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How Cross-Cultural Literature Negotiates the Legacy of Edward Said

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How Cross-Cultural Literature Negotiates the Legacy of Edward Said WRITING FROM THE SHADOWLANDS: HOW CROSS-CULTURAL LITERATURE NEGOTIATES THE LEGACY OF EDWARD SAID Tangea Tansley B.A. (First Class Hons.) University of Western Australia This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Murdoch University August 2004 I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary educational institution. _________________________ Tangea Tansley ABSTRACT This thesis examines the impact of Edward Said’s influential work Orientalism and its legacy in respect of contemporary reading and writing across cultures. It also questions the legitimacy of Said’s retrospective stereotyping of early examples of cross-cultural representation in literature as uncompromisingly “orientalist”. It is well known that the release of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 was responsible for the rise of a range of cultural and critical theories from multiculturalism to postcolonialism. It was a study that not only polarized critics and forced scholars to re-examine orientalist archives, but persuaded creative writers to re-think their ethnographic positions when it came to the literary representations of cultures other than their own. Without detracting from the enormous impact of Said, this thesis isolates gaps and silences in Said that need correcting. Furthermore, there is an element of intransigence, an uncompromising refusal to fine-tune what is essentially a binary discourse of the West and its other in Said’s work, that encourages the continued interrogation of power relations but which, because of its very boldness, paradoxically disallows the extent to which the conflict of cultures indeed produced new, hybrid social and cultural formations. i In an attempt to challenge the severity of Said’s claim that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric”, the thesis examines a number of different discursive contexts in which such a presumption is challenged. Thus while the second chapter discusses the ‘traditional’ profession-based orientalism of nineteenth-century E. G. Browne, the third considers the anti-imperialism of colonial administrator Leonard Woolf. The fourth chapter provides a reflection on the difficulties of diasporic “orientalism” through the works of Michael Ondaatje while chapter five demonstrates the effects of the dialogism used by Amitav Ghosh as a defence against “orientalism”. The thesis concludes with an examination of contemporary writing by Andrea Levy that appositely illustrates the legacy of Said’s influence. While the restrictive parameters of Said’s work make it difficult to mount a thorough-going critique of Said, this thesis shows that, indeed, it is within the restraints of these parameters and in the very discourse that Said employs that he traps himself. This study claims that even Said is susceptible to “orientalist” criticism in that he is as much an “orientalist” as those at whom he directs his polemic. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS That this thesis has reached timely fruition is due to the guidance and support of two very wonderful human beings. I extend my deep gratitude and thanks to my supervisor Professor Vijay Mishra for his extraordinarily patient coaching, for his unlocking of the world of theory, and for the part he played in the emergence of this study from its chaotic beginnings. It is a very great privilege to know him. Similarly, I would like to thank my husband Richard Wheater for his unfailing love, steadfast support, and for the breadth and depth of his emotional and intellectual understanding throughout this project. My family and friends have been wonderful, as always, but for specific help with this work I would like to thank two people in particular: my dear friend Pamela Mace for the informative articles she so cleverly spotted and forwarded to me from England and Shahram Sharafi for the knowledge and information on Iran he so generously shared. I would also like to express my appreciation to the personnel of certain libraries, in particular to Godfrey Waller of Cambridge University for his assistance with the Browne Papers, to the staff at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge, to Helen Monk of Sussex University with regard to the Leonard Woolf archive and to the many librarians at the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University for their consistent help and good humour. iii Finally, my thanks to Murdoch University for funding my scholarship and participation at the Humanities Conference in Greece, and for the financial help that enabled archival fieldwork at Cambridge and Sussex universities. iv CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter one Said, Bhabha and the Dynamics of “Orientalism” Chapter two The Orientalist Views of E. G. Browne Chapter three Leonard Woolf: A ‘Conscious’ Imperialist? Chapter four Michael Ondaatje and the Burden of Culture Chapter five Amitav Ghosh: Writing the Orient From Within Conclusion Bibliography v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii TABLE OF CONTENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE SAID, BHABHA AND THE DYNAMICS OF “ORIENTALISM” 12 CHAPTER TWO THE ORIENTALIST VIEWS OF E. G. BROWNE 66 CHAPTER THREE LEONARD WOOLF: A ‘CONSCIOUS’ IMPERIALIST? 130 CHAPTER FOUR MICHAEL ONDAATJE AND THE BURDEN OF CULTURE 181 CHAPTER FIVE AMITAV GHOSH: WRITING THE ORIENT FROM WITHIN 244 CONCLUSION HOW ANDREA LEVY WRITES “THE WEST” 291 BIBLIOGRAPHY 313 v Introduction THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF BEING OTHER THAN “ORIENTALIST” An Englishman acts out a boyhood dream when he travels on horseback through Persia in the late-nineteenth century. He writes: We sat for a while by the seven graves from which the place takes its name, and drank tea, which was brought to us by the kindly inmates. A venerable old dervish entered into conversation with us, and even walked with us as far as the gate of the city. He was one of those dervishes who inspires one with respect for a name which serves but too often to shelter idleness, sloth, and even vice. Too often it is the case that the traveller, judging only by the opium-eating, hashish-smoking mendicant, who, with matted hair, glassy eyes, and harsh, raucous voice, importunes the passers-by for alms, condemns all dervishes as a blemish and a bane to their country. Yet in truth this is far from being a correct view. Nowhere are men to be met with so enlightened, so intelligent, so tolerant, so well-informed, and so simple- minded as amongst the ranks of the dervishes.1 An English cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service describes his feelings on his promotion to assistant government agent for the district of Hambantota: I fell in love with the country, the people, and the way of life which were entirely different from everything in London and Cambridge to which I had been born and bred. To understand the people and the way they lived in the villages of West Giruwa Pattu and the jungles of Magampattu became a passion with me. in Hambantota, it is almost true to say, I worked all 1 day from the moment I got up in the morning until the moment I went to bed at night, for I rarely thought of anything else except the district and the people, to increase their prosperity, diminish the poverty and disease, start irrigation works, open schools. There was no sentimentality about this; I did not idealize or romanticize the people or the country: I just liked them aesthetically and humanly and socially.2 An Indian ethnographer ends a period of field trials in village Egypt in confrontation with Egyptian authority. He describes this incident: “I didn’t know Sidi Abu-Hasira was a Jewish saint,” I said at last. “In the countryside I heard that everyone went to visit the tomb.” “You shouldn’t have believed it,” he said. “In the villages, as you must know, there is a lot of ignorance and superstition; the fellaheen talk about miracles for no reason at all. You’re an educated man, you should know better than to believe the fellaheen on questions of religion.” “But the fellaheen are very religious,” I said. “Many amongst them are very strict in religious matters.” “Is it religion to believe in saints and miracles?’ he said scornfully. ‘These beliefs have nothing to do with true religion. They are mere superstitions, contrary to Islam and they will disappear with development and progress.”3 An expatriate Sri Lankan living in Canada traces his Sinhalese genealogy. In a “notebook” he captures images gathered in a visit to his homeland: To jungles and gravestones. Reading torn 100-year-old newspaper clippings that come apart in your hands like wet sand, information tough as plastic dolls. Watched leopards sip slowly, watched the crow sitting restless on his branch peering about with his beak open. Have seen the outline of a large fish caught and thrown in the curl of a wave, been where nobody wears socks, where you wash your feet before you go to bed, where I watch my sister who alternatively reminds me of my father, mother and brother. Driven through rainstorms that flood the streets for an hour and suddenly evaporate, where sweat falls in the path of this ballpoint, where the jak [sic] fruit rolls across your feet in the back of the jeep, where there are eighteen ways of describing the smell of a durian, where bullocks hold up traffic and steam after the rains.4 An author in exile contemplates: The Indian writer, looking back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles. (I am of course, once more, talking about myself.) I am speaking now of those of us who emigrated . and I suspect that there are times when the move seems wrong to us all, when we seem, to ourselves, post- lapsarian men and women.
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