Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers

Rethinking Postcolonialism Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers Amar Acheraï...

Author: Amar Acheraiou

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Rethinking Postcolonialism Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers

Amar Acheraïou

Rethinking Postcolonialism

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Rethinking Postcolonialism Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers Amar Acheraïou

© Amar Acheraïou 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978 0 230 55205 0 ISBN-10: 0 230 55205 6

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Acheraïou, Amar. Rethinking postcolonialism: colonialist discourse in modern literatures and the legacy of classical writers / Amar Acheraïou. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 230 55205 6 (alk. paper) 1. Imperialism in literature. 2. Imperialism. I. Title. PN56. I465A34 2008 809’.933581 dc22 2008000178 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Lætitia and Louise


Contents Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

Part I 1

Colonialist Discourse: A Rhetorical and Ideological Palimpsest

Modern Europe and Classical Connections Kipling and imperial Rome: the warrior ideal in ‘Regulus’ Ancient Greeks and Romans as heuristic teachers Colonialism-as-grafting

2

3

19 24 32 40

Classical Orientalism and modern colonial construction of difference: continuity and rupture The middle ground theory: its merits and limits

40 47

Impact of Classical Discourse of Barbarism on Modern Colonial Taxonomies

55

Colonialism: From Hegemony to Infantilism Colonial relation: child and instructor dyad When virile domination and infantile regression coalesce

5

11

Imperial Ideology: Between Totality and Differentiation

Language, culture and race Colonial politics of territoriality: keeping the ‘dumb’ barbarian out of the articulate centre 4

9

Modernist Writers, Classical Ideal and Empire E. M. Forster: a disenchanted Hellenist in the tangles of imperial ideology Virginia Woolf: classical culture, colonialism and gender James Joyce’s Ulysses: narrating the odyssey of imperialism through an odyssey of writing Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau and Albert Camus: Algeria and the Latinist myth vii

55 63 70 70 76 82 82 91 99 106

viii

Contents

Part II

Modernist Literature and Colonialism: Between Contest and Complicity

113

6

Modernism, Modernity and Imperialism

115

7

Culture, Civilisation and Inter-Racial Encounters: Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly

121

Cultural insularity: interrogating the dialogism of the colonial relation Hybridity: the space of the impossible Sexuality and colonial politics: containing the métis, preserving race and national identity 8

Redeeming the Colonial Idea: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Towards a humane colonisation The ‘saving idea’: the dialectics of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ colonialism Marlow’s ambivalence: where does Conrad stand in all this? Reading Conrad’s ‘barbarian’ trope in the light of Herodotus’s, Michel de Montaigne’s and Jean de la Bruyère’s observations

9

Pedagogy of Re-Colonisation or the Peaceful Re-Conquest: André Gide’s Voyage au Congo Saving the French empire: Gide, a modern Curtius Building a humanist empire: fusion of the religious imperium and kingdom of commerce

10

11

Split Between Radical Rhetoric and Conservative Practices: Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps

122 130 133

138 140 148 153

155

158 159 167

176

Questioning Western positivism: the primitivist discourse and its limits Negotiating Africanist and Orientalist discourses

177 187

Getting Out of the ‘Nightmares’ of History and ‘Stiff’ Imperial Culture: Albert Camus

196

Interrogating colonial mythologies Rehabilitating the petty colonist

196 200

Contents

The colonial relationship: racism, responsibility and guilt European settlers as semi-colonised Camus’s natives: from erasure to objectification

ix

204 207 209

Conclusion

214

Notes

220

Works Cited

233

Index

245

Acknowledgements While working on this book I have benefited from the knowledge and advice of several scholars and friends. I must first thank John and Margaret Crompton who had been enthusiastic supporters of the project from beginning to end. They offered encouragement and invaluable comments. I am most grateful to their interest and involvement in this intellectual undertaking. My thanks are due as well to Larry Ware and John Stape who kindly agreed to read the first draft and offer helpful suggestions. Don Rude and Keith Carabine have been supportive in various ways. I would like to say a word of thanks to them. Parts of Chapters 2 and 4 on Joseph Conrad’s ‘Karain’ and Nostromo first appeared in, respectively, Conradiana as ‘Colonial Encounters and Cultural Contests: The Confrontation of Orientalist and Occidentalist Discourses in “Karain: A Memory”’ (39-2, Summer 2007) and in The Conradian as “‘Action is Consolatory”: The Dialectics of Action and Thought in Nostromo’ (Nostromo: Centennial Essays, 2004). I am grateful to the editors of these journals for their permission to use the material. It is also with gratitude that I mention the editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, who saw the potential of the proposal and had faith in it. Her courtesy, efficiency and professionalism made our collaboration both smooth and pleasant. I should similarly like to extend my gratitude to the anonymous reader whose detailed comments and bibliographical suggestions have helped sharpen my argument. My thanks are also due to Racha Abdallah who gracefully designed the frontcover. Finally, I want to thank my family in Algeria and my in-laws in France, Dominique and Guy Crémona. My four-year daughter Louise, too, deserves special acknowledgment for being nice and patient throughout. To my wife, Lætitia, I am most grateful for her love, steady support and insightful criticism. Without her involvement and encouragement, this book might not have come to fruition.

x

Introduction

Following Edward Said’s pioneering Orientalism (1978), a substantial body of scholarship was produced in the field of postcolonial studies. Like the influential Orientalism, most of the works in this area of research centre on nineteenth-century imperialism, with little or no reference to former ideological formations to assess modern colonial ideology. While they remain on the whole heavily indebted to Said’s insights, these studies tend to move from Orientalism’s sweeping, often monolithic representations of colonialism to stress the heterogeneity and ambivalence of imperial discourse and rule. Elleke Boehmer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995), Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler in Tensions of Empire (1997), and Antoinette Burton in At the Heart of the Empire (1998), to name a few, insist on the interactions and interpenetrations of colonial cultures. The postcolonial emphasis on the polyphonic character and ‘indeterminacy’ of colonial discourse has been instigated by Homi Bhabha’s postmodernist approach to colonialism in The Location of Culture (1994) where he tackles among other things the notions of hybridity and mimicry which are his main contribution to the postcolonial debate. In ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’ (1997) Bhabha considers mimicry and ambivalence as the defining features of colonial discourse. He states: ‘The discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence’ and ‘the authority of that mode of colonial discourse . . . is therefore stricken by indeterminacy’ (153). Bhabha’s and generally the middle ground theorists’ focus on the ‘transactional’ nature of colonialism and permeability of colonial cultures intends to highlight the extent to which the colonies and metropolis influenced and shaped each other. As they try to uncover a neglected imperial reality, these scholars seek to challenge the centre–periphery model of analysis of the 1

2 Introduction

colonial fact, which they consider unfit to render the complexity of the colonial encounters. Central to the middle ground theorists’ emphasis on exchange and collaboration between colonisers and colonised is the issue of hybridisation – cultural, political and linguistic – resulting from colonial encounters. A widely discussed concept, hybridity as a theoretical tool has been associated with Bhabha who dealt at length with this issue in The Location of Culture and in such essays as ‘Cultural diversity and Cultural Differences’. In both he insists on the interdependence of the colonisers’ and natives’ structures of power and meaning. He argues that cultural systems and discourses are articulated from the ‘third space of enunciation’ where the subject can speak of itself and the Other in terms that transcend ‘the politics of polarity’. In keeping with Bhabha’s theory, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin write: ‘Hybridity and the power it releases may well be seen to be the characteristic feature and contribution of the postcolonial, allowing a means of evading the replication of the binary categories of the past and developing new anti-monolithic models of cultural exchange and growth’ (1995, 183). The deployment of the concepts of hybridity and ‘third space of enunciation’ to question binary interpretations of the colonial fact has become the model of analysis in postcolonial and anthropological studies. The restitution of colonial hybridity is no doubt useful to counteract Manichean readings of colonialism along with the myths of purity and essentialist discourses sustaining both colonialist and nationalist narratives. Yet, in order for the term hybridity to release its full historic, metaphoric and ideological implications, we should refrain from viewing it merely in terms of competition with the contested centre–periphery model of analysis it is meant to dismantle. My argument is that hybridity as both a theoretical tool and historical and cultural occurrence is not a linear, flat narrative of cultural exchange and balanced competition, as we tend to think, but a twisted, multilayered imperial tale of forced encounters and unequal relationships. Strictly speaking, hybridity concentrates multiple, contradictory forces involved in shaping cultures and identities. It represents a site of incorporation and rejection in which cultural difference is at once inscribed as sameness and continually disavowed. Within this dynamics of incorporation and denial, which is the essence of colonial relationships, métissage takes the shape of a burdensome imperial legacy, rather than a happy reunion of the Same and Other ‘developing new anti-monolithic models of cultural exchange and growth’. Given the violence, racism

Introduction

3

and imbalance of colonial relationships hybridity is perhaps more fittingly defined as the space of the impossible, since imperial encounters can at best produce alienated, schizophrenic subjects, and at worst turn the colonised into a sub-humanised, commodified mass. Manifestly, for most half-caste characters, métissage often represents less the materialisation of a harmonious polyphonic culture and an assumed multiple identity than the manifestation of a deep alienation resulting from the impossible reconciliation of their mixed legacy. Both for these métis in particular and in the imperial world at large hybridity articulates therefore around lack, crisis and fragmentation instead of balance and plenitude. Rethinking Postcolonialism analyses colonialist discourses in modern literary and non-literary texts and explores key philosophical concepts informing colonialism. It is divided into two main areas: first, a discussion of the ways in which classical writings influenced colonialist discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; second, an examination of the relationship between modernist literature and empire. In each section I investigate the ways colonial discourses construct, or produce, the colonised by adopting an array of strategies that draw inspiration from immediate as well as remote sources. In studying imperial intellectual history in the context of classical discourses and literatures, I offer a challenge to the conventional categories of analysis in the field of postcolonial studies, which tend to study colonialism as a synchronic phenomenon and mere product of modernity. Colonialism is an immemorial phenomenon. All through history it has taken various forms and has been highly parasitic. When Egypt came under Greek domination in 146 BC, the Greeks incorporated into their culture the Egyptian religions, myths and arts. When Greece became a Roman protectorate the Romans imitated the Greeks. They adopted their strategies of expansion, arts, gods, rituals and even dress, establishing continuities between the Hellenic and Latin worlds (Bernal 1987; Pagden 2001; Isaac 2004). Similarly, in America the Mayans inspired the succeeding Toltec and Aztec empires which adopted their arts, legends and religions. The Aztecs were in turn influenced by the Toltecs. They regarded them as ideal fighters and their arts were highly valued. The Inca Empire was also built on the achievements of former civilisations, embracing the Aztec and Toltec legends and religions which they fused into their own culture to build a centralised state (Davies 1987). In the sixteenth century the Spaniards, who vanquished the Incas and Aztecs, took after the ancient European empires which they viewed as models (Ramírez 1996; Mabry 2002). The Ottoman empire, too, imitated the

4 Introduction

Greeks and Romans. Sovereigns such as Mehmet Fatih (1451–81) and Suleiman Kanuni (1520–66) posed as continuers of the empires established in the Mediterranean by Alexander the Great and furthered by the Romans. Likewise, in the nineteenth century both Britain and France displayed continuities with the classical powers, adopting their ideas and instigating their methods of conquest and rule. From the ancient to modern times colonialism has thus been a synergetic phenomenon. Colonial powers drew on their predecessors to achieve their imperial motives and consolidate their domination. The British and French empires imitated the Greek and Roman empires. They incorporated tropes, modes of representation and myths of supremacy. The classical writers who backed them were revered by modern writers and colonial ideologues. Their themes and thoughts were assiduously rehearsed and the image of ancient Greece and Rome was reinvested and idealised by eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western writers and scholars, particularly the British and French. Rethinking Postcolonialism probes the interconnections between ancient and new imperialism. It examines modern colonial British and French literatures in the light of ancient Greek and Latin texts. It focuses on the Colonial Idea and attempts to chart the impact of classical thought on modern colonial cultures. In the main, I intend through the exploration of colonial historiography to trace the ways in which the classical models were re-inscribed and re-imagined, in an idealised form, in European metropolitan cultures in the period of imperial expansion. The aim in teasing out the conceptual and ideological links between ancient and modern colonialism is to place the discussion of empire in a wider historical and ideological arena. This necessary contextualisation serves to demonstrate how far modern colonial ideology forms an historical, ideological and narcissistic continuum whereby new theories of domination build upon ancient myths of grandeur and supremacy. By focusing on colonialism’s diachronicity and multi-faceted nature of imperialist ideology, I primarily seek to resituate colonialist discourse’s historical and ideological denseness which is often neglected in postcolonial studies. My assumption is that the scholars’ study of colonialism from a strictly synchronic dimension provides only a partial insight into imperial ideology. To get a fuller picture of this ideology requires re-examining it in connection with the former narratives of domination, notably the classical ideological formations from which it drew inspiration. The recovery of this neglected trans-epochal dialogue should help us grasp the multi-dimensional, palimpsestic (that is stratified and cumulative) character of modern colonialist discourse. This genetic approach,

Introduction

5

which sets the ancient and the modern in a productive dynamics, intends to shed light on these conceptual and ideological ramifications. It aims to uncover the legacy of the classical assumptions of linguistic, cultural and racial supremacy on modern writers and colonial ideologues. Such a historicisation, which invites consideration of the archaeological structure of imperialist discourse, is a prerequisite to mapping out the complex ideological network that shaped modern colonial representations. It enables us to trace the interface between colonial metropolitan ideological formations and classical imperial production of stories of power and supremacy. The idea of modern colonialist discourse as palimpsestic is the main line of argument in the book’s first part. Through examination of a range of modern texts, literary as well as non-literary, I show how concepts and assumptions borrowed from Greek and Roman literatures were integrated into modern colonialist rhetoric, forming a stratified site of knowledge and power. Linked to the idea of imperialist discourse as a palimpsestic formation is the notion of colonialism-as-grafting which is discussed in connection with the writings of Ernest Renan (1823– 92), Captain John Moresby (1830–1922), Rider Haggard (1856–1925), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), Albert Sarraut (1872–1962), and Robert Delavignette (1897–1976). Grafting is a fitting metaphor for the colonial fact; all the more so as colonialism has been a long story of borrowing and appropriation. Similar to the Greeks who incorporated the Egyptian heritage or the Romans who adopted many aspects of the Greek civilisation, modern imperial cultures were built on classical foundations. The incorporation of ancient ideas and thoughts is combined with hijacking the indigenous stories and canonical texts. In the same way as modern colonialist ideology generated much of its conceptual power from ancient Greece and Rome, colonial rule grafted itself on existing indigenous structures of power. A key feature of both colonial rule and discourse, grafting was a crucial component of the Western civilising mission. It contained in germ the idea of transplanting the European spirit onto the stagnant natives in order to regenerate them, culturally and racially. The modern representation of the colonised peoples as stagnant and degenerate entailed in the colonial metaphor of grafting echoes the description of foreign peoples in Greek and Latin texts. In the works of Lysias (440–380 BC), Isocrates (436–338 BC), Plato (427–327 BC), Aristotle (384–322 BC), Cicero (106–43 BC) and Sallust (86–34 BC), the Persians as well as the Scythians and Egyptians were cast as backward, racially and culturally inferior, and effeminate. There is continuity between these classical representations of the barbarians and the depiction of modern

6 Introduction

Europe’s Others, which leads me to argue that the ancient rhetoric of Othering served as a model for modern colonialist depictions of the natives. Identical stereotyped images recur in most modern colonial texts in terms that testify to the modern writers’ blending of the ancient and new in shaping difference. While demonstrating the impact of classical Orientalism on modern construction of Otherness, I reveal the dialectics of repetition and challenge pertaining to the definition of colonial subjects. This manifest ambivalence makes the discourse of Othering appear as a fluid system of representation based on a multi-level differentiation. As reflected in both imperial politics and colonial literature, the natives were often set in a hierarchical relation that obeyed a horizontal distinction based on skin colour as well as a vertical differentiation that encompassed the indigenous cultural and social layers. Exploring the arcane of these strategies of producing difference should allow us to grasp the colonisers’ ambivalent, protean attitude to the colonised. It is, above all, intended to uncover the colonisers’ manipulation of the indigenous peoples’ identity in order to serve immediate imperial ends. Most importantly, probing the category of the Other in the colonial context aims to demonstrate the tautological character of the colonial ethic of differentiation; that is the incapacity of the imperialist subject to engage in a genuine, non-appropriative relationship with difference. The British who ranked the Pathans higher than the Bengalis, or the French who considered the Kabyles superior to the Arabs did not value these ethnic groups in their complexity, but simply according to their affinity with the colonial culture and the imperial self which were used as the yardstick of accomplishment. Most modern texts including Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), André Gide’s Voyage au Congo (1927) or Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936) dramatise the colonial solipsistic view of the self and reveal how the natives were perceived by the respective protagonists mainly as a means of self-aggrandisement. Modern construction of Otherness, which posits Western subjectivity as the human norm, derives much of its substance from classical representations of the barbarians. The Greek and Roman racist depictions of non-Europeans provided a useful reservoir of ideas for modern colonial writers and supporters of empire. As Benjamin Isaac notes in The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, the Greco-Roman ‘proto-racism’ ‘served as prototype for modern racism which developed in the eighteenth century’ (2004, 2). The Greeks’ belief in cultural and racial supremacy, their chauvinism and disdain for non-Greeks, generated by Greece’s rise into an

Introduction

7

imperial power in the fifth century BC, provided an impetus for modern colonial ideology. This phase of Greek victory over Persia was perceived by many modern writers, including Condorcet (1743–94), Rider Haggard and Albert Camus (1913–60), as an ideological matrix. Several modern interpreters of the battle of Salamis (480 BC) saw the defeat of the Persians, which Isocrates identified with a ‘total war’, as a conflict between Europe and Asia, rather than merely a struggle opposing Greece and Persia. According to these authors and scholars, this period of Greek history corresponds to the birth of a European colonial consciousness, whereby the new binary ‘Europe–Asia’ replaced the former opposition ‘Greece– Persia’. Fifth century BC Greece, which was regarded as a redeemer of human civilisation from Oriental barbarism and despotism, may be said to have originated a polarised view of culture and race that paved the way for modern colonial Manichean representations of the world. Many nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers and imperial ideologues appropriated the classical myths of supremacy which they used to bolster empire’s confidence and rightness. As in the classical discourse of barbarism which inspired it, in modern colonialist rhetoric, too, language, race and culture formed key ideological components. Authors and scholars such as Gerald of Wales (1146–1223), Juan Gines de Sepulveda (1494–1573), Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Abbé Grégoire (1750–1831), Matthew Arnold (1822–88) and Ernest Renan were manifestly inspired by the Aristotelian view of racial supremacy based on linguistic superiority. Following the Greek philosopher, these writers linked language and race, persuaded that colonised peoples including the Amerindians, Irish, Scots, Bretons, Basques and Corsicans were savage and inferior because their idioms were unfit for high culture and elaborate thought. Classical linguistic racialism, which deemed backward, if not bestial those who did not speak Greek, was adopted by the moderns to confirm the natives’ inferiority and their inhumanity. Authors such as Armand Dubarry (1836–1910) in Voyage au Dahomey (1879) or Rider Haggard in Cetywayo and His White Neighbours (1882) repeat Aristotle’s racist views of the barbarians. In these narratives Africans are shown confined to a life of sensation, incapable of transcending the present’s literalism. The dehumanisation of the natives, recurrent in colonial literature and politics, served to legitimise their economic exploitation and political marginalisation. On a symbolic level, the reduction of the colonised to beasts entailed denying them existential substance and moral significance. The natives were, in short, dismissed as abnormal species and cautiously kept at a distance in order to prevent disorder and degeneracy – an anxiety which was prominent in the works of Aristotle, Isocrates

8 Introduction

and Plato, as much as it was central in colonial literature and politics. The fear of mixing with non-Europeans is predicated on a belief in purity, racial and cultural, that formed the driving force of imperialist ideologies, ancient and modern alike. Even anti-colonialist modernists such as Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) tend to espouse the myths of purity and eugenic theories that were the engine of imperialist ideology. The relationship between literary modernism and imperialism has gained momentum in the last five years. Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby in Modernism and Empire (2000) offer an illuminating analysis of the modernist writers’ convoluted attitude towards colonialism and imperial ideology. Elleke Boehmer in Empire, the National and the Postcolonial (2002) and David Adams in Colonial Odysseys, Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel (2003) also point out the modernist writers’ ambivalence towards colonialism, without, however, probing adequately these writers’ ideological inconsistencies in relation to imperialism. Elaborating on the modernists’ ambivalence about empire, I offer a wider conceptual and historical perspective in an analysis that integrates the discussion of modernist literature with a critique of European post-Enlightenment philosophical concepts. The second part focuses on the writings of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster (1879–1970), James Joyce (1882–1941), André Gide (1869–1951), Graham Greene (1904–91) and Albert Camus. The approach consists of assessing these modernists’ critique of imperialism in the light of the old Western tradition of self-scrutiny, initiated by such anti-colonial humanists as Bartolome de Las Casas (1484–1566), François Rabelais (1494–1553), Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96). These writers are remembered for their indictment of Europe’s abuses in America and explicit endorsement of cultural relativity as a means of rehabilitating the natives’ humanity that colonialism denied them. Their humanism inspired later generations, notably the modernists who criticised Western abuses in Africa and Asia. Just like their predecessors, however, the modernists were markedly ambiguous about empire. For rather than contesting the colonial idea or envisioning a post-imperial world, they merely projected into their fiction a humanist empire. The question is: what does the modernists’ alternative form of empire entail? How is it articulated and to what end? How does it fit into the overall colonial idea? These are some of the salient preoccupations that will be tackled in Part II.

Part I Colonialist Discourse: A Rhetorical and Ideological Palimpsest


1 Modern Europe and Classical Connections

Part I explores Britain’s and France’s connections to the Greco-Roman world, with an emphasis on nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary texts. It does not offer an exhaustive comparative historical, cultural and political study. It mainly consists of tracing some of the ways in which classical cultures were reinvested, re-imagined and appropriated by British and French intellectuals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As my emphasis is on the influence of classical conceptions of empire and race on modern imperialist discourses, I am concerned, above all, with mapping the ideological and cultural ‘contact zone’ between the Greco-Roman thought and modern colonial cultures. The aim is to pin down and analyse within a postcolonial perspective key Greco-Roman concepts and ideas that gained currency in the modern colonial era. France and Britain came in direct contact with the classical world through Roman colonisation, which was motivated by both political and economic reasons. Expansion to Northern Europe was an opportunity for Imperial Rome to add new territories to its Mediterranean-based empire and have a grip on the riches of Gaul and Britain: raw material, metals, wheat and cattle. Put succinctly, the Romans conquered Gaul, which today corresponds to the territories covering France, much of Switzerland, Germany and the Lowland countries, in the second and first centuries BC (Woolf 1998, x). After the defeat and pacification of the Gallic tribes, the Romans established their political and cultural domination, without, however, unsettling completely the indigenous structures of power. They skilfully maintained in place the Gallic aristocracy which they gradually integrated into the new system of power. The local élites, which served as political and cultural mediators, collaborated to consolidating imperial rule in Gaul. Their political and cultural 11

12 Colonialist Discourse

integration helped to validate the Romans’ domination and spread their culture. The Romanisation of the Gallic societies, which meant dissemination of the Roman beliefs, style of life, laws and arts across Gaul, was neither absolute nor uniform. Some regions were more Romanised than others and very often the tensions between adoption of and resistance to Roman culture were simultaneously at work (Woolf 1998). That being said, important transformations progressively took place. The Gauls adopted Latin and Roman culture, in the process they widely redefined their own cultural and social landscape. What is nonetheless noteworthy is that Romanisation or cultural assimilation in Gaul was not as smooth and romantic a process as the French historian of the Gallo-Roman world, Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89) once stated: ‘It was less Rome than civilisation itself which won over the Gauls . . . Being Roman, for them, was not a matter of obeying a foreign master so much as of sharing in the most cultivated and noble manners, arts, studies, labours and pleasures known to humanity’ (1891, 134–9). That the Gauls were seduced by some aspects of Roman civilisation and wanted to share its advantages is understandable. Yet, reducing a ruthless conquest to a smooth cultural encounter, as does Coulanges, is tantamount to an intellectual fallacy. It softens down the brutality of colonisation and downplays the traumatic effects of Romanisation, not to say colonial policies of assimilation at large, on the indigenous populations. It is important not to forget that Romanisation was part of a process of subjection that aimed at cultural and political domination. As such, it meant that the Gauls were forced to rethink their social and cultural identities within the Roman dominant frame of reference. The strategy of domination and acculturation underlying Roman colonisation was, of course, not a simple, uniform practice, as Coulanges wants us to believe. Rather, it was a highly it was complex scheme, involving violence and accommodation, incorporation and manipulation of the native identities and power structures. The Roman invasion of Britain followed an identical pattern of force and collaboration with the indigenous élite. Julius Caesar made incursions into Britain from Gaul in 55 BC, but permanent Roman invasion took place a century later, under Emperor Claudius. Claudius’s army carried fierce campaigns in what is now Southern England and by AD 50 they defeated the local resistance and controlled most of Southern England. The Romans’ expansion in Britain progressed steadily and by AD 80 most of today’s Wales and England was under Roman rule (Webster 1965). As in Gaul, Roman domination of Britain lasted four centuries, a period long enough for Roman culture to disseminate and take root

Modern Europe and Classical Connections

13

in the British Isles. Along with introducing the Gauls and Britons to Christianity, the Romans, who regarded themselves as ancient Greece’s heirs, were instrumental in spreading the classical values of rationality, democracy, order, law and justice. Roman colonisation left in France and Britain an impressive legacy that permeates many aspects of contemporary French and British cultures and societies. The influence of Roman law on the French and British judicial system is perhaps one of the most obvious signs of this legacy (Millett 1990; Jenkyns 1992). Ancient Rome occupied a central position among the early eighteenthcentury writers and scholars, particularly Voltaire (1694–1778) who is emblematic of the eighteenth century. Voltaire was a revolutionary, and political republicanism was the aspect of ancient Rome’s politics which appealed most to him. Roman republicanism was embodied by Brutus (85–42 BC), a senator of the late Republic who was said to have taken a major part in the assassination conspiracy of the dictator Julius Caesar. Brutus was a fitting symbol for the French Revolutionaries. Brutus’s figure, in the shape of painted and sculpted busts or in literary representations, was pervasive in the Revolutionary circles. The republican Voltaire immortalised the Roman legendary hero in Brutus, a play which was popular during the French Revolution. In addition to admiration for Roman republican figures, Voltaire, who was called ‘the French Virgil’, regarded highly the ancient Roman writers, especially Virgil who sang the foundation of the Roman ‘nation’ and empire. Aeneid, which celebrates the chivalrous, warrior ideal, had a great influence on Voltaire’s epic poem entitled La Henriade (1728). The hero of Voltaire’s epic is King Henry IV (1553–1610), the most liked French monarch both during and after his reign. Henry IV was an important figure in French history. In 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes which granted religious liberties to the Protestants and thus put an end to the civil war raging between Protestants and Catholics in France. Voltaire’s focus on Henry IV’s in La Henriade pays tribute to the King’s courage having like Aeneas, established peace and unity and given the warring communities a common destiny. In eighteenth-century Britain, interest in Roman history and admiration for the values of ancient republicanism were reflected in such popular works as Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) and Richard Glover’s Leonidas (1737). Glover’s epic poem, Leonidas celebrates the virtues of liberty and was so successful that it went through many editions. Addison’s Cato, held a special status and the author of the poem was praised both in England and Europe, specifically in France. Voltaire praised Cato and Campaign (1705) and considered both of high literary value. As Howard Weinbrot notes: ‘Voltaire regards the occasionally brilliant British writer


as crude, harsh, and vulgar but also urges that Addison’s Campaign and Cato have permanent value that redeems a barbarous nation’ (2007). One of the reasons why ancient Rome, Republican Rome in particular, was prominent in the eighteenth century was certainly because the political and social values – liberty, democracy and order – it stood for fitted the concerns of the period. A Republican Rome, based on order and civic virtue, was a welcoming force of stability in a world undergoing radical transformations: cultural, political, ideological and scientific. The spirit of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on order and stability, was, indeed, attuned to these values represented by ancient Rome. Martin Bernal argues: ‘In the eighteenth century Hellenism is seen as belonging to the Romantic camp. The gentlemen of the Enlightenment were concerned with order, regularity and stability over wide regions’ (1987, 209). The Enlightenment intellectuals, as Bernal remarks, obviously found in ancient Rome values which corresponded to the spirit of the period. Bernal seems, however, to overlook that the key principles – reason, liberty, law and order – on which the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were founded, were not uniquely Roman, but Greek as well. Examined more closely, the sense of Greek cultural remoteness, reflected by the eighteenth-century writers’ attitude, owes to a great extent to historical reasons. The Romans were physically present in the British Isles and France for centuries, but not the Greeks. There was consequently no tangible material Greek culture on the British and French soil that the populations could identify with, whereas the vestiges of ancient Rome were pervasive. Besides significant exposure to Roman culture and history through school curricula, the educated Europeans could see the traces of the ancient Romans almost everywhere. The abundant ruins, forts, bridges and theatres scattered across the British Isles and France were sound reminders of the Roman heritage. They must have contributed widely to facilitating these countries’ affiliation with and admiration for Roman civilisation. The other reason of the pre-eminence of ancient Roman culture during the Enlightenment may lie in the scholars’ insufficient knowledge of ancient Greek culture. At that period Western Educational systems tended to give primacy to Roman history and culture over Greek topics. It is perhaps little surprise, therefore, that ‘until the late eighteenth century most educated Europeans regarded their culture as Roman and Christian in origin, with merely peripheral roots in Greece’ (Turner 1981, 1–2). Before the late eighteenth century, intellectuals in France as well as in Britain were, thus, more likely to be adequately trained in Latin than Greek (Artz 1968). Moreover, in terms of aesthetic taste, ancient Greece


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was apparently not considered fashionable at that time. In a letter to Mr Damilaville, dated 4 November 1765, Voltaire wrote: ‘It seems to me the Greeks are no longer fashionable and that was true from the times of M. and Mme Dacier.’ The Daciers mentioned by Voltaire in this correspondence were enthusiastic admirers of the Hellenic world. Madame Dacier, in particular, was known for her passion for ancient Greek culture. In On the Cause of the Corruption of Taste (1714) she was striving, in vain, to overhaul and promote ancient Greece among her contemporaries. In the late eighteenth century the perception of ancient Greece by the French and British writers, literary critics and historians changed significantly; a change brought about by the influence of German Hellenist scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), Wilhelm Humboldt (1767–1835) and Goethe (1749–1832). Turner attributed the growing interest in and ‘major intellectual significance’ of ancient Greece during this period to cultural and ideological transformations within Britain and across Europe. According to him, it is the crisis of the values, ideas and institutions inherited from the Roman and Christian past that led the British to look to Greece for alternative cultural patterns (1981, 2). The passion for ancient Greece that swept over Britain and France from mid-eighteenth century continued well into the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In nineteenth-century France Hellenism was represented by the Parnassians, including such leading figures as Théophile Gautier (1811–72), Leconte de Lisle (1818–94), Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98). For these writers ancient Greece was the very embodiment of artistic creation; a Mount Parnassus or ‘Home of the Muses’ to which they returned to draw inspiration. In Britain admiration for ancient Greece gained significance in the Romantic period. Poets such as Perce Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), and John Keats (1795–1821) had an idyllic image of classical Greece. They regarded it as a model of beauty, democracy and, above all, as the fount of Western civilisation. These poets praised the ancient Greeks for having created, in the words of Matthew Arnold, a culture of the ‘highest possible beauty and value’ and viewed this civilisation as a rampart against the soulless nineteenthcentury commercial culture. The Romantics identified closely with the ancient Greeks. Owing to their Hellenism, poets such as Lord Byron, for example, went as far as participating in modern Greece’s war of liberation against the Ottoman empire. Byron actively took part in Greece’s struggle for freedom. He was in charge of managing funds and supplies


for the Greek forces. His death from fever in 1822 aroused deep sympathy in Europe and ultimately led to direct Western intervention. Shelley was also deeply concerned with modern Greece’s subjection to Ottoman rule. In Hellas, A Lyrical Drama he exhorts the British public to support modern Greece’s struggle, invoking strong affinities between England and ancient Greece: We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts all have their roots in Greece. . . . The human form and human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race (1822, viii–ix). Shelley, for whom the Romans were mere transmitters of Hellenic culture, identifies classical Greece with a source of culture and intellectual genius. He stresses the connections between the modern British and ancient Greeks in terms that condense the remote classical past and immediate present. The assertive ‘we are all Greeks’ is a rallying cry against Ottoman oppression. It also rings as an emphatic assertion of a Western collective consciousness in which Greekness and Britishness fuse into a unitary, homogeneous cultural and racial pattern. The passion for ancient Greece, seeping through the Romantic period, lived into the Victorian era where it acquired further significance and wider implications. Victorian Hellenism was championed by a constellation of writers and scholars including Matthew Arnold (1822–88), Walter Pater (1830–94), William Mitford (1744–1827) and John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919). These authors were fascinated by ancient Greece and most of them regarded the classical past as an intellectual, social and moral model from which they could derive lessons and remedies to their society’s ills. Arnold considered Greek literature as a ‘mighty agent of intellectual deliverance’ (1960, 20); others such as John Pentland Mahaffy went further to establish the ancient Greeks and modern British as mirror-images. An Anglo-Irish classical scholar who held a professorship of ancient history at Trinity College, Dublin, Mahaffy wrote: Every thinking man who becomes acquainted with the masterpieces of Greek writing must see plainly that they stand to us in a far closer


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relation than the other remains of antiquity. . . . They are the writings of men of like culture with ourselves, who argue with the same logic, who reflect with kindred feelings. They have worked out social and moral problems like ourselves, they have expressed them in such language as we would desire to use. In a word, they are thoroughly modern, more modern than the epochs quite proximate to our own (1874, 1–3). Like the Romantic Shelley, Mahaffy strings together the ancient Greeks and modern British, stressing likeness, real or imagined.1 By referring to its ‘modernity’ he intends to validate Greece as a dynamic force of progress able to help the Victorians address their current problems. Mahaffy’s association of ancient Greece with modernity and progress runs counter to the views of such Hellenists as Francis Cornford for whom the classical world was a static repository of values.2 In thus privileging a more dynamic vision of the classical Greeks Mahaffy clearly aligns with John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Gilbert Murray who subscribed to the ‘evolutionary humanism’ that developed during the late nineteenth century: ‘Throughout the efforts of scholars and critics such as Charles Newton, John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Gilbert Murray, Hellenism as a source of humanistic wisdom was transformed from a static attitude toward life to a dynamic force whose values each generation must rediscover for itself and make its own’ (Turner 1981, 17). The static-dynamic paradigm, in which the reconstructed Greece was framed, shows that the Victorian perception of the classical world was anything but monolithic or unified. Both ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’, centrifugal and centripetal tendencies were at work among the Victorian Philhellenists, each appreciating the Greek legacy according to their aspirations and needs. Writers who had a normative, rigid view of social and moral order were more likely to embrace the image of a fixed, tamed classical past. Those seeking social change, and liberal, cultural and sexual modes might instead find a dynamic picture of ancient Greece more appealing. The same Greek heroic figures or values were often used by competing social forces for contradictory aims. The Homeric ideal of chivalry, for instance, was mobilised by defenders of homosexuality such as J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater to advocate ‘socio-cultural renewal’ and sexual liberation (Collecott 1999, 35). It was likewise invoked by British anti-republicans to defend the values of British civilisation from forces of disorder, notably the French Revolution. Where Arnold would call upon ancient Greek civilisation to liberate Victorian society from the shackles of religion and blinkered


‘Hebraism’, W. E. Gladstone would solicit pagan Greece to reinvigorate and empower the Gospel. This is what Gladstone, then rector at the University of Edinburgh, told the students in his 1865 address: ‘the solid and fruitful materials of the Greek civilisation came in aid, by a wise Providence, of the restorative principles, precepts, and powers of the Gospel, to take part in securing a well-balanced development of the powers of the Christian system’ (quoted by Dowling 1994, 77). The conservative order represented here by Gladstone was unsettled by the forces of change and renewal in a rhetoric that questioned the relevance of the older principles on which society was founded. As Dowling observes: The older ideological structures of public life were no longer capable of sustaining Britain in the struggle among nations. Precisely as such structures as the warrior ideal underlying classical republicanism came to see increasingly irrelevant to the actual conditions imposed upon Britain by industrial modernity did the alternative values Victorian liberals located in Hellenism seem to promise the hope of cultural renewal (1994, 35–6). If the classical ideal of republican manliness, as suggested here, proved powerless to liberal humanists and unsuitable for modern Britain, the same model of republican chivalry and manliness retained all its potency among Victorian imperialist authors such as Kipling and Haggard. Which image of ancient Greece and Rome did these Victorian imperialists celebrate? How did they negotiate the static–dynamic or centrifugal– centripetal paradigm? These are some of the concerns that will be addressed in the following chapters. To summarise my argument, two main observations can be drawn in relation to the place of ancient Greece in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first remark concerns specifically the exploration of the Greek legacy in the Victorian era. It can be safely argued at this stage that during this period most scholars displayed an unbounded fascination for ancient Greece, but each manipulated the image of the chosen material to serve their own ends. Although their views of the cultural, social and political life in the Greek world might differ, they had, on the whole, an idealised and selective view of classical civilisation. Georges Boas in The Greek Tradition states: ‘Every age of European culture, like every individual of the intellectual classes, has gone back to the Greeks for inspiration ever since there were any Greeks to go back to. But what Greeks they selected as “The Greeks”, and what ideas and manners and


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standards they chose as typically Hellenic have varied from age to age and from individual to individual’ (1939, v). Ancient Greece has throughout history been shaped and reshaped in the Western imagination according to individual as well as collective aspirations. The implication is that the philhellenists’ Greece, rather than an authentic, realistic picture, is a re-imagined social and cultural cartography, devised primarily to address aesthetic, ideological and political concerns. The Victorians’ reinvention of classical Greece, which in itself is a dynamic process, tends paradoxically to mummify the Greek world. It involves selectivity, if not manipulation of the re-imagined past. Excessive romanticisation combined with a propensity to erase unfavourable aspects of the re-imagined classical material may explain why the ancient Greece emerging from Victorian literature is tame and romantic. It is purged of impurities and deficiencies to make it conform to the role it was expected to perform in society. The second observation is more general in scope and concerns the place of ancient Greece, not just in Victorian Britain, but throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. Turner and Bernal, mentioned previously, have discussed at length this subject, but their categorisations about the Europeans’ perceptions of ancient Greece need re-evaluation. That classical Greece gained scholarly interest and importance in the late eighteenth century is undeniable. But the Europeans’ passion for Greece does in no way mean that ancient Rome had fallen out of favour with the writers and scholars of the period. On the contrary, it remained a cogent reference for most British and French imperialist writers who often harnessed ancient Greece to Imperial Rome and indistinctly cited both to justify empire. If Kipling restricted his reverence for the ancient world to Rome, Lord Macaulay, Rider Haggard, Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert Delavignette, as will be shown, consistently appealed to both ancient Roman and Greek empires to promote imperialism. Their colonialist rhetoric blurs the distinction between ancient Greece and Rome pinpointed by Bernal and Turner, as much as it tends to suppress the aspects that may challenge the myth of the classical empires as model colonisers.

Kipling and imperial Rome: the warrior ideal in ‘Regulus’ Kipling was a zealous supporter of British imperialism and his ‘worship’ of the British empire often combined with a celebration of ancient Rome which he regarded as a model for colonial Britain. Several of his works


praise, directly or indirectly, the Roman empire. Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) is a good case in point. In this collection of stories relating the history of Britain, Kipling lauds Rome’s imperial might and points at the same time to its clemency towards the defeated. He has Parnesius say: ‘I have driven out the Britons . . . I occupy their high forts’, yet he makes him instantly add: ‘But Rome is merciful’ (168). Kipling’s fascination for the Romans is even more cogently expressed in ‘Regulus’ (1917) where he celebrates imperial values, using juxtaposition and analogy to bring together colonial Britain and Imperial Rome. Kipling was deeply influenced by Roman poets, particularly Virgil and Horace. He had special regard for Horace who was considered as his literary father figure (Carrington 1978).3 ‘Regulus’ is profoundly Horacian. Kipling draws widely on Horace’s Odes which were considered the paragon of poetry in the nineteenth century. The title of the story itself is taken from the fifth Ode of the third book, called ‘Regulus Ode’, which relates the story of the Roman general, Regulus that Horace viewed as a model for the Augustan expanding empire. A Roman general in the first Punic War (256 BC), Regulus (died 250 BC) defeated the Carthaginians in 256 BC at Adys near Carthage and forced them to peace. But the peace terms were so harsh that the Carthaginians decided to pursue the war. Their resolve paid off, for in 255 BC Regulus was vanquished at the Battle of Tunis. The General was taken prisoner together with hundreds of his soldiers. He was sent to Rome to negotiate peace, but on arrival there he advised the Roman Senate to reject the Carthaginians’ offer. Regulus later returned to Carthage and was tortured to death (Murray et al. 2001). Roman history and myths of grandeur are at the heart of Kipling’s story. Regulus occupies centre stage and symbolically connects Imperial Rome to modern colonial Britain. The use of the Roman hero is of the utmost significance for, as Kenneth Haynes remarks, Regulus ‘was often associated with British figures of self-sacrifice, like General Gordon at Khartoum’. Whether Kipling had in mind General Gordon when he wrote his tale is open to debate. What is, however, strongly suggested in this narrative is that militarism, courage, patriotism, discipline and devotion to empire are of central importance. These values, embodied by the heroic general, are subtly rehearsed throughout to the extent that they form the tale’s nexus. Regulus seems to function as a role model and crucial pedagogical tool in the service of imperial goals. King apparently expects his pupils, some of whom might become future imperial rulers, to adopt the legendary hero’s values and learn from his experiences.


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‘Regulus’ is set in a school where all the Fifth form students on which it focuses, except Beetle, are studying for the Army Examination that will enable them to pursue military careers and eventually work as imperial administrators. Their school looks like a military training ground, in which the boys are faced with moral tests and choices that are to some extent identical to those confronting the Roman general. The story revolves around King, a Latin master and his students, Beetle, Winton, Stalky and Mullins. The diffident pupils are asked to translate Horace’s ‘Regulus Ode’ that their teacher is forcing on them fragment by fragment, word by word. In the opening section of the tale the boys are shown wrestling with Horace’s arduous poem and continually humiliated by their school master. King’s ambition is to initiate his pupils to the refined Latin idiom along with the classical values it carries. He wants them to penetrate the arcane of this language in order to grasp the classical imperial spirit expressed in Horace’s ode and appropriate it. But the pupils show signs of being dwarfed by the task in hand. The translation in which the pupils are involved is significant on many counts. Viewed from a postcolonial perspective, translation operates both as a means of cultural mediation and as a vehicle of domination. The British and French colonial officials and intellectuals who translated The Arabian Nights or the Koran not only sought to familiarise the domestic audience with these texts and the world they represent, but also hoped to domesticate the native cultures and dominate them. In Kipling’s story, too, translation involves appropriation and domestication of an unfamiliar idiom and remote cultural landscape. Although the narrative does not relate a contest between coloniser and colonised per se, the pupils’ struggle to domesticate Latin and grasp the classical values it carries invites analogical readings. It is highly significant that King should explicitly refer to his pupils as ‘barbarians’, which suggests that their intellectual and spiritual elevation depends largely on their capacity to master the Roman language and culture. That is precisely what the students are expected to achieve in the end: to gain proficiency in the exotic Roman idiom and wrest from the poem the Roman values of heroism, law and order which they are instructed to abide by. A successful translation, the ideal to which King tends, would enable the students to incorporate the Roman values and then disseminate them across the nation and the British empire. The difficulty of translating Horace into English is eloquently illustrated by the recalcitrant Beetle who is standing before the class attempting an improvised translation of the ‘Regulus Ode’. Beetle undergoes an exacting experience, which turns him into a sacrificial figure in the grip


of a harsh, merciless god-like authority – King. He is seen fittingly compared to a ‘Christian martyr’ (196) and his unsuccessful, ad hoc efforts owe him the tirade of his Latin teacher: ‘Beetle, when you’ve quite finished dodging the fresh air yonder, give me the meaning of tendens – and turn down your collar.’ ‘Me, sir? Tendens, sir? Oh! Stretching away in the direction of, sir.’ ‘Idiot! Regulus was not a feature of the landscape. He was a man, self-doomed to death by torture. Atqui sciebat – knowing it – having it achieved for his country’s sake – can’t you hear that atqui cut like a knife? – he moved off with some dignity. That is why Horace out of the golden Latin tongue chose the one word “tendens” – which is utterly untranslatable’ (196). King is angered by Beetle’s inconclusive effort; however, he acknowledges the difficulty of his student’s stint, before ultimately admitting that the word ‘tendens’ which Beetle pains to translate is ‘utterly untranslatable’. According to King, this difficulty owes both to the unattainable perfection with which Horace’s idea is expressed and to the accomplishment of the Latin language. Kipling seems in this way to elevate Latin to a paragon of perfection, makes English appear comparatively deficient and indigent. King idealises Latin and equates it with a ‘golden tongue’, a valorisation which grants the Roman language a status similar to the one the IndoEuropeanists accorded to ancient Greek and to Aryan tongues in general. Kipling himself expressed veneration for Latin in a talk entitled ‘The Possible Advantages of Reading’ that he delivered on 25 May 1912 to the Literary Society of Wellington College. In the same speech he stressed that Latin had a unique genius of communicating ideas with ‘absolute perfection’. He also encouraged his audience to wrestle with Horace’s tongue in order to reach a state where they could ‘feel and absorb’ the classical thought. Getting his pupils to ‘feel’ and ‘absorb’ the idea of Horace’s ode, implicitly the classical imperial thought, is King’s main objective. His primary concern is to teach them to abide by the values of discipline, honour, self-sacrifice and solidarity incarnated by Regulus. Winton impersonates to some degree the Roman general; he is even nicknamed ‘Regulus’ by Stalky. After the Latin class Winton releases a mouse in Mr Lidgett’s mechanical drawing lesson. Following this ‘rank ruffianism’ (198) he is sentenced to a ‘thrashing’ by the head of games, his close friend Mullins that Stalky calls ‘my barbarus tortor’ (215).


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Winton’s rash behaviour and its consequences fulfil a didactic purpose: to illustrate in concrete facts the values that Horace’s ode communicates. The pupils gradually reach a stage at which they seem able to understand Horace’s poem and the values it conveys. Although ironically lacking the virtues of ‘balance, proportion, perspective’ (208) that the study of the classics teaches, King displays an acute sense of solidarity: ‘Winton was in King’s House, and though King as pro-consul might, and did, infernally oppress his own Province, once a black and yellow cap was in trouble at the hands of the Imperial authority King fought for him to the very last steps of Caesar’s throne’ (199). The need of bonding and solidarity is also suggested in Stalky’s response to King. Asked by his professor whether he and the other pupils trying to control the agitated Winton are ‘the populus delaying Winton’s return to – Mullins’, Stalky replies: ‘No, sir. . . . We’re the maerentes amicos [the sorrowing friends]’ (206). The boys show compassion for their schoolmate’s punishment. They even feel a bond of fellowship with him to the satisfaction of their professor who gleefully tells Reverend John and the science professor, Hartopp, ‘You see. . . . It sticks. A little of it sticks among the barbarians’ (208). The word ‘barbarians’ applied to the pupils aligns King’s teaching with a civilising mission. Metaphorically, King’s relation to his pupils re-enacts the dichotomy civiliser–uncivilised, educated–ignorant, Imperial Rome– former barbaric Britain. He impersonates an old Roman civiliser in the guise of a modern teacher of Latin, striving to enlighten his ignorant, diffident students and help them acquire intellectual confidence, in the same way as the Romans civilised their British ancestors. King is keen to lead his students closer to Horace’s spirit and immerse them in the Roman values exemplified by Regulus. Yet just as he seems deficient in the values he professes, he turns out to be biased and selective when it comes to representing Roman history. On evoking the Punic Wars,4 we see King lauding Imperial Rome’s victory over the ‘evil-minded commercial Carthage’ (197), which he compares to ‘a God-forsaken nigger Manchester’ (192). He presents the wars between Rome and Carthage as a battle between good and evil, virtue and vice, high civilisation and vulgar commercial culture. The classical dichotomy Roman-barbarian resonates in this depiction and reverberates in the overall narrative. Though a major power in the Mediterranean for a long time, Carthage, a Phoenician colony, is denigrated by the narrator and deemed culturally inferior, while the Romans are cast as enlightened civilisers. The corrupting influence of Carthage, suggested in this tale, echoes Virgil’s Aeneid, another classic text that inspired Kipling’s adventure stories. In rehearsing the binary,


Kipling carefully avoids Roman cruelty during the Punic Wars. After their victory, the Romans wreaked havoc on Carthage, killing most of its inhabitants and enslaving the survivors. Kipling eludes the Roman empire’s brutality and destructiveness, while implicitly valuing its capacity to export law and order. King’s erasure of the Romans’ ruthlessness tends to preserve the image of Imperial Rome as an agent of universal enlightenment. In the same flourish King reasserts through his omission the Romans as exemplary colonisers and implicitly confirms the study of the classics as a source of intellectual confidence, indispensable to the future servants of the British empire, that is King’s students.

Ancient Greeks and Romans as heuristic teachers The modern writers under examination consistently invoked the Greeks and Romans for a cluster of reasons. Some of these reasons are strictly pragmatic, such as imitating the ancient imperial methods and strategies of rule; others are ideological and narcissistic. Whether ancient or modern, colonialism has always proved a matter of brute force and material domination, as well as a narcissistic battle for representation and symbolic supremacy. In citing the prestigious Greek and Roman empires, modern colonial authors sought, explicitly or implicitly, three fundamental things: to legitimise the colonial project, enhance the colonisers’ intellectual confidence and reinforce Western cultural and racial supremacy. The way these authors connect modern Europe and the classical past highlights the static–dynamic paradigm mentioned earlier in connection with the Victorians’ attitude to classical Greece. In concrete terms, this means that authors such as Kipling, Haggard and Tocqueville often re-imagine the Greco-Roman world both as a reassuring, fixed cultural matrix from which to generate confidence and as dynamic forces of progress harnessed to the colonial ideal of modernity and modernisation. It can be argued that this dual image fits the demands of cultural essentialism and historical evolutionism on which the nineteenth-century narratives of the nation and empire were founded. The essence of Western culture is thus made available and precisely located in ancient Greece to which modern colonisers can return for inspiration or in times of crisis. At the same time, the whole ancient past is, at least rhetorically, set in motion and cast in an historic continuum, where space and time ultimately condense into an eternal now of the colonial moment. Put differently, in modern colonialist rhetoric and imperial imagination, the Greeks and Romans are often


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re-actualised in the here-and-now of empire in terms that inscribe the history of Western colonialism in a continuous, progressive pattern, moving from the Greeks to Romans and then to the British and French. The nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonialist authors’ emphasis on the connections between modern and classical empires is predicated on cultural, racial and genealogical considerations. The Romans regarded themselves as the Greeks’ heirs; likewise modern colonisers claim to be the heirs and pursuers of the classical imperial project. Moreover, just as the Romans considered the Greeks as their instructors, modern colonisers often equated the classical powers with educators. Classical colonisation was often assimilated to an educational enterprise, by the Greeks and Romans, as well as by the moderns. Throughout Western history, indeed, the ancient empires have been likened to agents of enlightenment in charge of ‘humaniz[ing] barbarism and enlighten[ing] superstition’ (Dickinson 1896, vi). The British and French, who proclaimed themselves heirs to the ancient empires, also stressed the links between modern colonisation and education. The role of the British empire was, in the words of John Robert Seeley (1834–95), a history professor at Cambridge: ‘similar to that of Rome, in which we hold the position not merely of a ruling but of an educating and civilising race’ (1883, 170–1). British colonialism, as summarised by Seeley, combines an administrative and educative enterprise. It is in charge of managing the natives’ affairs and instructing them, just as the Romans enlightened before the Anglo-Saxon tribes. For Seeley, colonialism is tantamount to a rite of passage. The British, who had benefited from Roman civilisation, must in turn perform their civilising duty in Africa and Asia. New instructors of mankind, the nineteenth-century British thus looked to ancient Rome for helpful military, administrative and moral lessons. Although the Romans were not the only military models the British took after,5 they remained the most significant providers of lessons. Both in administrative and technological matters the British, Boehmer observes, were inspired by the Romans: ‘In their plans for enlightened service and development the British discerned the makings of a new Rome. The Romans had laid roads; the British now built railroads and laid telegraph cables. Their rule exhibited inspiratorial continuities with the past’ (1995, 42). British colonial rule was no doubt based on many principles borrowed from the Romans as well as the Greeks, such as indirect rule or use of the local élite to maintain their domination. In addition to administrative and technological inspiration the British also derived a great deal of their imperialist ideology from the two classical empires, as will be shown later.


Like their British counterparts, French colonial writers and supporters of empire often cited ancient Greece and Rome to justify their countries’ conquests or exorcise doubts relating to the civilising mission. They took the ancient powers for cultural and military models and thought that their strategies of conquest could assist them in their global expansion. In his correspondence with Catherine the Great, Denis Diderot (1713– 84) identified the Greeks and Romans with universal instructors: ‘The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans. The Greeks and Romans have been ours’ (1775, 453). Similarly, for Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), an influential and zealous supporter of ‘La Grande France’, the classical empires were ideal conquerors to imitate. He exhorted the French colonists in Algeria to follow the ancient imperial example, highlighting imperialism’s propensity to uniformity and imitation: What matters most when we want to set up and develop a colony is to make sure that those who arrive in it are as less estranged as possible, that these newcomers meet a perfect image of their homeland . . . The thousand colonies that the Greeks founded on the Mediterranean coasts were all exact copies of the Greek cities on which they had been modelled. The Romans established in almost all parts of the globe known to them municipalities which were no more than miniature Romes. Among Modern colonisers, the English did the same. Who can prevent us from emulating these European peoples? (1841, 167) Tocqueville formulates an explicit, coherent pedagogy of colonisation that makes mimetism a central imperial design. He assimilates the modern colonial adventure to a learning process with Romans and Greeks as heuristic teachers. By adding modern colonial Britain to the list of the empires that France must imitate, Tocqueville inscribes imperialism in a dynamics of continuity and solidarity that federates in one common global project of domination the Greeks, the Romans, the British and the French. Paul Valery (1871–1945), too, advised his French contemporaries to imitate the ancient Greeks and Romans whom he viewed as worthy instructors: From the cultural point of view, I do not think we have much to fear now from the Oriental influence. . . . The Greeks and Romans showed us how to deal with the monsters of Asia, how to treat them by analysis, how to extract from them their quintessence . . . The Mediterranean basin seems to be like a closed vessel where the essences of the


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vast Orient have always come in order to be condensed (quoted by Said 1978, 250–1). Valery closely knits modern imperial ideology with classical Orientalism, reasserting the role of the ancient powers as beacons to the new empires. He stresses the need to draw from the Greeks’ and Romans’ knowledge of the ‘barbarians’ to domesticate and contain contemporary Asians. Valery in this statement displays cultural arrogance and repeats the Greco-Roman representations of Asians, implied in the word ‘monsters’. The best manner for modern Europe to deal with Asians, Valery suggests, is by pondering the lessons of the past, presumably those of the fifth century BC that saw the subjection of Persia by ancient Greece. Diderot, Tocqueville, Valery, Mahaffy, Macaulay, Haggard, Kipling and Seeley revered the classical empires and urged imitating them to provide moral, intellectual and ideological justification for colonialism. Because imperialism aspires to military as well as cultural domination, modern colonial authors valued both the examples of empire builders such as Alexander the Great or Augustus and the words and lessons of the classical bards of empire. Homer, Xenophon, Virgil and Horace, to name a few, were highly admired by classical and modern imperialists alike. Alexander the Great was an admirer of Homer and the Iliad was his favourite reading. He cherished it as a devout Christian would a Bible. This poem was, as Plutarch observes, Alexander’s inseparable companion during his military expeditions in Asia. He states in Moralia that ‘when Alexander was civilising Asia the reading was Homer’. Greek imperialism and Homer’s epics were thus inextricably linked, although the poems were written a few centuries before the rise of Greece into a major imperial power. The Iliad furnished inspiration and heroic values for Alexander to imitate. As is commonly acknowledged, Alexander identified closely with Achilles, the hero of the Trojan War, and embraced the hero’s values and aims (Worthington 2003). Homer was highly esteemed by the Greeks and was regarded by many as their ‘instructor’ and the ‘founding father’ of their culture. His Iliad and Odyssey influenced various sections of ancient Greek cultural life and their impact has manifestly extended to modern Western thought. Homer initiated an elegiac tradition which celebrated Hellenic might and cultural supremacy. His epics, which were seen as the embodiment of Hellenic character and culture, were treasured by the Greeks, and later revered by modern writers and apologists of empire. Written possibly about 850 BC, Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad are considered as the paragon


of poetic genius.6 They provided a source of inspiration for British and French writers since the Renaissance (Bush 1932; Braden 1978). Homer’s epics were of particular interest to modern writers in general and of the utmost relevance to nineteenth-century colonial authors, in particular. Adventure story writers such as Haggard, Kipling and Armand Dubarry borrowed themes, myths as well as cultural and racial categorisations which fitted their imperial preoccupations. The heroic values, cultural confidence seeping through the narratives, and depiction of non-Greeks, or what Homer called the people at ‘the end of the earth’ were of paramount importance to the modern bards of imperialism. Although the colonial writers’ use of the classical canonical texts may vary from one writer to another, the way they deployed the borrowed ancient material highlights the continuity between the classical and modern colonial imagination. Homer’s poems, as well as Virgil’s epics, held a privileged status among the Renaissance humanists. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, a period of extensive colonisation, interest in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad reached its height. These works were often associated with and shared some of the cultural authority of the Bible itself.6 Such correlation endowed these poems with sacredness and elevated them to authoritative texts that commanded respect and veneration. Although Homer’s epics were by far the most influential, Xenophon’s Anabasis and Virgil’s Aeneid also held an important place in modern colonial thought and literatures. Both Anabasis, which relates Alexander’s penetration of Asia, and Aeneid which celebrates the birth of Imperial Rome, were valued by nineteenth and early twentieth-century imperialist writers. Virgil was inspired by Homer’s epics which he adapted to his own aesthetic and political aims. The Aeneid, the primary apologia for Roman imperialism, relates Aeneas’s long, perilous journey to Italy after his flight from Troy destroyed by the Greeks. His mission, which he assimilates to fated, godly command, is in many respects similar to that of the autocratic Roman emperor Augustus (63 BC–AD 14) who ruled for forty-one years. Augustus was credited with bringing to the decaying Roman state peace, prosperity and imperial grandeur, known as the Pax Romana. Like the emperor, Aeneas is concerned with uniting the Italian tribes and he is aware that for this unity to be achieved ‘he’ll wage hard war in Italy; savage tribes he must defeat, and give them towns and laws’ (10). Aeneas’s comment sounds like a civilising mission whose explicit aim is to tame the ‘savage’ Italian tribes into good, docile Roman citizens. His imperial ambition is two-fold: found ‘our Roman race’ (4) and erect a ‘towering Rome’ that will be ‘the throne of mankind’ (3). The newly born


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Roman race is assigned a ‘universal destiny’ and elevated to a human norm. Rome, in turn, becomes the centre of the universe from which the whole world is to be ruled. Virgil’s Aeneid as well as Homer’s epics and Horace’s odes may be fittingly characterised as the Bible of the modern colonialist writers. These canonical texts’ emphasis on the heroic values of self-sacrifice and patriotism, their celebration of myths of origins, and their projection of a universal consciousness may explain why they were revered by modern colonial authors such as Kipling and Haggard among others. If Kipling’s ‘Regulus’ was influenced by both Horace and Virgil, Haggard’s adventure story, She, which is my present focus, follows the Homeric tradition. This novel is perhaps the late nineteenth-century text which best illustrates the aesthetic and ideological continuities between the classical and modern empires. This narrative reflects the century’s idealised vision of Homeric society and poetry. It displays a cluster of myths, symbols, and structural and thematic motifs that evidence the intricate relation between ancient Greece and England. In She Haggard dramatises Britain’s close ties to the Greek world and these connections are conveyed by the potsherd motif and the hero’s portrait. The narrator writes about the protagonist: ‘though he is half a Greek in blood, Leo is, with the exception of his hair, one of the most English-looking men I ever saw’ (1887, 211–12). The offspring of an English father and a Greek mother, Leo Vincey exemplifies the connections between ancient Greece and modern Britain. His mixed descent makes him a natural continuer of the Hellenic civilisation. The retrieved sherd reinforces these links. As an archaeological discovery, this relic may refer to the important archaeological and anthropological works undertaken in the eighteenth century to learn more about the ancient Greeks with whom the British started to identify. It similarly serves as a link-between welding the modern and classical times. For Leo, the sherd has the value of an original script recording his family’s, and metaphorically British, history. Although a fragment of a missing whole, this artefact ‘carries absolute authority’ (Adams 2003, 17). It becomes a totalisation that determines both the protagonist’s life and the overall narrative. Notwithstanding its fragmentariness the potsherd originates, structures and bestows authority upon the story. Its prominence in the novel’s imagery suggests both Haggard’s dependence on Greek canonical texts and empire’s reliance on narratives of origins. The fragment is, in short, metonymic of both the Homeric tradition and the genesis of imperialism. Owing to its structural centrality the inscribed potsherd acquires the status of a founding


text which comprises all the other tales related in She. It stands for the grand récit of imperialism that encompasses modern histories of conquest and domination. Its cogent structuring function indicates the extent to which the modern imperial narrative, as inferred from the story, is a proto-text dependent on a supra-structure of knowledge and authority embodied in the past by ancient Greece, specifically in the Odyssey tradition. Manifest in this novel is Haggard’s consistent effort to set the Greek world and England in a permanent dialogue, with ancient Greece standing for a diffused voice of authority, a cultural and historical matrix and a racial ideal. The English are clearly identified as the ancient Greeks’ heirs in charge of pursuing the unfinished classical civilising mission. When he describes the sherd the narrator stresses the neatness of the inscriptions in Greek, adding that the other ‘legible’ thing is the word ‘ROMAE, A.U. C.’, to which Leo’s family migrated (36). As he refers to Leo’s family’s dual legacy, he nonetheless tries to undermine the connections between the Vinceys, metonymically the English, and the Romans. He does so by insisting that ‘with the exception of its termination (civ)* the date of [Leo’s family’s] settlement there is lost for ever, for just where it had been placed a piece of the potsherd is broken away’ (37). The Vinceys’ link to Rome is blurred, so, too, is the whole Roman period that is left unrecorded by the sherd: ‘After the Roman names [inscribed upon the sherd] there is evidently a gap of very many centuries. Nobody will ever know what the history of the relic was during those dark ages, or how it came to be preserved in the family’ (37–8). The English, as implied here, came to fill those gaps and work as intermediaries between the golden Greek era and Europe’s ‘dark ages’. The retrieved sherd, which suggests the incompleteness of the ancient imperial project, is a composite, multi-layered texture, ‘covered from top to bottom with notes and signatures in Greek, Latin, and English’ (35). Using allusion and symbol, Haggard strikingly brings into contact ancient Greece and Egypt while reasserting the bonds between the English and the Greeks. The potsherd’s structure bears, indeed, a stunning resemblance to the Rosetta Stone which carries an inscription in three languages that helped decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph script. It is the only surviving fragment of a larger stone slab recording a decree of 27 March 196 BC. At the top, the decree was written in hieroglyph, the 3000-year-old script of Egyptian monuments, in the middle it was in Demotic, the everyday script of literate Egyptians, and at the bottom the decree was in Greek, the language of the government, for at that time Egypt was ruled by a Greek dynasty.


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The potsherd, like the Rosetta, is the only remnant of a larger pot; it similarly hosts inscriptions in Greek and translations in Latin and English which reveal a stratified structure. Haggard re-appropriates and adapts the Rosetta’s symbolism to imperial purposes. Through the translations of the potsherd’s inscriptions he intimates a linguistic continuum where Greek, Latin and Old and Modern English flow into and build upon each other. He likewise suggests via the second writing on the artefact, which uncovers ancestral roots, direct racial filiations between Greece and England. Haggard infers, however, that Leo is not a seasoned conqueror, but a novice in need of ancient lessons and wisdom. The Odyssey is in this regard both a precious source of inspiration and a useful guidebook for adventurers like Leo en route for remote, dangerous places. Leo can familiarise with the ‘Homeric spirit’ (Murray 1897, 154) and find in the valorous combats and physical prowess of Homer’s heroes lessons of courage and endurance. If not exactly a guidebook in the way the Odyssey can be, the potsherd serves as a valuable ‘map’ helping the protagonist to find his bearings in Africa. A messenger of civilisation, Leo travels to the Dark Continent and confronts ‘cannibals’ who wound him. Obviously imperialist in orientation, Leo’s journey to Africa – the cradle of mankind – takes the shape of a legitimate quest for origins. Curiously, though, the Greek-looking Leo embarks on a journey in search of the truth behind the death of an Egyptian ancestor, a priest slain by an ancient sorceress, Queen Ayesha, a 2000-year-old ruler of the lost world of Kôr. The protagonist is described as: the only representative of one of the most ancient families in the world, that is, so far as families can be traced. . . . His sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth lineal ancestor was an Egyptian priest of Isis, though he is himself of Grecian extraction, and was called Killikrates. His father was one of the Greek mercenaries raised by Hak-Hor, a Mendesian Pharaoh of the twenty-ninth dynasty and his grand-father or great-grand father, I believe, was that very Killikrates mentioned by Herodotus. (10) The narrator focuses on Leo’s genealogy and draws attention to its palimpsestic patterning, revealing how Greek origins interlace with Egyptian history and culture. Implicit in the protagonist’s racial and cultural ramifications is Haggard’s recognition that ancient Egypt was Greece’s ancestor, the source of its civilisation, as many Greek poets and philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle recognised (Bernal 1987). Leo’s attempt to uncover the secrets of Kallikrates’ slaughter may rightly


be interpreted as Haggard’s effort to reconnect Greek culture with its Egyptian roots downplayed or ‘refuted by silence’ by most Greek historians, poets, and philosophers until the fifth century BC; a disavowal reiterated by many nineteenth-century colonial scholars and authors. Haggard’s writing at that particular period might have been directly or indirectly influenced by the debates in question. I know of no evidence that he had taken part in the nineteenth century discussions about the relationship between Greek and Egyptian civilisations. There is no indication either of his having openly claimed, like many Indo-Europeanists at that time, the purity and superiority of Indo-European languages over other idioms. Yet, She echoes these preoccupations in a way implying that Haggard might have been at least familiar with the debates, and might have had some knowledge of the Indo-Europeanists’ association of German and Greek with ‘sacred’ tongues.

Colonialism-as-grafting The layering of Egyptian, Greek and English origins in Leo’s identity intimates the idea of colonialism-as-grafting. The notion of grafting is first entailed in the Greeks’ relation to their Egyptian heritage upon which they built their culture and arts. It is similarly implied in the Romans’ incorporation of the Greek arts, myths and religions which they grafted onto their own culture. Grafting is equally reflected in the modern cultures’ adoption of classical tropes and concepts upon which colonial ideology is built. These imbrications highlight the synergetic nature of colonialism, past and present alike. In connection with modern empires, the need to blend the old and the new, expressed by Tocqueville and Seeley among other empire’s enthusiasts, casts colonialism as a cultural, ideological and epistemological continuum, with the modern parasitically and pragmatically building upon the ancient. Within the alliance of the ‘then’ and ‘now’, classical stories of glorious Greek and Roman conquests over barbarians were to inspire modern narratives of domination. In turn, ancient military figures were to be models for modern imperial rulers. For many conquerors, including Julius Caesar, Augustus and Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great was a model to imitate and surpass. Alexander the Great became King of the Macedonian empire at the age of twenty, after the death of his father, Philip II, in 336 BC. He was a visionary politician and fine tactician, known for his extraordinary capacity to blend imperial pragmatism with spirituality, violent conquest with ‘mystical belief’ that gave his rule a messianic dimension. Alexander


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believed that he was sent by the gods ‘to be a governor and reconciler of the universe’ (Hammond 1997). This may explain why on conquering Asia he was reported saying: ‘I accept Asia from the gods.’ He presented himself to the conquered Persians as a benevolent god and saviour, whose mission was to unite Persia and Greece. It is significant that Alexander’s universalism and messianism resonate in the discourses of modern imperialists, starting with Napoleon. Napoleon’s re-appropriation of Alexander’s rhetoric and persona reinforces the links between ancient and modern imperialism. It highlights how far classical profane messianism blends with the modern messianic doctrines of Christianity and Enlightenment to justify and further the goals of empire. An admirer of Alexander the Great, Napoleon unambiguously identified himself with the Macedonian conqueror and embraced the latter’s myths and rhetoric of self-representation. When Napoleon landed in Egypt with his army, administrators and scientists in 1798 he, too, presented himself as a liberator. And just as Alexander expected the Persians to welcome him as a god and saviour, Napoleon expected the Egyptians to reserve for him a godly welcome. To act out his Alexandrian role fully, he pretended to free the Egyptians from the abject condition into which the Mameluke rulers had plunged them (Pagden 2001, 137–40). Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt had various geopolitical and ideological motivations. Among these were a desire to acquire a new colony, challenge Britain’s power, spread French Republicanism in the Middle East and regenerate the ‘barbaric’ Ottoman province (Cole 2007). On a more personal basis, Napoleon wished through this expedition to achieve glory and greatness that would put him on equal footing with Alexander the Great, his military model. To his dismay, though, his army, which easily defeated the Egyptian resistance, was expelled by the British and Ottoman forces in 1801. Napoleon did not, of course, repeat in the Middle East the successes of Alexander in Asia, but he seems to have retained his model’s messianism. Indeed, like Alexander, who ambitioned to merge Persia and Greece into a universal civilisation, Napoleon was apparently moved by a similar desire to bring into fruitful alliance Egypt and France, Oriental wisdom and European cerebration. Napoleon’s admiration for ancient Egyptian culture, which he viewed as the ‘cradle of civilisation’, might account for his synergetic ideal. Yet the apparent striving for cultural syncretism proved merely strategic, for, deep down, he mostly aimed at turning the Ottoman province into a French colony. Theoretically, Napoleon’s wish to graft Western rationalism on Eastern wisdom suggests two important things: first, in ideal


imperial circumstances Europe and the Orient could mutually enrich and reshape each other; secondly, grafting, at least as implied in the WestEast binary, tends to maintain rather than dissolve cultural and racial hierarchies. Performed when a plant is unproductive or of insufficient output, grafting has a strengthening or regenerating effect. Transposed to the colonial context, the metaphor of grafting refers to the colonisers’ wish to transplant the advanced European civilisation onto the stagnant indigenous cultures in order to reinvigorate them. From a Western colonial perspective, the colonised required cultural as well as racial regeneration. For example, Albert Sarraut, a French Minister of the Colonies,7 suggested improving Algerian culture and mores through a ‘wise, useful infusion of modern principles of progress’ (1923, 104). Ernest Renan recommended in turn instilling a few drops of noble blood into the natives to racially improve them. Such a eugenic conception, which considers some races nobler than others, had far-reaching implications in the colonial world. It established a racial hierarchy that justified social and economic injustices and implicitly legitimised rape – a predominant colonial trope – as a means of improving biologically the natives. Similar to Renan, Robert Delavignette8 who viewed the Romans as a point of reference, advised the British and French colonisers taking after the Romans to save African civilisation from decay. His moral ambition was ‘to reconcile Africans with themselves in order to restore them back to humankind’ (quoted by Girardet 1972, 267). With this claim, Delavignette casts Europeans in the role of redeemers responsible for rehumanising the Africans and bringing them out of the state of nature into culture. In a similar vein, Captain John Moresby (1830–1922), a British naval officer who explored the coast of New Guinea, reiterated in New Guinea and Polynesia (1876) the Occident’s duty to save the people of New Guinea from the barbarous customs of ‘infanticide, self-mutilation, human sacrifices, cannibalism’ (300). In accordance with the ‘white man’s burden’, he recommended that the Europeans make themselves ‘tutors of the childhood of those races that lie directly within [their] influence, and [lead] them to moral and intellectual manhood’ (301). Both Delavignette and Moresby seemingly wished to integrate the natives into the human family from which colonial racism excluded them. All the same, their ethic of humanisation was undercut by downto-earth imperialist pursuits. For deep down Delavignette, like most French colonialists, was more preoccupied with France’s material interests in Algeria than with the fate of the indigenous population. Likewise, Moresby appears in practice less concerned with uplifting morally and


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materially the ‘heathens’ than with presenting New Guinea to his readers as a land of economic opportunities. The manifest contradictions of both authors reveal how the colonial humanitarian ethic, rather than contributing to the natives’ advancement, often served to validate their exploitation and dehumanisation. To elaborate on the imperial system’s ambivalence and murkiness we may argue that grafting is a key feature of the modern colonial enterprise. As well as building their empires on the vestiges of the classical powers, the British and French, like their Roman and Greek inspirers, grafted their mechanisms of rule onto pre-existing indigenous power structures. They continued earlier practices and cautiously amended inefficient, less advantageous ones. The British and French often upheld in respectively India and North Africa the traditional native power structures which they turned into conduits of colonial rule.9 Following Alexander the Great’s paradigm,10 and the Ottoman empire, which they later helped to dismantle, the British did little to upset the existing Indian social organisation. Most of the time, they left in place the Indian princes through whom they governed. In Africa, they also opted for indirect rule and administered their colonies through the local chiefs. Emulating the Spanish colonial system which used the indigenous leaders, the curaca, as mediators and tax collectors,11 the British turned the traditional African élites into an auxiliary force collaborating in varying degrees to the colonial administration. More inclined to direct rule, the French relied on aristocratic families in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia to tighten their grip. Like the Turks, they took advantage of prevailing power institutions. They administered the colony with the help of indigenous intermediaries, the qadis (Islamic judges), the caids or tribal chiefs, and the amins (religious leaders) who operated as useful tools, translating and validating colonial rule. The French and British benefited from the indigenous élite’s collaboration. They also gained by shrewdly exploiting the conquered communities’ divisions and investing their literatures and religious texts. For both the French and British during the nineteenth century, domestication of the native languages, stories and cultures soon turned out to be as vital as dispossessing them of their land and riches. It is worth mentioning, however, that Europe’s propensity to appropriate and colonise non-European texts did not emerge in the nineteenth century, but was common in earlier periods, most notably in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The fiction of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) offers illuminating examples. Robinson Crusoe (1719), Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722) and


Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724) promote at variance a mercantilist ethos with a particular emphasis on trade, self-interest, capitalism and colonisation. In his writings about politics and economics, Defoe urged Britain to secure new markets through conquest and expansion in order to boost her economy after the collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720, and the financial ruin it caused (Meier 1987; Owens and Furbank 2000).12 Written four years after what was called the South Sea Bubble affair, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress centres on capitalism, self-reliance, trade, slavery and imperialism. Most of the novel is set in Paris and Amsterdam and relates the life of Lady Roxana. Born in Poitiers of French Huguenot parents in 1673, Roxana settles in England at the age of ten to flee Catholic persecution. When she is fifteen she is given a 2000 pound dowry and marries a brewer. Her husband squanders her fortune and goes bankrupt, leaving her penniless with five children to fend for. The narrative describes Roxana’s fall from a comfortable middle-class position to destitution and relates her rebirth into wealth and social prestige by selling her body to upper-class dignitaries. At a more complex, deeper level the novel suggests Roxana’s, metaphorically Britain’s, transformation into an expansionist force, involved in the slave trade and plundering of foreign lands. We are told that Roxana bought a Turkish slave as well as a Turkish dress that she obtained by way of a ‘Malthese Man of War’ (102). The dress is described as ‘extraordinary fine indeed. . . . the Robe was fine Persian, or India Damask; the Ground white, and the Flowers blue and gold, and the Train held five Yards; the Dress under it, was a Vest of the same, . . . embroider’d with Gold, and set with Pearl in the Work, and some Turquois Stones’ (174). This description concentrates the riches of the Orient – gold, pearl, fine embroidery – that were long coveted and then looted by Europe. By purchasing the Turkish slave and dress Roxana literally appropriates the exotic Orient. The heroine’s ‘will to power’ which she owes to her accumulated wealth is compounded by a ‘will to knowledge’, both converging to turn her into a hegemonic site of dominance (Foucault 1980). Roxana combines material domination with an incursion into her slave’s culture and mores in order to have full possession of her exotic world. She has learned from her slave the ‘Turkish language’, ‘the Turks’ ways of dancing’ and ‘Moorish songs’, which, as she claims, were later used ‘to [her] advantage’ (102). Her appropriation of the Other’s culture and language is obviously motivated by a desire to further her interests in London’s high society. Assessed within the economic and ideological context of the eighteenth century, Roxana’s expansionist drive reflects


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Europe’s quest for global power through spoliation of the natives’ riches and domestication of their cultures. Western engagement with alien cultures and ‘will to power,’ suggested in Roxana, are manifest in nineteenth-century literature and colonial politics. They were part of Europe’s ‘planetary consciousness’ that emerged during this period (Pratt 1992, 25). Aware that ‘stories define us’, the British immersed themselves in the Indian literary and religious texts such as the Arabian Nights, the Koran and the Veda and took what could help them govern efficiently their colony (Said 1978; Bernal 1987; Boehmer 1995; Low 1996). One of the aims of invading and manipulating the natives’ self-representations was to subordinate the indigenous peoples’ knowledge of their cultures to Western redefinitions of them. As colonialism was based on both material appropriation of the colonies and symbolic dispossession of the conquered, it was necessary to estrange the colonised from their imaginary world, as they were robbed of their lands and riches. While material dispossession was intended to deprive the natives of economic and political power, cultural alienation was meant to drain them of intellectual confidence and the capacity to name their world in their own words and be masters of their destinies. The French adopted the same strategy in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal. They read the Koran and studied tribal religious customs for identical objectives. Just as the British encouraged the primitive aspects of Hindu religion and culture,13 the French fostered the most regressive aspects of the Islamic culture such as maraboutism and fraternities to subject the colonised (Kay & Zoubir 1990). They emulated the Turks, implementing the Islamic laws which were socially and fiscally favourable to them. In addition, they deftly exploited the native societies’ religious and ethnic divisions to establish their domination,14 as did the Romans in North Africa and elsewhere, the Spanish in America, and the British in India. The class-minded British imitated the Muslim rulers who, from the seventh century on, retained the Hindus’ caste practices and manipulated them to serve political ends. The British did little in the first place to change the Indian caste system. They even endorsed it. In 1905, they divided the state of Bengal into separate Hindu and Muslim sections. They later encouraged the Muslim leaders, who formed in 1906 the All-India Muslim League. By backing the Muslims they hoped to split the national movement and weaken the Indian National Congress. Though counter to the basic principles of a modern state, the British officials also engaged in forced labour which was widely used by earlier Indian rulers. This system was abolished only in 1921 (Kumar 1998, 299).


The ironic twist here is that the barbaric pre-colonial past that the British and French colonisers came to civilise turned out to be a precious tool of domination, used to subject the colonised and exploit them. The strategic alliance of the modern and archaic highlights the composite, elusive character of colonial ideology and rule.15 It shows how during colonial rule, modernity with its rhetoric of modernisation and progress dovetailed with archaism to achieve high imperial ends. The inter-relationship of the modern and archaic indicates how in modern colonial rhetoric civilisation and barbarity are enmeshed; the former often provides a thin varnish for the latter. Many colonial texts described civilisation and barbarity as blurred categories. At first glance, Haggard in King Solomon’s Mines (1886) strongly backs the British empire and praises the English spirit of adventure typified by Sir Henry Curtis, ‘the great Englishman’ who had been ‘looked on throughout Kukuanaland as a supernatural being’ (374). But while lauding ‘our modern institutions representing as they do the gathered experience of humanity applied for the good of all’ (420), he acknowledges that the frontiers between civilisation and modernity are narrow. He conceives of ‘civilisation’ as ‘only savagery silver-gilt’ and compares it to a tree which has grown ‘out of the soil of barbarism’ (420). In like manner, E.M. Forster (1879–1970) in ‘The Eternal Moment’ (1905) points to the corruptive influence of civilisation. He declares that his heroine, Raby ‘was not enthusiastic over the progress of civilisation, knowing by Eastern experiences that civilisation rarely puts her best foot foremost, and is apt to make the barbarians immoral and vicious before her compensating qualities arrive’ (221). More subtly, Conrad in Heart of Darkness (1899) suggests through Kurtz that the distinction between civilisation and savagery is tenuous. These fictional examples reflect colonialism’s Janus-faced nature. Both the British and French engaged in violence and oppression in their colonies, while outwardly displaying an image of enlightened, forwardlooking nations. Colonial massacres have been well documented, so there is no need engaging deeply this issue. The following cases are merely intended as reminders of colonialism’s cruelty: the British ruthless repression of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the 1916 Irish Rising, the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, the 1845 French murder of hundreds of rebels from the Ouled Riah tribe, near Mostaganem (Algeria), and the 1945 suppression of the street demonstration in Sétif, Kharata, and Guelma are among the most notoriously publicised occurrences of imperial violence (Fein 1977; Benot 1994; Judd 1997; Sellam 1999). These brutalities both reveal the thin veil separating civilisation from barbarity16 and challenge


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the assumption that colonising nations should resort to violence only for progressive purposes (Cooper and Stoler 1997, 31). The fierceness with which the risings were met in India, Ireland and Algeria was no doubt intended less for the improvement of the natives than for preserving the colonies and continuing to exploit their resources. By crushing these revolts the British and French exposed their intention to perpetuate the colonial subjects’ political exclusion and economic exploitation. These empires’ combination of a progressive rhetoric of enlightenment with a policy of oppression and retardation shows that colonial rule and ideology were ‘hybrid’ and protean, based on repression and consensus, totality and differentiation. Modern construction of difference, too, is composite and ambivalent. It articulates around the dialectics of generalisation and distinction, repetition and variation.

2 Imperial Ideology: Between Totality and Differentiation

Classical Orientalism and modern colonial construction of difference: continuity and rupture From the middle of the fifth century BC the Greeks nurtured a feeling of superiority over the barbarians, especially the Persians that they defeated at the battle of Salamis. Anti-Persian views permeate ancient Greece’s literature. Isocrates in his most celebrated oration, Panegyrics (380 BC) exhorted the Greeks to unite against the Persians whom he assimilated to corrupt, wicked and contemptible barbarians; a representation repeated later by Lysias in his funeral oration composed between 392 and 386 BC. The two writers opposed a civilised Greece to a benighted Persia. They referred to the Persian Wars as a struggle between one continent and another, Europe and Asia, same and Other. For Isocrates and Lysias and most of their contemporaries, Greece stood for the whole of Europe and Persia represented the Orient. This clear-cut delineation was sustained by a racialist discourse that associated the Persians with effeminacy, luxury and corruption. The Greeks defined the Egyptians in identical terms, dismissing them as despotic, morally degenerate and cowardly (Bernal 1987; Isaac 2004). These racial and cultural taxonomies inspired the Romans who also represented their defeated colonial subjects as weak and effeminate. They recur in the works of such authors as Ciceron and Sallust, showing how the Romans’ depiction of their imperial subjects derived to a great extent from the Greeks. Many modern writers and scholars, particularly in the eighteenth century emulated the classical assumptions about ancient Egypt’s inferiority. For instance, Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer, essayist and philosopher (1694–1778), and Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), a German art historian, archaeologist and Hellenist, expressed 40

Imperial Ideology 41

similar hostility towards ancient Egypt. In his Traité sur la tolérance (Treatise on Toleration, 1763), Voltaire pleaded for universal tolerance and urged people to ‘regard all men as our brothers’ (138). At the same time, he ironically proved intolerant when it came to depicting the Egyptians whom he deemed a ‘contemptible’ people. Like most Indo-Europeanists, Winckelmann, who advocated ancient Greece’s youth, purity and artistic genius, reiterated the Greek assumptions about the stagnation and decay of Egyptian civilisation. In keeping with the classical environmental theories linking peoples’ character and wit to their land, Winckelmann related the Egyptians’ backwardness to their geography which he judged unfavourable to worthy artistic achievements (Bernal 1987). The ancient representations of Egypt lived into later periods and by the mid-nineteenth century the adoption of classical metaphors, symbols, modes of thought and cultural practices helped turn the ancient Egyptians into a fixed type. Their language and culture had consequently been ranked inferior to those of Greece or Rome. By that time, Egypt was reduced to a symbol of stasis and despotism – images that had a strong resonance in nineteenth-century Western colonial discourse about Africa and the Orient. Greece was instead identified with a dynamic force of progress and liberty. In casting the Egyptians, and along with other barbarians including the Persians and Scythians, as a backward, stagnant race the Greeks and the Romans that followed originated a discourse of barbarism1 which provided the terms in which the colonised were later characterised. Within the enmeshed connections between past and present, the classical Greeks and Romans came to represent for modern Europeans an ideal imperial selfhood. The Egyptians were in turn encoded as a universal negative Other, typifying the colonised African or Oriental. The racist rhetoric, which defined the ancient Egyptians and generally the barbarians, flowed into the Modern Age to categorise the colonised at large, as if the history of modern colonisation were a mere continuation of classical hegemonies. The Greek and Roman representations of foreign peoples were a fundamental source of inspiration. Edward Said in Orientalism refers to the body of knowledge about distant lands furnished by the classical powers: In Classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, public figures like Caesar, orators, and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separating races, regions, nations, and minds from each other; much of that was self-serving, and existed to prove that Romans and Greeks were superior to other kinds of people (1978, 57).


The Greek and Roman construction of difference was, as suggested in this statement, a collective enterprise that involved various sections of society closely collaborating in the same imperial project. This network of solidarities formed a social totality whereby scholars in diverse fields, public figures, historians and poets provided self-serving definitions. They helped in varying degrees to devise a hegemonic discourse which validated Greek and Roman supremacy. This rhetoric of Othering served as a template for modern colonialist depiction of the natives. Modern colonial writers borrowed classical racist stereotypes condensed in the word ‘barbarian’,2 which is no doubt one of the most enduring signs of the classical legacy. The definitions of the natives in modern colonial literatures and politics are to a great extent derivative and mimetic. Drawing from the classical characterisation of the foreigners, these definitions rehearse the image of non-Europeans as backward and inferior. At the same time, they tend to break away from the ancient vision of the barbarian as a generic type. Resilient and fluid, modern construction of difference is thereby set in a dialectics of repetition and variation, articulating around categorisation and distinction, integration and exclusion of the natives. Within this complex imperial network of incorporation and differentiation each colonial subject was characterised as simultaneously distinct and generic. Referring to the condition of the blacks in Jacobean England, Kim Hall writes: ‘[T]he status of black people as curiosities or commodities meant that they were considered both as individual “cases” and as emblematic of a larger group’ (1995, ii). The Blacks and generally the natives often see their identity fractured along the lines of individuality and collectivity, distinction and generalisation, which turns them into a fuzzy category. In Topography of Ireland (1188), for instance, Gerald of Wales, who was of Norman and Welsh descent, depicted the Irish as ambiguous. For this moralist and social scientist and historian, the Irish were both ‘so barbarous as they cannot be said to have any culture’ and ‘the fountain of art and music’ (Carroll 2003, 68). Many modern writers, including Las Casas, Tocqueville, Gide, Greene and Conrad similarly describe the indigenous peoples ambivalently. Conrad’s ‘Karain: A Memory’ (1897) is an eloquent example. This short story centres on the Malay chief, Karain, who is obsessed with the death of his sword bearer and charm provider. Revolving around the protagonist are the unnamed English narrator and his two companions, Hollis and Jackson who come to Mindanao to trade in arms illegally. The narrator relates the tensions between the West and East


and he is seen channelling Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses.3 He consistently promotes stereotyped images of the Malays and occasionally engages in a rhetoric that acknowledges the natives’ value. He portrays them both as ‘barbarous’ and ‘sometimes well-bred’, ‘truculent’ and capable of ‘restraint’, and martial and ‘soft’ (38). In short, for the narrator the Malays are hazy figures, at once alien and familiar, barbaric and civilised. But this initial differentiated view turns out to be inconsistent, as he gradually assumes narrative supremacy asserting truths about the Malays with generalising confidence. When it comes to describing Karain in particular the narrator tends to reiterate the colonial prejudices which he previously tried to dismantle. This perceptual and ideological shift betrays an inability to distance himself from Europe’s stereotypical views of the natives: ‘He summed up his race, his country, the elemental force of ardent life, of tropical nature. He had its luxuriant strength, its fascination; and like it, he carried the seed of peril with it’ (41). The ghost-ridden, superstitious Karain is a prototype concentrating the Malays’ features. He is made paradigmatic of his race, culture and environment typifying the very Malay essence and tropical nature. In semiotic terms, Karain becomes a mere metonymy – the part that represents the whole – mirroring his own people. He is reduced to a generic type, organically connected to his cultural and geographical milieu. In this way, Karain is denied the romantic privilege of the first person, lumped together with the rest of his community into an anonymous collective ‘they’. The narrator’s Orientalist views are further reinforced by Hollis’s stereotypical assertion: ‘Those Malays are easily impressed – all nerves, you know’ (81). The Malays are associated with emotionalism and irrationality, standing in sharp contrast to Europe’s rationalism and sense of moderation. As he dwells on cultural and racial differences, the narrator stresses the unbridgeable gap separating an enlightened West from a benighted East: ‘We felt as though we three had been called to the very gate of Infernal Regions to judge, to decide the fate of a wanderer coming suddenly from a world of sunshine and illusions’ (79). The opposition between a bewildering, emotional Orient and a coherent, cerebral West is even more striking at the end of the tale where Hollis is about to finalise his design to remove Karain’s ghostly memories: ‘They were in violent contrast together – one motionless and the colour of bronze, the other dazzling white and lifting his arms, where the powerful muscles rolled slightly under a skin that gleamed like satin’ (84). Although it is underpinned by irony that questions Western civilisation, the encounter between Hollis and Karain resembles a battle of wits where an enlightened West tries to heal the East of its superstitions and


demons. In this scene the narrator articulates a set of oppositions which mark the two characters and their worlds as poles apart. The distinction operates on cultural, racial and ideological lines. The white–brown and civilised–barbarian dichotomies join forces with the active–passive binary to discern a dynamic, powerful West from an inert Orient which has ‘the suspicious immobility of a painted scene’ (41). In ‘Karain’ the narrator both espouses and subverts the tradition of romantic exoticism. All through the narrative he adopts a process of aestheticisation associating Karain with a ‘noble savage’ and his world with a ‘monumental amphitheatre’ (44). The Malay universe is compared to an exotic stage and the protagonist is assimilated to a dramatic figure devoid of a real existence.4 Obviously aware of the dubious ideological freight underlying romantic exoticism,5 the narrator shortly afterwards backs away from the image of the native as a theatre. He insists that the pervasive sense of theatricality is not of his own design, but stems from Karain who always appeared before them ‘ornate and disturbing’ (40), and ‘faithful to the illusions of the stage’ (43). By means of this selfvalidating rhetoric, the narrator justifies reducing Karain and his people to dramatic figures on constant display. The imagery of primitiveness and theatricality at work in the narrative fulfils two major aims. First, it facilitates the three Englishmen’s aesthetic appropriation of the Malay world. Second, it legitimises their illegal trade by considering this world a ‘barbarous’, lawless locale where activities forbidden in Europe can be safely carried out (Acheraïou 2007). The strategy of generalisation and localisation underpinning the narrator’s representation of the Malays is a key feature of colonial Europe’s definition of its Others. Concerning Britain which had white and nonwhite colonies, the distinction of the colonial subjects operated in complex, multiple ways. Since the Middle Ages the English considered the Irish, Welsh and Scots backward and barbaric. Helen Carr observes that the Irish, for example, who were ‘one of the most despised groups in the nineteenth century,’ were often identified as ‘white negroes’ or ‘squalid apes’ (2000, 75). For Clare Carroll the racism which permeates the early modern writing on Ireland ‘is nothing more than the repetition of a medieval discourse on Celtic barbarism’ (2003, 66). This early racist profiling of the Irish may, as Carroll states, have drawn on medieval discourse on Celtic barbarism, but its deep roots lie certainly in the ancient Greek discourse of barbarism, which constitutes the founding narrative of race and racism. Modern racist representations of Otherness obviously involve complex ramifications and are far from monolithic. Despite manifest


stereotyping, the English ranked the Irish and other Celts superior to the brown and black natives. Although the Irish were not ‘considered to be racially identical with “Anglo-Saxons” or other Europeans,’ they were placed above the Indians and Africans (Lloyd 2003, 51). Kipling’s Kim (1901) is an enlightening case. The narrator describes the variegated, vibrant Indian street-life and relates how the lower-class Irish–English Kim who is fluent in the Indian vernacular mixes easily with the other street boys. At the same time, he indicates that the cultural proximity which the protagonist enjoys is frustrated by racial fixities which compel him to remain where he belongs: ‘Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mothertongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazaar; Kim was white – a poor white of the very poorest’ (1). Social class and race intertwine in this statement. Kim’s modest background facilitates contact and friendship with the Indian boys while his whiteness maintains the inequality of their relationships. Social immediacy is undercut by racial demarcation, which reasserts Kim’s Britishness, as much as it sanctions his supremacy over the coloured colonial subjects. Parallel to this horizontal distinction based on skin colour the British and the French engaged in vertical differentiation that worked through the indigenous cultural and social layers. They tended to value some castes or ethnic groups over others in terms that showed the category of the Other as a stratified, fragmented entity. Whether real or imagined, these differences were consistently entertained and used to political and ideological ends. For instance, among the Indian ethnic communities the warlike Sikhs and Pathans were rated superior to the ‘effeminate’ Bengalis (Boehmer 1995). Captain Lucas referred in turn to the Zulus as ‘the finest of all Kaffir nations, tall of stature, good-looking and rather “European in feature”, sober and temperate, cleanly and decent’ (quoted by Low 1996, 93). Haggard expressed similar admiration for the war-like Zulus, and in Allan Quatermain (1887) he talks about the Wakwafi, ‘a cross between the Masai and Wataveta,’ as being ‘a fine manly race, possessing many of the good qualities of the Zulus, and a larger capacity for civilisation’ (1951, 427). For Haggard, the Wakwafi and Zulus were superior to their neighbours. Their fighting spirit and aptness for civilisation made them appear as black replicas of the brave, war-like British. The French representations of Africans and Arabs followed an identical pattern. In Algeria the Kabyles were keenly distinguished from the Arabs. The Arabs were considered bigoted, undemocratic and fatalistic and were thereby marked as total aliens. The Kabyles were instead judged


liberal, industrious and more inclined to civilisation. They were readily identified with Europeans and compared to France’s assimilated Others – the Bretons and Auvergnats. This distinction was fuelled by the Kabyle myth, by virtue of which these Berber mountaineers, like the Bretons and Auvergnats, were deemed a civilisable category that colonial education would transform into responsible French citizens. Such assumptions were, of course, as strategic as they were deceptive. They were challenged by both the Kabyles’ long resistance to French imperialism and rejection of colonial education which they saw as a means of cultural and political alienation.6 Overall, the Kabyle myth, which fed on cultural and racial considerations, was predicated on the divide-and-rule policy characteristic of colonial domination. The French exploited the age-old conflict between the two ethnic communities, shrewdly playing on their divisions to better control them. What emerges from the French and British representations of the natives is that the colonial ethic of differentiation is underpinned by a narcissistic impulse; an inclination that highlights the tautological character of imperial culture and Western perception of alterity. At the core of these characterisations lies in fact a dual process of identification which incorporates the culturally close natives and casts aside those judged too alien. The whole colonial differentiating practice finally boils down to a self-mirroring strategy whereby the valorised native becomes a pale copy of the European self. Deep down, the Sikhs, Pathans, Zulus, and Kabyles, in their cultural contexts, were valued less for their distinction from other groups than for their correspondence to the Western human norm and affinity to the coloniser’s culture. This dialectic of generalisation and particularisation on which imperial ideology is based indicates that colonialist discourse is a totality underlying a differentiated rhetoric. Consistent with the divide-and-rule scheme, each colonial system tended to assimilate a few socially and culturally acceptable natives into the imperial same, while disregarding the majority as radically Other and inassimilable. Building on these distinctions, the British and French drew the native élites to the core of empire, but cautiously kept their movements and ambition in check. Since colonialism was not only racially-minded but also class-conscious, solidarities between the European and indigenous upper classes were built, cementing the colonial enterprise. In India, the British ruling class recognised the Indian and Irish aristocracy with which they strengthened bonds through an honours system (Gosden 2004, 152). All the same, this social recognition was merely a marginal occurrence or micro-phenomenon that neither reduced the colonial inequities, nor questioned the


colonial stereotypical views of the colonised. This discrepancy reinforces the totalising impulse of the colonial ideology and questions the ‘dialogism’ and balance of the relationships between colonisers and colonised.

The middle ground theory: its merits and limits Several studies produced over the last few years in the fields of anthropology and postcolonialism have been inspired by Bhabha’s middle ground theory of contest and negotiation, resistance and complicity. These studies consistently emphasise the circuits of exchange and collaboration between colonisers and colonised, keen to uncover overlooked smaller narratives of colonial entente and empathy. In the main, they tend to expose the imperial cultures’ permeability and mutual influence. By ricochet they contest the approaches to colonialism which stress the rigidity of the core-periphery binary. This trend of scholarship has gradually gained importance and elicited a great deal of support in the academia. It has also generated unfavourable criticism. Christopher Miller, for instance, who sees colonialism as a ‘messy history of hegemony and conflict’, strongly objects to the middle ground theorists’ emphasis on exchange and negotiation. According to him, the propensity of recent trends in anthropological studies to show that ‘dialogue and polyvocality can be uncovered within apparent hegemonies’ is a mere ‘fantasy [which] depends on a complete rewriting (or ignorance) of history’ (1990, 27–8). Benita Parry, too, questions the ‘contemporary studies of colonialism to introduce dialogic paradigms’ (2004, 68). Said refers to the ‘rigid division’ between the colonisers and colonised, insisting on the dissimilarity of the power relationship between them. For him, despite numerous ‘transactions’ empire in essence ‘maintained a strict social and cultural hierarchy between whites and non-whites, between members of the dominant and members of the subject race’ (2003, xxv). Elaborating on this criticism, I show in the following pages the mixed legacy of the middle ground theory. To begin with, I want to argue that the middle ground theorists’ revisionist view of the colonial relationships is to some extent justified, for the complicity between the conquerors and segments of the colonised communities has been a recurrent pattern since classical times. The Romans, for example, owed their colonial expansions both to their own military genius and to the enrolment of numerous indigenous soldiers. Many Berbers served as mercenaries aiding the Roman armies in the Mediterranean basin. Thousands of


Indians were also enlisted in Pizarro’s and Corte’s armed forces, and thus facilitated the conquest. When Edward I, the ‘Caesar of Britain,’ invaded Scotland in the thirteenth century about 3,000 Irishmen participated in the colonial adventure. They helped to subject the Scots after they had been themselves conquered by the Anglo-Normans in 1169. In Mexico the Totanques, who rebelled against Moctezuma, joined the Spanish forces and provided them with vital support; so too, did the Tlexcalans. Similarly, in Peru Pizarro had been backed by the Canari tribes who had risen up against Inca domination (Mabry 2002). In the sixteenth century, the French in Canada played on the divisions between the Indian tribes. They formed an alliance with the Hurons and their allies against the Iroquois; just as the British had long cooperated with the Mohawks and were supported by the Iroquois to attack Canada (Taylor 2006). In the nineteenth century, the British and French also enrolled local soldiers to consolidate imperial rule and conquer new territories. Enlisting Africans and Indians in colonial armies was common practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The English, the French and the Dutch recruited indigenous soldiers to consolidate their empires in Africa and the Indies, as well as to carry out military expeditions overseas. Between 1825 and 1850, for example, the Irish soldiers who enrolled in the Bengal army were only outnumbered by the English. By the 1860s roughly two thirds of the British army were Irish or of Irish descent, and in the early 1870s approximately a quarter of the British army officers were Irish. A number of Protestant Irishmen were employed as officers and had prestigious military careers; many others had long and successful careers in the Indian civil service. The Scottish and Welsh, too, contributed many officers and administrators who helped govern the British empire and defend it. Whether they joined the army to escape poverty or seek social prestige, the Irish, Welsh and Scots were crucial instruments in the wars of conquests and in shaping the British empire. In addition to the many conscripts drawn from her ‘internal colonies,’ Britain enlisted thousands of non-white soldiers in her imperial armies. Similar to the Dutch government which recruited several hundreds of Africans from the Gold Coast between 1831 and 1872 to serve in the colonial army in the Netherlands East India Company, the British enrolled many Africans and Indians. The objective was to maintain order in the native soldiers’ homelands and in other British colonies, as well as increasing the empire’s possessions. Indian contingents, who, according to John Robert Seeley, formed four fifths of the British army that conquered India, turned out to be particularly useful in consolidating British rule in both the subcontinent and East Africa (1883, 161–2). They were


also instrumental in wars of conquest such as those between Britain and the Kingdom of Burma. The British-led Indian troops conquered and gained complete control of the Kingdom of Burma in 1885. In so doing, the ‘Sepoys’ had ironically become a force of invasion. They subjected the Burmese to British imperial rule, just as the British had subdued the Indian populations. In the same way, when the British set out to gain control of Sudan in the 1890s it was an Anglo-Egyptian force led by Lord Kitchener which overthrew the Mahdists’ power. Like the Dutch and British, the French recruited many Africans to maintain order in the colonies and to pursue imperial conquests overseas. The Tirailleurs Sénégalais and the Corps Algériens or the ‘Turcos’, as they were called, played a crucial part in France’s imperial adventures. Founded in 1857 by Louis Faidherbe, Governor of French West Africa, the Tirailleurs (Riflemen) fulfilled a variety of tasks. They repressed protests in Algeria in the 1945 rising, as well as participating in the conquest of Morocco (1907–12) and in the Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1953–54). The Turcos contributed to the French war effort in Asia. In 1953, thousands of North Africans served in Indochina, where they earned the reputation of being an extremely ‘savage force’ (Shipway 1996; Cooper 2001). The alliance of Western forces and native contingents enhances the imperial rule’s heterogeneity. It exposes the duplicity of the natives, at once victims and victimisers, object and agents of oppression. It especially reveals how far colonial relations were unequal even when they were based on collaboration and complicity between colonisers and colonised. The partnership between the Irish, Scots, Welsh and Indians obviously gave British colonial rule a motley hue, without destabilising, however, the English ascendancy. The English remained at the top of the hierarchy and were direct beneficiaries of imperial expansions won to a great extent by non-English soldiers. The diverse forces that shaped the British empire all converged in a centre of dominance, the English core, which regulated contingency and distributed power. In India, in particular, although from the 1857 Mutiny to the First World War British rule was carried out mainly through indigenous clerks and soldiers, colonial power remained hegemonic. Both in the civil service and in the army, inequalities between ruler and ruled were maintained. Although the Sepoys took an active part in the various wars of conquest (the AngloAfghan War 1838–42; the Anglo-Sikh Wars 1845–46 and 1848–49; the Anglo-Burmese Wars 1823–26; 1852 and 1885; and the Opium Wars 1840–43 and 1856–60), they suffered from the blatant racism of their British officers (Stanly 1998; Ballantyne 2002; Gupta and Deshpande 2002).


Like the Indian civil service, the army, as an instrument of colonial domination, was organised along racial lines. The British were at the top of the military pyramid and the natives were confined to the bottom. Despite their huge war effort Indian conscripts had very limited opportunities for advancement as the positions of authority were all in the hands of the British. Similarly, the Egyptians enrolled in the British army were considered inferior and were confined to subordinate positions. Rather than being unique, this racial stratification was common to most colonial armies and administrations. The fate of the Africans who served in the French army or civil service was no better. Just as it was extremely rare for educated Africans to advance to high government positions, it was almost impossible for indigenous conscripts to become army officers. As the Algerian modernist novelist, poet and playwright, Kateb Yacine (1929–89) ironically states, even when a native was promoted to a higher army echelon he was assigned the degrading job of ‘clearing the European officers’ cigarette butts or coercing his own people’ (1956, 154). The colonial armies, as well as most of the aspects of colonial life were in varying degrees characterised by exchange and collaboration between the actors of the imperial drama, as middle ground theorists argue. In this respect, Antoinette Burton discusses in At the Heart of the Empire (1998) the colonial circuits of exchange and highlights the permeability of Victorian culture. She clearly states that she is ‘committed to questioning approaches to colonialism that insist on a binary axis between coloniser and colonised because they do not do justice to the complexity of colonial narratives in situ’ (22). Burton’s overall intention is to show that the centre and periphery were in constant dialogue, influencing and reshaping one another. She insists on the accessibility of late-Victorian empire and, in unison with Rozina Visram (1986), she reminds us that since the seventeenth century people, ideas and commerce flowed from East to West, linking closely Britain’s possessions to their mother country. Burton’s book focuses on the writings of three educated Indians – Pandita Rambai, Cornelia Sorabji and Behramji Malabari – who travelled to and stayed in England during the 1880s. Through these migrant intellectuals she demonstrates that the Victorian empire was a culture of movement and exchange. At the same time, she points to the various obstacles restricting their mobility within the metropolitan society: ‘Although it was axiomatic from the eighteenth century onward that even slaves were free once they set foot onto British soil, Indians were not at liberty to wander Victorian Britain without facing barriers thrown


up by the exigencies of Britain’s role as an imperial power and, more specifically, by the dictates of the civilising mission that a variety of Britons believed to be their special gifts to colonial peoples’ (2). This comment draws attention to the relative value of the Victorian ethic of mobility which, as made clear in Burton’s study, was determined by the imperial mental cartographies. Colonial subjects such as Rambai, Sorabji and Malabari could certainly move with relative ease from the periphery to the core of empire, but the space in which they circulated was mapped and regulated by colonial technology and ideology. In consequence, their mobility neither unsettled colonial territoriality, nor altered the metropolitans’ vision of India and its peoples. Both in the colony and in the metropolis, indeed, the colonised, as exemplified by Rambai, Sorabji and Malabari, were continually under the imperial eye of surveillance that checked their social moves and reminded them of their difference. Thus far, movement from the colony to the metropolitan centre undoubtedly reduced geographical barriers, but did not remove the cultural and racial prejudices sustaining the core-periphery axis. I want presently to pursue the politics of territoriality and stretch Burton’s as well as Dirks’s arguments about the periphery–metropolis binary. Burton states: ‘Colonialism was not a process that began in the metropole and expanded outward but was, rather, an historical moment’ (Burton 1998, 14) during which ‘new encounters within the world facilitated the formation of the categories of metropole and colony in the first place’ (Dirks 1992, 6). Admittedly, the colonial fact resulted from the collision of conquering and conquered peoples. As such, it was linked to the historical moment of the encounters. It is worth mentioning, however, that these forced contacts first occurred because Western countries expanded overseas to acquire colonies and exploit their human and material resources. More important still is the fact that the imperial idea or the myths of cultural and racial supremacy backing the colonial project were prior to these encounters. They germinated in fifteenth century Europe and gradually gained momentum and sophistication. Colonial ideology, chiefly devised in the metropolis, was later exported to the colony where it was adapted and suited to colonial circumstances and needs. Harking back to the idea of mobility from the colony to the metropolis that characterises Victorian empire, I wish to stress that British politics of space and territoriality was in some respects different from the French. While the Indians could move with some ease from East to West, the core of the French empire was less accessible to its colonial subjects. Indians could be seen in England since the seventeenth century. Most of


them were domestics and nannies brought to Britain by the East India Company’s agents and British family returning home.7 In contrast, there were virtually no Arabs or Muslims living in nineteenth-century France. In Algeria itself freedom of movement was strictly regulated by the Code de l’indigénat, established on 28 June 1881 and abolished in theory in 1946. The Code de l’indigénat denied the Algerians fundamental civic and political rights, such as circulating at night or moving from their village or city without an official pass. But the Algerians’ systematic containment began earlier, following the 1851 land charter. Owing to this legislation, whole tribes were legally evicted from their lands and pushed to distant, barren territories (Ageron 1993, 76). However, within this general politics of spoliation and hatred of the Other, French colonial rule allowed a space of mediated encounters where few chosen indigenous élites could embrace the empire’s culture and destiny. These inclusive practices testify to the relative permeability of nineteenth-century French imperial culture. But the élites were neither paradigmatic of the native population which they often considered inferior, nor totally immune to imperial prejudice. The segregation endured by the colonial subjects, their systematic objectification by the imperial gaze, and their minor status expose the limits of the ‘middle ground’ theorists’ approach to colonialism. Evidence of collaboration and complicity of the native élites with imperial rule no doubt unsettles the assumption that the core and periphery were sealed off from one another. Nevertheless, the recovery of traces of cultural dialogue and negotiation within empire was no guarantee that the colonial interactions were fair and unprejudiced. Conrad’s ‘Karain’ can be evoked again to substantiate this argument. In this short story, the unnamed English narrator and his countrymen, Hollis and Jackson stress the importance of colonial transactions. They refer to their relationships with the Malays as being equitable and based on mutual trust and friendship. Karain’s brother proffers similar praise on the Malay and Dutch encounters. According to him, the two peoples reap equal benefits from the colonial transactions. However, this idyllic vision is later tempered by Karain who points to the relationships’ imbalance. He shows how the very terms of the transactions are sealed unilaterally by the Dutch treaties which coerce the Malays into acceptance and subordination. The protagonist recalls with a shade of nostalgia how before the Dutch intrusion he was chief of a stockade at the mouth of a river collecting tolls for his brother from the passing boats. But this privilege came brutally to an end the day a Dutch trader went up the river with three boats and ‘no toll was demanded from him, because the smoke of the Dutch warships


stood out from the open sea, and we were too weak to forget treaties’ (63). The oppressive nature of the Dutch treaties is confirmed in this statement, and the Malays’ inability to ignore them reinforces the inequality of the Dutch–Malay relationship – by inference the whole colonial collisions. The inequities related in ‘Karain’ are certainly a key feature of colonial relations. Yet the heterogeneity of colonial rule and ideology makes it historically sound and intellectually honest to uncover the neglected colonial narrative of exchange and negotiation, as do Bhabha, Burton and others. At the same time, there is a danger in reducing colonialism to these middle-ground narratives or giving the latter primacy; just as it is reductive to view colonialism simply from the core-periphery model. For a better understanding of imperialism we certainly require ‘unpacking imperial histories’, as Catherine Hall suggests (1996, 76). Concomitantly, we should guard from re-writing the peripheral tale of mediation and negotiation as a central narrative of colonial encounters. Evaluating the complex colonial relations in the light of the core-periphery axis is no doubt inadequate, given the obvious hybridisation generated by colonialism. But to underestimate the validity of this binary as a structuring principle of the empire’s mythologies and fantasies may blind us to colonialism’s inhumanness and totalising impulse. My argument is that the core-periphery dichotomy and the ‘circulatory’ model are as complementary as they are equally incomplete tools of analysis. Substituting one for the other or re-telling an overlooked minor story as a central imperial narrative amounts thus to a strategy of displacement and mystification. It prevents us from realising that the colonial idea is not based on disparate, competing discourses, but is founded instead on a complex ideological network whereby diverse, apparently conflicting narratives of authority and power collaborate to the same imperial destiny. Part of the insufficiency of the postcolonial theoretical models derives, I think, from a scholarly habit of seeing colonialism as a purely horizontal manifestation and mere product of modernity. We lose sight of the fact that colonialism is a continuum that also obeys, at least on the level of discourse and representation, a vertical axis. Put differently, colonialist discourse operates horizontally by endorsing a linear narrative of technological development, the ‘rationality’ of the European system of government and the idea of social and economic progress. Most importantly also, imperialist discourse forms an ideological and rhetorical palimpsest: it digs into the narratives of the remote classical past and bores into the natives’ histories and texts to gain ascendancy and reinforce the colonialism quasi-divine


mission. This neglected verticality or multi-layered structure of colonialist discourse will be explored in the coming chapters, where I examine the derivative nature of the imperial rhetoric, with an emphasis on the influence of classical ideas and thought on modern authors and colonial ideologues.

3 Impact of Classical Discourse of Barbarism on Modern Colonial Taxonomies

Language, culture and race Ancient Greek and Roman assumptions about language, race and culture were recurrent in modern colonial literary and political texts. They were, consciously or unconsciously, integrated into colonialist discourse and helped to articulate imperial ideology. Isaac in The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity argues that the early forms of racism that he calls ‘proto-racism’ ‘were common in the Greco-Roman world’ (2004, 1) and that ‘those early forms served as prototype for modern racism which developed in the eighteenth century’ (2). As he discusses the relation between ancient and modern racism, Isaac pursues that ‘twentieth century racism could not have existed without [its] predecessors’ (5). According to him, in the same way as Greco-Roman proto-racism contributed to shaping eighteenth-century theories on race, several of the ideas that circulated in the eighteenth century were incorporated into later racial discourses. The classical Greeks’ belief in cultural and racial supremacy was, as Isaac remarks, first attested in fifth century BC Athens. During this period, which corresponded to Greece’s emergence into an imperial power, the Greeks’ chauvinism and contempt for non-Greeks reached their height. As will be shown in this study, the racialist discourse that backed Greek imperialist expansion inspired modern imperial ideology. It was appropriated by nineteenth and twentieth-century imperialist writers in order to justify colonialism. The authors’ steady borrowing of classical ideas and tropes to bolster the imperial project turns colonialist discourse into a mimetic, plagiaristic medium. Within the ancient discourse of barbarism, taken up by the moderns, language and culture became key racial markers. The conflation of language and race recurring in the works 55


and observations of authors such as Jonathan Swift, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) and Ernest Renan, for instance, emerged with the writings of Georges-Louis Buffon (1707–88), Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) and other naturalists. But its essence goes back to Greek roots and finds its fullest expression in Aristotle’s works. Aristotle was convinced of the Greeks’ racial supremacy on the grounds that they could boast a superior, articulate medium, while the barbarians had but incoherent, inarticulate languages. This Aristotelian view of racial supremacy based on linguistic superiority is taken over by such authors as Macaulay, an English poet, historian and Whig politician. He states in a confident display of cultural imperialism: The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence . . . , with the most profound speculation on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade. . . . Whoever knows that language, has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations (1835, 241–2). Lord Macaulay considers English superior to the other European languages and further connects this idiom and British culture to those of ancient Greece. He does so to confirm the British as direct inheritors of the ancient civilisation that they are in charge of spreading in the dark areas of the globe. For Macaulay, English is a medium of a higher civilisation and a vehicle of an ideal sense of selfhood. His argument about linguistic supremacy shows how, in his logic, English culture in its entirety ‘functioned as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state’ (Viswanathan 1989, 23). Lord Macaulay implicitly links language, culture and race in thinking that only a British education could lift the Indians into light and progress. As codified by him, the English vernacular alongside the higher self it carries mark the limits between civilisation and barbarity, just as Aristotle and most of his contemporaries saw their language as forming a barrier between the civilised Greeks and the backward barbarians. In the nineteenth century language was a prominent racial pointer. It was closely linked to the issue of race, which together formed key components of the imperial ideology. For many scholars and writers of

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the period language and race were, therefore, intricately connected. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) – a German poet, scholar and author of The Greeks and Romans (1797) – was one of the first scholars to link language and race and consider language a central racial indicator (Bernal 1987). In his efforts to establish the superiority of the Aryan culture and languages, he made a clear-cut distinction between the ‘noble’ inflected languages such as German, and the non-inflected ones he deemed inferior. In the end, Schlegel’s linguistic categorisations sound like a verbalisation of classical linguistic racialism which dubbed those who did not speak Greek or Latin as barbarians: a word connoting both backwardness and inarticulacy. Etymologically, the term barbarian derives from the Greek’s contemptuous reduction of foreign languages to the raw sounds ‘bar-bar’; a characterisation which institutionalises the Greek language as the sole attribute of civilisation, if not humanness. The way this concept flowed from the classical world to become a central component of modern colonial representations reveals the fluidity, slipperiness and multi-layered structure of colonialist discourse. The trope ‘barbarian’ connects ideologically ancient and modern imperialism. It was adopted by modern writers to refer to colonial subjects, at least since the twelfth century. This trope is redolent of cultural and racial biases from its outset. If in one of its basic, neutral meanings the word barbarian may be synonymous with the Bakhtinian concept of extopia (the fact of not belonging to a given culture), its use in colonial contexts, from the ancient to modern times, is burdened with prejudice. On migrating into the Modern Age it acquired further linguistic, ideological and racial connotations. These are reflected in the works of such writers as Gerald of Wales mentioned earlier, Sepulveda, Swift, Grégoire, Arnold and Renan. Informed that the Spaniards were savagely enslaving and murdering the Amerindians, the Spanish sovereign, King Charles V convened an assembly of experts and learned council at Valladolid in 1550. The King wanted to know whether the reported atrocities really took place, in which case a plan to stop them should be devised. The debates went on for several days and there was a heated confrontation between Sepúlveda and Las Casas. A Spanish theologian, philosopher and translator of Aristotle, Sepulveda defended the Spanish soldiers’ use of force and mass destruction to bring the Indians into the Christian faith. In his view, the atrocities against the Indians were justified because they were barbaric pagans who could hardly qualify as human beings. Convinced that the Amerindians were ‘natural slaves’, Sepulveda assumed that these inferior beings had, in their own good, to be ruled by the superior Spaniards: they


‘require, by their own nature and in their own interests, to be placed under the authority of civilized and virtuous princes or nations, so that they may learn, from the might, wisdom, and law of their conquerors, to practise better morals, worthier customs and a more civilized way of life’ (quoted by Hanke 1959, 47). Sepulveda is heavily indebted to the classical representations of the barbarians. In this statement he combines Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery1 with the idea of primitive peoples as children who require the authority of their civilised European masters. For him, the natives were as inferior ‘as children are to adults, as women are to men. Indians are as different from Spaniards as cruel people are from mild people’ (quoted by Hanke 1959, 47).2 For Sepulveda, the indigenous populations were a completely negative identity. They stood for ignorance, cannibalism, immorality and lasciviousness – a qualification that echoed the classical representations of the barbarians. To confirm the natives’ backwardness and inferiority he insisted on the differences between the latter’s cultures and Western civilisation. Drawing on classical linguistic racialism, he was keen to demonstrate that Europeans were superior to Indians not only on religious and technological grounds, but also on linguistic and literary ones. The first could boast accomplished vernaculars and sophisticated written literatures while the second had merely crude languages and rudimentary oral cultures. Sepulveda’s adversary, Las Casas – a Spanish colonist, priest, and historian – condemned the conquistadores’ abuses. He urged to treat the Indians humanely and lead them to God’s truth, not by violence but through peaceful means. Las Casas’s aim was two-fold: first, to free the Indians from the status of beasts in which Sepulveda confined them; second, to rehabilitate them as vehicles of knowledge and culture. To refute his opponent’s argument that these pagans had no worthy culture and artistic genius, Las Casas pointed to the Indians’ capacity to build powerful states ordered by ‘excellent laws, religion and custom’ (1550, 42) and further enhanced their skill in ‘mechanical art’ as well as in ‘architecture’, ‘painting’, and ‘needlework’ (42). The ironic twist, though, is that while attempting to restore the Indians’ humanity and worth Las Casas continued to see them as barbarians. For in his view Indians were, like all non-Christians, steeped in idolatry and ‘barbarism of vice’ (49). The trope ‘barbarian’, recurrent in the dialogue between Las Casas and Sepulveda, alongside the Aristotelian theory of culture and race, reactivated by Sepulveda, gained importance in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. In France the word ‘barbarous’ was commonly used to refer to the subordinate languages such as Basque, Occitan and


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Breton and their speakers. Similarly, in Britain this derogatory denomination was frequently employed to describe the Celts and Gaelic (Grillo 1989, 174). Swift reiterated the English hostility to the Celts and his racist assumptions connected language to intellectual and technological advancement. He was convinced that the Irish were underdeveloped because Gaelic was a ‘barbarous’ idiom impeding progress and civilisation. He states in ‘On Barbarous Denominations in Ireland’: . . . but I am deceived, if anything has more contributed to prevent the Irish from being tamed than this encouragement of their language, which might easily be abolished and become a dead one in half an age, with little expense and less trouble (1735, 86). Swift’s classically-derived conception of culture ascribes the Irish economic and intellectual undergrowth to their backward language. The English owed instead their development and presumed racial superiority to their sophisticated language and high culture. Identical representations were circulated about the Scots and their language in the eighteenth century. The English poet and essayist Samuel Johnson (1709–84) in Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) referred to the language of the highlanders as the ‘rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood’ (104). Johnson’s judgement composed of a cluster of linguistic and racial stereotypes emphasises the idea that Gaelic was unsuitable for civilisation and sophisticated thinking. In Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), it is Colonel Talbot who repeats the English stereotypical vision of Scotland, emphasising its backward, barbarous state. Scott in this novel tries to dismantle these prejudiced views. From the outset, his narrator sets out to teach English readers about the correct way to view Scotland and the Scots, eager to provide a balanced and more authentic picture of his country. In what sounds like a dis-Orientalising rhetoric, Scott tends to free the Scottish people from the colonial degrading stereotypes in order to rehabilitate them as normal citizens of the British empire. Concomitantly, he reasserts the close ties that unite Scotland and England, thus mediating between conflicting forces. He contrasts the opinions of Flora’s friends, who consider Gaelic more ‘liquid’ and better ‘adapted for poetry’ than Italian (255), to those of the English officer, Colonel Talbot, who dismisses Scotland as a backward, ‘miserable country,’ and its language as ‘gibberish’ (262). However, he does so less to exacerbate the prejudices than to reconcile the English and Scots – a reconciliation


symbolised by Edward Waverley’s marriage to Rose Bradwardine. Thanks to the happy union, emblematic of the 1707 Act of Union, Scott makes England and Scotland part and parcel of the British empire, sharing the same imperial destiny. Like the Irish and Scots, the Welsh and their language were consistently viewed in negative terms. The Kay-Shuttleworth Reports of the Commissioners on the state of education in Wales of 1847 declared: ‘The welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people. . . . It dissevers the people from intercourse which would greatly advance their civilisation, and bars the access of improving knowledge to their minds. As a proof of this, there is no Welsh literature worthy of the name’ (quoted by Grillo 1989, 87). This nineteenth-century English view of the Welsh merely recapitulates an established theory of the Celt as barbarous and incapable of rational thought. A school inspector besides being a poet and literary critic, Arnold was obviously influenced by the reporters’ remarks, but his attitude was one of both rupture and continuity. Akin to Scott, Matthew Arnold in On the Study of Celtic Literature attempted to reconcile the Anglo-Saxons and the Welsh, thus distancing himself from his father’s hatred of the Celts. Rather than dwelling on the distinctions between the Welsh and Anglo-Saxons, as did most of his contemporaries, Arnold stressed the two peoples’ similarities and fruitful alliances. He celebrated Celtic poetic genius and encouraged the study of Welsh literature, but considered the medium in which the latter was conveyed as an obstacle to modern civilisation. According to him ‘Welsh is the curse of Wales’ (1866, xiii) and the ‘sooner’ this idiom disappears ‘the better’ for both England and Wales. Arnold exhorted the Welsh to adopt English and thereby become ‘more thoroughly one with the rest of the country’, convinced that ‘the fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking whole’ was inescapable (9). Arnold’s approach to Welsh echoes Abbé Grégoire’s attitude to French vernaculars such as Occitan, Breton and Basque.3 Grégoire recommended eradicating these ‘crude idioms’ and imposing French to ‘spread enlightened ideas . . . , national well-being and political tranquillity’ (quoted by De Certeau 1975, 21). His project involved both civilising France’s ‘barbarous’ populations and achieving political unity. For him, coercing these people to speak French would not only ‘banish superstition’ and ‘simplify the mechanism of the political machine’, but also ‘mould all the citizens into a national whole’ (quoted by Grillo 1989, 24). The need to eradicate the regional vernaculars advocated by


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Abbé Grégoire was later vigorously restated by the French statesman, Jules Ferry (1832–93).4 For both Grégoire and Ferry, a common language was required to fuse the various ethnic groups and consolidate an emerging patrie, whose stability demanded linguistic homogeneity and cultural uniformity. In like manner, by recommending the suppression of Welsh in the name of national unity, Arnold showed how language was a defining factor in the formation of British national identity. Overall, in making English a lingua franca and wishing to fuse ‘all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking whole’, Arnold expresses a colonialist totalising impulse that nullifies diversity and Otherness. This imperial hegemonic inclination is also suggested in the image of a rapacious England ‘swallowing up . . . separate provincial nationalities’ (1866, 9). The metaphor of fusion and swallowing, manifest in Arnold’s argument and in Grégoire’s and Ferry’s observations, indicates that colonialism is not only a hegemonic force of expansion inclined to consume all the riches of the globe, but it is also a linguistic and cultural absolute which virtually involves a cannibalistic practice, with stronger cultures and languages devouring minor, weaker ones. Arnold inscribes colonialism within an historical dynamics following a linear, uninterrupted flow that leads to a higher historic phase: the formation of a national identity and consolidation of the nationstate that Hegel identified as history’s ultimate objective. In accordance with Darwinist evolutionary theories and historic determinism, Arnold sees the disappearance of conquered populations’ languages and cultures resulting from colonial encounters as part of the natural course of things. This outcome is, in his view and in Swift’s opinion, a matter of time, ordained by the march of history. Arnold restates in his gloss over Celtic cultures the evolutionary principle of natural selection, considering the absorption of weaker civilisations by dominant ones both normal and inescapable. The inevitability of colonialism, implicit in his argument, is curiously echoed in the indigenous representations of foreign invasions. In some parts of the Muslim world, Western conquests were sometimes interpreted as God’s retribution. For instance, General Daumas (1803–71)5 declared that most Algerians perceived France’s colonisation of their country as a heavenly calamity caused by their diversion from the Islamic principles. The Algerian writer, Mohammed Dib (1920–2003) in L’Incendie (1954) gives vent to this sentiment. He relates his countrymen’s historic fatalism expressed by the unnamed farmer for whom colonialism is an inescapable, transitory phase, bound to end as soon as the natives’ sins


have been purged. Dib’s character further voices the Algerians’ readiness to carry their burdensome sins: ‘It is God who thus ordered our retribution. May the will of the Almighty be accomplished?’ (85). The issues of language and race discussed by Sepulveda, Swift, Arnold, Grégoire and Ferry recur in the works of the anti-Semitic Renan. The latter’s assumptions on language and race echo the views of Grégoire as well as those of Winckelmann and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). A German poet, critic, theologian and philosopher, Herder established a direct relationship between reason and language. Winckelmann, like most Indo-Europeanists, promoted the sacredness of German and Aryan languages. Both theories resonate in Renan’s play, Caliban (1896). The protagonist, Ariel states: ‘Prospero taught thee the Aryan language, and with that divine tongue the channel of reason has become inseparable from thee’ (18). Following the Indo-Europeanists, Renan regards the Aryan language acquired by Ariel as a sacred, rational medium. It is a channel of clarity and abstract thought, precious qualities denied to the Semitic vernaculars which Renan deems incoherent and confused. Renan, as Said notes, relates directly the Semites’ backwardness and degeneracy to their ‘stagnant’, inarticulate vernaculars. In this, Renan seems to have taken the classical discourse of barbarism in its literal and etymological meaning. As Claude Lévi-Strauss notes: It is probable that the word ‘barbarian’ etymologically refers to the confusion and inarticulateness of the birds’ songs as opposed to the signifying value of human speech; and ‘savage,’ which means ‘from the woods,’ evokes also a type of animal life, by opposition to human nature (1971, 20) The word barbarian identifying those who did not belong to the dominant Greek and Latin speech communities was a rhetoric of racial and cultural exclusion. It denied foreign people linguistic clarity and coherent thought; in the process, it metaphorically robbed them of their humanness. In the words of Aristotle, the barbarians were reduced to the state of ‘animals’ or ‘plants’6 as they lacked Greek articulacy, his sole arbiter of humanness. Owing to linguistic and cultural superiority, the Greeks, as Aristotle assumes, are an elect people who should preside over the destiny of the inferior races for, according to him, the barbarians are ‘more servile in character than Hellenes’ (Politics 74). Aristotle corroborates the ancient poets’ assumption that ‘it is meet that Hellenes should rule over the barbarians’ (2). In his logic, the lucid Greeks, who were natural rulers, were instituted as civilisers of humankind. Their language and


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culture thus became prime movers of a civilising mission meant to instil Hellenic eloquence and order into the barbarians’ unintelligible world.

Colonial politics of territoriality: keeping the ‘dumb’ barbarian out of the articulate centre We may rightly argue that modern imperial politics of space and territoriality was informed by classical theories of language and race as codified in the concept barbarian. Colonial society itself was organised along racial and linguistic divides. The core of empire – a space of urbanity where imperial politics was performed – was generally represented as a place of law and order, rationality, and coherence. The periphery was instead associated with the realm of irrationality and barbarity where the natives led a primitive existence. Modern colonial categorisation of the indigenous people as unintelligible, backward and beast-like is no doubt a classical legacy. It was a central issue in the works of Aristotle who assimilated the barbarians to ‘a community of slaves’ (Politics 2) lacking the ‘rational principle’ that was, in his view, the feature of superior natural and human species. Aristotle compared them to animals because they were irrational and confined to a purely sensual existence. He concludes on this conviction that ‘the inferior always exists for the sake of the superior, and the superior is that which has a rational principle’ (177). The ancient equation of barbarians with beasts recurs in modern colonial representations of the indigenous peoples. In Voyage au Dahomey (1879), for example, Armand Dubarry, a nineteenth-century adventure story writer, portrays Africans as bestial, given to day-to-day sensory existence. Haggard in Cetywayo and His White Neighbours also compares the inhabitants of Natal to ‘animals’ who are ‘not even troubled with the thought of a future life’ (1882, 50). Identical images of Africans recur in the works of Greene, Gide and Conrad. Greene in Journey Without Maps and Gide in Voyage au Congo describe Africans as living in a natural state and lacking logical thinking. The Africans in Heart of Darkness and the Malays in ‘Karain’ are also depicted as irrational, and the narrators in both works consider the natives’ speech incoherent and inaccessible to Europeans. In ‘Karain’ the unnamed English narrator is set in the role of a cultural mediator in charge of dissipating Karain’s superstitions and investing his ‘absurd’ utterance with meaning and coherence. His challenge consists of shaping the protagonist’s inarticulate speech into a clear, logical discourse in order to enlighten the English audience. This propensity to edit and contain the irrationality of the indigenous discourse betrays


the colonisers’ intention to appropriate and domesticate difference by relying on the linear powers of their native language. At first glance, the narrator’s effort to have access to Karain’s world seems to stem from a healthy intent of gaining knowledge and teaching his readers about primitive, exotic peoples. But his imperialist codification of the encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans in terms of legibility and unintelligibility betrays a process of objectification which sub-humanises and drains the natives of moral and cultural significance. It implicitly reduces them to beasts that could be shamelessly exploited and guiltlessly destroyed (Acheraïou 2007). In French colonial politics, Maréchal Bugeaud (1784–1849), the Governor General of Algeria from 1840 to 1847, is the coloniser who best demonstrates what the classically-derived notion of ejecting people from culture into nature meant in practical terms. When he undertook to pacify Algeria, Bugeaud exhorted his soldiers to drive the resisting indigenous populations far into the woods and condemn them to the state of inarticulate beasts. He was notorious for his policy of ‘scorched earth’ (systematic destruction of the crops of the recalcitrant villagers with the intention of famishing them) and mass murder, resorting to what was known as the ‘enfumades’ – whereby whole tribes of rebels were forced into caves and asphyxiated. The most publicised ‘enfumade’ was the one ordered by Colonel Pélissier (1794–1864) in the caves of Dahra, near Mostaganem on 18 June 1845. Hundreds of insurgents perished during this infamous event, which caused Europe’s indignation and led the Minister of War, Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult (1769–1851) to make public apologies (Benot 1994; Sellam 1999). Kateb Yacine in Le Polygone étoilé (1966) paraphrases Bugeaud’s chilling rhetoric of pacification: The war we are waging against the Arabs is no longer merely a military one. It is by dispossessing them of their resources that they can really be done with. So, be not just soldiers, but also farmers and colonists of the new Algeria. Force the native into his deadly forests and let him rot in the marshes; reduce him to the state of the wolf, the boar, and howling beast. (123) This comment shows how colonial expansion demands the dehumanisation of the conquered peoples. It highlights the imperialism’s need to relegate the natives to the state of animals to justify taking their land and exploiting them. The statement also suggests that in order for the colonisers to achieve epistemological command over the colonised, the latter must be denied access to the signifying value of language. In other


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words, the indigenous peoples must be confined in the realm of linguistic inarticulateness to legitimise their domination and validate the coloniser’s need to speak for and represent them. It is almost a truism to state that the natives in both the colonies and at the heart of empire were subject to constant humiliation and segregation. At home most of them were relegated to the voiceless periphery through unfair laws that led them to pauperisation and political marginalisation. Besides being denied basic human rights, the colonised, confined in an everlasting dumbness, had for long been prevented from telling their stories and defining themselves in their own words. Imperial ideology and rule were no doubt ambivalent and protean (Boehmer 1995; Booth and Rigby 2000), yet colonial society as a whole was markedly racist and essentially based on repression, exclusion and fear of the natives. One of the persistent modern colonial anxieties was that of seeing the white race corrupted by contacts with the indigenous populations. Kipling, a zealous supporter of the British empire and a fervent admirer of the Roman conquerors, expresses in ‘Beyond the Pale’ (1888) Western fears about miscegenation. To avoid disorder and racial degeneracy, he warns the British against establishing social and implicitly sexual contacts with the natives: A MAN should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then whatever trouble falls in the ordinary course of things – neither sudden, alien nor unexpected. This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society and paid for it heavily (173). Implicit in Kipling’s caveat is a belief in myths of purity, the preservation of which requires a strict adherence to imperialist ideology and codes of conduct. In exhorting the British to keep away from the natives Kipling assiduously adopts the classical ideas of pure lineage and fear of mixed marriages prominent in the works of Aristotle, Isocrates and Plato. As discussed earlier, the idea of Greek purity originated in fifth century BC Athens and was accepted by most Athenians. It was adopted by the Romans and later taken up by modern colonial authors. Although they did not openly claim racial purity, the Romans who later colonised the Greeks valued pure lineage over mixed ancestry. Writers such as Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) and Tacitus (56 AD–117 AD) guarded against racial and cultural corruption that may result from mixing with non-Romans (Isaac 2004).


In Germania, for instance, Tacitus praises the Germans’ ethnic purity and shows contempt for mixed origins (Walbank 1985, 68; Cornell 1995, 60; Malkin 1998; Isaac 2004, 134). The myths of racial purity and supremacy alongside the fear of degeneration and disorder through contacts with the barbarians were paramount in the works of Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates. While pointing out the need to trade with the outside world, Aristotle in The Politics insists that ‘the introduction of strangers brought up under other laws, and the increase of population, will be adverse to good order . . . and is inimical to good government’ (164). He pursues that the mixing of different races has often been a source of social and political disorder: ‘Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution; for example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, becoming later the more numerous, expelled them; hence the curse fell upon Sybaris’ (114). For Aristotle as well as Plato and other ancient poets and philosophers the fear of political disorder resulting from encounters with foreigners combined with the fear of racial degeneration, a cogent preoccupation in modern colonial politics and literatures. As Isaac rightly remarks, the theory of degeneration, which is often associated with Buffon, is ‘essentially an application of the environmental theory’ (2004, 9) that was developed in Hippocrates’s medical treatise, Airs, Waters, Places (400 BC). In Menexenus, Plato celebrates the legendary history of Athens and the ancestors. He accords a prominent place to the Persian war and refers to the Athenians’ pure descent, arguing that Athenians had never been corrupted by foreign blood.7 In The Republic, too, Plato stresses the need to preserve racial purity and closely identifies inter-racial marriages with a source of degeneration. In concert with many Greek and Roman authors, Plato believed that the ensuing mixed offspring, deemed of poor quality, would inevitably cause racial and cultural decay.8 Plato’s ideas about purity and miscegenation, echoed in Kipling’s tale, can be discerned in most modernist texts, as we shall see later. They also surface in the works of modern historians and social scientists. Martin Nilsson, for instance, discusses the fall of the Roman empire which he attributes to the latter’s racial contamination: ‘Hybridisation on a considerable scale involves the break up of superior races into a heterogeneous and loose mass lacking stable spiritual and moral standards. This is, of itself, a sufficient explanation for the collapse of ancient culture and the Roman empire’ (1926, 365–6). The causes that led to the fall of the Roman empire were and remain a source of much scholarly debate, and hybridisation invoked by Nilsson, even on a large scale, is but only one


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possible reason among many others, including political and moral decay and ‘over-militarisation’ (Gibbon 1776; Pagden 2001). Together with racial degeneracy, modern colonial writers were informed by classical theories of cultural and linguistic corruption, recurrent issues in Latin and Greek literatures. Most ancient Greek and Roman writers, for instance, were convinced that contacts with the barbarians would not only generate social instability and moral and racial decline, but were likely to corrupt culture and language. Aristotle pointed to the threat of exposing the presumably pure Greek language to the corruptive influence of foreign vernaculars. In modern colonial literature the ancient anxiety about linguistic and cultural adulteration often went hand in hand with the fear of physical infection through contacts with the colonised. No wonder that the necessity to secure a proper distance between the coloniser and colonised soon emerged as a vital issue in the colonies. It implied the division of space into the centre– periphery, dumbness–articulacy, primitive–civilised, inferior–superior – a set of dichotomies which were intended as safe-guards against racial and cultural miscegenation. These lines of separation were supported by a medical taxonomy that reduced the colonised to a clinical anomaly, the embodiment of disease and physical decay. The Anglo-Indian community, for instance, was exhorted to avoid contact with the Indians, a caveat based both on racial prejudice and fear of infections. A series of regulations, including the Cantonment Act of 1864 and the 1868 Indian Contagious Diseases Act were passed. The first regulated the bazaars, regimental brothels and hospitals; the second allowed local authorities to take necessary decisions to stop the spread of disease (King 1976; Ballhatchet 1980; Low 1996). Medicine and racism, disease and imperialism were interrelated and nineteenth-century Western worries about infection were heightened by the outbreak of various lethal diseases in the colonies. The resurgence of epidemics like cholera and typhus with their sinister records of casualties stirred old fears and led to the reinforcement of the barriers between centre and periphery. In the mid-nineteenth century, the fear of the recurrence of leprosy in Europe was at its height in Britain, both in medical circles and in public debates. The numerous studies dealing with the disease were concerned about its contagiousness and destructiveness. In Leprosy: An Imperial Danger (1889), for instance, Henry Press Wright conveyed his contemporaries’ anxiety about the return of leprosy, predicting that this ailment might invade the ‘white races’ and become a ‘common scourge’ all over Europe. In Wright’s alarmist rhetoric, leprosy was personified in such a way that the threat of contagion took the shape of a


racial phobia: the fear that the black or yellow leprous Other may invade and lead to extinction the white race. Europe’s anxiety over leprosy is also exposed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels in Hawaii. Stevenson visited the leper colony on Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands, where the famous Belgian Catholic priest, Father Damien (1840–89), looked after the leprous population and later died of the disease. Stevenson in this narrative relates leprosy’s devastating effects on the victims, expressing deep worries about its possible spread to Europe: ‘To our syphilis we are inured, but the syphilis of Eastern Asia slays us; and a new variety of leprosy, cultivated in the virgin soil of Polynesian races, might prove more fatal than we dream’ (1973, 84). Stevenson drew an analogy between syphilis and leprosy and considered both equally damaging. In line with Wright and others, he warned Europeans against the danger of leprosy, enhancing its ruinous effects. British authorities took seriously the potential threat posed by this disease and tried to contain it at the root. Segregation was one of the means to which colonial governments resorted in order to combat the spread of leprosy in the colonies. In New South Wales, for example, a Leprosy Bill passed on 20 November, 1890, authorised detention and isolation of the people diagnosed with leprosy. Similar precautionary measures were taken in South Africa and India (Buckinghams 2002). Concern over disease, contamination and the extinction of the white race by deadly infections imported from the colonies is a recurrent theme in colonial literature. The Western anxiety of being lethally contaminated by their colonial subjects is compounded by the fear of cultural and racial corruption through contacts with the natives. Hence the imperial powers’ exhortation of their white subjects to avoid close relationships with the natives. The caveat has yet its limits. For in the same way as diseases often moved from one side of the divide to the other in defiance of the established social and racial barriers, colonial encounters generated, willy-nilly, cultural and linguistic cross-fertilisation. Both the English and French idioms abound with words borrowed from native vernaculars. A plethora of Indian words flowed into English. A good number of Arabic and Berber terms also migrated into French. The reverse holds true. Many words and expressions flooded the colonised dialects. The linguistic cross-fertilisation occasioned by colonialism undoubtedly enriched the imperial languages, as much as it deeply subverted the notion of purity sustaining colonialist ideology. It especially highlights the reversibility of the colonial legacy, in that both the colonisers’ and natives’ identities and cultures were questioned and reshaped by the colonial encounters. Despite this obvious métissage,


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the former conquerors and conquered were, and still are, unwilling to acknowledge their mutual borrowing, a reluctance which is yet far from being characteristic of our modern times alone. A similar resistance is indeed found in the multi-ethnic and culturally diverse Roman empire. Latin literature reflects a general consensus about, on the one hand, the benefits of the Roman domination for the colonised, and, on the other, the destructive influence of the natives’ cultures on the conquerors’ civilisation. For example, Strabo (63/64 BC–24 AD), a Roman historian, geographer and philosopher, famous for his 17-volume work Geographica, acknowledged that the Romans destroyed the societies they conquered, but insisted on their having also brought the latter social and political stability: ‘Take the case of the Greeks: though occupying mountains and rocks, they used to live happily, because they took forethought for good government, for the arts, and in general for the science of living. The Romans, too, took over many nations that were naturally savage owing to the regions they inhabited . . . , and thus not only brought into communication with each other peoples, but also taught them how to live under forms of government’ (487). Strabo associates the Romans with worthy instructors teaching the barbarians the principles of law and order. In the process, he downplays the barbarians’ impact on Roman culture in a striking display of cultural arrogance and Roman centrism. Strabo emphatically tells us what the colonised learnt from the Roman civilisers, but says nothing of what the barbarians, including the highly advanced Egyptians, bequeathed to their masters. In Tactica, Arrian (AD 92–AD 175), a Greek historian and philosopher of the Roman period,9 stressed instead the fact that the Romans also learned from their colonial subjects: ‘The Romans have many foreign (Iberian, Celtic) terms for formations, for they used Celtic cavalry. For, if on something else, also on this [matter], the Romans are worthy to be praised because they do not embrace only their own native things. Thus, having chosen noble things from everywhere, they made them their own’ (33). Arrian uncharacteristically recognised the colonised as vehicles of knowledge and culture. Yet his balanced perception of the colonial legacy is not the one that appealed to modern colonial writers. It is Strabo’s idea that the Romans and their followers were teachers of the child-like natives which recurs in nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial literature and serves as an engine to colonialist discourse.

4 Colonialism: From Hegemony to Infantilism

Colonial relation: child and instructor dyad The racial and linguistic theory discussed in connection with the writings and observations of Swift, Grégoire, Arnold and Renan involves fundamental political, economic and symbolic implications. The distinction these authors made between dominant and subordinate languages is a downgrading rhetoric whose alienating effects are two-fold: first, this categorisation implicitly excludes the natives from culture and articulacy; second, it denies them the status of mature citizens living in adult countries. Within global colonial politics and mythology, this design reflects the coloniser’s tendency to relegate the colonised to children or in-fans, which means lacking coherent speech, and thus unable to represent themselves and take charge of their countries. Widely in circulation in colonial literature and colonialist discourse, the concept of child alongside that of race – both gaining momentum in the eighteenth century – soon became ‘virtually interchangeable in their importance for colonialist discourse’ (Ashcroft 2001, 3). A dual symbol portrayed as both ‘unformed’ and evil-like, the child became a privileged colonial trope defining the colonised races. It combined with the metaphor of primitiveness which together served to justify Europe’s mission to nurture the colonised into civilised, responsible adults. This duty entailed in the colonial project’s self-proclaimed ideals consisted of both enlightening the natives and helping their undeveloped countries to advance materially and technologically. However, in view of the insignificant number of natives who benefited from colonial education we can safely state that the first ideal was a stark failure.1 The second did not materialise either, given the negligible amount of industries set up by the French in Algeria or by the British in India and Ireland. 70

Colonialism: From Hegemony to Infantilism

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Thus, rather than lead the colonised and their countries to modernity and modernisation the British and French maintained them in a state of infancy and underdevelopment to better exploit them. As Parry notes: ‘Predatory colonialism . . . had institutionalised economic and social retardation to further its own interests and inhibit colonial peoples from experiencing and conducting themselves as modern subjects’ (2004, 9–10). Modernisation and improvement of the social and material condition of the colonised were certainly not the main concern of Western imperial powers. When industrialisation was not conspicuous by its absence it was often unevenly spread and confined to the few colonial centres where Europeans lived. Overall, the British and French unwillingness to modernise their colonies was intended to keep the latter as a source of raw material and turn the natives into obedient, cheap labour force. They wanted in so doing to ensure that their subjects continue to depend on them, both economically, politically and narcissistically. Significantly, by refusing to lift the natives into modern subjects imperial France and Britain maintained them in their initial cultural and material retardation which in the first place provided a moral justification for their colonisation. One of the aims of infantilising the colonised was, as implied in Cecil Rhodes’s following statement, to confine them in a permanent state of political immaturity and alienation. In his 1894 speech at the House of Assembly in Cape Town, Rhodes declared that owing to their inability to manage their countries the indigenous populations should be chaperoned by Europeans: As to the question of voting, we say that the natives are in a sense citizens, but not altogether citizens – they are still children. . . . Now I say the natives are children. They are just emerging from barbarism. . . . To us annexation was an obligation, whereas to the natives it will be a positive relief, for they will be freed from the cauldron of barbarian atrocities (1900, 380–3). Rhodes repeats the idea of natives as children initiated by Sepulveda and Montaigne in relation to the Amerindians. He thus restates Western colonisers’ paternal obligation towards the colonised. He sanctions the European as a ‘paternal instructor’ to the natives, who become in his rhetoric, a blurred entity: they are at once ‘citizens, but not altogether citizens.’ Rhodes’s articulation of Britain’s ambivalence about the natives in relation to national identity and citizenship echoes France’s attitude to the Arabs and Berbers in Algeria.


French colonial politics in Algeria distinguished European settlers, who were mostly of Spanish, Italian and Maltese origin, from the Algerian Muslims as regards nationality and citizenship. By virtue of the SenatusConsulte of 14 July 1865, Arabs and Berbers were French nationals but not citizens, while the settlers were recognised as full citizens of the empire. It follows that the natives were regulated by a dual jurisdiction. The traditional Islamic law legislated for aspects related to personal matters and the Code de l’Indigénat with its policies of detention without trial, abusive penalties and spoliation of native property, governed the remaining sections (Prochaska 1990; Ageron 1993). In strict political terms, the distinction meant two things: first, the natives were not allowed to be represented nationally by members of their own community; secondly, the settlers and few Arabs and Berbers who could vote at local elections had to do so in separate electing bodies.2 Such disparity confirms the French colonial system’s racism and reinforces its declared intention to dismiss its colonised subjects as sub-nationals. The Berbers and Arabs thereby became a political anomaly, at once legally members of the empire and unequal imperial subjects. Political injustice and cultural and racial hierarchies on which imperial rule is based are mirrored in colonial literature. Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) are good illustrations. Both authors draw in varying degrees on the colonial adventure story genre, but use the colonialist tropes they borrow for different purposes.3 Conrad employs them to question imperialism and represent the crisis of empire; Kipling to celebrate it and reassert its rightness. Kipling’s story focuses on Kim, a young orphan born in India of Irish and English descent. With this characterisation Kim is immediately placed at the heart of the colonial enterprise. His Indian birth strengthens his links with the subcontinent; his mixed descent, on the other hand, highlights the hybridity of the British empire, which owed the conquest of India to its white subjects (the Irish, Scots and Welsh) as well as to the Indian soldiers. The first part of Kim gives a detailed account of Kim’s adventures with his companion, the lama with whom he embarks on a pilgrimage to Buddhist holy places. The second section begins with Kim’s discovery of his father’s Irish regiment. On finding out the hero’s white ancestry the regiment’s priest, Father Bennett decides to prevent him from continuing his journey and sends him instead to a school for ‘sahibs’. Meanwhile, Kim is recruited as a spy for the British secret service in India, teamed up with his Indian friends, the Muslim horse trader, Mahbub Ali and the Bengali Hurree Chunder Mokerjee, both natives collaborating to strengthen the British control of their country.


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Kim exemplifies the protean nature of imperial ideology and rule. He is a talented spy, and, like a picaresque hero, he is skilled in the art of disguise, donning a Muslim apparel now, a Hindu costume next to explore Indian religions and cultures. Changing costumes to suit every situation, Kim penetrates the various social spheres of Indian society, and in each he feels completely at home. For him the love of spying and disguise4 combines with a fascination for the enchanting East, embodied by India. His low birth comes in this case as a blessing. It enables him to establish friendships with the Indians, thanks to which ‘he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights’ (3). Besides exploring India’s social layers, Kim invests and invades the Orient’s founding texts – specifically The Arabian Nights – which he virtually inhabits. Kim seems thus to re-enact the imperialist’s propensity to colonise the indigenous texts. He becomes a site of authority, concentrating cartographic and anthropological knowledge about the native social and literary traditions. He is well equipped for his colonial mission: he knows perfectly Indian territory and has a command of the indigenous folklore, proverbs and vernaculars. Akin to an anthropologist he uncovers a subterranean, exotic world unfamiliar to both the Anglo-Indians and metropolitan readers. Kim is delighted to navigate through this ‘bustling and shouting’ underworld, an enthusiasm which reflects Kipling’s own fascination with the luxurious, secret India (73). Kipling stated in a letter to Margaret Burne-Jones: Underneath our excellent administrative system; under the piles of reports and statistics; the thousand of troops; the doctors; and the civilians runs wholly untouched and unaffected by the life of the peoples of the land – a life full of impossibilities and wonders as the Arabian nights. I don’t want to gush over it but I do want you to understand Wop dear that immediately outside of our English life is the dark and crooked and fantastic; and wicked: and awe-inspiring life of the ‘native’. . . . I have done my best to penetrate it (6–7). Kipling distinguishes a flat, colourless, administrative India sealed in the official documents from the ‘real’, fascinating subterranean subcontinent that he and Kim were privileged to know. By picturing India as a place of enchantment and delight Kipling seeks to satisfy the Victorian readers’ longing for the exotic. On the other hand, in casting Indian life as ‘dark’, ‘wicked’ and ‘crooked’ he tends to reassure the same readers of the validity of the British civilising mission in the subcontinent. He refers to India’s moral backwardness both to suggest Britain’s duty to


bring her colony in the orbit of order and light and reassert cultural and racial hierarchies. From the very outset, the narrator dramatises the rapprochement between Kim and his Indian friends, but he immediately stresses the separation of races. He continually reiterates Kim’s whiteness to reassure the reader that the protagonist did not degenerate into a native – a salient colonial anxiety. The narrator shows how deep down Kim remains a Sahib slipping into a second skin only to serve the British empire. The dark and white skin layers are metaphorically superimposed on Kim’s body, in the same way as the narrative conflates two levels of perception: the real and ideal, proximity and distance, apparent empathy and veiled contempt for native life. Despite the fluidity and permeability of the colonial relationships suggested by Kim’s adventures, cultural and racial divisions remain firmly in place. Thanks to his Sahibness Kim is centre stage. He is described as being highly active and ‘right in the middle of [India], awake and more excited than anyone’ (73); his peripheral Indian friends are instead mere functional tools assisting him in his imperial enterprise. Likewise, the imperialist discourse that Kim represents gains representational primacy, leaving little room for minor narratives of empire. By means of repeated incursions and moderating statements, the diffused authorial voice levels the text’s contradictions into a linear tale of imperial grandeur. This strategy underlines empire’s confidence and legitimacy; at the same time it reaffirms Kim as an integral part of the imperial self – his ‘white blood’ being its very emblem. Conrad’s protagonist, Jim can also be reclaimed by empire as ‘one of us’ (69). Jim works as first mate on the Patna which is taking Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah. The ship hits some underwater wreckage and her frightened crew abandons her alongside the eight hundred pilgrims aboard. Eventually, the ship does not sink and a French gunboat sailing by hauls her to port. Ashamed of their deed, the crew run away to avoid trial, but Jim stands the prosecution after which he is stripped of his sailing certificate. Fascinated by Jim, Marlow helps him to secure various jobs. He ultimately places his protégé on a trading post on Patusan controlled by his old friend, Stein. A fallen seaman, Jim arrives on Patusan as a confident, conquering imperialist, bringing law and order to the natives. He subdues the Raj Allang, leads successfully the Bugis against the Arab traders commanded by Sherif Ali, and establishes a safe society. Following his heroic feat Jim is awarded the title ‘Tuan’ or Lord. He is ‘idolised’ by the Bugis as though he were a ‘creature not only of another kind but of another essence’ (167). The whole community elevates him to an absolute authority whose ‘word decided everything’ (196). Until his


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confrontation with the gunrunner Gentleman Brown, Jim stand for an ideal portrait of the coloniser. He is a brave, born leader of men endowed with the virtues of his race that give him the aura of a supernatural being: ‘He was like a figure set upon a pedestal, to represent in his persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never grow old, that have emerged from the gloom’ (193). Youth, power and nobility combine with verbal authority to erect Jim into an exceptional leader trusted and respected by his adopted community. He is a political and commercial leading force, yet his power and authority are abruptly put to a severe test. During his absence Brown and his companions attacked the village, but are pushed back by Dain Waris and his men. On his return he goes to confront Brown, who deftly invokes common cultural and racial bonds to dissuade Jim from taking action against them. Moved by Brown’s theory of ethnicity he tells the Bugis that the best course of action is to let the brigands leave.5 Following this decision, however, Brown and his men, led by Cornelius, launch an attack killing Dain Waris and his followers. Jim assumes responsibility for the tragedy; he goes to see Doramin and accepts to be shot in what looks like a sacrificial rite that symbolically absolves his guilt, past and present. Conrad leads his hero to a tragic end, a denouement that deals a death blow to the myth of the coloniser as a pioneer taming single-handedly the natives and bringing order to their world. Blown, also, is the image of the colony as a space of rejuvenation and heroic rebirth. On Patusan, Jim is momentarily reborn into a hero, but in the end he neither achieves self-reconciliation nor reaches fusion with his adopted community. His integration into the native community turns out to be as partial as his loyalty to them is tenuous. When he is crucially faced with the grim prospect of spilling the blood of his race, Jim shuns military action and refrains from leading the indigenous population against white men. At this decisive moment when communion with the Other is required, Jim chooses to fall back on his roots. This irredeemable gesture shows how far the imperialist protagonist is determined by the ideological and mental cartographies inherited from his European culture. These preconstructed totalities prevent him both from turning native and from establishing with the Bugis authentic relations of reversals that cut across racial and cultural boundaries. Through Jim’s experience of difference, Conrad problematises the same–Other binary and takes the concept of alterity to a breaking point. He dramatises his protagonist’s final reconnection with his roots to reveal how this imperial subject tends to hold tenaciously to reassuring cultural


cartographies when dialoguing with Otherness. Conrad draws attention to Jim’s and generally the colonisers’ inability to free their identity from social and ideological determinants. At the same time, he questions the dialogism of the colonial relationship which he resituates as a tautological tale of the imperial self. Jim sees the natives as a means of self-rehabilitation and reassuring mirrors reflecting his supremacy. His tale, which is mediated by Marlow, is like Kim’s story, a self-referential narrative. Both Lord Jim and Kim display an inability to tell the natives’ stories other than in borrowed colonialist tropes of darkness and barbarism, violence and disorder. Such a representation of the colonial relation betrays a totalising impulse whereby the colonised characters are marginalised, while Kim and Jim are made the focal point of the related tales. The protagonists’ power to govern with unqualified authority the indigenous lives and texts is consequently heightened. The language in which their narratives are mediated is mimetic, representing the colonial world as it is codified in colonialist discourse. This characteristic mimetism shows how far the overpowering colonial ideology in which the imperialist Jim and Kim are enmeshed is a self-reproducing organism. This mimetism renders the colonial agents’ identities tautological and condemns their narratives of Otherness to repetition and stereotype.

When virile domination and infantile regression coalesce Kim’s and Jim’s centrality within the narrative crystallises empire’s hegemony. Their ego-centrism, on the other hand, reflects the imperial subject’s infantile fantasy. Rightly portrayed as an adult, virile and aggressive enterprise, colonialism is symbolically a puerile undertaking. The colonisers’ conduct in relation to foreign lands and people displays indeed signs of a child’s paralysing sense of insecurity and anxiety over the unfamiliar. Following a child’s psychic structure, they try to contain the threatening indigenous geography and its inhabitants by taming the first and reducing the second to a few stereotypes that can be safely handled. Colonial literature conveys both the Europeans’ fear of and attraction to the exotic lands and peoples. Marlow in Heart of Darkness, for example, describes the African jungle as inviting and threatening, a source of excitement and disorientation. Likewise, Kipling sees India as a place of enchantment, but finds its vastness disconcerting, for, as he states: ‘You can’t focus anything in India.’ Forster in A Passage to India (1924) also complains about India’s immensity and expresses the difficulty of grasping the subcontinent’s cultures and traditions. He invests the colony’s


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bewildering cultural landscape, keen to domesticate strangeness and tell a comprehensible tale of difference for metropolitan consumption. Such a need to exorcise the fears of the unknown through simplification and appropriation involves a desire to return to a womb-like world of protection and certainty. This regressive move highlights empire’s infantilism and perpetual search for a reassuring authority, whether ideological or ontological. But what best illustrates the infantilism of colonisation is the egocentrism and cupidity of its agents. The latter often tend to make themselves the centre of an objectified world, viewing the world mostly in terms of appropriation, caught, like spoilt children, in frantic material pursuits. Conrad’s protagonist, Kurtz is an illuminating example. An embodiment of European colonialism, Kurtz is completely sealed in the egocentric site of my-ness, seeing both the black tribes and ivory as reflections of his supremacy, as suggested in his acquisitive rhetoric: ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’ (1899, 206). Charles Gould in Nostromo (1904) also considers the workers extracting the silver to be his property, and assimilates the silver mine to a ‘secret sharer’. Like Nostromo – the protagonist who ‘exists in a present that knows neither past nor future’ – Gould lives in an everlasting now of ‘material interests’ (Berthoud 1978, 133). Obsessed with his mine, which he sees as an extension of himself, Gould becomes indifferent to feelings, his wife’s and his own. He is a prisoner of a myopic vision of the world, viewing people as a means to serve his ends. Gould undoubtedly proves a competent materialist by transforming the mine into a profitable business. The wealth he acquires secures him power and social prestige, but his devotion to financial gain causes the erosion of his spirituality. He becomes reified, completely enslaved by the mine, as Nostromo is enslaved by the stolen silver or Kurtz by the ivory (Acheraïou 2004a). Agents of imperialism, Gould and his ally, Holroyd are rapacious entrepreneurs. They are bent on the earth’s conquest, inspired by Holroyd’s theory of the world’s future: ‘We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it – and neither can we, I guess’ (1904, 94–5). Both characters erect material interests, imperialism’s primary incentive, into an ideology of conquest and an icon of worship. Their respective actions harden, in turn, into a doctrine of profit and exploitation. The practical Gould, more particularly, is devoted to the new ‘religion of silver and iron’ (90), and so becomes a fanatical materialist, just as Father Corbelan is a religious bigot. The two characters are haunted by a ‘fixed idea’ and, thus, as the narrator asserts, touched by insanity. On the other hand, the fact that the millionaire


Holroyd financing a South American mine comes from the United States is highly significant, given this country’s imperialist ambition in the region, which is entailed in the Pan-American Monroe doctrine (Collits 2005, 147). Through this character the visionary Conrad anticipates today’s commercial and financial imperialism, led by the United States which is determined to run the world’s business, concealing, like Holroyd, their true motives behind a thin veil of philanthropic universal ideals. Both Decoud and the anonymous narrator expose more or less explicitly the cupidity and hypocrisy of Gould’s and Holroyd’s joint enterprise. Their critique sounds like Conrad’s attack on the two imperialists’ overpowering agency. Emboldened by his economic and political influence Gould tends to behave like an autocratic sovereign. His relation to power reveals, however, a problematic attitude towards authority, symbolised by his father and such paternal figures as Holroyd and Father Corbelan. We remember the initial Gould being motivated by an urge to rehabilitate his father’s honour damaged by the Montero government which ruined his business. But the very decision to reopen the abandoned mine against his father’s wish involves an implicit defiance of the word of the father as a symbol of authority and guidance. Gould’s challenge to paternal authority is of the utmost significance. In regards to the new form of imperialism he embodies, his position vis-à-vis his father’s word involves a significant ideological rupture. For unlike the architects of nation-state colonialism who often justified the colonial project by citing the Greek and Roman ancestors, Gould – the apostle of monopolistic imperialism emerging in the 1890s – considers fatherly counselling and authoritative narratives of origin unnecessary. His success in the mining business transforms him into an overreaching, self-referential subjectivity. Consequently, the imperialism which he and Holroyd exemplify seems to revolve around its orbit, tied to the eternal present of immediate satisfaction. With the mine evolving from an idea into a fetish, and then into a monster, Gould breaks away from the imperial ethics of universal progress and justice that he once promised to spread in South America. In dispensing with his former ethical justification, crucial to nation-state’s colonialism, ‘monopolistic’ imperialism, as is inferred from Gould’s conduct, becomes a self-validating, theocratic system. Its global expansionism, crystallised in the neo-liberal doctrine of free trade and commerce, continues in disguised forms the former direct colonial exploitation of the South by the North. Similarly, Gould’s imperial enterprise is, as


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the narrator states, a mere continuation of Spanish colonialism. His undertakings in South America undoubtedly bring together the ‘new’ and ‘old’ empires. Specifically, the Sulaco aristocracy – Gould’s allies and remnants of the Spanish presence on the continent – connects the two eras, showing how colonialism is set in a network of continuities and solidarities. It draws on multiple sources and its hegemonic thrust objectifies the colonised as much as it alienates the imperial agents. Charles Gould’s materialism is excessive, to say the least, and his reification resulting from unrestrained pursuits of gain and power recalls Kurtz’s moral decadence. Kurtz is a notoriously ruthless capitalist who is completely alienated by the Ivory Company he serves.6 His ambivalent status both reflects empire’s authoritarianism and highlights the complex structures presiding over the construction of colonial identities. For one thing, Kurtz enacts empire’s self-centredness. Marlow deploys a gamut of adjectives – ‘remarkable’, ‘best’, ‘greatest’ and ‘exceptional’ (1899, 165) – to dramatise Kurtz’s hyperbolic personality and heighten his competence as an agent of capitalism and imperialism. He shows how the protagonist’s cupidity leads him to reduce the world to a selfreproducing mould – a reifying gesture that turns the Africans and ivory into objects of fantasy and self-gratification. Just as he feverishly toys with the ivory he collects for the Company Kurtz toys with the natives’ lives as a child would in his games. He cherishes his possessions, especially ivory, to the point of fetishisation. In the process both subject (Kurtz) and object (ivory) merge into an undifferentiated entity. The two parasitically absorb and consume each other. Kurtz, an exceptional collector, and, metaphorically, ardent consumer of ivory is finally consumed by his economic desire. The wilderness and ivory have got hold of him, as Marlow remarks: The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball – an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and – lo! – he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation (205). Wilderness and ivory become interchangeable. Both have enchanted Kurtz and enslaved him to their power. Kurtz the possessor is finally overwhelmed by his acquisitions which appropriate his body and soul. His devotion to the modern religion of trade and commerce causes him to cross the threshold of sanity and become a demonic, tyrannical figure among the black tribes. Kurtz’s greediness epitomises the rapacity


of capitalism. His indulgence in ‘unspeakable rites,’ on the other hand, suggests a barbarous practice, or what Marlow terms ‘the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation’. The two characteristics mark Kurtz as a figure of a cannibalistic empire devouring Africa’s resources and human labour. Marlow draws attention to Kurtz’s unrestrained materialism in a rhetoric that conflates colonialism and cannibalism:7 ‘I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind’ (245). He depicts him as a ravenous cannibal with an insatiable appetite. Following in the steps of Conrad, the Algerian writer, Mohammed Dib in L’Incendie and the Kenyan writer, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O (1938- ) in A Grain of Wheat (1967) associate the French and British empires with cannibalism. The two authors resort to metaphors of eating and drinking that reduce colonisation to a mere cannibalistic ritual. Dib evokes the spoliation of the Algerians, equating the French colonial enterprise with ‘a voracious and elusive monster’ which ‘was swallowing up into its shadowy mouth huge parcels of the lands they had watered with their sweat and blood’ (76–7). Ngugi relates British cupidity in India, stating: ‘The British were there for hundreds and hundreds of years. They ate India’s wealth. They drank India’s blood’ (102). The theme of cannibalism surfacing in the aforementioned modern texts was a key concern in earlier writings, notably in classical literature. Aristotle refers to cannibalism in The Politics: ‘There are many races who are ready enough to kill and eat men, such as the Achaeans and the Heniochi who both live about the Black Sea; and there are other mainland tribes, as bad or worse, who all live by plunder, but have no courage’ (188). The Greeks’ identification of the neighbouring peoples with beasts and cannibals, conveyed by Aristotle, partakes of the classical discourse of barbarism which considers subhuman those who are non-Greeks. As the discourse of barbarism goes, humanity and civilisation were on the side of the Greco-Roman world whereas bestiality and cannibalism were features of non-Europeans. Among modern admirers of the classical civilisations, Denis Diderot is one of the rarest to link metaphorically the Roman empire to cannibalism. After comparing the Greeks and Romans to ‘ferocious beasts’ (1772, 77) in ‘Pensées détachées’, Diderot pursues: ‘It was the time when the wild beast known as the Roman people was either devouring itself or busy devouring other nations that historians wrote and poets sang’ (81). Diderot’s metaphor of imperial Rome as both self-devouring and a devourer of other nations may have inspired the Francophile Conrad who yokes modern imperialism and cannibalism in Heart of Darkness.


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Karl Marx’s association of capitalism and human progress with a cannibalistic practice is another possible inspiration. When he discusses nineteenth-century capitalism, Marx deploys a range of metaphors that reinforce the voracity and barbarity of capital which he defines as ‘vampire-like’, living only by ‘sucking living labour’ (1867, 342). For him, capitalism is a brutal system of exploitation similar to ‘a hideous pagan idol [drink]ing the nectar from the skulls of the slain’ (1977, 336). Conrad’s protagonist condenses the evils of capitalism and cannibalism. To reinforce Kurtz’s egocentrism and immorality Marlow describes him in terms which conflate the figure of the cannibal with that of the child. He refers to his behaviour as ‘contemptibly childish’ (1899, 110), a qualification that links Kurtz and implicitly empire to infantilism. In defining Kurtz – a white protagonist – through the child trope, which usually characterises the natives, Conrad challenges to an extent the colonial representation of whiteness alongside the authority and sense of supremacy it entails. In other words, by undercutting the marker of whiteness with the child motif Conrad resituates the colonial project as an ambivalent system. He shows how the latter is informed by a progressive rhetoric embodied by ‘the emissary of light and progress’, Kurtz, as well as by regressive practices suggested by the protagonist’s relapse into an infantile state of myness, implied in his relation to ivory and to the Intended. Kurtz’s tension between idealism and ruthlessness exemplifies the selfcontradictions of the colonial enterprise. Monumental on the outside but hollow at the core, he stands for a hyperbolic figure that exceeds as much as it lacks. His identity is shaped by the dialectics of excess and deficiency around which the imperial self and ideology articulate. The confidence he displays in ruling the black tribes attests to his supremacy. His inability to break away completely from the Company’s regime indicates instead his subjection to a higher authority that maintains him in a state of subordination, and by inference, infantilism. His ambivalence reflects empire’s wavering between certainty and doubt, fear of and fascination for primitive lands and peoples. The coming chapters extend the discussion of these imperial contradictions with a particular focus on British and French modernist writers. They examine these modernists’ treatment of colonialism along with their investment of classical themes and tropes.

5 Modernist Writers, Classical Ideal and Empire

Victorian Hellenism, as argued previously, was multiple and fraught with tensions and contradictions, so, too, was modernist Hellenism. Just as the Victorians invested ancient Greek myths, symbols and figures to achieve their own artistic and ideological goals, modernist Hellenists took from ancient Greece what suited their own concerns (Gregory 1997). Modernist writers such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Albert Camus, who will be studied throughout, showed great admiration for classical literatures and cultures. They borrowed myths, themes and ideas from ancient authors which they used to various artistic and ideological purposes. Their attitude to classical legacy varied from one writer to another, but they all had an idealised image of Greece. Most modernist writers, as will become clear, tended to reproduce in their fiction the nineteenth-century stereotyped view of Greece as a place of moderation, artistic nobility and political and human accomplishment. Apart from Ezra Pound who once referred to the ancient Greeks’ ‘disreputable vices’ – the ‘vices’ in question being Greek homosexuality – modernist writers remained silent or evasive about the ancient society’s bleak sides. They overlooked, for instance, the fact that the theory of natural slavery was accepted by almost all the Greeks and that most espoused Plato’s eugenic theories and the myths of pure lineage. These unwelcome aspects of classical Greece are not evoked in modernist texts, not even in the works of Woolf or Forster who had mitigated feelings about the ancient Greek world.

E. M. Forster: a disenchanted Hellenist in the tangles of imperial ideology Forster’s perception of ancient Greece was influenced by the works of the Romantic and Victorian Hellenists, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, 82

Modernist Writers, Classical Ideal and Empire

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Matthew Arnold and Lowes Dickinson (Jeffreys 2005). Trilling, one of the earliest critics to discuss Forster’s Hellenism, argued that ‘surely the Greek myths made too deep an impression on Forster’ (1964, 38). He added in a comment that draws attention to Forster’s selective conception of Greece: ‘Forster’s is the Greece of myth and mystery, of open skies and athleticism, of love and democracy. It is not the “true” Greece, but no Greece is’ (30). In his early writings, Forster tended, indeed, to rehearse the nineteenth-century idyllic image of Greece. Klingopoulos notes: ‘The Hellenism of Mr. Forster’s earlier work had been of the simple idealising sort in which the ancient world is invoked as a standard to set off the deficiencies of modern civilisation. It supplies a pervasive symbolism for the short stories, and is closely associated with the theme of cultural vitality. Sometimes there is a measure of ironic – though uncertain – detachment’ (1958, 160–1). There is good reason to point to Forster’s idealisation of ancient Greece in his early fiction; at the same time it is reductive to think that Forster’s approach during his initial creative phase was merely of the ‘idealising sort’. Forster certainly displayed a complex and ambivalent feelings towards ancient Greek culture in his later works, but this ambivalence can also be easily discerned in such early stories as ‘Albergo Empedocle’. Published in 1903 in Temple Bar, one of the leading literary magazines of Victorian England, ‘Albergo Empedocle’ reiterates the nineteenthcentury idyllic image of classical Greece. Forster in this tale presents ancient Greece as a rampart against modernity’s discontents, but simultaneously points to its impotence as a source of aesthetic and ideological regeneration. Inspired by Forster’s first trip to Italy and Greece in 1901– 1902 ‘Albergo Empedocle’ puts centre stage classical Greece. The story revolves around the Peaslakes and Harold, who is engaged to Mildred Peaslake. After the engagement, Harold and the Peaslakes are travelling across Europe for two months. The characters’ discussions centre on ancient Greek culture and monuments. In contrast to Harold who is unfamiliar with classical Greek culture, Mildred and her father, Sir Edwin, are educated, fervent Hellenists. The enthusiastic Mildred is keen to lecture the unresponsive Harold about the Greek temples and suggests that he ‘forget all the modern horrors of railways and Cook’s tours, and think that he’s living over two thousand years ago, among palaces and temples’ (14–15). She wants him to ‘be a Greek’, to ‘think and feel and act like a Greek’ (15). To Mildred’s dismay, though, Harold is heedless to ‘the echoes of the past’ which overwhelm his fiancée (20). Later, however, he changes radically to Mildred’s surprise and delight. While visiting the Temple of Zeus,


Harold drifts apart and Mildred ultimately finds him asleep in a space between two fallen columns of the ruined temple. When he wakes up he experiences an epiphanic moment, telling the stunned yet ecstatic Mildred ‘I’ve lived here before’ (22). Hard pressed by his fiancée to provide facts and details about the city and people at that remote period, Harold replies that his former life was ‘wonderful,’ but ‘[he] can’t remember it’ (22). He recalls neither the century in which he lived nor the people or temples. This amnesia is disconcerting for the inquisitive Mildred who wants to have a clear historical, sociological and cultural map of the ancient times to which Harold journeyed back. In the exchange between Mildred and Harold, Forster contrasts a cerebral view of Greece with a sensual one. The first incarnated by the Hellenist Mildred amounts to a subject of study meant for the pleasure of the mind. The second embodied by Harold is instead founded on a deeper, indefinite sentimental connection with the spirit of the past. With this contrast, Forster suggests that true communion with the classical spirit is best achieved by feeling and sensation, which merge the past and present into an undifferentiated whole. Harold’s epiphanic experience has transported him back to an idyllic world where ‘[He] was better, [he] saw better, [he] heard better, [he] thought better’ (24). In this anterior life the protagonist typifies man at his best; he symbolises both an ideal ‘human norm’ and an accomplished mind. The recurrent superlative ‘better’ indicates the protagonist’s, implicitly Forster’s, reassertion of Greece as a site of clarity, rationalism, and artistic and cultural perfection. In this story Harold symbolically connects ancient Greece and modern Britain, suggesting aesthetic, cultural and racial continuities. By giving his protagonist a foothold in both universes, Forster turns metaphorically Britain into a natural geographical and cultural extension of classical Greece. He thus naturalises the British as the ancient Greeks’ direct heirs, as does Haggard in She where Leo Vincey on which Harold is modelled incarnates an ancient Greek. Unlike Haggard, however, Forster departs from the nineteenth-century writers’ use of the image of Greece to bolster empire. We recall Mildred’s disappointment on realising that Harold’s account tells nothing about fifth century BC Greece that apologists of modern imperialism regarded as a crucial source of inspiration: ‘Mildred was silent. She had hoped he would have said the fifth century BC – the period in which she was given to understand that the Greek race was at its prime. He could tell her nothing; he did not even seem interested, but began talking about Mrs Popham’s present’ (25).


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The fifth century BC corresponded, as discussed earlier, to the rise of Greece into an imperial power. The Greeks’ sense of supremacy and contempt for non-Greeks were at their prime during this period. Through Harold’s vague, de-historicised view, Forster attempts to distance himself from a belligerent imperialist Greece, but sticks to the image of classical Greece as a site of harmony and poetic accomplishment where, according to Harold, things were better than they are in the modern, disjointed world. From an aesthetic and spiritual perspective, Harold’s conception of Greece enacts a search for a cultural ideal that is susceptible to compensate for modern disintegration and decay. It indicates Forster’s desire to find in the Hellenic spirit authoritative answers susceptible to generate harmony and instil meaning to the modern vacuum left by the ‘death of God’. The longing for the remote universe of wholeness and harmony intimates an escape from the fragmented, decadent modernity where the artist’s vision and voice have lost their power to reinvigorate the word and redeem the world. The protagonist’s fate demonstrates, however, that the hope of intellectual and aesthetic regeneration is vain. Having failed to negotiate safely his return from the sublimated classical world to the disorienting modernity Harold ends locked up in an asylum. Before reaching the asylum his speech was already ‘unintelligible’, as the narrator remarks, and ‘by the time he arrived at it, he hardly uttered a sound of any kind’ (34). Harold’s predicament reflects the modernist artist’s inability to heal the ills of modern life and arts by the poetic genius of the classical past. This artistic powerlessness, which suggests Greece’s helplessness as an aesthetic ideal, is compounded by the inefficiency of Greece as an inspiring imperial force. Referring to this ancient imperial power’s inability to instil life into India that Alexander the Great invaded in 327 BC, Forster states: ‘Greece who has immortalised the falling dust of facts, so that it hangs in enchantment for ever, can bring no life to a land that is waiting for the dust to clear away, so that the soul may contemplate the soul’ (1971, 201). Forster repeats the classical representations of Orientals, notably the Persians and Egyptians, as effete and stagnant. He associates India with stasis and death, waiting for the potent West, ancient Greece in this case, to reconnect it to life and history. At the same time, he insinuates that this redemptive work is to no avail given Greece’s impotence. For him, Greece is a fallen authority that could neither turn formlessness into beauty, nor bring clarity and order to ‘poor India [where] everything was placed wrong’ (1924, 283).


Edward Said, Benita Parry, Muhamad Shaheen among others have stressed Forster’s sympathy for the colonised to remind the sceptics of the author’s engagement against colonialism. Parry in particular expressively recommended giving up viewing Forster as an Orientalist, insisting on the author’s socialism and struggle against fascism (2004). Forster’s activism should certainly be fully acknowledged, it must not, however, distract us from the author’s limits in this terrain. There is in this respect a shade of Orientalism in the previous statement, which reveals Forster’s ambivalence about the East. Imperial Greece’s powerlessness in the subcontinent mentioned above is vigorously rendered in ‘Jehovah, Buddha, and the Greeks’ (1920). Forster in this essay draws attention to the swiftness with which Hellenic influence faded away in India. He uses the following words to describe the collapse of the Greek empire that was thought to be eternal: ‘In a few generations the Hellenic influences died out, not through persecution, but because their day was ended. Poseidon becomes Siva on the coins, Artemis a wild Apsara, and the Greek types of Gandhara are lost in the sculptured jingles of Amaravati’ (731). Forster seems to mourn the rapid dissolution of Hellenic India, but considers this demise inevitable. History is replete with chronicles of the rise and fall of civilisations and empires. The Greek empire in India and elsewhere declined and came to an end, as did later Imperial Rome and many other colonial powers that followed. Nineteenth-century British and French authors and apologists of colonialism were obsessed with the fall of Imperial Rome which they saw as foreboding the decline of their own empires. In view of Forster’s close identification of England with ancient Greece, there is reason to believe that in referring to the demise of Greek imperial power in classical India he voices his own anxieties about the fall of British rule in the subcontinent. These worries are all the more justified given the rise of Indian nationalism in the 1920s in which A Passage to India is set. Consider this comment in which this ‘ominous’ prospect is formulated: The triumphant machine of civilisation may suddenly hitch and be immobilised into a car of stone, and at such moments the destiny of the English seems to resemble their predecessors’, who also entered the country with the intent to refashion it, but were in the end worked into its pattern and covered with its dust. (212) Forster points to the vulnerability of civilisation and evokes the precariousness of the colonial enterprise, which, as he cautions, may suddenly sway under the pressures of barbarism. While evoking the fate of the


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British predecessors, that is the Greeks he had in mind, he implicitly guards his countrymen against repeating the mistakes of their classical imperial model. He suggests preventing India’s disorder and dust from overwhelming the British empire. For Forster, ancient Greece stands in this case for failure and powerlessness. It did not only fail to reshape the colony in its own image, but also fell prey to the forces of darkness it was supposed to tame. Forster’s attitude to ancient Greece is ambiguous as his vision of colonial politics and society is elusive. His previous argument about the vulnerability of civilisation and empires contains in disseminated form political and ideological hints. But none is explicit enough as to stand for a definite theory of British colonialism in India. A Passage to India is also markedly evasive, both politically and ideologically. The narrator relates cultural and political frictions between Britain and her colonial subjects, but remains indeterminate. This irresolution may account for the mixed critical attention the novel received on its publication in 1924. The book was pilloried by the supporters of the British empire and acclaimed by those who questioned colonial presence in India (Shaheen 2004, ix). Contrary to what many readers thought when A Passage to India appeared, this novel conveys no explicit political message. The narrator’s detachment from the events he describes is manifest. Throughout he tries to preserve a non-committal tone, as though he were a historian keen to chronicle the events as objectively as possible. This narrative indecisiveness, symbolising Forster’s political detachment, allows the narrator to gain wider insight into the imperial tensions and simultaneously preserve a more or less neutral stance. Overall, his attitude to colonial politics and imperial representations involves both rupture and continuity. In describing India the narrator points to its cultural diversity and the myriad of forces that shaped it. He identifies it with a space of cultural, religious and ideological diversity that resists codification and easy categorisation. By acknowledging the subcontinent’s multiplicity and dynamism, Forster distances himself from die-hard Orientalists who tend to represent the Orient as inert and monolithic. However, through insistence on the difficulty of representing the fathomless subcontinent he tends to reiterate colonial Europe’s perception of the East as bewildering and undecipherable. Parry interprets Forster’s ‘self-declared incomprehension’ as a sign of India’s resistance to the conquerors’ ‘discursive appropriation’ (2004, 148; 166). This is a plausible reading given the rise of the Indian nationalist resistance during the 1920s. We may argue as well that by his


confessed incomprehension of things Indian, Forster tends paradoxically to maintain the subcontinent in its radical strangeness and deem its cultures and mores untranslatable. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that the passage to the East, suggested in the novel’s title, fails to generate the expected knowledge and understanding of the colony’s peoples and cultures. It does not bridge the gulf separating the British and Indians, either. But this outcome is apparently desired by the author himself. In a letter to his Indian lover, Ross Masood (27 September 1922), Forster writes: ‘When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable’ (quoted by Shaheen 2004, 96). Imperial geo-politics seems to have made Forster realise the impossibility of making East and West meet, but his original idea of sympathy and friendship between the British and Indians remains central in the novel. Both Mr Fielding and Mrs Moore show sympathy for the Indians and succeed in establishing intimacy with Aziz. Mrs Moore is attracted to the mysteries of India and tries to fit the colonial cultures into a harmonious whole. A well-meaning ‘matriarch’, Mrs Moore incarnates imperial benevolence and the idea of good colonisation that Forster implicitly endorses in this novel. We hear her lamenting the arrogance and incivility of the Anglo-Indian, expressing deep regrets that her son Ronny, a City Magistrate, was not ‘a different man, and the British Empire a different institution’ (49). Mrs Moore plainly argues for an efficient, urbane colonial administration after she had suggested bridging the gap between Britain and her colony. This idealised version of imperialism is nevertheless soon challenged by the Cave episode during which Adela Quested accuses Aziz of attempted rape. In the wake of this allegation the few friendships established by Indians and British are threatened. The colonial relationship is in turn reinstated as mostly a conduit of violence and mutual hatred and fear. Racial and cultural tensions are rekindled dealing a severe blow to Mrs Moore’s romantic conception of the colonial relationship. This benevolent matriarch is brutally forced to confront the naked truth of the imperial lie which is dramatised by Adela’s allegation. She is left to contemplate helplessly the collapse of her humanist notion of empire founded on ‘good will’ and mutual understanding (60). In colonial literature rape is a figure of imperial power and hegemony. It symbolises the white man’s domination of both the native woman and the colonised male who is usually characterised as effeminate. But in A Passage to India this paradigm is reversed, as the Indian Aziz


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becomes a presumed rapist of an English lady, Adela. At one level, the rape metaphor reinforces the climate of insurgency of 1920s India. At another, it communicates Forster’s anxiety about Britain’s future in this subcontinent. Specifically, it reflects the British fear of seeing their colony ravished by such Indian nationalists as Aziz.1 As can be noticed, Indian resistance to British rule embodied by Aziz is a marginalised theme in A Passage to India. Nationalist politics is confined to the closing pages and the question of Indian independence is subject to mockery and dismissal, particularly by Fielding, a benevolent colonial subject who conceives of the colonial encounters as a smooth, fruitful ‘give-and-take’ business (60). In this concluding scene, Fielding and Aziz are shown energetically discussing imperial politics. Aziz gives vent to his nationalist sentiment, pressing the British to quit India: ‘Clear out, all you Turtons and Burtons. We wanted to know you ten years back – now it’s too late’ (323). He postulates a post-British India which will be purged of all foreigners: ‘India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslim and Sikh and all shall be one!’ (324). Fielding listens attentively to Aziz’s radical nationalist rhetoric and mocks his liberationist project: ‘India a nation! What an apotheosis!’ (324). Fielding jeers at Aziz’s theory of independence and continues to promote the politics of friendship between the British and Indians, while Aziz is convinced that true friendship can only begin with the departure of the British. The concluding ‘No, not yet . . . No, not there’, which comes as a reply to Fielding’s ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ (325), suggests that for Aziz there is no turning away from the politics of hatred and rupture with the British master. From Fielding’s perspective, on the other hand, this terse deferral indicates that time is not, nor will ever be, ripe for India’s independence. The novel’s intriguing ending has generated much critical attention. Said interprets it as ‘a paralysed gesture of aesthetic powerlessness,’ stating: ‘Forster notes and confirms the history behind a political conflict between Dr Aziz and Fielding – Britain’s subjugation of India – and yet can neither recommend de-colonisation nor continued colonisation’ (1989, 223). Parry also reads the novel’s open-ended closing act as a sign of a ‘deferred post-imperial condition which temporarily in the novel has not the means to articulate’ (2004, 174). The apparent ‘aesthetic powerlessness’ is, I think, due less to Forster’s lack of the means to articulate a post-imperial condition than to his unwillingness to see this possibility materialised. By the final curt dismissal, Forster inscribes India in an eternal colonial condition, as suggested by Fielding’s response to Aziz’s idea of the


nation-to-come: ‘What would you want instead of the English? The Japanese?’ (324). Convinced that India must remain British, he gestures to the need to find a more efficient and humane form of rule. Fielding intimates the Indians’ incapacity to govern themselves. His position is similar to that of Forster who criticises the empire’s excesses, but deep down he neither wishes the end of British rule nor thinks Indians apt for self-determination (Said 1993; Boehmer 1995). Fielding refuses to legitimise imperial rule, but he justifies his presence in India. In response to Aziz’s disturbing question, ‘why are you in India?’, Fielding simply states: ‘I’m out here personally because I needed a job. I cannot tell you why England is here or whether she ought to be here. It’s beyond me’ (110). For Fielding, the ‘East’ or India is merely ‘a career’, to recall Disraeli’s words in Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847). Fielding explains why he has come to the subcontinent, but cautiously evades the disturbing issue of Britain’s domination of India. He does so by professing ignorance or political incompetence, an escapist rhetoric which suggests Forster’s unease and elusiveness about colonial politics. On replying to the critics who thought that A Passage to India conveyed a clear political message, Forster states in The Hill of Devi: ‘The book is not really about politics, though it is the political aspect of it that caught the general public and made it sell. It’s about something wider than politics, about the search of the human race for a more lasting home, about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and the Indian sky’ (1983, 298). Forster tries to depoliticise his narrative by insisting on its artistic, literary and spiritual dimension. Underlying this declaration is an aesthetic project that offers metaphysical answers to defuse an explosive colonial context of extreme hate and violence. According to this rationale, the difficulty of living in the colony simply becomes ‘the difficulty of living in the universe’ (quoted by Furbank 1978, 308). Colonial real-politics is in this statement abandoned for the much wider field of existential preoccupations and universalism, a strategy of displacement which involves a shift from the literal to the metaphoric. Forster’s ethics of territoriality thus slide from the local/terrestrial to the universal/celestial in a way that highlights his reluctance to involve directly himself in colonial politics. Forster’s universalist search for a ‘more lasting home’ where humankind could finally enjoy harmony and unity reflects residual idealism, as much as it reinforces his political and ideological escapism. Placed within a strictly modernist perspective, the suggested spiritual quest entails a desire to break out of the constraints and predicament of modernity in order to recover a harmonious universe embodied by the


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‘Indian earth and Indian sky’, and generally by ancient Greece. But both remain hopeless escape routes.

Virginia Woolf: classical culture, colonialism and gender Woolf’s interest in classical Greek culture started during her adolescence. She was initiated into the Greek language and authors by her tutors, Clara Pater and Janet Case and this was to continue for a number of years (Fowler 1999; Adams 2003). Her attitude to the ancient Greek legacy was influenced by the Victorian Hellenists as well as by the Cambridge Hellenism of Woolf’s brother Thoby and E. M. Forster. In her early essays and diaries, Woolf showed great admiration for the classical Greeks. In keeping with the Victorian Hellenists who stressed the British direct cultural and racial filiations with the ancient Greeks, Woolf in Passionate Apprentice talks of the British as being mentally linked to their classical ancestors: ‘I think I see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together – how any live mind today is of the very same stuff as Plato’s and Euripides. It is only a continuation and development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; and all the world is mind’ (178–9). For Woolf, the British are tied to the Greeks by a ‘common mind,’ an identification which welds the British and classical cultures. Woolf’s initial eagerness for ancient Greece decreases, however, in her later writings where her attitude becomes ambiguous. It wavers between fascination and distance, belief in ancient Greek culture as an antidote to modernity’s discontents and pessimism about the capacity of the classical spirit to regenerate the fragmented modern era. With the erosion of her previous confidence in the classical ideal, Woolf’s idea of a ‘common mind’ binding the British and ancient Greeks is wearing thin. In her essay, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, Woolf stresses the differences between the English and ancient Greeks, arguing: ‘Between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a tremendous breach of tradition’ (1925, 23). The distance separating the British and the Greeks seems unbridgeable. The two peoples are dismissed as culturally and racially distinct, divided by impermeable barriers of language, race and tradition. In the same essay, however, Woolf reiterates the importance of the classical civilisation as a crucial steadying base to which ‘we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age’ (1925, 38). She thus appears inclined to acknowledge the difficulty of fully disconnecting the modern world from the ancient,


British culture from the classical spirit from which it drew inspiration and authority. The Voyage Out (1915), the focal point of this discussion, illustrates Woolf’s complex view of the ancient Greek world. It also unveils her sophisticated approach to colonialism and the issue of gender that she presents as closely connected. The story relates Rachel Vinrace’s monthlong voyage from London to South America aboard her father’s ship, the Euphrosyne. Rachel looks forward to enlarging her mind and emancipating herself from her father’s and aunt’s routinely, claustrophobic domestic order. But after her upriver expedition into the wilderness she falls ill and dies. Ironically Woolf casts Rachel in the role of a modern Ulysses who confidently sails to the exotic South America, but instead of directing her heroine to extraordinary feats and glory, she leads her to decline and death. By this ironic twist Woolf mildly parodies the Odyssey tradition, which provided Victorian writers and supporters of empire such as Haggard and Kipling a valuable source of inspiration. However, despite her apparent subversion of the Homeric tradition, she neither questions the authority of the classical poet, nor challenges ancient Greece’s expansionism and racism. In both The Voyage Out and in her essay, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, Woolf idealises classical Greek culture. She regards The Odyssey as ‘the triumph of narrative’ and considers Homer the paragon of poetic creation worthy of emulation. The Voyage Out teems with allusions to ancient Greece: Besides Homer, Woolf refers to Pindar and Plato, the classical philosopher that Woolf read with much enthusiasm and diligence. Some characters are also described as fervent philhellenists. William Pepper, for example, translated ‘English prose into Greek iambics’ (14). Greek is Pepper’s ‘hobby’ and his voyage aboard the Euphrosyne is intended ‘either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the probable course of Odysseus’ (15). Overall, Woolf’s investment of ancient Greece in this novel involves admiration and nostalgia. The surrogate artist, Rachel yearns to ‘recover the taste of Homer’ and symbolically regenerate modern art with the wisdom of the past. On the other hand, when she articulates Rachel’s obsession with the loss of the principle of unity that binds organically the present to the past, Woolf must be thinking of classical Greece, commonly identified with wholeness and coherence: ‘She was haunted by the absurd jumbled ideas – how, if one went back far enough, everything perhaps was intelligible, everything was in common’ (70). The modern world with its ‘absurd jumbled ideas’ is contrasted to an ideal universe, presumably classical Greece to which Woolf and most


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modernists aspire. The juxtaposition of the ancient and modern worlds is subtly expressed. It is introduced obliquely by way of a network of echoes and analogies that keep the two universes in sustained contact. Woolf’s attitude to classical cultures is obviously selective. While she seems nostalgic about classical Greece, she tends to distance herself from Imperial Rome. This detachment is suggested by her ironic treatment of such characters as Richard Dalloway and St John who function as continuers of Roman imperial ideology. Woolf in this narrative places colonialism in a diachronic perspective, establishing bridges between Roman imperialism, Renaissance expansionism and nineteenth-century empires. Like Conrad and Joyce, she views new imperialism as a continuation of previous forms of domination. As she highlights this historic continuum, Woolf looks suspiciously at the self-proclaimed ideals of the Western civilising mission. The Spaniards, Portuguese and English conquerors are treated with irony and derision, dismissed as equally ‘vengeful’ and ‘rapacious’ (96). Richard Dalloway is the character who best articulates the connection between anterior forms of domination and modern imperialism. A fervent colonialist, Richard justifies the rightness of his country’s expansion overseas by citing near and remote imperial models. Owing to the achievements of the British empire and to the pedigree of its inspirers, Richard is convinced about the superiority of Britain as a colonising nation. In consequence, he is certain that his country’s records in Africa and elsewhere outshine those of other modern imperial powers: ‘I grant that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most men, their records cleaner. But, good Lord, don’t run away with the idea that I don’t see the drawbacks – horrors – unmentionable things done in our very midst! I’m under no illusions’ (67). Richard Dalloway repeats the sixteenth-century idealised view of Britain promoted by Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616) in ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ (1584). A geographer, clergyman and writer, Hakluyt is remembered for his promotion of the British settlement in North America. He was especially persuaded that the British Empire was to be a vehicle of commerce and liberty, peace and justice, unlike Spanish colonialism which was a compound of violence and barbarism. He described the Spaniards as ruthless conquerors, steeped in cruelty far worse than the Turks’: ‘The Spaniards have executed most outrageous and more than Turkish cruelties in all the West Indies’ (212). For Hakluyt, the Spanish are evil imperialists, whereas the British represent model colonisers. Richard Dalloway holds firmly to this romanticised picture. He praises the British empire and its inspirers, including the Romans


and such modern influential figures as William Pitt (1708–78) and Lord Salisbury (1830–1903). He ultimately justifies imperial violence in the name of progress and development. After lamenting the lack of opportunities for young men to prove their imperial mettle, Richard lauds conservative politics, from Lord Salisbury to Alfred, which he compares to a ‘lasso that opened and caught things, enormous chunks of the habitable globe’ (51). Richard’s wife Clarissa joins forces with her husband to extol the British colonial efforts to bring the natives on the path of progress: ‘One thinks of all we’ve done, and our navies, and the people in India and Africa, and how we’ve gone on century after century, sending out boys from little country villages – and of men like you, Dick, and it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English’ (51). Clarissa glorifies the young English country boys for having helped to build a great empire thanks to discipline, sacrifice and loyalty to their country’s ideals. Meanwhile, she enthusiastically recapitulates Britain’s long, sustained imperial tradition, which is reaffirmed in her husband’s sententious phrase: ‘It’s the continuity’ (51). The Dalloways describe the British colonial enterprise as a continuous national undertaking, supported by ‘King following King, Prime Minister Prime Minister’ (51). Defined in this passage mostly as an internal, continuous collective effort, the British colonial tradition is throughout the narrative subtly connected to the global history of imperialism in terms that place classical and ‘new’ imperialism in constant dialogue. The trans-epochal dialogue between remote and recent forms of domination, which is crystallised by Richard Dalloway, is also suggested by Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to which Woolf refers. This book forms a connector that brings together ancient and modern histories of conquest. The six volumes of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1788, cover a long period, spanning from 200 AD to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. They relate the material and moral factors that led to the decay and collapse of the Roman empire. As well as suggesting continuities between ancient and modern times, reference to Gibbon’s book portends the demise of the British empire that Woolf presents as imminent in her essay ‘Thunder at Wembley’ (1924): ‘Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing’ (1966, vol.4, 186). The paradox, though, is that despite its ominous title most of her imperialist characters praise the book and display unwavering confidence in the British empire. Mrs Thornbury and Mrs Flushing are most enthusiastic. The first considers it as ‘a very wonderful book, I know. My dear father was always quoting it at us’ (224). The second recalls her


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reading of the book as ‘some of the happiest hours of my life’ (224). Both women are conniving with empire, hence their pleasure in reading the Roman narratives of conquest and rule. Mrs Thornbury, in particular, who has sons in the army should certainly see in the brave Roman generals mentioned by Gibbon the image of her own offspring conquering Africa and subduing the natives. The British imperialists’ idealisation of the Romans is further reinforced by St John and Richard Dalloway. The former supports the European domination of North Africa; the latter justifies the need to pacify the ‘African coast,’ as the Romans before them subjected ‘Arabia Felix – Aethiopia’ (196). In unison, the two characters reassert Europe’s right over the Mediterranean countries which centuries back were Roman possessions. Their politics of territoriality validates the Western civilising mission and suggests Britain’s, and generally Europe’s, duty to continue the Roman imperial project in North Africa and elsewhere. Woolf dramatises Richard’s imperialist zeal to better indict the colonial enterprise he promotes. Her implicit critique of modern colonialism underlies a gender struggle. Through juxtaposition and metaphor she tends to connect the abuses of British imperialism overseas to the oppression of British women at home (Phillips 1994). She does so in a rhetoric that blurs the frontiers between the empire’s treatment of Otherness in the colonies and its domestic handling of gender difference. Woolf’s indirect assimilation of the British women’s condition to the indigenous peoples’ predicament was, of course, common among her predecessors. Nineteenth-century feminist writers such as Charlotte Brontë or Jane Austen tended to juxtapose women’s domestic subjection to male dominance to the natives’ oppression in the colonies.2 But neither Brontë and Austen nor the modernist and feminist Woolf went as far to question the legitimacy of the imperial system. This silence, manifest in the works of most nineteenth-century women writers, betrays the latter’s complicity with the oppressive imperial system of which they and the natives were victims. Laura Chrisman argued that ‘for many nineteenth-century white English women writers, it was precisely through collusion with, and not opposition to, hierarchical notions of ethic and cultural difference, that feminist identity was articulated’ (1995, 45). In line with Chrisman, Parry holds that nineteenth-century middle-class women writers had actively participated in the empire’s propaganda and contributed in shaping a national imperial identity. To substantiate her claim she refers to the ‘light’ fiction produced by the wives of the colonial officials. She shows how these women writers’ fictions corroborated the writings of the politicians,


political scientists, social commentators and men of letters who validated colonial ideology (Parry 2004, 110–11). In The Voyage Out the women’s relation to empire wavers between passive complicity and an implicit aspiration to alternative forms of colonial domination. Mrs Thornbury and Clarissa Dalloway represent the first category and Evelyn Murgatroyd stands for the second. Evelyn embodies an aspirant colonialist. In her discussion with the aforementioned women, she expresses a virile desire for conquest. Her longing ‘to be a man’ and ‘raise a troop’ in order ‘to conquer some great territory’ (151) may indicate the Victorian women’s frustration for not participating actively in the predominantly masculine colonial enterprise. With her radical claim Evelyn conflates feminism and imperialism to articulate a different theory of empire. Because she is a woman and a feminist, we expect Evelyn to move completely from man’s aggressive colonial system. But what we discover instead is an inclination to rival with her male conquering counterparts who indiscriminately dominate the natives in the colonies and women at home. Inspired by an ethical orientation that echoes Woolf’s liberal humanism, Evelyn projects an idyllic empire that would be made of ‘great halls and gardens and splendid men and women’ (151). Evelyn’s aspiration to such a utopian version of colonialism indicates how far she, implicitly Woolf, seeks merely to replace a ruthless, rapacious masculine imperialism by a smooth, womanly form of colonial domination. What is in fact most striking about The Voyage Out is that despite its apparent indictment of colonialism, the ambiguity and indirectness which characterise it underplay its subversive, anti-colonial potential. Akin to most modernists, Woolf in this novel interweaves imperial and anti-imperial discourses, but accords the first discursive and representational primacy. All through the narrative, apologists of empire occupy centre stage. They discuss the necessity and merits of the civilising mission, without being directly challenged by any of the novel’s characters. The only opposition to their colonialist rhetoric is authorial. It is expressed via irony and analogy which question empire as much as they reveal an inability to articulate a potent, unequivocal anti-colonial resistance. Woolf’s unconvincing critique of colonialism is due to a cluster of factors. Besides a belief in myths of purity and supremacy, Woolf had no direct contact with the imperial world, as had, for instance, Conrad or Kipling. Her experience of imperialism is therefore second-hand; just as her anti-colonial discourse is a borrowed rhetoric. The two derive from her husband, Leonard Woolf who served in the Ceylon Civil Service from 1904 to 1912 and later indicted the empire’s excesses.3


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Woolf’s reluctance is reinforced by the absence or complete marginalisation of native characters in this novel and in most of her fiction. The natives are, in sum, the absent centre in her critique of colonialism in The Voyage Out and in such novels as Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), which, in varying degrees, criticise capitalism, militarism, women’s oppression and colonialism. In these narratives, the natives are neither given voice as direct opponents of the empire which exploits them, nor recognised as conduits of knowledge and culture. The absence of the natives in Woolf’s works is informed by motives, conscious or unconscious, which are far more complex than a mere unwillingness ‘to speak for an experience outside her own’ (Phillips 1994, xxxiv). The involvement of Woolf’s family in the colonial administration and slave trade must have weighed heavily on her conscience. The author’s critique of colonialism might thus express a desire to exorcise a burdensome familial guilt.4 She seems to stand for her ancestors’ conscience lamenting the evils of colonialism, but unwilling to dismantle empire’s racial and cultural biases which were the engine of colonial ideology. Her perception of imperialism posits the colonisers and colonised as impermeable entities, doomed to indifference and prejudice. Erased from Woolf’s fiction, the natives are often treated with contempt and considered inferior in her diaries and essays (Phillips 1994). This sense of cultural and racial superiority may stem from Woolf’s eugenic beliefs alongside the aforementioned myths of purity whose roots go back to ancient Greek literature. Her covert endorsement of racial and cultural superiority inferred from her treatment of the natives finds its fullest expression in her attitude towards the modern Greeks. In the Greek diary she dismisses the latter as a degenerate race. She formulates her critique in words that recall Gobineau’s and Haggard’s perception of these peoples.5 She describes them in xenophobic terms where language, social class and race interlace in most suggestive ways. The alleged inferiority and mongrelised nature of the modern Greeks is sharply opposed to the superior, high culture of the ancients who, according to Woolf, are finer and ‘pure-bred’: . . . so you must look upon modern Greeks as the impure dialect of a nation of peasants, just as you must look upon the modern Greeks as a nation of mongrel element and a rustic beside the classic speech of pure-bred races (340). Woolf explicitly condemns racial and cultural cross-fertilisation in a way betraying an imperialist fear of miscegenation. The fact that


modern Greek culture and language had been corrupted by the long Ottoman domination may be another reason for Woolf’s contempt for these southern Europeans. Her dislike of the modern Greeks implicitly carries a fear of the Islamic Ottomans who were at the root of their bastardisation. In a concentrated form, the statement above reiterates the classical idea of pure lineage and fear of miscegenation through contacts with the barbarians. Donald Childs in his illuminating study, Modernism and Eugenics (2001), argues that Woolf’s eugenism might have been inspired by nineteenth-century eugenics to which her doctors initiated her. Another likely influence, overlooked by Childs, is Plato’s and Aristotle’s eugenic theories with which the Hellenist Woolf was familiar. Plato, whose works Woolf read avidly, writes in The Republic: ‘It follows from our conclusions so far that sex should preferably take place between men and women who are outstandingly good, and should occur as little as possible between men and women of vastly inferior stamp. It also follows that the offspring of the first group should be brought up, while the offspring of the second shouldn’t. This is how to maximize the potential of our flock’ (173). In his scheme to engineer a superior race Plato urges the Greeks to abandon the defective children and progeny of inferior parents. Aristotle goes even further to suggest killing the deformed and retarded offspring for the same purpose: ‘As to the exposure and rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live’ (Politics 182). In her 1915 diary, Woolf tends to follow Aristotle’s recommendation by crudely thinking that the group of mentally retarded people she encountered on her stroll ‘should certainly be killed’. In her aforementioned Greek diary Woolf articulates a multi-layered rhetoric which encompasses the doctrine of natural selection, Darwinist social thought and modern as well as classical eugenics. Her conception of race, culture and language is informed by both nineteenth-century racist theories and by Aristotelian and Platonic ideas of linguistic and racial purity. Woolf’s theory of Otherness in this essay knits together culture, race and territoriality. She rejects the mongrelised Greeks not only for linguistic, cultural and racial reasons, but also for implicit geographical considerations. In this, she seems to follow the ancient theory of topographic determinism, canonised in Hippocrates’s treatise, Airs, Waters, Places, which linked such values as ‘courage, endurance and high spirit’ to the type of geography in which people lived (109). Mrs Dalloway is the work which best illustrates Woolf’s adoption of the classical topographic theory.6 She more or less explicitly repeats the assumption that people living in Southern Europe lack the racial nobility


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that their Northern counterparts are usually credited with. The ‘vigour’, ‘determination’ and ‘pure condition’ that eugenicists associate with the Northern race are concentrated in the Dalloways, notably in Richard who is the very personification of these virtues. In contrast, Rezia stands for the Mediterranean type, ‘dark-skinned’, ‘simple’ and ‘impulsive’. On one side, there is sophistication and purity; on the other impurity, implied in the dark complexion, and simplicity, a euphemism for incompleteness, if not mental atrophy. Woolf’s belief in eugenism, topographical determinism and myths of purity no doubt stands in the way of a complete condemnation of colonialism. Owing to her reluctance to fully question the colonial idea, Woolf, like most liberal humanists, is best defined as empire’s good conscience rather than as a radical anti-colonial agent.

James Joyce’s Ulysses: narrating the odyssey of imperialism through an odyssey of writing Unlike Woolf, Joyce shows a manifest contempt for eugenic theories.7 In regard to modern Greek in particular he is less concerned with this idiom’s presumed impurity than he is interested in it as a valuable tool to grasp the ancient culture. According to him, ‘the best gate of entry to the spirit of ancient Greece was modern Greek’ (quoted by Budgen 1960, 170). Despite differences in handling cultural and racial taxonomies, Joyce and Woolf display a similar ambivalent attitude to colonialism along with an identical admiration for classical arts. Like most modernist writers, Joyce views ancient literatures as aesthetic models and precious sources of inspiration. Ulysses is by far the work that best reflects his engagement with classical myths and symbols. He once asserted that ‘[Ulysses] is a modern odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses’ (quoted by Budgen 1960, 20). By stressing Homeric correspondences, Joyce acknowledges his debt to ancient Greek literature and consequently wants his readers to read the novel in the light of Homer’s Odyssey. Yet, we are quick to realise that Ulysses is anything but a strict re-enactment of the Homeric tradition. None of Joyce’s characters has the stature of a Ulysses. Furthermore, the novel’s numerous episodes fail to weave into a linear epic tale of progress and self-fulfilment. Instead of heroic feats and thrilling adventures, we encounter characters trapped in ideological indeterminacy and inaction, endlessly repeating their cause instead of making it advance. Joyce’s narrative abounds with references to ancient Greek myths and poets, Aristotle and Plato in particular. He consciously models his work


on Homer’s Odyssey, but produces a mimetic narrative which imitates in order to parody, repeats merely to transgress (Deleuze 1968). Implicit in this mimetic impulse is a desire to step into Homer’s shoes, which symbolically requires supplanting this revered artistic fatherfigure. Joyce intends to achieve this aesthetic goal less by rehearsing faithfully the epic poet’s plot, as he proclaimed, than by shifting attention from the events to the act of writing itself, from the character to the narrating subject or implied author. The protagonist, Leopold Bloom is conspicuously at the heart of this subversive strategy. But despite being the narrative’s focal point, there is nothing heroic about his personality or his deeds. In ‘Circe’ Bloom is described as morally corrupt, defined in the following terms: ‘forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold, and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin’ (436). Devoid of moral and social substance, Bloom becomes a hollow man and turns out to be a mere rhetorical construct, beset by the ambiguity and elusiveness of a linguistic sign.8 He functions as a resonance chamber, channelling all types of discourses – social, scientific and political – to which he relates ambivalently. Throughout he is remembered as a loquacious rhetorician who ‘likes dialectic’, as Lynch states (520). Politically and ideologically, Bloom pretends to a hybrid status. He defines himself as a ‘staunch Britisher’ who fought for his country during the Boer War (1899–1902) or what he calls ‘the absenteminded war’ (427). At the same time, he claims allegiance to the Irish nation of which he considers himself to be an integral part. His Irishness is clearly asserted in his response to Private Compton who accuses Stephen of being ‘a pro-Boer’: ‘We fought for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops. Isn’t that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by our monarch’ (517). Bloom reminds Compton of the contribution of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers to the Boer War. But while presenting England (Compton) and Ireland (Stephen and Bloom) as partners in the same imperial enterprise, he reaffirms his Irishness through the divisive ‘we–you’ dichotomy which distances Bloom and Stephen from Compton. The novel’s emphasis on Bloom’s contradictions, its focus on language and subjectivity, and fragmentation and existential precariousness definitely make Ulysses a modern odyssey, as Joyce declared. But this massive, daunting work is best defined as an odyssey of writing through which Joyce wished to produce the very book that would comprise all the other books, the text which would encompass all the scriptures. The eight years he spent writing this novel, the encyclopaedic nature and the plethora of characters involved reflect the epic scale of this narrative and testify to the author’s ambitious intellectual undertaking. In view of this

Modernist Writers, Classical Ideal and Empire 101

modern odyssey’s prodigious background we may argue that Ulysses, who is manifestly the missing core of Ulysses, should be Joyce himself. His artistic endeavours mimic to an extent the classical hero’s adventures. Like these, they extend in space and time to embrace a wide spectrum of experiences and multiple strata of knowledge. We know that when writing his novel Joyce travelled across Europe and lived in various places, unlike his protagonist whose wanderings are tied to the here-and-now of Dublin City. For this reason, Bloom lacks the mettle of a Ulysses who explores the world with confidence and audacity. Basically a ‘sceptic’9 and an urban drifter, his insignificant actions and repetitive movements are strictly limited in time and space, confined to one day (16 June 1904) and to one place (Dublin). He is too detached from the field of action to be a heroic adventurer or charismatic leader. Additionally, his social theory is too removed from reality to be of any practical use: I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, Jew, Moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishcrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy, must now cease, bonuses for all, Esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical imposters. Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. (449) The utopian republic advocated by the protagonist is most appealing. It takes, yet, little to realise that this free, non-capitalistic and brotherly society is starkly undermined by Bloom’s blatant egoism and lust for money. As a social theorist Bloom certainly lacks credibility; as a husband and father, too, he is deficient in moral probity and authority that would qualify him for a parental model. In the final analysis, the anti-heroic, utopian protagonist impersonates an inverted Ulysses. He serves mostly to parody the ideas of heroism, militarism and colonialism embodied by Homer’s adventurer. A key feature of Joyce’s novel is its consistent subversion of centres of dominance, whether religious, nationalist or imperialist. This subversive strategy involves parodying such literary traditions as Homeric poetics, Elizabethan high culture exemplified by Shakespeare and the nineteenth-century adventure story genre represented by Kipling. All these had in varying degrees backed imperial expansions that Joyce


criticises in Ulysses. As a reminder, both Homer’s epics and Shakespeare’s plays inspired nineteenth-century apologists of empire such as Haggard and Kipling. Joyce refers obliquely to Kipling’s financial contribution to the Boer War. An important issue in the narrative, the Boer War involved the British and white settlers in South Africa, both greedily seeking the control of South Africa’s mineral resources. Kipling wrote a propagandist poem, ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ to raise money for the British troops. According to the author, a quarter of a million pounds was raised by the poem (1937, 88). The prominence of the Boer War in Ulysses is no accident, at least for two reasons. First, the evocation of this war serves to dramatise the cruelty of British imperialism in pursuing its economic ends.10 Second, the Boer War is of the utmost significance for the Irish because many Irish soldiers participated in it and a considerable number of them perished in battle. Bloom’s reference to the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in ‘Cyclops’ recalls the huge Irish casualties at the Tugela River.11 Like most Irish people the protagonist supports the Boers, but his loyalty remains on the whole divided. At once he criticises British imperialism during the war and refuses to side with the nationalists who identify with the Boers. As Keith Booker notes, his intention to secure the nine hundred pounds of the Canadian government stock revealed to the reader in the ‘Ithaca’ chapter may account for his reluctance to reject British colonialism altogether (2000, 92). Similar to Boylan’s father who had made huge profits by selling horses to the cavalry for use in the Boer War, Bloom expects financial benefits from this war. In this, both characters stand for ‘those portions of the Irish population who might have profited financially from continuing British rule in Ireland’ (Booker 2000, 92). They are paradigmatic of the colonised bourgeois élites who attacked imperialism’s abuses, but profited from the material advantages generated by the exploitation of the native proletariat.12 Bloom in particular appears as Joyce’s double. Coming from the same petit bourgeois extraction, both are wandering self-exiles who embrace universalism to escape from the politics of hatred and exclusion practiced by Irish nationalism and British imperialism. Irish nationalism and identity are at the heart of Bloom’s conversation with The Citizen and John Wyse in the ‘Cyclops’ episode. The Citizen is a staunch nationalist who defends the Irish language and encourages ‘the revival of ancient Gaelic sports . . . for the development of the race’ (302). He portrays the English as culturally inferior to the Irish from whom they presumably stole music and art: ‘No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. Tongue-tied sons of bastards’ ghosts’ (310). The Citizen reframes here


the colonial relationship in a rhetoric that rehabilitates the colonised as a vehicle of knowledge and culture. He considers instead the colonisers mere highjackers of the native cultures and arts. Implicit in the Citizen’s words is, to anticipate Mac Hugh’s discourse, that Ireland is more Grecian than Roman. It stands for a source of culture and arts, whereas England resembles Imperial Rome. For The Citizen England seems to owe its arts to Ireland, as Rome derived the bulk of its culture from ancient Greece. The Citizen espouses the hard line of ‘force against force’ to drive the English out of Ireland (315), a method to which Bloom objects. The latter condemns violence which he sees as a means of ‘perpetuating national hatred among nations’ (316). He pursues: ‘Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life’ (318). To play down Bloom’s discourse of universal love and humanism, Wyse mockingly asks him if he ‘[knows] what a nation means’ (316). Bloom replies: ‘A nation is the same people living in the same place . . . or also living in different places.’ He reasserts that Ireland is his nation because ‘I was born here’ (316). It is interesting to see how in these exchanges between Bloom, Wyse and The Citizen, Joyce places the issue of national identity in a dialectic that conjures up Aristotle’s views in The Politics. Aristotle writes: ‘The well-born are citizens in a truer sense than the lower born’ (70). For the Citizen, the Jewish Bloom, though born in Ireland, cannot be a citizen in the strictest sense, for he is, according to him, of lower descent. The protagonist’s presumed racial inferiority13 is further compounded by hereditary disorders (epilepsy, elephantiasis) and ‘sexual abnormality’ (chronic exhibitionism, unbridled lust) (451). Owing to these congenial deficiencies Bloom is in the eyes of the nationalist Wyse and The Citizen unfit to be a descent Irish citizen. Such exclusionary practices show how politics and race are inextricably linked in both Irish nationalist rhetoric, which denies Bloom citizenship, and in the British imperial ideology that relegates the Irish to secondrate citizens. Given the prevalent colonial ostracism Bloom cannot be considered fully Irish nor deemed completely British, a contradiction which turns him into a spatio-temporal hiatus, caught in the meshes of two extreme ideologies: imperialism and nationalism. At one level, Bloom appears as a helpless victim of these two overpowering systems. At another, he seems to generate benefits from this ambiguous status which helps him to negotiate with minimum damage the available discourses. In the main, Bloom’s apparent neutrality results from colonial exclusions; at the same time, it stems from a reluctance to commit himself


fully to the colonial drama. He seems, like Joyce himself, unwilling to take sides, aware that his own identity is shaped by these conflicting forces at work in Ireland:14 ‘Ireland is what she is . . . and therefore I am what I am because of the relations that have existed between England and Ireland. Tell me why you think I ought to change the conditions that gave Ireland and me a shape and a destiny?’ (quoted by Budgen 1960, 152). Similar to Bloom who promotes racial and cultural métissage, Joyce acknowledges his hybrid colonial identity, which is generated by the imperial encounters. He even accepts this condition with a shade of historic realism, not to say fatalism. For him, adulteration has taken place, which makes any search for purity irrelevant. But in denouncing colonialism’s rapacity and inhumanity, he does not openly question British rule in Ireland. Similarly, he criticises the Irish nationalists’ exclusivist rhetoric while trying not ‘to hurt or offend those of my countrymen who are devoting their lives to a cause they feel necessary and just’ (quoted by Budgen 1960, 152). Joyce’s conviction that Ireland is a site of adulteration may account for his ambivalence about imperialism, crystallised in the protagonist’s ambiguity towards the Boer War. In this novel Joyce refers to Ireland’s colonisation obliquely, using metaphor, allusion and juxtaposition. He keeps it at a heightened remove, seen mostly through the lens of the Boer War as it impinges on the conscience of the Irish population and on British colonial politics on the island. Like Woolf who draws parallels between the natives’ predicament and British women’s condition at home, Joyce juxtaposes the Boers’ fate in South Africa to the condition of the Irish in Ireland. By way of this analogy he reveals how British colonial system is informed by identical economic motives, whether this system operates in Africa or in the settler colonies. However, his focus on the plight of a handful of white settlers in a continent swarming with downtrodden blacks gives his critique a parochial accent. Such a discrepancy gives the impression that Joyce’s sympathy for the victims of colonialism is predicated on racial affiliation, as the Irish people’s support of the Boers is premised on whiteness. Focusing on the Boer War, as does Joyce, tells but a minor narrative of British colonialism from which Africans, including those who took part in the Boer War, are erased (Warwick 1983). The Blacks are conspicuous by their absence in Ulysses and in most of Joyce’s fiction. When they happen to be mentioned, they are, like the Jews, often subject to raillery and racial prejudice. To combat the anti-Semitism of some of his characters and the Irish at large Joyce in Ulysses, as Booker rightly


argues, is ‘urging the Irish nationalists to seek solidarity with the Jews’ (2000, 99). Joyce’s compassion for his ostracised Jewish protagonist is obvious. Booker is, however, excessive when he further asserts that Joyce in this novel extends his solidarity to the Blacks. The narrative communicates no such explicit message; and this silence somehow undermines Joyce’s ethic of solidarity and universalism. Combined with the erasure of Africans in Ulysses is the absence of working class or peasant characters, who are likewise often reduced to derision and fun when mentioned in discussions (Eagleton 1985; Duffy 1994). Joyce’s sense of cultural supremacy and social elitism may owe to this double erasure. Whether deliberate or not, these omissions sound like a tacit collusion with the very imperial ideology he challenges. He excludes the Blacks and working classes from his texts, just as colonialist representations tended to lump together the two categories and apply to them similar stereotypes. Given this inadequacy, Joyce’s universalism in the end amounts to a mere aesthetic posture lacking genuine solidarity with the human condition. Joyce’s paradox in Ulysses lies precisely in this: he indirectly assaults ‘new’ imperialism embodied by the British, but tends to minimise it by presenting the colonial fact as both immemorial and inherent in humankind’s history. Ulysses can thereby be rightly defined as the odyssey of imperialism. It recapitulates the genesis of colonisation, setting the former and modern empires in a historic continuum. Concomitant with this effort to provide a complete portrait of his protagonist’s life and family genealogy, Joyce tries to offer an exhaustive picture of the history of colonialism. Through evocation of the Boer War he refers to modern imperialism which he connects to the Elizabethan expansionism, a connection suggested by Stephen’s association of Shakespeare with the Boer War in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. In this episode, Stephen assimilates Shakespeare to a ‘bard’ of British imperialism and further blends this representative of English high culture with Kipling, a fervent supporter of empire and a vehicle of popular culture. As Booker states: ‘Stephen’s suggestion of Kipling’s poem [‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’] as a possible title for Shakespeare’s Hamlet conflates Kipling and Shakespeare and offers a subtle indication of the complicity of high culture in the British imperial power’ (2000, 93). Stephen links high and popular culture in a way that demonstrates that colonialism was a national and jingoistic undertaking, involving, directly or indirectly, the entire British society. On the other hand, by suggesting using the title of Kipling’s poem as a subtitle for Shakespeare’s Hamlet he reveals the palimpsestic structure of British colonialist


discourse. Modern British imperialism, located in the Elizabethan era, is placed within a wider temporal span that stretches back to the ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian times. In ‘The Cyclops’ Joyce establishes analogies between the Roman and British empires. He also draws parallels between the British colonisation of Ireland and the Egyptian subjection of the ancient Israelites. The choice of Bloom as a protagonist of a novel that addresses the genesis of colonialism is in this case very appropriate. Owing to his dual identity (Irish citizen of Jewish descent) Bloom stands for the portrait of the colonised par excellence, enacting a modern Irish colonial subject and an ancient colonised Israelite. As such, he connects modern British imperialism to the most ancient imperial power, the Egyptians. Interestingly, in this journey back to the ancient empires Joyce proves as selective as most of his contemporaries. He links British colonialism to the Egyptian and Roman empires, but remains silent about Greek imperialism. Joyce’s mouthpiece, Professor Mac Hugh sharply contrasts Imperial Rome to ancient Greece. He articulates the opposition in these suggestive terms: ‘We were always loyal to the lost causes,’ the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality? Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury! A sofa in a West End club. But the Greek . . . I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind (128). Following the nineteenth-century representation of classical Greece, Mac Hugh, by inference Joyce, aligns the ancient Greeks with spirituality, rationality and poetic creation. Instead, he dismisses the Romans, not unlike the British who took after them, as brutal, greedy imperialists.

Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau and Albert Camus: Algeria and the Latinist myth While Joyce identified the English with the Romans to condemn imperialism, French colonialist writers, particularly Louis Bertrand (1866–1941) and Robert Randau (1873–1950) connected France to imperial Rome in order to reassert the empire’s rightness. Both Bertrand, commonly regarded as the ‘fountain’ of Algerian writing, and Randau, who was


called ‘the African Rabelais’ or ‘French Kipling’, established strong links between the European settlers in Algeria and the Romans. For them, the French colonists were ‘insiders’ with a historical legacy bequeathed to them by the ancient Romans. The Algerianist movement15 to which they belonged, including such authors as Gabriel Audisio (1900–78), Jacques Heurgon (1903–95) and Camus, advocated the emancipation of Algeria’s literary and cultural scene from Metropolitan France. Bertrand and Randau together with the other Algerianists wanted to institutionalise Algeria’s Latinity. When they were struggling for cultural decolonisation, they invoked the ‘myth of Latinity’ according to which Algeria was no more than a Roman province. In their view, the French were in Algeria to re-conquer this province and reconnect it to its glorious Roman roots. A fervent promoter of the ‘theory of Latinity,’ Bertrand came to Algeria in 1891 to work as a school teacher. In his essays and novels, he presents the European settlers as the descendents of the Romans. According to him, the French colonisation of North Africa was merely ‘a continuation of Roman civilisation, which had been lying dormant under Arab rule’ (quoted by Vulor 2000, xiv). In most of his works and in those of the Algerianists, the colonists’ appropriation of Algeria is considered a legitimate undertaking. It is a conquest meant to re-appropriate a province that their Roman ancestors had lost to foreign invaders, the Arabs whom Bertrand in Le Sens de l’ennemi (1917) sees as enemies to be eradicated so that ‘Latin Africa’ can be ‘resurrected’. The Algerianists’ effort to achieve an autonomous settler culture required therefore the exclusion of the Arabs and Berbers as well as their cultures from the Latin cultural space. This exclusion belies France’s myth of assimilation alongside the Algerianists’ project ‘to develop in Algeria an intellectuality that is common to the people who live there’ (Vulor 2000, 46). Bertrand and Randau adopt a mythic discourse that reduces North Africa to a vacant space to be re-colonised, or a stagnant past to be revived. Bertrand’s association of Algeria with an empty space or a mere Roman site reinforces the continuity between Roman and French imperialism. As he makes clear in Les Villes d’or (1921): ‘Through today’s French Africa it is Roman Africa which lives on, which had not ceased, even in the most murky and barbarous times’ (6). According to Bertrand, Latin heritage continues into contemporary Algeria through the Roman ruins scattered around the country. In his essays on the Mediterranean and in Les Villes d’or in particular he urged archaeologists to start digs in Tipaza, Hippone and Carthage and thus reconnect these cities to their


classical past. The revival of Latin culture and the archaeological digs begun in the 1930s provided Algerianists and most of the settlers with a valuable justification for their struggle to reclaim this land at a time when mounting Arab and Berber nationalism threatened the imperial edifice. Phillipe Lucas and Jean-Claude Vatin enthusiastically wrote in L’Algérie des anthropologues: The revival of Latin culture arrived opportunely to resume relations with the exemplary advanced colonisers. To rediscover the outlines of ancient monuments, to re-launch Latin epigraphs, to start archaeological digs, these were to return North Africa to her Latinity. These were above all to give a genealogical shape to the Algerian melting pot. It was to replace the true ancestors, of different nationalities with a common ancestor of the great dream (1975, 39). The French colonists’ enthusiasm for the archaeological digs proceeded from two fundamental motivations: a desire to retrieve the Roman legacy, and a pressing need to legitimise their assumptions by irrefutable archaeological evidence. Their endeavour underpinned a strategy of hiatus and continuity: they sought to break away from the ‘dark centuries of Islam’ while striving to re-connect with Imperial Rome. The overall enterprise involved a re-historicising process that both ‘mummified’ Algerian history and confirmed Rome as a cultural and historical matrix. In trying to excavate an originary collective self, the Latinists manifested a hegemonic drive, seeking to melt Algeria’s multiplicity into a uniform same. The narcissistic demand fuelling their impulse for totality derived from colonialism’s dependence on fantasies of lineage and genealogy, expressed in their regressive journey to ancient Rome. Symbolically, the Latinists’ attempt to recover the Roman past entails an infantile regression which suggests a search for a genealogical ancestor. Like most colonialists, they were hunting for self-validating truths. In their pursuit they tended to manipulate history by completely erasing Algeria’s pre-Roman past. This reclaiming strategy led the Latinists to a process of appropriation and denial: considering themselves legitimate heirs, they dismissed the non-Latinists as unlawful proprietors. In view of this historical manipulation, the Arabs and Berbers, the first inhabitants of North Africa, who for centuries fought and made fruitful alliances with the Romans were simply effaced from the Latinists’ historical records. The attempt ‘to return North Africa to her Latinity’ amounts to an act of denial. It robs Algeria of its berberity and Arabness and divests this cross-fertilised area of its linguistic and cultural diversity.


What in fact the Latinists wanted was redefining North Africa’s history and its cultural and social landscape. Their project of turning the Algerian melting-pot into a homogeneous, continuous whole with Roman culture as a pivot is deeply exclusionary. It is based on racial and cultural purity that includes only Algerian-born Europeans, casting aside the Berbers and Arabs. Denied a position in the ‘great dream’, the indigenous populations are reduced to a historic hiatus, stuck between a barbaric pre-Roman past and a benighted present. Following Bertrand and most Latinists, Albert Camus subscribes to a de-historicised, mythic vision of Algeria which he identifies with an ideal, utopian land. But unlike the Algerianists, Camus moves away from the Latin myth to espouse the Hellenic genius. In his inaugural lecture at the Maison de la Culture (1937), he referred to ancient Greece as the source of Europe’s culture and history: ‘The error lies precisely in confusing Mediterranean and Latin, and in attributing to Rome what started in Athens’ (1965, 1321). His conception of the Mediterranean, he insists, is totally different from Bertrand’s: Oh, no! This is not the Mediterranean that our ‘Maison de la Culture’ is claiming. This [Mediterranean claimed by the Latinists] is not the real one. It is the abstract and conventional Mediterranean of Rome and the Romans. This people of imitators without imagination thought yet replacing the creative genius and the plenitude of life lacking in them by a bellicose spirit. And this much vaunted order was the fruit of sheer force rather than intelligence.. . . The Mediterranean is elsewhere. She is the very negation of Rome and the Latin genius (1965, 1324). In concert with many members of L’Ecole d’Alger, composed of French Algerians and French-educated Arabs and Berbers who advocated a more inclusive colonial culture, Camus in his fiction associates the Algerians (for Camus this means Europeans born in Algeria) with Greek descendants. He contrasts the Mediterranean genius to the Latin spirit which he considers autocratic. Evoking the First World War in Noces (1938), Camus condemns a Fascist Europe that he connects to Roman totalitarianism: We favoured power which aped grandeur; first, Alexander, then the Roman conquerors that the authors of our curricula, by an immeasurable spiritual hollowness, teach us to admire. We conquered in turn, removed borders, and mastered sky and earth. Our reason created a vacuum. Alone, at last, we accomplish our empire in a desert. (135)


Camus criticises both Roman despotism and modern Europe’s fascism, exemplified by Germany which he assimilates to a devastating scourge in La Peste (The Plague 1947). If he considers natural the Europeans’ affiliation with the Roman conquerors given their imitation of Rome and aspiration to world domination, he deems indecent their effort to establish filial connections with ancient Greece: That is why it is today indecent to call ourselves the sons of Greece, or if so self-proclaimed, we are then its renegade sons. Having installed history on God’s throne we head towards theocracy, just as had done those that the Greeks called Barbarians and fought to death in the waters of Salamis (Noces 136). Camus distinguishes the French whom he identifies with the Roman conquerors from the settler colonists (mostly of Maltese, Spanish, Alsatian, and Greek origins) that he connects to the classical Greeks. Within his ‘mytho-poetic’ discourse Algeria appears as a ‘cluster of symbolic, mythic structures’ (Haddour 1989, 23) denied historical and political reality. In occluding the brutal colonial context, Camus sublimates the French colony into an ideal, a-historical utopia, akin to an Arcadian Eden. More Greek than Roman, Camus’s Algeria is described in terms echoing those used by Victor Duruy (1811–94), a French historian and statesman who was appointed Minister of Education by Napoleon III in 1863. In line with the nineteenth-century vision of ancient Greece, Duruy drew a sharp distinction between Greek and Roman civilisations. He associated the first with ‘dynamism’, ‘light’, ‘beauty’, ‘passion’, ‘creativity’, and ‘ever-lasting youth’. The second was instead dismissed as ‘rigid’, ‘dull’, ‘cold’, ‘stern’, ‘unimaginative’, and given to endless ‘action’ and ‘political intriguing’ (quoted by Mathieu 1942, 99). Like Greece, Algeria in Camus’s works is suffused with light and beauty, standing in stark opposition to Italy: ‘Here, intelligence has no place as in Italy. This Algerian race is indifferent to the intellect. It has the cult of and reverence for the body. It is the source of their power and naïve cynicism’ (Noces 45). In this depiction, Algeria is a source of passion and sensuality. Rome is in contrast the epitome of intelligence and cold cerebration at the root of Roman absolutism. Camus compares Algeria to a land of mindless sensuality; the Algerians are in turn likened to happy ‘barbarians’ devoted to physical beauty and immediate sensory gratification. At one fell swoop Camus equates the colony with ‘a land of barbaric bliss’ and the colonists with children (96). He thus subverts


the colonial myth of the native-as-barbarian and re-connects with the image of Greeks as childlike.16 Relinquishing Imperial Rome in favour of classical Greece involves, in Camus’s rhetoric, moving away from reason to feeling, from cerebration to sensuality. He eschews Roman autocracy to embrace the Greek sense of moderation and balance: We exiled beauty. The Greeks had taken arms to re-conquer her. First difference (between them and us), an age-old one, though. Greek thinking had always rested on the notion of limit. It pushed nothing to a breaking point, neither the sacred nor the cerebral. It had mediated between opposites, balancing shadow and light.. . . In contrast, our times, engaged in the conquest of the universe, are the daughter of disproportion. (Noces 133) Camus offers an idyllic picture of ancient Greek culture, characterised by temperance, moral sanity and political wisdom. In his enthusiasm, he omits to mention that Greece’s history was not merely ‘the story of balanced Homeric monarchies’ but also that of ‘absolutist rulers’, social injustice, and slavery (Turner 1981, 186; 237). Evoking Greek moderation in the context of mounting Arab and Berber nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s sounds like Camus’s striving for political consensus in a colony fraught with cultural, racial and political antagonisms. His rhetoric entails a process of mythologizing and aestheticisation that reflects his unwillingness to face the brutality of the colonial context. In the final analysis, Camus uses a romanticised image of Greece mostly as an aesthetic vantage point from which he attacks both the Arab and Berber nationalism and the excesses of the French empire which he regards as a replica of Imperial Rome. In Le Premier homme (The First Man) published posthumously in 1995, he depicts his protagonist, Cormery, as a biological copy of Roman ancestors. He is the reincarnation of the ancient race. His ‘Roman head’ is metonymic of the ideal Roman body usually viewed as a symbol of supreme ‘physical power’ and ‘animal spirit’ that the Victorians considered crucial for imperial nations (Haley 1978, 66). In the same novel, Camus describes the old farmer as being Roman-like: he is a colonialist à l’antique, harsh with his labourers, and brutal with his own children. His farm is a copy of the Roman farm, built on the classical principles of symmetry and regularity which symbolise order and rigidity. In line with Joyce who assimilates modern colonial Britain to imperial Rome, Camus in The First Man presents the French as continuers


of Roman imperialism in North Africa. Joyce and Camus implicitly or explicitly cast the Romans as ruthless conquerors, while they deem ancient Greece a site of human and artistic fulfilment. It takes, of course, little to realise that Camus’s radical distinction between Rome and Greece is problematic. For Greek imperialism, too, had its trail of atrocities and horrors ignored by Joyce and Camus, as well as by most of their contemporaries. If the modernist writers’ approach to classical imperialism is manifestly selective, their attitude to modern imperialism is often fraught with prejudice and marred by contradictions, as will be shown in the coming chapters which further discuss the modernist writers’ vision of empire.

Part II Modernist Literature and Colonialism: Between Contest and Complicity


6 Modernism, Modernity and Imperialism

Modernism and empire entertain symbiotic, ambiguous relationships. They influence and feed upon each other in ways not always sufficiently acknowledged in postcolonial criticism. In their introduction to Modernism and Empire, Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby complain about the postcolonial scholars’ neglect of the interrelations between modernism and empire, stating that ‘modernism and Post-colonial studies are both seen in ways that have militated against the consideration of modernism and empire’ (2000, 1). They go on to assert: ‘Colonial discourse theory tends to end its analysis in the early twentieth century, while work on contemporary post-colonial issues usually begins with the widespread decolonisation that followed the Second World War: the literary texts examined are therefore early and foundational texts and contemporary writing’ (1). According to the editors, texts such as Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India ‘have been used, especially in the teaching of modernism, to establish a peripheral theme of race and colonialism in the period’ (1). Let me first note that the theme of race and colonialism in modernist novels and postcolonial literature at large is anything but peripheral. It forms instead the very nexus in relation to and against which modernist literature articulates. That Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, as Booth and Rigby observe, have focused the attention of postcolonial critics is hardly surprising given the texts’ direct engagement with colonialism and their complex, elusive perspectives about imperial politics and ideology. We may add in passing that these works surely belong chronologically with the early twentieth century, but their deep, if not visionary perspective of colonialism, Conrad’s novella in particular, gives them a universal, almost a-temporal dimension. Both novels address the violence and tensions of empire, but shy away from commitment to 115

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colonial or anti-colonial discourses. My argument is that Conrad’s and Forster’s ideological inconsistencies may derive from the split of their vision of colonialism between empire-as-reality and imperialism-as-anideal of development and human fulfilment. The two writers clearly indict colonialism’s abuses, but neither desires the demise of empire nor questions the idea at the back of the imperial project. What they mainly seek is a new, fairer mode of colonial rule that would be profitable to both sides. They expose the here-and-now of empire and transcend this confining present-ness by intimating the impossibility, or rather the undesirability of a post-imperial world. Notwithstanding his caustic critique of the Belgian empire Conrad does not envisage a post-imperial Africa, just as Forster in A Passage to India does not imagine an independent India despite the threat that Indian nationalism represented for British rule in the 1920s in which the novel is set. Conrad and Forster are key modernist authors whose works both reflect the centrality of the issues of culture and race in modernist literature, and reveal the intricate relationships between colonialism and modernism. These two processes are enmeshed in a web of relations and affect each other. Patrick Williams in ‘Simultaneous Uncontemporaneities’ shows how imperialism affected the forms and structures of modernism. According to him, ‘there is little indication that modernism influenced practices or policies’ of colonial governance. He adds: ‘At the level of institutions, there is the suggestion that modernism was imposed via the colonial education system, which would imply a high degree of acceptability in the eyes of the governing classes’ (2000, 21). Williams further discusses modernism in connection with colonial ideology and argues that ‘modernism might be seen as potentially having a more disturbing effect: imperial ideology speaks Western progress and expansion, modernism highlights multiple forms of dislocation, fragmentation and entropy; imperial ideology proclaims Western superiority, modernism alternately celebrates and mourns the decline of the West’ (23). Williams’s sharp distinction between imperial ideology and modernist ethics and aesthetics needs to be moderated. In regard to colonial ideology specifically, modernist writings are anything but a white and black issue. In the course of this study I show how modernist literature is informed by a dynamics of rupture and continuity in connection with colonialism, which testifies to the modernist authors’ ideological inconsistencies. Conrad, Forster and most modernist writers are in varying degrees anti-colonialists. They challenge imperialism, but prove at the same time tacitly collusive with colonial ideology and culture. This ambivalence in relation to empire may account for the modernist


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authors’ espousal of a para-colonialist discourse, which I define as a fractured enunciation split between a covert endorsement of the imperial major narrative of progress and an open support for a minor rhetoric of (anti-colonial) resistance. Yet, as a preamble to modernist literature’s contradictions in connection with colonialism, the definition of the terms modernism, modernity and modernisation is required. Defining a literary and artistic movement such as ‘modernism’ is complex and can never be fully satisfactory: owing to its heterogeneity and ambiguous relation to the present and past, this movement escapes easy categorisations. Modernism’s elusive character and resistance to a single definition are specially exposed in the critics’ and literary historians’ inability to reach any consensus on the movement’s chronology. In Modernism (1977), Peter Faulkner, for example, gives modernism a life span that ranges from 1910 to 1930; whereas Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in Modernism (1976) locate it between 1890 and 1930. Recent works such as Bonnie Kime Scott’s Refiguring Modernism (1995), or Alice Gambrell’s Women Intellectuals, Modernism and Difference (1997) also suffer similar shortcomings. They, too, confine the encompassing movement of modernism to a life span that does not go beyond 1945–46 (Williams 2000, 15). Such a strict delineation may provide useful bearings for scholars and readers, but the resulting arbitrary chronology is regrettably exclusive. It leaves out of the modernist canon numerous authors who have claimed or can be easily claimed as modernists.1 The problem of inclusion and exclusion inherent in the definition of modernism is also a salient issue within both the modernist canon and colonial politics. Which previous literary periods or authors to relinquish or identify with is a major preoccupation for such authors as Conrad and Forster formerly alluded to. And the absence of consensus in this respect complicates matters for anyone who tries to codify this Janus-faced movement that looks backwards as well as forwards. For many modernists, the past is both an enemy to collapse and a refuge against modernity’s discontents and decay. The process of rupture and continuity characteristic of modernism is precisely what best defines modernist literature both in relation to previous literary traditions and to its position towards colonialism. Modernist writing is commonly defined as a predominantly cosmopolitan literature, characterised by a rejection of bourgeois values and the nineteenth century conventions of realism, and abandonment of linear, chronological narratives in favour of fragmented, tortuous narrative techniques.2 However, despite its rejection of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology and the realist conventions, modernism does not effect


a total ideological and aesthetic break from the nineteenth century, nor does it fully distance itself from earlier literary traditions (Williams 2000, 16). Modernists such as Ezra Pound or W. B. Yeats revisit and idealise versions of the past. For Yeats, the Celtic past is a golden era of artistic and human fulfilment; whereas Pound sees medieval and early Renaissance culture as the epitome of beauty and refinement.3 Novelists such as Woolf and Forster delve even deeper into the European past to reconnect with the arts and spirit of ancient Greece which they view as the source of Western culture. In contrast, H. G. Wells prefers futurist flights to nostalgic, regressive journeys to an idealised past of aesthetic perfection. This preliminary review of the modernist writers’ varied trajectories shows how these authors, classified in the category ‘modernist,’ are not a homogeneous, monolithic set with identical artistic and ideological sensibilities. They certainly share values, even prejudices, but display differences both in their treatment of similar issues and in their approach to the very modernity which informs their art and outlook. One of the few points of consensus in definitions of modernism, as Williams remarks, is that it is ‘the art of modernity’, or that it constitutes ‘a cultural response to modernity’ – however modernity is understood, and whatever the form or content, political or aesthetic ideologies, which such a response may involve (2000, 27). Defining modernism in the light of modernity does not, unfortunately, get us out of our conceptual conundrum, for the concept of modernity itself is far from clear and unproblematic. To complicate matters, the terms modernism and modernity are connected to another important concept, modernisation which constitutes the source of modernism. Jameson notes that modernity ‘can be taken to mean something specific and distinct from modernism and modernisation: . . . if modernisation is something that happens to the base, and modernism the form the superstructure takes in reaction to that ambivalent development, perhaps modernity characterises the attempt to make something coherent out of their relationship’ (Jameson 1991, 310). According to Jameson, then, modernity forms a coherent articulation of an ambivalent modernism and transformative, even disruptive modernisation. It is both an aesthetics and an ethic, the way ‘modern people feel about themselves’ (310). The social theorist Johan Fornas follows a similar line of argument. He goes on to state: ‘While modernity is the result of modernisation that provokes modernisms, modernity is also the condition in which modernisation appears, and of which modernisms are necessary constituents’ (1995, 40). As defined here, modernisation is a network of economic,


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political and technological developments; whereas modernity is a ‘condition’, and modernism is ‘a heterogeneous group of collective ways of relating or reacting’ to modernity and modernisation (38). Materially, modernity is fundamentally linked to European cultural, social and economic context in which it was produced. Modernism is also a product of the European metropolis, shaped by Western authors and immigrant intellectuals who moved to the imperial centre. With reference to its socio-economic and cultural background, modernism is unquestionably a European phenomenon. But its inclusion of diasporic writers, its borrowing from indigenous artistic traditions, and its interest in imperial issues give this movement a ‘hybrid’ trans-national dimension (Gilroy 1993). Said in Culture and Imperialism argues that modernist culture, which is often thought to be generated from a ‘purely internal dynamics’, is also shaped by its response to the outside imperial world: I would like to suggest that the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western culture and society, include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium (1993, 227). Elaborating on Said’s observations, Parry closely connects modernist culture and colonialism. According to her, the ‘formal displacements and dislocations’ of the fiction of late colonialism are directly related to that specific period when colonial peoples started to manifestly oppose imperial rule: ‘[native dissidence] acted to heighten domestic consciousness of colonised cultures, expanding but also fracturing horizons, eroding confidence in the West’s undisputed and indisputable cognitive power and engendering disillusion in the ethos of an imperialist ascendancy’ (2004, 116). That the literature of late colonialism may be directly or indirectly affected by imperial politics is undeniable. Yet, the fact that this fiction is temporally linked to the emergence of native dissidence to imperialism does by no means indicate that the modernist texts’ internal formal dislocations emanate completely from the colonised anti-colonial struggles. What emerges from this discussion of modernism and empire is that modernist writings are shaped by both internal and external forces – a compound of pressures which give modernist fiction a blend of domestic resonance and a trans-national, universal import. The overlapping of intrinsic and extrinsic forces may have contributed to the modernist writers’ convoluted aesthetic and ideological outlook. Similarly, this dynamics of ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ elements may be at the root of


their ambivalence about colonialism. In order to trace and account for the modernist writers’ ideological inconsistencies, I have selected seven works by major French and British writers: Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly and Heart of Darkness, André Gide’s Voyage au Congo, Graham Greene’s Journey without Maps, and Albert Camus’s ‘Nuptials’, The First Man, and The Outsider. While examining these fictions in connection with imperial ideology, culture and race, I probe the writers’ tension between an ethic of multiplicity and reluctance to leave the security of their native culture.

7 Culture, Civilisation and Inter-Racial Encounters: Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly

Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), set in Borneo, is the story of a decaying colonial agent, Almayer who twenty years earlier ‘left his home with a light heart and a lighter pocket, speaking English well, and strong in arithmetic; ready to conquer the world, never doubting he would’ (8). Conrad’s irony is at its height in this statement. The protagonist, set off to master the universe with imperial determination and confidence, turns out to be a complete failure. He not only fails to prevent his trading district from falling into the hands of his Arab and Malay rivals, but he is also unable to control his native wife he married for sheer gain, or coax his daughter to adopt his culture. What is more, instead of wealth and power Almayer proves a bankrupt, impotent imperial subject. He is steeped in regrets and fantasy, witnessing the gradual crumbling of his familiar world. His native wife shows hate and contempt for him, and his cherished half-caste daughter, Nina refuses to reciprocate his affection. Almayer’s decaying condition enacts the decline of empire, a lingering anxiety among colonial powers even when colonialism was at its greatest. He is a ‘ruined’ and ‘persecuted’ individual; and his isolation is so extreme that he seeks relief in opium to which he becomes addicted. Having lost his daughter who eloped with a Balinese prince, Dain Maroola, Almayer burns down his house. He moves to his Folly, renamed the ‘The House of Heavenly Delight’, where he dies a solitary death. The story gives cogency to the themes of alienation, imperial rivalries, commercial rapacity, cultural and racial prejudice, hybridity, and the difficulty in exporting civilisation to alien lands. Conrad presents the Dutch colonial outpost as a brutal environment where the decay of Western civilisation, symbolised by a ‘feeble’, deteriorating protagonist, is vigorously enacted (38). Civilisation, or what remains of it, resembles an empty shell, and has little to offer; even when it does it is rejected by 121


the natives. In the same way as Almayer is totally indifferent to the Malay culture, Mrs Almayer shies away from her husband’s civilisation. Their daughter, Nina also finds extremely burdensome the ‘Christian teaching, social education, and [the] glimpse of civilised life’ that her father secured for her in Singapore (37).

Cultural insularity: interrogating the dialogism of the colonial relation Culture and civilisation are key issues in Almayer’s Folly, but Conrad’s relation to them is far more complex than critics contend.1 The way Conrad represents civilisation echoes the fears of degeneracy that pervades nineteenth-century colonialist discourse.2 His narrator considers civilisation to be shallow, and often a mere sham, but does not relinquish it altogether. He seems to be holding to the idea of Europe’s supremacy, even if he is aware of the deterioration of its civilisation. Obviously, at times he questions racial and cultural arrogance, but guards from removing the line of demarcation that separates the primitive Malays from the civilised Europeans. As exemplified by Mr. and Mrs Almayer, the interaction between the two sides of the colonial divide often generates tensions and prejudices. Mrs Almayer’s coming to the crumbling bungalow into which her white husband has retreated is felt by the latter as a barbaric invasion: One thing disturbed his happiness: his wife came out of her seclusion, importing her green jacket, scant sarongs, shrill voice, and witch-like appearance, into his quiet life in the small bungalow. And his daughter seemed to accept this savage intrusion into her daily existence with wonderful equanimity (30). The gulf between the spouses seems unbridgeable. Almayer despises Malay culture and abhors his Asian wife who stands for an irrational force of disruption unsettling his quiet, ordered, though, wretched world. In some narrative instances, however, the protagonist’s attitude to the Malays is not as clear-cut as described above. When he first meets Dain Maroola with whom Nina is infatuated, Almayer hardly takes notice of him. He casts an indifferent colonial gaze on his native visitor, dismissing him as an invisible, ghostly presence. At this early stage, Dain is reduced to a mere object of scrutiny and seen denied the locus of enunciation from which he can express his difference. Progressively, though, the protagonist moves from his initial aloofness and suspicion as he realises that he drastically needs Dain’s help to find gold in the interior of

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Borneo which would enable him to return to Europe with his daughter. The hankering after wealth compels Almayer to discursive compromise and consensus. The two characters, who were previously distant, finally become ‘connected by a community of interests’ (54), moved by similar greed. With this alliance they find themselves in those ‘situations where the barbarian and the, so-called, civilised man meet upon the same ground’ (57). Common interest seems to melt away the cultural and ideological differences between Almayer and Dain. The narrator relates the exchange and collaboration in which the two characters engage, showing the permeability of the frontiers that separate the colonisers and colonised. In this scene of interaction and dialogue Conrad tends to temper the cleavage between civilisation and savagery, thus making the very concept civilisation suspect. The phrase ‘so-called, civilised man,’ implicitly referring to Almayer, tones down the earlier assumptions about civilisation and culture. The cultural relativity it implies strongly resonates in the optimistic message of the ‘Author’s Note’ to Almayer’s Folly where Conrad attacks Western stereotyping of the natives. He protests that many Europeans think that in ‘distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or on the point of an assegai’ (v). Conrad’s conciliatory gesture is premised on mankind’s common destiny and universal solidarity: ‘I am content to sympathise with common mortals, no matter where they live; in houses or in tents, in the streets under a fog, or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea’ (v). The sympathy he displays for humankind in the ‘Author’s Note’ seems total. Racial and cultural differences are minimised, subsumed by a more essential preoccupation: the precariousness of the human condition. Nevertheless, when engaging deeply the fundamental issues of culture, race and civilisation Conrad’s tone does not match the optimism conveyed earlier. His overall narrative ultimately focuses on divisions and antagonisms instead of dwelling on what unites people. As well as expressing the complexity and paradoxes of existence, this ideological twist comes to mock the very cultural relativity which was the focal point of the ‘Author’s Note’ and a predominant issue in modernist writings. Nina’s following comment shows indeed Conrad’s profound pessimism about civilisation: It seemed to Nina that there was no change and no difference. Whether they traded in brick godowns or on the muddy river bank;


whether they reached after much or little; whether they made love under the shadows of the great trees or in the shadow of the cathedral on the Singapore promenade; whether they plotted for their own ends under the protection of laws and according to the rules of Christian conduct, or whether they sought the gratification of their desires with the savage cunning and the unrestrained fierceness of natures as innocent of culture as their own immense and gloomy forests, Nina saw only the same manifestations of love and hate and of sordid greed chasing the uncertain dollar in all its multifarious and vanishing shapes (38). Civilisation and culture, whether expressed in native or Western tongues, are defined exclusively by their negative characteristics: political violence, intrigue, plotting, cunning, fierceness and materialist greed. In singling out these features, the narrator draws attention to the imperfection of human constructs and invites people to transcend cultural and racial arrogance. His observation sounds like Conrad’s rejection of Almayer’s counter-productive, insular existence. Overall, the narrator intends to destabilise both Western colonial ideology embodied by the protagonist and essentialist native discourses represented by Nina and her mother. Specifically, through these characters’ polarised views, Conrad indicates the difficulty in transcending Manichean representations which determine the definition of cultures and identities. His young heroine, whose mixed descent is expected to fuse sameness and difference into a compound whole, displays instead fragmentation and cultural solipsism. Rather than a place of reconciliation and compromise, the ‘split space of enunciation’3 from which Nina narrates her identity and culture is a site of dissent and hostility. It is from this position that she rejects Otherness and excludes fruitful cross-fertilised cultural articulations. The ‘in-between’ space embodied by the heroine enacts the fractures and discrepancies of the imperial society. It serves less to construe the colonial relation as one of negotiation and reciprocity, than to represent it as mostly a situation of combat in which both parties try to gain ascendancy. As a metaphor of the colonial encounter, Nina both mirrors the ambiguous, mutually ‘transformative relationships’ between the heterogeneous colonial communities and suggests that ‘any dialogue said to occur between coloniser and colonised is [often] already subscribed by the all too tangible violence of imperialism’ (Coombes 1994, 6). More generally, Nina illustrates the empire’s contradictions as well as the individuals’ inability, if not unwillingness to translate the abstract notion


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of cultural relativity into concrete facts. Her reluctance to blend the two sides of her heritage suggests that culture is an absolute construct, replete with myths of purity and essentialist considerations. On these specific grounds she espouses her mother’s traditions instead of her father’s: To her resolute nature, however, after all these years, the savage and uncompromising sincerity of purpose shown by her Malay kinsmen seemed at least preferable to the sleek hypocrisy, to the polite disguises, to the virtuous pretences of such white people as she had had the misfortune to come in contact with. After all it was her life; it was going to be her life, and so thinking she fell more and more under the influence of her mother. Seeking, in her ignorance, a better side to that life, she listened with avidity to the old woman’s tales of the departed glories of the Rajahs, from whose race she had sprung, and she became gradually more indifferent, more contemptuous of the white side of her descent represented by a feeble and traditionless father (38). After recognising that love and hate, intrigue and greed are at work in all cultures, Nina considers her Western inheritance fake. She eschews her father’s ethnocentrism and openly expresses contempt for his Dutch visitors: I hate the sight of your white faces. I hate the sound of your gentle voices. That is the way you speak to women, dropping sweet words before any pretty faces. I have heard your voices before. I hoped to live here without seeing any other white face but this (114). Nina shows disgust for the Dutch voices and their conduct, while Almayer seems enlivened by the sight of white faces. During the discussions he gives vent to his anti-Malay feelings and underlines the cultural gulf between East and West. It is a great pleasure to see white faces here. I have lived here many years in great solitude. The Malays, you understand, are not company for a white man; moreover they are not friendly; they do not understand our ways (99–100). Almayer harbours a set of racial prejudices and fears that echo nineteenth-century colonialist discourse, particularly the idea that the natives are savage and ‘ineducatable’.4 He dubs the Malays unworthy of


the white man’s company owing to their backwardness and ignorance of Western ways. Assuming that these natives are total cultural and racial aliens, Almayer does not think it fit to establish with them decent, friendly relationships. In his view, the Malays are barbarous peoples, and as such they lack the degree of sociability required to qualify for respectable social peers. The assumption that primitive peoples are unsociable, which is implied in Almayer’s assertion, is a fundamental criterion in establishing the hierarchy among communities. Central in ancient Greek and Roman literatures, this theory recurs in the writings of modern authors such as Georges-Louis Buffon who considers sociability and social adaptation as the essence of civilised people: ‘A people who lives without restraint of fixed laws, or of a regular government, can only be considered as a tumultuous assemblage of barbarous and independent individuals, who obey no laws but those of passion and caprice’ (1766, 412). Buffon combines the words ‘barbarous’ and ‘independent individuals’ to dismiss primitive peoples as both unorganised and a-social. Echoing Buffon’s argument, Conrad’s protagonist evokes the anti-social character of the Malays in terms that betray a racist, ethnocentric drive. During his encounter with the Dutch officers Almayer appears adamant to native culture and extremely self-absorbed. He expects the Malays to ‘understand [his] own ways’, but shows no regard for the native mores or cultures – a marked cultural withdrawal that discourages discursive reversibility.5 In this episode the insulated Almayer is impervious to the available native discourses. He indulges in exclusionary rhetoric that discourages inter-cultural dialogue. For him, the Europeans and Malays as irreconcilable extremes and their respective worlds are hermetically sealed from one another. As a subject of enunciation, therefore, Almayer functions as a hegemonic voice that denies the Malays the status of viable interlocutors. Although, as Richard Terdiman remarks, ‘no discourse is ever a monologue’ (1985, 36) the speech that the protagonist delivers to his Dutch audience is plainly monological, for it literally erases the natives from the colonial discursive arena. During his discussion with the Dutch visitors, Almayer explicitly rules out the possibility for ‘dialogic’, polyphonic paradigms. He tends to retreat into an undifferentiated site of enunciation, leaving no place for contradictory voices or meanings. Given his isolation, due to a resistance to indigenous idioms and cultures, it is hardly surprising that Almayer finds relief in the presence of his countrymen with whom he tries to establish close bonds. It is precisely at this moment when he encounters the realm of sameness (that is the Dutch officers) that his dismissal of


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difference becomes categorical. The need to belong and identify with the distant, idealised metropolis to which he dreams to return with his daughter has manifestly sparked Almayer’s violent reassertion of his Western roots. If his identification with the Dutch provisionally sutures the protagonist’s fragmented self, his prejudiced views of the Malays condemns his discourse to a literal repetition of colonial stereotypes. Almayer’s overall conduct reflects an identity crisis that both shatters his unity of being-with-the-other and unsettles the notion of colonial encounters as ‘complicit’ and ‘dialogic’. Almayer’s Folly shows that exchanges between Europeans and nonEuropeans in Borneo were as frequent as they were asymmetrical. The Dutch, Malays and Arabs traded together and more often than not their contacts were plagued by violence, misunderstanding and racial prejudice. Almayer is an extreme example of solitude and alienation, caused in large part by fierce competition and plotting among the various traders on the islands. With the departure of the Dutch officers we see the protagonist withdrawing into his previous solipsistic existence. He ruminates on his failure and wretchedness, as he fantasises about future opportunities of success and wealth. In retrospect, Almayer’s enthusiastic welcome of his countrymen betrays his social and cultural alienation, which adds him to Conrad’s list of colonial outcasts, such as Kurtz, Jim and Lingard. Haunted by dreams of a future fortune and a glorious life, Almayer is almost literally led to madness by his search for the treasure island and the promise of riches that Lingard fed into his imagination. Paralleling Kurtz who is possessed by the ivory that he collects, Almayer cherishes fantasies of wealth and magnificence to the point of delusion. And just like Kurtz who frantically appropriates the objects and people around him, Almayer incorporates his beloved Nina into his imaginary flights and sees her as his extension. His material pursuits have blinded him to the aspirations of his daughter who reproaches him with not letting her chase her own dreams. Inevitably, his blatant egocentrism and cultural arrogance have fully estranged him from Nina. After ultimately turning her father’s culture into a total Other, Nina casts anathema on the entire Western civilisation and dismisses the Europeans as corrupt, given to ‘sleek hypocrisy, polite disguises, and virtuous pretences’ (38). Conversely, she strengthens her ties with her mother’s seemingly authentic traditions and intends to recover the pre-colonial, unspoilt Malay world. Nina undertakes a nativist6 quest intended to recover an indigenous authentic culture that Western invasion destroyed. She strives to reconnect with her ancestors’ world to retrieve the value and dignity of her


disregarded past. This longing for a shared original identity suggests the natives’ effort to rescue their history from colonial humiliation and oblivion. The quasi-historical project underlying Nina’s rhetoric is strongly expressed by her mother’s praise of Dain. She looks to the latter as a living example of ancestral nobility and a saviour who would reunite the Malays with their grand narratives and high history. Like her mother, Nina searches for an idyllic holistic communality. She aspires to an original state of completeness and grandeur. Her nostalgic flight suggests a return to a historical essence from which the Malays were excluded. Ideologically, Nina’s determination to restore and rehabilitate the past involves a production of a counter-discourse that tends to unsettle colonialist representations of the indigenous peoples. The role she takes up in this regressive journey puts her in the position of dissenting voice that questions imperial supremacy from the colony’s fringes. This rebellious position or ‘discourse-against’ is one of vehement revolt. It involves radical distancing, interrogation and challenge to colonial ideology.7 What Nina in the end seeks is the abolition, not the transformation of imperialist rhetoric. Her struggle against Western assumptions of supremacy, embodied by the protagonist, entails a strategy of manifest ‘de/citation’.8 It is spurred by a desire to free herself from the orbit of her father’s influence and his overwhelming discourse. As she questions masculine imperial order, Nina contests the empire’s progressive history alongside the Enlightenment’s principles of development. Her oppositional discursive practice, which targets primarily her father, aims to destabilise Western imperial authority and cultural arrogance; and on the whole, her Occidentalist discourse is no different from her father’s Orientalist rhetoric. Their respective Eastern and Western perspectives thrive, indeed, on similar biases; a shared feature that reinforces culture’s absolute character, as much as it reveals the symbiotic relationship that colonialist and native discourses entertain. Nina’s valorisation of the indigenous cultures challenges her father’s contempt for the primitive Malay culture. Her rehabilitating gesture especially countermands the assumptions of such anthropologists as William Robertson (1721–93), Edward Tylor (1832–1917), Andrew Lang (1844–1912), and James George Frazer (1854–1941), who categorised non-Europeans as culturally and racially ‘inferior’.9 Conrad’s complex use of the word ‘savage’ lends support to this argument. Although this concept is employed mostly to refer to the Malays’ backwardness, there are occurrences when it is assigned a positive value and is thus freed from its usual racist connotations. An evidence of this reversal is to be


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found in the scene where the narrator refers to native eloquence which is crystallised by Dain. The adjective ‘savage’ qualifying this character’s speech tends in this case to privilege primitive ‘authentic’ and ‘natural’ eloquence over empire’s corrupt eloquence typified by Kurtz. The relative deracialisation of the ‘barbarian’ trope in this episode partakes of Conrad’s rehabilitation of the Malay culture enunciated in the ‘Author’s Note’. This effort is consistent with the myth of ‘the noble savage’ that pervades Almayer’s Folly and Conrad’s later fiction. Conrad’s romantic view of the primitive and the image of organic pre-colonial societies thus combine. They join forces to erode, at least partially, the colonial representations of the colonised as benighted and corrupt. His apparent sympathy for the Malay traditional world, which is expressed in the ‘Author’s Note,’ may be due to his own ‘organic conservatism’ (McClure 1981, 95) that insidiously seeps through the heroine’s journey to her ancestral past. The travel metaphor fulfils here a dual function. It conveys Conrad’s, and generally the modernists’ search for a primitive, cohesive universe in order to counteract modernity’s ills. It especially reflects the natives’ challenge to progressive history and to the capitalist ethos that fuels imperial ideology. Conrad’s handling of the past in his first novel is a mixed endeavour. At first glance, he seems to sanction Nina’s essentialist conjecture as a counterpoint to her father’s decaying modernity. But a closer look at the narrative’s overall orientation unveils a subtle questioning of the heroine’s romanticised vision of the Malay past. We see how after encouraging Nina to travel back to an allegedly ideal pre-colonial community the narrator makes her realise that her search is as illusory as is her father’s implicit belief in cultural purity. This perceptual twist indicates that Conrad ultimately censures Nina’s nativist mythologies. His portrayal of the native pre-colonial societies as complex and multi-faced serves then to moderate Nina’s radical, simplistic vision of the past. Subtly, the narrator shows that the traditional Malay communities disrupted by colonialism were not a harmonious whole, but dissonant, frayed fabrics that were strongly hierarchical and fraught with ethnic, religious, and political divisions. He portrays those times as a period of both glory and devastating tribal warfare.10 Conrad invokes historical and cultural relativity in ways that destabilise both the values circulated in colonialist discourse (myths of purity and cultural supremacy, universalism, development . . .) and the indigenous self-representations. He conceives of history as the product of multiple contingencies and fits culture and identity into a multi-dynamic process with difference as its structuring principle.


Nevertheless, Almayer and his daughter deviate from this pattern. They adopt a one-dimensional conception of the self that hinges on essentialist considerations. Both view identity as a monolithic structure where the subject shapes itself through denial of difference. Almayer considers the Malays worthless, whereas Nina shuns her European self and desperately searches for a primitive pre-colonial authentic collective subject. The attempt to flatten out her composite identity makes her doubly alienated: she is both unable to recover the Malay essence that she desires and incapable of fully divesting herself of her Western inheritance. Ironically, despite a preference for her indigenous legacy, Nina remains an obscure cultural Other for her Malay lover, Dain who ‘was uneasily conscious of something in her he could not understand. . . . He felt something invisible that stood between them . . . she was his, and yet she was like a woman from another world’ (152). Nina’s estrangement from her Malay culture is even more manifest in the scene where she kisses Dain on the mouth. This occurrence confuses her lover who is not used to these Western amorous practices (Rebeiro 1999, 269). Above all, Dain’s incomprehension reveals that the apparent ‘cultural home’ he provides for Nina (Simmons 2006, 50) is a site of alienation. Similar to the Western exclusionary politics of territoriality embodied by Almayer, the indigenous space represented here by Dain is bent on reproducing sameness. It is unwilling to take difference in its own terms and accommodate the heroine’s multi-layered identity, just as the hybrid Nina proves unable to reconcile and assume her mixed cultural heritage.

Hybridity: the space of the impossible Nina’s failure to dispose of her European legacy and fully reconnect with an idealised past suggests that hybridity, which is emblematic of colonial cultures and cultures in general, is an irreversible process. This means that neither the colonised nor the colonisers’ cultures can realistically claim to have been unaffected by colonial contacts. Essence or purity, Conrad implies, is a chimera. It is a mere rhetorical construct that mystifies both the coloniser’s and the native’s identities and histories. Most importantly, Conrad also suggests that métissage, as a metaphor of the colonial experience, is not an occurrence of peaceful, harmonious blending, but a condition of violent struggle for power and domination. Nina has become a bone of contention that tears her parents apart. She forms an ideological and cultural stake, coveted respectively by the protagonist and his wife. Hybridity, as exemplified by Nina, amounts to a space of the impossible whereby the colonial subject’s identity is trapped in


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the imperialist dialectics of possession and dispossession, conquest and alienation. Owing to her mixed descent Nina becomes a cultural and racial anomaly that unsettles her parents. Staked out by the conflicting parties as their own possession, she stands for the figure of the colony that is there either to claim or reclaim, depending on which side of the imperial binary one stands. The native Mrs Almayer sees her daughter as a purely Malay girl who should be reconnected with her ancestors’ culture and traditions. Her European husband also appropriates his daughter and dreams of taking her to the imperial metropolis. According to him, once in Europe Nina’s half-caste status would be outshone by her great beauty and her father’s fantasised wealth: He absorbed himself in his dream of wealth and power away from this coast where he had dwelt for so many years, forgetting the bitterness of toil and strife in the vision of a great and splendid reward. They would live in Europe, he and his daughter. They would be rich and respected. Nobody would think of her mixed blood in the presence of her great beauty and of his immense wealth (7). The issue of métissage invoked in this comment is based on both racial and social considerations. The fate of the half-castes both in the colony and metropolis depends therefore largely on their social position. And being a rich half-caste in the metropolis, the narrator suggests, is by far better than being a poor half-caste living in the colony, which, in practice, most métis often were (Stoler 1997, 210). To pursue the initial discussion of Nina’s parents’ appropriative rhetoric, we may argue that both husband and wife perceive their daughter not in her difference or multiplicity, but according to her correspondence to the uniform sameness they both seek to reproduce. In so doing, they behave as if their mixed union, metaphorically the colonial encounters, had not taken place. The two cling to their rigid positions and see their daughter as an extension of themselves. Almayer expects Nina to be an icon for white men to bow low before the power of her beauty and her wealth. His wife, in turn, wishes her daughter to become the Ranee she herself will never be. Almayer and his spouse in their different ways reify Nina by reducing her to a mirror that would reflect their respective dreams. Their belligerent attitudes transform the halfcaste heroine into a site of contest over which Almayer and his wife attempt to gain mastery. For one thing, the totalising drive underlying the couple’s appropriative endeavour overwhelms Nina and alienates her identity from its essence.


Although, as many critics have pointed out, colonial rule was not uniform or homogeneous (Bhabha 1994; Boehmer 1995; Cooper and Stoler 1997), Conrad in Almayer’s Folly suggests that division and conflict are the most defining features of the colonial relation. Despite timid indications of intimacy between colonisers and colonised, the narrative tends to enhance the frictions and violence of the colonial encounters. The narrator does so in terms that make the colonial relation – at least as expressed by Almayer and his wife – appear as a vicious, relentless battle for supremacy. The spouses adopt radical views and the colonial relation they enact boils down to mutual hostility and sheer brutality where each seeks to nullify the other. Their exclusivist rhetoric underplays the cross-cultural circuits and colonial hybridity related in the narrative. We can further suggest that through the fierce contest between Almayer and his wife Conrad presents the colonisers’ and natives’ inability to acknowledge the manifest adulteration of their cultures. In view of this disquieting imperial reality, which destabilises the colonial myths of racial and cultural purity, the antagonists retreat into sheltered positions from which they battle for representation and power by means of inclusion and rejection. The words in which the narrator describes Nina shed light on the Dutch colonial politics of incorporation and exclusion regarding the question of métissage:11 She was tall for a half-caste, with the correct profile of the father, modified and strengthened by the squareness of the lower part of the face inherited from her maternal ancestors – the Sulu pirates. . . . And yet her dark and perfect eyes had all the tender softness of expression common to Malay women, but with a gleam of superior intelligence (17–18). This description brings us back to the notion of colonialism-asgrafting. Nina is portrayed as an interesting biological mix. She is a Malay girl with the common physical features of her mother’s Sulu ancestors, onto which are grafted her father’s Western refined, higher bodily and intellectual characteristics. She has inherited the ‘correct profile’ of her father, and the usual tender softness of Malay women is crowned with a ‘gleam of superior intelligence’ that ranks her higher than ordinary Malay girls. The idea of Western features correcting the natives’ nature recalls the nineteenth-century eugenic theories. It also echoes the Dutch educational policies towards the métis in Southeast Asia ‘for whom a curriculum and a vocational environment would be devised to make them


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into what one Dutch official called “perfected natives” not imitation Europeans’ (Cooper and Stoler 1997, 7). Nina’s education is, of course, a central issue in Almayer’s Folly. She is sent to Singapore for ten years to have a Western and Christian schooling, which Almayer thought would improve his daughter’s disposition. This notion of Nina’s improvement evoked earlier is mentioned again in another narrative instance where the narrator talks of Nina’s ‘startled expression common to Malay womankind’ as being ‘modified by a thoughtful tinge inherited from her European ancestry’ (27). The narrator here dissects the heroine’s biological profile, sifting the high from the low. He metaphorically reiterates the myth of an enlightened Europe biologically and culturally improving a backward, stunted East. Significantly, in relating these instances of ‘transculturation’ (Pratt 1992, 6) and racial cross-fertilisation the narrator does not imagine any reverse occurrence of Western features being bettered or tempered by indigenous characteristics. Colonial hybridisation, as reconfigured in the narrator’s description, amounts to a one-way process, whereby an accomplished European race is in charge of stimulating to growth retarded colonial subjects. This absence of reciprocity reinforces the status of the European as a knowledgeable subject, while reducing the natives to mere consumers of Western enlightenment.

Sexuality and colonial politics: containing the métis, preserving race and national identity The anxiety over inter-racial marriages and mixed offspring, conveyed in Almayer’s Folly, is a recurrent theme in nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial literature and politics. But Western preoccupation with métissage goes back to the ancient Greek and Roman times. Indeed, fear of contamination and degeneracy through contacts with barbarians was a prominent subject in classical literatures, as shown in Part I. In Conrad’s novel, it is the young Dutch officer who is the main conduit of Western anxiety about miscegenation. Within colonial societies, social and sexual contacts with the natives were strongly discouraged, in order to prevent racial and cultural degeneracy. When mixed marriages or relationships took place they were therefore usually dismissed as products of marginal Europeans who had turned native, or sunk into barbaric practices. Both Almayer, who married a native woman, and Kurtz, who took a black mistress, were Western outcasts living in the fringes of civilisation. In practice things were, nonetheless, more complex than they looked, for it was not unusual to see colonials of rank involved in


inter-racial unions. The problem of inter-racial marriages and frequent sexual boundary crossings challenged the imperial élites, in the process unsettling their received racial classifications. At the same time, these administrators of empire were conscious that marginal Europeans were not the only source of this threat, as was commonly held: ‘Colonial élites feared transgressions in both directions: that natives were surreptitiously entering the European ranks as “fabricated Europeans” and that going native was not confined to the destitute seaman and low-down bureaucrats that Somerset Maugham and George Orwell have caricatured so well’ (Cooper and Stoler 1997, 26). The correlation between sexuality and politics12 in the imperial world shows that the regulation of sexuality was dictated by both colonial racist policies and by preoccupations over national identity. The latter was often thought to be jeopardised by interracial unions and mixed blood(s). The imperial rulers’ reaction to the pervasive threat posed by métissage wavered between coercion and exclusion, and qualified inclusion. This pervasive tension testifies to colonial rule’s ambivalence towards the questions of race, culture and sexuality. If the way the issue of mixed relationships and half-castes was addressed and resolved differed from one imperial power to another, consensus about the characterisation of the métis had apparently been reached. In colonialist representations the half-caste was consistently viewed as a dangerous source of subversion, degeneracy, and a threat to the white race’s permanence. The way Conrad tackles hybridity in this novel widely echoes the Dutch colonial fears about mixed marriages and half-caste characters in their Southeast Asian colonies.13 More concretely, Conrad’s treatment of the European characters’ attitude to Nina’s métissage illustrates the Dutch politics’ split between incorporation and rejection of the métis.14 He highlights the unease that hybridity generates among both the colonisers and the colonised. The Europeans’ alarm over hybrid characters is sufficiently explored in postcolonial studies (Cooper and Stoler 1997). The natives’ worries about inter-racial relationships and mixed offspring are instead overlooked. Conrad offers through the Arabs’ attitude to Nina an idea about the colonised peoples’ fears of hybridity that the Algerian writer, Kateb Yacine explores at great length in Nedjma. Published in 1956 in the heat of the War of Independence, Nedjma is a fragmented, tortuous narrative which relates the violence of Algeria’s struggle for independence. This brutal war is metaphorically conveyed through Nedjma, a young, attractive girl born of a French mother and an Algerian father. Like Nina, Nedjma is torn between two conflicting forces, the Algerian nationalists


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and the French colonialists, each trying to win her over. But unlike Nina who has chosen her mother’s side, Nedjma evades the two hegemonic discourses alongside the purity they advocate. She remains permanently fixed in the ‘grey’ (167) and the ‘murky’ (170) – an indeterminate position that eludes nationalist and imperialist ideologies. She symbolically fuses the coloniser and colonised, the same and Other, without, however, watering down the tensions inherent in her dual heritage. Of great significance is the way Nedjma’s strict refusal to espouse the French and the Algerian sides inscribes adulteration as the very condition of the colonial encounters. Her indecisiveness situates colonialism as a murky condition made of conflicting, productive reciprocity and brutal cross-fertilisation. But neither the Algerian nor the French characters appreciate colonial hybridity in its true light. Both stick to the myths of purity instead of acknowledging cultural adulteration and reciprocal borrowings. They see Nedjma as the ideal brood-mare which would give birth to the superior, pure race that they project onto her. The two opponents also view the heroine ambivalently, wavering between attraction and apprehension. Mourad, for instance, is both enthralled by Nedjma’s beauty and aware that her mixed nature makes her elusive, ungovernable. Conrad’s Arabs in Almayer’s Folly perceive Nina in identical terms. On her return from Singapore most of the Arab men of standing swarmed around Almayer’s house to have a glimpse of the beautiful young heroine. They were physically attracted to her – Rashid even offered Almayer to marry her. At the same time, the Arabs openly expressed the fear of having to deal with an unconquerable half-caste girl who had adopted the white women’s liberal manners. Likewise, the unnamed young Dutch officer is attracted by Nina’s looks, but discounts her on the grounds that she is ‘after all a half-caste girl’ (103). His reluctance stems from an implicit belief in the classical notion of pure lineage, prominent among ancient Greeks and subsequently adopted by modern writers and apologists of empire. An adherent to the doctrine of pure descent, the Dutchman is visibly aware that the preservation of a presumed colonial purity demands a strict adherence to the empire’s politics which regulated social and sexual conduct. This may explain why he feels compelled to remain within the realm of sameness to prevent racial and cultural miscegenation. His exclusionary rhetoric shows how far sexuality, race and politics were interwoven within the colonial context. For him, the métis Nina is both an unacceptable sexual partner and an undesired member of the colonial community. Politically, this young officer implicitly harbours an Aristotelian vision of citizenship which bars mixed offspring


from being full citizens. Aristotle in Politics states: ‘In practice a citizen is defined to be one of whom both the parents are citizens (and not just one, i.e. father or mother); others insist on going further back; say to two or three or more ancestors’ (53). Akin to the young officer, Almayer also finds Nina’s hybridity disturbing. Before the arrival of the Dutch visitors, he had desperately wanted to help his daughter to escape with Dain merely to spare himself the humiliation of letting the Dutch officers discover his daughter’s union with a native: ‘I am a white man, and of good family. Very good family,’ he repeated, weeping bitterly. ‘It would be too great a disgrace . . . all over the islands, . . . the only white man on the east coast. No, it cannot be . . . white men finding my daughter with this Malay’ (149). The recurrence of the adjective ‘white’ reveals the extent to which the politics of race determines Almayer’s demeanour and discourse. He seems gripped by racial anxieties and social pressure in ways that indicate colonial ideology’s extensive power. Unquestionably, for Almayer Nina’s hybrid status is deeply unsettling. The young officer, on the other hand, perceives Nina as an ambiguous sign, standing both for an object of desire and a racial monstrosity.15 He thus subjects her to the empire’s fluctuating rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion, desire and fear in relation to the natives. The characters’ propensity to regard Nina as similar to but not quite like ‘us’16 reflects the blurred political status of the colonised in general and the métis in particular. It enacts the precarious legal and social status of hybrid characters within the Dutch imperial politics founded on both incorporation and rejection of this social category. In summary, Conrad in Almayer’s Folly tackles the thorny problem of hybridity in compliance with the available knowledge and prejudices of his time. He relates the colonial élites’ uneasiness and contradictions about the issue of métissage, but leaves this challenging question unresolved, at least not satisfactorily settled. Undoubtedly, Nina’s bold rejection of her father’s and Western legacy in favour of her mother’s Eastern roots makes her an orphan. She remains a split subjectivity, unable to view her identity in inclusive, dialogic terms. Through the half-caste Nina, whose mixed descent literally condenses sameness and difference, Conrad brings together the coloniser and colonised and exposes the limits of their respective essentialist narratives. He shows how the two actors of the colonial drama engage in a process of denegation and occlusion when defining their identities and collective histories.


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Interpreted within global colonial history, Nina’s dismissal of her European legacy may be said to prefigure the former colonised peoples’ refusal to assume their colonial heritage as part and parcel of their history. She rejects her European legacy en bloc instead of separating the good from the evil. On the other hand, Almayer’s dismissal of the indigenous cultures and reluctance to consider the Malays as both viable interlocutors and ‘agent[s] of knowledge’ (Parry 2004) are strategies of denegation. They reflect the colonisers’ inability to recognise their indebtedness to native cultures and civilisations. Conrad renders Nina’s and Almayer’s radical stances and thereby highlights the sterile cycle of denials and erasures underpinning colonial history and politics. He points out how both characters endorse totalising discourses by refusing to depart from their rigid conception of culture, identity and history. The explicit or implicit denial of the cultural and racial Other, which is typical of the colonial experience, is dramatised through the novel’s emblematic couple: Almayer and his Asian wife. As mentioned earlier, the spouses nourish mutual hate and contempt, which makes communication between them at best difficult, and at worst useless. This deficiency attributable to both characters signals the entrenchment of their respective Western and Eastern cultures brought together by colonialism. By emphasising the absence of fruitful inter-cultural dialogue within the mixed couple’s relationship, Conrad suggests that cultures, whether speaking from the imperial centre (Europe, Almayer) or the native periphery (the East, Mrs Almayer), remain deeply insular: they are determined by ideology and tend to be impervious to Otherness. This is the sad pervasive note of Conrad’s first novel. The begging question is to know whether this pessimism about cultural encounters is limited to Almayer’s Folly or whether it recurs in Conrad’s later fiction. What vision of colonial politics does Conrad offer us in Heart of Darkness, for example, and how does he negotiate Otherness, culture and race? These are the main issues that will be explored in the following chapter.

8 Redeeming the Colonial Idea: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness is a dense, multi-layered narrative characterised by structural complexity, ontological depth, and symbolic denseness. Conrad’s combination of elusive imagery with ideological irresolution turns this novella into a grey zone of signification. Antagonistic discourses about race, culture and imperialism confront each other, but neither is given primacy. Such narrative indeterminacy blurs Conrad’s vision of imperialism, as much as it enables the narrative to release its signifying potential. Readers are consequently urged to derive meaning horizontally, by relying on the linear powers of language, and vertically by delving into the multiple layers of knowledge and discourse mobilised in this narrative (Acheraïou 2005). Technically, the novella articulates around a dual narrative voice, consisting of a frame narrator and Marlow, supplemented by various sources of enunciation that feed the narration. The frame narrator introduces and describes the passengers aboard the Nellie: the Director, the Lawyer and the Accountant, members of the colonial enterprise from which the ‘ascetic’ Marlow is set apart (136). After few lazy exchanges the five meditative passengers wait silently for the tide to rise. During this interval the frame narrator broods over the serenity of the day, the brilliance of the sky, and ‘venerable’ Thames ‘whose tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin’ (137). The narrator then invokes the vital role that the river played for treasure hunters and colonial adventures. He hints at Britain’s place as a powerful maritime nation and refers to the Thames, metonymically England, as the point of departure from which 138

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the civilising missionaries, or the ‘bearers of a spark from the sacred fire’ (137), sailed to the earth’s dark places. This episodic account of the ‘greatness’ that flowed on the Thames is soon interrupted by the lights glimmering along the shore, and, most notably, by Marlow’s remark: ‘And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth’ (138). With this narrative intrusion the initially detached Marlow steps into the role of a narrating subject. He immediately inscribes colonialism in a much wider time span, bringing together the modern colonial adventures of Conrad’s time and the remote classical conquests, exemplified by Imperial Rome. By this analogy, Conrad returns England to its deep Roman roots, thus distancing himself from most modernists who emphasise the British filiations with ancient Greece. We can only speculate about the reasons that might have motivated the shift. The fact that he comes from a Catholic background, that he was steeped in French culture and literature, with classical Rome as a reference point, may have induced Conrad to revert to the Roman model.1 More concretely, it was perhaps much easier for a man of action like himself to identify the English with the Roman conquerors whose vestiges permeate the English soil than with the Greeks whose role merely flatters an intellectual speculation. The parallel between Imperial Rome and modern colonial Britain stresses the continuity between former and new colonialism. Conrad seems to suggest that akin to the Romans who brought light to the barbaric Anglo-Saxons, the English should in turn fulfil their great imperial destiny in the world. They are the new torch bearers in charge of spreading light and progress in Africa, whose condition is similar to that of Britain before the advent of Roman civilisation. Through the Roman–British continuum, Conrad sets colonisation within an evolutionary process, with its incipient stage in the classical period, its intermediary state in the sixteenth century, personified by the Spaniards, and its highest phase in the mid-nineteenth century, embodied by the British. Given Marlow’s ambiguous narrative, it is unclear whether Conrad is appreciative or ironic about the Roman civilising enterprise. We are not certain either if he endorses Europe’s colonial project in Africa. What is, however, clear is that in stressing England’s bonds with Imperial Rome he indirectly establishes the British empire, following the Roman example, as a global imperial power violently penetrating vast portions of the world. Conrad’s insistence on the continuities between the English and the Romans is of the utmost significance, for England had started to sever


her links with Roman culture since the eighteenth century in favour of Greece. His focus on Rome’s legacy on imperial England sounds like a reminder to the English that their culture had Roman Catholic roots that post-Reformation England tended to overlook. Indeed, when Anglican England, which was imitating Protestant Germany, started to manifest a fascination for Greece during the early eighteenth century, Catholic France rose into a cultural and military force perceived by its European rivals as a ‘New Rome’ (Bernal 1987, 205). The turning away from ancient Rome – the site of the Catholic religion and Latin culture – might be a means for England to distance herself from her rival France, seen as a direct Roman heir.

Towards a humane colonisation The initial reference to England’s former darkness that the Romans helped to dissipate anticipates Marlow’s own tale of darkness in Africa which focuses on Belgian colonialism in the Congo. From the outset, we learn that Marlow’s knowledge of colonialism’s excesses in the Congo, the personal property of Leopold II, King of Belgium from 1865 to 1909, preceded his direct experience of them. His symbolic contact with Africa took place at the heart of Europe, precisely in Brussels where he had his job interview.2 This metaphoric encounter with the continent’s darkness blurs the frontiers between Europe and Africa, the centre and the periphery, civilisation and barbarity. It is in this imperial city, compared to a ‘whited sepulchre’ (145), that Marlow had a fore-taste of the grim, absurd colonial reality awaiting him. The horrors were anticipated by the ‘ominous’ atmosphere of its Brussels offices and, particularly, by the two women, ‘guarding the door of Darkness [and] knitting black wool’, that Marlow met there (147).3 In Brussels Marlow was notified of his appointment to replace the Danish Captain, Fresleven, who was killed in a scuffle with the natives. Fresleven’s death was presumably caused by a misunderstanding about two black hens. Having thought himself wronged in the bargain, he went ashore and thrashed the village chief in recompense for the injustice. Angered by his father’s humiliation, the chief’s son planted a spear between the assailant’s shoulders. Flesleven’s body was left unburied, with grass sprouting out of his ribs. Following his death the villagers cleared into the woods to escape punishment by the colonial authorities. This gruesome incident gave Marlow a hint about the cruelty, waste and absurdity of life in the Belgian colony. The vague, bleak contours of the colonial presence glimpsed in the distant headquarters of the Belgian


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empire took a clearer, disturbing shape as Marlow reached the Company Station and proceeded further into the interior. On confronting the reality of colonialism on the spot, he saw his earlier suspicions confirmed with force and violence. He became appalled by the degree of cruelty and hypocrisy that he encountered. Marlow left for Africa in a French steamer. His first impression in response to the Dark Continent was that of awe and estrangement; feelings which reflect his geographical displacement and cultural alienation. He stopped at places that looked like a ‘God-forsaken wilderness’ (150), and passed various sordid trading places where trade and death went hand in hand. The up river journey was culturally and morally challenging to Marlow, and on the whole his African adventure was ‘like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares’ (152). Marlow’s arrival in the Company’s Station where he had his first-hand experience of the colonial existence brought him into the thick of these very nightmares. This shabby station is a wasteland. It is a place of utter desolation where wretched skeletal black men are subject to abject exploitation and inhumane proceedings: A slight clinging behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, clinking rhythmically. (154) Marlow is outraged by the upsetting spectacle at ‘the grove of death.’ He fiercely condemns capitalism – the ‘new forces at work’ – for exploiting Africans under the pretence of universal law and progress. His caustic critique of colonial economic exploitation combines with a strong indictment of capitalism’s criminalising rhetoric which hails as criminal all those who refuse to serve its ends. Marlow finds it cynical to identify these wretched creatures with ‘criminals,’ insisting that ‘these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies’ (154). What the sympathetic Marlow overlooks, however, is the fact that the Belgian companies exploiting the Congo’s resources did not need imagination to criminalise Africans. These companies had set up oppressive rules that justified exploitation in the name of universal good and human advancement. The natives’ sheer refusal to participate in the empire’s ethics of


progress was, therefore, enough to turn them into outlaws. The moribund Africans of the grove of death must in this case owe their villainy to those brutal policies of forced labour that were common practice in the Congo and other colonies (Morel 1903, 1904, 1906; Hochschild 1999). Marlow ironically refers to these dying contractual workers as ‘helpers,’ a euphemism for cheap, possibly unpaid, labourers. At the Company Station he is both revolted by the Africans’ destitution and startled by the inefficient activities undertaken there in the name of civilisation: A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not in the way of anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on (154). The desolation is so extreme that Marlow can find no extenuating circumstances for the Belgian colonial enterprise. On leaving this place, he is dismayed by what he witnessed. As he progresses from one station to the next cruelty gains in intensity; so, too, does his loathing of the Belgian empire. Basically, Marlow assimilates the conquest of the Congo to a brutal undertaking, devoid of all justifying moral principle: What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which means mostly the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . . (140–1). Marlow does not mince words in this statement. He condemns imperialism’s abuses and dismisses the colonial encounters as a case of sheer cruelty and destruction. Belgian colonialism is for Marlow, implicitly for


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Conrad, no more than violent robbery and murder, which leaves little room for intermediate positions or romantic views of King Leopold’s empire in particular and imperialism in general.4 Yet Marlow’s condemnation is not as radical as it first sounds, for both in this instance and in the remainder of the narrative his vision of empire is manifestly ambivalent. At once he contests and identifies with the imperial system; an ambiguity conveyed in his attitude to Kurtz who carries the empire’s ideals and its excesses. At the Inner Station Marlow shows mixed feelings about Kurtz. He disapproves of Kurtz’s ruthless proceedings which, according to the Company’s Manager, ‘had ruined the district’, but remains loyal to the protagonist and to the ideals he stands for (221). More still, Marlow considers himself a ‘partisan’ of Kurtz’s ‘unsound’ methods (228). This contradiction reflects his split between an open indictment of colonialism and a covert support of the saving idea that justifies the colonial project. Significantly, the attraction–repulsion dynamics, which defines his relation to Kurtz, enacts the mutual fascination and fear, desire and hostility characterising the relationships between colonisers and colonised. Marlow attacks colonialism on strict humanitarian grounds. As he deplores the empire’s deficiencies he recommends an acceptable form of colonisation. He argues for a benevolent empire – one where the Enlightenment’s ideals would be implemented in the good of all. Assessed within Europe’s old tradition of self-scrutiny, Marlow’s, implicitly Conrad’s vision of colonialism is predicated on the principle of ‘humane colonisation’ initiated by François Rabelais and Bartolome de Las Casas, and later adopted by Michel de Montaigne, Jean de La Bruyère, Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. These Humanists denounced the brutalities of Spanish and settler colonialism in America and elsewhere, recommending a humane colonisation that could be profitable to both the colonisers and colonised. Like most modernist authors, Conrad followed the humanist scholars, keen to give colonisation an ethical orientation. He offers through Marlow a qualified, consensual critique of colonialism, seeking chiefly to reconcile the imperial system with its original utopia. What Conrad wishes fundamentally is not to dismantle empire, but to make the idea at the back of colonisation mean something other than ‘a sentimental pretence’ with no concrete grounding. No wonder, then, that despite his mordant critique Marlow believes that the imperial idea is in essence a valid one. It is, he suggests, the failure to materialise or redeem it which is at stake. Marlow’s ambition consists precisely of redeeming the colonial idea, which entails transforming it from a sham and empty rhetoric into


an essential creed. He tenaciously holds to the ‘saving intention’ and literally elevates the idea into a deity you ‘bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to’ (140–1). The deification of the colonial idea, implied in this comment, serves as a moral pledge. It legitimises colonialism, at least the utopian version upheld by Marlow; at the same time it reinforces the saintly character of the civilising mission. Initially portrayed as embodying the empire’s ideals, Kurtz is metaphorically assigned a quasi-divine role. Marlow likewise performs a heavenly duty. His words resonate in the narrative like those of a superior voice of conscience attempting to redeem both the demonic Kurtz and the entire colonial peoples, colonisers and colonised alike. In Conrad’s conception of colonialism, these antithetical characters form the two extremes of the colonial experience: Kurtz symbolises the dark side of the imperial adventure and Marlow its redeeming light. From the start Marlow presents himself as ‘a lower sort of apostle’ of progress (149) and establishes a hierarchical relation with Kurtz, the higher missionary in charge of spreading colonialism’s ideals of universal development. Marlow and the protagonist are tied by bonds that unite a disciple to his guru. Marlow’s devotion to Kurtz is immediately asserted, and the main motivation of his journey is apparently spurred by an eagerness to meet this ‘remarkable’ being, the symbol of moral accomplishment and cultural refinement. He wishes, above all, to find out about colonialism’s ‘high and just proceedings’ that Kurtz is expected to implement on the African soil. To his dismay, though, the closer Marlow gets to Kurtz’s station the more he realises that the ideals associated with the protagonist have not materialised. They are consumed by the very cause of progress they are supposed to serve, just as Kurtz himself is overcome by his lust for ivory and power. Marlow’s discovery suggests that the impulse towards self-aggrandisement and totality, characterising Kurtz in particular and empire in general, carries the seeds of self-destruction. At the Inner Station Marlow is shocked and robbed of his initial illusions by discovering the extent of Kurtz’s moral degradation and hollowness. When the long-awaited verbal encounter with the ‘eloquent,’ ‘gifted’ Kurtz finally comes Marlow realises that his idol is blinded by his material pursuits to the point of self-destruction. His discerning account separates Kurtz’s ‘perfectly clear’ intelligence (34) from his ‘mad’ soul (235), a distinction that brings into play the conflict between knowledge and ethics, rationalism and spirituality, matter and idea. Like Las Casas who was hailed as the ‘authentic expression of the true Spanish conscience’ (Pagden 2001, 80), Marlow stands for Europe’s conscience, which, as Conrad states, is embodied by England (Karl and Davies


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1988, 96). In placing the issue of colonialism on a strictly ethical and philosophical plane, Marlow intends to draw the readers’ attention to the empire’s deviation from its duty and moral obligation towards the ‘child races’ under its authority. Thus, despite his unsettling finding he sticks to his redemptive enterprise. For him, the key problem with Kurtz is not his intelligence or sanity, as we tend to think, but rather his soul which has gone mad: If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear. . . . But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad (234–5). Kurtz’s soul turns out to be too blind to prevent or redress his conduct, but his mind is lucid enough to judge his experience. Marlow is aware that his secret sharer’s acts are irredeemable, but sets out to pierce his soul’s mysteries and evaluate its wickedness. Of course, he does not go as far as to condone Kurtz’s practices, but deploys a gamut of rhetorical devices to find extenuating circumstances for his cruelty. The first of these consists of presenting Kurtz as a helpless victim of dark powers; forces which, Marlow observes, are simply too overwhelming for the protagonist. The second device consists of showing that Kurtz’s experience in Africa is both one of darkness and barbarism and a case of enlightenment and self-discovery. Marlow claims that his African experience granted him insight into his inner self, as well as into Kurtz’s personality and human nature in general. Meanwhile, he argues that Kurtz, too, had ultimately gained self-knowledge which allowed him to evaluate his actions. Such an achievement, Marlow enthuses, is simply immense, for ‘the most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of inextinguishable regrets’ (240). Marlow admires Kurtz for having had the courage to pronounce a verdict about his life; a feat that he himself does not seem to be capable of: ‘I was within a hair’s-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it’ (241). He later refers to Kurtz’s final cry ‘The horror! The horror’ as a moral victory that few of us, and few of Conrad’s characters, too, are likely to achieve: Better his cry – much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable


satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond (241). In finding himself on the threshold of death, Kurtz acknowledges his misconduct in a display of moral courage that compares to Jim’s ‘passive heroism’. Like Kurtz who finally says the unsayable, Jim accepts to look into his cowardice and assumes the consequences of abandoning the Patna. And just as Marlow insists on the boldness of Kurtz’s confession, Marlow in Lord Jim considers Jim a moral hero, because the latter bravely stands up to the trial and faces his betrayal: ‘The inquiry was a severe punishment to that Jim, and . . . his facing it – practically of his own free will – was a redeeming feature of his abominable case’ (50). This valuing rhetoric conveys the narrators’ solidarity with the protagonists, as much as it indicates their fidelity to the betrayed maritime and imperial ideals embodied respectively by Jim and Kurtz. As he praises Kurtz’s moral victory Marlow reiterates his loyalty to the protagonist in words that suggest an intention to redeem the idea which sustains the imperial enterprise. Even after Kurtz’s death Marlow continues to hold onto this redemptive work. The temporal adverb ‘beyond’ used in the above statement is in this respect pregnant with meaning. It insinuates that Marlow’s belief in the colonial idea did not collapse with the demise of the protagonist who was supposed to implement it. His loyalty to Kurtz to ‘the last and beyond’ indicates a determination to sustain the viability of colonisation’s ideals before his continental audience. Accordingly, his lying to the Intended at the novella’s close reads as a reaffirmation of these ideals, rather than as a sign of ‘Marlow’s incompetence as communicator’ (Parry 2004, 135). Marlow in this concluding scene plainly tells the reader that he does not want to share with the Intended, with the people in the streets of the ‘sepulchral city’ (242), and with the domestic audience at large ‘the peculiar blackness of that experience’ (232). Jealousy and faithfulness to Kurtz’s memory are the reasons invoked by Marlow to account for his reticence to enlighten his despised public. Closely examined, this argument sounds nevertheless like an easy subterfuge. For Marlow’s main, silenced motivation consists mostly of preserving and rekindling the imperial idea. At the novella’s closure, Marlow certainly takes everyone by surprise. Instead of disclosing to the Intended Kurtz’s real life story in Africa, he comforts her in the conviction that Kurtz was an extraordinary imperial agent and a supreme human being worthy of respect and admiration. This ironic twist confirms Marlow’s early conviction that women must be kept out of the imperial business altogether. Speaking of his aunt who


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helped him to secure an appointment, he generalises about women in these words: ‘It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before first sunset’ (149). At this stage Marlow effects a radical ideological shift. The realm of truth that he considers as the man’s province is seen grossly eroded by his own final lie to Kurtz’s Intended. Marlow’s lying has drawn substantial criticism. For C. B. Cox, for example, the lie symbolises the decaying condition of Western Europe (1974, 40). According to Jeremy Hawthorn, the lie reflects ‘the separation of those in the domestic culture from full knowledge of what is being done in their name in Africa.’ He views ‘the Intended’s sterile isolation’ and unqualified support for Kurtz as emblematic of European women who were ignorant that their men were furthering ‘the aims of imperialism’ in Africa, while ‘offering strong ideological support to them’ (1990, 187). The Intended is certainly a naïve European woman who thinks that colonialism in Africa is carried out for humankind’s benefit. We should yet bear in mind that the Intended is far from being a representative of her class. For unlike Kurtz’s ignorant fiancée, many nineteenth century women, particularly the middle class category knew perfectly what imperialism was about. A good number of them even participated actively in shaping and promoting colonial ideology (see Chapter 5). Marlow’s lying obviously spares the Intended the harsh truth of colonialism. It also indicates that in order for imperialism to thrive overseas and for its ideals to be upheld at home, its hideous practices should be concealed from the metropolitan public. The lie may as well be said to carry a redemptive value; it functions as a buffer that preserves the distance between empire as it really is and colonisation as it should be. The lie manifestly shields the Intended from Kurtz’s demonic character; it also serves well Marlow’s ideological purposes. By devising a safe rhetorical smokescreen that prevents the Intended and domestic audience from seeing into Kurtz’s/empire’s dark side, Marlow paradoxically lives up to his role as the empire’s good conscience. However, his omission seriously questions his ethical orientation and disqualifies him as a reliable narrator. We recall him promising earlier his audience to speak freely about ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and let no one silence his voice: ‘I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced’ (187). Yet he finally chooses to hush up unpalatable truths about the representative of Western colonialism, Kurtz. Marlow’s decision not to disclose to the Intended the whole truth about Kurtz indicates how far he is determined by the very imperial system he criticises. It seems as


though ‘the Belgian lie in action’ to which Conrad once referred (Karl and Davies 1988, 96) had contaminated Marlow’s narration and become as irresistible as the powers of darkness were for Kurtz.

The ‘saving idea’: the dialectics of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ colonialism The ‘saving idea,’ which informs Marlow’s discourse, is a key component of Conrad’s perception of colonialism. Discussing Heart of Darkness with his publisher, William Blackwood, before the novel appeared, Conrad declared that it is ‘inefficiency and pure selfishness’ which is ‘criminal’ in ‘the civilizing work in Africa,’ not the idea of the work itself (Karl and Davies 1986, 139–40). A central concept-metaphor, the imperial idea as formulated by Marlow condenses a range of values that recur in the narrative. The most prominent of these is ‘devotion to efficiency’ or ‘good’ work which sequentially entails the dialectics of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ colonisation. The first is represented by the Belgians and the second is incarnated by the British empire to which Marlow obliquely referred as more enlightened. Marlow’s remark that ‘some real work is done’ in the ‘red’ (that is the British colonial territories) creates a distinction between good and bad imperialism that Nicholas Harrison, among other Conrad scholars,5 finds ‘dubious’: ‘Whether we should see Conrad as invoking a distinction between good and bad imperialism remains uncertain, of course, for all the same reasons that the racism of the text is hard to pin down’ (2003, 52). The author goes further to insist that ‘Marlow (whose remark about “real work” might even be read as ironic) is distinct from Conrad’ (52). Harrison is certainly right in stressing the need to distinguish Marlow’s comments and attitude from Conrad’s. The binary ‘good’/‘bad’ imperialism is nonetheless far from a gratuitous occurrence that simply serves an ironic function, as he contends. Given the recurrence of this dichotomy in Conrad’s colonial fiction, it is crucial not to underestimate its significance. As suggested in his fiction, although Conrad is critical of imperialism he does not reject the ideals sustaining the colonial enterprise. On a deeper, perhaps unconscious, level Conrad’s writings display an aristocratic vision of colonialism that establishes a hierarchy among Western colonising nations. According to this conception, some colonisers are deemed praise-worthy and others are dismissed as demeaning.6 The Belgian empire in Heart of Darkness is identified with a nefarious colonial presence. By portraying the Congo as mostly a place of exploitation, deficient administration and inefficiency, Marlow makes


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the Belgian colony stand for colonisation at its worst. He describes it as not only a realm of evil, hosting the ‘devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire’ (155), but also as the epitome of ineptitude and absurdity. Marlow stresses the Belgian empire’s incapacity to accomplish any meaningful activity in the Congo. The bulk of his observations in relation to work both in the Company Station and at the Central and Inner Stations concur to show that most of the activities undertaken within the Belgian empire are carried out for futile purposes: I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. . . . It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do . . . I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn’t one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up’ (155–6). Marlow brings to the reader’s notice the ‘philanthropic pretence’ and meaninglessness of the Belgian colonial enterprise and presents his journey in the Congo as a plunge into ‘the gloomy circle of some Inferno’ (156). Greed and brutality predominate at the Company Station. Tokens of modern civilisation are abandoned to decay and rust instead of being put to efficient use. As he lays bare the Belgian empire’s deficiencies Marlow refers to its inability to accomplish colonialism’s ideals of progress and advancement. Simultaneously, he implicitly designates the British as an ideal colonising nation whose colonies are considered better than the Congo. In Almayer’s Folly, published five years before Heart of Darkness, the narrator opposes the British and Dutch colonisers. Both colonial powers were present in Borneo. In the early nineteenth century they entered into agreement to exchange trading ports under their control. In the scene relating Almayer’s meeting with the Dutch officers, the narrator brings together the two colonial nations and makes the protagonist express a preference for England. Carried away by his excitement, Almayer has blunderingly voiced his regret at the non-arrival of the English ‘who knew how to develop a rich country’ (1895, 32). In ‘Karain’, too, the unnamed English narrator contrasts a mean Dutch coloniser to an ideal imperial British symbolised by Queen Victoria.7 Although existing only in absentia, the image of Britain as an ideal colonising nation pervades the short story. Given the rivalry between the two colonial powers it is no surprise that the Anglophile Conrad has his narrator disparage the Dutch and praise the British.8 He ascribes to Queen Victoria – the emblem of


the British empire – attributes of power and moral virtues which mark Britain and the Netherlands as poles apart. The narrator further elevates the monarch to a supernatural being that is even ‘more powerful than Suleiman the Wise, who commanded the genii’ (1897, 83). As suggested by the Queen’s sublime portrait the British empire is not only considered superior to the Dutch colonial power, but also outshines the former vast, mighty Ottoman empire that Britain helped to dismantle. In Under Western Eyes (1911) Conrad repeats in virulent diction his hierarchical vision of colonising nations. The fact that he tackled Russian imperialism only in 1911 comes nonetheless as a surprise. It is all the more so as the political and ideological context in England was favourable to such a subject, given England’s strong antipathy to her imperial rival, Russia in the nineteenth century. Conrad’s reluctance may derive from two major factors: the first priority for a writer like himself newly settled to a sedentary writing career after many wandering years at sea was to secure as wide a readership as possible; and Russian colonialism was less likely to draw a large audience. Colonial, exotic adventure stories offered instead more promising prospects. They were more likely to appeal to the ‘conservative’ imperialist readers of Blackwood’s Magazine, in which Heart of Darkness was serialised. The second reason may be psychological. The detour from European colonies in Africa and Asia was probably a necessary step before Conrad could finally rationalise and put into words Russian despotism. Under Western Eyes concentrates Conrad’s hate of the Russian empire.9 The Teacher of Languages rails against Russian despotism which he opposes to Western enlightenment embodied by Britain and himself. England is described as a place of moderation, rationality and development. Russia is the realm of absolutism, irrationality and regression, all of which are inscribed in the very national character typified by the protagonist, Razumov. For the Teacher of Languages the Russians are evil colonisers. For him, they are so politically extreme and morally abject that they must be denied the right to have colonies. The narrator further enhances the wide political and cultural gap between Russia and Britain and engages in a process of defamiliarisation that excludes Russia from the circle of civilised nations: ‘This is a Russian story for Western ears, which, as I have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe’ (180). The narrator deems the Russian character radically alien to the European audience. Owing to its strangeness and imperial cruelties, autocratic Russia, which stands for ‘the negation of everything worth living for’


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(Conrad 1905, 133–4), is thus pushed out of urbane Western Europe and cast as an Asian despot. It becomes a political and historical monstrosity, as well as a geographical anomaly which is neither of the East nor of the West: This despotism has been utterly un-European. Neither has it been Asiatic in its nature. . . . The Russian autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. . . . It is like a visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East or of the West (1905, 130–1). The barbarism, cruelty and evil characterising Russia are consistently associated with the Belgians’ practices in the Congo. Marlow describes, though less overtly, the British colonies and the Belgian Congo as poles apart. When recounting his job interview in Brussels he obliquely contrasts the two colonial nations and shows a predilection for imperial Britain. Before his interview in the waiting room Marlow was looking at the ‘large shining map marked with all the colours of a rainbow’ (1902, 145). His attention was especially focused on that ‘vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there’ (145). The dominant ‘red’ and ‘blue’ colours are a metonymy of the vast British Empire. Marlow covertly praises the British colonies which he assimilates to a successful colonisation. He sees them as places of efficiency and exemplary work where ‘the idea at the back’ of colonisation seems to retain its validity. Conrad’s humanist project in Heart of Darkness is two-fold: to reconcile colonisation with its utopianism and restore the Africans’ humanity in the name of cultural relativity and solidarity with humankind’s condition. Marlow has both objectives in sight. A romantic humanitarian, Marlow in the ‘grove of death’ scene bitterly criticises the Belgian companies for reducing Africans to ‘moribund shapes’ of ‘ pain’, ‘despair’, and ‘disease’, abandoned to starvation and slow death (156). He shows how the six black men were brought to the Company Station to work, but once they had been used up they were thrown away like useless objects. Being unable to provide efficient labour that fuels imperialism, their bodies lost their capitalist value and were condemned to a fate similar to that of the rusty, decaying machines of the Company Station. The body trope, predominant in colonial literature (Low 1996, 13–24), is central in Marlow’s description. Marlow deploys it mostly to indicate that colonial economic exploitation was not a vain word, but an


indelible stigma inscribed in the Blacks’ corporeality. His ambition consists of shifting the Africans from the state of ‘raw matter’ that feeds a cannibalistic empire into dignified human beings. Marlow’s effort to rehabilitate Africans is gradual, and, admittedly, not definitive. Accordingly, his evaluation of the Blacks is both inclusive and exclusive, displaying distance as well as collusion with colonialist representations of otherness. Marlow assimilates the Africans’ faces to ‘grotesque masks’ (151), which makes him, to an extent, guilty of racial prejudice (Achebe 1988; Firchow 1999; Harrison 2003). At the same time, he recognises a bond of fellowship, not to say of fraternity with them. Marlow through this rhetoric subscribes to an ethic of solidarity and universal brotherhood that somehow transcends the limits of race and culture. On the whole, his rehabilitating initiative is in compliance with the tradition of ‘romantic exoticism’. He describes the natives as ‘noble savages’ and likens them to a pleasant spectacle. They are, in his words, a ‘great comfort to look at’ (151). The Africans and their continent are here assimilated to ‘frankness’, naturalness, and delight. ‘The voice of the surf,’ which is metonymic of Africa, has the positive pleasure of a brother’s speech; the Africans’ physical expression is as natural and true as the surf itself (151). The two form an authentic alternative to modernity’s discontents, symbolised by the despised faithless ‘pilgrims’ of progress, that is the other company agents competing with the protagonist. Marlow makes the body his focal point. But unlike the moribund Blacks of the grove of death, the African paddlers described in this scene have vitality and energy of movement – features which challenge these colonial image of Blacks as indolent and passive. For Marlow the Africans’ re-humanisation is contingent on their physical rehabilitation. By insisting that the paddlers ‘had bone, [and] muscle’, too, Marlow resituates the Africans as human beings endowed with physical characteristics shared by the human species. The humanist principles he adopts lead him to distance himself from the racist theories which reduce Africans to beasts, immune to pain and suffering. To these basic features Marlow later adds other characteristics which bring the Blacks and Whites closer to each other: No, they were not inhuman. . . . They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (186).


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Marlow recognises the Africans’ humanity and kinship with Europeans, but for all his good will he reintegrates the natives into mankind merely as the civilised man’s Others, not as Europe’s true equals. The Africans stand therefore for those primitive, mindless ancestors that Europe had long lost to modernity. Their remoteness is suggested by both their physical difference (‘eyeballs glistening’, ‘faces like grotesque masks’) and their inarticulate speech. Although he acknowledges the Africans’ capacity for joy and grief, congeniality and restraint, Marlow in the end confines them in a natural state. By denying the Africans’ speech coherence and articulacy, he implicitly subscribes to the classical discourse of barbarism. He seems to emulate Aristotle’s cultural, racial and linguistic theories which deem the barbarians incapable of culture and civilisation.

Marlow’s ambivalence: where does Conrad stand in all this? The above-mentioned discrepancy shows how deep down Marlow holds onto Europe’s assumptions of supremacy. His attitude to African cultures finally proves as ambiguous as is his approach to colonialism. By making culture and race relative, he ostensibly questions cultural and racial arrogance. However, in defining the Blacks as barbaric he implicitly reasserts the superiority of Western civilisation. Marlow’s manifest ambivalence echoes Conrad’s own contradictions. As Terry Eagleton rightly observes: ‘Conrad neither believes in the cultural superiority of the colonialist nations nor rejects them outright. [His] viewpoint disturbs imperialist assumptions to the precise degree that it reinforces’ (1976, 135). We may dwell upon this insightful observation to suggest that Conrad does not straightforwardly sanction or censure assumptions of cultural superiority for direct personal reasons and implicit ideological motives. As a reminder, Conrad emigrated to England from Poland, an Austro-Russian colony until 1919. Endorsing imperial Europe’s presumed supremacy would have meant admitting ipso facto Russia’s cultural superiority. To show outright disapproval of Western cultural arrogance would have, on the other hand, sounded like a censure of his adopted country’s expansionist ambitions. Conrad’s overall ambivalence about colonialism should therefore be assessed in the light of this wider historical context of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe and Western expansionism overseas. His complex, elusive vision of empire is strongly determined by these confluent forces. It stems from his African and Eastern journeys


into former European colonies as well as from the traumatic childhood experiences of Russian, Prussian and Austrian domination of Poland (Acheraïou 2004b). Conrad’s early experience of foreign oppression had lasting effects on his life and fiction. It made him familiar with the violence of colonialism that he had later encountered in the exotic lands he sailed to. This historical background is a defining factor worth having in mind when addressing Conrad’s vision of colonialism. It has shaped the author’s attitude towards imperialism and deeply affects his conception of identity, culture, history and progress – major concerns in his works. Unlike most British authors of his generation, Conrad was a former colonised subject who later became a citizen of an imperialist nation to which he showed indefectible loyalty. The core of his contradiction in relation to imperialism lies precisely in his being a hybrid figure that combines the colonised and coloniser, the once subjected native and now (marginal) member of an imperial dominant centre.10 By virtue of his complex history, Conrad belongs at once to the periphery and centre, caught like Nina and Marlow, in the tangles of the imperial drama. He is at once a detached critic of imperialism and a helpless participant in the imperial game. A source of moral and ideological tensions, this hybrid cast makes Conrad a privileged depicter of colonialism, with deep insight into the world of the coloniser and colonised. Long before writing his first colonial tales, the young Conrad had been a direct victim of and helpless witness to the cruelties of Russian imperialism. As a child he had endured with his parents’ exile and brutality because of his father’s struggle for Poland’s independence. When he subsequently decided to leave his native country at the age of seventeen, he did so to flee Poland’s predicament and escape from being enrolled in the Russian army (Stape 2007). Conrad’s migration from Poland to Britain involves a shift from a peripheral colony to a dominant imperial centre – a leap that makes him a colonial writer with a peculiar status. With his naturalisation Conrad became a member of mighty British empire. He eagerly adopted British culture and espoused some of its prejudices, such as the myth of England as an ideal coloniser. By closely identifying with his surrogate motherland (that is England) Conrad intended to recover national pride and the social status that his family lost after the Russian invasion. His loyalty to a formerly colonised Poland and contemporary imperial Britain determines his conception of culture and race. It also conditions his perception of primitiveness and barbarism.


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Reading Conrad’s ‘barbarian’ trope in the light of Herodotus’s, Michel de Montaigne’s and Jean de la Bruyère’s observations Conrad manifestly supports a humanist empire and questions to an extent colonialism’s racist stereotypes. His personal narrator, Marlow associates Africans with ‘savages’ and ‘rudimentary souls’. He uses time and again the word ‘savage’ to describe them and very often casts it in a positive light, ranging from innocence and authenticity to restraint and even beauty. He refers to Kurtz’s black mistress as ‘savage and superb’ (225), a valuing qualification that equates Africans with symbols of physical beauty and aesthetic pleasure. More significantly, Conrad in Heart of Darkness reproduces the colonial discourse of barbarism condensed in the term ‘savage’ and complicates its import. This concept, usually applied to the natives, is associated with the colonial agents, and particularly with Kurtz’s methods in the interior. Marlow insists on the shared barbarity of the coloniser and colonised, but readily re-evaluates the concept and distinguishes two opposing types of savagery. The first is a plain, down-to-earth form of barbarity, characteristic of those leading an existence unfettered by the trappings of civilisation. This is a ‘pure, uncomplicated savagery’ (222) which is personified by the Blacks. In the ‘vile’ atmosphere of the Inner Station this unsophisticated savagery appears to Marlow as ‘a positive relief’ from the pervasive colonial abuses. The second type, represented by Kurtz and the other colonial agents, may be defined a contrario as a subtle, calculated savagery which knowingly spreads cruelty and desolation to serve imperialist and capitalistic ends. Unlike Almayer’s Folly where the adjective savage is employed to describe exclusively the natives, in Heart of Darkness it is made reversible, characterising both Africans and Europeans. Barbarity is presented here as a universal feature, common to all peoples regardless of geography, culture and skin colour. In this, Conrad seems to emulate such authors as Herodotus, Michel de Montaigne and Jean de La Bruyère who centuries earlier drew attention to the reversibility of the concept ‘barbarian’. Contrary to most of his contemporaries, Herodotus, whom Plutarch accused of being a ‘barbarophile’, was more nuanced in his representation and evaluation of foreign peoples, especially the Persians that fifth century Greeks generally regarded as backward and inferior (Malkin 2001). Although he supported Greece and saw Persia as the enemy, he recognised the value of Persia’s culture and the merit of its military force. Herodotus acknowledged that the Ionian cities under Persian rule were


well treated, but went on to argue that people tend to regard those who are different from themselves as barbarians (Isaac 2004). This observation was later restated in the works of Montaigne and La Bruyère. Montaigne in ‘Des Cannibales’ (1595) broaches cultural relativity and stresses the relativity notion of the term ‘barbarian’: ‘Everyone calls barbarity that which differs from their customs’ (318). Likewise, La Bruyère in his Caractères (1688) reminds the reader that difference always makes us look barbarian to other people. On first appearances, therefore, La Bruyère warns against conceit and cultural solipsism. But a close investigation of the author’s apparent openness and dialogism unveils persistent cultural and racial biases. When he deliberates on French culture, La Bruyère uses a plethora of superlatives leaving no doubt as to his sense of pride in his own national culture. Indeed, although he applies the word barbarian to French culture, La Bruyère implicitly ranks it higher than other cultures: ‘With a language so pure, with such refined modes of dress, cultivated mores, good laws, and a white face, we are barbarians to many a people’ (1688, 312). Of the utmost significance here is the condensation of three major elements – language, culture, and skin colour – which take the shape of determinant cultural and racial markers. La Bruyère suggests that the French may appear barbarian to other people. At the same time, he infers that thanks to their cultural refinement, to their ‘pure language’, and ‘white skin’ the French are allegedly superior. He clearly combines the privilege of linguistic purity with that of whiteness to reinforce French supremacy. Conrad revisits the notions of whiteness and barbarism in terms that call to mind La Bruyère’s rhetoric. Marlow quotes these following words from Kurtz’s report: We whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them (savages) in the nature of supernatural beings – we approach them with the might as of a deity’, and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded, etc.’ (208). Conrad’s reference to La Bruyère is manifest, and Marlow’s bracketing of the word ‘savages’ deserves close attention. The white man’s supernatural power evoked by La Bruyère finds its fullest personification in Kurtz who is presented as ‘a supernatural being’. The black tribes looked upon him as an ‘extraordinary’, trans-historical figure that blended attributes of whiteness and supremacy, civilisation and savagery. The word ‘savagery’ in its variants complicates our interpretation of this statement. Its integration into the overall utterance gives it an ambiguous turn which


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requires careful reading. The very bracketing of the concept ‘savages’ signals Marlow’s convoluted approach to colonialism, particularly his relation to the discourse of barbarism. Like Marlow who is both at the heart and at the periphery of imperial ideology, the term ‘savages’ is at once part and graphically distinct from the rest of the sentence. It is consequently both useful and somewhat redundant. The word’s sheltered status, which suggests Marlow’s, by inference Conrad’s, unease about applying such a derogatory terminology to his Western characters, affects the meaning of the statement. Read as an autonomous, separate particle the bracketed concept ‘(savages)’ serves merely to clarify the vague pronoun ‘them’ that precedes it. But if we remove the brackets the statement releases new meanings. This proliferation of meaning reflects both the novella’s multi-layered signification and Marlow’s ambivalence about culture and race. Let us read this sentence without the brackets and see which other meanings can be elicited: ‘We whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, must necessarily appear to them savages in the nature of supernatural beings. . .’. The outcome sounds very much like La Bruyère’s assertion that Conrad, who was versed in the European classics and in French literature in particular, might have had in mind when framing this utterance.11 As shown by Kurtz’s status among the black tribes, Conrad’s Whites must surely appear barbarians in the nature of supernatural beings. That is to say, savages, but of a higher kind; just as the French in La Bruyère’s depictions are, to use an oxymoron, superior barbarians. Owing to the brutal methods in which he indulges Kurtz must have been viewed as a cruel savage by his devoted black tribes. Conversely, his whiteness and the power it confers may account for the divine role that he had been assigned. In the final analysis, La Bruyère’s and Conrad’s respective gloss over culture and race brings into the open the limits of cultural relativism. Their ambivalence in relation to Otherness testifies to their difficulty of radically questioning Europe’s assumptions of superiority. However, by linking whiteness and savagery both writers show that darkness is shared by all peoples. The frontiers between white and black, enlightenment and darkness seem to blur, in consequence. Civilisation and savagery, Conrad and la Bruyère suggest, mutually inform and contest one another, which makes unqualified praise or rejection of either, at best cynically unrealistic, and at worst blatantly demagogic.

9 Pedagogy of Re-Colonisation or the Peaceful Re-Conquest: André Gide’s Voyage au Congo

A Nobel Prize winner in 1947, Gide was a prolific French writer and literary critic. His influence was felt by many French writers, such as Albert Camus, André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre. For Gide, writing and travel were interrelated. His journeys to Africa and Russia1 served thereby as an immediate source of inspiration in his fiction. Voyage au Congo is based on his travels with his lover Marc Allégret across French Equatorial Africa from July 1925 to May 1926. In 1925, Gide asked the French colonial government for an official ‘free’ mission to Equatorial Africa expressing the wish to undertake some detailed ethnographic study of the populations living in those areas. Soon after the approval of his mission, he was allowed to call on French colonial administrators for accommodation, transportation and native carriers (Putnam 2001, 96). He went successively to the Middle Congo (renamed the Republic of the Congo in 1958), to Oubangui-Chari (the Central African Republic), and then briefly to Chad and Cameroon.2 The journal sparked a great deal of criticism on its publication in 1927. It was hailed by left-wing intellectuals as progressive, but was denounced by right-wing intellectuals and politicians. Gide relates his African adventure and criticises the colonial administration. He attacks the Large Concessions regime (Régimes des Grandes Concessions) – by virtue of which parts of the colonies were conceded to national companies to exploit the natural resources. Most of the concessions had been accorded in 1899 by the government on a thirty-year lease basis. But due to bankruptcy and amalgamation their number dwindled from its original forty to a few powerful units by the 1920s. The companies were in charge of recruiting local labour and their methods were usually inhumane. In theory, this concessionary regime was under the supervision of the colonial administration, but in practice the companies’ agents in 158

André Gide’s Voyage au Congo

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place had absolute power. The directors rarely visited their companies, which they managed from their Paris offices with the collaboration of their agents in the colonies.3 Moreover, the colonial administration was often complicit with these autocratic agents whose cruelty is embodied by Pacha. The latter is the administrator of Boda, N’Goto and Bambio. His unrestrained power terrorised the native populations for the benefit of the omnipotent Compagnie Forestière Sanga-Oubangui.

Saving the French empire: Gide, a modern Curtius After three days of exhausting walk from N’Goto, Gide arrived in Bambio where he discovered Pacha’s atrocities. He had been informed by the indigenous chief that twenty rubber collectors working for the Compagnie Forestière were ‘forced to carry heavy logs in the burning sun all day long, and were beaten if they fell off the pace’ (102). The notorious ‘Bambio Ball’ lasted a whole day and took place in the presence of MM. Pacha and Maudurier, the Compagnie Forestière’s agent. This appalling incident was later ascertained by Garron, a French hunter, who learned from Pacha himself that his repressive methods caused over a thousand deaths. To confirm their ruthlessness and loyalty to their ‘commander’, the guards and the administrator’s allies felt compelled to return home with the ears and genital parts of their victims. In narrating Pacha’s Kurtzian methods Gide gives a chilling account of the companies’ agents’ brutality and the oppressive machinery they had put in place. He reports their abuses and indicts the policy of forced labour that the French companies implemented with method and zeal, thus imitating their neighbouring Belgian companies in the Congo.4 Gide describes how the companies forced the natives to leave their villages for long periods to work in the railway or collect natural rubber for survival and to pay exacting taxes. Generally the Africans were rarely paid appropriate prices for the rubber that they delivered. Worse still, the working conditions on the railway often proved lethal to a staggering number of the forced workers. According to Hochschild, about twenty thousand Africans perished during the construction of the Congo-Océan (1921–34), a figure exceeding the number of the natives’ lives claimed by King Leopold’s neighbouring railway (1999). In Europe, particularly in Britain, the Belgian atrocities were harshly condemned. The Congo Reform Association, presided over by Edmund Dene Morel, criticised the administration of the Congo Free State for its violence and human rights infringements. Literary and public figures such as Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement denounced


these atrocities and held Leopold II directly responsible for them. The anti-Congo Campaign’s ethical turn is no doubt praiseworthy, but its critical edge is undermined by its selective critique of colonialism. While its members launched a vehement attack on the Belgian atrocities, real or alleged, they remained curiously silent about France’s misconduct in the Congo and other African colonies, where similar violations took place. For instance, Conrad in Heart of Darkness and in the letters that he sent to Casement denounced King Leopold’s abuses, but elsewhere he praised imperial France, although the latter perpetrated identical excesses in Equatorial Africa. Conrad’s Francophilia might have contributed to his corroborating the myth of France as a model colonising nation, which was paramount in French colonial politics and literature: ‘The French were the only European nation who knew how to colonise; they had none of the spirit of Mr. Kipling’s “You bloody niggerisms” ’ (Conrad quoted by Ford 1924, 259–60). Conrad pursues here the views of such writers as Alexis de Tocqueville and Jules Ferry who considered the French as model civilisers. He valorises France’s ability to efficiently colonise other peoples, just as he views Britain as an exemplary imperial state.5 Similarly, Gide who admired Conrad, rehearses this idyllic vision of French imperialism, but uncovers inadmissible practices that question the idealised image of imperial France. He relates the ruthlessness of the labour policies in Equatorial Africa and compares the Africans’ exploitation to slavery. His observation is that the French, like their Belgian counterparts, merely substituted the slavery they found in Africa for an exploitative system, as cruel and morally unsustainable. He assimilates the agents of the rubber and railway companies to tyrants, cruelly punishing recalcitrant labourers, burning villages and randomly massacring the inhabitants. Gide’s abrasive verdict echoes the speech about the Congo Free State delivered by Leonard Courtney, chair of the Royal Statistical Society. Here is Courtney’s declaration that Lindqvist cites in Exterminate all the Brutes: ‘The Belgians have replaced the slavery they found by a system of servitude at least as objectionable. Of what certain Belgians can do in the way of barbarity Englishmen are painfully aware. Mr. Courtney mentions an instance of a Captain Rom, who ornamented his flower-beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition. This is the Belgian idea of the most effectual method of promoting the civilisation of the Congo’ (1996, 29).6 Gide recounts incidents where Blacks were chastised, sometimes killed if they were not sufficiently productive. For him, colonialism as it stands is a force of darkness and destruction, not to say a cannibalistic system.


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The railway company building the Congo-Océan stretching from Brazzaville to the coast is equated with ‘a ferocious devourer of human lives’ (200), a metaphor that reinforces the ghoulish image of empire. The latter’s corrupt administration and inhumane concessionary system are strongly indicted, but its self-proclaimed ideals are spared. It is no surprise, for the 1920s were far from being a time of radical anti-colonialism. Most French well-meaning intellectuals, including Gide, assaulted colonialism’s excesses, without questioning the imperial idea that paved the way for them. Voyage au Congo mirrors the intellectual, political and ideological ambiance of the 1920s, a turning point for both French and British colonialism. At that time colonialism was at its peak. Britain had the vastest empire and France the second largest. In both France and Britain public support for the empire was at its height during the 1920s and 1930s. Millions of people swarmed into the colonial exhibitions organised in celebration of the empire’s grandeur. The media and schools actively participated in bolstering the imperial idea (Girardet 1972; Ageron 1993; Booth and Rigby 2000, 3).7 However, amidst this imperial euphoria emerged increasing doubts about the colonial project, generated by native protests and uprisings. A cluster of forces can be cited as being at the root of the colonies’ unrest. The 1916 Irish Rising, the impact of the First World War on the psychology of the colonised peoples,8 Gandhi’s peaceful revolt, the Black Movement in the USA, and the 1921–26 Berber revolt in Morocco are among the major sources that inspired native dissidence. Colonialism’s well-established foundations began to shake. Fears of the empire’s collapse loomed large in the minds of British and French colonisers. Western critics of colonialism’s excesses, particularly the French leftwing intellectuals, viewed immediate social and economic reforms as the answer to the natives’ discontents. By the mid-1920s many French Socialist and Communist thinkers, including Gide, advocated reforms under the aegis of the metropolitan government. Gide’s text echoes these leftists’ support for reforms in the French African colonies. The same 1920s were also a period of intellectual and political awakening in the colonies, witnessing the emergence of a dissident indigenous literature in the colonisers’ languages. The Antillean writer, René Maran (1887–1960), a functionary in the Ministry for the Colonies, was one of the first native writers to rail against French imperial ills. In Batouala (1921), Maran criticises colonialism’s devastating effects on the populations of Equatorial Africa and advocates social, administrative and economic reforms. This novel crudely


brought onto the metropolitan scene France’s inhuman proceedings. On its publication in 1921, it stirred a controversy at a time when French colonialism was at its apogee and its ideals were taken for granted.9 In the novel’s preface Maran refers to the numerous casualties caused by the forced labour policies, showing how the population of villages such as L’Ouahm fell from 10,000 inhabitants in 1911 to 1080 in 1918 (1921, 10). Similarly, he implores his fellow French writers to rally to his humanitarian position and condemn France’s practices (12). Maran’s plea seems to have been heard, to the author’s satisfaction, by Gide and Denise Moran who published respectively Voyage au Congo (1927) and Tchad (1934). Gide follows in the steps of Maran and such earlier critics as Felicien Challaye, a professor of philosophy, who criticised in 1905 in Les Cahiers de la quinzaine the French administration’s injustice in the Congo. Gide’s report about the French companies had seemingly caused the National Assembly to act. It was believed that during the debates over the renewal of the government’s concessions, the French Parliament had read some excerpts from his journal. Although irrefutable evidence is hard to find on this matter, there is reason to think that the Parliament’s decision not to renew the concessions beyond their 1929 expiring date might have been influenced by a possible reading of the journal (Putnam 2001, 107). Whether the journal had affected the government’s decision is a debated and debatable issue. What is yet unquestionable is that Gide’s account triggered heated discussions about the French colonial ethos. He criticised the French methods, but remained deeply convinced of the legitimacy of France’s mission in Africa. The most concrete example of his ambiguity lies in his attitude to the notion of exploitation itself. Throughout he lends the African workers an attentive ear and proves a fair judge. He patiently listens to these forced labourers, who stealthily come to complain about the companies’ cruelty. On each occasion Gide encourages them to rebel against the economic injustices by demanding fair prices. He also advises them to weigh themselves the rubber they collected to avoid abuse from the rapacious company agents. The irony of the whole situation, though, is that Gide who is keen to curb the empire’s excesses finally participates in the exploitation of the Africans by paying his carriers a miserable 1f.25, food or return fees not included. In the end, his ambivalence is hardly surprising, at least for two reasons. First, contradiction or ‘aptitudes for contraries’, as he confessed, was almost a second nature (Nersoyan 1969, 14). Second, his propensity to change opinions is compounded by an identification with the French empire’s ideals and close relationship with some colonial administrators, including Coppet, Gide’s friend and Governor General of the Congo.


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Gide’s narrative deftly plays on the notions of verisimilitude and plausibility in ways that may distract us from the text’s aesthetic dimension or literariness. Of course, although Gide uses a direct, journalistic mode to reinforce the narrative’s reality-effect, his journal remains a fictional account. It mediates an observed reality, with the inevitable distortions entailed in every representation. The fact that this text ‘places the field of truth at a premium over imagination or invention’ is both manifest and barely surprising (Putman 2001, 95). For such a scheme is consistent with the ethnographic objective that Gide had officially declared before undertaking his African mission. Strictly speaking, Voyage au Congo does not offer an ethnographic study of French Equatorial Africa. It nonetheless contains ethnographic representations, or in Foucault’s words, ‘truths’. These truths are mediated to us and we are called upon to react to them. Gide clearly enhances the truth principle of his tale and wants his readers to adhere to it. This skilful strategy should not yet divert the reader from the fact that this narrative is not a political tract with a straightforward message, but a complex, elusive literary account. The various discourses about colonialism, culture and race that the narrative articulates are therefore not ‘irrefutable truths’, as Putnam states (2001, 95), but complex representations where truth and invention, reality and imagination relentlessly shape and challenge one another. Gide productively blends reality and fiction in order to shape a complex critique of colonialism. But confident that France’s rule in the Congo should not cease, he merely argues for an efficient and more acceptable form of colonisation. What he chiefly wishes is that France would eradicate the colonial injustice and rethink its imperial role in Africa. This would reconcile colonisation with its self-proclaimed ideals and revise France’s colonial methods. By enlivening the colonial idea, Gide hopes to achieve a humanist empire which requires a reform of the French imperial policy. He expects these reforms to bolster France’s image as a model colonising nation of which he affirms to be a proud representative. Furthermore, the terrain of reform was then easy to ride in Africa. Indeed, what the majority of Africans wanted during the 1920s was not to end colonisation, but to make it tolerable. Gide’s support of reforms was thus in conformity with the Africans’ struggle for a fairer, less oppressive colonial system. In most of Africa then the native leaders did not engage in radical politics, they mainly fought for social and economic improvements, including an immediate end to forced labour (Boahen 1989, 37). As he calls for reforms, Gide reasserts the need to spread the values of rationalism and progress he embodies. From the outset, he presents himself as a vehicle of rationalism, brought up on Cartesian


principles characterised by the love of logic and fixity: ‘For someone like myself who was brought up according to rational methods, I knew by order of my mother, nothing but fixed beds, the reason why I am today particularly subject to sea-sickness’ (7). The tone of the report is immediately set. Rationalism as both a theme and project is given primacy. Thanks to the rational, Cartesian education, stressed above, Gide becomes a principal conduit of knowledge and authority. In this narrative, Gide’s belief in Cartesianism, which he considers ‘the only discipline neutral and broad enough to be submitted to the widest range of mentalities’ (1933, 413), is coated with a spiritual dimension. The combination of the rational and the spiritual elevates the author to an absolute authority with a high political and moral mission: ‘I plunged headlong into this journey like Curtius into an abyss. I already have the impression that, to be more precise, I no longer wanted it but it rather imposed itself upon me like a sort of inescapable fate, as is the case with all important events in my life’ (7–8). In this statement Gide compares his African travels to Curtius’s dive into an abyss, an evocative image which both reinforces his journey’s spiritual dimension and erects him into a sacrificial figure. Curtius is a Roman hero. According to legend, in 362 BC a deep chasm, which was apparently created when lightening struck, opened in the Roman forum. The town’s well-being and permanence depended on closing this chasm. An oracle announced that the abyss would be only closed if Rome’s most precious possession was thrown into it. Curtius, a brave Roman citizen, decided to sacrifice himself. He jumped armed and on horseback into the chasm, which instantly closed. The place was later called Lacus Curtius. Thanks to his courage and self-sacrifice Curtius saved his town, and legend had later taken care to immortalise his name. Gide explicitly identifies with the Roman hero. He impersonates a modern Curtius and acts as France’s colonial conscience, eager to save his country’s civilising mission. His inexorable African duty is likened to a divine preordained command. His heavy social and political task is seen compounded by a spiritual or ethical responsibility entailed in the very word ‘mission’. This term brings together the secular and religious. The welding of the two spheres makes Gide a double agent serving both Christianity and rationalism, two energising forces which go hand in hand in this narrative. He is a representative of the French empire pursuing political and ideological ends; he also operates as a religious missionary and a vehicle of enlightenment. Gide takes up the role of a saviour, keen to rehabilitate the French colonial enterprise by undertaking social, economic and educational reforms.


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Education and training are at the heart of his elaborate programme. Most of the time, he behaves as a teacher dispensing wisdom and knowledge to the Africans he encounters. In view of the French civilising mission’s self-proclaimed ideals, Gide’s relentless efforts to tutor his guide and interpreter, Adoum, indicate a wider ambition to enlighten the Dark Continent. He particularly deplores the lack of funds necessary to the civilising mission, complaining about the dearth of competent teachers, the inadequacy of the school programmes and scarcity of books. These failings, he declares, impede the development of the colony and leave unquenched the African children’s thirst for learning: It is really outrageous to see in the whole colony children so attentive, so keen on learning, and yet so miserably helped by such unqualified teachers. If only we sent them books and appropriate blackboards! But what use teaching the kids of these equatorial regions that ‘slowburning stoves are very dangerous’ and that ‘our ancestors, the Gauls, lived in caves’ (151). In Gide’s logic, educating the African masses into responsible citizens of empire is inseparable from the improvement of the colonies’ administration. But as he condemns the colonial governors’ corruption and incompetence he lays most of the blame on the Parisian officials for sending insufficiently trained administrators to Africa. Obviously, Gide’s advocacy of economic, social and educational reforms proceeds both from humanitarian motives and ideological and imperialistic aims. As he does not question the rightness of the civilising mission, Gide points to the ways France’s rule can be improved and validated. Significantly, his intention to curb colonialism’s ills and win over Africans to the ‘good’ and ‘generous’ France10 entails a pedagogy of (re)colonisation in which matter and idea entwine, the first acting as fuel for the second. Aware that colonialism and commerce are enmeshed Gide is engaged in literally buying back the natives, specifically the village leaders who often functioned as an auxiliary force to colonial rule. He intends to bring them back to the colonial fold by means of money and good example. His strategy emulates Tocqueville’s idea of ‘peaceful conquest’, in which colonisation takes the shape of a transaction between the colonial officials and indigenous chiefs.11 Gide’s gentle re-appropriation of the Africans may as well have been induced by the methods of the nineteenth-century British non-conformist Protestant missionaries in South Africa whose philosophy consisted of evangelising and civilising the natives by ‘personal example’.12 A Protestant at war with the


established religion(s), Gide takes after these missionaries, trying in turn to civilise Africans by personal example. On his arrival in Batara, he feels pride and joy for having ‘won over [the Batara village chief] by our good behaviour and substantial cash’ (114). Gide’s strategy of re-colonisation also conjures up David Livingstone’s idea of colonialism. Like Livingstone (1813–73), who intended to improve Africans through the ‘inestimable blessings’ of ‘those two pioneers of civilisation – Christianity and commerce’ (1858, 21), Gide blends religion, commerce and the bourgeois ideal of progress. Material interests and moral principles converge and together consolidate the humanist empire he promotes. Money forms the sinew of his mission in Africa. Conscious of the power of cash in winning back Africans to France, he is anxious to deal with the chiefs as fairly as possible: ‘Tormented by the idea that we have not been generous enough with the village chief, we put, at the last stopping place, a two hundred franc banknote in an envelope and had it sent to him by a runner from Batara’ (130). As he tries to right France’s colonial wrongs Gide restates the legitimacy of the French empire. The necessity to re-conquer the hearts and minds of the Africans is emphatically reasserted and the benefits of his pedagogy of re-colonisation enhanced: A rural subdued area; we were expecting a lot of bad faith from the people. Our visit scared away many natives into the bush. But one could have seen how easy it was to recover possession of those who remain as soon as they understand that we do not come to their detriment. . . . How proud one can feel in winning back again this people to France. (128) Gide prides himself and his companions on having conquered the hearts of the remaining villagers by revealing to them the benefits of colonisation. He is persuaded that the colonial project is not a thing of the past. But, he is also aware that this promising future can only be achieved if the imperial injustice is alleviated and the civilising mission’s objectives re-explained. Implicit in this didactic rhetoric is that the colonial idea is still on the order of the day; it simply needs to be ethicised and updated. Gide cites the example of Lamblin, the governor of Oubangui-Chari, to consolidate his own approach to colonialism. He presents him as an efficient administrator who has political charisma and knows how to buy off the tribal chiefs and thus maintain his authority. The governor’s people seem content and the district of Bosoum of which he is in charge reflects colonisation at its best: ‘A neat, clean village,


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a decent chief in European clothes not the least ridiculous, wearing a spick-and-span helmet, and speaking French well’ (130). Gide’s praise extends to the unnamed dignified indigenous chief. The two collaborators exemplify an idyllic empire where the coloniser and colonised cooperate in the good of the whole imperial community. This occurrence of successful colonisation amidst endemic colonial corruption and incompetence reinforces Gide’s conviction that imperialism is not uniformly negative, in which case its redemption is still possible.

Building a humanist empire: fusion of the religious imperium and kingdom of commerce An enlightened liberal writer, Gide combines the role of a humanist rationalist with that of a benevolent missionary. He embodies the spirit of capitalism, evangelism and bourgeois morality, keen to build an ideal empire based on progress and spiritual elevation. His project intends to fuse the capitalist ethics and the spiritual imperium, the kingdom of God and commerce. In the same breath he strives to reconnect colonisation to its self-proclaimed ideals and seeks to restore Christianity to its essence. As he explicitly stated in Numquid et tu? . . . , Gide had mixed feelings about both Protestantism and Catholicism, but did not renounce his Christian faith: ‘I am neither Catholic nor Protestant; I am simply Christian’ (1926, 10). In his journey across Africa he protests against the established religion which teaches the Blacks superstition, fear, and hate instead of transmitting them the evangelical spirit of love and light bestowed by the ‘primitive Christianity’ to which he wants to initiate Africans. Recovery of this religious essence involves both teaching the Christian faith in its true light and fighting the competing Islam which impinges on Christianised Africa: On the other side of Hell, Fort Archambault, the march of Islam, where, far away from barbarism, we come into contact with another civilisation, another culture. A culture undoubtedly still rudimentary, but showing already refinement, a feeling of nobility and hierarchy, a spirituality lacking a sense of purpose, and a taste for the immaterial (149). At one level, Gide’s description of Islam corroborates the views of such writers as Robert Randau and Louis Bertrand who dismissed this religion as ‘fanatic’ and ‘backward’. At another level, it echoes the perceptions of colonials like Maréchal Lyautey, who considered Islam more progressive


and advanced than African traditional religions. At Fort Archambault, Gide ranks Islamic civilisation higher than African cultures, but betrays worries about the threatening Islam. These anxieties reflect the colonial administration’s fear and hostility towards Islam, prevalent in both the Belgian and French Congo (Boahen 1989, 355–6). His overall discussion of culture and religion is strongly informed by the nineteenth-century theories of classification of natural species, peoples and cultures. The evolutionary theory works full circle in his argument. Black cultures are described as being stuck at the lowest evolutionary stage and confined in backwardness. The Arab/Oriental/Muslim civilisation is in the intermediary stratum, and European cultures stand, by inference, at the top of the hierarchy. This formulation of religious and cultural difference echoes Richard Burton’s observations. On his journey to Lake Tanganyika, the English explorer compared the advanced state of Arab cultures with those of Africa and further described Africans as ‘lazy, childlike, [and] lost to barbarity’. To go further back in history, the parallel established between these two civilisations recalls Sepulveda’s famous opposition of Western and Amerindian cultures. Gide concentrates on similarities and valorises sameness – architectural refinement, elaborate social organisation, specialisation, and individual property – but, like Sepulveda, he tends to assimilate difference and absence to inferiority. He detects in the Islamic civilisation signs of ‘refinement’ and nobility, but finds it ‘rudimentary’ and wanting a sense of purpose. Gide’s attitude to difference wavers between incorporation and exclusion, recognition of the Africans’ humanity and contempt for their cultures and racial features. His numerous interactions with the African tribal chiefs and working masses do not disrupt his identity nor question the security of his native culture. They reinforce instead his sense of cultural superiority, which gives the impression that his face-to-face encounter with the radical Other does not lead to verticality or transcendence. It fails to reach that epiphanic13 moment in which the experience of difference is expected to generate a new self, or at least a new relation that deeply reshapes identity. In most of his dealings with the natives, Gide remains profoundly selfcentered and offers no single scene showing a truly dialogic or reciprocal ‘I–Thou’ relation. He tends to establish with Africans a one-dimensional, almost cannibalistic ‘I–It’ relation whereby the Other is perceived merely as an object to appropriate and domesticate.14 Of course, Gide occasionally shows solidarity with and responsibility for these Africans but remains impermeable to their difference. Being too engrossed in the idyllic French imperial self that he promotes, he retreats into the comfortable


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position of a knowledgeable subject confidently narrating and soberly evaluating difference. All through the narrative he reduces Africa to a spectacle and presents himself as a performer acting his role of a benevolent, enlightened coloniser keen to heal the Dark Continent’s ills; and on the whole, the Africa that he depicts amounts to an irrational, core-less geography: ‘But as is always the case in this boundless land, nothing is centered; lines go off haphazardly in all directions; everything is without limits’ (136). Gide’s cluttered Africa resembles Forster’s ‘muddled’ India. It is an unbounded locale devoid of a synchronising principle likely to help the multiple lines converge into a coherent, intelligible space. In French the word ‘sense’ means both ‘meaning’ and ‘direction’. In the abovementioned statement the term is also used polysemically, which brings together space and signification, geography and text. Owing to this conflation, Gide the narrator takes into his hands two more functions: a surrogate cartographer in charge of reshaping the African jumbled geography, and a semiotician eager to make sense of this flimsy, incoherent transcript suggested by the myriad lines going in all directions. In the same flourish he seeks to reduce the core-less Dark Continent to a tamed, rational space and turn what resembles a confusing locale into legible cartographic material. Inferred from Gide’s conception of territoriality is an effort to reoccupy Africa’s missing centre and metaphorically reshape the heterogeneous, polyphonic continent into a monological text. This observation leads me to argue that rather than ‘an empty signifier’ (2001, 98), as Walter Putnam states, the Africa described in Voyage au Congo is manifestly a site of plenitude and overflowing signification. It is a saturated, de-centered space that Gide desperately tries to contain and codify. As a narrating and knowing subject, Gide constitutes a concentrated site of power and authority, eager to bring the Dark Continent in the orbit of Western civilisation and turn the African into a tamed Other. He condenses the role of the ethnographer, biologist, and anthropologist, prone to analysis and classification with French insects, trees, rivers and man as reference points. Africans and their fauna and flora are often defined in relation to the French parameters of norm, proportion and symmetry: I marvel at the effort of so many equatorial plants towards a symmetrical, almost crystalline, form, unsuspected in our northern regions of France where Baudelaire speaks of irregular vegetation. Papyrus, palm trees, cacti, euphorbia, candelabra grow round an axis following a precise rhythm (165).


African nature and black cultures are subjected to a rational centre that subordinates the peripheries to its order and idiosyncrasies. Considering rationality to be the measure of all things, he takes France to be the ideal faunal, floral and human norm. The natives are consequently expected to tend to French perfection; so, too, African natural species seem to extol the necessary effort to attain Gide’s ideal of fulfilment: From Kugore onwards, very beautiful rocks of granite, even culminating to heights sometimes similar to those of La Forêt de Fontainebleau. Each time the landscape shapes itself out, each time it is delineated and tends to organise itself a little, it evokes in my mind some part of France; but the French landscape is always better laid out, better designed and far more appealing (131). Anyone thinking of culture in dialogic terms will immediately realise that Gide’s observations about the African geography, cultures and religions are reductive and profoundly insular. Indeed, each time he comes across African natural species which bear a resemblance to French flora and fauna he readily reasserts the superiority of the latter. The matrix is always France. Any sign of nobility or refinement seen in Africa is subordinated to the centre, confiscated through the colonial central trope: metaphor. France as a symbol of perfection is constantly reiterated. And this places the native in an endless state of becoming: he is exhorted to achieve the Western ideal cultural and human norm and simultaneously denied access to this sublimated self. Voyage au Congo exposes Gide’s ambiguities and generally the French socialist critique of colonialism, as much as it brings forth the selfcontradictions of the French imperial ideology. France’s extolled ideals of assimilation, re-enacted in this narrative, fail to materialise in Equatorial Africa, in the same way as France’s wish to create the populations in its likeness remains dead letter. Justifiably so, for in practice the assimilation of the natives had never been desired by the colonisers, just as racial equality was unacceptable for most of the settlers in French African colonies. Within the colonial society, the natives are, as Tocqueville bluntly put it, bound to a permanent state of inferiority and subjection: ‘It is our duty neither to encourage our Muslim subjects to have any exaggerated opinion of themselves, nor to persuade them that we are bound to treat them precisely in all circumstances as our countrymen and our equals’ (1847, 199). As summed up by Tocqueville, in the civilising mission’s rhetoric the native’s reformation was theoretically at stake, but it was in practice


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continually delayed. This deferral serves two complementary objectives: first, it enforces the separation between the colonisers and colonised; second, it keeps the native riveted to the image of an ideal Europe to which he is at once lured and denied access. Paraphrasing Raoul Girardet, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler argue that ‘France’s assimilationist rhetoric had long been compromised by the need to maintain the distinctions against a colonised population’ (1997, 22). This argument corroborates Albert Memmi’s observation that ‘within the colonial framework, assimilation has turned out to be impossible’ since ‘the candidate for assimilation almost always comes to tire of the exorbitant price which he must pay and which he never finishes owing’ (1957, 123). For North Africans, for example, assimilation meant renouncing their Islamic status, which few were ready to sacrifice. In the main, most of them saw assimilation as a cultural aberration based on racial inequality. The binary superior–inferior, civilised–backward, same and Other sustaining the colonial relation recurs in Gide’s journal. His own journey is placed on the same evolutionary pattern along which the natives’ culture and history are evaluated. Its itinerary corresponds to a progression from a lower to a higher stage of development. It starts from the south of the Congo where the populations are backward and miserable and leads to the north where the peoples are refined and happy. Gide’s message is clear: the more recalcitrant in relation to Western civilisation, the more wretched the populations are and vice-versa. In the north where the Christian civilisation is adopted, colonisation seems successful. In the villages of Yakoua and in those located beyond l’Ouahm the natives are ‘dignified’, ‘refined’ and more ‘spiritual’ (173). As he proceeds northwards, Gide comes across ‘cleaner’ inhabitants, a few ‘pretty women’ and ‘well-proportioned men’ (146). The village of Pakori is the place that best illustrates the beauty, refinement, and happiness that Gide encounters on his northward ascent: This big village is marvellous. It has a certain style, a certain elegance, and the people seem happy. . . . The cabins are no longer those squalid, insalubrious and uniformly ugly huts round the village of Birki; they are rather large, of a good shape and differentiated. . . . and all these people overwhelm you, swarm joyfully around to shake the hand you tend them; and all this is carried out in an atmosphere of shouts and smiles; there is a sort of lyricism in these shows of affection. It is almost cannibalism (98). The Pakori villagers are happy and live in elegant, well-proportioned houses that look like French replicas of symmetry and beauty. Gide


delights in what he recognises as sameness, a manifest self-centredness that reveals how colonialism is a narcissistic enterprise, dependent on mirrors that magnify the imperial ego. Gide relishes the nobility that surrounds him. He is both reassured to see that colonisation is in some places successful and thrilled to discover that it is the Africans themselves who are asking for Western enlightenment. The scene describing the villagers’ welcome of Gide and his companions is an eloquent example. Their fervent reception of these emissaries of imperial France recalls the warm welcome that Napoleon had apparently received from the Egyptians during his 1798 expedition. And akin to Napoleon who claimed to have been greeted as a saviour by the Egyptians, Gide is celebrated as a messianic figure revered by a population that colonisation has seemingly made happy. Gide’s reputation as a just ‘governor’ – he was called governor by the natives – is confirmed at Pakori. In the former description, Gide equates the natives’ excitement with cannibalism; a formulation that recalls Conrad’s words in Heart of Darkness.15 In this novella Conrad compares capitalism to cannibalism in order to denounce capitalism’s voraciousness and inhumanity. In contrast, Gide employs the word cannibalism to endorse the French civilising mission alongside reaffirming France’s duty to live up to its self-proclaimed ideals. His comment infers that good colonisation is not only apt to lift the natives intellectually, spiritually and materially, but is also requested by the natives who expect to see the colonial ideals implemented. Gide suggests through this almost cannibalistic manifestation of the villagers the indigenous populations’ hunger for Western enlightenment, which he seems to personify. As this description implies, the natives’ appetite for civilisation is such that they seem to literally devour the representatives of good colonisation, that is the author and his companions. During his African travels, Gide abides by the principles of a humanist empire, assaulting in one fell swoop the French excesses and the tyranny of the tribal chiefs. On penetrating further into Africa he feels the need to free the trampled, wretched populations from the grip of their despotic leaders in order to help them recover their dignity: In the regions we crossed we could only see races trampled underfeet, not so much vile by nature as made vile, enslaved, aspiring to nothing but vulgar well-being; sad human cattle without a shepherd. Here we find again true dwelling places; private properties, specialisation at last (149–50).


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Gide describes the indigenous populations he encounters as stray human beings in need of caring, fair leaders. By labelling them ‘sad human cattle without shepherds,’ a phrase which has a manifest biblical undertone, he reiterates the myth of the European as a saviour of the natives. The Africans’ complaints about their tyrannical chief, Korami confirm Gide’s assumptions: ‘Oh! If only there were more whites in this country; if only the whites were more informed; but it was Korami who used to inform them’ (179). Fair, rational colonial power and authority is what seems required in Africa. Gide implies that the need for colonial authority is wanted by the natives themselves who are antagonised by their chiefs’ tyranny. This rhetoric of justification underlies the perception of the colonised as children asking for the coloniser’s protection and authority. By maintaining Africans in the state of immature peoples Gide legitimises French rule in the Dark Continent. To give the measure of the deficiency of the French presence in the Congo he recounts the cruelty that some village chiefs inflict upon the inhabitants. The very words in which he describes the abuses echo, not to say repeat with a slight variation, Conrad’s description of the Blacks in the ‘grove of death’ (Heart of Darkness 43): A group of prisoners brought along by the chief of a neighbouring village. Nine in all, with a rope round their necks – a rope which was in truth no more than a string – that tied them all together. They were in such a miserable shape that seeing them makes one’s heart becomes wrung by pity. Each of them was carrying a burden of manioc on their heads, heavy, most certainly, but not excessively burdensome for a healthy man; but they seemed hardly fit enough to carry their own bodies (137). Gide at once seeks to restore the Orientals’ sense of dignity by crushing their tyrants and attempts to free the blacks from racist stereotypes. He describes his ‘boys’, metonymic of the natives, in idyllic terms in order to rehabilitate them in their masters’ eyes: ‘Our “boys” are endowed with a kindness, a thoughtfulness, a zeal beyond all praise; as to our cook he cooks for us the best dishes we have ever had in the country’ (93). He further argues that it is not the ‘boys’ who deserve blame, but the masters who do not treat and address properly their servants: I keep on believing, and more and more so, that most of the ills we permanently reproach the servants of this country with, derive chiefly from the way we treat them, the way we speak to them. We can only


be grateful to ours to whom we trust everything, before whom we leave our belongings unlocked, and who have so far displayed perfect honesty. (Footnote: I am ready to admit that each master has the servant he deserves) (94). Gide’s relationship with his ‘boys’ crystallises an ideal colonial relation where master and servant, coloniser and colonised live in mutual trust and harmony. He posits himself as a ‘good’ coloniser and castigates the ‘bad’ colonists who fail to be worthy models to the natives. He, above all, rails against the absurd attitude of most colonialists who are convinced that the colonised are civilisable only by force and violence: What a solemn people! How swift we conquered them! And which devil’s trick, what persistent misunderstanding, what policy of hatred and bad faith were required to justify these brutalities, these exactions and the services (167–8). Gide reasserts the merits of ‘peaceful conquest’ and distances himself from ‘bad’ colonisers whom he sees as a real threat to the benign imperialism he promotes. Despite his humanitarian approach, however, he is unable to fully depart from Western arrogance and racial stereotypes: I keep on teaching Adoum how to read; he shows a moving industriousness and I become more and more engaging to him. What stupid nonsense the white man very often displays when he gets indignant about Blacks’ stupidity. I believe them all the same only capable of a very slow development, their brain being numb, and very often caught in a thick darkness – but how often the white man seems to have taken care to make him sink deeper (95). Gide blames the white man for dubbing the Blacks stupid, but he himself deems them capable only of little progress given their limited mental faculties. He even goes as far as to consider them devoid of logical thinking: Generally speaking, the ‘why’ is not understood by the indigenous populations; I do not even suspect the existence of any equivalent in most of their idioms. I had already noticed during a proceeding in court, in Brazaville, that to the question ‘why did these people run away from the village?’ the answer which was given revolved


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invariably around ‘how, in what manner . . . ’. It seems that the minds of these people are inapt to establish a chain of cause and effect’ (Footnote: ‘This is confirmed, commented and explained very well by Bruhl, in his book on the primitive mentality which I was not yet familiar with’) (181). Blacks are granted a capacity for description, but are denied analytical powers. They are confined in the sphere of ‘how’ and ‘what’. The ‘why’ is implicitly the realm of the white man who has the privilege of logical thinking. Gide further cites the work of Lucien Levy-Bruhl to give (pseudo)scientific validity to the implied racial prejudices, and most importantly to highlight the differences between the Whites’ and Blacks’ nervous systems. [Levy-Bruhl] evokes the hypersensitiveness of the black race towards all that is related to superstition, their fear of mystery, etc, which are all the more remarkable that he presumes, on the other hand, that the nervous system of his race is less sensible than ours – hence their resistance to pain. (133) The force of Gide’s initial humanist, liberal argument diminishes as he engages in this racialist discourse which dismisses Africans as ‘squatting macaques’ (67). With his earlier exhortation to racial equality wearing thin, he espouses a pseudo-scientific theory that assimilates Africans to human beings immune to pain and suffering. These equivocations and slippages reflect the complex dialogue in which Voyage au Congo indulges. They show how Gide is forced to navigate through various interlocking, often contradictory discourses to save the contested French colonial system. The persistent ambivalence puts him in the position of a ‘romantic humanitarian’ poised between two irreconcilable positions. The first shows him in the light of an anti-colonialist who condemns colonialism’s excesses and laments the failure of the Enlightenment’s ideals. The second reveals him in the guise of a benevolent imperialist who embraces the myths of supremacy and backs France’s right to remain in Africa to accomplish its civilising mission.

10 Split Between Radical Rhetoric and Conservative Practices: Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps

Greene is one of the most widely read novelists of the twentieth century, yet his works have sometimes been unjustly regarded as a literature of entertainment.1 Journey Without Maps, which belongs to Greene’s ‘serious’ category of fiction, is my present focus. This novel relates the 1935 journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia that Greene undertook with his twenty-three-year old cousin, Barbara Greene.2 The history of Sierra Leone, which became a British colony in the seventeenth century, is, like the history of most African countries, shaped by European colonialism. Slave trade and anti-slavery struggles were also important historic markers. When slavery was declared illegal in England and Scotland in the 1770s, philanthropists, religious institutions (the Quakers in particular), and literary and political figures contributed to awaken the British public conscience about the wretched condition of the Africans. A group of philanthropists and humanitarians pressured the government to transport the recently freed slaves to Sierra Leone where they could start a new life. In 1787, about four hundred poor Blacks from Britain settled in Sierra Leone. But due to disease, inadequate shelter, and the hostility of the indigenous populations many did not survive the ‘Sierra Leone Experiment’. Long afterwards, the Sierra Leone Company was charted, with the aim of promoting lawful commerce between Africans and the outside world. With Freetown as its capital, Sierra Leone served as a refuge for slaves freed by judicial decisions in 1772 and 1778, and for thousands of others who were released from slave ships that were intercepted by British anti-slavery patrols. A group of former American slaves from Nova Scotia also settled in Sierra Leone in 1792 under the company’s rule. These Nova Scotians, numbering over a thousand people, had fought for the British during the American War of Independence (1775–83). After the war, they had 176

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been moved to Nova Scotia, but as they found the climate unsuitable and the promised land grants beyond their reach they were attracted by the prospects offered by Sierra Leone.3 In 1800, these settlers were joined by over 500 Maroons or fugitive slaves from Jamaica.4 The different groups of settlers had conflicting and tense relationships with each other and with the natives. But the Nova Scotians and Maroons, who regarded themselves as a ‘superior class’, despised both the ‘Recaptives’ or ‘liberated Africans’ and the indigenous populations (Spitzer 1974, 9–14). In 1807, Great Britain outlawed slave trade in her colonies, and in early 1808 the British government took over Freetown from the financially troubled company and used it as a naval base for anti-slavery patrols. Between 1808 and 1864 about 50,000 liberated slaves settled in Freetown. The liberated Africans were educated and converted to Christianity by missionaries. They became in turn active missionaries, traders and civil servants, and their descendents, the Creoles or Krios, were to continue the British civilising mission.5 Yet, the spread of civilisation to the interior was very limited, so, too, were British economic interests in Sierra Leone and its hinterlands. It is only in 1896 that Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the entire Sierra Leone, extending her authority to the interior, mostly to thwart French ambitions in the region. The protectorate was ruled ‘indirectly’ and a hut tax was imposed in 1898 to cover administrative costs. This tax angered the native populations, and in the same year it led to war, in which the British emerged victorious. In economic terms, then, the British colony was extremely underdeveloped. Indeed, until 1945 very little industrial development was accomplished. Besides, when economic improvements took place they were unevenly concentrated in the south and east of the capital. After 1945 a number of transformations occurred in agriculture, transportation and mining (diamonds and iron ore, bauxite, rutile . . .). However, the economy remained on the whole weak and was predominantly exportoriented. It was mostly based on the extraction of natural resources, rubber in particular, as well as on the production of peanuts and palm products which were the monopoly of a handful of rapacious foreign companies.6

Questioning Western positivism: the primitivist discourse and its limits Greene relates these economic discrepancies on arrival at Kailahun, Sierra Leone’s furthest reaches: ‘Civilisation as Sierra Leone was concerned was the railway to Pendembu, the increased export of palm-nuts; civilisation,


too, was Lever brothers and the price they controlled’ (61). This statement draws attention to the lack of modern infrastructures that British colonialism was supposed to set up in Sierra Leone. It also points to the hegemonic power enjoyed by the few companies operating there. Both failings serve to reinforce Greene’s conviction that Britain’s mission in Sierra Leone consisted mostly of taking advantage of the colony’s resources rather than spreading civilisation and modernity. The myth of the coloniser as a pioneer disseminating progress and modernisation is thus wearing thin. Greene’s moral indignation about the misery and exploitation encountered in Sierra Leone’s hinterlands leads him to condemn the whole of the British civilising mission as a mere farce. In his view, this mission was destined less to uplift morally and materially the natives than to alienate them from their cultures and increase their backwardness. Talking about the British district commissioner in charge of Sierra Leone’s hinterland, he argues that his work ‘was to a great extent the protection of the native from the civilisation he represented’ (61). In this comment, Greene discredits the British civilising mission and suggests that Britain’s and generally Europe’s declared intention to spread civilisation in Africa is a hoax. He indicates that the imperial project of bringing modernity and modernisation to Africans is at once emphatically proclaimed in colonialist rhetoric and constantly delayed in practice, if not simply cast into oblivion. In line with Greene’s argument, we may state that the modernisation and industrialisation of the colonies entailed in the civilising mission were the absent centre of colonial rule, just as was the promised reformation of the natives into modern, enlightened subjects. Greene’s journey through Sierra Leone is obviously one of shock and outrage. On arrival in the capital, Freetown, he is seen shying away from Western civilisation to embrace native culture: ‘Everything in Freetown was ugly. . . . If there was anything beautiful in the place it was native’ (38). In this imperial city, the narrator shifts from culture to nature, from Western corruption to African innocence in keeping with the myth of the authentic, ‘noble savage’. He valorises native cultures and favours intercultural dialogue. In travelling to what resembles the beginnings of time, he seems to renounce cultural supremacy. He criticises the superciliousness of Western civilisation and emphasises the relative notion of culture and knowledge: One didn’t have to condescend; one knew more about some things, but they knew more about others. And on the whole things they knew


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were more important. . . . One’s gun was only an improvement on their poisoned spear and unless one was a doctor, one had less chance of curing a snake-bite than they (54). The narrator defines knowledge and civilisation as a composite continuum, with both Africans and Europeans contributing to the universal civilisation. Soon after, he nonetheless tilts the balance in the Africans’ favour. He associates them with initiators of an inspiring technology on which Europeans later improved. For him, the technological and spiritual matrix is located in Africa, not in Europe. While praising the Africans’ creativity, the narrator ranks them spiritually higher than the Europeans. And the greater the valorisation of African cultures, the wider his distance from Western civilisation: ‘It was a carnival, but it wasn’t a carnival in the vulgar sense of Nice and the Battle of Flowers, it wasn’t secular and skittish, like the dancing of the Spanish cathedral at Easter, it had its religious value’ (92). Greene apparently finds in Africa the evangelical spirit which is wanting in Europe. His narrator’s ardent search for authenticity and purity in the Dark Continent entails an apparent ideological rupture with the British imperial culture. At once he rejects imperialism by declaring that on crossing Africa he felt that he was ‘no longer . . . a member of the ruling race’ (52), and distances himself from the products of colonialism, the Creoles whom he despises. Echoing Thackeray’s observations about the English colonisers’ propensity to replicate in the colonies the social and cultural habits of their homeland,7 Greene dismisses the English he encounters as mere reproducers of a trivial culture on the African soil. Similarly, he despises the Creoles and reproaches them with being as hollow and corrupt as the English traders of the coasts of Sierra Leone. For the narrator, the Creoles are strongly depersonalised, reduced to mere imitators of their mean white masters: The men . . . had been educated to understand how they had been swindled, how they had been given the worst of two worlds, and they had enough power to express themselves in a soured officious way; they had died, in so far as they had been men, . . . these men had been given their tin shacks, their cathedral, their votes and city councils, their shadow of self-government; they were expected to play the part like white men (37). The Creoles are described as doubly alienated subjects. They are both cut off from the essence of their native cultures which define


their identity and alienated from Western civilisation that they have uncritically adopted. According to the narrator, these ‘mimic men’ are tantamount to a cultural anomaly, resulting from ‘a simultaneous erosion of their indigenous way of life and of the imperfect adaptation to the coloniser’s culture’ (Schweizer 2001, 67). They are caricatured figures, intent on copying imperfectly their masters and, as the narrator states: ‘The more the [Creoles] copied white men, the more funny it was to the prefects. They were withered by laughter; the more desperately they tried their dignity the funnier they became’ (39). Greene’s depiction of the Creoles goes counter to Bhabha’s theory of hybridity. It destabilises the theorist’s assumption that ‘the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (1994, 88). For Greene, the Creoles are ‘mimic men’ with no subversive power underpinning their mimicry. Their attitude to Western culture is merely appropriative and imitative, based on undifferentiated mimetism. Their relation to white authority, on the other hand, is that of submission and loyalty, lacking the ‘double vision’ underlined by Bhabha. As described in Journey Without Maps, then, the Creoles do not go beyond literal repetition of the coloniser’s culture and social habits to which they slavishly comply. The narrator relates the Creoles’ copying of the colonisers, stating: ‘The Creole’s painful attempt at playing the white man is funny; it is rather like the chimpanzee’s tea-party, the joke is all on one side’ (41). The Creoles are assimilated to grotesque figures, aping, like chimpanzees, the British bourgeois and upper classes. The Western education they had benefited from and through which they gained a privileged social status encouraged the Creoles to identify with and imitate the ruling élites. Spitzer remarks: ‘By the second half of the nineteenth century social life among the Creole upper class in Sierra Leone was a self-conscious imitation of Victorian England. The governor and his lady were the focal points of Freetown “high” society and a person could gain prestige by being invited to a dinner or a monthly at home at Government House’ (1974, 15–16). The Creoles emulated the English middle-class in dress, speech and morality. They not only displayed ‘Victorian prudishness and moral rigidity’ (Spitzer 1974, 19), but also manifested contempt for the natives’ way of dress, manners, and backward traditions and ‘barbaric’ dances.8 This form of social racism, reflected in the Creoles’ sense of supremacy over non-Creoles, was common in the colonies. Empowered by their high social profile, the native bourgeois and upper classes, which identified with the colonisers, tended to regard the indigenous mass as inferior.


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Characteristically, some ethnic groups, as discussed in Chapter 2, showed contempt for other communities living in the same colony. Likewise, it was frequent to see colonial subjects of a specific colony despising natives living in other colonies. In Victorian England. Indians felt superior to Africans and often ‘exhibited the same kind of racism toward Africans as native Britons did’ (Burton 1998, 32). Within India itself the Parsis, who in the nineteenth century acted as cultural mediators between the British and Indians, thought of themselves as ethnically more authentic and superior to other Indian groups (18–19). By closely identifying with the English imperial culture and its racial prejudices, both the Parsis in India and the Creoles in Sierra Leone estranged themselves from the rest of the indigenous communities. The Creoles in particular, who are Greene’s focus in Journey Without Maps, were eager to shed their African heritage and adopt the English ways and traditions. They did so with such zeal that they were called ‘Black English.’ The wealthy Creoles reached a high degree of Anglicisation. They attended prestigious schools in England and gained a sense of pride and superiority. Thanks to their supposed likeness to the British, the Creoles were convinced to be Britain’s favourites. They felt to be part and parcel of England and saw themselves as enlightened intermediaries between Europe and Africa. Accordingly, they believed that they were equally concerned with the ‘white man’s burden’ in Africa. The narrator further argues that the Creoles and the English traders, prospectors and engineers living in Sierra Leone and along the coast take imitation without variation for an ultimate goal. He distinguishes these corrupt categories from the authentic natives and English of the interior. The former are described as conveniently backward, untainted by Western education and frantic materialism. The latter are depicted as morally ‘finer’, free of racial prejudice and live in brotherly congeniality with the indigenous peoples: ‘The English here did not talk about the “bloody blacks” nor did they patronise or laugh at them; they had to deal with the real natives and not the Creole, and the real native was someone to love and admire’ (54). Bolahun embodies colonisation at its best. The harmony and sense of solidarity and brotherhood characterising this community contrast sharply with empire’s greed and cultural arrogance. This place where the colonisers and colonised live harmoniously enacts a humane, model colonisation that Greene was striving for. The narrator here proudly reconnects with the English compatriots that he had previously dismissed as vehicles of a gimcrack civilisation. In this utopian world of congeniality and seemingly dialogic, balanced colonial relationships


the narrator strongly identifies with his countrymen who represent fundamental Western values that he fully shares: It was the English corner one could feel some pride in. It was gentle, devout, childlike and unselfish; it didn’t even know it was courageous. One couldn’t help comparing the manner of these nuns living quite outside the limits of European civilisation with that of the English in Free Town who had electric light and refrigerators and frequent leave, who despised the natives and pitied themselves. (83) For the narrator Bolahun’s English are the opposite of the colonialist archetype. They stand for ideal colonisers, described as ‘gentle’, ‘devout’, ‘child-like’, and ‘unselfish’. They are figures of innocence and generosity, keen on building a counter-culture that privileges deep human values over spectacular imperial splendour: [These Englishmen] were of a more subtle type than on the coast; they were patriots in the same sense that they cared for something in their country other than its externals, they couldn’t build their English corner with a few tin roofs and peeling posters and drinks at the bar. (54) Despite a manifest attack on imperial hypocrisy and ruthlessness, Greene’s critique of Western culture and colonialism is anything but radical. On peeling off the surface of his anti-colonial rhetoric, we realise that the author does not wish the end of imperialism, but merely hopes for a better colonisation, of which Bolahun is the real incarnation. This part of the country enacts a spiritual imperium where Christian innocence and native authenticity are shielded from colonialism’s corruptive materialism and exorbitant greed. The narrator consistently valorises the ‘real’ (pure) natives and implicitly associates the English of the interior with the true representatives of Western civilisation of which the one established on the coasts of Sierra Leone is an ugly, corrupted copy. According to him, these English privilege authenticity over corruption, substance over form, faith over material interests, thus standing in stark opposition to colonialism’s caricatured ideals. Greene’s subversion of colonialist discourse is at its peak in these accounts about the heart of Sierra Leone. Through the predominant ‘interior’ metaphor, which enhances his journey’s spiritual dimension, Greene seeks to unsettle both colonialism’s corrupt rhetoric and the Enlightenment’s principles of development. He adopts a philosophy of inwardness that gives primacy


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to feelings over cerebration. In this way he moves away from empire’s cold rationalism and ethics of progress. Greene seems to be pursuing the Romantic writers’ critique of modernity and the Enlightenment, but eschews their anti-Christian feeling. As well as wishing to return mankind to its essence Greene, like Gide, attempts to restore Christianity to its fundamentals. He is shown distinguishing the ‘bad’ nuns from the ‘good’ ones; just as he formerly separated the authentic Englishmen of the interior from those of the coast, the ‘real’ natives from the Creoles. The first category of holy women, mentioned earlier, lives in Freetown and serves a corrupt civilisation, while the ‘virtuous’ nuns dwell in the interior and dutifully cater for the local populations. Their conduct is in complete accord with the Christian creeds of tolerance and brotherhood. The narrator continues defending the honest representatives of Christianity and undertakes to clear the ‘good’ missionaries of the unjust ill-reputation of which they are often victim, such as the one associating them with ‘servants of colonialism and sexually abnormal types’ (83–4). The narrator’s efforts to redress the missionaries’ image partake of an overall attack on the Enlightenment’s ideals or what he calls ‘the new paganism of the West, which prides itself on being scientific’ (84). He re-enacts the colonial Christian–heathen binary and associates the term ‘heathen,’ usually applied to the colonised peoples, with the modern Europeans. He relegates the latter to the status of barbaric pagans and blames their chilling rationalism for having fuelled ‘the centuries of cerebration which generated unhappiness and drove Europe to the peril of extinction’ (21). This assault on Western positivism and decadent modernity sounds like a de-civilising strategy in which the natural and spiritual are given prevalence over the contrived and cerebral. The narrator casts anathema on European civilisation and condemns colonialism’s deficiencies in a statement that echoes Conrad’s denunciation of colonialism in Heart of Darkness and Tocqueville’s complaint about white settlers in America and French colonisers in Algeria:9 Civilisation here remained exploitation, we had hardly, it seemed to me, improved the natives lot at all, they were as worn out with fever as before the white man came, we had increased new diseases and weakened their resistance to the old, they still drank from the polluted water and suffered from the same worms, they were still at the mercy of their chiefs (61). Greene’s narrator challenges the assumption that colonialism is a force of progress and modernisation improving the lot of the colonised. He


shows that both the corrupt Englishmen of the coasts of Sierra Leone and the ‘finer’, ‘subtler’ Englishmen of Sierra Leone’s furthest reaches prove equally unable to clear these afflicted African regions of their ‘dirt and disease’ (60). Worse still, the civilisation that these Englishmen represent has, the narrator insists, amplified the natives’ wretchedness by adding new economic and sanitary problems to those already in place. This argument is both an attack on colonialism and a vindication of the natives’ right to remain underdeveloped and backward, which, in the author’s rhetoric, is synonymous with authenticity. Manifestly, Greene tends to maintain Africans in their natural state, even when he overtly challenges the myth of the ‘noble savage’: ‘ “The noble savage” no longer exists; perhaps he never existed’ (61). Greene’s primitivist discourse fulfils two interrelated, not to say contradictory aims: in valuing ‘underdevelopment as a more authentic mode of existence’ he questions Western rationalism and modernity. On the other hand, by maintaining the natives in their backward condition he implicitly denies them a capacity for progress and development. Greene visibly conceives of the primitive Africans as an antidote to Europe’s discontents. Later in the narrative, though, he shows the same natives craving for modernity and modernisation. This is suggested by the enthusiastic Liberian president, Edwin Barclay that Greene met during his African journey: ‘It was not easy to stem the rolling tide of the President’s hopes, the roads, the aeroplanes, the motor-cars. It was a paradoxical situation; a black preaching progress to a sceptical white [who] had come out of the busy bustling progressive scene’ (108). Barclay’s reaction shows that Africa is won to the colonial project of universal progress. During their discussion, the sceptical Greene shows reservations about Barclay’s unqualified support of modernisation. But he is pleased with the president’s policy of non-interference with the natives of the interior: [The native tribes] were not interfered with as they would certainly have been interfered with in a white colony, and one was thankful for their lack of education, when one compared them as they were in Buzie country, striding along the narrow forest paths, the straight back, the sword with an ivory handle swinging against the long native robe, with the anglicised ‘educated’ blacks of the Sierra Leone, the drill suits and the striped shirts and the dirty sun helmets (108). The discourse of authenticity is sharply contrasted to empire’s hypocritical rhetoric and corrupt practices. This opposition recurs in the


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narrative; so, too, does the binary ‘true’ and fake natives. As in Sierra Leone, in Liberia the indigenous populations who live in the interior are also praised for their naturalness and underdevelopment. Thanks to noninterference from the central government, these Liberians of the interior have preserved their dignity and traditions. Their lack of education is highly valued by the narrator and opposed to the Creoles of the coast of Sierra Leone that Western education corrupted and estranged from their traditional culture and way of life. Liberia or the ‘Land of the Free,’ which is Greene’s second important destination in Journey Without Maps, is a neo-colonial dependency. It was founded in 1822 by freed slaves from the United States under the supervision of the American Colonisation Society. These Americo-Liberians established a settlement in Christopolis, later renamed Monrovia, after the American president, James Monroe who was president of the Society. Lieutenant Robert F. Stockton of the US Navy helped, sometimes at gun point, to negotiate a treaty with the natives that led to the founding of the American neo-colony.10 Greene states in this respect: ‘England and France in the last century robbed them of territory; America had done worse, for she has lent them money . . . Nor can you wonder at their hatred and suspicion of the white man. The last loan and the last concession to the firestone Company of Ohio all but surrendered their sovereignty to a commercial company with no interests in Liberia but rubber and dividends’ (231–2). Like Gide, Greene explicitly criticises the concessionary system that allowed such companies as the Firestone Company to have an influential role in Liberia’s politics and economy. The presence of the Firestone Company in Liberia goes back to 13 January 1925, when National Legislature approved three draft agreements between the Republic of Liberia and the company.11 As Greene rightly observes, from the creation of the Firestone plantation onwards the company was mainly interested in extracting raw rubber without investing in any value-added manufacturing facilities. It resorted to forced labour and subjected its workers to working conditions no different from those of slavery. To meet their daily quota of rubber production, adult workers often had to bring to work all their family, including children in order to avoid seeing their desperately needed wages ruthlessly cut down. The American Colonisation Society, which sponsored the AfroAmerican settlement, sought to transport free or recently liberated Blacks to Africa in a professed effort to improve their condition. Between 1817 and 1867, 13,000 freed slaves arrived in the settlement thanks to the society. This led to the formation of more settlements and culminated


on 26 July 1847 in a declaration of independence of the Republic of Liberia. The Liberian constitution was modelled on that of the United States (Sundiata 1980, 7), but the country’s administrative system ‘was patterned along the lines of the British colonial philosophy of indirect rule: the utilisation of traditional tribal authorities as instruments of the colonial central government in the maintenance of law and order at the local level’ (Liebenow 1987, 54). The founding of the Republic of Liberia was, of course, far from easy. The black settlers from America periodically met stiff opposition from the local tribesmen, usually leading to bloody battles. Although their number never exceeded five percent of the total population, the AmericoLiberians monopolised the economy and politics. They subdued Liberia’s indigenous tribes and their True Whig Party dominated Liberian politics, allowing no organised political opposition. Although they were black, the Americo-Liberians behaved as if they were racially superior, distinguishing themselves from the ‘inferior’ autochthonous populations. Schweizer states: ‘When Liberia was founded in 1822 . . . hundreds of freed slaves (referred to as Americo-Liberians) made sure that ethnic discrimination against the country’s indigenous tribes was written directly into the Liberian code of law. The Americo-Liberian élite thus enjoyed a status of supremacy similar to that of colonial overlords elsewhere in Africa’ (2001, 64). The history of modern slave trade has shown us that both European and non-European nations were involved in this heinous business. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, the British and the Arabs actively sought profit in the transatlantic slave trade. Many Blacks similarly participated in capturing and selling other Blacks to slave dealers. This notorious fact reveals how far economic interests prevailed over the skin colour issue on which slavery was essentially based. The history of Liberia provides further evidence of the complexity and protean nature of racism. In this neo-colony, we have a situation in which a minority of freed slaves from the United States set up racist policies that oppressed and marginalised the native populations. Given this blatant discrimination, we may justifiably compare the Americo-Liberians’ segregating policies to those of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, with the exception that in the case of Liberia it was Blacks enforcing racist laws against other Blacks. If skin colour is undeniably a defining factor in the production of racist discourses and practices, the black settlers’ conduct in Liberia indicates that the struggle for power and material interests may just as well fuel supremacist ideologies. Manifest segregation, allegations of slavery and political oppression of the natives


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notoriously brought Liberian politics on the world’s stage in the 1920s. During this period, it was alleged that the country’s governing élites, who were themselves descendents of former slaves, had encouraged slavery and forced labour.12 The League of Nations started investigations into the case, and in 1930 the League’s Commission published a report showing that workers at the Spanish plantations of Fernando Po had been hired ‘under the conditions of criminal compulsion scarcely distinguishable from slave raiding and slave trading’ (quoted by Anderson 1952, 106). Following the report, the Liberian president, Charles King resigned from office and was succeeded by Edwin Barclay who promised to eradicate forced labour and the other abuses reported by the Commission. During the same 1930s the Liberian government was also accused of having brutally suppressed the Kru rebellion in the wake of the League of Nations’ investigation. The Krus were a tribe living in the south east of Liberia. They had repeatedly rebelled against the Americo-Liberian hegemony. During the 1930s, they tried to take advantage of the international interference in the country’s politics to rise up against the central government in order to secure an independent political status. Greene had apparently been drawn into Liberia with the intention of investigating these political troubles and reporting them. He himself admitted having contemplated meeting the Kru leader, Juah Nimley, but his ‘plan came to nothing through lack of money and exhaustion’ (47). Although Greene claimed that Journey Without Maps was ‘not a political book in the sense that Gide’s Voyage au Congo was political’ (1980, 50), African colonial politics permeates the novel. His biographer, Norman Sherry points out Greene’s political mission in Liberia, arguing: ‘It appears . . . Greene would be seeking information about present oppressions, including slavery, for the Anti-Slavery Society’ (1989, 511). Greene’s intention to investigate political oppression and slavery in Liberia might have been a likely possibility, but his account about slavery obviously lacks the insight of what may be called a thorough investigation. Instead of focusing on the Americo-Liberians’ alleged indulgence in slave trade, he concentrates on a single Muslim District commissioner, Mr. Reeves, and holds this character alongside Muslims and Arabs in generals fully responsible for the scourge of slavery.

Negotiating Africanist and Orientalist discourses Greene’s ideological ambiguities are hardly surprising given his past of inconsistent, shifty ideological and political loyalties. Over time and


depending on personal convenience, Greene was seen moving from one political party to another with disconcerting ease. Prior to joining the Independent Labour Party in 1933, he had been a member of the Communist Party for a while and periodically a supporter of the Conservative Party. He had formerly shuttled between leftist politics, which owed him the etiquette of a political radical, and conservative creeds that resonate in his works. He had, for instance, backed the Conservative Party’s harsh response to the 1926 general strike during which he served as a constable in charge of crushing the labour unrest (Schweizer 2001, 61). From the 1930s, Greene became a leftist liberal,13 but his conservative beliefs linger on in his fiction. When depicting the Africans in this novel, he wavers between the views of a humanist liberal and benevolent Catholic, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, those of an enlightened colonialist who is certain of his racial and cultural supremacy. Earlier on in the narrative, Greene’s narrator had insisted on cultural relativity and valued the Africans’ technological know-how and exemplary spirituality. He later consistently valorised the ‘true’ natives and tried mightily to free them from colonial prejudices. Akin to Gide, Greene attempts to rehabilitate the Africans’ image, praising his carriers’ loyalty, frankness and honesty. His rehabilitating gesture intends to discredit the coast commercial agents’ belief that ‘A Black will always do you down!’ (81). Instead of theft and dishonesty, the narrator insists on having met constantly with frank and gentle service, tenderness, and honesty: It was no good protesting later that one had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the boys, from the carriers, from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty one would not have found, or at least dared to assume, was there in Europe (81). The myth of the honest, gentle, ‘noble savage’ that Greene had formerly dismissed as sheer fantasy returns with force and insistence in this comment. After discarding the label ‘liars’ and ‘thieves’ foisted on Africans in general and on the author’s ‘boys’ in particular, Greene resituates the latter as mere children in need of his paternalist care and authority. His young cousin, Barbara Greene, who helped him recover from his serious illness at the end of their journey, declares: ‘[Graham], like a benevolent father would smile kindly upon them. . . . But with a child-like simplicity they handed all the responsibilities over to my cousin’ (1938, 68). Barbara later adds to reinforce her relative’s kind


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treatment of his carriers: ‘From the beginning [he] treated the [black carriers] exactly as if they were white men from our own country’ (68). Notwithstanding his humanist rhetoric, Greene turns out to espouse the very colonialist ideology that he had previously rejected. He refers to Blacks as children, and thus remains, in the words of S.W. Ogude, ‘a Victorian at heart’ and like the Victorians, he sees the existence of the ‘ “child races of the world” as the greatest proof of the civilisation of the white man’ (1975, 54). Greene’s conservative attitude is more marked at the novel’s close where the narrator reiterates colonialist tropes to reinforce his racial profiling of Africans. He defines the carriers as easily ‘distracted children’, given to immediate sensory experience and tied to an ever-lasting present. The narrator thus confines Africans to the literalism of facts (181) and, like Gide, he denies them logical thinking. In his words, ‘they cannot connect cause and effect’ (111). Politically, Greene’s representation of the carriers and natives in general insinuates the Africans’ immaturity and inability to assume their affairs. In terms of labour politics, on the other hand, his rhetoric reflects the need to maintain the colonised in a puerile status and discipline them into cheap, docile workers. Even more stunning is the fact the socialist Greene, who condemns the British empire’s greed and exploitation of the Africans, finally appears as an exploiter of his carriers, refusing to increase their pay although he finds that ‘[they] were disgracefully underpaid’ (148). Despite being aware that he is shamefully exploiting his ‘boys’, Greene believes that this exploitation, like colonialism itself, is a necessary evil. He cynically states: ‘I was exploiting them like all their masters. I could not afford not to exploit them and that I was a little ashamed of it’ (149). This justification cannot, of course, be taken at face value, for the author could have easily spared himself the shame if he really wanted to. One way of alleviating Greene’s apparent pangs of conscience was by simply agreeing to give the claimants the extra money they asked for. In the scene relating the pay dispute, Greene is shown faking a collective dismissal, offering to pay the carriers on the spot instead of undertaking fair negotiations with them. To his satisfaction, the decoy proved efficient, for the threatened employees, who desperately needed the modest sum of money they were getting from their employer, readily gave up their struggle. Greene rejoices at having quelled the labour struggle and relates his carriers’ defeat in these terms: ‘They were like children who have tried to get an extra holiday but bear no grudge because they have never really believed they would succeed’ (150).


What emerges from this observation is that the indigenous workers’ demands cannot be taken seriously, because the claimants, being childlike, are neither entitled to economic and political rights, nor fit to address responsibly labour politics and wage negotiations. Shockingly, though not surprisingly, Greene, during this labour contest, performs the part of an authoritarian, disciplining agent. His duty in this situation is similar to the one he performed in 1926 when he worked as a constable, committed to curb labour unrest. At the end of the dispute with the carriers, Greene relishes his victory in what looks like a policy of forced labour. Viewed within the wider colonial context, the bras de fer that the author engages with the carriers reflects the natives’ battle for economic justice. Most importantly, it reveals the power imbalance and inequities of the transactional relationships between the colonisers and colonised. The way Greene relates the pay dispute with his carriers shows that he remains not only a ruthless bourgeois capitalist at heart,14 but also a firm supporter of colonialist racial prejudices. His Africanist discourse, which dismisses Africans as children devoid of logical thinking, is compounded by basic Orientalist rhetoric. On describing his Oriental characters the narrator veers to cultural and racial stereotyping. He reiterates the image of the East as barbaric and the Orientals as stagnant, as suggested by the portrait of the Mohammedan District commissioner, Mr Reeves: [He] gave an effect, more Oriental than African, of cruelty and sensuality; he was gross, impassive and corrupt. . . . There were other stories for which I found plenty of evidence: stories of his house built by forced labour and paid for by the seizure of the natives’ produce; stories of how his messenger flogged the men working on the road, how no man from Christianised Bolahun dared show his face in the town (85). Mr Reeves is encoded as a typical Oriental who combines cruelty, laziness, corruption, despotism, fanaticism and anti-Christian feeling. He is the embodiment of the Arab slave-dealer and a continuer of the spirit of the last century, for he ‘belonged psychologically to the nineteenth century, to the days of the slave trade’ (85). Though historically sound, the narrator’s attack on Arab slave dealing requires qualification and further historicisation. Undeniably, in the nineteenth century the Arabs and generally Muslims dealt in slavery, just as the English, French, Dutch, Spanish or Portuguese did. These various peoples took part in the


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then lucrative global slave trade, competing against each other. But in condemning the institution of slavery through the single Muslim character, Mr Reeves, Greene fails to mention that Arabs and Muslims were by no means worse than European slave dealers. Like their Christian counterparts, they certainly had their share of the blame in the crime of slavery and deportation of Africans to the sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas. Above all, what is overlooked is the fact that slavery is not a modern invention, but goes back to times immemorial. Most societies practised slavery in one form or another. As has been underlined, slavery was common in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Aristotle, for example, regarded slavery as a natural condition of life for some races. Even monotheist religions such as Islam and Christianity consider slavery, under specific circumstances, legitimate. However, the fact that slavery had been a common practice for centuries, and that it is sanctioned by scriptures does in no way mean that we should condone it. A close attention to the complexity and historical span of slavery, undermined in the novel, might have helped Greene map out a clearer and more convincing picture of the issue at stake. It would have prevented him both from confining the phenomenon of slavery to the nineteenth century alone and from holding the Arabs fully liable to a practice of which they were but one part of a huge machinery. Greene’s focus on Muslims and Arabs in connection with the issue of slavery is nonetheless partly justified. While slavery was abolished in British colonies as early as 1808, slave trade was still thriving in east Africa and in the Muslim world. As late as 1867 when the convention of the British and Foreign Anti-slavery Society was held in Paris, Dr Livingstone returned from Africa with evidence that the slave trade was still at its height in Zanzibar and other parts of East Africa. Mr Reeves is the very personification of the lingering Islamic institution of slavery. For the converted Catholic Greene,15 this despicable character symbolises two loathsome evils: Oriental despotism and Muslim fanaticism that must be readily curbed. Greene’s anti-Muslim sentiment is reminiscent of Gide who assimilates the Islamised parts of the Congo to backwardness and ‘hell.’ It also echoes Bartolomé de Las Casas’s discourse of barbarism16 regarding Islam in In Defense of the Indians. Las Casas in this book associates the Moors of Spain with the ‘truly barbaric scum of the nations’ (1550, 47). For the Spanish theologian, the Arabs and Turks are subject to ‘complete barbarism’. They are, in his view, seeped in the ‘barbarism of vice’ because they are not ‘imbued with the mysteries of Christian philosophy’ (49). Las Casas further complicates the portrait of the Arabs and Turks by


identifying both with effeminacy and love of luxury: ‘The Turks and the Arabs are a people said to be well versed in political affairs. But how can they be honoured with this reputation for uprightness when they are an effeminate and luxury-loving people, given to every sort of sexual immorality?’ (51). Significantly, Las Casas in his characterisation of the Muslim Turks and Arabs repeats the classical Greek and Roman categorisation of the ancient Egyptians and Persians as barbaric, effeminate and morally corrupt. Placed within the context of the fierce competition between the Islamic and Christian empires, Las Casas’s redeployment of the classical discourse of barbarism serves to undermine Christian Europe’s Others, that is the Muslims, as a moral, cultural and religious agency. Inferred from Las Casas’s argument is the idea that only those imbued with Christian faith are entitled to build empires and convert the heathen populations to the one true religion on earth: Christianity. Following Las Casas, Greene reiterates a set of clichés in reference to Muslims and Africans, which betrays a sense of racial, cultural and religious supremacy. His definition of Africans and Orientals is a blend of classical Orientalism and modern theories of race and historiography. In keeping with the traditional image of a lascivious Orient, Greene reduces Africa to a land of unbridled sexuality. This depiction recalls Voyage autour du monde (1771), Antoine de Bougainville’s account of Tahiti17 where he landed on 4 April 1768. Bougainville describes this island as an ‘exotic’ and ‘erotic’ Eden where happy and peaceful Tahitians are given to unrestrained sensual pleasures. Like Bougainville’s Haiti, Greene’s Africa stands for an erotic paradise where Europeans, freed from social constraint, could enjoy sexual liberty. The eroticisation of the Dark Continent in both Journey Without Maps and Gide’s Voyage au Congo is reflected in the writers’ particular focus on the body as a channel of desire and fantasy. In both works, the body is an object of scientific scrutiny and the locus of sexual gratification. Gide, for instance, constantly evaluates the Africans bodies in terms of health and sickness, of appeal and repulsion. The redemptive work he undertakes involves redeeming the natives and healing their physical wounds. The metaphor of healing applies to body and mind alike. Science is in charge of alleviating the suffering of the first, religion fends for the second. Whereas Conrad in Heart of Darkness uses the body trope to illustrate imperialism’s abusive methods, for Gide and Greene the body forms a privileged site of desire and voyeuristic pleasure. From the start, Gide clearly stated that he and his lover Allégret were the only passengers travelling to Africa for ‘pleasure’. This word resonates in the journal and all through his journey Gide relishes the sight of healthy,


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appealing male bodies in a way betraying a manifest homosexual desire. Greene, on the other hand, is obsessed with female naked bodies to the point of reducing Africa and Africans to mere libidinous objects: I was not yet tired of the sight of naked bodies (later I began to feel as if I had lived for years with nothing but cows), or else these women were prettier and more finely built than most of those I saw in the Republic (at Kailahun). . . . It was curious how quickly one abandoned the white standard. (53) With the abandonment on the Dark Continent of the Christian standard of sexual rectitude, desire can be unleashed and blamelessly fulfilled. The narrator’s sexual fantasies, emblematic of Europe’s erotic representations of the Orient, are crystallised in the fascinating African women’s ‘long breasts falling in flat bronze folds’ (53). The indigenous women’s breasts, long and ‘swelling with milk’ concentrate the West’s phantasms over the exotic and the libidinal Africa/Orient. Greene’s erotically charged rhetoric turns the African body into a conduit of Europe’s sexual inhibitions, just as Africa becomes the locale onto which Europe projects its domestic anxieties.18 The libidinal and existential thus converge and together seek gratification or compensation in the Dark Continent. For Gide and Greene Africa is both a sexual outlet and an antidote to Europe’s metaphysical anxieties. This metaphorisation makes their African tales tautological. They boil down to self-perpetuating discourses lacking authentic inter-cultural dialogue where the same and other mutually inform and reshape the self. Within this inward-looking scheme of representation, Africans stand for pale copies of Europe’s former domestic barbarians. They symbolise the authentic and highly idealised Other that Europe lost to modernity. The natives are thereby turned into still life. Africa, which represents humankind in its infancy, is, in turn, fixated in an everlasting present. It represents an a-historical locale or, as Hegel puts it, a land of eternal childhood: Africa proper . . . has no historical interest of its own, for we find its inhabitants living in barbarism and savagery in a land which has not furnished them with any integral ingredient of culture. From the earliest historical times, Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, for ever pressing in upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light


of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night (1837, 174). Africa is reduced here to a stagnant historic reality. Following Hegel’s yoking of the images of childhood and primitiveness, which essentially denies Africa’s historical development, Greene’s narrator associates the Dark Continent with timelessness, asserting: ‘There is no such thing as time in the Interior’ (64–5). This de-historicising process both confines Africans to a state of permanent stasis and reduces Africa to a figure of speech devoid of substance. The narrator pursues his strategy of de-substantiation and insists that the Africa he evokes is not ‘a particular place’ (37), but a ‘mere image’ (20), ‘a shape’, ‘a strangeness’, ‘a wanting to know’ (37). This Rousseauesque description further de-realises the African continent that Greene considers not a place where one would wish to live, but the image of an absolute past to which we return in order to take up the thread of humankind’s history: It isn’t that one wants to stay in Africa. I have no yearning for a mindless sensuality even if it were to be found there: it is only that when one has appreciated such a beginning, its terrors as well as its placidity, the power as well as the gentleness, the pity for what we have done with ourselves is driven more forcibly home (249). If many nineteenth and twentieth-century writers revisit ancient Greece – the metaphoric birthplace of Western civilisation – in order to justify colonialism and reconnect with ‘high’ History, Greene’s narrator switches back to primitive Africa which was a fundamental source of inspiration for Western artists in the 1930s. He assimilates the Dark Continent to the cradle of humanity, susceptible to heal modernity’s ills and reconnect humankind to its roots. During his journey he gropes for Europe’s essence in Africa in order to trace where civilisation has gone astray. He hopes, in so doing, to find out the precise point at which the modern subject has deflected from its natural authentic development. In the final analysis, though, Greene’s travel to the beginning of time looks like a voyage immobile. The heart of Africa to which he journeys is merely a metaphor for the human – or more precisely the European – heart. By comparing the African topography to ‘the shape of the human heart’, Greene metaphorises his African trip in a manner that makes it less a geographical leap into immemorial time than a static, introspective plunge into the European psyche. In consequence, his apparently


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dialogic, inclusive narrative turns out to be self-reflexive, not to say redundant. It fails to reach out to that desired Other with whom the narrator has initially wanted to commune. Despite signs indicating an aspiration to cross-cultural dialogue, Greene, by inference the imperialist subject he stands for, proves unable to unmoor himself from the reassuring shore of sameness, that is Europe hemmed in its racial and cultural solipsism.

11 Getting Out of the ‘Nightmares’ of History and ‘Stiff’ Imperial Culture: Albert Camus

Interrogating colonial mythologies Similar to Conrad, Greene and Gide, Camus in his second collection of essays, Noces (Nuptials 1938) and Le Premier homme (The First Man 1994) bitterly criticises colonialism. He goes further by attacking global capitalism, bourgeois culture, history, and any anthropological studies backing imperial discourse. He revisits the myth of native-as-child alongside the primitive trope which he casts in a positive light. The revalorised attributes are then used to describe the European settlers. In accordance with the hedonism of L’Ecole d’Alger, Camus in Noces portrays his settler characters as care-free, happy barbarians, basking in the sun. These prelapsarian beings live in the realm of sensuality, given to the cult of the body and immediate sensory pleasures. Figures of immanence, the idling characters enact a philosophy of leisure and transience that challenges both colonialist ideology and the capitalist work ethic backing empire. Camus contrasts the bourgeois culture of certainty, permanence, and progress to the sub-culture of a population tied to an eternal now, with neither myths to return to nor future to look forward to. He places the settlers in a timeless present, devoid of history and memory, and associates them with ‘a creative people’ who are permanently reshaping their world (Noces 46). Conversely, he deems the French bourgeois colonialists, not unlike the Romans before them, as unimaginative imitators burdened with the freight of history and myths of grandeur. Despite an attack on the crude imperialist ideology, Camus in both Noces and Le Premier homme implicitly endorses the settlers’ protocolonialist discourse which considers the European immigrants and their descendents born in Algeria as its legitimate proprietors. The adoption 196

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of the settlers’ appropriative rhetoric may account for his reduction of Algeria to a history-less site of infancy populated by settler characters bent on continually re-creating their universe. Like the pieds-noirs, who viewed Algeria as ‘a land to conquer, a frontier to settle and reshape’ (Monego 1984, 13), Camus in Noces conceives of this colony as a vacant space, a place without past and tradition, waiting to be mapped and brought into existence. In his rhetoric, Algeria amounts to a territoryin-the-making that the settlers had to invent from scratch, just as his Sisyphean characters experience life as an eternal now. The idyllic universe hosting these happy barbarians stands for the humanist empire that Camus advocates in his fiction. On a deeper philosophical and political level, though, the characters’ moment-to-moment sensory existence denotes an existential precariousness. It betrays the anxieties of a settler community unsure of its future, especially with the rise of Algerian nationalism in the 1920s onwards that threatened the imperial edifice. Camus was distressed by this political climate which he was reluctant to face and accept. Assimilating Algeria, as he does, to an a-historical and a-political setting is tantamount to a form of escapism; a means of evading the unsettling Algerian political crisis (Prochaska 1990). Camus in Noces and Le Premier homme deploys a set of binaries – creativity–imitation, nature–culture, emotion–reason. By means of these dichotomies he re-enacts colonialist Manichean representations and re-evaluates them. In line with Conrad’s and Greene’s philosophy of inwardness, he valorises creativity, nature and emotion, but distrusts convention and cold cerebration. His critique of rationalism gains momentum in these two works where he assaults the totalising powers of history, reason and progress that fuel colonialist ideology: ‘I do not believe in reason enough to subscribe to progress, nor to any philosophy of history’ (Noces 112). Like Fanon who refuses to be history’s prisoner, Camus equates history with an unwholesome custody and ‘a barren land where [even] heather couldn’t grow’ (Noces 122). In Le Premier homme, the narrator extends his critique to question the very historical process involved in humankind’s destiny, targeting the evolutionary history and grand narratives on which empire rests. Meanwhile, he carefully distances the settlers from French imperial history. He asserts that Catherine Cormery, who stands for the settler community, ignores both France’s history and the very meaning of the word ‘history’. With this claim, the narrator ties this character and her community to an everlasting present, while confining Algeria to a land without history. Through this shared qualification, introduced by an incorporative simile, the destinies of the settlers and Algeria become indissolubly linked.


Both are lacking history, and both have to carve themselves out of the blue. The depiction of Catherine Cormery and Algeria reflects a de-historicising strategy, prominent in both Le Premier homme and Noces. This strategy involves an acquisitive gesture that naturalises the settlers as the rightful owners of a vacant space waiting to be filled. In the two works the settlers are given ascendancy over the indigenous and metropolitan populations. Le Premier homme focuses on the European working classes and stresses their reliance on the present’s literalism. It dramatises their up-rootedness via Catherine Cormery who is described as bereft of memory and historical lineage. She is an autistic figure, cut off from her surroundings by typhoid contracted when young, and was left ever since deaf and with a speech impediment: His mother, who had no idea what history and geography might be, who knew only that she lived on a land near the sea, that France was on the other side of that sea which she had never traveled through, France in any case being an obscure place lost in a dim night which one reached through a port called Marseilles, which she pictured like the port of Algiers, where there was a shining city that was thought very beautiful and which was called Paris, where there was also a region named Alsace that her husband’s family came from – it was a long time ago, they were fleeing enemies called Germans to settle in Algeria (68). With a ‘clouded memory’ (93) and no sense of history, Catherine Cormery resembles a historical wreck, cast away on a land whose contours are blurred. She is caught in the prison of here-and-now, capable only of vaguely speculating about what lies beyond her immediate environment. For this illiterate, amnesiac woman France is simply an uncharted territory whose history and geography are totally unknown to her. Catherine’s ignorance of France reinforces the settlers’ geographical, historical and cultural alienation from the imperial centre. Implicit in this description is an intention to root the settler community in the colony. By depriving Catherine of a past to which she can return Camus makes Algeria the character’s only possible anchor. This politics of territoriality reflects the settlers’ effort to have a firm grip on Algeria in a frontal struggle against two inimical forces, the indigenous populations and the French colonial administration. As Pierre Nora notes: ‘The French of Algeria have fought on two fronts: Algeria and the métropole’ (quoted

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by Prochaska 1990, 6). Camus through Jacques’s mother naturalises the colony as the settlers’ homeland. He implicitly considers the metropolis as an unlawful proprietor and turns the Arabs and Berbers into strangers in their own country. Camus further distances his female character from the imperial centre which he associates with obscurity and strangeness, images usually applied to the Dark Continent. This reversed imagery creates a de-familiarising effect whereby Algeria becomes a land of sweetness and light, whereas France is a heart of darkness located at the centre of empire. It turns out to be as exotic for Algerian school children as is Africa for Europeans: And these children, who knew only the sirocco, the dust, the short torrential cloudbursts, the sand of the beaches, would assiduously read – stressing the commas and periods – stories that to them were mythical, where children in hoods and mufflers, their feet in wooden shoes, would come home dragging bundles of sticks along snowy paths until they saw the snow-covered roof of the house (136). France amounts to an alien, mythic territory, with no concrete reality for the children. The gap separating the latter from the metropolis is immense. The narrator declares, in terms echoing the author’s own patriotic feelings, that Jacques’s ‘true fatherland’ (‘sa vraie patrie’) is Algeria not France of which he feels to be merely a ‘theoretical citizen’ (130–1). Camus uses defamiliarisation and de-historicisation to move away from French imperial mythologies of power and marks France as an exotic cultural and geographical Other. He does so to reassert the settlers’ close ties to Algeria and their right to claim this colony as their ‘true’ motherland. In ‘Chroniques Algériennes, Algérie 1958’ Camus denounces the Algerians’ struggle for independence, arguing that it was just as legitimate for Arabs and Berbers to proclaim Algeria their nation as it was for the Jews, Turks, Greeks and Italians who settled in this colony. He further states: ‘The French of Algeria are, in the deepest sense, equally indigenous’ (1965, 1013). Camus’s strategy of indigenisation, which consists of assimilating the settlers to a sub-class almost as wretched as the Algerian Muslims, is at its height in Le Premier homme. In this novel he dissociates the settlers from French imperial ideology and tries simultaneously to dismantle the myth of the coloniser as a disseminator of light and progress. Early in the narrative the narrator describes the white colonists as mere adventurers in search of wealth or better life in the colony, thus placing the history of colonisation back where it really belongs – in the economic order


of things. Colonisation is here depicted in terms of conquest for land and riches for some, and a chance for many others to get away from poverty. Most of the early settlers from Spain, Malta, and Italy had, as the narrator observes, come to Algeria to escape from misery and starvation. They were not emissaries of science and progress, as colonialist ideology maintains, but ‘a nest of illiterates who multiplied, far from any school, harnessed to a life of exhausting labour under a ferocious sun’ (82).

Rehabilitating the petty colonist Camus in his novels, short stories and essays pays close attention to the imperial material conditions, insisting on the colonial economic and social context. Le Premier homme evokes the genesis of colonisation in Algeria and points out the role of the colony as a safety-valve for domestic social, economic, and political pressures. Algeria, Camus shows, served as a buffer to France’s domestic discontents, just as did the British colonies in America and Australia two centuries earlier. Criminals of all stripes, fallen mothers and petty thieves vividly depicted in Dickens or Defoe’s novels, were sent to these overseas colonies in numbers in order to preserve morality and social order. Like the numerous British who fled religious or political persecution, many French political opponents persecuted during the 1848 and 1851 revolutions sought refuge in Algeria, which most of them left as soon as they were granted clemency. Camus’s concern with the economic, political and social forces informing colonialism adds historic importance to his colonial narrative. Yet in the end this materialist critique serves mostly to emphasise the part played by the settlers in building Algeria. It helps to validate these settlers’ right to claim ownership of this colony brought into existence by their labour. As he highlights the European working classes’ key contribution to the French empire’s development, the narrator in Le Premier homme celebrates mass colonisation which he considers more legitimate than capitalistic bourgeois imperialism. He similarly valorises the dynamic popular culture and rejects the bourgeois intractable, undifferentiated culture. He tries to unsettle this dominant culture which he dismisses as opaque and unintelligible to the working classes – attributes commonly applied to native cultures. This cultural estrangement is rendered in the scene where a bourgeois, metropolitan academic delivers a lecture to a mostly proletarian audience. The scholar’s speech teems with cultural references and humanist finesse which are out of the public’s reach. Its message proves as obscure to this popular public as native cultures are inaccessible to Western colonisers and vice versa.

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As implied in this cultural encounter, the academic and his audience, the metropolis and periphery, and the bourgeois and popular cultures remain strangers to each other, sealed in mutual indifference and incomprehension. In his essays, too, Camus stresses the cultural distinctions between the metropolis and periphery, declaring: It may be the moment to destroy a few prejudices. To start with, by reminding the French that Algeria exists. By that I mean it exists outside France and that its particular problems have a specific colour and scale. In consequence, it would be absurd to think that you could solve those problems by merely following the example of Metropolitan France (1965, 944–5). Like most pieds-noirs, Camus defines Algeria’s political and cultural identity through denegation and erasure of Otherness. The rhetoric of rupture that he deploys dissociates the settlers from the hegemonic metropolitan politics of incorporation, as much as it separates them from the indigenous multitude threatening to overwhelm the Europeans with their number. In Camus’s writings, the pieds-noirs articulate a common cultural and political identity through symbolic displacement and occlusion. In their self-redefinition they tend to posit themselves as a supreme collective subject that shapes itself against a devalued multi-layered colonial Otherness composed of the Francaoui (the Arabic word for French) and the Arabs and Berbers. The presumed superiority of the pieds-noirs seems predicated on a system of values that sets them apart from both the French and the indigenous populations. Qualities such as ‘generosity’, ‘virility’, ‘the cult of the body’ and ‘physical beauty’, which are the key features of Camus’s settlers, are consistently opposed to the ‘meanness’, ‘impotence’ and ‘intellectualism’ of the French, on the one hand, and to the ‘life of instinct’ and ‘ignorance’ of the Arabs, on the other (see Bourdieu 1963). In his novels and short stories Camus subtly rehearses the distinctions between the pieds-noirs and their French and Arab counterparts, but remains on the whole ambivalent. The conflict and incomprehension between the metropolis and periphery, between the pieds-noirs and the French government, represented in Le Premier homme, were legion in France’s colonial affairs in Algeria. For the settlers the metropolitan government was essentially an obstacle, not to say a threat to their political and material interests. They consistently expressed their aspiration to political and cultural autonomy in terms that questioned the myth of the colony as a cultural, historical and geographical extension of France.


Jean Pomier, one of the founders of the Algerianist movement, states in ‘Prélude à l’exposition coloniale’: Algeria is not France, it is not the extension of France . . ., not because there are Spaniards, Maltese, Jews, Mozabites, Italians, and Arabs; [but because] Algeria is not yet a real nation. Here, races live side by side, but do not mix. Religions are still almost at the stage of medieval fanaticism (1931, 4–5). For Pomier, and generally for the pieds-noirs, Algeria was a nationin-progress, with juxtaposed European communities awaiting crossfertilisation.1 The Arabs and Berbers were part of the colonial mosaic, but they were implicitly excluded from the nation to come. Their ‘backward’, ‘fanatic’ religion was apparently a serious impediment to their integration into Western civilisation. Camus recapitulates the sociological structure of Algeria, gesturing to the capacity for the various communities to interact and blend. In Noces and Le Premier homme, the European populations described by Pomier as living side by side have fruitfully cross-fertilised and generated a breed which is presumably finer than the metropolitan population. Besides cross-cultural fertilisation these works narrate instances of solidarity between the European and indigenous proletariat. This rapprochement enhances the distance between the imperial centre and colony, popular and bourgeois culture, and mass colonialism and bourgeois imperialism. The fact that Camus came from a modest background; that he had been for some time member of the Algerian Communist Party2 might have led him to valorise popular culture and support the workers of European, Arab, and Berber descent. His sympathy for the working classes may have accordingly urged him to condemn capitalism’s squeezing of the colony’s ‘white’ and ‘brown’ proletariat. The condemnation of capitalism and bourgeois culture in Le Premier homme is complete. France’s colonial enterprise is assaulted and the very notion of civilisation is questioned. After cutting off Jacques’s family from the empire’s grand History, the narrator relieves this family, and implicitly the working classes and settlers, from the ‘white man’s burden’. By declaring that the word ‘civilisation’ means nothing to these people Camus exempts the petty colonists from the abuses and guilt of the civilising mission. Inversely, he holds bourgeois capitalism fully responsible for colonial social and economic ills. He shows how the European and indigenous workers were ruthlessly exploited by the same handful of mighty capitalists whose hands were full of the colony’s

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riches. In ‘Les Muets’ (‘The Silent Men’ 1958), which indicts capitalism and celebrates working-class solidarity, the working classes are pictured as uniform and homogeneous. The indigenous Said and the European Yvars and Esposito, who are deemed to be victims of a common ravenous capitalism, are shown enjoying a brotherly relationship. In Le Premier homme, too, he insists on working class solidarity, arguing that both the indigenous and European workers are driven by the same needs and suffer from a similar servitude: ‘It was not for mastery of the earth or privileges of wealth and leisure that these unexpected nationalists were contending against other nationalists; it was for the privilege of servitude’ (237). Camus flattens out the disparities between the indigenous and European workers in the name of proletarian fraternity and solidarity. Underlying this labour rhetoric is a tacit desire to distance the settler working class from the French empire’s ruthlessness. For by stressing their ethic of survival he intends to dispense them of colonial responsibility and guilt. In the process he deems the settlers – including himself – free of racial biases. Germaine Brée notes: Camus describes, as none before him, the peculiar temperament, ethics, attitudes and language of the Algerians, with whom he felt at home more than anyone else’ . . . ‘the working-class population of Belcourt to which Camus belonged was impervious to racial barriers. . . . The Berber and Arab never seemed ‘strangers’ to Camus. (1962, 4) Camus must have certainly felt completely at home in his native Algeria, at least until the rise of Arab and Berber nationalism. But his relation both to the indigenous populations and to the issue of race is more complex than Bree wants us to believe. As a reminder, the Algerian colonial society was a highly stratified fabric with racism as a founding principle. Arabs and Berbers, as Bree remarks, might not have been strangers to Camus, but the segregating political and economic practices alienated them from the majority of the Europeans. Camus’s romantic view of the petty colonists and his idyllic portrayal of Algeria’s working classes needs therefore to be tempered. If we can easily concede that, as shown in Le Premier homme, friendship between Algerians and workingclass Europeans was not unusual, it would be mistaken to think that the European working classes were racially unbiased. There is ample evidence that both French and British colonialist propaganda had urged the working-class men en route for the colonies to feel superior to the indigenous populations (MacKenzie, 1984). Memmi in


Portrait of the Coloniser evoked the petty colonist’s racism and showed how the European proletariat shared the prevailing colonial sense of racial supremacy. Camus was naturally aware of the persistent prejudices against the Arabs and Berbers. He was similarly conscious, as suggested in Le Premier homme, that the settlers’ dormant racial biases regularly surfaced during fights involving Arabs and Europeans. These clashes often had appalling consequences, causing death and destroying the hardwon, fragile camaraderie that was sometimes established between the indigenous and European working masses.

The colonial relationship: racism, responsibility and guilt The thorny issues of racism, responsibility and guilt relating to empire’s excesses dealt with in Le Premier homme had been hotly raised in the 1920s and 1930s when colonialism began to be seriously challenged. Camus’s theory of colonial responsibility is perhaps better grasped in the light of the views of Gide, his major influence, and Greene and Conrad. As stated earlier, Gide complained about the colonial administrators, but held the metropolitan government fully accountable for the witnessed corruption and deficiencies. Greene, too, considers the London politicians liable for the colonial inadequacies in Sierra Leone, convinced that the officials who ‘came out for a few years, had a long leave every eighteen months, gave garden parties, were supposed to be there for the good of the ruled’ are the real rulers that have ‘so much to answer for’ (43). For him, the men in the city bar, the prospectors, shipping agents, merchants and engineers are not blameable since they are ordinary citizens who came to Africa to work and fend for their families: ‘[They] were simply out to make money, and there was no hypocrisy in their attitude towards the bloody blacks’ (43). Greene thus exempts the empire’s ‘outposts’ from the colonies’ deficiencies and lays the blame on the ‘headquarters’ (44). Over two decades earlier, Conrad in ‘Karain’ distinguished nation-state colonialism from imperial buccaneers looking for commercial opportunities in the colonies. The narrator, Hollis and Jackson pretend to engage in a para-colonial enterprise motivated less by the civilising mission than by trade and material pursuits. They insist on being non-colonialists who came not ‘to teach or rule’ (60), but to deal in arm-smuggling with the Malays. The narrator dismisses race or colour as irrelevant in commercial transactions and suggests that trade, even illegal, is more likely to generate friendship between coloniser and colonised than is imperial ideology which thrives on cultural and racial prejudices. According to him, commerce is the best means of construing the

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relationship between West and East, Europeans and natives. He boasts the value of commerce, arguing for a fairer type of colonialism based on balanced transactions. The narrator’s, implicitly Conrad’s, vision of colonialism here echoes both Edmund Burke’s idea of equitable colonisation and the Phoenician model of colonisation which was considered to be mostly mercantile.3 In Camus’s and Greene’s novels the defence of petty colonists articulates mainly along social class lines. Both writers view imperialism as mostly a class struggle, with the working classes reduced to enduring victims of a callous capitalism. They castigate the bourgeois élites managing the colonies’ affairs and draw attention to the plight of the working classes struggling to survive in a harsh imperial economy. Greene’s and Camus’s focus on colonialism’s socio-material conditions is highly significant for it resituates imperialism as a violent, exploitative economic system. And although their class-based approach is a limited tool of analysis of such a complex phenomenon it certainly has the merit of raising unambiguously the question of class that imperialist propaganda has taken care to occlude. It questions the myth of the colonising nations as a monolithic, homogeneous social class, while reasserting the bourgeois élites’ responsibility and culpability regarding the colonial economic and social ills. As a reminder, Greene and Camus were socialists and had both been Communists for some time. Their position to colonialism crystallises therefore both the ideals and contradictions of the socialist critique of imperialism. In concert with the Communist Party championing the cause of the universally oppressed, the two writers speak for the native and Western proletariat in a rhetoric that implies working-class solidarity and camaraderie. In ‘The Silent Men’, cited earlier, Yvars, Esposito and Said, all three prey to capitalistic exploitation, strengthen their fraternal bonds by sharing bread and figs. The act of food sharing epitomises the colonial working classes’ togetherness and common destiny. Despite its appeal, however, this idealised brotherhood proves problematic, both in Camus’s writings and in the overall socialist and Marxist rhetoric. The French Communist Party, for instance, had consistently railed against French colonialism in Algeria, and in the 1920s even argued for Algeria’s independence. They also supported the Riffan revolution (1921–26) led by Abdelkrim El Khattabi,4 and condemned France’s annexation of Morocco in 1912. Their main argument was that the protectorate was profitable to the European bourgeois, not to the proletariat who would not have wished to exploit their Moroccan ‘comrades’ (Ageron 1993). The implication is that had colonisation been a source of


prosperity for the western working classes the exploitation of the Moroccans would not have raised any moral problem. The French Communists’ ambiguity gives the impression that the Marxist universal struggle against capitalism in the end amounts to a provincial preoccupation. Greene, who turned fiercely anti-Communist in the 1930s, has captured this contradiction in Journey Without Maps. He argues that Europeans frequently protested against capitalism’s exploitation of the world’s proletariat, but often meant by the World Europe and Western workers: ‘Why should we pretend to talk in terms of the world when we mean only Europe or the white races?’ (61). He pursues: ‘Neither the ILP [The Independent Labour Party] nor Communist Party urges a strike in England because the platelayers in Sierra Leone are paid six pence a day without their food’ (61). Greene refers to Euro-centrism of the Western social theorising of labour and shows how the European socialists did not extend working-class solidarity to the third-world workforce. The evoked cultural insularity and racial impermeability of the British socialists are defining features of the French Communists in Algeria. The latter, who were mostly of European decent, had often been accused of being both ethnocentric and complicit with the very imperial ideology they criticised. This charge owes perhaps to their abandonment in the 1930s of their earlier anti-colonialist rhetoric. In fact, during the Popular Front period (1935–39), the close Franco-Russian friendship caused them to change the French Communists’ orientation and temper their former anti-colonial protests. They became less concerned with the plight of the Arabs and Berbers. During the Congress of the French Communist Party in June 1945, Caballero, the representative of the Algerian Communist Party, clearly associated those supporting the independence of Algeria with ‘conscious or unconscious agents of a new form of imperialism’ (Benot 1994, 59). The French Communist Party’s change of policy towards Algeria was both due to their struggle against fascism and to latent racism, for, as Tarrow remarks, most of its members were deeply ‘imbued with the racist prejudices of the pied-noir tradition’ (1985, 19). For some Algerians, the terms Communist and coloniser became even interchangeable: ‘If you scratch at a Communist’ as an anonymous voice once said, ‘you find a European conqueror underneath’ (quoted by McCarthy 1982, 55). Though disillusioned by Communism, Camus and Greene betray similar ambiguities regarding colonialism. Both strive to find a scapegoat for imperial excesses, resorting to socio-economic explanations and class considerations. But their revised version of empire finally sounds like an attempt to replace the imperial ruling class by a proletarian governance.

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In other words, following the working class’s philosophy of survival, the two novelists seek to substitute an exploitative bourgeois-inspired imperialism for an ideal proletarian-centered colonisation where exploitation of man by man would be simply wiped out. The dialectics of mass and bourgeois colonialism on which Greene and Camus base their analysis tends, yet, to blur rather than illuminate the complexity of the imperial machine. It overlooks the fact that colonialist ideology perniciously knits together society’s various strata in order to achieve its capitalistic global aims. Additionally, this class-oriented approach oversimplifies the issues of guilt and responsibility relating to colonialism, as much as it undermines the importance of the questions of race and culture within imperial ideology. Overall, the authors’ argument can, to some extent, be sustained in theory, but it is belied in practice. The complexity of the colonial context, racism’s elusive nature and nationalism’s totalising drive reveal the limits of the distinctions made by Greene and Camus. The inadequacy of Greene’s and Camus’s approach to colonialism lies precisely in this: it fails to realise that colonialism is a national undertaking involving directly or indirectly the whole social fabric. Because colonialism is a national scheme both the colonial élites and the petty colonists may, consequently, be, in varying degrees, responsible for the abuses of the imperial system they serve. The question of collective responsibility is cogently raised during Algeria’s War of Independence (1954–62) as well as after the independence. We remember how in the thick of the war, the Algerian revolutionaries directed their terrorist attacks at all the French, bourgeois and proletariat alike. It is ironic, that immediately after Algeria’s independence (5 July 1962) the French were indistinctly lumped into the category common enemy and were summoned to leave the country, just as the Algerians were during the war assimilated to ‘bandits’ and held communally responsible for the crimes perpetrated by single individuals. They were viewed as members of the same nation sharing their country’s guilt and responsibility. What might, then, have made Camus ignore such basic arithmetic and focus on the bourgeois-mass colonisation binary?

European settlers as semi-colonised Camus in his fiction re-enacts the coloniser-colonised dichotomy, but reshapes the terms of the equation to the settler community’s advantage. In Le Premier homme he associates the settlers with semi-colonised peoples. He re-appropriates the colonial representations of the natives which he applies to the settlers to better reinforce their feeling of


oppression from the metropolis. He further distinguishes the indigenous cultures from those of the settlers to reassert Western cultural supremacy. Whereas the conventional colonial lines of demarcation between coloniser and colonised comprise language, culture and race, Camus’s distinction between bourgeois colonialists and the European working classes operates mainly on cultural and economic considerations. His rejection of élite imperialism in favour of mass colonisation, evoked previously, involves a strategy of de-centering and re-centering that re-casts the colonial relation. Within the re-shaped binary, the empire’s élites are turned into usurpers of property. Their role in building the colony is in turn implicitly minimised. The settlers acquire instead pre-eminence and become an emergent centre of dominance with an edifying economic role. In their primacy, they embody a retrieved centre with two peripheries: the bourgeois are confined to their posh ghettos, the Arabs and Berbers dwell in the social hinterlands, and the settlers stand somewhere between the two. They reside in this intermediate position from which they challenge French colonial rule and Arab and Berber mounting nationalist aspirations. Camus is known for his infatuation with ancient Greek literature. His propensity to position the settlers in this sphere of in-betweenness recalls Aristotle’s perception of the Greeks. On classifying people, Aristotle placed the Greeks in the middle and saw them as an ideal group. According to him, the Greeks were suitable for universal rule because the ‘Hellenic race is situated in the middle’ and knew how to blend the spirit of the European ‘war-like races’ (40) with Asiatic ‘intelligence’ and ‘competence’ (165). By positioning the settlers in the middle, Camus follows to an extent Aristotle’s paradigm in Le Premier homme and seems to suggest that they, too, were ideally suited to rule Algeria. He insists on their being endowed with such qualities as generosity, camaraderie and creativity that he finds wanting in both the French bourgeois imperialists and in the indigenous populations. Camus’s alternative theory of colonialism challenges the imperial spatial and representational binary oppositions, but does not relinquish totalising assumptions of culture and identity. Colonialist founding myths in Le Premier homme are not rejected; they are merely revisited and adapted to legitimise the settlers’ secessionist aspirations. Inferred from this myth reshaping is an authorial support of these semi-colonised subjects’ struggle to break away from an oppressive hegemonic imperial metropolis. There is similarly an implicit endorsement of their struggle to reclaim Algeria as their own property, suggested in Camus’s depiction of the indigenous characters and their cultures.

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Like his fellow Algerianists, Camus campaigned for the emancipation of Algeria’s literary and cultural scene from France’s dominance. He had actively contributed with Gabriel Audisio and other Algerianists to the literary journal ‘Rivages,’ issued only twice in 1938 and 1939. The journal’s editors encouraged writers and artists to set up a specifically Algerian literary tradition. However, when it came to materialising the project the editors, including Camus, failed to take fully into consideration the prevailing artistic and cultural diversity. They focused on Spanish and Italian literatures and neglected the Arab and Berber texts, in compliance with the Algerianists’s support of the Latin myth. In the end, their aspiration to literary autonomy merely meant substituting one cultural absolute for another, just as Greene, Conrad and Gide sought to replace ‘bad’ colonialism by a benevolent one, instead of rejecting imperialism altogether. The cluster of prejudices and erasures at the heart of the Algerianist and L’Ecole d’Alger’s ideology gains cogency in Camus’s novelistic representations of the indigenous populations.

Camus’s natives: from erasure to objectification In Camus’s fiction the Arabs and Berbers are either totally erased from the narrative, as in La Peste (The Plague 1947), or reduced to an exotic setting in which the colonial drama operates.5 In L’Etranger the Arabs are described as mostly static, de-substantiated characters. Whether conscious or not, Camus tends by this representation to objectify the Arabs and Berbers. He implicitly subscribes to colonialist ideology that reifies the indigenous populations to justify their economic exploitation, or dehumanise them in order to make their destruction guilt-free. In this respect, the Arab that Meursault kills is drained of his humanity and reduced to a mere component of the landscape. However shocking, the killing of an Arab in the colonial context was from a judicial standpoint a negligible issue. The protagonist acknowledges that his deed disturbs less humankind’s moral foundations than the balance of nature: ‘I knew I had shattered the balance of the day, the exceptional tranquillity of this beach on which I had been happy’ (88). The protagonist’s homicide is a catalyst for the colonial politics of fear and hatred. Meursault, who crystallises the pieds-noirs’ violent, nationalistic aspirations, takes here cruelty and cynicism to their extreme. He rationalises his murder as an act of self-defence against a potential threat suggested by the Arabs’ menacing silence. He talks of the Arabs standing against the tobacco kiosk as individuals who ‘were looking at us in silence, but in their own particular way, as if they were nothing more


than blocks of stone or dead trees’ (73). This pervasive, invisible threat is reinforced by the fact that some of the Arabs who followed Raymond carried knives and ‘had something against Raymond’ (74). Meursault’s murder enacts a cathartic moment that slides the narrative from the dramatic to the tragic. Notwithstanding its brutality, what this episode manifestly shows is that the protagonist does not kill the Arab because the latter really threatens his life, but because he happens to be in a place where he is not supposed to be. In other words, the Arab’s biggest offence chiefly resides in his having trespassed on Meursault’s, implicitly Camus’s, utopian, sublimated Mediterranean landscape – a fantasmatic, Arab-free territory where the protagonist lives in a recurring present of sensual gratification. Implicit in the sordid act, therefore, is the idea that the Arab’s sheer presence on the beach among Europeans was an aberrant oddity, a desecration of the holy ‘eternal Mediterranean’ dear to Camus and his mentor, Audisio, as well as to Bertrand and Randau. From Meursault’s standpoint the Arab’s intrusion is a symbolic rape of the settlers’ space, in which case the murder was no more than reparatory justice for an intolerable sacrilege. Concretely, the protagonist’s slaying of the Arab reflects the settlers’ desire to literally erase the indigenous population from the colonial space of which they claim ownership. In the novel’s complex, knotted mythic structure, the levels of signification overlap, and within the conflation of the literal and the symbolic the murder comes to crystallise salient colonial judicial, political, and ideological questions. Although Camus in L’Etranger marginalises the Arabs and uses the colonial setting to expose his own philosophical ideas, he addresses via Meursault’s homicide the crucial issue of colonial justice which he satirises as a tragic farce. The narrator uses scathing irony at the court of justice scene where he relates the protagonist’s prosecution. He shows how the latter offended the audience more for failing to cry at his mother’s funeral than for having killed an Arab. This ironic turn indicates that the colonial judicial system was a parody of justice in which the colonised were denied basic human rights. Camus’s approach to colonial matters in L’Etranger displays, however, a striking paradox. While denouncing colonial abuses he perpetuates the existing exclusions by keeping out the Arabs and Berbers from the humanist empire he projects onto his fiction. Put differently, in redefining the colonial relation Camus puts centre stage the European settlers and casts to the periphery the native populations whom he denies participation in the edification of the Mediterranean utopian world to which he aspires. Noces is another good case in point. Camus in this narrative

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mentions the hospitality and beauty of Algeria’s inhabitants, including the Arabs and Berbers, but does so in a way that marginalises the latter: First, Algerian youth is beautiful. The Arabs, of course, and the others, too. The French of Algeria are a mongrel race, made of an unexpected blend. Spanish, Alsatians, Italians, Maltese, Jews, and finally Greeks met. These brutal encounters generated, as in America, favorable results. When you stroll in Algiers, take a look at the wrists of young women and men and then think about those you meet in the Parisian subway (127–8). This statement valorises cross-fertilisation in terms that subvert colonialist obsession with cultural and racial purity. The Algerians are depicted as a mongrel population, similar to the cross-fertilised brand generated by the brutal contacts among Amerindians and Europeans. The implied superior settler race, born of the colonial contacts is, yet, emptied of Arab and Berber stock. The latter are assimilated to insignificant Others, the first to be mentioned less for their centrality than for their triviality or evanescence. The exclusion of the Arabs and Berbers from the inter-breeding process betrays a marked ethnocentrism. Camus’s ambivalent representation of these categories shows how far he repeats imperial ideology with a slight variation. At once he attacks imperial injustice and adheres to the colonial ideal by seeking to reform empire and give it an ethical orientation. In Le Premier homme, too, the indigenous characters are peripheral entities. They are cast in an ambiguous shade, described as both ‘alluring’ and ‘disturbing’, ‘near’ and ‘distant’, hostile and capable of ‘friendship’ (257). In short, the Arabs are assimilated to ambivalent signs, at once inviting interpretation and refusing decipherment, familiar and strange, brothers in suffering (economic exploitation) and dangerous political enemies. The characterisation of the Arabs reflects Camus’s own ambivalence about both colonial ideology and the indigenous population. L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom, 1957) is a good illustration. In this collection of short stories, Camus directly engages with the Algerian political and economic problems which he preferred to evade in earlier works. Stories such as ‘L’Hôte’ and ‘La Femme adultère’ (‘The Guest’ and ‘The Adulterous Woman’), for instance, focus on the violence of the war of independence, the famine and misery hitting the indigenous populations.


Camus’s involvement in the Algerian socio-economic and political reality in these stories might have been facilitated by his Parisian exile in the 1950s, a period corresponding to the Algerian war of independence (1954–62). Being away from the war scene, he felt safer to speak his mind, and his political views were then more straightforward and clear-cut than they initially were. He openly condemned the violence of the Algerian revolutionaries and the French army, at the same time he objected to Algeria’s independence and firmly held to the myth of L’Algérie Française. For Camus, the Algerians’ struggle for independence was a purely ‘passionate’, ‘romantic’ idea promoted by a group of young ‘insurgents’ who had no sense of politics (1965, 1012). Persuaded that the insurgents’ romantic flight was caused mostly by colonial social and economic injustice, Camus hoped that France could save the colony by undertaking urgent reforms – reforms which at this stage of the conflict were no longer wanted by the Arabs and Berbers who were, in their majority, won to the cause of independence. While urging the end of the brutalities inflicted on the civilians by both sides, Camus stated that French Algeria was in danger of slipping away for ever, and, in his own words, it needed to be ‘conquered again’ (1965, 943). Although Camus’s vision during the Algerian war of independence remained fundamentally that of a white settler convinced of his legitimate right over Algeria, the conflict instilled doubt into his earlier beliefs and shattered his ‘myth of the Mediterranean as outside history and politics’ (Vulor 2000, 168). The previous unitary mythic structuring principle of his novels thus broke down, plunging narrator and author alike into a disquieting moral dilemma. The short-story mode of narrative he uses to depict the troubles in Algeria is characterised by fragmentariness and disintegration – two signs indicating his political disarray and split consciousness. The tales related in L’Exil et le royaume have no organic unity, held together only by the theme of exile. Most of the characters are themselves torn between contradictory aims and prove unable to transcend the polarisations of the political scene. The school teacher, Daru in ‘L’Hôte’ crystallises this predicament. After having set free the Arab prisoner entrusted to him, he abandons him in the middle of a crossroads with one escape route leading to a French police station, and the other to his native village where he may be lynched for the murder he was accused of. Daru both wishes to help the Arab and wants to remain loyal to French colonial rule – an indecision which exemplifies the author’s ambivalence. His inability to commit himself fully to either side of the colonial divide deems him a traitor to both, just as Camus himself was, in his

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own words, criticised ‘on his right and left side, bound to proceed without satisfying anyone’ (Lottman 1979, 629). This ambiguity reflects Camus’s difficulty of achieving a sustainable ‘in-between’ space that could merge the coloniser and colonised, humanism and colonialism, sameness and difference. For him and for such critics of imperialism as Conrad, Greene and Gide the intermediate position from which they articulate their humanist outlook proves a particularly challenging site of (d)enunciation. These well-intentioned, liberal intellectuals express in varying degrees an incapacity to preserve an ideologically and politically balanced position when narrating the empire’s tensions. Incidentally, by siding with imperial France during the Algerian Revolution Camus shows that the middle ground from which he articulates his vision of colonialism can be at best a theoretical, aesthetic posture; and at worst, an inefficient, if not sterile contesting agency. In the final analysis, Camus’s as well as Conrad’s, Gide’s and Greene’s indictment of colonialism sounds like a rhetoric of rupture premised on an aspiration to a utopian, humanist empire. The four authors’ inability to reject unequivocally the imperial system reveals how far they are determined by cultural and ideological totalities that condition their outlook. The ideological evasiveness characterising the modernist writers’ approach to colonialism suggests that their depiction of the colonial encounters is at best a displaced, mystified tale, and at worst an indeterminate narrative of tacit complicity and collusion with empire. This leads me to argue that the tale of colonialism remains a blurred picture, whether the colonial encounters are related from the marginal standpoint of the Western liberal humanist or from the perspective of die-hard colonists. We may add that the story of empire is just as blurred when it is told in native accents.

Conclusion

Modern colonial authors’ steady borrowing from classical literatures brings to light the intricate connections between ‘new’ and ancient imperialism. Throughout European history, classical Greece and Rome have been consistently regarded as the cradle of Western civilisation, a source of literary and military inspiration, exemplars of rationality, order and discipline, the site of cultural and poetic accomplishment, and the embodiment of an ideal human norm. For a hegemonic system such as colonialism, which was eager to turn the world into a uniform ‘empire of the same’, models and norms were of paramount importance. The ancient Greeks and Romans proved a crucial point of reference, constantly evoked to justify the civilising mission, or bolster a doubting imperial consciousness. They served as figures of intellectual authority from which to derive lessons; their literatures provided, in turn, a reservoir of ideas and concepts which were adopted and adapted to serve imperial goals. In all cases, the ancient imperial powers were seen as worthy instructors of mankind, which casts the modern colonising nations in the status of pupils learning the trade of empire by following their masters’ example. The idea of classical empires as exemplary teachers is manifest in the works of such authors as Haggard, Kipling, Diderot, Tocqueville, Seeley and Macaulay. These writers conceived of colonisation as a rite of passage or learning process with clear pedagogical objectives: instructing the natives and bringing them into the orbit of Western enlightenment and order, as the Greeks and Romans did with the barbarians. Valuable teachers, the ancient Greeks and Romans were also viewed as direct ancestors. Their ideal image was appropriated by means of identification and filiation. This affiliation puts modern colonists in the status of legitimate heirs in charge of pursuing the unfinished classical imperial project. The instructor-pupil dyad thus joins forces with the ancestorheir relation, both setting ancient imperialism and modern conquests in a historical continuum. The father–child relationship highlights the genealogical links and racial lineage between modern Europeans and the ancient world. The teacher-student pair, on the other hand, reinforces the ideological connections between the two eras. The first suggests the modern imperial nations’ narcissistic dependence on the classical powers, while the second indicates their conceptual indebtedness. The 214

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two corroborate to show the modern empires’ mimetic impulse and draw attention to the way the discourse backing it is a rhetorical, ideological and narcissistic palimpsest. For all their sophistication and presumed modernity, therefore, most of the racial taxonomies sustaining modern colonial discourse derive from classical literatures, starting with the word ‘barbarian’ which connects ideologically ancient and new imperialism. The classical assumptions about culture, race and identity, recurrent in nineteenth and twentiethcentury literatures, contributed widely to articulating the modern colonial ideology. The ‘proto-racism’, common in the Greco-Roman world, served as a template for the racist theories that developed in the eighteenth century and gained gradually scientific validation. Central in the works of Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates, the myths of racial purity and supremacy alongside eugenic beliefs and fear of degeneration permeate modern colonial literature. These thematic continuities and conceptual legacy bequeathed to the moderns endows the ancient canonical writings with an absolute textual and ideological authority. With its conceptual authority being mostly classically-derived, modern colonialist discourse forms a minor site of knowledge dependent on the ancient major discourse of barbarism with its attendant myths of cultural and racial superiority. Emulation, grafting, mimetism and conceptual indebtedness are defining features of the modern colonial writers’ relationship with their Greek and Roman ancestors. Authors such as Swift, Johnson, Arnold, Schlegel, Renan and Grégoire were assiduous repetitors of classical linguistic racialism, which deemed inferior those who did not speak Greek or Latin. This ancient theory of language and race fuelled modern colonial rhetoric. It also informed the empire’s politics of territoriality which articulated around the binary dumb/irrational periphery and rational/articulate centre. The separation of the Europeans and natives rested on cultural and racial fixities. It likewise operated along the lines of legibility and unintelligibility, a binary which involves a strategy of dehumanisation that justified the natives’ exclusion and economic exploitation. Initiated by the ancient Greek poets and philosophers, notably Aristotle, the idea of the barbarians as bestial or leading a life of sensation recurs in the works of such modern authors as Dubarry’s Voyage au Dahomey, Haggard’s Cetywayo and His White Neighbours, Gide’s Voyage au Congo, and Greene’s Journey Without Maps. As in classical literature, in modern texts, too, the beast trope is often combined with the figure of the cannibal to mark the natives as radically alien and a potential threat to Western civilisation.

216 Conclusion

Owing to these numerous thematic, rhetorical and ideological interconnections, modern construction of difference amounts to a protonarrative that draws its inspiration and force from a grand rhetoric of Othering, namely the classical representations of the barbarians. The originary narrative of race devised by the Greeks in the fifth century BC to categorise the Persians and Egyptians provided the conceptual apparatus which was subsequently used to define modern Europe’s colonial subjects. These categorisations inspired Sepulveda among others who reiterated Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery and linguistic racialism to prove the Amerindians’ inferiority and cast them as sub-humans. During the 1550 Valladolid confrontation with his opponent Las Casas, Sepulveda described the Amerindians in a rhetoric that echoed the classical definition of the Persians and Egyptians. On discussing the Greek and Egyptian civilisations Voltaire and Winckelmann, too, re-enacted the Greek and Roman prejudices about the Egyptians in terms that encoded the latter as a universal Other, typifying the colonised African or Oriental. The attributes of despotism, backwardness and stagnation characterising them resonated in nineteenth-century Western colonial discourse about Africa and the Orient. Central to modern construction of Otherness, these depreciative tropes form a network of echoes that bring together ‘new’ imperialism and classical hegemonies, with the former parasitically building on the latter. Derivative and highly mimetic, modern colonial definitions of the natives are at the same time resilient, articulating around the dialectic of continuity and rupture. In keeping with the classical characterisation of foreigners, modern writers rehearse the image of the native as backward and inferior. In the meantime, they break away from the ancient vision of the barbarian as a generic type. This dynamic of imitation and challenge may owe to the articulation of the modern production of difference on a dual axis: a linear horizontal line and a vertical trajectory, both converging to form a site of knowledge and power which is as polyphonic as it is decentred. With respect to a horizontal distinction based on skin colour, the colonised are lumped into the communal ‘they’ and are collectively deemed racially inferior. On the other hand, following a vertical differentiation digging into the indigenous cultural and social layers, the colonial Other is reinstated as a stratified entity, subject to categorisation and distinction, integration and exclusion. At one level, this differentiating practice seems to grant few valorised natives or ethnic groups the romantic privilege of the first person. It separates the shaft from the grain, stressing the affinity of the chosen few to the ideal European self. At another level, however, the ethic of differentiation

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characteristic of the modern colonial rhetoric of Othering forms a privileged means of manipulation, pertaining to the divide-and-rule tactic. In the final analysis, the ethic of differentiation betrays the tautological character of the imperial culture and identity which tend to acknowledge Otherness only in so far as it is almost like the sameness in relation to which it is evaluated. The same dialectic of totality and differentiation informs colonial rule, which combines coercion and negotiation, incorporation and rejection of difference, progressive and archaic practices. The inter-relationship of the modern and archaic, civilisation and barbarity suggested by Conrad, Forster and Greene testifies to the relative value of human constructs, including culture and civilisation. Colonialism’s blending of a progressive rhetoric with barbaric practices undermines Europe’s self-proclaimed duty to enlighten the natives. The deliberate economic and social retardation of the colonies, the inhumanity of the conquests with their trail of brutalities and massacres question the colonial ideals of enlightenment. They also challenge the view that the colonial encounters were based on balanced and equitable transactions. Conrad, Greene and Gide in respectively ‘Karain’, Journey Without Maps and Voyage au Congo dramatise the relations of exchange and negotiation between the colonisers and colonised. At the same time, they show how this minor tale of exchange is undercut by the major narrative of coercion and domination that recall the natives to their subordination and inferiority. These tensions may result from the empire’s manifest split between a humanist ethic of progress and a strategy of dehumanisation that tends to maintain the natives in a perpetual backwardness to better exploit them. Signs of the empire’s ideological schizophrenia, these conflicting urges reflect the colonising nations’ incapacity or reluctance to follow to its ultimate conclusions the professed linear narrative of social and economic progress, entailed in the civilising mission. The ideological inconsistencies mentioned above can also be easily discerned in the works of those criticising empire, such as Conrad, Forster, Woolf, Greene, Gide and Camus. Heart of Darkness, A Passage to India, The Voyage Out, Journey Without Maps, Voyage au Congo, and Le Premier homme are ambivalent about imperialism, classical and modern alike. They are informed by contest of and collusion with imperial representations. These modernists’ contradictions in relation to imperialism may derive from the split of their outlook between empire-as-reality and imperialism-as-an-ideal of development and human fulfilment. If all these authors implicitly or explicitly indicted colonialism’s abuses, none of them desired the demise of empire. The ugliness of the here-and-now

218 Conclusion

of empire seems to have pricked their conscience, but the possibility or desirability of redeeming the idea at the back of the imperial project prevented them from dismantling colonial ideology. This indecisiveness derives from the authors’ espousal of a paracolonialist discourse which tries to reconcile the colonial major narrative of enlightenment with the minor rhetoric of (anti-colonial) resistance. The modernists’ vision of empire strikingly echoes the approach of the Humanists who inspired them. Las Casas, Montaigne and La Bruyère condemned European excesses but did not challenge the rightness of the Western civilising mission. Similarly, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Greene, Gide and Camus taking after these early anti-colonialists attacked imperialism’s inhumanness while still believing in the validity of the colonial idea. They may be said to embody Europe’s good conscience, eager to reform the imperial system and connect it to its original utopia of universal progress. The pressing question is: why did modernist writers indict colonialism without going as far as to call into question the empire’s raison d’être? The modernist writers’ idealism and political and ideological escapism, their adherence to an ‘aristocratic’ view of culture, the eugenic inclination of most of them, their implicit belief in the European self as an ideal human norm, and their tacit identification with the ideals of the civilising mission might have been major obstacles in the way of a complete rejection of the colonial idea. Despite an implicit or explicit critique of empire, therefore, deep down the modernist writers’ identification with the imperial self was such that they could not question radically a colonial culture of which they were part and parcel. For modernist writers, an unqualified dismissal of imperialism would have meant relinquishing the idealised modern subjectivity which they embodied and that empire projected into the colonies. Given their identification with the colonial ideals and tacit collusion with the empire’s racism, it is hardly surprising that the modernists were neither ready to contest Western cultural arrogance, nor willing to adopt the natives as cultural and racial equals. Another vexing issue worth pondering at this stage is why the ambivalence of modern culture about such hegemonic systems as imperialism lived into our post-modern era which celebrates the death of absolutes. What makes many of our fellow scholars writing about empire look benignly at colonialism and re-narrate colonial collisions as an occurrence of flat dialogue and exchange? What motives lie behind the recent scholarly privileging of the minor tale of collaboration and exchange over the grand narratives of colonial violence, chronic conflict and sustained native anti-colonial resistance?

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Ideological consensus and compromise, characteristic of modern and post-modern cultures, may provide part of the answer. The other part is related to the way the experience of colonialism was inscribed and re-imagined in the collective unconscious. A combination of guilt and a sense of an unaccomplished imperial destiny seems to continue to overshadow Western collective memory and together obstruct a realistic vision that would take colonialism for what it is: a system of oppression based on violence and rapacity. The persistence of the ideological status-quo in relation to the colonial idea, conveyed in contemporary relativist, almost romantic views of colonialism, is the sign of a conscience that is still burdened with regrets and nostalgia. That colonial cultures were permeable; that the native élites collaborated and benefited from the empire’s largesse is unquestionable. All the same, the exchanges and complicities, which testify to a relative permeability of the colonial relation, are but a minor narrative or sub-text which has meaning and relevance only in so far as it is read in the light of the hypertext of hatred, fear and oppression on which imperialism was founded. Failing to acknowledge that imperialism was for the majority of the natives an odyssey of dispossession, humiliation and alienation may be just as mystifying as reducing the colonial encounters to smooth, balanced transactions. When it comes to theorising colonialism we should, therefore, not so much play colonial subtext against its hypertext as finding how both combine to articulate a stratified, hegemonic and elusive discourse of power and authority. For within the imperial context, the minor tale of exchange and inclusion and the major narrative of hatred and exclusion were not in competition with each other, as we tend to think, but dovetailed to consolidate imperial rule. This network of solidarity shows how colonialism is an overreaching system of domination in which narratives of enlightenment and barbarism join forces to sub-humanise the natives and drain the colonies of their resources. Continuing to romanticise the colonial encounters, as many scholars tend to do, may not be the best way to envision a truly post-imperial culture and build a genuine ‘planetary’ consciousness.

Notes 1 Modern Europe and Classical Connections 1. Referring to the Victorians’ identification with ancient Greece, Turner states: ‘Writing about Greece was in part a way for [the Victorians] to write about themselves’ (1981, 8). 2. Cornford writes: ‘The ancient classics resemble the universe. They are always there, they are very much the same as ever’ (quoted by Turner 1981, 17). 3. In Something of Myself, Kipling discusses his relationship with Horace: ‘My main interest as I grew older was C——, my English and Classics Master, a rowing-man of splendid physique, and a scholar who lived in secret hope of translating Theocritus worthily. He had a violent temper, no disadvantage in handling boys used to direct speech, and a gift of schoolmaster’s ‘sarcasm’ which must have been a relief to him and was certainly a treasure-trove to me. Also he was a good and House-proud House-master. Under him I came to feel that words could be used as weapons, for he did me the honour to talk at me plentifully; and our year-in year-out form-room bickerings gave us both something to play with . . . C—— taught me to loathe Horace for two years; to forget him for twenty, and then to love him for the rest of my days and through many sleepless nights’ (1937, 21–2). 4. The Punic Wars were a series of three wars (264–241 BC; 202–218 BC; 149–146 BC) fought between Rome, an ascending power in Italy, and Carthage, which was then the dominant power of the Mediterranean. A conflict of interests was at the root of these wars. The Romans wanted expansion through Sicily, most of which was under Carthaginian control. By the end of the third war, the Roman army had conquered and destroyed Carthage. The soldiers went from house to house, slaughtering the civilians (Caven 1980; Goldworthy 2003). 5. Quinn argues that the English colonists in Ireland self-consciously modelled their plans for conquest and plantation upon the Spanish example in the Americas (Carroll 2003, 66). 6. Turner points out the connections between Homer’s epics and the Bible that some Victorian scholars and critics had forged. He shows how these intellectuals identified the Homeric records of profane history with their sacred equivalent, the Old Testament (1981, 154–70). 7. A French radical Socialist, Sarraut was twice Governor General of French Indochina (1911–14; 1916–19) and twice Minister of the Colonies (1920– 24; 1932–33). He promoted the development of French overseas possessions and his colonial policy is reflected in La Mise en valeur des colonies françaises (1923) and Grandeur et servitude coloniales (1931). 8. A French scholar and politician, Delavignette was an administrator in Niger and Upper Volta, then Minister for ‘la France d’Outre-Mer’ in the Popular Front Government, before becoming Director for the Political Affairs of the Ministry for ‘la France d’Outre-Mer’ till the 1950s. 220

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9. According to Rops, the younger Cambodian generation called the French administrators ‘the old Khmers’ and accused them of upholding an archaic social structure that was less and less wanted by the Cambodians (1964, 30). 10. When Alexander the Great defeated the Persian Empire at Issus in 333 BC, he moved many Greek settlers into the vanquished empire, but did not deeply alter the latter’s administrative organisation. In some places he replaced untrustworthy princes by more loyal ones, but on the whole he used the existing structures of power, ruling mostly through the same ‘satraps’ or ‘protectors of the province’ (Pagden 2001). 11. The Inca Empire was split administratively into four regions. These regions were then divided into provinces, the provinces into peoples and these into ayllus. The curacas were the leaders of the peoples and ayllus (pre-Inca political structure unit, usually made of extended family groups). During the early years of the Spanish colonisation, the authority of the curacas was altered dramatically. They remained the chiefs of the peoples and ayllus, but they no longer controlled the communal administration, nor the workforce necessary to the networks of redistribution. Chosen by the chief magistrate, the curaca was mostly used as a tax collector. 12. The South Sea Bubble affair was caused by a cluster of political, financial and legal problems. The South Sea Company was formed in 1711, a period characterised by financial enthusiasm in Britain. The government promised the Company a monopoly of all trade to the Spanish colonies in South America in exchange for financing the national debt generated by the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14). The company’s shares were selling well, which gave the investors the impression that the enterprise was successful. But in 1718, the South Sea Company was in a financial disaster: Britain, the Netherlands and France went to war with Spain when the latter attempted to retrieve what it had lost in the Peace of Utrecht. The war ended the trade between the belligerents. As it was difficult to trade in those circumstances, the South Sea Company focused on selling shares. Even its management team began selling their own excessively priced shares. When this rumour spread, panic seized the shareholders, causing financial ruin (Ross 2000; Dale 2004). 13. The British ransacked the Sanskrit texts and used the local religious leaders’ knowledge to interpret them. Following the Aryan model which identified a common ancestry between Britain and India, they wanted to discover a cultural matrix. As Pagden remarks, this effort ‘implied that beneath the trappings of later non-Aryan elements it might be possible to find in India customs, habits, even institutions that had all but vanished in Europe itself’ (2001, 153). 14. Since immemorial times, colonial powers have often exploited the internal ethnic, religious and linguistic fractures within the conquered societies. When the Romans invaded North Africa, they took advantage of the rivalries among Berber kings, creating alliances with the loyal ones and fighting those who resisted them. They supported, for instance, Massinissa while they fiercely fought the dissident Jugurtha who waged an eleven-year war against the Roman armies and their Berber allies. With the capture of Jugurtha and destruction of his army, Rome installed loyal Berber kings to avoid further resistance. The English did the same during the first wars against the Scots

222 Notes (1296–1346). They tried to oust Robert Bruce’s son, David, and place their own puppet king, Edward Balliol, on the throne of Scotland. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish followed a similar strategy in Peru, torn by a civil war opposing the two sons of Huayna Capac, the illegitimate Atahuallpa and the legitimate heir Huascar who were struggling for power. Pizarro used this internecine strife; he backed the legitimate Huascar and his partisans against his brother Atahuallpa and his allies. 15. The French military élite that ruled Algeria from 1830 to 1870 established the basic bureaucratic institutions. Their attitude to the white settlers differed greatly from the succeeding civilian government of the Third Republic. The first had a firm institutional control on the pieds noirs (the population of European decent who lived in North Africa, particularly in Algeria). Contrastively, the second adopted a more lenient, liberal approach which allowed the settlers ‘to create local pockets of power in the interstices of the ‘looser’ republican administration’ (Prochaska 1990, 180). In India, too, British rule was fraught with tensions and inconsistencies. There was a stark opposition between the advocates of laissez-faire policy and the ‘paternalists.’ The former encouraged freedom of enterprise and unconstrained liberalism. The latter wanted instead a much fairer system: they urged to protect the peasants against unscrupulous moneylenders and preserve certain traditional institutions such as the village community (Kumar 1998, 7). 16. On 8 May 1945, many Algerians went to the streets to celebrate the end of World War II in which thousands of Africans participated. But the demonstration degenerated into a violent confrontation between police and demonstrators, causing between eight and forty five thousand casualties (Sellam 1999).

2 Imperial Ideology: Between Totality and Differentiation 1. Ironically the ancient Greeks who viewed the Romans as barbarians were in turn identified with barbarians when Greece became a Roman province in 146 BC, just as the Berbers, who played a key part in the conquest of Spain in the eleventh century, or the Kurds, who contributed greatly to the Ottoman expansion, were later considered barbarous by respectively the Arabs and the Turks. 2. The concept ‘barbarian’ is underpinned by cultural and racial biases that assert the Greeks’ superiority over non-Greeks. 3. Occidentalist discourse refers to the Orient’s representation of the Western world. 4. On ‘Karain’ and theatricality, see Brown and Sant (1999). 5. On colonial literature and exoticism, see Bongie (1991) and Gogwilt (1995). 6. From 1918 on, the Algerians were willing to send their children to school but the colonial administration limited access to a few privileged families. 7. From the eighteenth century, travellers, emissaries and petitioners who had grievances about the East India Company visited England. By the middle of the nineteenth century an increasing number of Indians, including students and professionals came to England (Visram 1986; Burton 1998).

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3 Impact of Classical Discourse of Barbarism on Modern Colonial Taxonomies 1. Aristotle writes in Politics: ‘It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right’ (7). 2. Sepulveda paraphrases Aristotle’s argument in Politics where he states: ‘the freeman rules over the slave after another manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child’ (19). 3. A Catholic priest and revolutionary, Abbé Grégoire advocated linguistic uniformity, the reform of the Church, racial equality and the establishment of a compulsory, free system of public primary education. 4. Twice premier (1880–81; 1883–85), Ferry instigated the idea of building a great colonial empire after the defeat of France by Germany in 1870. In a speech before the Chamber of Deputies on 28 July 1885, he declared that ‘the superior races have a right because they have a duty: it is their duty to civilise the inferior races’. Ferry was remembered for his fierce battle against France’s regional vernaculars as well as for his progressive educational reforms. He passed the eponym Laws of 16 June 1881 and 28 March 1882, which made primary education free, secular and compulsory. 5. A high military officer, politician and writer, Daumas came to Algeria in 1835. He was President of the Arab Bureaus in the Province of Oran and was President of all the indigenous affairs in Algeria. 6. Aristotle once told his pupil, Alexander the Great to treat the non-Greeks as if they were ‘plants’ or ‘animals’. 7. Isaac observes: ‘The value of pure lineage is first attested in fifth century Athens. An aggregate of theories about unmixed ancestry springing from native soil was regarded as highly significant by the Athenians themselves and taken over in various forms by later authors’ (2004, 56). 8. Most Greek and Roman writers decried contacts with foreigners and mixed offspring. In contrast, Apuleius – a Roman author of Numidian and Gaetulian origin – defended mixed descent in Apologia where he writes: ‘Concerning my fatherland, as you have shown on the basis of my own writings, it lies on the very border of Numedia and Gaetulia. I have in fact declared in my public declarations in the presence of the honorable Lollianus Avitus, that I am half Numidian and half Gaetulian. However, I do not see what there is in this for me to be ashamed of, any more than there is for the Elder Cyrus, being of mixed origin, half Mede and half Syrian’ (quoted by Isaac 2004, 145). 9. Arrian was a Greek historian, whose major works include Anabasis of Alexander and Indica.

4 Colonialism: From Hegemony to Infantilism 1. On the eve of the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962), for example, less than 13 per cent of Algerian children had access to the French public school system. Memmi writes: ‘After decades of colonisation, the multitude of children in the streets is greatly in excess of those in the classrooms’ (1957, 113).

224 Notes 2. The Loi Jonnart passed in 1919 gave more representation to Arabs, and made naturalisation possible for the Algerians willing to give up their Muslim personal status. But during the 1920s most Algerians viewed naturalisation as a mere apostasy. That is why from 1919 to 1936 only 1720 natives applied for French citizenship. 3. On Conrad’s borrowing from and transformation of the colonial adventure tradition, see Parry (1983), White (1993) and Dryden (2000). 4. On the symbolism of disguise, see Low (1996). 5. For more information on the relationship between Jim and Brown, see Crompton (2003). 6. For a psychoanalytic reading of the mechanisms of subordination, see Ross (2004). 7. For complementary analyses of the theme of cannibalism in colonial literature, see Barker et al. (1998).

5 Modernist Writers, Classical Ideal and Empire 1. For a different interpretation of the issue of rape, see Sharpe (1991) and Adams (2003). 2. Like the nineteenth-century feminist activists, the social scientists of the period also established analogies between the domestic poor and the indigenous populations that they often represented in similar terms. 3. In August 1908, Leonard Woolf was appointed to administer the District of Hambantota. He resigned from the Ceylon Civil Service in 1912 and in 1913 he published his first novel, The Village and the Jungle. In this work, based on his experiences in the colonial service, Woolf criticises colonial administration’s hypocrisy and abuses. 4. As Bell notes one of Woolf’s ancestors ‘settled in the West Indies and prospered in the unpleasant trade of buying sickly slaves and then curing them sufficiently to make them fit for the market’ (1972, vol. 1, 1); Marcus also observes that Woolf’s uncle Fitzjames Stephen ‘codified Indian law’ and her grand-father, James Stephen, who was Permanent Under Secretary for the colonies, condemned slavery but was a fervent advocate of colonisation (1988, 80–3). 5. Gobineau held that ‘modern Greeks were so mongrelised that they could no longer be considered as descendents of the Ancients’ (1983, 362); Haggard writes in She: ‘Ah, I loved the Greeks. They were beautiful as day and clever, but fierce at heart and notwithstanding . . . yet the Greeks of today are not what the Greeks of the old time were, and Greece herself is but a mockery of the Greece that was’ (1887, 111–12). 6. Childs refers to Woolf’s influence by modern theories’ connection of racial characteristics to the peoples’ environment (2001, 48–9), but does not mention her possible inspiration by classical topographic determinism. 7. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as Childs rightly observes, Joyce questions the myth of purity and caricatures the theory of eugenics (2001, 11–12). 8. On Joyce and language, see MacCabe (1978), McGee (1988), and Benstock (1991).

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9. Joyce writes that Ulysses is ‘the work of a sceptic, but I don’t want it to appear the work of a cynic.’ (quoted by Budgen 1960, 152). 10. To crush the Boer resistance, the British adopted brutal methods, including the imprisonment of women and children in concentration camps. See Davey (1978), Pakenham (1979), and Booker (2000). 11. According to Booker, it was speculated that the huge Irish losses were due to the British use of the Irish soldiers as ‘cannon fodder, employed in situations where the potential for casualties was high’ (2000, 88). 12. On the colonised bourgeois mentality, see Fanon (1961). 13. For complementary analyses of the issues of race and identity in Ulysses, see Cheng (1995). 14. See Cairns and Richards (1988); Kiberd (1996). 15. The Algerianist movement came into existence in 1921, founded by Randau and Pomier. Aesthetically, this movement intended to create an autonomous Algerian literary tradition that would break away from the tourist literature reducing Algeria to an exotic setting. Politically, Les Algerianistes represented, as Vulor rightly put it, the ‘Orthodox French colonist position’ (2000, xxi). 16. On portraying his characters as children and Grecian, Camus must have had in mind Plato who was the first to identify the Greeks with children. In Timaios, he reports the words of an Egyptian priest addressing Solon: ‘You Greeks are always children: there is no such thing as an old Greek . . . you are always young in soul, every one of you.. . . You possess not a single belief that is ancient’ (quoted by Bernal 1987, 209). The idyllic image of the Greeks was popularised in the eighteenth century by Winckelmann, and later taken up by German Hellenists like Schlegel and Goethe, as well as by such British writers as Hazlitt, Grote, Mill and Pater (Turner 1981, 2).

6 Modernism, Modernity and Imperalism 1. I am thinking particularly of the writings of North African writers such as Kateb Yacine, Rachid Boudjedra and Driss Chraibi, who are resolutely modernist, but cannot, according to this definition, be considered modernist simply because they were written in the 1950s. 2. Barth stresses the modernist writers’ ‘radical disruption of linear flow of narrative’ and ‘frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character’ (1982, 68). He, however, overlooks the janiform nature of modernist ethics and aesthetics. 3. Carr discusses the imagist poets’ search for a pristine poetic period highlighting their quest for inspiration in the distant and archaic Japanese, Chinese, early Greek, and ancient Hebrew traditions. Meanwhile, she points out that Pound’s favoured past was medieval Provence and Italy (2000, 64–73).

7 Culture, Civilisation and Inter-Racial Encounters: Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly 1. Edmond, for example, argues that ‘Almayer’s Folly dramatises a set of fears, namely that civilisation is skin-deep, that Europeans cut off from the roots

226 Notes

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

that nurtured them are easily decivilised, and that native populations are uneducable’ (2000, 46). This argument is illuminating, but it neglects the fact that Conrad’s view of culture and civilisation is complex and elusive. The frontier between the civilised and savage often prove thin (Griffith 1995). See Knox (1850), Rich (1986) and Ross (1982). See Greenslade (1994) and Pick (1989). Bhabha maintains that the relations of power and knowledge in the colonial context function ambivalently, through negotiation and contest, whereby the coloniser’s discourse is constantly interrogated by the colonised in native accents (1997). Hampson notes that the Arabs and Malays in Almayer’s Folly have a conception of culture that is as exclusive as Almayer’s, for they, too, think that ‘only their codes are valid’ (2000, 102). Nativism is a claim to ancestral purity that involves a belief in a collective, unitary subject or in a monolithic notion of identity. See Jan Mohamed (1983), Appiah (1988), Guha (1989), and Young (1990). Pêcheux distinguishes between ‘discourse-against’ and ‘disidentification’. He defines the former as a situation of radical rupture in which the subject of enunciation distances itself and questions the assumptions of ‘the universal subject’, in Nina’s case her father and the imperial subject he stands for. He refers to the second concept as a position that ‘constitutes a working (transformation-displacement) of the subject-form not just its abolition’ (1982, 157–9). For Terdiman the strategy of ‘re/citation’ is a situation in which the subject seeks to ‘surround the antagonist and neutralise or explode it’ (1985, 68). The technique of ‘de/citation’ is instead a condition where the subject attempts to fully free itself from the grips of the dominant discourse and tries to ‘exclude it totally, to expunge it’ (70). Terdiman acknowledges, however, that counterdiscourses are ‘always interlocked and parasitic on’ the dominant discourse they challenge (41). William Robertson was an anthropologist historian. His History of America (1777) in which he describes the Amerindians as ‘feeble’ and ‘indolent’ savages has very likely influenced Edward Tylor’s works, especially Primitive Culture (1871). Andrew Lang is known for his research on folklore, mythology and religion. His works include Custom and Myth (1884) and Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887). Lang’s The Making of Religion was influenced by the eighteenthcentury idea of the ‘noble savage’. James George Frazer was also interested in the study of myth and religion which became his areas of expertise, and he was the first to examine in detail the relations between myths and rituals. To extrapolate from Conrad’s representation of the Malay traditions, we may argue that the pre-colonial world depicted in Almayer’s Folly is no different from the traditional African or Indian communities respectively conquered by the French and British. These societies, too, were not as cohesive and harmonious as was commonly held by the indigenous nationalists. For example, Algeria, which the French conquered in 1830, was a highly stratified society. It was ruled by a Turkish military élite, the local nobility including religious leaders, key officials, and wealthy merchants and artisans. At the bottom of the social pyramid were the masses, themselves divided into sub-sections (Prochaska 1990, 55). Likewise, pre-British India was hierarchical, split into

Notes

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

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various castes and ethnic, linguistic and religious communities. Contrary to the beliefs of those who advocate a pre-colonial golden era, Hindus and Muslims did not always formerly live in harmony and peace, nor did they wage relentless wars against each other, as Hindu nationalists contend (Gopal 1993; Peabody 2003). Borneo in which Conrad sets his first novel, Almayer’s Folly was part of the Dutch Southeast Asian colonies. The Dutch settled in the Indies as early as 1600 and, as Stoler states, the population of mixed descent numbered in the tens of thousands in 1900; they amounted approximately to three-fourths of the section of the population designated legally as European (1997, 198). See Hyam (1990). As Stoler observes: ‘Nowhere is this relationship between inclusionary impulses and exclusionary practices more evident than in how métissage was legally handled, culturally inscribed, and politically treated in the contrasting colonial cultures of French Indochina and the Netherlands Indies’ (1997, 198). The Dutch concerns over the métis question and the related issue of national identity at the turn of the century converged with a ‘civilizing offensive’ (i.e. engagement in domestic and colonial reforms) aimed at the ‘dangerous classes’. These included the domestic poor and the impoverished IndoEuropeans, most of whom were of mixed descent and were viewed as a threat to national identity. On the ‘civilizing strategy’ and Dutch nationalism, see Schöffer (1978), Mosse (1985), Kuitenbrouwer (1991), and McClintock (1995). Martial, a Professor of medicine at the faculty of medicine in Paris and a fervent eugenist, considered the métis as a biological anomaly, fraught with physical and mental deformities (1942). Bhabha in ‘Of Mimicry and Man’ argues that colonial mimicry is ‘the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ (1997, 153).

8 Redeeming the Colonial Idea: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 1. On Conrad and classical literature, see Tillyard (1958) and Najder (1983). 2. In 1890, Conrad went to the Congo paid by a Belgian company, the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. His experience there is recorded in his ‘Congo Diary’ published in 1925, a year after Conrad’s death. See Stape (1996), Knowles and Moore (2000), and Harrison (2003). 3. Conrad’s depiction of the two women knitting black wool and symbolically initiating Marlow into darkness recalls the Greek Fates, especially Clotho and Lachesis; the first, named the Spinner, held the threads of human life, and the second measured the thread of life. The third Fate, Atropos, whose business was to cut the thread of life was left out of Marlow’s narrative. 4. In a letter to Roger Casement (17 December 1903) Conrad says that E. D. Morel’s pamphlet, The Congo Slave State, which exposes the corruption and excesses of the Belgian colony, is ‘absolutely true’ as a description of ‘the commercial policy and the administrative methods of the Congo State’.

228 Notes

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

He continues: ‘It [the Congo State] is the most brazen breach of faith as to Europe. It is in every aspect an enormous and atrocious lie in action.’ In the second letter written on 21 December of the same year he argues: ‘Barbarism per se is no crime deserving of a heavy visitation; and the Belgians are worse than the seven plagues of Egypt insomuch that in that case it was a punishment sent for a definite transgression’ (Karl and Davies 1988, 95–6). Ross also mistakenly considers the binary good-bad colonialism as both irrelevant and counter-productive (2004). According to Watts, Conrad ranked the imperial nations as follows: Great Britain, France, Spain, Japan, Austria, Holland, USA, Belgium, Prussia and Russia (1982, 62). The way the unnamed English narrator depicts the Dutch in ‘Karain: A Memory’ echoes the English non-conformist Protestants’ description of the Dutch settler colonialism in South Africa. Like the narrator who denounces the baseness of the Dutch trader, these missionaries referred to the Dutch as ‘vulgar’ colonialists (Comaroff 1997). Pagden writes that England and Holland ‘accused one another of exploiting commerce to achieve the kind of world dominance which had for so long eluded the Spanish’ (2001, 94). On Conrad and Russia, see Baines (1960), Najder (1983), Carabine (1996) and Acheraiou (2004b). McClure described Conrad as ‘a native of a colonised country and a member of a colonising community’ (1981, 92). Conrad had an extensive knowledge of French literature and had been influenced by such authors as Flaubert and Maupassant, two acknowledged masters, whom he held in high esteem (Hervouet 1991).

9 Pedagogy of Re-Colonisation or the Peaceful Re-Conquest: André Gide’s Voyage au Congo 1. A communist in the 1930s, Gide repudiated Communism after his 1936 visit to Russia. In Return from the U.S.S.R (1936) and Afterthoughts (1937) inspired by this visit, he criticises the lack of intellectual and political freedom in the Soviet Union (Hollander 1981; 2000). 2. These areas came under French sovereignty in the 1880s. Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, a French empire builder competed with agents of Belgian King Leopold’s International Congo Association (later Zaire) for control of the Congo River basin. In 1908, France organised French Equatorial Africa, including its colonies of middle Congo, Gabon, Chad, and Oubangui-Chari (modern Central Republic), with Brazzaville as the federal capital. 3. In an article entitled ‘La Détresse de notre Afrique Equatoriale’, Gide responds to his detractors saying that unlike most powerful directors of big companies, including M. Weber, in charge of the CFSO, who had never visited their companies in Africa, he travelled vast portions of the African continent (Archambault 1950). 4. The Belgian empire is known for its brutality in the Congo, yet its violence was far from exceptional on the African continent, as Hochschild remarks: ‘What happened in [the Belgian] Congo could reasonably be called the most

Notes

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

229

murderous part of the European scramble for Africa. But that is so only if you look at sub-Saharan Africa as the arbitrary checkerboard formed by colonial boundaries. If you draw boundaries differently – to surround, say, all African equatorial rain forestland rich in rubber – then what happened in the Congo is, unfortunately, no worse than what happened in neighboring colonies: Leopold simply had far more of the rubber territory than anyone else. Within a decade of his head start, similar forced labor systems for extracting rubber were in place in the French territories west and north of the Congo River, in Portuguese-ruled Angola, and in the nearby Cameroon under the Germans’ (1999, 280). In a letter he sent to Aniela Zagorska on 25 December 1899, Conrad criticises the Boers while praising the British Empire: ‘They have no idea of liberty, which can only be found under the English flag all over the world’ (quoted by Najder 1964, 232). This speech was reported in these following terms in the Saturday Review on 17 December 1898 (quoted by Lindqvist 1996). British colonial exhibitions are acknowledged to have really begun with the 1851 Great Exhibition. It was a successful exhibition that led to many other equally successful ones. The Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924 and 1925 was a huge gathering that attracted millions of visitors; so, too, did the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale (Mackenzie 1984). Africans were emboldened by their participation in the First World War. Besides, the humiliations suffered by the colonial powers during this war made Africans realise that these imperial nations were no longer invincible. In places like Guinea, for instance, the return of the war veterans saw the emergence of a wave of strikes and uprisings. On the First World War’s impact on the Africans’ psychology, see Boahen (1989). Maran writes in the preface to Batouala that an investigation was carried out in early January 1922 in the thick of the polemic generated by the novel, but apparently to no avail. According to him, the inspectors sent to Chad were unofficially ordered to look elsewhere instead of probing the atrocities that he related in his novel (17). Etienne Eugène delivered a conference in Bordeaux entitled: ‘La France dans l’Afrique occidentale’ on 26 June 1901, where he insisted on the generosity of French companies in the colonies, contrasting them with the ‘selfish’ and ‘greedy’ English firms. During the pacification of Algeria, which ended with the defeat of the Kabyles in 1857, Tocqueville once suggested fighting the recalcitrant Arabs and Berbers not with guns, but by resorting to money and flattery of the tribes’ chiefs. But he soon judged this pacific strategy inefficient and argued for more brutal forms of subjection (1841, 110). These missionaries include Robert Moffat and his son-in-law, David Livingstone, whose mission in Africa, as the latter insisted, tended towards the ‘elevation of man’. Strongly anti-establishment, most of these nonconformist missionaries, as Comaroff notes, came from peasant and artisan backgrounds and later rose to the lower end of the bourgeoisie, often through the church. Their aim was to establish in South Africa the kingdom of God

230 Notes that was to be founded on a ‘moral economy of Christian commerce and manufacture, methodical self-construction and reason, private property and the practical arts of civilised life’ (1997, 176). 13. Levinas uses the term ‘epiphanies’ to refer to the situation in which the ego’s encounter with the radical other brings into being a new self (1974). 14. Buber talks of identity in terms of a face to face encounter with the Other and distinguishes between the ‘I–It’ relation, in which a knowing ‘super-ego’ or majestic ‘I’ reduces the Other to an object of perception, and the ‘I-Thou’ relation which implies reciprocity and mutual recognition (1923). 15. For more details on the influence of Heart of Darkness on Voyage au Congo, see Putnam (1990).

10 Split Between Radical Rhetoric and Conservative Practices: Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps 1. Greene himself divided his fiction into two distinct categories: the ‘entertainments’ including espionage or crime thrillers such as The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana, and more serious works, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and Journey Without Maps. 2. Barbara Greene relates her travels with her cousin through Sierra Leone and Liberia in Land Benighted (1938), reissued in 1981 under the title Too Late to Turn Back. 3. As Spitzer notes ‘The Black-Poor,’ Nova Scotians, and Maroons had not been brought to West Africa merely to alleviate embarrassing situations in England, North America, and the West Indies, but rather to stand at the forefront of British civilizing mission. Each settler, exposed to western culture and engaged in a legitimate occupation, was considered by the British humanitarian ideologues who sponsored the Sierra Leone experiment as a living illustration of ‘the Blessings of Industry and Civilisation’ to Africans ‘long detained in barbarism’ (1974, 13–14). 4. The word ‘maroon’ comes from Spanish Cimarron and the French marron, which means fugitive slave. The Maroons were former Jamaican slaves who rebelled against their masters and ran off to the hills for many years, before being captured by the British and transported to Nova Scotia. 5. In a letter to Viscount Goderich, Secretary of State for the Colonies, Findlay writes: ‘If their [the Liberated Africans] are provided with the means of a Christian and religious instruction, as they grow up, so will religion, civilisation, and industry advance and spread into the interior of Africa.’ 6. After the Second World War, Africans were given more political responsibility and educational opportunities. In the economic sphere, too, improvements were noticeable. By 1957, for example, mining contributed to seventy-two percent of the exports. 7. Thackeray states in Vanity Fair (1847): ‘Those who know the English colonies abroad know that we carry with us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey sauces, cayenne-peppers, and other Lares, making a little Britain wherever we settle down.’

Notes

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8. Spitzer remarks: ‘As their status in Sierra Leone’s society grew, Creoles became increasingly sensitive to public activities which Europeans may label “barbaric.” Many were reluctant to participate in dances such as ‘Gumbe’ and ‘Shakee-Shakee’ – dances which could be associated with the ‘lower classes’ and which were frowned upon by some Europeans, especially missionaries, because of the drumming and suggestive gyrations involved in their performance’ (1974, 22–3). 9. Tocqueville declared on his return from America that the white settlers increased the wretchedness of the Indians instead of improving their lot. He made similar observations about the French in Algeria, arguing that France made ‘the Muslim society more miserable, more disorderly, more ignorant and more barbaric than they were before our arrival’ (1847, 198). 10. Liebenow notes: ‘At gun point, Lieutenant Stockton attempted to convince ‘King Peter’ and other minor Bassa and Dei chieftains that the settlers came as benefactors, not enemies . . . Hostility intensified as the settlers later pressed tribal residents into service as field hands and household domestics and imposed American forms of speech, justice, and commerce in the area under their control’ (1987, 16). 11. The first agreement, known as the ‘Mount Barclay Lease,’ transferred property formerly held by a British rubber company. The second offered Firestone a lease of one million acres (approximately 4 percent of the country’s territory and nearly 10 percent of the arable land). The third agreement required the company to build a harbour (Buell 1928; Sundiata 1980; Van der Kraaij 1983). 12. According to Sundiata, the report of the League of Nations completed in September 1930 revealed that Postmaster General Samuel Ross, VicePresident Allen Yancy, and other officials had ‘connived at the forcible export of labor, although the actual presence of ‘slavery’ (i.e. organised slave markets) was not found’ (1980, 11). See also Simon (1929). 13. Greene joined the Communist Party for a while in his twenties, but from the 1930s he turned a die-hard anti-Communist. It’s a Battlefield (1934) is a clearly anti-Communist novel. 14. As Schweizer observes, Greene once declared that his ambition in life was to make a great deal of money (2001). 15. When Greene was twenty-two he fell in love with Vivien Dayrell and, according to the author, he converted to Catholicism in order to marry Vivien. Greene remained a Catholic all his life and Catholicism occupies such a central place in his works that critics called him a ‘Catholic novelist.’ See Frazer (1994) and Bosco (2005). 16. It is worth reminding that the discourse of barbarism is not Europe’s monopoly, as we tend to think. At its heyday, the Islamic empire looked to its Christian others as culturally and scientifically backward. This Occidentalist discourse is prominent in Maalouf’s Les Croisades vues par les arabes (1983, 140; 154–7). 17. Bougainville gives a detailed and fantasmatic account of Tahiti in his Voyage autour du monde (1771) which contributed to shaping this island as merely an exotic and erotic place in the European imagination. 18. On the idea of exotic settings as a projection of Europe’s discontents, see Adams (2003, 9–10).

232 Notes

11 Getting Out of the ‘Nightmares’ of History and ‘Stiff’ Imperial Culture: Albert Camus 1. The fusion of the different sections of the European community in Algeria did not happen instantly. Prior to 1905 there was apparently no evidence of mixed marriages. 2. Camus joined the Communist Party in 1935 and left two years later repulsed by Communism which he associated with totalitarianism and called ‘modern madness.’ 3. Many Victorians, as Bernal notes, regarded the Phoenicians as ‘industrious cloth merchants’ who spread civilisation while trading and making profits with foreign people (1987, 350–1). 4. Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi (1882?–1963), a leader of the Rif tribes of Morocco, was a key figure in the administration of the Spanish Zone until 1920. In 1921, his small force defeated the Spanish army. In 1924, he drove the Spanish back to Tétouan and in 1925 he advanced into the French Zone. Defeated by combined Franco-Spanish forces, he surrendered in 1926 and was deported to Réunion. 5. Said in Culture and Imperialism discusses Camus’s erasure of the Algerian political realities, stating: ‘Camus is a novelist from whose work the facts of imperial actuality, so clearly there to be noted, have dropped away; . . . a detachable ethos has remained, an ethos suggesting universality and humanism, deeply at odds with the descriptions of geographical locale plainly given in the fiction’ (1993, 208).

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Index Achebe, Chinua, 152 Acheraïou, Amar, 44, 64, 77, 138, 154, 228 Adams, David, 8, 29, 91, 224, 231 Addison, Joseph, 13–14 Ageron, Charles-Robert, 52, 72, 161, 205 Alexander the Great, 27, 28, 32–3, 35, 85, 221, 223 Al-Khattabi, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Karim, 232 Allégret, Marc, 192 Anderson, R. Earle, 187 Appiah, Anthony, 226 Apuleius, 223 Archambault, Paul, 228 Aristotle, 5, 7–8, 56, 57, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 80, 98, 99, 135–6, 191, 208, 215, 216, 223 Arnold, Matthew, 7, 15, 16, 17–18, 57, 60, 61–2, 70, 83, 215 Arrian, 69, 223 Artz, Frederick Binkerd, 14 Ashcroft, Bill, 2, 70 Atahuallpa, 222 Audisio, Gabriel, 107, 209, 210 Augustus, 27, 28, 32 Austen, Jane, 95

Bertrand, Louis, 106–9, 167, 210 Bhabha, Homi K., 1–2, 47, 53, 132, 180, 226, 227 Blackwood, William, 148 Boahen, A. Adu, 163, 168, 229 Boardman, John, 20 Boas, George, 18–19 Boehmer, Elleke, 1, 8, 25, 37, 45, 65, 90, 132 Bongie, Chris, 222 Booker, Keith, 102, 104–5, 225 Booth, Howard, 8, 65, 115, 161 Bosco, Mark, 231 Boudjedra, Rachid, 225 Bougainville, Antoine de, 192, 231 Bourdieu, Pierre, 201 Bradbury, Malcolm, 117 Braden, Gordon, 28 Brée, Germaine, 203 Brontë, Charlotte, 95 Brown, James, 222 Bruce, David, King of Scotland, 222 Bruce, Robert, King of Scotland, 222 Brutus, 13 Buber, Martin, 230 Buckinghams, Jane, 68 Budgen, Frank, 99, 104, 225 Buell, Raymond, 231 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 56, 126 Bugeaud, Maréchal Thomas-Robert, 64 Burke, Edmund, 143, 205 Burne-Jones, Margaret, 73 Burton, Antoinette, 1, 50–1, 53, 181, 222 Burton, Richard, 168 Bush, Douglas, 28 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 15–16

Baines, Jocelyn, 228 Ballantyne, Tony, 49 Ballhatchet, Kenneth, 67 Balliol, Edward, King of Scotland, 222 Barclay, Edwin, 184, 187 Barker, Francis, 224 Barth, John, 225 Baudelaire, Charles, 15, 169 Bell, Quentin, 224 Benot, Yves, 38, 64, 206 Benstock, Bernard, 224 Bernal, Martin, 3, 14, 19, 31, 37, 40, 41, 57, 140, 225, 232 Berthoud, Jacques, 77

Caballero, Paul, 206 Caesar, Julius, 12, 13, 32, 41, 48 Cairns, David, 225 245

246 Index Camus, Albert, 7, 8, 82, 106–12, 120, 158, 196–213, 217–18, 225, 232 Capac, Huayna, 222 Carabine, Keith, 228 Carr, Helen, 44, 225 Carrington, Charles, 20 Carroll, Clare, 42, 44, 220 Case, Janet, 91 Casement, Roger, 159–60, 227 Catherine II of Russia, 26 Caven, Brian, 220 Challaye, Felicien, 162 Charles V, King of Spain, 57 Cheng, Vincent John, 225 Childs, Donald, 98, 224 Chraibi, Driss, 225 Chrisman, Laura, 95 Cicero, 5, 40 Claudius, 12 Cole, Juan, 33 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 15 Collecott, Diana, 17 Collits, Terry, 78 Comaroff, John, 228, 229 Condorcet, Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de, 7 Conrad, Joseph, 5, 6, 8, 38, 42–4, 52–3, 63–4, 72, 74–81, 82, 93, 96, 115–17, 120, 121–37, 138–57, 159–60, 173, 183, 192, 196, 197, 204–5, 209, 213, 217–18, 224, 225–6, 227, 228, 229 Coombes, Annie, 124 Cooper, Frederick, 39, 132, 133, 134, 171 Cooper, Nicola, 49 Coppet, Marcel de, 162 Cornell, Tim, 66 Cornford, Francis, 17, 220 Cortez, Hernando, 48 Coulanges, Fustel de, 12 Courtney, Leonard, 160 Cox, C. B., 147 Crompton, John, 224 Curtius, 164 Dacier, Anne, 15 Dale, Richard, 221 Damien, Father, 68

Damilaville, Etienne Noël, 15 Daumas, General Melchior, 61, 223 Davey, Arthur, 225 Davies, Laurence, 144, 148, 228 Davies, Nigel, 3 Dayrell, Vivien, 231 De Certeau, Michel, 60 Defoe, Daniel, 35–7, 200 Delavignette, Robert, 5, 19, 34–5, 220 Deleuze, Gilles, 100 Deshpande, Anirudh, 49 Dib, Mohammed, 61–2, 80 Dickens, Charles, 200 Dickinson, G. Lowes, 25, 83 Diderot, Denis, 26, 27, 80–1, 214 Dirks, Nicholas, 51 Disraeli, Benjamin, 90 Dowling, Linda, 18 Doyle, Conan, 159–60 Drake, Sir Francis, 138 Dryden, Linda, 224 Dubarry, Armand, 7–8, 28, 63, 215 Duffy, Enda, 105 Duruy, Victor, 110 Eagleton, Terry, 105, 153 Edmond, Rod, 225–6 Edward I, King of England, 48 El Khattabi, Abdelkrim, 205 Eugène, Etienne, 229 Faidherbe, Louis, 49 Fanon, Frantz, 197, 225 Fatih, Mehmet, 4 Faulkner, Peter, 117 Fein, Helen, 38 Ferry, Jules, 61, 62, 160, 223 Findlay, Alexander, 230 Firchow, Peter, 152 Ford, Ford Madox, 160 Fornas, Johan, 118–19 Forster, E. M., 8, 38, 76–7, 82–91, 115–17, 118, 169, 217 Foucault, Michel, 36, 163 Fowler, Rowena, 91 Franklin, Sir John, 138 Frazer, James George, 128, 226 Frazer, Theodore, 231

Index Furbank, P. N., 90 Furbank, Philip, 36 Gambrell, Alice, 117 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 161 Gautier, Théophile, 15 Gerald of Wales, 7, 42, 57 Gibbon, Edward, 67, 94 Gide, André, 8, 42, 63, 120, 158–75, 192–3, 196, 204, 209, 213, 215, 217–18, 228 Gilroy, Paul, 119 Girardet, Raoul, 34, 161, 171 Gladstone, William Ewart, 18 Glover, Richard, 13 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, 97, 224 Goderich, Frederick John Robinson, 230 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 15 Gogwilt, Christopher, 222 Goldworthy, Adrian Keith, 220 Gopal, Sarvepalli, 227 Gordon, General Charles, 20 Gosden, Chris, 46 Greene, Barbara, 176, 188–9, 230 Greene, Graham, 6, 8, 42, 63, 120, 176–95, 196, 197, 204–7, 209, 213, 215, 217–18, 230, 231 Greenslade, William, 226 Grégoire, Abbé, 7, 57, 60–1, 62, 70, 215, 223 Gregory, Eileen, 82 Griffin, Jasper, 20 Griffith, John W., 226 Griffiths, Gareth, 2 Grillo, R. D., 59, 60 Grote, George, 225 Guha, R., 226 Gupta, Partha Sarathi, 49 Haddour, Azzedine, 110 Haggard, H. Rider, 5, 7–8, 18, 19, 24, 27, 28, 29–32, 38, 45, 63, 84, 92, 97, 102, 214, 215, 224 Hakluyt, Richard, 93–4 Haley, Bruce, 111 Hall, Catherine, 53 Hall, Kim, 42

247

Hammond, Nicholas Geoffrey Lempiere, 33 Hampson, Robert, 226 Hanke, Lewis, 58 Harrison, Nicholas, 148, 152, 227 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 147 Haynes, Kenneth, 20 Hazlitt, William, 225 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 61, 193–4 Henry IV, King of France, 13 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 62 Herodotus, 155 Hervouet, Yves, 228 Heurgon, Jacques, 107 Hippocrates, 66, 98 Hochschild, Adam, 142, 159, 228 Hollander, Paul, 228 Homer, 27–8, 29, 92, 99, 100, 101–2, 220 Horace, 20–2, 27, 29, 220 Huascar, 222 Hulme, Peter, 224 Humboldt, Wilhelm, 15 Hyam, Ronald, 227 Isaac, Benjamin, 3, 6, 40, 55, 65, 66, 156, 223 Isocrates, 5, 8, 40, 65, 66, 215 Iverson, Margaret, 224 Jameson, Frederick, 118 Jan Mohamed, Abdul, 226 Jeffreys, Peter, 83 Jenkyns, Richard, 13 Johnson, Samuel, 59, 215 Joyce, James, 8, 82, 93, 99–106, 111–12, 218, 224, 225 Judd, Denis, 38 Jugurtha, King of Numedia, 221 Kanuni, Suleiman, 4 Karl, Frederick, 144, 148, 228 Kateb, Yacine, 50, 64, 134, 225 Kay, Jacqueline, 37 Keats, John, 15 Kiberd, Declan, 225 King, Anthony, 67 King, Charles, 187

248 Index Kipling, Rudyard, 6, 18, 19–24, 27, 28, 29, 45, 65–6, 72–4, 76, 92, 96, 101, 102, 105, 160, 214, 220 Kitchener, Herbert, 49 Klingopoulos, G. D., 83 Knowles, Owens, 227 Knox, Robert, 226 Kuitenbrouwer, Maarten, 227 Kumar, Dharma, 37, 222 La Bruyère, Jean de, 8, 143, 155–7, 218 Lang, Andrew, 128, 226 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 57–8, 143, 144, 191–2, 216, 218 Leconte de Lisle, Charles, 15 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 140, 143, 159–60, 228, 229 Levinas, Emmanuel, 230 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 62 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 175 Liebenow, Gus, 186, 231 Lindqvist, Sven, 160, 229 Linnaeus, Carl, 56 Livingstone, David, 166, 191, 229 Lloyd, David, 45 Lottman, Herbert, 213 Low, Gail Ching-Liang, 37, 45, 67, 224 Lucas, Captain, 45 Lucas, Philippe, 108 Lyautey, Maréchal Hubert, 167–8 Lysias, 5, 40 Maalouf, Amin, 231 Mabry, Donald, 3, 48 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 19, 27, 56, 214 MacCabe, Colin, 224 Mackenzie, John, 203, 229 Mahaffy, John Pentland, 16–17, 27 Malabari, Behramji, 50–1 Malkin, Irad, 66, 155 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 15 Malraux, André, 158 Maran, René, 161–2, 229 Marcus, Jane, 224 Martial, René, 227 Marx, Karl, 81 Masood, Ross, 88 Massinissa, King of Numedia, 221

Mathieu, J. C., 110 McCarthy, Patrick, 206 McClintock, Ann, 227 McClure, John, 129, 228 McFarlane, James, 117 McGee, Patrick, 224 Meier, Thomas, 36 Memmi, Albert, 171, 203–4, 223 Mill, John Stuart, 225 Miller, Christopher, 47 Millett, Martin, 13 Mitford, William, 16 Moffat, Robert, 229 Monego, Joan, 197 Monroe, James, 185 Montaigne, Michel de, 8, 71, 143, 155–7, 218 Moore, Gene, 227 Moran, Denise, 162 Morel, Edmund Dene, 142, 159, 227 Moresby, John, 5, 34–5 Mosse, George, 227 Murray, Gilbert, 17, 31 Murray, Oswyn, 20 Najder, Zdzislaw, 227, 228, 229 Napoleon, 32–4 Napoleon III, 110 Nersoyan, Hagop, 162 Newton, Charles, 17 Ngugi, Wa Thiong’O, 80 Nilsson, Martin, 66–7 Nimley, Juah, 187 Nora, Pierre, 198–9 Ogude, S. W., 189 Owens, William, 36 Pagden, Anthony, 3, 33, 67, 144, 221, 228 Pakenham, Thomas, 225 Parry, Benita, 47, 71, 86, 87, 89, 95–6, 119, 137, 146, 224 Pater, Clara, 91 Pater, Walter, 16, 17, 225 Peabody, Norbert, 227 Pêcheux, Michel, 226 Pélissier, Colonel, 64 Philip II of Macedonia, 32

Index Phillips, Kathy, 95, 97 Pick, Daniel, 226 Pindar, 92 Pitt, William, 94 Pizarro, Francisco, 48, 222 Plato, 5, 8, 65, 66, 82, 92, 98, 99, 215, 225 Plutarch, 27, 155 Pomier, Jean, 202, 225 Pound, Ezra, 82, 118, 225 Pratt, Marie-Louise, 37, 133 Prochaska, David, 72, 197, 199, 222, 226 Putnam, Walter, 158, 162, 163, 169, 230 Rabelais, François, 8, 143 Rambai, Pandita, 50–1 Ramírez, Suzan Elizabeth, 3 Randau, Robert, 106–9, 167, 210, 225 Rebeiro de Oliveira, Solange, 130 Regulus, 20 Renan, Ernest, 5, 7, 34, 56, 57, 62, 70, 215 Rhodes, Cecil, 71 Rich, Paul, 226 Richards, Shaun, 225 Rigby, Nigel, 8, 65, 115, 161 Robertson, William, 128, 226 Rops, Henri Daniel, 221 Ross, Emmett, 221 Ross, Robert, 226 Ross, Samuel, 231 Ross, Stephen, 224, 228 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 194 Ruskin, John, 17 Said, Edward, 1, 37, 41, 47, 62, 86, 89, 90, 119, 232 Salisbury, Lord, 94 Sallust, 5, 40 Sant, Patricia, 222 Sarraut, Albert, 5, 34, 220 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 158 Savorgnan de Brazza, Pierre, 228 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 57, 215 Schöffer, I., 227 Schweizer, Bernard, 180, 186, 188, 231

249

Scott, Bonnie Kime, 117 Scott, Walter, 59–60 Seeley, John Robert, 25, 27, 48, 214 Sellam, Sadek, 38, 64, 222 Seneca, 65 Sepulveda, Juan Gines de, 7, 57–8, 62, 71, 168, 216, 223 Shaheen, Muhamad, 86, 87, 88 Shakespeare, William, 101–2, 105–6 Sharpe, Jenny, 224 Shelley, Perce Bysshe, 15–17, 82 Sherry, Norman, 187 Shipway, Martin, 49 Simmons, Allan H., 130 Simon, Kathleen, 231 Sorabji, Cornelia, 50–1 Soult, Nicolas Jean de Dieu, 64 Spitzer, Leo, 177, 180, 230, 231 Stanly, Peter, 49 Stape, John, 154, 227 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 68 Stockton, Lieutenant Robert F., 185 Stoler, Ann Laura, 1, 39, 131, 132, 133, 134, 171, 227 Strabo, 69 Sundiata, I. K., 186, 231 Swift, Jonathan, 7, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 70, 215 Symonds, John Addington, 17 Tacitus, 65–6 Tarrow, Susan, 206 Taylor, Alan, 48 Terdiman, Richard, 126, 128, 226 Thackeray, William, 179, 230 Tiffin, Helen, 2 Tillyard, E. M. W., 227 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 19, 24, 26, 27, 42, 143, 160, 165, 170, 183, 214, 229, 231 Trilling, Lionel, 83 Turner, Frank, 14, 17, 19, 111, 220, 225 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 128, 226 Valery, Paul, 26–7 Van der Kraaij, F. P. M., 231 Vatin, Jean-Claude, 108 Victoria, Queen of England, 149–50

250 Index Virgil, 23, 27, 28–9 Visram, Rozina, 50, 222 Viswanathan, Gauri, 56 Voltaire, 13–14, 15, 40–1, 216 Vulor, Ena, 107, 212, 225 Walbank, Frank, 66 Warwick, Peter, 104 Watts, Cedric, 228 Webster, Graham, 12 Weinbrot, Howard, 13–14 Wells, Herbert George, 118 White, Andrea, 224 Wilde, Oscar, 17 Williams, Patrick, 116, 117, 118 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 15, 40–1, 62, 216 Woolf, Greg, 11–12

Woolf, Leonard, 224 Woolf, Thoby, 91 Woolf, Virginia, 8, 82, 91–9, 118, 218, 224 Worthington, Ian, 27 Wright, Henry Press, 67–8 Xenophon, 27, 28 Yancy, Allen, 231 Yeats, William Butler, 118 Young, Robert, 226 Zagorska, Aniela, 229 Zoubir, Abdelhamid, 37

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