Copyright By George Roland Waddington 2005 The Dissertation Committee for George Roland Waddington Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Something more than fantasy”: Fathering Postcolonial Identities through Shakespeare Committee: ________________________________ Alan Friedman, Co-Supervisor ________________________________ Eric Mallin, Co-Supervisor ________________________________ Brian Bremen ________________________________ Barbara Harlow ________________________________ Neville Hoad “Something more than fantasy”: Fathering Postcolonial Identities through Shakespeare by George Roland Waddington, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2005 “Something more than fantasy”: Fathering Postcolonial Identities through Shakespeare Publication No. _________ George Roland Waddington, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisors: Alan Friedman and Eric Mallin This thesis examines the referential and structural presence of “Shakespeare” in the autobiographies of Joseph Conrad (A Personal Record), Michael Ondaatje (Running in the Family) and Edward Said (Out of Place). These authors evoke “Shakespeare”—the product of centuries of political, national, and personal appropriation—as a means of understanding their own complex heritages, even as they displace his canonical authority. Exploring the relationships among Shakespeare’s plays, modern or contemporary autobiography, and postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity, I argue that writers and countries try constantly to secure Shakespearean paternity even for transgressive, postcolonial ends. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Emasculating Imperial Binaries 32 Autobiography as Hybrid Genre 72 Appropriate Shakespeares 98 The Third Gentleman of Verona: Writes of Passage in Joseph 236 Conrad’s A Personal Record Running in the Lear Family: Familial and Cultural Patrimony in Michael 276 Ondaatje’s Autobiography Maddening Methods: the Prince and his Protégé 315 Bibliography 352 Vita 372 v Introduction This study examines the referential and structural presence of “Shakespeare” — the product of centuries of political, national and personal appropriation—in the autobiographies of Joseph Conrad (A Personal Record), Michael Ondaatje (Running in the Family) and Edward Said (Out of Place). Exploring the relationships between Shakespeare’s plays, autobiography and postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity, I investigate how these authors evoke “Shakespeare” as a means of understanding their own complex cultural, literary and personal heritages, while simultaneously displacing Shakespeare’s canonical authority. “Shakespeare” is the benchmark of literary greatness; he is also the creation of centuries of writers and critics, who, from Ben Jonson onwards, projected their literary aspirations and individual ambitions onto the Shakespeare canon. Conrad, Ondaatje and Said indict the patriarchal models that defined their childhoods, of which Shakespeare’s plays constituted an important part; “Shakespeare” remains, however, a prevailing source of self-expression, self-reproduction and personal revelation within each author’s autobiography. As one of “the most powerful fathers in his own oeuvre” (Dobson 225), “Shakespeare” functions as a formidable, if not necessarily antagonistic, literary rival demanding address and critical exploration by authors whose non-western cultural roots distance them from the traditional assumptions behind the study and practice of English literature. My readings of Conrad, Ondaatje and Said’s 1 personal histories identify “Shakespeare” as an important source of autobiographical meaning for postcolonial writers who continue to be marginalized within literary discourse. I argue that Conrad, Ondaatje and Said’s autobiographies relocate “Shakespeare” within critical discourse by animating the cultural apparatus that continues to assert the primacy of western literature. My readings of Conrad, Ondaatje and Said’s personal narratives examine the tensions that exist between the national and literary patrimonies embodied within English literature and postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity. While the canon contributes to the diverse political perspectives and disparate aesthetic models that continue to emerge in the wake of European colonialism, conventional assumptions regarding the canon’s central role within international literary discourse, oppose postcolonialism’s emphasis on cultural diversity. The “patriarchal desire for self-reproduction . [and] self- duplication” (Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices 12) that underlies literary studies resists postcolonial attempts to integrate disparate forms of intellectual, creative and cultural discourse in order to facilitate the democratic exchange of ideas. Traditional models of power emphasize “purity” as a means of legitimizing and preserving positions of influence within society; kings conventionally derive their authority from their royal lineage, whereas nations celebrate their unique cultural and intellectual traditions. Patrimony views cultural difference with suspicion and hostility; foreign influences are denounced as “contaminating” and “corrupting” the propriety of western culture as it conflates purity with power. Postcolonial scholars celebrate multiplicity as a source of 2 strength, while western hegemony remains hostile to ideas, values and customs, that exist outside of the sanctioned spaces of patriarchal discourse, like family and nation. Beginning in the eighteenth century, British colonial expansion exported European beliefs, values and systems of governance throughout the globe. Despite the material and intellectual exchanges facilitated by British excursions into even the most remote geographical regions of Asia, Africa and the Americas, colonial paradigms exacerbated the xenophobia sanctioned and even encouraged by patriarchal models of authority. The binary paradigms that structure British imperial discourse produced a series of oppositional relationships —us and them, colonizer and colonized, black and white —intended to preserve Britons from “the horrors” of indigenous life. British officials relegated indigenous cultures to the margins of colonial society in an ongoing attempt to preserve the racial and cultural “purity” prized within European culture. The polarized models of imperial control not only separated, but elevated the British above their colonial subjects; in an era when “the monogamous patriarchal family, headed by a single, white father, was vaunted as a biological fact, natural, inevitable and right” (McClintock 56), native peoples were frequently categorized as children and, with respect to indigenous males, feminized to ensure their lowly status within the family of empire. Imperialism employed a complex system of racial, cultural and linguistic signifiers to protect the colonizing European power from being “infected” by the indigenous traditions and beliefs associated with an immoral and intellectually inferior people. In this respect, imperialism was characterized both by overwhelming military 3 force and a deep-rooted fear on behalf of the colonizer that European society might be consumed by the native Other. The postcolonial response to the cultural and intellectual models introduced and enforced by British imperialism has had a significant and positive impact on literary studies. In marked contrast to imperial paradigms which separated colonizer from colonized, postcolonial criticism argues that cultures develop, not in isolation, but through mercantile trade as it created a market for intellectual and religious ideas. Celebrating cultural diversity over cultural purity, postcolonial theories of hybridity have successfully challenged many of the racial, national and gender-based prejudices inherent in imperial paradigms of power. Postcolonial scholarship engenders increasingly diverse readings of established literary works by releasing them from the stifling political and cultural conservatism that typified literary attitudes throughout the colonial era. Edward Said’s reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Culture and Imperialism, for example, reveals Conrad’s “two visions” of Africa: the first acknowledges imperialism “as pure dominance and land-grabbing” (29); the second refuses to “grant the natives their freedom” from European rule (29). The practice of reading western literary texts through the lens of postcolonial theory confirms, however, the “universal” and “timeless” qualities historically attributed to English literature. Postcolonial scholarship complicates traditional understandings of established literary works like Jane Austin’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, but it also privileges western literature as a source of cultural as well as literary authority. To date, postcolonial criticism has failed to progress 4 beyond the Eurocentric values and beliefs fostered by imperial discourse and has yet to produce a truly hybridized cultural, intellectual and artistic discourse. Reading the canon as an expression of literary accomplishment and cultural prestige, I argue that postcolonial writers’ attachment and engagement with the western canon affects the literary patrimony exploited by British imperialism and celebrated by critics like Harold Bloom and W.J. Bate. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” T.S. Eliot