Aunt Emily, always “erasing, rewriting, underlining, trying to find the right mix that strikes home” (O, 49), and by people like her aunt, “clack[ing] away at their typewriters, spreading word like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky”, having their desperation gathered “into cool print” by the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians (O, 225). For Naomi, Aunt Emily’s angry writings, “all her papers, the telegrams and petitions”, are “like scratchings in the barnyard, the evidence of much activity, scaly claws hard at work”. What good they do, “those little black typewritten words – rainwords, cloud droppings” (O, 226), she confesses, she does not know. After all, writing cannot undo what happened. It cannot substitute reality. It cannot change the truth but only generate different versions of it. “The words are not made flesh”, she declares: “Trains do not carry us home. Ships do not return again. All my prayers disappear into space” (O, 226). Naomi’s doubts in language as a means of expressing or exorcising the pain she and her relatives had to suffer are enforced by the realization that Aunt Emily’s battles for compensation will never undo the damage caused. Seeing that there is no way of ever redressing completely the injustices done, Naomi has no other option than to renounce Aunt Emily’s policy of verbal protest and to follow the example of her other “obasan”, which is the Japanese word for “aunt”. In contrast to her sister, Obasan has retreated into absolute silence, not, however, out of a “survivalist intention to forget”, nor merely to give herself up to “silent grief”, as Gurleen Grewal suggests.7 The actual meaning of the stoic silence in which Obasan and Uncle have ensconced themselves surfaces when they for once break it and intercept one of Aunt Emily’s tirades by calmly asserting their gratitude, which is a movingly humble gratitude “for life” – even to 7 Grewal uses this term in her analysis of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved to explain Sethe’s categorical negation of the past and compare it to Obasan’s refusal to speak about bygone things (159).

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Canada. “Arigatai. Gratitude only”, the quiet little aunt announces, to which her husband, “who had been listening tensely up to this point”, adds emphatically: In the world, there is no better place .... This country is the best. There is food. There is medicine. There is pension money. Gratitude. Gratitude. (O, 50)

As the unexpected proclamation of the elderly couple reveals, complete abstinence from speech does not mean that there is nothing to say. Grewal quite aptly defines Uncle’s and Obasan’s taciturnity as a “language of silence”.8 Analogously, Devereux proposes reading the figure of the little aunt as the novel’s “eponymous centre” and “primary repository of memory”,9 as “a text upon whom is inscribed a language that must be interpreted”.10 In Kogawa’s own words, Obasan is “the bearer of keys to unknown doorways and to a network of astonishing tunnels ... the possessor of life’s infinite personal details” (O, 18-19). Even if her frail body seems so drained of energy that Naomi feels the time is approaching for her aunt to die, even if her incomprehensible mumbling, occasionally interrupted by incongruous, yet still intelligible remarks, leads her niece to believe that the old woman must be lost in utter confusion, Obasan does not embody total defeat. Her suffering has not, as her niece suspects, turned her to stone. Blinded by her concern for her aunt, Naomi is unable to see that, though seemingly indifferent to Aunt Emily’s efforts to recuperate the past, Obasan is far from indifferent to the past itself. As turns out, she is not as unlike her younger sister as Naomi thinks. The elder of her aunts may have been born in Japan and the younger in Canada, yet they both share the same origin, the same history, the same family name. They are both childless survivors, and devoted aunts of Naomi’s and sisters of Naomi’s mother. As such both feel responsible to protect their niece from the truth about her mother’s disappearance during a visit to Japan in 1945. On this one point the sisters are united in silence. In finally allowing this silence to be broken, they bring about the closure towards which they have both been propelling the narrative from opposite directions. Yet, not even to this end, does Obasan speak up. Instead she has a longstanding friend of the family disclose the secret she and her sister 8

Ibid., 147. Devereux, 238. 10 Ibid., 240. 9


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have been keeping from Naomi. It is the priest Nakayama-sensei who at last reads out to Naomi and her brother Stephen the last letters their family ever received from Grandma Kato in Japan. He has to impart the contents of these letters orally to Stephen and Naomi because they cannot read the Japanese writing on the thin sheets of blue-lined ricepaper kept in two envelopes about as narrow and long as bank cheques. Early on in the novel, Naomi comes across these letters for the first time as she finds Obasan reading them, “holding the magnifying glass about two inches from the sheet” (O, 55). The scene anticipates Naomi’s later dependence on another person to access her own personal history. The idea of people functioning for each other as media through which to attain knowledge about oneself occurs to Naomi when she tries to interrogate Obasan about the mysterious letters. Her aunt says nothing, yet the old woman’s small hand travelling over the table “like an electrocardiograph needle, delicate and unreadable” (O, 55) tells her that there is a truth her prodding questions have failed to elicit. The conception of the human subject as a text to be read, studied, and deciphered and, conversely, of the act of reading as a profoundly intimate exchange between humans is also expressed at a later point in the novel when Naomi recalls her brother imparting to her the contents of a letter from their father: One time Stephen was reading a letter Father sent but I did not know where Father was. The handwriting in the letter was as even as waves along the beach, row on row of neat curls and dots, perfect pebbles and shells on an ordered shore. I could only stare at the waves as Stephen deciphered their code. Father was telling us to be like Ninomiya Kinjiro, to help Obasan, and to study hard. (O, 160)

The reliance of the pre-school child Naomi, who cannot read, on her elder brother to reveal to her the meaning of her father’s handwriting is revoked when the adult Naomi, herself a teacher of English at a Canadian school, listens to her former teacher Nakayama-sensei, who finally answers the question everyone else has always been evading: “What is written?” (O, 279). “A matter of a long time ago”, the priest replies: Senso no toki – in the time of war – your mother. Your grandmother. That there is suffering and their deep love. (O, 279)

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It is not simply the reading-out of some old letters that follows. Along with the words in the grandmother’s letters, what Nakayama-sensei offers is an exegesis by someone whose authority is founded on more than a sound knowledge of the Japanese script, someone capable of discerning when tactful kindness is needed in his reading: He reads the letters in silence once more, then begins reading aloud. The letter is addressed to Grandpa Kato. It is clear as he reads that the letters were never intended for Stephen and me. They were written by Grandma Kato. ... Sensei’s faltering voice is almost drowned out by the splattering gusts against the window. I stare at the gauze-curtained windows and imagine the raindrops sliding down the glass, black on black. In the sound of the howling outside, I hear other howling. Sensei pauses as he reads. “Naomi,” he says softly, “Stephen, your mother is speaking. Listen carefully to her voice.” Many of the Japanese words sound strange and the language is formal. (O, 279)

As always in Obasan, yet more overtly than anywhere else, reading is described as a communal event here. It is neither a solipsistic process nor one that takes place in silence, but an experience that restores the “ethnic ‘we’”, or what Illich and Sanders have termed “the educated community”.11 The mother at last speaks through Grandma Kato’s letters and through Nakayama-sensei’s voice to her children. This is made possible by the priest’s willingness to act as a medium through which the truth contained in the letters can reach his listeners undistorted. Steven’s and Naomi’s illiteracy is not a lonely condition either, but, almost miraculously, the cause of a new togetherness shared orally. In capturing this togetherness, Obasan confers meaning onto scriptlessness as cultural difference potentially capable of occasioning social regeneration. What in the end distinguishes Naomi from Aunt Emily is that Naomi learns to absorb the past as she remembers it with the help of the written evidence she can obtain, whereas her aunt never ceases to try and change it. The difference that ultimately crystallizes between Naomi and Obasan, in turn, is that Naomi does not re-enact her 11

Illich and Sanders, 123.


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mother’s silence about the extremity of her sudden defacement and gradual dying but chooses to translate it, to make finally visible and audible “the cacophony life wrote into [her mother’s] bones” (O, 294). “The letters tonight are skeletons. Bones only”, Naomi concedes, adding: “But the earth still stirs with dormant blooms” (O, 292). While Aunt Emily’s protest remains directed against an anonymous enemy making its appearance in the form of public protests against the Canadian government’s enduring racism, Naomi’s writing is an intensely personal protest against her uncle’s, her mother’s, and Obasan’s silence. “Gentle Mother”, she writes, “we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction” (O, 291). “Let there be flesh”, she pleads: “The song of mourning is not a lifelong song” (O, 295). Her quest for another song, another language than that of silent grief leads Naomi to another form of writing, one readable even by those who cannot read, one that requires not conventional literacy skills but an ability to recognize and decode more basic clues to life’s secrets, a sensitivity to the subtleties of silence, to that which is not spelt out in letters. “Rescuing/writing her maternal and racial past”12 is only one purpose of Naomi’s narration. Another is to rescue a use of language and letters with which she can identify: Father, Mother, my relatives, my ancestors, we have come to the forest tonight, to the place where the colors all meet – red and yellow and blue. We have turned and returned to your arms as you turn to earth and form the forest floor. Tonight we picked berries with the help of your sighted hands. Tonight we read the forest braille. See how our stained fingers have read the seasons, and how our serving hands still serve you. (O, 295)

Not without reason this passage is reminisicent of the ending of Patricia Grace’s novel Potiki. With the direct address to Naomi’s diseased relatives, fashioned as a ceremonious appeal to an imaginary congregation, the novel finally draws attention to itself as Naomi’s poetics put into practice. This poetics is founded on an understanding of creative writing as a way of preserving what less thoughtful uses of the written word destroy. The imagery of the narrator’s hands getting 12 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Japanese American Women’s Life Stories: Maternality in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan”, Feminist Studies, XVI/2 (Summer 1990), 307.

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stained by the juice of the berries growing on what, to her, is ancestral land, suggests her willingness to accept the traces that her past leaves on her. Her body becomes the paper on which her family inscribe their story. Unlike in The Woman Warrior, this inscription is not a painful tattooing, but painless, impermanent, and, most importantly, visible also to the person inscribed. She offers herself as a medium for others and does so, like Nakayama-sensei, humbly but by choice. In the event she assumes not authority over, but responsibility for her family’s history. Her experience of her own dependence on others to read out to her signs of the past has enabled her to understand this fine difference.

CHAPTER NINETEEN GENERATIONS OF ILLITERACY: AMY TAN’S THE BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER

With her vision of a modality of writing different from anything her aunts, her mother, and she herself have experienced, Kogawa allows Obasan to end on a note not at all dissimilar from the tonality in which Kingston concludes The Woman Warrior by revoking the mythical figure of Ts’ai Yen and her “Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”. For the daughters in both novels, a reconciliation of the past and the present, of their Eastern and Western origins, of their mothers’ otherness and sameness ultimately becomes possible. As the daughters gradually come to accept their own hyphenated identities in the process of remembering or rewriting their mothers’ stories, the novels suspend any hard and fast distinctions between Western and Eastern traditions of thinking, Western and Eastern conceptions of truth, Western and Eastern literacies. Indeed, the distinctions between the different cultural backgrounds of the narrator protagonists blur. Their narratives, although conceived in English and containing only translations of Chinese or Japanese words and only descriptions of Chinese (or Japanese) ideographs, turn out to be truly hybrid expressions of their hybrid personae. Amy Tan’s novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter describes a similar development. It recounts the gradual metamorphosis of the youngest of the three female protagonists, Ruth Luyi Young, daughter of a Chinese immigrant to the United States, from a professional ghost writer to a real writer, from a co-author to an author in her own right, from “the small-type name that followed ‘with’”1 on the title page of her publications to the large-type name accrediting authorship to her alone. As in The Woman Warrior and Obasan, in The Bonesetter’s Daughter, the gradual acquisition by the daughter figure of an ability to tell her story in her own terms, in her own language, and according to the writing tradition in which she feels most at home, is contingent on her learning to understand her mother. To this end, Ruth must learn about her mother’s previous life in a culture practically unknown to 1

Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, London, 2001, 37.

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her, but also obtain a measure for her own distance from that culture. The completion of this learning process and the daughter’s emergence from it as a writer is announced at the end of The Bonesetter’s Daughter with the words, Her ability to speak is not governed by curses or shooting stars or illness. She knows that for certain now. But she does not need to talk. She can write. Before she never had a reason to write for herself, only for others. Now she has that reason. (BD, 337)

As a conclusion to Tan’s fictional exploration of the differences between Chinese and American literate practices, Ruth’s final espousal of writing in a creative act of self-expression also marks her acceptance of her indebtedness to seemingly irreconcilable writing traditions. In the event, her grandmother Bao Bomu, of whom Ruth does not even know that she is her grandmother until the end of the novel, is assigned the role of Ruth’s muse: In the Cubbyhole, Ruth returns to the past. The laptop becomes a sand tray. Ruth is six years old again, the same child, her broken arm healed, her other hand holding a chopstick, ready to divine the words. Bao Bomu comes, as always, and sits next to her. Her face is smooth, as beautiful as it is in the photo. She grinds an inkstick into an inkstone of duan. ‘Think about your intentions,’ Bao Bomu says. ‘What is in your heart, what you want to put in others’.’ And side by side, Ruth and her grandmother begin. Words flow. They have become the same person, six years old, sixteen, forty-six, eighty-two. (BD, 338)

Bao Bomu is “an artist, cultured and deserving of respect” (BD, 188). This is how Ruth’s mother LuLing describes Bao Bomu to her daughter and how Ruth images her in her own narrative. The only child of a renowned bonesetter, Bao Bomu is well educated for a Chinese woman of her time. However, the fact that she can read and write fills others with profound suspicion and is seen as the source of the disasters that befall her. Thus when on her wedding day her father and husband-to-be are brutally murdered, she is only grudgingly accepted into her fiancé’s family. They take her in because she is pregnant, but, to avert the disgrace an illegitimate child would bring on them, insist that Bao Bomu should henceforth be known as Precious Auntie, not mother but aunt by name only to LuLing. Bao

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Bomu accepts the arrangement and watches her daughter grow up in the rich family of ink-makers. To be able to stay close to LuLing, Bao Bomu abstains from disclosing the identity of her father’s and her husband’s murderer, who is a friend of the family, until LuLing consents to marry this man. To warn her daughter, Bao Bomu writes to her, yet irritated by her alleged aunt’s interference, LuLing neglects to read her letter. Instead she announces her engagement, thereby driving her mother to commit suicide. Bao Bomu cuts her throat with a knife used for carving inkstones. Clearly, the way Precious Auntie chooses to extract herself from the family of ink-makers, into which she would have been properly married except for her fiancé’s premature death on their wedding day, lends special meaning to her self-destruction as a symbolic renunciation of her literacy. It is not for the first time that Bao Bomu tries to symbolically disown this privilege. Years earlier, after witnessing the brutal murder of her father and her bridegroom, she takes to the same ink-studio in which she is found dead after her dispute with her daughter to poison herself with burning resin. Yet the oily ink, ablaze as “a blue soup of flames” (BD, 167), instead of killing the bonesetter’s daughter, disfigures her face and renders her speechless for life. Defaced and muted, Bao Bomu becomes more than ever dependent on writing for communication and on her “inky hands” (BD, 157) to say what her mutilated mouth can no longer say. These hands yield characters particularly fine and “more like painting than writing, very expressive, running down like cloud-swept branches” (BD, 188). Many years after Bao Bomu’s tragic death, her granddaughter Ruth still marvels at the beauty of her grandmother’s writing, which, however, she is unable to read. From her mother, Ruth learns that to bring forth such writing requires intense labour. This is how Bao Bomu once explained the art of calligraphy to LuLing, at least in LuLing’s reconstruction of the past: Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming at the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step of cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself.

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The Illiterate Returned What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my mind? (BD, 189)

By the end of the novel Ruth seems to have freed herself from the conviction her mother believes to have inherited from Precious Auntie that the actual act of writing must be conducted with great effort so as to cleanse the writer’s mind and heart. Ruth ultimately endorses the view that, under certain circumstances, writing can also be performed with great ease. To her, words at last come “automatically”, “effortlessly”. They simply “flow”. Yet, what at first glance seems to mark Ruth’s break with her cultural legacy is framed as a reappropriation of it. For when Ruth applies herself to the new form of writing she has found, Bao Bomu keeps appearing to her and, inspired by her grandmother’s voice, Ruth seems to reach what LuLing’s first husband, Kai Jing once defined as the fourth and highest level of beauty: We can sense it only if we do not try to sense it. It occurs without motivation or desire or knowledge of what may result. It is pure. It is what innocent children have. It is what old masters regain once they have lost their minds and become children again. (BD, 234)

If one accepts Kai Jing’s comforting idea that the fragmentation of the human mind in old age signifies a return to the purity and ease which perfect the beauty of childhood, then Ruth’s attainment of total effortlessness in writing also marks her becoming one with her mother, whose rapidly advancing dementia frees her from the pain of all too accurate recollection. At the very beginning of the novel, LuLing says to her daughter, “we are the same but for opposite reasons” (BD, 1). Nowhere in The Bonesetter’s Daughter is this observation truer than when, in the novel’s penultimate paragraph, Ruth and Bao Bomu, granddaughter and grandmother, are envisioned as writing together, “about what could have been, what still might be ... of a past that can be changed”. The Bao Bomu Ruth believes to hear, poses the rhetorical question: “what is the past but what we choose to remember?” (BD, 338). At last free like her mother to change the past, to remember selectively, to shape her own story, Ruth can commit herself to fiction writing as a celebration of human subjectivity. She cannot have inherited such ease from Kai Jing, Ruth knows, because he is not her biological father. But this does not


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matter. What matters much more is that her mother once afforded the luxury of erroneously including her in her Chinese past and remembering Ruth as part of her life with Kai Jing. By a mistake never explicitly corrected, Ruth momentarily becomes the archaeologist Kai Jing’s daughter, not only passing on his wisdom of the beauty of effortlessness but ultimately even re-enacting it in her own writing. Because she has learnt to comprehend the relativity of truth and to appreciate the significance of the mind’s slippages, Ruth is able to do so even if Kai Jing is not really her father. “The past, even revised, was meaningful”, she knows in the end (BD, 330). Indeed, the only past available to Ruth is a revised one. Unable to read her mother’s notes herself, she is forced to commission somebody to translate them for her and employs Mr Tang “a survivor of World War Two, the civil war in China, the Cultural Revolution, and a triple coronary bypass” (BD, 287) and a writer whose works, while famous in China, have remained untranslated and unknown in the United States. From the beginning, Mr Tang makes clear to Ruth that he will not “just transliterate word for word”. “I want to phrase it more naturally”, he explains, “yet ensure these are your mother’s words, a record for you and your children for generations to come. They must be just right” (BD, 288). Yet Mr Tang’s interference into LuLing’s “life story”, into “all the things she didn’t want to forget. The things she couldn’t talk about” (BD, 315) is discrete. It remains limited to translations of Chinese proper names into English: “Precious Auntie” for Bao Bomu, “Immortal Heart” for Xian Xin, the name of GaoLing’s and LuLing’s home village, “End of the World” for momo meiyou, the ravine outside the village into which the dead body of Precious Auntie’s was thrown. With the help of an aunt, Ruth can easily construct these translations. Indeed, as the aunt sounds out the originals, they acquire additional meaning. Thus the translation provides not only a record of past events but marks the beginning of Ruth’s reintroduction to the language she failed to learn when she was younger:2

2

Or as Lee puts it, “Translation releases the foreignness, the unfamiliar part within the text/culture itself. It is through the process of mutual translation …. that two cultures or two worlds come into existence and are endowed with new meanings (Lee, 121).

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The Illiterate Returned ‘Bao can mean “Precious,” or it can mean “protect.” Both are third tone, baaaooo. And the mu part, that stand for “mother,” but when it’s written in bao mu, the mu has an extra piece in front, so that the meaning is more of a female servant. Bao mu is like saying “babysitter,” “nursemaid.” And bomu, that’s “auntie.” I think her mother taught her to say and write it this way. More special.’ (BD, 320)

The overall accuracy of his translations confirms Mr Tang’s authority as a mediator between the Chinese mother and her far more American than Chinese daughter. In more than one respect, Mr Tang resembles the figure of Nakayama Sensei whose knowledge of the Japanese script renders him the prime administrator of truth in Obasan. Like Sensei, Mr Tang assumes the role of a kind of father substitute who reintegrates the alienated daughter into her family and, with his disclosure of longstanding family secrets, effects the reunion of a badly fragmented community. As in Obasan, rather than confirming patriarchal hierarchies, the intervention of the male translator covertly ironizes them as the occasion does not fail to remind the reader that full command not only of two different languages but of two different scripts, and, by implication, unlimited freedom to move between two different cultures, are the prerogatives of male members of the ethnic communities portrayed. Conceived as an assertion of female literacy contesting stereotypical associations of female ethnicity with orality and, more specifically, of Chinese femininity with illiteracy, Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiography, in turn, typically does without the idealized figure of the male translator-saviour. In The Woman Warrior, the female protagonists are, literally, left to their own devices – the daughter to the English language and her alphabetic literacy and the mother to her knowledge of the Chinese language and script. In the absence of a mediator, understanding can be accomplished only by abstraction as the female antagonists realize that otherness is an experience they both share. Sameness in difference is also what is achieved in Obasan as Naomi is finally given a way of understanding her mother’s silence even though she knows that silence would never be an option for herself. The translation conducted by Mr Tang in The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by contrast, is to delete differences, to bridge opposites by creating an artificial sameness. Symptomatically, unlike what happens in Obasan or The Woman Warrior, the act of translating from Chinese


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into English is described as a remarkably unproblematic procedure. While Kingston’s and Kogawa’s narratives repeatedly refer to the impossibility of capturing in English idiosyncrasies of either Chinese or Japanese thinking, Tan’s text does not record any truly insurmountable linguistic difficulties comparable to the dilemma of understanding the American “I” or “here” with which the Chinese American schoolgirl finds herself confronted in the Woman Warrior: How could the American ‘I’, assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness: ‘I’ is a capital and ‘you’ is a lower-case. I stared at that middle line and waited so long for its black centre to resolve into tight strokes and dots that I forgot to pronounce it. The other troublesome word was ‘here’, no strong consonant to hang on to, and so flat, when ‘here’ is two mountainous ideographs. (WW, 150)3

Clearly, it is not Mr Tang’s artistry alone that enables him to render LuLing’s account so perfectly accessible in English – like “the magic thread to mend a torn-up quilt” (BD, 297). As Ruth’s tellingly free use of the image of the quilt in connection with her mother’s story suggests, cultural incompatibilities are not Tan’s central concern in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. On the contrary, Tan seems determined to accredit Chinese migrants and their descendants, but also American society a sheer unlimited assimilating capacity. This explains why, even less than in Obasan, the migrant daughter’s fluency in English and her obvious Americanness, her liaison with a Caucasian American and her private and professional involvement in what might be apprehended as a distinctly “American way of life” are never identified as causes of conflict between her and her mother or other members of the family. Compared to the careful balancing Kogawa undertakes of Obasan’s and Uncle’s emphatic gratitude to Canada against Aunt Emily’s anger at her own country and compared to Kingston’s allusions to the discrimination suffered by Chinese immigrants in America, the attitude to the United States Tan represents in The Bonesetter’s Daughter appears to be one of almost unreserved approval. Not only 3

For a convincing reading of this passage, see Quinby, 131-33.

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is America the place to which LuLing and her sister take refuge from civil war, the communists, and predatory relatives, it is also the country Ruth identifies as the only place where her increasingly demented mother can feel truly and safely at home. Nowhere in China, the novel suggests, would Ruth be able to find a place like the paradisal retreat into which she resolves to book her aged mother. Though an asylum for old people, Mira Mar Manor does not look like one. The grand building, flanked by windswept cypress trees, looking out on the Pacific, and surrounded by shady arbours and luxurious gardens with flowers “thorn-free and non-toxic” all of them, “no deadly oleander or foxglove that a confused person might nibble on” (BD, 303), is run by “a polished-looking Indian man in suit and tie” with a warm smile, a British accent, and the looks of a stockbroker. “We’ve tried to think of everything that a family would think about”, this man assures Ruth as he takes her on a tour of his establishment (BD, 302). The novel seems to allow no doubt that Ruth has made the right choice of abode for her mother. After all, the reader learns that Mira Mar Manor employs a nutritionist to make up the residents’ monthly menu according to their needs and preferences, supplies a delivery service from approved restaurants, and offers escorts to monthly medical appointments. It even counts among its residents the manager’s own Jewish mother, a former sociology professor, as well as a former piano teacher. As if it were merely a quaint irrelevancy, the director of this distinguished multicultural setup briefly wonders which Chinese it is, Mandarin or Cantonese, that one of his caretakers can speak. LuLing would in any case be in good company and well cared for, he assures the daughter of his prospective client: one of the cooks is Chinese, too. The prospect that LuLing’s story will be brought to a happy conclusion in the glamorous setting of Mira Mar Manor, creates a sharp contrast to the preceding descriptions of Precious Auntie’s tragic life, of the sad losses LuLing has had to suffer, and of the problems Ruth encounters as she tries to accept her mother’s progressive dementia. Indeed, the contrast is so extreme that the reader is led to expect Tan to ironically implode the all too optimistic vision of LuLing literally and metaphorically ending up as a resident at Mira Mar Manor. Against this expectation, however, Tan enforces her conception of a fairy-tale finale with the disclosure of yet another family secret which, in a manner rather American, at least in Ruth’s


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understanding of the different cultures to which she belongs, resolves all her concerns regarding the financial costs of admitting her mother to a high-class retirement residency. In keeping with Tan’s increasingly overt emphasis on the importance of her characters’ material prosperity, she lets Ruth make the unexpected discovery that, over many years, her mother has been procuring considerable profits by randomly investing money on the stock exchange. The revelation leaves the daughter with no more excuse for delaying her plan to devote herself to writing down her own story as well as that of her mother and her grandmother. Tan’s repeated references to her protagonist’s pecuniary problems as the main reason for her inability to become a serious writer points at a provocatively if not even a cynically mundane view of the writing profession; as does the suggestion at the end of The Bonesetter’s Daughter that the sudden removal of all her financial worries should promptly effect Ruth’s transformation from a ghost writer to an author in her own right. As the novel’s closure implies, the kind of writing which Ruth finally endorses is an indulgence, a privilege of the wellto-do, a luxury that has always been denied to Ruth’s mother and grandmother by the repressive system in which they grew up. Analogously, Ruth’s inability to read the Chinese script is identified as an extravaganza reserved to the spoilt and fanciful. Ruth, we learn, would have had a chance to learn how to read and write in Chinese, but she did not study hard enough. She herself understands retrospectively that had she listened to her mother, she would not be scanning in vain the large calligraphed characters now withholding Precious Auntie’s and LuLing’s life stories from her; nor would she depend on a translator to save these stories from oblivion. In the light of LuLing’s rapid mental deterioration, her daughter’s omission to learn Chinese writing seems a particularly disastrous negligence. The thought that she might have forsaken the possibility of ever knowing her mother’s story leads her to understand that she is no better than LuLing, who, in callously refusing to read Precious Auntie’s letter, unwittingly disowned her own mother and killed her. As if under a curse cast over all of the mythical bonesetter’s daughters, over all of his female descendants, including those geographically far and safely removed from the spirit of their forefather, Ruth re-enacts LuLing’s fatal mistake of ignoring the notes her mother has addressed to her and, with it, the keys to her own Self contained in her family history.

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The reading of The Bonesetter’s Daughter as a story which is not in the first place about the fragmentation of a migrant family, but about two sadly warped mother-daughter relationships is corroborated by the novel’s extraordinary genesis. As Tan has explained in interviews, the character of LuLing is modelled on her own mother, whose real name she did not learn until the day her mother died.4 According to Tan, the shock of the discovery that she had never wholly known her own mother prompted her to retrieve the manuscript of her novel from her publisher and subject it to extensive re-writing, a procedure which took nearly five years. What Tan does not seem to have done in the process is to try to grasp her own longstanding misapprehension of her mother as a consequence of the cultural difference between them. Unlike Kogawa and Kingston, Tan does not consider linguistic and cultural incompatibilities between first and second generation Asian Americans insurmountable obstacles to mutual understanding. For her, comprehending the Other is in the first place a matter of devoted attention, which she posits, throughout The Bonesetter’s Daughter, as a moral obligation. Convinced of the essential intelligibility and translatability of human nature, Tan downplays linguistic and scribal differences as perfectly manageable challenges with which multiethnic societies such as that of the United States are faced. Correspondingly, Tan abstains from reflecting at great length on the complex processes of translation, transformation, and translocation which the representation of Chinese ideographs in Western form entails. In contrast to both Kingston and Kogawa, Tan does not admit to either herself or her protagonist reaching the absolute limits of their understanding of the Chinese Other. Complete epistemological destabilization never occurs in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. None of the narrators or narrating agents in the novel has to resort to a rhetoric of incomprehension, all maintain their self-assured embeddedness in Western narrative conventions. This is also noted by Sheng-mei Ma, who, in a study of The Hundred Secret Senses, exposes Tan’s dependence on nineteenthcentury stereotypes. Ma finds this dependence disconcerting because of the ethnocentric theories of American identity it encourages Tan to perpetuate. These theories, Ma argues, are informed by a late capitalist 4

Jamie Edwards, “Amy Tan: Interview”, Bookreporter.com (18-07-2003): http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-tan-amy-2asp.


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New Age ethos and reflect an “omnivorous appetite of absorbing and commodifying alien cultural elements”.5 Disagreeing with critics such as Malini Johar Schueller, Stephen Souris, and Yuan Yuan, who all insist that Tan, not wholly unlike Kingston, positively recreates a distinctive Chinese American identity,6 Ma contends that Tan does no such thing but “engineers and marionettes New Age ethnicity and primitivism” by rendering the Chinese “simultaneously animalistic and divine”.7 With her “obsessive whitening of characters”, the eager “packaging” of tropes easing the Western reader’s entry into the Orient, and her routine evocation of “fuzziness” in her descriptions of China “for the express purpose of touristic impressions and narcissistic wish-fulfillment”,8 she has the Chinese Other merge into “a generalized, marketable thing”, which loses any particular identity and even its sense of being “out there”.9 This also applies to LuLing’s final consignment to a perfectly selfenclosed universe with which Tan declares LuLing’s ink-making past a closed matter. In so doing, she reduces the Chinese script to an object as anachronistic as the precious oracle bones traded in preCommunist China. Thus defamiliarized or even exoticized, Chinese writing no longer compares to the writing in which Ruth engages. The sort of literary composition for which at the end of the novel Ruth 5

Sheng-mei Ma, “‘Chinese and Dogs’ in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive à la New Age”, MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, XXVI/1 (Spring 2001), 30. 6 Schueller, for instance, praises Tan for subverting East-West cultural dichotomies by “appropriating (and thus questioning) the rhetoric of universalist feminism” (78) and presenting the Joy Luck daughters’ cultural origins as multiple and complex, while Souris focuses on “the potential for active intermingling of perspectives” (Malini Johar Schueller, “Theorizing Ethnicity and Subjectivity: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club”, Genders, XV [Winter 1992], 78, and Stephen Souris, “‘Only Two Kinds of Daughters’: Inter-Monologue Dialogicity in The Joy Luck Club”, MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, IXX/2 [Summer 1994], 99-123). Yuan even goes as far as arguing that Tan, like Kingston, resists “the hyphenated experience embodied by the so-called ‘mestiza consciousness’ and that her writing marks “a transition from the position of separation and alienation to that of accommodation and re-position, initiating a positive self-invention instead of a denial of ethnic origin” (Yuan Yuan, “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts if Kingston and Tan”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, XL/3 [Spring 1999], 302). 7 Ma, 44. 8 Ibid., 31. 9 Ibid., 37.

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repairs to the laptop in her small office and her mother’s artful drawing of ideographs, which the daughter constructs as no more than a mildly alienating childhood memory, constitute conspicuously separate events. Their separateness suggests that Ruth never has to mirror herself in her own mother’s otherness. She never has to cultivate a sense of her own difference from her Chinese mother, not even when confronted with LuLing’s writing. LuLing’s linguistic handicap and alienation in American culture is neither analysed nor reduplicated by Ruth’s inability to read the Chinese script. Ruth’s illiteracy is never really experienced as an illiteracy, but only as a momentary condition of alienation, swiftly resolved by the commissioning of a translator. The contrast to Kogawa and Kingston is fundamental and, indeed, disconcerting. It seems to confirm Rosenwald’s observation that, after several decades of careful sensitization to aspects of non-literacy by ethnic writers, a systematic evasion of these aspects and a strategic belittling of their significance is bound to set in as the insatiable appetite of international readerships for all things outside its own centre causes self-consciously peripheral writers to be swallowed up into the mainstream.

CLOSING REMARKS


The idea for this book sprang from a reading of David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon (1993). The narrative is set in nineteenthcentury Queensland and starts with the sudden appearance of an adolescent boy at an outback settlement. Having lived with aborigines for years, the boy has practically forgotten how to speak English and at first can communicate with the settlers only by way of pantomime. As he watches the local priest and the schoolteacher put down in writing the life story they think he is enacting before them, the boy, who has never learnt to read and write, has the feeling that some magic is being performed. He senses that he is known and that his forgotten former self is about to come back to him: He knew what writing was but had never himself learned the trick of it. As he handled the sheets and turned them this way and that, and caught the peculiar smell they gave off, his whole life was in his throat – tears, laughter too, a little – and he was filled with an immense gratitude. He had shown them what he was. He was known. Left alone with the sheets, to brood and sniff, the whole of what he was, Gemmy, might come back to him, and he began to plot, as he thought of his life out of sight there in the minister’s pocket, how to steal it back.1

Towards the end of the novel, Gemmy decides to return to his previous life in the bush. Yet before he leaves he goes to see the schoolteacher in order to retrieve the papers that contain his story. The teacher knows that the boy cannot read and hands out to him a bundle of exercises he has been correcting. These Gemmy takes with him and surrenders to the pouring rain, watching them turn to pulp and almost ecstatic that his life has at last been set free again by the powers of nature. Gemmy’s error is the reader’s gain. If the schoolteacher had not been able to fool Gemmy, the boy’s story would probably not have been preserved for a later readership, a readership more sympathetic than the xenophobic settlers who remain too scared of Gemmy’s otherness to tolerate his presence amongst them. There is nothing pathetic about Gemmy’s innocent respect for the power of the written word. In fact, his appreciation of writing shames those who, though fiercely defensive about their culture, do not realize they are defiling the fragile civilization they have been trying to build in their strange new homeland when they use their own excrement to smear words of threat and abuse against Gemmy on the walls of his shed. Gemmy’s dignified lack of aggression commands the reader’s 1

David Malouf, Remembering Babylon (1993), London, 1994, 20.

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sympathy and conveys a sense of the pure love for writing to which the author himself seems to aspire. The desire to give value to imaginative writing has been one feature common to all the texts analysed in this book. This does not mean, however, that illiterates have been introduced into these texts merely as foils to artistic longing. Their role has proven to be far more complex than that. One cannot stress this enough, especially since the critical reception of the works analysed has always favoured a somewhat reductionist interpretation of characters unable to read and write. Indeed, the specific otherness of these characters has rarely been accredited sufficient significance to be commented upon in more than a footnote. If the discovery of an enduring fascination among twentieth-century writers with illiteracy has allowed the original idea for The Non-Literate Other to develop into a larger plan, the realization of this plan was crucially complicated by the failure of the academy to take note of this fascination. This failure needed to be accounted for – at least in order to demonstrate the originality of literary representations of illiteracy and to stress the personal commitment underlying them. Mostly, this commitment has had its origin in personal experiences. Many of the authors discussed in this book have taught reading and writing to children or illiterate adults.2 Some have witnessed the transition of their own cultures from orality to literacy.3 Others have testified to the same process from the other side as it were: as representatives of a regime imposing its culture on indigenous peoples against their will.4 Several of them have seen members of families handicapped by their inability to read and write in the script of the society in which they lived, or have themselves experienced situations of such exclusion when faced with the script of their own ancestors.5 Such experiences seem to have instilled in the individual writers a profound sense of gratitude for the ability to express themselves in writing as well as an appreciation of otherness that theoretical discourse rarely exhibits. In fact, the sympathetic understanding this book has traced in so many literary representations of non-literates 2

Notably Bouras and Sapphire, Grace and Kogawa. Erdrich taught poetry and writing to young people. Kingston taught English as a second language at several high schools. 3 Achebe, Grace, and Erdrich, for instance. 4 Greene and Coetzee. 5 Malouf, Bouras, Kingston, Anand, and Wright, as well as Kogawa and Tan.

Closing Remarks

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differs radically from the commitment to the cause of the “subalterns”, “the wretched of the earth”, “the lowest of the low” to which contemporary theorists of culture and literature like to subscribe. As has been suggested in Chapter 4,6 their routine equation of discursive disempowerment with silence, muteness, or voicelessness has prevented a proper appraisal of illiteracy and the social disadvantages caused by it. This equation has effectively distorted the problem above all by deflecting from the impossibility of those without learning to ever participate in the learned discourses through which they are officially defined. Admittedly, the actual exclusion of those unable to read and write is not really remedied by the literary works considered in The NonLiterate Other, since these works, too, address only literates. Yet they take great care not to reduce the illiterates they present to mere objects of inscription. To this end, they strictly refrain from making illiteracy available as an easily comprehensible condition of otherness. Instead of providing detailed ethnographic, sociological, or anthropological information, they call in question the legitimacy of rendering illiterates merely in terms of such information. This questioning is part of a more general criticism of literate civilization for the manifold abuses to which it has put writing. This book has isolated a number of dramatic accounts of such abuses to illustrate how they frame writing as an instrument of most brutal subordination and the illiterate as its defenceless and innocent victim. The mutilation of Sethe’s back by schoolteacher in Beloved, the maiming of the “barbarian” woman’s eyes in Coetzee’s novel, the tragic traumatizing suffered by Moon Orchid in Kingston’s autobiography, the killing of Toko in Potiki, or the atrocities to which Naomi’s family is subjected in Obasan are probably the most shocking instances of perverted literacy the compiled corpus has yielded. These instances both confirm and exceed the warning voiced by Plato, one of the Western world’s first opponents to universal literacy. Plato rejected writing as an artificial memory that would “implant forgetfulness” in the souls of humans. To him, the technology of writing represented “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder”. Accordingly, he refused to see any “true wisdom” in writing but insisted that writing was a mere “conceit of wisdom”, eminently 6

Cf. pages 106-107.

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dangerous should it fall into the hands “not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it”.7 According to Martin, Plato did not categorically oppose writing and really meant his criticism as a hermeneutic appeal for a proper use of literacy. Judging a medium still novel at his time, Plato, naturally, saw nothing paradoxical in the fact that he himself would use this medium to formulate his objections to it. In Plato’s perception of writing, letters were merely ancillary to sounds, and writing ancillary to speech. By inference, anything rendered in writing had first been rendered memorable in speech. That writing in itself could fulfil a mnemonic function was not yet a scenario possible for Plato to envisage. A world in which writing has become practically omnipresent has its own modes of remembering and forgetting and it is these that engage contemporary novelists concerned with the role of graphs and scripts in the making of history. In contrast to Plato, they perceive writing not as an amenity encouraging collective amnesia but as a vital means of counteracting oblivion. For them, it is a way of both preventing and, more importantly even, of reversing processes of forgetting. This is clearly suggested by the title of Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon, which returns to a specific moment of Australian history to salvage a story strategically omitted from official records. Like Malouf’s imaginative reconstruction of Gemmy’s life, the tales of illiterates assembled in this book attempt to counteract the selective remembering of literate societies and to correct their histories. In this respect twentieth-century constructions of the non-literate Other differ most from literary treatments of illiteracy in earlier novels. Though set in the nineteenth century, Gemmy’s story does not compare to that of the illiterate characters one finds in the novels of that time. The point of Remembering Babylon is not to recount how Gemmy becomes an accepted member of the community he enters by learning to read and write. Rather its point is that the narrative retrospectively integrates Gemmy into Australian history without adulterating his otherness or negating the atrocities it provoked. To a similar intent each section of The Non-Literate Other has attributed the special historicity of the analysed works. As has been argued, by including the perspective of subjects culturally marginalized on 7

The Phaedrus, as quoted in Martin, 91-92.

Closing Remarks

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account of their illiteracy, these works have offered completely new versions of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the ascent of communism in China, the abolition of slavery, India’s achievement of Independence, the beginning of colonization in Nigeria, Britain’s role in Africa during the Second World War, the German occupation of Greece, Ovid’s exile in Asia Minor, and even of the succession of Neanderthal Man by homo sapiens. As much as the texts have asked to be understood as journeys into their own pre-literate past, they have lent themselves to interpretations as symbolical journeys into the authors’ preliterate childhoods. In either case a full recuperation of the part of one’s history that precedes literalization tends to be framed as an absolute impossibility. The realization that one’s preliterate past is irretrievably lost once one has learnt to read and write has been one of the most important conclusions at which practically all the fictional explorations of illiteracy considered in The Non-Literate Other eventually arrive. It also accounts for the pronouncedly fragmentary nature of the illiterate’s story, which almost always ends with the non-literate’s premature disappearance from the text. The resultant ambiguity consistently serves to mark the literate’s epistemological defeat – a defeat that is not entirely deleterious. For it at least it facilitates an experience of unknowingness similar to the illiterate’s and thus an identification with the scriptless Other no ethnographic study of illiteracy can afford. At first glance, what Jacques Derrida has written about representations of blindness in painting seems to apply also to literary representations of illiteracy. “Every time”, Derrida observes, “a draftsman lets himself be fascinated by the blind, every time he makes the blind a theme of his drawing, he projects, dreams, or hallucinates a figure of a draftsman, or ...draftswoman”.8 Analogously, one could say that every time a writer is fascinated by a non-literate, every time nonliteracy is made a theme of writing, that writer projects dreams, or hallucinates a figure of a writer. Yet, Derrida’s analogy is not entirely unproblematic. For not once does Derrida reflect on blindness as a serious handicap, never does he concede that it is also a physical disadvantage distinguishing the truly blind from the seeing painter. In 8 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, translation of Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (1990) by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas, Chicago, 1993, 2.

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Derrida’s view, what blind persons portrayed by a painter epitomize in the first place is the blindness that artists feel at the moment when their gaze shifts from the sight to be represented onto to the blank canvass: In truth, I feel myself incapable of following with my hand the prescription of a model: it is as if, just as I was about to draw, I no longer saw the thing. For it immediately flees, drops out of sight, and almost nothing of it remains; it disappears before my eyes, which, in truth, no longer perceive anything but the mocking arrogance of this disappearing apparition. As long as it remains in front of me, the thing defies me, producing, as if by emanation, an invisibility that it reserves for me, a night of which I would be, in some way, the chosen one. It blinds me while making me attend the pitiful spectacle.9

What the Western world’s grand theorist of writing betrays here is his own blindness to the difference that separates those physically unable to see from those momentarily suffering a metaphoric blindness. After all, the painter still sees an actual canvass whereas the vacancy perceived, according to Derrida, by the blind is never anything but a subjective impression no other person can share or verify. Apparently oblivious to this difference Derrida projects his own narcissistic identification with mythical blind men celebrated as seers of another world or time, such as Homer, Milton, Joyce, or Borges, or onto the painters whose works he explores. However, it is doubtful whether these or other painters really share his idea of blindness as a sense of dazzling and overpowering vacancy temporarily hindering, yet eventually encouraging creative urges. Alternatively, their portrayals of the unseeing could also be interpreted as celebrations of seeing, inspired by the recognition of what it must mean to literally see nothing at all. Such a recognition certainly underlies all the narratives studied in this book. For all the identification they may court with the nonliterate Other, they never go as far as declaring the difference between the literate and the non-literate null and void. A sense of the nonliterate’s disadvantage always persists, and it is with regard to this disadvantage that the individual authors define their own position as one either at the centre or on the margin of a minority or mainstream culture and their work as opposing or supporting that culture. Close 9

Ibid., 36.

Closing Remarks

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attention to the way each narrative places itself as writing in relation to the non-literate Other has yielded the structure of the main part of this book: Sections III to VI have suggested a gradual advancement into the foreign matter of illiteracy, a process in which the theme of illiteracy is appropriated by degrees: first, by a self-defensive projection into the distance, then by a description of dramatic moments of contact. Other narratives processing historical instances of illiteracy cultivated within literate societies allow for an even deeper narrative involvement, while representations of new forms of illiteracy may confuse and temporarily invert established notions of sameness and difference. Therefore what this book has derived from the compiled corpus of imaginative writings is a counter-narrative to the forgetting of the illiterate unofficially, yet insistently practised by the academy. It proposes not only the endurance and urgency of illiteracy as a sociocultural problem throughout the twentieth century, but also its variability with time and place. The narrative submitted is a first account with no claim to completeness or finality but devised in the hope that other stories may follow to help elucidate further the neglected matter of scriptlessness. If for no other reason, such stories are needed to cast light on the as yet poorly charted avenues of literate communication connecting the world’s literate elite across vast geographic distances. Without thorough knowledge of these avenues, the terrain of literate culture remains an indistinct wild zone, unintelligible not only to the non-literate outsider. This prohibits a real understanding of the cultural place of modern writers and the reach of their works, which have long ceased to be explicable merely in geopolitical terms. Other terms need yet to be established by way of an exploration of the central role of literacy in the process of European colonization and expansion, of the different ways in which writing (and, more specifically, the Latin alphabet) was appropriated outside Europe, and of the cultural changes that ensued from this appropriation. This could reveal an as yet unacknowledged connectedness between today’s literatures and allow the theorizing of a global print culture held together by affinities across geographic distances potentially more powerful than the ties forged by geographic proximity across racial or cultural discrepancies.

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Thinking of literacy as a global infrastructure would also facilitate a different understanding of the illiterate’s confinement and exclusion. It would sharpen our awareness of literate activity as one of the main determinates of those cultural centres in relation to which contemporary literary and cultural theorists tend to locate cultural peripheries. Although the actual coordinates of these centres have not changed much over the past one hundred years, writers not physically stationed at the capitals of literate production are finding it easier and easier to access them. Their own mobility as well as that of their books has made it necessary to revise our idea of the empire from which they are “writing back”. We are required to see that these writers, while using and keeping alive historical ties, have also transformed these ties into currents along which a kind of writing can flow markedly different from the “political treatises, … acts and edicts, administrative records and gazetteers, missionaries’ reports, notebooks, memoirs, [and] government briefs”10 European imperialists once used to remain connected with their homelands. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin put it, “tools of control” have become “weapons of resistance”.11 Access to these new weapons, however, is not unlimited but continues to distinguish and separate those articulately representing the Empire from those represented by it. Still, there is hope that, for all the scepticism routinely voiced by postcolonial critics and theorists, the modern empire of representers is a beast more benevolent than the one from which it has sprung, and that the representations it engenders are motivated by other than purely competitive urges. The writers studied in this book encourage this hope. In finding new sympathetic ways of dealing with cultural otherness, they prove that knowledge and learning need not always be arrogantly mistaken for proof of an innate superiority but may also be employed wisely – with gratitude, modesty, and tact.

10

Boehmer, 14. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice on Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd edn, New Accents, London, 2002, 217. 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX


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INDEX

Achebe, Chinua, 78-80, 83, 92, 169, 174, 177, 227, 228, 263, 440n; Things Fall Apart, 155, 166, 167, 168, 170, 173, 176, 179, 191-20, 205, 218-20, 223, 224, 242, 261, 294 Africa, 8, 13, 53, 77-91, 173220, 225, 227, 344, 376, 443 African-American, 49, 262, 319-81 Ahmad, Aijaz, 55, 97 Aidoo, Ama Ata, 227 Ajami, 175 Al-cAzm, Sadik, 298, 299 Alkali, Zaynab, 227 Allen, Paula Gunn, 228, 243 Almoravid intervention, 174 alphabet, 14, 29, 32, 105, 142, 169, 393, 394, 410; Arabic, 174; Devanagari, 267n, functions of, 42; Greek, 23, 28, 29; invention of 29, 30, 37; Latin, 175, 226, 401, 445; alphabets in India, 267 alphabetic literacy, 77, 93, 161, 393, 394 alphabetization, 13, 23, 29, 30, 36, 40, 49, 50, 73, 74, 176, 225, 353, 369, 390 (see also literalization) alterity, 91, 97, 119, 274, 387 (see also otherness) Altick, Richard D., 67 Anand, Mulk Raj, 269-74, 335,

440n; Untouchable, 261-63, 270, 273, 274, 275-315, 331-32, 334 Anderson, Sherwood, 341 Anishinabe, 226 Arabian Nights, 301, 302, 310 Arabic, 174, 175, 267, 319 Aravamudan, Srivinas, 298 Aristotle, 20, 42, 48, 202 Arnold, Matthew, 40 Ashcroft, Bill, 51, 95, 96, 97, 446 Asnani, Shyam, 269 Assamese, 267 Assmann, Aleida and Jan, 20, 42 Atkins, J.A., 184 Attwell, David, 216, 217 Australia, 53, 61, 140, 143-46, 153, 161-62, 267, 387 authorship, 127, 250, 314, 375, 425 autobiography, 105, 140, 142, 279, 304, 308, 309, 311, 314, 323, 331, 332, 337, 340, 343, 367, 401, 430, 441 Awoonor, Kofi, 196 Babb, Valerie, 369, 372, 376, 380 Bald, Shuresht Renjen, 292n Bamum, 175, 176 barbarian, 103, 123-33, 140, 150, 153, 156, 157, 160, 165, 167, 170, 205, 207-24,

490


210-20, 224, 294, 409-10, 425, 441 Bardolph, Jacqueline, 223, 300, 301 Barrett, Linden, 319, 321, 325, 342 Barrow, Terence, 248, 250 Barthes, Roland, 20, 21 Batty, Nancy E., 302, 310 Bayer, John G., 49 Baynton, Barbara, 141 Beale, Peter, 4 Beavers, Herman, 371, 376, 379, 380 Beckett, Samuel, 44, 47, 133, 206; Waiting for Godot, 215-16 Begam, Richard, 195-96, 201202 Belanger, Terry, 61 bell hooks, 343, 344 Bell, Bernard, 10, 62, 65, 325, 342 Benesch, Klaus, 49 Bengali, 267, 283 Benton, Richard, 225 Bevis, William, 247n Bhabha, Homi, 53, 89, 90, 96, 97, 351, 352 Bible, the, 48, 61, 62n, 63, 66, 68, 126, 176, 185, 226, 288, 323, 351, 360, 361, 368 Bildung, 281, 353 (see also education) Bildungsroman, 72, 123, 332 bilingualism, 227, 267, 268, 269, 409, 415 binarism, 19, 24, 25, 27, 42, 94, 97, 123, 126, 133, 134

Birch, David, 301 Bishop, Peter, 150 Boas, Franz, 24 Boehmer, Elleke, 15, 446 Boesenberg, Eva, 49 book learning, 5, 68, 69, 135, 165, 166, 182, 262, 282, 285, 335, 337, 359, 363, 366, 385; lending, 62; market, 53, 178 Book Marketing Limited, 12 bookishness, 183, 282 Bouras, Gillian, 167, 261, 440n; Aphrodite and the Others, 105, 106, 139-62, 165, 166 Bradbury, Malcolm, 47 Brennan, Timothy, 40, 93, 299, 301, 302, 303, 308, 313 Brockmeier, Jens, 21, 26, 30, 34, 35, 46, 48 Brogan, Kathleen, 403 Brontë, Emily, 72, 76; Wuthering Heights, 71, 72, 155 Brookner, Anita, 385 Brougham, Henry, 65 Brown, Dee, 228 Brown, M.P., 37 Brownmiller, Susan, 397, 407 Bruner, J.S., 25, 26 Bukere, Momoru Doalu, 175 Bynum, David E., 247n Caliban, 5, 6, 104, 150, 151, 306 calligraphy, 394, 406, 427 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 388 Canada, 267, 387, 416, 420, 432

Index Carey, Peter, 61, 117; Illywhacker, 141 Carmean, Karen, 371, 378, 381 Carr, Helen, 36, 161 Carter, Angela, 105, 107; Heroes and Villains, 103, 104, 106, 123-37, 124, 125, 133, 135, 139, 157, 159, 165, 166, 261 Cary, Joyce, 173 caste, 103, 126, 135, 240, 261, 270, 277-305, 283, 288, 290-91, 295, 297, 271, 319, 331 Cavafy, C.P., 216 Cervantes, Miguel de, 47 Chatman, Seymour, 43, 44, 45 Chatterji, Bankim Chander, 278 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Canterbury Tales, 47, 48, 49 Chavkin, Allan, 223, 239 Cheng, Yuan-Jung, 86, 87 Cherokee Phoenix, 226 Cherokee, 226, 350, 351 Chinese, 29, 387-23, 397-98, 400-10, 412, 416, 425-26, 429-36 Chippewa, 166, 169-70, 22326, 229, 232-34, 237, 239, 242, 244, 247, 261 Chow, Rey, 97, 98, 99 Chrisman, Laura, 94 Christensen, Inger, 47 Christianity, 35, 66, 128, 175, 200, 226, 235, 287-88, 37071 Clanchy, Michael T., 24 Clark, J.P., 227

491 Clifford, James, 81 Cobb, Martha K., 49 Cobbett, William, 65 Coetzee, J.M., 155, 169, 174, 177, 224, 440n, 441; Waiting for the Barbarians, 90, 166, 167, 168, 170, 173, 176, 179, 205-206, 223, 261, 294 Cole, M., 24 colonialism, 15, 51, 77, 78, 81, 88, 105, 176, 270, 276, 344, 385 colonization, 14, 77, 93, 94, 141, 169, 174, 179, 200, 224, 273, 443, 445 Conrad, Joseph, 173, 177; Allmayer’s Folly, 149; Heart of Darkness, 15, 7792, 103, 149 Cornelius, Janet Duitsman, 320 counter-discourse, 95, 160, 357, 445; history, 210, 242, 252, 257, 272, 305, 309, 310, 328, 339, 354, 364, 369, 419 (see also history) Craik, Mrs, 72 Cree, 226, 244 Cressy, David, 4, 31, 49 Crystal, David, 11 Currie, Mark, 45 Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 236, 401 Dauterich, Edward, 347 Davidson, Jim, 146 Davis, Charles T., 332-33 Davis, Marianna White, 252 Defoe, Daniel, 47, 49; Moll

492


Flanders, 67; Robinson Crusoe, 63, 68, 149; The Complete English Tradesman, 67 Deloughrey, Elizabeth, 235 Delrez, Marc, 155 Derrida, Jacques, 20-22, 24, 53-54, 94, 96; Memoirs of the Blind, 443-44; Of Grammatology, 25n, 31-32 Dever, Maryanne, 150 Devereaux, Elizabeth, 223 Devereux, Cecily, 411, 416-17, 420 Devy, G.N., 267-70, 272 Dhar, T.N., 272-73, 275-76 Diamond, Jared, 169 Dickens, Charles, Bleak House, 71, 72, 74-75; Great Expectations, 72, 74, 75, 136, 155; Our Mutual Friend, 71, 72, 74, 155 Dingwaney, Anarudha, 310 Diringer, David, 29 Djenne, 174 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 338 Dovey, Teresa, 207, 218 Dreiser, Theodore, 341 Du Bois, William E.B., 325, 333 Durix, Jean-Pierre, 252 Durkheim, Emilé, 133 Eagleton, Terry, 40, 41, 54 education, 32, 41, 65, 66, 68, 72, 84, 86, 123, 135, 140, 165, 168, 226, 228, 239,

240, 241, 253, 279, 281, 288, 289, 295, 322, 325, 328, 329, 331, 335, 336, 338, 350, 360, 361, 363, 366, 377, 379, 388, 406, 417 Edwards, Jamie, 434 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 24, 61, 62 electronic media, 21, 32, 34 (see also media) Eliot, George, Adam Bede, 72; Silas Marner, 73; The Mill on the Floss, 72 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, 326-29, 331, 342, 367, 371, 377 Emecheta, Buchi, 227 Empson, William, 41 epistemic violence, 13, 54, 59, 115, 206 Epping-Jäger, Cornelia, 42 Erdrich, Louise, 92, 225, 263, 440n; Love Medicine, 16670, 223-24, 226-29, 231-58, 261, 294 ethnocentrism, 25, 26, 123, 155, 200, 435 Eurocentrism, 28, 35, 37, 50, 77, 88, 161, 179, 188, 275, 325 Europe, 13, 28, 31, 36, 41, 51, 52, 62, 68, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 95, 101, 103, 105, 106, 139, 141, 142, 145, 161, 174, 175, 176, 177, 219, 270, 276, 278, 298, 305, 385, 445 European expansion, 61, 223,

Index 319 (see also colonialism) Evans, James, 226 Facey, Albert B., A Fortunate Life, 140-41 Fausset, Jessie Redmon, 325 Ferreiro, Emilia, 12 Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews, 68, 82 Fishburn, Katherine, 331, 332 Fletcher, John, 46-47 Fludernik, Monika, 286-87 folk, 40, 74, 91, 114, 127, 131, 308, 343, 369, 397 folklore, 114, 195, 279, 325, 410 Ford, Ford Madox, 103, 143 Forster, E.M., 278 Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments, 62n Foucault, Michel, 39, 53-54, 94, 97-98 Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career, 141 Freud, Sigmund, 261 Fuchs, Miriam, 235, 236, 237 Gaines, Ernest J., 262; A Lesson Before Dying 263, 367-81 Galton, Francis, 348 Gandhi, Mahatma, 262, 275, 276, 277, 280, 282, 289, 290, 293, 295 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 319, 324, 325, 344 Gaudet, Marcia, 377 Gaur, Albertine, 28, 30, 34, 37, 66, 175, 392

493 Gegenüber, 105, 119 George, C.J., 275, 278, 280, 290, 292, 293 Gernet, Jacques, 393 Gibbins, Christopher, 298 Gikandi, Simon, 192, 199, 200, 201 Gladstone, William, 66 Glenn, Ian, 81 global dissemination of English, 52; of literacy, 29, 385; print culture, 12, 77, 445; printscape, 54 globalization, 12, 29, 37, 53, 54, 55, 56, 93, 269, 385, 445, 446 Goellnicht, Donald C., 401n Goetsch, Paul, 32, 41, 42, 43, 49, 74 Goldie, Terry, 37, 229 Golding, William, 123, 125, 130; Lord of the Flies, 106; The Inheritors, 103-104, 106, 107, 109-21, 127, 131, 139, 140, 160, 165, 166 Goldsmith, Oliver, She Stoops to Conquer, 67 Goodheart, Eugene, 86 Goody, Jack, 23, 27, 29, 32 Gordon, Elizabeth, 225, 252, 281 Gothic, 345, 358, 362 Gough, Kathleen, 23n Grace, Patricia, 92, 169, 191, 225-44, 263, 440n; Potiki, 166-68, 170, 223-24, 22729, 231-58, 261, 294, 423, 441 Granta, 267n

494


graphein, 14, 25 graphocentrism, 27 Grass, Günter, The Tin Drum, 301 Greene, Graham, 169, 184, 261, 440n; Journey Without Maps, 181; The Heart of the Matter, 166-68, 173-74, 176, 179, 181-90, 191, 202, 205, 206, 218, 219, 220, 223, 294 Gregor, Ian, 115, 116, 121 Grewal, Gurleen, 411, 419, 420 Griem, Julika, 79, 80, 83 griot, 194 Groß, Konrad, 49n Gutenberg, Johannes, 30, 32 Haarmann, Harald, 37, 392 Haggard, Henry Rider, 74 Hakuta, Kenji, 388 Halifax, John, 72, 184 Hallab, Mary, 132 Hamilton, Cynthia S., 324, 345 Hampson, Robert, 78, 84 Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, 72; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 73 Harris, Roy, 22, 37 Harris, Trudier, 319, 349, 35556 Hausa, 175 Havelock, Eric A., 23, 25 Hawlin, Stefan, 104 Herbert, Xavier, Capricornia, 141 Hindi, 267 Hinduism, 276, 277, 279, 280,

281, 284, 290, 297 historicity, 14, 30, 60, 140, 442 historiography, 92, 121, 123, 160, 217, 275, 311, 320 history, 14, 95, 139, 142, 159, 160, 187, 228, 233, 263, 307, 309, 340, 354, 356, 357, 364, 369; and writing, 26, 51, 92, 105, 127, 149, 192, 200, 214, 218, 223, 247, 271, 311, 442 Homer, 23 Houston, R.A., 64 Huggan, Graham, 51, 54n, 95, 97, 174n, 207n, 217n, 300, 314 Hughes, Ted, 117 Huntley, E.D., 406 hybridity, 96, 97, 98, 106, 137, 162, 177, 227, 268, 274, 286, 287, 297, 299, 300, 387, 392, 395, 401, 405, 425 hybridization, 235, 269, 272, 342, 347 Igbo, 166, 169-70, 173, 176, 179, 192-93, 219, 223-24, 261 Illich, Ivan, 24, 32, 35, 47, 48, 49, 153, 250, 422 illiteracy, 3, 4, 15, 19, 21, 29, 31, 33, 37, 40, 50, 59, 61, 67, 77, 92, 168, 185, 263, 279, 282, 294, 303, 308, 312, 349, 367; definition of 8-10, 19, 36, 52, 96, 345, 363; discourse of, 7, 13, 14, 19, 21, 24, 25, 31, 35, 40,

Index 61, 134; of the reader, 236; rates, 7, 8, 11, 177, 267; vs. literacy, 9, 36, 165 (see also non-literacy, non-writingness, and scriptlessness) illiterate, the, 45, 64, 92, 100, 305; as Other see nonliterate Other; in Australian literature, 141-42; in nineteenth-century literature, 70-86, 155 Imhof, Rüdiger, 47 immateriality of language, 22, 41, 46 imperialism, 51, 74, 78, 80, 86, 90, 97, 105, 145, 179, 207, 235, 271 (see also colonialism and European expansion) inarticulateness 250, 409 (see also muteness, silence, speechlessness, and voicelessness) India, 12, 13, 23, 29, 53, 54, 264, 265-315, 443 indigenous culture, 179, 22326, 242, 274; literacy, 22627, 242; orality 179, 224, 242; societies, 13, 31, 166, 227, 231, 440; writing in English, 228, 229, 235, 236 (see also native) ink, 4, 126, 154, 329, 348, 353, 386, 391, 398, 399, 403, 427, 436; making, 348, 353, 391, 427, 436 Innis, Harold, 23 invisibility, 118, 234, 239, 262, 319, 401, 403, 444

495 Irele, F. Abiola, 177 irony, 68, 71, 73, 85, 95, 113, 115, 126, 127, 130, 134, 135, 146, 149, 167, 169, 170, 181, 190, 199, 200, 202, 205, 206, 210, 212, 237, 240, 241, 273, 279, 283-88, 292, 312-15, 336, 348, 351, 356, 362, 370, 374, 377, 378, 380, 402-03, 407, 414, 430, 433 Iser, Wolfgang, 44 Islam, 174, 279, 297, 298, 299, 300 Islam, Syed Manzurul, 300, 305n Iyer, Pico, 271n Jablon, Madelyn, 345 Jackson, Thomas H., 50n Jacobs, Connie A., 224, 228 James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw, 73 JanMohamed, Abdul, 155, 178-79, 191-92, 201 Jaskoski, Helen, 233 Jaynes, Julian, 23 Johnson, James Weldon, The Autobiography of an ExColored Man, 338 Johnston, Arnold, 106n Jolly, Roslyn, 150 Jones, Manina, 417n Joyce, James, 173, 177n, 292, 444; Ulysses, 47, 292n, 301 Judy, Ronald A.T., 319n Kafka, Franz, 215; The Castle, 339, 340

496


Kalantzis, Mary, 162 Kannada, 267n Kashmiri, 267 Kaufman, Paul, 63 Keehnen, Owen, 367, 368 Keown, Michelle, 227n, 229n Kermode, Frank, 110, 114 Khatibi, Abdelkébir, 298 Killam, G.D., 196n Kingston, Maxine Hong, 92, 386, 387, 389, 432, 434, 435, 436, 440n, 441; The Woman Warrior, 387, 39091, 392, 395, 397-410, 41114, 424, 425, 430-31 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 115, 116, 121 Klooss, Wolfgang, 191, 200 Knights, L.C., 41 Knudsen, Eva Rask, 224, 225, 235, 242, 248, 250, 251 Koch, Peter, 43 Kogawa, Joy, 387, 391-92, 395, 425, 431-32, 434, 435, 436, 440n; Obasan, 387, 391, 392, 395, 401, 411-14, 425, 430-32, 441 Kong, Belinda Wai Chu, 391 Kraft, Marion, 343, 344 Kreiswirth, Martin, 417 Krishan Chander Azad, 290 Krupat, Arnold, 247 Künstlerroman, 332 Kuo, Helena, 390n Lacan, Jacques, 96 Latin, 4, 28, 83, 147, 157, 158, 175, 226, 445 Lawson, Henry, 141

Le Comte, Edward, 49n learned elite, 4, 133 learnedness, 89, 326, 329, 347 learning, 26, 50, 55, 74, 89, 118, 126, 132, 135, 136, 145, 167, 192, 232, 240, 252, 262, 264, 277, 278, 285, 289, 291, 292, 293, 302, 319, 323, 322, 325, 328, 337, 342, 348, 353, 360, 361, 364, 365, 366, 370, 372, 378, 380, 387, 398, 406, 426; lack of, 48, 74, 294, 297, 302, 328, 375 Leavis, F.R., 41, 83 Lee, Ken-fan, 105, 389, 392, 398, 401, 402, 404, 430 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 23 lettered, 4, 6, 9, 69, 149, 313, 354 (see also literate) letters, 75, 306, 344, 357, 442; images of, 283, 298, 327, 355, 360, 397 letter-writing, 61, 68, 149, 167, 182, 183, 339, 351, 354, 368, 373, 377, 391, 397, 417, 421, 422, 423, 427 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 24, 31, 133; Tristes Topiques, 25 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 24 Lewis, Sinclair, 341 Li, David Leiwei, 401, 404 libraries, 30, 62, 71, 124, 136, 159, 167, 183, 340 Lidinsky, April, 352, 365 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 423 Lindfors, Bernth, 178n Ling, Amy, 390, 403 literacies, 10, 14, 34, 37, 48,

Index 49, 70, 72, 226, 250, 282, 294, 300, 385, 388, 425 literacy, 4, 9, 10, 22, 35, 49, 88, 89, 103, 105, 139, 166, 167, 169, 175, 176, 179, 190, 223, 224, 226, 241, 242, 254, 300, 327, 335, 338, 342, 350, 361, 363, 366, 370, 372, 380, 385; alphabetic, 13, 24, 30, 33, 50, 93, 224, 392, 394, 430; and slavery, 320, 322; and the literary text, 60; Anglophone, 406; as a global infrastructure, 446; as otherness, 104, 147; black literacy, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 326, 347, 367, 369; conventional, 350, 423; critique of, 366, 427, 441; discourse of, 28, 36, 41, 64, 67, 154, 326; dominant, 319, 327; Eastern, 314; female, 430; forbidden, 263, 341; functional, 9, 10; high, 10, 43, 54, 79, 84, 86, 91, 99, 120, 191, 228, 244, 254, 324, 344, 373, 385; indigenous, 226, 242; Islamic, 300; limitations of, 76, 99, 100, 219; mass, 15, 61, 65, 70, 91, 103, 175, 321; oral, 224; partial, 4, 63, 64, 140, 150, 327, 354; rates, 8, 11, 15, 31, 49; rudimentary, 267, 322, 353; skills, 4, 7, 9, 10, 19, 34, 35, 69, 249, 322, 339, 350, 353, 370,

497 371, 375, 377, 379, 380, 394, 423; standards, 10, 33, 39, 48, 84, 301; understanding of, 9, 55, 149, 227, 342; universal, 19, 22, 41, 76, 141, 294, 441; uses of, 227; vs. orality, 25, 26, 28, 35, 42, 43, 136, 224, 342, 343, 344, 347, 400; Western, 49, 166, 169, 223, 224, 254, 300; white, 237, 249, 351, 358, 363 literalization, 8, 11, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36, 46, 49, 65, 71, 72, 75, 77, 91, 141, 167, 169, 170, 177, 197, 225, 226, 262, 263, 284, 290, 291, 304, 319, 338, 341, 359, 363, 364, 369, 370, 373, 375, 385, 440, 442, 443 literate authority, 93, 309; civilization, 7, 19, 35, 88, 91, 103, 155, 161, 166, 183, 441; communication, 170, 354, 445; culture, 7, 11, 13, 15, 19, 23, 24, 26, 30, 32, 34, 47, 55, 60, 63, 72, 74, 77, 84, 90, 91, 93, 106, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 162, 191, 205, 218, 223, 224, 242, 262, 297, 319, 324, 326, 327, 336, 349, 353, 354, 363, 365, 367, 387, 445; discourse, 51, 160; elite, 11, 14, 97, 445; knowledge, 123, 385; practices, 9, 23, 43, 46, 86, 124, 179, 183, 282, 320, 391, 426; societies, 10, 26, 35,

498


37, 41, 74, 139, 248, 249, 331, 354, 442, 445; thinking, 7, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 43, 46, 59, 71, 110, 120, 121, 149, 176, 179, 188, 190, 219, 228, 312, 328 literate, the, 26, 35, 43, 55, 71, 73, 74, 76, 99, 100, 129, 150, 155, 162, 165, 168, 170, 174, 191, 217, 218, 223, 237, 282, 294, 324, 440, 441 literati, 40, 262 litocracy, 55, 56, 123 Locke, John, 273 Lodge, David, 181 Lofton, Ramona (see Sapphire) Logan, Robert K., 36n Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 184 Loomba, Ania, 39, 51, 53, 94 Lord, Albert Bates, 23, 106 Lovesey, Oliver, 178n Lurija, Aleksandr, 23 Lyons, Paul, 154, 155 Ma, Sheng-mei, 155, 207, 300, 435-36 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 184 MacKenzie, Craig, 50n Mahoney, Elizabeth, 123 Mailer, Norman, 49n Malamet, Elliott, 182 Malayam, 267n Mali, 174 Malouf, David, 167; An Imaginary Life, 105-106, 13962, 165, 166, 261; Re-

membering Babylon, 105, 155, 439-40, 442 Mangan, James Clarence, 184 Manguel, Alberto, 30 Mansfield, Nick, 150n Maori, 166, 169, 170, 223, 225-27, 229, 231-58, 261; Renaissance, 223n; woodcarving, 248, 249, 250, 254, 255 Marais, Mike, 155, 207n Marathi, 267n marginality, 91, 103, 185, 238, 263 marginalization, 52, 99, 227, 333, 343, 354 Margolies, Edward, 331, 332, 333 Martin, Henry-Jean, 4, 37, 62, 63, 65, 86, 87, 149, 393, 394, 405, 417, 442 Marxist, 94, 97, 178, 290 master culture, 77, 223, 229, 249, 319, 363; language, 36, 53, 274 Masters, Edgar Lee, 341 materiality of texts, 16, 23, 44, 69, 254, 304, 391 May, Brian, 311 McCarron, Kevin, 104, 120 McIntosh, Carey, 61-63 McLuhan, Marshall, 22, 24, 30, 32, 33, 44, 59, 176, 251 Meaney, Gerardine, 123, 130, 133 media, mass, 299; other, 21, 22, 32, 34, 46, 250, 299, 322, 345, 387, 421 Mencken, H.L., 341

Index Mende, 168, 169, 175, 176, 184 Merivale, Particia, 215 meta-discourse, 46, 48, 120, 258, 269, 372, 386 metafiction, 14, 15, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 56, 90, 92, 104, 160 metafictional resourcefulness, 14, 50 metropolitan intellectual, 54, 55, 314 Michel-Michot, Paulette, 155 Middle Ages, 28, 31 migration, 13, 140, 141, 144, 161, 300, 340, 387, 388, 389, 390, 392, 395, 397, 400, 401, 402, 403, 409, 413, 414, 425, 431, 432, 434 Miller, Christopher, 178 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 73 mimetic, 45, 48, 76, 258, 301, 304, 345 mimicry, 95, 241, 286, 337, 414 Mistri, Rohinton, 271 Mitchell, David, 236 Mongia, Padmini, 51, 96 More, Hannah, 72 Morgan, Sally, 141 Morgan, Sally, My Place, 141 Mori, Aoi, 355n Morrison, Toni, 92, 324, 326; Beloved, 261, 262, 263, 344, 345, 347-66, 367, 369, 371, 380, 411, 419, 441; Jazz, 347

499 Mphalele, Esk’ia, 227n Mudford, Peter, 189 Müller, Anja, 123 Muslim, 174, 185, 298, 299, 300, 313 (see also Islam) muteness, 15, 53, 99, 179, 206, 207, 409, 441 (see also inarticulateness, silence, speechlessness, and voicelessness) myth, 32, 161, 215, 228, 298, 349 mythology, 194, 232, 252, 254 Naipaul, V.S., 271 naming 124, 129, 136, 416 Narayan, R.K., 271, 273, 286n narration, 43, 45, 47, 50, 71, 83, 91, 105, 195, 214, 235, 243, 301, 303, 310, 312, 343, 385, 423, 435 narratology, 14, 42, 43 Nash, Ronald H., 10n Nasta, Susheila, 276 nationalism, 39, 40, 80, 271, 272 native, 74, 78, 126, 166-68, 173, 174, 179, 188, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 219, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 233, 234, 236, 238, 239, 242, 243, 247, 248, 257, 263, 268, 287 (see also aborigines and indigenous culture) Native American, 224-47; Renaissance, 223n Naumann, Michel, 209, 210 Nazareth, Peter, 78

500


Needham, Joseph, 393 Neilsen, Philip, 143 New Zealand, 13, 37, 53, 22127, 248 Ngugi, wa Thing’o, 177, 227n; A Grain of Wheat, Devil on the Cross, 178n; Decolonising the Mind, 95, 175, 177n; Petals of Blood, 17792 Njoha, King of Cameroon, 175 non-alphabetic thinking, 59; writing, 36, 392 non-literacy, 105, 142, 264, 335, 363 (see also illiteracy, non-writingness and scriptlessness) non-literate culture, 23, 24, 191, 218, 223, 360; Other, 15, 16, 52, 59, 76, 77, 78, 91, 92, 93, 100, 106, 107, 131, 154, 155, 162, 165, 188, 218, 261, 262, 305, 306, 309, 385, 442, 443, 444 (see also Other, the); otherness, 15, 35, 55, 59, 92, 100, 123, 162, 274, 385; thinking, 23, 52, 59, 71, 313, 314, 343, 350 (see also oral) non-writingness, 37, 104, 140, 168 Nsibidi, 176 Naipaul, V.S., 271 Oesterreicher, Wulf, 43 Ogundele, Wole, 177n Ojibwe, 226 Oji-Cree, 226

Okara, Gabriel, 227n Oldsey, Bernard S., 114n Olson, David R., 8, 9, 10, 11, 21, 24, 25, 49 Ong Walter, 23-29 32, 42, 59, 153 oracity, 170 oral culture, 4, 26, 28, 29, 74, 176, 198, 219, 320, 358, 365; literature, 42, 50, 227; narration, 83, 90, 91, 243; societies, 13, 26, 27, 151, 178; traditions, 28, 43, 166, 176, 200, 203, 229, 343 oralities, 43 orality, 6, 14, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 35, 41, 42, 43, 45, 49, 52, 59, 79, 84, 88, 91, 92, 94, 136, 169, 170, 173, 176, 179, 187, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199, 201, 224, 242, 250, 263, 293, 319, 325, 342, 343, 344, 347, 354, 363, 365, 366, 369, 400, 430, 440; vs. literacy (see literacy vs. orality) Oriya, 267n Orwell, George, 278 Oster, Judith, 387n Other, the, 7, 52, 54, 56, 77, 79, 80, 89, 90, 95, 96, 100, 106, 118, 119, 120, 121, 130, 134, 139, 152, 154, 160, 188, 190, 191, 207, 210, 218, 219, 262, 273, 356, 386; from the literate’s point of view, 94, 97, 150, 154, 206, 216, 217, 262;

Index inscription of, 211, 212; knowledge of, 149, 150 Othering, 15, 74, 94, 95, 96, 98, 139, 173, 179, 207, 326, 363 otherness, 24, 35, 77, 91, 186, 261, 386, 387, 446 (see also non-literate otherness and alterity) Owens, Louis, 242, 243 pakeha, 227, 231, 241, 249, 256 Palmer, Eustace, 196n Papastergiadis, Nikos, 158n paper, 3, 20, 25, 30, 53, 65, 68, 74, 84, 85, 98, 126, 153, 160, 168, 182, 185, 253, 254, 283, 348, 350, 351, 357, 360, 364, 365, 366, 379, 386, 392, 394, 397, 398, 403, 412, 413, 414, 419, 421, 424; consumption, 62 papers, 63, 168, 183, 278, 321, 322, 339, 397, 402, 416, 419, 439 Parrill, William, 368 Parry, Benita, 23, 207 Parry, Milman, 23 Pathak, R.S., 271 Paul, Premina, 295 Peach, Linden, 106, 124, 126, 348, 352n, 354, 356n, 358n Pecora, Vincent, 84 Perry, John Oliver, 267 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 65 Peter, John, 114

501 Peterson, Nancy J., 228 Phillip, Arthur, 143 phonetic, 30, 32, 195, 392, 395, 403 phonocentric, 14, 21, 27, 42, 49, 99, 391 Pitman, Benjamin, 223n Pittman, Barbara, 236, 237, 376 Plato, 23, 48, 441; Phaedrus, 442 Plutarch, Lives, 73 Postman, Neil, 32, 33, 298 post-structuralism, 14, 42 Pratt, Mary Louise, 94 preliterate, 19, 88, 111, 115, 120, 159, 169, 251, 303, 344, 346, 385, 443 Prichard, Katherine Susannah, Coonardoo, 141 primitive, 24, 25, 27, 67, 80, 124, 150, 154, 160, 251, 321, 348 primitives, 126, 202 (see also barbarians) primitivism, 24, 325, 435 print culture, 22, 30, 61, 62, 63, 70, 73, 77, 445; genre, 48, 92 printed matter, 63, 183, 283, 350, 416 printing, 4, 32, 49, 61, 62, 63, 64, 175 Punjabi, 267, 279 quest, 249, 277, 281, 288, 295, 297, 321, 326, 359, 385, 423 Quinby, Lee, 401, 431

502


Rabine, Leslie W., 404 Rainwater, Catherine, 237n, 246n Rao, Raja, 271 Ratheiser-Baumgartner, Ulla, 191 Ray, Martin, 86, 87 readership, 11, 12, 42, 44, 48, 61, 65, 70, 192, 217, 268, 299, 300, 410, 436, 439 reading, 33, 41, 44, 61, 63, 64, 70, 182, 193, 195, 201, 208, 214, 215, 267, 323, 339, 341, 416, 421, 422; and writing, 5, 69, 148, 298, 323, 394, 411, 416, 440 Reid, E. Shelley, 243 religion, 35, 195, 198, 200, 249, 269, 276, 285, 290, 297, 298, 300, 319 Renaissance, 61, 223, 227, 298, 325, 342 representation, 7, 15, 20, 22, 24, 30, 51, 54, 56, 59, 76, 77, 87, 97, 99, 100, 112, 115, 117, 119, 121, 132, 133, 142, 145, 151, 155, 179, 200, 208, 321, 331, 393, 398, 435, 440, 443, 445, 446 representer, 54, 99, 446 Rhydwen, Mari, 27, 29, 36 Richards, I.A., 41 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 68 Ricoeur, Paul, 299 Riemenschneider, Dieter, 270, 277, 281 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 44,

45 Roberts, Peter A., 61, 319 Robertson, Roland, 54 Rody, Caroline, 347, 352 Roman Empire, 140, 145 Romance fiction, 124 Romanticism, 273, 308, 325, 345 Roosevelt, Theordore, 387n Rosenwald, Lawrence, 387, 388, 436 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 65, 206, 273; Émile, 123 Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, 11, 22, 37 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 320 Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, 239 Rushdie, Salman, 40, 271, 272; Midnight’s Children, 26163, 270, 273-74, 297-315; The Satanic Verses, 298, 299, 300, 301 Russ, Joanna, 133n Sabaeans, 175 Sage, Lorna, 104, 105, 106, 107 Said, Edward, 78n, 80n sameness, 16, 99, 119, 217, 242, 278, 286, 381, 406, 425, 431, 445 Sanders, Barry, 24, 32, 33, 35, 47, 48, 49, 132, 153, 250, 422 Sanders, Joe, 132 Sands, Kathleen M., 228, 236 Sanskrit, 267 Sapphire, 440n; Push, 261,

Index 263, 367-75 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 227n Sarris, Greg, 246 Sarshar, Ratannath, 278 Saussure, Ferdinand, 20 savage, 6, 24, 25, 68, 73, 83, 86, 88, 123, 128, 129, 149, 150, 154, 155, 165, 205, 217, 325, 351, 410 savageness, 133, 157, 308 Schafer, Elizabeth, 182, 189, 190 Scheffel, Michael, 47, 48 Schneider, Lissa, 245 Schofield, R.S., 67 Scholes, Robert, 50 school, 8, 11, 31, 33, 62, 63, 66, 67, 71, 72, 84, 125, 141, 152, 168, 175, 198, 226, 239, 240, 241, 253, 261, 277, 278, 279, 289, 328, 331, 334, 336, 367, 371, 377, 378, 379, 393, 397, 407, 417, 421, 440 schooling, compulsory, 15, 66, 226; free, 30, 66, 70 Schueller, Malini Johar, 435 Schweizer, Bernard, 188n Scott, Sir Walter, 74-76, 91, 376; Ivanhoe, 72; The Antiquary, 74 scribe, 16, 90, 141, 147, 165, 166, 168, 192, 217, 278, 279, 309, 313, 339, 393, 401 Scribner, Sylvia, 24 script, 10, 14, 19, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 42, 50, 52, 59, 103, 129, 175, 176, 217,

503 226, 267, 313, 373, 385, 386, 387, 390, 392, 393, 394, 395, 398, 401, 405, 407, 422, 430, 433, 436, 440, 442 scriptlessness, 7, 33, 35, 36, 37, 52, 59, 61, 79, 88, 91, 104, 135, 140, 142, 152, 162, 178, 224, 231, 263, 270, 303, 313, 385, 422, 445 scriptures, 226, 289 Sealy, Allan, 271 Sequoyah, 226 Seth, Vikram, 271 Shah, Syed Waris, Hir and Ranjah (Heer Ranjha), 279 Shakespeare, William, in Greene, 185, 189-90; Coriolanus, 189; Cymbeline, 5; Henry IV, Part One, 189; King Henry the Sixth, Part Two, 4; Much Ado About Nothing, 4; Romeo and Juliet, 3; The Tempest, 5, 6, 104, 150, 151, 306 Shakinovsky, Lynn, 49n Shan, Te-hsing, 388, 390 Shell, Marc, 387, 388 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frankenstein, 72, 73, 149, 155 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The Rivals, 67 Shirali, K.A., 25 Shohat, Ella, 387 Showalter, Elaine, 300 sign, 20, 22, 44, 62, 67, 82, 89, 103, 105, 120, 127, 142,

504


143, 147, 152, 153, 158, 162, 169, 179, 192, 193, 201, 211, 216, 224, 229, 232, 244, 251, 283, 284, 286, 288, 326, 348, 350, 355, 356, 357, 363, 373, 377, 386, 392, 394, 398, 402, 416, 417, 424 silence, 6, 15, 53, 79, 90, 98, 135, 146, 147, 158, 179, 186, 187, 194, 195, 206, 207, 208, 220, 250, 276, 280, 356, 361, 404, 408, 409, 411, 412, 413, 417, 419, 420, 422, 423, 431, 441 (see also muteness, speechlessness, and voicelessness) Sindhi, 267n Skinner, John, 52, 53, 227, 267 Skuttnab-Kangas, Tove, 388 slave narrative, 319, 323, 324, 345, 347, 353, 358 small population cultures, 229 Smith, Bruce R., 6, 7 Smith, Grahame, 183 Smith, William H., 31n, 49, 67n, Souris, Stephen, 435 Southern Europe, 105, 142 Soyinka, Wole, 177, 227 Spear, Hilda D., 103 speech, 10, 14, 20, 21, 22, 24, 41, 42, 43, 44, 78, 83, 90, 92, 94, 97, 99, 136, 159, 194, 200, 207, 257, 258, 282, 289, 290, 293, 295, 307, 325, 336, 343, 344, 354, 386, 393, 394, 399,

411, 412, 420, 442 speechlessness, 15, 53, 88, 92, 98, 99, 207, 409 (see also muteness, silence, and voicelessness) Spencer, Herbert, 348 Spender, Stephen, 273 Spinks, Lee, 105, 162 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 15, 25, 53, 54, 55, 98, 99 Srinivas, V.S., 178, 298 Starling, Marion Wilson, 322, 323 Stepto, Robert B., 335, 338 Sterne, Laurence, 47, 69, 301 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 47, 69, 301 Stone, Laurence, 67n structuralism, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 41, 46, 49 subaltern, 15, 53-55, 97-99, 208, 217, 263, 264, 272, 291, 292, 303, 313, 327, 342, 358 subalternity, 15, 54, 97, 99, 269, 273, 295, 343 subculture, 320, 331 sub-Saharan Africa, 8, 13, 174, 177, 227 Sugnet, Charlie, 197n Suleri, Sara, 54, 271, 272, 274, 300n, 301n Sundquist, Eric J., 319 supernatural, 252, 345, 346, 357 Sutherland, Kathryn, 62, 64, 65n, 66, 70 Swahili, 174, 175 Syrian, 175, 184, 185, 188

Index Tagore, Rabindranath, 278 Tai-yi, Lin, 390n Talib, Ismail, 53 Tan, Amy, 386, 440n; The Bonesetter’s Daughter, 387, 391, 392, 395, 425-36 Tanner, Toni, 79 Tapping, Craig, 49n, 51, 52 teacher, 11, 68, 71, 126, 129, 144, 150, 157, 158, 161, 175, 199, 226, 253, 262, 277, 290, 334, 340, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 359, 361, 362, 364, 365, 367, 368, 369, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 377, 379, 380, 381, 408, 421, 432, 439, 441 teaching, 71, 123, 233, 253, 349, 358, 367, 371, 373, 377 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 133 television, 33, 145, 256 (see also media) Telugu, 267n Tharoor, Shashi, 271, 272 Tiger, Virginia, 107, 109, 110 Tulip, James, 146n Tuman, Myron C., 34 Twain, Mark, 47, 48, 49n typographic culture, 27, 52; thinking, 100 (see also literate thinking) United Nations, 8 uncanny, 137, 143, 165, 194, 233, 355 UNESCO, 7, 10, 177

505 Untouchables, 275-95, 319, 331, 335 Urdu, 267 US Bureau of the Census, 7, 9, 11 Vai, 175, 176 Van Dyke, Annette, 239 Vaughan, Megan, 94 Verma, K.D., 270, 271, 273 vernacular, 28, 31, 36, 39, 269 Viola, André, 78 voice, 79n, 83, 84, 344, 372, 403, 409, 417n, 422; narratorial, 44, 83, 118, 149, 201, 202, 256, 257, 327, 345, 347, 366; of the subaltern, 98, 206, 302 voicelessness, 15, 53, 91, 94, 99, 356, 371n, 405n, 409, 441 Volney, C.F., Ruins of Empires, 73 Vygotsky, Lev, 23 Wali, Obi, 177 Walker, Alice, The Color Purple, 343-44 Washbrook, David, 54n Watego, Cliff, 229 Waten, Judah, Alien Son, 141 Watson, Stephen, 174n, 217n Watt, Ian, 23, 23n, 27, 32, 50n Waugh, Evelyn, 189 Waugh, Patricia, 45, 46, 189 Weintraub, Stanley, 114n Wells, H.G., Outline of History, 114, 115, 121 West Africa, 166, 173, 174,

506


175, 181, 183, 190, 194, 320 White, Andrea, 79n, 80, 81 Williams, Jeffrey, 81-82 Williams, Mark, 225, 227 Williams, Patrick, 94 Wilson, Keith, 301 Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, 223 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 416 World War II, 106, 166, 173, 181, 387, 406, 411, 414, 443 Wright, Derek, 50n Wright, Richard, 326, 440n; Black Boy, 261, 262, 263, 331-46, 367, 371; Native Son, 338 writing, 20, 66, 151, 154, 158, 160, 166, 176, 250, 311,

372, 441; act of, 45, 188, 372, 397, 428; as transcription, 192, 234, 344; limitations of, 90, 119; notion of, 13; system, 10, 13, 14, 19, 29, 37, 170, 175, 213, 216, 385, 392, 393 Wyatt, Jean, 344 Yeandle, Laetitia, 4 Yeoh, Gilbert, 206, 207, 208, 212, 213, 217, 218 Yuan, Yuan, 86, 386, 390, 404, 435 Zabus, Chantal, 78, 80, 88 Zeck, Jeanne-Marie, 223 Zelliot, Eleanor, 295 Žižek, Slavoj, 100

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