The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere

The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness Also By Tabish Khair BABU FICTIONS: Alienation in Contemporary Indian Engli...

Author: Tabish Khair

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The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness

Also By Tabish Khair BABU FICTIONS: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels THE BUS STOPPED FILMING: A Love Story OTHER ROUTES: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing WHERE PARALLEL LINES MEET

The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness Ghosts from Elsewhere Tabish Khair

© Tabish Khair 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion 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, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. 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 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–23406–2 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–23406–2 hardback 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. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Part I

Introduction


Part II 1 2 3 4 5

3

The Gothic and Otherness

Ghosts from the Colonies The Devil and the Racial Other Heathcliff as Terrorist Smoke and Darkness: The Heart of Conrad Emotions and the Gothic

21 39 61 72 86

Part III Postcolonialism and Otherness 6 7

Can the Other Speak? Negotiating Vodou: Some Caribbean Narratives of Otherness 8 Can the ‘Other half’ Be Told? Brodber’s Myal 9 The Option of Magical Realism 10 Narration, Literary Language and the Post/Colonial

Part IV

101 110 122 132 147

Conclusion

Summing Up

157

Notes

175

Main Texts Cited

185

Index

193

v

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements are due to Wasafiri, A Companion to the History of the English Language, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, which published papers based on chapters of this book, to the organisers of the ESSE 2008 (Aarhus) conference for making me speak about the gothic and colonial Other, to the Danish National Research Agency for an enabling grant, to the Carlsberg Foundation and Churchill College, Cambridge University, for a fellowship, to colleagues in the English Department for coffee and conversation, to Dr Ib Johansen for the loan of a wayward book, to Professor Justin Edwards, Dr Sebastien Doubinsky, Professor Svend Erik Larsen and Paula Kennedy for faith in my work, to my lovely children, Adian and Safia, for never asking about my research and to Isabelle Petiot for asking, but gently.

vi

Part I Introduction

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The Gothic and the postcolonial are obviously linked by a common preoccupation with the Other and aspects of Otherness. This preoccupation shares areas of concern, but it can also differ in significant ways, especially across the colonial/postcolonial1 discursive division. Hence, an examination of the ways colonial and post-colonial literatures within or influenced by the Gothic genre negotiate with and narrate (or fail to narrate) Otherness is a particularly fertile way to look again at postcolonialism and the Gothic. Put simply, this book is not a study of the Gothic or postcolonialism; it is a re-examination of central (and pertinent) aspects of both through a discussion of the problematics of narrating the Other.2 This takes it into the past and into areas of specialised academic concern, but it is also a book that is implicitly and yet vitally about the present and the wider world. It is a present and a world in which notions synonymous with simplified versions of Otherness – on all sides – play a dominant part, a (de)formative role that is best encapsulated in that catchphrase ‘War on Terror’. If, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, the object of our fear tells us more about the epoch we live in than the substance of the fear itself (Bauman, 1995), then it is necessary to note how the ‘War on Terror’ has reconstructed or revivified some colonial and even precolonial notions of racial3 and religious Otherness (Kundnani, 2007). What is as interesting, in the context of this study, is the relative failure of even major creative writers to engage convincingly with these issues. In a paper in Wasafiri, Robert Eaglestone discusses three recent novels by Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Safran Foer and a story by Martin Amis that engage with the current ‘War on Terror’.4 He concludes that “despite their many merits, they fail to address precisely the issues to which they lay claim” (Eaglestone, 2007, p. 18).5 Illustrating 3

4


this statement with textual analysis, Eaglestone goes on to note, among other things, that the texts treat terror as “simply evil” (Foer and Amis), as “an illness” (McEwan) or as stemming from “universally comprehensible personal motives” (Rushdie). It is obvious, and I shall explicate and develop this matter throughout this book, that the partial failure of major writers to engage with terror stems from a flaw (which runs through European thought and played a huge part in making European colonisation such a traumatic experience for many peoples6) in our ability to conceptualise Otherness. For instance, the above engagements with ‘terror’ posit the terrorist either in terms of absolute and absolutely negative Otherness (“evil”7) or in terms of an essential sameness, a difference waiting to be remedied into the Self-same (“illness”, “universally comprehensible personal motives”). This is, as I shall illustrate in this book, a common tendency in European thought and practice when it comes to the Other. In general, the Other is seen as a Self waiting to be assimilated (and hence effectively internal or secondary to the Self), or the Other is cast as the purely negative image of the European Self, the obverse of the Self. Either as lack or as an absolute incomprehensibility-read-negatively, this reduced Other is posited as inferior or secondary to the European Self – and utterly knowable in its very negativised unknowability.8 In colonial terms, these relations to Otherness defined the difference between the approaches of the civilising or evangelising gentleman, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ‘school’ that posited nonEuropeans as basically unmitigated/lurking cannibals (waiting to jump out of the skin of European acculturation at any moment and gobble up Europeans) or introduced homilies such as “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” This, in current terms, is the difference between those who see terrorists as simply misled, ill, confused etc, and those who see terrorists as absolutely evil (and hence to be remedied by physical annihilation or contended against relentlessly as part of an idealist notion of universal evil directly or indirectly traceable to Lucifer as Satan). Both approaches, as we shall see, simplify the issue of Otherness and hence fail to come to grips with the fruitful and fulfilling ways in which the Self can live in a world of difference and sameness, a world in which, to some extent, all of us can claim along with Rimbaud: I am another. It need scarcely be stressed that Otherness is a central concern of Gothic literature in general. The very reception of the Gothic has been seen by all major critics, such as Fred Botting or David Punter, as balanced between the past and the future, the old and the new: even as the Gothic was offered primarily as an antidote to the coldness of

Introduction 5

Enlightenment Reason – thus going back beyond cultivated rationality to the early basis of humanity in ‘emotions’ (which I shall return to elsewhere in this book) – it was enabled by the very progress and rationality that it decried or critiqued. As David Stevens puts it, “social progress, relying largely on more and more rationally based political and social organization and on various scientific and technological inventions, had made it comparatively ‘safe’ to indulge in irrational fantasies. Middle class readers, safely tucked into their stable and unthreatened social positions, could feel secure enough to cultivate imaginary fears and fantasies” (p. 10). Not surprisingly, as a genre the Gothic in English literature looks backwards in its adherence to ‘medieval’ settings, ghosts, castles, revenge, despairing maidens etc; it looks forward in its fascinated suspicion of aristocratic tyrants and similar beings, and its close connection to the novel and, more so, the entire range of popular genre writing that arose in the nineteenth century and accounts for the highest sales even today: science fiction, ghost stories, horror, adventure novels, crime fiction. Among other things, it is this ambivalent relationship of Gothic literature to place and time that makes it difficult to define: a problem that is solved, to some extent, by defining the Gothic as a “writing of excess” and transgression (Botting, p. 1). It is, however, as I argue in this book, also a ‘writing of Otherness’. This claim does not detract from any of the major ways in which the Gothic has been read: Freudian, as by Elizabeth MacAndrew; Marxist, as by Rosemary Jackson; gender-related, as by Coral Ann Howells; Bakhtinian, as by Jacqueline Howard; or the many other readings within mainstream traditions of literary criticism. I can argue that, in different ways, all these readings stress the concern with difference in the Gothic. This is so even in the postmodern Marxist tradition, which tends to be sceptical of the Gothic as a genre. Jameson, for instance, writes that the “Gothics are ultimately a class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by the same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault” (p. 289). This perception is undoubtedly true and more so along the colonial/postcolonial axis, given the extreme interplay of privilege and power in a colonialist context, though it appears to be somewhat reductive in implying that privileges are the only source of difference: as if other factors do not exist and, at

6


times or in contexts, ‘seal’ off groups and individuals from one another. However, even within that limitation, which I do not accept in this study,9 it can be seen that Jameson relates the Gothic to the presence, real or imagined, constructed or imposed, of difference. It is this aspect that I take up and examine using the conceptual tool of the ‘Other’ and ‘Otherness’, while also placing it in a historical context, that of colonisation and imperialism.10 I do not claim that this was the only or even the dominant historical context for the writing of these primary texts; I only claim – and this can scarcely be contested – that it was significant enough, and perhaps particularly significant for a genre of excess, ambiguity, sensationalism, difference, novelty, (often) non-rationality and terror like the Gothic. When I suggest that Gothic fiction is a ‘writing of Otherness’, I allude most simplistically to the fact that it revolves around various versions of the Other, as the Devil or as ghosts, as women, vampires, Jews, lunatics, murderers, non-European presences etc. From the first Gothic work in English, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), through all major examples – William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s novels, Lawrence Flammenberg’s The Necromancer (1794), William Godwin’s The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, stories, novellas and novels by Sheridan Le Fanu, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker etc, and fiction heavily influenced by the Gothic genre, such as some novels by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) – the Other remains the lynchpin of all perceptibly ‘Gothic’ action. It is when the Other enters – as Satan, demon, orphan, the outsider, vampire, ghost, non-Christian gods, sexually dangerous women, racially different characters etc – that the action of most Gothic narratives really commences. And they usually end with the predictable destruction or containment of this Otherness. As Mary Snodgrass puts it, “The concept of Otherness underlies Gothicism as a structural myth” (p. 267). This can be sustained by highlighting the defining elements of Gothic fiction from any standard book: “the disturbing return of pasts upon presents”, the “negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic”, “tales of darkness, desire and power”, stories containing “spectres, monsters, demons, corpses, skeletons, evil aristocrats ... madmen, criminals and the monstrous double”, etc (Botting, pp. 1–3). Every definition of the Gothic highlights a version of Otherness, an event, personage or term that is finally a partial

Introduction 7

or flawed attempt to conceptualise that which is vital to the Self and absolutely not the Self. An uneasy negotiation with the ‘foreign’ runs through the Gothic tradition, as is evident even in the way the term from its root of ‘Goth’ has come to be applied, adopted and contended over. It is not surprising that this negotiation starts assuming urgency in the eighteenth century, when, as Pike puts it, “the unwanted spectres of prostitution [crime] and foreigners” were acutely, if somewhat unconsciously, perceived as having infiltrated the alleys and corners of old city centres (p. 135). There were both internal and external reasons for this. Internally, the novel-reading middle class lived in a relationship of ambivalence with both the aristocracy and the ‘labouring classes’. Its calls for ‘reforms’ were balanced not only between these two internal ‘Others’ – the aristocracy and the ‘labouring classes’ – but also marked by the ambivalence of the middle class towards both. Gothic fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is marked by this tension: by aristocrats as powerful and elegant as well as decadent and devilish, by the lower classes as vigorous and oppressed as well as childlike, crude, ludicrous or beastly. This is one reason why the mixture of serious and lowly, tragedy and the comic – a typical feature of Shakespeare (a major influence on Gothic literature) that had been decried into the eighteenth century – came to be defended by Horace Walpole and adopted in many Gothic texts. In fact, a good example of this ambivalence towards the two bracketing classes is provided even in that ‘first’ Gothic novel, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764),11 and it can be traced through a number of succeeding narratives. Foreignness, in class and cultural terms, was internal and essential to this worldview and self-perception. However, I am not simply concerned with ‘foreignness’ in Gothic fiction, for that has been examined and discussed by various critics. I am concerned with a special kind of foreignness, and in order to address this one has to note the second – external – impetus behind the fascination with the foreign and the Other in Gothic fiction. This external impetus was empire, which had become a reality for Britain by the eighteenth century. More than that, by the eighteenth century, empire was no longer just out there; it had also started reaching the centre. Nabil Matar, among others, has convincingly documented that even in the early Elizabethan period, when empire was more a dream than a reality for the English, various non-English peoples – Moors, Jews, Arabs etc – did live in or pass through at least the main port-cities of England (Matar 1999). However, by the eighteenth

8


century, their numbers appear to have started swelling in a visible manner: thousands of black soldiers from the United States who had fought for the British in the American War for Independence, slaves, servants, ayahs, lascars as well as the occasional non-European nobleman or ‘business partner’12 (Khair et al).13 This was supplemented by the growing number of Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen who had been to the ‘empire’ and had returned, usually with living and nonliving reminders of the empire in their possession. In other words, by the eighteenth century, empire was no longer just out there; it was also present in Leeds and London and Liverpool, and could sometimes, in the shape of tinkers, travelling sellers and gypsies, even penetrate the smaller towns and villages (Visram). Strangely, mainstream English literature gives a rather muted account of this presence of the imperial ‘periphery’ in the ‘centre’ of empire all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While a market was created for the accounts of Englishmen and women in the empire, everything from William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)14 through Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839) to much of the oeuvre of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling gives us, in various ways, this penetration of Europe into non-Europe, the stories of ‘us’ dealing with ‘them’ out there. Veritable mountains of literature – fiction and non-fiction (which we shall have occasion to look at again with reference to the discourse on cannibalism) – give us the experiences, real or imagined, of Englishmen on the ‘peripheries’ of the Empire. Nothing of comparable bulk exists about those colonial and racial ‘Others’ who had, by the eighteenth century, started arriving in and even settling down and marrying into England. But there is a difference. In this book, I argue (among other things) that Gothic literature – and fiction influenced by the Gothic – has allowed greater space for the narratives of these Others in England than most of the mainstream branches of literature. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the very self-definition of the Gothic, its concern with excess and transgression, its ambivalence, the tense dialectic of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘Other’ within which the genre achieves its elusive definition, as well as the fact that British narratives that took place out in the ‘empire’ naturally gravitated – as Kipling and Conrad demonstrate – towards the Gothic under the impetus of colonial definitions of the colonised. But I am not overly concerned with the Gothic and the non-European Other in those British stories and novels that are based outside Europe; I am interested mainly in those that take place in Europe. In this sense, however, Gothic fiction shows a deep

Introduction 9

subterranean anxiety and awareness of a ghost that was already stalking England, but which mainstream novelists preferred to see mostly in the far-flung reaches of empire. Thanks to recent scholarship, particularly because of major studies by Brantlinger, Malchow and Punter, it is no longer surprising to associate ‘empire’ with the ‘Gothic’. As Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert puts it, the Gothic “was, from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening” (Paravisini-Gebert, in Hogle, p. 229). She goes on to point out that one of the earliest Gothic novellas, the much-admired Charlotte Smith’s The Story of Henrietta (1800), was set “in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica”. Patrick Brantlinger also writes illuminatingly about the ‘imperial Gothic’ in his book, Rule of Darkness (1996), as does Punter in his magisterial history of Gothic fiction. But these discussions tend to focus on the Gothic in colonial settings outside Britain and/or the United Kingdom. My point of departure in this book is a complementary reading of the ‘colonial’ Gothic in a British setting. My reading here overlaps at times with that of Howard Malchow in his excellent Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain, who argues that social, sexual and, particularly, racial apprehensions of the literate middle and lower middle classes in England found an outlet and reflection in the nineteenthcentury Gothic, but again I focus, of necessity, more on colonial/ imperial Otherness in texts set within Britain than Malchow does. This focus makes me pass over many Gothic texts which negotiate identity in the colonies, and engage with texts – sometimes by the same author – that negotiate foreignness and colonial ‘Otherness’ in an English or British setting. As far as this perception of ‘foreignness’ and ‘identity’ was concerned, one has to go beyond Stevens’s observation, also quoted above, that “middle class readers, safely tucked into their stable and unthreatened social positions, could feel secure enough to cultivate imaginary fears and fantasies” (p. 10). Perhaps middle class readers were not as ‘unthreatened’ as that; perhaps the nightmares of empire had started seeping into their dreams in London, Leeds and Liverpool too. At least terse and worried accounts of ‘foreigners’ in England in newspapers and ‘invasion-scare’ fiction throughout the nineteenth century indicate this, as does, at the anecdotal level, the fact that at least some contemporary correspondents attributed the killings of ‘Jack the Ripper’ to esoteric Indian rites or escaped African animals (Whitehead and Rivett). Perhaps Gothic fiction was best situated to access, within the limits of

10 The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness

the genre, the hauntings and dreams, the nightmares and anxieties of empire brought home to roost in the British countryside, the English metropolis and the British castle. As the early chapters in this book will show, Gothic fiction and fiction influenced by the Gothic tradition do not only bring the colonial/racial Other back to the (imperial) centre; they also depend on and examine the anxieties and complexities of such hauntings. That they do so more often and more powerfully than mainstream fiction might be due to the fact that, as Hogle puts it, the “deep fears and longings in western readers that the Gothic both symbolizes and disguises in ‘romantic’ and exaggerated forms have been ones that so contradict each other, and in such intermingled ways, that only extreme fictions of this kind can seem to resolve them or even confront them” (p. 4). Much of the burgeoning critical writing on the Gothic has covered these deep fears and longings in the Western reader, usually from a Marxist, psychoanalytical or feminist perspective. These are all valid readings, and my book seeks neither to repeat nor to controvert them. What my book seeks to do is to explore another major source of “deep fears and longings” on the part of the Western reader – the colonial Other, the ghost from the empire, whose presence too is deeply ‘unconscious’ in the Gothic but no less significant than the other ‘unconscious’ ghosts of gender, madness, class etc that the Gothic also grapples with. In many “Anglo ... middle-class, white readers” (who, according to Hogle and others, have been the traditional “audience of all such Gothics” (Hogle, p. 3)), the racial/imperial/colonial Other evoked or evokes as deep a fear – and one liable to a similar exaggeration and subconscious resolution or confrontation – as any other, and perhaps more so than most, fears. However, unlike other ghosts, the ghost of the empire has seldom been commented upon in mainstream studies of the Gothic, and almost never been considered as central to it as the other ghosts in a British setting. Until recently, it has been common to see and situate the Gothic solely within the European consciousness and maintain the myth of European centrality and selfhood, a tendency that goes a long way towards explaining both the unconscious presence of the nonEuropean Other in Gothic fiction and the havoc often caused by it. The Other – Gothic, gendered, imperial, colonial or racial – remains a key concern of not only Gothic fiction but also postcolonialism, even as discussions of Otherness (and related concepts) are central to an intellectual understanding of recent decades: “Few issues have exercised as powerful a hold over the thought of this century as that of ‘the Other’ ” (Theunissen, p. 1). Philosophers have increasingly noted that

Introduction 11

“the identity of the European tradition is always impurely traced and contaminated by the non-European Other that it tries unsuccessfully to exclude” (Critchley, p. 137), and this perception is widely disseminated in postcolonial studies.15 The crucial question asked by Gayatri Spivak – Can the subaltern speak? – is, after all, a version of this concern, as is Homi K. Bhabha’s worrying of the ‘Other question’. In a more lucid manner, Edward Said has illustrated, in its essence, some of the limits and dangers of ‘narrating’ the Other in his seminal book Orientalism. Apart from this ‘holy trinity’ of postcolonial theory, postcolonialists return again and again in their engagements with narration, representation, power, gender, sexuality, subalternity etc to the question of the Other. However, to be honest, it is not often that postcolonialists pause to say what they mean by the Other. Hence, that is a task I have to stop for, even though a full description is part of the job of this book and not this chapter. What is the Other – or the notion of Otherness – that, as we have seen, preoccupies both Gothic fiction and postcolonialism, and, according to some philosophers, is a major concern of recent times? This is a difficult question to answer, and that might be the reason why the ‘Other’ is so often used, not least in the field of postcolonial studies, as a gesture rather than a term. Non-Europeans were seen as the Other, we often write, without really defining what this notion of Otherness implies. Or the Other is seen, as it was often seen in colonial times and by colonialist discourses, as a negation of the European Self. Stuart Hall puts the dominant postcolonialist perception in pithy terms: he writes that the figure of the ‘Other’ was “constructed as the absolute opposite, the negation of everything the West stood for”16 (Hall, ‘West and the Rest’, p. 314). Kenan Malik, differing from Hall and what he considers a perspective that incorrectly privileges difference, also defines the perception of Hall, Edward Said etc in these words: the differences between Western and non-Western cultures are rationalised through non-Western peoples being defined as the “Others”, distinguished solely through their antagonism to the dominant image of the “self”, and against whose peculiarities the selfimage of the West is created. (Malik, p. 220) While I partly differ from Malik’s perspective, he is nevertheless right in noting that many postmodernist and postcolonialist critics see the Other merely as a negation of or the obverse of the self. This is not

12


something they create out of thin air: they simply stress the dominant perspective on Otherness in European and, particularly, European colonial thinking. As Todorov has noted in The Conquest of America, Columbus’s evaluation of the ‘savages’ fluctuates widely and quickly from one pole of goodness to another of depravity and evil, and all of it without any ability to communicate with the newly discovered peoples (Todorov, 1982, pp. 36–41). It appears related to certain preconceptions that Columbus already had and to political considerations, but it is also influenced by what I have termed the alterity of the Other.17 When Columbus perceives the natives as an emptiness waiting to be civilised and converted into the Self-same, the natives are seen as good, innocent, generous etc; when the natives present any indication of a will that cannot or will not be reduced to sameness, they end up – on as little ground – being considered wicked, terrorising, cannibalistic, thieving etc. In short, Columbus’s evaluation of the Other oscillates between the dominant colonialist poles of the (European) Self-same, and hence good/ civilised or capable of goodness/civilisation, and the negative-of-the(European)-self, and hence evil and incapable of being really civilised. Or, as Todorov puts it, Columbus’s attitude with regard to the Indians is based on his perception of them. We can distinguish here two component parts, which we shall find again in the following century and, in practice, down to our own day in every colonist in his relations to the colonized ... Either he conceives the Indians (though without using these words) as human beings altogether, having the same rights as himself; but then he sees them not only as equals but also as identical, and this behaviour leads to assimilationism, the projection of his own values on the others. Or else he starts from the difference, but the latter is immediately translated into terms of superiority and inferiority (in his case, obviously, it is the Indians who are inferior). What is denied is the existence of a human substance truly other, something capable of being not merely an imperfect state of oneself. (Todorov, 1982, p. 42) This historical and theoretical context explains why postcolonialists tend to consider the European notion of the colonial/racial Other as basically a negative and negating construct. It is not, as I have noted earlier, something that postcolonialists pull out of thin air; it is actually a perception of the dominant trend in European and colonialist

Introduction 13

thinking. But, of course, in focusing solely on this trend, postcolonialists can also implicitly and against their conscious judgement accept the reduction of the concept of Otherness imposed on it by the very texts they set out to critique. The Other, in philosophical terms, is not necessarily just a negative image, or a shadow of the Self.18 Yet, the tendency in postcolonialism to see Otherness as simply a negative imputation by the European self is grounded in historical facts, because often the difference of the European from the non-European, real or imagined, was cast in the light of a lack, a deficiency, an abnormality of the non-European, as (among others) Stuart Hall and Edward Said have highlighted in various publications. The postcolonial critique of this dismissal and the accompanying privileging of the European self is part of a larger questioning, also undertaken in radical European circles: the philosopher and scholar, Fred Dallmayr, even imputes “the post-Cartesian turn to ‘Otherness’ ... [to] dislocations manifest in the confrontation between Western and revitalized non-Western cultures on a global scale” (Dallmayr, ‘Introduction’, in Theunissen, p. ix). Moreover, even the rich European philosophical tradition of discussions of ‘self’, ‘other’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘transcendence’ and related matters has been seen by philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, to whom I will often have recourse in this book, as employing the Other to put the ‘I’ or the ‘Self’ in question (hence finally privileging the Self over the Other). Levinas differs from this. As Pierre Hayat puts it in his preface to Levinas’s Alterity and Transcendence, for Levinas “the I does not put itself in question; it is put in question by the other” (p. xiii). It is this conception of Otherness that I will draw upon, and elaborate as the book proceeds. In this initial clearing of ground, it needs to be added that, while it may be true, as Kenan Malik alleges, that the postmodernist, poststructuralist and postcolonialist use of the ‘Other’ to conceptualise the European(ised) negotiation of differences and identity with the ‘nonEuropean’ is sometimes ahistorical (Malik, p. 222), this need not lead to a dismissal of the category of the Other. Neither should the concept of the Other be seen only in terms of the fixity and negativity imposed on it by colonialist power. This is implicit in Bhabha’s very complex engagement with the Other, which runs between the two categorical poles of, shall we say, a colonialist and a conceptual definition. Bhabha sees the “ideological construction of Otherness” by “colonial discourse” as dependent on “the concept of ‘fixity’ ” and “ambivalence”: in this sense he correctly identifies (sometimes reduces) the Other to the

14


‘stereotype’ (Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, p. 66), an identification also made by Fanon (in Black Skin, White Masks) and Said (in Orientalism) in different ways. In this sense, which is the dominant sense of colonialist Otherness, Otherness is “at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity” (Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, p. 67). In the process, “colonial discourse produces the colonized as a social reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, pp. 70–1). While I will keep this aspect of the ‘other question’ in mind, I also argue that this, unlike much of postcolonialism, by no means exhausts the concept of the Other even within Western traditions. Bhabha is aware of it when he talks about “a knowledge that is arrested and fetishistic and circulates through colonial discourse as that limited form of Otherness that I have called the stereotype” (Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, pp. 77–8). In other words, there is a form (or forms) of Otherness which need not be “limited” to the “stereotype” – to the fetishised, fixed, negative, emptied, desired–derided Other of colonialist discourse. Outside the colonial referent, one can argue that the category of the Other is a conceptual sign, whose referent changes across time and space – as Foucault, among others, repeatedly suggests. However, while the actual ‘Other’ might change in space and time, the category of the Other and, above all, the negotiation with Otherness seems to be a persistent feature of the negotiation with self and related ideas – though it needs to be stressed that this category is not to be confounded with the reduced and largely negative notion of Otherness that European colonialists often had in mind in the past and that postcolonialists critique today. On the other hand, at least in the centuries of European colonisation, the non-European was mostly constructed as the reduced, largely negative Other against which many Europeans defined and constructed the European Self, and to some extent still do. All this needs to be borne in mind by the reader of this study. Hence, mine is not really a postcolonialist position on Otherness or subjectivity, and not even a common position associated with postmodernism or post-structuralism. In post-structuralist discourse too, as in postcolonialism, the European perception of the Other is often conceptualised merely in terms of negativity. For many followers of Michel Foucault, if not always for the ‘master’ himself, the Other, as a social object, is merely or predominantly the difference against which the (European)

Introduction 15

Self measures itself. This focuses on only one side, if the dominant one, of a tendency. For, as Dallmayr notes, “Contrary to the assumption of a fixed or easily defined boundary, there is a strong tradition in Western thought – stretching back to Hegel, Schilling, and beyond – according to which the linkage between I and the Other is not a relation of exclusivity but one of mutual dependence” (Dallmayr, ‘Introduction’, in Theunissen, p. x). It is a point that also comes through in Jerrold Seigel’s magisterial study of the idea of the self in Western Europe. And yet my position is defined by my post-colonial origins not only in my preference for Levinas over Hegel, but also in my choice of Levinas over Husserl, to whom Levinas openly acknowledges a debt. For I follow Theunissen in continuing to feel that, while Husserl insists on the fact that the Other represents the ‘I’, for Husserl – and for all major European thinkers of my acquaintance until Levinas19 – the ‘I’ still remains central and the Other is finally a means by which the I is represented. It is this centrality that one cannot accept from a post-colonial position, and that one has to reconceptualise without just turning the equation around and privileging the ‘Other’, so to speak. It is here that Levinas’s work has been most enabling for me, even though I came to it after I had already formulated a similar conception of the relationship between the Self and the Other. Not wishing to linger over philosophical matters (though I shall perforce return to them elsewhere in this book), I will provide only a working definition of my usage of the Other here. Levinas follows Husserl in conceiving of the Other “as one who is not merely different from me in being this or that other (person) but who, as the I that he is for himself, is quite different from the I that I am for myself” (Theunissen, p. 17). With Levinas, this ‘difference’, which is essential for the Self, is teamed with a responsibility to the Other: Does not that summons to responsibility destroy the forms of generality in which my store of knowledge, my knowledge of the other man, represents the latter to me as similar to me, designating me instead in the face of the other as responsible with no possible denial, and thus, as the unique and chosen one? (Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 27) Levinas’s Other is both “defenceless”20 and always “oppositional” (Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 29); essential for the Self, the Other cannot be reduced to the Self. And yet, the Other is not simply

16


“limit and menace”, a cause of terror, to the Self: Who would dispute that it is so, for the most part, in a human society subjected, like all finite reality, to the formal principle according to which the other limits or cramps the same: the wars and violence of the world, of all ages, is sufficient proof of that. But the other man – the absolutely other – the Other – does not exhaust his presence by that repressive function. His presence can be meeting and friendship, and in this the human is in contrast with all other reality. (Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 56) This conception of the Other-Self relationship is, as Theunissen puts it with reference to the work of Martin Buber (with whom Levinas shares much), “dialogical” (p. 257) and opposed to the dominant tradition of transcendentalism in European philosophical discussions of Otherness. I will follow Levinas (and, at least implicitly, Buber) in his establishment of a mutually equal relationship between the Self and the Other, without reducing the Other to the Self and doing away with either its oppositionality or its connectivity, as often happens in mainstream accounts of society or the Self. I will, however, differ from all these philosophers in thinking of the Other not just as an abstract concept but as an abstract concept with which to negotiate actual difference and sameness in concrete societies. In that sense, my use of ‘Otherness’ is not just philosophical but sociological, which is only appropriate because, whether or not literature reflects society, it is written in that most social of all human creations: language. I will also avoid splitting hairs over the relationship of the self and the Other, either in the postmodern and postcolonial tradition of Homi K. Bhabha or in the postmodern psychoanalytical tradition best exemplified by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: such further engagements might be rich in some contexts, but they would not add much to, or detract much from, the main arguments that I have to make in this study. As an initial working definition, then, one can do worse than employ Todorov’s words from The Conquest of America: But others are also “I”s: subjects just as I am, whom only my point of view – according to which all of them are out there and I alone am in here – separates and authentically distinguishes from myself. I can conceive of these others as an abstraction, as an instance of any individual’s psychic configuration, as the Other – other in relation to myself, to me; or else as a specific social group to which we do not belong. This group can be interior to society: women for men, the

Introduction 17

rich for the poor, the mad for the “normal”; or it can be exterior to society, i.e. another society which will be near or far away, depending on the case. (Original stresses; Todorov, 1982, p. 3) More commentary is unnecessary at this moment, though two things still need to be stressed. The first, already stated, point relates to how much of colonial literature, including Gothic fiction, tends to see Otherness as either absolutely opaque and hence only capable of genocidal confrontation, or simply as a difference waiting to be redeemed into the Self-same by civilisation, conversion, education, capitalism etc.21 The second, less obvious, point relates to how the excess of Gothic fiction and its original privileging of emotions against rationality are not without a serious purpose, however unconscious on the part of the writers. For emotions, as Martha C. Nussbaum defines them in her important book Upheavals of Thought, arise at exactly the juncture in time and space when the human rubs up against, in Levinas’s words (quoted above), “all other reality”. I will have occasion to return to this later in this book, as it forms a central part of my larger thesis.

The chapters to follow It is not my intention to deal with all of Gothic literature and its history, let alone associated genres like the sensation play, even though these may be used to illustrate similar points. I also do not wish to extend my study much beyond the circumference of the British empire, because it would be as much a mistake to suppose all modern European empires to have been identical as it would be to assume that they did not show some family resemblances. On occasion, I might deviate from the central texts to refer, though only in passing and as an illustration, to other genres or subgenres, to American literature or even the occasional Gothic text in Danish or French. However, as a rule, this study will restrict itself to fiction in English written in Britain or the United Kingdom and situated in Britain or the United Kingdom – initially providing a rereading of British Gothic fiction from the perspective of my thesis. The selection of texts is perforce eclectic, for my purpose is not a systematic study of Gothic literature but an examination of the role in it of the colonial/racial Other, which is then used to provide a basis for discussion of selective postcolonist texts and theoretical issues central to postcolonialism. Hence, I engage only with specific texts that enable me to highlight significant aspects of the way in which gothicised colonial fiction engaged with colonial


Otherness. This is mostly the general concern of the section entitled ‘The Gothic and Otherness’. In the section after that, entitled ‘Postcolonialism and Otherness’, I take up novels and stories by ‘post-colonial’ subjects (with a few necessary exceptions) from the ‘empire’ (or the post-colonial nation states it became) that mostly share or employ Gothic elements. Again, this selection is, of necessity, eclectic. The purpose here is to develop and re-examine the narration of the post/colonial Other, now visited from the ‘peripheries’ of the empire; to see how the postcolonial project of ‘writing back’, ‘filling the gaps’, ‘breaking the silence’, ‘telling the other side of the story’ or ‘opposing colonial discourses of difference’ impacts on the purpose of narrating alterity and Otherness. This aspect of the book makes a rather controversial point: that the postcolonial defence or explication of Otherness has, at times (but by no means always), narrowed down the scope for narrating difference. At its worst, it has indulged in a gambit associated by Michel de Certeau with European modernity: the reduction of Otherness to more of the Self-same. As Svend Erik Larsen put it recently, the bid to narrate the ‘Other’ in positivist terms often entails the disappearance of Otherness (Larsen, 2007, 2008). While not a holistic study, my readings in this book do suggest a reexamination of Gothic fiction in the colonial context and a revaluation of postcolonialism as a consequence of this re-examination. In different ways, I argue in this book about the pitfalls and achievements of colonial and postcolonial attempts at depicting or ‘giving voice’ to the colonial or racial Other, as seen in Gothic fiction or fiction influenced by the Gothic. Hence, this study suggests not only points of departure and revaluation in the fields of postcolonialism and the study of Gothic fiction, but also, implicitly, in our political engagement with presentday global realities.

Part II The Gothic and Otherness


1 Ghosts from the Colonies

In retrospect, it should have been obvious at the time that the great socio-political upheavals of the late fifties and sixties, especially those regrouped under the names of decolonization and liberation movements, would have a major impact on the ways of knowledge. This impact, though it had begun to occur almost immediately, has not, for the most part, been recognised for a variety of reasons. Wlad Godzich (in de Certeau, p. x) Wlad Godzich notes that for an overlapping variety of reasons the even earlier socio-historical impact of colonial and racial Others was resisted not only in the literature being written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also in later critical studies of that literature. The colonies, when they appeared, were kept at a certain distance in the narratives – as in much (but not all) of Kipling, where the far-flung empire is a place of adventure and gothic amalgamations, or as in Jane Austen, where its hidden economy sustains but almost never intrudes into the rationalised respectability of England (Said, 1993). The obvious pattern in colonial literature (when it dealt directly with Empire) appeared to be that of the Arthurian romance, a conception that Godzich considers “paradigmatic” to European encounters of Otherness: “the adventurous knight leaves Arthur’s court – the realm of the known – to encounter some form of Otherness” (in de Certeau, 1997, p. xiii). Switch ‘Arthur’s court’ with England, and you have a passing description of English fictions of Otherness in the empire out there, ranging from Haggard to Kipling and Conrad, though there remain areas of (dialogical) ambiguity even in such texts – and in my reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness I explore one such complex text. However, 21

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the colonised who had come or come back to England, while they could not always be ignored by mainstream literary genres, as Dickens’s novels demonstrate, were often beyond the pale of direct narration, perhaps partly due to their very Otherness. But fiction influenced by the Gothic – with its fascination for Otherness, transgression, decay, impurity, crime, all words often implicitly hyphenated to foreignness – found more space for the colonial Other. With some recent exceptions, literary criticism has been rather blind to the presence of these ghosts from the empire in Gothic fiction. Even in his excellent introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Jerold E. Hogle refers in passing to “racial mixture” (p. 12) and the gothic as “a term of racial othering” (p. 16), but does not really dwell on the impact empire and colonisation have had on the development of Gothic fiction in Europe: for instance, he mentions the ‘ghost’ in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, but overlooks the ghostly ‘Orient’ in it. The Paris Opera was/is, in some ways, one of the hearts of ‘European civilisation’, at least when seen from a French perspective. But in Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1911), this heart hides the secrets of empire, ghosts from the colonial margins of ‘French national culture’. The French empire is present in the very heart of the Paris Opera: there is an excerpt when this empire, ostensibly so far away from the Opera and the heart of civilisation, provides both extremes of the dramatic action in the novel. The mysterious “Persian”, who haunts the labyrinths of the Opera, says, I continued to be greatly interested in the relations between Erik and Christine Daaé, not from any morbid curiosity, but because of the terrible thought which obsessed my mind that Erik was capable of anything, if he once discovered that he was not loved for his own sake, as he imagined. I continued to wander very cautiously about the Opera and soon learnt the truth about the monster’s dreary loveaffair. He filled Christine’s mind, through the terror with which he inspired her, but the dear child’s heart belonged wholly to the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny. While they played about like an innocent engaged couple, keeping to the upper floors of the Opera, to avoid the monster, they little suspected that some one was watching over their safety. I was prepared to go to all lengths: to kill the monster, if necessary, and explain to the police afterwards. (p. 159) Here, if the Persian comes across as the guardian angel of the innocent couple in the book, the crazed ugly musician, Erik, is the Gothic

Ghosts from the Colonies

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monster. But until quite late, apart from the name which the text has suggested might be a pseudonym, all we really know about Erik is that, before ‘haunting’ the Paris Opera, he had worked with the Persian in the East. In that sense, he is as much from the ‘empire’ – significantly, given the French site, Iran, not India – as the Persian. Later we are told, almost towards the end of the novel, that Erik was born in France, but that he lived for many years, and achieved his first architectural wonders (of the sort that he created in the Opera cellars later) in Persia and Turkey. In many other ways, too, the non-West is present in the heart of the Opera: scenes from Roi de Lahore and set pieces from Rêverie orientale litter the multi-storeyed opera, in keeping with Cannadine’s ‘Ornamentalism’ footnote to Said’s ‘Orientalism’ critique. One can argue that this is the ‘East’ as assimilated and consumed (in the shape of culture here) by the ‘West’; the Persian and ‘monster’ represent something else, something beyond complete erasure or assimilation, something Other enough to carry with itself the aura of the Gothic and the terror of the sublime.1 To be fair, in a general introduction Hogle could perhaps not be expected to pause for such ghosts from the empire, though one wishes he had – for it is by no means unusual in books and papers on the Gothic to largely overlook or refer in passing to these ‘Eastern’ ghosts. Even Terry Eagleton’s powerful reading of the genesis of Heathcliff in the light of the Irish famine is only partly justified. One can argue that the Irish context remains valid in the case of Wuthering Heights, given the background of its author, and it can be used fruitfully at times – for instance, when Eagleton connects the interplay of ‘hunger’ and fasting in the novel with the Irish ‘hunger’ (Eagleton, 1995, p. 11). But to stress it solely is to ignore the actual text of Wuthering Heights, which refers to Heathcliff as the child of a lascar, gypsy or coloured slave, while also – at least in Nurse Nelly’s narratives – painting him in diabolical and vampire-like hues overlapping with features of racial Otherness. Even the ‘hunger’ and ‘fasting’ of Heathcliff can be understood just as fruitfully in the context of vampirism and related gothic discourses, though there is no denying the fact that, at least in the early years of empire, the Irish were sometimes painted with the same (or similar) brush of racial and cultural Otherness that was employed to daub much of Africa and Asia.2 The above reading highlights that ‘ghosts’ from the colonies, in Gothic shades or even as the living Gothic Other, enter the narratives of English and spaces of Englishness in different ways. The most obvious one, as already stated, is the imperial Gothic, excavated brilliantly


in recent years by Brantlinger and Punter, among others. My use of the ‘imperial Gothic’ confines it to its main components. Brantlinger, for instance, uses ‘imperial Gothic’ to refer to “late Victorian and Edwardian stories” in which occult or Gothic “phenomenon follow characters from imperial settings home to Britain” (Brantlinger, pp. 230–1), and also highlights the overlap between imperial anxieties and works of “invasion-scare” in science fiction, for instance. This point, as we shall see later, is developed brilliantly by the Swedish historian, Sven Lindqvist, as well. However, by and large, Brantlinger’s and Punter’s references to “imperial Gothic” include texts by Stevenson, Haggard, Stoker, John Buchan etc that “manifest” themselves “in imperial settings” (Brantlinger, p. 230).3 In this book, for obvious reasons, I have decided to restrict the application of the term ‘imperial Gothic’ to texts that take place outside Britain/the United Kingdom and in the empire, or on its fringes: texts such as Haggard’s She, B. M. Crocker’s ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Mark of The Beast’ or ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, Stevenson’s The Beach of Falesá and ‘The Bottle Imp’, Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River (1909) etc. Some of these – such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Kipling’s ‘The Mark of The Beast’ – will be read in the following pages because they are relevant to aspects of my argument, but by and large this book is not overly concerned with the imperial Gothic, as defined here. The imperial Gothic, in that narrowed sense, has been much studied in recent years. I am more concerned with texts in which ghosts, so to speak, “follow characters from imperial settings home to Britain”. However, it might be relevant to pause here and add a postscript on the matter relating to Kipling, as I have not come across any such commentary in the many excellent works on that perennially fascinating and infuriating writer. Kipling, as we know, wrote a number of tales of hauntings, real or imagined, and similar supernatural matters, some 33 in all collected by Peter Haining. In terms of their relationship to rational explanation, these vary from predominantly ‘supernatural’ narratives, such as ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, ‘Haunted Subalterns’ and ‘The Mark of the Beast’, to tales basically offering a rational explanation (a murder, trick or misunderstanding), such as ‘The Return of Imray’, ‘The House of Suddhoo’ or ‘An Indian Ghost in England’. It is remarkable that, while the latter kind can take place in both India and England, the former type – the narratives that clearly incline towards a supernatural and non-rational explanation – are confined to India or the empire. Kipling does not easily allow real Indian ‘ghosts’ to penetrate rational


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English spaces, though an Indian jackal might reach England (as one does in ‘An Indian Ghost in England’, and is mistaken for the “devil’s dog”) and the English can, in Indian spaces, be put through experiences that shake their complacencies regarding power and knowledge (as in ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’). But, even in the supernatural stories of Kipling that take place in India, the essential ‘colonial’ equation of power might be shaken, implicitly, but it is never overturned explicitly. This is probably best illustrated in ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, where (with conscious irony) the ghost of an English memsahib (Mrs Wessington) returns to haunt her jilting lover on a rickshaw pulled by native bearers, who are the same as her bearers in ‘real’ life, conveniently consumed by cholera a few days after her death: “So there were ghosts of rickshaws after all, and ghostly employments in the other world! How much did Mrs Wessington give her men? What were their hours? Where did they go?” (Kipling, ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, The Complete Supernatural Stories of Rudyard Kipling, p. 17). Colonisation, for Kipling, is a greatly contradictory experience, a frayed one, but the cracks are not to be consciously acknowledged: the white man’s burden is extended into the next world, which includes, like this world, the inevitability of brown men carrying white burdens. Similarly, England is not left untouched by the colonial experience: subalterns return with tales and harrowing experiences, a jackal or two gets across and haunts the rural populace of some English village, but real ‘Indian’ ghosts are still left confined to Indian spaces by and large. This is part of the reason why I have decided to focus on texts that bring such ‘ghosts’ into English spaces. What, then, are the types of ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’ presences in British (colonial) Gothic fiction? The first type is common to both mainstream fiction and Gothic fiction and it does not concern me much in this book. Here, the ‘empire’ is present in its absence. In novels by Austen, Dickens or Collins, the empire can be a place into which the protagonist or a major character disappears, or from which s/he returns (as in The Woman in White). Or it can be, as most famously in Austen’s Mansfield Park, the silent, un- or under-narrated base of the narrated ‘English’ superstructure. This also happens in Gothic fiction or fiction influenced by the Gothic, as, to quote again, in The Woman in White, Dickens’s Great Expectations and Bleak House etc. But there are other types of ‘absences’ that can be made to speak under critical scrutiny. As Sven Lindqvist indicates in his eye-opening book, A History of Bombing, a diverse ‘subgenre’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries derived its impetus – and often justified


its narratives of the genocide of ‘other races’ – through an exaggerated perception of the ‘invasion-scare’. These include texts like Samuel W. Odell’s The Last War, Or the Triumph of the English Tongue (1898), which eulogises the brutality of colonisation and narrates the linguistic colonisation (after a necessary genocide of nine million) of the rest of the world by the “English-speaking nations”, Stanley Waterloo’s Armageddon (1898) and Robert W. Coles’s The Struggle for Empire (1900), which advocate something similar by the Anglo-Saxon races, Roy Norton’s The Vanishing Fleets (1908), J. Hamilton Sedberry’s Under the Flag of the Cross (1908), which achieves the Crusading dream of the defeat of ‘heathendom’ in September 2007, and many other texts: these texts are seldom ‘Gothic’ (though science fiction, it has been convincingly argued, has Gothic roots), but they depend heavily on the ‘invasion-scare’ of the late colonial period and a heightened perception of racial Otherness. One typical novel of the kind was Mathew P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1908), grimly summarised by Lindqvist in these words: [F]our hundred million Chinese, who rip open the belly of anyone they run across, flood the European continent. What makes this bloodbath particularly horrifying are all the “sweating [Chinese] women, who, crazy with heat and lust, and the instinct for blood, and the ultimate wantonness of crime” satisfy their forbidden lusts and then, exhausted, go to sleep on the piles of corpses ... The hero, Hardy, finds another solution. He selects one hundred and fifty Chinese, gives each of them a little injection in the upper arm, and lets them return to their countrymen. A black splotch emerges on their cheeks, a black foam forms on their lips. Soon the plague has liberated Europe from its yellow nightmare ... The extermination of the Chinese is no great loss, since their “dark and hideous instincts” lie beyond the grasp of even the most craven European. (Lindqvist, p. 60) The dovetailing of the Gothic – and the use of racial Otherness as a ‘horror’ or source of terror that justifies genocide – into such ‘action’ or science fiction texts (of which the greatest include classics such as H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds) is not my concern in this book, but needs to be put on record as a related matter. Then there are texts that can be understood fully only if the experience and anxieties of colonisation are borne in mind. In some ways they operate by creating a fictional space with the help of distinctive discourses of and from empire: for instance, a colonial version of Social Darwinism, a racialised conception of civilisational/biological


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degeneration or, perhaps most commonly, a fear of ‘racial’ or cultural hybridisation may get transposed into more accessible, sometimes completely ‘English’, narrative contexts. Again, these texts can take place either in the colonies, as is the case of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), or they can take place in England, as is the case of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), whose distortion of character – which induced Stevenson to refer to it as a “Gothic gnome” (Halberstam, p. 12) – was by no means confined, at least in its resonances and discursive sources, to an English space of conceptualisation and identity. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau is a good example of the Gothicinfluenced story or novel that takes place in the ‘colonies’ and reflects the doubts and ambivalences nurtured in the heart of Englishness/ civilisation by exposure to ‘empire’ and the ‘Otherness’ of colonial power. While on the one side it engages with issues of science and technology, on the other side this engagement is coloured by the experience of empire and fears of the colonial Other. These two sides of the narrative are evidently and obviously linked by issues of evolution and degeneration, as is also the case in the two texts that obviously influenced Wells’s tale, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) – itself an example of the sort, but discussed in a separate chapter – and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. In the introduction by the nephew of the fictive narrator, Edward Prendick, the unnamed island of Doctor Moreau is located between “latitude 5o s. and longitude 105o e.”, which places it near the Galapagos Islands, the site of Charles Darwin’s historical observations in 1831. Supplementing this evolutionary echo by naming the nephew ‘Charles’, the narrative moves us back to the notes of the uncle, Edward Prendick, but only after the introduction has already warned us of a mystery and the possibility of madness, both integral to the Gothic. We have been told that, after being recovered from the sea, almost a year after his ship (Lady Vain) sank, Edward “gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed demented” (p. 174).4 Then, perhaps in keeping with what generally happens to the ‘colonial gothic’ in English spaces, “subsequently, he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain.” It appears that the Englishness of England does not allow colonial and gothic Otherness to be narrated or recognised. But this Otherness persists, and even when it is located and narrated outside the actual space of England (and ‘civilisation’), as in The Island of Doctor Moreau or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it returns to haunt both England and ‘civilisation’.

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In the very first chapter of Edward’s recovered narrative, the shipwreck and the incident of planned murder and possible cannibalism that it leads to are described in these words: “It is quite impossible for the ordinary reader to imagine those eight days. He has not – luckily for himself – anything in his memory to imagine with” (p. 176). This locates the “ordinary reader” in a normalised space of civilisation and implicit Englishness, and prepares him, while also warning him of his lack of preparation, for the Gothic horrors to be narrated. But more than that, it is a line that can be read as ironic after the narrative is over, for part of the horror of the narrative lies in the repressed realisation of Edward, and through him the reader, that he does have a “memory” that can “imagine” such horrors. This appears to be hinted at in Edward’s own recognition of the first “humanised animal” he meets on board the ship, which rescues him and then takes him to the island. This animal is initially described in terms of racial and diabolical Otherness, which, as we will see in a later chapter, tend to overlap, perhaps not only in Gothic fiction: “blackfaced”, “deformed”, grotesquely ugly, with “big white teeth”, the suggestion of a “muzzle”, pointed ears,5 twisted thighs (animal-like, and devil-like, so to speak) etc. But, even then, Edward keeps getting the “odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me” (p. 180, original stress). On the island, after Edward discovers the truth – that Doctor Moreau has been humanising animals, sometimes conjoined ones, through ‘vivisection’ etc – this “odd feeling” apparently becomes clear. After all, these “humanised animals” have been carved out of ‘proper’ animals: wolves, pigs, dogs etc. Doctor Moreau’s island is in some ways Circe’s island in reverse. But, even as Edward’s “odd feeling” becomes explicable, another set of events raises related questions, and raises them to greater heights. For the “memory” that makes Edward feel that he knows these “humanised animals” is much deeper than that born of resemblance. We get an early inkling of this in chapter XII: ‘The Sayers of the Law’. This chapter presents the community of “humanised animals” – those released into the wilderness from Moreau’s laboratory and used as cheap labour or kept under colonial subjugation to Moreau’s civilised ‘humanity’. But the rituals of the humanised animals in this chapter also present a satire on the Ten Commandments, the Anglican Liturgies, and much of established religion and rule-bound culture or civilisation. There is a suggestion in this satire that what happens in, say, England might not be all that different from the rituals of these humanised animals, and


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with this the suspicion grows that perhaps these “monsters” are not that different from civilised humans anyway. This suspicion is reinforced in different ways throughout the rest of the text, and becomes even more obvious from Chapter XIV onwards, when Edward finally discovers that these “monsters” are not animalised humans but “humanised animals”. Doctor Moreau has turned these animals into humans – they even talk and have a basic kind of religion, centring on revealed texts (revelation), rituals and an omnipotent, allseeing God – but he has not been able to take “the mark of the beast” off them. They always revert to ‘type’: “somehow the things drift back again, the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day” (p. 227). One obvious aspect of this fear is the colonial experiment, the ‘white man’s burden’: much of the text is about the possibility and even desirability of civilising the ‘Other’. The fact that the humanised animals are described in terms of racial Otherness is not insignificant. The first successful subject, says Doctor Moreau, was a “gorilla”, who, when finished, was considered by the doctor to be “a fair specimen of the Negroid type” (p. 226). Such echoes would have reminded the contemporary reader of some of the debates surrounding the white man’s burden: was the ‘negro’ human or basically apelike? Was it possible to civilise (or Christianise) the ‘savage’ and the heathen? Was learnt European civilisation anything other than a veneer on the Other ‘races’?6 These were common enough debates in the nineteenth century, and perhaps even more common than they appear to have been today, as many scholars focus only on works by the most learned and accomplished of writers in the past. In this sense, the Empire informs Wells’s narrative. But if this ‘fear’ or doubt relates to the Empire out there (and hence does not much concern me), another ‘fear’ returns from the Empire to the very heart of England. For the text of the novella suggests that the animal lurks also in the heart of English civilisation. Already, right at the start, before the island even enters the narrative, Edward experiences and narrates a scene of ‘primitive’ brutality: the two shipwrecked men with him first draw lots on whom to kill first, then topple abroad fighting over the result, and Edward watches their end shrieking with sudden laughter. Now, on the island, as the humanised animals start ‘reverting to type’ and the situation gets out of hand, Edward, Moreau and Montgomery, the assistant, all show strange streaks of brutality, passion, vindictiveness, irrationality. Even as they reveal the animal in themselves (Edward in particular relishes the chase and the hunt), the human in the humanised animals


is also surprisingly highlighted. At the moment when Edward is about to shoot a humanised animal, he notes, It may seem a strange contradiction in me – I cannot explain the fact – but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity. (p. 240) He shoots the humanised animal, but then comes to formulate the fear and doubt that have also been growing in the reader: A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate, in its simplest form. The Leopard Man had happened to go under. That was all the difference. (p. 241) This doubt or fear does not disappear even after Edward returns to England. The last chapter teems with references to it: I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals halfwrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that. (p. 267) ... Then I would turn aside into some chapel, and even there, such was my disturbance, it seemed that the preacher gibbered Big Thinks even as the Ape Man had done; or into some library, and there the intent faces over the books seemed but patient creatures waiting for prey. (p. 268) So here we have a version of the fear – an essential anxiety of empire – that can also be used to understand texts as different as Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, as Punter indicates: “It is strongly suggested that Hyde’s behaviour is an urban version of ‘going native’ ... If an empire based on morality declines, what are the implications? It is precisely Jekyll’s ‘high views’ which produce morbidity in his alter ego” (Punter, 1980, pp. 62, 241). Related fears will come to haunt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness too: To what extent is the savage lurking under the veneer of civilisation? When will the animal under the human suddenly erupt? Can


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the facades of culture ever completely hide the terror and the (Gothic) Other that lurks in the heart? In Heart of Darkness this fear will be taken further: it will not only be the fear of regression in an evolutionary or civilisational sense, it will also obliquely hint at the very monstrosity of civilisation, its brutality as experienced by the Other, the fact that the only thing that redeems it is a possibly hollow ‘idea’. The Other, in this sense, lurks in the very heart of England in texts like these. As suggested here, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores similar anxieties arising from empire, but – unlike texts like The Island of Doctor Moreau, which take place ‘out there’ – it does so in the heart of England. It is, however, as critics like Malchow have noted, impossible to understand the tensions between Jekyll and Hyde and the discourses (of civilisation, culture, the hidden beast in ‘man’, degeneration etc) framing the narrative without reference to the discourses of Empire and colonisation. Again, stories containing Gothic elements or genres arising from the Gothic can also depend, indirectly or directly, on a knowledge, implicit or explicit, of the colonial margins: this can happen in stories projected into the future, as in some of H. G. Wells’s science fiction (a tendency that seeps, in obscure but significant ways, into sci fi and cyber fiction films, such as Blade Runners and Matrix I), or it can be used to construct and narrate the prehistorical past, as in Wells’s ‘A Story of the Stone Age’. A third type of ‘imperial’ or ‘colonial’ presence in British Gothic fiction is that of the, shall we say, ‘colonial ghost’, as a role assumed by an English protagonist. Here the ‘colonial’ or ‘racial’ Other is not actually present, but the narrative – and sometimes an English character – depends on an image of this non-English Otherness. This can involve elaborate play-acting: the Englishman ‘doubles’ as the non-English Other, as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story, ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’. ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’ is basically a story of infidelity and revenge. Douglas Stone, a brilliant, high-spending surgeon, has an affair with the “notorious Lady Sannox”, which – unlike the lady’s earlier affairs – is conducted openly, and inadvertently flaunted in the face of Lord Sannox, once a talented actor, now a retiring gentleman pottering about in his garden, wilfully or otherwise blind to his wife’s indiscretions. One day, an hour before his appointment with Lady Sannox, Stone receives a visitor, Hamil Ali of Smyrna: “a small and decrepit man ... His face was swarthy, and his hair and beard of the deepest black. In one hand he held a turban of white muslin striped with red” (Luckhurst, Ed., Late Victorian Gothic Tales, p. 144). Having established the visitor as a (stereo)typical Turk, the narrative of Hamil Ali now uses similar elements to further the action. Dr Stone is


offered a lot of gold to excise the lips of Ali’s wife, who has injured herself with a poisoned – suitably mystical references here – antique dagger. The poison is mysteriously Oriental: fatal and slow-working. The unconscious wife herself is veiled, except for the lips, because, as Ali points out, “You know our views about woman in the East” (p. 148). The incision performed, it is discovered that Ali is Lord Sannox in disguise and the unconscious and veiled ‘Turkish’ wife is Lady Sannox: the disfigured Lady Sannox takes the veil and retires from society; Dr Stone goes mad; Lord Sannox goes on a vacation, but only after giving the necessary instructions for the upkeep and display of his precious flowers. This is the sort of story, like Rochester as the gypsy in Jane Eyre, in which the colonial Other does not appear, but the narrative depends on a set of images and assumptions associated with colonial/racial Otherness. Lord Sannox’s deception is as dependent on notions of Oriental Otherness in Doyle’s story as Rochester’s play-acting depends on stereotypes about gypsies in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. However, it is true that in these cases the Otherness of the Colonised or the Oriental is not directly countenanced; the structures of rationality and civilisation are not directly threatened by Otherness. This remains the reason why I do not focus much on such Gothic texts in this book. And then, of course, there is the fourth type of presence: those many ghosts from the colonies. Words, curses, artefacts, scrolls from the colonies or non-European spaces can prove to be much more ‘material’ and threatening in British spaces, as we can see in another story by Doyle, ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892), or Doyle’s ‘The Brown Hand’ (1899), in which “an Anglo-Indian doctor is haunted after his return to England by the ghost of an Afghan whose hand he had amputated” (Brantlinger, p. 231). It need hardly be pointed out that the moonstone in Collins’s The Moonstone, to take just one common example, comes from India. As another example, H. G. Wells’s fiction oscillates between ‘science fiction spaces’ and ‘imperial/colonial spaces’ as locations of Otherness and excess. If, on the one hand, we have the famous The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine (1895), on the other hand we have stories such as ‘The Empire of Ants’ and ‘The Country of the Blind’, which take place in colonial or non-European spaces in the world. However, in a story like ‘The Truth about Pyecraft’, a fragment of these colonial nonEuropean spaces also intrudes into English spaces. Wells’s ‘The Truth about Pyecraft’ is a light-hearted fantasy tale, with some Gothic elements – such as family secrets, potions and poisons, excess and the common aporia of fantasy or fact, superstition or science. Mr Pyecraft is a “great, uneasy jelly of substance” (p. 872), worried


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about his weight, who manages to get a secret receipt out of the narrator. The receipt, in Hindustani, was inherited by the narrator from an Indian ancestor, about whom he has ambivalent feelings: “I suppose I am rather dark, still – I am not ashamed of having a Hindu great-grandmother” (p. 873). The long and short of it is that Mr Pyecraft, partly because he uses the euphemism ‘weight’ when he means ‘fat’, ends up taking the mysterious and nauseating concoction – and ends up weightless. After days as a balloon on the ceiling of his room, he finally ends up walking on earth, dressed in lead underwear and boots. Here, once again, you have an element from the colonial margin (a receipt) literally inverting and hollowing out the reality of a very English man, a substantial, club-going gentleman. “Amazing inversions” is how the text describes it (p. 881). Finally, as the fifth type of presence, we can list actual Gothic others in skin and bone. The list here is almost endless, ranging from the gypsy fortune-teller in Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Cammermoor (1819) to Eulalia Bon, the Haitian Creole, in (the American) William Faulkner’s Gothic-influenced Absalom, Absalom (1936). Matthew Sweet comments, in the introduction to a recent edition of Collins’s The Woman in White, Using a high-impact style of narrative that put its characters through a series of extreme mental experiences, Collins and his imitators (writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Ellen Wood and Rhoda Broughton) brought the terrors of the Gothic novel down from mouldering Italian castles and into the back parlours and drawing-rooms of a recognisably modern, middle-class Victorian England. (Collins, 2003, p. xiii) Nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and fiction influenced by the Gothic brought something else into “the back parlours and drawingrooms of a recognisably modern, middle-class Victorian England”: the colonies. This had to do with the concern with foreignness and Otherness – hence, “mouldering Italian castles” – that characterised Gothic fiction in any case. But it was still a noticeable development, and ought not to be confused with the trajectory of either mainstream English literature based in England, such as the novels of Jane Austen, or colonial writing, in which the Gothic and the colonial were set in the colonies and not in England, as indicated earlier. In some cases, though, what was brought back from those Other spaces of empire was not just a significant silence or a metaphorical meaning

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or a ghost, curse or artefact, but a flesh-and-bone colonial Other. And it appeared to be more in evidence in Gothic fiction or mainstream fiction, such as that of Charles Dickens, tinged by the Gothic. The colonial Other appears in Dickens’s fiction more often than in many other mainstream novelists of the time, but even then only fleetingly, as in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and then more often than not in Gothic colours (such as the opium den, and the mysterious disappearance it presages right at the start of Edwin Drood). More commonly, in keeping with the mainstream tendency, the empire is merely a ploy in Dickens’s novels: it is a place people go to when they are not needed by the narrative, or when they need to be disposed of or made to earn a fortune, as in Bleak House. When the empire returns, say, as Magwitch does in Great Expectations, it does so largely under the banner, however obscure, of the Gothic: of crime, doubleness, transgression, revenge, mystery. Not surprisingly then, in the more blatantly Gothic novels of Dickens’s close friend, Wilkie Collins, the empire returns with greater effect and causes deeper anxieties. Much of Collins’s The Moonstone takes place in as English a country house as one can imagine, sandwiched between the shores and fields of Yorkshire, next to the little town of Frizinghall, a community of decent people, who all, in keeping with such decency, do not take easily to gypsy-like strangers such as Dr Ezra Jennings but are generally mildmannered and honest. Something is brought into this country house, this very English country house. It is the moonstone. And it comes from the mysterious colonies, those places of unfathomable Otherness – from India, in fact, the jewel in the crown: The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. (p. 64) Mysterious Indians will follow it soon, three ‘Hindoo’ Brahmins masquerading as jugglers. As the story proceeds, and the moonstone vanishes, this heart of England will be thrown into turmoil. The colonies and various colonial connections will be revealed in the heart of England, this country house and, later, London: not only the moonstone and the juggler-Brahmins, but also “the celebrated Indian traveller,


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Mr Murthwaite” (p. 67), Indian workers (including an accomplished craftsman employed in London) and dark sailors, Indian cabinets and of course various narratives about Hindoos and Muslims, Tippu and Oriental perseverance. What the hell has happened to this quintessential heart of England? Actually, well into the novel, the hullabaloo about the loss of the moonstone seems a bit hyperbolic. After all, only a diamond has gone missing. Later on, one gets to understand some of the inner tensions, but the suspicion lingers that the moonstone is more than just a coveted diamond. There is something about the moonstone that creates dissension and mystery. As Mr Franklin Blake puts it, When I came here from London with that horrible Diamond ... I don’t believe there was a happier household in England than this. Look at the household now! Scattered, disunited – the very air of the place poisoned with mystery and suspicion! (p. 170) The moonstone is not just a stolen diamond. It is also an immigrant from the colonies. And the dissension and hungama it creates resonate with the sort of tension that would accompany the political visibility of such colonial immigrants from the 1960s onwards. The case of The Moonstone is obvious enough: a jewel stolen from the Indies not only disrupts the very English atmosphere of the novel, but also tags along with it three mysterious Indian ‘agents’. However, Collins’s The Woman in White is also haunted by ghosts from the colonies, even though it falls back more heavily on the earlier – more narratable, perhaps – Otherness of ‘Italian’ aristocrats and revolutionaries. However, the mystery of the novel is not only shaped by the asylum, past (aristocrats) and Italian figures; it is also linked to colonial presences in many ways, the most obvious and mainstream way being that of the colonial expedition – for instance, the expedition to Central America on which Hartright departs after falling in love with Laura and which shapes his fortune and character. What he learns in Central America helps him in England, thus complicating a merely binary and negative notion of Otherness: I reached home, on foot; taking the precaution, before I approached our own door, of walking round by the loneliest street in the neighbourhood, and there stopping and looking back more than once over the open space behind me. I had first learnt to use this stratagem against suspected treachery in the wilds of Central America – and


now I was practising it again, with the same purpose and with even greater caution, in the heart of civilised London! (Collins, The Woman in White, p. 454) Less obviously, the reality of England is played out against the backdrop of a non-European colonial empire and presence, as in extracts like this one (which actually develops from the Count’s cosmopolitan relativism, quoted below, to Walter Hartright’s more colonial version of the superiority of English civilisation): “It is true,” said the Count, quietly. “I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong. Here, in England, there is one virtue. And there, in China, there is another virtue.” (p. 234) Finally, there is the physical presence of the colonies in the novel: Mrs Rubelle, who plays a decisive role in the mystery, if only as an appendage of Count Fosco, is described as “a small, wiry, sly person, of fifty or thereabouts, with a dark brown or Creole complexion” (Collins, The Woman in White, p. 363). In general, Collins’s Italians are a version of Otherness that, nevertheless, extends to other foreigners as well and is underpinned by the colonial presences and references in the novel. As Pesca, the ‘good’ Italian, puts it, Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at that secret self which smoulders him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquillity of a man like me; sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am – but judge us not! (p. 575) So, suddenly, there they are, those ghosts from the colonies, right in the middle of England (or the United Kingdom, as the case may be), an England whose fate has long been interlinked with the fate of the colonised but whose literature – especially creative literature – has only intermittently and hesitatingly recognised this. It need hardly be said that the above examples are not really ‘types’, let alone exclusive categories, as they offer many kinds of overlap: for instance, in Collins’s The Moonstone, an artefact from India – the stolen moonstone – is followed to England by three actual, flesh and blood, mysterious Indians. Similarly, Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934)


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establishes its occultist credentials in the first two chapters by introducing a host of ‘foreign’ Satanists in the heart of London – “Mr Mocata” (p. 20), “a native of Madagascar ... half-Negro and half-Polynesian ... a ‘bad black’ if ever I saw one” (p. 21), “a grave-faced Chinaman wearing the robes of a Mandarin”, “a Eurasian with only one arm” (p. 26), “a fat, oily-looking Babu in a salmon-pink turban” (p. 27) etc – while also connecting the European hero Duke De Richleau’s knowledge of ‘white magic’ to his extensive years in the “East” (p. 31). As such, I am not trying to establish very firm borders between these ‘types of presence’, but simply sorting them out for the sake of convenience and record. However, almost all the texts that I will read in the following chapters fall into the ‘types’ etched above, particularly into the last two, for (as explained earlier) I am interested in texts that, directly or indirectly, bring the ‘empire’ back into Britain. In short, in much of Gothic literature, or literature with Gothic elements, the colonies and the colonised remain eerily half-present throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. They are like the mysterious Indians in The Moonstone, or the mad Creole in Rochester’s ‘attic’ in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. They are seldom narrated directly; their materiality is downplayed rather than heightened. They are like Bertha Mason, Rochester’s mad, Creole and secret wife, tucked away into the recesses of the narratives, haunting its corridors more in the shape of ghosts and nightmares than as fully fledged and fully fleshed characters. And yet they are there, and at times – like Bertha – central to the story. Jane Eyre, as Jean Rhys realised when she set out to write Wide Sargasso Sea, is Jane Eyre’s story only to the extent that it chooses not to be Bertha Mason’s story. These are parallel stories, but the narrative limelight falls on Jane, not on Bertha. One ought not to make morality out of this narrative choice, but the choice itself has to be noted, because, in some ways, Bertha is just as central as Jane to the dramatic tension of Brontë’s novel, as critics like John Thieme and Angela Smith have noted. Jane Eyre, to take just one example, has been described as “realistically if not Gothically haunting” (Gilbert, in Jane Eyre, p. 476). This is an accurate description, but it has to be read further, and in the light of the clear examples of ‘Gothic haunting’ in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Charlotte Brontë tries to curtain the Gothic, or limit it. Its traces are there everywhere in Jane Eyre, in suggestions of haunting and vampirism, but these traces are almost always rationalised. A good example is the gypsy woman who turns out to be Rochester in disguise. For

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Charlotte Brontë, though not for Emily, the sublime has to be erased by the beautiful, horror by anger, ‘evil’ by trickery, exultation by domesticated love. But, of course, the Gothic cannot be completely erased, and Gothic strangeness remains hidden in the ‘attic’, as Rochester’s mad Creole wife. Michel de Certeau has noted that any autonomous order is founded upon what it eliminates; it produces a ‘residue’ condemned to be forgotten. But what was excluded re-infiltrates the place of its origin – now the present’s ‘clean’ [propre] place. It resurfaces, it troubles, it turns the present’s feeling of being ‘at home’ into an illusion, it lurks – this ‘wild’, this ‘ob-scene,’ this ‘filth,’ this ‘resistance’ of ‘superstition’ – within the walls of the residence. (de Certeau, 1997, p. 4) The Gothic, and genres arising from it, illustrate this philosophical insight in literature as much as anything else. It hardly needs to be reiterated in conclusion that much of what I say about the Gothic and Otherness in a colonial or post-colonial context can also be said to some extent in a ‘fully’ British context. The Gothic has a troubled relationship with the normative in general, and the colonial or post-colonial context is only one of various such negotiations with the normative. In stories like Saki’s ‘Sredni Vashtar’ and ‘The Music on the Hill’, the normative is fully European in location, and so is the ‘Otherness’ confronting it: actually, in the former the normative is seen as tyrannical but in the latter it is even seen as partly heroic. In both cases, though, it is restrictive and blind to Other aspects of reality even within a British/European context. In colonial and post-colonial contexts, obviously, the ‘normative’ can be even more restrictive and potentially blind, and hence the Gothic can be used to greater effect in suggesting what the normative and sometimes even the norms of narration do not fully allow.

2 The Devil and the Racial Other

In her introduction to the Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature, Mary Ellen Snodgrass notes that indigenous human interest in scary stories drew writers and readers to the “murky past” when “literary trends fled the high-toned, artificial sanctuary of the Age of Reason”. She goes on to state that [t]he most accessible model of imaginative narrative derived from the Middle Ages, a fertile period textured with contrasts – great productivity and abominable crimes, piety and religious barbarism, admirable soldiery and the doings of witches, scientific innovation and the dabblings of alchemists, royal ritual and the danse macabre, and bold architecture to suit church and civic needs. The period thrived on a grand cultural exchange as wandering rabbis visited distant enclaves of Judaism, traders imported the wonders of Asia, and Christian crusaders tramped the long road to Jerusalem. (Snodgrass, p. xiii) This observation maps the birth of the Gothic in the mainstream manner of the study of Gothic fiction by European and American critics: it says much that needs to be said, but it also leaves out all that is the reason for my writing this book. For instance, the Gothic reversion to the Middle Ages was undergirded by the fact, mostly not faced by critics well into the twentieth century, that the writers and readers of the eighteenth century were also living in an age of “grand cultural exchange”. Moreover, the exchange was not – and had not been even in the Middle Ages – simply that of Europeans entering Eastern spaces and eastern commodities entering European spaces, as is suggested in the quotation above. Probably in the Middle Ages, definitely in the Age of Discovery and with greater 39


frequency from the eighteenth century onwards, Asians and Africans came to European spaces too: as traders, travellers, ambassadors, captives, sailors, servants, soldiers, slaves. In Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery, Nabil Matar recovers various stories of the presence of Africans, Moors, Arabs and Jews in the urban spaces of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Again in In the Lands of the Christians, Matar recovers seventeenth-century Arab travel accounts of Europe and the Americas. Moreover, by the eighteenth century, the flashpoint century of the ‘Gothic revival’ in literature, Asians and Africans were to be commonly found in urban spaces of England, and other colonial metropolis – as documented, apart from Matar, by Rozina Visram in Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The History of Indians in Britain, 1700–1947, Sukhdev Sandhu in London Calling, Susheila Nasta in Home Truths, and others.1 What was interesting in the eighteenth century, apart from the growing visibility of the ‘empire’, was the fact that so-called Enlightenment discourses, or the discourses of Reason, had come to organise and conceptualise the world in ways very different from the medieval world view. Michel Foucault puts this succinctly in the context of ‘madness’, which is Gothic enough a concern, though Foucault is not concerned with the Gothic per se: As for a common language, there is no such thing; or, rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. (Foucault, 1961, p. xii) That Foucault locates the roots of psychiatry, which he calls “a monologue of reason about madness”, in the eighteenth century is not without significance to our study: for pre-eighteenth century negotiations between madness and reason were just as open-ended as the related dialogue between reason and faith. And eighteenth-century Reason, as it grew into twentieth-century scientific objectivity etc, began by constructing both madness and religion, though initially the ‘superstitions’ of religions other than Christianity, in the shape of its ‘negative’ Other. Once that divorce had been made, it was (and is) no wonder that madness and religion became (and are) the ‘source’ of terror – the terror

The Devil and the Racial Other

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induced by a negativised Otherness – in much of Gothic literature. Hegel, for instance, had a clear notion of an essential source of such terror: “the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive, nothing that fills it with a content” (Hegel, 360). The dominant European (and colonialist) tendency to empty the Other of all except negativity and lack – a tendency critiqued and resisted by recent European philosophers such as Levinas and Buber – is central to an understanding of this terror. It is also important to bear in mind that this terror is a legitimate response to the “limit and menace” (in Levinas’s words, quoted above) that the Other presents, but it is not the only response (unlike what colonialist discourse, also at times in the Gothic narrative, mostly assumes). Moreover, the reason why Gothic writers in the eighteenth century went back to the Middle Ages had to do with the fact that, so to speak, ‘reason’ and ‘superstition’ were not as clearly segregated in medieval times as they had come to be, at least in theory and for the thinking classes, in the eighteenth century.2 There was no or little opposition between piety and religious barbarism, science and alchemy in the Middle Ages. Even someone like Leonardo da Vinci was capable of believing in both science and alchemy, and the rank of leading thinkers all the way down to, and sometimes into, the Age of Reason who could combine science with superstition, reason with faith is simply mind-boggling and inexhaustible from a late Enlightenment perspective. Actually, it was in the eighteenth century that these oppositions came to be seen primarily in incompatible terms: people still continued to merge reason with religion, for instance in daily life, but (many) learned people thought in terms of binary oppositions that did not permit, at least in thought, a ready amalgamation. (It required, instead, an ordered hierarchy: one or the other had to be made the dominant term.) One of the reasons why Gothic writers in the eighteenth century needed to go back to the Middle Ages had to do with the fact that such amalgamation, essential to the Gothic, could be placed there in the past, or placed in the present as a survival of the past, but could not be placed entirely and only in the present of the Age of Reason. This fact is central to our understanding of what actually took place in the eighteenth century. Suddenly, educated Englishmen and women – and it is striking how well-educated and even cosmopolitan the early Gothic writers were – found themselves in a world of many invasions, ambiguities, uncertainties, all of which were brought home to them not only by their knowledge of Empire but also by the physical presence of Empire in metropolitan spaces in England. This presence was difficult to

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understand or comprehend; its difference could only be comprehended in the nature of Otherness, more so given the structures and strictures of Reason, as illustrated, among others, by Foucault in the context of his history of madness. In the Middle Ages, perhaps, this difference would have been amalgamated unconsciously; in the eighteenth century, it needed to be tackled consciously and ordered. But the Age of Reason, working with old and new binarisms in an accentuated form, had very little equipment with which to account for or even register this difference. There was some recognition of the colonial or soon-to-be-colonised non-European expanses, not least in genres that appear to have flowed into Gothic fiction, such as fairytales and the Renaissance stage, and Gothic authors like Horace Walpole presented odds and ends of Asian stories in their writings. But the colonial Other, as a presence in Europe,3 was not really or significantly noted well into the nineteenth century, and even then mostly in fiction influenced by the Gothic. Hence, in the eighteenth century, while the colonial Other went unnoticed or was skipped over in haste, English imagination went back to the issue of Otherness undergirding the presence of the colonial Other. It did not do so, initially, by facing up to the presence of the colonial Other, though the fact that Gothic fiction displaced itself not only temporally (into the Middle Ages) but also spatially (into border regions of Europe, in particular Italy, the ‘grounds’ of European ‘civilisation’, but also the region, along with East Europe and Spain, with the greatest overlap with Africa–Asia) suggests a subconscious awareness of the issues at stake. So does the early presence of orphans and people of uncertain origins. No, while the colonial Other took some time to appear in Gothic fiction as the colonial Other, Gothic fiction coped with the notion of Otherness by taking up culturally familiar signposts: ghosts, spectres, wizards, demons etc. Of these, of course, the greatest and original ‘Other’ in the European Christian context was Satan in his various forms. Hence, it is little surprise that the Devil appears in almost all the earliest Gothic texts. The Devil, after all, was the most common image of ‘negative’ Otherness available to Christian peoples, the ‘terror-ist’ par excellence;4 until the Renaissance, even “the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis” (Foucault, 1961, p. xiv). This role of the Devil has been studied in the context of anti-Semitism, and scholars have shown how the ‘wandering Jew’, as the disciple of the Devil and an impossible-to-assimilate entity in the early periods of nation formation, has been cast as the Other in much of Gothic fiction


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(see Davison). I will not allude much to these convincing and relevant readings, and will keep ‘the Jew’ out of this discussion by and large, even though there is a clear overlap between the depiction of Jews and that of other ‘nations’ and ‘religions’ from outside Europe. As the Jew as the Gothic Other (along with other anti-Semitic representations) has already been studied in detail, I will focus more on the ‘imperial or colonial Other’ as outlined in the previous chapters. But this focus has to start off with a reference to the ways in which the Jew was cast in the colours of the Devil, also because finally the notion of the ‘negative’ but absolute ‘Other’ in European thinking is a theological one. Secular thinking or enlightened ‘Reason’ can seldom conceptualise this Otherness as anything other than deviance, and hence waiting to be assimilated into the ‘self’: when supposedly secular writers insist on some kind of absolute Otherness – of, say, Jews in the past or Muslims today – they basically colour this Other (particularly when negativity is presumed) in hues borrowed from a supposedly dead (Christian) Devil, even when professing disbelief.5 In this chapter, I intend to trace the role of the devil as the ‘original’ Other – and source of terror – within Euro-Christian thinking, and examine the Devil’s overlap with ‘racial’ and ‘colonial’ Otherness.

I The Devil was not always black. As Frank S. Kastor points out, there is a kind of Christian unholy trinity: Lucifer (as Archangel), Satan (as Prince of Hell) and the Devil (as Tempter) (Kastor in Bloom, pp. 56–7). The first of the three, as the name indicates (Lucifer means ‘light-bearer’ in Latin) is often portrayed or imagined in texts as luminescent or exceedingly white. The other two, however, dovetail into various other shades which would have certain practical uses for at least some Europeans in the centuries of ‘enlightened’ slave-holding and colonisation. At least as Satan and the Devil, Lucifer tends to be depicted not only as a serpent or half-animal-like, but also as disfigured, deformed and black. As Jeffrey Burton Russell notes of the depiction of Lucifer in High Medieval art and literature, “The Devil is usually black or dark, but the opposite is also common: he is livid or pallid, a hue associated with death, heretics, schismatics, and magicians. He is usually naked or wears only a loincloth” (Russell, ‘Lucifer in High Medieval Art and Literature’, in Bloom, p. 127). It is easy to see how such representations lent themselves to, shall we say, colonial uses in some hands and minds: the naked ‘black’ savage with his magical practices, or the coloured ‘heretic’

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and ‘schismatic’ Turk or Arab. It is also easy to trace how characteristics of the Devil were transferred to people considered to be against Christianity or simply beyond the pale of real religion: “Demons have long, hooked noses [in medieval art and literature], a characteristic transferred to Jews in the process of demonization” (Russell, ‘Lucifer in High Medieval Art and Literature’, in Bloom, p. 127). It is also a characteristic, as Hollywood films have attested for at least a century now, associated with other ‘Semitic’ peoples, such as the Arabs, and even with Turks. “The role of Prince of Hell ... is regularly distinguished from that of Archangel, as well as characterised, by demonic disfigurement,” notes Frank Kastor (Bloom, pp. 59–60), and goes to demonstrate, with six lines from The Story of Genesis and Exodus (c. 1250), how “the characterisation and differentiation of the two roles rest upon a few statements of disfigurement”. The six-line extract quoted by Kastor contains three clear “statements of disfigurement”, of which two are “mirc” (dark) and “swart” (black). Such examples can be multiplied, undergirded as they are – even at their most innocent – by the imagery of light and darkness in the Bible. Kelly notes in Satan: A Biography that “the most popular book of the Middle Ages was a collection of ... Passiones”, Legenda Aurea, in which the Demon is described as looking like “an Ethiopian blacker than soot” (Kelly, p. 227). Elsewhere in the same book, the “Apostles order the Demons out of their Idols, and they emerge as two black and naked Ethiopians, who depart with wild cries” (Kelly, p. 257). It is true that in Euro-Christian legends, such as the Lives of the Saints, “the Devil and his Demons can appear in any shape they want to”, but “when Demons appear in their own form, they are often, as we have seen, characterised as Ethiopians, that is, Black Africans” (Kelly, p. 285). This characterisation of the Devil and his Demons as ‘black’ did not only associate them with the racism of slavery and the dominant dismissal of non-Christian faiths and deities; in the nineteenth century, it also came to cut a broader swathe across Asia and Africa, as the word ‘nigger’ was applied not only to ‘Black Africans’ but to Other-skinned colonised subjects in general, even in some cases to the Chinese. Nineteenth-century colonial depictions of Indians apply ‘nigger’ and its equivalents to Indians as well. To this was added the old crusading dismissal of Islam, which not only had Christian Europe equating Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam, with the Devil (Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy, pp. 31–44), but also had the great Dante placing Mohammed and Ali, a major Caliph, in one of the innermost circles of his Hell.6 Furthermore, there was an easy equation between the Devil and “allegorical personifications such as Wrong, Falsehood, and Deceit” not only


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in William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1360), as illustrated by Russell, but also in a number of other texts down to the nineteenth century, and in the popular mind. For Langland again, as Russell notes, “money and profit” were the “chief idolatry” associated with the “Dark Lord” (Russell, ‘Lucifer in High Medieval Art and Literature’, in Bloom, p. 141). In general, well into (and, perhaps, particularly in) the nineteenth century idolatry itself was associated with the Devil, and ‘heathen gods’ were considered either empty idols or versions of the Devil, or a hazy combination of the two. For instance, if, in the eighteenth century, Africans could occasionally be seen as “strangers alike to luxury and toil” and their superstitions as a remnant of earlier times or the mistaken beliefs of a childish people, by the nineteenth century ascendant evangelisation in Africa seldom left any doubt as to the devilish sources of such indigenous beliefs.7 The colonial discourse on the non-European as potentially or actually a cannibal – a discourse that was and continues to be at times in remarkable excess of the hard and scientifically observed facts8 – was itself very often premised on the ‘devilish’ character of non-Christian faiths, a character also attributed to Jews by European anti-Semitics until recently. Almost every seventeenth–nineteenth-century European text on African or Asian ‘superstitions’ or even, in more generous terms, ‘religions’ is permeated with the images of devilry, satanic influences and dark heathen rites and rituals, or with references to related matters, such as ‘cannibalism’, ‘human sacrifice’ and, in some versions, ‘idolatry’. There is also a long ‘Christian’ tradition of associating not just Jewish beliefs but also Islamic ones with Satanism: in 1213, Pope Innocent III described Mohammed as “the Beast of the Apocalypse” and Richard Webster correctly notes that the “enemies of Christendom” used to be commonly “equated with the apocalyptic beast” (Webster, p. 79). The ‘racialised’ Devil united the two main sources of negative Otherness (and ensuing terror) in the Euro-Christian imagination – theological (fallen Lucifer) and geocultural (‘negroes’, ‘Jews’, ‘Mohammedans’ etc).9 Hence, it is not unexpected that many colonial Gothic texts, or fiction inspired by the Gothic, depend much for their narration of Otherness on a conflation of racial and diabolical characteristics. The “humanised animals” – animals turned into monstrous half-humans by science – in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau combine these characteristics: they are described not only as “black-faced”, “brown men”, being like “the Negroid type”, wearing “turbans”, grotesquely ugly, deformed etc, but also as “elfin”, “a Devil”, having eyes with green light and twisted

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thighs and legs,10 “diabolical”, like a “bogle” (goblin). The repeated “mark of the beast” does not refer as obviously to Satan as Kipling’s story ‘The Mark of the Beast’ does, but nevertheless it is impossible to read that description within a Christian context and not be reminded of the Antichrist in the Revelation of St John the Divine (13: 16–17). In at least one place the word ‘satanic’ is used to describe these “monsters”: actually, the word ‘satanic’ is almost conjoined in the same sentence with the description “coarser Hebrew type” (p. 234), thus repeating a common element of European anti-Semitism, which in the past often portrayed Jews as devilish and devil-worshippers. The connection between Satan/the Devil and religions other than Christianity is beautifully and subtly used in Kipling’s Gothic short story, ‘The Mark of the Beast’, first serialised in 1890. The story begins with these sentences: East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen. (Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales, p. 84) In the second paragraph, this link between the superstitions of the East and devils is substantiated by the suggestion that a full knowledge of “natives” is not “good for any man”, presumably because it reveals the darker side of nature and in its negativity becomes a source of potential terror. Kipling, however, retains his typical generosity even while using the usual Christian–civilisational reference to the superstitions of the heathen, the tendency to equate non-Christian gods with devilworship. He does not diminish the power of the heathen gods – in this case, Hanuman – and when a drunk Englishman pollutes an idol of Hanuman he is cursed by a “mewing”, “face-less” and “silver” leper,11 and within hours the Englishman degenerates into a tortured wolf-like creature, with a penchant for blood and raw meat. This degeneration brings to mind the “reversion” of Doctor Moreau’s “humanised animals” and holds the possibility, not developed by Kipling, that the beast lurks within civilised man. But after two Englishmen capture the leper and torture him – this “part is not to be printed”, says the text in one of those unconsciously frank admissions of the bottom line of colonisation and the civilising mission in Kipling – the curse is retracted and the Englishman suddenly recovers.


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Kipling uses the usual equation of non-Christian deities with the Devil to spin a powerful tale of terror and mystery, made more so by the fact that the deity and his followers are given actual power and agency. Their Otherness is a threat (“limit and menace”, in Levinas’s words) and not transparent, and even Strickland, the Englishman who knows his natives best in the story (and also in Kim, where he makes an ‘expert’ appearance), is considered by the narrator as basically failing to know them to any significant extent. Their gods and rituals might be ‘devilish’, but they are by no means impotent, and in their place they can be as powerful as anything else – either the fully Christian God of yore or the half-Christian dismissal of more recent times (except perhaps the “not to be printed” physical power of colonisation, its capacity to ‘torture’ and ‘police’ dissidence and difference into conformity). Hence the story ends with the narrator saying that no one will believe his story because “it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned” (Luckhurst, Late Victorian Gothic Tales, p. 95). This sounds like a standard dismissal of non-European beliefs and systems of knowledge, but is actually – or at the same time – a deeply critical statement aimed at what in later years would come to be termed Eurocentricism. It remains a fact of Rudyard Kipling’s oeuvre that, while he was often a colonialist of a rather jingoist variety,12 he was also at the same time far less Eurocentric and far more open to nonEuropean ‘Otherness’ than is commonly acknowledged. Of course, ‘imperial Gothic’, as defined earlier, depends heavily on the common equation of the Devil with the false faiths and superstitions of non-Christian people (sometimes liberally extended to Catholics by “hard-shell Baptis’ ”, as Randall, the Papa, proclaims himself in Stevenson’s ‘The Beach of Falesa’ in South Sea Tales and Island Nights’ Entertainment). The action of novels like Haggard’s She and novellas and stories like The Beach Of Falesa and ‘The Bottle Imp’ by Stevenson depend on a clear or vague, serious or ironic equation of the Devil with other faiths. This list can be extended to many other stories and novels by Doyle, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Bram Stoker, John Bunyan, Maturin, Edgar Wallace and, in a highly complex and selfcritical version (as we shall see), Emily Brontë.

II Now, it is true that the Devil was slowly emasculated in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Perhaps this was a process that

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began way back in the seventeenth century and was not unconnected with the monolingual predominance that Reason was to establish over unreason, as Foucault indicates: “The great theme of the madness of the Cross, which belonged so intimately to the Christian experience of the Renaissance, began to disappear in the seventeenth century, despite Jansenism and Pascal” (Foucault, 1961, p. 78). With the advance of ‘modernity’, there is a slow diminishment of Otherness – unreason, madness, the Devil etc – as autonomous areas of experience and knowledge, both separate from and intricately connected to aspects of the Self (or reason, sanity, divinity etc). Instead they are seen increasingly and only as a ‘lack’ or ‘deficiency’ or, at best, negation in relation to the Self (or reason, sanity, divinity etc)13 – though as negativity they extended a common theological perception of the Devil. Perhaps the appearance of the Devil in eighteenth-century Gothic is the last gasp of a dying man. As the nineteenth century unfolds, the Devil does not appear in person or as vividly as he did in eighteenth-century Gothic novels like The Monk, or in the early Faust legends. But he never quite disappears. He turns into types of psychological drama, a process that appears to have started at least as early as 1824 with the publication of James Hogg’s Gothicised crime novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which featured not the Devil in hoof and cape but “satanic voices” in the head. But just as the “return of the repressed” is the nineteenth-century Freudian discovery that lies at the heart of psychoanalysis (de Certeau, 1997, p. 3), the Devil, himself suppressed in the Miltonic sense and repressed in the nineteenth century by the dominance of the Protestant doctrine of the ‘Bible within’ (Webster) and rationalism, survives in Gothic literature and associated genres as demons (increasingly psychological ones), ghosts, lunatics and, often, diabolical foreigners and racial Others. It was easy to slide from the Devil to the racial Other, as indicated earlier in this chapter: much of the language used for both overlapped, and there was still, well into the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century at times, a tendency to contrast the truth (sometimes supplemented by rationality within a tradition established centuries ago by Aquinas14) of Christianity with the ‘superstitions’ of other religions, to consider and depict the gods and goddesses of other faiths, particularly non-Semitic ones, as demons and devils. Again, both remained sources of potential terror within a certain construction of European selfhood. However, the Devil did not decline only in Gothic fiction. In ‘The Devil’, J. W. Smeed documents the “decline of the Devil” as “one of


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the characteristics of Faust literature in the 19th and 20th centuries” (Smeed, ‘The Devil’, in Bloom, p. 81). He also notes how in nineteenthcentury versions of the Faust myth, such as Spielhagen’s novella Faustulus (1898), “the Devil, if he exists, is within man” (Smeed, in Bloom, p. 87). This metamorphosis of the Devil/Satan/Lucifer into demons of the mind, the human heart and human society occurs quite early and in a distinctive fashion in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth The Wanderer (1820),15 if we confine ourselves to texts influenced by the Gothic and the nineteenth century, though in this case from a particular geopolitical space between the imperial ‘centre’ and its peripheries. In general, this long and multilayered novel provides a good outline of the argument I have propounded in this chapter. One can put this argument in three parts: 1. That the Devil/Satan/Lucifer is the Original ‘negative’ Other in the earliest phase of British Gothic fiction, which is in keeping with both the position of early Gothic fiction between medieval romances and ‘modern’ novels and the fact that the Western notion of the absolute Other was originally a theological one. 2. That the Devil is associated with non-Christian (sometimes also non-Protestant), heathen, African and Asian spaces and beliefs as Gothic fiction develops and bifurcates in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.16 Both, as noted earlier, can be sources of terror to a Euro-Christian imagination which, within a certain discourse of binary rationalism, constructs the Other largely as lack/ deficiency or sheer negativity. 3. That the Devil/Satan/Lucifer diminishes or metamorphoses into demons of the human heart, mind, society and psyche as the twentieth century approaches – and that many of these retain ‘colonial Other’ features in Gothic fiction. To begin with, in Melmoth The Wanderer, the Christian Devil and his demons are always an implied ‘fact’, a physical possibility; they have not yet become just ‘voices in the head’. But, in contrast to texts like Lewis’s The Monk, they never actually appear – there is only a suggestion, towards the end, that Melmoth the Wanderer might have been dragged off into the sea, and from there the flames of Hell, by demons. But of course the character of the Wanderer depends on a theological conception of the Devil as the Other: this is underlined right from the start when the Devil is hinted at as “one whom we dare not mention to


‘ears polite’ ” (p. 11) and the presence of the Devil lurks behind various references – including the anti-Semitic dread of the ‘Wandering Jew’, which informs the very title of the novel. The story itself is one of a Faustian pact, though the pact is never clearly described, just as the Devil never actually appears. Instead we have Melmoth, the Wanderer, a man who should have been dead decades ago, stalking the various characters in the story, first helping them plunge into calamities, then appearing to them at the lowest ebb of their fortunes and making them a ‘devilish’ offer that is not described in the context but is invariably rejected by the characters. In the end, the Wanderer gives up his attempts to find victims willing to accept his ‘offer’, returns ‘home’ to Ireland and awaits his doomed end. It is then that the “suggested idea” of the novel, as specified by Maturin in the preface and taken from one of Maturin’s actual sermons, connects fully and clearly with the Faustian deal-making. This is what the quoted sermon extract says: At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his word – is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? – No, there is not one – not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer! (p. 5)17 As the ending of the novel clarifies, Melmoth the Wanderer has attempted and failed to get someone else to take his (doomed) place in order to be released from his mysterious pact with the Devil. He has finally given up hope of finding such a man, no matter how depraved and oppressed, and has returned ‘home’ to await his gory end. If the Devil pervades the narrative of Melmoth The Wanderer without making a full appearance, it is also remarkable how the deeper the narrative gets into ‘Devilry’ the farther it moves from the Anglo-Protestant heart of the United Kingdom. The narrative starts with John Melmoth, a descendant of Melmoth the Wanderer, leaving Trinity College, Dublin, to visit a dying and sole relative in the family home, a bleak, obscure part of Ireland. The relative’s death, and inherited material, introduce John to the Wanderer figure and the usual Gothic family secret. The first full account of the Wanderer is provided in a mouldering manuscript by an Englishman called Stanton, who encounters him in the year 1676 in Spain, meets him again in London, turns down his offer of “life, liberty, and sanity” when confined falsely to a madhouse, follows


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him obsessively all over Europe and finally comes to the family home in Ireland and leaves his manuscript there before departing. Already, the scope of the Devil’s Otherness has been expanded from British Protestant spaces to continental Catholicism, and the novel is ostensibly a critique of Catholicism (though we shall see that it is also more than that). Enter, next, another major narrator, a Catholic Spanish nobleman. His narratives of Melmoth the Wanderer take us not just into the heart of Catholic Otherness in Europe but also to the East Indies: the most elaborate and Gothic of the narratives in the novel, Melmoth’s “demonmarriage” to the innocent Immalee, combines Spanish Catholicism with non-European Otherness for its setting and enactment. Throughout, the novel makes use of Catholic and non-Christian or ‘colonial’ elements – also in the case of historical references, as to the “Moors” and “Mahomet” – to stress and develop the Otherness of the mysterious Devil who never really appears but always informs the narrative. It is necessary, however, to deviate from the main argument here – deviations from the main narrative being the essence of Maturin’s art in the novel in any case – and add that Maturin’s ‘Protestantism’ is by no means as narrow as the above account might make it seem. If Catholicism and non-Christian beliefs are the scaffolding on which he constructs his image of the Devil’s Otherness and Evil, the doubts that result from this vision permeate the very heart of his British Protestantism at times. This has been noted by Punter and Byron, though only in its antiCatholic context, and it is best to quote them: Maturin’s own position as a writer – he was a Protestant clergyman – is clearly against Catholicism in particular and all its works, but one of the most interesting features of the book is the way in which time and time again particular characters go beyond what is necessary to defend this specific position. At one point a dying and very evil monk offers a neat summary of his views on the falsity of religious belief: “All saints, from Mahomet down to Francis Xavier, were only a compound of insanity, pride, and self-imposition; – the latter would have been of less consequence, but that men always revenge their impositions on themselves, by imposing to the utmost on others”. (Punter and Byron, p. 204) While, as Punter and Byron also point out, such extreme statements of doubt are inevitably made by evil characters, even the good characters come up with additional commentary that brings “most of the edifice

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of religion, or perhaps indeed of belief itself in a more general sense, down” (Punter and Byron, p. 204). It is as if the doubts harboured and espoused openly and legitimately by the narrative in the spaces of nonProtestant Otherness sneak into and haunt the centres of Protestant belief too, similarly to the way colonial Otherness enters and haunts the spaces of Britain in many Gothic texts. If, then, the Devil informs the narrative of Maturin’s novel and is often visualised or foreshadowed in the (‘legitimate’) context of Catholic and colonial Otherness, it is also true that this Devil is suggested in shades and states other than that of the sulphurous Satanic in Melmoth The Wanderer. While the Devil, as tempter, always haunts the text, what really comes across is not the details of the agency of the Devil but the minute, destructive, tortured workings of human minds, emotions and, above all, society. The relative John visits right at the start of the book is a good example of a man who is both tortured and depraved, who is even evil (but never Devil). Similar characters proliferate in the novel, and even the sufferings of the good characters are imbued with details and vividness that make the Devil almost immaterial. When Stanton, the good Englishman, is put in a madhouse, he deteriorates into a madness-like state in spite of all his efforts to stay sane and his knowledge that he is not mad. The modern reader of the novel finds creeping on him the suspicion that Maturin’s Devil is less Lucifer or Satan, in a physical sense, and more the sum of the evils of humanity and society, evils that are both less than the Devil and more than the demonic. When the good Spanish nobleman, one of the three main narrators, is treated as possessed and mad by monks, who want to influence and pressurise him by that pretence, he starts believing himself depraved too. He is, so to say, ‘negatively’ Othered in his own mind by the impact of the society around him: The terror that I inspired I at last began to feel. I began to believe myself – I know not what, whatever they thought me. This is a dreadful state of mind, but one impossible to avoid. In some circumstances, where the whole world is against us, we begin to take its part against ourselves, to avoid the withering sensation of being alone on our own side. Such was my appearance, too, my flushed and haggard look, my torn dress, my unequal gait. (p. 158) This, and similar passages and actions, indicate the social and psychological aspects of the Otherness that the text, in more correct theological


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fashion, attributes to the Devil. Throughout the novel, the Devil does not need to appear, because he is not required. Everything attributed to him is achieved by and in human hearts, minds and, above all, society. Punter and Byron note that the world is not purged by the eventual death of Melmoth – as it is, for example, by the death of Ambrosio in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk or of Schedoni in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian – because Melmoth is not a principal of evil in himself but rather an agent and indeed a product of the perennial evil of others; were it not for this greater evil he would have no hoped-for victims to whom to offer his bargain. (pp. 205–6) The Devil does not need to make an appearance in Melmoth The Wanderer, because the human heart – and, what is more, human society – contains all the evil a demon is capable of, and a bit extra: “there is a point to which human malice and mischief may be carried, that would baffle those of a demon” (p. 156). Maturin’s novel occupies a fascinating position between Gothic texts, quite a few of them earlier ones, in which the Devil or a representative demon is necessary as the fountainhead of terror, and later texts in which the Devil has disappeared completely into psychological, moral and political states, into (terrifying) ‘voices in the head’. In Melmoth The Wanderer, the Devil informs the narrative but never really appears, and is not really required, as the human mind and heart, products of a depraved, malicious, unfair society, are considered sufficient for the actual enactment of evil. A deeply religious novel, this also says much of the trajectory of Christian – especially Protestant – belief under the impact of modern discourses, its dovetailing into modernity, its haunting of the secular. But that is a matter beyond the concerns of this chapter, which needs to return, or go on, to the diminishing or metamorphosing Devil in later Gothic texts.

III In contrast to the Devil, who features in thresholds to the underground and always figures conflict in the world above, the new underground and the necropolis both feature the underground qua underground, figuring conflict with the world above only when their ideal functioning is seen to have been disturbed. (Pike, p. 103, my stress)

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Transposing this comment, one can say that vampires are connected with myths of the underground and the necropolis in ways other than the merely literal. When graves no longer fulfil their ‘ideal function’, the vampire comes into being. Or un-being. And vampires, in that sense, are the shadow of the Devil: when dominant discourses make it impossible for the Devil to appear on the thresholds of ‘daylight’ in “the world above”, vampires and similar diabolical ‘shadows’ begin to haunt the narratives of night. One way in which the Devil both disappears and continues in Gothic fiction and fiction influenced by the Gothic is clarified if we take a look at the vampire, starting with Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla and ending with some twentieth-century versions, by way of Stoker’s Count Dracula and Brontë’s Heathcliff, among others. This dovetailing of the Devil into the vampire has been lamented by Fred Alford, who sees in it a modern diminishment of the capacity to narrate ‘evil’, and defended by Cynthia Freeland: my book engages with the issues highlighted by this debate but in more general and different terms. However, in this chapter, the vampire is simply documented as a literary figure, which, drawn partly from folkloric images and partly from discourses of colonial conquest and exploration, came to stand in the nineteenth century for both the diminished Devil and the ‘invisible’ but terrifying racial Other. It is undeniable, as H. L. Malchow indicates, that the development of the Vampire coincided with growing and extravagant interest in ‘reports’ of cannibalism from non-Europe. Even at the time, some scholars, such as the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace – and even racialist ones like Robert Knox, the surgeon who wrote of “race war” and catalogued the “dark races of the world” as losers everywhere except in the tropical zone (Curtin, 1971, pp. 12–21) – either described ‘mortuary cannibalism’ in a limited context, or remained clearly sceptical of reports of cannibalism from places like Africa. But these were a minuscule minority. The public and the press in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fed off reports of cannibalism: the cannibal had to exist, for he was essential to a simplified ‘negative’ notion of Otherness that finally justified colonial and evangelical missions, ranging from reformation and conversion to extermination. In recent decades, scholars have sown reasonable doubt about many of these reports – for instance, popular reports of cannibalism among Australian Aborigines were probably due to the Aboriginal custom of removing and burying mortal remains a second time, etc. Whether or not cannibalism existed in some limited


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and contextualised circumstances, the sensationalist European discourse on the cannibalism of the racial Other is significant not for what it says about the other peoples (which is mostly conjecture and second-hand reportage) but for what it says about Europeans. For instance, “cannibalism as a racial image conveniently served to invert reality by encoding as appetite those whom the Europeans sought to incorporate” (Malchow, p. 42). However, I do not intend to debate the nature and significance of the European discourse of cannibalism,18 beyond noting the relatively noncontroversial points that 1. the discourse of cannibalism was central to the construction of the colonial or racial Other in simplified terms of binary opposition, and 2. cannibalism, despite narratives in Herodotus etc, and local European versions of it, came to be associated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries primarily with the non-European ‘savage’. What I intend to do is stress how this construct of the racial Other – as a cannibal – combined with the diminishment of the Devil to a ‘fiend’ or ‘monster’ or ‘family of blood-sucking aristocrats’ to give us one of the main villains of Gothic fiction: the vampire, as finally embodied in Count Dracula. It is best to quote Malchow again: “The savage cannibal and the gothic vampire, a species of cannibal, have much in common. Their sharp teeth and bloody mouths signify an uncontrollable hunger infused with a deviant sexual sadism. Both are types of the primitive: the vampire appropriates the vitality, the life-blood, of his victim, just as the cannibal wished, it was thought, to absorb the physical strength and courage of the enemy upon whose body he feasted. Together they share a kind of unholy communion, taking the body and blood of the innocent and transmuting them into their own identities” (Malchow, p. 124). In effect, the Vampire myth overlaps with the myth of the cannibalising ‘racial’ Other, the threat of the colonised. It is this that makes Malchow claim that, in Britain, the vampire story is one of the two “types of nineteenth-century sensationalism” that best illustrate “the bridge between the popular culture of cannibalistic folktales and gothic literature” (Malchow, p. 45). I would like to add, and Malchow suggests as much elsewhere, that the immediate unconscious reference is not to “cannibalistic folktales” from within Europe but to ‘reports’ of cannibalisation from Asia, Africa and the Americas.


Malchow has noted that, like “assertions of racial inferiority, accusations of cannibalism establish the community of the virtuous by projecting onto others evils feared within. Thus cannibalism juxtaposes in striking contrast victim and predator, innocent and depraved, sane and mad, white and black. The most graphic and emotive accounts of cannibalism are in fact those that involve, not like eating like, but the victimization of an opposite: of one sex devouring the other, of age feasting on youth, of the young feeding on the old, of the living violating the dead and the buried, of one ‘tribe’ or race consuming another” (Malchow, p. 43). It does not take much acuity to note how the myth of the vampire uses some of these “graphic and emotive accounts of cannibalism” directly – as in one sex devouring another, age feasting on youth, one ‘tribe’ or race (aristocrats/family of vampires) consuming another – and indirectly, through a clever reversal that has the dead violating the living (and, actually, giving rise to the ironic need for the living to violate the dead in order to ‘kill’ the vampire). In effect, the rationale runs like this: because the dead are not really dead, the only option is for the living to deconsecrate the dead, dig them up, drive a stake through their hearts, cut off their heads, stuff their mouths with garlic. There is a kind of self-justifying, double-thinking logic involved here that one very often also encounters in imperialist discourses. It is thinking that draws a connection between two different ethical and conceptual events in order to justify what the imperialist wants to do anyway: because the Aborigine does not occupy land, Aboriginal land can be occupied by Europeans; because the English mimicked the Romans, Indians ought to be forced to mimic the English (Macaulay, in effect); or, as Sydney Olivier, as astute a British critic of jingoist imperialism as any in the nineteenth century, paraphrased it, because the ‘black man’ cannot or will not work, the European must force the black man to work under his direction and for the European’s “economic profit, which the black cannot either create or wisely use” (Curtin, 1971, p. 107). Again, in the vampire myth there is always an allusion to nonEuropean spaces – probably the earliest literary version in English, a few lines in Lord Byron’s The Giaour (1812), has an Oriental setting, and is from a major ‘Orientalist’ poem of its age. In John Polidori’s The Vampyre, called “the first vampire novel in English”,19 the bloodsucking gentleman is one Lord Ruthven, pronounced ‘Riven’ and hence calling up images of that bird of ill-omen, the raven. He is, to all practical purposes, European, perhaps even English, though his vampire nature is revealed to the protagonist only in Greece, that border land


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between the East and the West. In that sense, he recalls Bram Stoker’s later Dracula, who actually comes from another of those in-between areas between Europe and Asia:20 the very first chapter of Stoker’s novel, an entry in Jonathan Harker’s journal, repeatedly stresses the ‘Eastness’ of Dracula’s location. “We were leaving the West and entering the East”; the journey to Dracula’s castle “took us among the traditions of Turkish rule”; in “the extreme east of the country”, says the very first page, and there are at least three other references to the East, Orient and the frontier over the first two and a half pages of the novel. There are other allusions to Lord Ruthven’s East-facing Otherness in Polidori’s The Vampyre: “Mahomet’s paradise” and houris (p. 73), the gazelle and the “Kashmere butterfly” (p. 74), and Turkish cities like Smyrna and Turkish daggers like the “ataghan” (p. 80). These and similar references not only highlight Lord Ruthven’s in-between position as the living dead; they also use notions of ‘Oriental’ romance, danger and Otherness to add requisite colours to Lord Ruthven’s portrait. While this again confirms my reading of the overlap between nonEuropean Otherness and Gothic Otherness, The Vampyre does not link Lord Ruthven to the Devil as openly and often as later crucifixand-garlic versions of the vampire myth. Lord Ruthven is a “fiend”, “monster” (pp. 74, 75) and an “extraordinary being” (p. 70) and not described explicitly as the Devil, though this early narrative stresses the idea of the dead rising again, which holds a Christian echo as a perversion of one of Jesus’s miracles. In general, Romantic vampires are not cast explicitly as or in the shadow of the Devil: they are seen more as monsters and fiends, carrying faint echoes of the unholy, the undead, the unchristian. This is partly due to the Romantic fascination with the Devil as a Promethean figure of revolt on the one side, and the fact that the Devil as the Other is still directly present in some works (including sermons) of the age. It is only with the Victorian period that, with the Devil often failing to make a personal appearance in the light of scepticism (or at least the growing belief that religious texts should not be read literally) and rationality, the Vampire becomes a shadow from hell, the diminished shade of the Devil, so to speak. One can see this happening, though it is not fully achieved, in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Increasingly, the Vampire myth depends on various discourses and fears that were most commonly employed to deal with colonial Otherness. These included matters of ‘race’ and ‘violence’ and ‘fiendish/ diabolical’ presences, all being associated with the colonial Other as well as with, say, Count Dracula, and matters such as miscegenation,


inherited madness, unnatural appetites etc. The vampire myth uses and develops various other discourses too – for instance, the ‘depravity of women’ or the post-1789 fear of the violent revolutionary masses who were often shown as cannibalising the better classes (a discourse that is used and also turned around in the vampire myth by creating a ‘race’ of blood-sucking aristocrats, a fact that, among other things, indicates the ambivalence of middle-class readers, sceptical of a ‘rapacious’ aristocracy as well as the ‘revolutionary’ masses). Both these myths are put to effective subconscious use in Carmilla, where the threat comes from women and a dead family of aristocrats – though this should not obscure the ‘foreignness’ of Carmilla, the vampire. If she symbolises, as feminist critics often note, the threat of the ‘new woman’ (lesbian sexuality is a subtext too), Carmilla also comes from afar, in both time and distance (“her native country was much more remote than I had first fancied.”, Williams, Ed., Three Vampire Tales, p. 105), and is accompanied by signs of racial Otherness: the carriage that disgorges her at the start of the narrative also contains a mysterious “hideous black woman with a sort of coloured turban on her head, who was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding and grinning derisively towards the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large white eye-balls, and her teeth set as if in fury” (pp. 98–9). The servants accompanying Carmilla and her “mother” are also described as “strangely lean, and dark”. Carmilla is a longer and much more complex text than Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’, and the figure of the vampire is accordingly richer in significance. Though a number of Romantic writers apart from Polidori and Lord Byron had already attempted versions of the vampire figure, it is with Le Fanu that the myth reaches another stage of ‘finish’, and points to Stoker’s Dracula. Anne Williams notes in her introduction to Three Vampire Tales that “Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla is the most significant of the Victorian vampire tales because it links Romantic vampires and their late-Victorian ‘grandchild’, Dracula” (p. 8). One of the links is that of the diabolical: matters like the “hellish arts” and “the malignity of hell” (p. 127) are mentioned by the avenging General Spielsdorf, and the notion of a “pious sacrilege” as the only way to get rid of the vampires – by disinterring their bodies and destroying them – is mentioned too. In both these matters, Carmilla sets a precedent for Stoker’s Dracula. Even as the Devil qua Devil starts disappearing from literary narratives, the vampire starts smelling more of the fires of Hell, while also retaining his place in a ‘natural’ nomenclature of interlinked race and class, shot through with unnatural perversions and passions.


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Count Dracula, like Carmilla, is a member of a separate (aristocratic) ‘race’, set on consuming innocent victims and, like Haggard’s Ayesha in She, establishing an empire within the British empire, so to speak. He is also not the Devil, but has various diabolical attributes, including those attributed to the racial Other and to Jews by anti-Semitic discourse: “His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils” (Williams, Ed., Three Vampire Tales, p. 165). It is true that “the racial threat of Stoker’s Dracula can best be associated with the Jew rather than the black or Asian, [but] one must remember that Jew, Asian, and black shared a rhetorical opprobrium that, although each possessed in the literature of prejudice uniquely repulsive elements, tied them together” (Malchow, p. 149). It need scarcely be noted that the narrative of Dracula teems with ‘Christian’ imagery – after Stoker the crucifix (missing in Polidori and Le Fanu’s Carmilla) would be considered an effective antidote to vampires in all except some very late twentieth-century versions of the myth. As the good Professor Van Helsing, among others, says so picturesquely of Dracula, “he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not” (p. 345). Even the “extraordinary pallor” of Dracula can be seen as a characteristic of the Devil: as I have indicated earlier, the Devil, as Lucifer, was also conceived in the popular imagination earlier on as an ‘albino’, a very ‘pale’ person, which was probably a ‘transliteration’ of his archangelic name. Such examples can be multiplied: Dracula, situated in between the East and the West, between the dead and the living, is also situated between the Devil and the human. He is not the Devil or even a demon in the Biblical sense, but he walks in the shadow of the diabolical. To understand the in-betweenness of Dracula, one has to situate him in the liminal space between cultural in-betweenness (the racial Other as cannibal versus the civilised and Christian European) and theological in-betweenness (not the Devil and not human either). The connection of vampirism and cannibalism/racial Otherness was to be extended (and diluted by its very breadth) in late nineteenth- century and twentieth-century texts and films that featured either apocalyptic situations on earth or invasions of other peoples (or space creatures), sometimes literally and always figuratively depicted as vampire-like or cannibalistic. A reworking of vampirism and cannibalism mixes with racial Otherness in novels like Mathew P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1908), in which (as quoted earlier) “four hundred million Chinese, who rip open the belly of anyone they run across, flood the European continent. What makes this bloodbath

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particularly horrifying are all the ‘sweating [Chinese] women, who, crazy with heat and lust, and the instinct for blood, and the ultimate wantonness of crime’ satisfy their forbidden lusts and then, exhausted, go to sleep on the piles of corpses” (Lindqvist, 60). By the later nineteenth century, the connections between the vampire and the ‘colonial’ Other had become much more complex and evident – and perhaps more so in novels, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, that used vampirism as a discourse rather than the vampire as a protagonist or character. The mad ‘Creole’ wife of Rochester is narrated indirectly or directly as a revenant and vampire: a matter made evident in early illustrations such as the wood carving by Fritz Eichenberg depicting a large, racially foreign, manly woman, with distorted features and big teeth, gazing at a sleeping and virginal Jane Eyre. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a novel I will treat separately in the next chapter, we come across an exceptionally clever use of the ‘vampire’, as it is given to us by the main narrator of Heathcliff’s story, Nelly Dean, a well-meaning but limited and at times culturally prejudiced nurse. In this version the myth of the vampire is used to advance tension and terror but also, as is the case in general with the use of ‘mainstream’ discourses in Wuthering Heights, undercut by the less valorised elements of the narrative. Heathcliff remains a good example of what happens to the Devil in the context of empire, even when the empire is not really visible.

3 Heathcliff as Terrorist

Apart from prophecies of doom and similar ‘religious’ texts, the Gothic novel is the genre in English literature that depends most heavily for dramatic tension on both displacement and terror. At the heart of the Gothic text there hides a fundamental ambiguity: nothing is as it appears to be on the surface, the holy is intertwined with the demonic, the space between the Beautiful (also as the ‘moral’ or the ‘rational’) and the Sublime (also as the ‘amoral’ or the ‘non-rational’) is measured and narrated in screams of terror.

I This perception starts off in Gothic novels as a narrative of what Terry Eagleton has recently called “holy terror”: “the word sacer can mean either blessed or cursed, holy or reviled; and there are kinds of terror in ancient civilization which are both creative and destructive, life-giving and death-dealing. The sacred is dangerous, to be kept in a cage rather than a glass case” (Eagleton, 2005, p. 2). The book often considered to be the first major Gothic novel in English, Mathew Lewis’s The Monk (1794), is fully aware of this: it tells the story of an extremely virtuous monk, a holy man seduced into committing acts of terror by the Devil and his own inability to recognise the thin line separating the divine from the demonic. The monk of Lewis’s novel is so enamoured of the glittering body of his own erudition, goodness and blessedness that he overlooks to recognise its shadow side. This is in keeping with the definition of wickedness and evil that Mary Midgley formulates in an excellent meditation on selves and shadows: “The acknowledged shadow may be terrible enough. But it is the unacknowledged one which is the real killer” (Midgley, p. 126). It also recalls Jung’s observation, quoted 61


by Midgley, that “I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole; and inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other” (Jung, p. 40). Lewis’s monk is shockingly unaware of his own ‘shadow’; so convinced is he of his erudition and goodness that he believes that he is incapable of committing a sin, or doing evil. This is what lets the ‘Devil’ in. Something similar takes place in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a later Gothic text. Dr Jekyll believes, as Midgley points out, that he can, so to speak, separate his shadow from his body, the evil from the good at will. He finds out that he cannot. This play of shadow and body continues all the way through Gothic narratives, until in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) it has almost been reduced to a generic fetish, so that the interplay of body and shadow evokes horror but does not really convey a clear meaning. However, to revert to an earlier observation, Dracula again returns us to the ‘holy terror’ that underlay the earliest Gothic texts, such as Lewis’s The Monk. This was terror that (unconsciously) depended on the ambiguity of the ‘sacred’, a deceptive plant sprouting from the seed of a word that could mean both ‘blessed’ and ‘cursed’; it depended on the ease with which the divine and the demonic could be interchanged, the knowledge that, after all, Satan was a fallen angel. In this Gothic strain, what had been banished – Satan or the Devil to Hell, Dracula to his coffin, the dead to the other world – returned to evoke terror. It was a bit like Dr Jekyll realising that, actually, he did not have the power to banish – to separate from – Mr Hyde; Hyde could come back almost at will. In a sense, this ambiguity of ‘sacred’ within Euro-Christian thinking is very similar to the ambiguity of ‘European’ selfhood in its relation to the non-European Other: what this construction of European selfhood banishes into lack or negativity is always lurking in the wings, capable of evoking terror either in its overdetermined absence or by its sudden presence.

II At a certain philosophical level, the ambiguity of ‘sacred’ hinted at a concept of God that was being forgotten under the utilitarianism and voluntarism of Western capitalism, the narrower kind of Enlightenment rationality and the pragmatism of Protestantism. All these different developments were tending to reduce God to a thing of rationality, beauty, order, a being or concept that could be dealt with at

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a rather businesslike level, even if the currency of that transaction was less cash and more ritual. Against this, in a confused, half-conscious manner (a symbolic manner which was in keeping with something happening in the symbolic realms of literature), the early Gothic texts stressed the terror of God. This was not God as Sunday churchgoing, a stylised representation of Jesus, Santa Claus, vague Christian feeling for the suffering of the earth, a coin to a charity, or brotherly love. If God was love, it was a terrible love, impossible to be humanly imagined. If God was mercy, it was mercy so unconditional that it could wreak havoc on all the moral and social structures of humanity. Even as the plastic surgeons of Capitalist–Protestant thought operated on the God of polite circles in the nineteenth century and turned Him into a thing of beauty, the God of Gothic literature retained some sublime features, if only in ‘demonic’ forms distorted into a mirror image of the divine. This development can be understood with reference to Edmund Burke’s distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime: [S]ublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great [sublime], rugged and negligent; ... beauty should not be obscure, the great [sublime] ought to be dark and gloomy ... They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one [sublime] being founded on pain, the other on pleasure. (Adams, p. 306) As is obvious from the extract above, the Beautiful is humanly encompassable, perhaps even partly or wholly man-made, for Burke: it is small or tractable, smooth and polished, clear and comprehensible. The Sublime is all that goes beyond such human limits of the Beautiful. The Sublime is that which exceeds the human, that which comes or comes back from ‘elsewhere’. In the Gothic texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this aspect of God – largely being reduced to the beautiful and the ‘love-ly’ in polite society – comes back to haunt human beings and maim, cripple and kill them, to terrorise them in the negative forms of the demonic: the Devil, vampires, monsters, ghosts, the living dead. But if terror comes back or comes from ‘elsewhere’ – thus revealing the terror of the sacred – in many early Gothic texts, by the end of the nineteenth century its return has started shadowing the trade and military routes of European empires. The Gothic protagonist is not just an orphan of obscure or hidden origins (as in Lewis’s The Monk and many

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other early Gothic narratives); he is increasingly from the East or at least the margins of Europe. One can see this happening throughout the nineteenth (and early twentieth) century in texts by Edgar Alan Poe and Rudyard Kipling, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), in novels with Gothic elements, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and in perhaps its richest complexity in Emily Brontë’s great novel, Wuthering Heights (1847).

III Imagine an intelligent dark-skinned person, slipping into the countryside of a peaceful European country from somewhere disturbingly ‘postcolonial’, lying dormant for many years and then snaring the families that harboured him in a net of violence, revenge and terror. It might sound like an account of the so-called ‘sleeper agents’ that organisations like Al Qaeda are said to send into the heart of Europe, but actually it would be one way of describing Heathcliff. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel of terror. In this it is not very different from other Gothic texts or from narratives influenced by the Gothic genre. Wuthering Heights is also a novel that brings the Empire into the heart of England, thus interlinking Gothic terror with imperial displacement and power. In this too it is not entirely different from the odd work by Kipling or Conrad. What makes it exceptional, to my mind, is its difficult and complex analysis of the relationship of terror to displacement, dispossession and power, its unrelenting narration of the colonial centre as haunted by ghosts from the colonial margins, its examination of the tensions between the Beautiful-as-colonised/ civilised and the Sublime-as-always-beyond-colonisation/civilisation. In this it prefigures some later novels, written by colonised or postcolonial subjects, such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) or Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988). Terror creeps into the narrative of Wuthering Heights even before the main story begins. Lockwood, the limited but well-meaning narrator of the novel – who will, in turn, be given much of Heathcliff and Catherine’s story by the limited but well-meaning nurse, Nelly – has just experienced some of the minor horrors of Heathcliff’s household and been forced by a storm to spend the night there, sleeping brokenly over his experiences and the dream-echo of names and accounts read in some mildewed books lying about in the room. Lockwood has a confused nightmare, which ends with the image of the dead Catherine, a waif-ghost, trying to enter his room from a window that has been


unlatched by the storm: The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, “Let me in – let me in!” “Who are you?” I asked, struggling, meanwhile to disengage myself. “Catherine Linton,” it replied shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton.) “I’m come home. I’d lost my way on the moor!” (pp. 42–3) Lockwood writes that “terror made me cruel”: he rubs the “creature’s” wrist on the broken glass pane, until blood “soaked the bedclothes”. But still the “ghost” maintained its “tenacious grip”, almost “maddening” Lockwood with fear. It is a disturbing scene – both terrifying and intensely moving in the thwarted humanity of the “creature”, the dehumanised instrument of terror – and it is followed by another disturbing scene. Heathcliff, on waking up and being told of this experience by Lockwood, rushes into the room, wrenches open the lattice and pleads to no avail into the howling storm: “Come in! come in! ... Cathy, do come. Oh do – once more! Oh! My heart’s darling! Hear me this time – Catherine, at last!” (p. 45). The terror of this scene is intricately connected with displacement. In an almost banal sense, Lockwood is a traveller, sleeping for a night in the house. In a more immediate sense, Catherine is displaced, banished from her house and love, so to speak, an exile for “twenty years” as the “ghost” puts it. In an even more key sense, Heathcliff – the current owner of the house – is a displaced person, a person who has usurped the house, but only by using the legal and social rules that, in the first place, left him (and Catherine) on the margins. (Significantly, Heathcliff’s way out of the margins and into brutal power leaves him displaced in a deeper way – estranged from his love, Catherine, whose “waif-ghost” fails to enter his house and does not respond to his entreaties. It has to be borne in mind that both Catherine and Heathcliff see each other as their own true selves – and in that sense Heathcliff becomes estranged from his true self.) It is from here that the narrative leads us back to the ‘origins’ of Heathcliff. Decades ago, Mr Earnshaw came back from a trip to Liverpool bearing not only the presents that his children, Catherine and her brother, Hindley, had requested, but also a bundle tucked into his greatcoat. He handed this bundle to his wife with the comment,

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“See here, wife; I was never so beaten with anything in my life; but you must e’en take it as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil” (p. 51). This bundle was Heathcliff, described by Nurse Nelly as “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk ... yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand” (p. 51).1 Faced with this mini-alien in their midst, Nurse Nelly is “frightened”, which is in keeping with her well-meaning but limited – domesticated and normal, if one may say so – character. So intense is the ‘Otherness’ of Heathcliff, often described as looking like a “gypsy”, a “moor” or being a lascar’s child by people like Nelly in the novel, that no effort is made to decipher his gibberish. His Otherness is not only illegible, but is considered to be incapable of any other meaning, of being simply “gibberish”. The only sentiment that he evokes in Nelly at that moment is the feeling of fear. It is not incidental that Mr Earnshaw had returned from Liverpool. As Susan Meyer points out, “in 1769, the year in which Mr Earnshaw found Heathcliff in the Liverpool streets, the city was England’s largest slave-trading port, conducting seventy to eighty-five percent of the English slave trade along the Liverpool Triangle” (p. 481). Liverpool was also, like almost all major ports in European imperial states, a place that contained various non-European peoples, including Black sailors and lascars (Indian sailors whose numbers rose steadily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries partly due to the fact that they were paid only one-sixth of the European rates of pay). Throughout, the novel highlights Heathcliff’s ‘Otherness’ and suggests – without ever making it explicit – how his difference is negotiated by ‘normal’ people. On the one hand, we have Hindley, who hates Heathcliff in a deeply visceral manner, a class hatred permeated with elements of what Anthony Kwame Appiah has termed intrinsic racism. Then there is the more common kind of fear that people like Nelly display: this is fear that situates Heathcliff’s physical difference on a moral plane, thus divesting him of all positive attributes. For instance, Nelly fails, right from the start, to see anything good in Heathcliff: if he complains less than other children, it is just because he is “hardened”. As she is a decent, kind woman, there are moments when she softens, but then, faced with something in Heathcliff that she cannot comprehend, she lapses into seeing him as diabolical and devilish. This is something she does even when she discovers Heathcliff lying dead, a strange expression of “exultation” on his face; this largely positive


word “exultation” soon disappears in the usual terminology employed by Nelly to explain Heathcliff: “frightful”, “sneer”, animal or vampirelike (“sharp, white teeth”) etc (pp. 285–6). Finally, there are people like Isabella who move from a fascinated dislike of Heathcliff’s Otherness to a romantic idealisation of his difference. That in Heathcliff which indicates all that is Other, not-fullycolonised and not-domesticated in his nature, and in human nature in general (of which he is one example), is reconstructed into something else by Isabella, something more ‘normal’, such as a dark Romantic hero: much to Heathcliff’s irritation (though he takes full advantage of it), Catherine’s chagrin and Isabella’s own subsequent suffering. One way to understand Isabella’s error would be to return to the concept of the Sublime as something vast, non-rational, non-human, something always exceeding the ‘now’ and the ‘here’: Isabella’s romanticisation of Heathcliff is similar to an attempt to force the Sublime into the narrower and more decorous garments of the Beautiful. Another aspect of Isabella’s ‘romantic’ endeavour, until she is battered and disillusioned, is typical of the Western response to the Other: as Godzich notes, “Western thought has always thematized the other as a threat to be reduced, as a potential same-to-be, a yet-not-same.”2 It is as this ‘potential same-to-be’ that Isabella, and at times Nelly, casts Heathcliff, and it is little wonder that on being disappointed – a disappointment Catherine anticipates – Isabella can have nothing but horror for the now eternally unregenerate foreignness of Heathcliff. One can argue that this intruding foreigner in the cosy Earnshaw household is basically liked only by Catherine and her father, Mr Earnshaw, in the novel – and later by the faithful Hareton. Mr Earnshaw dies soon after bringing Heathcliff to his home and, as such, it is not feasible to discuss his reaction to Heathcliff, except to point out that he recognises Heathcliff’s difference but does not see it in primarily negative terms. Catherine and, much later, Hareton do something similar. Of course, as some critics have already noted, Catherine is the member of the family who comes closest to being an outcast. Her rights as daughter and wife are limited: for instance, she cannot and does not inherit property. In this, she comes closest to Heathcliff: a ‘member’ of the family, but without the privileges afforded to other members of the family. Hareton, it can be argued, comes to share a similar marginalised position due to the later mechanisations of Heathcliff. The acceptance that Heathcliff meets with from Catherine and Hareton does not suggest some sort of socialist solidarity of the oppressed, but it does

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indicate that perhaps one needs to stand somewhere on the margins of power before one can begin to see the working of power as determinate, lopsided and oppressive (as well as constructive). Heathcliff learns this in different ways, from the maltreatment and prejudices he faces after Mr Earnshaw’s death, as well as seemingly innocuous incidents like his capture by the Lintons. It is worth looking at this scene. Heathcliff and Catherine, both wild children, orphaned by Mr Earnshaw’s death, have been spying on their refined (and richer) neighbours, the Lintons, and they are taken for accomplices of burglars, set upon by guard dogs and caught by servants. Now they are being examined, like any colonial museum specimen, under the light, and finally Cathy is recognised: “That’s Miss Earnshaw!” He whispered to his mother, “and look how Skulker has bitten her – how her foot bleeds!” “Miss Earnshaw? Nonsense!” Cried the dame. “Miss Earnshaw scouring the country with a gypsy! And yet, my dear, the child is in mourning – surely it is – and she may be lamed for life!” “What culpable carelessness in her brother!” exclaimed Mr Linton, turning from me to Catherine. “I’ve understood from Shielders” (that was the curate, sir) “that he lets her grow up in absolute heathenism. But who is this? Where did she pick up this companion? Oho! I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool – a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.” “A wicked boy, at all events,” remarked the old lady, “and quite unfit for a decent house! Did you notice his language, Linton? I’m shocked that my children should have heard it.” I recommended cursing – don’t be angry, Nelly – and so Robert was ordered to take me off. (p. 62) This is an extract that reveals more than it seems to. It places Heathcliff (and, initially, Cathy, who being a daughter does occupy a position closer to the margins) under scrutiny, as if he were a museum specimen. In its one-sided, objectifying slant, this scrutiny replicates the colonial gaze. As Susan Meyer also points out, this scrutiny reduces Heathcliff to his Otherness and explicitly deprives him of any real language, so that Heathcliff joins that position of the colonised Other which has been best expressed by Caliban, the monster in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. When Prospero accuses Caliban of being ungrateful in spite of the fact


that he, Prospero, the civilised nobleman, has taught him his own language, this is what Caliban says: You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you, For learning me your language! (Act I, Sc. II) Heathcliff, like Caliban, has learnt a “language”, but is finally reduced to cursing. Mimicry has its limits. So does language, when not undergirded by other structures of power. And both can be wielded like weapons. Heathcliff is learning his lessons of terror. He is soon to disappear – like all those terrorists in real life whose CIA or FBI-documented histories present a gap, six months or a year, when the terrorist is supposed to have been receiving training in Afghanistan, except that there is also some evidence of him being issued some official card in the USA during the same period. What Heathcliff does in that period remains shrouded in mystery and conjecture to the same extent as the activities of these real terrorists. But, when he returns, Heathcliff has achieved much dexterity in the instruments of power; for the rest of his life, apart from the last few days of ecstatic self-absorption, he will turn these instruments into devices of terror. They are the same instruments – language, manipulation, legal deeds, marriage connections, money – with which his marginalisation had been enforced in the past. Now he uses them not only to terrorise his enemies and the bystander (which means anyone who stands in his way), but also to end up becoming the richest gentleman in the neighbourhood – the owner of both Wuthering Heights and the grander estate of the Lintons. The instruments are the same that once empowered the Earnshaws and the Lintons, except that they are experienced – and not only by Nelly – as instruments of terror in the hands of Heathcliff. Does this literary terrorist then differ so much from real terrorists who turn the instruments of power manufactured, marketed and used by the West – guns, bombs, the desire for bioweapons and atomic power, to name only a few – against the West and the innocent bystander?

IV The Gothic narrative had a point. Wonders take place ‘elsewhere’; terror comes from ‘elsewhere’. But terror, contrary to what some might claim


‘here’, is not born ‘elsewhere’. Terror takes place when that which has been disowned, exorcised, banished, exiled, prevented entry, nevertheless crashes the barriers. The Devil tempts the most virtuous monk alive, Frankenstein’s repudiated monster returns to stalk his creator, Count Dracula rises from his coffin, ghosts walk into the lives of the living, the gypsy–lascar–slave whose labour has contributed to the affluence of the Lintons and the Earnshaws arrives in Wuthering Heights – and is not allowed to be anything other than ‘evil’. Deprived of love, acceptance, language, voice, turned into a “hardened” child even in his forbearance, the very Devil in his difference, a museum specimen or a thief, what can Heathcliff be left with except the fetishisation of power (which, coming from him who came from ‘elsewhere’ and hence coming from ‘elsewhere’, can only evoke screams of terror from those who take their own empowerment for granted)? It is one of the strengths of Wuthering Heights that Heathcliff’s terror, coming from ‘elsewhere’, is situated in the context of the sublime in the English moors. The displaced may well become instruments of terror, like Catherine’s ghost when it tries to get back into her home and Lockwood’s room or Heathcliff after he returns to exact revenge. But this terror does not lie in their nature; it does not even lie in sheer displacement. It does not simply come from ‘elsewhere’. It also lies in the local: the sublime moors and mountains in Wuthering Heights are an indication of all that cannot be simply tamed, domesticated and beautified even in neighbourly nature. Terror arises, to rephrase Mary Midgley, from our inability or refusal to see the shadows that we always cast. It arises from our refusal to recognise all that can exceed our beautified (beatified) and domesticated limits of the human, the natural or the divine. The Devil, in that sense, is the shadow of God; ‘elsewhere’ a shadow of ‘home’. If the displaced become instruments of terror, it is as much because we, who have decided to stay home or who have the privileged option of making the entire globe our home, have for too long averted our eyes from those who are ‘elsewhere’ or who come from ‘elsewhere’. In a globalising world, to choose to stay home – to stay ‘local’ (or even ‘glocal’) – and to be able to make the globe your home are very different acts, but what tends to be forgotten is that both are acts of the empowered. What happens to those who cannot stay ‘local’, those who are forced to stay ‘local’ or those to whom the ‘global’ is synonymous with displacement and loss? These three are very different kinds of predicament, but their agents are united by a certain degree of disempowerment. The Moroccan who has to risk being drowned in the sea


to get to the privileges of Europe because he would never be allowed to immigrate legally, the Indian villager who can achieve affluence only by emigrating and the mullah, priest or local politician who sees his traditions under assault by the ‘global’ (or the ‘Western’ or whatever): all these occupy spaces that are ‘elsewhere’. But this is an ‘elsewhere’ that also lies at the very heart of the ‘home’ of those who are at home ‘here’ or ‘everywhere’, for the relationship of ‘elsewhere’ to ‘home’ is also the relationship of the ‘Other’ to the ‘Self’.

4 Smoke and Darkness: The Heart of Conrad

In the previous chapter, I tried (among other things) to highlight how colonial Otherness is encountered in a Gothicised narrative that takes place in Britain. I have already explained why this study underplays texts whose narratives are placed out in the empire. However, there are some works of fiction that need to be addressed regardless of this selective criterion because, first, their negotiation of colonial/racial Otherness is a reflection and half-gagged critique of the European Self and, second, they provide extraordinary and highly developed examples of the negotiation of Otherness by a Gothicised text that takes place largely out in the ‘colonies’ but does not remain confined to the imperial periphery in its concerns or implications. To my mind, among the most vital of such works is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Ostensibly, Heart of Darkness, first serialised in three parts in the February, March and April numbers of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899 and revised for book publication in 1902, belongs to the category that, following Brantlinger, I have dubbed the ‘imperial Gothic’ and redefined a bit more narrowly than Brantlinger. I have already discussed my reasons for not dwelling excessively on these texts, for these are stories and novels in which the Gothic is situated or enacted out in the colonies. This book, as argued earlier, takes recent readings of the ‘imperial Gothic’ and the links between Empire and the Gothic as valid and necessary, but mostly not in need of further elaboration. Instead, I have concentrated on texts in which Gothic Otherness enters the heart of Britain/Europe, in a simple geographical sense, from the colonies and the Empire and disturbs notions of rationality, meaning, identity, truth, knowledge, power etc. In this sense, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness seems, at first glance, to belong to the ‘imperial Gothic’: it was partly this that caused Chinua 72

Smoke and Darkness: The Heart of Conrad

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Achebe to write his critique, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’,1 to which I will have occasion to return. The elements of ‘Gothic’ terror and Otherness appear located in Africa, as the “heart of darkness”. There is an element of truth in this perception. But it does not do full justice to the text of Heart of Darkness, because, in contrast to some other examples of the ‘imperial Gothic’ (as defined by me), terror and Otherness also haunt the heart of England and Europe (‘Civilisation’) in Conrad’s novella. It is true that terror and Otherness in the ‘imperial Gothic’ mostly refer back to Britain and Englishness anyway, either implicitly or explicitly, as when the British trader–coloniser– narrator–protagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Beach of Falesá makes this remark about beliefs and the Devil: “This is mighty like Kanakas; but if you look at it another way, it’s mighty like white folks too” (Stevenson, Island Nights’ Entertainment, p. 108). But Conrad’s novella goes far beyond such passing reverberations, explicit or implicit, in the ‘imperial Gothic’, both problematising and pressing their limits and not being able to overcome them completely. Hence, it is necessary to deal with Heart of Darkness as an integral part of this study. The narrative of Heart of Darkness begins at the mouth of the British Empire, and its heart. Nellie, “a cruising yawl”, lies at the mouth of the River Thames, waiting for the tide to turn. Ahead of it stretch the sea and the sky and ships in that “luminous space ..., with gleams of varnished sprits” (p. 135).2 Behind the yawl lies London, the heart of Britain and Empire and, strangely (given colonial discourses of civilisation and the white man’s burden), not a place of light: “The air was dark about Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth” (p. 135). We are introduced to the host, the “Director of Companies”, a person so “nautical” that it was “difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom” (p. 135). Then the narrative proceeds to introduce the “Lawyer”, the “Accountant” and Marlow – as well as the unnamed first-person overall narrator (though most of the narrative to follow, and all the embedded core narrative, will be in Marlow’s voice). Again and again in the initial pages, the stretch and luminescence of the “seaways” are contrasted with the darkness of or over London: the “gloom brooding over a crowd of men”. Not much is made by the narrative voice or authorial commentary of this darkness. It seems to be there almost unnoticed by the narrative, for it is only noticed when placed in the past; for instance, when the


narrative, using a common colonial rationale, connects Britain’s imperial mission to the colonisation of a rude and early Britain (and London) by the Romans in Classical times. This, it need hardly be pointed out, was a trope often used by European colonisers and imperial rulers, particularly by the English, whose nineteenth-century bigwigs still stand sculpted in Roman togas in Asia and Africa. However, while the narrative recognises the ‘darkness’ of a London in the past (before it was civilised by Roman colonisers), it does not seem to notice the darkness and gloom that it wraps around London in the present as well. Instead, it moves on to images of ‘light’ as the civilising mission: it sees the Thames pouring out, in the recent past and the present, adventurers “bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire” (p. 137). As is common with Conrad, particularly in Heart of Darkness, phrases like “spark from the sacred fire” are used to establish deep resonances – both cultural and religious – which, on analysis, remain impossible to pin down. Achebe has noted this in different words, and accented it negatively. But even if one avoids a negative connotation, the tendency calls attention to itself. What exactly, for instance, is this “sacred fire”? Or, as we shall see later, what is the ‘idea’ that justifies oppression and empire? There are many answers to these questions, but the text leaves all of them open and depends more on the resonant value of such phrases within a colonial context than on an exact meaning. That, of course, is one way of looking at it. The other way, as I will highlight later, is to see such phrases as essentially empty, as revealing a bombastic hollowness within the heart of imperialism and the civilising mission, as indicating an inability to look the Other in the eye. But to return to the narrative, dark London, lurking like a Gothic secret in the text, disappears as soon as the narrative is taken over by Marlow and his story of Africa/Kurtz – which, however, stays linked to London, using the classical Roman allusion, for as Marlow puts it London too “has been one of the dark places of the earth” (p. 138). It was colonised by Romans who “were men enough to face the darkness” (p. 139). That, as I noted earlier, consciously recognises the darkness of London only in the past; the brooding gloom over present-day London mentioned earlier is not faced up to in the same manner. And the narrative discourse returns consciously to darkness only when it moves to Africa. Africa (or, what is hinted but never stated: the experience of imperialism, among other things, hidden in its heart) is a ‘transforming’ factor, at least in Marlow’s account of what happens to Kurtz. Rudyard


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Kipling too associates the experience of empire as, among other things, a greatly transforming one, an experience that the protagonist of only his second (Gothicised) short story describes in these words: For though, Lord help me, I had travelled far enough from all paths of decent or godly living, yet there was in me, though I myself write it, a certain goodness of heart which, when I was sober (or sick) made me very sorry of all that I had done before the fit came on me. And this I lost wholly: having in place thereof another deadly coldness at heart. (‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’, The Complete Supernatural Stories of Rudyard Kipling, p. 6) This experience of Otherness in Kipling’s story is also seen largely as a negating one, which is in keeping with the dominant colonialist perception of the Other as a negation or an antithesis, but even here the matter is not external to the European ‘self’: it concerns the ‘heart’ of Europeans, either reducing it to ‘coldness’ or plunging it in ‘darkness’. It is this, again, that Achebe correctly notes and objects to in Heart of Darkness. Something similar, but much more complex, takes place in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (as it also does in more complex texts by Kipling). Let us take up, again, what Marlow has to say about the civilised Roman coming to ‘savage’ Britain: all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate. (Heart of Darkness, p. 140) This is a very complex picture of Otherness from within colonial discourses, which it nevertheless stretches to the limit: the alterity of the Other is fully recognised, as was common in some colonial discourses. This alterity is considered detestable, which was again not uncommon in colonial discourses, but – more unusually – it is also considered fascinating. However, this is not the fascination of difference; it is the “fascination of abomination”. The fascination does not stem from desire, the longing for that which is not just the Self, the anticipation (however flawed)


of something that exceeds the limits of one’s subjecthood, the lure of transcendence. It is simply the fascination of what is thoroughly detestable, utterly alien and utterly negative in terms of the Self. If this is how Marlow – and, to be honest, colonial discourse at its most complex – tends to see the Other in the theoretical past, the text also adds another aspect of fascination to the Other in Marlow’s present. For, surely, as Marlow illustrates, the African ‘savage’ is fascinating to the degree that he or she is seen as having the same relationship to the British coloniser that the British ‘savage’ had, once upon a time, to the classical Roman ‘coloniser’. On the scale of social Darwinism, on the tree of evolution of ‘civilisation’, the African ‘savage’ sits ‘today’ where the British ‘savage’ sat 2000 years ago. Make of it what you may: potential for progress, evidence of regress, or inevitable ‘racial’ stagnation. Surely, Marlow’s fascination with the savage (African) Other also includes this element (presumably lacking in the Roman sent to Britain): a fascination with oneself, a kind of narcissism of the Self. The African ‘savage’ is the mirror of the Briton’s past, and in that sense is he or she really an Other? By a strange twist, the colonial discourse of absolute Otherness in aspects of Marlow’s narrative dovetails into the colonial discourse of sameness: the savage occupies a point, however far behind, on the very scale of progress/civilisation that has led to Marlow, Kurtz and their contemporary Britons. (There is more than this to Otherness in Heart of Darkness and I shall return to it later.) Marlow’s discourse, after establishing this connection between the classical Roman in Britain and the contemporary European (Briton) in Asia/Africa, also tends to privilege the latter: 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 ... It was just robbery with violence. (p. 140) Now, Marlow has no illusions about current European/British colonisation either. He notes, a couple of lines later, that “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means 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” (pp. 140–1). This statement evidently applies to current European colonisation too, despite the “efficiency” (another empty but resonant word?) that distinguishes it from Roman conquest in Marlow’s account. However, Marlow suggests – and this is applicable to current European colonisation rather


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than brute Roman conquest, which has been defined as “robbery with violence” and hence lacking an ‘ideal’ element – that there is a redeeming feature to European colonisation: 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. (p. 141) There are two significant things about this statement. First, the idea is not defined. What is this quasi-Hegelian idea? Is it anything more than words? Is it hollow? I will set out to answer this question with reference to Marlow’s narrative later in this chapter. The second significant thing is the way “belief in the idea” is described. It replicates what Conrad’s contemporaries saw as the ‘superstitions’ of ‘savages’: an idol that demands constant worship and (human?) sacrifice. There is a suggestion that the idea – like ‘savage’ idols – is just stone; what makes it powerful is the human intention and effort invested in it. But before I address this crucial matter, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of the narrative. The overall (unnamed) narrator of Heart of Darkness introduces the secondary narrator and protagonist, Marlow, as not ‘representative’ of seamen, as sharing much with seamen and also as being different from most seamen. One of the things he shares is a love for ‘yarns’. But while seamen, we are told, love a yarn of direct simplicity, whose entire meaning lies in it like the kernel of a nut, Marlow’s yarns are conducive to a different archaeology of meaning: “to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze” (p. 138). If so, can we not conclude that the ‘whole meaning’ of the story narrated by Marlow – the story that centres around Kurtz – is to be found not in the story, but outside it? And what lies outside it, what impacts most from outside on the story, are the half-related or almost unrelated facts of imperialism, of colonial–capitalist exploitation, of how the European Self treats or eliminates the non-European Other. What Marlow finally brings back from the heart of darkness is a lie. The fact that ‘words’ like culture and civilisation – perhaps language itself – may be used only to embroider a lie has been repeated, without being fully faced, throughout the novella. Marlow’s own desire to meet Kurtz has been related to his [Kurtz’s] ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most

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contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. (pp. 203–4) Marlow’s account always comes up against these limits in the imperial/colonial context: the ivory that ‘trickles’ in, the gunship that shells the ‘empty’ forest, the Winchesters that are fired into the bush; all these are partial acknowledgements of the violence of imperial capitalism. Colonial violence is shown, but it seems ineffective, as if the bullets never hit anyone (though, interestingly, the spear thrown by the ‘natives’ does hit and kill quite graphically later in the story). There are various examples of this, one of the most early and prominent ones being the story of Marlow’s predecessor, Fresleven, who is (almost accidentally) killed by natives in a squabble over some fowls and then the entire native village vanishes for good: “mad terror had scattered them”, says Marlow, without really noting the common possibility or dread of colonial/imperial retribution (p. 144). Once in a while, as in the section where Marlow sees African workers drag themselves into the forest to die, the narrative shows awareness of the horrors of colonisation, but then it evades facing such matters as political consequences by casting them largely in existential and philosophical terms, and ends with statements like this one: the “essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of meddling” (p. 190). Marlow cannot always speak the full truth, and neither can the overall narrator. Perhaps, caught as they are by the ‘idea’ of it all – though unlike most they can see through the bombast – they are unable to see the truth fully and end up projecting the lie that their discourses embroider into the ‘African’ interior. But occasionally their discourse cracks and reveals the nature of the hidden lie – that the heart of darkness is not out there, but in here, in London, in English/colonial chests, in Kurtz. This realisation is often occluded as soon as it arises by offering some version of social Darwinism, some notion of travelling to the edges of time in Africa. But it can never really disappear, and it leads Marlow to end his mission with a gallant lie. All the brave words at the beginning (which are actually a postscript to the tale of Kurtz) about the redeeming ‘idea’ (of imperialism/civilisation) are finally reduced to a lie in the heart of civilisation.3 Among other things, the ending throws light on an incidental observation Marlow had made, earlier in the narrative, about the significance of Kurtz and his kind finally: “He was very little more than a voice. And I heard him – him – it – this voice – other voices – all of them were so little more than voices” (p. 205).


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What does all this suggest (without stating it) but the fact, never stated in the kernel of the story, that what we construct as civilisation in the wake of imperialism is based on lies about the Other and Otherness, and hence also about ourselves? Marlow is aware of the ‘lie’ – “I laid the ghost of his [Kurtz’s] gifts at last with a lie” (p. 205) – but, as is common in the narrative, the lie is placed on a personal or existential level when it also exists at the political, economic and historical levels of imperialism. In an interesting paper on Heart of Darkness, Frances B. Singh divides Marlow’s “impressions of colonialism” into three classes: (1) “Direct attacks” on colonisation, such as the lines about the Roman colonisation of ancient Britain (also quoted above); (2) Ironic references to “progress”, “noble causes” and “improved specimen [of natives]”; (3) the use of metaphor (such as the description of Brussels as a “whited sepulchre”) to “lash out against colonialism” (Singh, ‘Norton’, p. 269). She also notes, a point Achebe stresses, the fact that the story, despite its anti-imperial tones at times, “also carries suggestions that the evil which the title refers to is to be associated with Africans, their customs, and their rites” (Singh, ‘Norton’, p. 271). She notes, correctly to my mind, that the historical and psychological levels of metaphor work against each other in Heart of Darkness: “Historically Marlow would have us feel that the Africans are the innocent victims of the white man’s heart of darkness; psychologically and metaphysically he would have us believe that they [Africans] have the power to turn the white man’s heart black” (Singh, ‘Norton’, p. 271). Achebe, adopting a more antagonistic stance, focuses on one side of this contradiction in the discourse of the text, which makes him read Heart of Darkness as “an offensive and deplorable book” that basically rehashes “comfortable myths” and fits into the European stereotype of “Africa trapped in primordial barbarity” (Achebe, pp. 253–61). This is obviously an aspect of the narrative of Heart of Darkness, though the text also contains what can be called anticolonial perceptions as well as liberal notions of an Enlightenment-based conception of various peoples on a mobile ladder of progress, leading to contemporary Europe. In other words, Heart of Darkness contains the two common colonialist constructions of the Other: as beyond comprehension (and hence only a threat or a negativity in positivist terms) and as a difference-waitingto-be-the-same. However, the matter does not rest there. Heart Of Darkness presents other, more explicit, versions of racial/colonial Otherness in the African context, or the Otherness of Africa: (1) “the silence of the land went

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home to one’s very heart – its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life” (p. 170). For instance, the novella, predictably, uses the trope of ‘cannibalism’ and contains some ‘cannibals’: I will not comment on these as I have already discussed the matter elsewhere. More interesting are comments that posit (2) the Otherness of the European to the African; (3) the hidden and separate (perhaps not just negative) meaning within the alterity of the Other; (4) the Otherness of any other person, including Europeans; (5) the humanity of the Other; (6) the Self as the Other of the Other; and, finally, almost involuntarily and very seldom, (7) a grudging acknowledgement of the Other as not just a negativity and a threat. Each of these is represented by one quote below (though more examples can be found in the text): 2. “They [captive Africans] were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea” (p. 154) 3. “Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild – and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country” (p. 161) 4. [About the station manager, a European]: “... it was impossible to tell what could control such a man ... He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping” (p. 164) 5. “It [the earth] was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. 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. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of the first ages – could comprehend” (p. 186) 6. “An appeal to me in this fiendish row – is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced” (p. 187) 7. “And these chaps [starving and cheated African, purportedly cannibal, sailors on Marlow’s steamboat], too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have expected


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restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact [that the African cannibals, though starved, never attacked the few Europeans on the steamboat] facing me – the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery” (p. 195) In short, the text of Heart of Darkness is always shifting between various depictions of Otherness: not just the African negativised Other (also sometimes, as Achebe notes, in ‘racist’ terms), but also the Otherness of Europeans to Africans; not just cultures as Others, but individuals from the same culture as ‘dark’ and impenetrable to other individuals; and, above all, a grudging, never fully acknowledged realisation that the African Other is not just the perennial negative image of the European or an empty space or a difference-waiting-to-be-the-same. Interestingly, these perceptions are scattered, sometimes even hidden away, in the shrubbery of more standard colonial statements and assumptions about Africa and Africans, and what Africa ‘does’ to Europeans like Kurtz. In this sense, they resemble the actual facts about ‘imperialism’ in Heart of Darkness. I have already highlighted how the text notes and then shrouds aspects of colonial violence. I will not repeat those examples. But it is necessary to add one final example to them. Marlow has just pulled the string of the whistle and the steamboat has started pulling away from the African tribesmen standing around it, perhaps in order to rescue Kurtz. The other Europeans want to shoot the Africans, and Marlow has pulled the whistle to avoid this needless bloodbath, for he knows that the sound of the whistle will frighten away the tribesmen. But even as the steamship pulls away, and the tribesmen show no inclination to attack, the other Europeans start firing into the crowds. It can obviously be nothing but a massacre. But this is what Marlow’s account has to say about it: “And then that imbecile crowd [of Europeans] down on the deck started their little fun, and I could see nothing more for smoke” (p. 237). The Europeans are firing, needlessly, on Africans who are already running away or lying prostrate and who, in any case, do not present a serious threat. The smoke is gunsmoke. Significantly, it is used in the narrative to shroud the actual massacre. Marlow’s narrative and the text of Heart of Darkness is full of such moments, moments when what has not been said or not said fully cracks the surface of what is being said and reveals something terrible: “the horror, the horror of it” might be read along these lines too. Similarly, the ‘Gothic’ in Heart Of Darkness is not located simply in Africa; it also


exists in London and London’s ‘darkness’ and it can even be seen as being visited upon Africa from Europe – for Africa is seen as “invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms”. Here the phantoms are Europeans. Similarly, the terrifying ‘Gothic’ secret at the heart of the text is not necessarily a colonialist assumption about Africa, or ‘racial’ degeneration etc. Perhaps it is a secret that Marlow, perhaps even Conrad, cannot reveal or even countenance fully; the conventional face of the Other, whose negativity inspires terror, is after all easier to confront than, shall we say, the Levinasian face of the Other as demanding an equal and ethical response in its very alterity. Justin D. Edwards notes, with reference to Toni Morrison’s great novel Beloved, that the “horrific experiences of colonization and slavery cannot be easily articulated in a comprehensible language. Racial violence, then, points to the continual eruption of indecipherable languages that attempt to utter the memories of the slave” (Edwards, 2008, p. 119). Conrad’s novella, written in the colonial period, does not attempt the postcolonial agenda of uttering the “memories of the slave” or the subaltern. And yet it runs into a ‘limitation’ of language: this limitation is not the same as that experienced by postcolonial writers, and yet some of its causes are similar. Both Marlow and Conrad operate with some given assumptions about Africa and Europe, about the Self and the Other, and their conscious discourse would be impossible without these assumptions. But their language strikes other aspects of Otherness in the narrative and sometimes fractures to reveal that which cannot be said fully or clearly. Conrad is not entirely unaware of this; for instance, in one of those moments where Marlow appears to be ready to launch into a more clear critique of colonisation, one of his listeners commands him into “decency”. But what is this decency, this veneer of civilisation, and how does it link to the Other? It is, most certainly, not the “ethical relationship” demanded by Levinas. Heart of Darkness suggests a great emptiness at the heart of civilisation because its conception of itself leaves out a true account of its relationship with the Other. It is like the emptiness that Marlow suspects in the wraps of Kurtz’s “magnificent eloquence”: “He was hollow at the core” (p. 221). And yet Marlow’s admiration for Kurtz is not totally feigned, for Marlow realises that Kurtz has seen “the appalling face of a glimpsed truth – the strange commingling of desire and hate” (p. 241). While Marlow’s statement can be understood along colonialist lines, it is also a rough but fairly accurate description of a colonial perception of non-European Otherness: a mixture of “desire and hate”, mostly (but not always) settled in favour of a simplified Otherness,


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which, as a source of negative terror, can only be fled from or exterminated, both being reasonably convenient colonialist options. However, even this perception of “desire and hate” is not permitted to enter the confines of mainstream Europe. There civilisation is a lie, a virginal lie, a bombastic, empty lie founded on multiple deaths.4 When Marlow finally goes to visit Kurtz’s betrothed, the text has already warned us: “I know that the sunlight can be made to lie too” (p. 244). What happens during their meeting sheds light on the ‘idea’ that supposedly justifies imperialism and colonial plunder. Faced with her personal suffering, and the public image of Kurtz as an universal genius and man of high morality, Marlow utters a polite, civilised lie. She insists on being told Kurtz’s last words (“The horror! The horror!”), which Marlow, in a thoughtless moment, has claimed to have heard. Marlow hesitates, but she appeals and ... “I was on the point of crying to her,” “Don’t you hear them?” The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. “The horror! The horror!” “His last words – to live with,’ she insisted. Don’t you understand I loved him – I loved him – I loved him!” I pulled myself together and spoke slowly. “The last word he pronounced was – your name.” And thus ends Marlow’s lie, on a falsely tender note, a disturbingly ‘civilised’ one, with the betrothed crying, ‘I knew it – I was sure!’ Marlow’s account has ended. The overall narrator returns us, in just one last paragraph, to the mouth of the Thames, which “seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (p. 252). Heart of Darkness, with all its Gothic reverberations, is a deeply troubled encounter with Otherness and the racial/colonial Other. It eschews the usual colonial simplifications about the Other, but is again and again caught in the trap of that language. The Gothic ghosts in it are as often European as African. The darkness lies over London and in European hearts too. The idols worshipped and sacrificed to are also those of civilisation: ‘the idea’. Though Conrad was cautious enough to project the tale into the Belgian Congo at a time when English opinion was against the Belgian version of imperialism, neither Conrad nor his narrators had the language to narrate Otherness except as it had always been – as the fixed negative image of the European Self, or a


difference-waiting-to-be-made-the-same. And yet, in greatly complex ways, the text engages with the notion of the Other, revealing the Other as not the Same as the Self, but also not just a negativity, an emptiness. It suggests, perhaps despite itself, the great ‘lie’ of civilisation and colonisation, when they ignore, eliminate or simply conscript the Other; the foundational ‘lie’ of decency in the absence of an equal and ethical relationship with alterity. And it reveals, despite itself, the great ‘lie’ we speak when we portray the European Self in simple opposition to or complete separation from its non-European Others. Conrad’s novella never reduces the Other to just a difference-waitingto-be-the-same, as Marlow sometimes does; the alterity of the Other is recognised again and again. This alterity mostly dovetails into the colonial myth of complete negativity, but even this is evaded at times; Marlow is often depicted as half-aware that the Other is also a Self, and that the European is also an Other to the Self. The colonial discourse on the African Other that Marlow employs to narrate Kurtz’s story comes up against some contrary facts: for instance, the basic reliability and civility of the starving ‘cannibals’ on Marlow’s boat. However, the narrative cannot fully acknowledge the rights and experiences of the Other as legitimate and as both connected to and separate from the experiences of the European in Africa. Michael Levenson has rightly noted that, in Heart of Darkness, the “psyche is a sequel to society”, but that does not mean, as he suggests, that politics and psyche are “two antagonists” in the novella (Levenson, p. 401). For if there is antagonism between them, there is also collaboration: the narrative uses the psyche to avoid confronting the political and ethical whenever this confrontation exceeds the borders of the enabling discourses. These discourses are many, and sometimes anticolonial. They stem from the discourses of Enlightenment and Humanism, to which Conrad was sympathetic due to various factors (such as his father’s revolutionary activities for Polish freedom), and also from more conservative, but still anticolonial, discourses such as those from Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (pp. 1784–91). Some statements are made more easily within these discourses, and some are pushed into partial silence. For instance, while Marlow can posit a unity of mankind, he still has to construct a ladder leading from the civilising of Britain by the Romans to the possible civilising of Africans by Europeans. Similarly, he can only falteringly focus on colonisation as ‘savage exploitation’, and usually succumbs to Herder’s approach to it: as Young notes, Herder’s attacks on colonialism “do not censure it on the basis of unjustified oppression and exploitation of other peoples but


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rather because he considers that it will decimate the colonising nation” (Young, 1995, p. 39). Hence the recurrent, but not sole, trope of the degeneration of Kurtz to which Achebe reacted so strongly in his paper on Conrad. The conservative American essayist, H. Mencken, has noted that what “Conrad brought into English literature was a new concept of the relations between fact and fact, idea and idea” (Mencken, p. 521). To this astute perception I would add that what Conrad almost brought into English literature was a new concept of the relations between fact and idea within a certain relationship of power. In general, the narrative of Heart of Darkness has to continue with the pretence of the idea that justifies colonisation, and it has to shroud massacres in ‘smoke’ for that purpose. It is this that makes Marlow, and to some extent the text, ‘lie’ about the “horror” witnessed and perpetuated by Kurtz. It is not just the lie of “European officialdom”, which Levenson notes (for this lie is clearly suggested in Marlow’s narrative and Marlow’s response to people like the “manager”), but the lie of the civilising mission, the white man’s burden, of a certain construct of European selfhood: this lie cannot be exposed without the language of the narrative and the voice of the ‘Self’ fragmenting into something Other. This is the great ‘Gothic secret’ at the heart of Conrad’s novella, the secret that cannot be revealed without the subject being struck dumb, for the language of the narrative does not permit its full enunciation, just as the employed language of the European Self in the novella resists the equal reality of the Other and can only half-acknowledge, in Levinas’s words, the Self’s moral relationship to the Other. Terror, as is to be expected, arises at the instant of friction against the equal reality of the Other, but it can only be narrated in the novella as a nameless and psychological “horror”.

5 Emotions and the Gothic

David Punter suggests that the “principles of the Enlightenment never came into an easy relationship with the novel form ... [by accommodating] an over-consistent view of man” (Punter, 1996, vol. 1, p. 24). It is true that the genre of the novel was, in some ways, resistant to the balance and restraint of an intellectual version of Reason even when ‘Reason’ was ruling the roost. Eighteenth-century and, later, nineteenth-century novels – during and after the intellectual predominance of restraint, balance and reason during the ‘Age of Reason’ – tended to be touched by the “stigma” of “sentimentalism” (Steeves, pp. 164–5). Steeves uses the word “stigma” because he focuses on the “faddish” aspects of sentimentalism: sentimentalism was not just “high emotionality”, but “a stimulated consciousness of emotion, even a certain vanity in that consciousness” (Steeves, p. 161). Quoting Steeves, Punter draws a valid link between this trend of sentimentalism in mainstream novels and its presence in Gothic novels (Punter, 1996, vol. 1, p. 25). He notes how this sentimentalism was based on some “stylistic conventions”, but goes on to add the astute point that the “strength of sentimentalism, the aspect of the real which nevertheless underlies all this conventional paraphernalia, was the minute and detailed observation of emotions” (Punter, 1996, vol. 1, p. 26). It has been commonly remarked that the Gothic novel “gives great scope for the portrayal of violent emotion” (Tompkins, p. 217), and it has been noticed that the style of the Gothic conveys the possibility of “the balance and reason of the Enlightenment being crushed beneath the weight of feeling and passion” (Punter, 1996, vol. 1, p. 26). However, the predominance of ‘violent emotions’ in Gothic fiction should not be seen as merely a stylistic feature, influenced by mainstream sentimentalism and ‘artistic’ trends such as sensationalism, or a reaction to 86

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the reason and balance of the Enlightenment, though of course it is that too. The violent emotions of Gothic fiction also need to be understood as an attempt to narrate the Otherness of the Other, and the impact of this Otherness on the Self (any Self, though of course the Self of Enlightenment too). It is with this observation that I intend to end my discussion, started early in this section (and elaborated in the previous chapter), of what the colonial Gothic could actually achieve, an achievement that was always only half-conscious and is, perhaps because of that, undervalued by postcolonial criticism.

I In her path-breaking study Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha C. Nussbaum has defined emotions as “eudaimonistic1 evaluations” of a Self which is “constituted (in part at least) by its evaluative engagements with areas of the world outside itself” (Nussbaum, p. 300). She has, among other things, argued how emotions arise at the point of Self–Other distinctions in the infant, and how they are evaluative judgments “essential to the development of practical reason and the sense of self” (Nussbaum, pp. 190, 191, 200, 207). In other words, there is a convincing argument for defining at least some major emotions as arising from and at the point where the Self encounters “the world outside itself”.2 If so, it is not surprising that the encounter of the Self with the Other, by definition that which defines the Self but is also always in the world outside the Self, tends to be narrated in terms of heightened, even hysterical, emotions. Terror – or extreme fear – is not the only one. These emotions, as narrated in Gothic fiction, are an index of the encounter with Otherness and an attempt, however incomplete or unclear, by the Self to deal with the Other. Before I pursue this argument further, let us look at some such scenes from some Gothic texts in the colonial context. Marlow has just heard a wild, keening cry as the steamboat penetrates the wilderness – probably a cry of sorrow by natives who realise that Kurtz will be leaving – and then Marlow suspects that Kurtz is dead. This is what he narrates: “I will never hear that chap [Kurtz] speak after all, – and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these savages in the bush” (Heart of Darkness, p. 204; my stress). In this concise formulation, Conrad brings together the Self and the Other in a shared capacity for emotion, which is again based on an actual or thwarted encounter – an encounter with the Other, either as Kurtz, ‘African savages’ or Marlow’s steamboat


rescuers, depending on who is doing the encountering. The moment of heightened emotion coincides with a confrontation between the Self and the Other (or Otherness), or a recollection or evaluation of such a confrontation, and the capacity for emotion can also be seen as a recognition, however subconscious, of that which (body/life) is shared by the Self and the Other, that which exceeds the language employed by the Self to capture, describe, conscribe or deny the Other. To continue, I have already quoted, in a previous chapter, the emotioncharged nightmare scene from Wuthering Heights in which Catherine’s ‘ghost’ begs to be admitted to the house, and later Heathcliff pleads with the ‘ghost’ to come again. More standard Gothic texts contain similar sections of heightened emotion: in Lewis’s The Monk, Ireland’s Gondez the Monk, or Radcliffe’s The Italian, to quote only three obvious examples, scenes of heightened emotions are, as is to be expected, moments of denunciation or confrontation (sometimes mental and in memory) with that which exceeds the grasp, control and sometimes comprehension of the protagonist, but affects the protagonist in direct and sometimes visceral ways. These sudden starts, and panic fits of tremor, Claim heedful notice, they import a malady Of dangerous consequence. The Count in Harriet Lee’s Gothic melodrama, The Mysterious Marriage; or, The Heirship of Roselva: A Play in Three Acts (1798) (Franceschina, p. 78) As the Count suggests in the excerpt above, signs of emotion are always matters of importance and concern – because, though he does not say so, they are indications of an encounter with the Other or Otherness, with that which can both affect the Self and is ultimately beyond the control of the Self. Two almost ‘classical’ Gothic texts, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, can be employed to highlight the obscure but significant links between the Gothic Other, colonial/imperial experiences/discourses and, so to speak, the ‘Otherness’ of emotion. As Brantlinger and Punter have suggested about Jekyll and Hyde, and Malchow has documented with Frankenstein, both these texts – like many others which these two will represent in this study – can be read fully only in the light of empire and discourses of racial or non-European Otherness. Much of what I write about these two texts as ‘imperial


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contextualisations’ has been stated or suggested by the three scholars noted above, and yet I need to retrace their mapping in order to complete the project of this book, and move on to my point about emotions. For not all the ways in which the colonial Other ‘appeared’ in Gothic and Gothic-influenced British fiction in the nineteenth century were transparently ‘colonial’ in location or nomenclature. Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde are not about empire, or located in the colonies per se. And yet they are haunted by ghosts from the empire. As Malchow puts it, it is at least as plausible that Mary Shelley drew upon contemporary attitudes toward nonwhites – in particular, on fears and hopes of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies – as upon middle-class apprehension of a Luddite proletariat or her own ‘post-birthing trauma.’ Indeed, the peculiar horror of the monster owes much of its emotional power to this hidden, or ‘coded’, aspect, and the subsequent popularity of the tale through several nineteenth-century editions and on the Victorian stage derived in large part from the convergence of its most emotive elements with the evolving contemporaneous representation of ethnic and racial difference. (Malchow, pp. 9–10) Malchow convincingly locates the novel not only – as is common – “in the context of the general assault on radical ideas”, but also in the context of slave revolts in the Caribbean, particularly the successful slave rebellion in Haiti, and the anti-slavery movement in England. Specifically, he highlights the ways in which the monster can be seen as refracting racially non-European features, and hence standing in for the colonial Other, so to speak: He is, first, larger and more powerful than his maker, and second, dark and sinister in appearance. This suggests the standard description of the black man in both the literature of the West Indies and that of unfolding West African exploration. (Malchow, p. 18) While the Monster is described as having “yellow skin”, he is also described in terms that suggest stereotypical ‘negroid’ elements: dull yellow eyes, shiny black and ragged hair, black lips and pearly teeth. As Malchow states, when the text compares the Monster’s skin “in colour and apparent texture” to that of a “mummy”, it can only be noted that “mummies are, of course, ordinarily dark brown or black in colour”


(Malchow, p. 18). Again, Malchow correctly stresses that the physical attributes of the Monster – his ability to endure temperatures that European man would find intolerable, his agility, his ability to live on a coarse diet etc – were also attributes associated in Mary Shelley’s time with the non-European savage. Even the vegetarianism of the Monster draws on “a long European tradition that imagined wild men or natural men of the woods as ... colossal vegetarians” (Malchow, p. 19). In his vengefulness, the Monster replicates European images of the vengefulness of the savage, particularly the Black African slave. The acts of vengeance – for instance, when the Monster murders both a woman and a child, and burns the De Lacey cottage to the ground – also bear an uncanny resemblance to the more sensationalist elements of accounts of slave revolts in the West Indies (Malchow, p. 23). Again, Malchow correctly notes that, while Shelley’s Monster is not depicted as a cannibal, he is accused of cannibalistic intent and often depicted in tropes that recall contemporary discourses of cannibalism and vampirism. He also presents a “classic threat” associated with the coloured, in particular black, male in colonial accounts: The murder of Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s bride, would seem almost certainly to draw, either consciously or otherwise, upon the classic threat of the black male. The sharp contrast between the hazeleyed, auburn-haired, high-browed, fragile white woman and the dark Monster was sharp in the 1818 version, but was made much starker in Mary Shelley’s revision of 1831 ... [where Elizabeth ends up being golden-haired, etc, and with a German mother: a stereotypical northern, Teutonic beauty]. It is this master-race maiden whom the Monster, her racial negative – dark-haired, low-browed, with watery and yellowed eyes, violently assaults in her bedroom and strangles as Othello strangles Desdemona. (Malchow, p. 25) Similarly, Stevenson’s Mr Hyde can only be imagined fully in the context of certain nineteenth-century discourses associated with matters of empire and racial thinking. Once again, it is best to quote a sizeable section from Brantlinger (who also quotes Punter), which puts the matter in context, before moving on to my main concern with ‘emotions’: Although not overtly about imperial matters, Jekyll and Hyde, perhaps even more than Treasure Island and Kidnapped, served as a model for later writers of Gothic imperial fantasies. Because “within the Gothic we can find a very intense, if displaced, engagement with


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political and social problems,” it is possible, as David Punter argues, to read Jekyll and Hyde as itself an example of imperial Gothic: ‘It is strongly suggested [by Stevenson] that Hyde’s behaviour is an urban version of ‘going native.’ The particular difficulties encountered by English imperialism in its decline were conditioned by the nature of the supremacy which had been asserted: not a simple racial supremacy, but one constantly seen as founded on moral superiority. If an empire based on a morality declines, what are the implications ...? It is precisely Jekyll’s ‘high views’ which produce morbidity in his alter ego.’ Jekyll’s alchemy releases the apelike barbarian – the savage or natural man – who lives beneath the civilised skin. (Brantlinger, pp. 232–3) Hence, the ‘action’ and concerns of both Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde are rooted in imperial and colonial anxieties and draw upon and engage with, consciously or not, notions of Otherness – colonial, imperial, racial, ranging from ‘savage Africans’ to, as Brantlinger notes, those of the “Irish hooligan”, the Other next door (Brantlinger, 233). However, to take the matter further, both these books – very different from each other in many ways – also situate this engagement differently along the axis of emotion and reason. The case of Jekyll and Hyde is more obvious, and perhaps simpler. Jekyll can be seen as a person who represses the physical and emotional – emotions, as passions, have been traditionally located in or connected to, as Nussbaum also suggests in her book, the body – and, hence, the ‘natural’ or the ‘animal’/savage in ‘man’. Here the ‘savage’, the repressed ‘natural man’ who comes out as Hyde, is seen, as savages were in imperial discourses, as having a distorted bodily presence – expressed also by a tendency to let his passions dominate reason. Hyde, like non-Europeans in colonialist discourse, is given over to passions, bodily pleasures and overtly emotional (understood negatively) propensities. With Frankenstein we are presented with a greater complexity, because, often, it is not really the ‘monster’ but Dr Frankenstein who is ‘emotional’. Frankenstein’s initial response to life in the ‘monster’ is extravagantly emotional, passionate. It is interesting that this response occurs only after the Monster comes alive, that is, when he is no longer an aspect of Frankenstein’s Self but a living, independent Other. And it happens without any reasonable grounds, for even the ugliness of the ‘monster’ is debatable: Frankenstein has already told us that he has assembled the ‘monster’ from, so to speak, the best and most comely spare parts of humanity, and we have to choose between this and later

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statements about the ‘monster’s’ ugliness. And yet, the instant this ‘monster’ comes alive, Frankenstein is thrown into emotional disarray and confusion: How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness ... [N]ow that I had finished, the beauty of the dream had vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. (p. 51) When he falls asleep, he has a nightmare – often discussed by critics – that mixes his sweetheart with his dead mother, life with death, the future/present with the past. On waking up, partly influenced by the dream but with no objective reason to do so, Frankenstein has already decided to move his ‘monster’ from the category of a “wretch” (quoted above) to that of evil and death: “the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life” (p. 51). After this, the ‘monster’ is experienced simply as a ‘horror’ and a threat: the common colonial perception of the Other, especially when the coloniser becomes aware of the ‘will’ that makes the Other irreducible to the Self. Frankenstein is almost always hysterical when he talks with or confronts the ‘monster’. On the other hand, the ‘monster’ – as critics have noted – is largely collected and reasonable, perhaps even eminently rational. Take, for instance, the first real exchange that takes place between them: “Devil!” I [Frankenstein] exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? ... and oh, that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”3 “I expected this reception,” said the dæmon. “All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you


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and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends.” “Abhorred monster! fiend that thou art! the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes” (p. 81) Apart from the different tones of the two – the ‘monster’ trying to deal reasonably, Frankenstein shouting and ranting – what is also interesting is that what the ‘monster’ says comes so close to a critique of colonialist dealings with the colonial Other and replicates, in part, more recent accounts of the Other–Self relationship (as in Levinas). The ‘monster’ has a clear perception that the position Frankenstein – or all ‘men’, according to the ‘monster’ – has adopted is one that does not recognise the Self’s “duty” towards the Other (which is what Levinas conceptualises in ethical terms), and he berates Frankenstein not for sporting with his life but with sporting with “life” in general. To sport with life is not just to play with creating life; it is also to ignore the right of the Other to live, and to ignore (in a Levinasian formulation) the Self’s responsibility towards the Other. It is this that Frankenstein has determined to do from the moment the ‘monster’ opens his eyes, and this has to do with the demonisation of the Other, the dominant colonialist tendency to see the Other in a negative light, as only a lack, a threat, a negation. Instead, the ‘monster’ offers a deal: give me the right to live (which includes a partner and perhaps procreation), he says later on, and I will leave you and your world alone. But this is exactly the core of Frankenstein’s fear of the Other: he cannot and will not comprehend a world that would contain more such ‘monsters’. Interestingly, while the ‘monster’ is driven to his crimes by cold logic, Frankenstein flails about in passion, seeking vengeance. Is it, as some critics have claimed, that Frankenstein is the real monster? Or is the ‘monster’s’ use of cold reason itself monstrous – for it reduces human beings to means rather than ends, and as such shadows Frankenstein’s inability to accept the Other? Or is the matter a compound of the two positions? Whatever the case may be, Frankenstein again presents the encounter of the Self with the Other in highly ‘emotional’ terms.4 But this time it is not the Other who succumbs to bodily passions and extravagant emotions; it is the Self whose encounter with the alterity of the Other propels him, unprepared as he is for this encounter, into a series of emotional acts and gestures. The emotions, in this case, are those of fear, repulsion and horror. They could also have been of compassion,


and there was no reason – at least at the beginning – for Frankenstein to choose terror and horror instead of compassion. That choice revealed a particular response to the Other.

II Emotions such as compassion, as Aristotle remarked, have long been understood as directed at another person’s experience and state. Again emotions such as grief and anger and fear are responses to external stimuli, so to speak: that which is outside the Self and still vital to the being of the Self. As Nussbaum illustrates, our “emotions have heat and urgency ... because they concern ... the most urgent transactions we have with our world” (Nussbaum, p. 77), and “the reason why in some emotional experiences the Self feels torn apart (and in happier experiences filled with a marvellous sense of wholeness) is, once again, that these are transactions with a world about which we care deeply, a world that may complete us or may tear us apart” (Nussbaum, p. 78). However, the world does not exist as an abstraction; it exists as concrete presences which we experience as essential to our selfhood but also not confined to that selfhood, not reducible or even pliable. The world exists as an interaction with the Other, who “may complete us or may tear us apart”. It is this realisation that is addressed again and again in Gothic fiction, and sometimes other forms of fiction too. However, the Gothic – unlike some other subgenres – is deeply concerned, without necessarily theorising or even comprehending it, with the Other, as I have illustrated in this book. This concern, partly the consequence of its genesis in partial opposition to the discourses of Reason and partly due to stylistic and historical factors, seeps through the Gothic novel, not only pervading the moments of confrontation with Otherness but also existing as a valorisation of emotion, or as sentimentalism at its weakest. For what this sentimentalism claims is priority for the emotions over cold and balanced reason, or at least an equal status; however, even this is not a matter of simple opposition (as we have seen with reference to Frankenstein). By claiming equality or priority for emotions, the Gothic genre also suggests that some truths and thoughts are accessible through emotions; that rationality does not have a monopoly over the understanding of experience; and this explanation might well fit the characterisation of both Frankenstein and the ‘monster’ and the different kinds of lack through which they interact with each other in Shelley’s novel. However, the heightened state of emotions in Gothic fiction, especially


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‘standard’ early examples – the swooning, weeping, fainting, crying, shouting, cursing etc – are also important as an index of the fact that the grammar of speech itself, a rational construct, does not exhaust the realms of human experience and thought. Not all emotions, writes Nussbaum, have “a linguistically formulable content” (Nussbaum, p. 79). How then can some emotions be communicated except as an excess of sound, or its diminishment: sulky silences, screams, shouts, weeping etc?5 It is perhaps not incidental that, even in its ‘degraded’ version of eighteenth-century ‘sentimentalism’, a certain sensitivity to the realm of emotions led to an awareness and championing of difference (though almost never ostensibly as difference in a contemporary sense). Quoting the historian David Brion Davis, Philip Gould counts the “rise of sentimentalism in the eighteenth century” with its focus on “the virtues of sympathy and benevolence” as one of the three main changes that facilitated the rise of anti-slavery movements (Gould, in Fisch, p. 11). It is here that what the colonial Gothic does, without even being fully conscious of it, comes to relate to another aspect of what postcolonialism tries to do, and sometimes concedes – consciously – the impossibility of ever achieving. Postcolonialism often tries to give speech to the Other, at least in the European context, and it also often answers in the negative the question posed by Spivak: Can the subaltern speak? Hence, it is best to move on to the ‘other half’ of this book, with some initial remarks from before postcolonialism. The European philosophical engagement (or lack of it) with the Other presents a query similar to the Spivakian question. As Critchley notes (with qualified reference to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, David Theo Goldberg’s Racist Culture, and Edward Said), perhaps “[European] philosophy tells itself a story which affirms the link between individuality and universality ... where at the same time universality is delimited or confined within one particular tradition, namely the Greco-European adventure” (Critchley, p. 128). However, he goes on to ask, if we provisionally admit that there is a racist or imperialist logic in philosophy ... then could it ever be otherwise? That is, would it be conceivable for philosophy, or at least for “we European philosophers”, to be in a position to repeat another origin? Wouldn’t this be precisely the fantasy of believing oneself to speak from the standpoint of the excluded without being excluded, of wishing to speak from

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the margins whilst standing at the centre, that is to say, the fantasy of a romantic anti-hellenism or Rousseauesque anti-ethnocentrism? (Critchley, p. 129) This again, as Critchley explores a little later in the book, shares the problem – the critique – that Derrida aimed at Levinas (and, in different ways, against other European philosophers too) in his essay ‘Violence and Metaphysics’: the problem of positing a philosophical discourse that, in its claim to exceed or counter the tradition of philosophy within which it assumes meaning, ends up claiming to speak philosophically about that which, by definition, cannot be spoken of philosophically. As is obvious, the Other – as irreducible alterity and not just another of the same – presents exactly the same problem to the Self: it is always beyond the language of the Self. It cannot be spoken about in terms that apply to the Self with equal validity. The Other cannot be spoken of as the Self. Hence, any discourse on the Other – philosophical or explanatory or revelatory, as in some novels – is circumscribed and limited. It will either leave the irreducible alterity of the Other out of the discourse, and thus reduce it to another of the same, or turn the Other into a simple negation of the Self (and hence a potential or convenient excuse for genocide, as is evidenced in many colonialist texts6), or lapse into silence and thus posit the Other as mere blankness. As illustrated in later chapters, novels and short stories that take up Otherness, of whatever nature, have to speak about this Otherness, but they also have to leave space for the alterity of the Other, which, by definition, exceeds their language, the language of the Self, the language of the speaking subject. It is here that ‘emotions’ come into play, for emotions depict not the nature of the Other, or even the nature of the meeting with the Other, but the impact of the Other on the Self. The Self does not, cannot, exist alone in an emotional state; the emotions evinced by the Self, while not portraying the Other directly, remain as true to the alterity of the Other as is possible, for they are the evidence of that alterity as it impacts on the Self and, so to speak, pulls, prods and pushes the Self into a (limited) degree of transcendence. To comprehend this is also to realise the extent and nature of the problem of narration that postcolonialism is confronted with in its bid to give voice to the subaltern, the colonial Other etc. After all, displays of emotion, often termed ‘passionate’, are problematic in a certain postcolonial context, just as they are problematic in some feminist contexts – and for largely the same reason: because they have been


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posited as the negative half of the rationality–emotionality binarism and associated, implicitly or explicitly, with women or non-Europeans. However, to narrate the Other only in words – in language – is to reduce the Other to the language of the Self-same, as either basic similarity or obverse negativity. Or is it? In the next section, I will examine this matter with reference to some Gothic/ised ‘postcolonial’ texts.


Part III Postcolonialism and Otherness


6 Can the Other Speak?

In previous chapters we have looked at how colonial Gothic texts dealt with the racial/colonial Other, lacking the language to narrate its alterity but sometimes managing to register its presence, if negatively, as ‘terror’, ‘fear’ and other states of strong emotion. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for instance (as read earlier), the racial/colonial Other is reduced to lack and negativity (though by no means all the time). But Conrad – and many other ‘colonial’ writers, especially in Gothic texts (which allowed wider space for the play of ‘emotions’ and the depiction of deviance and difference) – by his very focus on an irreducible alterity at times succeeds in opening up silent spaces of narration about an Otherness that cannot be simply reduced to the Self-same. With this chapter, we move on to the next half of my larger argument, and one that relates to postcolonialism. Instead of focusing on the colonial Gothicised narrative’s failure, partial or full but always fertile, to narrate the alterity of the Other as anything but lack or negativity (and hence a cause of terror), we will move on to some selective ‘postcolonial’ attempts to speak up from the Other side. If colonial Gothic texts often threw up their hands in the bid to narrate Otherness and resorted to the expedience of screams of terror, they nevertheless registered (often despite themselves) the existence of irreducible alterity. Postcolonial texts, in their brave and necessary bid to narrate the ‘subaltern’, ‘write back to the centre’ or ‘tell the other story’, have to engage with the problem of Otherness once again, and this time they cannot just throw up their hands or scream. Beginning with this chapter, I hope to see what this effort might entail and imply. Postcolonial narratives often start off, at least ostensibly, if I may adapt Graham Huggan’s suitably ironic description of the Booker, by “prizing Otherness” (Huggan, p. 104). But does it lead them to an unproblematic engagement with or narration of the Other? 101

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I Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1997) is a fascinating and accomplished fictionalisation of the “true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s”, as the blurb puts it. Atwood explains in an “Author’s Afterword”: Grace Marks ... was one of the most notorious Canadian women of the 1840s, having been convicted of murder at the age of sixteen. The Kinnear-Montgomery murders took place on July 23, 1843, and were extensively reported not only in Canadian newspapers but in those of the United States and Britain. The details were sensational: Grace Marks was uncommonly pretty and also extremely young; Kinnear’s housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, had previously given birth to an illegitimate child and was Thomas Kinnear’s mistress; at her autopsy she was found to be pregnant. Grace and her fellow-servant James Mc Dermott had run away to the United States together and were assumed by the press to be lovers. The combination of sex, violence, and the deplorable insubordination of the lower classes was most attractive to the journalists of the day. (Atwood, Alias Grace, p. 537) It was also, particularly in Britain, at the height of a period that has been described as an “age of sensation”, when sexual scandals, news of crime, immorality, deviance, and any other ‘shocking’ matter (including ‘monsters’, ‘exotic’ peoples etc) were lapped up with moralistic relish. As Diamond puts it in Victorian Sensation, the “ideal murder drama at this period” had “three acts: the crime, the trial and the hanging” (Diamond, p. 155). Grace’s drama had all three: McDermott was hanged, and Grace reprieved at the last moment, after which she went through years of imprisonment, also in mental asylums, before she was finally granted a pardon and appears to have disappeared into urban domesticity. Atwood’s novel uses an interesting combination of snippets from the time of the crime, thematically relevant literary quotations and, of course, the fictional narrative, which is given in the words of Grace, mostly narrated to the young Dr Simon Jordan, and as third-person narrative. Obviously, there can be various reasons for ‘recovering’ a story like Grace’s: to tell it ‘fully’, or ‘differently’, or more in detail, or of course just for entertainment. While Atwood’s novel is fascinating and very entertaining, it is also obvious that she has a serious purpose in mind.

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But here, one runs up against a problem. If the past is another country, and if someone else is another person, to what extent can a narrative relate the story of a crime while retaining its nature as a crime? To narrate a story in which the criminal is exonerated is to deny the alterity of the criminal qua criminal. But to simply narrate the guilt of the criminal is either to simplify the Otherness of the criminal in terms of mere negativity – evil, for instance, or inhumanity – or to claim to see into the motives of the Other, and hence reduce the Other to legibility or, in effect, a blankness that can be inscribed on. Given this problem and the need to make Grace speak for herself, Atwood adopts a ‘late Gothic solution’ (as outlined in the chapter on the Devil): “voices in the head”. She complicates the matter by suggesting, though the narrative does not do too much to build up this suggestion, that Grace might be a careful liar and manipulator. But, by and large, the narrative leans towards the “voices in the head” option: the Devil is not out there, or in the person of the criminal; if there is a Devil, he resides in the human psyche. Dr Jordan is after “the missing memory ... those few crucial hours” when the murders were committed by Grace or McDermott or both. What he gets finally is a story of possession or somnambulism. The first option is provided through the agency of a trickster character who has a soft spot for Grace. Under hypnotism, Grace speaks in the voice of a dead person, a close friend, who appears to have connived in the murder, while Grace was asleep and walking in her sleep. The other option, the more scientific one, is that of sleepwalking and divided personalities, the latter term being our imposition on the age. In either case, Atwood works hard both to give us the ‘voice’ of Grace and to protect her Otherness as a person. This is also done by leaving certain spaces open in the narrative: is Grace lying, what is the motivation of a particular character etc? In this sense, Atwood’s novel can be seen as a response to a contemporary account of Grace and the Kinnear-Montgomery murders, in Life in the Clearings (1853) by Susanna Moody, to which Atwood alludes both in the texts and the paratexts of Alias Grace. Moody identified Grace as “the prime mover” (Atwood, Alias Grace, p. 538) behind the murders, and Atwood basically leaves the door open between two options: that of innocence and that of unconscious guilt, with the third faint option of ‘manipulative guilt’ reduced but not entirely dismissed. The greater details provided by Atwood in comparison to Moody’s version of Grace actually enable her to complicate the matter and open up areas of doubt that restore the character of Grace as someone who

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cannot be known entirely and fully. Grace is removed from the role in which she was cast by many contemporary accounts, including that by Moody: the role of a simplified Other, someone eminently ‘knowable’ in her negativity as an evil criminal. Instead, she is narrated as someone who cannot be entirely comprehended – as either an innocent person, a divided subject or a criminal – and who is used, throughout the novel, by others, including Dr Jordan, mostly to delineate their own sense of themselves. Hence, Grace appears as the Other in the real sense of the term: not simply a negation, but still different; not reducible to the Self, but still necessary for the Self to understand/narrate itself; not beyond communication, but never fully transparent to the Self.

II But if greater details can sometimes have an enabling effect in postcolonial fiction about the ‘factual’ past, greater details can also prove an impediment to the narration of Otherness, and I shall illustrate this with reference to another exceptional postcolonial novel, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997). As Thieme has noted, Jack Maggs “responds to [Dickens’s] Great Expectations, albeit obliquely, by taking a returned convict, reminiscent of Dickens’s Magwitch, as its protagonist, while also, like Coetzee’s Foe, engaging with elements from the writer’s other novels and the figure of the author himself” (Thieme, p. 104). Hence, let’s begin with Dickens and Great Expectations. The Gothic informs most of the novels of Charles Dickens, as it does the work of his good friend, Wilkie Collins. Sometimes Gothic elements are sustained almost throughout a novel by Dickens, as in Bleak House, though it would be a rash critic who would call any of the novels ‘Gothic’ per se. More often, though, there are scenes – as a rule, vital ones – in Dickens’s novels that appear to be seeped in the Gothic, even though the novel does not always follow the rules of the genre. One such scene occurs quite early in Great Expectations, and it is, to some extent, the most significant scene of the novel, for not only does it return to haunt the protagonist, Pip, but also it provides us with the title of the novel by, unknown to Pip and the reader, leading to the ‘great expectations’ of Pip. Pip is an orphan – not of unknown origins, though. He lives with his dominating sister and her meek husband, Joe, a blacksmith. Both are much older than Pip and function as effective parents, though Mrs Joe, with her self-righteous temper and her low opinion of both her husband and Pip, does an excessive amount of parenting at times. On


the first page of the first chapter, Pip is out visiting his parents’ grave – a “bleak place overgrown with nettles” – when he is accosted by “an escaped convict” (as those pages are headed): A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars, who limped and shivered, and glared and growled, and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin. (p. 2) In Pip’s imagination the man is not just a “fearful man”, a criminal, a ghastly figure in a graveyard, he is also perhaps a cannibal, and the man builds up that fear: “ ‘You young dog,’ said the man, licking his lips, ‘what fat cheeks you ha’ got.’ ... ‘Darn Me if I couldn’t eat ‘em” (p. 2). Having elicited a promise that Pip would fetch him a file – under the threat of roasting and eating Pip’s heart and liver otherwise – the man stumbles away through the graveyard: As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in. (p. 4) This is as ‘Gothic’ a scene in its resonances as any: graveyard, spookiness, criminal, threat, mystery, violence, ‘cannibalism’, orphan etc. It remains the most Gothic of scenes in Great Expectations, a novel whose relative absence of a villain curbs its Gothic tendencies. The man who threatens Pip – Magwitch, to give him his proper name – appears as the Other of everything associated with Pip’s world: the steady, good-natured labour of Joe, the pushy, churchy, middle-class aspirations of Mrs Joe and the upper-class world of ‘real’ gentlemen and ladies that Pip is soon introduced to. A convict, Magwitch is also deported – as we learn later – to Australia, and in that sense becomes a sort of colonial Other too. That he returns towards the end of the novel and is revealed as Pip’s benefactor – the ‘marginal’ man who made Pip a gentleman – can be read, among other things, as an inadvertent commentary on the relationship of the Self and the Other. The Other, which is central to the identity of the Self, is also always outside and different from the Self.

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Hence the claims of the Other, particularly in a colonial context of power, are often experienced as a threat and a presumption, and the Other is habitually denied a claim on the Self. Pip struggles manfully with this situation, trying either to hide the Otherness of Magwitch or to get rid of him altogether. Carey makes much more of this refutation, for his ‘Pip’ takes elaborate steps to avoid, deny and, finally, kill his Maggs/Magwitch. Carey also engages with the need of Magwitch to refer back to the colonial centre, the selfhood of England: his Maggs achieves redemption only when he realises, fully, that he has a separate and fulfilling life in Australia and returns to it, with the English servant-girl he falls in love with. Carey’s Maggs, unlike Dickens’s Magwitch, is a character of more details: he does not just exist in his relation to the past and England, as Magwitch does; he also exists (though it takes him time to realise this fully) in his relationship to the present and Australia, and to a future in Australia. Hence, despite highlighting the independence of the ‘colonial space’ from which Maggs returns, the bid to narrate Maggs/Magwitch also forces Carey to present a person and a world that are eminently understandable in ‘British’ or ‘universal’ terms. In contrast to Atwood, Carey does not attempt to establish the Otherness of Maggs; his motivations, aspirations, even his life in Australia are perfectly normal and transparent. This is because Maggs has to be fully narrated, haunted, as the text of Carey’s novel is, by the ghost of the less-than-half-narrated Magwitch (a very postcolonialist predicament). But, in the process of this detailed narration, a character comes into being who is fully transparent. His location might be Australia, but his lifestyle and decisions, his emotions and experiences can all be read in terms that are equally valid in England: “Jack Maggs sold the brickworks in Sydney. In Wingham he set up a saw mill and, when that prospered, a hardware store” (Carey, p. 358), and so on and so forth at the end of the novel. The gaps and doubts that Atwood leaves hanging in Alias Grace are missing in Jack Maggs. An excess of detail, while it achieves much, does not leave space for the Otherness of Maggs/Magwitch to be suggested. The difference of Maggs/Magwitch is championed and narrated in Carey’s novel, but in the very championing and narrating it becomes more of the (Self)same.

III The racial/colonial Other is not predictable or fully legible because he comes from elsewhere, he speaks another language, he is another Self. In


different ways, both Stoker’s Dracula and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses are aware of this. At the core of both these texts, there is a similar event: the abrupt, mysterious entry of a racial Other into London. The entry is abrupt, because the Other is not welcome within dominant discourses in Europe. The entry is mysterious because the Other comes from elsewhere and arrives, always arrives, in the heart of selfhood no matter what defences might be erected to keep Otherness out. But the racial Other arrives in England in different ways in these two texts. In Dracula, the count arrives by water, but comes rooted in the soil of his origins. He has already had transported the coffins and the original soil that he needs for his daily repose in the dark. His arrival is premeditated and planned. In The Satanic Verses, Gibreel Farishta arrives by an aerial route, and he falls into London by accident, horribly interlinked with his alter ego, Saladin Chamcha. It is interesting that in The Satanic Verses the intermingling of opposites serves a radical purpose: it suggests, as some Islamic fundamentalists might have vaguely realised, that the good/divine and the evil/ diabolical may have the same source or may be interchangeable. But, at the same time, even Gibreel needs the Anglophone Chamcha in order to be narrated, and the independent agency of the racial Other is greatly reduced by the accidental nature of the descent and the characteristics of magical realism (as examined in another chapter). In Dracula, the Count has greater independent agency. As the Vampire, he does not exist alone, but his companions (unlike Chamcha) are not ‘normal’ in any way and cannot be fully narrated. Actually, to become his companion, as is the case with Lucy, one has to be moved away from ‘human’ normality and common understanding of goodness, rationality etc. This allows a space for the irreducibility of Otherness that The Satanic Verses sometimes fails to allow, and that many postcolonial texts cannot allow at all because they are driven by their bid to tell the ‘Other story’. But Dracula, in keeping with its historical position as a text written during a period of dominant colonial binarisms, cannot simply allow this space for Otherness; it also has to reduce it to the oppositionality that Rushdie strives to avoid. So the Count or the vampire is not just something that cannot be understood and/or even fully narrated, something beyond the realm of human language; it is also imbued with a sense of sheer negativity. One indication of this is the fact that what is necessary/good for ‘humans’ becomes anathema to the vampire: sunlight, shadow, the symbolism of the cross etc. And yet, unlike Chamcha/Gibreel, Dracula, appearing as a great wolf/ dog or the nocturnal vampire, does not have a human language. His


language is only legible to those who are not normally human. When he appears in human shape, as a Count, he speaks a human language, which wraps a cloak around his Otherness. On the other hand, Farishta is gloriously verbose. His verbosity challenges the limits of a narrow English selfhood (by introducing non-English elements into the language), but it also renders him transparent to understanding and labelling at times. This is partly resisted by the text when his qualities and those of Chamcha start melting together and warping into one another, when something else starts appearing in both of them. And that, exactly, is the problem of postcolonialism: it is a problem of language. The desire to correct, narrate, speak back to the empire opens up some possibilities and it presents certain dangers. The gaps and silences that allowed Otherness to exist in the colonial Gothic can sometimes be replaced by a necessary verbosity in postcolonial fiction, which, while it enables many things, tends to reduce the Other to more of the Self same. In that sense, Gayatri Spivak’s pertinent question and seminal essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, is also limited by its insistence on language as the only mode of expression, resistance, contestation. For of course, as Spivak notes, the subaltern cannot speak because language does not belong to the subaltern; it is (partly; some might say ‘largely’) language that creates the subaltern. Something similar can be said of the negative ‘Other’, or the simplified concept of the Other as understood by dominant colonial discourses and hence as critiqued (and in the process at times revived) by postcolonialism. As Bhabha notes, “if the differentiating force of the Other is the process of the subject’s signification in language ... then how can the Other disappear?” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 45). But, in a certain sense, the subaltern and the Other are not the same: the subalternity of the subaltern is created within a relationship of power (most obvious in the use of a language). The Other, especially if defined in a negative manner (prevalent in colonialist discourses and critiqued, at the risk of reproduction, by postcolonialist thinkers), exists in language, but also exists as an alterity beyond the language of the Self. Essentially, the Other – as understood in this book, and not as defined by colonial discourses or even much of postcolonial writing (as seen earlier) – exists in its Otherness outside any relationship of power: it is when this Otherness is inscribed within a relationship of power that the irreducibility of the Other is dismissed. In this sense, when the Other is reduced to the language of the Self, it becomes the subaltern. Even Bhabha’s very complex notion of the Other, for instance, reduces the Other to a kind of subalternity by confining everything to language.


But the fact remains that even the subaltern, let alone the Other, cannot be simply limited to language. This does not mean that language can be disregarded. Bhabha correctly insists that “the difference of other cultures is other than the excess of signification or the trajectory of desire. These are theoretical strategies that are necessary to combat ‘ethnocentricism’ but they cannot, of themselves, unreconstructed, represent that Otherness” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 70). And yet: how can the Other be ‘represented’ in the language of the Self, whatever the ‘theoretical strategies’? I argue that it can only be acknowledged in its alterity (as I have illustrated, in particular, in the previous chapter on emotions in colonial Gothic fiction) in what it does to the language of the Self. For the Other in its irreducible alterity always exists outside the language of the Self. It is this that Gothic fiction has sometimes been able to suggest and that postcolonial fiction sometimes erases, especially in its justifiable desire to explain, narrate, correct the errors and oversights of colonial narratives. As for the subaltern, surely the terror that Otherness evokes in those who reduce the Other to lack or negativity is partly an acknowledgment of the fact that even the subaltern need not speak: she can scream, shriek, throw stones, yes, also – unfortunately – bombs.

7 Negotiating Vodou: Some Caribbean Narratives of Otherness

The previous chapter examined the problem of narrating the Other, a problem that assumes special significance in the postcolonialist context of writing back to or filling the gaps of, or going beyond, colonialist narratives. The postcolonial usage of the Gothic is in this sense a tightrope walk between silence and sameness. In this chapter, in order to further explicate the elements involved, I shall explore some aspects of this tightrope walk in a demarcated context: that of certain Anglophone texts from the Caribbean that take up, in different ways, a powerful colonial marker of Otherness.

I Paravisini-Gebert claims that “a postcolonial dialogue with the Gothic plays out its tendencies most completely” in Caribbean writing: “The Caribbean, it turns out, is a space that learned to ‘read’ itself in literature through Gothic fiction” (in Hogle, p. 233). She goes on to add that the “perception of the Caribbean as a site of terror dates back to the myriad tales of atrocities committed against white planters during the Tacky Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760 and three decades later in the gory and brutal slave rebellion that destroyed the colony of Saint Domingue in what is now Haiti” (pp. 233–4). The Haitian Revolution – the only completely successful slave revolution in the world and one that faced up to and defeated even Napoleon’s elite troops – might or might not have been “gory and brutal” in the wake of the indisputable brutality of slavery, but it did (as Paravisini-Gebert notes) become “the obsessively retold master tale of the Caribbean’s colonial terror” (p. 234). Master tale, and master’s tale too at times – and it is both aspects of this Gothic tale that Jean Rhys employs and subtly contradicts in Wide Sargasso Sea 110

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(1966), whose first part ends in a rebellion that is clearly reminiscent of the Tacky Uprising and the Haiti Slave Revolution. Hence, Caribbean fiction remains a rich mining ground for any discussion of the Gothic in colonial or postcolonial contexts. It is not, however, my purpose to spread the net of my analysis that wide. I intend to focus primarily on three Caribbean novels by women writers, and, in those novels, on the narration of Obeah and Vodou as problematic markers of Otherness. To these three novels, I will add (mostly in passing) some discussion of two other novels – by men – because any discussion of the fictionalisation of Obeah/Voodoo by Caribbean writers cannot afford to leave them out altogether: Hamel, The Obeah Man (1827), by an anonymous colonial writer, and Herbert G. De Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall (1958). My discussion of Obeah/Vodou will refrain from wading into the muddy waters of history, sociology or ‘ethnography’ as far as possible. There is a lot of material along those lines about Obeah, Vodou, Myalism and related categories. Sometimes, as my discussion progresses, I will have to refer to these secondary texts and discussions, especially in the next chapter (which continues the argument of this one). But, by and large, I want to engage with Obeah/Vodou not in a bid to define, defend or situate them, but simply – as one comes across the terms in colonial discussions – as markers of non-European Otherness in the Caribbean context. All five novels taken up in this chapter engage with Obeah, or related (but not exactly the same, as we shall see) concepts, in a bid to define and narrate Caribbean realities that cannot be confined to European strata of experience, knowledge and perception. In some ways, engaging with Obeah/Vodou and related concepts is as necessary for the Caribbean writer as is the creation of a “nation language”, to quote Edward Kamau Brathwaite (on language, not Obeah!), and for the same reasons: because standard English cannot always contain or convey the realities, subtleties and sounds of the Caribbean. In a novel like de Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall one can notice the tension of such an effort. The White Witch of Rosehall is a Gothic novel – mansion, tempestuous passions, ghosts, power, insanity, murder, vengeance, mysterious identities etc – featuring a ‘white Devil’ (comparable to Haggard’s ‘She’) in a nineteenth-century Jamaican setting. It tells us of the arrival of Robert Rutherford on the main (slave-) plantation in Jamaica. Fresh from England and newly made heir to a plantation himself, Robert has decided to work as a lowly bookkeeper to learn the business from the bottom. Very soon, given his heroic features

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and ‘fresh from England’ glory, he attracts the attention of the plantation’s fascinating owner, Mrs Palmer, thrice widowed, as well as his beautiful coloured ‘housekeeper’, Millicent. At first too fascinated by Mrs Palmer and too much the gentleman to heed the sounds of ghosts haunting her mansion, or rumours of her having murdered her previous husbands, Robert slowly discovers that Mrs Palmer is a cruel woman whose “sensuality was temperamental and dominant” (p. 67). She is also skilled in the arts of Obeah and Vodou (learnt during adolescence from a Black nurse in Haiti). When Millicent defies Mrs Palmer over handsome Robert, she does so partly out of love for Robert and partly due to her faith in her grandfather, Takoo, a free ex-slave who had been brought over from Africa and who is now a powerful and feared Obeah man in Jamaica. Takoo, formerly an ‘accomplice’ of Mrs Palmer in the death/murder/bewitchment of her first husband, tries to protect Millicent, his beloved grandchild, but his ‘magic’ is powerless against the greater Obeah of Mrs Palmer. The novel ends in much violence and the death of both women, plus a few others, but that is beside the point here. What concerns us is the narrative’s relationship to Obeah. Throughout, the narrative uses the suspense and terror of Obeah and related images – vampires, spectres etc – while also providing a ‘rational’ explanation for them, mostly through the voice of Rider, a defrocked, alcoholic clergyman, now doing petty jobs on plantations, who befriends Robert: You heard of Mesmer ... He could certainly influence the minds of people: they say he “mesmerised” them. I have heard of the same kind of thing being done in India ... The power may be purely mental, not supernatural at all. (pp. 160–1) The narrative suggests – in the voices of both Rider and Robert as well as the ending, where Takoo exacts a very physical revenge and Mrs Palmer cannot concentrate her mind fast enough to call her spectres to her aid – that the ‘Obeah’ attributed to both Takoo and Mrs Palmer has rational explanations, though perhaps not too narrowly rational ones. But even Rider, the most rational of the lot, cannot avoid using terms from irrational spheres, such as ‘witch’: The brute [a spectral bull with eyes of fire] that we all saw, Robert, was, believe me, a figment of the imagination. It had no existence outside the bad brain of the wickedest witch in this country. (p. 206)


As for Robert, he often fluctuates wildly between rational and paranormal explanations. Whenever the narrative moves towards the paranormal and Obeah, the ‘Otherness’ of the slaves and ex-slaves is explicitly linked to their Africanness, as in the Obeah ceremony that Takoo conducts in an attempt to save his grandchild from Mrs Palmer’s spell: It was nothing that even Rider had ever heard before, no Christian words or air; it was something that had come out of Africa and was remembered still. There were people in the swaying crowd who had been born in Africa, and in their minds and emotions they had travelled back to that dark continent and were worshipping again some sinister deity with power and will to harm, one to be propitiated with sacrifice. (p. 200) Here we have some standard colonial expressions and ideas – dark continent, sinister deity, sacrifice – about Africa in particular and non-European spaces in general, though the discourse is complicated by the (hidden) presence of Mrs Palmer, the ‘white’ Obeahman, and the capacity of Robert – attributed to a human sharing of “primitive emotions” (p. 201) – to indulge instinctively in the rhythm of the sound and the ceremony. However, again and again in the novel, this perception of the Otherness of the slaves and ex-slaves (and one has to concede that the narrative is very sensitive to differences and power relations between whites and blacks) is finally, at least ostensibly, subdued to European rationality, or at least rationality with a European face. Just as the whites combine (across individual differences) to triumph over rebellious slaves, Mrs Palmer wins the ‘man’ from coloured Millicent in the beginning and again at the end. Moreover, the ‘white witch’ makes stronger magic than black Obeahman, Takoo, and finally European rationality is depicted as offering an explanation of black superstition and Obeah, though of course some loose ends remain. It is in this contentious relationship that one begins to understand the significance of Obeah in Caribbean narratives. Finally, the depiction or understanding of Obeah is a matter of defining the Caribbean. If it can be understood in terms of European rationality, the Otherness of the slave experience is finally subsumed within the European Self. And if not? Well, let us answer that question with a look at another novel published around the same time as The White Witch of Rosehall, but with the proclaimed agenda of opposing a perceived ‘colonial’ (in our terms) depiction of Caribbean Creole subjecthood. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso

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Sea was written not just in response to the depiction of the mad Creole in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but also because Rhys suspected Brontë of harbouring prejudices against the Caribbean (Wyndham and Melly).

II To begin with, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a Gothic novel not just because it is ‘inspired’ by the most Gothic of all elements in Charlotte Brontë’s reluctantly Gothic and often anti-Gothic novel, Jane Eyre: the mad Creole woman in the attic, the secret of the Great House. Much as Charlotte Brontë, unlike Emily Brontë, resists the supernatural and tries to re-establish the ‘rational’ against the grain of Gothic sensationalism – the scene where a Gypsy frightens Jane and her companions only to be revealed as Rochester in disguise is typical of this bid – Jane Eyre nevertheless slides towards Gothic elements whenever, so to speak, the author lets the story take the upper hand. For the story – secrets, ancient houses, madness, love etc – contains elements amenable to the Gothic. However, Wide Sargasso Sea does not simply take on these elements from Jane Eyre: it establishes its own relationship to the Gothic, and hence to discourses of rationality and the supernatural. For instance, while both the novels contain ‘Gothic’ secrets, the main secret in Wide Sargasso Sea is not that of a ‘Creole madwoman in the attic’: madness, depravity and intermarriage are not the main secrets of Wide Sargasso Sea. They are minor secrets, more symptoms of the great secret that even the narrative of Wide Sargasso Sea never fully acknowledges. Wide Sargasso Sea is not primarily, as one (Penguin) blurb puts it, the story of “Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway” who, born in “an oppressive colonialist society”, meets “a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage disturbing rumours begin to circulate, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.” There are minor simplifications in this ‘blurb’ version of the novel: it is doubtful whether the Englishman (Rochester) was ever in love with Antoinette and even more doubtful whether “sensuality” would be attractive to him, and it is definitely clear that he married her at least partly for her fortune. It is also unclear whether Antoinette really goes ‘mad’ in any simple sense of the word, at least not before she is carted off to England. However, these are minor matters. What is more interesting is the way in which the blurb completely overlooks – with a simplistic gesture towards “oppressive colonialist


society” – the great secret that haunts Antoinette, her mother and her family. This is the secret of slavery. Antoinette and her mother belong to the disappearing old ‘plantation’ families, the crumbling great houses that were built on the labour of slaves. Antoinette grows up in a period when slavery has been abolished – leading to the impoverishment of families like hers – but its memory is still fresh. This memory is used against her by both blacks and whites, especially the new white class, which despises the older slave-owners because its basis of profit, though as exploitative in many ways, rests on the obfuscating control of capital, not of human bodies directly. However, finally, as Antoinette realises, control of capital translates into control of human bodies: she is rendered a captive in her marriage and made ‘mad’ because her husband, not she herself, inherits her father’s wealth. Both Antoinette and her mother resent the new exploiters and their assumed moral superiority. They also see the reality of slave-holding in grey tones, rather than the black-and-white of the ‘newcomers’: this even enables them to connect with some ex-slaves, such as Christophine, in a way that the new whites, like Mr Mason or Rochester, are simply incapable of. The “rumours” that, according to the blurb, poison Rochester’s mind against Antoinette also arise due to the paradigm shift between the exploitation of slavery and the exploitation of high capital. Rochester cannot comprehend the ways in which some white slave-owners used black women for sexual purposes (though he does go to bed with a coloured woman, who wants cash), and this lack of comprehension of the old relations of power is exacerbated by his lack of physical connection to the place and the people. All this leads to suspicions of ‘racial contamination’, miscegenation – he imagines Antoinette as being of mixed blood – and these suspicions conveniently mesh with his economic interests. On the other hand, even though Antoinette and her mother can see the hypocrisy in the ways of the newcomers, they cannot fully face their own past history of slavery. They either tend to see it as largely benevolent, or simply overlook its oppressive and brutal face. The latter occurs in a number of places in the novel, but I will confine myself to one instance. Antoinette is taking Rochester to her honeymoon island, and reaches a village called Massacre. Rochester asks, with a touch of moral superiority, “And who was massacred here? Slaves?” “Oh no.” She sounded shocked. “Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now.” (Rhys, p. 39)

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Antoinette is generally vague about the slave-holding part of Caribbean history, and in this case – as Angela Smith points out in the introduction to the edition of the novel that I have used – a precise answer is available. What is interesting is that this answer puts both Rochester and Antoinette in the dock. The massacre recorded in the name of the (actual) island took place in 1675, when one Colonel Philip Warner probably murdered his “mixed race” half-brother, Indian Warner, whom he had refused to recognise as being related to him. This ‘history’ not only puts paid to Rochester’s glib moral certainties about a place he hardly knows; it also forces Antoinette to face the brutality of a past she would prefer to see in softer colours. Critics often refer to the fact that miscegenation plays a role in this legend, and miscegenation is supposed to be a secret haunting both Antoinette and Rochester. While I do not mean to deny this, I think that the greater secret is that of slavery – an institution that made the European Self live cheek by jowl with the non-European Other, thus confusing the easy demarcations of people like Rochester. In different ways, it is the complex reality of this secret that is denied by both Rochester and Antoinette. Rhys, as a Caribbean ‘Creole’, has a different relationship with both identity (colour) and terror (Obeah/Vodou) than the anonymous writer, probably English and white, of Hamel, The Obeah Man (1827), perhaps the first colonial Gothic novel set in the Caribbean (Jamaica) that makes extensive use of Obeah, as an ‘African’ element in the new world. Paravisini-Gebert aptly describes Hamel, The Obeah Man as “a Eurocentric narrative haunted by the recent memory of the Haitian Revolution” (p. 231), but its use of the matter is complex enough to make critics avoid simplistic treatments of colonial binarisms. The ‘Gothic’ villain in the novel is a white preacher, Roland, who, driven by sexual passion, attempts to overturn ‘natural’ and ‘social’ order by leading a slave rebellion against the local planter. Hamel, on the other hand, is a black man, linked to Africa by Obeah, who finally renounces the slave rebellion, turns his back on ‘civilisation’ and returns to Africa. This return to Africa is a possibility available to colonial binarism, in which the black man is always black enough to return to his ‘original roots’ (which is the obverse of his inability, according to the same discourses, ever to become ‘white’). From this perspective, in texts as varied as Hamel, The Obeah Man and some of Kipling’s stories, it is the ‘mixed race’ person and the upstart ‘Creole’ who can never be reclaimed or redeemed, who is most likely to slip into Gothic villainy. It is no wonder then that Rhys, a Creole, needs to negotiate both Otherness and identity with greater care and subtlety than the narrative


of Hamel, The Obeah Man. Obeah itself becomes a much more complex matter in Wide Sargasso Sea, without losing its ‘Otherness’ altogether. This, as I shall illustrate, is of crucial significance to Rhys’s agenda in the novel, which is the depiction of reality that is both ‘same’ and ‘different.’ In this sense, the title of the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, suggests an indeterminate state (water covered with weeds and appearing to be land: ambiguity), a location between Europe and the Caribbean (both space and passage: creolisation) and the difficulty of navigation. Perhaps the last (difficulty of navigation) alludes not only to the human relationships in the novel, which are so difficult to navigate, as Angela Smith notes in the introduction of the edition to which I refer (Rhys, p. vii), but also the subtlety of navigation that the narrative requires from the reader. It is not the purpose of this chapter to explore Wide Sargasso Sea in detail, a job that would require a book rather than a chapter in any case. I intend to focus on its treatment of Obeah/Vodou. But, before I do so, it is necessary to pause and illustrate, shortly and in passing, this subtlety of navigation that I have mentioned, for it bears upon the discussion of Obeah/Vodou. As stated earlier, the first section of the three parts of Wide Sargasso Sea ends with a rebellion that carries clear echoes of the Haiti slave revolution. There is much in this section that is left to the reader to excavate: the discourses of slavery and ‘racial degeneration’, for instance, the suggestion of bewitchment and decadence, the reason why the freed slaves attack Mr Mason and his family, even the fire (which can be easily attributed to the protesting ex-slaves by the unwary reader, though the narrative does not imply any such thing and actually suggests a candle left burning, and perhaps knocked down, in Pierre’s room) that is the dramatic high point of the first section. Again, fires consume the ‘big houses’ in two of the three sections – the first and the third (which is Rochester’s inherited house in England, and hence the ‘house’ in Jane Eyre). This a/symmetry itself is significant because it makes one think of the absence of a fire in the second section: once this question is posed, the reader discovers the markers which suggest the ‘fire’ that burns down Antoinette – reduces her to ‘Bertha’, wastes her love and passion, negates her past, destroys her future etc – in the second part. Wide Sargasso Sea is full of such subtleties: it always tells a story that has more than one side to it. Sometimes, the ostensible narrative – like weeds on water – is deceptive, and the reader who takes the plain facts for reality is heading for a cold plunge. As Antoinette replies when Rochester asks her whether there is another side to Daniel Cosway’s story, “There is always the other side, always” (Rhys, p. 82).

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If that is true even of minor matters in the novel, how do we pick our way through Rhys’s engagement with the discourse of Obeah/ Vodou, given the fact that the discourse, for better and for worse, is central to a perception of the Caribbean, at least in English? Within the colonial tradition, if ‘rationality’ is seen as the ‘European’ component of the Caribbean, Obeah/Vodou is seen as the ‘African’ component.1 Any attempt to narrate the Caribbean has to negotiate this equation, even if the signifiers employed are different from the ones I have focused on. The usual problem of sameness and difference is made particularly visible in the Caribbean context, given its peculiar history and situation. Rhys engages with Obeah/Vodou in a manner that is initially predictable within the colonial context: she attributes it to a ‘more’ African character. Unlike Takoo in The White Witch of Rosehall, she is not from Africa, but (like Takoo) she is from ‘elsewhere’ (Martinique, a Francophone Caribbean island) and more ‘black’ than others: Her songs were not like Jamaican songs, and she was not like the other women. She was much blacker – blue-black with a thin face and straight features. She wore a black dress, heavy gold earrings and a yellow handkerchief – carefully tied with the two points in front. (Rhys, p. 7) It is this woman, Christophine, Antoinette’s nurse, to whom ‘magical’ powers are attributed by the other women, and to whom Antoinette resorts when she wants a potion to make Rochester love her once again. Christophine, unlike Mrs Palmer’s nurse, does not pass on her arts to Antoinette, and gives her the potion only with much hesitation. Already, the narrative has established an ambivalent relationship to Obeah: while Rochester and the colonial system see Christophine as both an impostor and a practitioner of Obeah/Vodou, the narrative suggests something closer to a wise woman, with knowledge of traditional cures and herbs. And yet, this is not reduced to ‘European’ rationality, explained away as The White Witch of Rosehall seeks to explain it away. Moreover, the notion of Obeah/Vodou is complicated in a way that is similar to, and yet very different from, what happens in The White Witch of Rosehall. In The White Witch of Rosehall, Mrs Palmer, the white witch, first comes across as stronger than Takoo, the ‘African’ Obeahman, and then finally there is an attempt to reduce their claim of supernatural ‘magic’ to European rationality and science: hypnotism etc. In


Wide Sargasso Sea, too, there is a white ‘Obeahman’, but his ‘Obeah’ is a version of European rationality. Here Wide Sargasso Sea is perhaps the earliest example of a tendency common to postcolonial novels (including Myal and Cereus Blooms at Night, in different ways): it reconstructs the British or colonial influence as a demonic Other, thus explicitly or implicitly reversing the gaze of selfhood. Rochester, as both Antoinette and Christophine recognise in different ways, practices – successfully – ‘obeah’ on Antoinette. As Antoinette tells Rochester when he insists on calling her Bertha (her deranged mother’s name), “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too” (Rhys, p. 94). In her long discussion with Rochester, Christophine repeatedly suggests that he is manipulating Antoinette in evil ways, though always within the boundaries of cold calculation and reasonability, the latter being one of Rochester’s injunctions to his wife (“promise to be reasonable”, p. 82). Hence, Rhys’s novel both uses and complicates ‘Obeah/Vodou’ as a sign of Otherness. It cannot do away with Obeah/Vodou as a sign of Otherness, for that would reduce the Caribbean experience to the sameness of European rationality. But it cannot simply celebrate Obeah/Vodou, as that would make the Caribbean experience impenetrable to narration and confine it to the ‘African’ component. Instead, it has to deal with the Caribbean location in the philosophical sense of Otherness, as something both vital to the Self and not reducible to the Self. This Self can be ‘European’ or ‘African’: in both cases, the Caribbean, personified in the Creole Antoinette, has to be other than ‘European’ or ‘African’. No matter what one may think of the opposition of rationality and Obeah/Vodou, given the discourses available to the narrative, Wide Sargasso Sea makes the vital point of how the Other is never just the Self, and how the Self is never totally severed from the Other. It may appear that this point can be made more strongly while avoiding any kind of potential binarism – such as that of rationality and Obeah/Vodou (irrationality). This is often the assumption of much of postcolonial writing, which points out, correctly, the constructed nature of binarisms, and then tries to go beyond them. It is one of the reasons, as I shall argue in another chapter, why magical realism, with its merging of binaries, appeals more to many postcolonial writers than the Gothic narrative, with its oppositions and potential binarisms. But the problem is not so easy to resolve, as my reading of two other (excellent) Caribbean novels will suggest.


III Erna Brodber’s Myal is – as I shall elaborate in the next chapter – a bold and significant literary work in many ways. In this chapter, however, I will only concentrate, in passing, on its deployment of vodou and myalism. As I illustrate in greater length in the next chapter, Brodber’s bold attempt to avoid the colonial binarisms that frame Caribbean vodou and push it into the realms of the ‘darkest Gothic’ is only partly successful. By bringing into being a ‘myalist’ world, she steps outside the usual dualisms of colonialist discourse. But her narrative remains conditioned, subtly, by the very language that she tries to leave behind. This is not her fault, but part of the necessary conditions that enable her narration. For instance, it is common, and correct, to see Myalism as an African religion that commingled with Christianity: “Myalism, which is the most commonly used name for the religion that developed in Jamaica during the period of slavery, began slowly to change under the influence of Christianity” (Alleyne, p. 88). However, whatever the African roots of Myalism might have been, Myalism in Jamaica had always been a response to enslavement, transplantation and Christianity. Its entire ‘nature’ is creolised – collaborative and oppositional. Myalism’s conflict with Obeah is not just a transference of the African conflict between private and public magic2 or good and bad medicine. It is a reflection of the Creole–Christian nature of Myalism. It emanates partly from colonial discourses hostile to African religions and beliefs – religions and beliefs often collated with ‘bad medicine’ or reduced to and dismissed as Obeah. It reflects not only the oppositional stance that led to Christianised Myal but also resistance to the African element, ‘Obeah’. Hence, in Brodber’s Myal it is not surprising to see Myalism being implicitly portrayed as the good force opposed to the evil of Obeah. Brodber manages to force Myal’s entry into ‘English literature’, but she cannot manage to bring Obeah out from the cold. It remains there, its alterity reducing it to negation or obscuring its narration. I will examine this in detail in the next chapter. But now it is time to conclude this chapter with another, more recent, attempt to tackle the problem of narrating the Otherness of vodou, obeah etc in English. Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night features a character, Mala, who is considered a witch by most people on her Caribbean island. It also contains other strongly Gothic features, such as madness, deviance, decaying houses, ghostly secrets, family crimes, doubled selves etc. Cereus Blooms at Night is presented as a first-person narrative by Tyler, a homosexual male nurse, taking care of Mala in her old age. Framed as


a letter to Asha, Mala’s sister, who fled their life of abuse (by the father) years ago, this narrative is less about the first-person narrator and more about the patient, Mala. However, Tyler too plays a role, if only by suggesting the redeeming possibilities of acceptance and pointing to a lighter future for difference. Tyler’s narration, as Justin Edwards notes, “draws upon gothic language”: words like ‘phantom’, ‘ghostly’, ‘terrifying secret’ etc (Edwards, 2005, p. 133). Moreover, as Edwards points out, because “the traumatic event [in Mala’s past] cannot be precisely grasped, never fully comprehended or articulated by Mala or Tyler, it shares with the gothic a language that tries to express something that can never be known” (Edwards, 2005, p. 133). However, this Gothic ambiguity is not extended to Obeah/Vodou in Cereus Blooms at Night. Even though the islanders see Mala as a witch and the narrative contains some magical realist elements (hence it is not to be constrained by strictly objective/rational realism), as the narrative progresses the reader comes to see Mala as a traumatised person, perhaps a strong woman too, but not as a ‘witch’ in the sense of being a practitioner of Obeah/Vodou. In this, Cereus Blooms at Night shades towards magical realism, and this is a trend and a factor I will examine in a later chapter. Another promising first novel by a Caribbean author, David Chariandy’s Soucouyant, does something similar: despite its title and occasional narrative impulses, it provides a thoroughly psychological and historical explanation of the seemingly ‘paranormal’. Here it is sufficient to conclude that both these excellent novels are bound by the very terms by which they set out to narrate Otherness: for instance, Cereus Blooms at Night does narrate varieties of Otherness – colonial, sexual (lesbian and gay relations) etc – but these are all types that are visible and narratable within the European tradition. If Caribbean Vodou or Obeah represented the alterity of internalised experience by the colonialised Other in a certain sociocultural and historical context, that alterity cannot truly be narrated in Cereus Blooms at Night, or not unless it is given more legible stylistic (magical realism) and cultural (sexuality etc) underpinnings. Is it at all possible to narrate Vodou or Obeah in English to an ‘international’ audience? To answer that we need to return to Erna Brodber’s Myal in the next chapter.

8 Can the ‘Other half’ Be Told? Brodber’s Myal

In the previous two chapters, I suggested some of the ways in which postcolonial narratives have dealt with the problem of narrating alterity: I indicated that, while this effort is necessary and has certain benefits, it also runs the danger of reducing alterity to more of the Self-same. In this chapter, with a detailed focus on Erna Brodber’s Myal – a fascinating novel that resolutely and brilliantly attempts to tell the ‘other half’ of the story and has been considered radical in this endeavour within postcolonialism – I will explore the matter further, particularly (but not only) with reference to the ongoing discussion of ‘Obeah’ and ‘Vodou’ as problematic ‘colonial’ markers of Otherness. The exploration will consist of a textual analysis of the novel, with particular reference to its ‘creolised’ nature (and related aspects) and its narration of Obeah/Vodou (in keeping with the discussion in the previous chapter). It will illustrate, I hope, both the radical nature of Erna Brodber’s endeavour in this novel (with its many strengths) and its inability to fully transcend the clutches of ‘negativised Otherness’ within the tradition of English-language narratives about the Caribbean. This partial in/ability also reflects on postcolonialism. There is in Erna Brodber’s Myal a deep tension that highlights some of the most important and overlooked aspects of ‘postcolonial’ criticism and studies. These aspects I will define in terms of Michael de Certeau’s distinction between “resistance” (contestation of a given system from outside that system) and “opposition” (contestation of a given system from inside that system).1 I shall explore the tensions between these two modes of contesting power in the narrative of Myal. In the process, however, I will also seek to problematise a term used widely and, at times, superficially in the fields of postcolonialism and cultural studies – ‘creolisation’ – and through that, and Myal’s relationship to 122

Can the ‘Other half’ Be Told?

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Obeah, Vodou etc, return to the matter of the Gothic and the postcolonial. If Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea tries to convey the Otherness of the Caribbean by performing a delicate balancing act between colonial oppositions, and forcing the reader to excavate beyond the obvious, and if Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night attempts, in a fashion closer to Magical realism, to dissolve these oppositions, Brodber’s Myal is basically an attempt to narrate the ‘other half of the story’, the half that cannot and should not be reduced to European rationality. This, however, is of necessity done in a context that, given the nature of Caribbean realities, is heavily ‘creolised’. Myal presents three broad areas of creolisation, a term that has its uses both in postcolonialism and, sometimes under differing guises (‘hybridity’, transgression, ambiguity, excess etc), in the study of Gothic fiction. These areas of creolisation can be dubbed generic, linguistic and religious creolisation.2 Of these, the first – ‘generic creolisation’ – is the simplest and the least crucial to the argument that follows. However, it is best to begin with it as this enables the presentation of a short synopsis of the novel. Such a synopsis is particularly necessary in the case of Myal because, in spite of being an undoubtedly important novel, Myal is less widely available than the novels by Rhys and Moottoo discussed above. It is tempting to read Myal as a bildungsroman. A simple synopsis would present it as the story of development/growth of Ella O’Grady, the illegitimate daughter of a black Jamaican woman and a white Irish policeman. The novel – apart from a first chapter which serves as both an invitation3 and a warning to the general reader4 and is chronologically antecedent to the initial developments – starts off with Ella reciting Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden. It traces the growth of Ella from a zombie mouthing the words of a colonialist text to a thinking teacher willing to question another colonialist text (Mr Joe’s Farm). In between, Ella is transported from the colonised environments of Grove Town to the neocolonial United States, where her stories of Grove Town are appropriated and distorted into a coon show by her white, capitalist husband, Selwyn. She returns a wreck – and unable to give birth to new life – and is helped to recover by various people, a process involving the healing ceremony by Mass Cyrus that is partly described in the very first chapter. However, we cannot confine ourselves to a merely bildungsromanesque summary. Such a description would leave out the fact that Ella’s growth is linked to that of Anita and Maydene and that, contrary to the bildungsroman’s tendency to focus on the main protagonist all the


way through, Ella is conspicuously absent from the narrative for large stretches, a significant absence that often assumes Gothic overtones. The narrative itself is not chronologically linear: it moves back and forth and involves a plethora of characters, bodies, voices and perspectives, again coming closer to certain kinds of Gothic fiction than the classical bildungsroman. In general, then, Ella’s development is not the growth to maturity of the individual bildungsroman protagonist; it is, at best, the development of a community. Dan and Mass Cyrus, two embodied and subversive Myalist spirits, posit it in those terms towards the end of the novel when they rejoice at the fact that their people have started to see through colonialist verbiage. But, more than that, Ella’s growth runs parallel to the development of Maydene and Anita. Maydene develops from a well-meaning but obtuse white woman married to a local, Creole priest (Reverend Brassington) and Anita develops from playing music by rote (and being a hapless victim of ‘rape’) to a more active, empowered and aware existence. Myal, then, does not display a basic characteristic of the European bildungsroman: a centred, individual character whom the narrative follows all the way through from the start to the end page. The growth it describes is as much communal as individual: actually, the two are linked throughout the novel, which is essentially about the need to reconnect all the ‘halves’ severed by colonisation. However, there are other, deeper, problems with considering Myal a bildungsroman. At its most basic, the European bildungsroman presents the development of the protagonist with experience.5 This can be observed even in later, more experimental versions of the genre, such as James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, one can claim that, in Myal, Ella develops against experience and, hence, through cognitive elements (including emotions) that cannot be reduced to a narrow conception of Enlightenment rationality. The above statement should not be read in a simplistic sense. For example, I am not denying the fact that the protagonist of a European bildungsroman also experiences various contrary events and defines himself or herself against some of these experiences and the people involved. However, even when the experiences are contrary, they cohere into a whole – a tradition, if one may say so – that shapes the growth of the protagonist. The past flows into the present and points to the future of the protagonist. But the colonial and postcolonial situation is peculiarly one of the inability of the subject to posit any organic transition between past, present and future: a fact that is evident in the


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highly exaggerated opposition between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in postcolonial societies and colonial discourses. Similarly, it is the particular predicament of the colonialised or ex-colonialised subject that his or her experiences do not lead directly and naturally to the shaping of an oppositional and uncolonialised subjecthood. The colonised or excolonised subject has to go beyond and against the colonial experiences to recover that half of the story that ‘has never been told’: in Ella’s case this involves going beyond school experiences and reading against colonial texts. It is at least in this sense that Ella’s growth has to be against her experiences while the growth of the typical bildungsroman protagonist is with his or her experience. This, however, is not a dismissal of experience in favour of some kind of mystical communion. That experience is necessary to this growth is evident from the fact that Ella has to physically go through the twin phases of colonisation (in Grove Town) and neocolonisation (with Selwyn in the United States) before she can ‘grow’. However, the fact that finally Ella has to go beyond the experiences is evident not only in her final ability to read against the colonial experience (as canonised in the fable, Mr Joe’s Farm) but also in the spiritual elements of the narrative. The spiritual, after all, represents that bit of ‘experience’ which can never be completely experienced (in a rational sense) and, as such, can never be completely canonised as legitimate experience (unlike, say, the ‘experience’ of the animals in Mr Joe’s Farm) from a position of power.6 The spiritual element also plays a role in distancing Myal from one of our core and unstated expectations: that the novel – a product of an industrialising, capitalist or quasi-capitalist age – is essentially a secular narrative. When spiritual matters enter the novel, they do so draped in satire, irony, ambivalence or, at the least, aporia,7 except of course in Gothic fiction, and subgenres indebted to the Gothic. However, Myal can very easily be read as an unambiguous ‘spiritual narrative’, and hence a potentially Gothic one. In that sense, it is not just a novel: it connects with the prose and poetry of spirituality, religious discourse, Biblical texts, the novel of ordeal8 and even apocalyptic writings in a deeply non-ironic manner. It might not connect with the Gothic in a conscious manner, and yet it can only be read, as a postcolonial novel within and contending a larger ‘European’ tradition, in the light of the Gothic: ‘ghosts’, spirits, Obeah, Vodou, possession, innocent virgins, venal patriarchal and ‘aristocratic’ villains etc feature in Myal, as does a common desire to go beyond Enlightenment rationality. There is no use at all of the common postmodernist device of aporia in Myal: Miss Gatha’s tabernacle9 is a spiritual ritual that works

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unambiguously at the spiritual level, the Myalists are clearly spirits as well as bodies, Ella’s final cure is a deeply spiritual performance; none of this is obscured, fudged or left in doubt,10 and here too the novel connects more with the Gothic tradition than with rational European realism. It is in this sense, again, that Myal presses against the historical and generic limits of the novel form, though it achieves legibility only as a novel in the final count. Even the pretext and the paratext have to concede this limitation: “a novel by Erna Brodber”, we are told on the cover page; “Myal / a novel”, the inside cover informs us. With this realisation we return to the central issue of this paper: that Myal, in spite of everything, is finally an act of opposition and not one of resistance. To understand the dynamics of this matter (and its consequences) further, we need to take a closer look at the language of Myal and, in the process, question some assumptions behind certain uses of ‘linguistic creolisation’ and ‘Creoles’. Erna Brodber presents a wide range of Englishes in Myal. These range from standard English (of the received pronunciation (RP) variety) to various Creoles, thus presenting a brilliant example of the kind of language/linguistic continuum that exists in many parts of the Caribbean. But such a wide range of Englishes and the central role that Brodber allots to Creole11 should not make us claim an exaggerated recuperative or subversive role for Myal the novel. For the very fact that this narrative is directly available to us in the anglophone ‘world’ indicates its nonviability as resistance. Regardless of Brodber’s brilliant use of ‘Creole’ (or because of it), the legibility of Myal in the anglophone ‘world’ indicates its incorporation into the ‘system’ of English. The word ‘Myal’ and the critiquing of the colonialist text that Myal narrates also indicate that Brodber is working with the notion of opposition; resistance having been rendered impossible by history and the nature of creolisation in Jamaica. Creole marks not only a site of opposition but also the end of resistance. Regardless of how many African elements might have gone into Caribbean Creoles, the Creoles have a hegemonic European linguistic base. It is their acts of departure (opposition) within the framework of English (or some other European language) that confer on them the epithet ‘Creole’ for much of the world. It is seldom, if ever, that one hears a hybrid of predominantly African languages (e.g. Swahili) or predominantly Asian languages (e.g. Urdu) being described as a ‘Creole’ in postcolonialist and other literary–cultural discourses arising from Western academia.


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Thus, the movement from being abused as Creole to being celebrated as Creole does not hide the fact that both abuse and celebration are predicated on relative proximity to European linguistic centres. In other words, Myal would have been relatively inaccessible to us had it been written in an African language: a fate being suffered by the recent works of even such an accomplished and established writer as Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o. The celebrated Caribbean ‘language continuums’, then, do not have an African language at one end and English at the other. The word ‘continuum’ itself indicates a common base, which is English or some other European language – though this fact is often forgotten by many European and ‘Creole’ champions of language continuums. The matter is further complicated when we enter the field of religion. It is difficult to speak of a “continuum of religious differentiation” (Alleyne), if one means a continuum with African faiths at one end and European Christianity at the other; not because there might not be predominantly African faiths in the Caribbean, but because these faiths cannot, historically or theologically, be placed on the same continuum as European Enlightenment Christianity. European Enlightenment Christianity (henceforth EEC) – which is shorthand for mainstream versions of various European Christianities and colonialist churches – was and continues to be a different system from that formed by African religions. Its discursive legitimisation is different; its discursive identity constituted against ‘other superstitions’. Of these, the ‘darkest superstitions’ were often seen as emanating from the heart of Africa and of ‘African’ beliefs like Obeah and Vodou. To be incorporated into the EEC is to be creolised – to be moved from a position of resistance to one of opposition. This position of opposition is limited and, to an extent, compromising – as is obvious from the fact that the most intense and vigorous slave revolutions and revolts (such as in Haiti in 1791) have been the least Christianised ones.12 In Myal, Brodber is aware of the above relation far more than students and critics who tend to see Myalism as merely a set of African rituals and beliefs. Brodber’s Myalists are posited not only against the colonialist church (and EEC), but even more so against Obeah. Regarding this Obeah–Myalism opposition, we can well echo Ole African’s words from Myal to the effect that ‘the half has never been told’. Sociologists and anthropologists have informed us that in Caribbean societies “myal was hostile to Obeah” (Alleyne, p. 84). In his foundational study, The Sociology of Slavery, Orlando Patterson notes the differences between Myalism and Obeah: “Obeah was essentially a type of sorcery which largely involved harming others at the request of clients,


by the use of charms, poisons, and shadow catching. It was an individual practice ... Myalism, on the other hand, was obviously a form of antiwitchcraft and anti-sorcery” (Patterson, p. 188). In keeping with the above perception, in Brodber’s Myal, Dan and Willie – two embodied Myalist ‘spirits’ – narrate how bad medicine men and Obeahmen stole ‘their’ powers and deprived the people: “– Then came the outers singing our song, ruling the rulers. Hoodoo men, voodoo men, wizards and priests. Gave them our sound, then sold their own souls” (Brodber, pp. 66–7). Again, when Anita is being ‘possessed’ (and ‘raped’) by Mass Levi and her ‘adoptive’ mother, Mrs Holness, considers requisitioning the services of Obeahmen to save her, the soon-to-be-discovered Myalist, Maydene Brassington (White Hen), cautions her against it: “It is tempting but don’t go to the conjuror. You would be giving somebody else control over your spirit and good as he might be, that could be dangerous, it is unhealthy –” ... But I am not being fair to you. You couldn’t know. Some clergymen in the Christian Church are taught how to handle spirits. My father was one [such] ... Don’t reject my offer. I’ll help you to pray while you fight ... Reverend Simpson has been there. He knows. Don’t believe he is not working for you. Put your spirit in another’s hands and you hold him back. (Brodber, pp. 64–5) The Christian invitation to “pray” and the intonation of “you hold him back” consolidate the significance of the fact that Maydene refers to her father – a liberal English clergyman in England – as one of those people who know something about the spirit world. This reference brings to the fore the links between Myalism and Christianity. It is a link that is stressed throughout Brodber’s Myal. Maydene’s recovery of her Myalist past is accompanied by her praying more and more often. Even Ole African – the most ‘African’ and least Christianised member of the Myalist coven – makes his central and most dramatic appearance as a Christ figure: “it seemed as if he were a rugged cross. And the stones started to come like never before. But none of them came into the house. They all landed on him. His blood was now sprinkling the steps” (Brodber, p. 40).13 When Ella denies Ole African, she echoes a Biblical denial: “No, I do not know him” (Brodber, p. 55). Other Biblical echoes deck the narrative of Myal, ranging from exhortations to pray to the complex symbolism of “They sold Joseph, Dan” (Brodber, p. 67), uttered by one of the Myalists. Finally, in the figure of Reverend Simpson we have a Myalist who is right at the heart of the


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Baptist church. But Reverend Simpson is not where he is because of the writer’s whim. Brodber is not a Rushdie, unaware of the fact that the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre was not carried out by British soldiers; Brodber knows intimately the history and sociology of Jamaican society. Brodber is well aware of the historical links between native Baptism and Myalism in Jamaica. As Mervyn Alleyne tells us in Roots of Jamaican Culture, “Myalism became tighter and more structured, especially when it took over Baptist churches, for it not only converted these churches to Myalism but incorporated Christian elements into its own organisation” (Alleyne, pp. 96–7). However, Alleyne also implicitly posits Myalism as an African religion that commingled with Christianity: “Myalism, which is the most commonly used name for the religion that developed in Jamaica during the period of slavery, began slowly to change under the influence of Christianity” (Alleyne, p. 88). It is my contention in this chapter that, whatever the African roots of Myalism might have been, Myalism in Jamaica had always been a response to enslavement, transplantation and Christianity. Its entire ‘nature’ is creolised – collaborative and oppositional. Myalism’s conflict with Obeah is not just a transference of the African conflict between private and public magic14 or good and bad medicine. It is a reflection of the Creole–Christian nature of Myalism. It emanates partly from colonial discourses hostile to African religions and beliefs – religions and beliefs often collated with ‘bad medicine’ or reduced to and dismissed as Obeah. It reflects not only the oppositional stance that led to Christianised Myal but also resistance to the African element, ‘Obeah’, which refused to be incorporated by EEC. Here, again, we can return for historical evidence to the 1791 slave revolution of Haiti and to slave uprisings in Jamaica – for these were led not only by Blacks (and, often, Africans) but also by Obeahmen or their descendents.15 The ‘nature’ of Obeah ought to be read in the light of the identities of Jamaican Obeahmen, and here Patterson’s comments are revealing: “Who were these Obeah men? ... they were, with few exceptions, Africans ... What is significant is the fact that they ‘were generally old, misshapen or deformed Negroes of African origin’, especially those skilled in poisonous and medicinal herbs” (Patterson, p. 189). The ‘African origin’ of Obeahmen and women combines with their obvious role as repositories of traditional lore (“skilled in poisonous and medicinal herbs”) to highlight the ‘Other’ nature of Obeah. Obeah presents a site of potential resistance and hence of alterity. Myalism, on the other hand, presents a site of ‘creolisation’ – by definition, a site of potential collaboration and opposition.


It is in the above senses that one cannot read Myal as a narrative of resistance or alterity. Brodber has carefully highlighted the nature of the English–Creole text as opposition. She is aware of the fact that the possibility of resistance is not always available in places like Jamaica. What is available is the potential for opposition, for “correct[ing] images from the inside” (Brodber, p. 110). After all, that is the lesson that Ella learns when she moves from echoing a colonialist text (Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden) to critiquing another colonialist text (Mr Joe’s Farm) from within in the process of having to teach it. Ella cannot discard the colonialist text. She does not have an option outside the colonialist or neocolonialist text. She cannot walk outside herself, her cultural heritage and the colonialist text and engage in resistance. She has to work with – and against – the colonialist text. Opposition is what she can provide. Claims to the effect that, in Myal, Brodber goes beyond ‘colonising dialectics’ or that she ‘intuitively restores lost acts of memory’ have to be balanced against a full realisation of the limits of opposition. In Myal, creolised literary genres, creolised language and creolised religion are themselves acts of opposition within the so-called ‘colonial dialectics’. Memory can never be simply (or totally) ‘restored’ in such a world, for the very structures that enable memory have been erected on the creolised grounds of colonisation and opposition to colonisation.16 The colonialist text, the colonialist church, the colonial language base of English–Creole do not permit narration from without – resistance – in places like Jamaica. Brodber does narrate the enabling possibilities of narration from the inside – opposition – but the limits of opposition circumscribe her mythmaking. In other words, what enables her to speak and to ‘re/make’ myths also sets the limits of her speech and outlaws certain myths. That, after all, is the reason why this brilliant novel by Brodber bears as its title the oppositional word ‘Myal’ and not the discredited, impossible-to-assimilate, dark ‘Other’ word, Obeah. What enables Brodber to ‘narrate’, what enables Ella to ‘speak’, also restricts Brodber’s narration and Ella’s speech to opposition. This realisation is vital to understanding Myal’s problematic relationship with the Gothic. I have already highlighted how Myal strains against the mainstream traditions of European novel-writing and can be better understood, in its concern with non- or para-rational cognitive modes, peripheral beings, ghosts, spirits, ‘raping’ ‘aristocrats’, vulnerable virgins, and possession etc, within the Gothic tradition. But, of course, Myal is also written at a tangent to the Gothic tradition, though one need not attribute any conscious effort to use that tradition to Myal’s narrator or writer. That it nevertheless comes close to


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that tradition has to do with Myal’s attempt to go beyond colonialist discourses and a narrow type of rationality, and to address topics and experiences which are Other than those easily permitted within mainstream European discourses. In this sense, Myal illustrates the overlap of concerns between European Gothic and some types of postcolonial writing in general. Myal goes further than many Gothic and postcolonial texts in positing a narrative world that has its own conditions of existence and its own internal coherence. In keeping with other Caribbean texts addressed in the previous chapter, it has to engage with that extreme trope of Otherness – Obeah or Vodou – and it does so with remarkable independence of imagination, not trying to explain away the Otherness of Obeah and Vodou and not throwing up its hands in the face of the problem of narrating this irreducible Otherness. But, as I have shown above, even this effort is finally legible within a certain incorporation of the structures of opposition and resistance – so that the aspect which is fully ‘Other’ comes across permeated with negative shades of terror. Myalism, the accessible face of Caribbean Otherness because of its overlap with Christianity, ends up being assigned a morally superior position to Obeah in the narrative. In the novel, the ‘good guys’ are Myalists; the bad guys practice types of spirit possession associated with or narrated (in the case of Europeans) by association with Obeah. Much as the novel resists the tendency of colonialist thinking to establish a binary opposition that places the non-European element in a negative light, a subtle shade of this negativity nevertheless lingers on exactly those elements of the narrative which are seen as most ‘non-European’ within the European context. Opposition, in de Certeau’s terms, is made possible in the narrative of Myal, but not necessarily resistance. Difference is championed, no doubt, but alterity is still tinted negatively. Perhaps the problem, in a postcolonial context, is not so very different, except of course in extent, from the problem confronted by, grappled with and not completely resolved in such colonial texts as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

9 The Option of Magical Realism

The Gothic, as a narrative of terror, depends on a perception not just of ambivalence but also of opposition and ‘irreconcilable’ difference. While it undercuts at times the simplicity of binary oppositions, it nevertheless insists on some conception of opposed or at least contradictory forces within a specific context. This opposition, at its simplest, leads to a dualist world view: it is not surprising that the early Gothic fiction of the eighteenth century was so heavily dependent on a dualistic reading of Christianity. The good monk in Lewis’s The Monk is tempted by the Devil, and could be saved only by God.1 But, as highlighted in previous chapters, a simple dualistic reading of the world is not inevitable in Gothic fiction. For, along with crude binary oppositions at its simplest, the Gothic, at its best, insists on the recognition of entities that are not, finally, reducible (or transparent) to one another. Difference, as sheer negation, though often adopted in terror by the Gothic ‘hero/heroine’, is at least implicitly not the only option. In fact, one can argue that, simply by bringing the Devil and the divine together, by placing ‘evil’ next to ‘good’, ‘European’ cheek by jowl with ‘non-European’, even colonial Gothic fiction tended to complicate a simple dualism, while ostensibly and perforce using it. The stranger in much of Gothic fiction is always within the walls of the city, so to speak; and this, in turn, leads to the psychological Gothic in which both ‘evil’ and ‘good’ are part of the same person. While this is no doubt true, it is also true that one can have a concept of, say, ‘evil’ as opposed to ‘good’ without subscribing to a simple dualism. In Wickedness, the philosopher Mary Midgley argues convincingly against a dualistic view of evil, without conflating it with goodness. She argues against the dualistic perception that “evil is a radically distinct force in the world, co-ordinate with good and having nothing in common 132

The Option of Magical Realism

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with it” (Midgley, p. 18), while also stressing a view of “evil as negative, as a more general rejection and denial of positive capacities” (Midgley, p. 16). This negativity is not to be understood in a binary sense but more, to my mind, in the sense in which Colin McGinn suggests: the evil character “can be either agent or spectator of the suffering he relishes” (McGinn, p. 66). Here the ‘negativity’ of the “evil” Self stems from an inability/unwillingness to understand the experience of the Other, except as internal to the ‘negating/self-ish’ needs of the Self. In this sense, again, ‘emotions’ – as discussed earlier in this book – come to play a significant (and revealing) role. Hence, my argument is not that the Gothic needs a simple dualism for its generic identity. The vast critical literature stressing the genre’s fascination with in-betweenness and ambivalence demonstrates that this is not so. But I wish to point out that refusing this simple dualism does not mean conflating evil with good, negative with positive. It does not mean formulating a consciously ‘hybrid’ identity, or even celebrating hybridisation. Gothic fiction retains a sharpened perception of oppositions and borders, even when it operates in the spaces between them. One can argue that in this Gothic fiction differs from generic magical realism, which tends to narrate and champion an indistinguishable bolus. Both offer certain possibilities and problems, and these possibilities and problems impact differently on the way they narrate, or fail to narrate, the Other. One way to understand it would be to look again at the ‘colonial foreigner’ as the Gothic Other. In Gothic fiction and fiction with strong Gothic elements, this ‘foreigner’ is inserted right in the middle of the ‘self-identities’ of England or France or Europe, thus questioning assumptions on all sides. But the ‘foreignness’ of this foreigner is never erased, and neither is he or she made central to this space in which he or she is, above all, ‘foreign’ or ‘invisible’. His or her ‘strangeness’ is not consumed or denied by the colonial Gothic narrative. It may be tinted negatively, as is the case of Heathcliff (especially from the wellmeaning nurse’s perspective), for instance, but it is not subsumed to sameness. The alterity of the Other is recognised, even when it is – as by Frankenstein with his ‘monster’ – seen only or primarily as a threat. Similarly, when the supernatural takes place in Gothic fiction, it is narrated as something other than natural/normal – with all the consequent terror and dislocation. It is both linked to the natural and not simply part of it. The Gothic, for instance, sometimes mocks the notion of the natural as ‘beautiful’, but that is because the notion of the ‘beautiful’ leaves out the notion of the ‘sublime’. So, when the ‘sublime’ barges


in and disarrays the beautiful, when the supernatural starts haunting the natural, Gothic fiction does not simply say, here, that is what I told you all along. It also opens its mouth and screams in terror. This is not really (or very seldom) the case with magical realism, when the ‘magic’ rises naturally out of the ‘real’ and there is no highlighting of the opposition/contradiction/tension between the two. If this serves the necessary purpose of “exposing discourses of difference”, which is rightly “one of the projects of postcolonial literature and criticism” (Edwards, 2008, p. 18), it also runs the risk of positing an implicit or explicit sameness. However, before returning to this crucial matter, let us take a quick look at ‘magical realism’ in fiction in general. Without being too polemical, one can argue that some of what is considered magical realism today distils a whiff of laziness. For instance, in an acclaimed recent novel (Chandra2), the narrator is faced with a problem: a character who, sometime in the future, needs to understand a conversation in a language he does not know at present. Hey presto, the magic solution: this character is suddenly blessed with the ability to remember entire sound sequences verbatim, so that, when he finally learns the language in the far future, he can understand what was uttered in the past. This is by no means exceptional or extreme. Much of magical realist fiction, especially in recent years, is full of such shortcuts to narratability. It is easy to defend these examples of authoritative laziness by thumping the drums of anti-realism, non-European perspectives and the ‘fantastic’. But the fact remains that the best of magical realism (such as Marquez or, for that matter, Rushdie in Midnight’s Children) used to create a world that – as is the case with realistic narratives – established, and operated according to, its own internal coherence. The problem is not that the ‘laws of probability’ are flouted in magical realism, or in fantastic fiction in general. As Todorov notes, The probable is ... not necessarily opposed to the fantastic: the former is a category that deals with internal coherence, with submission to the genre; the fantastic refers to an ambiguous perception shared by the reader and one of the characters. Within the genre of the fantastic, it is probable that “fantastic” reactions will occur. (Todorov, 1970, p. 46) Moreover, fictional realism, unlike what is often implied, is not the photography of ‘reality’, for fiction cannot and does not claim any ‘truth value’ outside its own circumference and language. Hence,


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even realist fiction is above all a narrative that contains elements standing in a complex mutual relationship, which is internal to their existence in the world of the narrative (and, only incidentally, in the world on which the narrative is based). When the salesmen snigger about Denise and the salesgirls plot against her and Mouret, the playboy entrepreneur, resists the idea of marriage, what Zola achieves (in The Ladies’ Paradise) is not just a ‘realistic’ description but a convincing arrangement of the relations that construct and hold in place the elements of that narrative. The same can be said of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or George Elliot’s Middlemarch or any novel by Thomas Hardy. Todorov has rightly noted that “[t]ruth is a relation between words and things that the words designate; now in literature, these ‘things’ do not exist. On the other hand, literature does admit a requirement of validity or internal coherence” (Todorov, 1970, p. 83). Todorov expands this idea by drawing on an earlier example from his book on the fantastic. He has already illustrated that a statement like ‘John was in the room, lying on his bed’ in a novel cannot be considered true or false, unless it has been made by a character who, like all characters in or outside literature, may be lying. Now he adds: “[I]f on the next page of the same imaginary book, we are told there is no bed in John’s room, the text does not fulfil the requirement of coherence, and thereby makes that requirement a problem, introduces it into its thematics as a problem” (Todorov, ibid.). Hence, if – to continue Todorov’s example – it turns out that, despite the preceding statement about John sleeping on his bed in his room, the narrative goes on to tell us that there is no bed in John’s room, we are faced with a problem that Todorov has explored comprehensively in The Fantastic. The mystery may have a natural explanation, and, once this explanation arrives, according to Todorov, the narrative will fall into the genre of the “uncanny”. Or it may have a supernatural explanation and, again, once this supernatural explanation is given, the narrative falls into the genre of the “marvellous”. But if and as long as the narrative makes the reader hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations, it falls into the category of the “fantastic”, according to Todorov. Hence, the missing bed on which John is supposed to be lying moves the narrative away from the realm of ‘mundane probability’, but it does not do away with the need for internal coherence. This is true even if a ‘supernatural’ or ‘magical’ solution is propounded, for this explanation will have to be internally coherent within the narrative and not just an ‘aside’, a last-minute plug, a filler.


When we move away from fictional realism – whether socially or psychologically inclined – we do not do away with the need to establish the internal coherence of the narrative. If anything, we increase and complicate that need. For now, the ‘magic’ has to stand in some sort of relationship to ‘reality’ in the text, and the magical elements themselves have to achieve coherence among themselves within the narrative. This even takes place at least some of the time in such seemingly incoherent novels as Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard.3 This lack of ‘probable’ coherence, in a realistic sense, is obviously an aspect of magical realist fiction. In itself, this is nothing to be condemned, for it can be used, as Todorov suggests, to introduce a ‘problem’ – in the narrative, in the traditions of the genre, in philosophical apprehension of the world etc. This means that the lack of ‘realistic’ coherence is presupposed on the presence of some sort of thematic, narratorial or philosophical structure that is, in its own terms if not in accordance with ‘mundane reality’, internally coherent. When some recent magical realist novel deviates too easily from the need to establish this narrative tension and internal coherence, it does so only at the cost of art. The blame need not be laid at the doors of magical realism, as I have indicated above, but it is true that magical realism offers more temptations in these directions for postcolonial writers. In some ways, its very genesis as a literary style in modern times indicates this. Magical realism – as a contemporary literary style and not as ‘surrealism’ or the ‘magischer realismus’ or ‘neue sachlichkeit’ of ‘postimpressionist’ art – can be traced back to discussions of the ‘baroque’ and the ‘marvellous real’ by the great Cuban writer, Alejo Carpentier. In his seminal essay of 1949, Carpentier devised the term ‘lo real maravilloso americano’ to describe what he considered a uniquely American form. This was not just a literary form but a sensibility rooted in the history and existence of America: “What is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvellous real?”, as Carpentier put it, and he had in mind not only the mixture of peoples and languages but also El Dorado and mythical beings (Carpentier, in Zamora and Faris, p. 88). In this essay, and another published in 1975, Carpentier had much of interest to say about Latin America, the world, literary styles, perceptual paradigms and the nature and importance of creolisation. But, with all its strengths, the 1949 essay (and the perspective that grew out of it) was still the essay of a Latin American returning ‘home’ after years abroad, especially in Europe. In its very perception of America as a mixture of the magical and the real, there was a movement – frankly conceded and acknowledged by the great writer – from Europe to the


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rest, from ‘colonial’ myths of purity to ‘postcolonial’4 realities of mixing (mestizaje). One can argue that this perception, though justified as a counter to Eurocentric discourses, was nevertheless defined by the relationship of Europe to itself and to the rest of the world. There is nothing particularly new in a perspective that sees non-Europe as mixed, hybrid, a combination of the real and the magical/fantastic – though there was (and continues to be in the best of magical realist literature) something partly radical and necessary in a celebration of the Creole, the development of ‘impurities’ into a literary style of adamant impurity. From way back – ranging from the classical Romans all the way down to the late Victorians – many in Europe had tended to see non-Europe as hybrid, fragmented, inconsistent, superstitious, impure, contaminating. To narrate Latin America – or, increasingly, Africa and Asia – in magical realist terms might question the primacy of the terms or even the nature of the binarism, but it does not provide a new paradigm of ‘non-Europe’ from this particular Eurocentric perspective (a perspective which can be traced back in part to Herodotus). Today, half a century after Carpentier’s necessary reformulation, perhaps ‘magical realism’ as a style lends itself more easily to a certain lazy evasiveness of the relations that construct both realities and the marvellous, both purities and impurities? Perhaps it requires a greater creative effort to see how mestizaje is part of Europe and how ‘realism’ is also a non-European tradition than to use ‘magic’ – a common Eurocentric tendency – to narrate non-European ‘realities’? Can it be that magical realism – in its easy acceptance of a standard European paradigm (regarding the non-European world) – slants writers away from an engagement with the internal relations that not only enable all narratives but also construct ‘reality’ and ‘magic’? So much so that, finally, in the weaker examples of the subgenre, magical realist fiction loses its own internal coherence? Furthermore, what can one make of the claim, advanced or implicitly accepted by various writers and critics, that the mixture of ‘fantastic’ and realistic elements is per se subversive? It is true that, within a tradition of novel writing, the intrusion of the supernatural can be disruptive. That, for instance, is one of the reasons why we continue to study the rise of Gothic fiction against the backdrop of eighteenth-century rationalism and classicism. But to stop there is to tell only half the story. Carpentier, for instance, was aware of the other half too. He saw the Americas as a marvellous realm partly because of a colonial inheritance: the search, for example, for El Dorado. As Todorov, among others, has noted, the


earliest ‘discoverers’ and explorers of the Americas took with them certain beliefs which mingled the ‘real’ with the ‘fantastic’: “Columbus believes not only in Christian dogma, but also (and he is not alone at the time) in Cyclopes and mermaids, in Amazons and men with tails, and his belief, as strong as Saint Peter’s, therefore permits him to find them” (Todorov, 1982, p. 15). In this sense, does not magical realism – at least in the postcolonial context – simply superimpose a common European tendency to view the non-European, as I have already noted above? But there are other problems. It has also been argued that magical realism fulfils a radical role by contesting the ‘Cartesian certainties’ of the European tradition. This is true, but only partly. One can argue that magical realism does not, if one follows the useful scheme worked out by Todorov, fall into the genre of the ‘fantastic’, because in magical realism, by definition, the magic has to be an integral and irreducible part of the ‘reality’ being described. As Wendy B. Faris puts it, “magical realism combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed” (Faris, p. 163). In that sense, does magical realism leave any space for Otherness at all? By collapsing all possible oppositions, does it also reduce alterity to a kind of ‘hybridity’ that is always there, integral to itself and reality, and hence finally devoid of contestation? If the postcolonial championing of ‘hybridity’ was salutary in the wake of colonial theories of ‘purity’ (which led to, among other things, genocides in and outside Europe), it has not been without problems, some of which also afflict magical realism. Young notes, correctly, that “Herder’s argument ... works by a central paradox, which we will see repeated in Gobineau: while on the one hand colonisation and racial mixture are regarded by Herder as introducing a fatal heterogeneity, on the other hand the very progress of mankind comes as the result of diffusionism, or cultural mixing and communication, whereby cultural achievements of one society are grafted onto another” (Young, 1995, p. 41). But, from the opposite viewpoint, this is also the central paradox in any specific celebration of ‘hybridity’, for this celebration depends, in its specificity, on the presence, theoretical or actual, of that which is not-hybrid. One of the more common theoretical assumptions of postcolonialism (along these lines) rests on a slanted reading of M. M. Bakhtin. This comes across even in the work (or, to be honest, the earlier work) of a scholar of the stature of Robert J. C. Young. In Colonial Desire, he writes, It is a commonplace of Romantic thinking that, as Humboldt puts it, “each language embodies a view of the world peculiarly its own” – an


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idea that was developed by Voloshinov into the “struggle for the sign.” For Bakhtin, however, hybridity delineates the way in which language, even within a single sentence, can be double-voiced. (Young, 1995, p. 20) Correct enough in itself, this reading – and particularly the forced opposition of Voloshinov and Bakhtin (who belonged to the same circle and shared more or less the same views) – tends to ignore the fact that, for Bakhtin, the double-voicedness of every sentence, every word was premised on the social life of each language. Dead languages were monolingual, so to say; living languages were always dialogical and hybrid. Voloshinov, starting from the perspective of society, traced how the various meanings of every living word are always being struggled over. Bakhtin, talking more in terms of language and literature, noticed how each living word is hybrid, multi-voiced – but he presumed, in keeping with the Marxist tradition within which he wrote his critique, the existence of a social struggle over the meanings, the many voices of each word. That, after all, was the point of his notion of carnivalisation as well. The double-voicedness of the sentence and the multiple meanings of each word do not exist in a state of ideal equivalence and equal revelation; they are always being struggled over in the society which keeps that language alive. Young is too erudite a scholar to completely miss this point about Bakhtin and he notes, later in the same chapter, that Bakhtin is “more concerned with a hybridity that has been politicised and made contestatory” (Young, 1995, p. 21). But the point is that, for Bakhtin, the very possibility of hybridisation rests in the livingness of a language in a contestatory social matrix; this aspect is evaded in certain postcolonial versions of hybridity and leads to some problems in ‘magical realism’. Interestingly, while theorists do not want magical realism to be read allegorically, magical realism itself tends towards the ‘allegorical’ because of its seamless combination of the ‘magical’ (as fantastic) and the real (as mundane). Talking of Nikolai Gogol’s story, ‘The Nose’ (in which a nose comes alive and separates from its ‘owner’), Todorov notes: “It is, on the contrary, the life of Saint Petersburgh down to its most mundane details. Since the supernatural elements are therefore not here to evoke a universe different from our own, we are tempted to search out an allegorical interpretation of them” (Todorov, 1970, p. 72). However, this condition – the ‘magical’ in a ‘mundane’ setting – is common to magical realism and, according to many of its theorists, essential to it.

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One can argue that, unlike Todorov’s ‘fantastic’ and the Gothic, which are based on concrete encounters with ‘solid’ alterity (the natural and supernatural for Todorov’s ‘fantastic’, various kinds of Otherness in the Gothic and Gothicised text), magical realism tends towards a liquid state of the intermingling of opposites. Is this simply emancipatory and radical, or is it also an aspect of the dominant ethos of our times? Zygmunt Bauman argues in Liquid Modernity that the current phase of modernity (or postmodernity) is characterised by a certain privileging of the liquid over the solid, the private over the public. He points out that What is currently happening is not just another renegotiation of the notoriously mobile boundary between the private and the public. What seems to be at stake is a redefinition of the public sphere, as a scene on which private dramas are staged, put on public display and publicly watched ... The consequence arguably most seminal is the demise of ‘politics as we know it’ –Politics with a capital P, the activity charged with the task of translating private problems into public issues (and vice versa). It is the effort of such translation which is nowadays grinding to a halt ... What are commonly and ever more often perceived as “public issues” are private problems of public figures. (Liquid Modernity, p. 70) Private problems of public figures would be one way to understand the clown–terrorist, hence reduced from his alterity, in Rushdie’s Shalimar, the Clown. But that is not my point. What I want to highlight is the tendency in magical realism to collapse differences, unite them within a fluid whole. This is best illustrated in its self-definition as fiction that combines the magical with the ‘real’ in such a way that both are essentially the same or at least interchangeable. This has its advantages. But it also has the disadvantage of removing both as containing possible contradictions, and definitely aspects that are not possible to combine without doing violence to the one or the other. This disadvantage extends to other aspects of magical realist fiction, or at least the weaker specimens, and curtails the narrative of Otherness and alterity.5 If it recognises the Other as “meeting and friendship”, it reduces the Other as “limit and menace” (in Levinas’s words, quoted earlier) – but both aspects are essential to a full conception of Otherness. Let me illustrate this with just one recent example, a novel that in its themes and concerns might have been ‘Gothic’ if it had not adopted the stylistic option of magical realism. It is an interesting novel in its


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own right, and by a significant English-language writer from India. Fireproof (2007) is Raj Kamal Jha’s third novel, of which the first, The Blue Bedspread (1999), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Eurasia). Fireproof concerns itself with one of the most serious problems that confront contemporary India – ‘communal riots’, the term used to define violent conflicts between two religious, linguistic or ethnic communities, but most often to define bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims in India. As such, it concerns itself with death – and such potentially Gothic aspects of it as ‘ghosts’, murders, monsters etc. It starts with a petition-like “opening statement” by the dead, point number three of which presents a number of opposites/differences unified by the removal of punctuation marks: That alternatively, you may refer to us, at any time, by one or more of any of the following: bird beast, black blue, Hindu Muslim, Muslim Hindu, fire ice, cock cunt, song dance, sickness health, bridge river, radio TV, cat dog, night day. So on and so on. (Jha, p. 3) Then, later in the same statement, the ‘dead’ report That once dead, we discovered gifts we never knew we had. We found a home in the sky far above, where, as the poet says in the child’s book, there is plenty of room in the blue. We can ride across the city curled around wisps of smoke. We can climb up drops of rain to reach the castles of clouds, paint them red, yellow, any colour we choose. And while we are up there, we can scrub the moon clean, stoke the sun if it begins to cool. Our children can dance underwater on the tips of leaves, our fish can fly, our birds can swim. In short, we can do anything. Except coming back to life, of course. (Jha, p. 5) What is significant about this ‘statement’ is the way in which death – in keeping with the kind of magical realism framing the narrative of the novel – is amalgamated with life. First, differences and opposites are dissolved. Then the Otherness of the dead vis-à-vis the living is also reduced: the dead do the same things as the living; actually death is merely an opening up of possibilities in all regard but one. They have a home, they discover gifts, they ride, climb, paint etc. They have dancing children, fish, birds. There is little or no space here for the terror with which the Gothic regards the dead, the screams with which it greets the Otherness of death returning to life.6 The dead do not only

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act and behave and live like the living; (using transparent terms) they even have similar values and thoughts: That considering all of the above, we decided death should not be an excuse for inaction, grief should not become a substitute for sloth. That instead of trying to fight the fire with our tears, perhaps the time had come for us to give ourselves the promise of a better future, maybe some justice as well. (Jha, p. 6) Strangely, while the alterity of Death – which, as Bronfen suggests in Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, is the Other of Life – is reduced to a strange echoing of the lifelike, Death becomes legible in terms of the living. Its difference, when it appears, also becomes just an overturning of the normally lifelike: birds swim, fishes fly. (This is not far from the usual reversing of the Self that passes for a narrative of the Other in some colonial fiction.) What is left out is the irreducible alterity of the experience of Death, the Otherness that can be experienced in terms of transcending possibility or acute terror (or both). Similarly, if the Otherness of the dead disappears in Fireproof, the figure of the ‘monster’ is also reduced. While Ithim, the mutilated baby born to the (living) narrator, is described with much attention to grotesque details, its Otherness is again and again drowned in a flood of descriptions, the language of transparency, as in the long excerpt on pages 15 to 18 of Fireproof. This connects again with a general tendency in magical realist novels: these novels, like those of Salman Rushdie, teem with mutilated figures and acts of mutilation, but the descriptions and acts are singularly devoid of emotional impact. They are not ‘terrible’, nor do they ‘terrorise’ as much as even newspaper reports can – let alone the terror of a Frankenstein faced with his monster, or any run-of-the-mill gothic protagonist discovering his first mutilated body or monster. It is as if the magic realist narrative cannot express the pain of bodily mutilation, perhaps because the conjoinings that it narrates take place only or largely in language and so are obviously positive aspects of a celebrated ‘hybridity’. This is very different from the Gothic, which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, is filled not only with screams but also with heightened moments of emotion. In keeping with shrinking space for the perception of Otherness, the narrative of Fireproof also explains away too much. Even the meaning of the central and potentially Gothic Other in its narrative – the voiceless, featureless monster baby, Ithim (It-him) – is given over a page-long


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extract when one of the doctors enquires after the meaning of the name (Jha, pp. 47–8). The fact that magical realist texts need to amalgamate differences in a bid to narrate them, or do justice to the ‘negative’ term of a binarism, seems to reduce the scope of Otherness more often than not: this can also be seen in the bid to narrate ‘terrorist violence’, say by Salman Rushdie in Shalimar, The Clown, as basically a kind of deviance, inspired by a broken heart or some such fully ‘transparent’ feeling. But the narration of ‘death’, violence and other themes common to Fireproof need not lead inevitably to an erasure of Otherness in postcolonial literature, or even in fiction that uses the fantastic. In his story, ‘The Devil’, Achmat Dangor, the South African poet and writer, presents an ordinary man, Sharman, with a disturbed childhood, who, in mature middle age, after his wife leaves him and after years of a placidly ‘strange’ existence, starts inhabiting the bodies of others. He travels the land in these other bodies, mostly those of men, watching and indirectly instigating the horrors of apartheid and the violence of postapartheid South Africa. Sharman and the bodies he inhabits never “pull a trigger”, but he “nudge[s] into brilliant and murderous goading more sane people than any other devil he knew” (Dangor, p. 156). The story pivots on the suggestion that Sharman is one of many devils/demons who inhabit the bodies of “ordinary” people, making them participate in, or at least condone, such atrocities as “massacres”. But the orgy of torture and killing – a reflection on the violence of the days of apartheid – lead Sharman to “boredom” and make him change his tactics: in the end, boredom and not exhaustion ... forced Sharman to reconsider his tactics ... He realised that all the endless killing had been foolish. People wearied of it, turned away from the beauty of its horror precisely because it numbed them. (Dangor, p. 157) Instead, Sharman feels “something much bolder was needed, a demonstration of the precise power of evil” (Dangor, p. 157), and he resolves to kill the recently released Nelson Mandela. Then, he rationalises, “everyone would feel a sense of loss” (Dangor, p. 157). For that purpose, he enters the being of “Veli Maluleke, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who lived with his mother on the grounds of Mandela’s gracious home in Houghton” (Dangor, p. 158), an “innocent” and “beautiful” boy. Sharman inhabits Veli, but, on the day of the murder, Veli goes to bed with a young girl, upsetting (in a more complex way than paraphrased here) Sharman’s plans.

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Leaving aside the historical echoes, not only of apartheid but also of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa, the story is significant – from the perspective of my study – for the attempt to explain the Otherness of violence. For this is violence that is committed, and instigated or condoned, by ordinary people. In the moment when an ordinary person casts aside the garments of normality and commits or instigates an act of extreme violence, he can be understood, within ordinary morality, only as committing evil. As ‘evil’ could not be part of his ‘normality’ and ‘ordinariness’, it has to be seen as coming from elsewhere: hence the notion of Satan in general, and hence Sharman, the devil who inhabits people in Dangor’s story. Dangor, of course, complicates matters beautifully by positing an ordinariness for Sharman too, and by introducing an ending that, in the process of sexual love, a reaching out for the Other, provides an antidote for the Otherness of ‘Evil’. Here, evil – as Sharman–Devil – is seen as the Other that possesses the ordinary Self, but love – as the sexual act – is also an engagement with the Other that is capable of bestowing redemption. By introducing this pattern, Dangor illustrates the twin nature of Otherness – often reduced to the opposition of evil– good or negative–positive in traditional thought, but more fruitfully conceptualised as the link that exists between the Other and the Self partly as and because of their mutual irreducibility to each other. It is here that the Gothic, despite all its colonial penchant for reading difference negatively, seems to effectively leave enough space for at least acknowledging the alterity of the Other. Some ‘general’ novels also reveal and employ this advantage of the Gothic. For instance, E. M. Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, assumes its most Gothicised moment in the caves that force even Forster’s narrative to face the limits of his philosophy of ‘only connect’. Similarly, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s important first novel, English, August, is distinguished among other things by the profane, matter-offact tone and world of its urban protagonist. The novel does not slant towards the Gothic when its privileged male fantasises or acts to exploit weak females sexually (a relationship susceptible to Gothic renditions from the time of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Lewis’s The Monk onwards.) But it does run into the Gothic when the actions of ‘tribals’ against the middle-class male ethos are narrated. Here the text turns to versions of Gothicised horror, violence and Otherness: as in the incident when a character, called Gandhi, has his hands chopped off by local ‘tribals’ (aborigines) for seducing a tribal woman (Chatterjee, pp. 261–3).


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This is perhaps inevitable, given the relationship of the narrator– protagonist’s class to Indian rural/aboriginal peoples in the novel, a relationship that quite bravely exposes its own colonial underpinnings. In these cases, two different writers – Forster and Chatterjee – writing from outside the magical realist and Gothic traditions nevertheless use a Gothicised excerpt to suggest a narrative moment where ‘foreignness’ cannot be reduced to the Self-same. To conclude, one might add that there is a tendency in recent thinking, reflected in postcolonialism but perhaps at its strongest in what is called postmodernism, to dissolve the Other into the Self, or vice versa. In either case, it comes to the same thing. For instance, in such texts as For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) and Simulacra and Simulations (1981), Baudrillard dismisses distinctions between signified and referent, thing and idea etc. He posits instead “a strange new world constructed out of models or simulacra which have no referent or ground in any ‘reality’ except their own” (Baudrillard, p. 6). Such perceptions are useful to the extent that Baudrillard’s readings are meant to suggest that the object, primarily the simulated object, has usurped the privileged position previously occupied by the subject. To take them further, however, is to do something similar to collapsing the Other into the Self or the Self into the Other. For (conceptually speaking) subject and object can be understood as having a relationship of Otherness to each other, as can the signified and the referent, etc. This is, as Levinas might put it, an ethical relationship: its failure lies in the usurpation of the entire space by one of the two, by the Self or the Other. In a different but not irrelevant context, Bauman notes in Liquid Modernity that the “main point about civility is ... the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place” (pp. 104–5). It is true, as Bhabha, among others, highlights, that it is in the liminal space of ‘in-betweenness’ that colonial Otherness – or, for that matter, Otherness itself – is constituted. Hence, the Other cannot be seen as occupying a fixed phenomenological point opposed to the Self. It might also be true, to an extent, that the subject of desire is never simply a ‘myself’ and therefore the Other is never simply an itself, as Bhabha insists (Bhabha, 1994). But, in the moment in which the stranger is truly Other, there exists not only the possibility of desire but also that of threat/terror, for above all there exists an alterity which cannot be subsumed simply into negativity or similarity. While Otherness might come into being in a liminal space, it is not simply a space of ‘meetings’

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and ‘overlaps’, so to speak. It is also a space of differences and contrasts and struggle, even if the struggle is largely in a dominant language with that which cannot be confined to that language. From a different perspective, again, one need hardly point out that encounter, dialogue and interaction are premised on the perception of strangeness, not on its blurring or eclipse. Sometimes, in a bid to celebrate difference, magical realist texts amalgamate it into the Self-same, and thus do away with its essential alterity. Young has correctly noted that “[t]here is no single, or correct, concept of hybridity. It changes as it repeats, but it also repeats as it changes” (Young, 1995, p. 27). If that is so, hybridity is a temporal concept: the hybrid exists in a coming-intobeing; there is no given hybrid. The moment one thinks of the hybrid on the spatial plane – as an entity – one ends up running the risk of reducing alterity to the Self-same. The Gothic, though it can be faulted for its ‘colonial binarisms’, allowed space for the narration of contestation as a fact of existence because it allowed space for the alterity of the Other, the difference outside language that, even when it was blanked out or registered in negative terms in language, led the ‘European’ self to scream, shriek, rant or cry.

10 Narration, Literary Language and the Post/Colonial

There is no doubt that works such as those John Thieme aptly terms “postcolonial con-texts” tend to “induce a reconsideration of the supposedly hegemonic status” of canons and open up “fissures in their supposedly solid foundations” (Thieme, 2001). There is also no doubt that many postcolonial texts take up the necessary job of narrating overlooked stories or narrating canonical stories from a different perspective – and this serves a radical purpose. But, again and again, postcolonialism runs into the problem of narrating Otherness. It encounters this problem not only in thematic but also in stylistic terms. It is obvious enough from the preceding discussion that the themes of narration, in order to be legible, are often formulated in many postcolonial novels in terms that are accessible to the ‘Self’. This can happen in a major ‘realist’ novel, such as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (with its largely anglophone–colonial schemata of Hindu caste1), or in a major magical realist novel, such as Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar, the Clown (with its largely anglophone–individualist schemata of terror). One can also argue that the spate of interest in ‘multicultural’ novels based in Western cities, including such fine examples as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, is at least partly attributable to the fact that such works (consciously or unconsciously) provide their Western and Westernisedglobal readership with aspects of difference that can be easily digested within the context of ‘European Selfhood’ (now that multiculturalism is commonly considered an aspect of European/ised postcolonial experience). I have already indicated this problem earlier on. Again, in stylistic terms – as read in the previous chapter – a style like that of magical realism can serve the purpose of reducing the alterity of the Other. One way to look at the problem would be to look at the language of postcolonial narratives. By this I mean, obviously, narratives in 147

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once-Eurocolonial languages written by subjects in or from postcolonial nations, e.g. ‘Indian English’ or francophone Algerian novels. The narration of postcolonial stories in, say, English runs the gauntlet of either accepting Standard English usages or contending with them. Both options present certain advantages and disadvantages – and both present different dangers to the narration of difference (let alone Otherness). The eruption of other languages into an English-language text (thus contending with Standard English) is a complex issue and one that differs from context to context. As I have already noted in my reading of Myal, while the use of Caribbean Creoles marks ‘opposition’, it does not mark ‘resistance’ – as the base language, English, already incorporates the Creole into certain assumptions about the world that are difficult to escape even in the case of a radical novel like Myal. In these cases, and in the case of a novel like Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, the intrusion of non-English linguistic elements serves to indicate the ‘different’ reality of the narrative and the narrator. But the pressure of legibility within the circles of English also presses that ‘difference’ into at least substantial transparency to the Self-same. This, of course, varies from book to book: readers of Saro-Wiwa might find Sozaboy more difficult than Myal, while Myal might be more difficult than Shalimar, the Clown, and so on and so forth, in terms of the use – nature and extent – of the non-English linguistic element. The existence of difference suggested in any one particular language by creolisation, hybridity, dialogism etc is not to be confused with the problem of the Other and the Self. The two exist at different conceptual levels. The notion of difference is not the same as the notion of alterity (or Otherness), though the latter perforce includes the former. We have to talk of difference when talking of alterity/Otherness, but we need not have alterity/Otherness in mind when discussing every difference. One way to conceptualise this would be to bear in mind that we often talk of a ‘resolution’ of differences. Alterity, on the other hand, presents a difference that cannot be resolved: it is this that makes the relation of the Self with the Other an “ethical” one, in Levinas’s terms. However, the attempt to press the borders of a dominant language within that language is sometimes, implicitly or explicitly, read by postcolonialism as an attempt to allow space for difference, sometimes even alterity/Otherness, to be narrated. Hence, it needs to be addressed. One way to understand this would be to look at Salman Rushdie’s use of the English language. This will move us away from a Gothic focus momentarily, but it is in keeping with my agenda: for the main purpose of this section is to examine the problem of narrating Otherness in

Narration, Literary Language, the Post/Colonial

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postcolonialism, and examine it against my earlier reading of the Other in colonial Gothic/ised fiction. To understand Rushdie’s achievement and its limitations – which are connected with the problem of narrating Otherness – one has to go back to the official founding of English-language literacy in India by the Governor General, Thomas Babington (later Lord) Macaulay. It is, however, faulty to see Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835) in isolation: Indians like Raja Ram Mohan Roy had been pressing for education in English for some time. However, when Macaulay resolved the ongoing debate between ‘Orientalists’ (who wanted Indians to be educated in their own languages) and ‘Anglicists’ (who wanted Indians to be educated in English), he – and his followers – introduced an essentialist and evaluative binarism into the choice that was largely missing from the thought of Indian reformers like Rammohan Roy. Roy, who had started his reformist career in Farsi (not English, as is widely assumed), saw English as a window to modern and scientific education. His assumption was that English would be adopted by Indians in the public sphere (as Farsi had been in the past), while other Indian languages would continue to operate in the private sphere. Macaulay, however, saw English as an instrument of control – it would create a buffer zone of colonial subjects – and a symbol of superiority/ civilisation: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (Macaulay, in Allen and Trivedi, p. 198). The end result was a gradual divorce between education in English and education in other Indian languages. When the schools of theology in Europe were finally turning into ‘modern’ and ‘secular’ universities, Indian madrassas and ashrams were forcibly and discursively receding into traditional and time-warped branches of learning, while ‘modern’ education at the highest level was largely imparted to a small urban class in ‘English-medium’ institutions. In short, the colonised were being given the common choice of becoming the Self-same or an obverse Self, the negativised/fetishised Other. The prestige and the advantages of a up-to-date education drove some of the most ambitious Indians, provided they could afford it, to these English-medium institutions, which continue to be prestigious (and for good reasons) in independent India. But it also created a strange situation in which some Indians started writing creatively in English, either from choice or necessity, about an India in which most people did not speak English. But Rushdie’s literary language is also partly an index of the sociohistorical changes that India has undergone since 1835. English still


has a special (though embattled) relationship of privilege to other Indian languages, but it is also an Indian language to the extent that it is spoken, read and written by many Indians. Recent census figures suggest that about 4 per cent of India speaks English, though many of these English-speakers presumably also speak other languages. Four per cent of India is 40 million people, which is larger than the population of most European nations. Moreover, a smattering of English will be familiar – legible or audible – to a number of urban Indians who might not be able to speak or write it with any degree of fluency. In other words, since the days of Macaulay, English has come to permeate the rich linguistic matrix of India even as it has also been, to some extent, ‘nativised’. All Indian languages contain hundreds of English (and European) words today, some so deeply camouflaged that they can only be distinguished by the scholarly eye, just as English contains hundreds of Indian words. Rushdie’s use of Hindustani words in his fiction is an index of this change. So is his post-independence and diasporic bravado with the English language. Such bravado would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine in a fully colonial subject striving to mimic the ‘correct’ language of the coloniser. ‘Eat, na, food is spoiling,’ (p. 24) says Padma, the much-ignored listener–lover of Saleem-the-narrator-protagonist, in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Padma is the kind of semi-literate, working-class urban Indian who would speak, at best, broken English, replete with nonEnglish idiomatic flourishes. As such, the fact that she is made to speak broken English in Midnight’s Children is neither surprising nor brave. Indians had for long been accused of assaulting English. It was an accusation that had provoked the Bombay journalist Malabari to such a degree even in the nineteenth century that he had felt the need to answer back (Khair, Leer, Edwards and Ziadeh, Ed, pp. 366–81). Rushdie’s bravery, then, lies in partly exorcising this viciously scoffing ghost of monolingual colonialism, and he does so not by making Padma speak as she does but by making his narrators in Midnight’s Children, Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the exceptional and often overlooked Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), and some of the stories in East, West (1994) speak as they sometimes do. In this, at his best, Rushdie tries to avoid the relationship of colonial power that the narrator has with some of his characters in, say, V. S. Naipaul’s early works, in which the narrator speaks Standard English and the characters speak broken English.2 But Rushdie did not simply replace the keys of his typewriter with the mike of a tape-recorder taken into ‘the streets of India’. If he had done


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so, his books would have been illegible – and unpublished. There was much he could work with, but it did not add up to a coherent ‘literary language’, partly because literary languages are, by definition, crafted and not copied, and partly because, as illustrated above, English is not spoken in the streets of India. The latter is a problem any serious writer of English in India (and many other postcolonial societies), or actually any serious writer who wishes to narrate India and Indians in English, has to confront, thus complicating the already complex issue of narrating Otherness in any language. Rushdie’s option – though perhaps the flashiest – is only one of various partial (and partially deceptive) solutions. Rushdie’s option moves in two directions. At its most complex, his language contains references, insights, puns and jokes – such as the “Rani of Cooch Nahin” (which subtly plays on an actual Indian place and ex-monarchy, ‘Cooch Behar’, and the fact that ‘Cooch Nahin’ [kuch nahin] means ‘nothing’) in Midnight’s Children – which are fully accessible only to readers who know the many dialects and offspringlanguages of Hindustani spoken mostly in North India (and Pakistan). But Rushdie also writes for a non-North Indian readership and, hence, his language also turns to face another direction and conveys an atmosphere of ‘Indianness’ to the reader who can access India only in English. This can suggest postmodernist or magical realist playfulness. It can also lead to problems. Most problematically, some of Rushdie’s language use – especially in and after The Moor’s Last Sigh – appears gratuitous at first glance. Consider the acronym of Mynah’s (the Moor’s sister) feminist group. This is given as “WWSTP”, which is then glossed as “We Shall Smash This Prison (Is Jailko Todkar Rahenge)”. This gloss reverses what appears to be the logical order of explanations – Hindustani followed by English. The Hindustani version appears particularly superfluous when one realises that it does not tally with the acronym. It is not needed to explain the acronym. The only reason it is there is to confer a degree of vernacular ‘authenticity’ on Rushdie’s description – not because it is needed (as the full version of a Hindustani acronym) or because it is meant to convey a mite extra to Hindustani speakers. Here, obviously, linguistic Otherness is performing a not uncommon postcolonialist monkey trick for the Self-same.3 One feature of Rushdie’s language is his use of Hindustani–English compound neologisms, such as ‘dia-lamp’ on page 280 in The Moor’s Last Sigh. This is something he appears to have adapted from G. V. Desani and certain Indian English usages. For instance, Indian English newspapers


often write about something called a ‘lathi-charge’: a baton charge, but for the fact that Indian policemen do not use sleek, short ‘batons’. They use long bamboo sticks – lathis. Hence, ‘lathi-charge’ describes a reality with a difference. Rushdie’s neologism, dia-lamp, is not the same as actual Indian– English neologisms (such as lathi-charge). Lathi-charge unites two different words, each carrying a particular semantic charge, to convey a third meaning. But ‘dia’ is itself a lamp, at best a clay lamp. A ‘dia-lamp’ is a ‘lamp-lamp’: such redundant compounds are not found in actual Indian English usage, except in ironic post-Rushdie mimicry (and in the ‘staged English’ of Desani’s 1948 novel, from which Rushdie might have taken it).4 Here, then, is another attempt to narrate a difference that is, after all, not ‘irreducible’ and hence cleverly sidesteps the problem of narrating alterity. Rushdie’s literary language can be accessed in its full complexity only when it is seen as the (at times brilliant) art of a major talent impacting on given socio-historical factors. It is not a tape-recording of Indian English, partly because of the class–cultural dimension highlighted above and partly because, as Braj Kachru points out, there are “several varieties within [the] variety” of Indian English. Rushdie often manages to combine many of the oral and written registers that can be found in some of these varieties – at his best focusing on some prominent aspects and at his worst ignoring social subtleties in favour of something like staged English. Above all, he uses that hybrid language in novels that champion – in style, plot and theme – a particularly appropriate world view of playful hybridity, of palimpsest cultures. In spite of the occasional limitations of Rushdie’s experiment, his literary language cannot be dismissed as just West-facing gimmickry: it is part of a larger philosophical and historical point being made about life and India. And it is in the way the nature of this point fits in with the art of his language that Rushdie achieves his acknowledged stature as one of the major novelists of his generation. But, again, it is not an instance of narrating the Other or even the ‘subaltern’, for the language itself makes the Other invisible or implicitly constructs the Other in terms of the Self-same. The language indicates, but only in its gaps (in its non-English ‘noises’), the existence of this Other, but it survives, in its legibility, largely at the cost of this Otherness. Given the historical context illustrated in this chapter, this is evident enough in the case of Rushdie. But I have argued in this book that it is also the case, to a greater or lesser extent, in all attempts to narrate the Other in positivist terms. To narrate the Other only in words – in


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language – is to reduce the Other to the language of the Self-same, as either basic similarity or obverse negativity. Playfulness – as in Rushdie or many other magical realist texts – can distract the reader from this problem, but it does not solve it. However, in all fairness, it should be stressed that there is also another aspect to this problem, one that underlines and justifies the postcolonial objection to colonial representations of Otherness. For the danger of echoing old colonialist binarisms never really disappears in postcolonial literature within the confines of, say, Standard English; and it can return to haunt a postcolonial text at the very instance when it makes space for the suggestion of alterity. For instance, the connection of terror with Africa and both with (African) cannibalism, as noted in an earlier chapter, is not confined to British colonial fiction. To take just one postcolonial example, in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (which is highly amenable to a Gothicised reading and written, like most of this remarkable author’s work, largely in Standard English), one can find the connection in full force, and free indirect speech, at the pinnacle of the novel’s moment of terror and crime:5 He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless, an aunt Sally, a figure from a cartoon, a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. Mission work: what has it left behind ... (Disgrace, p. 95) The ‘he’ in this extract is urban (White) Professor David Lurie, visiting his daughter (Lucy) out in the South African ‘country’, and the crime is that of three strange (Black) men looting Lucy’s farm and raping her, causing bodily injury to the Professor and shooting six dogs. It is a moment amenable to Gothic tropes: crime, haunting, vengeance, monstrosity, secret etc. And, not surprisingly, the text raises a common colonial contrast between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘uncivilised’, using a language of narration that, being ‘standard’, can directly evoke such colonial echoes. Professor Lurie’s understanding of the situation and of Africans oscillates between complete transparency – also suggested by the narrative text at times6 – and “anthropological” turgidity (Disgrace, p. 118). More interestingly, Lucy and her father look at the terrible event that has overtaken them in very different and revealing ways. Let us look at this

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conversation, in which Lucy is referring to her rape: Halfway home, Lucy, to his surprise, speaks. “It was so personal,” she says. “It was done with such personal hatred. That was what stunned me more than anything. The rest was ... expected. But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them.” He waits for more, but there is no more, for the moment. “It was history speaking through them,’ he offers at last. ‘A history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t. It came down from the ancestors.” (Disgrace, p. 156) Professor Lurie’s intellectual, non-passionate understanding is faced at this moment with Lucy’s perception of ‘hate’, a passion of the greatest emotional vibrancy. Professor Lurie, in keeping with the ‘civilised’ European tradition he connects with, tries to avoid the realisation that the perception of emotion is always at the instant where the Self clashes with or meets the Other. This much is suggested, though not developed, by Coetzee’s novel. What is unfortunately not clearly appended in the narrative is the fact that much of colonial power was based on a dispassionate, ruleregulated, ‘standard’ imbalance and display of power (which also included rape, murder, massacres), and that the ‘emotional’ response of the colonial Other to such imbalance was always decried as terribly ‘uncivilised’. It was a relationship that replicated the relationship of the ‘standard’ language of the coloniser with the supposedly degrading ‘creoles’ of the colonised. Perhaps that is why the alterity of the colonised can be preserved – largely as unnarratable – in the Standard English of Coetzee’s novel, but partly at the cost of appearing to replicate certain accreting colonial binarisms and discourses. In general, Coetzee’s – like V. S. Naipaul’s – oeuvre contains many brave attempts to narrate the alterity of the Other within post/colonial contexts, and it also runs the risk of being haunted by (and appearing to replicate) certain colonialist binarisms in the process.

Part IV Conclusion


Summing Up

Throughout this book there runs an awareness of the problematic of sameness and difference. This has been traced primarily through readings of colonial and postcolonial fiction, from Britain or former British colonies, which can be considered Gothic or influenced by the Gothic. Of course, the problematic exceeds that narrowed demarcation: that, in fact, is the larger rationale that overshadows and justifies my thesis. Without going further back than the mid-eighteenth century, or the inception of Gothic fiction as a genre, it can be seen that many of the seminal debates in the world have ranged around the matter of sameness and difference. The basic Enlightenment perspective, as Kenan Malik repeatedly highlights in The Meaning of Race, was that of the ‘sameness’ of humanity. As Malik notes, writers like the nineteenth-century English anthropologist, E. B. Taylor, whose work drew heavily on Enlightenment traditions, believed that it was “no more reasonable to suppose the laws of the mind [to be] differently constituted in Australia and in England ... than to suppose that the laws of chemical combination ... vary” (Quoted in Malik, p. 142.). On the other hand, in roughly the same period, as Malik illustrates, there were people like the French writer Hippolyte Taine, “who mocked the Enlightenment belief that ‘men of every race and century were all but identical’ ” (Malik, p. 142). Robert Young, among others, has illustrated how the word ‘civilisation’ came to be geographically and historically inflected in the late eighteenth and, particularly, nineteenth centuries to turn “white skin” into “both a marker and a product” of civilisation, with civilisation being defined “through difference, against a hierarchy that invokes the state of other, historical or non-European, societies” (Young, 1995, p. 35). Again, history records that while the ideologues of unbridgeable difference, such as those associated with Hitler, were guilty of unimaginable 157


oppression and genocides, the ideologues of essential sameness – the many administrators and missionaries who ‘civilised’ various peoples into extinction – have also been guilty of much cruelty and oppression. At the smaller, individual level, sometimes conservatives believing in absolute difference have been more willing to let other peoples be, and liberals believing in essential sameness have imposed that sameness at the point of a sword, so to speak. Keeping this complicated history in mind, where members from both ‘sides’ have taken an aspect of the argument to oppressive extremes, it is important to look at how this book deals with the Other, and Otherness. In short, as far as this book is concerned, the Other can be visualised in various terms of difference – those of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, ‘colour’, ‘ethnicity’, culture, class, nationality etc, or a combination of two or more of these. What the Other signifies is the ineradicability of difference. But this is not the same as absolute difference, across space or time: sheer incomprehension. For this difference to come into being, there already has to be a relationship between the Self and the Other. The very perception of difference insists on an exchange that can be experienced as different and a look, given and returned, which can distinguish sameness from difference along certain avenues of perception, even if we do not move on to more complex philosophical aspects. What the term ‘Other’ insists on is that this relationship, which is vital for both the Self and the Other, cannot be reduced to sameness. For the Other to be Other, there has to be difference – and space for its acceptance, interplay and recognition. This is very different from the common colonialist tendency to turn Otherness into sheer negativity, blankness or a waiting-to-bethe-sameness. In some ways, this matter is quite easily illustrated with reference to the common colonialist tendency, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to connect only with certain types of ‘natives’. As Charles Allen writes of Kipling’s father, correctly considering him typical of the vast majority of Europeans in India in the nineteenth century, “Like so many of his peers, he had time only for those Indians who posed no threat, exemplified by the figure of the Indian ryot. It is no accident that the most offensive of his newspaper articles are those that mock Anglicised Indians, and the most sympathetic those portraying Indian farmers and artisans” (Allen, pp. 57–8). As Allen indicates, the ‘ryots’ (taken from a Urdu word meaning ‘subjects’, used to refer to people working the fields of aristocrats and landowners) are servile enough to pose no threat. But farmers and artisans are also considered transparent in their Otherness, mostly as a kind of

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blankness that has been inscribed over by colonial discourses of ‘power/ knowledge’. In this sense again, the Other as sheer negativity is easier to accept – and, if necessary, murder (which, as read earlier, partly explains Dr Frankenstein’s initial reactions to the ‘monster’- come-alive). The anglicised Indian is dangerous because he confronts the European Self with an Otherness that can neither be wished away nor fully ‘understood’. In this sense too, the Other ‘faces’ the Self, and this facing makes the Self aware of both the proximity and centrality of the Other and its alterity. No wonder the ‘babus’ were sometimes perceived as more disturbing than the servile farmer, cultivating the fields of and not looking at (or speaking back to, lacking the language) the English landowner/ administrator!1 In Gothic fiction this comes through, probably unconsciously, in the preoccupation with shadows and doubles. For what is more terrifying, being confronted with the Other – in this case a ‘ghost’ – or the realisation that the Other is related to your Self?: and I, Duncan Parrenness, who was afraid of no man, was taken with a more deadly terror than I hold it has ever been the lot of mortal man to know. For I saw that his face was my very own, but marked and lined and scarred with the furrows of disease and much evil living. (Kipling, ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’, The Complete Supernatural Stories of Rudyard Kipling, p. 4) In other words, both ineradicable difference and genuine contact are essential to the relationship between the Self and the Other. Interestingly, this perception comes across in creative literature more often than in mainstream philosophy2 or academic discourse. I have already read some such instances of literature, above and in preceding chapters. But one illuminating novel that I have left out, even though it contains Gothic elements, is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (Melville being an American writer). However, it is necessary to waive the rules of this book and tarry a little on Moby-Dick, for the novel leads itself most readily to a confirmation of the point I make about the Other. There are two central encounters with Otherness in Moby-Dick: Ishmael (the protagonist–narrator)’s encounter with the cannibal, Queequeg, and Captain Ahab’s encounter with the white whale, MobyDick. These are of very different character, though essentially about the same problem. Ishmael’s encounter with Queequeg launches the narrative of the novel, so to speak. It is worth looking into for its negotiation with sameness and difference. Ishmael, the narrator–protagonist, has

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just introduced himself as a man smitten by the sea: after many trips as a sailor in merchant ships, he has now decided to undertake a whaling voyage. This undertaking is itself presented by Ishmael in mockheroic terms as a major event, sandwiched between imagined headlines reporting the election of the President of the United States and “Bloody Battle in Afghanistan” (p. 37). Ishmael’s narrative is already full of references to non-European spaces and people, and when he arrives in New Bedford, on his way to shipping aboard a Nantucket whaler, we enter a world that existed in both the Old World and the New but that has seldom been described. It is a world of Black churches and coloured sailors. The note of cannibalism is sounded when Ishmael enters the Spouter-Inn for a lodging and sees an array of spears, whaling lances and harpoons on its walls. “You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement” (p. 44). Cannibalism is constructed as the standard antithesis of (Western) civilisation (as noted earlier in this book), and Ishmael uses this binarism, but he also turns it upside down. For very soon, in this very inn, he is to meet, and to sleep next to, a ‘cannibal’. Ishmael is not without his prejudices. Let alone cannibals, he is not too comfortable with coloured strangers either. When he is told that he will have to share his room and bed with a “dark complexioned chap”, he tries to avoid such a fate and attempts to sleep on two hard and uneven benches: “I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of the ‘dark complexioned’ harpooner” (p. 47). As he has not yet met the harpooner, Ishmael’s suspicions are not grounded in any actual experience: they are the result of language and the assumptions he already carries in his mind. The ‘dark complexioned’ harpooner is already portrayed in Other terms: not only does he look different, but he also earns money on the side by “such a cannibal business as selling heads of dead idolators” (p. 54) as souvenirs. When Ishmael finally decides to sleep in the room – the cannibal has still not returned – he rummages around in the harpooner’s possessions and is confirmed in his perception of threat and difference. But even then, when the man finally arrives, Ishmael is in for a shock: “What a sight! Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large, blackish looking squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow” (p. 56). Narrating the story of this first meeting, which results in more frights, Ishmael makes a statement that appears retrospective and is

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significant to the entire matter: “Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself” (p. 58). Here, we have returned to the old Gothic linkage of the Devil with the ‘dark complexioned’ Other. But Ishmael’s story is different: he gets to know this stranger, Queequeg, and they become the best of friends. However, this does not happen at the cost of Queequeg’s Otherness: Queequeg remains a ‘cannibal’, different in his behaviour and beliefs but still able to relate to Ishmael. Perhaps it is this ability to live with the Other, which both Queequeg and Ishmael demonstrate, that finally complicates notions of cannibalism-vs-civilisation to such an extent that we have remarks like this one by Ishmael later in the novel: Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilised and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pâté-de-foie-gras. (p. 415) Ahab has a completely different relationship to Otherness. MobyDick, the whale, is incomprehensible to him (and to the sailors). This is not total incomprehension: for instance, Ahab knows enough about Moby-Dick and sperm whales to be able to chart their courses and track them. But there is a point beyond which the whale, Moby-Dick, is different. It is the Other, so to say. This point, as I have repeatedly stated, is a necessary condition to any encounter that the Self can have with another Self/being or that a society can have with another society. It can be accepted, as Stubbs the chief mate suggests, as a difference without either negative or positive connotation. But, as we have seen, a negative connotation is usually attributed to this difference. Ahab (and his sailors), as Ishmael did with Queequeg, tend to see Moby-Dick in the colours of the Devil. Even Ishmael succumbs to this perception at times. Ahab is not unaware of the sources of his hate for Moby-Dick. It is not just that the whale took off his leg; it is also because there is a point

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beyond which Moby-Dick, like all other reality, is “inscrutable”. This is how Ahab puts it, Hark ye yet again, the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. (p. 237) (My stresses) This is a rich passage, but it is also – consciously or not – a powerful record of a common kind of reaction to the Other. The Other is always a Self with another will: “some unknown but still reasoning thing”. Part of the threat (and value) of the Other arises from this ‘wilful’ and ‘ineradicable’ difference, this difference that can never be erased without erasing the Other which, like the white whale, is always “shoved near” the Self. To live with this difference, this limit of scrutability, is to live differently: or, as Levinas suggests, it is to live with “the moral imperative that pierces the Self with moral obligation, with service to the other” (Cohen, in Levinas, 2006, p. xxvii). Or one can adopt the more common option, the option so often adopted within European imperialism (though by no means confined to it): one can, like Ahab, “hate” that “inscrutable thing”, ascribe ulterior motives to it (“agent” of the Devil, or “principally” Devilish) and seek to destroy it. In his introduction to Levinas’s Humanism and the Other, Richard A Cohen talks about “a question as old as philosophy”: “How does one preserve ineradicable difference while at the same time make genuine contact?” (Cohen, in Levinas, 2006, p. xi). In an earlier section, I have noted the limitations (but not total redundancy) of language by highlighting how and why ‘emotions’ play a major role in the colonial Gothic narration of Otherness. Perhaps, as Levinas also suggests, it is a question that can be answered outside mainstream philosophy: it is a question that cannot be answered within the logocentricity of language, but can be answered in praxis.

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The very dichotomy between subject and object, Self and Other etc, which was basically formulated by Descartes and which continues to haunt European thinking is based, after all, in a privileging of theory (and, hence, language) over experience: it is by ‘thinking’ in ‘language’ that Descartes concludes that “it is not reliable judgement but merely some blind impulse that has made me believe up till now that there exist things distinct from myself which transmit to me ideas or images of themselves through the sense organs or in some other ways [or experience: my note]” (Descartes, in Pojman, p. 472). For the experience of, say, cycling is not divided between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’: one does not have a theory of cycling in mind when one cycles, or a theory of the way the cycle operates. This theory of the ‘cycle’ comes into being, or is required, only when the cycle breaks down.3 And that is what Melville’s Moby-Dick suggests: for it is in praxis that Ishmael and Queequeg learn to “preserve ineradicable difference” and “make genuine contact”, and it is both in language and in praxis that Ahab fails. This may be one reason why creative literature, which simply depicts experiences and events, is better at coping with Otherness than discursive and academic literature, which often tends to follow logical contradictions to the point of intellectual genocide. Hence, perhaps, the postcolonial attempt – brave, necessary and radical in its own ways and context – to narrate the Other or to narrate Otherness is flawed from the start, for it brings into language that which cannot truly be spoken about, or at least not fully. On the other hand, the colonialist ‘binarisms’ that postcolonialism often – and rightly – disdains can be turned to great (though often limited) effect by the best literary practitioners, because the binarisms, when not totally simplified, also imply a point of contradiction, which might allow space for alterity to survive in the narrative even if it is not narrated. In the colonial response, Otherness, as discussed in this book, and narrated, often at its most complex, in Gothic or Gothicised fiction from the period, is commonly perceived as a threat. In the following extract from a novella by Doyle, which falls more into the genre of colonial adventure than the Gothic (though it contains elements of the latter), this comes across with vividness. The colonial Other is always out there, and its presence and language, being indecipherable, are experienced and explained in the negative light of a threat to the Self: “Yes, sir, war drums,” said Gomez, the half-breed. “Wild Indians, bravos, not mansos; they watch us every mile of the way; kill us if they can.”

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“How can they watch us?” I asked, gazing into the dark, motionless void. The half-breed shrugged his broad shoulders. “The Indians know. They have their own way. They watch us. They talk the drum talk to each other. Kill us if they can.” By the afternoon of that day – my pocket diary shows me that it was Tuesday, August 18th – at least six or seven drums were throbbing from various points. Sometimes they beat quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in obvious question and answer, one far to the east breaking out in a high staccato rattle, and being followed after a pause by a deep roll from the north. There was something indescribably nerve-shaking and menacing in that constant mutter, which seemed to shape itself into the very syllables of the half-breed, endlessly repeated, “We will kill you if we can. We will kill you if we can.” No one ever moved in the silent woods. All the peace and soothing of quiet Nature lay in that dark curtain of vegetation, but away from behind there came ever the one message from our fellow-man. “We will kill you if we can,” said the men in the east. “We will kill you if we can,” said the men in the north. (Doyle, The Lost World, p. 58) But, if the inescapable proximity and final irreducibility of the Other can be experienced simply as a threat to the existence of the Self (as above), colonial discourses can also posit the Other as utterly knowable in his (fetishised/negativised) Otherness. A few lines after Malone, the narrator of The Lost World, experiences the drums as threat, two of his companions, competing professor–explorers both, evince a different but also typical reaction to the same drumbeats, after ignoring them for most of the time: “Miranha or Amajuaca cannibals,” said Challenger, jerking his thumb towards the reverberating wood. “No doubt, sir,” Summerlee answered. “Like all such tribes, I shall expect to find them of polysynthetic speech and of Mongolian type.” (Doyle, The Lost World, p. 59) Malone reads the language of the drums, which he does not understand, as a threat to his existence: a notion first suggested to him by the “half-breed” and then expanded into a definitive statement about all the natives in the vicinity, from east to north. The professors, on the other hand, faced with the same evidence of Otherness – indicated by

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something shared but beyond one’s power, such as a language one does not understand – come up with another typical response. They ignore the drumbeats because they are convinced that they basically know all that can be known about the Other: “polysynthetic speech” explains away the fact that they do not really know what the drums are saying. Malone’s response can be seen as recognising that the Other is never completely transparent, but then it turns that lack of legibility into a threat, a source of terror and nothing else. The professors’ response is premised on the fact that the Other is not totally illegible, that there is a relationship of mutuality (facingness, so to say) between the Other and the Self. But then the professors turn this valid recognition into a complete legibility of the Other: the Other comes across as known through and through, so transparent as to evoke only a passing discussion, though this transparency – as the reference to cannibalism indicates – is premised on a fetishised and simplified construct of Otherness. In the colonial Gothic, these two approaches are present, but along with them is the recognition of the centrality of the Other, which translates not only as repulsion (threat/terror/death) but also as attraction (possibility/transcendence/love). The relationship between Victoria and the Moor in Dacre’s Gothic novel, Zofloya, is structured by this complexity. The Moor (who is also the Devil) is graceful and singularly attractive to Victoria, the European lady, and not only to Victoria: “The Moor smiled also, and bent, as in acknowledgment, his graceful form, – fascination dwelt in every movement of this singular being, and in nothing was it more evinced, than in the power he held over the proud heart of Victoria” (Dacre, Zofloya, pp. 199–200). But the Moor’s attraction is also intermingled with repulsion even for Victoria, and both attraction and repulsion are perhaps related to the alterity (“inscrutability”, in the second extract below) of the Other, for alterity is commonly experienced as either repulsive (threat, negation etc) or attractive (love, transcendence etc): such powerful fascination dwelt around him [Zofloya, the Moor], that she felt incapable of withdrawing from his arms; yet ashamed, (for Victoria was still proud) and blushing at her feelings, when she remembered that Zofloya, however he appeared, was but a menial slave, and as such alone had originally become known to her – she sought, but sought vainly, to repress them; for no sooner ... did she behold that beautiful and majestic visage, that towering and graceful form, that all thought of his inferiority vanished, and the ravished

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sense, spurning at the calumnious idea, confessed him a being of superior order. (Dacre, Zofloya, p. 227) she loved, yet trembled at the inscrutable Zofloya. (Dacre, Zofloya, p. 237) Faced with that which is Other, and hence not the same or capable of being fully conscribed by ‘knowledge’, the Self reacts with various value judgments, which can be usually ranked along the poles of attraction and repulsion. The existence of the one often, if not always, implies the existence of the other. To return to an early Gothic text, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla presents an interesting conflict of attraction and repulsion that can be seen as a narrative of the Self and the Other. For the reduction of Otherness to simply a repulsive negation is a recent – modern and rational, some might say – development. Theologically, Satan is the Other not only as the Devil and the Tempter, but also as Lucifer, the archangel. It is an index of the attraction afforded by Otherness that Milton’s version of Satan has so often seemed, as it did to Blake, to be an unconscious championing of the Devil. For the Other does not simply repulse; the Other also attracts. The Other is always that which is not the Self: it can be desired with a strength that matches the strength with which it may repulse. Carmilla and Laura have such a relationship in Le Fanu’s Carmilla. While it obviously has its proto-lesbian aspects, what it illustrates most of all is the doubleness of attraction and repulsion between the Other and the Self. Carmilla talks of “the repute of that cruelty, which yet is love” (p. 104) and Laura is “conscious of a love growing into adoration and also of abhorrence” (p. 104). The relationship between the two women – Carmilla, the ancient, undead vampire, and Laura, the young, innocent girl – is distinguished by a mixture of attraction and repulsion, the desire to possess and the desire to be independent of the Other. The two women are different in character and personality, and in origin and religion: “How can you tell that your religion and mine are the same; your forms wound me,” exclaims Carmilla in a weak moment. And even after Laura is ‘saved’ from Carmilla, the vampire – this woman who is everything a woman like Laura cannot and ‘should not’ be – the relationship remains ‘ambiguous’ in Laura’s memory: We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla

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returns to memory with ambiguous alternations – sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door. (p. 148) Different critics have noted this relationship of attraction and repulsion, though often using terminology different from mine. For instance, in a paper discussing Jack London’s South Sea writings, Christopher Gair notes “the sense of alienation felt by London’s protagonists in their own society”, which leads them to identify at times “with the very Otherness [of other ‘races’, which they also consider inferior and doomed] they are simultaneously helping to destroy” (p. 258). He adds that, for London, “the destruction of the exotic [used synonymously with the notion of Otherness by Gair] is inseparable from the destruction of the self” (p. 260). One can keep adding examples from primary and secondary literature, but it is better to return to the other side of the argument – that relating to postcolonialism. I have illustrated above (and in previous chapters) that colonial Gothic/ised fiction, with its binarisms (even with its simplified antagonisms, its desperate attempts to negate or eradicate the threat of the Other) recognised, if only grudgingly or implicitly, the alterity of the Other. However, as I have suggested earlier, this could not be the case with postcolonial Gothicised fiction (and postcolonial literature in general) when it set out to narrate or narrate from the position of the Other. While the attempt itself was necessary and laudable, it created another set of problems even as it remedied some of the imbalances and problems of colonial discourse and fiction. The world began to be decolonised at “that moment when the unspoken discovered that they had a history which they could speak ... [and] languages other than the languages of the master”, writes Stuart Hall. This excerpt is quoted by Kenan Malik in his criticism of “contemporary theories of difference” as exemplifying those theories (Malik, p. 220). Malik himself takes issue with this “embrace of difference” in post-structuralist and postmodern (one can add, postcolonialist) theories of difference. He notes, Whereas I have argued that it is the degradation of universalism that has given rise to the discourse of race, poststructuralist and postmodernist theories take universalism itself to be the source of a racial outlook. Where I have placed stress on ideas of difference as lying at the heart of racial theories, many contemporary theorists regard the

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right to be different as an essential part of any antiracist strategy. (Malik, p. 219) In some ways, I have engaged with exactly this ‘controversy’ in this study, and the end result is to show that both Hall and Malik, both the ‘differentialists’ and the ‘universalists’, are correct about one feature of the elephant they wish to describe, but their focus on that feature leads them to distort the elephant’s nature. It can be shown that both positions are rooted in some correct and necessary arguments. The opposition to universalisation arises from the fact of Otherness, the fact that the Other, in order to be the Other, cannot be reduced to the Self (not even as its antithesis). This realisation leads to calls for the celebration of difference. Taken to an extreme, such celebration forgets that the Other exists in an intricate relationship to the Self. If this relationship were not in place, the Other would be so opaque to the Self as to be immaterial. This, however, is not the case, and the lines from Hall that Malik, rightly or wrongly, attributes to the ‘differentialist’ position reveal this. To repeat, Hall writes that the world began to be decolonised at “that moment when the unspoken discovered that they had a history which they could speak ... [and] languages other than the languages of the master”. This stress on Otherness – the other history and the other language of the Other – is nevertheless premised on that which is recognisable as language and history between the Other and the Self. What is being resisted is not just an aberrant difference waiting to be assimilated into sameness; what is being claimed, consciously or not, is not just absolute Otherness. Instead, here, in Hall’s lines, we have a stressing of the fact that the difference of the Other has to remain, finally, irreducible to the Selfsame. The language of the Other cannot be the same as the language of the Self, and this realisation is vital to a relationship between the two. But implicit in the claim of this irreducible difference lies the realisation of that which connects the Other to the Self, in these lines simplified to the notion of ‘language’: there is a recognition that the Other also speaks a ‘language’ and not, as the nurse hears it in Wuthering Heights, “gibberish”. Malik, on the other hand, focuses in his book on these connections: that is his starting point, and the factor he champions, but he too never dismisses the fact of differences, of a difference that, at some level, cannot be dissolved or erased, that has to be respected and hence, as Levinas puts it, form the basis of an “ethical relationship”.

*

*

*

While not denying myself the pleasure of investigating relevant passages and knolls en route, the argument that I have traced in this book

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has explored the twinned paths (running next to each other, if at times with traffic headed the opposite way) of colonial (Gothic/ised) and postcolonial (Gothic/ised) narratives over the rocky terrain of Otherness. Starting with a discussion of how colonial Gothic/ised texts deal with the Gothic/demonic other, and noting how and why the contours of this demon assume the shape of racial/colonial Otherness, I have noted that the terror and other states of heightened emotion that often fill these texts indicate a colonialist limit and potential at times. Their failure stems from the common colonialist (and often European) failure to conceptualise Otherness as anything but a lack or a negativity: the Other is seen only in its potential as “limit and menace”, and hence a source of terror. The postcolonialist response (an attempt to narrate the ‘other half of the story’ or to ‘write back’) was predicated by such a dominant colonialist trend in negotiating with and narrating difference. In the most typical of all postcolonialist perceptions, difference had to be championed, respected, narrated – and rightly so. The Other of much of postcolonialism is largely or primarily ‘a meeting, a possibility, a mutually vital relationship’, perhaps holding in itself the magic of transcendence – and that is also what the Other can be. However, this legitimate and necessary postcolonial attempt, with its various strengths, always runs into the danger of narrating the Other not as “limit and menace”, and hence of reducing its alterity. If the colonial Gothic/ised text was haunted by ghosts from the empire, the unconscious conceptual litany of that haunting ran a bit like this: “Can the Other be anything but the obverse of the Self or its juvenile/deviant version? And if so, is the Other anything but a threat and a source of terror – to be reduced, if juvenile/delinquent, or to be fled from and/or eliminated, if the obverse of the Self?” If we head the other way, postcolonial texts are faced with another set of questions. They usually take for granted the need to narrate, defend, justify the colonised and the subaltern – the Other in conceptual terms. But, in the execution of this need, they are faced with the problem of language and its close imbrications with power: a scream of terror negates and reduces the Other but starkly registers its alterity; an explanation of events and character, however, runs the risk of reducing the Other to more of the Self-same. As is obvious by now, my use of Otherness in this book has been based largely on texts by Levinas, Buber, Todorov and Michel de Certeau. It differs from various other European formulations, at least in the sense in which Buber puts the stress not on the “cogito” but on the relation to the Other as the basis of philosophy and knowledge (Buber, 1950),


a point also echoed by Levinas.4 It also differs from the European mainstream philosophical tradition in the sense that Levinas himself points out: The very large and quasi-formal structures of the neo-Platonic schemata, the contours of which can still be clearly discerned in the set of modern Hegelian or Husserlian themes ... mark the return of transcendent thought to itself, the identity of the identical and the non-identical in self-consciousness, which recognises itself as infinite thought “without other” in Hegel. And, on another plane, they command Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction,” in which the identity of pure consciousness carries within itself, in the guise of the “I think,” understood as intentionality – ego cogito cogitatum – all “transcendence”, all alterity. “All externality” reduces to or returns to the immanence of a subjectivity that itself and in itself exteriorizes itself. (Levinas, 1995, pp. 11–12) For Levinas, not only is “knowledge” in itself “a relation to something other than consciousness and, as it were, the aim or willing of that other, which is its object” (Levinas, 1995, pp. 16–17) and the Other an “end”, not simply a “means” (Levinas, 1995, p. 148), but also the Other is “inassimilable”, “irreducible”, “unique” (Levinas, 1995, p. 138). Or, as Pierre Hayat puts it in his introduction to Levinas’s Alterity and Transcendence, “In order for a true transcendence to be possible, the other must concern the I, while at the same time remaining external to it. It is especially necessary that the other, by his very exteriority, his alterity, should cause the I to exit the self” (Levinas, 1995, p. xiii). It is in this later aspect that my readings of Otherness in this book often stand at a tangent to postcolonialist narratives. Postcolonialist narratives, partly because of the ‘colonial’ past embedded like a grain of sand in their shells, often accrete around Otherness an anticolonial defensiveness or a postcolonial/modern acceptance, as I have tried to highlight in previous chapters. Many of these narratives, with the best of intentions and partly out of radical necessity, narrate the Other and in the process replicate the structures of mainstream European thought by subsuming it to the Self. In spite of differences of location, discourse and agenda, they very often have what Godzich and de Certeau would term a paradigmatic European ending: “the other has been reduced to more of the same” (Godzich, in de Certeau, p xiii). Part of the problem was and is the colonial conception of racial and non-European Otherness. This was seldom the Otherness of Levinas.

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It seldom saw difference as anything other than error, and the colonial/racial Other often ended up being portrayed as the dustbin or antithesis of the European Self. Pejorative terms – cannibalism, human sacrifice, superstition, irrationality etc – accreted to it, while positive terms – civilisation, rationality, truth, religion etc – remained the explicit or implicit preserve of the European. Even many enlightened and liberal Europeans, who did not agree with this sort of black-and-white binarism, tended to see the non-European as a child to be controlled or tutored into (European-like) maturity: “If the tutelage of children be regarded as a period of slavery, I allow that civilized nations have some right to exercise dominion over the uncivilised, provided that this happy dominion be confined as a paternal yoke, and that the duration do not exceed the period of a child’s maturity”.5 Given this situation, where the non-European Other was seen either in negative colours or on the way to European-like maturity, it is only to be expected that many postcolonial narratives tend to deny that Otherness, either by situating difference along a schema legible within Europeanised discourses or by denying Otherness altogether. The very act of making the Other legible to the Self is very different from Levinas’s claim that the irreducible Other is the source of knowledge for the Self. For Levinas’s claim stresses the fact that the Other, while not simply the negative image of the Self, is nevertheless not an end that can ever be ‘known’ completely: “Alterity’s plot is born before knowledge” (Levinas, 1995, p. 101); “the other is alterity” (Levinas, 1995, p. 103); the Other is the “origin of all putting into question of the self” (Levinas, 1995, p. 99); and, above all, the alterity of the Other is “irreducible to the logical identity of an ultimate difference added to a genus” (Levinas, 1995, p. 138). Once again, going over some of the grounds and texts I have covered earlier, I want to reiterate my main twin point: that, much as we may criticise the dominant colonial discourses of non-European Otherness and the very exploitative and demeaning nature of colonisation, the very notion of colonial conceptions of non-European Otherness allowed some spaces of implicit narration and alterity that are sometimes closed or blurred in the postcolonial bid to narrate non-European Otherness. On the other hand, the postcolonial bid to narrate the ‘other half of the story’ is a necessary corrective to the colonial tendency to view the Other as either a self-waiting-to-be or the negative image of the Self. In both cases, however, the space allowed to the alterity of the Other shrinks when one seeks to capture that difference in language. As Gayatri Spivak has shown, the attempt of intellectuals to “dissolve

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and know the discourse of society’s Other” often leads to an appropriation or making transparent of the Other (Spivak, p. 271), and hence basically reduces the Other to the Self. However, this need not lead us simply to ask the question: can the subaltern speak? For that question is again circumscribed by the Cartesian privileging of language and theory as the only or primary source of agency, opposition and legitimacy. For the subaltern may not be able to speak, but the subaltern can throw stones, burn books, shout, even – though this is something that the pacifist in me cannot condone – maim or kill. It is in this realisation that we can still leave space open for the alterity of the Other to be registered – but not explained away or, as literature, narrated ‘fully’. Whether this realisation translates into the political possibility of subversion is debatable. In The Madwoman Can’t Speak, CamineroSantangelo makes two relevant points, with reference to the trend in some feminist circles of highlighting the madwoman6 as subversive: (1) that the madwoman cannot be subversive when she is effectively imprisoned, silent and unseen, and (2) that the critics who write articles or books about “the liberatory power of madness” demonstrate, in the very act of writing their academic text, “just how fully they themselves can engage in public, rational forms of discourse” (Caminero-Santangelo, 180). These are not insignificant objections, but to my mind slightly different from the problem of the madwoman (or any other similar figure, such as the ‘savage’) as the Other. If this Otherness is seen as unrelated to the ‘normal’ Self, the act of madness cannot be subversive because of exactly the reasons highlighted by Caminero-Santangelo in her book. The Other as absolutely beyond the Self or, as it often happens, the Other as the negative, the reverse image, of the Self (or a Self in abeyance), cannot be subversive. Neither, as I have highlighted, can Otherness be conceptualised as just a Self in waiting or a Self in abeyance. For Otherness to be disturbing and subversive to the Self, both connections (‘concern’) and a final irreducibility have to be highlighted. And, when we look at creative texts positing madwomen as subversive, this is what we encounter: not a simple negation of rationality, but a contention with it, a staring-back-at-it, as in, say, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. What this suggests is another rationality and another irrationality, a difference that is neither the obverse nor a (potential) copy of what exists. If that is so, the ability to leave space outside language for the alterity of the Other can hold out subversive or radical possibilities, and narratives that, knowingly or unknowingly, provide

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this space – as gap, break, excess or in some other form in the narrative – should be read accordingly. The screams and sulky silences of Gothic fiction do not set out to ‘represent’ the Other; they primarily register the irreducible presence of Otherness. In this sense, both Coetzee and his narrator are unwittingly on to something more than the White and highly ‘civilised’ professor in Disgrace realises: “He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa” (Disgrace, 95, quoted earlier in context). Not just Italian or French, language itself cannot ‘save’ the Self when faced with the Other in its alterity. Terror is always a possibility (but not the only one) at the border of selfhood and Otherness, Otherness and selfhood. Faced with the Other, the language of the Self breaks down. Later on, it may recover, as Frankenstein’s does, and categorise the Other in purely negative terms. But at that moment of confrontation – either as unspeakable surprise or sheer terror or any other such fracture – the Other is registered in its full alterity; its agency is recognised as independent from that of the Self and, hence, at least potentially, terrifying. If this terror cannot and should not be explained away, as has been done in some recent texts,7 either as sheer negativity or deviation/lack, it can also not be reduced to one face of a possibility. In this sense, both in literature and in the world, a battle against terrorism is not the same as a ‘war on terror’. A ‘war on terror’ sets out to erase terror or at least the cause of terror: in the colonial Gothic/ised text this usually means the physical elimination of the Other; in the postcolonial Gothic/ised text it can mean the textual elimination of Otherness. But the option of terror is hardwired into the relation of the Self with the Other, who is both “limit and menace” and “possibility and concern”. To dismiss either of these broad aspects would be to reduce the Other, and in the process reduce the Self – for, as Levinas illustrates again and again, not only is the Other vital to the Self, but the Self can achieve a completeness only in its acceptance of an “ethical relation” with the irreducible Other, a relation that can be “ethical” only in the context of the “alterity” of the Other. To conclude by quoting Levinas again, the Other is not simply “limit and menace”, a cause of terror, to the Self. Levinas does not dispute this “repressive function” of the Other, adducing “the wars and violence” of history as evidence of it. But he points out that “the other man – the absolutely other – the Other – does not exhaust his presence by that repressive function. His presence can be meeting and friendship, and in this the human is in contrast with all other reality” (Levinas, Alterity

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and Transcendence, p. 56). In simpler words, to battle ‘terrorists’ is to engage in a legitimate historical function of law, order and polity, but to wage war against ‘terror’ is to reduce the human in all of us. For finally, if it is not to be a universalising erasure of difference or a tribalist insistence on exclusive difference, the ‘human’ can only be shorthand for the Self’s “ethical relation” with the “irreducible” Other.

Notes The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness 1. I use the word ‘post-colonial’ to suggest a historical and political demarcation, and the term ‘postcolonial’ to suggest a discourse and/or a branch of study. 2. ‘Other’, used as a term, has been capitalised in order to distinguish it from ordinary usages of the same word, though of course the Other is always an other. 3. I use the word ‘racial’ and the word ‘race’, unless otherwise specified, in the broad sense of a ‘medium’ denoting a (changing) sense of physical and/or cultural Otherness in the post-Enlightenment context. A narrow definition of ‘race’ is avoided even by scholars in the field. For instance, Kenan Malik notes in The Meaning of Race: “The concept of race is too complex and multifaceted to be reduced to single, straightforward definitions. Different social groups and different historical periods have understood race in radically different ways. The concept of race arose from the contradictions of equality in modern society but it is not an expression of a single phenomenon or relationship. Rather it is a medium through which the changing relationship between humanity, society and nature has been understood in a variety of ways” (p. 71). 4. McEwan’s Saturday, Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Amis’s ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’. 5. It should be noted that there are contemporary works, by younger or newer writers, which do a more complex (to my mind) job of engaging with the ‘war on terror’: for instance, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Adams’s Harbor. 6. It might also exist, at least in phases, in other cultures, but that is not my concern here. 7. Fredric Jameson correctly notes that “evil is ... the emptiest form of sheer Otherness ... into which any type of social content can be poured at will” (Jameson, p. 290). However, while I share this perception, I do not dismiss the concept of Otherness, as Jameson tends to do, for reasons that are clear from my definition and employment of the term. 8. In this book, I often refer to this ‘reduced Other’ as the negative Other (negativised Otherness), colonialist Other etc. It should be noted that my use of ‘colonial/racial Other’ (as a historical marker) need not coincide with the Eurocentric meanings of ‘colonialist Other’. 9. Which is not to say that I do not accept the substantial (even dominant) role that the ‘dialectic of privilege and shelter’ plays in the world and, particularly, in the narrative logic of a largely bourgeois genre like the novel. While accepting that role, I argue that the negotiation of sameness and difference in the world, and even in the novel, cannot be reduced to simply the dialectic of privilege and shelter. (And hence, once again, the concept of ‘Otherness’, however dangerous and misused, cannot be discarded). 175

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10. ‘Otherness’ should not be conflated entirely with ‘difference’, and yet the two examine related and at times overlapping areas of perception, cognition and experience. 11. I am not making the point that this ambivalence was only a middle-class phenomenon: it was more a spirit that emanated from those classes, but could also be picked up by, say, aristocrats who were in sympathy with that spirit. 12. Two of the earliest travel accounts of modern Europe by Indians were written in this period: the first in English by Dean Mahomet, basically a ‘business associate’ who came over and settled down in Britain, and the second in Farsi (Persian) by Abu Taleb, a minor aristocrat from India who travelled to England and returned to pen his account. 13. Even a safely conservative estimate by Jerry White, who specifically scoffs at revisionist historians who suggest tens of thousands of non-Europeans in nineteenth-century London, allows for the presence of at least a few thousand (see White’s London in the 19th Century). 14. Originally written in French, with the later English translation revised and corrected by the author. 15. Though sometimes the other side of the coin tends to be neglected in some postcolonial circles: what Critchley calls “the acceptance of the impossibility of a pure outside to the European tradition for ‘we Europeans’ ” (Critchley, p. 137). 16. The quotation, earlier on, from Spivak also suggests a similar understanding of the ‘Other’. 17. Otherness, writes Jameson, is “a dangerous category, one we are well off without” (Jameson, p. 290). While, no doubt, Otherness is a dangerous category, largely for reasons outlined above, it is not, in my opinion, a category one can erase – or one can erase it only at the risk of capitulating to the other, greater, danger of an easy and hegemonic assumption of transparency, legibility, reducibility, sameness. 18. It need hardly be noted that the shadow appears as the Other of the self in many different Gothic texts: it may appear directly, as in H. C. Andersen’s story, ‘The Shadow’, where a man is visited by his shadow, lost in the “hot” countries of the East, (Andersen, p. 376), or as an absence (most famously perhaps in the case of Dracula and the evil Mocata in The Devil Rides Out (Wheatley, p. 185), but also more symbolically, as in the relationship of Jekyll and Hyde). 19. Though there are radical exceptions using different terminology; one can argue that Karl Marx gave the ‘Other’ as the proletariat (and, in an earlier historical context, the ‘aristocracy’) a decisive and finally independent role in the negotiations and contestations of bourgeois Selfhood under Capitalism. 20. Which is not to say that it cannot be “limit and menace” too. 21. We have encountered this position also in different literature, such as the discourse of the ‘War on Terror’ and the texts by Amis, Rushdie et al mentioned at the start of this chapter.

1


1. The sublime, as Vijay Mishra puts it, is always “an overglutted sign, an excess/abscess, that produces an atmosphere of toxic breathlessness”

Notes 177

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

(Mishra, p. 19) and it always carries in itself the potential for “desecration/ decreation” (Mishra, p. 187). Above all, it is always beyond the ‘beautiful’, ‘normal’, ‘ordered’ and such positivist attributes of rationality. And yet, from the perspective of British colonisation of regions in Asia and Africa, Ireland – or at least its privileged classes – cannot be put outside the bracket of British colonising projects. Elsewhere, Brantlinger correctly notes that the “Imperial Gothic frequently expresses anxiety about the waning of opportunities for heroic adventure” (Brantlinger, p. 239). This implicitly suggests the trajectory and space of its ‘action’, with the ‘hero’ leaving the United Kingdom in search of adventure elsewhere. All references to the text in Judith Wilt, Ed., Making Humans, which also contains the text of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though this is a slightly later ‘discovery’; not before Edward reaches the island. One should not generalise too much about the European response to ‘other races’, for parallel to a dominant discourse of civilisational and/or ‘racial’ superiority there also ran some contradictory and ambivalent responses to the perception of ‘racial’ difference. Even when the discourse of European civilisational superiority was maintained, other races were not placed on an equal pedestal of inferiority, for instance. Wheatley in The Devil Rides Out, for instance, has a very different response to Indian and Tibetan ‘magic’ and peoples than to African and Creole ‘magic’ and peoples: the former being sometimes ranked with Europeans and Christianity and, in the case of those mythical Tibetan ‘yogis’, even placed on a higher spiritual platform, but the latter being relegated to brutishness, animalism and Satanism (Wheatley, pp. 40–1).

2 The Devil and the Racial Other 1. Apart from historical accounts, S. I. Martin’s novel, Incomparable World (1996), is based on the often ignored fact that thousands of American Blacks – mostly males, as the soldiers were not allowed to bring their families with them – who had fought for the British during the American War of Independence were living in and around London in the late eighteenth century. 2. This does not mean that people were no longer religious; it simply means that religiosity was increasingly premised upon Reason, or made subservient to it. This assumption of the ‘correct’ relationship between Reason and Religion can itself be considered, to a degree, a kind of belief, and it definitely owed much to the trajectory of Protestant thought and theology, as well as the politics of theological conflict in Europe. 3. Once again, it is necessary to stress that I am not talking of colonial texts that took the European reader out into the Empire, such as Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug or Kipling’s works. This is another matter altogether and not the main concern of this book. I am also leaving out North America, and in particular the frontier Gothic, which can be said to have been launched in the late eighteenth century with Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Once again, such texts, written by people from outside the colonial centre or dealing

178 Notes with experiences in the colonial periphery, are not my direct concern in this book. 4. Satan, in Book 2 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, is portrayed in the colours of a ‘modern’ terrorist, plotting revenge and destruction, trying to penetrate into the common ‘crowd’ of humanity in order to confuse and destroy, heading for earth on a mission of destruction: “Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,/Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he hies.” 5. Refer, for instance, to the rhetoric surrounding such recent political events as the Iraq War and the ‘War on Terror’. 6. From Inferno: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (pp. 1265–321), Canto XXVIII, lines 22–36: “No barrel, even though it’s lost a hoop or end-piece, ever gapes as one whom I saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart: his bowels hung between his legs, one saw his vitals and the miserable sack that makes of what we swallow excrement. While I was all intent on watching him, He looked at me, and with his hands he spread His chest and said: ‘See how I split myself! See now how maimed Mohammed is! And he Who walks and weeps before me is Ali, Whose face is opened wide from chin to forelock. And all the others here whom you see Were, when alive, the sowers of dissension And scandal, and for this they now are split.” (Trans. Allen Mandelbaum) 7. See, for instance, Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa, for a discussion of the continuity and changes in British perception of Africa and Africans. 8. See the papers by Hulme, Arens and Obeyesekera in Barker, Hulme and Iversen, Ed., Cannibalism and the Colonial World. 9. A less obvious way to highlight this equation would be to consider the European response to Indian iconography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Partha Mitter illustrates in Much Maligned Monsters, appreciation of Hindu iconography was hobbled by both aesthetic and religious preconceptions, Hindu idols being considered evidences of superstition and false belief and sometimes termed ‘devilish’. Probably the first European who overcame aesthetic provincialism in order to appreciate Hindu sculpture – a rare accomplishment until the twentieth century – had to answer for it in the sphere of religious belief: “The most impressive work of this genre was written ... in 1713 by the Royal Danish missionary, Batholomaeus Ziegenbalg, at Tranquebar in south India ... Unfortunately, [Ziegenbalg’s] Geneology of the Malabar Gods, a work of great usefulness even today, was not welcomed in the eighteenth century. The hostility of Ziegenbalg’s colleagues prevented its publication, for it was pointed out that the duty of missionaries was to extirpate Hinduism and not to spread heathenish nonsense” (Mitter, p. 59). 10. Both being characteristics associated with animals, and also with the Beast, Satan.

Notes 179 11. A “Silver Man”, Kipling’s text tells us, and then quotes the Bible: “a leper as white as snow”. Both these references highlight the physical and moral degeneracy associated with lepers in Kipling’s time, as well as notions of ‘uncleanness’, deracination and pollution, which cut across much of nineteenth-century colonialist thought, but is there also a reference here to Lucifer, the archangel of light before his fall? As Frank S. Kastor points out in Bloom’s Satan, Lucifer as archangel was depicted as luminous, as the name suggests; it is only in his other two roles, as Satan, the ruler of Hell, and Devil, the tempter, that Lucifer assumes other and darker shapes. 12. Though mostly in his journalism and public poetry. 13. As deficiency, they become a source of nuisance and potential terror; as negativity they can hardly be anything other than the very face of terror. Hence, the binarism that opposes reason to religion, or sanity to madness (etc), does not diminish the terror of their Otherness. If anything, it increases the terror. 14. I allude to Aquinas’s influential claim that nothing in faith is opposed to reason. 15. One complicating factor in this novel – Ireland – has been perforce bracketed in this discussion, though it should be noted that Maturin writes from an England-facing Protestant Anglo-Irish position and not that of Catholic or nationalist ‘Irishness’. 16. As the hero of Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out puts it, “didn’t I tell you that there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo?” (p. 124). 17. Maturin came from a family of distinguished clergymen and was himself an ordained minister. Here he quotes from his sermon preached on the death of Princess Charlotte. 18. For a balanced version of the debate, the reader is referred, in particular, to Hulme’s introduction to Cannibalism and the Colonial World. 19. Introduction, Williams, Ed., Three Vampire Tales, p. 7. 20. “The delimitation of east and west within Europe has long been a conventional one for historians. It goes back, in fact, to the founder of modern positive historiography, Leopold Ranke ... [who] drew a line across the continent excluding the Slaves of the east from the common destiny of the ‘great nations’ of the West” (Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, p. 15).

3 Heathcliff as Terrorist 1. Unlike Nurse Nelly, who is simply frightened of the difference of the Other, Ishmael, the protagonist–narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, recognises the centrality of the Other to the Self, as I shall (diverting from my focus on ‘British’ fiction) illustrate elsewhere. As such, it is not surprising – and quite against nineteenth-century currents – to find the word ‘gibberish’ applied to European languages, as heard by the ‘cannibal’ Queequeg: “And thus an old idolator at heart, he [Queequeg] yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish” (p. 101). 2. Godzich, Foreword, in Michel de Certeau’s Heterologies, p. xiii.

180

4

Notes


1. First given as a lecture by Achebe at the University of Massachusetts in 1975, later published in The Massachusetts Review, 1977. The version referred to in this chapter is taken from The Massachusetts Review, as anthologised in the Norton Critical edition of Heart of Darkness. 2. All references to the text of Heart of Darkness from the Oxford World Classics edition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. 3. It has to be added that most of the more ordinary ‘notions’ that people hold in the novella are often exposed as having nothing behind them. 4. After all, can ‘decency’ that is not founded on an equal and ethical relation with the Other be anything but sham?

5


1. Eudaimonistic: “Concerned with the person’s flourishing” (Nussbaum, p. 31). 2. Similar points have been made earlier, though not as fully pursued or elucidated as in Nussbaum. Sartre, for instance, noted that emotion “signifies ... the totality of the relations of the human-reality to the world” (Sartre, p. 63). 3. Note: Frankenstein does not, as yet, have any objective evidence of his emotional conviction that the monster has murdered his brother and, hence, caused the death of the woman accused and convicted of that murder. 4. Another literary classic, with Gothic elements, that presents a complex example of the interplay of emotion and reason in the encounter between the Self and the Other is the American Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: there are various such encounters in the novel, the most prominent ones being between Ishmael and Queequeg, and between Ahab and the whale. 5. A corollary to this discussion is the fact, noted by Marina Warner in a recent essay that “in order to inspire terror in the audience you do not show the object of terror but the terrified face of the person witnessing it – Janet Lee in [Hitchcock’s] Psycho, shrieking, eyes bulging” (Warner, p. 4). My point is not just that, as Warner rightly notes, this is a device central to fiction and cinema which expects us “to make up the pictures in our mind’s eye in response to the words” that we read or hear. My point is that the Other can only be narrated without incorporation, reduction or distortion in its effects on the Self. In horror films these effects are, given the genre, basically terrifying, but they need not always be negative in other narrative genres. 6. As a poem by one of the most popular colonial writers of the late nineteenth century in India puts it: “Old Colonel Thunder used to say, And fetch his bearer’s head a whack, That if they’d let him have his way, He’d murder every mortal black.” The poem proceeds to end with: “In fact, throughout our whole dominion, No honest nigger could be got,

Notes 181 And never would, in his opinion, Until we’d polished off the lot.” (‘Those Niggers’, from Major Walter Yeldham’s Lays of Ind, published in 1871, quoted from Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib, 2007, p. 20.) Similar sentiments, in neutral reportage or direct espousal, can also be obtained from colonial texts about ‘natives’ in Australia, Africa etc.

7 Negotiating Vodou: Some Caribbean Narratives of Otherness 1. Once again, I wish to state that I do not attribute rationality to Europe or religion to non-Europe. I am talking of a dominant discourse, rather than my own perception of the matter. 2. Though that conflict is also there. Take, for example, the conflict between Mass Levi’s magic and Miss Gatha’s tabernacle. As the text tells us, “Miss Gatha had no audience. But Miss Gatha spoke and that was how her private hurricane became a public event.” But while Miss Gatha turns her private hurricane into a public event, Mass Levi’s magic – whose effects are public on Anita – is performed in that most private of places, a toilet!

8

Can the ‘Other half’ Be Told? Brodber’s Myal

1. See Michael de Certeau, ‘On the Oppositional Practices of Everyday Life’. Social Text, 3, pp. 3–43, 1980. 2. While any such act of tagging is partly arbitrary, it is justified as an emblematic device to aid discussion and conceptualisation. 3. It is, after all, ‘the global language’ – English! 4. In spite of being in English, the first chapter is not at all transparent – linguistically or descriptively. 5. See, e.g., M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Bildungsroman’, from Speech Genres and Other Essays. 6. This is what makes the spiritual such a fertile bed of subversion: a fact that is obvious in the differences between mystical movements (often popular ones) and religious establishments as well as in the links between anticolonialist movements and religion. However, this should not lead us to a postmodernist celebration of the subjectivity of the spiritual experience, for non-verifiable subjectivity can be just as oppressive an instrument of control as a narrowly causal rationality. 7. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses presents a very good example of all these tendencies. 8. This is another of Bakhtin’s precursors of the bildungsroman, and again illustrates the transgeneric character of Myal. But, unlike the typical novel of ordeal in which “events shape not the man but his destiny” (Bakhtin, ibid., p. 19), in Myal events shape the woman and her people’s destiny. 9. Which enacts the ritual that rescues Anita from Mass Levi’s spiritual attempts at physically raping her. 10. This, however, can and should be read in the light of my critique of ‘beyond aporia’ in the previous chapter. I have avoided exploring that aspect because

182

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

9

Notes it will distract us from the purpose of this chapter. But I have been able to avoid that aspect only by implicitly reading the spiritual elements in Myal in a highly metaphorical manner. Having taught the novel for four years, I am aware that most students adopt a much more literal approach and explain away the ‘spirituality’ with the help of colonialist dichotomies. For example, creolised Englishes creep into the narrator’s speech as well as that of the characters in Myal. This is in direct contrast to, say, the practice of V. S. Naipaul, who makes his characters speak Creole while the (superior) narrative voice resonates with the privilege of standard, literary English. In Jamaica, too, a contemporary account states that the 1776 slave uprising alarmed the Whites much more than previous uprisings not because it was more effective or more violent but because it marked the first rebellion by Creole slaves. Almost all Jamaican slave uprisings before and after 1776 had a distinctive African character and did not witness much, if any, participation by Creole slaves. Note not just the “rugged cross” but the biblical echoes of stoning and of Jesus bleeding from his crown of thorns and his nailed feet and hands. Though that conflict is also there. Take, for example, the conflict between Mass Levi’s magic and Miss Gatha’s tabernacle. As the text tells us, “Miss Gatha had no audience. But Miss Gatha spoke and that was how her private hurricane became a public event.” But, while Miss Gatha turns her private hurricane into a public event, Mass Levi’s magic – whose effects on Anita are public– is performed in that most private of places, a toilet! See Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery and Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988 (first published, in “essentially the same form”, by Simon and Schuster as The Serpent and the Rainbow in 1985). See also Richard D. E. Burton’s Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. It need hardly be pointed out that the definition of memory is always a matter of contention in all societies.


1. This was in keeping with ‘Faust’ and related myths, going back at least to the earliest years of the Renaissance. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, for instance, is a similar character, torn between God and the Devil – though in his case the Devil appears to have a more mature and complex perception of the elements involved than the prank-playing doctor. 2. As an aside, one can hardly help noting that Vikram Chandra’s fiction grew in depth and complexity when he moved away from magical realism in a simple sense. 3. For an interesting analysis of the significance of the ‘linguistic incoherence’ (my term) of this novel, see Charles Lock. 4. Though he does not use the term, and the term had not yet come into vogue even in 1975. 5. Because, if the colonial discourse on Otherness often obscured the promise and possibility in favour of the threat posed by the Other, we can also do injustice to Otherness by simply seeing it in terms of a ‘friend not yet met’.

Notes 183 6. Or even compare, for instance, with Burroughs’s ‘schizo/dead’ in Naked Lunch: “I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers ... I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants – a body – after the Long Time moving through odourless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death ... Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh” (Burroughs, p. 8).

10

Narration, Literary Language and the Post/Colonial

1. I am not denying the fact of caste oppression in many parts of India. What I am suggesting is that the version one finds in Mistry’s novel is highly textual, and based on a largely colonial and anglophone understanding of the mechanism and nature of caste in India. The attempt is brave and admirable; the result is strangely comforting to the anglophone reader – because it presents difference in eminently understandable terms. Something similar happens to the terrorist in Rushdie’s novel, though from another stylistic region. 2. It should be noted that Rushdie’s bravery had a past. It is informed by various literary ghosts, not just those that are visible, such as the ghosts of Kipling’s literary language and of G. V. Desani’s experiments in All About H. Hatterr (1948), from which Rushdie has obviously learnt much, but also those that cannot be seen by Rushdie or his critics. These include the many Indians who in different ways struggled with a problem that Raja Rao conceptualised in the Foreword to his Kanthapura (1938), a major experiment with English in the Indian context of other languages. But Rushdie’s bravery also had a present. It was something that could have happened only in a certain phase of the relationship of English with India and Indians. While Rao’s injunction to write neither as the English nor ‘only as Indians’ still held, a number of Indians in the big cities and abroad had grown into adulthood capable of ‘thought-movements’ only or largely in English. English – and a less selfconscious, more exuberant version of it, as evident in the film columns of Shobha Dé around that time – had pervaded the fabric of professional middle-class life in the bigger cities, and particularly the circuit of ‘diasporic Indians’ that Rushdie inhabited. 3. There is, no doubt, some truth in this interpretation of Rushdie’s ‘slips’. But, given the heavily associative nature of Rushdie’s oeuvre, one has to note that ‘Is Jailko Todkar Rahenge’ was the slogan on a poster put out by the Women’s Liberation Group to mark International Women’s Day in Bombay in 1982 (the poster was reproduced on p. 107 of Kumar’s illustrated history of women’s movements in India, published in 1993). Rushdie’s slips, unlike the errors of lesser writers, carry interesting echoes. 4. But again, before one makes this an argument against Rushdie, it has to be noted that such compound words – combining an English word with a Hindustani equivalent – are not uncommon in Urdu and Hindustani. And Rushdie, at his best, can combine or superimpose Indian and English words with devastating effectiveness: for example, the ‘mainduck’ (‘menduk’ or ‘frog’ in Hindustani) of The Moor’s Last Sigh is not only explained within the

184

Notes

text but is also meant to be read in English (Main Duck = Big Boss), with an added load of significance. 5. I am not blind to the fact, to which I will return in the next chapter, that this moment in the novel – and Coetzee in general in his works – recognises the identification of selfhood with language and hence the alterity of the Other to both. 6. “Of Petrus there is no sign, nor of his wife or the jackal boy who runs with them” (Disgrace, p. 217). For instance, here ‘Petrus’, the probably good and inscrutable African, is subtly made transparent by the text. As the ‘jackal boy’ is one of the rapists of Lucy (and is later revealed to be related to Petrus’s wife), the fact that he ‘runs’ with Petrus and his wife turns the latter into a pack of wolves or dogs, thus making their aims vis-à-vis Lucy and her farm quite transparent.

Summing Up 1. Of course, the colonialist imagination was also aware of the potential (real) alterity of such peasants when any particular context brought colonialist power into conflict with them – an awareness coded into the British legend of the mysterious circulating ‘rotis’ (common Indian flat bread) supposedly used to instigate the mutiny of 1857. 2. I am obviously leaving out recent philosophers, such as Levinas or Buber, who have addressed the matter, and to whom I refer elsewhere. 3. I owe my example of the cycle to a conversation with Dr Kevin Cahill, University of Bergen, Norway. 4. Especially in Alterity and Transcendence (1995). 5. C. B. Wadström, Observations on the Slave Trade (1789) p. 60 (Quoted from Curtin, p. 105). 6. An argument that can be extended to ‘madness’ in the Gothic text. 7. McEwan’s Saturday, Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Amis’s ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’.

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Index Achebe, Chinua, 73, 74, 75, 79, 81, 85, 180 Adams, H., 63, 175 Africa, 23, 44–50, 54, 55, 73, 74, 79, 81, 82, 84, 112, 113, 116, 118, 127, 137, 143–4, 153, 177, 181 African, 9, 40, 44–50, 76, 78, 79, 80–4, 87, 89–91, 116, 118–20, 126–9, 143, 153, 177, 178, 182, 184 Alford, F., 54 Allen, C., 158–9 Allen and Trivedi, 149 Alleyne, M., 120, 127, 129 Root of Jamaican Culture, 129 Al Qaeda, 64 America, 12, 16, 40, 55, 136–8 American, 33, 39, 40, 68, 85, 136, 159, 177, 180 American Literature, 17 American War of Independence, 8 Amis, Martin, 3, 4, 175, 184 Andersen, H. C., 176 ‘The Shadow’, 176 anti-semitism, 42–6, 50, 59 Appiah, A. K., 66 Aquinas, 48, 179 Aristotle, 94 Asia, 23, 39, 42–6, 55, 57, 74, 76, 137, 177 Asian, 40, 42, 49, 59, 126 Atwood, M., 102–4, 106 Alias Grace, 102–4, 106 Austen, Jane, 24, 33 Mansfield Park, 25 Bakhtin, M. M., 5, 138, 139, 181 Barker, Hulme and Iversen, 178 Baudrillard, J., 145 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 140, 145 Liquid Modernity, 140, 145 Beckford, William, 6, 8 Vathek, 6, 8 Bernal, Martin, 95 Black Athena, 95

Bhabha, Homi K., 11, 13, 14, 16, 108, 109, 145 Blackwood’s Magazine, 72 Bloom, H., 43, 44, 45, 49, 179 Botting, F., 4, 5, 6 Brantlinger, P., 9, 24, 32, 72, 88, 90, 91, 177 Rule of Darkness, 9 Britain, 7, 9, 17, 24, 37, 40, 52, 55, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 84, 102, 157, 176 British, 8, 9, 10, 17, 25, 32, 38, 51, 56, 73, 76, 89, 106, 119, 129, 153, 157, 177, 178, 179, 184 British Empire, 59, 73 British Gothic, 25, 31, 49 Brodber, Erna, 64, 120, 121, 122–31, 181 Myal, 64, 120, 122–31, 181 Bronfer, E., 142 Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, 142 Brontë, Charlotte, 6, 32, 37–8, 60, 64, 114 Jane Eyre, 6, 32, 37, 60, 64, 114 Brontë, Emily, 6, 37, 38, 47, 54, 60–70, 114 Wuthering Heights, 6, 23, 60–70, 88, 168 Buber, Martin, 16, 41, 169, 184 Burke, Edmund, 63 Burton, R. D. E., 182 Afro-Creole, 182 Byron, Glennis, 4, 51, 52, 53 Byron, Lord, 56, 58 The Giaour, 56 Caminero-Santangelo, M., 172 Cannadine, D., 23 cannibal, 4, 45, 54–5, 58, 59, 80, 81, 84, 90, 105, 159–61, 179 cannibalism, 8, 28, 45, 54–5, 56, 59, 80, 90, 105, 153, 160–1, 165, 171, 178, 179

193

194

Index

cannibal – continued cannibalist/ic, 12, 55, 59, 90 Carey, P., 104–6 Jack Maggs, 104–6 Carpentier, Alejo, 136–7 Chandra, Vikram, 134, 182 Chariandy, D., 121 Soucouyant, 121 Chatterjee, Upamanyu, 144, 145 English, August, 144–5 Coetzee, J. M., 104, 153, 154, 173, 184 Disgrace, 153–4, 173 Foe, 104 Cohen, R. A., 162 Coles, R. W., 26 Collins, Wilkie, 6, 25, 32–6, 104 The Moonstone, 32, 34–5, 37 The Woman in White, 25, 33, 35–6 colonialism, 79, 84, 150 colonial Other/ness, 10, 18, 22, 27, 32, 34, 42, 43, 49, 52, 57, 60, 72, 79, 83, 89, 93, 101, 105, 106, 145, 154, 163, 169 colonisation, 4, 6, 14, 22, 25, 26, 31, 43, 46, 47, 64, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 124, 125, 130, 138, 171, 177 Columbus, C., 12, 138 Conrad, Joseph, 8, 21, 24, 27, 30, 47, 64, 72–85, 87, 101, 131, 180 Heart of Darkness, 21, 24, 27, 30, 64, 72–85, 87, 101, 131, 180 Critchley, S., 11, 95, 96, 176 Curtin, P. D., 54, 56, 178, 184 The Image of Africa, 178 Dacre, Charlotte, 6, 165–6 Zofloya, or the Moor, 6, 165–6 Dallmayr, F., 13, 15 Dangor, A., 143–4 ‘The Devil’, 143–4 Darwin, Charles, 27 Darwinism, 26, 76, 78 Davis, W., 182 De Certeau, M., 18, 21, 38, 48, 122, 131, 169, 170, 179, 181 De Lisser, H. G., 11, 112, 113 The White Witch of Rosehall, 111–13, 118

Derrida, J., 96 Devil, 6, 25, 28, 36, 39, 42–63, 66, 70, 73, 92, 103, 111, 132, 143, 144, 161, 162, 165, 166, 176, 177, 179, 182 Diamond, M., 102 Victorian Sensation, 102 Dickens, Charles, 6, 22, 25, 34, 104, 105, 106 Bleak House, 25, 34 Great Expectations, 25, 34, 104–6 The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 34 Dostoevsky, F., 135 The Brothers Karamazov, 135 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 6, 31, 32, 47, 163 ‘The Brown Hand’, 32 ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’, 31–2 The Lost World, 163–5 ‘Lot No. 249’, 32 Dracula, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 62, 70, 107, 176 Eaglestone, Robert, 3, 4 Eagleton, Terry, 23, 61 Edwards, Justin D., 82, 121, 134, 150 England, 7, 8, 9, 21–46, 64, 66, 73, 89, 106, 107, 111, 112, 114, 117, 128, 133, 157, 176, 179 Englishes, 126, 182 Englishness, 23, 27, 28, 73 Enlightenment, 5, 40, 41, 62, 79, 84, 86, 87, 124, 127, 157, 175 Enlightenment rationality, 62, 124, 125 Enlightenment Reason, 5 Europe, 8, 9, 15, 22, 26, 40, 42–4, 51, 55, 57, 64, 71–3, 79, 82, 83, 107, 117, 133, 136, 137, 149, 176, 179, 181 evil, 4, 6, 12, 38, 51–4, 56, 61, 62, 70, 79, 80, 92, 103, 104, 107, 119, 120, 132, 133, 143, 144, 159, 175, 176 Fanon, Frantz, 14 Faulkner, W., 33 Absalom, Absalom, 33 Faust, 48, 49, 182 Dr Faustus, 182 Faustian, 50 Faustulus, 49

Index 195 feminist, 5, 58, 96, 151, 172 Flammenberg, L., 6 The Necromancer, 6 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 3, 4, 175, 184 Forster, E. M., 144, 145 A Passage to India, 144 Foucault, M., 14, 40, 42, 48 Freeland, C., 54 Freudian, 5, 48 Gair, C., 167 ghost, 5, 6, 9, 10, 21–5, 27, 31–7, 42, 48, 63–5, 70, 79, 83, 88, 89, 106, 111, 112, 120, 121, 125, 130, 141, 150, 159, 169, 183 Gilman, C. P., 172, 173 ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, 172–3 Godwin, William, 6 The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 6 Godzich, Wlad, 21, 67, 170, 179 Gogol, Nikolai, 139 Goldberg, D. T., 95 Racist Culture, 95 Gothic Other, 23, 31, 33, 43, 88, 133, 142 Gothic Otherness, 27, 57, 72 Haggard, Rider H., 6, 21, 24, 47, 59, 111 She, 24, 47, 59 Haining, Peter, 24 Hall, Stuart, 11, 12, 167, 168 Hamel, the Obeah Man, 111, 116, 117 Hayat, P., 13, 170 Hegel, G. W. F., 15, 41, 77, 170 Hindu, 33, 34, 35, 141, 147, 178 Hinduism, 178 Hindustani, 33, 150, 151, 183 Hogg, J., 48 Hogle, J. E., 9, 10, 22, 23, 110 Howard, Jacqueline, 5 Howell, Carol Ann, 5 Huggan, Graham, 101 Hulme, Arens and Obeyesekera, 178 Hulme, P., 179 Husserl, Edmund, 15, 170 Husserlian, 170 imperialism, 6, 56, 74, 77, 79, 81, 83, 91, 162

India, 23–5, 32, 34, 36, 112, 141, 144, 149, 150–2, 158, 176, 178, 180, 183 Indian English, 148, 150–3 Islam, 44 Islamic, 45, 107 Ireland, W-H., 88 Gondez, the Monk, 88 Jack, the Ripper, 9 Jackson, Rosemary, 5 Jameson, Frederic, 5, 6, 175, 176 Jansenism, 48 Jews, 6, 7, 40, 43–6, 50, 59 Jha, R. K., 141, 142, 143 Fireproof, 141–3 Kachru, B, 152 Kastor, F. S., 43, 44, 179 Kelly, H. A., 44 Satan: A Biography, 44 Khair, et al, 8, 150 Kipling, Rudyard, 8, 21, 24–5, 46–7, 64, 75, 116, 158, 159, 177, 179, 181, 183 ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’, 75, 159 ‘Haunted Subalterns’, 24 ‘The House of Suddhoo’, 24 ‘An Indian Ghost in England’, 25 Kim, 47 ‘The Mark of the Beast’, 24, 46–7 ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, 24, 25 ‘The Return of Imray’, 24 ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, 25 ‘The White Man’s Burden’, 123, 130 Knox, R., 54 Kristeva, Julia, 16 Powers of Horror, 16 Kundnani, A., 3 Langland, W., 45 Piers Plowman, 45 Larsen, S. E., 18 Latin/Central America, 35, 136, 137 Lee, H, 88 The Mysterious Marriage, 88 Leer, Martin, 150

196

Index

Le Fanu, Sheridan, 6, 54, 57–9, 166 Carmilla, 54, 57, 59, 166–7 Legenda Aurea, 44 Leroux, Gaston, 22 The Phantom of the Opera, 22–3 Levinas, E, 13–16, 41, 47, 82, 85, 93, 96, 140, 145, 148, 162, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173 Alterity and Transcendence, 15, 16, 170, 173, 174 Humanism and the Other, 162 Levinasian, 82, 93 Lewis, M. G., 6, 49, 53, 61, 62, 63, 88, 132, 144 The Monk, 6, 48, 49, 53, 61–3, 88, 132, 144 Lindqvist, S., 25, 26, 60 The History of Bombing, 25 Lives of the Saints, 44 Lock, Charles, 182 London, Jack, 167 Luckhurst, R, 31, 46, 47 Late Victorian Gothic Tales, 31, 46, 47 MacAndrew, Elizabeth, 5 Macaulay, T. B., 56, 149, 150 ‘Minute on Education’, 149 Malchow, H. L., 9, 31, 54, 55, 56, 59, 88, 89, 90 Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth Century Britain, 9 Malik, Kenan, 11, 13, 157, 167, 168, 175 The Meaning of Race, 157, 175 Marquez, G. G., 134 Marx, K., 176 Marxist, 5, 10, 139 Matar, Nabil, 7, 40 Maturin, C. R., 6, 47, 49–53, 179 Melmoth the Wanderer, 6, 49–53 McEwan, Ian, 3, 4, 175, 184 McGinn, C., 133 Melville, H., 159–63, 179, 180 Moby-Dick, 159–63, 179, 180 Menchen, H., 85 Meyer, Susan, 66, 68 Midgley, M., 61, 62, 70, 132, 133 Wickedness, 132 Mishra, V., 176, 177

Mitter, P., 178 Moody, S., 103, 104 Life in the Clearings, 103 Moor, 6, 7, 40, 51, 66, 150, 151, 165, 183 Mootoo, S., 120, 121, 122, 123 Cereus Blooms at Night, 120–3 Muslim, 35, 43, 141 Naipaul, V. S., 150, 154, 182 Nasta, Susheila, 40 Home Truths, 40 Ngûgî, wa Thiong’o, 127 non-European, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 32, 36, 42, 45, 47, 51, 55, 56, 57, 62, 66, 77, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 97, 111, 113, 116, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 157, 160, 170, 171, 176 Nussbaum, Martha C., 17, 87, 91, 94, 95, 180 Upheavals of Thought, 17, 87 Obeah, 111–31 Odell, S. W., 26 The Last War, or the Triumph of the English Tongue, 26 Paravisini-Gebert, L., 9, 110, 116 Patterson, Orlando, 127, 129, 182 The Sociology of Slavery, 127, 182 Pike, D. L., 7, 53 Polidori, John, 6, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59 The Vampyre, 6, 54–7 post-colonial, 3, 15, 18, 38, 175 postcolonialism, 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 95, 96, 99, 101, 108, 122, 123, 138, 145, 147, 148, 149, 163, 167, 169, 175 Punter, D., 4, 9, 24, 30, 51, 52, 53, 86, 88, 90, 91 racial Other/ness, 10, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 31, 39–60, 72, 107, 171, 175, 177 Radcliffe, Ann, 6, 53, 88 The Italian, 53, 88 Revelation of St John the Divine, 46 Rhys, Jean, 37, 64, 110–19, 123 Wide Sargasso Sea, 64, 110–19, 123

Index 197 Rushdie, Salman, 3, 4, 107, 129, 134, 142, 143, 147–53, 175, 176, 181, 183, 184 East, West, 150 Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 150 Midnight’s Children, 134, 150, 151 The Moor’s Last Sigh, 150, 151 The Satanic Verses, 107–8, 150, 181 Shalimar, the Clown, 140, 143, 147, 175, 184 Russell, J. B., 43, 44, 45 Said, Edward, 11, 13, 14, 21, 23, 95 Orientalism, 11, 14 Saki, 38 ‘The Music on the Hill’, 38 ‘Sredni Vashtar’, 38 Sandhu, S., 40 London Calling, 40 Satan, 4, 6, 42, 43–60, 144, 166, 178, 179 Satanic, 45, 46, 107, 150, 181 Satanist/ism, 37, 45, 52, 177, 179 Scott, Sir Walter, 33 The Bride of Cammermoor, 33 Sedberry, J. H., 26 Under the Flag of the Cross, 26 Shakespeare, William, 7, 68 The Tempest, 68 Shiel, M. P., 26, 59 The Yellow Danger, 26, 59 Singh, F. B., 79 Smeed, J. W., 48, 49 Smith, Angela, 37, 116, 117 Smith, Charlotte, 9 The Story of Henrietta, 9 Smith, Zadie, 147 White Teeth, 147 Snodgrass, M. E., 6, 39 Spielhagen, 49 Faustulus, 49 Spivak, Gayatri, 11, 95, 108, 171, 172, 176 Steeves, H. R., 86 Stevens, David, 5, 9 Stevenson, R. L., 6, 24, 27, 30, 47, 62, 73, 88, 89, 90, 91 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 27, 30, 62, 88–91, 176

Kidnapped, 90 Treasure Island, 90 ‘The Beach of Felesá’, 24, 47, 73 ‘The Bottle Imp’, 47 Stoker, Bram, 6, 24, 47, 54, 57, 58, 59, 62, 107 Dracula, 54, 55, 57–9, 62, 70, 107–8, 176 Sweet, Mathew, 33 Tacky Rebellion/Uprising, 110, 111 Taine, H., 157 Taylor, E. B., 157 Taylor, M., 88, 177 Confessions of a Thug, 88, 177 terror, 3, 4, 6, 16, 22, 23, 26, 30, 31, 33, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 73, 78, 82, 83, 85, 87, 94, 101, 109, 110, 112, 116, 131, 132, 133, 134, 141, 142, 145, 147, 153, 159, 165, 166, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 183 terrorism, 173 terrorist, 4, 42, 61, 69, 140, 143, 174, 178, 179 Theunissen, M., 10, 13, 15, 16 Thieme, John, 37, 104, 147 Todorov, T., 12, 16, 17, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 169 The Conquest of America, 12, 16 The Fantastic, 135 Tompkins, J. M. S., 86 Trivedi, Harish, 149 Turk, 31, 40, 44 Turkey, 23 Turkish, 32, 57 Tutuola, Amos, 136 vampire, 6, 23, 54–60, 63, 67, 107, 112, 166, 179 Visram, R, 8, 40 Vodou, 111–31 Wallace, A. R., 54 Walpole, Horace, 6, 7, 42, 144 The Castle of Otranto, 6, 7, 144 War on Terror, 3, 173, 175 Wasafiri, 3

198

Index

Webster, R., 44, 45, 48 A Brief History of Blasphemy, 44 Wells, H. G., 26, 27, 31, 32, 45 ‘The Country of the Blind’, 32 ‘The Empire of Ants’, 32 The Island of Dr Moreau, 27–9, 45–6 The Time Machine, 32 ‘The Truth about Pyecraft’, 32–3 ‘A Story of the Stone Age’, 31 War of the Worlds, 26, 32

Wheatley, D., 36, 176, 177, 179 The Devil Rides Out, 36, 176, 177, 179 Whitehead and Rivett, 9 Young, R. J. C., 84, 85, 138, 139, 146, 157 Colonial Desire, 138 Zamora and Faris, 136 Ziegenbalg, B., 178

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